by Melvyn Bragg
He tried to take refuge in another bite which went down the wrong way but produced a merciful coughing fit. The subject was closed.
‘He simply ignored what I said.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Matthew, ‘or more likely he was overcome with shyness. It sounds as if you delivered the compliment rather forcefully.’
‘He wanted to know if we could recommend someone with a car to help shift these wretched works of art to Wadham.’
‘Wretched? Unfair. You have not seen them.’
‘It is that which arouses my suspicion.’
‘You read too many crime novels.’
‘Don’t be absurd.’
Roderick found the solution.
‘Bob, you and me, four or five trips each, carry the things, what’s wrong with that?’
So they did. The little procession of three undergraduates walked backwards and forwards between the college and the house of Professor Stevens several times, bearing paintings. Roderick looked approvingly at the final stack in the college room which had no history of being an art gallery.
‘Quite an effective operation. Drink?’
‘There’s one more,’ said Joe. ‘She’s working on it now. I said I’d collect it at about seven.’
‘Time for a quick one, then,’ said Bob who, like Roderick, was determined to treat Joe to a drink for having helped him.
‘They have to be hung by ten tomorrow morning,’ Joe said as they congregated around the bar. ‘Could you tell Mrs Harries I’ll be legitimately late?’
‘She won’t buy it for a minute. Good luck. Here’s to the exhibition.’
The three glasses were raised in a ragged salute.
‘I deliberately,’ said Bob, after a deep sip had left him with a white froth moustache, ‘tried not to look. Far better to see them in situ.’
‘Gawd, suddenly it’s “in situ”,’ said Roderick. ‘Is there no end to the man’s talents?’
‘She writes poetry as well,’ Joe said. ‘I wanted her to use lines from it underneath the paintings. She doesn’t believe in titles. She says that English people in particular read the title more carefully than they look at the painting.’
‘Fair cop,’ said Roderick, ‘that’s me.’
‘I like a title,’ said Bob, taking out the pipe and the tin of Bruno and beginning the slow charging; Roderick offered Joe a Disque Bleu. ‘I like to test my idea of what the artist says it is with the artist’s own idea.’
‘Natasha says the point is the painting. Not how anyone describes it – not even the artist.’
‘If it says it’s the Battle of Waterloo that could be quite important, couldn’t it?’ said Roderick. ‘Imagine the confusion to all parties if it turned out to be the Battle of Blenheim.’
‘I grant you historical paintings,’ said Joe.
‘And portraits? Terrible rumpus in France if Louis XIV were mistaken for Louis XV.’
‘Portraits I’ll give you.’
‘Landscapes? You wouldn’t want to think that Holland was Norfolk, would you?’
‘Landscape, OK,’ said Joe.
‘Still lifes? Apples is apples, and if the artist wants to say Apples he should be given the benefit of the doubt, surely?’
‘Still lifes – oh, shut up!’
They looked on as Bob put a well-flamed match to the little haystack of tobacco. Joe felt overcharged with happiness.
Natasha had taken it out of the house and back to the art school because she could no longer bear Joe’s puzzlement bordering on impatience that it would not ‘come out’. She was convinced it was the best work she had ever done even among this sudden dynamic flurry which had produced more and better work than ever before.
It was the biggest. There was a woman, naked, thrown diagonally across the piece, legs stretched apart in agony or desire, it was difficult to decide which, breasts definitely modelled on her own as was the ghost-like face, hair swept back from the forehead, eyes slanted to one side, transfixed. But by what, Natasha wondered, and why? The rest of the painting would not emerge. Thick black stabbing strokes, small images which could be imps or homunculi, two big claws reaching up on either side like a dark comment on the shell from which Venus arises but here undoubtedly about to close over her and claw her down, annul her. Natasha had explained to Joe, in answer to his persistent questions, that she painted from ideas more than from the run of the paint, and that the ideas were often never resolved. At its best this gave a power of ambiguity which was compelling. But this one? Standing in the poor light of the Ruskin life-class room, alone, given special permission to stay late, she stared at her work, troubled that she could not resolve it, her mind beginning to panic with the effort of trying to find a way to make it work, make it satisfy some notion, even if only half understood, which would give her ease.
