by Rosie Thomas
‘George, you can’t mean to give me this,’ Julia protested, but he put his hand over hers.
‘It’s to keep your precious things in.’
They were sitting a little apart from the others, where it was quieter for George. Julia looked sideways at him. ‘The trouble is that you can’t put the really precious things in boxes.’
George’s gaze moved to settle on Felix. ‘That’s true. Luckily we both recognise that, don’t we? And we can also innocently enjoy the bibelots that do fit in boxes. Aren’t we fortunate?’
Yes, Julia thought, looking at her pretty room warmed by the company of friends and the spirit of Christmas. Fortunate, after all. She squeezed George’s hand, wondering that she had ever dismissed him as a waspish old queen, wondering at all her other mistakes. After dinner, they played charades. After everything, Julia still clung to her notions of what a proper Christmas should be. Felix and Lily were demons at the game. It was after midnight when the last guests left. Julia went upstairs to see Lily into bed. She lay under the covers and held up her arms.
‘Thank you for my presents. It’s been a lovely day. I love you, Mummy.’
You can’t put the really precious things in boxes. Lily was the most precious.
‘I love you too.’
*
Lily was to go to Ladyhill for New Year. She didn’t usually go in the Christmas holidays but she had asked if she might this time because her summer visit had been cut short, and Julia saw no reason to refuse her. Alexander had accepted the suggestion eagerly, and it occurred to Julia that he might not want to see in 1970 alone in the house. She wondered how often he thought of the New Year ten years ago, and how vivid the memories of it still were for him, even though Felix and his minions had removed all the black traces from the fabric of Ladyhill.
When he arrived to take Lily back with him, two days before the end of the year, Alexander and Julia greeted each other stiffly. It was their first meeting since she had driven away with Lily and left him. They didn’t know how to confront one another, and they took refuge in chill politeness.
‘Do you mind parting with her for a few days?’
‘Yes,’ Julia answered, ‘but she wants to come, and I’ve never stopped her, have I?’
‘No. Thank you. What will you do for New Year yourself?’
For Julia, it was a night to be survived rather than celebrated. If she guessed at Alexander’s concern for her she didn’t grasp at it, in case it was an illusion. She shrugged. ‘There are two or three possibilities. One of those, or none of them. It isn’t important.’
‘You could always come with us to Ladyhill,’ Alexander said.
For an instant, Julia thought of it almost longingly. But then the pall of smoke rose up around her. It burned in her throat and blinded her eyes, but still through the folds of it she saw the old, horrifying images, all of them still weighted with her guilt.
‘I couldn’t do that,’ she said quickly. ‘Not this time.’
Alexander nodded, masking his disappointment. ‘If Lily’s ready, I think we’ll go.’
Julia went out into the street to wave them off. Then she climbed into her red Vitesse and drove away to work, where she spent the day interrupting the post-Christmas torpor of some of her suppliers with unnecessarily brisk telephone calls.
In the end, improbably, Julia saw the New Year in with Betty and Vernon. Betty had telephoned to suggest it, so tentatively that it was hardly a suggestion at all, and Julia had accepted the invitation. She knew exactly how the evening would be, and the certainty of dullness was more reassuring than the parties or the solitude that were her alternatives.
There was no one else at Fairmile Road, of course. Betty and Vernon didn’t entertain. Julia wasn’t sure what they did, in Vernon’s retirement. When she arrived she saw that the newspaper on the coffee table was folded open at the television pages, and Vernon had already marked his choices of prepacked heather-flavoured celebration for the evening. He had been a late convert to television from the Third Programme, but Julia guessed he had become an enthusiast. Probably he sat in his chair watching it while Betty looked after the house, as she always had done.
