by Rosie Thomas
‘Shh, see the birds? You’ve woken them up. Shh, there’s my girl. Look, can you see Felix?’
Felix and George were strolling between the wings of the house. George was wearing a panama hat and carrying a silver-knobbed cane. How bloody affected, Julia thought. Lily’s screams swelled in volume. Suddenly, standing there by the window, Julia felt her like a dead weight in her arms. The paved courtyard below shimmered in the sun, and beyond it the grass rippled. Empty, emptiness everywhere except for Felix and George in the foreground, their arms and legs moving like clockwork figures.
Despair gripped Julia like an iron fist.
Lily’s screaming was intolerable.
She dropped the baby awkwardly back into her cot and ran out of the room. Out of the room, down the stairs and outside, without any sense of where she was going except that she must escape.
It only increased her claustrophobia when she stopped running at last, panting for breath, to realise that she had no idea where to escape to.
George and Felix went back to London, to the neat shell of Tressider Designs, taking their notes and their sketches and measurements with them. Alexander went to London and then to the States, and Julia stayed at Ladyhill with Lily. Autumn came, and the borders silted up with the russet and gold patchwork of dead leaves. Julia scraped half-heartedly at them with a wire rake while Lily stumped to and fro in her wellingtons, picking up fistfuls of leaves and letting them fly. They whirled around her head like huge brown moths.
It grew cold, and the first frost came early. At once the landscape took on a dead, closed-up aspect. Looking out at it, Julia said aloud, ‘I hate this place.’ She thought of Josh, gleefully waiting for the first fall of snow, like a boy with a new toboggan. He had disappeared just as effectively as he had always been able to do, but he was still with her. She had the sense of him wherever she looked, somewhere just beyond the line of her vision.
Alexander came back, but his presence didn’t make much difference. They were like strangers now.
In the middle of December, Julia went Christmas shopping. She left Lily with Faye and drove the forty miles to the big town in Alexander’s red Mini. She made the circuit of the shops, buying toys for Lily and a dashing plum-coloured silk dressing gown for Alexander and a Victorian jardinière for Faye, all the time with a numb sense of isolation from the bustle and glitter of the shops. She felt as if she was standing a little way off, watching her own preparations unbelievingly, like absurd antics. There was a Salvation Army band playing outside one of the stores but the Christmas music seemed to come from a long way off, filtering through layers of separation that muffled and deadened it. Julia shook her head from side to side, but the misery didn’t lift. She went back to the car, tossed the bags of shopping in around the jardinière, and drove back to Ladyhill. When the bare fingers of the trees along the drive laced over her head, trapping her, Julia found that she was shuddering. When she rounded the corner the low winter sun behind her was shining into the windows of the house, and it seemed for a fraction of a second that its eyes blazed with flame again. Julia heard the greedy crackle and her throat filled with the acrid taste of smoke. She braked violently and sprang out of the car. Running towards the house she saw that the windows were reflecting the setting sun, nothing more.
Alexander and Lily were playing together. They looked up as she stumbled into the room. Their faces were alike and their calm expressions mirrored each other.
‘Did you get your shopping?’ Alexander asked politely.
Julia was breathing hard from running and her heart was thumping, but she answered with the same politeness. ‘Yes, thanks. I think I got everything I wanted. It wasn’t too crowded.’
‘Good.’
Civility was a weapon too, the way Alexander used it. They used all the weapons against each other now that they were enemies, Julia thought, except passion. There was too much heat in passion.
She carried her parcels upstairs, but she felt too sad to put the purchases away. She sat down on the wide bed instead, and picked up the telephone from the bedside table. She dialled Mattie’s number and listened to the ringing tone, on and on, imagining the small rooms and the view over the Bloomsbury street. Mattie didn’t answer. Julia replaced the receiver. Her head was heavy with the weight of tears, but she didn’t cry. Instead she went back downstairs.
She asked Lily, ‘What shall I make you for tea?’
‘Egg,’ Lily answered stoutly, and Julia smiled at her.
