Remember Me...

by Melvyn Bragg

  ‘More nineteenth than eighteenth century, I would say, an imitation of an imitation of perhaps a Roman imitation from the Greek,’ Matthew asserted when the stone thudded onto the kitchen table, ‘and therefore of little real value. The fashion on the great estates, especially, I suspect, those of the nouveau riche around these parts, was to pop classical-looking busts on top of every available high wall. Did you find it near a wall?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Joe, his arms tingling with lightness, ‘but there were no busts on the wall. I looked. And it had been in the ditch for some time: I cleaned it up.’

  Matthew considered the matter: that estate, he knew, was run-down, perhaps unoccupied. Julia and Natasha waited for his verdict.

  ‘Strictly speaking you ought to report it to the police.’

  ‘They have quite enough to do,’ said Julia.

  ‘Quite. There’s some law of “treasure” one ought to know about,’ said Matthew, looking to Joe who shook his head and sank a big mouthful of tea. Could he will Natasha to understand this was for her? For them? He tried, he concentrated.

  ‘I like it.’ Natasha smiled at all of them. ‘Joseph’s head. It will bring luck.’

  ‘It could stay here,’ said Julia, ‘as a reminder of the two of you. It would look perfectly in place in the drawing room.’

  ‘I knew Julia would get her hands on it,’ said Natasha, later. ‘I could see from the way she looked at it. You carried it all that way for me, didn’t you?’

  ‘We can claim it back when we settle down.’ He was disappointed, unreasonably, he thought, Julia had been good to them.

  But somehow they never did claim it. It stayed in the house in which they had met. After her death it was occasionally referred to. He let it stay on, somehow wanting it to be there, a presence there cast in stone, and not until the Stevenses finally retired and moved to a smaller home did he take possession of it and pass it on to their daughter who had heard the story several times and liked it that her mother had christened it ‘Joseph’s head’.

  Dear Mam and Dad,

  Sorry for not writing last week. I’ve been trying to catch up on work for Finals. They’re only six weeks away now but I find it quite hard to concentrate. Still, I’m sure I can work here better than anywhere else. After all, it’s purpose-built for the job!

  I’m spending some of the time encouraging Natasha to get enough paintings together for an exhibition. The bursar says I can have a room in college for three days at five pounds a day and we’re sure we can cover that at least. She is a wonderful painter and the exhibition will consist of what she calls ‘monotypes’, thickly textured prints over which she paints. There’s a very crude first ‘pull’ which she transforms: it’s great to watch her doing it. She’s never had an exhibition and I’ve never organised one and so it’s fingers crossed! She’s studying hard too for what are called the Cambridge Exams (I don’t know why), but she’ll walk it, she’s amazingly intelligent. I’m sure you’ll both like her very much. Did I tell you she wrote poetry?

  Well, I proposed to her and she accepted. I know this will be a bit of a shock but I’ve no doubt she’s the one. And I want to get married as soon as I’ve taken the exams. The reason for this is that we could have our honeymoon in the summer and I could get back for work – whatever that turns out to be – in September. I’ve put in for some jobs – the WEA, Marks & Spencer, the BBC and ICI. If the degree is OK I could stay up and carry on studying but my tutor says it would be better to get out and see a bit of the world and come back to university only if I really felt like it. I rather think he’d like to get rid of me and I don’t blame him! Anyway, there we are. I’ll give you more details when I know about them.

  You really will love Natasha and I’m sure she’ll get on very well with both of you. Thanks for the ten pounds, Dad. It was a real help.

  Yours truly, Joe

  PS I met her father three days ago. He’s a teacher. Natasha said he was in favour. Her mother died just after she was born.

  PPS We’ll be married in Oxford. Natasha wants that.

  In the kitchen of the pub, last embering of coal, late at night when all the customers and helpers had gone, Sam and Ellen, finally alone together, tried to address their son’s letter. Sam folded a corner of the page and closed The Third Man.

  It was he who broke the silence.

  ‘Do you think I should go and have a talk with him?’

  ‘He’s twenty-one,’ said Ellen and looked again at the letter.

  ‘Things can get out of proportion when you’re cut off.’