She became aware that she too, in this cluttered gloaming of easels and the picturesque detritus of painters, was being stared at. She let it go on for a few moments and then, although it was a very unwelcome intrusion, eventually she turned.
It was Robert.
‘Leave it,’ he said. ‘It’s as good as you’ll get it to be.’ He came forward, looking intently at the painting. Natasha refused to shrink away from him as her instinct demanded. He had been drinking: she feared the mood it could generate. ‘Jonathan told me you’d been doing new work.’ He stopped, looked for another moment or two, said, ‘The misery’s done you a service. I should get a credit.’ He laughed, turned to her and held out his arms. She stepped back.
‘Come on.’
In the poor light, his American maleness, black leather jacketed even in the summer heat, black hair, thick, oiled, big hands, ‘farmer’s hands’ he called them, the Southern tone which could cross so quickly from comfort to menace; she had to be brave to face him.
‘I don’t want to see you, Robert.’
‘But you can’t help it. Here I am. Wholly visible.’
‘You’ve been trailing me.’
‘Clever girl.’
‘You are wasting your time, Robert.’
‘I don’t believe so.’ He took a step nearer to her and she did not step back. His breath smelled rich with whisky. ‘I came to take you for a drink.’ The room seemed smaller now. The museum around them had long ago closed. The dead objects in the galleries would hear no cries. ‘Let’s go. We’re good together. We’re both a bit mad, Natasha. Let’s go now!’
‘No.’ Natasha tried to breathe evenly. ‘I will not come with you of my free will, Robert.’
The answer made him pause. Then he smiled, a broad, white, even-toothed smile, threatening.
‘Do you think I would take you by force?’
Natasha did not reply but her bravery was revealed by a steadiness in her look which held his eyes and took the sting out of them. It was he who looked away.
‘I’m sorry about all that, Natasha. It was wrong. I regret it, believe me.’
But she had found strength in silence.
‘It wasn’t good. I’ve had time to think about that. I behaved badly.’ He turned back to her, the threat now a plea. ‘But why don’t we just, make it up, here,’ he looked at the floor, ‘right now, right here.’ Still no answer. There was the threat of tearfulness in his voice which gave her hope. ‘I was a fool, Natasha. Maybe I ran away because I was afraid to be so hooked. Well, it didn’t take me far, did it? Here I am again, just as hooked.’
She would have to leave the painting on the easel. That would be no hardship. It was not ready. Perhaps it never would be. She walked away suddenly, quickly, without gesture, without looking back.
Had she turned her head she would have seen him looking closely at the painting, in one hand a cigarette, in the other the brush which Natasha had just put down.
She went out into the air, cool, clean, able to be free of him, she thought; the act of leaving had been done but much more than that she had felt no love for him, and no hate, only that he was an obstacle, in those moments, between herself and Jose
ph, an obstacle she had cleared. Now she had to see Joseph; her heart lifted, her step lightened, she loved him.
Joe thought the Post-Mortem was best of all. The exhibition had opened on Thursday. On Wednesday night, starting at ten, they had hung the paintings. Joe had no idea this could be such a lengthy and fastidious business. His notion was that you knocked in the hooks, strung the paintings, popped them up and that was that. But to Frances, her best girl friend at the Ruskin, whom Natasha had enrolled for her ‘perfect taste’, and Jonathan who somehow just turned up, it was a conference and, it seemed to a sturdily patient but increasingly weary Joe, an unnecessary, addictive drama, the longer drawn out the better for those involved. It went on and on and on. At first he acknowledged and saw that improvements had been made but quite soon he concluded it was the law of diminishing returns but kept that to himself. He arrived at his digs at 2.30 a.m. and Mrs Harries woke up and woke up Mr Harries to inform him for the umpteenth time that this was what came of letting his kind into a university like Oxford.
