by Melvyn Bragg
He took her arm and the dry touch of the kisses faded away. To be on his arm, daughter and representative of mother, as they walked up from the station into the university city was a double pleasure which fed so richly her long-starved affection that she would remember for always that hour, just the two of them, just walking through Oxford, she on his arm. She let nothing diminish that hour. It was a phial of great happiness.
He had looked through a brief history of Oxford and he commented on the architecture, on the names of the colleges, produced references to eminent Oxford scholars from the past, delighted in the Radcliffe Camera, talked of the camera obscura and of St Peter’s, was impressed at the sight of the Bodleian Library, compared it to the Bibliothèque Nationale and other libraries back to Alexandria. By the magnificence of Christ Church he was ‘étonné’, by the haughty spires of All Souls he was ‘enchanté’. Natasha was relieved to become the visitor, he the guide and she wanted Joseph to be there both to listen to the easy learning of her father which on so many subjects over the years could mesmerise her into a kind of adoration and to contribute, as he surely would have done, being, as she had found out, such a proud tenant of the university.
‘To conclude – the Ashmolean Museum,’ he said, ‘where I believe there is a marvellous Uccello.’
She did not take him to the painting school. Term was finished. It would look dingy. And she did not want to draw the attention of this scholarly man to her life as a student of painting. Much as she wanted it she knew that even if it found his formal approval it still represented a sad lapse from the academic honours he had hoped for and she, in his version, had flung away. And had he come to the small painting rooms she sensed that in his presence she might have agreed with him, that they were a portrait of her failure.
‘Cambridge is more beautiful,’ he concluded as they approached the Stevenses’ house. ‘But Oxford has more character. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to see it.’
He was rather portly and by the time he reached the top of the stairs he was catching his breath.
Natasha’s studio was stunningly tidy.
‘A garret,’ was all he said, after the briefest of glances and appeared to give it neither another thought nor another glance.
‘I was hoping you would offer me English tea,’ he said. ‘Merci.’
‘I thought you would enjoy it,’ she replied, shyly.
Natasha smiled at this evidence of their closeness and they sat down at the table with the crockery borrowed from Julia and the plum cake baked by Julia. He had two cups of tea and two slices of cake and from the intensity of Natasha’s concern he could have been taking the holy sacraments.
He wiped his lips with a pristine white handkerchief, glanced at his watch, sat back in the chair, and fixed her with a concentrated but not unkind look.
‘So what is all this drama?’
She smiled, reminded of old times when he had called her into his study to deliver warnings and propose logical and apparently effortless routes out of her failures and confusion. But now she was a woman and it seemed that her father had not registered the change. So she smiled out of the sense of liberation.
He frowned, but let it pass. Sometimes he did not like to look at her too directly: the resemblance to his first wife in aspect and gesture could be too strong. And he felt that she not so much looked at him as searched his face looking for resemblances to herself.
‘Is it serious, this proposal of marriage?’
‘Joseph is very serious.’
‘But so sudden? And you say he wants to be married soon?’
‘He is impatient.’ She withdrew from him a little, letting Joseph into her thoughts now, not letting the searchlight of her father’s presence eliminate all other shades and figures, and she repeated, ‘He is impatient. But he has reasons. He will need to find work after July and that will not be in Oxford. If I am to live with him he says we must marry. I understand that.’
It was the first time she had said out loud that she would ‘not be in Oxford’ and for the first time she felt apprehensive about where he would take her. She made herself put it aside.
‘I am helpless,’ he said and this time she smiled broadly. There was no one less helpless than her father. He understood and nodded his appreciation. ‘But this young man – who is he?’
‘He is waiting to meet you.’
‘Tell me about him.’
And so, carefully, without gloss, Natasha sketched in his character. She made a fine case for him, referred to the little she knew of his ordinary background in the far North of England, dwelled rather heavily on the scholarship which she knew would impress, mentioned the reviewing and the acting and risked the existentialist film he had made. Her father laughed at that, an amused laugh, she judged.
