Remember Me... (2 page)

‘Joe it is, then,' said Sam, his father.

‘Natasha's a great name.'

‘It's not good enough for my aunts. But my mother was bohemian.'

Joe held tight to the fistful of questions her sentence provoked. It was as if there were a bowl brimful of mercury between them and he must not spill it. Bohemian!

‘Thomas Mann wrote a novel about Joseph,' he said.

‘I've read only
Death in Venice.
I must go to Venice. I must.'

He caught something of urgency, even desperation, but it was too remote a cry to do anything but hear and faintly register, and again be excited by the foreignness and want for more, try to fix her face despite the failings of candlelight.

‘It did not get much further,' he told their daughter, ‘and some of what I remember could well have been drawn from later encounters, or be made up, or be misremembering, or come from the desire to please you. But she always called me Joseph.'

Joe stayed the night. He was given a bed in a large room with two double beds. Don, the blond American painter who seemed to be in charge, was in the other bed.

‘Natasha Jeanne Prévost,' said in answer to Joe's question. ‘She's been at the college for years. She's an enigma.'

Joe wanted more than that but he did not know what he was looking for.

‘If you concentrate,' said Don, after a long pause, ‘you can hear the Thames out there. Just close your eyes – that strengthens your hearing – and listen. Out there.' They listened. Joe thought he heard something but he may have been trying to oblige his host who had so easily and generously offered the bed. ‘I used to imagine the Thames to be such a big river, when I read about it back home,' Don said. ‘Something like the Mississippi. I couldn't believe how small it was when I saw it. But now I think it's a big river again because of the artists and the history. Does that make sense to you?' Joe wanted to think it through and say something which sounded intelligent, as if Don were an examiner. ‘I'll open the curtains,' said Don. The moonlight lit up his nakedness: he was built like a boxer, Joe thought, not like an artist at all, a light heavyweight at least, and unashamed to stand ivory-white nude before the big window, which he opened. You yourself could be a painting, Joe thought.

Don went slowly back to his bed. The moonlight was a shaft between them and now Joe could hear something in the distance.

‘It's the weir,' Don said. ‘A boy was drowned there last fall. Another boy tried to rescue him and he got in trouble but they pulled him out in time.' Don paused. Joe liked these pauses, they implied deeper meaning. They introduced a grain of drama. ‘What would make a boy risk his life to save another boy?'

‘You just do it, don't you?' Joe said. ‘You just – do it.'

‘I see that,' said Don, in a rich American tone that reminded Joe of so many films and because of that made Don instantly familiar, friendly, to be liked and trusted. ‘Instinctive heroism. Dying for your comrade in arms.' Again the pause, but the distant drama of the weir, the few glasses of wine, the newness of it all were making Joe sleepy, keen to burrow into the bed, squirrel down and defy the winter air. ‘Deeper
than that,' said Don, ‘it must be the love that the Bible says passes the understanding of women. Women don't do what we do. For other women. Men can love men, don't you think so, Joe?'

‘Yes.' He thought of one of his friends at home in Wigton of whose adolescent friendship he had been so jealous and he thought of James, so discerningly understanding, with whom he had shared a room in his first year at Oxford. ‘I'm sure they can. You can even put your arm around their shoulders. I used to do that.'

‘And when you did that, was it a sort of love you felt, do you think? Would you call it that?'

‘I don't see why not,' said Joe. ‘There's got to be lots of different sorts, haven't there?'

‘But the intensity of voluntary love – not family – voluntary, is that always the same? Man or woman?'

This time the pause came from Joe and it lengthened into silence and the soft purr of his sleep.

Natasha always slept with the curtains open. She preferred the night.

