by Rosie Thomas
To Julia the careful calculations suddenly felt like little more than wishful guesses. But Felix and Thomas had assured her that they seemed businesslike enough.
The bank manager turned his Parker pen over and over in his fingers. ‘What will you call your – ah – shop, Lady Bliss? Your proposed business doesn’t seem to have a name.’
Julia almost smiled. The importance of a name. Lady Bliss might, after all, impress a bank manager more than Julia Smith. ‘I’m going to call it Garlic & Sapphires.’
The man blinked. ‘But, as I understand it, you are not intending to sell either Continental foodstuffs or precious stones?’
Julia knew then that she wouldn’t get the loan.
‘It’s from a poem. Quite a famous poem, actually.’ She had brought the volume home from Holborn Library and read it in Mattie’s Bloomsbury flat, ‘For the shop, it’s just supposed to sound different and intriguing.’
‘I see.’
It was very clear that he didn’t see anything at all. Julia guessed that the last poem he had read was ‘Daffodils’, in the fourth form. And that different and intriguing were not businesslike adjectives. He drew her papers together in front of him and tapped them to align the edges. Then he told her why he wasn’t prepared to give her a loan. Not even to match her own capital of two and a half thousand pounds. She had decided that it wasn’t necessary to mention that the money was really Felix’s.
‘It is my sad experience,’ he concluded, pompous to the last, ‘that women do not make successful business people. Particularly in ephemeral enterprises of this kind. Perhaps if your husband …’
‘My husband is not connected with this proposal,’ Julia said coldly. She found herself standing up, holding out her hand for her papers.
‘If I happened to be a man, would you think differently?’ she asked.
The man didn’t even hear the significance of the question.
‘It’s possible,’ he answered. He made a note for himself and screwed the cap back on his pen. The interview was over.
Julia strode past his minions at their desks outside his door. They reminded her of herself outside George Tressider’s door, and she promised herself that she wouldn’t stay in that subordinate position for a day longer than she had to. She walked out of the bank and straight down to the river. The muddy breeze blowing off it cooled her hot face. When her rage had subsided she leaned over the parapet and looked down at the water.
The colour of green olives, as it had been the day she met Alexander …
Julia jerked her head up. She was renewing her promises to herself, and this time not just to survive, but to be a huge, blazing, incandescent success.
She had a moment of understanding of Mattie, and of Mattie’s early craving to be an actress, a Name, a Somebody. Mattie had done it, and on her own. The recognition was like a bond, tightening, making her long for her friend’s company. And if Mattie could do it, Julia could do it too. Not even though she was a woman, but because of it. She would find the sinew to do it without a husband or a lover, a prop or a screen. And it would be something that she could pass on to Lily, even though she couldn’t give her grass or space or the protection of ancestral walls.
Not yet.
The determination to raise enough money to match Felix’s became an obsession. Julia went to see everyone she could think of and begged and flattered and cajoled. And when Sophia’s husband Toby couldn’t stand it any longer, he introduced her to a banker friend of his who had some private funds to invest. He read her proposal carefully, asked her some searching questions, and then, to Julia’s triumphant joy, agreed to the loan.
She took a deep breath, gave her notice in to George, and went out and signed the lease on the shop premises.
‘I’ve done it,’ she told Thomas Tree. ‘We’re in business.’
‘I’ve done it,’ she told Mattie. ‘You are talking to the proprietor of Garlic & Sapphires.’
Mattie shouted with delight. ‘Now we’re doing it. Now we’re going places.’
She came to see the shop, with Chris Fredericks. Mattie looked happier than she had done for months. Her face looked rounder, and her hair waved wildly. She had discarded her tight skirts and knee-boots in favour of jeans and shirts, like the others wore. But most noticeably of all, the old aggression had softened. In the past Mattie had wisecracked and attacked to defend herself. She was still funny and witty now, but she laughed more herself because she was relaxed enough to see the joke.
