by Rosie Thomas
Josh met her at the airport. He stood at the barrier, waiting for her to come through, and although he saw her at once, walking briskly in the midst of a mixed convoy of nuns and businessmen, he had to look again to assure himself that she really was Julia.
And then she was standing in front of him, smiling, her head on one side. Josh held out his arms and she stepped into them. He held her tightly for a long moment, before moving back to look at her again.
Julia had discarded her miniskirts, although only a year ago she had sworn she never would. Now she was wearing a sand-coloured Saint Laurent suit with a slim, knee-length skirt. She had a plain white shirt, and pearl studs in her ears. Her five-point Vidal Sassoon bob had grown out long ago, and her hair waved thickly around her face, as it had done when Josh first saw her in Leoni’s. Her face was thinner but there seemed to be a new luminosity beneath the surface of her skin. She looked older, but she also looked as if she had grown into herself. She was no less beautiful than she had ever been, but she was different, and that was why he had had to look again, as she came towards him, to make sure. If he had to choose a single word for this Julia, Josh thought, it would be formidable.
They stood there, holding hands, while the departing passengers ebbed away from them. Julia was thinking, So I did it. I turned up in Josh’s life, instead of he in mine. I’m the traveller, the initiator. And Josh is the same as he always was. He looked exactly the same. The bright fairness of his hair might have faded a little and there might be an almost invisible net of fine lines in the tanned skin at the corners of his eyes, but he was as lean and muscled and quick-moving as he had always been. Even the clothes were the sarne, jeans and a thick leather belt, and a denim work-shirt. He looked tough, and handsome, with a streak of warm good-humour, as he always had done.
Deliberately she put her hand behind his head, and drew his face down to kiss the corner of his mouth. His eyes half closed, and she saw the sun-bleached tips of his eyelashes. The current hadn’t flickered either. It ran between them, as powerfully as it ever had.
‘Come on,’ Josh said. ‘The car’s outside. Give me those bags.’
He hoisted her neat, executive luggage and Julia followed him.
The car, negligently parked at the doors, was an open white Mercedes 220SL. Julia whistled at the sight of it and Josh grinned.
‘Neat, hey?’
She settled into her red leather seat, sighing. ‘How senior we all are. Cars, and houses, and businesses.’
Josh looked sideways at her, amused. ‘Don’t class my car with all that other shit. This is a pair of racing skis, or a jetplane. Watch.’
They had left the tangle of airport traffic behind them. The car’s long white nose pointed on to a freeway, and Josh accelerated. They whirled past a truck, and another, and howled past a line of family sedans. Julia felt herself pressed backwards into the seat’s leathery grip. The wind sliced over the screen and pinned her skin to her face, peeling a smile out of it as tears smarted in her eyes. Her hair whipped around her cheeks and she lifted one hand to draw it back into a knot. Josh was smiling too. The wind blew his hair off his forehead and his eyes narrowed with concentration as they sped faster. Julia remembered that that was how he had looked when he was skiing. Absorbed, and exultant.
They went faster. The roar of the engine drowned out the rest of the world, and speed enveloped the sight of it in a featureless blur. Suddenly Julia thought, He’s like a boy, showing off his car to impress his girl. If we were in a plane, he’d, be looping the loop. He did that once, didn’t he? The realisation touched her, and made her want to laugh, but it was also oddly startling. She filed it away, in the back of her mind, to re-examine later. Then she reached out and put her hand on Josh’s arm.
Josh! I’m sorry!’ she yelled. ‘Forgive my classing your car with the other trappings of middle age. It’s faster than a jet, more frightening than skis. Now, will you bloody well slow down?’
She had been watching the speedometer. The needle had held steady, somewhere, way past the 100 mark. Now Josh lifted his foot and the red finger obligingly fell back again.
‘Are you a trapping of middle age, my Julia?’
‘It looks like it,’ Julia said drily.
‘In that case, I forgive you everything.’
At a sedate sixty miles per hour, Julia could look around her. They were outside the city now and the clear air shimmered. Ahead of them, between the billboards that lined the freeway, she saw mountains. Even in midsummer, the peaks were seamed with white.
