Remember Me... (11 page)

‘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, suppressed 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.

‘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.'

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.