It was not a long story, not a long life. She told him nothing that most mattered to her.
Then, out of nowhere, it seemed, came a question which, looking back, she knew she could never have put in any other context; a question which, as it was uttered, seemed to carry a terrible weight of longing.
‘For how long did you know my mother before you proposed to her?’
Would he reply or, as so very often, ignore what did not suit him?
‘I fell in love with her the instant,’ the word was explored and repeated, ‘the instant I saw her.’
And following that, a pause in which she scented the romance of her parents, seen through two photographs, one of her father when a young academic, the air of distinction already there, she thought, and so confident, in his first university post, the other of her mother smiling over her shoulder in the lavender fields. Her association with the photographs, her love for them, flooded through her.
‘And Mother?’ She was bold.
‘Ah!’ He smiled, Natasha’s smile. ‘Afterwards she said – “just the same for me”, but not at the time!’ He laughed. ‘She was from a superior family, you know, but she was intellectual and a little bit bohemian and so! I had to wait. I had to prove myself. Ha!’
Could he not say more? Could he not use the eloquence he had used for the Oxford buildings to tell her what her mother was like? What she was really like, then, at Natasha’s age, how she spoke, what she enjoyed, what she read, how that famous bohemianism had been expressed, and above all what they had meant to each other. Could he not, for once, tell her? Why could he never tell her and not even now?
‘You are like her,’ he said, abruptly, ‘in many ways.’ He stood up. ‘Where is this young man?’
Natasha would not cry. She too stood up.
‘In the Randolph Hotel. He thought we could have tea.’
‘Tea! Again?’ He looked at his watch. ‘Is this hotel near to the station?’
‘It’s on the way.’
‘Very well. More tea! He is a true Englishman.’
He turned to go and she followed.
Joe had made every attempt to look the part. He wore the clerical grey suit bought by his mother at the outset of his voyage to the new world, the uniform of acceptance. But he decided against the waistcoat. In that at least he acknowledged the first budding of an uncommandeered self. White shirt, college tie, black shoes polished to his father’s standards, spectacles lodged in breast pocket ready to be whipped out should they be required, a fresh packet of cigarettes and even a clean handkerchief.
The Randolph Hotel was chosen because it was the best. It was also the most expensive. Joe’s finances were at their outer limit. He had always been thrifty and with holiday jobs, the occasional lobbing in of a gift from his father and the careful husbandry of the grants – from the state and from the college – he had managed well enough. The only clothes he had bought which cost more than a couple of pounds were the fake fur jacket, rarely worn now, the whipped cords and the black shirt and zip-up boots which he had bought for the film. He drank little; cigarettes were cheap. The libraries supplied the books; those purchased were sixpence each, paperbacks from Oxfam. The only extravagance wa
s the Spanish restaurant but even there Natasha now insisted on paying her way. His parents had sent him seventy-five pounds for his twenty-first birthday the previous autumn and thirty-five pounds were still untouched.
But there had been the outings – London for West Side Story – there were the flowers. Money like much else in his life over the past few months had somehow slid into another dimension, not as threatening as it had been, no longer the tyrant, rather companionable, more Natasha’s style. He must never borrow, debt was the slippery slope; but the fear of it was receding as skins began to be sloughed off in this new world. It was, in many ways, the old world, the ancient culture of privilege and advantage. He was beginning to be changed and this rendezvous in the aped grand-country-house drawing room of the Randolph Hotel, where tea would be served as by a butler and maids in the stately homes of England, was a proof of that change.
He fretted, he wished there was a proper table with hard-backed chairs and not these overlarge chintzy armchairs, too deep, too comfortable, too far away from the inconvenient low table, but that was the way it was and so he sat on the edge of the seat.
He had ordered the sandwiches and cakes and scones in advance, despite the barely perceptible demur of the young waiter: it would speed things up.