‘The Rockies?’ she asked Josh.
He nodded, whistling, his forearms lazily crossed over the wheel.
‘Where are we going? To Vail?’
Through all the years, summer and winter, she had somehow imagined him out on the ski-trails, or in the glittering powder snow of some huge mountain bowl.
‘No. I try to keep out of it for some part of the summer. I’ve got a place up here, although I don’t use it much. How did you know to call me there?’
‘I didn’t. That was the number Information gave me, that’s all.’
He looked at her again, an open, reflective glance this time, undisguised by laughter. ‘Then it must be fate,’ he said softly.
And Julia felt her tender, innermost muscles secretly contract and loosen again. Her response to the aviator was just the same as it had always been. He disarmed her effortlessly, and left her helpless. But I didn’t come here to defend myself, Julia thought. I came because I wanted to, and because I wanted Josh. Because I’m old enough to understand that if you want something you have to gauge how badly you want it, and then you have to reach out and take it.
Surely we both know why I’m here. We don’t need to dissemble, after so long. She knew that her face had reddened, and she stared ahead at the green and blue and grey rockfolds of the mountains.
They left the freeway and followed a smaller road past scattered motels and diners, linked by the taut black lines of telegraph wires like apron strings. They were climbing steadily. They passed through a small town and Julia glimpsed the storefronts and two trucks pulled up on the forecourt of a filling station. Beyond the town, higher up, there were fewer buildings along the roadway. They passed farm waggons and timber trucks, and the driver of one of them raised his arm and waved to Josh.
‘Almost there,’ Josh said.
They turned off again, along a road that was hardly more than a rutted track. They were in trees now, a heavy green canopy that knitted over their heads. Josh slowed the car to walking speed, and they bumped slowly over the grassy ridges. The engine’s echo thrummed back at them. Through the beat of it Julia could hear birdsong, and the splash of water.
Josh swung the wheel again, and the car nosed past a rough timber gate. He drove up a track for a little way, and then they stopped. When he reached and turned off the ignition the silence suddenly yawned, seemingly immense.
Ahead of her, Julia could see the wall of a timber shack.
Josh came round and opened her door for her, helping her out. She stood up in the green stillness, stretching, her legs stiff after the long flight and the drive. Josh folded her arm through his. ‘It’s up here,’ he said gently.
They walked on up the steep track, leaning against each other. The low, dark wall of the shack looked like a frown amongst the greenery. Julia caught her foot in a hollow and stumbled.
‘City shoes,’ she said.
‘City girl,’ Josh teased her.
They reached the shack wall and skirted round it, Josh leading the way. Julia was breathing heavily after the uphill scramble. He pushed the branches aside as they walked, so that the fingers of them didn’t catch at Julia’s clothes. Then they turned the corner. Julia looked up and gasped. Josh’s summer house was built on a little plateau in the side of the mountain. The trees grew up to each side of it, and reared above and behind. But in front of the cabin a space had been cleared, and the magnificence of the view dropped away, unobstructed, beneath their fe
et.
Julia stood at the edge of the clearing and looked down over the variegated canopy of trees, over the silver thread of a waterfall that broke between them, and on down to the yellow-green expanse of open grassland, rolling away further to the bluish hump of a little town in the distance and, beyond that, a blue haze that melted into the indistinguishable skyline. The colours were different, and the air had a sharper bite to it, but the memories stirred just the same. It was like Montebellate, and she had half turned to Josh to say it when she felt the warmth of his breath on her neck.
‘I know,’ he said, reading her thoughts. ‘It reminds me of it, too.’
‘Only there’s no old woman in a black dress, and no tethered goat up here,’ Julia said softly. ‘No cracked bell ringing the hours.’
Josh touched her arm. ‘Come inside,’ he said.
