Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection

by Rosie Thomas

  ‘I love you,’ she said again, to the safety of his closed ears.

  In the morning, with Julia’s feet in Lady Bliss’s gumboots, they went out to look at the gardens. There was a high wind, and fretted clouds raced across the cold blue sky. They were both elated and they shouted like children, and ran across the winter-pocked lawns until the blood pounded in Julia’s rosy cheeks. She slowed down beside Alexander as they paced along the flowerbeds, and she listened as he recited plant names like a litany. ‘Mahonia, magnolia. Anemone, forsythia.’

  They all looked the same to Julia and she beamed fondly at him. ‘Are you a gardener?’ Nothing she could have learned about Bliss would have surprised her today.

  He laughed. ‘Pa would be pleased if I was. No, China is the gardener of the family. She restored the old gardens, laid out most of these beds.’

  Hosta, hellebore. Salix, sambucus.

  In a birch spinney at the furthest point from the house lay a sheet of pale gold. The daffodils shivered and swayed, profligate in the sharp chill.

  ‘That is beautiful,’ Julia murmured, drinking in the sight. Alexander watched her until she turned again, almost high with their colour and with the thin, sweet scent. They stood side by side, with the shelter of the birch trees behind them, looking at the house. The shifting sky was reflected in the windows now, so that the house itself seemed to move, sailing before the wind.

  Alexander took her hand, weighing it in his own. She had a sense that he had been waiting, waiting for a long time with a kind of calculating patience that had utterly escaped her attention, and that now, at Ladyhill, he judged that the time had come. She felt outguessed and outmanoeuvred, and it was an oddly exciting sensation. She looked at him with minute attention, oblivious of the house and the gardens, of everything except Alexander himself.

  Even so, she didn’t guess what was coming.

  ‘I wanted to ask if you would like to marry me.’

  The wind took his words and seemed to spread them over the grounds, seeding them richly, and the house seemed to dip and shimmer in its stately progress. But the ground felt solid under Julia’s feet, and the cold still stung her face.

  She was thinking, Not me. You should choose someone better than me. Someone good, like you, not a survivor, which is all I am.

  She was going to say, I can’t marry you, but she swallowed the hasty words as they took shape in her mouth. With sudden perfect clarity she understood that Bliss did love her, and she began to comprehend the importance of that. To be loved by a man like Alexander made her more than a survivor. It made her full and strong, no more a dirty little baby or even a bad girl, and it made her long to return his love with her own. She did love him now, with an untroubled conviction that was nothing like her grinding passion for Josh. It was simple, and comfortable, and good.

  A huge sense of relief washed over her, and happiness swelled up in the wake of it. She was afraid that it would shatter if she moved, but she did move, going to him. The anxiety in his eyes changed to delight. Alexander’s arms wrapped round her. The happiness was still there, intact.

  ‘Yes,’ Julia said. ‘Yes, if you really want me.’

  ‘I want you,’ Alexander assured her. ‘I wanted you from the moment I first saw you.’

  Julia murmured, with her face against his, ‘I’m here. I always want to be here, wherever you are.’

  Thirteen

  Julia and Alexander were married in the little church in Ladyhill village. After the ceremony Lady Bliss, or Faye as she had briskly instructed Julia to call her, gave a small reception for their guests in the Long Gallery at Ladyhill. They were mostly family, villagers and tenants. Sophia recalled that at her own wedding there had been five hundred guests and a marquee in the garden.

  ‘At least I’m escaping that,’ Julia said with relief.

  She had wanted to marry in London, in a register office, and to give her own kind of party afterwards in the Rocket Club. Alexander wouldn’t hear of it. He wanted them to be married properly, as he put it, at Ladyhill, and for the rest of the fuss to be kept to a minimum. Loving him, and anxious to do whatever pleased him, Julia agreed. She was fitted for a ballerina-length dress of cream wild silk, and chose two small Brockway cousins to be her bridesmaids.

  ‘We can have a big celebration for all our friends later, in London, can’t we?’ she begged Alexander.

