by Rosie Thomas
Afterwards they lay in the still room together. They studied each other’s faces, seeing the marks that the years had made and triumphantly discounting them. There was no need, yet, to talk very much.
It began to get dark outside, the quick and mysterious spring dusk overtaken by the orange glow of the city night. Julia looked at her discarded watch. It was almost nine o’clock.
‘I must ring Mattie,’ she said.
Alexander yawned luxuriously. ‘I’ll get us a drink,’ he offered. He padded away to the kitchen, and Julia dialled the Coppins number.
Mattie was sitting on her bed. She didn’t know quite how long she had been there, but her limbs were stiff and heavy. It must be a long time. She looked down, frowning, and saw an empty bottle nestled in the bedcover’s satin folds. As the telephone began to ring she remembered that earlier she had stood by the window, watching the wind tossing the trees. She hated the wind. She had drawn the curtains to shut it out, but she had still heard it clawing at the roof.
‘Mattie?’
‘Yes.’
‘Mattie?’
‘What is it?’ Her voice came out thickly. Even in her own ears it sounded rusty, as if she hadn’t used it for a long time.
‘Are you all right?’
The howling of the wind was so loud, she could hardly hear what Julia was saying. How long was it since her last call? It was impossible that it had only been this morning. A very long time seemed to have gone by since then, only she had no idea what she had done with it. ‘What’s the time?’
‘Nine o’clock,’ Julia answered, in her enviable, clear voice. ‘Mattie, are you a bit pissed? You don’t sound very well. Have you had anything to eat?’
‘Nine o’clock at night?’
‘Of course. Listen, is Mrs Hopper there? Can I talk to her?’
‘I can’t hear you very well. Is it windy there?’
‘Yes, it is.’ The wind had pulled at the willow branches and shaken the red tulips in the park.
‘It’s very windy here,’ Mattie said slowly. She was glad that it was real, at least. She had begun to be afraid that it was only in her head. But now it seemed to threaten its way into the bedroom with her. It stirred the heavy curtains at the windows. Mattie turned away from it, hunching her shoulders. ‘Mrs Hopper’s gone down to the village to a whist drive. I’m okay. I’m going to have dinner now. On a tray in front of the TV. There’s a play I want to see.’ She had used to do that with Mitch. Mattie built up the little details for Julia, as if with her loving accuracy she could make them come true.
‘That sounds nice. What time’s the play? Shall I drive down and watch it with you?’
Mattie stared around her. She didn’t know what was on television. She hadn’t watched anything for days. She looked down again, and saw that there were stains of spilled whisky on her clothes. She felt afraid of Julia’s intrusion. Even Julia was an intruder here, behind the curtains that couldn’t close out the wind. Julia would see the whisky stains. It was difficult enough to allay Mrs Hopper’s suspicions.
Mattie smiled, with a kind of new cunning. ‘No, don’t bother with that. It’ll be over before you get here.’
As they talked, she could hear Julia’s anxiety begin to fade. Regret swam like a quick fish in Mattie’s head, as if she had missed a vital chance. But she didn’t want Julia down here, did she? She was trying to keep them all away, because then it hurt less, didn’t it?
Sitting up in her own bed, listening to Alexander hunting for glasses, Julia made a last try.
‘Mat, Alexander’s here. Shall I put him on?’
‘What? Oh, don’t worry, I’ll miss the beginning of the play. Give him my love, will you?’
‘Yes. Yes, of course I will. He sends his, too.’
Mattie stared unseeingly at the crumpled satin and the Johnny Walker label. Then a thick, wet mist of tears rose up and washed everything out of sight.
‘Goodnight, then, Mat. I’ll call in the morning.’
‘Goodnight. Thanks for ringing.’
‘Sleep well.’
