Remember Me... (6 page)

‘David's great, isn't he? And it doesn't show but he knows a heck of a lot.'

Natasha was drawn in. Joe could sense it. He sat as still and alert as a hare, all but trembling at this particle of slight but crucial development. She offered him a cigarette and let him offer her a light.

‘I think he is a good man,' she said, exhaling the perfectly even column he could never quite match. ‘But . . . horribly nervous.' Which is why I can trust him, she thought.

‘Nervous?' Joe shook his head, plunged in. ‘David Green goes to more parties than anybody else in Oxford according to
Parson's Pleasure.
They poke fun at him sometimes.'

‘He needs those parties,' Natasha said. ‘He likes you.'

‘I like him. He got me the job on
Cherwell.
We met at the party after the film preview and he asked me back to his rooms. We talked until about five o'clock in the morning. About everything. He says he talked about the Old Guard and I talked about the New Wave! He asked me if I wanted to be the film critic for
Cherwell
, I said if he thought I could do it, and that was that! He's in with everybody.'

‘Is he?' Natasha kept her tone neutral. ‘I like him,' she said.

‘That's great! I could see he liked you. He's the first of my friends you've met. They've all been yours so far. And I bet you'll like Roderick and Bob as well.'

‘Are you making me part of a family, Joseph?'

‘Why not?'

His cocky look was flirtatious and Natasha felt as if she had been touched gently on the cheek. For the first time Joe felt that he was more than just attendant on her.

‘You have kind eyes,' she said. The compliment disconcerted him. For a moment he did not know where to look. He was not used to it. He could rarely if ever remember his mother paying him a direct compliment. Yet there was a subversive feeling of pleasure. What if she were right?

He knew he ought to return the compliment and he wanted to but it was too difficult. She had the loveliest smile he had ever seen.

‘You told David a lot about yourself that night in his rooms.'

‘Yes.' About Rachel, of course. And the pub he had grown up in. His parents. The small town of Wigton. His friends back home. His ambition to make films. Much of which he had repeated over the past weeks to Natasha.

‘He would want to know everything about you,' Natasha said, quietly, ‘I can see that.'

‘He talked to me about himself as well,' said Joe, ‘it wasn't just one-sided.'

Natasha waited. Joe was a little reluctant. Had it been confidential? But then, nothing should be kept secret from Natasha.

‘One thing that will surprise you,' he said, dropping his voice. ‘He isn't really English. His father is German, was German, was killed in the war but before that he got his mother and David out, because she's Jewish. They have well-off relatives over here and they pay for his education.'

Natasha took another cigarette.

‘Poor boy. German father. Jewish mother. English public school. And now, Oxford.'

‘He did say he was got at a bit. But he joked about it.'

‘I see. So he is taking his revenge now, in a most intelligent and very risky manner.' She laughed to herself. ‘I like David. He is daring them.'

A few days afterwards, in the mid-afternoon, when the children were being taught at their respective schools and Matthew and Julia were
doing research at their respective colleges, they made love. It took Joe by surprise.

In fact, when it became clear that Natasha would go to bed with him Joe panicked. He went downstairs to the lavatory where he tried unsuccessfully to pee. Back upstairs he suggested a glass of wine ‘Before . . . before . . .' Natasha poured half a teacup for him which he knocked off like beer. He was too nervous to notice her mood, too fearful of fatal failure, consumed wholly by the desperate hope that it would be big enough, that he could last long enough and she would not laugh or be disappointed and leave him. What he had been male-groomed to think he wanted most about a relationship he now wanted least. She stripped, without coquetry, and slid into the rickety bed. Joe tugged at buttons, cursed socks, hesitated at underpants. She was French. She was an artist. She was unknown.

It was impossible to talk to their daughter about any of that, out of which, a few years later, she was created. Memories of their early frequent love-making came back unsummoned. They seemed so innocent; too innocent, it was to prove. It was an innocence that stoppered curiosity, baulked at unfettered sensuality, left questions, over time, to fester. But for now, for some years, it was enough, it was the physical seal, and it was sweet and loving.

