Remember Me...

by Melvyn Bragg

  Joe was relieved that Natasha’s room was tidier. The more he had thought on its bohemianism, and he had thought of their meeting constantly, the thinner the scruffy glamour had worn. Disorder excited him but only in small doses. There were still the unfinished canvases and the easel, the unorthodox wardrobe and what he had named ‘the forbidden portrait’. It was still properly artistic, he thought, a real studio, but no longer a mess. The bed was made. The seven roses were reunited, all shorn now, in a large jam jar beside the tubes of paint.

  He had taken down the number on the phone in the hall on his way out the previous evening and called just before lunch to leave a message that he would be there at five. To be fair and give her the chance not to be there? Or pretend not to be there? Or be there? In those first days Joe had not much of a clue as to what he was doing or why. He was like a puppy dog in a wood, blundering after scents which might be dead, might not, just enough to keep it keen. He had small expectations.

  Natasha noted that she was pleased to see him. For the company, for the gust of life that came through the door, for the smile which so openly liked her? It was a brief and superficial stroke of pleasure, like a flat stone merely skimming across the surface of a lake. Yet she was honest enough and so acutely attuned to her own depression to notice and to register this positive effect of his presence and be grateful.

  ‘Feeling better?’

  She nodded, not wanting to disappoint him.

  ‘You look better.’

  A long woven wine-coloured skirt bought in the market in Avignon, a clean white shirt open at the throat, a thick college scarf draped as a shawl, the lightest rub of lipstick, the pallor softened as her back was to the window.

  ‘Which college is that?’

  Natasha looked at the scarf as if surprised to find it there. ‘Roland gave it to me,’ she said and shook her head.

  ‘Who’s Roland?’

  ‘You are nosy.’ The flickered smile only partly reassured him. She drew deeply on her cigarette and Joe reached for his own. She exhaled the smoke evenly, in perfect lines, Joe observed, like those sharp rays of light that shot down through a mass of cloud, staircases to heaven they had been called, staircases to her lips. He smiled more broadly, encouraged by the warmth which was in him, which came from the force of attention he was paying her, though from a distance, still circling.

  ‘Roland is the janitor at the college. He finds lost property in the museum and after a few months he gives it to us. Jonathan says that Roland gave him a packet of contraceptives just before Christmas. One had been used.’

  Joe kept his mouth shut and blushed. In the Ashmolean Museum? Where?

  ‘I’ve got the tickets.’ He patted his jacket pocket, unsure why he needed the reinforcement of mime. ‘It starts at six-ten.’

  ‘Six-ten.’ She repeated the numbers mockingly, and waited.

  ‘We’ll miss the trailers.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Which I like. I like trailers . . . usually . . . Not always.’

  ‘Six-ten. Now it is five-fifty-two.’

  She stood up and Joe’s heart leaped to see her stand, again silhouetted, this time against the window which brought in the last light from a dying winter sun. He saw that she was wearing leather boots.

  ‘You look like a Cossack,’ he said. ‘Have you read The Cossacks? I think it’s his best.’

  ‘You are funny,’ she said and Joe felt complimented by the first warmth in her tone.

  In the cinema Natasha used the celluloid-lit darkness and the comfort of the thin audience to float, to be borne up above the pain, to let the images on the screen give her just enough of a drug to stir into the painkillers taken before Joe came, to numb the ravenous grief. Occasionally her attention would be caught by the adolescent girls in the elaborate white dresses of a distant time, and memories of photographs and of her own childhood would surface to remind her of past losses, missed chances of happiness; or the bewildered expression of the old professor would be transferred onto a recollection of her father and the world of the film would become a dream, welcomed because it eased the pressure of grief at what Robert had done. Without finding the opportunity to object, she was guided to a small restaurant that Joe and Roderick used occasionally. It was cheap but the crisp tablecloths were in a red and white checked pattern and she could see the place was well cleaned. The woman who served was Spanish. On the walls were the accoutrements of matadors and two posters of the Bull Ring in Seville. There was a guitar hanging next to the door to the kitchen. It was the most sophisticated and romantic restaurant that Joe knew.

