After Julius (14 page)

‘You only picked at your supper,’ he said encouragingly. ‘Rice pudding’s best cold in my opinion.’ He pushed the jar towards her. ‘Try some of this with
it.’

‘How do you know I didn’t eat much?’

‘I was there. Pour the tea and let’s have a feast.’

She smiled and picked up the pot. He liked her hands: they looked soft, but not just soft, without fancy nails. She liked the fact that he’d noticed she didn’t eat: women always
liked that sort of thing. I must entertain her, he thought; take her out of herself a bit. ‘Do you often make tea?’

‘In the middle of the night? I don’t think so. I heard you come down – at least I didn’t know it was you, and I’ve run out of sleeping pills.’

‘Do you take ’em every night?’ (How the rich
lived
! Everything done for them by someone or something else!)

‘No. Just sometimes.’

‘Nervy, are you? I’m nervy myself: it’s awkward, because you can’t put your finger on it – what’s wrong, I mean. It’s a nice cup of tea you’ve
made. Who did you guess it would be then, when you heard the noise?’

She looked warily at him for a moment: she wasn’t at all like Emma. ‘Not you,’ she said. She pulled a packet of cigarettes out of her pocket and a small gold lighter.
‘Want one?’

He didn’t smoke.

‘Who could it have been?’

‘Emma – most probably. My mother wouldn’t eat in the night: she’d worry too much about her figure.’

He wanted to smack her for that. ‘What about that doctor?’

She looked at him for a moment without speaking, said coldly. ‘I’ve no
idea
what
he
does,’ and then, without any more warning, burst into a flood of tears.

He waited a bit, amazed, and then fetched one of the drying cloths from the rack over the stove.

‘What’s upsetting you so much then? Poor girl: what’s making you so angry – and sad?

‘Use this – it’s nice and warm to mop you up.

‘Have another cup of tea.’ He had poured it out. ‘Strangers don’t count: you can talk to them and no damage done.’

When she had given over gasping and streaming, she told him. It was a queer tale and more than anything else he found it confusing. All about her mother and this doctor (he
knew
you
couldn’t trust them) years ago. When her father had been alive – before he was a hero. The doctor had been much younger than her mother – he hadn’t been a doctor then
– but he had seduced her; or, as the poor girl cried, her mother had seduced the younger man. With the father in the house and all.
She
thought that this was why he had gone off to get
himself killed in the war: it had been so awful for him. And she, a young girl of seventeen, she had known about it – she’d heard them in the garden one night when they thought she was
asleep in her room. Up till then, she’d just thought he was a friend – you know – someone who came and went – she hadn’t noticed that he seemed always to come when her
father wasn’t there – was working in London. But the things she had heard in the garden had made it all abominably plain. And her poor father had got to know of it – never
mind
how she knew that! She just knew it; and then there had been Dunkirk and he had gone off one morning when she had been practising, and she’d just kissed him like any other morning
only he hadn’t come back. And then she had realized that it was because her mother had made his life so terrible – not worth living – that he had gone off in a little boat and got
killed. Now he saw, didn’t he, that for her to walk into the room twenty years later and find this awful man there with her mother was too much?

He listened, and nodded – more to show that he was listening than to indicate agreement or even understanding. He understood that she was not happy all right, and of course, if people felt
like that, they spent nearly all their time trying to find the reason for it, and he knew that he wasn’t there to find the reason
for
her, just to provide comfort – a little
ignorant warmth in this awful life of hers, jam-crammed with ideas and disaster and with no man to account for it or take her mind off herself.

When she had no more to say she asked him what he thought. He thought.

‘Twenty years is a long time. Even if your mother fancied him then, she wouldn’t be picking up her skirts after him now. After all, twenty years ago she would have been
what?’

She did some rather sulky calculations then, and said thirty-eight.

‘Only a year older than you are now,’ he began, but she interrupted with arrogant astonishment:

‘How on earth do you know my age?’

He looked sly, but resisted the temptation to tease her.

‘Your sister told me. You don’t look it,’ he added. ‘But I don’t suppose your mother did either. Come now, you’ve been a married woman – haven’t
you ever been in love?’

She blew her nose on the tea towel. ‘Of course I have.’

‘Well, then.’

‘Have
you
ever been in love?’

Trust a woman for turning the tables. ‘Yes,’ he said promptly: ‘with Rita Hayworth. It lasted eighteen months and broke up for lack of occasion.’ That got him out of any
real confession. He’d never told anyone about Violet and he wasn’t starting now.

‘That’s not what I mean.’

‘She died,’ he said, without having meant to at all. ‘Anyway, you can see that there’s nothing unnatural about falling in love: I’m not talking about rights and
wrongs or morality of any kind – just how people are. You can’t go on blaming her for that. Is there someone you care for at the present time?’