  ‘Of course we can,’ he promised. ‘Let’s just be married, first.’

  The wedding preparations were tedious to both of them, for different reasons, but they were happy and in love, and they cheerfully performed the expected rituals. Once it was over, Julia remembered very little about her wedding day. Betty looked timid and overawed, swamped by a new two-piece that was too big and too bright for her. Vernon seemed to be leaning on Julia’s arm, rather than the other way round, as they made their way down the aisle. Julia recalled Sir Percy’s poker-straight back in the family pew, and Faye beside him, mistily smiling beneath the tulle-swathed brim of her hat. China was there too, sitting on the bride’s, half empty, side of the church. Her self-possession was as formidable as a weapon, but Julia warmed to her for her evident pleasure at Alexander’s happiness.

  Julia had no doubt that she was far from being the kind of daughter-in-law that Sir Percy and the second Lady Bliss would have chosen, had Alexander offered them a choice. Rather sensibly, she thought, they had decided to make the best of her. Probably they were relieved that Alexander had decided to marry at all.

  As she stood demurely at her new husband’s side, listening to the dull speeches and wishing she could take off the flowered headdress that was pinching her temples, Julia decided that they could have been even less lucky. Alexander might have wanted to marry Mattie, for example. Julia had to bite the inside of her cheek to stop herself giggling at the idea. Mattie had already drunk a good deal of champagne, and was creating a disturbance amongst the bachelor cousins and uncles at the far end of the gallery. Julia felt Alexander’s arm pressing against hers in sympathy, and she kept her face perfectly straight.

  After the wedding, Mr and Mrs Bliss flew to Paris for a week’s honeymoon. When it was over they came back to Alexander’s flat in Markham Square. Julia unpacked their wedding presents and tidied up the worst of the bachelor mess. One morning, when Alexander had gone out to a business meeting, she sat down and wrote a letter to Josh Flood.

  I’m married now, she wrote. Isn’t that strange? I still think of you, although I love Alexander very much. Is that wrong, do you think?

  When she had finished the letter she read it through, and then tore it up. It was all finished, she told herself. It was gone, like Blick Road and the old square and the frustrating days at Tressider Designs. The sadness and the sense of loss, of unfinished business, must just be part of being grown-up, Julia thought. She would learn to live with that, like everything else.

  The next thing she did, with her Tressider experience to back her, was to apply for a job in the Homes department of a glossy magazine. To her surprise, she got the job. Alexander was pleased and proud, which made her feel proud of herself. She started work, and their life began to settle into a comfortably bohemian routine. Alexander wrote his music, and played his trumpet or the piano. In the evenings they gave messy, prolonged dinner parties, mixing new friends with the old ones, or went out to jazz-clubs, or sat holding hands in little bistros before hurrying home to bed.

  It was a happy, deeply satisfying time.

  ‘I like being married,’ Julia said to Mattie. ‘Who’d have guessed it?’

  ‘I would,’ Mattie said promptly. ‘I wish I could find someone half as decent as Bliss.’

  ‘You will,’ Julia promised. ‘Just wait.’ Neither of them mentioned Jimmy Proffitt.

  Then, barely three months after their wedding, Alexander’s father had a stroke. It seemed at first that he would survive it, but he died a week later, with Alexander sitting at his bedside.

  At first, Julia didn’t understand what the old m
an’s death meant. It didn’t occur to her that after the funeral, after the dismal formalities of wills and settlements had been attended to, they wouldn’t be going back to Markham Square to pick up the cheerful threads of their life again.

  Alexander was gentle, but he was quite firm.

  ‘We’ll have to spend much more of our time down here, now that my father has gone. I have to run the estate, and the farm.’

  Julia said, ‘How much more time? Weekends, and so on?’

  Alexander put his arm round her. ‘More than that, Ladyhill is my home.’ He caught himself, corrected himself almost before the words were out. ‘Our home. I can’t be an absentee landlord, Julia.’

  She knew, now, what was coming, but she would make him admit it to her.

  ‘What does that mean, exactly?’

  ‘I want us to live here.’

