Remember Me... (15 page)

Natasha threw the burning remains of the cigarette into the lake.

‘Sometimes I know,' she said, ‘sometimes I know nothing.'

She wrapped her arms around her knees and gazed across the water to the twilit beech woods on the other side, gazed intensely as if a voice would come across the lake or a figure rise out of the water and give her the answer, the answer sought by everyone, the single simple answer that ends all questions.

‘Why not wait?'

Frances was tempted to reveal the warnings in the Tarot cards which had, among other insights, predicted that after a few years of tranquillity, there would be catastrophe. She believed in the cards, but Natasha, she knew, had no such faith.

‘He is so determined,' Natasha smiled, ‘there are no shadows around Joseph.'

‘Are you sure? I can see shadows.'

‘That is his shyness. Or his nervousness. Now and then he is overcome by that.'

‘No.' Frances repeated carefully, ‘I can see shadows.'

‘He is a Romantic and he is a Realist, both at the same time. But more a Romantic. If he were here he would want to talk deep thoughts.'

Frances laughed.

‘Yes. It is funny,' said Natasha. ‘But it is not funny at the same time. In fact, I love it.'

‘Rather earnest.'

‘That can be attractive, Frances. Sometimes seriousness is the most seductive.'

‘Do you think,' Frances trod with the greatest care, ‘he sees you, from his own background, let us say, as something of a “catch”?'

‘I am a poor art student whose father is a teacher in France.'

‘Is that what he believes?'

‘Of course.'

‘He certainly proved himself with the exhibition,' Frances admitted. ‘I'll give him that.'

‘He wants to help me . . . He wants to help me all the time. I think I trust him.'

‘Only think?'

‘What else is there?'

She looked across the water towards the trees darkening, just a rim marking their tops outlined against the sky: shades of darkness all around. Her landscape. Were there names for all those different shades of darkness?

The nightscape enveloped her and seemed to enter into her mind, seemed in a way to join her mind, to make what was within her part of that which was without. There was no distinction. Her thoughts floated on those velvet shadows, her imagination was calm; the water, the sky, the silence, the grass beneath her, the breath of her life were all one and she longed for this state of pure completion to go on, on, on for all time.

Joseph floated to the surface of her thoughts. After Robert she had begun to drown and she could find in herself no resistance. Joseph had given her another chance, perhaps the final chance. The ripple of that thought disturbed her back into the present and she waited for Frances to say something, to start again.

But Frances left off and after a while she whistled up the terriers and the two women ambled back towards the house, yellow-lit in a couple of windows, a floating fortress of stone, yet solid in the changing times.

‘You haven't asked me to be your bridesmaid,' said Frances as they reached the house.

‘Can you have a bridesmaid in a register office?'

‘Certainly.'

‘Frances!' Natasha turned, and with a rare impulsive gesture, took her friend by the shoulder and kissed her hard on the cheek. ‘Thank you! That is so lovely.'

In her room later that night, Frances took out the Tarot cards, wanting to break their spell. But she dare not try them again, and returned the mystical, disturbing picture messages to their drawer.

‘There was bad luck too,' Joe told her. ‘But when you have really good luck then even bad luck somehow works for you. The good luck absorbs it and eliminates the negative.'

Two days before his final exams he found himself covered in small, hard, red lumps.

Glandular fever, the doctor said, hospital isolation room, immediately.

Psychosomatic, said Julia, quite common at Finals.

Unlikely to be psychosomatic, said Turney, not the type.

They are lumps, said Natasha, horrible little red lumps, not imaginary lumps.

A vicar who had suffered and survived glandular fever was his invigilator and brought along the examination papers every day at 9.30 a.m., left for lunch at 12.30 and returned at 2 p.m. to stay until 5 p.m. He sealed up and took away Joe's essays after elaborately licking
the thick gum on the envelope with a long doggy tongue. He was a chatty man and the three-hour silences were difficult for him to bear. He was also inordinately fond of hot chocolate and at least twice in every session he would ask Joe if he would like ‘a little pot of their first-rate hot chocolate'. Joe always agreed and tried not to look up and catch the vicar's doleful eye, pleading for a little conversation. But three hours for four examination questions were barely enough and although the nurse had provided a solid bed table, lying in bed was not the optimum position for the speed writing required.

