After Julius (17 page)

All right, she meant that.

Anyway, she wasn’t keeping to the point. Caring about humanity didn’t rule out personal affections: it was simply that different occasions required different scales of concern . .
.

No! no!
no!
People could always suit occasions to their temperament! And Julius had always been a man for the larger, more distant occasion.

Did she not think that the world needed men like that?

She thought they had been talking about marriage – not the state of the world.

It seemed to him, Felix had said, pouring the dregs of the bottle into his own glass, that this was a time for worrying about the state of the world.

All
right
, she had said: perhaps it is – in fact it obviously is: we may be invaded next week. But you can’t expect that to alter my feelings about somebody I’ve been
married to for eighteen years.

There was the first silence of the quarrel, then she picked up the telephone pad on the table by her empty glass and saw it had Julius’s handwriting on it. They had been sitting in the
dusk, and it was now too dark to see his face across the room. As she got up to do the blackout, he said, from miles away, ‘We don’t understand one another.’ He got up and left
the room. She did the blackout with meticulous, despairing care: there were two windows and the black blind stuff could only just be made to fit. Then she switched on one of the small lamps. Seeing
the small, empty room, she had the first surprising, painful stab of loneliness – of being on her own now with nobody entitled to care. She listened, but could not hear a sound of him.
Perhaps he had gone? The second this occurred to her, she was sure that he had. He’d just walked out in an angry huff. She would be alone all night in this flat which had really belonged to
Julius . . . She ran to the door and into the hall, and in the dark she ran straight against him. ‘Felix!’ The panic that he might have gone, the fright of running into him, the relief
that it was he, were too much for her and she burst into tears. She sobbed and sobbed, clinging to him, unable to say anything coherent or to move until he half carried her into the bedroom and
laid her on the bed. He was all kindness, all tender concern: he sat on the bed and held her in his arms and comforted her. She was really unhappy and he was truly kind and it was all real again.
‘Don’t go tonight – please don’t leave me.’ He would not dream of it, of course not.

He undressed her and put her to bed: and for both of them the absence of eroticism was another layer of discovering love. He was almost like her father, but she had never had a father whom she
could remember. Then she had got frightful hiccoughs – the whisky and emotion and no food, and he had propped her up and made her sip water and repeat some nursery formula after him which he
swore could cure her and it did. When he joined her in bed, it was he who commanded the situation; she enjoyed the voluptuous confidence of utter passivity . . . She went to sleep holding his hand
as though he were leading her to it.

And in the morning, as she was afterwards never able to forget, everything seemed very calm, and gentle, and sunlit. Once she had tried to speak about their quarrel, to assume apologetic
responsibility for it, to explain quietly in this more temperate climate of affectionate intimacy, but he would not allow it, and she still felt he was so much wiser (older?) than she that she was
grateful, really, to desist. She was going down to Sussex, to the children, she said: she must tell them. Of course, and he would take her to Charing Cross. He had waited until the train started,
and she had watched him standing on the platform, his hair ruffled by the departing train. She had watched until his face was a blur and his hand, raised in farewell, had dropped. Then she had
turned anxious attention to the separate problems of telling Cressy and Emma that their father was dead.

On Friday morning she had got his letter. The post had been late that morning, so by some devilish chance she had opened it in front of both children at breakfast. She had been feeling so
peaceful about Felix that it was just lovely to see his handwriting, and she had ripped it open with no more thought than that she must read it impassively with Cressy there. The first sentence had
stopped her cold. He announced baldly that by the time she got this he would be in uniform, training somewhere in England. He had volunteered for the Royal Marines. She had folded up the letter
without reading any more of it, and put it back into its envelope with clumsy, trembling fingers. ‘Was it from Daddy?’ Emma had asked. She had simply not taken in the fact of her
father’s death – interpreted it as some different kind of journey which she constantly alluded to in a challenging manner. Now Cressy said: ‘Of course not, Em. He’s gone
– he’s not coming back.’ ‘He’s gone to London for the weekend?’ ‘No,’ said Cressy and Emma had looked up at the sound of such a tormented voice and
then dug viciously into her boiled egg. ‘He
is
.’ The egg had overflowed, and tears had begun to spurt from her eyes.

