by Rosie Thomas
Alexander drove her down to Ladyhill on Saturday morning. They set out very early, into a thin mist that masked a featureless world, but as they drove the sun came out and the countryside emerged in shades of ochre and opal and sharp green. There were new lambs in the fields and Julia stared blankly at them.
It was a long way, and they stopped for lunch in a country pub that reminded her of the one Josh had taken her to. Those days seemed to belong to another life.
‘Are you all right?’ Bliss asked her. They were walking down a lane, stretching their legs before driving the last miles of the journey. Julia noticed that Bliss looked right in the countryside. He wore clothes that were the same colours as the fields, and he held his shoulders squarer, as if there was more space available for his height and breadth. Her own thin shoes slid on the hummocks of wet grass and the pillar-box red of her coat suddenly seemed too bright. But she didn’t want Bliss to have to feel concerned for her.
‘Yes, I’m all right.’ She smiled. ‘It takes a bit of getting used to, all this … space. I can’t remember when I was last out of London.
‘Dear me,’ Bliss said mildly.
They reached Ladyhill when the afternoon sun was shining squarely into the windows of the west face. They turned a corner between tall trees and the house stood in front of them, blazing with reflected light from every tiny pane of the leaded windows. The house seemed to glow with living warmth, and in contrast the clipped yew trees in the paved space enclosed by the wings looked dead black, two-dimensional.
Alexander left his car slewed at an angle in front of the house’s magnificence. They crossed the hollowed paving stones in silence. Alexander opened the front door under its stone arch, and they passed through into the dimness. There was a faint scent of lavender and of the soft accretion, in invisible corners, of centuries of dust. Standing in the hallway, where a shaft of light from the high window at the turn of the stairway struck across their heads, Julia looked upwards. There was carved oak and the dull gleam of gilt picture frames, a great iron hoop with brackets for dozens of candles suspended by a chain from the dim heights, shadows, and silence. Outside the birds had been singing and there had been the wind in the elm trees, but there was no sound inside the house.
She couldn’t raise her voice above a whisper. ‘It’s beautiful.’
To Julia, houses were no more than little boxes like those in Fairmile Road or on the estate, or else they were set out in rows in London terraces, sliced up inside into flats and rooms where the ceiling mouldings ended abruptly at arbitrary new walls. Even the flat in the square was only home because Mattie and Felix were there, not because of her own possessions laid out in it. And Julia, who loved everything new and sharp-edged and iconoclastic, saw how different Ladyhill was. Its beauty was timeless and majestic, dwarfing her and her irrelevant appraisal of it. She followed Alexander obediently through the Long Gallery, looking out at the green view of the gardens beneath the windows, touching the yellow brocade hangings of the great half-tester bed in the room beyond it. Alexander called it the Queen’s Bed.
There were family rooms as well as formal ones, Alexander’s father’s bedroom with silver-backed brushes on the tallboy, Sophia’s mother’s with a lavender silk bedcover, Alexander’s and Sophia’s rooms still decorated with the clutter of childhood. At the end of the corridor there was a nursery with a dappled rocking-horse and shelves of tattered books. They wandered through the rooms together, undisturbed. Julia was glad that he had chosen a time when it was empty of everyone but themselves. The spirit of the house closed intimately around her.
Afterwards, she remembered how all her casually acquired impressions of Bliss changed that afternoon. She was impressed by the house — more than impressed, she was awed by it – but she was struck most strongly of all by the difference in Alexander. His sardonic detachment was gone, and his faint, weary vagueness went with it. He was as gentle as he always was to Julia, but he seemed also more forthright, and more able to show her his feelings. As he talked about the house and told her the stories of it, his love for the place showed clearly. She saw it vividly, and her recognition of it provided a missing piece in her understanding of him. Belonging to Ladyhill defined Alexander, and she realised that in London he was different because he was less than himself.
They came back to the ground floor once more by the back stairs, and threaded their way through a seeming warren of stone-flagged kitchens. The house wasn’t large, but the succession of rooms was bewildering. Julia had lost her bearings, and she exclaimed with surprise when they re-entered the drawing room by a different door. Alexander clicked it shut and the rectangle disappeared into the panelling.
