“That’s all right then. Why, you don’t know you’re born yet, my girl. It’s yes, then?”
“Oh, I suppose so,” said Julia, and this time she held up her face. Herbert kissed her differently, clumsily and gently, and she liked him better than she ever had before.
“We won’t wait long,” he murmured. “You’re not set on marriage in church, are you, or anything like that?”
“I’m not, but Mum might be.”
“Oh, that doesn’t matter. When can I see you to-morrow?”
“I don’t know. I can’t tell you. We’re dreadfully busy just now.”
“Well, can’t you lunch?”
“Oh no, I never can say about lunch. Sometimes we never get any.”
“Well, I’ll ring you up then.”
“No, you mustn’t do that. They don’t really like me being rung up at the shop. Call for me after six, and I’ll come away with you if I can. Don’t come in. I’ll look out of the window about six.”
Herbert grumbled a little … keeping him hanging about all day, and then standing in the street like an errand-boy … but there it was, she would have her way.
She fitted her key into the front door, and there on the top of the Bridge of Sighs, Herbert kissed her again, more greedily this time. Julia nodded at him, and pushed him gently back with her outspread fingers against his face. His breath felt hot against her palm. She shut the door between them, and went upstairs to find Bobby sunk in sleep on Elsa’s bed.
There were, of course, things to be talked over, and Julia found herself as business-like as she was at the shop. She wouldn’t, she said quite frankly, marry Herbert if Bertha were to live with them, neither would she—and here Herbert was terribly shocked—share a bedroom with him. She didn’t tell him it was a room to herself that was beckoning her, particularly that lovely room in Saint Clement’s Square, with the tall windows, cut into large square panes, and the window-boxes, and the view of the drooping trees and the broken statue of Apollo striking his dumb lyre in the midst of them.
“You can come and see me when you want to,” said Julia firmly, “but I’m a very light sleeper”—this was totally untrue—“and men snore, at least Dad did, and I’m sure you do. After all, you slept in your present room all the last months you were. …” She stopped. She didn’t like to say: “All the last months you were married to your wife.”
Herbert looked down at her, his expression a mingling of indulgence and irritation. “Oh, well,” he said, “I suppose you’ll have to have it your own way.”
In spite of Mrs. Almond’s tearful objections, the marriage took place at the Registrar’s, much to Julia’s relief after she had read the wedding service. The things they wanted you to say. …
She felt funny enough the morning of her marriage as it was. She awoke in a state of panic, feeling that she couldn’t go through with it. She sat up in bed and stared across her room at the saucy little face upon the pillow opposite, a face purged now of its impertinence by unconsciousness, the face of a child. Lucky Elsa, not having to be married this morning. … And yet, she supposed, lucky Julia, to be going to be married to what Dad had always called a good solid man, who loved her, and was taking her away from this dreadful Two Beresford; where Uncle George boomed, and Aunt Mildred organised everyone almost out of existence, and Elsa was always altering her performances and being a different sort of little girl, none of them real, and Mum was tearful and sycophantish by turns.
And as to marriage itself … well, Julia had picked up fragments of knowledge here and there, and had no reason to believe, taught as she had been by her own and Alfie’s youth and ardour, that it would be anything dreadful. True, she hadn’t had those exquisite and almost terrifying physical sensations she had had while yet a virgin with Alfie, but then there was no reason why she should have had; Herbert’s hands had been respectful. Marriage would bring those. And she did want them; she admitted that to herself at last. She had wanted them, had ached for them, ever since Alfie had taught her. Only lack of any strong temptation, combined with hard work, and the interest and exhaustion of hard work, had kept her what was called “straight.” Marriage would satisfy all that. It wasn’t as though Herbert repulsed her in any way; he didn’t. So when he started to make love to her, all would be well.