  ‘I hoped he might get back with Rachel at Christmas. You could tell he was keen. I still speak to her when we meet. I always thought they might get together again.’

  ‘He’s always needed somebody . . .’ Somebody strong, Sam wanted to say, somebody to counteract the yield and history of that seven-year, over-protected, semi-orphaned war childhood with his mother. He needed somebody who would face him up to life . . .

  ‘He’s out of your reach now, Sam,’ she said.

  He has been for a while, Sam thought, but not when it came to the business of right and wrong and the employment of common sense. He could still have an impact there and Joe knew it and was perhaps avoiding him on that account.

  ‘He’d have come home if he wanted to talk it over,’ said Ellen. ‘He would have brought her to meet us if he’d really wanted us in on it. But he’s made his own mind up.’

  Each year he seemed more foreign now, her son. Each year he went further away, despite his loyalty, and she saw him circling further and further, in the distance, from her, from the town, from his past. She envied with all her might those of her friends lucky enough to have children who stayed near by, sons who did not want to leave or soar, a family intact: what could be better than that?

  She put the letter on the table, closed down the fire and went to bed, slowly up the stairs, feeling old.

  ‘She sounds very talented,’ said Sam. ‘A poet.’

  CHAPTER NINE

  Natasha’s garret had become the setting for a cottage industry. The monotypes, most of them framed by now, so dominated the small space that it was difficult to move without disturbing a finished work of art. Those unfinished were under the bed. There was a circle on the floor near the middle of the room, like the space left clear for a fire in primitive times or the meeting place for a powwow: this was where Natasha sat and worked, like a shaman with her own spirits, studying the first pull of the monotypes and then working on them with oils. In the last days before the exhibition she was enraptured in concentration.

  She was moved that Joe had initiated it, not only in steaming ahead with this undreamed-of exhibition but in his constant, pressing, warming admiration for her work. Instantly he saw in her the true heir to all the painters he liked. Soon after that first visit to her attic room he had launched into a rhapsody about the ‘real’ paintings he had seen in Paris, especially those in the Jeu de Paume, so enthusiastic and proprietorial that she did not at the time want to spoil it by confessing that she too, who had lived in Paris for many years, knew those paintings and indeed had, in a depressive state, after considering herself an academic failure, been inspired to try painting after seeing there the work of Van Gogh, reinforced soon afterwards by seeing Lust for Life. The tragedy of Van Gogh, the mind-catching power both of his painting and his notebooks, had met her need to go as far away as possible from scholarship.

  Now the imperative to mount an exhibition at such speed had, for the first time since that adolescent escapist desire, called fully on her resources.

  What emerged were paintings which disturbed and intrigued those who knew how to read paintings. Her modest technique was not exposed by works founded on clear and heavy shapes of thick paint; her individuality was unloosed in archetypical images. Circles would metamorphosise into faces, sometimes several as in one large vivid yellow-orange face filled with egg shapes, like cells in the brain, the cells themselves hinting at other even more elusive
faces. Menace and darkness prevailed: there was no redemption. It was as if her fears had at last found expression outside herself. The most literal was a picture of a realistically painted naked body, but blue-winged and falling away from the sun: Julia pointed out to Natasha that this was surely Joe’s body. Natasha merely smiled. Enigmatic images crept through the heavy textures of paint, a new world arrived in that small room, a world which sometimes dismayed Natasha herself, sometimes made her want to destroy everything. But a stronger impulse would not let her surrender and Joe fortified her. He was in a trance of excitement.

  He sought out Jonathan.

  ‘They gave me a good discount at Cherwell for an advertisement,’ he said. He had hoped they would do it for nothing, not only because he was a contributor but because he had wheedled a promise for a review by Natasha of a book on Le Corbusier. So she too surely deserved a favour. The business manager, who was reading Politics, Philosophy and Economics with an eye on the City, had been immovable. Cherwell, he said, had to break even.

  ‘I need posters.’

  ‘Posters?’ It was then, Jonathan reported, that he realised Joe was serious.

  ‘Yes. Where do you get posters?’