Seeing her with her new friends, Julia kept her jealousy rigidly contained. She thought, Mattie’s happy, at last. That’s what counts.
After the shop had been admired, the two of them took Julia to the pub. They made mild fun of her gin and tonic beside their beers, and Julia smiled to hear Mattie, who she couldn’t remember ever opening a newspaper except to read her horoscope, discussing women’s freedom and workers’ freedom and Karl Marx.
Felix asked Julia, ‘Are you going to let me help you design your shop, even though you turned me down for your flat?’
She hugged him. ‘I hardly dared to ask. You know I couldn’t afford you for the flat!’
They had a wonderful time doing it.
‘I want white and silver,’ Julia said. ‘Space-age silver. The colour of the Sixties.’
They painted the inside shell of the shop white, and from an Italian lighting designer Felix bought a dozen silvery anodised spotlights. Julia eyed them sceptically when they were delivered, but when the electrician had wired them in and Felix switched on, she gasped in amazement. Bright, pure pools of white light shone on the floors and walls.
‘Your merchandise will look as good as sapphires,’ Felix said. Within a year, the newest shops and rooms and restaurants were all spotlit.
Felix made low wooden plinths and pyramids and sprayed them silver, and Thomas bought aluminium sheet and smoothed it and polished it to make the shelves for the walls.
‘It’s going to look wonderful,’ Julia breathed. ‘I hope I can find goods to do it justice.’
In the busiest, shortest days of her life she borrowed a beaten-up car and set off on a circuit of art colleges, workshops, import companies and wholesalers. She rejected most things, but when she saw something she wanted she bargained, chiselled, and begged for delivery dates. She discovered that she had undreamed-of talents. She could beat a glass importer’s price down without agreeing to take any more of his greenish glass wine goblets on firm order. She could make a reluctant designer promise to deliver another half-dozen of his shiny PVC liquorice allsort cube seats by guaranteeing that they would just walk out of her wonderful new shop.
For most of the goods she had to pay in advance because she was new and unknown, and she was frightened all the time as she wrote out the cheques in the brand-new company cheque-book. But she was also exhilarated. The excitement of finding something she loved and longed to sell was unlike anything she had ever known.
Then, in a slow stream just as the shopfitting was completed, the merchandise began to arrive. Felix and Thomas and Julia were like children at Christmas. They stayed in the shop until late at night, unpacking the boxes and carrying the newest treasures around in their arms, from silver plinth to silver shelf, to find where they looked their very best.
Very late one night, after even Felix and Thomas had gone home to bed, Julia stood looking at her white and silver creation, with the bright colours of her stock shining like jewels. Thomas’s palm tree stood in the window, its plastic fronds dipping against the blackness outside. For once she wasn’t thinking about the money it had all cost, and counting up in her head the sales that must be made before she could begin to recoup any of it.
Instead she told herself, with elation, This is right. For a moment, she was clearly aware of the frustration and boredom that had muted and stretched the last years. They were tangible, like a thick, wrinkled skin. She was frightened and exhausted now, but she was awake. She was lonely, but the loneliness fuelled her.
With the awareness, she thought of Alexander, and of how little happiness she had succeeded in bringing him. Coldly, she thought of Josh too. I’m learning to be tough, she realised. She didn’t know whether that was what she wanted, but she was sure that it was happening.
She made a last circuit of the shop, touching a gleam of silver, moving a glass so that it caught the light. Then she went to the bank of switches. She extinguished the white circles of light one by one, and the shop crowded with shadows. Julia locked the doors on them and drove home in her borrowed car.
At the height of Julia’s rush to make the shop ready, Alexander brought Lily back. He was going abroad to do some lucrative work, he explained regretfully.
