After Julius (4 page)

And so, early in September, on the night train to Inverness, she lay in her bed and called to him in the adjoining sleeper. They had dined, with a bottle of burgundy; it was the beginning of a
short holiday, and for a while she had lain simply enjoying the rhythmic rocking of the coach and beneath it the wheels racing over the track with a mathematical roar. The charm of sleeping
compartments, she thought, was entirely masculine; the white paint and much mahogany, the navy blankets with scarlet stitching, the heavy glass water-bottle and coarse white linen floor drugget
– everything was ingenious, simple and solid, and surprisingly satisfactory. But when she called to Julius, he didn’t answer – he was in the next compartment, after all, and the
communicating door was only just ajar. Suddenly, she leapt out of her bed, spilt some scent down her neck, took off her wedding ring and knocked on his door.

‘I wonder if I might trouble you for a light?’

‘But of course.’ He had been hanging up his suit and was in his dressing-gown.

‘You must think it funny of me, barging in like this, but I can’t do without a last smoke before sleeping.’

‘Not at all. Do take a seat – Miss –’

‘Upjohn: Ruby Upjohn.’

‘What a pretty name.’ His face was impassive as he handed her his case.

‘What a pretty case!’

‘You think so?’ He gave a modest laugh. ‘As a matter of fact if that case could talk, it could tell us a thing or two.’

‘Ooh – could it?’

‘To cut a long story short, it was given by King Edward to my father in gratitude for some highly confidential service. Do you see?’ And he showed her the ER (the case had been her
engagement present to him in the days when she was Esme Roland).

‘You must be ever so proud, to own a valuable thing like that.’

‘Naturally I wouldn’t have told you if you hadn’t seemed so interested.’

In a minute he would start asking her questions, so she crossed her legs, blew out her smoke in a manner which she hoped was beguilingly inexpert and said:

‘Actually I’m running away!’

‘Miss Upjohn!’

‘Oh do call me Ruby –’ and she launched into her tale about a cruel theatrical manager, at the end of which he exclaimed with glowing eyes:

‘Ruby, what a splendid little girl you are! I think this calls for a drink.’ He had unscrewed the cap of his silver flask, and handed it to her: ‘Let’s drink to the brave
new life opening out before you in Inverness.’

As she drank some, and choked prettily, he added: ‘Don’t ask me where the flask came from: it conjures up painful memories never far from my mind, which I should be happier to
forget.’

‘Ooh, I am sorry: I can’t imagine a man like you having troubles.’

‘Little Ruby! How touching that you should think that.’ He gave a bitter laugh and stared moodily between her breasts.

By the time he had finished telling her about his wife whose whole nature was given to her rock garden, and who consequently had not a spare second over for beginning to understand him
‘and I’m a funny, complicated sort of chap’ the brandy was drunk, and she could say that it was funny they’d met wasn’t it, both lonely, both in trouble. Well –
she stood up – she thought that perhaps she’d better be getting back to her bed now. Ruby – Ruby – he had seized her in a vice-like grip, wasn’t there anything else
she couldn’t do without before she went to sleep? ‘Captain Fortescue!’ ‘Call me Valentine!’ and she swooned neatly on to the bed, pulling him with her . . .

Sixty miles further north she murmured: ‘Dear Captain Fortescue: I like trains –’

‘And?’

‘I like no poetry –’

‘And?’

‘I want a son not called Valentine.’

And that was when Emma was conceived.

