After Julius (20 page)

Everything had seemed sunny and soothing at breakfast until that damned girl appeared. Looking outrageous, she had managed to upset everybody at the table – excepting Dan Brick, and that
was only because she hadn’t, in his case, tried.

Her physical presence upset him one way, and her manners another, and between the two he was divided between wanting to tear down her jeans and beat her, or just tear down her jeans. She was old
enough to know better, he told himself grimly with what Jack would call his
most
Scottish accent. Going to Battle with her would give him a chance to speak his mind. Put her in her place at
once.

Now he sat beside her in her scarlet Mini and she was driving them at a speed which precluded any serious conversation, he told himself; but really, glancing at her profile with the dramatically
tilted chin, eyes firmly on the road, so that he got a fine view of her eyelashes – like sooty fur – the down on her upper lip and one small, neat mole just below her cheekbone, really
when he looked at her, he could think of nothing to say. It was she who began it.

‘You don’t
really
want to see the Abbey, do you?’

‘Why are you always so offensive?’

He saw her start to smile, and with evident satisfaction she said:

‘
Am
I?’

‘You’re one of the most offensive people I have ever met in my life.’

‘With you, I should have guessed that that was some accolade.’

‘I asked you a question.’

‘So did I. I asked you one first.’

‘You know the answer to it. Of course I don’t want to see the Abbey. I wanted to talk to your mother.’

‘Exactly!’

‘And you prevented me. So – I ask you again: why are you always so offensive?’

‘Perhaps you bring out the worst in me.’

‘Like your mother! And your sister! In fact everybody I’ve seen you with. You’re not a child!’

‘Would it be better if I was? Oh yes, then you could ignore me.’

‘What on earth are you talking about?’

‘You’re not married, are you?’

‘No.’

‘You never have been?’

‘What the hell’s it got to do with you? No, I never have been.’

She slowed the car and then stopped it, her hands still gripping the steering-wheel.

‘I’ll tell you. Because it’s people like you who go around ruining other people’s lives. And the funny thing is you’re too selfish and
stupid
to see more
than a fraction of the damage you do.’

‘I say, are you sure you’re not over-estimating my powers a bit?’ he said mildly, concealing both irritation at her melodramatic manner and the faint desire it provoked in him
to laugh.

‘I don’t think so. I think people are divided into those who try to help other people and those who try to help themselves. Where have you been for the last twenty years? Have you
got a cigarette?’

‘Here you are. Ignoring your asinine distinction, let me turn to the far more interesting subject of my life. Well – first there was the war, you know. I was a Commando in the Royal
Marines. I ended up as a Major with a DSC. And if you think that that was entirely because I was trying to help other people, you’d be wrong; I was quite keen on my own life as well. Then
when I came out, I read medicine at Aberdeen until, in due inexorable course, I qualified. Don’t know who that was for, other people or myself. A bit of both, I’d say. When I’d
qualified, some idealistic bug drove me to a rehabilitation camp in Korea. I spent six years there. That was the only time I had the mistaken view that whatever you were like you could help other
people. I’ve grown up now. It’s time you did the same.’

There was a long silence. Then, in a much smaller voice, she said: ‘I see. I suppose I owe you an apology.’

‘Not at all. If I hadn’t been a fairly destructive sort of chap with an eye to number one, I wouldn’t have got the DSC. I’d have got a VC. And I’d be dead. One had
a kind of licence to ruin other people’s lives in the war, but I don’t think I’ve made a habit of it.’

There was another long silence. Then she just said: ‘Oh.’

Then he said: ‘Look here, I can’t have you caving in like that. You must have had some reasons for your sweeping assertions about me. Since frankness is the hallmark of this
conversation, you needn’t feel in the least inhibited.’

This roused her: ‘Of course I have reasons. What about my mother? What about my father? What do you think that was like for Emma and me?’

‘What do I think
what
was like?’

‘Now you’re simply hedging. I know perfectly well that you were having an affair with my mother.’

