Life was lovely for Julia just now. She was not making enough money to be able to leave home, but she had enough ascendancy over her parents to prevent them becoming dictatorial. All the world was loving a lover just then—even at hours when men in uniform were not supposed to be served with intoxicants, a waiter would pour out the drink that had been demanded; not that sex, youthful and unspoiled, often demanded a drink. Young men and girls like Alfie and Julia were too interested in each other to need any further intoxication. Everywhere couples were gazing into each other’s eyes over a cup of tea, and feeling the stirrings of desire at any hour of the day without artificial assistance. Julia and Alfie cared not at all if a meal of bacon and eggs was all that they could obtain.
One day Julia received at the shop a wire from Alfie asking her to meet him at Appenrodt’s, in the Strand, that evening. She hurried away as soon as she could get free, but he was there before her. He looked, she thought, as she caught sight of him, a little different from usual, more alive, and yet somehow a little unnatural.
She stayed looking at him for a moment while he was still unaware of her presence, feeling as though she were looking at someone in the unconsciousness of sleep; you saw a person quite differently if he didn’t know you were there, and her heart said suddenly very gently, over and over, “Alfie, Alfie.”
She felt a sudden intense tenderness for his small brown face with the high cheek-bones; his rather too long round neck, his narrow dark eyes. He looked as though he was standing staring out at the future instead of at the crowded Strand, and he seemed young and terribly vulnerable, helpless in the face of what might be coming towards him. She knew suddenly that he was going to tell her that he had been ordered to France.
He did tell her, over the cups of thick chocolate, with whipped cream on the top, which Julia as a rule so particularly loved.
“I can get leave next week, just before we go,” he said, and their eyes met. He paid for their meal and they went to a cinema. They sat silently holding hands—afterwards he saw her home.
It was a damp, warm evening; there had been a shower which brought out the smell of earth and leaves, so that Two Beresford gave the impression of being in the heart of the country. They clung together under the sycamore tree.
“Julia, Julia,” murmured Alfie blindly, into the warmth and softness of her neck. “You’ll give me that night, won’t you? you’ll manage it. Surely you can arrange it somehow?”
Julia, heart thumping, all resistance gone, could only say: “How can I? What can I say at home?”
“You can arrange it somehow. It’s my last chance, Julia. I’ll marry you on my first leave if you want me to. I won’t let you down, I swear it, and nothing will happen. I won’t let you in for anything.”
“Oh, it’s not that,” murmured Julia, with whom it was most undoubtedly “that,” though she would not admit it.
“What is it then? Don’t you want to?”
“I don’t know. … Yes, I do, I suppose I do. But honestly, Alfie, I don’t see how I can manage it.”
“Say you’re going to spend the night with Ruby. I’ll tip her the wink, she won’t let you down.”
“Well …” Julia hesitated. Of course, she was afraid of having a baby, what girl wasn’t? Your lover told you he would arrange all that, but did he? How was one to know? It was all very well for tarts and girls who had been there before, and even they, she heard, sometimes got caught; but how was she to know whether it was safe or not? Even so far, Alfie had had to explain every step of the way to her, although she felt sure that she did things that her mother and grandmother had never dreamed of doing, even with the men to whom they were married. It seemed to her sometimes that no one could ever have felt the sharp ecstasies that Alfie had taught her. How could the secret fumblings, the half-ashamed realisations of her forebears be weighed against them, or else, why should she have been kept in ignorance, as though there had been a conspiracy to shut off from her the knowledge that there was such a lovely sensation? It was as though love were a secret that had been forgotten, and which, thanks to the genius of Alfie, she had been privileged to recapture.
“Julia, Julia,” murmured Alfie again, and he caught her against him, pressing kisses upon her mouth. It seemed to her that her body turned to water within his arms and her strength went out of her. She wanted Alfie more than she wanted anything on earth. Alfie lifted his head, and she looked up at him, dimly discerning the deeper darkness of his eyes through the darkness of the night.
“I’ll see,” she whispered.
“Promise, promise.”
“All right. I’ll manage somehow. You’re sure nothing could happen?”
“I swear it: nothing.”
Julia disengaged herself. Her legs felt weak and she found she was trembling a little.
“I must go now, Alfie, it’s ever so late.”
He saw her to the gate without speaking, and she let herself in, to meet the querulous enquiries of her mother. Mrs. Almond had the acrid jealousy of the elderly woman who has never been satisfied, who has borne the pains of motherhood without any preliminary ecstasy.
“Where have you been, my girl?”
“Up West,” said Julia warily, “to see Ruby’s show, if you really want to know, and then I had a little supper with her afterwards.”
“Well, I don’t like your coming home so late. It isn’t right.”
“Oh, Mum, what nonsense. Everyone does it. I can’t be in by ten if I go to a theatre, can I?”
“That’s all very well,” grumbled Mrs. Almond, “having a good time’s all you think about.”
