After Julius (11 page)

‘Was he much older than she was?’

‘He was twelve years older: he was forty-nine.’

The telephone rang; she answered it, and it was Jack. She spoke briefly to him: said that he’d been putting an appendicitis into hospital, and then, as she returned to the sofa, he said
suddenly, and much louder than he had been talking: ‘He was killed returning from Dunkirk in a small sailing boat the following May. It wasn’t his own boat. He didn’t know much
about sailing. He collected three men off the beaches. It was the only way he could think of to be useful. He died and I joined the Army.’

She couldn’t understand his defiance. ‘That’s nothing to be ashamed of, surely?’

He didn’t reply; got up rather clumsily, and poured them more Scotch.

‘Sorry – I’m being dense.’

‘
You’re
not dense.’ He smiled at her and sat down. ‘Oh – well.’ It was a full stop to the confidence rather than the end of the story.

‘What about the lady who hasn’t telephoned?’

‘It’s the same lady.’

‘Felix! She must be . . .’

‘Fifty-eight last July.’

She was staring at him with something like incomprehension or incredulity, he wasn’t sure which. He held her eye and said slowly, carefully:

‘I’m not sure. Perhaps I ought to have been married to her for the last twenty years – that’s the thing. That’s why I have to go and see.’

She started to speak, checked herself, took a swig at her glass, and then the front door shut. Jack had returned.

‘Oh dear, oh dear. I should like to have come back weary from my tense, medical crisis (a straightforward case of appendicitis diagnosed correctly for me by the child’s mother) to a
scene of illicit and unbridled passion – my best friend in the arms of yet another wife.’ He collected his empty glass and made for the bottle. ‘You can see why I’m forced
to the movies week after week: my home life’s so unemotional – human nature simply doesn’t function here. Everything goes on being
all right
: why is that, I
wonder?’

‘You’re not being funny: don’t.’

He turned round from pouring his Scotch.

‘Something might go wrong about our holiday,’ she said. She looked up at him. ‘I honestly couldn’t bear that.’

‘Oh yes you could. But it won’t go wrong.’ He put his hand round the back of her neck and Felix saw her little shiver of pleasure and her face soften from anxiety.

‘I promise you, as far as I’m concerned, nothing will go wrong about your holiday,’ he said. Committed. Not to disappoint one nice girl about two weeks. You’re coming on,
King: you’ve made a start; in a month you managed to make two personal decisions and get your teeth fixed – oh yes, and buy a second-hand car and a couple of warm suits . . . I suppose
that by this time next year I may be irrevocably settled – as I would already be if I’d married Clara. Until he’d met her he would have thought it impossible for anyone to be a
sexy prig – I should have told Mary
that
story – that would just have made her laugh . . .

Mary returned, and he came away from the window to help her with the breakfast things.

‘What have you done with them?’

‘The baby’s in her pen and Barney’s spending the morning in the bath. He’s got his aircraft carrier you see,’ she added as an explanation. ‘He plays battles
and shipwrecks: I just have to warm up the water from time to time and he’s perfectly happy. What time are you going?’

‘Afternoon. I’ll do the shopping for you if you’ll make a foolproof list.’

‘Oh Felix. Then I can do all the house and keep the telephone switched on here.’

‘You lucky, lucky girl.’

She gave him a battered purse and a list in her clear, rather masculine writing. ‘Get two more herrings if you want lunch with us. Sorry it’s a long list, but it’s groceries
for the week. You know where to go, don’t you?’

He knew. In the purse were three pounds: much less than he would spend on giving dinner to a girl. This was the kind of thing that Clara had never stopped pointing out, although she was always
on the being-given-dinner side of the question: she would state one of these discrepancies with sentimental formality, and try to make him feel responsible for it. At first, she had succeeded.
Whatever it was that had decided him upon working in the hospital of a camp for Korean refugees was fed by her smug determination that together they were good enough (i.e. chronically better than
all these thousands of people who had been so ignorant and stupid as to get turned out of their homes without visible means of sustenance) to save the world. It was her contempt for what they were
supposed to be saving that in the end had so disgusted him (and thereby brought him to his senses). The final, frightful scene he had had with her when he had unleashed all his pent-up resentment
and dislike on what she thought and felt and was, had confoundingly presented him with a self-portrait of hideous completeness and accuracy. Afterwards he had realized that their association had
been founded on the most nauseating kind of mutual flattery; something like Orwell’s pigs trying to be angels – scratching each other’s backs in vain for wings . . .