‘A secret door,’ she exclaimed delightedly.
‘Only semi-secret. For the servants to make discreet exits. Or perhaps for the hostess to escape her guests, for a moment or two?’
With the thought of all the people who must have thronged through this room, all around her like a ghostly pageant in their different clothes, Julia wandered down the length of it. There was a huge open stone hearth, and the scent of woodsmoke lingered pleasantly in the heavy, mulberry velvet drapes of the curtains. There were family photographs clustered in silver frames, but the pictures hanging against the panelling were English landscapes rather than portraits. Books and magazines lay on the tables, and there was a pipe in a rack beside a deep armchair. Julia remembered what Sophia had said about Ladyhill. ‘It’s where we come from, Daddy, Alexander and me. The most beautiful place in the world.’
Julia had thought she was affected, but she understood her words now. For all its size and grandeur, this was a room for living in, redolent of family life. Yet China Bliss had left here, hadn’t she? She must ask Alexander about it. Not now, but sometime.
In the tall bay at the end of the room stood a grand piano, stacked with sheet music. Alexander went to it and began to look through the piles. He took a sheet seemingly at random, and then he opened the piano and began to play. Julia had heard him play often before, at Markham Square, but never like this. She didn’t even know what the piece was, but the notes fell on her as softly as the petals dropping from the scarlet tulips in the vases. As softly as the invisible Ladyhill dust.
Alexander played for a long time and she watched his head, bent intently over the keys. The light began to fade outside. Julia knew that she liked Alexander very much, and that he was important. It was a rare moment of being quite sure of one truth, its existence untouched and unaffected by the network of other conflicting truths that governed her life.
She envied him too.
She envied his roots here in this place, and the sureness that their secure anchorage gave back to him. It was the sureness that had transformed him for her this afternoon. It made her feel the feebleness of her own grip on the world, and the shallowness of the toehold that Betty and Vernon had hollowed for themselves. She understood their fear and their desperation, then, with the solidity of Ladyhill’s centuries rearing around her.
Then she looked back at Alexander’s bent head and smiled, and the music joined them together as surely as if they were lying down together.
It was almost too dark for him to read the music when he lifted his head again.
‘I’ll make some tea,’ he said.
They lit the fire, and then they sat in front of it with the big silver teapot on a tray between them. The logs crackled and shadows thickened in the corners of the room.
Julia said, ‘It’s so quiet. This house needs people. Lots and lots of people. Mad parties.’
‘Perhaps it does,’ Alexander said. He came closer to her and they examined each other’s faces intently. In London, Julia might have said something flippant to make the moment pass. Here, in the firelight, she put up her fingers to touch his face. The glow from the hearth reddened the blond hair over his ears. Her eyes travelled slowly, seeing each of his features in turn. They had become familiar to her without ever seeming especially interesting, but now it was as if he wa
s a different person, to be rediscovered. Not Bliss, who she had giggled about with Mattie. Julia wondered a little at her own crassness. This Alexander was a stranger, faintly awe-inspiring. But as she looked into his eyes, Julia saw that he loved her. How could she have been unaware of it before? It seemed very simple, and reassuring, and welcome. He smoothed the hair back from her face, and kissed her. His mouth was more insistent, and her own opened obediently under it. Her head fell back against the cushions and his tongue traced the arch of her throat.
He said, ‘Julia,’ and the timbre of his voice reminded her of Josh. She lifted her head again and stared at the log in the hearth. The surface of it was crazed with grey ash, but when the draught fanned it red veins ran over it like lava. Julia shivered a little and went to close the velvet curtains on the darkness outside. Released from their dull gilt ropes and tassels, they fell in faded but opulent folds. George and Felix would approve, Julia thought. George devoted his life to recreating for his clients just the dim, negligent grandeur that Ladyhill exuded from every corner. George Tressider would die for this place, she realised. And here she was. The irony tickled her, and with her face bright with amusement she went back to Alexander and took hold of both his hands.
‘Play some more music. Something silly and loud this time. Let’s hear if the house likes the sound of it.’