  ‘I’ll make them,’ said Jonathan. ‘How many?’

  Joe had no idea. He sipped at his half of bitter, keeping his head clear for afternoon swotting. They were in the Eagle and Child, the Bird and Baby to old hands, among whom Joe was now beginning to count himself. His involvement with Natasha had not only healed the loss of Rachel, and put in motion a passion and a friendship which were set to deepen beyond the horizon, it had put him at ease with himself, as if the invisible but effective armour of apprehension was no longer necessary. That outsider sense of lurking in the tolerated margins of privilege was disappearing. The anxiety about ‘doing the right thing’ began to abate. The fears that there were better ways of behaving than those he had been taught, different ways of phrasing that he would never get the hang of unless he abandoned his former self and became a class mimic were fading. With and through Natasha he sensed that another way was opening up involving neither imitation nor embarrassment. It could be the entry to a world built equally on his past and her vision, free, unbound; and for a time it seemed possible. The great exhibition was the first public proof of this.

  ‘Forty posters,’ Joe said, eventually. ‘One – no, two – for the Cherwell offices, one for the Union, one for the Ruskin, two or maybe three for Wadham, thirty for other colleges, and what’s left over for any of the art galleries in Oxford that will let you in. There’s the Bear Lane for one, we went to an exhibition of watercolours there last week – Geoffrey Rhodes, one of Natasha’s teachers.’

  ‘I’ll do fifty,’ said Jonathan, seeing his days and nights totally requisitioned by this mere undergraduate’s enthusiasm.

  ‘By Friday?’

  Jonathan sipped very slowly at his pint and then said,

  ‘Chriiiiiiist! . . . OK . . . Consider it a tribute. To Natasha.’

  Joe sought out David and found him asleep in the college garden, under the big copper beech tree, lying flat on his back, a white handkerchief across his face, white shirt uncharacteristically unbuttoned at the neck, tie slid down, black trouser legs crossed at the ankles revealing black socks in black shoes, black jacket folded as a pillow. Joe hesitated for a moment or two and then nudged him on the shoulder. David woke and gave Joe a beatific smile.

  ‘The sunlight,’ he said, ‘dappled through the copper beech leaves, gives you a sort of halo.’

  He made no attempt to sit up. Joe sat down, awkwardly cross-legged, beside him.

  ‘Sleep is the best compliment one can pay to the traditional Oxford summer luncheon,’ David said. ‘Salmon, cucumber, salad, a punnet of strawberries and cream of course, but the Pimm’s they insist on drinking! It tastes like lemonade which I love but then the gin hits you. Why do the English have to fill themselves up with alcohol to enjoy life? How are you?’

  ‘Natasha and I went to a press launch at the Bear Lane Gallery,’ Joe said. ‘We should have a press launch for her exhibition.’

  ‘I agree,’ said David, who enjoyed remaining recumbent, looking up beyond Joe through the sunlit leaves, ‘but it would be a mistake to call it a press launch. Far too pretentious. You’ll only get Cherwell, Isis and the Oxford Mail anyway, and that’s if you’re lucky. Call it an opening. No one can object to that. You’ll need wine. In London they have champagne for this kind of thing. For this you must get the cheapest white wine it is possible to buy and make sure it is stone cold so that all the taste will be driven out. This will be seen as appropriate. Don’t offer any other drinks at all: far too bourgeois. They should be grateful for the white wine. I will underwrite this. A friend of mine buys wine regularly, I’ll enlist him; he’s a rather louche and extravagant aristocrat and the wine merchant will wish to do him a favour. You can often get a discount even on the dirt cheap.’

  ‘I can pay,’ said Joe.

  ‘I’m sure you can,’ David smiled again, ‘and I hope you will. When I say underwrite, I mean that after you have paid for the framing, and for the cost of the room, and the advertisement in Cherwell – you should have asked me about that, the editor is a good friend – I will submit my costs before Natasha takes home the sack of gold.’

  ‘She’s not doing it to make money.’

  ‘I am absolutely certain that profit has occurred to neither of you. Nevertheless.’

  ‘What about the glasses?’