She had come home the moment Jonathan had offered her a lift. The party had filled in time but there was nothing to keep her there. The art students, the genteel young English, had been discreet; the older Americans more awkward but then Natasha suspected they might be a little ashamed of what Robert had done to her. She had invited Jonathan in for a polite coffee but he had to pack, he said. Paris tomorrow and then Berlin with his sketch pad as a cover. After all, he said in his slow delivery which had always amused Natasha because she could never quite work out whether it was a heroically corrected stammer or a sly means of commanding and controlling the fullest attention, artists had long been anonymous in European capitals and he wanted to spy on the existentialists in Paris, sketch out the culture of the Cold War in Berlin, stitch the two together and see if he could place the piece in the
New Yorker.

As he drove away to his digs in Walton Street he wished he had not mentioned Paris.

Natasha lodged in a tall, Georgian house in the Banbury Road and the three flights of stairs to her attic room were steep. She ought not to have felt so very weary after such a small effort, but when she closed the door of her room behind her she could have collapsed. She sat on the edge of the bed to undress and the clothes lay where they dropped.

Her portrait of Robert was where she had left it and full on to the moonlight. She should get out of bed and turn it to the wall but in the secrecy of the small room she could study it. It was unfinished. She could see its technical shortcomings. Unlike Robert, the other Americans and most of the English, Natasha had come to the Ruskin without any formal training beyond a modest talent encouraged by one of the nuns who had taught drawing at school. But the portrait had a strong look of him, Robert himself had admitted that and he was even more critical than Natasha herself. Sometimes, he said, technique can get in the way. The perfectly crafted thing can be perfectly dead. An ounce of true innerness can be worth a ton of accuracy. Better not to finish it, he said, this is as good as you'll get.

He was the best artist in the Ruskin, they all said as much. He had picked her out, the real one, he had said, not like the others. Though she had been burned before and though she knew he was careless of women, she became his wilful accomplice. He had released her, thrillingly, from her self-imprisonment. She had surrendered to his promises and been helpless when they were broken, brutally broken. She had felt herself break with them. If she looked long enough, hard enough at the portrait maybe she would understand and begin to find a way out of this darkness. Her watch told her she had been in her room for less than ten minutes. It already seemed half the night and yet she wanted only to be here in the slow time of her lair, humiliated, hurt, adrift, looking for a place she could neither see nor reach.

She had called him Robert in the French way. At first he had liked that; then he had come to hate it. Perhaps she ought to have dropped it sooner and not teased him. He did not like being teased but she liked the reaction it provoked and the animation of anger. She brooded on the portrait, looking for explanations, looking for comfort. The faint light enriched the painting, she thought. She looked at the dark window panes that needed to be cleaned. Beyond the window were slated
rooftops and below it the garden adjoining other gardens, winter dead, sealed in the city of learning sunk now in sleep inside its beautiful and ancient walls of scholarship. Robert had involved her in that, too, with Jonathan, and a few American academics who threw around their ideas with a vigour that could make Natasha want to applaud. That group had gone out of her world now. Save for Jonathan, none of them had been seen since Robert had left her, without warning, just a note, a note, not even a letter.

She turned away from the portrait, put her face to the wall and huddled under the bedclothes, legs drawn up to try to squeeze out the misery by going back to unthinkingness, rocking herself slightly. There were no resources left. Misery was in every cell. Misery was her condition. It was beyond pointlessness now, even more than before. She wanted sleep. But even there, he would be waiting.

Joe walked quietly even though Don's loud snoring signalled deep sleep. Odd it did not wake up Don himself, Joe thought: he had been disturbed awake by the dawn light through the open window and the snoring had made it impossible to go back to sleep. It was an entertaining noise, though perhaps just for a short time. Don lay splayed on his back, mouth gargoyle open, blond hair mussed over his forehead, somehow incongruous that he was snoring, too young to snore.

The drawing room was a mess and Joe was glad to tidy up, to earn his stay, take away the glasses and wash them, empty the heaped ashtrays, clean out the grate. He liked being in a room so uncramped: it emanated ease and quiet wealth.

‘Coffee?' Don was in the kitchen. Joe had put on the kettle for tea but he complied.

‘Thanks, yes. Toast?'

‘Sure. You done all this?' Don indicated the wine glasses washed and dried and set out neatly on the kitchen table. ‘That's Northern British, isn't it? Like your accent. Not really English at all.'