Joseph was to be trusted, she told herself. He was like one of the village boys she had played with in La Rotonde, the brother of Martine her best friend, an open-faced, cheeky, sure-grounded boy, guileless, she thought.

Joseph would not harm her.

Robert had to be annulled. All he had done and not done had to become the past in her body as she so longed for it to be in her mind. She had to be brave: and to be brave, again, as his urgent but boyish love-making threatened comparisons with Robert. Yet, she thought, Joseph would carry no danger, Joseph could be controlled.

That night, after he had gone, that first night, Natasha felt the possible dawning of a new life. She lay in her room in the dark and, unusually, turned on the radio, found a performance of
Fidelio
and let herself be dissolved into it.

Joe skimmed the ground as he went back to Mrs Harries's. He had not realised the burden of the emptiness. Natasha gave him everything
and he felt almost mad with it. He would move in with her. They would never be parted. There was a new world now, a world fulfilled and for ever with Natasha.

Natasha stood in her black dressing gown at the window. Her feet grew colder on the bare floorboards. Darkness outside, darkness in the room, afloat on the genius of Beethoven. She smoked and peered intently through the glass, seeking to order her thoughts and feelings and take on this tide of energy which Joseph brought to her. This love, this new beginning which would not be denied.

Jonathan came into Natasha's room like a man condemned.

Joe was there. He had become a fixture after their first coupling. For Joe such love and sex meant marriage and despite the moral straitjacket of Oxford, England in 1961, he had decided a semblance of that could start now. Matthew and Julia had become resigned to the rattle of the rickety bed late at night, followed by Joe thundering down the stairs to race back to his digs. ‘There are several reasons why I ought to disapprove, but I find that I don't,' said Matthew.

‘Natasha is almost normal and occasionally even cheerful, which is a miracle,' Julia said, ‘so what can one say? You can smell it on them.'

Jonathan too was to report that he could ‘smell it on them'. He thought of waiting until Joe left but soon realised that Joe would never leave him alone with Natasha.

He would accept nothing to drink.

Natasha and Joe looked at him expectantly.

‘I come bearing a message,' he said, slowly, eventually, reluctantly.

They waited.

‘A friend,' he looked at Natasha pleadingly, then at Joe without success, then at the ceiling. ‘A mutual friend of ours – that is Natasha's and mine – is back from abroad and would like,' one final pause, one more moment in which the bad news was not yet delivered, ‘to see you . . . Tomorrow . . . For a drink . . . In the White Horse . . . At one.'

Natasha went still. Joe tried to read her expression but failed. She wanted both of them to go. The news came as an act of aggression. Now that she and Joe were lovers she had begun to believe the affair with Robert was buried, or at least beginning to retreat from her present
mind and move into the past, be anaesthetised, to be coped with. But how could it be? It roared back through her. She made such a taxing effort to reveal nothing of the turbulence of her feelings in front of the two men that she felt dizzy with the strain of it.

‘Natasha?' Joe's voice came from far away. She could not open her mouth to reply in case a cry came out of it and she did not want him to hear that. She just wanted both of them to go away.

‘I'll leave.' Jonathan heaved himself slowly to his feet. ‘Don't shoot the messenger. I told him to phone but he point blank refused. He said that either Julia or Matthew would answer and they were not reliable. He said something more colourful than that but “not reliable” covers the case.'

He went out in silence and his deliberate tread on the stairs accentuated their own continuing dumbness.

Joe's gaze sought out the portrait of Robert. ‘You don't have to go,' he said.

She did. She had to go whatever the consequences.

‘I shall just see him this last time,' she said.

‘Not if you don't want to.'

Natasha looked at him with such complexity in her expression that Joe stepped back. He felt hit in the solar plexus by this. From somewhere, though, from stubbornness and the certainty and power of happiness, he recovered. ‘You meet him at one. I'll turn up at two.'

Again she looked and this time Joe knew she was pleading with him and he knew he ought to give in and make it easier for her, but he stood his ground.

