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

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 everythingand 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.

CHAPTER FIVE
    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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜I come bearing a message,’ he said, slowly, eventually, reluctantly.
    They waited.
    â€˜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