Never such innocence, p.10
Never Such Innocence, page 10
‘Don’t mind me,’ said Julia. ‘What have they been doing?’
‘Apart from their apparently congenital logorrhoea, they’re apt to say things – in court, mind you – like: “The voice you hear is the knocking of my knees. They haven’t knocked so hard since I asked my wonderful little wife to marry me.”’
‘You’re joking,’ said Julia, really shocked. ‘In court? God, the Americans! And those are the people we’re all so dependent on now. It seems … Well, at least Keynes managed to get them to promise that loan for this summer, so we won’t starve.’
‘No,’ agreed Mark, ‘but in 1951 we’ll have to start paying it back at – what? – $140 million a year until the year 2001, quite apart from this disastrous business of making sterling fully convertible when the loan comes through. There’ll be an appalling run on sterling. But don’t let’s even think about the bloody Yanks. They’ve got all the power and the money now and we can’t do a thing about it. I know you’re busy, Julia, but could you manage lunch?’
Julia had a quick look at her watch and then smiled.
‘If we go now and eat fast,’ she said.
Mark laughed.
‘Good. I’ll see if Antonio has a table for us. May I use your telephone?’
‘Please,’ said Julia, beginning to pack up the papers on her desk.
They went to the small restaurant in the Aldwych and although the food was based on the usual war-time makeshift, Julia enjoyed herself. Mark told her far more about the trial in Nuremberg than he had allowed himself to write in his letters and gave her a vivid word picture of the court, packed with lawyers, judges, Nazis, journalists, photographers, translators, visiting firemen and brash young American guards. The French judges wore their traditional black gowns and lace jabots, the British and Americans ordinary striped trousers and black coats, but the Russians wore their military uniforms, and the contrast looked most peculiar, he told her.
‘And the defendants?’ Julia asked curiously. ‘What are they like?’
‘A very mixed bag,’ he said. ‘It’s hard to generalise. One thing, though, they all hate being photographed and most of them put on dark glasses whenever the photographers come in. And they don’t like being shown films of the camps. The first time, at least two of them burst into tears.’
‘Does that suggest that they really did not know about them?’ asked Julia, curiously.
‘God knows. Perhaps it was just that being faced with what the reality looked like they were at last ashamed. Who can tell? But that’s enough of Nuremberg,’ said Mark as their meat plates were removed and the glorified rice pudding put down in front of them. ‘How are you?’
‘I’m perfectly all right,’ said Julia.
‘Really? You look awfully tired,’ said Mark, noticing the dark bruises under her eyes and an unusual tension about her lips.
Julia shrugged.
‘We’ve just had Anthony at home for three days, which was glorious, but he’s gone again now, and I feel … oh, I feel as I did at the beginning of a term at boarding school: unhappy, apprehensive, and quite unable to believe that the holidays will ever come again.’ She took a gulp of wine and made a valiant effort to smile.
Mark thought how like her it was to try to camouflage her distress in frivolity.
‘If only there were something I could do in Venice,’ she said, putting her glass down again. ‘I suppose I could go and live there with him. But much as I want to be with him, I can’t just drop everything to do it. I’d wreck my career – and probably go potty if I had nothing to do, which wouldn’t be much help to him.’
‘I wonder,’ said Mark, spooning some of the glutinous rice mould into his mouth.
‘Well, I would,’ said Julia. ‘I’ve never not worked since I came down from Oxford, and I simply wouldn’t know how to go on … least of all now. I suppose in the old days I could have behaved like my mother and spent all day having my hair done, buying hats, interviewing the dressmaker and so on … but not with the world in this frightful chaos.’
Mark swallowed the last sickly mouthful of his pudding.
‘That’s not what I meant,’ he said. ‘Kesselring’s to be tried there by a military tribunal some time next year. I just wonder whether there might not be something you could do with that.’
‘In Venice?’ said Julia, her spoon halfway to her lips. She dropped it back on to her plate. ‘How extraordinary. Why?’
‘Didn’t you know that it’s been agreed that the lesser Nazis should be tried in the countries where their alleged crimes were committed? Kesselring was Hitler’s C-in-C Italy, and Venice has been chosen. Since we’re the Occupying Power there, it’ll be a British tribunal that tries him.’
‘Well, if it’s a military tribunal I don’t suppose there’s much a civilian lawyer could do,’ said Julia, suppressing the wild hope that had leaped in her mind. She doggedly finished her syrup-flavoured rice pudding.
‘I don’t know,’ said Mark. ‘Would you like me to talk to a few people?’
‘I’d love it,’ said Julia, giving up all attempts to pretend otherwise. ‘More than anything in the world just now I’d like to be able to live with Anthony again.’
Mark’s face tightened and he closed his eyes for a moment.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Julia. ‘I didn’t think.’
He shook his head.
‘No, it’s very right and proper that that’s what you should feel,’ he said. ‘I just wish … Never mind. I’ll see what I can do. I don’t suppose it’ll be a very long trial – unlike Nuremberg, which looks as though it’s going on for ever – but it would mean a few months with your husband.’
