Herbert’s holiday, which was arranged to be at the same time as her own, was an anti-climax, after Paris, though they went to quite a good boarding-house at Southsea, almost a private hotel, for trade was booming more than ever—the peace seemed even better than the war. Bertha joined them, for as Herbert very reasonably said, it was bad enough for the poor old girl to have lost him again just when she had thought she had got him back; and if Julia wouldn’t have her to live with them at Saint Clement’s Square, which would have been much the most economical arrangement, then she must jolly well make the best of her during the holidays. Julia countered by paying for Mrs. Almond to go also. It was high time, she said, that poor Mum had a bit of a rest from slaving for the Beales and listening to Uncle George blustering away at her.
Julia hated Bertha by the time the fortnight had come to an end, and Bertha certainly disapproved of Julia. Indeed, Julia herself felt she was being a different person from the girl at l’Etrangère’s who could seem so quiet and distinguished, and different again from the glowing girl of Paris. With Herbert’s family and her own she became once more the Julia who was sometimes rowdy, who liked scandalising people, and drawing attention to herself in public in a way that she would have died sooner than do with Mrs. Danvers or René Imbert.
But what was she to do at this stuffy boarding-house, full of old people like Mum and Bertha … and Herbert? For Herbert did seem old, though he was only thirty-six. It had only been desiring Julia that had made him seem more alive, and now that she was married to him he no longer felt it incumbent on him to seem young or even considerate. His desire was of a different quality now; it no longer flamed, it smouldered with a domestic heat. He liked to be warmed, but not to be burned. Yes, he seemed to go better with Mum and that awful Bertha than with Julia, and she seemed to go better with the two young men in the boarding-house who taught her to play tennis, and used to take her on the pier. One of them even took her out in his side-car, much to Herbert’s annoyance.
Herbert and Julia had to share a bedroom at Southsea, because Herbert said he wasn’t going to pay for two rooms, and anyway people would think it funny it they didn’t share a room. Every night Herbert would scold Julia for her frivolous behaviour during the day, and Julia flared back at him.
“You make me tired the way you go on, Herbert; you’re stuffy, that’s what’s the matter with you, stuffy as that old sister of yours. I suppose she’s been putting you up to this?”
“I don’t know what you mean by ‘putting me up’ to anything. I can see for myself that you don’t know how to behave.”
“And you always do, I suppose? What about that time you came to fetch me out to dinner from the shop? Behaved more like a bear than a man.”
“And you liked it all right.”
“That’s not true. I hated it.”
Herbert laughed. “I know all about just how much you hated it. What did you marry me for?”
“Not for that.”
“I don’t know what you mean by ‘not for that,’ but I married you for what any man who is a man marries for, and for a well-run home and peace and quiet. Not to foot the bill for someone who rushes round all day with a couple of young bounders.”
“They’re no more bounders than you are, and they both fought in the war; didn’t just sit in an office miles behind the lines.”
“Oh, shut up. I’m sick of this. Get into bed.”
And sometimes he would turn his stout back on her, and without saying good night, go to sleep; sometimes he would perform that rite which, if ever they quarrelled about it, he called exercising his rights as a husband.
Winter came again, and Julia, as usual, had two terribly bad colds, and a slight one that went on and on. She was hardly recovered when she had to go to Paris again to buy the spring models.
Herbert couldn’t get leave from the Company. For one thing, trade showed signs of faltering, and it was far too soon for him to hope for another holiday. He didn’t worry, as he had worried the first time. That dark, domestic winter in Saint Clement’s Square, the ordinariness of colds and sore throats, and familiar surroundings, had all combined to make him less nervous. Besides, always in the back of his mind there was Julia’s description of the Paris agent, as small, pale and with a wooden leg.
She went with rather a sinking of the heart, for no one knew better than she that unless the weather were fine in Paris, she would no longer give the impression of the warm, vital Julia of the preceding summer. Also she found it more difficult to see, without the sharp shadows and bright contrasts of sunlight with which summer made the world more or less clear to her. Everything was a uniform shade of grey. She found it far more difficult to get about without glasses.
René was not waiting for her at the station. She felt a little twinge of disappointment. He was not at the hotel either, but there was a large bunch of flowers already arranged in water in her room, with a card bearing his name laid beside it.
She had hardly unpacked before the telephone rang.
“Is that Mademoiselle Almond?” said René’s voice.
“Yes.”
“Good evening, madame. It’s René Imbert speaking. Did you have a good journey? Would you be able to come out to dinner to-night?”
“Oh yes,” said Julia, feeling at once less tired and less plain than she had hitherto. “I’d love to if I shan’t have to dress.”
“Oh no, we will just go to some quiet little place. I will call for you at half-past seven. Is that all right?”
“Yes.”
“Au revoir till then.”
“Au revoir.”