It was hot and he kept open the french windows while he swotted in the evening. On three successive evenings his room was invaded by a drunken Scottish anaesthetist who liked to talk about skiing. He never stayed for much more than an hour.

Joe was in there for nine nights. No visitors. The weekend was free of examinations, otherwise there were two sessions a day, up to the last one on the Thursday morning. That was the translation paper, Latin and at least one other language. The vicar announced that he was ‘a bit of a linguist' and looked over Joe's shoulder quite a lot in that session.

When it was over, the last hot chocolate drunk, the last gum licked, the vicar liberated, Joe felt good. Being so isolated, he thought, had been lucky. It had allowed him to give it his undistracted and best shot. He felt a sweet, healthy tiredness.

It was over at last, the long journey. The slog at school, the harsh self-regulating timetables, the heavy loads of homework, the practice tests, the marks, the memorising, the real tests, the waiting on the results, the scholarship exams, the entrance exams, the weekly, sometimes bi-weekly essays, the cramming and sifting and learning to learn. The education was over. He felt he could float, up to the ceiling, out into the grounds of the hospital, float above Oxford, go to the deep North and hover over his old school, hover over his bedroom in the pub in which so many solitary hours had been spent while his parents worked downstairs; he could float above it and say goodbye, and thanks, many thanks; whatever it was that had set him out and pulled him along was over and the world was beyond examinations now, outside, waiting and unlimited.

He had his lunch and then went for a bath. The lumps were definitely receding. He had overheard the doctor say that he was no longer
infectious but still quite weak. Keep him in for another two or three days under observation.

Joe returned to his room, dressed, walked through the french windows and through the sun-filled grounds, walked down Headington Hill and over Magdalen Bridge, walked slowly into the heart of Oxford, the streets now occupied by white-tied, black-gowned undergraduates blinking into liberty. In a state of euphoric dizziness he walked past his celebrating college for luck, but walked on, making for Natasha.

Ellen bought a new hat. She kept it in its box until a few minutes before she set off for the wedding. Sam wore his ‘best suit', seven years in spare service, dry-cleaned. Without consultation, Ellen bought him a new white shirt and a smart tie. She would have enjoyed buying a new outfit for herself but Joe had warned her that very few people would be there because most of them had left the university; it would be a register office ceremony; and the ‘wedding breakfast' would be a few drinks in the college gardens, immediately after which he and Natasha would go on their honeymoon. It seemed an unnecessary extravagance – especially as Sam had given her the money for a good suit only recently to celebrate their wedding anniversary. And the marriage was not in Wigton.

It was hard not to be upset, Ellen thought, her heart almost sick with unease, and she flickered through wildly changing moods as the steam engine clicked over the points and drew them south. She had not met the woman who would be her son's wife. There would be no church wedding. No friends there, no crowd lingering at the church door as she and other women had done so many times, ready with the confetti, connoisseurs of a wedding. But, far more importantly, whatever she said in public, she knew that he was too young for marriage. He had not known Natasha for long enough. But it was too late, it was too late, too late, too late, and the words replaced the clickety-click on the rails.

When she got to their small hotel and Joe came round to see them, she discovered that he had forgotten about a wedding cake. At least it gave her a purpose and the next morning Ellen finally hunted down a suitably iced cake, with ‘Happy Birthday' inscribed on it. An
uncollected cake. The inscription was rather ineptly removed: there was no time, the shopkeeper said, to put on ‘Congratulations'.

Sam would glance at her now and then and there would be a faint smile, a little forced, he thought, but he too was apprehensive. Joe's impetuosity was not something he admired. He would have thought more of their son if he had come home with or without Natasha and announced it face to face.