‘Thank you, Mark,’ said Julia, really touched that after everything they had meant to each other he should be the one to make it possible for her to live with Anthony again.
Mark did as he had promised, and almost three months after their conversation in Antonio’s dark little restaurant, a week after she and James Norgrove had succeeded in their defence of the alleged murderer, Julia was offered a job helping to prepare the case against Field Marshal Kesselring, who was to be tried for war crimes.
The status she was offered was fairly menial, but the job would at least allow her to live with Anthony for perhaps half a year. She weighed that against the briefs she would lose in London during those months, her clerk’s probable rage and the distinct possibility that he would punish her when she returned to London by restricting her to work outside the courts. It did not take her long to decide that the risk to her work was worth taking for the sake of Anthony and their marriage, and she wrote to accept the job; but she said nothing to anyone in case Anthony decided to return to London after all. If that happened she would find a way to extricate herself from the war crimes office.
A week later the government nationalised the Bank of England and Julia began to think that six months or so out of the country might help her to keep her temper. It was true that they had also reduced the standard rate of income tax by a whole shilling in the pound, but that did not make much difference to someone like Julia who was paying nineteen-and-sixpence in the pound on everything she earned on the top slice of her income in combined income tax and surtax.
Trying to ignore the gloom she felt whenever she thought of what the Socialists were doing to her country, she concentrated on her work and tried to decide how and when to tell her clerk that she would be deserting chambers for about six months.
When she did eventually tell him in June, after it had become clear that Anthony was not going to leave Italy, her clerk was predictably angry. He told her that it would be a waste of her success in the winter’s murder trial to run away before she could reap the full benefit from it. Julia explained that she would not be leaving London until the following November and tried to placate him by explaining that she felt she had done very little for the war effort and thought it her duty to use her legal expertise in the Allies’cause at last. She carefully avoided any suggestion that she was deserting chambers to be with her husband. It would have been the sort of wifely behaviour which her clerk and certain colleagues would have approved of in the abstract, but which they would also have taken as support for their view that women should not become barristers.
Eventually, after Julia had deployed her hard-learned skills of advocacy and persuasion for some time, her clerk grudgingly told her that he understood and even admired her ‘sense of duty’. He added a rider to the effect that he might find it hard to persuade solicitors to offer her briefs when she came back again, but that he would do his best. Julia smiled with as much amiability as she could manage and went back to write to her husband.
Her letter reached Anthony almost exactly a year after he had sent her his first letter after the end of the war. He found it waiting for him when he got back to his digs after a particularly gruelling day at the hospital, and he sat at his desk, reading and rereading it.
‘Dottore,’ came Annunziata’s voice, interrupting his difficult thoughts. He looked up.
‘I’m afraid there is no news,’ he said sadly, thinking of their very different circumstances and wishing that the letter he held in his hands could have announced the imminent arrival of one of her children rather than his own wife. Annunziata shook her head, and he saw that the grey threads were beginning to outnumber the black in her hair. Her gaunt face had filled out a little since she had started to work for him, but like most inhabitants of the occupied countries, she still looked years older than her age, which was forty-three. She was only one year older than Anthony, but a stranger meeting them would have assumed the difference to be more like ten or even fifteen years.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I know that you would tell me as soon as you had news. But you look so sad. Is it the poverini in the hospital? Can I do anything to help?’
‘I’m not sad at all,’ said Anthony, pulling himself together as well as he could. He picked up Julia’s letter. ‘This has good news in it for me. My wife will be coming to work in Venice in the late autumn. Shall you mind looking after her as well as me?’
Annunziata’s drawn face took on a lightness Anthony had never seen in it before and she went so far as to lay a work-hardened hand on his shoulder.
‘That is wonderful,’ she said. ‘But she cannot come here. You must find better rooms, dottore.‘
‘I think I have,’ he said. ‘I meant to tell you. Signor Wallington has written too to say that he is coming here as well. He tells me that he has found a wonderful set of rooms over on the other side of Venice.’ He rummaged in the papers on his desk and consulted a letter written in a firm, black hand. ‘Yes, in the Campo San Maurizio, and he suggests that you and I share them with him.’
‘And the Signora Gillingham, too?’ said Annunziata a little doubtfully.
‘I don’t see why not,’ said Anthony, sounding almost as tired and dispirited as he felt. ‘He says this flat has five bedrooms and a huge salone and so it ought to be big enough. It belongs to a friend of his mother and he wants to rent it so that she should have some income, but it is too big for him alone. I suppose I’d better write to him and my wife.’
‘Not until you have eaten,’ said Annunziata firmly. ‘I will fetch your dinner. Wait.’
Anthony, who had to make appallingly important decisions in almost every minute he was at the hospital, succumbed to the odd pleasure of doing as he was told.
‘Will so large a flat be too much for you to manage?’ he asked when Annunziata came back with the pasta she had cooked for him. She shook her head and even laughed.
‘There is not enough to do here,’ she said, ‘and I have too much time to think.’
‘Yes,’ agreed Anthony, pouring himself a modest glass of wine, ‘it hurts to think, doesn’t it?’ The housekeeper nodded silently, no longer laughing, and went away.