Mattie uncurled her stiff fingers. She put the receiver down, knocking it sideways. She pushed the telephone off the bed and on to the carpet. The thick pile muffled the purr of the dialling tone, and the blast of the wind seemed to engulf everything else. The tears ran down Mattie’s face. She shook her head from side to side, too weary even to stop them dripping from her jaw. The wind mocked her with its noise, and she wanted nothing more than to go to sleep. She had hardly slept last night, whenever that had been, and in the intervals of it when it did come she had dreamed of Mitch, lying in his cold steel drawer and then under the earth in the windy churchyard.
Mattie stumbled to her feet. She needed another drink. In her luxurious bathroom she took another full bottle out from under the towels in the linen chest, and unscrewed the cap. Then she took the brown bottle of sleeping pills down from its place on the shelf and ate one with a swig of whisky, and then another.
If I could only sleep, Mattie thought. If I could only sleep, and not have to dream any more.
A little while later, Mattie went downstairs. She knew that she should eat something now. She moved clumsily in the kitchen, knocking a dish off the worktop and sending a knife skidding across the polished floor. She found a loaf, and tore some ragged chunks off it. She put a plateful of bread on a tray, and carried it through into the television room. Then she sat down in front of the dead screen and ate the dry hunks of bread, chewing them slowly until they slipped heavily down her throat. She didn’t think of the other suppers that she had eaten here with Mitch, their trays balanced companionably on their laps. She concentrated on swallowing the bread, lump by lump.
When it was all gone she stood up. The tray and the plate crashed to the floor. Her legs had begun to fold beneath her, but she made her slow, painstaking way up the stairs to her bedroom. Then she lay down across her bed and closed her eyes. The wind had stopped blowing at last.
Twenty-seven
It was the beginning of September. It was as hot as midsummer; hotter, even, with the reverberating heat stored in the earth and stone, but the light was already changing. The shadows, infinitesimally lengthened, made Julia think of autumn, and the Italian winter following it.
She was standing on the lowest terrace of the garden, her back against the stone balustrade that protected the paved walk from the sheer drop down to the sea. Far below her was the restless water with its white and gold fringe, and in front of her the serene terraces rising up to the palazzo walls.
Mechanically, Julia’s eyes followed the lines of them. She knew each lemon tree in its terracotta pot, the face of each statue and the contours of each step. She knew the welcoming shade of the vine and jasmine pergolas, and the exact music of the fountains. She knew them and she loved them with fierce pride, but she was going to leave them for the last time.
Yesterday, Nicolo Galli had told her that she must go home before it was too late. She had come out into the gardens at last to breathe in their sweetness, and to think, but she had found that there was no need even for that. Julia knew already what she must do. She felt that she could see clearly again, after the months of grief, all the way to the horizon.
Mattie was dead.
She had died alone, on the same night that Alexander and Julia had slept together in the Kensington flat. Her housekeeper had found her, and it was the housekeeper’s telephone call that woke Julia as she slept in Alexander’s arms. They had gone at once to Coppins, but there was nothing they could do for Mattie. They could only arrange to bury her in the Whitby churchyard, with the wind blowing across it off the North Sea.
They reopened Mitch’s grave to put Mattie in beside him. Their friends stood in a little huddle around its open mouth, Julia and Alexander and Lily and Felix, and Mattie’s brothers and sisters. Lily had cried, big choking sobs like a child’s. Julia had stared straight ahead of her, her eyes wide and dark with grief.
Afterwards they had stumbled
blindly away, unable to believe that they were leaving Mattie’s brightness behind for ever on the windy headland.
Julia left the Kensington flat. She gave the keys back to Tressider & Lemoine, and went to Coppins. She stayed in the big, desolate house, living like a wraith herself in the sad rooms, until all Mattie’s accumulation of belongings had been sorted and removed. The furniture and the prints of popular works of art and the fringed lampshades were all sold or given away, and then the house itself was put on the market. There had seemed to be no place for Alexander there, nor even for the faint expectation of their own happiness, while those painful rites were being completed. When it was over, exhausted and torn too many ways by guilt and grief, Julia fled back to the bare simplicity of Montebellate.
