Remember Me...

by Melvyn Bragg

  Sam nodded but said no more. He had been captivated by Natasha. If he could have found an acceptable way to use the word he would have confessed that at first sight he had loved her. He did not want to examine it now. It could wait, better to wait. But he was utterly captivated by her – the bold smile in her eyes, the high style, the equality of her attention, the way she had immediately called him ‘Sam’, but something much deeper, a fragile innerness which Sam could sense and wanted to guard, an innerness which to understand would, he thought, be to know something rare.

  ‘I hope he takes care of her,’ he said, rather huskily.

  ‘He will.’ Ellen was quick to defend. There would be no real talk with Sam about the wedding and so she put off that conversation for the future. She looked over at the chest of drawers where her hat lay as in state, a wide-brimmed pearl-grey creation, which matched the suit, decorated with a broad pink satin band bowed at the side which, the shopkeeper had said, ‘threw it into relief’. ‘What do you think of my hat?’

  ‘Very nice,’ said Sam, scarcely glancing.

  ‘I don’t think it was quite right for the occasion.’

  ‘You looked,’ Sam said, unusually firmly, ‘the bee’s knees.’

  ‘I’ve heard more romantic declarations.’ Yet his calm, his contentment reassured her and over time the day clarified and took on a remembered happiness . . .

  Joe pounded through the Chiltern Hills scornfully as if proving by the pace his several times expressed view that they were ‘nothing like the Lake District’. He and Natasha were out soon after breakfast and onto the paths and bridleways which took them through old woods, up deep valleys rich in forest, onto hills on which Natasha demanded a break while she pencil-sketched a prospect of what she called ‘the true English countryside, so green, so varied, and gentle’.

  ‘No wonder your lot came over to grab it,’ Joe said.

  They stopped for lunch in pubs invariably ancient and oakbeamed in tranquil villages, Ibstone, Turville, Hambledon, and Joe would propel her into the churches or use the afternoon to make for another landmark.

  ‘You have peasant legs,’ she said.

  ‘They come in useful.’

  In those few days they roved widely over the bow-backed hills, ambled through dappled woods, lay and looked at the clouds and talked profoundly and lightly of eternal questions, made love in forested seclusion, wedded in Oxford and wedded again in those days when Natasha saw him plain and let go more of herself, and Joe was so swept up by her he soared on the upward surge of his feelings, soared and glided, like the hawks.

  On the last afternoon they were later than usual and came from Turville Heath down to South End to cut through the Stonor Estate to the hotel. The light was clear and though the sun had gone it was warm. Both of them were tired and quiet.

  They went down into the dense woods and came out at a point where the crescent mass of Stonor House lay just a few hundred yards below them and beyond that were the now familiar multiple green undulations of what had become for both of them a countryside of dreams.

  Joe stopped and held out an arm to check Natasha. He put his finger to his lips. Then she too heard the drumming sound, the light drumming on the ground and the brushing of the trees like a wind among the leaves and suddenly there they were, led by a magnificently antlered white hart, a herd of deer, racing out of the wood behind the great white hart, twenty, thirty deer, following him into the open down the hill and then changing direction obediently as he swerved to climb again and race into another reach of the woods, into silence.

  Joe was taken over by intense and inexplicable joy and Natasha too, he saw, was smiling, fully, no teasing, no mockery, like him, blest.

  ‘That was you,’ she said, ‘the white one.’

  Joe’s cup flowed over.

  ‘And you?’

  ‘All of the rest, Joseph,’ she said and took his arm. ‘I am all of the others. Beware!’

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  As the car moved across one of the high plateaux of northern Provence, Joe increasingly felt as if he were being seduced by Frenchness and drugged by the voluptuous difference of it all. Then he saw the village, La Rotonde, which appeared at a distance, as if it were an illustration in a mediaeval Book of Hours. That first sight of the village immediately imprinted itself on his imagination.

