Remember Me... (12 page)

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 thirty 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.

He tried to take refuge in another bite which went down the wrong way but produced a merciful coughing fit. The subject was closed.

‘He simply ignored what I said.'

‘Perhaps,' said Matthew, ‘or more likely he was overcome with shyness. It sounds as if you delivered the compliment rather forcefully.'

‘He wanted to know if we could recommend someone with a car to help shift these wretched works of art to Wadham.'

‘Wretched? Unfair. You have not seen them.'

‘It is that which arouses my suspicion.'

‘You read too many crime novels.'

‘Don't be absurd.'

Roderick found the solution.

‘Bob, you and me, four or five trips each, carry the things, what's wrong with that?'

So they did. The little procession of three undergraduates walked backwards and forwards between the college and the house of Professor Stevens several times, bearing paintings. Roderick looked approvingly at the final stack in the college room which had no history of being an art gallery.

‘Quite an effective operation. Drink?'

‘There's one more,' said Joe. ‘She's working on it now. I said I'd collect it at about seven.'

‘Time for a quick one, then,' said Bob who, like Roderick, was determined to treat Joe to a drink for having helped him.

‘They have to be hung by ten tomorrow morning,' Joe said as they congregated around the bar. ‘Could you tell Mrs Harries I'll be legitimately late?'

‘She won't buy it for a minute. Good luck. Here's to the exhibition.'

The three glasses were raised in a ragged salute.

‘I deliberately,' said Bob, after a deep sip had left him with a white froth moustache, ‘tried not to look. Far better to see them in situ.'

‘Gawd, suddenly it's “in situ”,' said Roderick. ‘Is there no end to the man's talents?'

‘She writes poetry as well,' Joe said. ‘I wanted her to use lines from it underneath the paintings. She doesn't believe in titles. She says that English people in particular read the title more carefully than they look at the painting.'

‘Fair cop,' said Roderick, ‘that's me.'

‘I like a title,' said Bob, taking out the pipe and the tin of Bruno and beginning the slow charging; Roderick offered Joe a Disque Bleu. ‘I like to test my idea of what the artist says it is with the artist's own idea.'

‘Natasha says the point is the painting. Not how anyone describes it – not even the artist.'

‘If it says it's the Battle of Waterloo that could be quite important, couldn't it?' said Roderick. ‘Imagine the confusion to all parties if it turned out to be the Battle of Blenheim.'

‘I grant you historical paintings,' said Joe.

‘And portraits? Terrible rumpus in France if Louis XIV were mistaken for Louis XV.'

‘Portraits I'll give you.'

‘Landscapes? You wouldn't want to think that Holland was Norfolk, would you?'

‘Landscape, OK,' said Joe.