Lily ran down the steps to the basement front door at Gordon Mansions and launched herself into her mother’s arms. She was bigger and heavier, and she was wearing an unfamiliar pink dress with a Peter Pan collar that must have been bought by Faye. Julia held her and pretended to stagger under her weight. She rubbed the curly hair and kissed her while Lily pinched her cheeks and nose and shouted her news. Julia had hardly had time to miss her, and she knew that she was too busy to spend enough time with her now. The familiarity of guilt and anxiety knotted with her love and pleasure.
‘There’s a pony, and I rided it!’
‘Did you really? I can’t ride a pony.’
‘Why didn’t you come and see me?’
Over Lily’s head, their eyes met. ‘I have to stay in London, Lily. I’m busy making our new shop. Wait till you see it, it’s so beautiful.’
Alexander followed them into the flat. Lily ran to and fro, finding half-forgotten possessions and bouncing on the beds and chairs. Watching Julia pour him a drink, Alexander told her the truth without thinking about it first.
‘You look happy, Julia.’
She handed him his glass before answering, carefully, ‘I’m very busy. I don’t know about happy.’ She was afraid of his probing and she added, as if to deflect him, ‘How’s Ladyhill?’
He accepted the deflection, changing the subject to an important sale of English furniture to be held the next month. ‘There’s some linenfold panelling, and some fine chairs. I want them quite badly. Felix is going to the sale for me. Didn’t he tell you?’
‘No, he didn’t.’
Felix was tactful. He never mentioned the work at Ladyhill unless Julia asked directly, and she rarely did that.
‘Well. I hope you get the pieces you want.’ Obsessions, she thought. Alexander’s with Ladyhill, now mine with Garlic & Sapphires. Both of us, putting our love and energy into inanimate safekeeping. It was the first time that the similarity had struck her. Lily ran back into the room, dragging an armful of toys with her.
Except for Lily. We both love Lily. What would happen when she was older? Anxiety flicked her again, like a cold finger. There was no safekeeping between parents and children, any more than between men and women. Julia was rawly certain of that. She shivered, and tightened her fingers on her glass so that a drop of wine spilled over the rim. She licked it away, hoping that Alexander wouldn’t see. ‘Lily seems to have enjoyed herself.’
Alexander smiled. ‘I think she did.’
The summer at Ladyhill had drawn them close. Lily had seemed much older when she arrived, suddenly an individual instead of the unpredictable baby he had taken on weekend outings and for the first long visit to Ladyhill. Then, she had been a mystery to cajole and placate. China and Faye with their female expertise had been essential assistants. But this time, the two of them had made friends.
Alexander had put off all his own work until the evenings, when Lily was in bed. Through a succession of long, hot days they had explored the grounds and the fields around the house. They had picnicked, and waded in the river, and Lily had demonstrated her swimming in the deep pool under a line of alders where Alexander had learned to swim as a little boy. He had watched her rounded arms and legs moving strongly under the water with a mixture of pride and amazement.
He built her a house in the low branches of an oak tree, and taught her to climb the ladder to the little door. Lily helped herself to plates and cups from the kitchen, and gravely invited him into her house for banquets of shredded leaves and rose petal tea. He found that he enjoyed the games of pretend almost as much as Lily did herself, and wondered why he couldn’t remember playing in his own childhood.
‘I’ve been grown up for much too long,’ he told her, and she nodded sympathetically.
‘Never mind. Have a nice cup of tea.’
Lily loved Ladyhill, Alexander could see that. It was one of the surprising, potent pleasures that her company gave him. She followed him through the house, unafraid of the black, remote corners that were still waiting to be restored, unawed by the echoing spaces of the rooms and the shadowy passages. Her own voice echoed through it as she shouted after him. The house and the gardens were her playground, and she took possession of them without hesitation. Alexander was delighted.
‘She did enjoy herself,’ he told Julia.
Julia looked from one to the other of them, but she saw the house with its blackened walls and the exposed rafters like bony fingers. The walls were clean now, of course, and the roof was whole again. It was fanciful and morbid to think of the fingers reaching out for Lily. It was jealousy, again, no more than that. The wine slopped once more in Julia’s glass.