The supermarket was full and dazzling, impregnated with creamy music, and the shoppers, pushing their wire perambulators along the highly polished floors, looked from the street as though they
were swimming in light, but the moment one was inside, it was the street people who looked like dim fish in a dirty tank. With list in hand, Felix settled down to the grim business of finding the
goods Mary wanted: in spite of the music, this was not soothing. He rammed his perambulator against a stand and large packets of detergent fell, in slow motion, to the floor where they seemed to
take on new life and skidded for yards. The pot of jam he chose was mysteriously sticky. He simply could not find any sign of pearl barley, and by the time he was in despair about this, felt too
self-conscious and unpopular to ask. He got stuck behind a woman with a large walking child, and every time he bent down to take something from a shelf near the floor, the child tickled him with a
plastic daffodil. The first time this happened, he turned round with what he hoped was an appearance of cooperative
bonhomie
: but the child’s expression was impassively grim. After
that, he tried to pass the woman (this was when he rammed the stand), and after that, he tried not to bend down much. In the end, he gave up the pearl barley, and queued to check out. He had spent
two pounds, seventeen and fourpence. With laden baskets, he staggered to the fishmonger. It did not seem a very good shop. The fish had the strained worldly expression of people who have had to
keep still for too long, and the fishmonger looked startlingly like a fish, which seemed to Felix the wrong way round. Then he went to a small grocer and bought the pearl barley, a Fuller’s
walnut cake and two bottles of Mâcon. The grocer looked sad and tired, but was working hard on the personal touch. ‘Doing the shopping today, I see.’ Later he said that it seemed
they were in for fog, and that he could see that Felix had his hands full. This was when Felix was trying to ram the Mâcon, one in each basket, without the grocer noticing that he had clearly
bought most of his groceries elsewhere. A bottle punctured the barley, which was in a weak blue paper bag, and he heard it pouring steadily into the basket as he backed out of the shop, opening the
door rather cleverly, he thought, with his foot and a bit of his shoulder. He had meant to buy Mary a bunch of chrysanthemums, but unless he carried them home between his teeth it was out of the
question.

The Lewises’ maisonette started on the second floor of the house, and he realized, as he trudged up, stabbing the electric time-switch buttons with his right elbow, that if he was Mary, he
would have been doing all this in the company of Barney and the baby, and except that Barney might have been a useful counter-ploy with the plastic-daffodil torturer, the prospect seemed almost
insurmountable.

Mary received him with rewarding gratitude.

‘’Fraid I broke the barley. The cake and the wine are from me. What would I do next if I
were
you?’

‘You’d have a strong cup of Nescaff while you did the vegetables for lunch. Oh, Felix – she rang up.’

‘Who?’ He wasn’t thinking.

‘You know. Your lady you told me about. She said she’d only got your letter this morning, and that she’d love you to come for the week-end.’

He smiled and sat down. ‘I don’t know how to do vegetables.’

She put the coffee in front of him. ‘They’re done. Felix, I know it’s none of my business,
really
’ (what did she mean by
really
, he wondered indulgently),
‘but you won’t rush into anything, will you? I mean, you will
think
– you know what I mean.’

‘Would you say I was an attractive man?’

‘Why?’

‘Well, here I am, jobless, homeless, practically friendless: I’m not much of a catch, am I? And the last woman I had anything to do with told me she loved what was inside me –
she wasn’t interested in my appearance.’

‘I bet she
was
. Weren’t you interested in hers?’

‘Oh I loved what was inside her – but not where she meant. So you see I need reassurance: otherwise, who knows, I might throw myself gratefully on anybody who’d have
me.’

She was not sure whether he was teasing her or not and started to blush.

‘Of course you’re attractive,’ she said angrily, ‘and doctors can easily get jobs, and you’ve got us and you can always stay here.’

