by Rosie Thomas
‘Go now, this time. Please, Josh.’
He turned stiffly and went away down the platform.
There were more long minutes before the train left. Josh stood staring at it from the shelter of the barrier. But even though he was waiting and watching, Julia didn’t climb down and come running back towards him. Josh’s eyes and mouth burned. He had come closer than he had ever done in his life, with Julia’s white, tight face in front of him, to saying Come with me then. I’ll try to be what you want.
He knew that he loved her. But he was afraid that wasn’t enough.
Doors were slamming down the length of the train. The guard bustled out and blew a whistle, and the long line of coaches began to slide away. Josh stood in his place, watching unblinkingly, until the swaying tail end of the last carriage had turned the corner, out of sight. Then he swung round and began to walk, too fast, almost bumping into people. He was going back to the neat white house that he hated, without knowing whether he hated it for what it stood for, or because it was empty now. He would pick up his belongings and keep moving, on to somewhere else.
The train seemed to leave London behind very quickly. It gathered lubricious speed and plunged into the countryside. To Julia, staring out of her dirty window, it seemed that the lush meadows and heavy green trees were gorged and somnolent with last night’s rain. Even the animals in the fields were too drowsy to move.
At last Julia climbed down at the local station, the only passenger to leave the train. With her suitcase in her hand, she passed through the dimness of the booking hall with its posters of Bournemouth and Poole, and found the driver of the single waiting taxi.
She said, ‘Ladyhill House, please,’ and he had to ask her to repeat herself because her voice was too low for him to hear.
Under the bright bars of sunlight, the countryside seemed to have emptied itself of all relics of life.
Julia made the taxi-driver stop just short of the stone gateposts of Ladyhill. She paid him off and started to walk up the driveway under the trees. Alternating bands of light and shadow swept over her face, the illusion of rapid change contrasting with the unbroken silence. She stopped again just before the curve in the drive that would reveal the house, conscious of the handle of her suitcase biting into the palm of her hand, and of the pungent rural smells of grass and manure. It was odd, she thought irrelevantly, how she was never aware of the city’s smells. They were natural to her, like hard pavements under her feet.
Julia took a deep breath and switched off the stream of thoughts. She knew that she was putting off the moment of turning the corner. She was afraid of seeing Alexander. In the past her inborn defiance might have helped her, but it was hard to be defiant at that moment, when she despised herself.
She switched the suitcase to her other hand and trudged on. Round the elbow corner under the last bridge of shade, and there was the house. The new roof glittered rawly, but the empty windows beneath it were blinded eyes that couldn’t see her. She glanced to the left, towards the long herbaceous border, at the height of its midsummer magnificence. The blue masses of delphiniums and starry white clouds of campanulas drew her hypnotically, but she made herself walk straight on towards the frowning house.
She went in through the new front door, seeing for the thousandth time the obscene black mouthprints left on the brickwork by the devouring smoke. In their own habitable wing the rooms were tidy, Lily’s toys and bricks stacked neatly in their boxes beside her empty playpen. Julia knew where her husband and daughter must be. She went outside again, round to the back of the house, looking across the uncut grass under the apple trees towards the summerhouse. Alexander was there, bending over Lily who sat on her rug at his feet. Julia went towards them, stupidly still carrying her bag, the reminder of it making her feel like a refugee.
Lily saw her first. She lifted her head and gave a crow of delight. Julia ran forward then. She dropped on to her knees and took hold of one of the fat little fists. She kissed it, and the baby’s rosy cheeks, murmuring ‘Lily. Oh, Lily, I love you.’ Lily beamed and shouted ‘Dat!’, her single, all-purpose, portmanteau word.
Slowly, stiffly, Julia let go of the baby’s soft hand and stood up again. Alexander hadn’t moved; their eyes met now. She saw at once how angry he was. She had futilely rehearsed something to say, mollifying and empty words, but they dried up in her mouth.
‘Where have you been?’ asked Alexander.
