by Rosie Thomas
‘I’m ready,’ she said quietly.
He took her suitcase from her and carried it out to the Mercedes. The car rolled smoothly down the track, and the cabin was swallowed up by its curtain of trees. Julia didn’t look back at it. She didn’t want to think of its emptiness. Instead she fixed her attention on the road as it unfolded, in reverse, through the new familiarity of Honey Creek, down again, and at last out on to the freeway. She thought of the distance ahead of her, beyond Denver, and New York, to the village in the hollow of green English countryside.
It was only when they had reached the airport, and found the New York flight already boarding, that Josh said, ‘I’m glad you came. I told you that already.’ And then, abruptly, ‘I shouldn’t have asked you to stay on. Or hoped that you could have. That wasn’t part of the contract, was it?’
‘No, I suppose it wasn’t,’ Julia said.
‘And I think I set the terms of the contract.’ Josh was smiling, making her want to reach out and hold on to him.
‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘We kept to it, more or less, didn’t we?’
And the other contracts? she wondered. With Alexander, and Lily. Betty and Vernon, even. Those were harder to keep. Because they were real. What I imagined with Josh never was real. Gilt, instead of guilt. That was what I was chasing. The recognition made her smile, a small, thin smile.
‘It’s time to go.’ Josh took her hands and kissed the suntanned knuckles, then turned her towards the departure gate.
‘Come and see me in London,’ Julia said. Me, not us, although the plural could have included Lily, or Mattie, or the whole wide spread of the city, rather than herself and Alexander.
‘Of course I will.’
They kissed, touching cheeks, like friends. The contract of friendship, Julia thought. Mattie and I kept ours. That’s one truth. Perhaps Josh and I mil achieve that now. But only perhaps.
She was walking away from him now, patting the pocket of her Rive Gauche suit to check her boarding card, hearing the busy click of her high heels on the wide shiny floor, carried along, a traveller. When she looked round, before turning the corner, she saw Josh’s bright head over the other heads moving past him. He looked exactly as he had done across the room at Leoni’s. When she was sixteen, half drunk, a dirty little baby.
Josh lifted his arm, and waved.
Julia turned the corner, her own click click accompanying her.
She flew back to New York, and transferred to the first available London flight. As soon as she was airborne, she felt the threads of eagerness pulling at her. She leaned forward in her seat, as if that would make the jet fly faster through the curve of blue sky. She reached London in the grey-white light of early morning, but by the time she was climbing the five steps to her own front door the sun was streaming down the length of the street. London was welcoming, a city of top-heavy trees and homely corners, but Julia hardly registered it. The rooms of her house looked pretty and unusually clean and tidy, but she didn’t stop to admire them. She tipped the contents of her suitcases on to her bedroom floor, intending to sort through them, but impatience took hold of her before she had begun and she pushed the heaps into a corner. She went downstairs and flipped through the piles of mail that Marilyn had stacked on the pine table, but there was nothing to catch her attention. She went back up the stairs and ran a bath, scenting it with Floris oil.
Lying in the water, looking through the steam at the coral branches and conch shells ranged on the shelves above her, Julia thought, I couldn’t sleep now, even if I wanted to, I’ve come this far. I’ll go straight on to Ladyhill.
She sat up abruptly, sending a little wave of scented water splashing over the floor. An hour later, with the damp ends of her hair still curling around her neck, Julia turned her scarlet Vitesse into the traffic at the end of the street. She hadn’t telephoned. I’ll surprise them, she thought. Lily will like that.
She hadn’t done the drive to Dorset for so long, but she remembered it without effort. She knew that she was very tired, but the road seemed to unroll in front of her, hypnotic in its steady familiarity. When she had left London behind the fields opened on either side of her, yellow and gold, patched with knobs of trees and little clusters of houses, doll-like after the scale of Josh’s America. Julia laughed, tightening her grip on the steering wheel. She sang to keep herself alert, snatches of songs that she had hummed to Lily on similar journeys, ‘One Man Went to Mow’ and ‘Buttercup Joe’.
Her mind wandered. How did she know songs like that herself? Had Betty or Vernon ever sung to her?