But when Natasha and her father arrived it took him several agitated minutes to fail to secure the attention of the demurring young waiter who seemed intent on rendering Joe invisible. Joe was up and down like a yo-yo but tea came only when Natasha caught the young man’s eye: her disdainful look restored his sight.
‘I will try the cucumber sandwiches. Let me see if they taste like Cambridge.’ Her father’s English was lightly accented and confident. Joe had been mugging up his French but that one sentence let him off.
The two of them watched him eat the tiny, quartered white-bread cucumber sandwich.
‘Excellent,’ he judged, ‘exactly the same.’
He ate nothing else.
Not until the fiddling with the cups, teapot and hot-water pot and milk or lemon and sugar and would you like a scone were dealt with could Joe feel that the real conversation could start. But who would start it? And was it a conversation or an examination?
‘Why is this hotel called the Randolph?’
‘I don’t know,’ Joe said.
Dr Prévost looked disappointed.
‘There was no King Randolph. No?’
‘No.’
‘A duke?’
‘I don’t know,’ Joe said.
‘Maybe a very rich man,’ he mused, ‘who wanted to perpetuate his name. That is not uncommon. But not so common with hotels. Not in France. In England?’
‘I don’t know,’ Joe said, miserably, ‘sorry.’
‘It is not important. Natasha tells me you are a student of History?’
‘Yes.’ Joe made the word sound as neutral as possible.
‘Do you begin with the Greeks or before the Greeks with the Babylonians and the Egyptians?’
‘That’s more Classics,’ Joe said, grimly holding onto his disappearing nerve, ‘that’s Ancient History.’
‘But it is History.’
‘In Oxford, History is divided: the History I do is Modern History.’
‘Only Modern History?’
‘We start in AD 412.’
‘I see. When the Roman legions withdrew from Britain.’
‘Yes.’ Relief. Perhaps the siege would be lifted.
‘The Dark Ages.’
‘Not altogether Dark,’ Joe ventured. ‘At least not over here. We have the Lindisfarne Gospels and The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.’ He warmed up a little putting up a defence for the English who had not been attacked. ‘There’s Beowulf. All the work that King Alfred did in Winchester . . .’ What else?
‘But compared with the Arabs it was the Dark Ages. The Arabs are very interesting at that time. Especially how they translated the Greeks in medicine and mathematics and in philosophy.’
‘We don’t learn about the Arabs,’ Joe conceded. Then he rallied. ‘We concentrate on Europe. Well, Western Europe. Mostly Britain. England, really.’
‘And America?’
‘You can take America only as a Special Subject.’
‘Modern History but not America?’
‘Not on the main syllabus. Most people don’t do it. I did the Italian Renaissance.’ Joe was dismayed that it sounded like an apology. Surely everybody knew that the Oxford history course was the Best in the World.
‘Les anglais.’ Dr Prévost shook his head, then took pity. Skilfully he found some common ground in the French Revolution.
‘You were excellent,’ Natasha said to him afterwards. Joe was not convinced. Nor did the word ‘excellent’ do anything save make him feel ungraciously uncomfortable. ‘He said you were “un jeune homme très sérieux”.’ That was better, much better. It was the first time he had been called ‘serious’ and though he thought it funny (it must have been the whipping out of his spectacles when they talked of Robespierre) he was flattered. But ‘jeune homme’. He was aware that he was thought too young for Natasha, too young for marriage and he objected. Plenty of men in Wigton were married by twenty-one. Princes had been betrothed at twelve years old. Young love? Popular songs and ballads described little else. And what about Romeo? Twenty-one was not young and young was not a drawback.
Joe had insisted that Natasha alone take her father back to the station; he thought he knew what it meant to her. He ate a few of the tiny sandwiches and a couple of cakes before asking for the bill to which he added a scrupulous ten per cent tip.
‘He knows a lot,’ Joe said, that evening, as they sat in the Lamb and Flag, two halves of bitter on the wooden-topped table between them. ‘But if you teach History every day I suppose you’re bound to know a lot.’
Natasha could not resist.