There was no point in lying, even deflecting. The truth was the only possibility. ‘With Joshua Flood,’ Julia said simply.
Alexander’s fists clenched, and for an instant she thought that he was going to hit her. Instead, staring at her, he said, ‘But you and I are married. You are my wife, Julia.’
Her own anger swelled up. Coldly, she said, ‘I am at least a dozen other things as well as being your wife. But you don’t want to take account of those, do you?’
They looked at each other; there was a moment when either of them might have spoken, but neither of them did so.
The silence went solid between them.
It was Lily who broke it, rocking merrily against Julia’s legs and shouting, ‘Dat!’ all over again. Confused by guilt and anger, Julia bent down once more. She wanted to make a kind of reparation to the baby, but anxiety made her clumsy. She opened her suitcase and took out Josh’s enormous doll. Even as she held it out to Lily she recognised the inappropriateness of the gesture.
‘Look, Lily. A baby for you to play with.’
The doll’s flaxen braids flopped forward and her staring blue eyes rolled up into her head. Lily took one horrified glance at it and her bottom lip quivered and dropped. Her face slowly crumpled and she gave a long wail of terror, bumping backwards to bury her face against the security of Alexander’s legs. He hoisted her against his shoulder and comforted her, and Julia was left with the doll hanging limply in her hand. She dropped it back into her suitcase and it uttered a thin, complaining squeak, ‘Ma – Ma’. Lily’s face was hidden and two or three of her black curls had caught on the roughness of her father’s sweater. Her screams subsided into muffled sobs. Julia wanted to reach out and stroke the curls back into place, and then to hide her own face.
Instead she stood stock still for another long moment, and then she turned and walked back towards the house, leaving her husband and daughter under the apple trees. That was the beginning of the end.
It took another year and a half for their marriage to founder completely, but after that day there was never a real chance for its recovery.
In the unhappy months that followed, Alexander seemed to find bottomless reserves of energy within himself. He devoted almost all of it to work and to Ladyhill, the one providing the reason for the other and both of them supplying a kind of comfort. He went everywhere he could possibly go to drum up work, and the commissions began to flow in. A low-budget film he had worked on in the year after the wedding became a sudden, surprising cult success. Alexander’s theme music even crept, for one or two weeks, into the bottom of the hit parade. As his name became known and the royalties slowly mounted up, Alexander found that he had more work than he could cope with. He grimly took on more, and he worked even longer hours. The energy he had to spare was devoted to Lily, and the money was ploughed into Ladyhill.
Minns and his men came back, and they were followed by George and Felix. The decorators stalked through the empty, desecrated rooms, frowning and murmuring about country house sales where suitable pieces might be picked up, and making cryptic notes for each other.
Julia trailed after them, only half listening. George and Felix had become a team, she noticed. Their ideas sprang from their mutual enthusiasm and then bounced to and fro between them, gathering impetus like tennis balls in a hard rally. They even finished each other’s sentences. They had started to look alike, too, reminding Julia of a pair of sleek pedigree cats in their grey Savile Row suits and silk foulard ties.
‘This house is quite, quite beautiful,’ George murmured to h
er. ‘You know, your fire might turn out to have been a blessing after all.’
Julia wanted to protest, It wasn’t my fire, but she knew that it was, and always would be.
‘I’m speaking just in terms of the house. The tragedy, of course …’ George remembered himself and coughed discreetly. ‘These old families do neglect their houses,’ he added in a brighter voice. ‘Now, with the opportunity to restore this one, and to put just the right pieces into it, we shall be able to see it just as it must once have been. Quite magnificent.’
‘If my husband can afford Tressider Designs’ ideas of magnificence,’ Julia said stiffly. George glanced sharply at her, raised his eyebrows a millimetre, and wisely said nothing. Out of the corner of her eyes, she saw Felix moving towards her, protectively. She knew that he was looking at her, but she turned her face away. He had been picking carefully at the charred remnants of some panelling, and the ashy, burned smell that he had released rose in her nostrils. She had to escape from the repellent scent of it, and from the dependent, symbiotic closeness that flaunted itself between George and Felix. She thought, with a bitterness that was no longer new, that they looked almost obscenely happy with each other.