They dined at a little restaurant in the Rue Blanche, and at once Julia felt herself, without any difficulty, becoming again the attractive young woman she had been before in René’s eyes. Even her cold cleared up and she ceased to have to blow her nose. For the first time she began to let flow towards René that quality of sex which was in her a gift. On her previous visit she had been too puzzled by him, and too interested in the new Julia he presented for her view. Now she felt self-confident and very much mistress of the situation. She could not know that to René’s logical mind she was giving him every reason to believe she meant to fulfil what her eyes promised; and, although his two years in England had given him a good deal of experience of the “respectable flirt,” he placed Julia above that order of chilly voluptuaries. Her excitement, which in reality was all about the dream Julia, and not at all about him, yet communicated itself to him. He kissed both her hands with more fervour than correctitude when he left her at the hotel.
The next day he was ill, with a sharp attack of the fever which had attacked him intermittently since the war, and Julia, though disappointed, soon forgot him in the thrill of exploring for herself and buying successfully alone. She found one or two smaller, cheaper, and more individual houses than those to which he had taken her. That night, alone and bored, suffering from a reaction from the exaltation of successful buying, she felt disturbed and unhappy. She wished to do her best by the shop, and still she hated to do René out of his commission. She could already see that by the time she got to know Paris a bit better it would be far more economical if she went about by herself, finding out places where even the wholesale people bought their goods, the places where everything was started. She could get the models, the hand-bags, and the underclothes more cheaply, and she wouldn’t have to pay an agent’s commission. But it would mean breaking with René—and somehow she knew he could have been a friend of a quality hitherto unknown to her … oh well, what was the good of worrying. Things would work out some way.
She was glad that her time in Paris was so short, and that on the last day there was nothing to do but finish up the business she had already transacted with René.
The last evening was very different from the first. René, well again, had looked forward to that dinner with interest and pleasure, but Julia was distraite.
Not till the wine and the flattery of his interest had begun to bring her to life did he catch a glimpse of the Julia of that earlier evening. And that glimpse was short-lived.
Julia glanced round the little room and noticed that she and René were the only two people who were not obviously lovers, for here were midinettes with their heads leaning against the shoulders of their best boys. Here people quite simply and naturally stooped to kiss; here the man’s arm was always round the waist of the girl dining with him, unless he actually needed that arm for using his knife and fork, when, with strict Latin logic, he removed it, cut his meat up into small pieces, replaced the arm round the waist of the loved one, and fed himself with the fork.
René followed her eyes, and with what seemed to Julia his uncanny knowledge, followed the processes of her mind as well.
“You see,” he said, “they’re all lovers here. It is quiet. There is no music. Who in heaven’s name first started the idea of music at meals? It must have been someone who knew nothing about music, still less about food, and least of all about conversation.”
“I thought music was supposed to …” Julia hesitated, “to sort of help when you were in love?” she continued lamely.
René laughed. “Oh, that is the English idea. In France you don’t even need wine. You need nothing. The beauty of making love is that it is what you call in England ‘a standing jump.’ We can do it from nothing. It is quite enough in itself.”
“But …” began Julia, and then stopped. She couldn’t go on in the English manner about “being in love.” Her mind clarified by the Vouvray they had drunk, she realised that René did not use the word “love” sentimentally. Yet the English mingling of the romantic and the respectable in her, which she owed to her upbringing and not to her own nature, made her unable to accept that nature’s true conclusion—the logical acceptance of passing pleasure which was René’s heritage.
“Now you, Mademoiselle Julia,” said René, “—pardon me the ‘mademoiselle,’ because here in Paris you are ‘Mademoiselle,’ apart from the fact that it seems to me that you have not been married at all—for you, love is not easy. As I told you before, you should have been born a Frenchwoman.”
“Yes, I remember,” said Julia, overcome by the interest of discussing herself, “and I remember that you said you couldn’t tell me why. But surely you can tell me now? We know each other well enough,” and she narrowed her short-sighted eyes at him, really so as to see him the better, though it looked to René as though at last she were beginning to play the game as he knew it.
“Because you were made for love,” said René. “That is a bad thing for an Englishwoman. To become a professional in that one thing is not well looked on in England. Here it is a different affair.”
Julia stared at him. “To become a professional? What do you mean?”
“Well,” continued René, rushing upon his fate, “in France you would have started, I hope, by having an amant de coeur … which is a part for which many men would have worked hard, believe me, mademoiselle. And that quality you have could not have gone unnoticed here in Paris. There would have been … whom shall we say? … a rich wine merchant, and then a millionaire. Yes, there would certainly have been a millionaire, and no more work for charming Mademoiselle Almond.”
Julia blushed slowly, but with intense violence. She felt the blood creep over her neck and face, and yet all the time in her mind there ran the thought: Now I can be offended. Now I can make an excuse not to deal with him any more, and that will be for the good of the shop. How lucky that I blush so easily. And something else, something truer and more honest within her was sorry for René, because she knew he was justified in what he had said. Because she knew that, shocked as her English middle-class blood had been at this matter-of-fact portrayal of her life, yet had she been French she knew that she would not have taken offence had it not been in her business interests to do so. She could be free now, free of René Imbert or any other agent. She could range Paris at will, going to the little places she had discovered, buying the very best things and paying no commission. L’Etrangère would profit as never before.