‘Yes?’ He felt his heart beginning to pound.

‘You can’t possibly argue that that was a good thing to do.’

‘I’m not arguing about it.’

‘Well – I don’t suppose, either, that you’ve the faintest idea how much damage you did.’ There was a pause and then she said: ‘Have you?’

‘Look – I’m not trying to defend myself at all costs: but when one is twenty-four one doesn’t think in terms of damage much. I was in love with your mother. She was in
love with me. You must know what I’m talking about. There was never any question of her leaving your father or breaking up your home or anything like that.’

‘That’s exactly what happened though, isn’t it?’ She wound down her window and threw out her cigarette stub.

‘No, it isn’t.’ He was beginning to get angry with her. ‘How on earth do you arrive at that?’

‘My father went off and got himself killed. Why?’

‘Your father went off to try and collect some of the BEF off the beaches at Dunkirk. That’s why he went. He was a brave man who wanted to do something to help. It had nothing to do
with me,
or
your mother at all.’

‘It
had
! You see – you
don’t
know what you are talking about! My father knew about you! That’s why he went!’

This was worse than the worst he had suspected.

‘To begin with I don’t see how you can possibly know that he knew . . .’

‘I tell you I
know
that!’

‘To go on with, he wasn’t the kind of man who’d deliberately get himself killed because of anything he knew or found out about his private life.
How
did he know,
anyway?’

She turned quickly to him and then looked away.

‘
I
told him,’ she said.

He swore violently to himself, counted three, and then said as calmly as possible: ‘What on
earth
– made – you – do – that?’

‘I thought he ought to know. It was wicked to him. My mother had absolutely no right –
I
don’t know. I – just told him – that’s all.’

‘But why didn’t you talk to your
mother
, for heaven’s sake, surely that would have been a more honourable way of . . .’

‘Honour!’ She was trying to sneer but her voice broke. ‘That comes well from you, I must say –
or
from my mother. What good do you think that would have done? She
wouldn’t have given you up, because
I
talked to her. She would simply have been more careful, told even more complicated lies – including me in them – and stopped you
coming down here!’

‘Well – you would have done better to talk to me.’

‘Why should I? You treated me like a child! Worse than that: like somebody treats a child who isn’t even fond of children.’

He gave them both cigarettes and lit them, thinking, but she
had
been a child – well, seventeen, not much more than one: and except that she’d been very intense and silent,
and Esme had said she was musical, he couldn’t remember anything about her. No – he had to admit that it would have been difficult for her to approach him. He said so.

‘How did your father respond to being told this tale by you?’

‘That was what was so awful! I simply couldn’t tell at all. He treated me as though it was all happening to some other people. He sort of
generalized
about it. He kept telling
me not to worry about it. The only thing he made me promise was not to say anything to Emma about it! As if I would have! She really
was
only a child; she couldn’t have been made to
understand. But Emma was
the
child to
him
you see – he loved her most for being that. He was always trying to protect her. He said that people over-estimated their personal
importance and this made them get things out of proportion. He said there wasn’t time to interfere with what separate people did – that they were responsible for far more than their
immediate, personal actions . . . I can’t really remember any more. Except that I tried to tell him that he’d got me, but he didn’t seem to understand. So I left him. But
afterwards, because he seemed so quiet in there . . .’

‘In where?’

‘His study: the room he was sitting in,’ she said impatiently, as though he ought to have known, ‘that after I’d been away from him for a bit, I went back and listened at
the door, and I couldn’t hear a sound, so then I went out into the garden to see him through the window, and he was sitting at his desk, leaning over it, with his hands over his face. So then
I knew that really he was very unhappy.’

‘And then what?’ He thought he knew, but he had to ask or rather, she had to tell him.

‘Then about a week later he went. Then I really
did
know.’

‘Know? What?’

‘That I shouldn’t have told him, of course!’ she said, in a voice so used and worn with guilt that for a moment he felt a third and quite different feeling about her. ‘If
I hadn’t told him, I don’t think he would have gone. He would have been alive now.’

