by Melvyn Bragg
Joe was in there for nine nights. No visitors. The weekend was free of examinations, otherwise there were two sessions a day, up to the last one on the Thursday morning. That was the translation paper, Latin and at least one other language. The vicar announced that he was ‘a bit of a linguist’ and looked over Joe’s shoulder quite a lot in that session.
When it was over, the last hot chocolate drunk, the last gum licked, the vicar liberated, Joe felt good. Being so isolated, he thought, had been lucky. It had allowed him to give it his undistracted and best shot. He felt a sweet, healthy tiredness.
It was over at last, the long journey. The slog at school, the harsh self-regulating timetables, the heavy loads of homework, the practice tests, the marks, the memorising, the real tests, the waiting on the results, the scholarship exams, the entrance exams, the weekly, sometimes bi-weekly essays, the cramming and sifting and learning to learn. The education was over. He felt he could float, up to the ceiling, out into the grounds of the hospital, float above Oxford, go to the deep North and hover over his old school, hover over his bedroom in the pub in which so many solitary hours had been spent while his parents worked downstairs; he could float above it and say goodbye, and thanks, many thanks; whatever it was that had set him out and pulled him along was over and the world was beyond examinations now, outside, waiting and unlimited.
He had his lunch and then went for a bath. The lumps were definitely receding. He had overheard the doctor say that he was no longer infectious but still quite weak. Keep him in for another two or three days under observation.
Joe returned to his room, dressed, walked through the french windows and through the sun-filled grounds, walked down Headington Hill and over Magdalen Bridge, walked slowly into the heart of Oxford, the streets now occupied by white-tied, black-gowned undergraduates blinking into liberty. In a state of euphoric dizziness he walked past his celebrating college for luck, but walked on, making for Natasha.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Ellen bought a new hat. She kept it in its box until a few minutes before she set off for the wedding. Sam wore his ‘best suit’, seven years in spare service, dry-cleaned. Without consultation, Ellen bought him a new white shirt and a smart tie. She would have enjoyed buying a new outfit for herself but Joe had warned her that very few people would be there because most of them had left the university; it would be a register office ceremony; and the ‘wedding breakfast’ would be a few drinks in the college gardens, immediately after which he and Natasha would go on their honeymoon. It seemed an unnecessary extravagance – especially as Sam had given her the money for a good suit only recently to celebrate their wedding anniversary. And the marriage was not in Wigton.
It was hard not to be upset, Ellen thought, her heart almost sick with unease, and she flickered through wildly changing moods as the steam engine clicked over the points and drew them south. She had not met the woman who would be her son’s wife. There would be no church wedding. No friends there, no crowd lingering at the church door as she and other women had done so many times, ready with the confetti, connoisseurs of a wedding. But, far more importantly, whatever she said in public, she knew that he was too young for marriage. He had not known Natasha for long enough. But it was too late, it was too late, too late, too late, and the words replaced the clickety-click on the rails.
When she got to their small hotel and Joe came round to see them, she discovered that he had forgotten about a wedding cake. At least it gave her a purpose and the next morning Ellen finally hunted down a suitably iced cake, with ‘Happy Birthday’ inscribed on it. An uncollected cake. The inscription was rather ineptly removed: there was no time, the shopkeeper said, to put on ‘Congratulations’.
Sam would glance at her now and then and there would be a faint smile, a little forced, he thought, but he too was apprehensive. Joe’s impetuosity was not something he admired. He would have thought more of their son if he had come home with or without Natasha and announced it face to face.
Natasha had gone to London to meet her father and her stepmother. Their parents met at the pre-wedding lunch in the Spanish restaurant. Frances, Jonathan and Roderick, who was to be best man, were there, and the Stevenses, who proved to be invaluable and somehow made it all seem normal and as it should be, happily inevitable. It was ‘their’ restaurant, Joe told his mother, and Ellen told him it felt very friendly. It felt something like a wedding for that hour or so. Afterwards Natasha went back to the Stevenses’ with her parents to be prepared for the four o’clock nuptial and, after dropping off the cake at the Porters’ Lodge, Joe took Sam and Ellen on a brisk tour of central Oxford which provoked Ellen to wonder and Sam to an increasingly silent understanding. Joe showed it off, he thought, as if this were now his home, this to Sam forbidding and awesome place. By the time the Richardson family arrived at the Town Hall, at the tail end of an earlier wedding, they were thoughtful, even subdued, each one affected by the complex and powerful atmosphere of the old university city.
