by Melvyn Bragg
Joe fed on her story with every grain of his imagination. His sympathy for her was unbounded and unleashed. She was a heroine in a novel, forever unjustly treated, forever baulked by misfortunes not of her making. She spoke of these trials in a quiet ferocity of tone which gripped him, the anger and the hurt, the shame and the bruises were so deep. Some American soldiers had come to the house as the war was ending and she had sat on the knee of one of them and sang a song for him and her stepmother had sent her to her room without supper after they had gone, punishment for promiscuity. When she went to the lavatory to pee she had to hit the side of the bowl for no sound of splashing must be heard. None of the other children was sent away to boarding school. She had run away three times and each time her stepmother had come to see the nuns and told them to be harsher with her, that she was fatally exhibitionist, bohemian, it was in the blood. Her story mesmerised him.
Joe saw the young girl, alone, rejected, humiliated, unwanted, crushed, and his love for her strengthened by the day: the worse news she brought him the greater his love until it grew to a flood which he was certain would sweep away all her grievous past, all that persecution. He would take care of her.
On the last day of term, just before the Easter vacation, he proposed to her and moved in.
CHAPTER SEVEN
‘I do believe he believes he has moved in permanently,’ said Julia.
‘I met him this afternoon on the stairs.’ Matthew gave her his full attention, laying aside Such Darling Dodos and lighting a cigarette. ‘He offered to pay rent, which I thought commendable.’
‘And?’
‘Julia!’
‘I would have accepted.’
‘Turney speaks quite highly of him.’
‘The children tolerate him rather well. Except for Peter, who appears to be jealous.’
‘Nine is a difficult age.’
‘Can you truly remember?’
‘Precisely,’ said Matthew. ‘A visit to the pantomime on Brighton Pier. The Principal Boy was love at first sight. A coup de foudre. The usual long-legged shapely young girl of course, but to me an apparition of sexuality. Perhaps it was the doublet and tights. Disturbing and confusing, but inexplicably exciting and indubitably sexual in nature. That was for my ninth birthday.’
‘Goodness me.’
‘The eroticism of pre-puberty is understandably under-researched.’
‘I suppose we just accept him.’
‘Out of term time,’ said Matthew, ‘yes. When term recommences, no.’
‘Did you tell him that?’
‘It seemed rather early. The vac. has just begun.’
‘I will have to tell him. You’re such a coward in these matters.’
‘The critical point,’ said Matthew, his hand holding the cigarette as elegantly as all other unconscious imitators of Noël Coward, ‘is that Natasha is beginning to look happy. Rarely a satisfactory word. But here it fits perfectly.’
‘I still have anxieties.’
‘Yes?’
‘What if he wants to marry her?’
‘Ah.’ Matthew took his time. ‘I hadn’t considered that.’
‘Why do you want to marry me?’ Natasha spoke softly, looking away from him. They were packed together in the single bed, books propped on knees, bared black windows rattling cosily against the excited wind.
Joe wondered why she was asking.
Because I love you, he wanted to say and had done and would again but not again now; her tone was too thoughtful for that, she needed a more deliberated answer. But other words failed him. He loved her, that was all in all. They had made love. They should get married. But there was something serious in her voice and in that simple question a warning, which he could not quite fathom, that he ought to take great care. To remain silent would be to allow her to doubt his feelings. Yet they had been so quickly fixed into stone certainty. He had to say something! Why was ‘because I love you’ not enough? He could just say it again, perhaps he should say it again and then again and again until she was forced to accept it.
‘You told me,’ she said, kindly lancing the silence, ‘that your mother and father waited for more than three years and “saved up” – that was it? – and courted each other to make sure.’
‘They did.’ Joe eagerly embraced the chance to speak. ‘Most people back home still do. One man’s been courting for seventeen years. They go for a walk every Sunday after evensong. He’s a cobbler. He says he wants to be sure.’
Natasha smiled but kept to her purpose.
‘Why aren’t you doing that, Joseph? Why aren’t we courting?’
‘I’m at university,’ he said, promptly. But that was an excuse. It was Natasha, Natasha, not Oxford. It was nothing to do with the university, he thought, when later, as always, he picked over their conversation.
Again she smiled, again she held her peace, but his answer helped her. To Joseph, she thought, university was a foreign country. The old order held no sway. You could begin again, and, if you were bold, reinvent yourself. This is what she assumed Joseph wanted to do. For Joseph, she thought, it was not so much liberty as opportunity. In this transaction he felt that he need obey few of the old rules. No one was watching him, no one who mattered in his past. He was an explorer in a newly discovered land not understanding much of the language of the natives yet but seeing in their difference from his own tribe a chance to slip off the old skin. She appreciated that. She liked that daring all the more because it was hedged about with anxieties. That made it harder for him. That would make him stronger. Already she knew him well, she thought, as clear as he was foggy, as cool as he was hot.
‘We too have times for courtship, where I come from,’ she said. ‘And in Provence it is in all the classes of society.’ But not in Oxford, not on this island of exile, she thought to herself and smiled that inward smile whose last and smallest ripple would appear faint as a will-o’-the-wisp in her eyes and tantalise him.