That night, Julia had a nightmare of the fire.
She dreamed that the flames had engulfed Lily and Alexander and Flowers and everyone else she cared for, and that as she ran to save herself Sandy pursued her, calling her name out of a mouth that melted and flowed like lava.
Julia didn’t scream. Her eyes opened and she stared silently into the darkness. When the trembling had subsided she sat up. She was wet with sweat, and the cold air struck like ice. Alexander was asleep, turned away from her with his shoulders hunched. His breathing seemed very even. She knew that even if she did disturb him he would tell her, ‘The fire’s over. You must forget it.’
Looking down at him Julia remembered the night in the white house when she had watched Josh sleeping. She wondered now, as she had often done in the last weeks, if she would feel the loneliness less sharply when she really was alone. As the sweat of terror dried between her shoulder blades she thought that nothing could hurt more than the parody of closeness that she and Alexander made one another live in at Ladyhill. Carefully, so as not to wake him, she lay down again, but she didn’t go to sleep before Lily made her first morning summons from her bed in the next room.
Christmas came closer. On the day before Christmas Eve, Alexander brought home the tree. Julia and Lily met him in the wide hallway amongst the seemingly permanent detritus left by the builders. Alexander swung the tree off his shoulder and stood it upright for them to admire.
‘But isn’t it too big?’ Julia asked, puzzled. The huge specimen would fill half of their little sitting room.
‘I thought,’ Alexander announced, ‘that we should put the tree back in the drawing room this year.’
Lifting the tree again, and without looking at her, he crossed to the drawing room door and opened it with a flourish. With Lily tugging at her hand and shouting, ‘Yes, Daddy, yes, Daddy,’ Julia followed him. The empty room, freshly plastered, seemed a huge, gaunt shell. There was no furniture and on the new, bare floorboards a few woodshavings uncurled. Alexander went across and balanced the tree in its old place, in front of the window, where the ancient velvet curtains had fed the candle flames so generously.
Julia whispered, ‘No. Not in here. Why not in the little room?’
The fresh, festive scent of the pine needles threatened to choke her, and she could smell melting wax too, and see the merry points of light twinkling between the thick green branches.
Alexander almost threw the tree aside. He came across the room and Julia shrank a little, drawing Lily’s fist, clenched in hers, closer to her side. As if she or Lily could protect each other against him. Her grip must have hurt because Lily whimpered, complaining.
Alexander didn’t touch either of them, of course. He came so close that Julia could see a tiny pulse beating at the corner of his eye. She also thought that she could see anger and disappointment only half masked by his anger, but she was angry and very afraid herself, and somehow she found a way to ignore whatever Alexander might feel.
‘I think we should have the Christmas tree in this room, where it belongs,’ Alexander repeated. They were confronting each other now. Julia knew with cold, exhausted certainty that the moment had come. She looked around the room and recognised, with faint surprise, that even though the fire had started here, no visible trace of it remained. The leading in the windows that had melted, and the shattered glass, had been replaced, and the new floorboards of seasoned oak butted together so snugly that there were none of the scything draughts that had characterised the old ro
om. The old oak panelling and the intricate plasterwork of the ceiling had been entirely demolished, and not even George and Felix were proposing to try and copy them afresh. In their place was smooth, as yet unpainted plaster. The smoke-blackened Tudor roses of the carved stone fire surround had been cleaned, and the hearth only needed a new log fire. The room looked just what it was, a big, fresh, airy space, waiting to be lived in again.
But Julia didn’t believe that it was waiting for her. It was Alexander’s room. She had even seen him run the tips of his fingers over the smooth joints in the floor, as if he was stroking living flesh. It was Alexander’s house, and his life enclosed within it, and she was bitterly convinced that she didn’t belong in either. She didn’t know, after so long, if she hated Ladyhill because she and Alexander had failed in it together, or whether it was because of the destruction and renewal of Ladyhill that they had come to this, their final point, tonight. All she did know was that they had no point of contact left, except Lily. Lily, oddly quiet, with her fist still folded in her mother’s. And that Christmas here was unthinkable, impossible. She couldn’t stay here any longer.