Julia followed him. Under the shallow pitch of the shingled roof there was a porch, open on three sides. There was one wicker chair, facing outwards. Josh had to stoop to pass under the lintel of the door. The inner part of the cabin was divided into two rooms. The larger was furnished with a table and a couple of upright chairs, two armchairs, and some shelves and a wood-burning stove. Through an open door beside her Julia could see a bed with a turned-back blanket, and some of Josh’s clothes laid neatly on a chair. In a corner, propped against the wall, were two fishing rods and a shotgun. On the shelves were a handful of paperback thrillers, a radio, and a telephone, incongruous even though it was a heavy, old-fashioned black one. There was almost nothing else. No patina of accumulated possessions, no pictures or photographs or mementoes, nothing to decorate the bare walls.
Julia thought of her little house by the canal. It was full of things, reminders and pleasurable acquisitions, arranged and laid out as if to reassure her of some necessary permanence.
Josh had none of that. This cabin on the side of the mountain was the same as the cottage in the angle of the Kentish woods, uninhabited by memories, a place to sleep in and then leave behind.
‘Is this all there is?’ she asked, and then blushed. ‘I didn’t mean that, exactly …’
He smiled at her, undeterred. ‘There’s a kitchen out back and a perfectly good bathroom, if you aren’t too particular. There’s water from the well, and that only runs dry if there’s a drought. I’ve got electricity, canister gas for cooking, and the telephone. As you know. What more could anyone want?’
‘What do you do here, Josh?’
‘I fish, do a little shooting and stalking, drink a few beers. That’s all.’
Julia tried, and failed, to imagine herself in such self-contained isolation. ‘Don’t you feel lonely?’
He laughed. ‘You always like to be with people.’
To reflect myself back at me? Julia wondered.
‘No, I’m not lonely. My nearest neighbour is only a quarter of a mile on up the track. These woods are full of people vacationing, trying to get away from each other. If I need company I can drive down into Honey Creek and sit in a bar, talking about baseball.’
Honey Creek must be the little town with the trucks and the shuttered storefronts. Thinking about it, and about Josh sitting in a bar with the farmers and loggers, Julia had wandered across the room. She put the toe of her city shoe in the powdering of wood-ash around the legs of the stove.
‘What’s your proper home like?’ she asked. ‘In Vail?’
‘Oh, it’s a modern apartment. If you’re asking me whether it’s got pictures on the walls and ornaments on the mantel, then, no, it hasn’t.’
She went back across the room to him, put her fingers on the rolled-back cuff of his shirt. ‘Don’t you ever want to put down roots?’
Josh looked down at her. She thought that she was seeing his face, clearly, without the camouflage of good humour or detachment or charm, for the very first time. She wondered if she had ever really known Josh at all.
He said, ‘I have spent so long evading it, I don’t think I know how to begin, now.’
She asked him again, ‘Are you lonely?’
And this time he thought about it, and then he answered, very quietly, ‘Not all the time. Not even most of the time.’ After a moment, he added, ‘I’m glad you called when you did.’ Then he touched his forefinger to the tip of her nose, the old, teasing Josh again. ‘I’m not looking after you very well. My cabin isn’t as primitive as you think it is. There’s no English tea or anchovy toast, I’m afraid …’
‘Do you imagine I spend my life sitting on rolling lawns sipping Lapsang Souchong and nibbling toast?’
‘… But there’s cold beer, or coffee. Which would you like?’ Julia accepted the deflection. For Josh, even so much openness was startling.
‘I would like a beer, please.
‘Let’s sit on the porch.’
He brought two cans of beer from the kitchen refrigerator, and settled Julia in the wicker chair. For himself he dragged out one of the upright chairs and sat with his feet hooked over the porch rail.
The light was fading from blue to dove-grey, and the splash of the waterfall below them sounded louder in the stillness.
Julia was watching the dusk thickening under the trees, and she sighed with satisfaction. ‘It seems a long way from New York.’
Josh’s eyes had been on her face. ‘Tell me about it. Tell me everything you’ve been doing. And about lovely Lily. And Mattie. I saw one of her movies. The girl I was with wouldn’t believe me when I said I knew her.’
