Love in the Valley

by Susan Napier

  Yet, watching them, Julia could detect no sign of deep-running passion between them, no silent strands of communication. She knew for a fact herself that Hugh was no stranger to voluptuary—he had proved that more than once. Julia couldn’t imagine Ann ever abandoning herself to feeling. She seemed to be the opposite of sensuous, filtering everything through her brain. Hugh was different. For real fulfilment he would require more from a woman than mere compliance, or intellectual stimulation. He needed a different kind of woman, one who could help cross-pollinate that rigidly departmentalised personality of his. Someone like me, Julia thought.

  One afternoon, as Julia rooted around in the weedy vegetable patch, searching for the tender remains of the brussels sprouts, she was caught off guard by the unexpected appearance of her arch rival, who rarely ventured out of the house unless in the passenger seat of the Maserati.

  ‘You enjoy gardening do you?’ she enquired in tones which equated it on a level with finger-painting.

  Julia arched her aching back and managed a thin smile, conscious of her grubby denims and old navy sweater with holes in the elbows. Ann wore one of her wool suits, knife pleats and all. At least her condescension didn’t extend to Julia’s skill in the kitchen. Thumbing her nose at fate she had surpassed herself in the last three days, producing ever more delectable and complicated dishes. Last night she had stunned everyone’s taste buds with her Maigret de Canard—thin slices of very rare duck served with béarnaise and bordelaise sauce—supplemented by a big tureen of green vegetables layered with scallops and hollandaise sauce. While they were still in a state of shock she had followed it up with her killer: pineapple flamed with Tia Maria served with vanilla ice-cream sprinkled with fresh-cracked pepper. The repast had pierced even Ann’s blasé facade. Hugh hadn’t commented, but he had eaten every bite and Julia had been reassured by his evident appreciation of the whole sensual experience.

  ‘You finish here in a couple of days, don’t you? Going back with everyone else?’ Ann asked, with a casualness belied by the fact she had actually sought Julia out.

  ‘Yes.’ Julia stabbed savagely at a sprout.

  ‘I’ll be staying on, of course, with Hugh. Just for a few days, to help with his book. Hugh and I are friends from way back.’

  ‘So Connie said,’ Julia forced out through numb lips. She should have seen this coming.

  ‘Did she?’ Julia could practically hear the wheels clicking. Does she think that Connie’s accepted the inevitable, on the strength of a few days’ visit? Does she think she’s in there with a chance? So why slog out here to hold a conversation with one of the educationally sub-normal? Hugh wouldn’t go as far as marrying her, would he? Perhaps he would, not because he couldn’t bear not to, but because it would be a practical way to protect himself from any future threat to his equilibrium. A marriage of convenience.

  ‘It was very good of you to help Hugh with his typing.’ Now Ann was being kind. The knife twitched in Julia’s hand. ‘He told me how you shut his hand in the door.’ She shuddered delicately. ‘He must have been rather annoyed. It was typical of him to let you work out your apology.’

  That puts me in my place. ‘Yes, wasn’t it. Actually he hit the roof when I did it. He yelled and cursed. I thought he was going to kill me.’ She opened her blue eyes to their most fearful wideness. The slight rigidity of the older woman’s expression told her she had struck a nerve. Ann had obviously never seen Hugh in one of his tempers. Only I can rouse him to that, thought Julia with satisfaction. ‘Then he practically twisted my arm to get me to do his typing. He’s so forceful and dominating; I love a man with a bit of fierceness in him.’ The last half of that statement was entirely truthful.

  ‘He has an extremely fine legal brain,’ Ann said firmly, dismissing this unlikely aspect of Hugh. She watched painfully as Julia clumped off the garden with her bucket and paused to scrape off the mud which clung to her extremely large gumboots. Jean Brabbage’s of course—her husband’s would be several sizes smaller!

  ‘You must realise that, to a man like Hugh, work is the central pivot to life.’ Did she lecture in this supercilious fashion? Julia wondered. ‘He needs the constant stimulation it provides for him, and he will always put it before everything else. That’s why he needs tranquillity to come home to, not a constant barrage of distractions. Naturally, in his position he also has to maintain a certain standard of responsibility, particularly if he’s planning a political career.’