  There was a silence, the particular Ladyhill silence in which there were no sounds of traffic, no voices from a busy street beneath the windows. The quiet was oppressive to Julia and she broke it by asking, ‘What about my job, Alexander? I like my job. I thought you liked me to do it?’ It struck her now as the only work she had ever shown any talent for, as her great chance, impossible to give up.

  Alexander didn’t hedge, at least.

  ‘I thought that Ladyhill might be a job, too. For both of us, together.’

  He was looking straight into her eyes, concerned, but with the clear expectation that she would do as he asked. Men like Alexander Bliss – Sir Alexander, she reminded herself, just as she, unthinkably, was now Lady Bliss – were brought up to expect agreement from their wives. Faye would always have agreed. China, presumably, had not. Alexander was clever, and sensitive, and all the other things Julia had learned to love him for, but he had his father in him too. She straightened her back, ready to fight him.

  And then she recalled their first visit to Ladyhill, when she had seen Alexander in the different light of this silent, sombre place, and had fallen in love with him. He had told her that he would live here one day. ‘After my father dies,’ he had said. ‘That’s the understanding.’

  She had accepted the provision then. She had known it all along. She had even envied Alexander for his roots, spreading out through the Ladyhill earth. There were, of course, no grounds for dissent now. It was in Julia’s nature to understand all that in the few seconds that they stood looking at each other, and to reach her own decision.

  ‘Well,’ she said lightly, ‘jobs come and go. If we’re going to live here, Alexander, we shall have to liven the place up.’

  He beamed at her, pleased and happy, and Julia felt satisfaction in her own secret generosity. Alexander wound his arms tighter around her. ‘Of course we will. You said the house needed lots of people. Everyone will come, you know. We’ll make sure of that.’

  ‘We owe ourselves a party. A housewarming.’ Julia slid out of his arms, spinning around the room, suddenly excited. ‘We’ll make it a wonderful housewarming. New Year’s Eve. The best party of all time. Shall we?’

  Alexander watched her, loving her. ‘Of course,’ he answered. ‘What else?’

  So Julia gave up her job, and they closed up the Markham Square flat.

  ‘Don’t sell it, or even let it,’ Julia begged. ‘There are still weekends, and holidays, aren’t there?’

  Alexander could afford indulgence. ‘Of course. We’ll keep it for you to use whenever you want,’

  They moved down to Ladyhill together.

  A little to Julia’s surprise, Faye quickly moved out to a cottage on the estate.

  ‘Don’t want the old folks in the way, do you?’ she insisted. Julia grew to like her, seeing Sophia’s innocent good nature in her mother too. She also thought that, beneath the perfectly judged display of grief for the loss of her husband, Faye seemed rather relieved to be handing over responsibility for the estate to Alexander and retiring in peace to the chintzy cottage set in its manageable little garden.

  Whether or not she had enjoyed it, Faye had filled the public role of Lady Bliss much better than Julia promised to do.

  ‘I’m not Lady Bliss,’ she wailed to Alexander. ‘She’s someone old. Your mother. Your stepmother.’

  Alexander was indifferent to his tide. ‘It’s only a name,’ he shrugged. ‘It doesn’t get the roof repaired. I wish it did.’

  But Julia couldn’t get used to hers, nor to the obligations that seemed to go with it.

  ‘It isn’t me.’

  ‘Yes,’ Alexander said gently. ‘It is you, because you are my wife.’

  At Ladyhill, all the people in the village and on the surrounding farms called her Lady Bliss. ‘I’m Julia,’ she insisted, over and over again. They stared at her distrustfully.

  ‘Don’t you see?’ Alexander asked her. ‘They want you to be who you are. They don’t want some way-out London dolly.’

  After a moment, Julia had asked him, ‘And do you?’

  He kissed her then. ‘I want what I’ve got, and I don’t ever want anything else. I love you.’