But after that, everything seemed to tail off into a mist of routine, fatigue, anxiety and hectic, immemorable celebration. He grew perceptibly more concerned with the state of the world: he
worried about unemployment, disarmament, and Hitler and the monarchy; he insisted on Cressy being educated at home; he worried about China and Spain and Abyssinia; he would not let either of the
children listen to the wireless. A good deal of this was reflected in his publishing: he stopped building up his list of young poets for which both he and the house had begun to be distinguished,
and started upon symposia of political thought, aspects of international economy, the effects of science and philosophy upon industry, the distinctions between racial and religious prejudice, the
psychological implications of leadership and freedom – books which she couldn’t even try to read and which in any case hardly sold at all. (His brother, Mervyn, kept the whole thing
going with what Julius described either as nice novels or pot-boilers.) He seemed to work harder and harder, had chronic indigestion, slept badly and was only occasionally fun – with the
children. By now she had grown accustomed to his ways and the mechanics of their domestically hectic life: traffic out of London at week-ends was becoming frightful, and two households were a
perpetual strain. In the end she left Cressy and her governess in the country, and very often Emma as well. No son was a private, nagging refrain, and for the rest of her functions she sometimes
felt as though she was endlessly laying an elaborate table for a meal to which nobody in the end sat down. On top of this, some people, at least, began talking of the possibility of another war. It
was too much: to slip quietly into middle age without a son, without a husband whom one could any longer meet as a stranger on a train, without a lover . . .

And then, the first May of the war, the last morning of her married life. She had woken early, opened her eyes, and gone down alone, out to a milk-and-gold morning, a pale and tender sky,
declining dew, and the sun still rising higher above the exclaiming birds, opening roses with fresh pangs of light, exposing the shabby backs of airy bees and devouring the night sweat of the
ground with radiant consolation. She was never in her life entirely to forget the earthly delight of being in such a morning. Afterwards, she thought: a seed, perfection; a drop of mercury, some
drip from a celestial sphere, and she looked up at the sun and felt blissfully of no account.

When at last she went back to the house and up to her bedroom, he was standing with his back to her, staring out of the window with a newspaper in his hands.

‘Did you hear the guns?’

She had not heard them. There was a long, choked-up silence, and he did not turn round.

‘Esme –’

‘What is it, Julius?’

‘
Don’t you know?
“Now all the youth of England are on fire.”
Can’t you imagine?
’

He turned round, and she saw with an ugly shock that he was crying. The sun from another window shone on him; he stood grey faced, a little paunchy, balding – two deep lines dredged from
his nostrils to below his mouth – a worn and ageing creature now rubbing the dry freckled knuckles of his hands in his eyes – incompatible with his anguish which seemed to her only
unlovely and discomforting. She felt a surge of anger at the discrepancy between his appearance and his feeling, at the pathos of his uselessness; it didn’t
matter
what
he
felt
and there was something contemptible in his showing it: he had had his war – why, he did not even have now to face her illicit fears! Aloud, with soothing cruelty she said:
‘There’s nothing
you
can do.’

‘Are you glad of that?’ he answered quietly, and a thrill of uncertainty and fear shot through her and was gone. She didn’t know.

He picked up the newspaper which had fallen to the ground, and folded it up. ‘I must catch my train.’ Below them, the sounds of Cressy’s morning practice had begun –
fine, heroically measured scales, four octaves, the beginning of her three hours. ‘Well,’ he said again, ‘I must catch my train.’ He had blown his nose, his eyes were no
longer naked; he had withdrawn into his ordinary appearance distinguished by nothing in particular.

‘Have a good day. Look after yourself.’ Now that he was asking nothing, she was trying to seem ready and kind. She kissed his cheek: he had cut himself shaving. ‘Wait a minute:
you look awful with blood on you.’ She ran her handkerchief under the cold tap and dabbed him up.

‘It would be awkward if I looked better. Don’t let Emma on to the main road with her bike. She shouldn’t do that until she is at least ten. Good-bye Esme.’

She heard Cressy break off in a scale, and imagined her flinging her arms round his neck: she was going through a dramatic phase. With the piano stopped she could hear an aeroplane –
limping on one engine by the sound of it. And every now and then, that casual, throaty rumble of the guns which she had not heard when she had been in the garden. She went to the window where he
had been, trying to put out of her mind the picture of him which part of her was ashamed of having found distasteful.

The piano had begun again. He would have gone – unless he was saying good-bye to Emma. She began to walk to the telephone; the day had become simply another fine one, and exciting. Had he
gone? Something made her go back to the garden window, and he hadn’t; he was holding the back of Emma’s bicycle, pushing her along towards the garage, his head bent over her stiff
little pigtails. She could not stop watching them, feeling so little that either of them felt: Cressy, she knew, adored him, but he adored Emma. At the garage Emma got off her bike, leaned it
against the water butt, and threw her arms round his waist until he lifted her up; the bicycle collapsed to the ground behind them, but neither of them took any notice.

