After Julius (18 page)

‘I used to get newts and tadpoles here,’ said Emma.

‘Have they all left then?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Can’t you get ’em any more?’

‘Oh. Well I haven’t tried: I think I got too old for them.’

‘Well – it’s the wrong time of year,’ he said with regret.

The ducks watched them carefully; they had swum a token distance away and were now waiting for them to go, Emma thought. The whole place seemed to be getting quieter all the time. When a cock
pheasant squawked, she started. They agreed to go on. ‘A nice pond,’ he said politely. Better in summer, she said. Things were always more showy then, he agreed.

They walked through three fields’ worth of the cart-track to Hanwell’s Farm. It lay in a hollow with a steeply banked meadow beside it. There was another pond there and sheep. Geese
were loose about the place and some rather dirty white ducks. She led the way to the cow-shed where in a sweet warm twilight three brown-and-white cows were each chewing in their stalls. She took
off her woolly gloves for one of them to lick the salt off her hands. Chickens were fussing about in the loft above – in fact everywhere, and a thin black-and-white cat sat looking at them
severely. Next to the cow-shed were four pigs in a sty who rushed out to see who might have brought them food.

‘He’s got a horse as well,’ said Emma: ‘and Mrs Hanwell keeps bees. Some of everything: not many farmers have that nowadays. I thought you’d like to see it
all,’ she added rather anxiously. And luckily he said that she was quite right, he would. ‘Mrs Hanwell says he’s a wonder with animals; it’s people he’s not so keen
on. He never even talks in the pub – just listens. That’s their house. It’s very pretty inside with a great many things in it. When I was young I used to go to tea and collect
eggs and milk the cows with Mr Hanwell: he doesn’t mind children nearly as much as people, Mrs Hanwell says.’

The cart-horse was standing apparently plunged in thought, as it gave a theatrical start when at last it realized that they were there. They rubbed its nose and it tossed its head as though
their hands were flies.

‘Mr Hanwell calls it Jock, and Mrs Hanwell calls it Brenda,’ said Emma: ‘she doesn’t count gelded animals as male, you see: and she thinks women do most of the work in
this world while men just go through the motions. They both agree this horse is a good worker.’

‘We had a mule, once,’ said Dan. ‘And a sheepdog and my sister had a canary. Oh yes, and ferrets. My Dad had a white ferret for a time:
they’d
work for you if you
knew how to handle them. But this one went mad and ate what it caught – or mauled it so’s you couldn’t hardly make a stew of what was left. Eyes like rubies it had. Where does
this go then?’

It was a ladder up to the hay-loft above the horse’s stall. They climbed it. Bales of hay were stacked against whitewashed walls; an untidy nest was tipsily perched on a crossbeam and
there was a very old calendar nailed to the wall. A girl dressed as a drum majorette in a heatwave (tight and scanty green satin) lolled on a polar-bear rug. ‘Mrs Hanwell wouldn’t have
it in the house,’ said Emma. ‘It’s no good to him now though: it’s 1944. Let’s sit here a bit, shall we? I want to smoke a cigarette.’

‘Mind you don’t start no fire then.’

They settled themselves on some hay, and she lit her cigarette. Then she said: ‘What did you and Cressy talk about last night?’

He seemed both watchful and guarded. He waited a moment and said: ‘She made some tea; she talked about men.’ Then, added casually: ‘She’s a tart, isn’t
she?’

‘What on earth do you mean?’

‘I mean she goes with men she’s not married to.’

‘But lots of people do that, without being
tarts
! Of course she’s not a tart! Tarts get – paid – for one thing!’

‘She doesn’t need money though, does she? She wouldn’t be doing it for that.’

‘Honestly, that isn’t the point. She – she just
loves
people. She wants to get married again.’

‘She told me she was going with a married man. That doesn’t sound like wanting to get married to me.’

‘You’re just being old-fashioned about it. Perhaps she loves the man. If you love somebody and they want to – want to go to bed with you, if you love them – you do
it!’

‘Do you?’

She couldn’t understand what had got into him. ‘Of course,’ she said stiffly. There was a silence, and then she said: ‘In any case, I’m very fond of my sister and I
won’t have her spoken about like that.’ How awful! Whenever she wanted to sound dignified and angry her voice shook. She smoked her cigarette hard and then said: ‘It may be
different on canals and wherever else you’ve been, but I assure you that nowadays people don’t get all stuffy and call other people tarts because they go to bed with people without
marrying them. People are doing that all the time!’ She took a deep breath. ‘Virginity’s simply uncomfortable and out of date and nobody goes in for that unless they can’t
help it!’