Alexander sat down at the piano and struck up a Scott Joplin rag. Julia beamed her approval, twirled in the middle of the Turkey carpet, and launched herself into a Charleston. Alexander played, faster and faster, until she was panting for breath and then she collapsed sideways against the piano, gasping and laughing. ‘Mercy. I can’t Charleston like Mattie.’
Alexander glanced up at the ceiling. The music seemed to reverberate there still. ‘I think you’re right,’ he mused. ‘The old house is too quiet. Lots of people. Lots of parties. Would you like that, Julia?’
Julia didn’t know what to say. She didn’t look at him, and then when the moment was past she wished that she had.
‘I always like parties,’ she mumbled.
‘Hmm.’ Alexander closed the lid of the piano. ‘Let’s go and forage for some dinner, shall we?’
They found some cold chicken in the refrigerator, and vegetables in a rack in the immense, chilly larder.
‘I don’t suppose Pa and Faye will mind,’ Alexander said.
‘Where are they?’ Julia asked curiously.
‘In London. The housekeeper has the weekend off too. Nobody else lives in. There are only a couple of cleaning ladies who come in from the village, anyway. Everything has to run on a shoestring nowadays.’ He nodded cheerfully at the chipped cream paintwork, and then his expression changed. ‘I like being here alone with you.’
‘I like it too,’ Julia said.
‘Where shall we eat?’
‘In the dining room. Properly.’
The room was cold, but Alexander turned on an electric fire and Julia laid the table. There were fourteen high-backed chairs around the length of blackened oak, and she set their two places one at either end. Ransacking the baize-lined drawers of the sideboard she found the heavy silver cutlery with a worn ‘B’ squirling the handles, and made an elaborate setting with too many knives and forks. Alexander brought up a bottle of hock, and she put out tall glasses with a cloudy spiral trapped in the stems. She enjoyed playing at chatelaine in the sombre magnificence of the room.
They sat down, facing each other, so far apart that they almost had to shout. They found it irresistibly funny, and laughed so much that the boiled potatoes went cold in front of them.
Afterwards they went back and sat in front of the drawing room fire again, their fingers twined tightly together.
‘Will you live here, one day?’ Julia asked.
‘One day,’ he told her. ‘After my father dies. That’s the understanding. ‘
His London detachment was more comprehensible now. That wasn’t his real life. Even his music wasn’t quite real, perhaps. His life was here, at Ladyhill. Envy nibbled at Julia again. What was her own freedom, except being adrift?
When they went upstairs, and Alexander showed her into a guest room hung with peacock-patterned fabric, he didn’t say goodnight. Julia undressed, cleaned her teeth and brushed her hair, and took her diaphragm out of its pink box. She put it in place and lay down between the chilly sheets. Alexander knocked at the door and came in, closing the door behind him with a faint click. When he slid into the bed beside her he seemed larger, and strange because of it, but his warmth struck through her and she stopped shivering and turned to him.
Bliss was gentle, more gentle with her than he need have been, and his care heated her response to him. Their love-making was good, and she knew that she shouldn’t have been so surprised by it.
In the privacy of the dark Julia wondered, Why did he choose me to love? Why not Mattie, or any of the girls from the Rocket, or Blue Heaven … She contemplated her own ordinariness, and the narrow confines of her background compared with Alexander’s. Then she thought, You don’t choose. I didn’t choose Josh. It takes hold, and you can’t shake it off.
Beside her Alexander breathed deeply, warming her cheek. He tightened his arms around her. ‘I love you,’ he said, as if he could hear her thoughts.
‘I love you too,’ she answered, offering it hopefully, as if hope could change everything.
Alexander fell asleep. Julia lay very still, her head in the hollow of his shoulder, her physical contentment giving her a sense of stasis, of welcome tranquillity. The wind creaked and groaned in the elm trees beyond the windows and she tried to imagine the dark gardens, spreading away from the walls of the house. More territory, unexplored. Alexander’s territory. She put her hand out to touch him, spreading her fingers over the firm flesh of his thigh.
‘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.