Never such innocence, p.22
Never Such Innocence, page 22
Buying her new clothes helped, with all the half-forgotten luxury of choosing the models in Dior’s grey-and-gold salon and returning for fittings as the suits and dresses were moulded to her figure. After the depressing makeshifts to which she had been reduced by British rationing, the sensation of wonderful materials against her skin was almost as pleasing as the vendeuse‘s comments about ‘Madame’s wonderful figure’and striking face.
The finished clothes were delivered to the hotel on her last morning in Paris only an hour before Bob Storrington was due to collect her for lunch. Comfort tried on all the clothes and decided to wear the black suit. It would be perfect for lunch in Paris and, although it was not really suitable for travelling, it would at least ensure that she looked as she ought for her reunion with Anthony. Having seen herself properly dressed again, she could not bear the thought of confronting him in the skimpy, shabby, ready-made clothes of wartime London.
Sitting in front of the looking glass, making up her face, she hoped that Anthony was all right and not quite as heartbroken as Julia seemed to think he was. It seemed unlikely that he could be as devastated by the death of a single patient as Julia had made out in her letters, but then she had never really understood him. Probably, Comfort thought, as she blotted her lipstick and bared her teeth to check that there were no lipstick smears on them, Anthony had simply not felt like explaining his feelings to Julia and she had misinterpreted his silence. Certainly the letters he had written home had made no great fuss about the child’s death.
There was a knock at the door. Checking her face in the glass, Comfort smiled in satisfaction.
‘Entrez,’ she called, still sitting at the dressing table, and turned her head with impeccable grace to welcome her guests.
The two men who came in were old friends of hers, rich American connoisseurs who had made their home in Paris before the war and left only just in time. As far as Comfort knew, they had returned to the States for the duration, although in fact they had been in London for part of the time, working for the Free French, and back in France for most of the rest. After the liberation they had found their old apartment undamaged, moved back in and set about recreating their old life of searching out young artists, arranging exhibitions for them and building up their own collection of European art. To Comfort, they seemed as anxious as she to ignore the war and they had put themselves out to entertain her during her visit.
The previous evening they had insisted on taking her to the cinema, ignoring her protests that she would rather see the Molière play at the Comédie Française, to watch Jacques Prévert’s film Les Enfants du Paradis. It had been made in 1942 but had not been shown until the Nazis had been banished from the country. The two men had told Comfort that she would just love it. Planning to despise the film as a poor substitute for classic drama, Comfort had actually found it touchingly romantic, but oddly disturbing too.
‘So what did you think of the film, Comfort?’ asked Bob Storrington, peering over her slim shoulders into the looking glass and repositioning his silk tie. ‘You refused to say last night.’
‘It was hardly a refusal,’ said Comfort, amused to see that the war had done nothing to reduce either his unfailing elegance or his vanity. ‘It was just too much to absorb straight away.’
She stood up to get her little black hat, perched it on the side of her sleek fair head and skewered a pearl-tipped hatpin through the felt. Long suede gloves and a new handbag completed her ensemble and she stood waiting. Bob whistled.
‘You look beautiful!’ he said. ‘Doesn’t she, John?’
‘Much more like herself than in those dreary London clothes,’ said his companion with an engaging smile. ‘Well, Comfort?’
‘Well what? Oh, the film. You were right: I loved it. I loved the sadness of it and the staginess … and the tragedy of their loving each other so much that they could not be happy without each other or even manage to make anyone else happy, despite all their niceness and good intentions.’ She stopped and stared at her own face in the mirror.
‘And?’ said John, surprised that the usually articulate Comfort should phrase her approval in such pedestrian words.
‘And I loved the ending,’ she added quickly, turning back to face them with her familiar, brilliant smile in place, ‘with the hero playing himself for once in a crowd of clowns, as though he could only be real in an unreal world and vice versa.… I think that’s what I mean. But you’d need Julia to reduce all that raw feeling to accurate words.’
