Never such innocence, p.19
Never Such Innocence, page 19
There were two large vases of flowers in front of the steps up to the sanctuary and between them lay a small, white coffin on trestles. Red candles stood in the massive gold sticks around the altar and the priest who waited there was dressed in black vestments.
‘Am I late?’ she whispered to Anthony as she slid into the chair beside him. He shook his head. A choir of small boys filed into their seats in the sanctuary and Julia was touched to see how many of them had sticks and crutches. They, too, must be Anthony’s patients.
The priest came forward and began what Julia slowly realised was a full requiem mass. The scent of the incense that was blown in great smoky drifts across the church made her feel faint and the unfamiliarity of the Roman Catholic service made it seem even longer than it was. Julia tried to feel appropriate emotions, but all she could think of was how inappropriate the endless, heavy service seemed for the death of so young a child, and all she could feel was a strong conviction that if Anthony had cared so much for a strange child, he ought not to be so adamantly opposed to their having their own family.
She looked sideways at him during the mass itself, while the Catholics among the congregation took communion, and lost her anger as she saw the misery in his eyes and the whiteness of his face. He had clamped his bottom lip between his teeth, and when she looked down she saw that his fists were clenched. Julia looked away, unable to watch so much pain without offering help he would not accept.
At last the mass was over and Anthony edged out of the row of chairs to pick up the little coffin and carry it down the aisle himself. His shoulders were taut and his face paler then ever and set in bleak lines. Exchanging a surprised and anxious look with David, Julia picked up her bag and followed. When they walked out of the church into the little grey square, they found that Anthony was carrying the coffin towards a purple-draped, black motor-boat that was tied up by the stone steps down to the canal.
‘Come on,’ he said. Julia and David obeyed, and joined Anthony and the priest. The boat set off through the small backwaters towards the Fondamente Nuove and out across the lagoon to the island of San Michele. Julia remembered how David had pointed it out to her when he had first brought her to Venice and how she had thought it the ideal place to be buried. Now, all she could think of was the child who had lived in the body that lay in the coffin. Rain started to fall, lightly at first and then in such solid, relentless drops that it beat up the surface of the water and made it hard to see more than a yard or two ahead.
Julia found herself shuddering at the thought of what would happen to the body itself and wishing that she could believe in some kind of afterlife. Brought up as a Christian, she had mislaid her childhood faith at some stage in her growing up, almost without noticing it, and now she regretted it. There had been so much death in the last six years that it seemed almost indecent to mind so much that this one child was dead, but Julia could not help herself.
She felt something being thrust into her gloved hand and looked down in surprise to see that David was offering her a large handkerchief. Until that moment she had not realised that she had tears mixed with the rain on her face and quickly mopped them.
When the burial was over and they had all returned, wet and cold, to Venice, Anthony announced curtly that he was going to the hospital. Annunziata said that she had shopping she must do and so Julia and David were left to go back to the flat together.
‘Thank you for your handkerchief,’ Julia said when they were alone. ‘I’ll get it washed and give it you back. I’m sorry to have made such an exhibition of myself.’
‘You didn’t do any such thing,’ said David quietly. ‘It was a very natural reaction. In fact I …’ He broke off and Julia hurried to fill the difficult silence.
‘I’m not sure whether I was really crying for that poor child,’ she said, not wanting him to think her more altruistic than she was, ‘or for Anthony or for myself. I … I so much want to help him, but all I manage to do just now is irritate him.’
‘As I do,’ said David. ‘Please don’t let it make you unhappy.’
Julia was so surprised that she stopped. David stopped too and turned to face her in the rain, which was slowly beginning to slacken.
‘I just mean that there’s been enough unhappiness over all this without your suffering, too,’ said David. ‘I know you can’t simply turn it off, but I’m sure when Anthony recovers he’d hate to think of your remembering the things he said when he was half out of his mind with misery.’
