by Rosie Thomas
‘No,’ Mattie said flatly. ‘I don’t.’
Julia glanced curiously at her. ‘Not even Jimmy Proffitt?’
‘No, I didn’t love Jimmy Proffitt. I wanted to, tried to. But he wasn’t very lovable. I love you, and Bliss, and Lily, and Felix. Rozzie, and the others. Not men. Men happen to you, that’s all.’ Seeing Julia’s face, she tried to shrug her confession off with some kind of humour. ‘It’s all right, darling, I’m not a lezzy. I’d have had a go at you by now, wouldn’t I? But you must tell me what it’s like, some time. Being in love.’
‘Mattie.’
But Mattie saw her glance flicker to the clock on the mantelpiece. ‘Not now, you haven’t got time. Do you want a drink, before you go?’
Julia had already picked up her little suitcase, was on the way to the bathroom to change. ‘No, thanks. Don’t think I could force anything down.’
Mattie unscrewed the half-bottle of whisky that she had firmly put away this morning. Then, half listening to Julia in the bathroom, she slammed the bottle down again and went to look out of the window. The bookseller’s awning had been rolled up again, the closed sign hung idly inside the glass door. The view of the street was soothing because of its monotony. Mattie watched some pigeons pecking around a dustbin that had been put out for the morning’s collection.
Julia came out of the bathroom within five minutes. She had changed into a simple polka-dot summer dress.
Her face looked clean and malleable, ready to take the fresh impressions. She put her fingers up to her cheeks, explaining, ‘I tried some make-up on but it looked as if I was trying too hard, so I took it off again.’
‘You don’t need it tonight,’ Mattie said truthfully.
‘Well, then.’ Julia was standing by the door, not wanting to seem to rush away and leave Mattie alone.
‘Go on,’ Mattie said. ‘Have a good time. Will you be coming back tonight?’
Julia looked almost frightened. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know anything, except that I’ve got to go to him now, and I’ll do whatever he asks me.’
What must it be like? Mattie wondered again. ‘If Bliss rings I’ll make up some reason why you’re not here.’
‘Yes. Thank you.’
The door was already open when Mattie asked her, ‘What about Bliss?’
Julia’s eyes were wide and blank. For some reason Mattie remembered the fire. ‘I don’t know,’ Julia murmured. ‘I told you, didn’t I? I just don’t know.’ She turned, the door clicked, and she was gone.
Mattie sat down at the table. You do know, she thought. This will hurt him, you must know that much. She was afraid, then, that this evening had come between herself and Julia. The suspicion made her feel lonely and cold. Julia was her friend, after all, and Bliss and the aviator and Jimmy Proffitt and the rest were just men who had happened to them. Even Bliss. Abruptly, Mattie reached for the whisky bottle and poured herself a deep measure.
Josh had been waiting for almost an hour. He had known that he was ridiculously early, but he hadn’t been able to stop himself from sitting down in the most conspicuous place, watching the big doors every time they revolved. At exactly seven o’clock, he saw Julia.
She stepped into the cool, lofty space, glancing quickly upwards and then around her, faintly impressed in spite of herself, reminding Josh of years ago when they had arrived in Wengen and Julia had stared upwards at the Eiger and the Jungfrau. He didn’t know quite why he had chosen the Palm Court at the Ritz for their meeting. Perhaps to acknowledge that they weren’t kids, and they didn’t need to improvise any more. Josh had changed from a ski-bum into a ski-entrepreneur, and Julia, he reminded himself, Julia was Lady Bliss, a wife and a mother, and what else? The idea seemed laughable when he first saw her, all the way across the room. She looked seventeen, exactly the same as when he had first known her. It was impossible to imagine that she had a child of her own.
Then she saw him, and came quickly towards him. There were waiters, and women in cocktail dresses, all obstacles in their way. Josh had stood up when he saw her and the spindly table rocked in front of him. He held out his hands as she reached him at last.