‘We knew you’d like it,’ said John, satisfied. ‘I’m glad you didn’t miss La Princess d’Elide too much. And now to lunch. I wish you could stay a bit longer. We’ve hardly had time to do anything, and now that you’re looking so wonderful…’
‘But I can’t,’ said Comfort, her eccentrically beautiful face softening. ‘It’s been too long already.’
They took her to a small, perfect restaurant, where she had never been before, and fed her on soup and fish and meat and cheese, all of a quality and in quantities she had only dreamed of during the war. As she finished the last morsel of a perfectly running Brie, she said, sighing:
‘There have been times since it ended when I gave up hope of ever eating food like this again.’
‘Only the lucky rich can do it,’ said Bob. ‘But since you are just as rich as us …’
‘Richer probably,’ said John, raising a smile from Comfort, who liked her assets to be appreciated just as much as her talents and her looks.
‘… you ought to come and live here,’ Bob went on, ignoring his friend’s interruption, ‘and leave your brother and his good, dull wife to their sober lives.’
Comfort put down her wine glass with a snap, her smile shrinking like a jersey boiled in washing soda.
‘Julia is not dull,’ she said through her teeth.
‘Oh my!’ said Bob, looking at her more seriously than his voice would have suggested, ‘you have changed your tune. What’s happened?’
‘Nothing,’ said Comfort, who had been unable either to forget or justify some of the things she had said to Julia during the war. She hunched one shoulder. ‘You’ve never properly appreciated her.’
‘And you have?’ said Bob, nibbling at the last of his cheese.
‘Not always,’ said Comfort, with rare honesty. It would, she felt, atone for the things she had said and mean that she did not have to talk to Julia about them. Much more happily she went on: ‘But that’s because I’m not as sensible as she is – or as kind, or…’
‘“Sensible”, “kind”,’ said Bob as the waiter removed their cheese plates and substituted a wonderfully fragrant apple tart. Tasting it, Comfort thought that it was as different from English apple pie as champagne was from soda water.
‘In fact dull,’ Bob went on, watching her with a cynical smile. ‘And as you well know you find dullness just as awful as we do. That’s why you love us so much.’
She laughed, half pleased and half resentful, and finished her apple tart.
‘You ought to move back here,’ said John. ‘Do think about it. We need people to fascinate us. And unlike some others, we understand you.’
‘I can’t,’ said Comfort, liking the word ‘fascinate’. ‘And anyway Anthony understands me … Needs me too. Besides …’ She broke off, unaccountably reluctant to tell them the rest, although she had made no secret of it in London.
‘Aha,’ said Bob, twinkling at her, ‘so now at last we come to it. There’s a new man in your life, isn’t there? I told you so, John,’ he added in a stage whisper. ‘We heard that you’ve even got him in the house.’
‘Well yes and no,’ said Comfort with a quick, almost self-conscious smile. ‘There is a painter, whose work I really admire…’
‘It’s just his work, honestly,’ said John to Bob. ‘There’s nothing naughty about it at all. She’d never…’
‘Shut up, both of you,’ said Comfort, really laughing. There were very few people who were allowed to tease her, but these two could just get away with it. ‘His work and him. He’s a charming Hungarian, who had such trouble with the Communists that he had to get out. I’ve rented Julia’s rooms to him while she’s in Venice and he paints up in my studio.’
‘And …’ prompted John. ‘Come on, Comfort, tell all. We’re horribly short of gossip.’
‘Well I don’t want you two gossiping about me,’ said Comfort, her lazily amused voice sharpening until it sounded almost vicious. The two men, who were used to her, turned and raised their eyebrows at one another. Suddenly Comfort did not find their double-act funny any longer. She looked at the gold watch that hung loosely on her thin wrist. ‘I’m going to have to leave soon if I’m not to miss my plane,’ she said.
‘Oh, you must wait for coffee,’ said Bob, sobering and turning to signal to the young waiter. Comfort agreed and enjoyed it when it came, but the sparkle and fun had been taken out of their conversation by the unfortunate choice of the word ‘gossip’. When they had all finished the coffee, Bob got up to pay the bill, leaving John to apologise for his misplaced piece of mockery.
