by Rosie Thomas
The toe of Mattie’s shoe poked at the sodden rug.
‘Give me another drink,’ she begged him. And then added, in bewilderment, ‘I don’t know what to do.’
Alexander filled her glass, watched as she emptied it, then took her hands.
‘You need to go to sleep now.’
‘I can’t.’
He saw fear in her face. ‘I’ll stay with you. I’ll be here.’
He led her upstairs. In the pink marble bathroom he sponged her face, and undressed her as if she was a child. He was ashamed of seeing that her body seemed as richly perfect as it had done six years ago, at Ladyhill. He found a nightdress, and covered it up. He straightened the creased bed, and drew the covers back for her. Like an obedient robot, Mattie lay down. Alexander closed the dressing room door, so that she couldn’t see Mitch’s empty clothes. Then he sat down in a velvet chair and watched until her face sagged, the lines in it softening, and she fell asleep.
In the morning, it was Alexander who made the necessary, painful telephone calls. He spoke to Mitch’s brother in Whitby, and to Mattie’s family and her agent. He fended off the reporters and photographers who had heard the news and gathered in the Coppins driveway, and he dealt with police and solicitors. He broke the news to Felix in his office at Tressider & Lemoine, and he answered the telephone’s increasingly insistent ringing.
‘Thank you,’ Mattie said to him. ‘I couldn’t do any of this myself, you know. I never could do anything like this. That was why Mitch was so good for me.’ She shook her head, turning her flat eyes away from Alexander’s sympathy. She seemed to watch the sad arrangements being made as if they concerned someone else, he thought, and half wished that she would cry so that he could make some attempt to comfort her. The bluff, golfing GP came back and confided to Alexander, ‘Grief manifests itself in a dozen different ways. We can only let it run its course.’
He left a prescription for tranquillisers and sleeping tablets and Alexander, irritated, watched him drive away again.
In the evening, Alexander sat beside Mattie on the slippery sofa in her drawing room. Every lamp was lit, and the housekeeper had taken away the whisky-stained rug.
‘Let me call Julia,’ he pleaded. ‘She’ll want to come and be with you. You should have her here, Mattie.’
Mattie didn’t even look at him now. She turned her wedding ring to and fro on her finger. ‘What can Julia do?’ She added, almost conversationally, ‘Better to leave her in peace. Her garden is beautiful, you know.’
But when Mattie had taken her sleeping pills and gone to lie in her wide bed, Alexander picked up the telephone on Mitch’s desk. The news would be in the papers the next day, and he didn’t want Julia to have to learn it from them. As he waited through the complications of reaching Montebellate, his eyes wandered over the neatly arranged documents in front of him. Copies of Mitch’s will, insurance policies and everything else that was necessary, had been immediately to hand. Mattie was right, he thought. Mitch had been very good for her. Grief, and anger at the pointlessness of his death, struck him simultaneously. Alexander had to rub his face as the call went through at last. He found himself trying to explain to an elderly-sounding Italian man that he must speak to Julia Bliss at once.
‘Julia Smith?’ Nicolo Galli asked. ‘There is no trouble, I hope?’
‘Tell her it’s Alexander here. It’s not Lily, tell her.’
‘Thank God,’ Nicolo replied. ‘I will fetch Julia for you.’
Alexander waited for a long time. He tried to imagine the little hill town and Julia’s house, but he could only see Mitch’s tidy desk, and the photograph of Mitch and Mattie on their wedding day that stood at one side. Julia was in the picture too, but a shadow partly hid her face. Alexander found that he couldn’t even remember exactly how long it was since he had spoken to her. He rubbed his knuckles wearily into the sockets of his eyes.
‘Alexander?’
Julia’s voice came from a long way away, but he could hear the sharpness of anxiety it it. Quickly and quietly he told her what had happened.
There was a moment’s silence.
‘Poor Mattie. Oh God, Alexander. Poor Mattie.’
They talked for a moment longer. It struck Alexander that Julia spoke English too carefully, as if her command of it was slipping away. But yet there was no hesitation between the two of them. They were drawn together by their love for Mattie, and the common bond of the years.
‘I’ll come as soon as I can,’ Julia promised. ‘Tomorrow, sometime.’
‘She’s very shocked,’ Alexander warned her, as they hung up.