‘You make me sound more pathetic and dependent every minute. Come on, Mary, am I an attractive man?’

But it was no good: she was blushing too much and too cross about it.

‘You and Marlon Brando,’ she said as bravely as she could.

‘A lot of Jews have red hair you know: you ought to like me.’

At this point Barney appeared round the kitchen door. He wore a loofah strapped on his forearm and Mary’s bedroom slippers, and carried a sodden number of the
British Medical
Journal
.

‘I’ve finished,’ he said: ‘the paper floated badly. I’m hungry.’

‘The only good thing about
lunch
with the Lewises,’ said Jack, ‘is that there are fewer Lewises present.’

Barney and the baby had been fed at twelve thirty and were now resting, although resting up a child of Barney’s physique seemed to Felix to be asking for trouble. The bathroom, as his
father had remarked, was like the Everglades. The grownups had eaten their herrings, mashed potatoes and sprouts, and were now engaged upon the best rice pudding Felix had ever eaten. Most of the
practical problems of Felix being locum had been discussed; Mary was going to make an explanatory address book, and Jack was going to go through the patients’ files to give him the low-down
on their characters – ‘in some cases, very low indeed’. This was for Sunday night.

‘You’ll be back by then?’

‘I’ll ring you if not. No, of course I will be.’

Mary was anxious either about her holiday or his week-end: he wasn’t sure which.

She planned to take the children to her sister in Esher on Sunday, spend the day there to settle them in, and come back in time to be taken out to dinner by Jack and Felix. ‘Where does she
want to go?’

‘Last time she was going on about it, it was to be Wheelers, but she’s bound to change her mind. You know what they are.’

‘Indecisive little creatures.’

‘They only like to pretend to choose things.’

‘Have to let them have their head sometimes.’

‘After all, their brains weigh much less than ours.’

‘Still, they make a lovely change from men.’

‘You don’t make a lovely change from children,’ said Mary, blushing with rage. ‘Either of you.’

As soon as lunch was over, Felix said he’d better be off. It was Friday, and the fog might get worse, he said. Really, he was beginning not to want to go at all. This established family
life was softening him up to the point when his intentions were starting to seem anything from deliberately silly to dangerously absurd.