‘I’ll forgive you,’ said Comfort, ‘although considering the trouble you caused me with your wretched tittle-tattle in the old days, I ought…’
‘What do you mean, trouble?’ asked John, completely serious at last. Comfort looked at him, surprised to see him without his mocking smile, and then she shrugged.
‘When you started prattling about that man I sometimes saw here before I ever went up to Oxford,’ she said. ‘Anthony got to hear the story and in the usual way of gossip heard a greatly exaggerated version and was seriously upset. I never want to face that sort of thing again.’
‘Comfort, I –’
‘Don’t apologise again. I’ll forgive you if you find me a taxi that will take me back to pick up my baggage and get me to the airport on time.’
‘Consider it done,’ he said, with a faint echo of his usual theatrical flourish. He left the cosy little restaurant to reappear a few minutes later with the announcement that her taxi was at the door and that he and Bob would go with her as far as her hotel. The head waiter opened the door and Comfort preceded the two men out, enjoying the way her long black skirt swung about her legs and showed off her slender ankles and new, high-heeled shoes.
She did not notice the raggedly dressed, exhausted-looking woman who was carrying a heavy basket across the road towards her, until she heard the bitterly articulated:
‘Salope!’
Outraged, Comfort looked at the woman, drew herself up to her full height, looked down her beaky nose and began to cross the road towards the waiting taxi. More obscenities followed just as the two men were hurrying to catch up with Comfort, and then the woman stopped dead in front of Comfort and spat in her face.
The disgust she felt almost paralysed Comfort for a moment, before she started to fumble in her bag for a handkerchief. Bob caught her by the shoulder and used his own to wipe her face, while John turned on the woman and let loose a volley of dismissive French. She turned away and he, too, came to Comfort’s side, urging her towards the taxi. A sharp blow hit her between the shoulder blades and she wheeled round to see the woman who had spat at her leaning down to pick up another stone.
Without waiting for anything else, Comfort ran to the taxi, pulled open the door and almost flung herself inside.
‘Why? Why?’ she said, her face bitter with fury, when the two men got in beside her.
‘It has been happening a bit,’ said John soothingly. ‘It’s not you, Comfort; it’s the clothes. There’s a pretty strong feeling that while materials are so scarce it’s not fair for the rich and privileged to wear things like that when the rest of the population can hardly even get their shoes repaired. It happens over food, too. She saw us coming out of the restaurant and …’ He stopped, shrugged his shoulders and left the rest to their imagination.
‘She was vile,’ said Comfort, recovering fast as she took in the impertinence of anyone’s venturing to question her expenditure or appearance. ‘And probably mad.’
‘Or desperate,’ suggested Bob, who knew rather more than Comfort did about the straits to which many Parisians had been reduced by the war. He toyed with telling her a few home truths, but then decided it would do no good. Truth had had to go by the board in the work he had been doing during the war and there seemed no point on insisting on using it again. Comfort was Comfort, he reflected, and no one had ever been able to change her. As he had once said to John, you took Comfort as she was or you ignored her, and he enjoyed her enough to put up with her.
She caught her aeroplane easily and spent the journey thinking about Anthony. It seemed outrageously unfair that after so long she could not have him to herself and she hoped that his lodger would be tactful enough to leave them in peace during her visit. Anthony had written that Julia seemed to like him, and so perhaps she could keep him out of their way. At the thought of Julia, Comfort’s fine eyebrows contracted above her bony nose. Ever since Julia had acknowledged that she needed Comfort’s help to make Anthony happy, Comfort had known that somehow she was going to have to make it up to Julia.
At that moment, Julia herself was walking across Venice, thinking happily of Comfort’s arrival. Having escorted Felicity Suvarov around St Mark’s cathedral, Julia had gone back to the Danieli hotel and shared some lunch with her. As they talked about the war years and about what the future might hold for them both, Julia found herself liking Felicity more and more, although she was astonished at the freedom with which Felicity was prepared to confide in her about everything except her work during the war. Julia, accustomed for years to keeping her own counsel, listened but did not reciprocate.
