Free Shipwreck by Tom Stoppard Page A

her before, but it was only when she returned from abroad … well, you know … and anybody would fall in love with Natasha, I fell in love with her myself!
    MARIA    Really? Really in love?
    NATALIE    Yes!—really, utterly, transported by love, I’ve never loved anyone as I loved Natasha, she brought me back to life.
    MARIA    You were lovers?
    NATALIE    (
in confusion
) No. What do you mean?
    MARIA    Oh. Utterly, transportedly, but not really. Why won’t you look at my picture?
    NATALIE    Your …? Well … it seems rude to …
    MARIA    You’ve always idealised love, and you think—surely this can’t be it? (
She laughs.
) Painted from life, one afternoon when we lived in the Rue de Seine over the hat shop, do you know it? I’ll take you there, we’ll find something that suits you. Go on, have a good look.
    NATALIE    (
looking
) He’s got the porcelain quite well … What do you do with it when just anybody comes, your … companion’s friends, the landlord, strangers …? Do you cover it up?
    MARIA    No … it’s art.
    NATALIE    And you don’t mind?
    Maria shakes her head
.
    MARIA    (
confidentially
) I’m in the paint!
    NATALIE    What do you … (
mean
)?
    MARIA    Mixed in.
    NATALIE    (
Pause.
) I’ve only been sketched in pencil.
    MARIA    Naked?
    NATALIE    (
laughs shyly
) Alexander doesn’t draw.
    MARIA    If an artist asks you, don’t hesitate. You feel like a woman.
    NATALIE    But I do feel like a woman, Maria. I think our sex is ennobled by idealising love. You say it as if it meant denying love in some way, but it’s you who’s denying it its … greatness … which comes from being a universal
idea
, like a thought in nature, without which there’d be no lovers, or artists either, because they’re the same thing only happening differently, and neither is any good if they deny the joined-upness of everything … oh dear, we should speak German for this …
    MARIA    No … I could follow it, being in much the same state when I met Nicholas Ogarev at the Governor’s Ball in Penza. A poet in exile, what could be more romantic? We sat out and talked twaddle at each other, and knew that this was love. We had no idea we were in fashion, that people who didn’t know any better were falling in love quite adequately without dragging in the mind of the Universe as dreamt up by some German professor who left out the irritating details. There was also talk of the angels in heaven singing hosannas. So the next time I fell in love, it stank of turpentine, tobacco smoke, laundry baskets … the musk oflove! To arouse and satisfy desire is nature making its point about the sexes, everything else is convention.
    NATALIE    (
timidly
) But our animal nature is not our whole nature … and when the babies start coming …
    MARIA    I had a child, too … born dead. Yes, you know, of course you know—what wouldn’t Nicholas tell your husband? … Being taken to meet Alexander for the first time was like being auditioned for my own marriage.
    NATALIE    It was the same for me, meeting Nick, and I was expecting Sasha.
    MARIA    Poor Nick. Even my having another man’s child, it was nothing to the agony he went through when he found himself caught in the middle between his wife and his best friend.
    NATALIE    But we all loved each other at the beginning. Don’t you remember how we joined hands and knelt and thanked God for each other?
    MARIA    Well, I didn’t want to be the only one standing up.
    NATALIE    That’s not so, is it?
    MARIA    Yes—it is so. I found it embarrassing … childish—
    NATALIE