‘I don’t know. I mean, you can go to bed with someone for
months
, can’t you, without really knowing what you feel about them?’

This threw him. To conceal his amazement and curiosity he took her untouched rice pudding. ‘Do you mind if I finish this for you?’

She shook her head. ‘Of course, one calls it love because one can’t think what else to say.’

‘Does one?’

She glanced sharply at him, but he stared back guilelessly. Then he filled his mouth with rice pudding and quince. He was thinking furiously. She took his silence as an invitation for further
confidence.

‘Everybody’s
married
, you see. They’re always weighed down with wives and families and awful, arduous jobs to pay for their boring lives. I’m just light relief
– only I’m not a light person, and they don’t relieve me. I met Dick
with
his wife on the train from here to London . . .’

He heard what she said, but he wasn’t taking it in much. He had too much on his mind. If one of the hazards of living a rich life was that you couldn’t call your wife your own, he
would have to think again about his entire future. He had the sick, familiar sensation of sliding imperceptibly into a jam. Already it looked as though he’d got stuck with a career that left
you wondering what to do with a lot of your time. He knew all right that you could spend weeks without a poem coming your way, and he didn’t get at all the same kick out of any other kind of
writing. In between times he’d thought that having enough money would mean that things like new blades for shaving and making a proper job of it, affording stamps and sticking them on
envelopes, frying sausages exactly right how you wanted them, would be pleasant enough while he was waiting for any great adventure. But beyond, or within his dreams and his day-to-day habits, lay
a number of convictions which he didn’t want interfered with by the facts of other people’s lives, thanks very much. He didn’t at all like his idea of respectable girls and tarts
being interfered with by people having too much money to need to be paid for it.

‘. . . half resents me being a pianist and half expects it to fill my life when he’s not there . . .’ she was saying. Was her being a pianist the point? After all, he
hadn’t met any of them before – perhaps music made them a randy lot. Or perhaps it was because she was a widow: that wasn’t her fault, after all.

‘Once you’re sure that the other person doesn’t love you, you have to stop – don’t you think?’

‘Perhaps you should get married again,’ he said hopelessly. Who on earth would marry a tart of thirty-seven? She didn’t seem too sure either, for she said immediately:

‘It’s all very well to say that, but one has to find the right person first. I want a man I can respect: someone who is at least trying to help other people – you know –
with ideals and at least one principle I can understand and admire. Not just making a little more money this year than he would have dreamed of needing last.’

‘Last what?’

‘Last year.’

Of course she didn’t
look
her age. That was something to do with the rich which fitted in with his scheme of things. Without the slightest warning he was engulfed by a huge yawn.
This meant, he knew, that he wanted to get out of a situation – not just because he was getting bored, but because it made him anxious. He used to yawn and yawn the days before his
operations; he’d tricked them there: they all thought he was being cool. Luckily for him, she yawned too.

‘Caught it from you,’ she said. ‘You’ve been very patient, listening to me like this, Dan – I suppose I may call you that?’

‘Try and stop you,’ he thought. ‘It’s my name,’ he said.

She put her hand over her mouth to yawn again. That’s why her fingers were nice – all that piano-playing.

‘I’d like to hear you play the piano,’ he said.

‘Why do you think he’s come back here after all this time?’

She was off again. ‘Who?’

‘Dr King. Why would he
want
to come?’

He sensed some sort of trap here: like smelling fire without knowing where it came from. ‘Perhaps he wanted to see how you’d all grown.’ She couldn’t quarrel with that,
surely? And she didn’t.

‘I suppose he might have wanted to do that. I’ll play for you tomorrow. Do you write good poetry? I should think you might.’

That was a fool question. That was more like a woman than she’d been being for some time. ‘It’s not something you have much say in,’ he answered with better-humoured
care. ‘Supposing you know in the first place. It wouldn’t be at all like playing the piano – where you have all your notes laid out . . .’

‘I know that,’ she interrupted – very rudely, he thought. ‘But do
you
think it’s good? When you’ve finished it, I mean.’

‘They’re making a book of it,’ he answered stiffly: ‘they don’t pay me for my opinion.’

She looked abashed, and much the better for it. She hadn’t the face for gaiety, he thought – the very opposite of Dot – she looked her best with trouble brewing, more like
those record sleeves of grand opera. She’d look just right coming down some draughty stone steps in her nightdress yelling out some royal secret.

They went to bed in the end: she didn’t clear up much – said Mrs Hanwell would do it, and his opinion of her dropped further still. However, he wanted to get back to the strange and
crowded privacy of his room. They were quiet on the stairs, and she did all the lights. ‘Good night, Dan,’ she said. ‘Good night, then,’ he answered, and she slipped off
down the passage.