  Natasha’s sweet smile as she sat down at a corner table – the place was quite full but this table was produced like a special treat – confirmed to Joe that he had made the right choice. The waitress came and with a flourish she lit the thick red wax-dripped candle stuck in the dead bottle of Mateus rosè. She stood back, her native costume enlivened by the glow, and bowed her head slightly at Joe’s beam of applause.

  ‘Bravo!’ said Natasha, and the women held each other’s gaze for a moment and then, in a slightly different tone which appeased and convinced the waitress, ‘Truly: bravo,’ Natasha repeated and held out a cigarette to the candle, twirling it slowly in the yellow flame. An understanding had been reached.

  After the paella – they had only one course and Natasha scarcely ate – and house red wine, two glasses for Joe, one for Natasha, he sat back proprietorially with coffee and a cigarette, glowing with hope.

  ‘My father teaches . . . like that old professor in the film.’

  ‘My father wanted to be a teacher,’ Joe said. ‘A village schoolmaster.’

  It was as if she had not heard him.

  ‘He is ill now,’ she continued. ‘He has been made ill!’ The snap of the sentence alerted Joe to instant concern.

  ‘I’m sorry. What is it . . . ?’

  She shook her head, chiding herself, not Joe. ‘The film you made with your friends. Was Ingmar Bergman your inspiration?’

  ‘It was a bit of a failure really,’ Joe murmured. Somehow – he could not work out why – she put a new and testing perspective on what he had done. He had hoped she had forgotten his nervous boasting on the way to the cinema. ‘We thought it was existentialist.’

  ‘What do you know about existentialism?’

  ‘English existentialism.’ He tried to grin. ‘We put jokes in. They didn’t come off.’

  ‘You should see your expression.’

  Joe looked around as if for cover.

  ‘You are so disappointed. Like a little boy. About your film.’

  ‘That’s what I’m going to do,’ he said, provoked to boast but avoiding her mocking eyes. ‘I’ll make a film. I’ll do it one day. I’ll get the bill,’ he said and Natasha regretted her teasing.

  ‘We must share.’

  ‘No. My treat.’ Natasha reached out as if to restrain his arm from going to his wallet. ‘No. I’m flush.’ He looked around for the waitress.

  ‘She is in the kitchen,’ said Natasha. ‘It is not normal for a woman to be the waitress in a restaurant like this.’

  ‘She told me about that. Her husband’s a better cook, she said. And he never wanted to be a waiter. She likes doing it: she says she couldn’t do it in Spain, but I don’t know. They met in Seville when they were at school. They left because of Franco. She’s called Carmen – like the opera. That’s how she tells you – “I’m Carmen-like-the-opera-in-Seville.” She once said she was my Spanish mother!’

  ‘You know all about these people,’ Natasha said. ‘That is good.’

  ‘Well,’ Joe threw an explanation over his embarrassment, ‘Roderick and I have been here a few times.’

  ‘You make it sound like an excuse. Not everybody who comes here will be interested to know what you know. And you know much more. Don’t you? Why is that?’

  ‘My mother and father . . .’ He changed his mind and said no more.

  As they were about to leave, Carmen came to t
he door with them. To Natasha she presented a small-faced white carnation. To Joe she said, most solemnly and in a stage whisper, with a possessive hand on his arm, ‘She is grand, Joseph . . .’ And looked deeply into his eyes.

  Grand? Missing its Spanish meaning, Joe rather jibbed at the word. Grand was nowhere near right. They went out into the cold.

  ‘I can walk by myself from here.’

  ‘I’ll set you back.’

  ‘“Set” me?’

  ‘Take you.’

  ‘“Set” is better. But no. Please. And thank you for a lovely evening . . . Please.’

  Suddenly she had to go. The front of manners fell away. Weariness engulfed her.

  She left him and he watched her walking through the yellow pools of lamplight along the empty Oxford pavement, the clicking of her boots finally fading away and still he stood for some moments, relishing her absence.

  He was confident that they would meet again: she had already become such an essential presence in his life. He would make it happen.