Julia watched David as he stood silhouetted against the low grey sky, looking solid and dependable. For once she forgot that she was older than he and more experienced in everything except war, she forgot Anthony’s warnings and her own resistance to David’s charm and she let herself acknowledge for the first time that in him she had found a person who seemed in some way a reflection of herself. She felt that she knew him well and ought to be able to trust him, too.
‘Thank you,’ was all she said.
‘For nothing,’ he answered. ‘It’s only common sense.’
‘I think that perhaps that’s one reason I feel so grateful,’ said Julia with a rueful smile on her wide mouth. ‘Both Anthony and Comfort get horribly irritated when I try to do for them what you have just done for me and I … I wonder,’ she added in quite different voice. She started walking again.
‘Wonder what?’ asked David falling into step with her.
‘Oh, just whether I could get Comfort to come out here to stay for a bit. She might well be able to get through to him. She … they … she always used to be able to reach him in his blackest glooms, when I could only offer things he did not want.’
‘Are they so very close?’ asked David as they reached the empty expanse of St Mark’s Square. ‘When he got back from London last year he gave me the distinct impression that he found her rather tiresome.’
‘He was a bit annoyed with her then,’ Julia admitted, watching the way the pigeons scuttled away from them through the puddles, only bothering to take to the air when escape became inevitable.
‘But yes, they’re very close. Much more so really than brothers and sisters who have been brought up together.’
‘I hadn’t realised that they had not,’ said David, coming to a halt outside the plate-glass windows of Florian’s café. ‘I say, would you like a cup of coffee or something? There’s no particular reason to get back home, is there?’
‘None that I know of,’ said Julia, thinking how extraordinary men were. Anthony and David had spent two years living in close proximity in the greatest danger and yet they had obviously never discussed their families. ‘And it might even stop raining. Yes, I’d love a cup. Thank you.’
David pushed open the door for her and they went in out of the rain, taking off their coats and shaking the wet off them. Julia loved the elegant old café, with its painted walls and hard, red-velvet seats. No one hurried you there, even if you chose to spend all morning toying with a single cup of coffee. After the bustle and discomfort of wartime restaurants in London, Florian’s seemed a haven of half-forgotten leisure.
As usual it was full of Allied officers on a ‘swan’ from their tedious post-war postings around Italy, mixed with a few Venetians, who were reading newspapers, chatting or simply idling their time away looking out of the windows that overlooked the square. David exchanged greetings with half a dozen men in uniform and introduced Julia to each one. She was rather amused to see one or two knowing glances cast in her direction and, as soon as she and David were settled at their own table out of earshot of any of his acquaintances, she said with a smile:
‘I think one or two of your friends are wondering what’s happened to make you pick up such an eccentric sort of popsie.’ To her surprise, and amusement, David took it seriously.
‘I do apologise,’ he said formally. ‘I ought to have made it clearer that you were here with Anthony.’
‘Oh, don’t worry, David,’ said Julia. ‘I only mentioned it because I thought it was funny. Now, what shall we have? I think I’d like hot chocolate, if they have any.’
David turned to give their order to the white-coated waiter who was hovering by their table, and before he had finished Julia’s attention was caught by a familiar, drawling American voice. She looked up to recognise Jackson French.
‘Why if it isn’t Mrs Gillingham from the plane,’ he said, seeing her watching him. He levered his long, heavy body up from behind the little white-marble table where he was sitting and strolled over to her.
‘Mr French,’ she said, holding out her hand. ‘How nice to see you again so soon. This is Major Wallington, an old friend of my husband. We’re all sharing the same digs here in Venice. David, this is Jackson French of UNRRA.’
‘We met at the airport of course,’ said David, nodding a little stiffly to the American. ‘How are you, French?’
‘Fine, just fine,’ he answered.
‘Are you here for long?’ Julia asked, suddenly remembering his job and its possible implications for her husband. The shock of Flavia’s death and Anthony’s reaction to it had overshadowed the significance of his revelation about buying drugs on the black market.