  ‘The college bar will loan us the glasses. I’ll ask my scout to serve the wine. I’ll tell him half a glass max at a time and not to hurry. He’ll relish that. He comes from a rationing age and thinks wine is too good for us anyway. They are there to look at the paintings and, one hopes, buy them.’

  Natasha invited David to help her with the pricing. He arrived with a packet of small circular red stickers.

  ‘These will indicate “sold”,’ he said. ‘Stick them on immediately and take the painting off the list.’ From the moment he came in the room, his probing, restless eyes swung their glances between the paintings, appraising, checking, picking.

  ‘Joe’s making the list.’

  She had offered him a glass of red wine but he preferred a glass of water. It was a warm May evening, the window of her room wide open, a fine flowering bringing in perfumes from the Oxford gardens.

  ‘Joe is hopeless about pricing,’ she said.

  ‘And you don’t care.’

  ‘I don’t want the prices to be foolish.’

  ‘I,’ said David, ‘am a connoisseur of the prices of paintings I cannot afford. These, though, present a problem.’ Without looking at her, he said, ‘These are very good, Natasha, and powerful. I am surprised.’

  ‘Should I be pleased or offended?’

  ‘Now, now.’

  David was looking at the painting of Icarus. He saw the closed eyes, the fall of the head (so clearly Joe), the resignation of the boy who flew so close to the sun that his waxen wings were melted and here he was poised in that caught crucial moment for the death drop to earth. He saw the violent – some might say too violent – yellow of the sun – but more than that he saw the black strokes and rages of darkness coming up from the earth waiting to claim the life which had tried to defy it.

  ‘That,’ he said, ‘should be Not For Sale. It is always rather stylish to have at least one painting with the sticker NFS. It adds a little mystery.’ He paused and turned and looked at her full on. ‘And you should keep it,’ he said, ‘unless you want to give it on loan.’

  ‘To you.’

  ‘Who else?’ He looked again and said, ‘Better if you keep it. Now! We are dealing with nervous friends with little money who will want to buy to support you. Therefore a few of the small ones at seven pounds ten shillings, rather more for the rather more affluent friends at ten pounds, and then throw caution to the winds, move to fifteen pounds, and for better ones, and some of the bigger ones – twenty-five, one or two at thi
rty and forty. Perhaps even a fifty-pound jewel. Let’s work out which. What fun!’

  Joe was high; somehow the energy which he gave Natasha and her exhibition fed rather than tired him and he was working harder for his Finals than either he or his tutors had anticipated. Certain expenditures of energy, he thought, energy for someone you loved, for instance, instead of exhausting you seemed to recharge you. His trusted schoolboy lists reappeared, the underlinings in red ink, sometimes twice, the culling of twelve reasons for an event to six to three, and more importantly the drawing of connections between one period in history and another. Yet it was still not the same as it had been before he met Natasha; still he felt rather disconnected and he would dream of being pushed onto a stage having forgotten all his lines. The conviction that Natasha had to be supported, unstintedly and constantly, tested him in new ways. But the exhilaration of this unpremeditated life made by the two of them lit into him and he loved the flame.

  ‘It’s a pity that we do not possess a car,’ said Julia. She and Joe were alone in the kitchen. Matthew was still at his college. Natasha had gone back to the Ruskin to work on what she promised would be the final two prints and the children were in the sunlit garden. Tea had been poured, there was bread, strawberry jam and half a sponge cake.

  ‘Matthew walks everywhere, I have my bicycle, cars are useless in Oxford. No one actually needs one. Help yourself, please. The cake was baked yesterday. It needs to be eaten.’

  Joe obediently reached out for a second slice.

  ‘Take a big one,’ said Julia and watched while he did. She waited until he had bitten off a self-conscious mouthful. ‘We think that you have been very good for Natasha,’ she said. ‘Her whole attitude has changed. It would not be true to say that she is a different person but, as Matthew put it, you have drawn out the positive and quelled many of the negative aspects of her personality. We can’t quite work out how you’ve done it.’ She had considered telling him, plainly, that she had until very recently thought him unsuitable, but he looked tired. Even the rather cheerful remark she had made seemed to stump him.