‘Excuse me,’ she muttered, and walked away.
Felix watched her go, his face sombre.
George pursed his lips. ‘Dear me. What can have persuaded a man like Alexander to marry her? Other things, maybe, but marriage?’
‘I know why he married her,’ Felix said softly. ‘What puzzles me more, now, is why she married him.’
He had seen enough, in the course of two or three visits to Ladyhill, to divert almost all his sympathy to Julia. He had seen the way that she lived, in Alexander’s frequent absences, alone except for their baby, in the dusty, reproachful shell of his house. She was lonely, and Julia had never been good at being alone. And when Alexander did come home, he was polite but withdrawn. Felix half guessed that his remoteness was self-protective, and that Julia had hurt him badly in some way, but he also knew Julia’s power of contrition and it puzzled him that, if there had been a breach, her warmth hadn’t succeeded in closing it long ago. Watching the two of them, he began to see another side of Alexander, and he suspected that if he himself had failed to notice it before, then Julia might also have partially overlooked it. Alexander Bliss was an upper-class Englishman.
Felix smiled faintly. In the summer of 1962 the very idea of class seemed quaint, but in Alexander the reality of it suddenly confronted him. Alexander had been reared in the traditions of dignity and conformity. He had made minor deviations, but when the time came he did what was expected of him, and he expected the same of his wife. Only his expectations were marked by a certain hardness and coldness. He had made Julia into Lady Bliss, and now he simply expected her to mother his children and supervise his house, and to help his stepmother to preside over the WI and the WRVS and the Church Wives. He seemed to make no allowances for the fact that Julia had come to him when he was a Chelsea musician, and they shared, however approximately, the common ground of the Markham Arms and the King’s Road.
Felix watched Julia’s drooping head as she passed outside the windows. He would have done anything possible to comfort her, but he knew that it was beyond him.
‘I hope our clients’ problems won’t affect the restoration,’ George said briskly. ‘It’s a particularly attractive job.’ He was looking up at the windows, and Julia had passed out of sight. ‘I’m sure they had moth-eaten velvet here. We could use the rose chintz, with raspberry swags and tails.’
‘The enthusiasm for the work is all Alexander’s,’ Felix said. ‘Not Julia’s. I don’t think anyone would blame her if she hated the sight of the place.’ He was afraid she did, and afraid that no acreage of chintz could change the fact. ‘Isn’t it rather early to be thinking about curtains? The plasterwork and panelling alone will probably take years to restore.’
Felix was finding that his interest was increasingly engaged by the architecture and inner structure of their projects, the hard aspects, while George enthused over the richness of soft upholstery and carpets. It was yet another wholly satisfactory aspect of their partnership.
George smiled at him. ‘You know I like to plan ahead.’
They returned to their work.
Julia walked slowly, feeling the sun on her face, frowning a little as if the warmth puzzled her. Lily was having her sleep, and for a moment she couldn’t remember whether Alexander happened to be away or at home. The recollection came back to her a second later. Of course, he was working. In the summerhouse, as he always did in warm weather. Encouraged by the sun, or by stepping outside the dimness of the house, she thought she would walk round and ask him if he would like some coffee.
Alexander was lost in what he was doing. A phrase repeated itself in his head, but the precise cadence that he wanted eluded him, like a fish sliding away under the thick skin of river water. He had had a small upright piano installed in the summerhouse and he sat motionless, hunched over the keyboard, his fingers hanging from the keys.
Then Julia’s shadow fell diagonally across his hands and he looked up in surprise, his eyes blank for an instant.
‘It’s me,’ she said. He heard the note of bitterness in her voice. It crept into everything, with monotonous frequency. As if to remind him, she added, ‘I live here, remember? I came to ask you if you’d like some coffee. That’s all.’