  Over the next few days she would not see him.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Julia, ‘but she’s not at all well.’

  All the more reason to see her, Joe thought, all the more reason to be with her.

  ‘I’ll take those up to her.’ Joe handed over the six red roses. ‘You’re very sweet.’

  He did not want to be sweet but let it pass.

  ‘Will you tell her I’m asking after her?’

  ‘Of course.’

  They stood as if they were on a vital narrow bridge challenging each other to see who would give way first. Noises of children from within the house settled the matter.

  ‘They’re back from their grandmother’s,’ said Julia. ‘Peace is at an end. I must fly.’

  Although she shut the door gently, she had a twinge of conscience as if she were unfairly shutting it in his face. She was starting to like him although she thought him unsuitable.

  ‘He does seem devoted to you. I might even say obsessed,’ Julia said to Natasha as she picked up clothes and tidied up the room which had soon subsided into slovenliness. ‘He’s very sweet,’ and she added, with emphasis, ‘he’s becoming a limpet.’

  Natasha looked at her and said, ‘Please keep the flowers. I can’t stand them.’ The little outing with Joe seemed to have accentuated and not eased the remorseless gnawing on her wound. The glint of light that evening had been extinguished minutes after she had left the restaurant and she found herself at once utterly consumed by her loss. She knew that Julia was being kind but she wanted Julia gone. She needed all the space around her to be empty to cope with these relentless surging tides of darkness.

  ‘I’m exhausted,’ said Julia. She and Matthew had come together to listen to the headlines of the news on the radio, to have a final (and in Julia’s case her first) drink of the day and to discuss what, as atheists, they liked to call their parish notices. ‘One doesn’t anticipate the au pair becoming more of a burden than the children she has been employed to help organise or the house she is supposed to keep clean.’

  ‘Natasha is not one of nature’s skivvies,’ said Matthew, taking care not to over-soda the whisky.

  ‘I appreciate that.’ Julia filled up her tumbler with a quantity of tap water guaranteed to drown the modest tot of scotch. The coal fire was low but still warm; the yellow side lamps threw cosy shadows across the well-proportioned room; the few paintings and the regiments of read books were a reassurance of arrival. Academic North Oxford was Julia’s Arcadia.

  ‘We are in loco parentis’, said Matthew, removing his spectacles to mark the end of another day’s hard reading.

  ‘Others did not think as we do.’ Julia had protected him from Natasha’s more lurid stories of a bleak life below stairs as au pair to other Oxford intellectuals of modest means who aspired to the pre-war luxury of servants through the cheap and exploited labour of young foreign girls ‘learning English’.

  ‘That makes it all the more incumbent on us,’ said Matthew.

  ‘Quite frankly I’m worried about her,’ said Julia. ‘She’s been in Oxford for ages. She won’t take any of the exams at the Ruskin. She shows no ambition and no sense of direction and the small sum she gets from her parents barely keeps her going.’

  ‘Her parents are a mystery,’ said Matthew. ‘Now and then there’s a sighting . . .’ He fished out what would be his last cigarette of the day. ‘And now there’s this new chap.’

  ‘He is much too young for her. Excuse me, I must go up and see her.’

  Natasha was asleep. Julia looked at her for a while. She had no truck with any form of divination yet she stayed for some time and wished that by thought alone she could help and heal Natasha, and feared what might happen to the self-hugged, pallid, foetal figure so desperately asleep in the narrow bed.

  The college library was open until midnight. Joe was making notes on an essay which he should have handed in the previous term. He had promised himself that after Christmas he would drop everything (save the film criticism) and work flat out for Finals. Exams were the point of being at Oxford, he told himself. That was what the scholarship was for. It was a matter of pride. It was a question of honour. To show them.

  He had been asked to discuss the effect of the French Revolution on Ideology in British Politics. He was trying to make himself familiar with the principal characters for his essay. Already met in school were Hazlitt and Wordsworth. Now there were new heroes, Tom Paine and Charles James Fox, a new villain the younger Pitt, and the disturbance of Edmund Burke. What Joe really wanted to write was that it was a tragedy that revolutionary ideas did not flower in a Britain in which many of them had been seeded.

