Remember Me... (7 page)

‘I have to go,' said Natasha. She stood up as she spoke the words and held out her hand to Joe.

For a moment he could not believe he had been chosen. Then he too stood. Should he say something? Surely he had to say something after being sworn at.

‘I'm late,' Natasha said to Joe and her hand drew him away.

This time it was Robert who laughed.

Later Joe thought of the many cutting, devastating comments he could have made. Sentences that would kill. But he had said and done nothing.

Natasha scarcely spoke as they went back to the empty afternoon house where she sped upstairs, took off her clothes and made love to Joe more furiously, more fiercely than she had ever done before, murmuring ‘Joseph' which profoundly moved and inflamed him.

They sat back against the pillows for some time in silence, a blanket shielding them against the cold which was mitigated only slightly by the two-bar electric fire. They were in a sweat of satisfaction.

‘Do you think I was a coward?'

‘I thought it was bold of you to come to the pub.'

‘Did you?' Joe was relieved.

His simple-seeming question sought out more comfort.

‘Yes.' She looked around for the saucer and found a resting place for her ash on a heap of butts.

Joe waited in vain for more. He was reluctant but determined to face up to his failure. ‘When he told me to fuck off. Shouldn't I have hit him?'

‘Why should you do that?'

‘I don't know. But I felt as if I should. And,' he pushed on, ‘when I didn't, I felt that I'd been a coward.' Further. ‘I've been a coward before, so I recognise it.'

‘Oh, Joseph!' Natasha leaned across and kissed him on the cheek; the blanket slid down and he saw her breasts. ‘You are not a Sicilian. My honour was not at stake. Nor was yours.'

‘But it felt like that. And I just walked away.'

‘It was I who walked away. You came with me.'

‘That's even worse.'

He spoke so gloomily. Natasha was moved by him as she had never been. She stubbed out her cigarette, did the same with his, and eventually, more quietly, they made love again. When they had finished, Natasha held onto him, her own courage strengthened. Both his strength and his weakness could nourish her; already she saw, valued and loved that.

‘He is a cruel man,' she said.

Her face rested against his throat. She did not want to look at him while she said what now must be said whatever the consequences. The sentence put Joe on alert. If Robert was a ‘cruel man', why had she gone with him? Why had she done that fine painting of him? Surely a work like that had to come out of deep feeling. Didn't all great art? Why had she insisted she had to meet him?

‘At first I didn't realise he was cruel.'

Joe tried not to get tense. This was fair enough. He had told her about Rachel. Somehow he had to keep Robert out of this bed, this room, see him as a figure in her story only.

She had to risk telling him. He was serious and deserved the truth.

‘I ought to have told you sooner,' she began, ‘but I thought Robert was gone for ever . . . Perhaps it would have made you less . . . determined . . .' She paused and it was as if every pore in her body was sensitised to the slightest tremor of retreat on his part: none came. She concentrated and tried to speak evenly.

Robert, she said, had pursued her for more than a year. Or, she thought he had. There had been other women; his friends said that he
treated the women in the Ruskin School of Art like his personal harem. But Natasha had kept her distance, partly to show that she was not a member of the harem and partly because she knew that she must not trust him.

But he had ‘captured' her: the word was emphasised. She wanted to live with him, he said he wanted to travel the world with her. He would be her twin soul in the pure pursuit of painting. She fell under his spell.

He began to neglect her. That was bad enough. Then he told her, with increasing bluntness, that she was not sufficiently passionate as a lover. She discovered that he told others this too. He further humiliated her by publicly turning his attention to a young English rose who had drifted into the Ruskin from a finishing school in Florence. There had been a scene after a life class where he had told her, loudly, in front of their friends that she had to leave him alone. Finally, she said, very quietly, there had been her attempts to win him back, even pleading with him. He had gone to Europe, to get away from her, he said, although she did not wholly believe that.