They didn’t speak. They stood looking at each other, their hands clasped. The hum of conversation and the clink of glasses, even the splash of the absurd fountain and the clamour of the rococo gilt decor, faded into silence for Josh and Julia. Josh leaned forward very slowly and kissed the vulnerable point of her jaw. It was at once more intimate than any brash kiss on the lips could have been.
She had changed, Josh saw that now.
It was as if the years had intervened to define her face. The bones had set under the thin skin, to form more noticeable smooth plateaux and shadowed hollows. Josh recognised that the shadows were real, not transitory. She looked older, more graceful, self-possessed, and beautiful rather than wilfully pretty.
‘I’m glad to see you,’ Josh said at last.
Julia sat down rather quickly, not letting go of his hands.
‘I don’t think I really believed, until I saw you at this table, that you were going to be here. I sat in the taxi on the way, looking at the trees in the park, thinking, If he’s not there I’ll order a bottle of champagne. I’ll sit and drink it and remember every single day we ever spent together.’
Reluctantly taking his eyes off her face, Josh realised that someone was standing beside their table. It took him a second to grasp that it was the waiter.
‘Sir?’
‘A bottle of champagne,’ Josh said.
When it came they raised their glasses to each other.
‘To you, Julia,’ Josh said, but she shook her head, smiling.
‘I don’t deserve a toast. Let’s drink to understanding.’
He echoed her serious tone, ‘To understanding,’ and they drank.
It was hard to know where to begin. Now that they were here, isolated in the sociable splendour, they were almost shy. The champagne helped. It prickled on Julia’s tongue, loosening it, and slowly, picking their way around the dangerous corners, they started to talk.
The tables around them emptied as people drifted away to dinner, the ice melted in the champagne bucket, but Julia and Josh didn’t notice. Julia told him about Ladyhill, and the fire, and Johnny Flowers and his girl.
‘I’m sorry,’ Josh said simply. He understood the hollows in her face. He took her hand again and they both looked down at the four diamonds set in a gold band and the thin, plain wedding ring that Alexander had given her. When Julia asked him, he told her about the new trails that were being cleared, the ski-lodges he had borrowed a frightening amount of money to build, that were bringing the skiers into Vail at last.
‘Are you happy?’ Julia asked him, but she thought the question answered itself. Josh was alive, as vibrant with energy and determination as he had always been. She was almost painfully conscious of his closeness to her, of the way his thumb moved over the thin skin on the back of her hand. Josh generated his own happiness and she felt the reflected warmth of it within herself, melting her bones.
‘I’m happy with what I do,’ Josh answered. ‘It’s a good life.’
But he was thinking, I’m so careful about keeping it all, just as it is. I have to be most careful of all with you, Julia. Looking at you now …
He didn’t ask her about Alexander. Instead, he returned her own question. ‘Are you happy?’
She tilted her head. Reflections of the shaded lights glinted off the gilt scrollwork and the fountain water splashed softly behind her. Suddenly it seemed that she understood everything with perfect clarity. Infinitesimal structures and complex motivations were laid bare for her inspection, and the simplicity of it all was dazzling. She was here, now, in the midst of her life, with Josh.
She smiled at him. ‘I’m happy at this minute.’ That was enough. It had to be enough.
The last of the champagne had gone flat in their glasses.
‘Would you like to go somewhere for dinner?’ he asked her formally.<
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Julia looked straight back at him, seeing the colour of his eyes, her heart beating high in her throat. ‘I don’t think I could eat anything,’ she said.
He stood up, holding her chair for her, his hand under her arm.
‘Come home with me, then,’ he said.
Out in Piccadilly the sky was royal blue over the street lamps. Josh whistled for a taxi and they sat with the width of the seat separating them, not touching, not even looking at each other, but the acknowledgement of what they were doing leapt and burned between them. Julia watched the shop mannequins under the display lights, and the tiers of curtained and uncurtained windows in the tall buildings, thinking of the lives behind them, and of her own and Josh’s, threads crossing and knotting again. They stopped outside a little mews house in Kensington. Josh unlocked the door and she followed him inside.