Julia’s face had gone white. She looked across his piles of books to meet Nicolo’s concerned gaze. ‘I’ve got to go home. I’ve got to go home right away. Mattie’s husband is dead.’
Outside, Montebellate was silent. Julia remembered how she and Mattie had huddled against one of these walls and laughed together. Tonight’s darkness had extinguished the first warmth of the southern spring day, but it would be warm again tomorrow, and then warmer. But Julia felt England pulling at her. The urgency of her need to be there tightened and twisted inside her, so sharply that she could smell the green March winds and feel the sting of driven rain in her face. She ran down the steep hill to her own house, as if by running she could reach Mattie more quickly.
Alexander walked slowly through the glossy, ornamented rooms of Coppins. He was thinking of the time that Mattie and Mitch must have taken to accumulate all these things, and of his own pursuit of the pieces for Ladyhill. The futility that he had grown to recognise at Ladyhill confronted him again, sharpened by the arbitrariness of tragedy. And he thought of Julia again, and the estranged, Latinate cadences of her voice. Yet still, for all the distance and the time, he knew her better than he knew anyone else. He reached under the silk shades of the lamps and turned them off, one by one. The darkness seemed to move faster than he did. Alexander was used to empty houses, but he had never learned to be happy with the emptiness. His own vacancy seemed to stretch ahead of him.
In Coppins, now, Alexander shivered and turned off the last lamp.
Mitch was buried in the graveyard of the church where he had been christened. It stood on a headland overlooking the sea, and as the group of mourners watched the coffin being lowered the salty wind blew inland and wrapped the loose strands of Mattie’s hair against her cheeks. It made her think of Chichester harbour and the soaking rain in her face, and then the teashop where she had taken shelter with Mitch. Her face and her eyes were dry now.
She watched the ropes being removed and the bearers, Mitch’s brother and the other Whitby fishermen, stood back with their heads bowed. The vicar’s surplice billowed as he motioned Mattie forward. Mattie dropped her wreath of roses into the hole and stepped back again. Julia put a hand to her arm, but she didn’t need steadying. Felix and Alexander stood at her other side, but she felt separated from them by thick, invisible walls. She wasn’t thinking about them, or even about Mitch. The smell of the sea reminded her of fish and chip suppers in northern towns, and the zigzagging, cross-country progress of Francis Willoughby’s touring company. But that was all finished, long ago. Mattie had a sense of many things being finished.
The funeral tea was held in her brother-in-law’s terraced house in one of the little streets not far from where Mitch had grown up. Ruddy-faced Mitchells and Howorths crowded into the front room, holding teacups and staring covertly at Mattie. She was pale, but perfectly in control of herself. She nodded gravely in acknowledgement of their condolences, and made sure that she spoke to everyone who had come to remember Mitch. Once or twice she glanced at Felix and Alexander, who sat on upright chairs by the window, talking in low voices. Julia was in the kitchen, fiercely buttering sliced bread and helping Mitch’s brother’s wife to refill the emptying teapots.
Mattie felt that she was delivering a finely judged performance as the young widow. Each moment, she wished that the performance would end. If only it would end, Mitch wou
ld come into her dressing room and wait while she removed her make-up, tell her that the show had been wonderful, and then take her back home again.
Mattie’s performance concealed all the rage and terror and grief that wound up inside her, and the invisible walls that separate the victims of tragedy cut her off even from Julia.
Another hour, Mattie was thinking, then this tea will be over. What shall I do then?
Mitch was in his coffin, under the wreath of roses and the salty earth. They had cleaned his face, and taken off his broken glasses.
‘Thank you,’ Mattie murmured to a Howorth cousin. ‘Thank you for coming.’ At last the proper ritual of the funeral tea was over. When the people had all gone, Mattie said suddenly that she wanted to go back to Coppins. Julia and Alexander tried to persuade her to stay another night with Mitch’s family, but she was adamant.
‘I’ll drive you,’ Felix offered. In the Howorths’ front room Felix looked alarmingly exotic. ‘I must get home, too.’