‘I fly out tomorrow,’ he said pleasantly. ‘We’ve had reports that a big batch of penicillin has been lifted from the depot in Klagenfurt and it’s said to be on its way into Italy. We want to get hold of it and the “liberators” before it’s been divided up and possibly adulterated and distributed to God-knows-where. Good to see you both. So long.’ He raised a hand and retreated to his own table, collected his companion and left the café.
Julia had avoided looking at David while the American was with them, but once he had gone she said quietly:
‘What would happen to him if it were discovered?’
‘Anthony? God knows … Probably not much, but it wouldn’t do his reputation any good at all either here or in London, which is unfair since what he’s done has always been wholly altruistic. It’s not as though he’s profiting from the black market: simply spending his own money to make good the deficiencies of the legitimate distribution system.’
‘I know all that,’ said Julia. ‘But if someone really is messing about with the penicillin, the authorities ought to be given every chance of catching them. That’s far wickeder than any black marketeering.’
‘I know,’ said David. The waiter arrived just then with a heavy silver tray of cups and pots. He arranged it on their table and David poured out Julia’s hot chocolate and then his own coffee. ‘Anthony and I have argued about that. But he won’t do anything about it and I can’t bring myself to report him. The one faint gleam of light in this whole horrible murky business is that he’s unlikely to go to the black market again.’
‘And so we just ignore it?’ said Julia, holding her warm cup in both hands.
‘I can’t see that we have any realistic option,’ answered David sadly. ‘Besides, Anthony has a virtually unanswerable criticism of anyone who suggests to him that it is illegal to buy black-market drugs and that he ought to uphold the law, and be seen to do so, particularly now when it has been so badly threatened for so long.’
‘Really?’ said Julia, interested and a little worried. ‘And what is that?’
‘That we are in the process of prosecuting a man for obeying the laws of his own country when it would have been more humanitarian to have disobeyed …’
‘Ah, that,’ said Julia, who often thought about that particular dilemma. ‘Yes. It isn’t answerable, although there are a lot of answers one could try to make. But it doesn’t alter the fact that he might have information that could help identify the criminals who are selling lethal drugs.’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘But all I can bring myself to do is to try to persuade him. You may be able to do more.’ As he spoke Julia looked so troubled that David made an effort to change the subject.
‘You were just about to tell me about Anthony and his sister when I interrupted you,’ he said in a quite different voice.
Appreciating his attempt to distract her, Julia smiled and drank some hot chocolate.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘you asked me if they were close. I think that because of their rather peculiar lives they are much closer than siblings in any normal family.’
‘I hadn’t known that there was anything peculiar,’ said David. ‘Not that I want you to tell me anything …’
‘Don’t worry. There’s nothing at all secret about it. Their parents split up when Anthony was six and Comfort two. Their mother took Comfort back to Pittsburgh and brought her up as a rich American, while Anthony lived with his English father in rather straitened circumstances in Cornwall. They met again at their father’s funeral when Comfort was twenty-one and just becoming determined to live in Europe, where she thought her painting would have a better chance than in the States.’
‘How extraordinary it must have been!’ said David. ‘Meeting as complete strangers and yet, according to the photographs Anthony has shown me of Comfort, they look almost exactly the same.’
‘Yes they do, although their characters have quite big differences. Anyway, they became the firmest of friends. I imagine that he took the place of the father she’d never had. Comfort moved in with Anthony and when he took a job at one of the Oxford hospitals, she decided to go with him and take a degree there. That’s where I met them.’
‘I’d wondered about that,’ said David with a smile as he remembered his surprise at Julia’s complete unlikeness to her husband. ‘And so you were friends with her first?’
‘Yes. She was quite a bit older than the rest of us, but she took me up and included me in most of the terribly glamorous life she and Anthony lived out at Cumnor.’