Natasha had gone to London to meet her father and her stepmother. Their parents met at the pre-wedding lunch in the Spanish restaurant. Frances, Jonathan and Roderick, who was to be best man, were there, and the Stevenses, who proved to be invaluable and somehow made it all seem normal and as it should be, happily inevitable. It was ‘their' restaurant, Joe told his mother, and Ellen told him it felt very friendly. It felt something like a wedding for that hour or so. Afterwards Natasha went back to the Stevenses' with her parents to be prepared for the four o'clock nuptial and, after dropping off the cake at the Porters' Lodge, Joe took Sam and Ellen on a brisk tour of central Oxford which provoked Ellen to wonder and Sam to an increasingly silent understanding. Joe showed it off, he thought, as if this were now his home, this to Sam forbidding and awesome place. By the time the Richardson family arrived at the Town Hall, at the tail end of an earlier wedding, they were thoughtful, even subdued, each one affected by the complex and powerful atmosphere of the old university city.

Joe and Roderick went into the office to check out the form. As Sam and Ellen waited in the lofty antechamber, he said,

‘I'm glad I got to Oxford at last.'

‘He invited us twice.'

‘He did,' said Sam, ‘and he meant it.'

‘Maybe we should have accepted.'

‘We should've done. But we didn't want to embarrass him. We should have chanced it.'

‘He's just the same, isn't he?' Ellen said, rather timidly.

Sam nodded; he had noticed many changes on the surface but time would be needed to work out their implications and time together, a browsing, loose-reined time together, would no longer be available. Already on that day he had noticed his son ducking away, keeping his
distance, unkeen to connect. Sam felt a sadness for a long-hoped-for friendship that would now never have time to take root. The boy had been stretched and impatient in his last two years at school and nothing had grown between them nor had the increasingly unhappy returns to a Wigton without Rachel allowed the easy hours together to which Sam now realised he had looked forward and waited for. It would be another path not taken, and here, waiting for the wedding in Oxford Town Hall, he could feel Joe drift out of reach, finally go beyond him, and he mourned the loss.

‘It is very good that he is to work for the BBC,' said Dr Prévost to Sam as they walked to the college after the ceremony. ‘You see, in France the BBC during the war was absolutely necessary.'

Sam did not have an apposite response and his silence, interpreted as good manners, allowed the Frenchman to go on and enabled Sam to weigh him up. The two men were walking down the sleepy summer High Street side by side, as were Ellen and Véronique (who had complimented Ellen on her hat in such a way as to make Ellen want to throw it away), followed by Roderick and Frances, Bob, Julia and Matthew, two girls from the Ruskin, the Turneys bringing up the rear. Joe looked back as they crossed the road to St Mary's Church.

‘We could be leading them to the Ark,' he said.

I wish they'd got married in a church like that, thought Ellen as they crossed over the street. She noticed that it was called St Mary's like their church in Wigton and for a moment she thought she would cry; their church in Wigton seemed so steeped in security.

‘The dome is interesting,' said Dr Prévost as they passed the Radcliffe Camera. ‘It is probably Muslim in origin and requires great ingenuity of engineering.'

The words and the information roll out in a university, Sam thought, what a life they must have in such a place.

‘Evelyn Waugh was at Hertford. He hated the place. He was a terrible little snob. Brilliant writer,' said Roderick as they passed that college: he was determined to impress Frances ever since she had come up to him and said, ‘You Best Man, me Bridesmaid. How!'

‘It is very good that Joseph is in the BBC,' said Madame Prévost to Ellen. ‘We were so relieved.'

‘I rather think they'll make a go of it,' said Turney.

‘I think they just might make a go of it,' said Julia, ‘especially after meeting the parents.'

‘The parents, I agree, are not unimpressive. All four,' said Matthew.

‘I wish David could have postponed his holiday,' said Natasha as they turned into the college.

‘I wish James could be here as well,' said Joe, who beat away any sense of disappointment that they were too few. ‘It was good of Roderick and Bob to make an effort,' he said. ‘Oxford's dead now that term's over.'

But under a high, unthreatening grey sky, warm enough, a white-tableclothed trestle table set out with sandwiches and cakes, wine and tea next to the copper beech, it became a lively making the best of it, which became making the most of it, an Oxford occasion, to be remembered. Bob had appointed himself the official ‘wedding snapper' and was conscientious not only in the taking but in the thoroughness of the taking; the bride and groom, the bride and groom with best man and bridesmaid, the bride and groom with family and best man and bridesmaid, the bridegroom with everyone including Bob himself (photograph courtesy of the college servant who had been hired to dispense drinks) and, at Roderick's special request, the best man and bridesmaid.