“You’re … you’re insulting me,” said Julia. “How dare you!” And then her sense of humour warned her that “how dare you” was a stupid thing to say—and more important still, that neither Marian nor Gipsy would ever have said it.
She opened her eyes wide, and René’s face swam like a large surprised balloon in front of her.
“I think it’s beastly,” she said energetically, flogging herself with her own words into belief of what she said. “All that you say about love. You don’t really mean loving, you only mean sleeping with someone. It’s horrible, all that!”
Her blush had told René where he had been mistaken. She was too encased in her upbringing to accept herself. Always the two would be at war, and this time, for some reason he did not comprehend, it was the upbringing that won. He bent his head politely.
“I’m very sorry,” he said. “I thought one could discuss anything with you. I was mistaken. Forgive me. Perhaps it is all in that little difference of phrasing. The English say ‘sleeping with’ when they mean they don’t sleep. We French say coucher avec, and we mean it. I ought to have known.”
“Yes, you ought to have known,” said Julia angrily, with the thought of l’Etrangère, and l’Etrangère’s benefit, held firmly in her mind; and yet in her innermost being feeling very ashamed of herself. “You ought to have known. Of course, I can’t have anything more to do with you; you understand that?”
“I understand, madame,” said René.
He called for the bill and sent her home in a taxi, paying the driver beforehand, and thus putting himself in a curious manner, thought Julia, in the right.
Julia went back triumphant to l’Etrangère. She was able to tell them that for the future she could manage without an agent, and she brought back with her better models and novelties than they had ever had before.
When after her first day’s work at the shop she returned to Saint Clement’s Square, she was able with more truth than usual to tell the sulky Herbert that she was too tired to have anything to do with him.
She took Bobby into her room with her and then she slept as she had not slept for years. It seemed to her that her life was laid out clearly before her at last. Saint Clement’s Square was just a place to sleep in. She must deal with Herbert somehow or other. Love, certainly not in the sense that René Imbert used it, was not for her. She wanted romance with her love. She wanted what she had read about in all the story-books ever since she could read at all. If she could not have that, she had, as a solid fact, l’Etrangère. She, and she alone, far better than even Gipsy, could build up the business until it was the most important dressmaking business in London. She loved even the business troubles that they had, because she had to fling herself into them and use her ingenuity and work hard. As for the rest of her life, it would continue to be in books and in the dream life that she imagined—and, after all, she would be so drugged with fatigue that that surely would be enough.
So the pattern of the days and months persisted; the damp pallors of spring, the uncertain gold of English summers, of which the chief interest to the Starlings, and thousands like them, was the probability of it being fair for “the holidays”; dim, burning autumn, that touched even Saint Clement’s Square to fire, through the evening mists; and the cold and wet of winter that seemed always like a dark tunnel which had to be traversed. In winter Julia’s sore throats and the rheumatism from which the ageing Bobby suffered were her chief worries. There were, of course, bright flashes, the sudden pleasures of little successes, visits to Paris … vague regrets. The tension of battling with the first slump, the pride in survival. Occasional theatres, lovely fabrics draped by her pleased fingers, fine sunny days. And always the feeling that life was all about her, and still more strongly the belief, not yet faded, that round the corner of th
e next little period of time, life, as she had always imagined it, still lay in wait for her.
Book Three
“The trouble with the present generation is that it has lost its sense of sin.”
Mr. Gladstone, circa 1870
The Dream
Time, felt rather than seen by Julia, as a pattern flying swiftly past her, went more slowly for Herbert. Julia had her creative work at the shop. Herbert had only the humdrum round to which he had been accustomed. Julia was given a rise in salary; Herbert asked for one, but very nearly got what he described to Julia as “the noble order of the sack” instead. Julia had her limited, but highly coloured, imagination as a field into which she could stray when she disliked the outer world of fact; Herbert had no such solace.
Thus all the time, two human beings, never at the best very close to each other, grew further and further apart, and in them both worked those strange and unknown ferments to which everyone is subject. Outwardly they were a respectable married couple; a husband considerably older than his wife, who both went to work every morning, and kept going a cosy little maisonette for home hours. Yet inwardly neither Herbert nor Julia corresponded to the description of them that their immediate friends—with the exception of Dr. Ackroyd and his daughter—would have given of them. Julia was a different person “up West,” and at home she withdrew into a book, or her own imagination. She never thought for a moment that she was just an ordinary, respectable wife and wage-earner. She still knew she was something wonderful.
Herbert only wanted to be an ordinary, decent husband and wage-earner; he distrusted the wonderful, and he only knew that his life had turned to nothing in his hands, like withered leaves. He had no joy in his wife, for whom he had once lusted so violently, and for whom he occasionally lusted still. He had anxieties in business, and he was jealous, perpetually jealous, of the strange thing in Julia that he couldn’t catch and pin down, but which he knew was there. He was jealous also, more simply and plainly, of her greater success, of her few years, and he was angered by the way she could always make him feel common and vulgar when she chose.
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