  He had looked out a copy of The Prelude and found the passage in which the young Wordsworth and a pro-revolutionary officer had been walking in the countryside. They had come across a ‘hunger-bitten girl’ who ‘crept along’ leading a heifer.

  . . . at the sight my Friend

  In agitation said, ‘’Tis against that

  Which we are fighting . . .’

  When he had read that at school, Joe had immediately and passionately transferred the image to the lanes around his home town, an area still mired in Victorian rural poverty. He saw it where he was and that one image called out his most generous feelings every bit as much as the following lines served as a clarion call to arms.

  I with him believed

  Devoutly that a spirit was abroad

  Which could not be withstood, that poverty,

  At least like this, would in a little time

  Be found no more, that we should see the earth

  Unthwarted in her wish to recompense

  The industrious, and the lowly Child of Toil . . .

  He still felt the words as a song in his mind, as an anthem, even a creed.

  Until he came into the arms of Oxford, he would have argued that to be the inheritor of the French Revolution which had blown up privilege and sanctified equality would be a far, far better thing than to be the subject of what in England at that time was still in style and social order a feudal system. But now he himself was privileged and a price was demanded and part of that was to see early views as naïf.

  Head bowed over the desk he now argued for the superiority of English moderation despite the repressive acts which made it very like a tyranny.

  Perhaps because his heart was not in it, his concentration was patchy. He had been at the desk for about three hours. He took a break for a breath of air and a cigarette and he strolled around the shadow-cloaked quad. In that cloistered darkness he felt a bliss of certainty and calm. Everything was so good. Thoughts of Natasha displaced scholarship. He was at the beginning of the adult adventure, in Oxford, fired up with life. He wanted to race around to make her see him, but he forced himself back into the library.

  Over the past year he had fallen behind in his academic work and accepted that the duty of hard reading was waiting for him. Now was the time. What did the world have in
store for someone from his common background, just another scholarship boy who had somehow managed to clamber aboard Oxford, if he failed the crucial final exams? What did acting and writing and making an existentialist film matter compared with Finals which could take him he could not define exactly where but on some safe and desirable path in this new world to which he had gained access. If he fell out of the race now – what waste! What shame! And what would there be to do?

  Yet lash himself as much as he could, the taste for it, the love even, was diminished. Natasha was now his chief subject and study and her banishment of him was hard to bear. Every day’s rejection turned the screw tighter.

  He scarcely knew her. He ought to pull himself together. It was the masculine approach, it was the sensible approach and it took him nowhere. She had made him realise the hunger of his loneliness.

  He would not let her go. He had been caught and he had wanted to be caught. The tug grew more insistent the more he saw of her. He could not give up. And yet he would not have described what he felt as love, not yet, not like the ever-aching, carnal, lust-twinned love he had known for Rachel.

  As he sat in the library with a few others equally roped to the oars as the final examinations reared up in an uncomfortably foreseeable future, thoughts of Natasha, vague, indistinct, but relentless, drew him further and further away from the effect of the French Revolution on Ideology in British Politics or other tasks in waiting: the influence of Aristotle and Plato on the Italian Renaissance, or the tragedy of Dido in The Aeneid, Book Four, which luckily he had studied at school and learned chunks of by heart. After less than an hour he surrendered, closed the books and left them there for the morning. They could not, as so recently they had done, take over his life, or not now, which ought to have been disturbing. Yet as he walked through the perfect Jacobean college quadrangle, there was elation, and an undefined freedom.

  It was about a mile and a half to his digs out of the centre of the city along the Marston Road. He enjoyed the night walk in the frosty air. He liked the thought that he was the only human being walking down the curving lane of Holywell, imagining himself a Jude the Obscure, barred, bricked, out walking alongside the high wall of Magdalen College, picturing the herd of college deer asleep in its silvery park. He loved to see the running of the deer. He was the sole traveller to pass the mediaeval, singing tower on the bridge and he stood there a while looking down on the water, somewhere between striking a pose and relishing the solitary present.