The old people seemed glad to see her. They settled her in the best chair, placed squarely in front of the set, and Betty brought her the first in a series of cups of tea. Julia noticed, as she had done on other visits over the last months, that Betty had become the power now. It was Betty who decided when the kettle was to be put on, and when the room was warm enough for one of the bars of the fire to be switched off. Vernon had control of the knobs of the television, and in everything else he deferred to Betty. He called her Mum, and she fussed him mildly. Julia was reminded of the way that Betty had mothered her, as a very little and obedient girl, before she had turned rebellious. She saw that Betty was at her best in looking after a not very demanding dependant. She seemed happier than she had once been, and no longer even remotely afraid of Vernon.
At a quarter to midnight, Betty asked, ‘Would you like a glass of wine, Julia? To toast the new decade?’
Julia blinked. She couldn’t remember there ever being any alcohol in the house. ‘Yes, please. That would be … nice.’
She picked up the teacups and put them on the flowered tray, followed her mother into the kitchen with it. Betty held out a clear bottle of yellowish liquid and Julia read the handwritten label. It was homemade elderflower wine, the bottle bought or more probably won at a church Bring and Buy, and saved. Betty was making a tribute, bringing it out for her.
‘Thank you for coming,’ Betty said. ‘It means a lot to your dad, you know.’
‘Does it?’ Julia wished that Betty could say it meant a lot to her, but to be open or demonstrative wasn’t Betty’s way. It wouldn’t change now.
‘How’s Lily?’
‘She’s very well. She has written to thank you and Dad for the jumper …’
‘That’s all right. Gone to Ladyhill, has she?’
Betty knew that already, of course. ‘Yes.’
‘She’s a lovely girl.’
‘I know.’
After a little pause, Betty said something that astonished Julia. She asked, ‘Do you ever think of her? Your real mother? At Christmas and New Year, times like this?’
‘Always,’ Julia said softly. ‘Betty, do you know anything about her? Who she was, or where she came from?’
She had asked the question only once before, just after Lily’s birth, although it had often been in her head. Betty had answered, I’m your mother. Why do you want to know? And then, I don’t know anything about her, anyway.
Now, after a small silence, Betty said, ‘I told you. You came to us from the adoption society. They were very careful, those people. They wouldn’t want trouble, would they?’ Julia shook her head. She reached out and covered her mother’s thin hand with her own. From the next room Vernon called impatiently, ‘Come on, you’ll miss Big Ben.’
Betty drew her hand away, picked up the tray with the glasses and bustled out with it.
When the twelfth stroke of Big Ben had died away and the studio erupted into ‘Auld Lang Syne’, probably prerecorded months ago, Julia and her parents kissed each other and lifted their glasses of elderflower wine.
‘Happy New Year,’ Betty said.
‘Happy New Year,’ Vernon and Julia agreed with her.
It was 1970.
Outside, Fairmile Road was dark and silent. There were no visible signs of celebration. The utter predictability of her surroundings blanketed Julia’s terrors. There was no log fire here, no pretty candles, no music or dancing or sudden cannibalistic crackle of flame. She thought of Ladyhill, quiet in its gardens, and she knew that Lily would be fast asleep in her bed, because Alexander was far too strict to let her stay up. Happy New Year, she wished them, and Mattie and Mitch, and Felix and George and Marilyn and Nicolo Galli, and all the others. Happy New Year.
Twenty minutes later Vernon fell asleep in his chair. Julia sat on for a little
while with Betty, and then said she would drive home. She didn’t feel afraid of the prospect of home, any longer. Betty came to the door and stood in the rectangle of light until Julia had driven away.
The roads on the way back were almost empty, slick with rain. Julia drove steadily and carefully, relieved that the night was almost over. She saw only a few other cars, and occasional knots of directionless revellers on the street corners, until she reached London.
Alexander looked down the length of the table. He had been invited to a neighbour’s house for dinner, and he had left Lily with Mrs Tovey and come to the party because he didn’t want to be alone at Ladyhill.
He had hoped that Julia would be there with him, but it seemed clear now that he would have to stop hoping for the ghosts finally to be laid to rest. Another, newer ghost had glided between them. It was an added, bitter twist that the ghost should be Mattie. And now Mattie was married, and he had no idea where Julia was tonight, or what she was doing.