  So it was, for the few weeks that they had together before the night of Julia’s party. Julia chafed at the conventions of country life and at the matronly role her position required her to play, but in private, within the thick walls of Ladyhill, she was surprised by the depth of her happiness. She loved new challenges, and she was amused and entertained to find herself mistress of a household as grand as Ladyhill. She was full of plans for it and she rummaged through the silent rooms, moving the furniture and dragging back the curtains. She even went out into the wintry gardens and poked in the flowerbeds, under the suspicious eye of the old gardener.

  ‘We’ll bring the place alive,’ she promised Alexander.

  ‘You already have,’ he said softly. He reached out for her and caught her as she pretended to evade him. They clung together, laughing and then breathless and then greedy for each other. Alexander drew her down and they made love on the floor in front of the big stone hearth.

  Two weeks before Christmas, Julia’s doctor confirmed that she was pregnant.

  She kept the secret to herself, without really understanding why. She had planned to tell Alexander on New Year’s Eve, at the party.

  Then the fire came.

  In the aftermath of it, it seemed that the flames had consumed everything. Not just the house, but their hopes, the soft growths of their happiness, and in the end the love itself.

  Julia knew that it was all her fault. Everything that happened on New Year’s Eve, the terrible things, and everything afterwards, Right at the beginning, while the ashes were still smouldering and Alexander and Flowers’s girl were lying in the hospital, guilt took root inside her.

  The flames were swift and devastating, but the slow spread of guilt was just as deadly, like a malignant tumour, the more frightening for its invisibility. It took a long time for Julia to understand that against the fire and the guilt, she and Alexander stood such a small chance together. It took longer still for her to forgive herself for what happened.

  And up until the moment when the flames took hold, she might have believed that the two of them were invincible.

  Julia enjoyed every moment of the preparations for her party. She invited all the old friends from London, and Alexander’s country friends and neighbours. Only Felix couldn’t come, because he had gone to New York with George. Julia persuaded a rock and roll band from the Rocket to make the journey to Ladyhill, and she ordered champagne and planned the decoration of the house in minute detail.

  The huge Christmas tree was to be the centrepiece. When the men carried it in, Julia clapped with pleasure. The tip touched the ceiling of the panelled drawing room, and the dark, aromatic branches fanned out in perfect proportion. It was Julia’s idea to decorate the tree with real candles. She wanted to recreate a Victorian Christmas, like the ones she had dreamed of as a girl in Fairmile Road. Alexander argued in favour of ordinary tree lights, but he gave way to her in the end, as he did in all small things.

>   The house was decorated and the food was prepared and laid out with the silver and glass in the dining room. The musicians set up their instruments, the candles were lit and the guests came, flooding into the old house until it shook with music and laughter.

  Julia floated through the rooms, watching her party, her creation. If she didn’t feel quite a part of it she believed that was because she had made it, and her sadness was all for the decade that was slipping away.

  Then at the best moment of the party when the best guests were drawing closer under the spell of it, and the tree was shining at the height of its beauty, it shivered, and fell in an arc of flame.

  The flames burnt themselves into Julia’s head. Wherever she looked, in the days after the fire, she saw them dancing. They came back most often in her nightmares, bringing convulsions of horror and fear, but even in daylight they leapt in front of her eyes. Over and over again the black outline of Ladyhill reared over her. The windows were obscene red mouths, and their light licked the swelling underside of the smoke pall. The noise was always there too. It was a merry, hungry crackle of flames, and the splinter and roar as old wood and brick succumbed to them.

  At first, it had seemed that the house was their only victim.

  There were the seconds of blind panic as the flames licked up the old velvet curtains, and the wood panelling began to crackle, and then the guests choked and stumbled, screaming directions to each other, out into the courtyard. They huddled together, shivering in the cold, seeing the busy flames shoot upwards.

  It was Julia who remembered Johnny Flowers and his girl. She and Alexander blundered between the huddles of people, searching for them. The party to end all parties, Johnny had said. Johnny and the girl were nowhere to be found. Alexander had turned to face the house, and Julia had seen the light of the fire reflected in his eyes. ‘They must be still inside.’

  Alexander broke away from her side, unthinkably running towards the house. The heat and the smoke seemed to reach out for him.