She sighed – a tremor of anticipation, of regret, of danger and satisfaction; the tightrope of longing and secrecy and play-acting was quivering for her, and she picked up the
receiver.

The room was still the same room, and still too cold. She got up, pulled on her pink mohair dressing-gown as quickly as possible, and went to the same window where he had stood
and wept – what was it, twenty (
twenty
?) years ago. The sloping lawn declined from the house, the wide border against the wall, even most of the trees were unchanged. One or two had
blown down, one or two had been planted; the rest continued in their apparently ageless prime. This morning there was a heavy white mist above the crystallized grass; the sun was like an enormous
frozen firework. There might well be fog, and Emma’s train would be late. She put on her mules, and clacked downstairs for the post.

There was one letter. She knew the writing immediately, but it was still an extraordinary shock, and she simply held it for a long time in a kind of mindless amazement, before going upstairs to
open and read it.

CHAPTER 3

DAN

H
E
woke to the pulverizing roar of the washing machine, which seemed to be operating in or on his outer ear. His mouth was
like slimy gravel and his eyes like small pieces of scorching plush. The thin, jazzy curtains were letting in light of a second-rate kind and he could hear kids outside. He heaved himself up, found
he’d been sleeping with his head pressed against the rotten little cardboard wall – because the bloody machine noise got less at once – and waited to see whether the inside of his
head was going to keep still or not. Tea was what he craved: a good strong pot of tea, but she wouldn’t hear if he yelled; you got privacy these days with machine noises instead of properly
built houses. Nevertheless, he yelled – once – just to see if he still could, and while the noise was still bucketing through his head like some rocks being chucked down hill, she came
in, her face all pursed up with ready-made shock.

‘Sir Walter Scott awake! Well what a surprise! Do you happen to know the time by any chance incidentally?’

‘I don’t,’ he said carefully, ‘happen to have it on me. Oh go on, Dottie – be a sport – make us some tea.’

‘You needn’t think you’re getting it in bed.’ She twitched back the curtains and began a kind of useless, irritable tidying of the room, which meant, he knew, that she
was nervous as well as angry.

‘Look, Dot. You can say anything you like to me if you’ll just get the tea first.
Don’t
do that to my books.’ She was throwing them into his cardboard brown
suitcase which lay by the settee on which he was wedged.

‘You’re a nice one to worry about what other people do with
your
property: it comes well from you that kind of fuss after your lazy
sodden
uproar last night with people
banging on walls, and that cat one floor down asking me whatever was the matter last night.’

‘Don’t answer her – lazy bitch – she’s not worth your golden breath.’

‘I didn’t say: “It was nothing, Mrs Green, only my brother got drunk and beat up my husband before my own eyes”.’ She left the room on this, and he heard the
washing machine stop and taps being run.

Oh dear oh dear, he thought. It was a bit hard on poor old Dot – he didn’t care a bugger what Alfred thought of it; it was Dottie he loved – his favourite sister – in
fact none of this would have happened if he hadn’t been so shocked at what Dot had got herself into. Alfred was a little security-loving pipsqueak with no more go in him than a waterlogged
ball in the cut. He swung his legs over the settee, and while waiting for his head to subside, looked gloomily round the room. Everything about it seemed terrible to him: the walls covered with
three kinds of fidgety wallpaper, the heavily varnished bilious walnut furniture, the art mirror with a wrought-iron frame, the paper flowers nasty, greedy overfed-looking roses in the green vase
shaped like a girl wearing a transparent dress which she held up in a festoon on one side, the chair covers made of something which looked like waitresses’ greasy hair-ribbons machined
together, the zigzag mottled buff tiles where there wasn’t a fireplace, and the semi-circular rug – a cubic design in pea-green, saxe and old gold – the telly, the wedding
pictures in chrome frames, the mags which were all Dot read now she was married and the collection of Disney china animals, the streaky carpet – modern again – as Dot had proudly
pointed out, black, yellow, red, grey, black, yellow, red, grey, black . . .