Alexander was too much of a realist to wish that what had happened had not, and he valued the memory of the happiness that he had shared with Mattie. He missed her, when she was gone. He still missed her, even now. But he did wish that the timing might have been different: that they could have been luckier, all three of them.
Julia had looked away when he had asked her to come home, for the end of this ten years. I couldn’t do that, she had said.
It struck Alexander with cold force that all their years, together and apart, were finally over.
And now he found himself part of a merry party, as if to celebrate his acceptance of the truth at last.
Alexander knew that he had had enough of being alone. He felt tired, with another ten years ahead of him, and on the point of getting old.
The girl opposite him leaned across the table. She was in her thirties, he guessed, and she had fair hair and big grey eyes. She had been introduced to him as Clare something.
‘Penny for your thoughts,’ she invited unstartlingly. Alexander smiled. ‘They’re not worth half that.’ The girl laughed as if he had delivered an epigram of Wildean polish. Her top lip lifted attractively when she laughed, showing her gums. ‘They’re worth twice as much as mine, then,’ she told him.
‘It sounds to me,’ Alexander said, ‘as if the two of us should give up thinking.’
At midnight, when they all joined hands, he noticed that Clare made her way round the circle so that she could be next to him.
Twenty-three
Summer, 1971
The office was a welter of boxes, spilling woodshavings and crumpled tissue, with the enthusiastic girl burrowing amongst them. After a moment, she found what she was looking for. She unwrapped the object from its tissue layers and held it up. ‘Look at this.’
Julia studied it. It was a teapot, made in the shape of a black kitten with a tartan bow around its neck. One upraised paw formed the spout, and its curled tail made the handle. The creature’s expression was sickeningly winsome. The girl rubbed it with her sleeve, beaming at it.
‘It’s wonderfully kitsch,’ she assured Julia.
‘I can see that it’s kitsch.’
Julia transferred her attention to the girl. She was wearing very short pink velvet shorts with a bib front, and a pale blue T-shirt with the message, Kiss me Quick. She had very long, tanned legs, ending in spotted ankle socks and a pair of platform-soled clogs. She was in her early twenties, almost straight out of college. She was Julia’s newest and brightest buyer.
‘It’s funny,’ she insisted. ‘People want things that will make them laugh.’
Julia sighed. ‘I’m not sure that I want pussycat teapots or ashtrays shaped like lavatories, or plaster ducks to hang on the walls of my house, even though they make my family and friends choke with laughter.’
‘Well …’ the girl hesitated. She was much too bright actually to suggest that her employer was too close to senility to hope to understand what the young wanted nowadays. But it was clearly what she was thinking.
Julia laughed, in spite of herself. ‘Oh, all right. Two dozen. You can try them in Oxford. Are they funny enough there? We’ll see how they go before putting them in the other shops.’
‘What about the ashtrays?’
‘No.’
‘The ducks?’
‘Two dozen of those as well. On your own head.’ Suki had been right before, Julia had to acknowledge that.
‘Great. Fantastic. Now, wait till you see this …’
Julia looked at her watch. ‘It’ll have to wait until tomorrow, whatever it is. A leopardskin umbrella stand? A pokerwork poem, addressed To Mother? I haven’t got time for any more now.’
‘Okay, whenever you say.’ Suki hesitated, then she added, ‘I think people are getting tired of wholesome good taste. Pine cupboards and glass and steel tables and that sort of stuff. They want something a bit tacky and decadent.’ Suki loved her job, there was no doubt about that. Her pretty face was radiant, and she couldn’t have looked less like the decadence she was advocating.
‘Maybe you’re right,’ Julia said. She watched Suki bounding away on her towering platform soles and was reminded of Lily. Lily would certainly love the pussycat teapot. Only Lily didn’t have any spending power. Not yet. But Lily had just turned eleven. It wouldn’t be long before she did have.