Julia bent her head, looking down at Lily’s dark curls and the vulnerable, childish line of her parting drawn through them. She thought what it would mean to Lily and she felt her heart contract.
‘I can’t,’ Julia said.
Stubbornly, Alexander took her literally. His voice was brusque. ‘Julia. The fire was three years ago. We’ve mourned enough for it, and what happened. It’s time for Ladyhill to come alive again.’
In this very room, Julia remembered, she had said, Lots of parties. Crowds of people. At the beginning, when she had made herself believe that she would love Alexander Bliss.
Numbly, she shook her head. ‘I said I can’t. Don’t you understand what I’m saying?’ Even now, she saw, he didn’t. All he was thinking about was Ladyhill, and bringing it to life once more.
Julia turned away. Her hand tightened on Lily’s and then she stooped down and hoisted the child into her arms. Holding her with her head tucked under her chin, Julia ran out of the room and up the bare wooden skeleton of the stairs.
First, in Lily’s room, Julia scooped her clothes out of the white-painted chest of drawers. She flung the little woollen jumpers and kilts into a suitcase. Lily sat on the edge of her bed, watching her mother with wide-open eyes. Pausing and looking desperately around her, Julia saw all the safe, cosy accretions of her daughter’s life lining the room. She swept an armful of toys off a shelf and into the suitcase, then lifted Lily’s precious toy dog off her pillow.
‘Not doggy,’ Lily said accusingly.
Julia understood that Lily thought her possessions were going somewhere without her. It was as if she already regarded herself as inseparable from Ladyhill. Her father’s child.
‘It’s all right, darling. You’re coming with doggy and me. We’re going to have a nice time.’
Stupid words, an empty promise.
Julia went into the next room and piled haphazard armfuls of her own clothes into another holdall. At the bottom of the wardrobe she saw the presents she had bought for Lily’s Christmas stocking. With cold hands she picked them up and put them on top of the clothes. Then she closed the bags and lifted Lily in one arm. As she went down the stairs again, the two heavy cases gripped in one hand, the edges banged against her legs and rattled the banisters.
Alexander must have heard the noise. He came out into the echoing hallway, a screwdriver hanging in his fingers. He had bought fairy lights for the tree, and he had been wiring them up. Julia almost fell down the last few stairs.
‘What are you doing?’
Julia thought she had seen Alexander angry before. But now he was incandescent with it. It was impossible to believe that he had ever seemed cold, or had ever been the mild, sardonic Bliss that she had married. His face was burning, twisted with anger. ‘I can’t stay here any longer,’ Julia managed to say. ‘We make each other too unhappy.
‘Unhappy?’ The scorn in his voice bit into her. ‘What does our relative happiness matter? Have you thought about Lily? Or about everything we’re trying to do here?’
The two suitcases slid out of Julia’s grasp and banged to the floor, but she managed to hold on to Lily. She tightened her arm protectively around her again.
‘Lily will be safe with me. And as for here, I don’t care about that. I hate Ladyhill. I hate everything about it. Most of all I hate it because it doesn’t matter, and you make it matter so much. It’s only a thing, isn’t it? Only a house. Bricks and stones and pieces of wood.’ The words, at last, came pouring out of her. Her face was wet and her tongue was too big for her mouth. ‘You love it more than me,’ she said, almost inaudibly.
‘Where are you going?’ Alexander demanded.
‘I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. To London, I suppose.’
He came closer. One hand gripped her elbow, then wrenched it so that she almost cried out.
‘You are a fucking stupid, selfish little bitch.’
Of all the things that had happened, all the things that they had said to each other, that was oddly the most shocking and disturbing. Alexander never swore. Suddenly, without warning, Lily gave a long wail of dismay.
‘It’s all right, darling,’ Julia tried to reassure her. The same empty words. Trembling, she bent down to retrieve her suitcases and at the same moment Alexander pulled Lily out of her arms.
