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clear and too shameful. Only later did he realise that he had seen her always in those early weeks through a veil of pain. They were eyes that could seem to want to be closed in peace and for ever and whose expression, when Joe did catch it unawares, sliced to his heart.
    He had to wait some time until he knew for certain they were in love, he said, because of your mother. It was not the beginning that mattered. But she would not be deterred and he did his best. He could joke that this older, more distinguished and experienced Frenchwoman of a mixed European ancestry simply did not recognise the obstinate country courtesy of the Northern grammar-school arriviste. There was even some pleasure to be had as Joe played up the story of the rustic lump and the courtly lady and there was a truth there. But he knew it was a waste of time to look for truth in the beginning.
    Many years later he made a radio programme called
Not One Truth.
There was religious truth through divine Revelation, the truth in the genes, Galileo’s truth that the book of the universe was written in the language of mathematics, the truth of the historical method, Keats’s ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’, truth as relative, as analysis, as physics, as reason, as fiction and finally as unknowable. The routes to private truth were no less numerous. Yet a single answer was always longed for by those, like their daughter, who thought all life would be made understandable if only they could see and hold the one key.
    The start of the love that came to lock together Natasha and Joe in a dance of life and then of death had to come from her. Joe was willing. At that stage in his life Joe was longing to fall in love, it was a condition that had recurred after Rachel and more than likely it was the lack of response from Natasha in those first weeks, her very emptiness, which spurred him on and gave him courage. Had there been resistance perhaps he would have fallen away quite soon as he had done during the past year on his few tentative forays back into the ring.
    What he tried to tell their daughter was that Natasha had no wiles, she had no agenda, she had no English baggage of ‘placing’ him. When she gave him her attention she possibly saw a rather blurred young Englishman who had loomed out of an undergraduate Oxford she scarcely knew, and certainly not in young men such as Joe. There was from her no categorisation after the English fashion. In that undemanding ambience, Joe’s confidence grew.
    â€˜What did Mum think of you when she first met you?’ He had an answer to that yearning question only years later and even then he was sure that he knew it only in part. ‘Not much, at first,’ he said. ‘She thought of me very little at first and in the landscape of her mind I was way in the background, I was that small figure in the far distance only there to prove a point about perspective. I don’t know if she thought of me at all then.’
    From the beginning, Joe was eager to spend his energy on her as recklessly as a rich suitor lavishes gifts, but it was better than that, Natasha thought, because he did not give any signal she could recognise of looking for a reward. Now and then he attempted a kiss but proved too shy. Once or twice she caught him looking at the bed with a cautious hope, easily deflected. What he seemed to want was to look after her. Her only previous experience of that was deep in the unwanted past, two loving friends of her mother, ages ago in Provence.
    But this was different. He was younger than her, she felt safe in that, as if the age gap was a sure layer of security, enabling her to control him, and yet he as it were ‘mothered’ her. Even fussed over her. He took her to London to see
West Side Story
, recommended by James, a friend, a classical scholar who had become bored with Classics and left the university more than a year ago. They had continued to keep in contact. He bought