A Midwinter Promise

by Lulu Taylor

  She puffed quickly on her cigarette while she looked for the waiter. ‘Where is that wine?’

  Lala moved slightly towards her, her pale blue eyes sorrowful. ‘It must have been awful for you.’

  Julia didn’t say anything, barely looked at her, but a bitter voice in her head replied, Of course it was. I’m tormented by it all the time. If Lala can’t see it, then who can?

  ‘I’m worried about you.’ Lala was more chic and Parisienne than ever, her fair hair in a neat bob with a feathery fringe sweeping over her forehead. She wore a striped blouse and a white skirt, and looked more elegant than anyone else in the room.

  She looks happy, Julia thought, her gaze pulled to the shiny red lipstick her sister was wearing. There was a man in Paris, she remembered, a much older professor who worked at the Sorbonne. Lala didn’t live with him but they were a couple. At least, she thought that was right. Time and distance had loosened their bond, and Lala seemed so very grown-up now. ‘Did Daddy send you?’

  ‘He’s worried too. We all are.’ She emphasised the ‘all’. No one knew why Julia would barely speak to her father. After what had happened, after Mummy was buried, Julia disappeared into a black hole of depression. Her school work stopped abruptly and she plummeted out of St Agatha’s sixth form like a stone sinking without trace in the sea.

  ‘We would like to help Julia, Mr Teague, but I’m afraid that she is a little beyond us now,’ the headmistress had said gravely, as though Julia hadn’t been sitting right there, staring mulishly at the carpet. ‘We suggest she takes a long holiday to put recent events behind her and perhaps an independent therapist may be of some help in a case like this.’

  No one is going to mention Mummy, Julia had thought, furious. When Julia went away to the funeral and then returned, no one so much as asked her how she was. She was expected to behave quite normally, as though she hadn’t seen what she had seen, done what she had done. That was some kind of dirty secret, that she must keep to herself and not bother anyone else with.

  Daddy insisted on the therapy, so she went, but it made no difference. When she told the therapist outright that she felt that Daddy and the family had murdered Mummy by forcing her to get pregnant, the therapist had found it all so interesting that she had ended up agreeing with Julia that perhaps he had. That was when she found she could barely look at her father, let alone touch him or smile at him, or beg him for the comfort she wanted so desperately.

  Fix this! she wanted to yell. Bring her back!

  But there was no mending it, and Daddy seemed entirely ignorant of the pressures he’d put on his wife, and the fact that she’d carried the weight of Tawray’s future on her shoulders. So Julia wouldn’t stay.

  She’d demanded to go to London and try her luck as an actress, and Daddy let her go, helpless in the face of her determination, just when she most wanted him to hold her close and tell her he needed her and loved her, and he was sorry. But Daddy was lost in his own grief, and around him fluttered Gran and Aunt Victoria, like a pair of anxious pigeons, and he couldn’t seem to see out from the whirring of wings flapping and snapping around him.

  The acting course Julia took at a theatre school in north London was not a particularly good one – it didn’t have the cachet of RADA or the more well-known schools – but it was something, and it was there she met Mark, a tall, round-faced old Etonian who was passing time until he inherited a baronetcy and a country house in Yorkshire. They seemed to recognise something in one another – a desperate nihilism disguised as an appetite for fun – and they started spending all their time together. Mark kissed her one night at a party and the next day he casually asked a barman for a glass of wine ‘for my girlfriend’ and Julia realised that they were a couple. She liked that. She liked him kissing her, although it was usually when they were both very drunk and it was hard to remember much about it afterwards. It didn’t take much to persuade her to leave the respectable house she was lodging in and move into his place, a shabby old townhouse in Stockwell that had once been grand and imposing but was deteriorating slowly, its stucco crumbling, the roof slates sliding off, the chimneys growing crooked. Mark’s other friends were a mixture of public-school boys and anarchic students, dropouts and addicts he had met in local pubs and offered rooms to. They all had one thing in common: drugs.

  Julia was innocent of everything but cigarettes and the occasional drink, but she soon learned that Mark wasn’t fussy: he took anything and everything he could get his hands on – mostly pills, weed and coke when he could get hold of it. The house reeked with cannabis smoke and was covered in the detritus of drinking, smoking and drug-taking. It was seedy but Mark lent it a rakish glamour.