The nuns had received her kindly, but Tomaso was surprised and Nicolo was shocked. For the first time, Montebellate failed to provide the expected balm. Julia walked through the perfection of her gardens, and up and down the steep cobbled streets, and thought of Mattie. She dreamed of her, talked to her, and cried because there was never the whisper of an answer. She was never able to unravel the secret that Mattie had taken with her. None of them knew whether Mattie had wanted to die, or simply to sleep.
All through that Montebellate summer, Julia lived with the memories of their friendship. The act of remembering made a tribute to Mattie.
She went back over the years, picking out the threads that linked the two of them and that stretched all the way back to hated Blick Road. She tried to recall each moment with perfect honesty, because she wouldn’t have the shadows of guilt any longer. There were times when they had neglected one another, and times when they had been less than generous. Julia had counted them over with clear sight, and set them on one side. Even at the end, Julia knew, she hadn’t failed Mattie. She had given all that she could, and Mattie had not found it enough. She had gone her own way, and not even Julia could see that way clearly.
On the opposite side of the reckoning, after all they had lived through, there was the friendship that had endured. The friendship had been strong, and they had drawn their own strengths from it. They had been mother and sister to one another as well as friend, and Julia was orphaned by her loss more truly than she had ever been by Betty or by Margaret Hall.
It took all the early summer months, when the garden walks and the palazzo shadows seemed full of Mattie, for Julia to realise that the fact of their friendship hadn’t disappeared. It was still with her, and it would always remain with her, even though Mattie herself had withdrawn.
Julia’s strength returned, and she was surprised by the measure of it. Even before Nicolo warned her, she knew it was time to leave her refuge and go back to her own world.
Nicolo had a chest infection that would not respond to treatment. The nuns had done their best to nurse him, but at last he had been taken to the big hospital in Salerno. Only a few months before he would have resisted the move with every ounce of himself, but he was an old man and he was beginning to fail.
‘Don’t bury yourself here any longer,’ he urged her. ‘Go home now, to Alexander and Lily, or it will be too late for you.’
Julia sat by his bed. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I’m going, my old friend.’
She would go back home for Mattie’s memorial service. It was important to do that.
Now, in her garden with the sun hot on her head, Julia knew that she didn’t need to think any more. She had done enough of that, in her solitude.
She didn’t owe any debt to Mattie. Mattie and Mitch were dead, but her own choices and discoveries lay ahead of her. Her debts were only to the living, to Alexander most of all.
If she had never before done anything just for him, Julia resolved, she would do it now. She would leave her gardens behind, for the nuns and their patients and Tomaso, their real owners. She would leave the safety and the simple, limited satisfactions, because she was strong enough, and go back to Alexander and Ladyhill. If he wanted her, still and after so much, she would be there for him.
Julia said her goodbyes. It took only a very little time. Nicolo held her hand in his thin, dry one. ‘You are doing right,’ he told her.
‘At last,’ Julia smiled at him. She kissed him on the forehead and walked away down the ward without looking back.
On her last evening she walked with Tomaso through the secret garden, and out on to the highest terrace. The air was so still that they could hear the whisper of the sea, and the stillness distilled and intensified the flower scents. Julia felt the full beauty and magnificence of what she was leaving behind.
‘You will miss your gardens, I think,’ Tomaso observed.
‘They aren’t mine,’ Julia answered. ‘And you are here to look after them. I will always know that they are here.’
Like the memory of Mattie. Like our friendship itself. They had not ceased to exist, any more than the gardens would just because Julia was no longer there.
Julia and Tomaso went down the flights of steps and leaned over the warm stone coping to look down at the sea, and then they walked back up to the palazzo together. The nuns came to the palazzo gates to see Julia off. The children ran with them, and a handful of residents. The Mother Superior kissed Julia on each cheek.
‘May God be with you.’
‘Thank you, Mother.’
Looking back, as the taxi took her down the hill, Julia saw the nuns’ white coifs moving like butterflies in the garden.