She had put down the letter and got to her feet to comfort Emma: her throat was aching as though it was burned, but Cressy was before her. ‘
I’ll
explain to her: come on,
Em.’ And she had swept Emma out of the room, leaving their mother alone. Really alone. By the time she had read the letter once she was in no doubt about that. What had hurt her most had been
the way that the letter had avoided saying that everything was over between them; had relied upon Julius’s example, the state of national emergency, the fact that he, Felix, had been brought
to the sudden realization that he had been trying to avoid his own responsibility, that his career must come second and so on. Nothing about their situation – simply the firm, constant
inference that it was over. He had not even given her the opportunity to reply: no new address (he did not, conveniently, know where he would be sent), but he made it plain that he had cleared out
of his London digs. But to begin with she had not really been able to take in the finer points of her misery. All she
knew
with shocking certainty was that he had left her – for good.
It was all over: she really
was
alone. The first few months had been the worst of course, just like people – whether anything had ever happened to them or not – always said that
they were. She had got through them by a lot of hard gardening, by teaching Emma to read, by struggling with Cressy’s unaccountable tantrums of alternate hostility and sulking. It was very
difficult to eat; the greatest luxury was being alone at night in her bedroom and able to cry without interruption. After these fits of exhausting grief she would fall into a stupor of dreamless
sleep. She wrote six separate letters to Felix, but sent none of them, although she even addressed one or two to his home in Scotland with ‘Please Forward’ printed and underlined in one
corner. But she always burned them in the end, impelled by a mixture of pride and knowing that really, no letter she wrote could possibly make any difference. If Julius had been there she would
have told him everything, and sometimes she wondered whether if she had been able to do that, it might not have been a new start for them. For Julius had been an extremely
kind
man. In a
sense, she discovered bitterly, the more you take somebody for granted, which at the time seems to equate with any kind of incompatibility and/or dullness, the more you miss them if they vanish or
die. People were kind to her: she had lost her husband in the war; nobody had known about Felix and they had no friends in common, but as the weeks went by she came to accept people’s
kindness on his account: the two losses became inextricably confused.

One really horrible thing had happened which had shaken her out of her enduring stupor for a time, but in the same way that she discovered that nothing mattered for ever, so nothing ever
mattered too much: and during the next twenty years she cultivated busyness, attention to detail and other peoole’s smaller problems. ‘Like planting dozens of little shrubs in a
desert,’ she thought now as she sat on her newly made bed. ‘Things that are hardy enough not to die, and will stand being somewhere where they can’t grow.’ At least she had
made her own bed – properly. She must stop brooding over her life: but there would be time before the others returned to go and examine those new mole-hills, to see which, if any, of the new
muscari could be saved. There was plenty to
do
, after all.

CHAPTER 9

EMMA

S
HE
had set her alarum clock for seven o’clock because she particularly wanted her hair to be washed and dried by
breakfast time. She didn’t want to waste any proper time of the day doing it; on the other hand, one couldn’t change one’s whole life just because one had invited a man to stay
for the week-end. She laughed silently and hugged her knees in bed: she was certain it was going to be a lovely day. Morning: walk to Hanwell’s with Dan. Smashing Mrs Hanwell lunch (bags wash
that up and then Cressy will have to do dinner). Afternoon: take Dan to see the sea. Somehow, ‘I’ll have to stop the other people coming too: he’d surely rather see it for the
first time by himself. She wouldn’t count as she was his friend. Back to tea and fireworks, and even good old Jennifer Hammond wouldn’t be able to spoil dinner. What on earth had made
her ask him for the week-end? A kind of experiment in being brave and casual, and also, she hadn’t honestly thought he would accept. But the good thing about him was that he seemed to know
what he wanted to do and immediately do it. One good thing: not the only one. It was lucky her mother had invited that rather nice doctor: it took her mind off possibly disapproving of Dan –
she always seemed to think if Emma mentioned anyone, or had a meal with them that marriage was in the offing. She laughed again – she was laughing all the time – poor Mummy always
thought of
things
happening to make life better; she never considered the possibility of life just being marvellous and
that
making things happen. She sprang out of bed. Too dark
still to see what kind of day it would be, but there’d been a frost all right. She turned on her fire and seized her old blue woollen dressing-gown which had once been full length and was now
too short for her. Her hair was not long – just below the ears – but it was terrifically thick and was quite a job to wash and dry. She settled down to the business of washing it.

