by Melvyn Bragg
Joe laughed. It was such rubbish. He loved David’s company. For a moment he was tempted to tell him that the clinging background was the setting for two recently written short stories, which had driven him straight back to his childhood in that far Northern town so exotic to David, so magnetic to Joe. But the writing had to be kept secret . . .
A few days later, Roderick and Bob, friends he had met in his first week in Oxford, were introduced to Natasha, also in the Cadena. She had heard much about them from Joseph: Roderick, who, like Joe, was reading History, was from an army family, lean-jawed, square-shouldered, in all things brisk, very like the heroes in Joe’s boyhood books on public schools. Bob more languid, owlish, the swotty boy who surprised them all in those school yarns which had been magical kingdoms to Joe. Bob was a zoologist and a fanatical fisherman. Both, Natasha noticed, appeared more relaxed and self-possessed than Joseph but clearly all three were fond of each other in that understated English way she liked.
Afterwards, they were unreservedly complimentary. Nor in private did their opinion veer from this.
‘They’re so different, it makes a kind of sense,’ Roderick said as he and Bob killed the final hour of the morning in the King’s Arms. ‘I must say I feel rather responsible – hauling him off to that Christmas party.’
‘She is,’ said Bob, his hesitation down to a scientist’s care with fresh evidence, ‘both delightful and very intelligent. Not, I suspect, a common combination. Half of bitter?’
‘She is,’ said Roderick, when Bob returned from the bar, ‘somewhat older.’
‘Possibly a touch more than somewhat.’
‘No bad thing,’ hurriedly added.
‘On the contrary,’ Bob began the lengthy process of filling his big pipe. Roderick waited for more but more was not forthcoming. Bob was fully engaged with his pipe and would be for some time . . .
In their late-night drawing room, the children fed and finally bedded, Julia and Matthew sat down with their books and drink. The house shivered a little as the single rickety bed two floors up strained at the demands being put on it.
Matthew glanced at the ceiling.
‘Yes,’ Julia drawled, thoughtfully. ‘He can’t seem to leave the poor woman alone.’
‘Perhaps . . .’ Matthew paused entirely for effect, ‘she enjoys it?’
‘I sincerely hope so,’ said Julia and took a sip of her watery whisky, ‘if only to drive out Robert.’
In the morning break in the life-drawing class, Don and Jonathan came out for some air and to lounge against the great columns at the entrance to the Ashmolean. Americans appropriately framed in the neo-classical architecture of imperial power. Both enjoyed their awareness of it and took a mental snapshot for memories back home. They smoked American cigarettes, Lucky Strike.
‘He told me,’ said Jonathan, in slow awe, ‘that he thinks she should have an exhibition and he’ll organise it.’ Taking his time, he drew every particle of the smoke deep down into his waiting lungs.
‘He’s certainly changed,’ said Don, with some regret.
‘So,’ Jonathan struggled to reach the next two monosyllables, ‘has she.’
‘Not as much as him. It’s blast-off.’
Jonathan nodded and once more appeared to attempt to suck through the whole cigarette in a single inhalation.
‘She’s on the rebound,’ Don said. ‘Dangerous.’
‘Maybe,’ said Jonathan. He looked across to the Randolph Hotel, and observed the scurrying grey figures in the bleak English winter light. He wanted to distance himself from Natasha for whom, when she had become, as he thought, free, post-Robert, he had felt an unmistakable pang.
‘She’ll be too complicated for him,’ said Don and ground a wastefully big stub under the heel of his warm American boot. ‘And he needs time to play around.’
Joe’s essay on the impact of the French Revolution on English thought in the 1790s had been thin. He had read it slowly because it was also too short but a chill had soon settled in his mind as the intensifying boredom of Malcolm Turney, his tutor, had transferred its force across the short space between their armchairs. It was the final tutorial of the morning, the noon-to-one slot, never an easy posting with lunch in the offing. Turney on his third tutorial hour of the morning was aching to get on with his own work in the afternoon, already switched on to it, lending a mere fraction of his mind to the present, a trick he could also manage at the concerts and operas to which his cultivated Italian wife zealously drove him. Joe had begun to follow the panic-fashion of getting up very early on the day of a morning tutorial and finishing the essay by relying on the drive of the deadline, collapsing arguments into lists and filling with waffle the gaps left by inadequate preparation. Oxford, Roderick maintained, was a world leader in the higher waffle.
Turney let him endure a serious interval of silence after the final blustered paragraph and then opened up and spared him nothing. It was quite merciless. Joe did not have the guns to return fire and he was honest enough with himself to give up the attempt early on. When it was done, the tutor glanced at his watch. There was still twenty minutes to go. He would steal ten.
‘Sherry?’
Joe accepted the unexpected treat with suspicion. They sipped.
‘If you want a decent degree you’ll have to pull your socks up. You know that.’
‘Yes.’ The sherry felt strong. He was suddenly tired from the frantic morning.
‘My guess is that you’ve already decided against trying for a first.’ Turney sank his face behind long steepled hands. ‘Making a film, writing for Cherwell, that sort of thing.’
Joe nodded: it was a reprieve of sorts.