Anthony finished his pasta and, pushing his plate and glass away, he picked up his pen and set about the letters he had to write. The one to David Wallington was easy enough and he did that first.
My dear David,
How good to hear that you will be coming to Venice for the trial. I have just heard from my wife, who will also be working on it and expects to arrive here sometime in early November. From what you have written about the rooms in the Campo San Maurizio it sounds as though there would be plenty of room for all of us. Does that suit you?
I think you and Julia will get on all right. She’s very sensible and not one to make a fuss about things that can’t be helped and so the primitive bathroom ought not to fret her.
It struck Anthony as he reread that paragraph that it did not sound very complimentary about his wife and so he added a few sentences of description, explaining her standing at the Bar, so that David would not expect to be faced with some fragile tiresome siren. Then he started to tackle the more difficult letter.
My dear Julia,
What surprising news [he wrote laboriously]! I had heard of the Kesselring trial because David Wallington will be coming here for it too. I am glad that you two will meet, because I think you will like the boy.
He proposed to me some time ago that we should share a set of far more luxurious rooms than these over on the other side of Venice and I have already accepted. Would you be prepared to go along with that? I couldn’t expect you to live here. As my housekeeper has just pointed out, there really isn’t enough room and it’s a pretty comfortless house. There are five bedrooms in the place David has found, which should give us all plenty of room.
Anthony reached for another sheet of writing paper and wrote, ‘It will be pleasant to be able to show you Venice.’ That did not sound enthusiastic enough and so he ripped the page in half and started again.
It will be wonderful to have you here. I can’t wait to see you.
Love, Anthony.
He hoped that Julia would not be hurt at the suggestion that they should share their digs with young David Wallington. He had never even considered the possibility that Julia would come to Venice and was dismayed at the prospect. Her presence in the city would mean a considerable adjustment to his life. No longer could he spend every moment of his time at the hospital, returning to his rooms merely to eat and sleep. He would have to start behaving like a husband again and he did not know whether he had the strength for that as well as the work he had undertaken to do for his orphans. It occurred to him that life might be much easier if he and Julia were to have another person in the house with them.
He addressed and stamped both letters and left them for Annunziata to post while he returned to the hospital.
Julia received his letter ten days later and was surprised by the tone of it. She reread it, noticing his exclamation of pleasure at her news and the way he had ended the letter, and decided that she was being over-imaginative.
‘What does he say?’ asked Comfort from the opposite side of the breakfast table.
‘Ah,’ said Julia, who had not told Comfort about the Venetian job. She explained and handed Anthony’s letter across the table.
Making a superhuman effort not to give expression to her immediate jealousy, Comfort managed to say:
‘I’m glad, Julia, for you and for him.’
‘Thank you, Comfort,’ said Julia, really touched. ‘I won’t insult you by asking whether you’ll be all right alone here, because I know that you will.’
‘I’ll be fine,’ agreed Comfort, thinking quite the opposite. ‘Who is this Wallington boy he talks about? He’s never mentioned him to me.’
‘As far as I can remember, he’s a much younger man who was with the same partisan group as Anthony. He told me that David Wallington was the best friend he’d made in the war. I hadn’t realised before that he’s a lawyer. Anthony always calls him “the boy”.’
‘Pretty tough on you to have to share your home with him,’ said Comfort. Julia, who had been thinking just the same, merely smiled ruefully.
‘Look, it’s time for the news,’ she said, leaning towards the wireless and switching it on.
Together they listened to an announcement that bread was to be rationed for the first time.
‘Hell and damnation!’ shouted Comfort, getting up from the table and flinging herself across the room. ‘When is it going to stop? And don’t you start being reasonable about this too,’ she warned Julia.
‘It would be pretty hard to be reasonable,’ said Julia, thinking of VE Day and all the pleasure that peace had seemed to promise. ‘Obviously we and the Yanks have to feed Germany, but it seems –’
‘Bloody unfair,’ finished Comfort, swearing far more than she usually did. ‘Particularly since they’re getting more than we are at the moment.’
‘You’re joking,’ said Julia, thoroughly surprised.
Comfort shook her head, making the unkempt blonde curls fly about her face.
‘No. I had dinner last night with a man from the Treasury and he told me.’
‘Did he have much to say about what this government is doing to the economy?’ asked Julia.
‘No, he was either too discreet or too careful not to bore me,’ answered Comfort with a smile. ‘But he did give the distinct impression that he’s worried about the loan.’
‘Aren’t we all?’ said Julia. ‘But don’t let’s argue again about that,’ she added quickly.
Comfort came back to the table and poured some more coffee into Julia’s cup.
‘I’m beginning to see what you meant,’ she said pacifically.
Julia looked up in delight, not because Comfort was agreeing with her at last, but because she seemed so much easier, so much more like her old self again.
‘Do you suppose we’ll ever be able to live a normal life again, Julia?’ she said after a long moment.
‘With Anthony back here or with unlimited amounts of food?’
‘Both,’ said Comfort, smiling her old familiar smile.