I’m as fresh as a daisy, that grows in the fields, and they calls I Buttercup Joe.
Did Lily still remember the words? They could sing it for Alexander. It would make him laugh.
Basingstoke, Andover, Salisbury. After Blandford, over the Stour, almost there.
‘Nearly home,’ Alexander used to say, almost always at exactly the same point in the road. Julia remembered that his pleasure had irritated her. Why was I so jealous? she wondered. She rubbed her eyes with the knuckles of one hand, yawning. Blinking, looking around, she thought she understood Alexander’s satisfaction perfectly. It was very beautiful, this corner of England. Little hills, and open fields, and wooded hollows, each little valley with its own stream. The villages with their low-browed cottages were sunny and sleepy. How had the vertiginous spaces of Josh’s mountainsides reminded her of this?
Julia knew that she was only two miles from Ladyhill. She had just passed the fingerpost that announced Ladyhill, 3, and that was on down to the village itself. A tractor materialised ahead of her and she slowed to a crawl in its wake. Her memory served up a picture of straight, open road ahead of it, dipping down to the stone gateposts of Ladyhill House.
Julia pressed her foot down and the car surged forward, swinging out parallel with the tractor. The road was clear, as she remembered, of course. The roar of the Vitesse’s engine swirled in through the open window and she caught the scent of hay from the tractor’s load. In the same instant, the threat of it frighteningly at odds with the reassuring country smell, a car shimmered up in her path. It was big and grey, and it swept up out of a dip in the road that her memory had obliterated. It was travelling fast, coming at her like a silvery bullet. She knew that she couldn’t brake hard enough to get back behind the tractor. Its huge wheels turned beside her head.
Julia stamped her foot hard. The car howled in protest, but it leapt forward. The tractor seemed dragged back behind her. She wrenched the wheel and the car rocked under her, slewing across to her own side of the road. The grey car whirled past her in a dazzle of headlights and a deafening blast of the horn. She caught a glimpse of the driver’s angry, red, frightened face, and then he was gone. They had missed each other, she guessed, by less than a yard.
Julia drove on, her hands damp and shaking, and sweat sticky in a patch at the small of her back. Relief made her legs feel weak and her head too heavy for her neck. She was tired, and she had been driving recklessly, but she had been lucky. Lucky this time. Ahead of her were the stone gateposts of Ladyhill.
With an extraordinary, grateful surge, her spirits lifted. She knew that life was precious, she felt it like a smooth stone, miraculously veined, warm in the palm of her hand. She would hold it, keep it safe, value it. From now, this moment.
The shadow of the trees lining the driveway dappled her face. She slowed the car, lifting her head to the coolness. She turned the corner and saw the house in front of her. Her head held a hundred different images of Ladyhill, but none of them matched this afternoon’s. It was as if she had known but never before acknowledged that it was beautiful.
She let the car drift to a standstill and climbed out. She walked on, up to the house, her eyes fixed on it. The grey stone was gold-tinged in the sunlight, the brick was warm coral-pink. Beside her, now, was the wing where the fire had started. The black stains of it had been cleaned away. The windows had been releaded, and the small panes of glass shone. There was n
o sign, any more, of the devastation.
The blanket of smoke and fear had drifted away.
Julia’s footsteps scrunched on the gravel. She walked on, to the paved court enclosed by the two projecting wings. Lavender and nepeta had been planted in blue-grey drifts in the beds against the grey walls. The front door, under the portico in the short central arm of the house’s E-shape, stood invitingly open.
Julia wondered where Lily and Alexander could be.
On the threshold, as the shadow of the house fell over her face, she hesitated. She hadn’t been here since she had run away, with Lily in her arms.
Did she have the right, now, to walk past the bees humming in the lavender and into the dim silence of the house?
Julia looked up. Above her head, over the door, was a stone tablet with the family motto carved in it. It was the single word, Aetemitas.