‘You mustn’t let it drift too far, Richardson.’
‘Sorry about that.’ He indicated the sheets of paper now on the floor.
‘More or less a waste of time for both of us.’
‘I agree.’ Joe thought this owning up was rather man to man and felt somehow enhanced by the exchange.
‘Mrs Harries has laid complaints against you, I’m afraid.’
The floor would not open up and let him disappear. He wanted to look away but found his gaze locked onto the eyes of a man who was not giving him an inch.
‘I am your moral tutor as well as everything else.’
‘I know,’ Joe agreed eagerly, appealingly, he hoped.
‘Mrs Harries is a much valued landlady and servant of this college. She reports that despite clumsy attempts at a cover-up by Roderick, you have not spent the night there on, she reports, at least three occasions during the last week alone.’
A response was clearly called for and Joe found none.
‘I presume it is what I guess it is.’
‘Yes.’ The syllable crawled all the way up a long dry throat, over a barely living tongue, fell lamely through crumpling worried lips and scarcely made the short distance between them.
‘Is she up?’
‘No.’ Joe felt more confident in denying that she was at the university which would have been more serious: there was even the bud of virtue in his denial.
‘Town girl?’
‘No.’
‘For pity’s sake, Richardson!’
‘An art student.’
‘Ah!’ Turney swept the sherry down. ‘What do I do with Mrs Harries? The college cannot afford to lose a landlady with her length of service and she’s hopping mad.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Joseph.’ Joe felt the Christian name like a blow to the back of his neck. ‘This is a moral matter. If you continue to flout the rules I will have little option but to send you down. Expel you. For a few weeks at least and at a most inconvenient time. You could miss Finals.’ Turney looked at his watch.
Joe was stunned. To be expelled from Oxford was to be eternally disgraced, to let down his schoolteachers, to expose his parents to public shame, to find himself among the damned.
He tried to swallow but his Adam’s apple had trebled in size.
‘D
on’t be an ass. Bluff out the weekends, Saturdays only, Friday in extremis, a trip, a visit, but through the week you belong under the roof of Mrs Harries.’
‘Thank you.’
‘I’m fining you ten pounds.’
‘Thank you.’
‘That was a lousy essay. Beta minus.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Lunch.’
After lunch Joe took to the Parks.
Walking alone had been a first resort for years now, ever since the breakdown in his early teens when the rhythm of it, the daring to face himself in solitude, the immersion of himself in nature had eventually worked some calming, ordering magic. Walking alone was by now a compulsion in times of anxiety.
The Parks were all but deserted on the pewter-grey winter afternoon. His breath pushed out a plume almost as dense as the exhalation of a mouthful of cigarette smoke. He walked across to the river and followed it until he came to the round pond on the perimeter of the Parks where he found a bench, took out a cigarette, opened his pad and began to write down the pros and cons of his present situation. But sitting down was no good. Nor did the usually so helpful listing of pros and cons apply to his case now. He could not even construct one of those timetables of his days which used to come so easily and which were useful, like a rope rail to help the haul up steep stairs. Monday 9–1: Italian Renaissance – revise Guiccardini; 2–4.30: English History notes; 5–7: more English History; 9–11: if not out, back to Renaissance or practise for French and Latin papers. And so through the week he would attempt to go, as if he were on an assembly line, steadily shifting the work. The very making of lists had once been a sufficient jump-start, commandments to himself, both energising and reassuring. But on that day on that freezing bench in cold weather in the Oxford Parks they seemed a waste of time. He abandoned the attempt and walked on.
He crossed the bow-backed bridge and turned onto the path in the fields. It was more countryside here, an echo, a relation of the countryside which in those adolescent walks in the far North he had found healing. Not that he was as distraught as he had been then, nor was he full of nameless fear: but he had been jarred by Mr Turney, jangled by the harsh tone of a man he respected and a man who had proved over the last couple of years to have his best interests at heart.
What was his course of action? It was hard to think without pen and paper. But the seat by the pond had proved no sanctuary. He had to let the encounter into his imagination and hope that thinking on it in the steady beat of the walk would resolve it as sleep sometimes resolved it. Although he did not realise this until later, the encounter with Natasha had released and focused a spring of energy which had catalysed his belief in himself. The walk was now no more than a nod to his past; redundant. It was with Natasha that he would shape his world.
Natasha was now so important in his life that everything else had receded. She was like a hand that could block out or reveal the sun. Friendships that mattered to him still mattered but they had been moved aside; the academic work that he enjoyed was still there to be enjoyed but now it was at arm’s length, even though Finals were less than four months away, and he ought to be winding up, he ought to be dominated by a routine. Now it was Natasha that fed into all that he did.
He liked the film reviewing now because Natasha came to the cinema with him. He was trying to persuade the editor of the university newspaper to let her write about art. He was sure she could do it. He wanted to help her do her exams once and for all. She had failed to pass them in previous years only because she had failed to work, he was convinced of that. He had found a school report, ‘Livret Scolaire’, from the Institut Notre Dame at Meudon in 1953. Dissertation Philosophique: first in the class. Mathématiques: second. Sciences Physiques: fourth. Sciences Naturelles: third. ‘Très intelligent.’ ‘Bon travail . . .’
