She was silhouetted against the log fire, sitting on the floor, her legs drawn elegantly to one side, her right arm as it were a prop, in her left hand the cigarette. When Joe saw her as he came, nervous through loneliness, into the grand drawing room of the riverside house, he went across to her tentatively but immediately, perhaps already sensing a fellow loneliness, captured by the dark silhouette, darkened further by the deep purple dress she wore, which, he would learn, was her only good dress. He was attracted across the quietly convivial room full of strangers by the sadness of her isolation and the space around her.
There was the mystery of her, from the beginning, the difference about her. Joe would often come back to that first image. It was not love at first sight. It proved to be not much of a conversation. He wanted to tell her that she looked like the engraving of Shelley in his book of the poems, but he could not summon up the nerve.
They smoked. He poured her a glass of red wine from the cheap bottle he had brought. He never could remember much of what they talked about but he always remembered not telling her, not then, that she looked like Shelley. Even many years later when it finally proved to be the time to tell her story, their story, to their daughter, to tell it in full as far as he could, it was this picture of her to which he returned, the silhouette, which made him want to cry out again for the violent death, the wounded life. He could find so much, fathomless, which came from that first accidental encounter. He did not know then that like him she was still numb and lost in the aftermath of a love which had taken almost too much to bear; he did not even sense that, and as for the rest she was and in ways remained as unknown as an undiscovered planet. Whereas before her, from the first he felt transparent; he believed she could understand everything about him. To the end, he held onto the conviction that she saw right through him.
The party went on around them but it was as if the volume had been turned down by someone aware that the two of them needed all the silence and stillness they could get to nurse the feeble pilot flame of this slight encounter. Nothing should have come of it. They were not meant to meet, he never felt that nor did she, nor did they pretend. But for a splicing of accidents they would never have met at all: and yet, given the way this unsought fragile conversation was to wrench their lives, mark, brand and gut them, it came to seem impossible that their life could have been lived on any terms other than those to be set in motion in these unplotted moments. A million taunting reasons never to meet each other. Trajectories in different quarters of the universe. The worlds of their deeper past so far apart. All they had to build on was the temporary companionship of strangers. But the pilot flame stayed alive, that night, in the week before Christmas, in the rather rundown Victorian manor house by the Thames just outside Oxford, leased by American art students, log-lit, candlelit, everyone shadowed, the flickering lights stroking a glass or revealing the sudden fullness of a glance across the room.
In the early days, Joe had liked to dwell on the high odds that led to their meeting. It lent the glamour of the miraculous. Even sticking to the narrow window of that evening, so many exceptional factors had been required. She had stayed on in Oxford rather than return to France following another bitter exchange of letters, so bitter that for the first time in her life she would not spend that season in her own country with her own family. Jonathan, one of the Americans in the art school, had taken pity, knowing, as they all did, what had happened between Robert and herself, what a cruel breaking apart it had been, and though this friendly soul did not know the worst of it he knew enough to seek her out and persuade her to come to Shillingford that evening where there was to be a gentle party for the left-outs and leftovers. Several students from their art school had missed her over the past weeks, he said. She was persuaded partly out of her good manners, partly because the American was kind; mostly, though, because the family she worked for was on holiday and the house was cold and its emptiness intensified her dread.
On that evening, Joe had been standing in front of the Oxfam shop in Broad Street wondering whether to go back to the library for a last couple of hours. For the first time he had stayed on at the university for an extra week. The excuse was that he needed to catch up on his work, but a stronger reason was that he was reluctant to go home to Wigton and see Rachel, whom he still loved, as happy now with someone else as she had been for so long with him. The Oxfam window could trap him. One late afternoon he had been convinced that Rachel would come to see him and he had gone to the station and waited until the last train arrived and departed and still he sat on the station bench as if he could will her to appear before him. On the way back that night he had stopped in front of this Oxfam shop, bewildered with his need for her, and looked at the rows and rows of second-hand paperbacks, attempting to staunch the bleed of hopeless passion by trying to memorise the titles and authors.
Roderick called him from across the street, clipped military syllables cracking through the icy air. Off to some party, sure Joe would be welcome, just grab a bottle at the off-licence next to the bus station. An American GI met at a concert, very bright, at the Ruskin School of Art. Party would be full of arty types but could be fun.