She did not tell Joseph about the still-unhealed wound of failure nor of the scarcely bearable pain of that rupture. It was, in any case, impossible to describe. That a separation could cause such insistent physical agony . . . that it could go on, and on, through the day, through the night, a malign infection occupying every moment, crushing her with the awareness of her own failure, leaving her with a weight of misery and loss she thought that she would never be able to shift. Nor had she been able to do so – until she met Joseph. He dissolved in a pride of love for her when she said that: to be of such importance in her life, to be of such use.

‘When you met him, I knew if I walked away with you, he had lost his power over me. You have freed me from him.'

And then she fell silent, fearing that his love for her might now be fatally impaired by the confession, fearing it the more because this young foreign implacable suitor had become so swiftly the keystone in the building of her new life.

Joe let a silence help him absorb both her story and what he could breathe in like air itself, her continuing distress. He felt that he had been admitted to the deepest and most private corner of her soul. He could feel what it had cost her to make that confession and the love that was growing for her was now steeled with an all but worshipping admiration. Insofar as the confession could be uttered in a neutral manner, it had been. There was no sobbing, no self-pity. She had offered him the freedom to walk away.

Pity, engulfing pity was what Joe felt. But responsibility as well. She had put herself in his hands and that was a sort of real love, wasn't it?

And as for the pain of it, he felt it pass into him from her, he felt some of the weight of it light on him and he was glad. It more strongly bound them, that he could bear some of her pain. In those moments the love which had grown in the vague blind ways of inexperience and impatience, as much in the fear of not succeeding as by the usual rules of desire, took on the possibility of a new dimension, of sharing pain and truth and of being open to the understanding of what was most intimate and perilous about the nature of someone else.

Joe lay there after her challenge, her confession, and wave upon wave of warm feelings swept through his body and his mind with a certainty of exhilaration twin to the surge of sexual fulfilment. If he knew anything at all in this tidal rush then he knew he would never leave her, nor she him.

‘I think you may prove to be very lucky,' David said. ‘She'll lever you away from that charming but clinging background of yours and set you free. I see you as a pair of refugees, exiled from your own countries, out to find a new life. I'm rather pleased with that!' He giggled and his brief intense look as always made Joe feel uniquely appreciated.

They were in the Cadena, fashionable with the artistic and intellectual crowd, taking mid-morning coffee and biscuits which David, plumping out, ate instantly. Joe sat back. David cast some sort of spell on him; in his company he felt cradled.

‘May I?' He took one of Joe's biscuits, swept his eyes around the room, ceaseless searchlights, spotting and docking, and then returned his gaze to someone who, for a short time, would be his plasticine. But also someone he respected, puzzled over, wanted to befriend. ‘Not that there's anything intrinsically wrong with your clinging background,' he spoke through the biscuit, ‘on the contrary,' a wistful smile, ‘everything you tell me about it makes it sound enviably desirable but you have to let it go now or you'll end up going back there as an outsider, a schoolteacher or something, very nice too, but I think you can do something other, not better, “other”. To me Natasha proves it. Your interest in her, to use an anaemic word for the
PASSION
of it!' a sudden loud ear-catching laugh, ‘is telling you what I am telling you. She won't let you go back.'

Joe laughed. It was such rubbish. He loved David's company. For a moment he was tempted to tell him that the clinging background was the setting for two recently written short stories, which had driven him straight back to his childhood in that far Northern town so exotic to David, so magnetic to Joe. But the writing had to be kept secret . . .

A few days later, Roderick and Bob, friends he had met in his first week in Oxford, were introduced to Natasha, also in the Cadena. She had heard much about them from Joseph: Roderick, who, like Joe, was reading History, was from an army family, lean-jawed, square-shouldered, in all things brisk, very like the heroes in Joe's boyhood books on public schools. Bob more languid, owlish, the swotty boy who surprised them all in those school yarns which had been magical kingdoms to Joe. Bob was a zoologist and a fanatical fisherman. Both, Natasha noticed, appeared more relaxed and self-possessed than Joseph but clearly all three were fond of each other in that understated English way she liked.

Afterwards, they were unreservedly complimentary. Nor in private did their opinion veer from this.