Julia took a long gulp of her beer. ‘All kinds of things have happened,’ she said. ‘And yet in another way, hardly anything has happened at all.’
While the darkness crept out from under the branches of the trees, she told him about Lily and Alexander and Ladyhill, about Mattie and Chris, and about Garlic & Sapphires and Thomas Tree and the house by the Regent’s Canal.
Josh listened, and nodded, and when their beers were finished he went in and brought two more.
The sky over their heads lost the last pinky-grey glimmer, and he lit the lamp in the window of the cabin. The glow of it lay thickly on the old boards under their feet, and big, pale moths came drifting out of the darkness to bat their wings against the glass.
‘A long time,’ Julia said, at the end.
Josh stood up. He came to perch on the rail beside her, and the old wood creaked in protest. He leaned over and kissed the top of her head.
‘What now?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Julia said softly.
But she was thinking, I do know. She wanted to go home, to Lily and Alexander. The thought of them, together at Ladyhill, pulled sharply at her. And the thought of Alexander himself was more important still. It seemed to have grown in her consciousness, always demanding more of her attention, although, superstitiously, she had refused to give it. He had been in her head in New York and he was present even more strongly, now, while Josh sat beside her on the porch rail. She had dreamed of coming here, of seeing Josh again, but with sharpened perception she wondered if she had come out of a need to knit up loose ends. To draw a neat line, freeing herself. So that she could see Alexander again? She didn’t expect him to say anything, or to do anything, any more than he ever did. She knew his mild, dry, English demeanour well enough by now. But she suddenly understood that she was ready, at last, to go to Ladyhill again, without fear of the black fingers of the old terrors snatching at them again.
She would like to visit them, to see Lily and Alexander happy together in the old house. That was all, wasn’t it?
But she could no more confess to Josh what she felt now than, in London, she could have told Alexander that she was going to look for her comic-book hero.
Subterfuges, Julia thought suddenly. I’m tired of them. I want everything to be simple. She turned her face up to look at Josh in the yellow light of the lamp.
It was Josh who was here with her. He was still her aviator, and she felt the force of the old attraction. It had followed her like a shadow for so long, but now she felt
that she had the power to reach down and roll up the shadow, to put it away in a drawer with the other, musty keepsakes from long ago, or to take it out, and examine it, at her own pleasure.
The recognition of that power released an erotic charge inside her.
Deliberately, she reached up and put her mouth to his. She held herself still for an instant and then she leaned back again, breaking the connection.
It was an added satisfaction for both of them, she understood, to play with the moment before it overtook them. They were old enough, now, to postpone it, and so to heighten the eventual satisfaction. Once, they would have fallen on each other, incapable of any delay.
‘Do you remember the Swann Hotel?’ Julia asked, her voice ripe with amusement.
‘And the Pensione Flora. And the Signora in the next room, who must have heard everything.’ His fingers touched her cheek. ‘Shall I cook you some dinner?’
Postponement, imagination, recollection; the delicate refinements of adulthood.
‘Yes, please,’ Julia said.
Josh made a simple meal in the bare kitchen, and Julia watched him, leaning against the door frame and sipping the glass of red wine that he gave her. He moved economically in the cramped space, and she knew that she liked watching the turn of his wrists, and the set of his head on his tanned neck.
They sat facing each other across the small table, talking, leaning back in their creaking chairs to look at one another. From the darkness outside the moths went on batting against the windowpanes. When they had eaten they carried the dishes out into the little kitchen. Julia washed them and Josh took them from her and dried them and put them neatly away. She remembered how the parody of domesticity had been so painful in the empty white house in London, and she wondered how the pain could have evaporated. She understood that the net of longing and wishing that she had tangled around herself had simply dropped away, and set her free.
She was glad to be with Josh. She felt a girl’s excitement, and an adult’s satisfaction in their closeness, but she didn’t want, or expect, any more. Not any longer. She felt just as Josh must have done, she thought, in Wengen and in Montebellate and in the times afterwards. And all through those times she had been beating herself against his indifference to the future as hopelessly as the big, pale moths beat themselves against the glass.