Yet that was no more than the tip of it, Joe would think later. He could so easily have walked back by the High Street and not the Broad. He could have stayed in the pub for another drink as he very nearly did. She could have changed her mind about the invitation as she had so often done about others in the past few weeks. Roderick might not have spotted him across the street. He could have said ‘no’. She could have been in another room and not silhouetted against the log fire. Someone else could have been talking to her. The possibility of their meeting could be sliced so thin it would disappear altogether like the thought of parallel lines meeting only in infinity which had once made him giddy. He could still sweat at the thought years on. What if he had missed her? If destiny meant anything surely they were destined not even to know of each other’s existence let alone to meet, and yet out of this would come an embrace to the death: so perhaps, he thought, later, chance was their destiny.
It seemed very difficult to ask her name. ‘Natasha,’ she said and waited, but Joe took time to enjoy the name, the charm of those three syllables falling like quiet notes in a Romantic sonata, a name unique in Joe’s personal experience and pronounced in a silver-toned English which managed to sound both pure and foreign.
‘French?’ he guessed.
The response was a barely perceptible smile.
‘Joe,’ he announced.
‘That’s American. GI Joe.’
‘No it isn’t!’ He spotted no playfulness. ‘Joe’s plain English.’ Once again the brief smile across features as pure and foreign as the accent. Again she waited. ‘It’s Jewish, to be fair,’ he said. ‘The coat of many colours.’
‘That’s Joseph. I prefer Joseph.’
His aunt Grace, who had aspirations, had wanted him to be called by his ‘full name’. ‘Call him Joseph and he’ll get Joe,’ she had warned, ‘and Joe’s common.’
‘Joe it is, then,’ said Sam, his father.
‘Natasha’s a great name.’
‘It’s not good enough for my aunts. But my mother was bohemian.’
Joe held tight to the fistful of questions her sentence provoked. It was as if there were a bowl brimful of mercury between them and he must not spill it. Bohemian!
‘Thomas Mann wrote a novel about Joseph,’ he said.
‘I’ve read only Death in Venice. I must go to Venice. I must.’
He caught something of urgency, even desperation, but it was too remote a cry to do anything but hear and faintly register, and again be excited by the foreignness and want for more, try to fix her face despite the failings of candlelight.
‘It did not get much further,’ he told their daughter, ‘and some of what I remember could well have been drawn from later encounters, or be made up, or be misremembering, or come from the desire to please you. But she always called me Joseph.’
Joe stayed the night. He was given a bed in a large room with two double beds. Don, the blond American painter who seemed to be in charge, was in the other bed.
‘Natasha Jeanne Prévost,’ said in answer to Joe’s question. ‘She’s been at the college for years. She’s an enigma.’
Joe wanted more than that but he did not know what he was looking for.
‘If you concentrate,’ said Don, after a long pause, ‘you can hear the Thames out there. Just close your eyes – that strengthens your hearing – and listen. Out there.’ They listened. Joe thought he heard something but he may have been trying to oblige his host who had so easily and generously offered the bed. ‘I used to imagine the Thames to be such a big river, when I read about it back home,’ Don said. ‘Something like the Mississippi. I couldn’t believe how small it was when I saw it. But now I think it’s a big river again because of the artists and the history. Does that make sense to you?’ Joe wanted to think it through and say something which sounded intelligent, as if Don were an examiner. ‘I’ll open the curtains,’ said Don. The moonlight lit up his nakedness: he was built like a boxer, Joe thought, not like an artist at all, a light heavyweight at least, and unashamed to stand ivory-white nude before the big window, which he opened. You yourself could be a painting, Joe thought.
Don went slowly back to his bed. The moonlight was a shaft between them and now Joe could hear something in the distance.
‘It’s the weir,’ Don said. ‘A boy was drowned there last fall. Another boy tried to rescue him and he got in trouble but they pulled him out in time.’ Don paused. Joe liked these pauses, they implied deeper meaning. They introduced a grain of drama. ‘What would make a boy risk his life to save another boy?’
‘You just do it, don’t you?’ Joe said. ‘You just – do it.’