‘They're so different, it makes a kind of sense,' Roderick said as he and Bob killed the final hour of the morning in the King's Arms. ‘I must say I feel rather responsible – hauling him off to that Christmas party.'

‘She is,' said Bob, his hesitation down to a scientist's care with fresh evidence, ‘both delightful and very intelligent. Not, I suspect, a common combination. Half of bitter?'

‘She is,' said Roderick, when Bob returned from the bar, ‘somewhat older.'

‘Possibly a touch more than somewhat.'

‘No bad thing,' hurriedly added.

‘On the contrary,' Bob began the lengthy process of filling his big pipe. Roderick waited for more but more was not forthcoming. Bob was fully engaged with his pipe and would be for some time . . .

In their late-night drawing room, the children fed and finally bedded, Julia and Matthew sat down with their books and drink. The house shivered a little as the single rickety bed two floors up strained at the demands being put on it.

Matthew glanced at the ceiling.

‘Yes,' Julia drawled, thoughtfully. ‘He can't seem to leave the poor woman alone.'

‘Perhaps . . .' Matthew paused entirely for effect, ‘she enjoys it?'

‘I sincerely hope so,' said Julia and took a sip of her watery whisky, ‘if only to drive out Robert.'

In the morning break in the life-drawing class, Don and Jonathan came out for some air and to lounge against the great columns at the entrance to the Ashmolean. Americans appropriately framed in the neo-classical architecture of imperial power. Both enjoyed their awareness of it and took a mental snapshot for memories back home. They smoked American cigarettes, Lucky Strike.

‘He told me,' said Jonathan, in slow awe, ‘that he thinks she should have an exhibition and he'll organise it.' Taking his time, he drew every particle of the smoke deep down into his waiting lungs.

‘He's certainly changed,' said Don, with some regret.

‘So,' Jonathan struggled to reach the next two monosyllables, ‘has she.'

‘Not as much as him. It's blast-off.'

Jonathan nodded and once more appeared to attempt to suck through the whole cigarette in a single inhalation.

‘She's on the rebound,' Don said. ‘Dangerous.'

‘Maybe,' said Jonathan. He looked across to the Randolph Hotel, and observed the scurrying grey figures in the bleak English winter light. He wanted to distance himself from Natasha for whom, when she had become, as he thought, free, post-Robert, he had felt an unmistakable pang.

‘She'll be too complicated for him,' said Don and ground a wastefully big stub under the heel of his warm American boot. ‘And he needs time to play around.'

Joe's essay on the impact of the French Revolution on English thought in the 1790s had been thin. He had read it slowly because it was also too short but a chill had soon settled in his mind as the intensifying boredom of Malcolm Turney, his tutor, had transferred its force across the short space between their armchairs. It was the final tutorial of the morning, the noon-to-one slot, never an easy posting with lunch in the offing. Turney on his third tutorial hour of the morning was aching to get on with his own work in the afternoon, already switched on to it, lending a mere fraction of his mind to the present, a trick he could also manage at the concerts and operas to which his cultivated Italian wife zealously drove him. Joe had begun to follow the panic-fashion of
getting up very early on the day of a morning tutorial and finishing the essay by relying on the drive of the deadline, collapsing arguments into lists and filling with waffle the gaps left by inadequate preparation. Oxford, Roderick maintained, was a world leader in the higher waffle.

Turney let him endure a serious interval of silence after the final blustered paragraph and then opened up and spared him nothing. It was quite merciless. Joe did not have the guns to return fire and he was honest enough with himself to give up the attempt early on. When it was done, the tutor glanced at his watch. There was still twenty minutes to go. He would steal ten.

‘Sherry?'

Joe accepted the unexpected treat with suspicion. They sipped.

‘If you want a decent degree you'll have to pull your socks up. You know that.'

‘Yes.' The sherry felt strong. He was suddenly tired from the frantic morning.

‘My guess is that you've already decided against trying for a first.' Turney sank his face behind long steepled hands. ‘Making a film, writing for
Cherwell
, that sort of thing.'