Julia stopped then, thinking back to the idyllic years they had spent as first Comfort and then Anthony had made friends with her and introduced her into a world quite different from anything she had known.
They had made her feel both valuable and valued, which was an intoxicating sensation to the young provincial girl who had been brought up to think of herself as a poor substitute for a son by her father and as a tiresome and unsatisfactory rebel by her mother. Anthony and Comfort had also made Julia feel that she fitted into their world of internationally acclaimed artists and connoisseurs, scientists and writers. Dazzled by their friends as much as by the style in which they lived, Julia had thought that the Gillinghams were the physical embodiment of every virtue. By the time she had learned to know them well enough to see their failings, she loved them both too much to care.
‘They were wonderful to me,’ she said, blinking, unaware that her face had softened and her mouth curved into the gentlest, most delightful smile David had ever seen on her lips.
‘Anthony’s a good friend,’ David said. ‘And so if his sister is anything like him, I can understand how you must feel about her.’
‘Apart from that,’ said Julia, still smiling but in her more familiar lopsided way, ‘there was her extraordinary generosity. She seemed positively to want me to fall in love with him. Most women who cared as much as she does about their brothers would have had some reservations about a usurper.’
‘But you were hardly that, were you?’ said David. ‘I mean, you didn’t exactly take him away from her. You all share your house, don’t you?’
Julia nodded. ‘It seemed both practical and the best thing to do. After all, we did before Anthony and I married and so it would have been odd, as well as horribly unkind, to leave Comfort alone afterwards – when she had become my sister … in law at least.’ She drained the last of her rich, thick hot chocolate. ‘I’m sure she’ll come here when she knows how much he needs her, and I hope you’ll like her.’
‘I’m sure I shall,’ said David. ‘After all, you do.’
He got up and called the waiter so that he could pay their bill, leaving Julia taken aback by his choice of words.
As soon as they got home again, she went up to change out of her damp clothes and to write to Comfort, begging her to come to Venice to help Anthony. Julia said nothing about the black market or the possibility that the penicillin Anthony had injected into Flavia had been adulterated, but she did explain about his devotion to the child and his unhappiness.
I seem unable to give him any kind of consolation [she wrote], and you were always so good at cheering him up in the old days. Couldn’t you come? I know it’s difficult to get a place on an aeroplane, but you managed to get Anthony home last Christmas. Do try, Comfort. I miss you so much and Anthony needs you.
Julia had to wait three weeks for an answer, weeks during which Anthony became more and more distant from her. He insisted on sleeping alone and left the house before either Julia or David were up each morning, returning silent and exhausted long after dinner. He seemed to talk more to Annunziata than to either of the others, meeting all their overtures with monosyllabic coldness. Knowing how unhappy he was – and how guilty he felt himself to be – Julia did not resent his silences or his long absences from the house, but she was hurt by them and longed to be able to help.
David watched her, admiring the way she put up with Anthony’s patent hostility without ever snapping back at him and most desperately pitying her. Her predicament made him angrier with Anthony than he had ever been and shook the foundations of his friendship as nothing else had done. How anyone could treat a woman like Julia with as much coldness as Anthony did was something that David could neither understand nor forgive. It seemed to him that Anthony ought to put the war behind him, difficult and unpleasant though it had been, and make a fraction of the effort Julia made every day to keep their life together amicable.
As Anthony became increasingly hostile, Julia found herself turning more and more to David, until she had to face the fact that she had allowed herself to grow dangerously fond of him.
Something in David had woken her to a knowledge of her own needs. She was not sure whether it was his generosity, his quiet courage, his unfailing care for people or the knowledge he had of his own character and his acceptance of it, but something in him had made her recognise that there were parts of her own self that had been too long denied. It occurred to her forcibly that it was nowhere written in stone that she should be the Gillinghams’devoted protegée and emotional punchbag for ever. She owed both Comfort and Anthony a great deal, but it suddenly seemed to her as though she had been paying the debt for too long and with too much interest.