‘I see that,’ said Don, in a rich American tone that reminded Joe of so many films and because of that made Don instantly familiar, friendly, to be liked and trusted. ‘Instinctive heroism. Dying for your comrade in arms.’ Again the pause, but the distant drama of the weir, the few glasses of wine, the newness of it all were making Joe sleepy, keen to burrow into the bed, squirrel down and defy the winter air. ‘Deeper than that,’ said Don, ‘it must be the love that the Bible says passes the understanding of women. Women don’t do what we do. For other women. Men can love men, don’t you think so, Joe?’
‘Yes.’ He thought of one of his friends at home in Wigton of whose adolescent friendship he had been so jealous and he thought of James, so discerningly understanding, with whom he had shared a room in his first year at Oxford. ‘I’m sure they can. You can even put your arm around their shoulders. I used to do that.’
‘And when you did that, was it a sort of love you felt, do you think? Would you call it that?’
‘I don’t see why not,’ said Joe. ‘There’s got to be lots of different sorts, haven’t there?’
‘But the intensity of voluntary love – not family – voluntary, is that always the same? Man or woman?’
This time the pause came from Joe and it lengthened into silence and the soft purr of his sleep.
Natasha always slept with the curtains open. She preferred the night.
She had come home the moment Jonathan had offered her a lift. The party had filled in time but there was nothing to keep her there. The art students, the genteel young English, had been discreet; the older Americans more awkward but then Natasha suspected they might be a little ashamed of what Robert had done to her. She had invited Jonathan in for a polite coffee but he had to pack, he said. Paris tomorrow and then Berlin with his sketch pad as a cover. After all, he said in his slow delivery which had always amused Natasha because she could never quite work out whether it was a heroically corrected stammer or a sly means of commanding and controlling the fullest attention, artists had long been anonymous in European capitals and he wanted to spy on the existentialists in Paris, sketch out the culture of the Cold War in Berlin, stitch the two together and see if he could place the piece in the New Yorker.
As he drove away to his digs in Walton Street he wished he had not mentioned Paris.
Natasha lodged in a tall, Georgian house in the Banbury Road and the three flights of stairs to her attic room were steep. She ought not to have felt so very weary after such a small effort, but when she closed the door of her room behind her she could have collapsed. She sat on the edge of the bed to undress and the clothes lay where they dropped.
Her portrait of Robert was where she had left it and full on to the moonlight. She should get out of bed and turn it to the wall but in the secrecy of the small room she could study it. It was unfinished. She could see its technical shortcomings. Unlike Robert, the other Americans and most of the English, Natasha had come to the Ruskin without any formal training beyond a modest talent encouraged by one of the nuns who had taught drawing at school. But the portrait had a strong look of him, Robert himself had admitted that and he was even more critical than Natasha herself. Sometimes, he said, technique can get in the way. The perfectly crafted thing can be perfectly dead. An ounce of true innerness can be worth a ton of accuracy. Better not to finish it, he said, this is as good as you’ll get.
He was the best artist in the Ruskin, they all said as much. He had picked her out, the real one, he had said, not like the others. Though she had been burned before and though she knew he was careless of women, she became his wilful accomplice. He had released her, thrillingly, from her self-imprisonment. She had surrendered to his promises and been helpless when they were broken, brutally broken. She had felt herself break with them. If she looked long enough, hard enough at the portrait maybe she would understand and begin to find a way out of this darkness. Her watch told her she had been in her room for less than ten minutes. It already seemed half the night and yet she wanted only to be here in the slow time of her lair, humiliated, hurt, adrift, looking for a place she could neither see nor reach.
She had called him Robert in the French way. At first he had liked that; then he had come to hate it. Perhaps she ought to have dropped it sooner and not teased him. He did not like being teased but she liked the reaction it provoked and the animation of anger. She brooded on the portrait, looking for explanations, looking for comfort. The faint light enriched the painting, she thought. She looked at the dark window panes that needed to be cleaned. Beyond the window were slated rooftops and below it the garden adjoining other gardens, winter dead, sealed in the city of learning sunk now in sleep inside its beautiful and ancient walls of scholarship. Robert had involved her in that, too, with Jonathan, and a few American academics who threw around their ideas with a vigour that could make Natasha want to applaud. That group had gone out of her world now. Save for Jonathan, none of them had been seen since Robert had left her, without warning, just a note, a note, not even a letter.
