Remember Me... (3 page)

His return to Wigton for the Christmas vacation had been undermined by sightings of Rachel. He decided to leave it early to come back to Oxford. To study for Finals was a good excuse, but there was also the tug of the thread of contact with Natasha from that first and only meeting. It had held through the cold break in the North and grown stronger in imagination. A phone call to Don had confirmed that Natasha was still in Oxford and had been ill over Christmas with ‘something like influenza, more a depression, I'd guess'. When he pressed the bell he put the flowers behind his back.

This did not deceive Julia, who smiled but did not comment. Her smile widened when she took in his outfit: he had bought himself a
canvas jacket with a fake fur collar and a pair of light brown cords, thin-ribbed and tight.

‘He looks about sixteen,' said Julia later in the drawing room to Matthew, who was almost through his annual Christmas read of the whole of Jane Austen. He did not look up. ‘Like one of those town boys one sees on Saturday nights on the way to the dance.'

‘And very nice too,' said Matthew, his head determinedly bowed.

‘Oh, I agree. But for Natasha? Surely . . . ?'

‘He can't be worse than Robert.' Still steadily moving through the prose, he added with precise dismissive conviction, ‘Robert was a shit.'

‘I disagree,' said Julia. ‘He was a predator like a lot of men of his type at his age. He wanted an affair and then he would move on, he is a sort of sexual nomad. It was quite obvious to me.'

‘From what I gather,' Matthew uplifted his head for a moment or two, ‘he gave wholly the opposite impression to Natasha.'

‘She always expects too much,' said Julia. ‘And she is an adult.'

‘I'll stick,' said Mattthew, ‘with shit.' And his eyes returned to the pages of
Sense and Sensibility.

Julia picked up her copy of
Death on the Nile.

Her accent, like that of her husband, was careful, clear, academic in its exactness, eschewing ‘upper' but espousing pure. They would have wanted the approval of Jane Austen. Julia looked the part, Joe was to think, as he got to know her, extremely pretty, plainly served, morally earthed, amused.

‘May I ask your name?'

‘Joe, Joseph, Joe. Richardson.'

‘I presume you are a friend of Natasha?'

‘Well . . . not really . . . We've met. Once . . .'

‘She's at the top of the house, the room on the left. Come in.' She stood aside. Joe blushed as he revealed the flowers. Noting this, Julia said, ‘What lovely roses. I'm sure she'll approve.' He was nodded through.

‘I noticed that
Lady Chatterley
was sticking out of the pocket of that dreadful jacket,' she said. ‘Rather obvious.'

‘Or merely coincidental,' said Matthew, and read on.

‘I've never been in an artist's studio,' said Joe.

The bed was unmade as he thought it should be. The floors were bare boards, quite right, and clothes were not in a cupboard but hung on a rail in full view. There were saucers used as ashtrays and paint brushes sticking out of coffee mugs. There were two old easy chairs, one of which looked very unreliable. The sink was stashed with unwashed dishes. The day was darkening and the light was on. The central bulb was bare. Best of all, Joe thought, was the easel, on which was a canvas barely begun. None of the paintings stacked around the easel or on the walls was framed and Joe was soon to be told that none of them was finished.

To Joe the room was exotic. There was even a sloping ceiling. And Natasha fitted the part; a black dressing gown, sloppily tied, no slippers, cigarette, trying to force the stalks of the seven roses into a hastily rinsed milk bottle. Three was the limit. She snapped the stalks off the remaining four and put them in a coffee mug next to the brushes against the bare window. The milk bottle went on the small table beside her bed, displacing the plate bearing the half-eaten sandwich. Joe had never seen flowers look so artistically arranged.

‘They look great,' he said, ‘don't they?'

Natasha drew the dressing gown around her as she sat down and turned on a small red-shaded lamp which stood on the floor. In the ruby light the studio, Joe thought, became a set.

‘Look,' she said, pointing to the mug of amputated roses next to the window. ‘They transform the balance of the whole room.' She turned. ‘And those three . . .' She looked at the three blood-headed roses in the milk bottle, arrested, for a moment, by the fact of them. The velvet heads still upright, green stalks in clear water. She could understand why painters would want to capture them though still lifes were not for her. ‘Yet you think – they're dying. Once they are cut they begin to die,' she murmured.