Joe and Roderick went into the office to check out the form. As Sam and Ellen waited in the lofty antechamber, he said,
‘I’m glad I got to Oxford at last.’
‘He invited us twice.’
‘He did,’ said Sam, ‘and he meant it.’
‘Maybe we should have accepted.’
‘We should’ve done. But we didn’t want to embarrass him. We should have chanced it.’
‘He’s just the same, isn’t he?’ Ellen said, rather timidly.
Sam nodded; he had noticed many changes on the surface but time would be needed to work out their implications and time together, a browsing, loose-reined time together, would no longer be available. Already on that day he had noticed his son ducking away, keeping his distance, unkeen to connect. Sam felt a sadness for a long-hoped-for friendship that would now never have time to take root. The boy had been stretched and impatient in his last two years at school and nothing had grown between them nor had the increasingly unhappy returns to a Wigton without Rachel allowed the easy hours together to which Sam now realised he had looked forward and waited for. It would be another path not taken, and here, waiting for the wedding in Oxford Town Hall, he could feel Joe drift out of reach, finally go beyond him, and he mourned the loss.
‘It is very good that he is to work for the BBC,’ said Dr Prévost to Sam as they walked to the college after the ceremony. ‘You see, in France the BBC during the war was absolutely necessary.’
Sam did not have an apposite response and his silence, interpreted as good manners, allowed the Frenchman to go on and enabled Sam to weigh him up. The two men were walking down the sleepy summer High Street side by side, as were Ellen and Véronique (who had complimented Ellen on her hat in such a way as to make Ellen want to throw it away), followed by Roderick and Frances, Bob, Julia and Matthew, two girls from the Ruskin, the Turneys bringing up the rear. Joe looked back as they crossed the road to St Mary’s Church.
‘We could be leading them to the Ark,’ he said.
I wish they’d got married in a church like that, thought Ellen as they crossed over the street. She noticed that it was called St Mary’s like their church in Wigton and for a moment she thought she would cry; their church in Wigton seemed so steeped in security.
‘The dome is interesting,’ said Dr Prévost as they passed the Radcliffe Camera. ‘It is probably Muslim in origin and requires great ingenuity of engineering.’
The words and the information roll out in a university, Sam thought, what a life they must have in such a place.
‘Evelyn Waugh was at Hertford. He hated the place. He was a terrible little snob. Brilliant writer,’ said Roderick as they passed that college: he was determined to impress Frances ever since she had come up to him and said, ‘You Best Man, me Bridesmaid. How!’
‘It is very good that Joseph is in the BBC,’ said Madame Prévost to Ellen. ‘We were so relieved.’
‘I rather think they’ll make a go of it,’ said Turney.
‘I t
hink they just might make a go of it,’ said Julia, ‘especially after meeting the parents.’
‘The parents, I agree, are not unimpressive. All four,’ said Matthew.
‘I wish David could have postponed his holiday,’ said Natasha as they turned into the college.
‘I wish James could be here as well,’ said Joe, who beat away any sense of disappointment that they were too few. ‘It was good of Roderick and Bob to make an effort,’ he said. ‘Oxford’s dead now that term’s over.’
But under a high, unthreatening grey sky, warm enough, a white-tableclothed trestle table set out with sandwiches and cakes, wine and tea next to the copper beech, it became a lively making the best of it, which became making the most of it, an Oxford occasion, to be remembered. Bob had appointed himself the official ‘wedding snapper’ and was conscientious not only in the taking but in the thoroughness of the taking; the bride and groom, the bride and groom with best man and bridesmaid, the bride and groom with family and best man and bridesmaid, the bridegroom with everyone including Bob himself (photograph courtesy of the college servant who had been hired to dispense drinks) and, at Roderick’s special request, the best man and bridesmaid.