After a bit, he said gently: ‘Have you told anyone else this?’

And she said immediately, and between her teeth:

‘Of course I haven’t! Of
course
not! I did it: the least I could do was bear it. And I could protect Em a bit. The awful months afterwards – you wouldn’t know
– you’d disappeared pretty smartly – when my mother was being a grief-stricken widow and I wanted to kill her for pretending about something so important – I did what I
could about Em because he’d asked me to. My mother used to cry at night, you know, without making the
slightest
effort to be quiet about it; and one night I found Em sitting up in bed
with her teeth chattering: she could hear my mother and she was terrified.
She
was crying, and she kept saying “It’s horrible: I hate her doing that: I hate it”, so then I
moved her to my room, which was farther along the passage where she couldn’t hear. But it didn’t stop me feeling to blame.’

She had thrown the second cigarette away – seemed to be watching it burning out on the verge – then she said: ‘If something has gone wrong – you know the feeling, that at
the time it doesn’t seem to matter what you do, everything’s burned up anyhow – but then afterwards, without you being able to help it, you find it
does
matter, just as
much as if nothing had gone wrong in the first place.’

He didn’t know the feeling, but he thought he knew what she meant, so he said yes.

‘That’s how life has seemed to me ever since. I got married like that. I seem to have done nearly everything like that.’ She made some small sound, like a sigh – he could
only just hear it.

‘We must get on with going to Battle,’ she said, and started the engine.

He wanted to say so many things to her: and it was necessary, he thought, to say something to lighten this load she had carried alone for so long.

‘Interesting, what your father said about there not being time to interfere with other people. I suppose when he said that they were responsible for far more than their personal actions,
he meant that if you worried too much about any one of them, you became irresponsible on the larger scale.’

‘I think he was talking about the war then.’

‘Oh well, war shows that sort of thing up – like emergencies do.’

‘But if you want to – be any use in the world, surely you have to start with a clean slate?’

‘You can’t. People aren’t born with clean slates. At least, I don’t think so. When I’m born I don’t think that I’ve no right to a smallpox vaccination
until I’ve isolated the bug and prepared a home-made vaccine. We’ve got to accept that that has been done already. Well, then there are the disadvantages: the nature of man, many of his
actions and so forth.’

‘But we all know that babies are innocent. They don’t
know
. . .’

‘That’s the Christian view of innocence – calling it ignorance of evil – dangerously idealized, if you ask me. The time to assess innocence isn’t with a baby,
it’s with an old man. Everybody wants to be a little fallen angel – that’s the trouble: that leads you slap into the stalemate of guilt.’

He stopped: he hadn’t meant to say anything like as much as that; but things that he’d been dimly trying to think about alone, had suddenly become clear to him in her company:
he’d had nobody to
talk
to for years, he realized.

‘Go on about guilt: I want to know what you think
that
is.’

He looked at her beautiful hands, much more relaxed now on the steering-wheel – her curtain wedding-ring glinting in the sunlight.

‘Guilt,’ he said slowly: he had to be a bit careful here. ‘Guilt is just the failure to live up to an arrogant self-made image. It hasn’t got anything to do with being
sorry for what you’ve done. It’s only being sorry for what you find you aren’t. But it’s a great preventative from getting on with the next thing.’ Then, with a touch
of what he hoped would be psychological cunning, he said: ‘I feel much better. I must say, you’re wonderful to talk to, offensive though you are.’

And that, for the time, was that. They did all their commissions in Battle, and he bought a bunch of dahlias for Esme. On the way home she asked abruptly:

‘What made you come here after all this time?’

‘I wanted to see that your mother was all right.’

‘What could you do about it, if she
wasn’t
all right?’

He thought about this for a moment, and then laughed. ‘
I
don’t know. One doesn’t always think these things out. I expect I would have indulged in a bit of
guilt.’