Felix was in love. He had only met William Paget a few days before Mitch’s death. William was Felix’s own age, the younger son of a grand family for whom Felix had done some work at their country house. William had never been there when Felix had visited it. Then, by coincidence, they had met at a private view in London. William was a painter, although the exhibition was of someone else’s work. He had turned his back on the packed gallery and stretched his hand out to the wall, as if to exclude everyone else and to stop Felix from escaping.
‘I wondered what you were like,’ William said. ‘Now I see.’
Felix was slightly drunk. ‘And what am I like?’ he enquired.
William put his head on one side, considering. And then he answered, ‘Extremely exciting.’
They left the gallery and went back to Eaton Square.
William laughed at the serious paintings, and then he closed the door of Felix’s bedroom behind them. For more than a week, they had hardly been apart.
Felix had stood on the windy North Yorkshire headland thinking of William, and then of Mitch, who wouldn’t have the chance of any more beginnings. He wondered how Mattie, standing so stiffly beside him, would find her way on her own again, and he was conscious of Julia and Alexander and the inexplicable distances between them. Tasting the salty air, stirred by the freshness of it, Felix was possessed by a furious longing to get back to London and to William, and to seize his own chances while they still lay within his reach.
‘I must get home,’ he repeated, in the street outside the Howorths’ home.
Mattie went with him. ‘I’ll be all right,’ she said in her composed way. ‘I’m going to get back to work in a day or two. Everyone says it will be for the best. I’m sure that’s what Mitch would think.’
They let her go. Julia and Alexander stood watching as Felix’s latest Alfa growled out of sight.
‘Will she be all right?’ Julia asked, not expecting an answer. Alexander didn’t give one. They felt Mattie’s removal from them, and their inability to help her. The street’s windows, overlooking them, suddenly seemed like prying eyes.
‘Let’s go for a walk,’ Alexander said.
He drove them southwards, along the coast, to a wide, flat expanse of glittering sands. They walked parallel to the low waves as they tipped over and slid back again under the netted foam. It was the first time that they had been alone together since Julia’s return to England, but they talked very little because there seemed to be no need. The common bond of the years, Alexander thought again. That’s what Julia and I have. Time is rubbing us smooth, like stones in the sea.
A seventh wave ran up and engulfed Julia’s feet. She laughed briefly and took off her shoes, emptying the water out of them. She unrolled her black stockings and walked barefoot in the sand, and Alexander put her shoes in his pocket. He watched her as she walked, a little ahead of him, her head turned to look out to sea.
Alexander had looked at her often since she had come home, but he seemed to see her with perfect clarity in this strong, coastal light. Julia was older, and there was a look to her as if she was too used to the hard sun and the slow demands of her Italian gardens. But if the work had worn her, it had also softened her. The lines of bitterness that had begun to set in her face had all been rubbed out. Her tranquillity, and the efforts by which he guessed it had been gained, gave the old Julia an added dimension of sweetness. As they walked, Alexander thought how much he liked her.
He knew her, and he liked her better than he had ever done. If, at the beginning, he had ever truly liked her, beyond loving her too insistently. Alexander understood that he had tried to replace her, with Clare and the others before her, and he had failed. Now, with Julia beside him at the edge of the grey sea, Alexander felt the soft, dead weight of regret. He might have tried to push it away, taking her hand in his or even trying, with awkward inappositeness, to kiss her. But as soon as he thought of it Julia turned round to him, walking backwards and leaving deep, dissolving footprints in the wet sand.
She said, ‘I should get back to London, too.’
Her glance held his for only a second, and then her eyes slid away again, back to the sea.
Alexander drove them the distance back to London.
They talked about Lily, and about the gardens at Montebellate, and about Alexander’s late success in his work.
In the long intervals of silence, Julia looked out at the length of England. She was sharply conscious of every green and dun contour, of the little grey huddles of villages and the sudden, stridently ugly outcrops of the towns. And she believed that she could feel, under the road, the firm flint and chalk backbone of it. It was hard and inhospitable, in its coldness quite unlike Italy, but she felt herself luxuriously drawn against it, like a baby to its mother.
Alexander was part of this landscape. She peered at him, almost furtively, as he drove. There was an English hardness in Alexander, an uncompromising strength beneath the undramatic surface. She had seen enough now to recognise its worth, at last. Julia suspected that she had fought against that strength, in their early days, as she had fought with herself. If she had won the battle with herself, she thought sadly, she had lost Alexander’s. She loved him, but she was almost as deeply afraid of what loving him might mean. She had no idea what Alexander felt, and it occurred to her that she never had. The retrospective vision of her own selfishness made her feel cold, and she drew her coat around her in the furthest corner of the car.