There was a long pause while she felt the heat slowly dying out of her face and she burned her fingers on the cigarette through holding it badly.

He leaned towards her. ‘Give me that,’ he said. He took it and pinched it expertly out between his fingers.

‘Golly!’ she said.

‘I’m sorry if I upset you about your sister. Of course you’re fond of her. You wouldn’t be sharing a flat with her if you weren’t. It’s natural, after
all.’

‘What is?’

‘Family feeling. Pity you have no brother.’

‘If I’d had one, he’d probably be dead from the war. Unless he’d been much younger than me. My father died twenty years ago, you know. I suppose I could have had a
brother who’d be about twenty now.’

‘You’d have spoilt him between you. One boy and a lot of women. Your sister plays the piano, she tells me.’

‘Oh yes: she’s awfully good. Well – fairly good, but one judges her by professional standards, you see, and that’s pretty high these days.’

‘You know a lot about these days, don’t you?’

‘Well I am
in
them. So are you.’

Everything seemed all right again. Without talking about it, they left the loft. It was likely that people would have different points of view, she thought: it needn’t spoil things.

‘We could go home a different way, and buy some sweets in the village.’

He agreed to this, and they went on past the farm until they struck the winding narrow lane, sunk between high banks. Wild strawberries, violets, primroses, cuckoo-pint, ragged robin, speedwell,
scarlet pimpernel, roses, hawthorn, blackberries and deadly nightshade, lords and ladies, garlic, crab-apples, elder-berries, buttercups, cow parsley, orchids, bugle, daisies, hazel nuts –
telling him about these banks she described everything from the point of view of its fruit or flower which was how she had first discovered them. Now the banks looked ragged and sodden, with only
old man’s beard and briony to decorate the hedges above. ‘Still,’ she said: ‘I expect you know what they’re like without my telling you.’

‘If you like the country so much, why do you work in London?’

‘Oh – well, I have to have some sort of job, and most of them are in London.’

‘You don’t have to work if you don’t want to?’

‘Well – I suppose I do want to – in a way.’

‘And I suppose you meet more people in London?’

Something in his voice made her look sharply at him; but his face was bland.

‘I met you,’ she said.

‘You meet a lot of writers, I suppose. What are they like?’

‘Well – goodness, that’s a hopeless question! How do you mean?’

‘Am I like them? Any of them?’

‘No – you’re not!’

‘I see.’ He seemed disappointed. ‘Well – go on: say something about them.’

‘Let’s see. We have a pretty general list, so there are all kinds.’ I’m being frightfully boring, she thought; must try a bit more. ‘Well – first there are
the terrifically serious ones – you know – they go about looking patronizing
and
tragic; they talk about being writers all the time; they’re sorry for you because you
aren’t a writer but they make you feel that
they
don’t feel you have the character to stand being one. As long as you realize that writers are the most important people in the
world and they are one of the very best, they’re quite kind and democratic. That’s one kind. They write poetry and rather obscure novels. Then there are rather bluff but shy tweedy ones
who always live somewhere where the post takes three days to get to them, and only come to London about twice a year wearing a lot of clothes they’re too hot in. They write historical novels
and books about animals. Then there are the academic ones who speak so quietly you can’t hear a word they say, and never meet your eye and always bring bulging brief-cases which they always
leave behind. They write books about Shakespeare or Milton, or detective novels. Then there are rather dashing ones who look like secret agents who are always going off or coming back from some
terrifically rare place. They write books about where they’ve been. Then there are what my uncle calls the overdressed mums who have hats and furs and masses of jewellery –
they’re very fierce about royalties and advertising: they write romantic novels in which love is all . . .’ She stopped to see how he was taking this.

‘Sharp, aren’t you?’ he said; he was smiling faintly, but she sensed his discomfort. ‘Aren’t
any
of them natural? You know, people you could stand to have a
drink with?’

‘Oh yes! The best ones are. The best ones are very nice and just like people. I was listing the funny ones: to – to entertain you.’

‘You do entertain me. You’re the first girl I’ve met to do that. That’s all your education, I suppose?’

‘I don’t think so,’ she said, startled at the idea. ‘Here we are, anyway.’

The sweet shop was in sight, and she was glad to change the subject. It would be awful if he counted things about her life that she couldn’t help against herself.