  It rose up suddenly like a double helix spiralling towards a cylinder of stone, a beacon of war, the tower, La Rotonde itself. Lavender fields occupied the gently rising ground which came to the skirts of the village and in fields beyond the lavender Joe could see, and would hear, shepherds with their biblical flocks of sheep and goats, bells round their necks tinkling with a tinny sound like the small bell of the church whose modest Renaissance tower floated above the maze of ascending rooftops. The heat of late afternoon brought a shimmer to the light. Joe felt a brush of Jerusalem, the shining city on the hill, the golden. The steep road up to the village curled round the outside of the rock settlements: once inside, to Joe’s pinch-himself delight, there was no space for cars, the streets were too narrow, many of them were stepped, only humans and horses had passage. Cars were parked outside the massive walls.

  When Joe got out of the car and went to the parapet to look over the broad, hazy, apparently uninhabited valley with even the tips of other hill villages obscured by the veil of heat, he was transported into the landscape, as he had been on occasions when walking near his home town in the Lake District where also he had been overcome by the feeling that whatever it was that was him had for a moment escaped the skull and joined up with what was before it. The hills, the haze, the heat dissolved all thought and his senses wholly possessed his mind. Maybe that connection with nature, and the disappearance of the self, was the crucial purpose of a life, he had said to her on their honeymoon, just letting go; joining, rejoining, knowing being alive, perhaps this was the soul, perhaps this was the best of it. He had been far too exhilarated by the new freedom of marriage to catch her muted scepticism at the time, her puzzlement at these outbursts of a faith somewhere between paganism and pantheism.

  When he walked through the half-ruined fifteenth-century arch into the village itself it was like entering a dream made stone. The narrow streets, more like lanes, twisted and turned with rarely a straight run of more than a dozen metres. Most of these passages were in shadow, protected by the high-walled houses, some of them still farmhouses with the ground-floor rooms used by animals in the winter. There were steps everywhere, staircases of stone, always broken, in romantic disrepair, Joe thought, as in those weeks he clambered over the village, a village in retreat, empty cottages, fallen stones, dereliction. Whichever route he took, he always found his way to the tower, and sat on a heap of stones from which he could gaze downhill into the stony heart of a settlement which had, over centuries, past its martial purpose, slowly waterfallen down the rock in unordered rivulets of habitation, reluctantly leaving the security of the high fortification, wending their way as slowly as they could, the paths twisting and even turning back as if looking over their shoulders.

  The place infected him. If he could escape the house even for half an hour he would do so, just to lose himself in it, as if this physical spot was in some way Natasha, but also as if his infatuation with it was of an intensity he could not quite bring himself to show directly to Natasha or feel that she would allow. La Rotonde was always waiting, faithful, attentive to his moods. The villagers took to him, the mad young Englishman forever wandering about in the heat and then pausing, basking like a lizard in the deep sun, or ‘in a dream’, they said, ‘in love’, ‘a new husband’.

  As Joe explored the village in the next weeks, he was to discover several grand Renaissance houses, run-down like everything else, and be surprised by their elaborately ornamented doors, their declarations of old splendour hidden in the modesty of alleyways: somehow that was Natasha too, her splendour hidden by modesty.

  The shepherds brought their tinkling sheep and goats through the village
. For fresh bread every morning you went to the window of the bakery and the hot loaf was handed over to you as you stood in the street; there was one bar only and all those who drank congregated outside there in the evening while inside you could eat food which was reared or grown around the place. As in the Wigton of his childhood, everyone who passed by nodded to you as a friend would do. The slit alleys made for sudden theatrical exits and entrances and this isolated place bred as it had in Wigton its daily gossip of who had done what, the routines, the similarities, the differences, the remarks closely analysed, the unwearying finely worked chronicle and story of the village.

  It was a story which stretched back to the early Middle Ages as the fortifications bore witness. La Rotonde itself was a circular building, in picaresque disrepair, roofless, uncared for. But inside were twelve stone niches, twelve broad seats for the twelve knights who had gathered there centuries ago preparatory to leading their men south, over the mountains down to the toe of Italy and from there east across the Mediterranean to fight for Christ and Jerusalem.