Julia was given a week’s holiday for the honeymoon. Miss Lestrange and Mrs. Danvers had both been ever so nice about it, and had given her quite a little trousseau out of stock—a set of crêpe de Chine underclothes and a night-gown and a pink charmeuse wrapper and pink mules with ostrich-feathers curling all about them, that tickled her ankles but looked lovely. Her simple grey satin frock had been made in the workroom, and Mrs. Santley herself had made the little grey felt hat with the imitation ospreys curving like prawns round about it. The work-girls had given her a grey bag to match the get-up. Mum had given her her going-away coat, of squirrel-dyed coney, that looked almost like real. Mum had bought it out of Dad’s insurance, and had explained between her tears that it made it seem partly like a present from Dad, too. Uncle George and Aunt Mildred, in their relief, had stumped up a good cheque—twenty-five pounds. Even Bertha, furious and full of forebodings, had at last been prevailed upon by Herbert to behave decently and give an electro-plate and glass epergne of great hideousness. Julia laughed to herself whenever she thought of the ejection of Bertha from Saint Clement’s Square.
Julia bathed and dressed herself with care, adding the touch of rouge that made all the difference to her looks, which were those of gleam and glow, not the true beauty of bone that remains as a beautiful mask throughout life. Elsa watched her protestingly. Rouge! She was sure Mummy wouldn’t like it, nor Auntie either. Julia laughed. What did she care? She felt better about the marriage now she was dressed.
Uncle George did things well, she had to hand him that. A car had been hired for the occasion, and he himself wore his best suit, with a white slip in his waistcoat. At the Registrar’s, however, he was outshone by Herbert in uniform. Elsa carried a bouquet, a smaller replica of Julia’s, and looked exceedingly pleased with herself, and pretty in her unexciting way, in the pale blue that Julia’s education at l’Etrangère’s had taught her to dislike, but which Aunt Mildred thought so sweet for a young girl. The Registrar’s office was a bleak place, with walls painted dark brown below and a dingy cream above.
It was rather terrifying, the swiftness with which the ceremony was over, there seemed to be no one point at which she could have arrested it if she had suddenly been overtaken by panic. Almost before she knew it was over, the Registrar was shaking her by the hand and saying: “Allow me to wish you the best of luck, Mrs. Starling.” Mrs. Starling! … that had been the thin, pale-faced woman with the pompadour of faded hair and the gold pince-nez. … It surely couldn’t be Julia. … She looked down at the ring on her finger and up at the flushing face of Herbert. Mrs. Starling … no longer Julia Almond. It was as though, in some curious way, she had ceased to exist.
vi
Marriage
Julia sat in the train opposite Herbert, who had fallen asleep. As they were no longer starting for a honeymoon, but returning from one, Herbert hadn’t tipped the guard so as to ensure privacy, and a fat, elderly gentleman, with respectable-looking side-whiskers, shared her compartment, rather to Julia’s relief. The journey from Hampshire to London alone with Herbert would have seemed longer had they been alone together; people who had been on supposedly intimate terms for a week would have felt the necessity to try and make the time pass pleasantly. As it was, she could read Home Chat and Home Notes, and the rest of the ephemeral literature with which Herbert had provided her, without the uneasy consciousness that she ought to be paying attention to her husband.
Her husband. … That was funny, to look at Herbert and reflect that he was her husband. What did it mean exactly, this thing that had happened to her by means of the person called Herbert Starling? What did it all
amount to? What was the sum of the past week?
It hadn’t been wholly dullness, though she had often felt dull enough to scream. It certainly hadn’t been pleasure, or even excitement. Not even peace, although she thought she might have expected peace in marrying a kind, well-to-do man like Herbert. He possessed the power, so she had thought, to solve all her problems for her. Now it seemed to her he had solved none, but only presented her with a different set. Was it possible that, to avoid sleeping with Elsa, she had agreed to sleep with Herbert? He swore he would stick by the pact they had made of separate bedrooms at Saint Clement’s Square, but had jovially insisted that the honeymoon was different.
It had, indeed, been different. The only time she had felt at peace had been after lunch, when Herbert liked to have a little sleep, and she had been free to walk over the sand-dunes, past the little bungalows and along the edge of Poole Harbour.