The soft rosy light from the lamp had recaptured some of the silhouetted beauty he had nursed throughout his absence. When he had come into the room he had been rather thrown by her pallor, the sweat-flattened hair, the listlessness. Now that very evidence of illness, softened and made beguiling by the low seductive light, attracted him afresh, gave him an impetus of concern.

‘Don said you hadn't been well.'

‘Did you see Don?'

‘No. I phoned him.'

‘You spent that night at Shillingford?'

‘Yes. He put me up. It was very good of him.'

Natasha smiled at the tone: so innocent. But did that mean it was to be believed? Joe felt the appraisal.

‘I like that,' he said, pointing to the portrait of Robert. ‘I really like that.' He fixed his gaze on the portrait, trying to squeeze as much out of it as he possibly could. Natasha glanced at him as he stood unawares, and caught her first glimpse of an energy and an intensity which had so comprehensively drained out of her.

‘He must be a friend,' said Joe, and there was an intimation of jealousy. ‘A good friend?'

‘He was.'

Natasha went across to the bed and sat against a heap of dented pillows.

‘Not any more?'

She looked at him and for a moment or two everything was in the finest balance. She thought she might throw out this unfeeling stranger in his stupid jacket or just cry: but she could not impose that on him. The three roses stood between them.

‘There's some wine in a bottle by the sink,' she said, eventually, and Joe was relieved, though he did not know why. ‘Use teacups.'

He washed them carefully, delighted again, and sat on the armchair nearest the bed. They smoked. For some time Natasha said nothing. She had pulled up her knees and wrapped her arms around them, the motion of smoking being the only movement. She wished he would go away. Tiredness was pulling her into unconsciousness like a relentless undertow and she did not want to find the means to resist it.

Joe had felt a strong scent of danger when the portrait had been discussed. It was better to say nothing. It was as if Natasha had imposed on him a sudden glimmering of wisdom. Before this encounter he would have rushed to fill every void with words. Now he sensed that he scarcely existed for her and that realisation made him breathe softly, stay still, just stay. Staying was the best he could hope for.

She looked around for the saucer to offload the collapsing column of ash and noticed him.

‘Why did you come?'

‘Don said you hadn't been very well.'

Why had Don not come? Or any of the others who were in Oxford over Christmas? But these were weary questions, not seeking an answer. She thought less of herself even for letting them crawl across her exhausted mind. She was truly glad they had not come. She wanted none of them. But this stranger who had walked in, why had he come? Was it not just naïf, unthinking, without a history? Or had she been made sentimental by the gift of the blood-headed winter roses?

‘Thank you for the roses,' she said and in such a way that Joe stood up to leave.

He tried to think up a telling, witty last line, but blurted out,

‘It would be great to see you again. We could go to
Wild Strawberries.
Ingmar Bergman. I get two complimentary tickets because I review films for
Cherwell
– it's the university newspaper. Same time tomorrow?'

He would spend some time throughout the rest of the evening burning with retrospective embarrassment, closely analysing those clumsy sentences and finding every single component wrong, wrong, wrong.

Natasha made a small gesture with the cigarette. Contempt? Tiredness? Certainly it said, ‘Please go.'

He closed the door quietly and though a burden was lifted from her when he left the room, there was also the faintest regret, for his openness, the excitement he tried to conceal with such limited success. That truly terrible jacket.

She took the flowers across to the bin beside the sink but then decided to keep them. Watch them die.

The smell of them brought no memories, filled her with no sweet sensation of that natural benediction which came from herbs and flowers. Freshly cut lavender was the only potion which could move her. There was that photograph of her mother holding a large bunch of lavender, smiling over her shoulder, dressed like the peasant women in
Provence before the war. Natasha looked at it only rarely. It was too hard.

The sink was such a mess. She turned on the unreliable hot water tap, and looked around for washing-up powder. She had let the place go. As the water ran, she began to tidy up, slowly, moving like an old woman, prepared to quit at any time.

Much later, when she was brooding yet again on their beginnings, she came to believe that Joe's first awkward visit may well have helped save her.

‘Just as shiny-faced,' Julia reported, ‘and still that dreadful jacket.'

‘I must,' said Matthew, who was preparing himself for
Emma
which he always kept until last, ‘catch a glimpse.'