Breakfast – in spite of the mushrooms – was spoilt by Cressy. She knew that Cressy was in a bad mood, but it was very unusual for her to take it out on
her.
But immediately
after breakfast, Cressy came to her room and apologized. She said that she’d decided to leave Dick, and also that that doctor got on her nerves.

‘Perhaps you’ll like him more when you’ve taken him to Battle,’ said Emma hopefully. She had a forgiving nature, and was so glad that Cressy was really friends that she
wanted everything to be all right for her sister. ‘Isn’t he rather attractive?’ she added nervously.

But Cressy gave an incomprehensible snort at this suggestion.

‘He’s old, of course,’ she said to seal the peace: it was the only derogatory thing she could think of.

‘He’s not
old
!’ cried Cressy: ‘That’s the one thing he isn’t. I think Dan’s very nice though. And your hair looks gorgeous.’

‘What
match-making
remarks,’ she thought, rummaging for her gum boots: ‘I do see that what men think about women is right quite a lot of the time.’ But her hair
did look good. It was a very dark brown and when clean it had what hairdressers called copper lights in it. She had her camelhair jersey and the same old pleated skirt, but she didn’t think
men noticed skirts so much: legs and breasts were supposed to be the things. Not as though Dan was men though: he was more like a surprisingly intimate friend. Just as well: her breasts
weren’t up to much. ‘Still, breasts aren’t necessarily the gateway to happiness,’ she thought thinking of Cressy; ‘and it doesn’t matter what your legs look like
in gum boots.’ Her coat was in the hall, and he helped her into it like he had at the office yesterday –
ages
ago – and then lifted her hair and settled it over the top of
her collar. ‘See? I’m up to all the fancy moves,’ he said.

They walked in silence down the drive, and at the gate, she said: ‘Would you like to see the farm?’ And he said he would. So they crossed the lane and entered a field which had a
broad-cart track across its narrow end. She explained that there was a right of way to Hanwell’s Farm and on out to a lane beyond his land. To their left was a hazel-nut coppice, and to their
right a gently declining, undulating view which went on till the sea – invisible from here, she said. They walked slowly because it was all so nice. The cart-track had short, very green,
cropped turf between the ruts which were red, with rusty-coloured ice splintering under their feet, and sometimes there were deeper ruts reflecting the marvellously blue sky. The hedge winked and
glittered with rime and frosty old disused cobwebs. The sun was pale and dazzling, not even faintly warm, but the bare woods ahead looked almost fiery in its light. It was a very good year for
berries. At the end of the field was another gate and two haystacks by a small wood. The wood had a stile in it, because down in the middle – it was more a wooded quarry – was a small,
deep pond: Mr Hanwell had known someone who had stepped into this pond in rubber boots and been drowned. She, Emma, had once seen an adder swimming there on a summer evening. She offered him these
pieces of information in case he found the walk boring. Should they go and see? They climbed the stile, and a jay flew angrily over them shouting about their arrival: ‘You’d think we
had machine guns the way they go on,’ Dan said. What was left of the path down to the pond was very steep, and brambles, shrouded in sheep’s wool, sprawled across it. But it was worth
it when they got there. Half of the pond had streaky ice, and on the other half a pair of mallard floated in a still and secret manner. There was a rotting old landing-stage and the ribs of a
sunken boat with rushes growing out through its middle.