  She went on and on as she followed a smouldering Julia back to the house, stressing the importance of Hugh’s career, and how clever he was. Strange how two women could see a single man so differently, Julia thought. Ann patently believed every word she said, and heartily approved of Hugh-the-automaton. But it was because Julia didn’t believe he was really like that that she loved him. Are we both projecting our own needs on to him? she worried. Does Hugh only exist as we perceive him? Or has he a separate existence which neither of us can see or understand? If she could see him, talk to him alone, she might be able to resolve some of her confusion.

  Chance was a fine thing. Hugh had perfected the art of avoiding people, and unwelcome confrontations. Julia was frustrated at every turn, but a brief conversation with Connie persuaded her to force the issue.

  ‘He’s not really serious about her, is he?’ Connie mourned to her, the day before the exodus from Craemar. ‘I mean, honestly, at least I used to be able to rely on Hugh’s predictability. Lately he’s been impossible. I thought perhaps you …’ she trailed off with unaccustomed delicacy, raising her eyebrows expectantly.

  Julia was warmed by her partisanship, but compelled to say: ‘I thought Ann was getting on rather well with all of you.’

  ‘And straining at the seams in the process,’ Connie said acidly. ‘She comes from an old family, you know, and silly as it seems in this day and age I think she feels that the Marlows are a little outré. She has these fantasies about Hugh … and you must admit it isn’t de rigueur for a New Zealand Prime Minister to have an actress for a mother and a rock singer for a brother.’

  Julia gave her a strained grin. ‘You sound as pompous as Hugh sometimes.’

  ‘I know, darling. Infectious isn’t it? But can you imagine Ann putting up with us on an in-law basis? And we see little enough of Hugh as it is.’

  ‘She sticks to him like glue!’ Julia burst out. ‘And he hardly ever talks to me anymore.’

  ‘She’s scared, poor thing. Not half as confident as she looks—though she’s got the hide of an armadillo, and an equal amount of sensitivity. Like me to draw her off for you, so you can sink a word in edgeways?’ She tossed out the invitation casually.

  ‘Would you? I mean … there’s something that needs to be said.’ She would explode like an over-heated pressure cooker soon, if she didn’t.

  ‘Of course there is,’ said Connie placidly. ‘This afternoon, after lunch.’ And at the nervous gleam in Julia’s eye: ‘I’ll be the soul of discretion, darling.’

  For once she was. As they rose from lunch Connie corralled her victim and bore her off to Michael’s study to read his play: ‘Being an English Honours, I’m sure you’re interested. It’s about the conflict between machines and man … there’s a marvellous part in it for me …’

  They had barely passed through the study door before Julia was upstairs, knocking tentatively at Hugh’s door.

  ‘Come in, Ann,’ came the call, and Julia was pleased to hear the barely disguised impatience. So Ann wasn’t welcome any time of the day or night!

  Her appearance earned her a double-take. ‘Julia!’ He recovered at once. ‘What do you want? I’m very busy.’

  ‘I’ll wait.’ She walked over to the fire, deliberately picking his wing chair to sit in, scuffing off her shoes and tucking her feet up.

  With a sigh he carefully capped his pen and laid it down, centring it precisely on the papers in front of him. But he made no move to get up. ‘What is it that’s so important?’

  ‘You. Me. Us.
And her. She’s a bore.’

  ‘Ann is extremely intelligent.’

  ‘And beautiful,’ agreed Julia. ‘An extremely intelligent, beautiful bore. The conversation must be riveting when you’re alone. Do you sit and stroke each other’s egos?’

  ‘Isn’t this a bit childish, Julia?’ he asked tightly. Julia wondered if she had struck a nerve.

  ‘On the contrary.’ She gave him a provocative look.

  ‘We’ve been over this …’

  ‘No we haven’t. You wouldn’t let us. You’d rather bury your head in the sand … or should I say hide behind one hundred per cent woollen skirts, imported, naturally,’ she parodied the drawl. ‘Why can’t you be honest with me?’