  It must be all right, if Mark does it.

  She smoked her first joint with Mark the day she moved into his house, both of them sitting cross-legged on the floorboards of his bedroom, and then he suggested they have sex.

  ‘All right then,’ she said, shrugging, as though it was something she’d done many times, not never. I’ve got to some time. Maybe being a bit dizzy will help. They say it’s always horrible the first time. First joint, first shag. Might as well get it all over at the same time.

  It was the afternoon, the window half obscured by a piece of tie-dyed cloth nailed to the frame. On Mark’s bed, the mattress was only just covered by a sheet of uncertain cleanliness and a duvet without a cover. Julia lay down, hoping that Mark knew what to do and that he would be able to transport her with the kind of raptures she’d read about in forbidden books at school, but she felt nothing except discomfort, while he panted and groaned, evidently getting something from the whole process that she did not. She couldn’t lose herself in it. It wasn’t anything like the excitement of kissing the boy in the village that night of the royal wedding. There was nothing of the urgent, pleasurable rush, the strange need to complete the act she’d felt then. But that was only kissing.

  Is sex always like this for us? For women? she wondered. She wrapped her arms around him and tried to make a connection with him as he heaved on top of her, but into her mind flashed the terrible picture of her mother, lying on the floor of her bathroom in a pool of scarlet, and she remembered scrabbling with towels, shouting for help, slipping in the blood, seeing that awful sight on the tiles . . . She knew suddenly and without a doubt that it was her lot to suffer too. That’s what happened to women. There was the blissful time when they were children – happy, unselfconscious, natural – before the gruesome transformation into the beings desired by men, and then they were slaves – not just to men but to these bodies, full of the mysterious and bloody machinery that created life.

  Gripped by panic, she pushed Mark away suddenly, with a strength that she hadn’t known she had.

  ‘What?’ he said groggily, confused.

  ‘I won’t get pregnant, will I?’ she demanded, urgent and breathless.

  ‘I don’t know. Are you on the pill?’

  She shook her head, eyes wide and frightened.

  He grumbled as he disentangled himself from her, and crawled over to his trousers to retrieve a small foil packet. ‘S’alright. I’ve got a johnnie.’ A moment later, he was crouched over himself, pressing on the small slippery disc and rolling it down. ‘There we are. You’re safe now.’

  She didn’t really want to carry on, but he assumed it and she didn’t feel she could call a stop to things now. She stared at the patterns on the ceiling until it was, at last, over.

  ‘Did I leave you high and dry?’ he said, rolling off her.

  ‘Oh no, I had a lovely time, thank you,’ she said politely, though she wasn’t really sure what he meant.

  The next day she went to a clinic in Clapham and got herself on the pill. After that, she felt all right when they had sex, although she never seemed to get as much from it as Mark did. Another couple in the house couldn’t keep their hands off each other, and sounds of enthusiastic congress emanated from their room at all hours – groans and screams and thuds and poundings – after w
hich they emerged looking dazed and euphoric. Julia wondered what on earth they could be up to. Could it be so very different from what she and Mark did? Surely there were only so many permutations available in the basic biological process. How could it be blissful for some people and not for others? It was a mystery.

  But still – sex and drugs. This must be living, at last, Julia thought. It was exciting: endless parties, music and dancing, the oblivion of cheap white wine, vodka from the corner store, and the fuzzy numbness from smoking joints. She dyed her hair peroxide white and put another piercing in her right ear. She bought clothes in the markets and charity shops, and changed her look entirely. When Mark offered her pills, she said no, but she drank hard, smoked weed and snorted coke, quickly loving the buzz, the rush, the mania it gave her. With coke she could stay up all night, drinking and dancing, losing herself in the frantic rush for pleasure.

  It helps.

  But it wasn’t really pleasure, she knew that. It was valuable because it made her feel hyper-alive while numbing the pain. When she wasn’t in the grip of chemically induced excitement, she felt she was existing in a world full of cotton wool, removed from the rest of the human race, as though she was opting out of all that. She was never hungry, and either slept very little or else for long, dead, dreamless hours. She lost weight, smoked too much, flunked her course and dropped out, living on the allowance Daddy gave her. Two years had gone by and she had nothing to show for it.