‘Good for her to be in the fresh air,’ she said, with a show of briskness.
Alexander prepared to leave.
‘I’m opening the shop in two weeks’ time,’ Julia told him. ‘There’s a party to celebrate it.’
He nodded politely. ‘Good luck. I’m sorry I won’t be here. But this job will pay for the panelling.’
‘Of course.’ She would have liked him to be there to see it, but she wouldn’t let him know as much. Even then, the pettiness of her motives dismayed her.
After Alexander had gone Lily said, ‘Let’s play now.’
Julia peered around the flat and saw the limitations of the walls and windows looking out on the murky street. For the last weeks, it had been no more than a place to sleep. Now it would have to be home to both of them again. She tried to smile reassuringly. She had a pile of paperwork to do and half a dozen telephone calls to make. ‘Tell you what. Why don’t you do a painting?’
And with Lily installed at the other end of the table with her paintbox and a beaker of water, Julia did her best to work. Irritation at the constant interruptions gave way to a mild panic. She could do her accounts at night, all night if necessary, but suppliers wouldn’t welcome midnight telephone calls.
‘Lily, I’m busy.’
‘Daddy doesn’t be busy.’
Julia’s head jerked up. Staring across the table into the child’s clear eyes Julia read the signs of a new, strong will, and the beginnings of defiance. She looked like her father. ‘Daddy isn’t here, is he?’ Dismay made her voice sharp. In her own ears she sounded as childish as Lily herself.
Lily’s stare didn’t waver. ‘I want to play. Not paint.’
Julia’s patience deserted her. She snapped, ‘We can’t always do what we want to do. Whatever you and Daddy think.’ There. Now I’ve put them both on one side, and ranged myself against them. All in the space of an hour.
She dropped her pen with a clatter and went round the table. She lifted Lily from her chair and held her. ‘I love you,’ she whispered. The violence of it made Lily stare harder and Julia knew that she was only confusing her.
Out of nowhere, the thought came to her: If I had a real mother, would I be a better mother myself?
The riddle seemed unanswerable. Wearily, Julia focused on the present battle. ‘Tomorrow you can go to Forgum’s.’ Forgum was Lily’s name for the childminder. ‘And play with Warren and all the toys.’
‘Don’t want to,’ Lily wailed. ‘She’s horrid.’ She knew that she had the advantage, and she was pressing it home. Like a full-grown adversary. If she hadn’t been caught so badly off-balance, J
ulia might have laughed.
‘No, she isn’t. She’s your friend, and Warren is too. Come on, let’s go to the park now, if you want to play.’
And Lily, all smiles again, beamed up at her through her wet black eyelashes.
In the morning, at Mrs Forgan’s, she cried and hid behind Julia’s skirt. The woman pursed her lips.
‘It’s disruptive, Mrs Bliss. Taking her away for weeks. No wonder.’
Cowardly, Julia said, ‘I’m sorry. It’s the only way.’ She disentangled her hand from Lily’s and ran away, trying not to hear the screams from the other side of the door. She raced to the shop and worked with all the concentration she could muster until it was time to go back to Mrs Forgan’s again.
The last two weeks of preparation before the opening of Garlic & Sapphires were a whirlwind. Lily quickly realised that the shop was her rival for her mother’s attention, and she marshalled all her resources to divert Julia from it. She tried everything, from saccharine charm to temper tantrums, and then alarming, convincing illness. She’s only three years old, Julia told herself. She needs me, and she needs to be shown that she can’t win.
She dismissed the images of Betty that came back to her, and did her best to be consistent and gentle. She gave Lily medicine for her complaints, waited patiently until the tantrums burned themselves out in gales of sobbing, and lived every day with the guilt that Lily’s sweetness brewed in her.
But the effort cost her, and she knew that sometimes she hated her own child, and felt the weight of her like a stone round her neck. Love and guilt seemed ugly, inseparable partners.