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morning. They could not, as so recently they had done, take over his life, or not now, which ought to have been disturbing. Yet as he walked through the perfect Jacobean college quadrangle, there was elation, and an undefined freedom.
    It was about a mile and a half to his digs out of the centre of the city along the Marston Road. He enjoyed the night walk in the frosty air. He liked the thought that he was the only human being walking down the curving lane of Holywell, imagining himself a Jude the Obscure, barred, bricked, out walking alongside the high wall of Magdalen College, picturing the herd of college deer asleep in its silvery park. He loved to see the running of the deer. He was the sole traveller to pass the mediaeval, singing tower on the bridge and he stood there a while looking down on the water, somewhere between striking a pose and relishing the solitary present.
    Then he was out of the enchantment of the university and into the swathes of semi-detached houses which shored up the city, home of legendary Oxford landladies like his own, Mrs Harries, who had told Roderick and himself on their arrival that she would ‘brook no nonsense’.
    Walking often lifted his mood. There was a settlement inside himself which came from steady solitary walking, a physical clarification that could exercise its way to an experience of happiness, a rhythm which could reach into a reservoir of calm. It encouraged thought. He could understand why Wordsworth liked to compose his poems while he was walking, the beat of the heart, the breath of the stride, the beat of the line.
    By the time he put the latchkey in Mrs Harries’s lock his anxiety was dissipated. He would find a way to meet Natasha again. Whatever she did, he would not let her go.

CHAPTER FOUR
    Their daughter wanted to know precisely when they had fallen in love. Joe wanted to find a dramatic moment. Something wild and romantic, to smile over and cherish, a gift to one who had suffered so much, a light in the dark inheritance. Most of all she needed something to smile over, to remember fondly, to see her parents as young, younger than she was now, in Oxford as she was, wonderfully in love then, everything finally worth it because of that. Joe was tempted. Julia had later described what he did in those early days as ‘a siege’ and been quite funny about his brazen dogged unsnubbable visits, sometimes two, even three times a day. But that was not enough; that did not deliver what his daughter needed. Roderick could tell funny stories about covering for Joe when, as the love affair developed, he failed to turn up at his digs and Mrs Harries went ‘madly puritanical’; but that was later. It was the beginning she longed to know about, the seed of it, as if so much that was to happen would be understood and could be forgiven if only their beginning could be claimed as pure and marvellous.
    He would retell the story of first seeing her beside the fire. He would tell of his first visit to her mother’s ‘artist’s studio’ and elaborate on its garret bohemianism, its thrilling resemblance to the studio of Modigliani which he’d seen in a French film. He would describe the first meal and even point out the little Spanish restaurant. But falling in love had happened without Joe recognising it. Perhaps he was still nervous after Rachel. Perhaps he wanted it so much that he dare not look it fully in the face. Or he took his cue from Natasha, who was distant in those early weeks, as if seeing him short-sightedly.
    It was Natasha who controlled those days. Joe sensed that to crash inwould be to destroy whatever small connection had been made. She was so far away from him. Her eyes were sometimes kind, sometimes teasing, but mostly they were clouded in concentration on herself, straining to combat and vanquish the reality of her abandoned state. They were eyes that wanted no one to look at them because they feared the pain would be too