Robert looked older than his portrait, darker and more thickset. Joe had not anticipated that. It made sense of course – he had been a GI and put in military service like so many of Joe's contemporaries, an experience he regretted that he had missed. There was something else, Joe thought; a worldliness, the feeling that if he had not done it all, he had done a good deal of it and from the way he gave the once-over to Joe, he knew a greenhorn when he saw one. Natasha introduced them, without apparent emotion.

Natasha was dressed in the Cossack style Joe most admired. There was a Paisley neckerchief and a broad silver-looking bangle on her wrist and her face was without pallor – from her time with Joe? From this reunion? Her beauty winded him. He pulled up a chair in the quiet corner of the pub Robert had chosen.

As Robert had just returned from Spain Joe had thought he might crash in with Orwell on the Civil War or Picasso's Spanish influences or was he for or against bullfighting. As Robert was an American Joe had thought he might ask him about the new young President Kennedy or the Arms Race. As Robert was an artist he had thought to ask his opinion of Van Gogh or Pop Art. He had also rehearsed other options. None now seemed appropriate. That the two people before him had been physically locked together was something he had to block out. This man was a visitor, maybe a guest, just passing through.

‘Natasha tells me you're a film critic.'

‘Where do you come from?'

‘The South.'

‘I thought so.
Gone with the Wind.
It's a great accent. Tennessee Williams.'

‘And what's your accent?'

‘I'm from the North.'

Robert nodded, uninterested.

‘Well now. We got each other just about taped. I'm a Southerner. You're a Northerner. You English get an accent and that's all you need. Right?'

‘Not really. Not always. Not necessarily. There is something in what you say.'

‘I'm relieved to hear it.'

Joe laughed. The drawl was so attractive. So was Robert, he conceded. The black leather flying jacket was glamorous and indicated a style and experience way beyond Joe's reach. His thick black hair was too long by the Oxford undergraduate standards adopted by Joe, who had come to the university sporting just such a rock and roll cut. A fear of nonconformity had led him to be shorn. He liked the way Robert looked. Robert, he thought, would court nonconformity.

‘Try one of these?'

Robert offered Joe a Camel cigarette. He lit an extra one in his own mouth for Natasha and passed it over to her. Joe's stomach clenched and he tried not to look as she put it in her mouth. The shock of fury and jealousy wiped out all sympathy.

‘How long will you be here?'

‘Now that depends.'

On what? Too obvious.

‘Did you do much work in Spain?'

‘That depends on what you call work.'

Joe's temper was unsuccessfully bridled.

‘I would have thought it was obvious enough. Work's work, isn't it?'

‘Depends again.'

One more ‘depends', Joe thought, and I'll be allowed to blow up.

‘You mean work doesn't necessarily need to have an end product. I see,' Joe said. ‘You can think, or just dream, I suppose, if you're an artist. That can count.'

‘On the button.'

The patronising tone was like a jab to the jaw. Joe came back.

‘What sort of art do you do?'

‘You could call it a kind of Abstract Expressionism.'

‘But what do you call it?'

Natasha laughed, a small, quiet laugh, but unmistakably a laugh which to Joe sounded like applause.

Robert looked at Joe as if he were about to hit him.

‘Natasha and I were engaged in a private conversation.'

Joe stubbed out the Camel and took out one of his own.

‘What I am saying, Joe, is why don't you just hurry along and leave us be?'

‘Why don't you?'

Robert had trouble keeping calm. Joe leaned back a little; out of range, he hoped.

‘What about tonight?' Robert said to Natasha, deliberately cutting Joe out.

‘Tonight,' said Joe, ‘we're going to see the new Fellini at La Scala.'

‘We could have a meal together,' said Robert, looking intently at Natasha.

‘I've got the tickets,' said Joe, ‘and booked a restaurant for afterwards. Spanish.'

Robert turned slowly and said with measured sweetness,

‘Why don't you just fuck off, sonny boy?'

That was the uppercut. Joe was unprepared for it. What did you do when somebody told you to fuck off? In Wigton you would be expected to fight. But in Oxford? And with an American?