In his room, he took off his jacket, shoes, trousers and his top jersey: quite enough in a strange place. Then he shut the windows as he never fancied air coming in at him all night, and got
into bed. He tried to get to sleep before what had been making him anxious came into words in his mind but he couldn’t do it. He was afraid that Emma might turn out to be like her sister: he
didn’t want that, but they were likely two of a kind. It stood to reason. I must test her so she won’t know she’s being tested, but I have to know. I’ll think of a test
first thing tomorrow – something cunning that she won’t know what it is. . .

CHAPTER 8

ESME

S
HE
had had a wretched night. She should never have drunk that cup of coffee after dinner. Only then she had thought that
perhaps the girls and that strange young man would go to bed, or go to play the gramophone in the library, and she would have Felix quite naturally to herself. But it hadn’t turned out like
that. They had all sat so long over dinner that she had sent Mrs Hanwell home and she and Emma had done the washing up. When they had joined the others, it was to find Cressy gone to bed, and Mr
Brick teaching Felix some extremely complicated patience game. As she had come into the room, and seen Felix’s red head bent over the cards, she had resisted an absolutely mad impulse to
stroke it. Naturally, one resisted one’s impulses, but that didn’t stop one feeling frightful about having had them in the first place. Perhaps she just felt maternal about him now. But
much later that night, as she tossed in a bed which she felt Mrs Hanwell could not possibly have made properly since it had seemed cold and lumpy from the word go, the idea of her feeling maternal
about Felix made everything much worse. It underlined everything that she had lost and everything that she had never had. He had matured so well, while she had simply decayed as little as she could
contrive. At dinner she had got him to tell her something of his Far Eastern experiences, and even while he was being most interesting about how long it took to rehabilitate a starving child, she
had wondered – in a manner which she drearily recognized as incurably vulgar and frivolous – whether, in true Somerset Maugham fashion, he had contracted some quasi-marriage with a
beautiful illiterate half-caste.

Even if he hadn’t done anything of the kind, she thought, switching off her bedside light for a third attempt at sleeping, he must have slept with other women since me: perhaps dozens,
perhaps just two or three serious ones. But while the thought of an anonymous crowd of girls was painfully bearable, the idea of two or three mistresses (such as she had been) was not. In the dark,
when one had the double ostrich sensation of neither being seen nor being able to see oneself, it was easy for memories and sensation to flood her stranded body so that it became what she felt.
Now, she was not feeling so old: just parched and abandoned, overcome by simple longing for him to press his hands each side of her waist, to stroke her shoulders, to sharpen her nipples with his
fingers until she was ready for him to come slowly into her (as she had taught him, because then he had been too young to wait long). Afterwards he would kiss her – the best time for it; they
would admire each other’s eyes, intent, affectionate – nothing to gain at those moments because they each had everything of the other; he would admire her ears, her knees, her wrists
(which he said was the first thing he had noticed about her), and she, more secret in her admiration because really it was more than that, would adore his neck and the shape of his head and the
polished skin over his back. His skin had smelt wonderful, ‘of warm grapes’, she had said, and he had said ‘nonsense’, but she had felt his young man’s vanity examine
the remark and accept it as a compliment. He had been such a darling, and nothing about him seemed changed except to make him even more attractive. She shifted from lying on one side of her back
– she seemed to be burning hot and her body ached. She was back where he had left her, twenty years ago, and, she had bitterly discovered, in love for the first time in her life, and without
him – only now he lay a few yards away. Being in love meant that one could not do without the physical presence of the other person: without it, one forgot everything; had no proportion about
time since it all seemed indiscriminately endless; one did not notice anything very much and one did not in the least care about not noticing. All this, she knew, would make some kind of people
assume that all she wanted was to be eternally in bed, with Felix making love to her non-stop. She had wanted to be eternally with Felix whatever either of them was doing, and of course, sometimes
it would have been making love. But she knew that loving someone entirely was, for her, at least, centred upon their being there – hearing them, seeing them, touching them only sometimes. And
all this, when she was thirty-eight, had burst upon her – with someone who was fourteen years younger than she. Then, she had been able to say that this difference did not really matter: she
had been remarkably attractive and Felix had set the seal on her attractions: she had the kind of figure that in the ’twenties had been described as ‘boyish’; and impeccable skin
(which meant not just her face) and an emotional energy unimpaired by domestic chores or tensions. It had not seemed impossible then. She had imagined marrying him; having their children; providing
him with all the structure for a happy and successful career; and even, she remembered now, putting up gracefully with his casual infidelities which she had reckoned would have started just about
now. Some time when he was over forty and she ‘was older’.