Free Remember Me... by Melvyn Bragg Page B

shillings at hand for the meter. Joe was in no doubt that they could live together in that attic room for all time.
    It was there that he learned the outline of her life. She told him in one swoop like a confession. She told him that her mother had been a scientist and a bohemian who admired Georges Sand. She had insisted on going back to work too soon after Natasha had been born and as a result, weakened, had contracted pneumonia and died. She told him she was an unwanted child, accidentally conceived ten years into a blissful marriage. Five years later her father married again – Natasha did not know the precise circumstances but coloured the event darkly. This stepmother had persecuted her relentlessly, sent her to a succession of punitive convent schools, had three children of her own who were allowed liberties and privileges denied her, and tried all she could, as Natasha saw it, to cut her off from her father.
    In adolescence her hated new mother had sent her to a psychoanalyst for no good reason and then let her leave home to live with an elderly cousin who Natasha said had used her as an apprentice housekeeper and gave her no time to study for her baccalaureate, as a result of which she failed. She went to Switzerland to work in a ski resort for some time until she took ill with a deficiency in the adrenal glands. Her father then arrived and in effect saved her. He was a teacher in Provence, his own father Italian, his mother Provençal; her own mother too had mixed parentage, a French father, a mother from Latvia, and beyond that a genealogy which spun from the Baltic into Russia.
    Natasha had come to Oxford to stay with an old colleague of her father’s and her first return to France was so unhappy that she came back to Oxford and here she had stayed, as an au pair and a student, for eight years, returning to France in the summer and at Christmas for visits which were invariably distressing. Finally, this last Christmas, she had rejected them. She wanted never again to go to a home where she was never wanted.
    When she finished it was as if thunder had rolled through the room and demanded a silence succeed it.
    â€˜Over the years,’ he told their daughter later, ‘all this would be unravelled and dissected and assume meanings different from those ascribed by Natasha on that night of revelations. But then it was received as given, whole, gospel, her testament.’
    Joe fed on her story with every grain of his imagination. His sympathy for her was unbounded and unleashed. She was a heroine in a novel, forever unjustly treated, forever baulked by misfortunes not of her making. She spoke of these trials in a quiet ferocity of tone which gripped him, the anger and the hurt, the shame and the bruises were so deep. Some American soldiers had come to the house as the war was ending and she had sat on the knee of one of them and sang a song for him and her stepmother had sent her to her room without supper after they had gone, punishment for promiscuity. When she went to the lavatory to pee she had to hit the side of the bowl for no sound of splashing must be heard. None of the other children was sent away to boarding school. She had run away three times and each time her stepmother had come to see the nuns and told them to be harsher with her, that she was fatally exhibitionist, bohemian, it was in the blood. Her story mesmerised him.
    Joe saw the young girl, alone, rejected, humiliated, unwanted, crushed, and his love for her strengthened by the day: the worse news she brought him the greater his love until it grew to a flood which he was certain would sweep away all her grievous past, all that persecution. He would take care of her.
    On the last day of term, just before the Easter vacation, he proposed to her and moved in.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    â€˜I do believe he believes he has moved in permanently,’ said Julia.
    â€˜I met him this afternoon on the stairs.’ Matthew gave her his full