The house was almost empty, and in the process of being decorated. It smelt of new carpet and wallpaper paste. Everything was white, even the sofa still swathed in its wrappings. Julia walked through the small rooms, touching the new white laminate in the kitchen, raising one eyebrow at Josh. It seemed too permanent to belong to him.
‘It’s owned by some friends of mine. They’re on their honeymoon right now. It’s mine until they come back and enter into married bliss.’ His face changed. ‘I’m sorry …’ He was going to say, Of course you’re married too.
Julia turned away again, closing her mind, walking back into the living room. She remembered the cottage at the edge of the woods and the way that Josh had touched down in it, hardly disturbing its arrangement, and then taken off again. And his friends. So many of them. Everyone loved Josh. Her happiness was less potent for an instant but she moved quickly, stalking it.
On the low white table there was a large rectangular box, wrapped in bright paper. Josh picked it up and presented it to her. ‘I told you, I had a gift for Lily.’
Julia studied the shape of it, weighing it in her hands. Then she looked into Josh’s eyes. He was smiling, anticipating the unwrapping.
‘Go on. Open it.’
‘Josh. Were you so sure I’d come back here with you?’
It was important to know. If it was inevitable, or if he had calculated it. But his expression disarmed her at once. He was honest, she knew that.
‘I hoped you would. I wouldn’t dare to be sure of anything, with you.’ He moved awkwardly, wanting to hold her, but she evaded him.
‘Let me open the present first.’
It was a doll, almost as big as Lily herself. It opened and closed its eyes and mouth, cried and talked and walked, drank water, and the label threatened that it would wet itself too.
‘Isn’t it great?’ Josh beamed. ‘All the things it can do.’
Julia spluttered, ‘It’s wonderfully hideous. Look at its face.’
They took one look at each other and started to laugh. The laughter was cleansing and uncomplicated and it reminded them of other times they had shared, blotting out some of the shadows and some of the other memories.
When it was over they faced each other again, aware of the silence, and the anonymity of the white house enclosing them. Josh stepped forward and took her by the elbows. He bent his face to hers and kissed her eyelids and her cheek and the corners of her mouth, and when she turned her head, suddenly demanding, he kissed her throat and her neck under the warm weight of her hair. Julia’s fingers tightened on his arms. ‘I knew I would come back here with you.’
He lifted her hand and kissed the knuckles. They went up the stairs, slowly, holding on to each other.
The bedroom was white with a low white bed. The white-painted cupboard doors were closed on the strangers’ possessions. Josh’s friends. There was one suitcase in the middle of the floor, a pair of jeans over the back of a chair, no other evidence of Josh at all. Stupidly, Julia realised, she had expected skis and ski-bindings, books and records and clothes to confirm his solidity. This shadowiness, thrown into even sharper relief by the white rooms, frightened her. She wanted to take hold of him, fix him, as she had wanted to in the Pensione Flora with the gold and brown landscape spread under their windows.
Now, in the strange house, her longing translated itself into physical need. A wave of intense desire washed all through her body. She pressed herself against him, her mouth searching for his, and her wide-open eyes saw the pores in his skin, the tiny, sun-bleached hairs, an enlarged freckle at the angle of his jaw.
Love me. She didn’t know whether she said the words or not. Josh undid the red and white dress, tearing the buttons. Her fingers felt limp and thick as they fumbled with his. Their clothes dropped, tangled together, and their skin burned as it glued them. She heard Josh gasp, once. He pushed her blindly back on to the bed and dropped on top of her. Their mouths met, ravenous, but they were too desperate for touch or exploration. She lifted herself, aching with need, and Josh was almost brutal as he plunged straight into her. And at once, the violent waves rose silently, gathering into a single peak that swept her up and then broke all through her body. Julia screamed, a tearing noise that she had never heard before, and then Josh’s cry echoed her own and they twisted together, caught, blinded, and then fell back, their bodies wound together. They were bruised, breathing in shuddering gasps, their faces and their eyelids stuck with sweat and tears.