CHAPTER 6

ARRIVALS

T
HE
house was very quiet, in spite of Mrs Hanwell in the kitchen. On most winter evenings, when she was entirely alone,
Esme used the radio a lot. She hummed to herself; she never thought of the whole
house
– simply whatever room she happened to be in. Floorboards creaked, logs crackled; she turned the
pages of a book and unwrapped the silver paper from a chocolate, while outside the windows, weather of one kind or another made larger, more distant sounds which prevented her from feeling cut off
in a domestic vacuum. But on Fridays, when she always had people to stay, she noticed the silence: the house seemed too big for her – too spasmodically inhabited. About six o’clock, she
would go round to see that everything was ready for the week-end. She would begin with the main double spare-room and check that it had its preliminary hot water bottles (she had her
generation’s terror of damp linen), flowers, suitable books, rich tea biscuits in a padded chintzy tin, and the bedside lamps working. A glance at Emma’s room – a stranded beach
of all her childhood – filled with objects that had become family landscape and which Mrs Hanwell (who approved of possessions) kept rigidly and symmetrically regimented. Cressy’s room
was crammed always and only with her immediate past: clothes she couldn’t decide what to do with, programmes of the last concert she had given, postcards and photographs of the last foreign
holiday she had had. At least once a year Cressy indulged in a moody clean sweep, which left her room belonging to nobody. There was no photograph of Miles, which, when she remembered him, Esme
found faintly disturbing. Either Cressy cared about him so much that she couldn’t bear to be reminded, or she didn’t care at all, and neither of these feelings was comfortable when one
was thinking about somebody else. The room that had been Julius’s dressing-room she changed so much that she need not remember how it had been. Now it had fashionably ornate flowered
wallpaper, a white Venetian blind, built-in cupboards and the fireplace blocked by an electric heater that Cressy had condemned as hideous. There were two more small rooms where the maids had slept
before the war, but nowadays they were hardly ever used. Generally, at this point of her tour, she would go downstairs to talk to Mrs Hanwell, but tonight she felt far too strung-up. She went back
to her own bedroom, sat down in front of her dressing-table, and from the back of her sewing box took out once more the small dog-eared photograph. She had taken it herself, at Pett Level –
made him wind down the front window of the car and lean out of it towards her – and the sun, of course; snapshots then were always taken with the maximum sun direct on the subject’s
face, with the result that his eyes were screwed up with smiling and the light. He wore an open-necked shirt with a silk scarf which she had given him; a lock of hair lay across his rather square
forehead; the angle of his head showed his high cheekbones and pointed chin, but the slight, accommodating smile with which, on demand, he had provided her, had obscured the shape of his mouth,
just as you couldn’t see the natural contours of his eyes (hazel, they had been, with absurdly long, dark lashes). But then, in the photograph, his hair was not red, there were no freckles
visible, and his habitual expression of expected amusement was missing. She had never understood this expression. To begin with she had thought that perhaps he might be laughing at her, or worse,
at himself
about
her, but he had early displayed all the sensual devotion, all the petulance of incipient jealousy, all the day-to-day uncritical approval which ranged him on her side. Esme,
as any of her friends would have said, was a practical creature; laughter meant that one was not serious, and apart from Noël Coward and P. G. Wodehouse and stories told by people about
friends whom they did not really like, people who seemed to have an aimless desire to find life amusing were simply frivolous – which meant light-hearted in the wrong way. You could be funny
about ‘characters’, and she was definitely not a character. She wanted life to be unreal – and earnest: and with Felix it had been both those things. He had seemed gravely
involved with her. The only fault he ascribed to her was the one which all lovers find essential to their self-respect: that before him, she had chosen the wrong man – in this case to marry.
She was an intelligent, charming, discriminating, sophisticated, sensitive, entertaining creature, but she seemed to have made the fatal pathetic disastrous mistake of marrying a brute, boor, bore,
man-who-wasn’t-able-to-appreciate-her, man who cared nothing for love, for woman, for human relations, above all for her. It would not be true to say that he revelled in her suffering (he had
had to temper his opinion of Julius who ascended from brutishness to callous indifference), but in the end he had had to pay more attention to the dramatic facts of her situation than to the
character of a man he had never met. And by the time they had both settled for this, her situation
had
begun to weigh upon her; her need for Felix was consuming her life. The rest of it had
become a dreary, practical dream where she did the same practical, meaningless things over and over again, always just out of emotional earshot as it were, and nobody could ever hear what she was.
But now, she was simply staring at the snapshot which she had once known by heart. Felix – he looked so – oh! more than anything, he looked so
young
! Involuntarily, she looked up
at the mirror. Large, grey-blue eyes, slightly protuberant; a very good, fine skin; small, neatly defined nose and mouth, an enormous forehead – wonderful for arranging hair; delicate but
unremarkable eyebrows – these were all things she could always have observed. But the marks, lines, blurring, fore-knowledge, fatigue, the harness of boredom, of minutely perceptible physical
decay – the descent from ‘good lines’ to ‘good features’ with no discernible line attached – had all occurred about ten years ago. She touched her well-preserved
throat with elderly hands: her body was now neat but shapeless – at least she was neither scraggy nor fat and her legs were still good. She was an attractive, elderly middle-aged woman whose
heart, at the moment, was refusing to keep up with her times – was thudding with obtrusive, irregular haste. She was fifty-eight. She looked again at the snapshot: he would be older too, but
this, from her memory of him, would only be to his advantage. She knew he had become a doctor, and she had read in the newspapers that his parents had been killed in a car accident. ‘Mr and
Mrs King of Easter Ross . . .’ Mrs King; she wondered whether in all these years there had been a Mrs Felix King: if there had been, she was certain, from his letter, that Felix was now
alone. Why was he coming? After all these years of silence, of cutting himself off completely, why did he suddenly decide to come? She could no more stop asking this question than she could think
of any contenting answer. She looked once more at the snapshot, put it away, and reached for her Arpège – a touch more of that to give her confidence. A car was coming up the drive
– she hurried to the landing window: it wasn’t Emma’s taxi – it was a car.