What had happened? When asked, point blank and bluntly, she smiled and turned away. When asked again, she merely shook her head. ‘Some other day,’ she said. ‘It was so long ago.’
‘But you will take these exams this time.’
Natasha pulled a face but she could not resist his bounty of help.
‘If you say so,’ she said, to please him, which it did.
He wanted to persuade her to do enough paintings for an exhibition. He could organise it, he said, in that unused room next to the Junior Common Room in the college. He wanted to make sure that none of the men at the Ruskin moved in on her. He wanted her to shine, to throw off all melancholy, to be seen as glorious as he knew she was. He wanted nothing but to be with, to serve, to please, to impress, to be fascinated by Natasha.
So on a walk aimed at divesting himself of thoughts of Natasha in order to put the rest of his life in order he strolled along the banks of the icy river thinking of nothing but Natasha. He stopped to look at an English winter through the bare-ribbed trees, the dull and frosty landscape, the canopy of low grey cloud, the narrow leaden lustreless river and the white sun, which reminded him more than anything of the Northern winter, a sublime contradiction, an ice-coloured sun. Natasha ought to be here to see and paint this.
In the past he had been able to force himself into a working pattern at will. That capacity seemed to have gone, a slave to any whims of feeling for Natasha. She had led him outside, above, his old imperatives. For instance, what steps was he taking to get a job? Now was the time the Oxford Appointments Board summoned the stately businessmen of England to occupy the better hotels and vet future managers; now was the time the Civil Service beckoned, the professions called, the job-fat world out there held its arms open to embrace the products of that small privileged Oxbridge band who were ready to take their influential place in the nation. Joe had to make himself interested. He had no clue what he wanted to do: writing short stories and making films were not on the careers list. Natasha wanted him to dare to be an artist. But how would they live?
He walked back to his college briskly, nothing accomplished, happy.
Evening, and they were in bed together, reading, smoking, drinking coffee. A curtainless window framed a crescent moon sliced clearly in the black icy night. Joe was in a bliss of bohemianism.
It was the constancy and the ardour, both, Natasha thought. He gave her no time to question, no room for retreat, no excuse for refusal. Whenever he saw her, he smiled with warmth and open love and he saw her at every spare moment. The memory of Robert was inexorably being erased by the pressure of Joe’s attention. It was so ardent it made her smile when she saw him, smile in prospect and smile at the recollection of their meetings. He bounded up to her. He embraced her the moment they were alone: embraced? Hugged her as if for dear life. He had schemes for her. He made her laugh and with a transparency which touched her heart. To Joe she was strange, unique, irresistible.
Over the next few weeks, when they were not at the cinema or extravagantly in ‘their’ Spanish restaurant, they sat side by side prop-pillowed in the single bed, Natasha reluctantly working for her exams, Joe more enthusiastically for his. Spans of time in which an observer might have predicted a long and settled, a calm and equal life of books, loving silences, enduring companionship.
The room was sprucer now. Joe liked it tidy and tidied up when it was needed, which was less and less often as Natasha kept it cleaner. Half the table had been declared his desk. The sink was not allowed to host dirty dishes for more than a few hours. Joe replenished the jar with flowers as soon as the imminent death of the current bunch could no longer be ignored. There were shillings at hand for the meter. Joe was in no doubt that they could live together in that attic room for all time.
It was there that he learned the outline of her life. She told him in one swoop like a confession. She told him that her mother had been a scientist and a bohemian who admired Georges Sand. She had insisted on going back to work too soon after Natasha had been born and as a result, weakened, had contracted pneumonia and died. She told him she was an unwanted child, accidentally conceived ten years into a blissful marriage. Five years l
ater her father married again – Natasha did not know the precise circumstances but coloured the event darkly. This stepmother had persecuted her relentlessly, sent her to a succession of punitive convent schools, had three children of her own who were allowed liberties and privileges denied her, and tried all she could, as Natasha saw it, to cut her off from her father.
In adolescence her hated new mother had sent her to a psychoanalyst for no good reason and then let her leave home to live with an elderly cousin who Natasha said had used her as an apprentice housekeeper and gave her no time to study for her baccalaureate, as a result of which she failed. She went to Switzerland to work in a ski resort for some time until she took ill with a deficiency in the adrenal glands. Her father then arrived and in effect saved her. He was a teacher in Provence, his own father Italian, his mother Provençal; her own mother too had mixed parentage, a French father, a mother from Latvia, and beyond that a genealogy which spun from the Baltic into Russia.
Natasha had come to Oxford to stay with an old colleague of her father’s and her first return to France was so unhappy that she came back to Oxford and here she had stayed, as an au pair and a student, for eight years, returning to France in the summer and at Christmas for visits which were invariably distressing. Finally, this last Christmas, she had rejected them. She wanted never again to go to a home where she was never wanted.
When she finished it was as if thunder had rolled through the room and demanded a silence succeed it.
‘Over the years,’ he told their daughter later, ‘all this would be unravelled and dissected and assume meanings different from those ascribed by Natasha on that night of revelations. But then it was received as given, whole, gospel, her testament.’