Alexander and Lily were at the airport to meet her. Julia saw them as if they were the only people in the arrivals hall. Lily was shouting.
‘Mummy! Oh, Mummy, welcome home. We thought you’d never come.’
Alexander was standing behind her. Alexander never changed. Julia thought he looked just as he had done when they first knew each other. Even the checked shirt and old jacket might have been the ones he had always worn.
He stepped forward and put his hand to lift her chin, so that he could see into her face. She met his eyes, and they smiled at each other.
In Alexander’s car, the same dusty estate, Julia asked, ‘Where are we going?’
‘Lily and I have rented a flat, in Fulham,’ Alexander answered. ‘It’s rather suitable. We use it whenever either of us needs to be in London.’
‘Neutral territory,’ Julia murmured.
‘Exactly,’ he agreed. They were both thinking that Ladyhill wasn’t neutral, not yet.
They reached the Chiswick flyover. Julia looked at the tangled buildings and the streaming cars, all bathed in thin, murky sunlight. Montebellate already seemed far behind her, but she felt no regret. She turned to look at Alexander’s profile, filled with affection for its familiarity.
‘Do you know what I was thinking, on the plane?’
‘Tell me.’
‘I was thinking that we should have a party, for Mattie. Not a solemn business like her memorial service will be. But a real old noisy party, like there used to be.’
To her delight, Alexander caught the shimmer of the idea and tossed it back to her. ‘Yes. And I know where we should have it, too. The only possible place. The Rocket. It’s been turned into a bar now, rather a louche one, and there’s a little dance-floor downstairs.’
Lily leaned forward between them, her arms spread along the backs of their seats. ‘A party,’ she chanted. ‘A wonderful, wicked party.’
Later, when they were alone together, Julia sat with Alexander’s arms around her and her head resting against his shoulder.
‘I couldn’t come back any sooner,’ Julia said. ‘Not straight after Mattie died. I didn’t see how we could start again with shadows still between us.’
‘I know,’ Alexander answered. ‘I understand why you went away. It’s part of your strictness. We didn’t deserve our happiness then, when Mattie was dead. That was what you thought, wasn’t it?’
He understood more, at last. He understood Julia herself. ‘You lost her too.’
‘Yes, I lost her. I loved her as well.’
To her infinite relief, Julia realised that there was no bitterness left between them.
‘Julia, are you here to stay?’
‘If you will have me.’
He held her tighter, answering her.
Felix was standing in his dressing gown at one of the tall windows that overlooked Eaton Square. There had been weeks of rain, but now there was the promise of an Indian summer. The angle of the sun had already declined, and it filtered through the tired trees to cast long, autumnal shadows.
Felix was thinking of the old days, with Julia and Mattie, and the other flat with a view of London plane trees. He remembered how their female mystery had seemed to exclude him, but how the three of them had still drawn closer together, until he loved them both.
He had kept the drawings that he had done of them, all that time ago.
And this April, after Julia had telephoned to tell him the unthinkable news, he had gone to the dusty folder and taken them out.
The first drawing showed the two of them sprawled on Mattie’s bed. Mattie was reading a magazine, Julia a fat novel. Mattie was all loose curves, and her bare thigh showed where her robe had fallen open. Beside her, Julia was dark and angry-looking, with sharp bones showing under her thin skin. Looking afresh at his work, Felix realised that he had unknowingly drawn her as a boy. And he also saw that they were only children, trying hard to look like bad girls.
It was twenty-two years since he had done the drawing, but he had found that he could still remember their reaction when he showed it to them. ‘You haven’t made us very pretty,’ Julia had complained.
And he had told them that they had more than prettiness, they had style. They had kept their style, the two of them, individually and in the convolutions of their friendship. He had taken out the second drawing and studied that. It showed the three of them, Mattie and Julia and Josh. They were listening to ‘Rock Around the Clock’. Such a long time ago, even the music seemed innocent.