The icing on the cake had hardened over the uncollected days, but once cracked open the fruit cake itself was applauded as was the neat brief speech given by Roderick and the elegant words said by Dr Prévost, who came over to Natasha at the end of it and kissed her more tenderly than she could recall, so tenderly that she avoided her stepmother’s eye. Joe’s speech was unbearably nervous and because of that applauded most warmly. About an hour later they left, a taxi at the gate booked to take them to a ‘secret location’, which was the bus station. They had half an hour to wait for the next bus to Henley, where they would change for another bus. They went into the Welsh Pony.
It was just after opening time and empty. The emptiness was a relief. Joe appreciated the knowing smile of the barmaid but took the two halves of bitter well away from the bar, into the far corner of the room, against the big window. The late afternoon light illuminated Natasha. She could not have been more enticingly lit by the best cameraman in films, Joe thought, so bathed in the intense streams of light, so wrapped in it, enthroned in it as the rays burst through the window panes and radiated around her, as if she had for those moments been chosen.
This, he wanted to tell their daughter, was when he fell profoundly in love with her mother. But it would have been thought too late, he guessed, and too difficult to explain how he was so certain. Why so late? she would have asked. What had been his feelings before then? How could he have proposed without being ‘really in love’? Natasha was almost like a vision, he would think, even a revelation, but that was too grandiose to pass on and how could visions and revelations lead to what happened? The truth about Natasha would come out slowly and piecemeal.
Perhaps in his nervousness he had needed the few months since meeting her to build up the confidence to realise the finality of it. Perhaps there was something about that particular moment in the corner of the pub next to the bus station that prompted the unmistakable physical sensation of finally, utterly falling, falling into love, the great force of the sunlight, the sense of unique good fortune, the confluence of assured desire and protectiveness. But it was falling most of all, falling for Natasha.
Did she feel the same at that moment? He never did ask her. And how valid or significant was this flood of his feeling if not returned? Was it no more than a stone thrown into space? Was it love of his own love for her?
But most of all he did not speak of it to their daughter because the memory of it led immediately to a much later image of her, towards the end, so worn, so disappointed, frightened, strained, so far from their wedding day; a fall too tormenting to speak of, one which still caused him physically to flinch and turn away his head as if blows were being rained on him, a deep strike of guilt and the unceasing reminder of responsibility, of failing.
‘To us,’ he said, and raised his glass of beer.
Natasha’s smile was shy, unusual for her; in this public place together she felt so rawly married.
‘Who did your hair?’
‘I’m pleased you like it.’
‘It’s great,’ Joe said. ‘It really is dead classy. No question.’
Frances had decided that Natasha must have her hair up for the occasion and the long student locks had been shaped and swept into a high soft curving crown. It made her look distinguished.
‘She’s what you could call handsome, isn’t she?’ Ellen said as they sat in the bed at the end of the day and picked their way through the last twelve hours. Sam merely nodded; he was sifting through his impressions with some care. ‘That hairstyle suited her well,’ said Ellen. ‘I’ve seen it on women at society weddings. You have to be tall to carry it off . . .’
‘That dress,’ said Joe. ‘It’s . . . You suit it well.’
It was new, bought with money given to Natasha by her father, high-necked, long-sleeved, in patterns of lilac and cream, and something in the material that floated, Joe thought, bore her up, and again altered her to bring out that which he had not seen before, another Natasha even more mysterious than the woman he knew . . .
‘She looked very like her mother,’ said Dr Prévost as they walked back to the Randolph from the Stevenses’, where they had been offered supper. Véronique held his arm and held her peace; it was not often he referred back to his first wife so directly and it would pass. ‘Especially with the hair,’ he gesticulated with his free arm, ‘comme ça.’
‘She looked well,’ was her measured response. I feared she would do so much worse was unsaid. ‘He is very young.’