‘You must. I have never seen such an appalling garment.'

‘I meant of him,' said Matthew. ‘Dick?'

‘Joseph she calls him.' Julia frowned. ‘Joe is much more appropriate.'

‘How would you defend that?'

‘You know perfectly well what I mean.'

Joe was relieved that Natasha's room was tidier. The more he had thought on its bohemianism, and he had thought of their meeting constantly, the thinner the scruffy glamour had worn. Disorder excited him but only in small doses. There were still the unfinished canvases and the easel, the unorthodox wardrobe and what he had named ‘the forbidden portrait'. It was still properly artistic, he thought, a real studio, but no longer a mess. The bed was made. The seven roses were reunited, all shorn now, in a large jam jar beside the tubes of paint.

He had taken down the number on the phone in the hall on his way out the previous evening and called just before lunch to leave a message that he would be there at five. To be fair and give her the chance not to be there? Or pretend not to be there? Or be there? In those first days Joe had not much of a clue as to what he was doing or why. He was like a puppy dog in a wood, blundering after scents which might be dead, might not, just enough to keep it keen. He had small expectations.

Natasha noted that she was pleased to see him. For the company, for the gust of life that came through the door, for the smile which so
openly liked her? It was a brief and superficial stroke of pleasure, like a flat stone merely skimming across the surface of a lake. Yet she was honest enough and so acutely attuned to her own depression to notice and to register this positive effect of his presence and be grateful.

‘Feeling better?'

She nodded, not wanting to disappoint him.

‘You look better.'

A long woven wine-coloured skirt bought in the market in Avignon, a clean white shirt open at the throat, a thick college scarf draped as a shawl, the lightest rub of lipstick, the pallor softened as her back was to the window.

‘Which college is that?'

Natasha looked at the scarf as if surprised to find it there. ‘Roland gave it to me,' she said and shook her head.

‘Who's Roland?'

‘You are nosy.' The flickered smile only partly reassured him. She drew deeply on her cigarette and Joe reached for his own. She exhaled the smoke evenly, in perfect lines, Joe observed, like those sharp rays of light that shot down through a mass of cloud, staircases to heaven they had been called, staircases to her lips. He smiled more broadly, encouraged by the warmth which was in him, which came from the force of attention he was paying her, though from a distance, still circling.

‘Roland is the janitor at the college. He finds lost property in the museum and after a few months he gives it to us. Jonathan says that Roland gave him a packet of contraceptives just before Christmas. One had been used.'

Joe kept his mouth shut and blushed. In the Ashmolean Museum? Where?

‘I've got the tickets.' He patted his jacket pocket, unsure why he needed the reinforcement of mime. ‘It starts at six-ten.'

‘Six-ten.' She repeated the numbers mockingly, and waited.

‘We'll miss the trailers.'

‘I see.'

‘Which I like. I like trailers . . . usually . . . Not always.'

‘Six-ten. Now it is five-fifty-two.'

She stood up and Joe's heart leaped to see her stand, again silhouetted, this time against the window which brought in the last light from a dying winter sun. He saw that she was wearing leather boots.

‘You look like a Cossack,' he said. ‘Have you read
The Cossacks?
I think it's his best.'

‘You are funny,' she said and Joe felt complimented by the first warmth in her tone.

In the cinema Natasha used the celluloid-lit darkness and the comfort of the thin audience to float, to be borne up above the pain, to let the images on the screen give her just enough of a drug to stir into the painkillers taken before Joe came, to numb the ravenous grief. Occasionally her attention would be caught by the adolescent girls in the elaborate white dresses of a distant time, and memories of photographs and of her own childhood would surface to remind her of past losses, missed chances of happiness; or the bewildered expression of the old professor would be transferred onto a recollection of her father and the world of the film would become a dream, welcomed because it eased the pressure of grief at what Robert had done. Without finding the opportunity to object, she was guided to a small restaurant that Joe and Roderick used occasionally. It was cheap but the crisp tablecloths were in a red and white checked pattern and she could see the place was well cleaned. The woman who served was Spanish. On the walls were the accoutrements of matadors and two posters of the Bull Ring in Seville. There was a guitar hanging next to the door to the kitchen. It was the most sophisticated and romantic restaurant that Joe knew.