Joe was unaccountably nervous and he did not know whether to be flattered or piqued.

‘You guys are Celts,' said Don, ‘so it isn't your fault.' He paused. ‘You have a nice smile.' Joe felt it slide off his face. Don laughed and handed Joe the coffee. ‘Let's go look at Ole Man River.'

They took the bus into Oxford at midday and Don insisted he came to see the poky, raffish Ruskin Art School tucked away in the back of the Ashmolean Museum. The American walked through the museum as if he owned it, Joe thought. He himself felt it was a waste not to examine some of the paintings and statues especially when he was with a real artist who could tell him about them, but Don ignored everything.

Don had produced Natasha's address and after a pie and a pint in the Lamb and Flag, Joe went to her house which was just a few hundred yards away. He had known since he left her that he would seek her out; their loneliness was a mutual field of force. As he walked out into the grey, low-cloud winter afternoon, enjoying the bite of the cold, he sensed that she would be there waiting for him.

The shrill doorbell startled her awake but she would not go down. It would not be Robert and she wanted to see no one else. When she was sure the visitor had given up, she did go down – to the kitchen where there was food. They had asked her to give the house ‘a good clean' while they were away and they would be back in two days. She would start after a cup of coffee. But after the coffee as she looked through the window it began to snow and the prettiness of it, the lingering flakes of white, the sweetness of the snow, the pure white life in those unstained innocent flakes made her cry and cry so hard she could do nothing until night came back.

Their daughter wanted to know more about Shelley. Joe could recite a few lines and recall some of the life, but it was how he looked that she wanted to know. ‘Hair swept back,' he said, ‘far too long for the close-cropped male of post-war England and the style gave the poet a feminine look and Natasha's hair was swept dashingly from her face in a similar manner. A broad high forehead. A strong nose, the “Bourbon nose” she was to call it. Face rather long and pale with a look of distinction in the slim lips and the eyes, just a little large, but so
voluptuously and teasingly expressive. Even against the fire in silhouette, the candlelight had given me glimpses of the eyes and it was most likely,' he said, ‘that it was what I saw there which would one day lead me to a life I could never have dreamed of.

‘But there were other photos from around that time,' he said, ‘and sometimes she doesn't look at all like Shelley. There's none of that romantic brooding. She's just smiling, so lovely, clear-eyed.'

He did not tell her that a disturbing dream had returned since he had begun to write, which had recurred often in his adolescence. In it he saw a dam which he had built across the river with other boys when he was seven or eight. In the field beside the dam a girl was buried, a girl he had somehow murdered, a girl he recognised. The field was always empty but he knew that one day they would arrive and dig her up.

Nor did he tell their daughter that he had sought out photographs recently as a preparation for this telling. They were in a drawer at the bottom of an old linen chest he used for storing finished work. He had not seen them for decades. There were packets of them. Some neatly labelled by Natasha, others not as neatly by himself. After just a few minutes, a look at the merest fraction, he had put them away. They were unbearable. Her look of such life.

He bought winter roses, deep red. Seven. The man in the market threw in the extra one for luck. The boy looked so spry, so clearly, eagerly, nervously on the gad. Joe walked through the near-empty, pre-term Oxford streets not sure whether it was better to hold the flowers down like a walking stick or up like an umbrella. He alternated. The deep red flowers were like a torch that late slate January afternoon, under the frozen busts which guarded the Sheldonian, past Trinity and Balliol, colleges now as familiar as Wigton pubs, names warm to him at last, in his final year. He turned to pass St Mary Magdalene's of the incense and the chanting in Latin and then the Martyrs' Memorial calm in stone where a few centuries ago red torches had burned men alive for their faith, and he headed for North Oxford and fabled dens of inimitable Oxford dons, including the two at whose house Natasha was the au pair. The Ashmolean was to his left, the Lamb and Flag pub, soon to be their favourite, to his right. On his rose-bearing journey to Natasha through the cold streets, he felt open, free, unencumbered.