Not that Herbert hadn’t been kind. He had. But her body still felt battered as well as her soul. Apparently a man didn’t necessarily give a woman the sensations she craved, although he attained them for himself. That pleasant, rather dull-looking man opposite, with that slight air of foolishness that everyone has who sleeps with his mouth slightly open, was the strange man with whom she had passed that first devastating night, who had assaulted her, apparently without any thought of her own sensations.
Julia glanced away from Herbert to the fat old gentleman with the side-whiskers who was reading the Financial Times. Had he, too, been a wild beast in his day, and mixed the whole thing up with a sort of sentimental possessiveness? She supposed so. One looked at people in buses and trains, when their bodies were quiescent and their minds somewhere else, in a book or a newspaper, or behind them at the place they had left, or before them at the place they were going to, and they seemed harmless enough, and so they were while you were looking at them—but what hadn’t those apparently tranquil bodies harboured? Souls that had been jealous and angry and afraid and envious, even murderous, and the bodies themselves had been passionate, intemperate, greedy, agonised. People you saw in the buses and trains weren’t really themselves at all, only the quiescent ghosts of what they had been, and what they might still be again.
Perhaps Alfie would have proved unsatisfactory. She knew he would have been selfish, probably unfaithful. But she thought of his expert caressing hands, and of Herbert’s uncompromising attack, and wished that she had known more about the art of love.
Oh well, it wasn’t any good bothering now. Herbert would be leaving her to-morrow, anyway. She supposed she’d have to go through it again to-night, and then there’d be the peace and comfort of Saint Clement’s Square. She’d be her own mistress in her own flat. She could take Bobby for a little walk, leave him with Emily the maid, who adored him, go back to l’Etrangère’s, and take up her work as though it had never been interrupted. She would be Miss Almond again; how heavenly that would be.
Julia leaned back in her corner and opened Home Notes, studied the fashions, read the short story. There were a man and a girl in the story. They were in love … there were difficulties which came right in the end. Love … this sort of thing she read about. Did it exist? Ought she to have waited and given it another chance? After all, she’d always believed in it. She’d read books about nothing else since she could remember anything. It was really Alfie who had spoiled her certainty, Alfie who had given her such divine sensations, but whom she knew she hadn’t loved in the story-book acceptance of the term. Julia turned to the correspondence column. Someone called Daisy had written to ask “Isabel’s” advice, and “Isabel” gave it to her with her usual sound measure of common sense.
“Ask him why he has suddenly become so casual in his manner when other people are present,” wrote “Isabel.” “Possibly someone has been making mischief. Whatever the trouble, there is no remedy as satisfactory as a good friendly talk, but be very careful not to let it degenerate into a ‘scene.’”
Could she have a good, friendly talk with Herbert? Quite impossible. Herbert, except when he wished to ask for the fulfilment of certain simple needs, was very inarticulate. If Julia tried to explain herself to him, he would only laugh and pat her on the shoulder, and suggest a nice bit of dinner and bed. That had been Herbert’s recipe for happiness all this week, varied by a nice bit of lunch and bed. She supposed she was lucky that he had consented to have the after-luncheon bed to himself.
Julia returned to Home Notes. Here was “Mopsa.” “Isabel” advised her not to wait too long for marriage, but the winter was always an expensive time, and winter would soon be coming on, and, after all, fifty shillings a week wasn’t much to marry on. What about just waiting for the spring, when “Mopsa’s” boy might be making more? There were so many good jobs nowadays for men who were too delicate to get into the army, and what about “Mopsa” herself trying to make something, most girls worked nowadays, so that she could put a bit by to help furnish the nest?
If Julia had waited. … Well, she supposed she could have lived on thirty shillings a week, though how she would have arranged for Bobby she didn’t know. Anyway, her nest was already furnished with the rather dreadful furniture that had been Herbert Starling’s and Mrs. Starling’s, but at least it was solid, and there was something in Julia that appreciated the solid things of life—security, mahogany, good insurance, a regular salary, an assured position. The other half of Julia wanted danger and excitement and romance.