‘I can’t stop you going. But you won’t take Lily with you.’
Lily’s head turned. She looked at Alexander, then back at Julia. What she saw must have terrified her. Her face contorted with fright and she began to scream.
‘Mummy. Mummy, here.’
She writhed and struggled in Alexander’s grasp, stretching out her hands to Julia. Her mother’s daughter.
Alexander’s face went stiff. He was older in that instant, almost an old man. He held on to Lily for another second while her screams tore into both of them and then, so painfully that it dug deep lines beside his mouth, he handed her back to Julia. Lily buried her face at once against her mother’s neck. Even as Julia hugged her Alexander leaned foward. He rested his cheek against the back of Lily’s head, closing his eyes, and then he straightened up again.
‘I’ll bring her back again, you know,’ he said dully. ‘Her home is here, at Ladyhill. But once you go, you don’t come back.’
It wasn’t a threat. It seemed more a statement of the truth that they both recognised. To Alexander, the words rang with a dull familiarity.
‘I don’t want to come back.’ Somehow Julia picked up the luggage again, and she struggled to the front door.
It was very cold outside. Over her head the sky was pearl-coloured, and in the west the sun floated like an angry red eye in a pink sea.
Alexander’s car was parked on the gravel between the dark yew trees. Hastily, afraid that he would follow and stop them, Julia bundled Lily into the back seat. She wedged her in with the suitcases and then clambered into the driver’s seat. Alexander always left the keys in the ignition. As the car swung away Julia realised, with a touch of panic, that she didn’t even know the way to get to London. She had only been driving for a few months, no further than to the nearby towns, for shopping. When they were together, Alexander always drove.
She felt even colder with the recognition of how dependent on him she had become.
I’ll have to learn to be independent again, won’t I?
‘Tell you what, Lily,’ she said brightly. ‘We’ll drive to the station and catch the London train. That’ll be fun, won’t it?’
‘Ooo, train,’ Lily beamed.
As they turned the corner in the driveway Julia knew that the windows of the house would be reflecting the blaze of the setting sun again. But she didn’t look back to see.
Alexander listened until he couldn’t hear the Mini any longer. Then, aloud, he said, ‘I do love you.’
It was too late to say it now, of course. Alexander knew th
at it was his failing, to leave the most important assurances until too late. He threw the screwdriver down, and it rolled away across the floor. As he walked back into the drawing room he remembered why the earlier words had seemed familiar. His father had said exactly the same thing to China, at the end of one of their chilly battles. ‘Once you go, you don’t come back.’
He must have been eight or so, he thought, because he had just come home from prep school for the summer holidays. He had listened, frozen, outside the door. The curious thing was that he couldn’t remember now whether China ever had come back to Ladyhill. After that all he could remember was the fun of staying at her flat in Town, and how he had imagined that his father’s house missed her.
Alexander looked across the drawing room. At the far end, under the propped-up tree in a brilliant, coiled snake, the fairy lights twinkled at him.
Julia parked the car neatly in the station yard. She gave the keys to the station master telling him that Alexander would collect them, and led Lily across to the ticket window. It was then she realised that in her haste she had come without her cheque-book. But she had enough money with her for a ticket to London, and a taxi to Mattie’s. Once she had reached Mattie, then she could stop and think.
The train was a slow one, and it was packed with Christmas travellers. Wrapped presents protruded from their bags, and a man in the corner of the compartment brought in a miniature fir tree and stowed it on the luggage rack. Lily sat on Julia’s lap. She was cheerful and content at first, but as the train crawled on towards London she became irritable, then hungry. Julia had brought no food with her, and there was no buffet on the train. An old woman sitting opposite offered her an apple, and Lily devoured it. At Reading, Julia jumped off the train and bought some milk from the platform buffet. It was after nine o’clock when they reached Paddington, tired and stiff and hungry. Lily hung in Julia’s arms, her arms clasped around her neck. They queued for a long time for a taxi.