Thursday afternoon was when people from Cherwell and Isis arrived, and the Oxford Mail also sent an unanticipated photographer who made Natasha nervous. Friday was exhaustion for Natasha and for Joe the hurried preparation of an essay for an evening tutorial, a day made more unstable by his inability to stay in the college library for more than half an hour without rushing down to see if anyone had strayed into the exhibition and bought a painting.
Now it was late Saturday morning, Natasha’s room, just the two of them, coffee and two copies of an Oxford Mail which had devoted a full page and two photographs (one of Natasha, one of Icarus) to the exhibition to which the critic had given high praise. Natasha could not take it in. She had skimmed it twice and picked out ‘a true talent although something maybe owed to Francis Bacon’, ‘a rare intensity for one so young’, ‘the monotype is not a fashionable form but in the hands of Miss Prévost it explores great depths with a very confident technique’. This was so far from where she had been so recently. Was that photograph really her?
‘I don’t see why he has to mention Francis Bacon,’ said Joe. ‘All your stuff is off your own bat: that’s the point of being an artist.’
Natasha smiled, but now without any mockery or teasing. Joe would race or blunder into the lists for her whatever the merits of the case. She saw him ever more plainly and what she saw, she believed, was someone honest and clever and bold and to be trusted. And as she began to drop her guard, she accepted the love he had for her which flowed towards her ceaselessly, unqualified, and hers for him grew firm.
‘Julia came up to talk about it,’ she said. At one time she would have added that she did not know whether Julia had come in appreciation of the review or of the exhibition. But a gentler mood, softened by a happy tiredness and the confidence of her success, made her keep the barb to herself. ‘She was very sweet.’ She had been much more, but Natasha preferred to hug that to herself. The exhibition had given Julia an occasion on which to express her respect for Natasha, and generously to imply an equality which, she sensed, until now Natasha had never thought she accepted. But ‘very, very impressive’ were the words that remained. ‘And Matthew thought so too, indeed even more emphatically. We bought,’ said Julia, ‘number nineteen. I would have appreciated titles.’
Many people had bought. David, of course, and Roderick and Bob as Joe had expected but for which he was still grateful, Don and more obviously Jonathan and several others from the Ruskin, including Frances and Geoffrey Rhodes, her favourite teacher, Malcolm Turney, with his formidable Italian wife – they had bought ‘a thirty-pounder!’ said Joe, as had an elderly, willowy, linen-suited acquaintance of David. The Wadham College Junior Common Room Picture-Buying Committee had spent more than an hour scrutinising the paintings and retired for discussions never to return. The editor of Cherwell came too late for the cheap ones and muttered that he had to leave early for the office. James, slimmer and less guarded than he had been at Oxford, on the way to becoming a dandy, had come up from London, back to the college which had exiled him, together with a young actor. The actor had bought and so had James. With Bob and Roderick they commandeered a corner of the room for some time until James sensed the moment had come to break it up. Joe watched proprietorially as he went across to Natasha and congratulated her.
Now, in the redoubt of her garret, Joe, with a little flourish, produced a copy of the red-freckled sale list. Natasha looked but said nothing, not wanting to spoil his moment.
‘Nearly two-thirds sold! Almost unheard of, David said. And . . .’ again the conjuring gesture, this time a sheet of paper covered in numbers, ‘after deductions for rent of room, framing, cost of wine, tip to scout, you have a profit of seventy-two pounds and ten shillings. So far!’
‘The honeymoon,’ said Natasha, surprising herself so much that she felt a prickle of tears behind her eyes, ‘that will be for the honeymoon.’
Joe nodded, gravely, and stood up to undress. At last, it registered in some secure part of his mind, at last in her words and in her mood and in the calm of her success, at last he knew that the marriage really would happen and there would be a honeymoon.
‘It is better,’ she said.
