by Melvyn Bragg
‘When I reached La Rotonde I sat where Natasha and I had last sat together, one night, so many years ago now. As I waited for you, I got out my notebook. There were very few people around at this hot time in the afternoon but I wanted to cut myself off and I knew that if I seemed to be absorbed in writing, I would not be disturbed.
‘The notes made there are the basis for these final sentences. I have tried my best to bring Natasha home to you who now look so much like her. Many times I feel that I have not done justice to her, to a life so much purer than mine. Time is said to heal all wounds. Well, it doesn’t always, Marcelle; in some cases it deepens them. I wanted you to know what I know about your mother, my wife. This account is yours, to do with as you wish.
‘The biggest thing of all is loss. Not to see her again, never to hear her, to be alive when she is not alive . . . Time is passing faster for me now, year by year more quickly, and sometimes I find I say, “It will not be long now.”’
He sat in the shade on the steps of La Rotonde and waited. Eventually he saw Marcelle down the path in the distance, the sun behind her. He closed his notebook. She looked up, saw him and smiled and then she waved as she walked towards him and brought Natasha with her.
He got up from the bed and went across the cool tiles to the window and looked again at what Isabel had given him.
Natasha had copied out some lines from Christina Rossetti. They were scrawled in uncharacteristically hectic loose handwriting.
Remember me when I have gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go, yet turning stay.
And then the scrawl slid into a violent tangle of lines and shapes, wordless; nothing but pain.
The shutters were ajar. He opened one of them wide and looked at the diamond stars, the fathomless darkness, and listened to the night sounds of Provence.
She is out there now, he thought, in the infinite and unbearable space of memory.