She put out her hand, tentative, as if she was feeling her way in darkness. The heavy door, warmed by the sun, swung open. Julia walked into the stone-flagged hallway. She looked up, surprised. The walls were washed pale ivory, bringing light into the heart of the house. Sunlight streamed through the restored glass of the high stairway window, lying in lozenges over the clean stone flags and the new oak boards of the stairs. The intricately turned banisters looked just as they had always done, instead of the bitten-off black stumps of her nightmares. There were new pictures on the walls, landscapes and a tiny, glowing still life, and a pair of fine Gothic hall chairs faced each other from opposite sides of the front door.
So Alexander had done it, she thought.
He had remade Ladyhill. It was as lovely, more perfect in itself than it had been before.
Julia stepped forward, the lozenges of light breaking over her feet. There was one wrong detail, just one tiny flaw in the picture of perfection. At the foot of the stairs she bent down and picked it up.
It was a high-heeled gold sandal. Not gold, rather. Gilt. Rather a tarty piece of work, Julia thought.
What was it doing here?
Then the answer, satisfyingly obvious, came to her. It must be Lily’s, one of Lily’s dressing-up shoes. At school jumble sales Lily always bought the cast-off evening slippers, and stumbled around in them at home, dragging a wake of chiffon scarves and floppy hats and beads behind her.
Swinging the shoe by its strap, Julia went on through the house. Of course Lily and Alexander would be outside, in the sun. They would be sitting in the orchard, by the white-painted summerhouse.
The back door had been replaced. There were six glass panels in it now, letting new light into the once dingy flower room with its big stone sink and hanging row of gardening jackets and fraying straw hats.
Julia saw them through the glass panels.
Alexander was sitting in a Lloyd Loom chair, reading, and Lily was lying on her stomach, a little way away from him, drawing on a sketch-pad. The tip of her tongue stuck out between her teeth. It was then that Julia remembered that Lily had stopped dressing up years ago.
Mattie was sitting on the grass beside Alexander’s chair. The other gold sandal, discarded like its partner, lay next to her. And as Julia watched, Alexander looked up from his book and let his hand fall on to Mattie’s shoulder. His fingers touched the nape of her neck, where she had bundled up the heavy mass of her hair.
At once, immediately, Julia understood everything.
She stood frozen into stillness, her hand on the latch of the door. A second later, their attention drawn by her guilty, horrified stare, the comfortable trio on the grass looked up and saw her.
Julia turned away and ran.
Without knowing where she was going she ran up the stairs, her feet thudding painfully on the oak boards. She ran down the gallery to the big bedroom that she had shared with Alexander. At the beginning, when they were first married. When Alexander was a boy, he had told her, the room had been his parents’.
The room looked different now. The first thing she saw was a new dressing table, oval, with a looped skirt of unusually pretty chintz. Felix’s touch, she thought dully, automatically. The top of the table was protected by an oval of thick glass, and on the glass there was a dusting of spilled powder. Julia swept her hand over it and stared down at the pinky-white crust edging her palm.
The powder told her everything she already knew, hammering it brutally home. There were, other things too: another pair of high-heeled sandals, a lace-edged slip, turned inside out, flung over a chair with one of Alexander’s familiar Tattersall-check shirts. But the powder on its own was enough.
Julia turned, and saw that Mattie had followed her. Her cheeks were too pink, and her hair was escaping from its combs.
Standing in the doorway, seeing julia’s grey face and burning eyes, Mattie said, ‘Why didn’t you tell us you were coming?’
Julia was shaking. She felt cold and stiff and sick with anger and shame. She found the words, any words, out of the torrent that boiled up in her. ‘And why didn’t you tell me? I thought you were my friend, Mattie. I thought you were.’
‘I am your friend.’
Julia’s hand flew up, and then she found herself looking at it, wondering why, as if it didn’t belong to her. She was still holding the silly gilt sandal. She let her arm drop again, stiff, to her side and the sandal fell at her feet. ‘No. No, you aren’t. How could you be?’
And then they heard Lily and Alexander, coming after them.
Mattie began, ‘Julia, I want to …’ but Julia turned on her, cutting her short.
‘I don’t care what you want. How could you do it, Mat? Here. With Alexander. After … after everything.’