In the shop they bought bulls’ eyes, and pear drops and extra strong peppermints. Then he saw some sherbet and got some of that.

‘I could drink it out of the cup you made me.’

‘Did you keep that?’

‘Yes.’

‘I never like waste,’ he said. He seemed pleased.

Clouds had arrived in the sky: hardly any of it was blue now and it seemed colder. They walked home fast. On the way home, and having thought about it, she said:

‘Dan, I’m not going back on my promise about the sea. But if we’re going to have the fireworks, we ought to set them up this afternoon: posts for the rockets and things. We
could go to the sea tomorrow morning. We could take a lunch picnic there, if you like. But of course we can go this afternoon if you like.’

‘Just you and me for the picnic?’

‘If you like.’

‘All right. We’ll do the fireworks today, and go off tomorrow. That’s a strong promise, then?’

‘Of course.’ She looked at him to make sure it was all right, and he looked at her back and it was.

Lunch – Mrs Hanwell’s fish pie, and dozens of crisp, thin lemon pancakes brought in in relays by Mrs Hanwell – was just as good as she’d expected. Dan ate nine pancakes
– she counted them – and Cressy seemed to be in a better mood to their mother, who seemed, or at any rate looked, rather tired. After lunch, Cressy said she was going to practise but
she’d play to Dan first as she’d promised. Her mother and Felix King went to drink coffee in the drawing-room ‘like the grown-ups’ she thought, which was a bit silly because
Felix King wasn’t really so old. He looked like a nice, intelligent, craggy kind of fox: that was partly his red hair and high cheekbones, but also his eyes; she liked foxes so it
wasn’t at all a rude thing to think.

She was doing the washing up. Mrs Hanwell had gone home and she had the kitchen to herself. She’d refused offers of help, from her mother and Felix King because she wanted to be alone to
think about the morning, to understand her feelings about it. She liked Dan enormously, she began briskly: he was a much nicer man than any she had met for a long time. He was intelligent and funny
and they seemed to like a lot of the same things – animals and walks and sweets and talking and just having fun. He had an extraordinary face, really; because without one being able to say
why, he was sometimes rather beautiful, although if you took each of his features separately there didn’t seem to be any reason for this. His eyes were quite large, but pale blue, and you
couldn’t tell what he was feeling from them. He had a very long upper lip (just like poets in books) and a very long, curling mouth – not thin either. He looked like someone from the
country, but then he had surprisingly delicate eyebrows – the colour of sharp sand. A nose which was quite a good shape but larger than usual. In fact, most of his features were on the large
side, so he must have a very big face for this not immediately to strike one. It certainly hadn’t struck
her
. When they had been talking about her having a brother this morning, she
had thought that
he
would have made a very good one. And he didn’t pounce on you before you’d even had a chance to see what he was like. Whenever she thought of people pouncing
on her she got the same sick little shiver which came always from the one time this had happened. A friend of a friend of Cressy’s – up in London for the evening – who’d
pressed her to go out to dinner with him. She and Cressy, and Cressy’s newest man and this friend of his, had all been having drinks in their flat. Cressy had awfully wanted an evening alone
with her lover, so Emma had agreed to go out to dinner with this man; she couldn’t at all remember what he had looked like, except that he had seemed old. He had told her to call him John and
she had done her best. They had had a rather nasty dinner in Soho where he drank a lot and kept telling waiters to do things that they were just going to do anyway, and then he said he knew a jolly
good place to go where they could get drinks all night. He hadn’t asked her whether she wanted to come, but in the lavatory she’d noticed that it was only half-past nine, so she knew
Cressy wouldn’t want her back. So they’d got in a taxi, and in that he’d suddenly screwed her head round, so that a bone felt as though it was breaking in her neck, and started to
kiss her with his tongue in her mouth. She hated the smell of him, and she’d struggled. His tongue seemed enormous and he had huge grasping hands which made her shrink in her clothes. She
couldn’t say anything, but she made some idiotic noise meaning don’t, and quite suddenly he released her and said in his ordinary dinner voice as though nothing had happened:
‘You’re quite right: this isn’t the place for it.’ And they had sat well apart in the taxi and she rubbed and rubbed her mouth with the back of her hand until she saw that
he had taken out a handkerchief and was carefully mopping up his own mouth. ‘Can’t give the show away to the driver, can we?’ he’d said. By now she was hating him, but it
was dark and she didn’t know where they were, and they got out at what looked like a hotel.