Remember Me... by Melvyn Bragg Read Free Book Online

otherwise occupied lips acknowledged; the manoeuvre was done with some speed so as not to appear rude but it was clear to Natasha that there was a greed or more like a need for it and that softened her towards this otherwise swashbucklingly dominant figure.
    â€˜You’ve caught me out,’ David said, reading into her glance. ‘My little weakness.’
    â€˜You enjoy it,’ said Natasha.
    â€˜That’s the only point in having a weakness.’
    Natasha nodded in recognition at the effort that David was making.
    â€˜He was a star, you know,’ David said, waving both hands as if he were about to transform Joe into a Hollywood icon. ‘They made a filmand Joe wandered around looking significant although we could never quite fathom what he was being significant about.’
    â€˜Alienation,’ said Joe, promptly, quite enjoying the role into which David had cast him.
    â€˜Much better if it had been about class, and your exile from your class,’ said David. ‘Alienation is far too European and middle class for you. Joseph and I went on the Ban the Bomb march together last Easter,’ he said to Natasha, ‘with the jazz bands and Bertrand Russell, with vicars and MPs and playwrights, all very English, very village English, like a garden fete, and the conversation among the undergraduates in the evenings would often revolve around this word “alienation”. I thought they should stick to class. Now there’s a subject.’
    â€˜You see yourself as his guide, don’t you?’
    â€˜I,’ said David, giggling, ‘am his Virgil, guiding him through the Oxford circles of hell.’
    â€˜This is a very boyish hell, David.’
    â€˜So it seems this evening. You should see them scent blood and bay at the sound of breaking glass – Evelyn Waugh is reliable on that.’ He paused. ‘Let me tell you something.’ Another mite of a sip and a rapid smile from those long curvaceous lips and he leaned forward, voice guarded. ‘In my first week here at Oxford, four of us met in my rooms for tea. We had never met before. Each of us had been to a different public school. In less than an hour we discovered that we knew about sixty people in common – in their case often sisters and cousins but in all our cases friends we’d met through school chums or at London parties or wherever. It’s a caste . . . England is a hierarchy of courts and clubs and this handsome cadre may be tolerant and amused by the Joes of this world but, as a group, they do not rate or like or understand his world. Individuals can be an exception, of course.’ His smile melted Natasha’s resistance. ‘But Joe’s background is very foreign, slightly threatening, coarse, and less attractive than, say, that of any roughneck from the old colonies. He is, unfortunately for them, English, and being at Oxford theoretically one of “them” but he is clearly not, until he converts and adopts their religion, but even then . . .’
    â€˜Why should Joseph need a guide to that?’ Natasha asked. ‘And how can it matter? Class is of no importance in the real world.’
    â€˜Of course you are right,’ he said, and changed the subject.
    Soon David left, all but danced away, full of beaming affection for both of them, his drink barely touched, on his way to the first of three parties that evening. Natasha and Joe soon followed. She too had scarcely touched her drink.
    Natasha had to be back by seven to babysit the three Stevens children; Joe went to eat in college.
    When he came back the children were headed for bed. The boys were aged eight and six, the girl four. Joe’s contribution was to romp with them and make them too excited to want to go to bed. Natasha sent him down to the kitchen, with which he was now quite familiar. He made a pot of tea and read more of
Justine
while he waited.
    â€˜David’s great, isn’t he? And it