Julia turned in her swivel chair to stare out of the window behind her desk. It made her anxious to think of Lily. Julia had hoped, without thinking particularly hard about it, that as Lily grew older their defined mother–daughter relationship would soften into a more sisterly friendship. She imagined that they would develop the kind of closeness that she had never achieved with Betty. Julia was ready to accept confidences, holding herself open for them in the way that she believed she had wanted Betty to do, before it was too late. But they never came. If Lily had confidences to bestow, she saved them for Alexander.
Or perhaps for Clare.
Julia stared out into the street. The windows opposite were so thick with summer dust that she could hardly see into the depressing offices. She peered downwards, into the traffic. The busy street was baldly ugly.
She didn’t want to think about Clare, even now. The view offered no distraction. But Lily. Lily was growing up, and away from her. Julia was afraid that, to Lily, she was only her mother. She was the one who enforced the rules about bedtimes, and made unwelcome strictures about clothes, and homework, and friends. Just as Betty had done. Julia’s mouth twisted. She could appreciate the irony, at least. But it didn’t make her anxiety any less sharp. If I had stayed at home, she thought. Like Betty did. Would that have made the difference for us, for Lily and me? Would she be mine, then, instead of her father’s?
But Julia had asked the same questions too many times lately. They were hypothetical, unanswerable.
The only fact was that Lily was increasingly rebellious as Julia’s anxiety for her increased. Alexander’s was the only voice she listened to. And Clare’s, sometimes, because Lily liked Clare.
Julia turned abruptly back to her desk. Her in-tray was piled high, and her secretary was waiting in the outer office to take dictation. Julia pressed the intercom button and asked her to come through.
After they had done the letters Julia pulled the stack of papers towards her and worked at full stretch for an hour. Then she realised that the offices had gone quiet around her. She looked at her watch. Six thirty, and everyone had gone home. She would have to go herself, because she was meeting Felix at seven. They were going to have dinner together, and Julia was looking forward to it.
Julia went through into the bathroom that was part of her office suite, smiling briefly as she often did at the memory of the dingy, all-purpose cubicle behind the first shop. Julia stood in the shower for five minutes, letting the hot needles of water ping against her skin, then rubbed herself briskly down. She noted with an automatic sidelong glance into the mirror that her stomach was still flat, there was no loosening of the skin under her arms or over h
er thighs. Then she redid her face and her hair, and stepped into her dress. It was a Thea Porter, with a tight bodice and a skirt made of panels of oriental silk. Julia wore it with a wide, beaded choker, but even as she did up the ribbons that fastened the choker and turned her head from side to side, she felt dissatisfied. The dress had been expensive, and looked it, but she was afraid it lacked the certainty of style that Suki had managed in her velvet shorts.
Perhaps I am losing my touch, Julia thought. Like with the bloody teapots. What do I know, any more?’
Or care, she retorted to herself. She marched back into her office, picked up on of the teapots, and stuffed it into her bag. She would ask Felix what he thought of it. As always, the sight of him cheered her up.
He was waiting for her at a corner table in the mirrored bar and he stood up at once and kissed her on both cheeks. Then he held her at arm’s length to look at her.
‘That dress is wonderful.’
If Felix said it was, then it was. He could still criticise, while managing to remain beyond criticism himself. Tonight he was wearing a cream raw silk Nehru jacket. The pale colour made his skin look darker, the bones of his face more prominent.
George Tressider had died twelve months before. He had been ill for a long time, and he had survived longer than the doctors had predicted, but even so the loss of his partner had shocked Felix deeply. For a time he found it too painful even to go into work at Tressider Designs. He grew alarmingly thin, and saw almost no one except Julia. Then he disappeared. Julia didn’t know where he had gone but she guessed, approximately. When he resurfaced he was dead-eyed with exhaustion, but he went back to work. He reorganised some of the systems at Tressider’s, and he began to gain weight again. Felix had dealt with his grief in his own way. Julia loved and admired him for his strength.