  ‘But we’re having a marvellous time,’ Mark told her, so she tried to believe him. When his friend, a marquess who spent thousands a month on heroin, took them to his stately home in a helicopter and they spent a weekend utterly out of it, high, sick, drunk and in a state of dazed depravity while surrounded by priceless works of art and magnificent furniture, Julia felt that something was terribly, awfully wrong, even when Mark told her that they’d had the weekend of their lives.

  What was the answer then? It seemed clear. She should surrender to drugs entirely, like Mark, let go of her old life, and forget all the misery and pain. Would it be so bad to accept this strange muffled netherworld? To stay forever huddled up to Mark, both of them out of it, living on in this broken-down house in a grim part of town?

  Under the influence of his grand, addicted friends, Mark had gone from weed and coke to using heroin. Julia was becoming accustomed to finding him dazed and bleary-eyed, totally out of it, the nasty paraphernalia of tubes and needles scattered around him. He was slipping away from her into a closed-off, utterly personal existence. He wanted to inject her too, and she’d refused. But lately she was finding that heroin was on her mind more and more. Now, every day, she wondered if today she should ask him to shoot her up too, to give her a taste of the marvellous escape he had told her about, the warm, all-enveloping euphoria that melted pain and trouble away. She yearned for it in a primitive, infantile way, but Mark’s evident physical decline stopped her from taking the step, along with her certainty that she would surrender instantly and completely to it. Then they would be addicts together, egging each other on until they grew scarred, pocked, thin, grey. That image of the future frightened her. But she still wondered, every day, if today would be the day.

  How did I get here?

  Now here was Lala, a person from that old life. Julia knew Daddy had sent Lala to find her and talk her round.

  He can forget about it. I’m not going back.

  Tawray was like a dream, a world that she had inhabited in another existence, or a place in a story she had once read that was so vivid it had been like living there. In her heart, though, she yearned for home: the familiar beauty of the old house, the garden that spread down the cliffs to the sea with its ever-changing moods, the lake and the roof and all her secret places. Here, in London, she was nothing – a tiny speck of pointless humanity in a seething city. She couldn’t see a time when this wouldn’t be her lot: struggling on, trying to get through another day with as much pleasure and as little pain as possible.

  The waiter brought the wine and Julia drained hers in two gulps. ‘Can I have another?’

  Lala nodded. ‘I mean it, Julia. You’re not looking your best.’ She watched as Julia smoked nervously, waiting for the waiter to bring her refill. ‘Your hair . . .’

  ‘I love it. It’s like Debbie Harry,’ Julia said quickly. She touched her hair, which was rough and straw-like from the peroxide.

  ‘It’s not just the hair. You don’t look well.’ Lala put her hand out and rested it suddenly on Julia’s, quelling the nervous tapping, and gazed into her eyes. ‘I haven’t been around for you, I know that, and I’m sorry. My life has been so busy – but that’s no good as an excuse, I know that. I want to make it up to you. Why don’t you come with me to Paris? You could sleep and eat and rest. I could look after you.’

  Julia shook her head. ‘No,’ she said vaguely, ‘I’m too busy.’

  ‘Doing what? Daddy said you’re not acting anymore.’

  ‘I might take it up again. The course was no good. I’m thinking of doing some fringe theatre.’ Julia stubbed out her cigarette and lit another immediately. ‘Someone I know is putting on a rehearsed reading in a pub. I might audition.’

  Lala looked doubtful. ‘A pub?’

  ‘I’ve got to start somewhere.’ Julia smoked crossly. ‘All right. I won’t bother.’

  ‘Darling, I can see you’re not happy. Let me help you. Come to Paris. Get away from here for a while. You might see things differently after that.’

  Julia blew out a plume of smoke and tapped her foot anxiously. ‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘I’ll think about it. My boyfriend might not like it.’

  ‘Your boyfriend?’ Lala looked interested. ‘Who is he?’