‘Why wait?’ Joe strove to sound plausibly mature, all aspects examined, soundings philosophically taken. ‘If you’re sure, why wait?’
How are you sure of it? How are you ever sure?
She returned to her examination book which plodded through the history of Impressionism; it was a way to end the conversation without causing any offence. He would not give up, she knew that, and it brought a pressure to bear which she did not like, the urgency, its unrelenting nature; and yet, to be wanted so much, to be loved . . .
Why wait? He seemed to be making such a difference to her life. Wait for what? More proof, of course; her eyes picked listlessly over the pedantic ‘explanation’ for the rise of Impressionism and for Joe’s sake she stuck at the task. It meant so much to him that she pass these silly exams. What did exams have to do with any life worth living? Of course they would enable her to graduate from the college with the normal certificates but they meant little to her; time spent painting and talking, most of all being free to think and dream, that was the life that mattered. She wanted to discover how to live fully, seriously, and now perhaps happily.
He shored her up here in her studies as steadily as he did in the careful, innocent, unlearned physical attentiveness which had already begun to repair what had seemed her irreparable failure with Robert. But why, she could still ask herself, should Joseph be more enduring, more steadfast? He was much younger than Robert, younger than her, younger than all her crowd. Sometimes he looked like, sounded like a boy, among these men, especially the Americans, so many toughened by military experience, long studies back home and hard pay-your-way work: but there was something in him that she trusted above them.
Suddenly, into the bookish silence, Joe sang. He sang very loudly, pretending he was still reading, pulling out all the Elvis Presley vibrato he could summon up, especially on the last two lines, every word in them drawn out with throat-swollen intensity:
It’s now or never,
My love won’t wait
‘Love’ was held high and long unti
l breathlessness.
Natasha wanted to say, ‘Keep quiet, they’ll hear you all over the house.’ He had been impassive over his book while the song erupted into the room. She loved the incongruity of it, the bit of madness that made her feel safer.
When the air had settled, she said,
‘That is “O Sole Mio”.’
‘Not any more,’ said Joe, still at book. ‘It’s “Now or Never”. Elvis the King has claimed it. Droit de seigneur.’
Natasha turned to him quite abruptly and stared hard at him, the rather faded blue eyes searching to force him to open up to his deepest truths. She had to know. It was a look which sought to find his soul and hold it. Could she trust him?
Joe tried to meet her gaze and succeeded for a while. What did she want him to feel? What could he return to a look as intense as hers? He felt nervous, he felt that he was being scrutinised beyond his capacity, plumbed too deep. He wanted to hide so as not to be found out. There was a physical sense of weakening: what could he give? Finally, his eyes dropped back to the book and he said nothing.
‘I was on a boat in the Bay of Naples one night,’ she said, ‘a warm night in summer and across the water some people in another boat started to sing “O Sole Mio”, then others, then those in our boat, until it seemed the whole of the Bay of Naples was singing “O Sole Mio”. We had lanterns even though the moon was up.’
Joe envied that moment. There was an easy and simple richness to it that seemed a life away.
‘Why do I want to marry you?’ he said, eventually. Because you made so little fuss about making love? Because you are always here now when I call? Because you are enigmatic and I don’t know you but there’s something I know I can do for you? Because I feel set and grounded and I can see a wonderful life with you, a life which will take me to where I would never have dreamed of going without you but I want to go there? And I can’t leave you alone. And all I can do is persist. But he said none of that.
‘I want to marry you,’ he said. ‘That’s it.’
Later when he thought back on it, Joe wondered if he had underestimated the gratitude he felt from that so easily forfeited gift of sex. Sex which in his generation and class and reckoning had to be paid for, in marriage or in guilt. Perhaps it was her sinless easiness which overcame him. She wanted no return and yet she had resolved the greatest problem of his physical life. She had given herself wholly and trustingly and thereby he was honour-bound; she had made no demands and so the responsibility to her was doubled. It was an arrangement; he need never again ache and long for sexual love. Life was now unencumbered, the point and curse of life was taken care of. It would be deeply unjust, unchristian, to some extent unthinkable, to enjoy sex and not to want marriage as the consequence. She must love him to do it so soon and with no demand on him.
More than thirty years later it was hard to explain how important that might have been at the time. Yet he came to think he had exaggerated the gift of sex. The truth was that he loved her in ways he did not know then nor would he ever fully know what this ‘love’ was, where it came from, why it sealed him to her and why it could not prevent destruction. So sex was not the essential thing, but what a line was crossed, what a key to life was given when that first awkward but unfussed coupling was accomplished. Now he thought that the key had been her erotic Frenchness, the lure of the older woman, so foreign to his past. She was as much imagination as flesh.
‘But Marriage,’ an incredulous daughter asked, ‘so soon, after just a few weeks, you only turned twenty-one, why Marriage?’ ‘Because Marriage then for me in the world of my youth was the goal, the pinnacle and the end of waiting, and of wanting. Marriage for me and for millions like me was the happy ending of the first chapter. Marriage was bold, it was a public declaration, it was manly and honourable. It staked a sole claim. It was the end of adolescence. It was the mark of manhood. The real adventure started here. It was the biggest statement of life on your own terms that you could make. And Marriage meant that the world could be shown how much your mother and I mattered to each other and that, then, mattered.’