She learned among many other things that Felicity had known Peter’s first wife quite well and admired her desperately as she struggled with her increasing disability and urged her husband to live as freely as he could.
‘She must have been an extraordinary woman,’ said Julia, trying to imagine living her life in a wheelchair and knowing that her attractive husband was falling in love with someone else. It would take superhuman charity, she decided, to forgive, let alone encourage him.
‘She was,’ said Felicity, her beautiful face glowing. ‘The first time I met her, while I was working for him, I think she knew that I had fallen in love with him and yet she was kinder to me than anyone I’ve ever known. D’you know, in a way I feel as though I have to take care of him for her.’ She laughed a little self-consciously. ‘I know that sounds revoltingly sentimental.’
Julia smiled, enjoying Felicity’s ingenuousness as well as her readiness to laugh at herself, but she looked at her watch and said:
‘I’m going to have to go and give my regular Saturday afternoon lesson to my refugees.’
Felicity hauled herself out of her chair, admitting that her doctor had ordered her to rest after lunch every day and they said goodbye to each other.
Julia set off towards the Dorsoduro, beginning to feel really ill with a headache pounding behind her left eyebrow, smarting eyes, a rasped throat and a nose that felt as though it were stuffed with hot, wet flannel with a few pins in it, but even so she decided to give her lesson. On her way to the house she stopped off in the Campo San Maurizio to see if Annunziata had everything she needed for the dinner she was preparing to welcome Comfort, and discovered that the English post had arrived with a letter from George Wilson.
Julia opened it and read it as she made her way towards the Accademia Bridge. George wrote that he was not optimistic about the possibilities of getting Raffaella permission to emigrate to England.
There are so many cases of genuine, unbearable hardship [he wrote] that unless your protégée can produce some family connection here, I don’t see how you’ll be able to swing it.
Julia waited to give Raffaella the bad news until she had delivered her lesson, led a halting conversation in English about the future of Italy, handed out the previous week’s exercises that she had marked, and set the work for the next lesson. While the other women were packing up their books, she turned to Raffaella.
‘May I say hello to your son?’ she asked.
Raffaella’s green-blue eyes sharpened.
‘Of course, Signora Giulia,’ she said, standing up gracefully. ‘Will you come now?’
Julia followed her to the private bed-sitting room, where her child was happily playing in his cot. Raffaella lifted him out and turned him to face Julia.
‘He looks very well, Raffaella,’ she said carefully. ‘And getting bigger all the time.’
‘Have you news, signora?’ asked Raffaella, dumping the heavy child on the floor at her feet.
‘Not very good news, I’m afraid,’ she said and read out what George Wilson had written. She had to translate one or two words into Italian.
‘But I have a family connection,’ said Raffaella at once.
‘You have?’ said Julia, surprised. ‘But why did you not tell me that at once?’
A faint colour appeared in Raffaella’s pale cheeks and the clever eyes were veiled. When she looked up again, they were clear and slightly pleading. She gestured to the child playing on the floor.
‘His father is English,’ she said.
‘Ah,’ said Julia, thinking that she understood why this particular piece of information had been withheld. ‘But not your husband?’
Raffaella shook her blonde head.
‘He was … no: he wanted to marry me,’ she said. ‘He said so. But my brother made … was difficult. And he had to went.’
Julia sat down on a hard chair beside the child.
‘Had to go,’ she corrected. ‘Well, I think you had better tell me the whole story. It might help.’
Raffaella sat on the bed and proceeded to explain her history in a mixture of broken English and fast, graphic Italian to Julia. Her headache seemed to be getting worse and worse, and Raffaella’s command of English slipped as she grew increasingly excited. Her voice seemed to get shriller, too, and her hands danced in front of Julia’s painful eyes as she gesticulated more and more wildly. After fifteen minutes or so, Julia thought that she had grasped most of the story.