  ‘No one. Just a boyfriend.’ She shrugged. She didn’t have the energy to tell Lala all about Mark. She couldn’t begin to describe how the house was deep in squalor and how she was afraid of being sucked under, taken down into the murky depths of the place where Mark now lived. She wanted to, she longed to, but she didn’t know where to start. Lala would be horrified, she would try to take Julia away from Mark and the filth of the Stockwell house; she didn’t understand that it was something bigger than just where she lived and who with. It was something inside herself, a monster that wanted to pick her up and throw her into the fire and watch her burn.

  They ate lunch together, Lala trying to get as much information out of Julia as she could, until it became obvious that Julia intended to be uncooperative, and then she changed the subject entirely. By the time lunch was over, Julia felt happier, blurry on four glasses of wine and replete from an unaccustomedly huge lunch, so she agreed to wander with Lala along the Brompton Road. They stopped to look at the clothes in the windows of the exclusive dress shops and Lala talked to her about her work in Paris and her dreams of designing and perhaps having her own atelier.

  Lucky Lala. She sees something in the world that I don’t.

  It felt like almost everyone else was absorbed in this strange existence, acting as though it wasn’t the temporal, brief little dream she knew it to be. They lived as though now mattered and as if they were going to live forever. Try as she might, Julia couldn’t see it. The knowledge of the short flicker of existence dominated everything for her. What could last? Only places, like Tawray, and the seasons, and the sea.

  ‘Come and stay with me,’ Lala said when they reached Knightsbridge underground station. ‘I mean it. I think it will help you.’

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ Julia promised. She imagined leaving her dark, grubby world and going to Paris, for light and life and rehabilitation. It sounded inviting. Perhaps it was possible. She trembled on the brink of saying a decisive yes, giving herself over to Lala’s vision, and then she pulled back, not quite ready for that commitment. Instead, she let Lala kiss her cool cheek. ‘Bye, Lala. Thanks. Give my love to Daddy, okay?’

  She turned and descended into the dark warmth of the underground.

  Chapter Eleven

  The invitation was
completely unexpected and arrived with Tawray’s address crossed out by one strong blue line and the Stockwell address carefully printed next to it.

  Julia stared at it, blinking.

  ‘What’s that?’ Mark asked. He was lounging on the sofa, feet crossed on the coffee table, an overflowing ashtray next to them. The television was showing some daytime quiz show but he was waiting for the lunchtime edition of Neighbours to start.

  ‘An invitation from a girl I knew at school,’ she said. ‘Look.’

  He took the stiff card from her and looked at it. ‘Mr and Mrs Jardine for their daughter Seraphina. Birthday party at Annabel’s. How nice.’

  ‘Do you know her?’

  Mark shook his head. ‘I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure.’ He tossed it down onto the coffee table. ‘It’s for tomorrow night, that’s a bit sudden.’

  ‘It was sent home. They’ve only just forwarded it. Do you want to come with me?’

  ‘You’re not going, are you?’

  ‘Well . . . I don’t know.’

  ‘You don’t want to be with that lot anymore, do you? It’s much more fun here.’

  Julia looked around the dirty sitting room, with its broken furniture covered in cigarette burns and stains, the filthy carpet, the fireplace full of fag butts and the bare bulb dangling from the ceiling. She knew Mark was high. It was only ten in the morning, but his gear was on the table – burned tin foil, a spoon, a cigarette lighter – and his face had a bleary quality that showed he was half lost to a world of oblivion.

  She stared at him in a rush of sadness. He hadn’t been like this when they’d met; he’d been plump-faced, not gaunt, his eyes clear, his voice strong. He’d been warm and funny and sweet. She’d been fond of him and then grown to love him. The sex might have been less than earth-shattering, but it was affectionate and friendly, and she’d come to like the nearness to him and the comfort his body offered her. They rarely did that now. Mark didn’t have the energy or the inclination. He was thin, full of anxiety when he wasn’t smoking heroin, and then utterly zoned out, until the effects wore off and the anxiety returned. Julia saw suddenly and clearly that Mark would probably not survive and that if he was going to be saved, she wasn’t the person to do it. He would, inexorably, take her with him and something small and persistent inside her told her that, despite everything, she wasn’t ready to go under. Not yet.