“That’s not true,” said Julia. “I work so hard, and you know I do. As to enjoying myself, it wasn’t very amusing for me playing gooseberry for Ruby and her young man, and the worst of it is, I’ve promised to do it again. Ruby’s got her best boy coming to town for the last night of his leave, and she’s giving a party for him. There’ll probably only be her dull old uncle for me.”
Julia had already explained away Ruby’s friend, Mr. Gordon, to Mr. and Mrs. Almond, in an avuncular capacity.
She turned to go up to bed, yawning slightly. “I’ll probably stay the night with her,” she added, “at the flat. Catch me coming all the way back here at about three in the morning and having to be at business at nine.”
“Your Dad won’t like your being out all night,” complained Mrs. Almond, but accepting the suggestion as a truthful one, Julia was glad to notice.
“Dad will have to lump it,” said Julia, and went to bed.
But there was a thing called a “Push,” and that officer and gentleman, the trusty and well-beloved of King George, known as Second Lieutenant Alfred Safford, was sent off to France at a moment’s notice, before he could make an honest woman of Julia. The night that she was to have spent with him in an hotel in Oxford Street, he lay, his peaked face upturned, swept with the green and white of the Verey lights, and then pale with dawn, amidst a tangle of barbed wire. He lay there for many days disintegrating, while Julia, all unknowing that the flesh which had awakened hers breathed no more, walked desperately back and forth across the Park, and her own flesh cried out in frustration.
At last Ruby rang her up at the shop and told her the news, and Julia sat stunned for a while. Luckily no customer came in and Marian was out. Gipsy, noting her pallor, said: “Anything wrong, child?” Julia nodded. “That friend of mine, you know him, Ruby Safford’s cousin? He’s killed. She rang up to tell me.”
Gipsy made her a cup of tea and sent her home, but Julia could not bear to go home. She walked about till she was tired—the walks they had so often taken together, down through Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, then all the way to Hammersmith Broadway, down the High Road, up through Heronscourt Park, back and forth until suddenly she was so tired she sat upon a seat by the little lake where she and Alfie had often sat, and wondered how she was to man
age the short distance to Two Beresford.
She sat quietly through supper, merely telling her parents briefly that her friend Ruby was very upset—her young man had been killed. Yes, the young man who had been going to spend the last night of his leave at Ruby’s party and who had been sent to France instead. She went up to bed early, turned out the light, and tried to sleep. She thought she would be able to cry, but no tears came.
She was sorry for Alfie, dreadfully sorry—it seemed such a shame, but she was not heart-broken, she was shocked. And as she lay in her bed, there suddenly flashed into her mind the realisation that she might at this moment have been in far worse trouble. Alfie might not have gone until after that night they had arranged to have together, and, in spite of his promises, she would now have been feeling very frightened. … In that dreadful walk, all the way from George Street to Two Beresford, something finer than this relief had held her mind—the thought that Alfie had gone away without possessing that after which he had lusted, and that now he could never have. During those hours it had seemed to Julia that the only thing that mattered was that she had not been able to give him what he wanted. Alfie, poor Alfie. … But now, in the darkness of her own room, she felt relief. She did not realise how she was going to miss him.
Julia remembered Alfie not only with her body, but with her mind. She thought of him in a way that hitherto she had only thought of Bobby, with a mingling of affection and tenderness that made her pitiful. She remembered him more sharply with her senses, where he had lit a fire that smouldered to her great dis-ease. She grew irritable and nervous. The first Zeppelin raid, that took place a few weeks after Alfie’s death, was supposed to account for this. As a matter of fact, Julia loved the raid, it was excitement at last, something that could take her out of herself and satisfy her craving for a keener edge of life.
But the raid that stimulated Julia made Mrs. Starling a very sick woman. Her delicacy had never been a pretence; her heart, as well as her digestion, made her life a martyrdom. Herbert showed at his best during the weeks that she was growing more and more ill. He thought for her in little ways that he had not before, tried to make less noise when he came in, and ceased to assure her that she could really manage to eat tinned salmon perfectly well if she chose. Mr. Starling had been one of those who panicked about food supplies at the outbreak of war, and had filled the flat with tinned supplies of every description, which he had been trying to force his friends to eat ever since.
The little supper-parties followed by whist ceased to be held at Saint Clement’s Square, though Mr. Starling still sometimes came round of an evening to Two Beresford, and helped Mr. Almond in the garden. It took his thoughts off, he said. Julia hardly noticed when he came. She was working harder than ever at the shop, for Marian had suddenly decided to join a woman friend who was already driving an ambulance at what was called the Front by people at home, though in reality it was many miles behind the lines. Like Julia, Marian had grown nervy and irritable, though from a different reason. Billy bored her thoroughly when home on leave and now he had added to his sins by being shot down and taken prisoner. There he would be, in Germany, till the end of the war, and all that was left to Marian was the trouble of sending parcels and writing letters. Better to have him home on leave than that. Why hadn’t she waited a little longer before marrying? She couldn’t divorce Billy, or get him to divorce her while he was a prisoner, and the war might go on for years. … So she went to drive an ambulance and see if she could be more interested “out there” than she succeeded in being on the home front.