Julia might have said something different. It might have been, Can I come and sit with you? It’s so light and bright out here after being inside, and Felix and George made me feel miserable.
Alexander might have said, I’d like some coffee. Stay out here and have yours with me.
But with the tone of Julia’s voice in his head, and her dark, accusing face looking down at him, he answered curtly, ‘I’ll have some later. I want to finish this piece.’
Julia turned on her heel and walked back through the long grass.
They were only tiny incidents, each of them, but they punctuated the days and weeks, and every one drove the wedge deeper between them. As she headed unseeingly for the house Julia thought that it was already too late. Neither of them knew how to go back and take up the little, painstaking stitches that would repair the damage. There had been no big, tempestuous battles. It would have been better if there had, because those would have been easier to reconcile. Instead there was the slow attrition of coldness and misunderstanding.
Julia reached the wall of shadow cast by the house. It seemed to drop over her face like a veil. Her eyes stung, but she blinked and stared ahead. There wasn’t even anything to cry for, after all.
Alexander hadn’t bent his head to his work again. Instead he watched Julia going away, with part of himself still seeing and admiring her lean height and the economy of her movements. The rest of his consciousness went on gnawing at the familiar questions: what had happened to the girl he had married and why this different Julia, who still looked poignantly the same, couldn’t be happy with the here and now. If Julia could be happy, he thought, then he would be happy too. Alexander believed that he understood her horror of the fire, and he was also sure that there was no blame or forgiveness to be bestowed anywhere. What had happened had happened, and all that was needed was work to put the damage right.
What was much less fathomable was the fact that before the fire, long before, at the very beginning, he had brought Julia to Ladyhill. She had surely understood what it meant, and what she would be undertaking, when she had agreed to marry him. Yet now bewilderment, impatience and boredom seemed to fight for dominance in her, and Alexander felt himself stiffening in defence of the house he loved and the lives that belonged in it.
It would be so easy for them to be happy and comfortable here, the three of them. There should be a son too, for Ladyhill. Alexander wasn’t ashamed of his longing for that. And another girl, exactly like Lily. The shadows of the north wall of the house swallowed Julia up, and Alexander reflected that there wasn’t likely to be a
son or a daughter because they didn’t sleep together any more, even though they shared the same bed. She had slept with Josh Flood, her comic-book hero, of course. Alexander’s anger at that had faded, but a different, colder, less focused resentment had replaced it. Alexander picked up his pencil and twisted it in his fingers.
He couldn’t make Julia want what he wanted, of course. He was becoming increasingly aware that no one could make Julia do anything. In that, she was like China. And China had left Ladyhill. A weary sense of inevitability settled around Alexander. As if to dispel it he stared fiercely at the house. The flames had devoured the ancient patch of yellow lichen on the roof. When he was a child, he had thought that the outline of the growth looked like a man’s profile. The new roof was bare, the colour of it not even softened yet by the weather. But the existence of it was a minor triumph. It protected the house beneath it. And the walls were intact. As a little boy he used to climb the apple trees and follow with his eyes the patterns made by the old bricks. The same patterns were still there, and the deep crack in one of the stone lintels, and the red rust biting into an iron brace whose bolts had long ago fused to the metal itself. That much of the house had withstood the fire, and he would see that the rest was restored.
There was so much still to do.
The thought was like a goad. Alexander hunched his shoulders over the keyboard again. He brought his forefinger down on middle C, holding the note so that it reverberated in the humming quiet, and then died away.
As soon as she walked into the house Julia heard that Lily was crying. She often woke up irritable after her midday sleep. Julia went upstairs and found her standing up in her cot, gripping the bars with her fists and her face red and wet and accusing. When Lily saw her she stopped crying for a second, then started again, twice as loudly. Julia went to her and picked her up. Lily’s legs and arms were stiff, and she wouldn’t yield as Julia carried her over to the window and tried to soothe her.