  He liked to walk alone, feeling free. Walking with Natasha brought different feelings. He knew that in her heart she responded as he did but for her it was as if there were a constant searching, her eyes not so much looking at as examining the buildings, her preoccupations often beyond him. She liked to take her watercolours up some of the steps and sit there for a morning, transforming the enduring slow time-layered work of La Rotonde, itself become a work like art, into watercolours, quick, delicate, fragile, so easily dried by the sun.

  Usually when he went off alone late in the morning, she let him rove. But about a week after their arrival she sought him out. He was sitting in the sun, unusually not reading his current passion, more absorbed by the heavy drug of the sun than by the stories of Chekhov. She appeared suddenly as it were out of the stone, and they moved to the shade against the wall of La Rotonde itself.

  They smoked in silence for a while but although she looked out across the rooftops to the already sun-hazed valley, Joe knew that she was looking inwards and waited.

  ‘Véronique told me you were too young and would soon look for others. She said you reminded her of the baker’s son training to be a chef.’

  Joe waited. Natasha paused, fighting her anger or her fear, letting herself alone take the blow.

  ‘That is what she is like.’

  Véronique had been overwhelmingly kind and appreciative to Joe but now was not the time to say so. The quality of Natasha’s silence, he knew, was unmistakable proof of hurt.

  ‘She says I am lucky my father likes you.’

  Joe knew that it was not the correct reaction, but he felt flattered.

  ‘We had a dog. It was my dog. When I came back last year she said it had been so ill it had to be destroyed. And I believed her! How could I believe her? She never liked it.’

  Nothing that came to mind seemed sufficient to be turned into speech, he thought, and she had not come to seek out his opinion, only his company.

  ‘She takes revenge in many ways.’

  ‘She’s very generous to me,’ Joe said, a sense of justice finding voice. ‘Speak as you find.’

  ‘Yes,’ Natasha turned to him, ‘poor Joseph.’

  She moved down a few steps and took out her sketching pad.

  ‘Try to be still and keep your face in one expression,’ she said. ‘You are difficult to catch.’ His face froze in compliance as she worked him onto her pad.

  They would go up to the Crusaders’ Tower at night. They walked quietly in the dark, picking their way carefully along broken paths, uneven steps, the moon not yet up. They stood in silence, his arm around her shoulder, smoking, looking out across the black hills, into the blank dark of woods. It would be so good, Joe thought, never to move from this spot; just be there for ever.

  When they did finally and always reluctantly go down, their way clear now under the moon, they went to the outer wall of the village, a wall built in the time of the religious wars, rearing out of the great rock on which the village had been planted. Certain houses had been built into the encircling fortifications. They had the purpose and the atmosphere of a castle. These houses were war-walled, many-storeyed, bedded into the base rock: one of these belonged to Natasha’s family.

  ‘Why don’t we stay on and live here?’ Joe said, as they lingered to draw out every last taste of the night.

  ‘Could we?’

  ‘Why not? If your parents don’t mind us being in the house when they’re not here. Or there are broken-down cottages up near La Rotonde. We could rent one of those. Or do one up. That would be better. Our own place. I could teach English somewhere. You could sell your paintings. I could write. A lot of English and American writers came to France to write. When we talked about this before in Oxford it seemed impossible. But this place changes everything, doesn’t it? Why don’t we just stay? It would be great, wouldn’t it? We don’t need much to live on.’

  ‘One minute you’re so romantic and then you are so practical.’ She lit a cigarette. ‘But not really practical, Joseph . . .’

  ‘Why not? We—’

  ‘Ssshhh . . . Listen.’

  The noise of the cicadas rose and cascaded around their ears like diamond hailstones. They listened, separate but bound in the same spell . . .