Well, she reflected, gazing at Herbert as his own snoring woke him up with a sudden jerk, she was done with these last three things for ever, except, perhaps, the danger implicit in child-bearing, and Herbert had promised her that till the war was over this should not be hers. Besides, Julia had asked Anne how to prevent “anything happening,” just in case Herbert was careless or deliberately dishonest. For some men, Julia knew, thought they had got hold of you for life if you had a baby.
“Judging from what you tell me,” wrote “Mrs. Jim” of Home Chat, “I would say that you and this widower are particularly well-suited to each other, and stand every chance of happiness. If you are sure there is sufficient trust, respect and affection between you, why worry? As you were born in August, your lucky day is Sunday, your colours green, orange and brown, your stone the sardonyx, and your number thirty-four.”
Well, she hadn’t been born in August, her birthday was in July, and, anyway, she’d look awful in brown and orange, and what was a sardonyx? But otherwise it did seem to apply to her and Herbert. Only what exactly was trust, respect and affection? She supposed she was fond of Herbert, and he was greedy for her. Affection … that was something that grew; perhaps it would grow between them. Trust and respect. … Here she was more lost even than with affection. Herbert was a decent sort. He was honest about money. She knew they thought a great deal of him at his place of business. He had been kind and, Julia thought, probably faithful, to the dull, ailing Constance, so it was presumed he would be kind and faithful to her. But trust and respect. … Respect for what? Trust to do what? She didn’t really know how Herbert would behave in any crisis, any more than Julia knew how she would behave.
She had to let Herbert sleep with her that night, but he sank to sleep at last, pleased with life. And to-morrow she would be Julia Almond again.
vii
End of an Era
It was very pleasant being Julia Almond during the weeks that followed. Herbert was away. Bertha had retired to the dry bosom of that family where she had been a “P.G.” until her brother had become a widower, and Julia lived through what were, perhaps, the happiest weeks of her life. She had Bobby, she had a maid, she was busy and appreciated at the shop, and on Sundays she could either go to Two Beresford in the character of a prosperous young bride, or Two Beresford could come to her with obvious envy in its eyes. And there were even better things. There were evenings spent talking with Dr. Ackroyd and Anne, evenings when again Julia caught glimpses of those unattainable ideals w
hich she had first realised at the Polytechnic, and which still had the power to stimulate her.
Sometimes she and Anne would go to the pit of a theatre, and then Julia tasted again of the romantic life which, whenever she met it, absorbed her utterly.
Julia’s life, through those last months of the war, seemed to her exquisitely arranged. She had given up any notion of the war ever coming to an end. Like most other people, she seemed to be suspended in a space where time was not. Nobody thought in terms of time any longer. This was life as they had always known it. It seemed to be life as it always would be. Marian, Gipsy, Mrs. Santley, the work-girls, the wholesale people, the travellers, the customers, Darlings and otherwise, Ruby and Ruby’s affairs, Mum, Uncle George, Aunt Mildred and Elsa, Dr. Ackroyd and Anne, and Herbert, in so far as she was aware of him in his chatty and rather dull letters, made up the personal element of her life.
Not a very exciting life, perhaps, for a young woman of twenty, but marriage had not taken away from Julia that sub-conscious hope of a glory yet to come. She didn’t put it to herself in plain terms, she didn’t say: After all, I may still fall in love, everything may change. She was simply content to go on as she was because, far ahead, perhaps, or perhaps only round the next corner, something lovely was waiting to happen. A letter might come, the telephone might ring, there were infinite potentialities in these two mundane happenings. In spite of the feeling that she had arranged her life, there still remained the possibility of something exciting, though quite what it might be, she didn’t envisage.
For the first time in her life her surroundings didn’t jar on her. … She heard no quarrelling, no utterances of discontent. The autumn evenings when she came back to the yellowing leaves and the mute Apollo pleased her senses, the mellow light that filled the Square, the evenings at the theatre with Anne, filled her imagination with the same glow. During the day-time, the hard work and successful deals done at business, stimulated and excited her. Her body, under the impression that, after all, there was very little in this business of making love, left her alone, her mind was fully occupied, and her imagination was free to project itself into those fields peopled by the characters that walked upon the stage or across the pages of novels. She was content.
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