  He leaned back in his chair, eyes narrowed on her small face, purified by the white light of the spot above her head. ‘But I have been honest. You just won’t accept it. I admit that on an elemental level I find you attractive, but not overwhelmingly so, as Sunday night should have told you. Consider it a momentary aberration.’

  ‘Aberration, nothing!’ cried Julia, furious at his coolness. ‘And it wasn’t momentary either. We were both naked and in your bed. The only reason we aren’t lovers is because you’re afraid of the depth of your own desires. Or else you’re a virgin, which I doubt, from your expertise!’

  ‘Don’t make this harder than it is, Julia.’

  ‘I want to go to bed with you, you want to go to bed with me. I don’t see what’s so hard about that,’ she persisted, pushing small, clenched fists against her thighs. She mustn’t let him steamroll her.

  ‘Then you’re even more naive than I thought. What you want, I can’t give.’

  ‘What does it matter what I want? It’s what you want that matters,’ she cried, her voice thin and high.

  ‘Is it?’ He shifted sceptically in his chair, and it creaked mournfully. ‘How self-sacrificing of you. But I make it a rule not to have sex with women who believe themselves in love with me.’

  Have sex? Believe? How often did it happen, for God’s sake? Julia battled her rage. He was still avoiding the issue.

  ‘All right,’ she said gently. ‘Let’s pretend I’m not in love with you.’

  He removed his hands from the desk, hiding them behind the barrier of the desk. Julia remembered what it was like to have them drifting across her body, cupping her breasts, stroking a lazy path to her thighs. Oh, Hugh.

  ‘That’s not possible.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Haven’t you found solace already?’

  ‘What?’ Julia was bewildered by the harshness of the sudden accusation.

  ‘I saw you, the other night, coming out of Richard’s room.’

  ‘Spying?’ she demanded, her heart leaping. Was he jealous?

  ‘Passing by.’

  ‘You’re not going to bring up that hoary old groupie theory again, are you?’ she scoffed. ‘Richard and I aren’t lovers, never have been. He was trying to take my mind off your rotten behaviour. He knows I’m in love with you.’

  ‘No, Julia. You’re in love with some kind of image of me that you’ve created in your own head.’

  ‘God, I wish I was,’ said Julia fervently, having considered, and finally dismissed the idea herself. ‘A fantasy Hugh would be so much more accommodating than you are. I even love the beast in you.’

  He flinched. ‘And what about your pathetic attempts to thrust me into the bosom of my family? Isn’t that trying to make me someone I’m not. Trying to make me into the kind of man you expect to love?’

  ‘I’m not trying to change you. Just to discover who you really are. To help free you from whatever it is in your past that stops you from loving, or letting yourself be loved …’

  ‘What in the hell do you know of the past!’ His savage ferocity forced Julia back into her chair, even as he rose violently to his feet, his own chair crashing over with the movement. ‘I’ll say it again, Julia, I am what I am. Don’t meddle with what you don’t understand.

  ‘Stay out of my life! Keep your damned inquisitiveness to yourself!’

  ‘It’s not inquisitiveness!’ Julia wasn’t afraid. She preferred this to his punishingly logical calmness. ‘It’s because I care. I know you didn’t have a very happy childhood—’

  He gave a hoarse laugh. ‘I don’t need your pity, Julia, any more than I need your love,’ he ground out. ‘Don’t feel sorry for me. I’m precisely where I want to be.’ There was loathing in his very contemplation of her pitying him.

  Julia got up and moved towards him, speaking passionately: ‘I don’t. Oh, I feel sorry for the boy, that scrawny twelve-year-old who took up weightlifting to escape the bullies. But not for the man. I don’t pity the man. You’ve made yourself into something that doesn’t need pity. I may not like the things you are, but that doesn’t change the way I am. That doesn’t stop me wanting or loving you. And don’t fool yourself that you can do without love entirely, Hugh. Without love you wouldn’t be here today. You wouldn’t have Connie or Michael, or your brothers and sisters. If you deny love, you deny them; and you don’t really want to do that, Hugh, do you? You want the best of both worlds. You want love but you don’t want to have to acknowledge or understand it. Hugh … Hugh!’