  ‘I can’t live in France and certainly not here,’ said Natasha, firmly. ‘We must go now. They do not like us to be out too late. See? I am already following the rules of childhood again. I am already doing what is expected of me. No.’

  Joe let it go, but only, he thought, for a while. Why not? It was perfect. Where would they find anything as perfect, anywhere? Oh, it would be such an amazing life, here, the two of them, for ever. ‘We should have done it,’ he told their daughter, ‘we should have found a way, if not there then somewhere else, we should have taken all the risks we could at that time, while we were young and able, and then we might have been safe.’

  He followed her into the big, rather daunting house.

  ‘The house came from my mother’s family.’

  Natasha spoke with reluctance but Joe had waited for an explanation for long enough, she thought. They were outside the bar-restaurant in mid-morning, the only customers. Before them over the narrow street was a small classically modelled square, roofed, pillared, overlooking the valley, used for village gatherings, a place to stand in the shade and look towards the sun.

  ‘It’s a big house,’ Joe said, cautiously.

  ‘She was from a big family!’

  ‘The flat in Paris was big as well.’

  ‘That belongs to the university.’

  ‘You didn’t tell me he taught at a university.’

  Natasha hoped someone would pass by. She had known the village all her life and it was second nature to talk to villagers and learn something of everyone’s business. But no one rescued her.

  ‘No.’ She stubbed out her cigarette. ‘He is mainly in his laboratory now.’

  ‘In Paris?’

  ‘No, the main one. In Concarneau, in Brittany. He will go there soon. He always prefers to go there alone. Except when my mother was alive of course. They worked there together.’

  ‘Was he brought up around here?’

  It was only fair to answer, but she still had a reluctance, almost a foreboding: better if he did not know.

  ‘Yes, and the first university he went to was Montpellier. Joseph! Enough questions. Since the wedding he likes to talk to you.’ She looked mockingly at him. ‘You like to listen! And you give him a chance to practise his English.’ But she was pleased. Matthew Stevens had given her father a glittering reference which, coming from an academic whom Dr Prévost had discovered to be distinguished, had thoroughly established Joseph in favour.

  ‘Your mother’s very kind.’ He wanted to talk about her: to pick at it.

  ‘My stepmother.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I am married now. And my father likes you.’

  ‘Neither of
them will let me pay for a thing. He won’t let me pay our way when we eat at the café. When we went to Avignon she was always offering to buy me things.’

  ‘She wants to prove her generosity in front of my father.’

  ‘You seem to get on with her a lot better than I thought you would. From what you said.’

  ‘Do I?’

  Natasha smiled, stood up, and walked up the narrow street, leaving him to follow.

  How could she tell him that already she hated being here? That she hated it so much that apart from the time spent with him it was a struggle against the old pressures she had left behind. She had torn herself out at such cost but succeeded and by herself made herself free. Would he understand that? And yet, did he need to know?

  How could she tell him that, when she saw him on such a wing of happiness and when his presence had brought her father so much closer to her? Was that not the greatest bonus she could have imagined? How could she say she longed to pack now and go back to damp, alien England, where her childhood could be kept at bay and she would be out of her stepmother’s reach? She turned and waited for him. It took some time to pay the patron as conversation was a necessary part of the transaction. But as he came towards her, tanned now, his sandy hair becoming lighter, his open enthusiastic smile all for her, loving the place so much, she thought, I will stay just a little more time for him, just a little more time here before I am, at last, with him wholly free to build my own life.

  When what Dr Prévost called ‘the children’ were alone together, there was a feeling of wildness generated by Natasha. They would leave ‘the parents’ in the evening after the early dinner if at home and play elaborate games two floors below. François, who was seventeen, like his father in looks but cursed by academic failure and a heavy burden on Véronique; Pierre, fifteen, bright like his father with the looks of his mother; and Madeleine, fourteen, who dreamed of being a ballet dancer, in awe of her older, artistic, exiled and now triumphantly married sister.