‘He teaches Chemistry and Biology,’ she said and went on, forcefully ducking any response, ‘he’s always known about everything. Did you like him?’
‘He’s impressive, isn’t he? He knew far more than I did about the French Revolution.’
‘He is French, after all.’
‘But he didn’t study it, did he? And I’ve been writing essays about it for weeks. Not good essays, but still.’ He struck out with precisely what she wanted to hear. ‘It was good to see you with him. You looked very happy.’
Natasha smiled, full of pride. That he had been so bowled over by her father, that her father on the way to the station had been sincerely complimentary about Joe as a ‘vrai’ young Oxford scholar, meant much to her. She had united these two men, acting independently. It brought about a momentary equilibrium and even the possibility of a future in which all could be fulfilled.
‘He has no objection,’ she said and raised her glass. ‘Salut.’
She did not want to tell him the whole truth. It was important for him not to be entangled in the web of her background; she wanted a new start; Joseph’s ignorance of her past had to be preserved. Nor did she let the afternoon be stained by how it had concluded . . .
They had arrived at the station too late for the train and though there was only an hour to wait for the next London connection, her father’s agitation at the compounding consequences of broken engagements soon eroded the goodwill brought on by the architectural beauties of the university and the encounter in the Randolph.
As his temper sharpened Natasha’s past clawed at her and she was immersed in the fears and guilts and second guessing of her distraught childhood. Although he said little explicitly, indeed grew more and more silent as the hour deepened, Natasha felt the heart of this beloved father close against her yet again. Her stepmother – who, he told her, was among other objections suspicious of the urgency of this marriage, a suspicion shared by the aunts who also wanted to know why a Frenchman was not good enough – was invoked as always as the avenging sword of rectitude.
Natasha, who had bloomed in that brief time alone with her father, withdrew, became angry in return, s
uppressed it, hated herself both for feeling it and for suppressing it, finished side by side with him on the bench, both of them intense in silent longing for the arrival of the train to Paddington. His attempt at a reconciliation as he kissed her goodbye was not hollow but it was not enough. She stood on the platform until the train was out of sight.
For the first time she was glad that it was a weekday and so Joe had to be under the morally correct roof of Mrs Harries.
Just before he left he said, ‘Your father didn’t look ill. You said he was ill.’
Natasha flushed but kept her tone steady.
‘He is in a good phase,’ she said. ‘They come and go. We were fortunate to see him in a good phase.’
‘We were,’ said Joe. ‘You look a bit like him, not a lot, but a bit, there’s no mistaking it.’
This time she blushed with pleasure.
Joe would still find time whenever he could, which was now less and less often, to go for a walk in the countryside around Oxford. It was there that he found the head in a ditch. It was slightly bigger than life-size, dull grey stone, heavy as Joe discovered when he hauled it out and, he thought, splendid. Classical, bearded, the nose half chopped away, a boxer’s broken nose, it reminded him of busts he had seen in the Louvre or more recently outside the Sheldonian Theatre. He looked around like a thief but no one was there to detect him.
Staggering into Oxford he felt like some mythical wretch fated to carry the lump of stone for eternity. His hands were scraped and sore and subject to cramps. His shoulders and his arms ached. Yet to abandon it would be to give in. Besides it felt lucky.
It would be perfect in Natasha’s studio. He had seen classical busts in paintings of artists’ studios and this could begin to enhance what he saw increasingly as ‘their’ studio. More than that, as he struggled to carry the stone down endless winding English roads and along leaf-tunnelled lanes, he felt like a Viking at some great Trial in the Sagas. It was a Trophy. Rescued for the Fair Natasha. A proof of love. A prize, the head of her deadliest enemy, a stone god of art, and he a Sisyphus reborn as he sweated fantasies until he turned into the long but final road. But instead of his taking it on its last triumphant lap, up the stairs, to its true destination, Julia, who was in the hall, demanded that he bring it downstairs to the kitchen so that they could all examine it.