  The last was a desperate plea. She came right up to him and struck him on the iron chest with her tiny fist. As she touched him a shudder passed through his body and she shuddered also, as if his anger, his pain, his tortured confusion passed physically over to her. She felt it as if it was her own. Hugh was staring at her, not seeing, and his hands came slowly up to rest on the close, curving arch of her hipbones and grip hard, clenching, as if he would wring the love from her body.

  Instinctively Julia arched towards him, pulling his head down with her fists on his shoulders, going up on her toes to kiss him, groaning with satisfaction as his arms went around her and he held her so tightly her bones ached. For long, long moments they were locked in a desperate embrace as he yielded to hot, urgent passion. The large hands slid to the small of her back, pulling her soft thighs against him. He was as hard as iron, driven by her sweetness into unleashing his demons upon her. He used her roughly, but not hurtfully, and she was exultant at his surrender.

  But then, at her moment of triumph, he suddenly tore himself out of her arms, white-faced, and stared at her in a kind of tormented horror.

  ‘No. No.’ He scrubbed his mouth with the back of a shaking hand, wiping out the ecstasy of the last few minutes, speaking raggedly, the soft voice splintered with purpose. ‘I refuse to do something that we can only regret.’

  He was gone. Slamming out of the room, out of her life … and this time it was Julia who was left alone to contemplate an empty future.

  CHAPTER TEN

  ‘I THINK you’ve been putting on a little weight,’ Phillip Randolph ran a critical eye over Julia as he came into the kitchen after farewelling the last of his dinner guests. He had been back for three weeks, entertaining almost every night, and Julia had avidly welcomed the intense activity. She was uneasily aware that for the first time in her career she was looking on cooking as a distraction, rather than as the main focus of her life.

  And it wasn’t working.

  ‘I have to taste the food, Phillip,’ she snapped sarcastically, slamming down a pan.

  Phillip backpedalled hastily: ‘I didn’t mean that as a criticism … you look … er … extremely well.’

  ‘Good, because I think you’ve put on some weight yourself. Must have been all that high-calorie Continental food.’

  Phillip glanced down at himself, alarmed. ‘Do you think so?’ He tugged nervously at his waistcoat and Julia sighed. What a bitch she was.

  ‘Only kidding, Phillip, you’re as sleek as ever. Well-fed, but sleek.’

  He relaxed, reassured, and Julia sighed again. She shouldn’t take out her frustrations on Phillip. She had put on weight. Other people pined away for love, but Julia’s metabolism reacted with characteristic waywardness. She was hungry, constantly, a burnin
g, nervous, compulsive hunger and she ate to reassure herself that she really was alive. She didn’t feel alive, she felt desiccated, shrivelled, she felt thin. It was a shock to look in the mirror every morning expecting to see a gaunt skeleton and be confronted instead with a blooming image. Her body was firm and resilient, her eyes sparkled, her hair shone. It was the exercise that did it… she had been forced to take up jogging, which she loathed intensely, to keep herself down to a reasonable size. Every time she went out, torturing her body with speed and distance, she was torturing her mind with memories, and, over and over, the futile question why?

  Right up until the end she had been confident that she could reach him, that there was a way but that she was too inexperienced, too ignorant to find it; that given time she would. But time had run out on her, and with it her shining dreams.

  Why? Why? the question was pounded out on the neighbourhood pavements. Because he was afraid? Afraid of what? Some future hurt? Surely his logic should tell him that all of life is a gamble. He wasn’t a coward. Cautious, perhaps, but not a coward. Didn’t his instinct tell him that she would never, never hurt him? Obviously not.

  Ironically, her last sight of him had been almost an exact reverse of the first … in her rear vision mirror, slowly dwindling to disappear as she turned the bush-lined curve of Craemar’s driveway. Until that moment she had truly believed that he would relent. How wrong she had been; completely, shatteringly, excruciatingly wrong, throwing into doubt everything she thought she had known about him.