‘It’s nothing,’ Mattie said helplessly. ‘It’s just, friends.’ The blaze of anger in Julia’s face frightened her.
‘Don’t ever say it’s nothing,’ Julia warned.
Lily was shouting, ‘Mummy, Mummy, where are you? Where have you gone?’
‘I’m here,’ Julia managed to say, her eyes fixed on Mattie in disbelief. ‘I’m here, Lily.’
A moment later, Lily appeared at Mattie’s side. She had grown. Her brown legs, netted with bramble scratches, looked longer and thinner than ever. Julia felt a treacherous space of jealousy and secrecy yawning between them. She wanted to rush into it, headlong.
‘Mummy, why are you here? Is everything okay?’ Lily was surprised, not alarmed.
Julia said, ‘I thought I’d surprise you all. I did, didn’t I?’
She was tired now. Exhaustion and misery pulled at her, dragging at her limbs. Lily came and hugged her, the perfunctory, dismissive greeting of security.
‘It’s a fab surprise. Isn’t it, Mattie?’
‘Yes, love,’ Mattie said. Julia wouldn’t meet her eyes. They could hear Alexander coming along the gallery towards them.
Twenty-one
For Lily’s sake, they made the necessary pretences.
Alexander held out his hands to Julia, large warm hands that enveloped her own cold ones, and she saw the concern in his face. She also saw that he was awkward, and unhappy at the position that she had put him in. She had never seen Alexander awkward before, and she knew that when her anger and shock had subsided she would be sorry for having made him so. She withdrew her hands and pushed them, defensively, into her pockets.
‘Did you have a successful trip?’
The question was so strangely formal that she stared, uncomprehending, for a moment. ‘Oh. Yes, very successful. I met all sorts of people, saw all kinds of interesting things for the shops.’
They were like polite strangers, Julia thought bitterly, newly introduced at some less than successful cocktail party. This reality, compared with the rosy, romantic dreams that she had permitted herself as she drove through the summer country, made her want to duck her head to hide her shame and embarrassment. She held it up defiantly, and saw Mattie gathering up her rolls of hair that had escaped from their combs. She was straightening herself, putting on a public face after the intimate scene that Julia had glimpsed in the orchar
d.
A public face for me. The sense of exclusion cut through her, sharp as a knifeblade.
Mattie as châtelaine, graciously dispensing the hospitality of Ladyhill. Furiously, childishly, Julia hated her, knowing that there were no grounds for hating Mattie except for puncturing an illusion. She turned away from the sight of her, to Lily, who was hopping with impatience by her side.
‘Mummy, come to the paddock and see Marco Polo. You’ve never even seen him.’ She took her mother’s hand, swinging it. ‘Alexander put up some jumps. I’m so pleased you’re here.’
Julia looked down at her oval face, noticeably printed with Alexander’s features as well as her own. Lily was pleased. She made herself smile, feeling it as a grimace. ‘Of course I’ll come. I’d love to see Marco Polo.’
It would help to leave this bedroom, with its little bits of sordid evidence. Had Lily seen them? she wondered. What had Lily guessed? Perhaps she would be able to breathe more easily, outside these walls. Perhaps she would be able to straighten the tangle of jealous questions without Mattie confronting her, without the gold sandal lying on the floor between them.
She held out her hand to Lily. ‘Come on then. Show me the famous Marco Polo.’
They went down the stairs together, out into the sunshine. Lily led the way, skipping, talking, full of the news of the summer.
We went to Weymouth … we had a picnic … Julia half listened, not daring to ask the questions that throbbed in her head.
When they reached the paddock Lily climbed the gate and ran to put her arms around her pony’s neck. He nuzzled at her hand, looking for sugar. Julia heard Lily telling him, ‘Mummy’s here.’
She watched her scramble on to the pony’s back and then urge him to a trot. There was a circuit of little jumps made of brushwood and fencing poles, and Lily and Marco Polo hopped neatly over them. Julia stretched her arms along the top of the gate, feeling the splintery wood against the palms of her hands. Lily looked so happy. Her face, and the pink shirt she was wearing, made her a bright, moving spot of light in the soft green landscape.