She turned away from the portrait, put her face to the wall and huddled under the bedclothes, legs drawn up to try to squeeze out the misery by going back to unthinkingness, rocking herself slightly. There were no resources left. Misery was in every cell. Misery was her condition. It was beyond pointlessness now, even more than before. She wanted sleep. But even there, he would be waiting.
Joe walked quietly even though Don’s loud snoring signalled deep sleep. Odd it did not wake up Don himself, Joe thought: he had been disturbed awake by the dawn light through the open window and the snoring had made it impossible to go back to sleep. It was an entertaining noise, though perhaps just for a short time. Don lay splayed on his back, mouth gargoyle open, blond hair mussed over his forehead, somehow incongruous that he was snoring, too young to snore.
The drawing room was a mess and Joe was glad to tidy up, to earn his stay, take away the glasses and wash them, empty the heaped ashtrays, clean out the grate. He liked being in a room so uncramped: it emanated ease and quiet wealth.
‘Coffee?’ Don was in the kitchen. Joe had put on the kettle for tea but he complied.
‘Thanks, yes. Toast?’
‘Sure. You done all this?’ Don indicated the wine glasses washed and dried and set out neatly on the kitchen table. ‘That’s Northern British, isn’t it? Like your accent. Not really English at all.’
Joe was unaccountably nervous and he did not know whether to be flattered or piqued.
‘You guys are Celts,’ said Don, ‘so it isn’t your fault.’ He paused. ‘You have a nice smile.’ Joe felt it slide off his face. Don laughed and handed Joe the coffee. ‘Let’s go look at Ole Man River.’
They took the bus into Oxford at midday and Don insisted he came to see the poky, raffish Ruskin Art School tucked away in the back of the Ashmolean Museum. The American walked through the museum as if he owned it, Joe thought. He himself felt it was a waste not to examine some of the paintings and statues especially when he was with a real artist who could tell him about them, but Don ignored everything.
Don had produced Natasha’s address and after a pie and a pint in the Lamb and Flag, Joe went to her house which was just a few hundred yards away. He had known since he left her that he would seek her out; their loneliness was a mutual field of force. As he walked out into the grey, low-cloud winter afternoon, enjoying the bite of the cold, he sensed that she would be there waiting for him.
The shrill doorbell startled her awake but she would not go down. It would not be Robert and she wanted to see no one else. When she was sure the visitor had given up, she did go down – to the kitchen where there was food. They had asked her to give the house ‘a good clean’ while they were away and they would be back in two days. She would start after a cup of coffee. But after the coffee as she looked through the window it began to snow and the prettiness of it, the lingering flakes of white, the sweetness of the snow, the pure white life in those unstained innocent flakes made her cry and cry so hard she could do nothing until night came back.
Their daughter wanted to know more about Shelley. Joe could recite a few lines and recall some of the life, but it was how he looked that she wanted to know. ‘Hair swept back,’ he said, ‘far too long for the close-cropped male of post-war England and the style gave the poet a feminine look and Natasha’s hair was swept dashingly from her face in a similar manner. A broad high forehead. A strong nose, the “Bourbon nose” she was to call it. Face rather long and pale with a look of distinction in the slim lips and the eyes, just a little large, but so voluptuously and teasingly expressive. Even against the fire in silhouette, the candlelight had given me glimpses of the eyes and it was most likely,’ he said, ‘that it was what I saw there which would one day lead me to a life I could never have dreamed of.
‘But there were other photos from around that time,’ he said, ‘and sometimes she doesn’t look at all like Shelley. There’s none of that romantic brooding. She’s just smiling, so lovely, clear-eyed.’
He did not tell her that a disturbing dream had returned since he had begun to write, which had recurred often in his adolescence. In it he saw a dam which he had built across the river with other boys when he was seven or eight. In the field beside the dam a girl was buried, a girl he had somehow murdered, a girl he recognised. The field was always empty but he knew that one day they would arrive and dig her up.
Nor did he tell their daughter that he had sought out photographs recently as a preparation for this telling. They were in a drawer at the bottom of an old linen chest he used for storing finished work. He had not seen them for decades. There were packets of them. Some neatly labelled by Natasha, others not as neatly by himself. After just a few minutes, a look at the merest fraction, he had put them away. They were unbearable. Her look of such life.