Yet these explanations, however hard they try to root out the morals and imperatives of the time and of the man he was then, however much through hindsight as well as recollection they reason through the need he felt, are beside the point. Reason was not present. There was a falling like gravity, the compulsion like gravity, that surge of feeling too deep to excavate, known by the fortunate and unfortunate alike who have no choice, who believe even briefly that they have found all that completes them in another person, who are impelled into love by forces they do not and do not want to understand, and Joe was of that self-selected tribe.
To Natasha, he later thought, it may at that time have carried little if any of that burden or that resonance. There was an imbalance which would be reversed, cruelly. Moreover, Joe came to believe that sex was never the determining matter for her that it might have been for him. She gave it to him as comfort perhaps because he comforted her. She would never give herself to anyone else and she never did because she knew that would hurt him. To Natasha sex was not the centre: trust was the centre; trust and freedom, perhaps even faith although she believed in no God.
Yet what he could see now as he looked back was the sense of his own selfish certainty; it was blind to her needs. He assumed that as the force of his certainty was so unquestioning and permitted to be such, then she must share it. He had no idea that he might be taking advantage of her pain or ripping her out of a womb of slow healing or unthinkingly imprinting his ways and wants on someone all but destroyed, someone who would cling to him for life and, having found a support, stay for that support, expect it, rely on it, have their love moulded around it.
The more he thought later about Natasha and himself, in those first months, the more ashamed he grew that he had taken so little trouble to find out more about her. Yet how could he have done that? What she told him was enough and good enough. He made no effort to question her, to discover what lay behind the acceptance of his occupancy of her small room, of sex with her, of his directives. He believed her words.
For Natasha it was a little like walking in her sleep. Actions were pursued. Steps went in a known direction. The greater part of her was bound and isolated in a secluded, shrouded life of her own. But there were moments when she saw him clearly, when she felt his love for her and she could sense there was a life to be had, perhaps even a life knowing happiness.
‘Should I marry him?’
‘You must decide for yourself,’ said Julia. ‘I like him. So does Matthew.’
‘He is young.’
‘Yes. And there are great differences between you. But there we are.’ Julia smiled. ‘You certainly seem much happier now that he is on the horizon.’
‘Do I?’ Natasha looked away and Julia thought how beautiful she looked, and fragile, her face seen through a faint gauze of cigarette smoke. ‘I shall write to my father,’ she said.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The heart of it is shame. That is what he wanted to tell his daughter, but how could he convey it without running into an excess of self-reproach or falling into the arms of self-pity? And you tried not to pass on your burdens to your children, not to saddle them with your debts, or brand them with your mistakes. If he told her that since her mother’s death shame had all but crushed him, had been the weight to be shifted before anything could be done, then what would that serve? What would it mean? That he was making excuses? That he was apologising yet again?
He saw the truth of it when the depression came back – shame reappeared as clearly as the mark of Cain. The shame had poisoned him, but it was a poison he deserved and his system learned to live with it though at a price. Shame was a weakener of life, a permanent wound, and to try to conquer it he had to race headlong into activity, the more intense, risky and distracting the better. Silence fed the shame as did solitude. Yet he craved both.
He would have had to say to her also that a life of sorts can be
lived with that condition. There can be friendships, there can be work done, there can even be spans of happiness now and then, but any dwelling on that past summons up the shame and he could not leave the past alone. He could not pass this on to her just as he could not be at any peace with her mother, not until he had served his time, the life sentence.
‘I am coming across to London for a conference which is fortunate,’ her father replied. ‘Therefore I can come to Oxford to see you to discuss the matter. I will telephone you to tell you the time of arrival of the train. We could meet at the railway station . . . ?’
Natasha was there early, clutching his letter like a card of identity. She was dressed in her Cossack outfit. Had her father noticed such things, had he not still been a little annoyed at being required to use a break in the conference for this errand, had he wanted to respond to her fully, or be tender, he would have been touched by the earnest hope which seemed to tremble on her features like broken sunlight on still water. Her longing for his love, even for a token of his love, was barely containable.
‘Ah! Natasha,’ he said when he reached her on the platform. He put down his briefcase and laid his hands on her shoulders and for a moment looked at her. Sweetly? Steadily? She could not tell. Then he kissed her first on the left and then on the right cheek: lovingly? A vertigo of confusion threatened to take possession of her as her childhood engulfed her in those two dry kisses. Yet she loved him and could not and did not want to stop herself loving him and despite everything that had happened and not happened between them she held to a conviction, a faith, that he loved her and also through her the wife he had so worshipped and so cruelly lost.
‘We could go to my room first, I thought,’ she spoke in French, ‘it’s the quietest place.’
‘First, no. First I will take a look around Oxford. Your mother and I went to Cambridge for one summer before the war. We never came to Oxford. We intended to. Now I will “stroll around”’ – he broke into English – ‘with you.’