Julia worked very well with Gipsy, who promoted her to twelve shillings a week. In addition to being a showroom girl, she now sometimes “modelled” as well, whenever there was a dress show, or an important customer wanted to see a lot of frocks. The wonderful soldier of her dreams never came in, however, and when she turned and swayed down the room head high, hand on hip, presenting her pelvis to the audience in the correct fashion, there were only women to see her. Still, the shop absorbed all her conscious attention. It was only on days off, or in buses and trains, or in the park with Bobby, that her other life, that of her imagination, took charge of her. More and more this dream-life became the chief thing by which she lived; it was more real to her than the commonplace of every day. The dreams varied—sometimes she was in the Secret Service, and did something so wonderful that she was sent for to Buckingham Palace and thanked by the King; sometimes Lord Kitchener fell in love with her—That’s the only woman I’ve seen that I could love, he would say. Sometimes it was just a young lieutenant, with nothing much but his pay, but who was a wonderful lover, whom she married secretly, and who would come back and claim her after the war, and meanwhile wrote her the sort of love-letters that became famous, the sort you read about in history.
Meanwhile the summer dragged on, autumn came, and with it an air-raid in which forty-one civilians were killed—and if you counted Mrs. Starling, who died a few days later of shock, forty-two. Hers was the first funeral Julia had ever attended, and in its way it was as thrilling as Marian’s wedding. Gipsy gave her a black frock out of stock, a frock which had failed to sell. It was rather romantic to be in black, to drive to the cemetery behind the hearse, and to know that for the passers-by you had the importance of being a mourner.
In sober truth, few people can have been less mourned than poor Mrs. Starling. She had been an invalid since her marriage, and what faint attractiveness might once have been hers had vanished early. Herbert thought he was sorrow-struck, because he was a bereaved husband, and so sorrow was a matter of common decency. Herbert’s sister, Bertha Starling, whom Julia met for the first time at the funeral, made very little pretence at regret. For the Almonds, it had always been the bluff, friendly Herbert and not the pallid Mrs. Starling who had been the attraction.
After the funeral everyone went to Saint Clement’s Square for what Mr. Starling called “a cold collation.” There was a ghostly quality about the function that impressed Julia to the point of excitement. For one thing, she discovered she had never been so hungry in her life, although she had had a good breakfast, and no hard morning’s work. At the shop often she didn’t manage to get lunch at all, and the fact never worried her. Now, in spite of a shamed feeling that it oughtn’t to be so, she ate and ate, only hoping that no one observed the fact. She ate cold chicken and ham and tongue and potato salad and chutney and bread and cheese and cake, and the more she ate the hungrier she seemed to be. The sherry was rich and dark and she drank it in sips after satisfying her thirst with water. And everything, food, water, and sherry, seemed so good to her palate and that hungry void within her, that only the fact that it was a funeral and she was Julia Almond, prevented her asking for more, and from picking up the chicken-bones in her fingers as everyone did at Two Beresford on the rare occasions when they could have chicken.
And, in spite of her avidity, there was to Julia something ghostly and odd about this feast. She had only been to this house for parties. The parties had sometimes bored her, and sometimes amused her, but always the occasion had been, officially at least, a party. This, too, was a party, but with a dead presence at the head of the board. Strange that someone who in life had been so unnoticeable that she hardly seemed to be in the room, should now make herself felt so insistently. Was it perhaps the fact that nobody really mourned her which made conscience uneasy?
“Well,” said Herbert Starling, with a sort of melancholy satisfaction, as he wiped his lips, “there’s one comfort at least, and that is the doctor says she’d have got much worse if she’d lived; there was a growth, he said, but he didn’t tell her about it, because with the state of her heart he really hoped that she’d pass away without ever knowing.”
Julia glanced up from her coffee, intercepting a glance that Bertha Starling was just giving Herbert, who remained all unconscious of it, but in one of those sharp moments of clarity that flash across the consciousness, Julia could read the thought behind
Bertha’s hard little eyes, that were like flecks of steel in her long bony countenance. Julia knew, as plainly as if Bertha had spoken aloud, exactly what was her opinion of her brother’s late wife; tiresome, inefficient, a drag upon poor Herbert.
Bertha was ten years older than her brother, and after the death of their mother, when Herbert was only eight, had superintended his life until the pale girl, daughter of the local minister, had ensnared him. Bertha had lost Herbert then, now it would not be her fault if she did not recapture him.
Suddenly Julia ceased to hunger, and felt she had really eaten too much. She yawned a little and wished she were at home—for she had the day off—to go up to her room and sleep. She hadn’t been sleeping very well at night lately, but the older people were still talking together, sympathising with Herbert in his loss, discussing symptoms—his symptoms, he’d been having indigestion lately—and advising remedies. Herbert, for the first time for years, was able to feel a little ill himself, no longer being overshadowed by a professional invalid. Like many healthy persons, he was by nature inclined to be nervous about his condition, but it had been no good indulging in this luxury up till now.
A Pin to See the Peepshow Page 13