Robert had brought the painting to her room and, pretending that Natasha had asked him to deliver it, managed to negotiate past Julia who nevertheless went upstairs to dust the bedrooms on the floor below Natasha.
Natasha looked at it for some time. What he had done was very skilful, she thought, and, she had to admit, sensitive. The work now had a force, and a coherence, though perhaps its ambiguity had gone: this, she thought, was a portrait of a woman unmistakably condemned to darkness.
‘It’s disturbing,’ she said.
‘All art should be disturbing.’
For once she thought his Delphic pronouncement rather trite.
‘I don’t want it,’ she said.
‘It’s the best thing you’ve ever done.’
‘I didn’t do it.’
‘Undo it, then.’
‘No. I don’t want it. I’m not her. I don’t want to be her.’
‘It’ll grow on you.’
Natasha shook her head and turned to face him.
‘I think I am in love with Joseph,’ she said. ‘I know he is younger and all sorts of other things, I know, but he lets me love him and I have no doubts about him.’
‘You’re taking a hell of a risk, Natasha. Listen to me. I’ve lost. But listen to me. You needn’t do this.’
You left me with no option, she thought. Risk was the only way out.
She saw a handsome, talented American man, a master of his world, confident, ruthless, mature, and she knew why she had fallen so deeply for him and why she had become his prey. With Joseph she would not be prey.
‘Thank you, Robert,’ she said, looking at the painting, ‘it’s a better painting. But it’s yours.’ If he did not take it, she would turn it to the wall.
She kept her eyes away from him, knowing that even now, at the last, he had the power to weaken her.
‘I’ll play the Southern Gentleman, ma’am,’ he drawled. ‘I’ll quit the field.’
He left the door half open and walked quietly down the stairs. Julia nodded with relief and then bashed the pillows with unnecessary vigour.
When she came back the following evening, Joe was sitting on the bed staring at the painting. She had scarcely stepped in when he said,
‘Why didn’t you show this?’
She looked at it, flinched at the doomed young woman and looked away, her eyes resting on the Icarus painting, again propped up by Joe in a prominent position.
‘It’s great,’ he said, and looked up to smile at her, that enthusiastic, innocent, intelligent smile that seduced her by its safety. ‘It’s your best. I got out the other,’ he nodded to the Icarus, ‘to compare. Neck and neck, I think.’
‘I didn’t finish it in time,’ she said.
‘Well. It can be the big one for the next exhibition.�
��
He looked intently once more at the woman so clearly pulled into darkness and fear, so expertly pointed up by Robert.
Natasha for a moment felt that she inhabited him. She could see what he saw, she could feel what he felt, this man to whom she was to pledge her life. She could become him. That would be safety.
Did he really understand? Did he not realise that here, in this picture, it was only one step through the art to the artist? If not, her relief was profound, the liberation from her past like the breaking of psychological chains. What he saw in this painting was not her; he did not see her like that; he did not want to see her like that. That was more than she could have hoped for.
‘You look tired, Joseph,’ she said, ‘why don’t you sleep for a little while?’
He nodded, her sympathetic words like a spell.
‘It is great, though,’ he said.
‘I’ll wake you in an hour.’
While he was asleep she took both paintings down the stairs to the cellar where she had stacked the unsold paintings after the exhibition.
CHAPTER TEN
‘Your mother brought me luck at the beginning,’ he told their daughter. ‘I think I gave her luck in return. I believe that it does exist. It’s like a sixth sense: not uncommon to experience, not easy to explain. Natasha was my good luck, I’m sure of it. Just by being who she was and the way she made me feel about myself – confidence, perhaps, or a useful relaxed carelessness – helped me land the best job I could have hoped for. I was probably the first Richardson to do a job he really wanted to do,’ Joe told her, ‘previous Richardsons had taken work available, usually at the bottom of the heap, and been obliged to make the best of it. To them, to “love work” would have been a contradiction in terms. To me it was the sun and the moon: it still is.’