She closed her eyes, and made the journey inside her head from the harebell-blue door of her house, up the cobbled street under Nicolo’s balcony, across the square and through the gates of the palazzo. She knew the steps across the courtyard, and the scents trapped in the warmth of the secret garden. She knew the view from the stone-framed window, down over the terraces to the sea. But in her head, there was no sun shining. The sunlight all seemed to be here, invisibly brightening the unspectacular outlines of England.
But Italy is safe, Julia whispered to herself. Italy is safe.
Alexander glanced sideways at her, and thought she had gone to sleep.
Felix had lent Julia a Kensington flat that Tressider & Lemoine were converting for resale. He hadn’t wanted Julia at Eaton Square, witnessing his incredulous happiness with William, and he felt ashamed that his roundabout lack of generosity drew gratitude from Julia. She took the keys from him with cheerful relief.
‘I don’t know where else in London I could have stayed. I’ve neglected my friends, haven’t I? Mattie doesn’t seem to want me at her house, although I wish she’d let me look after her. And I haven’t really got the money, any more, for hotels.’
‘It’s yours for as long as you want it,’ Felix said quickly.
It was midnight when Alexander stopped his car outside the door. Julia reached into her bag for the keys with their Tressider & Lemoine label. They both found themselves looking at it, under the car’s dim courtesy light, as if it had some significance. Alexander thought of Mattie’s set, pale face,
and in another, deeper recess of his mind he thought again about kissing Julia. She opened the door of the car, letting in the cold air, and slid out. She had to lean down to see his face as she spoke.
‘Good night. Thank you.’ The rusty, Italian sound had come back into her voice.
‘There’s no need to thank me,’ Alexander said. Julia ducked her head, a quick, acquiescent nod, and then ran up the steps to the door.
She closed it behind her, letting out a long breath of relief and regret. Then she picked her way past the decorators’ ladders and paint pots that filled the hallway. She heard Alexander driving away, remembering that she didn’t even know where he was going.
Twenty-six
‘The law changed,’ Lily said. ‘Didn’t you know?’
‘What law? I’ve been away a long time. There must be all kinds of things I don’t know about.’
Julia and Lily were perched at opposite ends of the makeshift dining table in the Tressider & Lemoine Kensington flat. They had been drinking instant coffee and talking. George Tressider’s marquetry box was open on the table between them. Lily looked up from Valerie Hall’s birth certificate.
‘The adoption law. If you’re adopted, you’re allowed to try to find your real mother. They give you all the papers and files, and help you.’
Julia shook her head. ‘I didn’t know that,’ she said softly. ‘I’ve wanted to find her, you know, with part of myself, ever since you were born.’
Lily stood up, came round the table to Julia, and gave her the birth certificate. Julia folded it up and put it back in the box, on top of the envelope that held her two rings, and Pia’s Rapunzel book. In all the haste of packing to get back to Mattie as quickly as possible, Julia had still remembered to put the marquetry box in her suitcase. The box and its contents had become a kind of talisman.
‘I’ll come with you, to start looking for her, if you want me to,’ Lily offered.
Julia looked up at her in gratitude. Since she had been back in London, since Lily had come up from Ladyhill to stay with her for a few days, Julia had noticed yet another change in their relationship. Julia had found that London was different, and that it seemed more than ever like a foreign city. It seemed bigger, dirtier, and vaguely threatening. Lily noticed her uncertainty and she had become oddly protective, almost maternal to her own mother. The gap in years between them seemed to have diminished. They were more nearly equals, now. And in their most recent hours together, Julia had observed her daughter with a mixture of incredulity, amusement and pride. At almost seventeen, Lily seemed to have made the transition into adulthood with admirable panache. She had her own life, her own well-considered opinions, and a startling sense of style. To make the trip to London to stay with her mother, she had chosen her haute punk mode. She was wearing tight black plastic trousers, a torn black vest and a festoon of chains and pins. Her dark hair was teased into sticky points, each one tipped with what looked like an arrowhead of red ink.