‘Professor Stevens speaks highly of him. He says he is a very solid young man, from the North of England and full of common sense. He is exactly right for Natasha. And the BBC!’ Again a gesticulation. ‘Professor Stevens told me that was a very good thing. No. I am pleased for her.’ He patted his wife’s hand. ‘I am very pleased for her.’
You are very pleased for yourself, she thought, but again an indulgent silence prevailed. She is finally off your hands. And mine, she thought, holding his arm more tightly as they turned into Beaumont Street. Thank God, at last, off mine.
‘I talked to Joseph about Africa,’ he said as they strolled across the empty road. ‘He was very intelligent about the British Empire. The French have similar problems. I invited him to come to Provence for the summer. They do not have much money.’
‘But we . . . The arrangements are . . . Would it not be better for them to be on their own?’
‘He was very pleased to be invited.’ He stood back so that she could precede him up the steps. ‘I must ask where this name Randolph comes from. Professor Stevens said he “had not a clue”.’ Dr Prévost said it in English, the phrase amused him. ‘“He had not a clue” . . . !’
The bus stopped just a few yards from the Stonor Arms, the small hotel in the Chilterns recommended by Frances. It seemed to Joe to be more like a house, the house of wealthy people, Joe thought, as he took in the comfortable floral-patterned sofas in the reception area, the dark oil paintings on the wall, the highly coloured rugs, the antique umbrella stand, the sets of antlers jutting out from above the ornately designed fireplace and what he thought of as the rather intimidating welcome from the tall, tweeded owner, whose look seemed to say, ‘Newly-weds, ha! I’ll be keeping an eye on you two.’ Joe was a little brusque in confirming the four-night reservation and Natasha took comfort in this reassuring gaucheness.
Their room, large, two deep armchairs, plumped cushions, old mahogany furniture, heavy curtains, paintings and rugs once again, was the most luxurious bedroom Joe had ever seen.
‘Look.’ He sat on the bed and attempted to bounce, but sank into the deep goose-feathered mattress. ‘A double bed!’
The cases were unpacked, the curtains drawn, the gong sounded for dinner. Joe took off with speed the clerical grey suit put on with such care, wrenched off the tie and
watched as Natasha, more slowly, did she know how beautiful she was? undressed and they took possession of the double bed.
‘Ah,’ said their host, gin and tonic in hand, as they came down the stairs late for dinner, ‘our newly-weds! Is the room to your liking?’
‘It’s fine,’ said Joe. ‘Thank you. I’m starving.’
‘A young warrior,’ murmured the host, and Natasha noticed his condescension.
‘Mais bien sûr,’ she said, ‘comme tous les vrais anglais, n’est-ce pas?’
They swept into the whispering dining room . . .
‘It was nice of that Roderick and Bob to take us for a drink,’ Sam said. They were in bed, too restless to sleep, too full of the day to read.
‘Yes.’ Ellen grasped at this, as reassurance. ‘They’re very good-mannered.’
‘So he’s made a couple of good friends,’ said Sam. ‘That’s all you need. That tutor was good to talk to. So was her father.’
For Sam it had been a day of unanticipated satisfaction. Oxford had taken his breath away: Joe had told him about it but he had never anticipated the impact of the buildings, the gardens and streets, the towers and spires, the variety of colleges. Dr Prévost, Professor Stevens, Malcolm Turney, all had treated him as an equal in conversation and their cast of mind, the way they expressed and commented on even the simplest issues made it a privilege, he said later to a friend back in Wigton, just to listen.
‘And Natasha,’ Ellen said, ‘what did you think of Natasha?’ She had wanted to save that question until they were back home when there would have been time to consider. But she could not repress it.
‘I liked her.’
‘She’s not too old for him?’
‘They’ll manage.’
‘Not too sophisticated?’
‘Joe can cope.’
‘You can’t help but take to her,’ said Ellen quietly, after a pause, ‘there’s something about her, isn’t there? Something you can’t help but like.’ But for Joe? What would they have in common, she thought, after they left Oxford, after the attraction of mutual strangeness had worn off? She needed Sam to help her.