At last, when the pounding that shook her had become just her heartbeat again, Julia opened her eyes. There were tears on her cheeks, and she saw the darkness of Josh’s eyes, looking into her head.
‘What am I going to do?’ she whispered.
To answer her he rubbed the tears away with the tips of his fingers.
‘How much time have we got? Now, here?’
‘Two days, three days. I’ve stolen them.’ And after that, what would there be? Wild, intoxicated hope fluttered. With Josh. She couldn’t think of Lily and Alexander now. Not now. ‘Mattie will tell some lies for me.’
Josh turned away from her to look up at the blank ceiling. He lay very still.
‘Don’t lie for me,’ he said. ‘Don’t lie for anyone, but yourself and Lily.’
Coldness gathered around Julia’s heart.
And if all I want from all my lies is you, Julia thought, what then?
Sixteen
The white house was a haven, and also a cruel taunt.
They spent four days in it together, going out to eat, or to walk in Holland Park, and coming back again to the silence, and the mocking intimacy. Julia lay beside Josh in the white bed and looked at the blank room, trying to imagine a connubial life lived between these walls, picturing her own clothes, and Josh’s, hanging side by side behind the white doors. However sharply she longed for it, the vision stayed dim.
Josh was a perfect companion as well as the breathtaking lover she remembered. His material success seemed to have rounded him. He talked to her about all kinds of things, bridging the spaces of time that had separated them, and he listened intently to her own more halting contributions. He made her laugh, and Julia knew that the fabric of immediate happiness that they wove between them should have furnished the little house for her as comfortably as it did for Josh. But it didn’t, and the failure made the happiness seem all the more desirable, and as thin as gossamer. She listened so hard for any mention of their future together that Josh’s words began to distort inside her head, changing their significance, becoming almost unintelligible. There never was any mention of it.
She wanted to shout at him, Yes, this is a magical time. But I want next week with you too. Next year. Ordinary times, Josh, like your friends will share in this house. She listened to everything he said until her head throbbed, and watched him, but there was nothing beneath the surface except a kind of wariness that frightened her. She said nothing, and she was reminded of the desperation she had felt at Montebellate. It was intensified because there was everything to lose now, and because she didn’t understand what she was trying to gain.
On the third day, at the limit of the time s
he had allotted herself without thinking carefully enough about what would happen when it was over, she telephoned Mattie. ‘Has Bliss called?’
‘Of course,’ Mattie said evenly. ‘Twice, yesterday. In the morning I told him you’d gone shopping. And in the evening I told him you’d bumped into an old friend and gone out to dinner. If I’d known where you actually are, I could have rung and passed on your husband’s messages. I take it you’re still with the aviator?’
‘Yes,’ Julia said. They had eaten dinners in quiet restaurants, holding hands and watching the reflections of the candles. They had filled the white bath with bubbles and soaked in it together. They had slept and woken up again, and reached out for one another. But yet not together. Julia’s fingers tightened around the white shell of the receiver. She managed to repeat, ‘Yes. I’m with the aviator.’
‘Do you want to give me some instructions about what to say next time Bliss calls? I don’t really want to tell him any more lies. He doesn’t believe them, in any case.’
‘I’ll call him right now,’ Julia said. ‘I’m sorry, Mattie.’
‘That’s all right,’ Mattie answered before she rang off. ‘I hope it’s worth it.’
The happiness hung in shreds now, but the fragments of it were so beautiful.
Julia lifted the telephone again, intending to dial the Ladyhill number. She thought of Lily in her cot, her round face turning up and her fingers stretching out to catch her mother’s hands. Julia’s shoulders hunched as another kind of longing swept over her. She wanted to lift her baby, cupping her damp, hard head to keep it safe and burying her face in the folds of sweet skin. She knew that Lily would chuckle, and wind her fists in her mother’s hair. In that instant Julia missed her so much that it was like an intolerable pain.