Never such innocence, p.32
Never Such Innocence, page 32
‘Darling, here you are back at last! If only you’d brought Anthony, too,’ said Comfort. ‘My God, you look terrible. Are you all right?’
‘I soon will be,’ said Julia. ‘Anthony warned me that convalescence would take time.’
‘When is he coming?’ asked Comfort, ignoring the subject of Julia’s health for the more important one.
‘He’ll be back presently,’ said Julia, falling back easily into her role as soother and supporter. ‘He’s already training his successor. Now, Comfort, won’t you introduce us?’ she went on.
‘Tibor Smith, Mrs Gillingham,’ said the short man, holding out a surprisingly shapely (if rather painty) hand. ‘I hope you do not mind that Comfort brought me with her today?’
‘Not at all,’ said Julia, liking his wide smile and his reliable-looking face. His deep voice was attractive, too, and he was obviously making Comfort happy. Julia smiled at him. ‘But “Smith”?’ she asked, managing to sound rather amused.
‘Is much easier than my Hungarian name. When I was first in London I took so many hours to explain to the English how to pronounce or spell it that I thought Smith would be better. Good idea, no?’
‘Very good,’ said Julia. ‘And it’s very good of you both to come. I’d been expecting a dull drive on my own.’
‘Let’s go,’ said Comfort, taking Julia’s arm and wheeling her out of the building. Julia looked back over her shoulder to see the Hungarian painter obediently picking up her luggage.
When they got back to the big house in Brunswick Square, Julia had her first moment of genuine amusement. In order to appease convention, Comfort had installed Tibor Smith in Julia’s rooms on the first floor, and had had to move him hurriedly up to the spare rooms when Julia’s telegram arrived.
‘But, Comfort,’ said Julia when she had stopped laughing, ‘you’ve never cared what anyone thought about you. You always said that rules did not apply to you and you despised middle-class convention. Do you really think that leaving a flight of stairs between you both makes any difference? Do stairs prevent impropriety?’
‘It was Tibor,’ said Comfort, clearly not as amused as Julia had been. ‘He seemed to think that it was necessary to make some gesture to show people that I was not sleeping with him.’
‘And you’re not?’ said Julia, trying not to sound surprised. Comfort’s letters had suggested that she was falling much more in love with the Hungarian than with any other man she had ever known.
‘Certainly not. He needed a home and somewhere to paint. I’ve told you all this already,’ Comfort protested. ‘I enjoy his company and admire his work. I’m not in love with him.’
‘Well he certainly loves you,’ said Julia, having noticed in Tibor’s dark eyes the same light that David’s had taken on whenever he had looked at her in the days before Florence. She must not think of David. ‘Did Bob Storrington arrange a Paris exhibition of his stuff as well as yours?’ She went on, trying to keep her mind on London matters.
‘No. They showed mine all right, but were too stuffy to take a gamble on an unknown Hunk. But Marcus has agreed to a double show in his main gallery here. There’s to be a huge party to launch it. You will come, won’t you, Julia? It’ll be just like old times,’ said Comfort, tucking her painty hand into the crook of Julia’s elbow.
‘Well yes, if you want me,’ she said, ‘although I’m not sure my clothes won’t disgrace you. I’ve nothing smart and Parisian like yours.’
Comfort laughed. ‘No one expects lady lawyers to be fashionable,’ she said. Julia was trying to think up a witty rejoinder when the sound of Tibor’s rich, deep voice distracted her.
‘You should rest, Mrs Gillingham. I have put your baggages in your room.’
‘That was kind,’ said Julia. ‘And you’re right. I am tired.’
She went up to her room alone and lay on the big bed, trying not to think of David, trying to make plans for the future and to feel excited about Comfort’s exhibition.
The following morning she went to chambers, where Mark Heathwood gripped both her hands and stared down at her.
‘Thank God, you’re all right,’ he said tensely. ‘When I heard that you had pneumonia I could hardly … Thank God,’ he finished with a painful smile.
Julia, looking into his lined, familiar face, wondered how she could ever have thought that she loved him. The undoubted affection she felt for him was one part admiration, one part gratitude and two parts sympathy, and it must always have been so. Compared with the violence of emotion that David had aroused in her, her feeling for Mark had been almost nothing.
‘Thank you,’ she said, gently squeezing his hands before she pulled her own away. ‘How have you been?’
He told her and they were soon joined by George Wilson, who had plenty to say until their clerk reproachfully interrupted them. Julia went with him to listen to his account of the work he had had to turn away because of her absence and the poor prospects with which she had left herself. Later in the day she met two new members of chambers, young men who had returned from the war after she left for Venice. They greeted her warily and just before she left for the day, she overheard one saying to the other:
‘I thought the much vaunted Boadicea looked rather wan, didn’t you, Wilkinson?’
‘They do say she’s been ill. Perhaps it’s just that. But I rather agree that she didn’t show many signs of being dangerous competition. Has she got any briefs lined up?’
‘Only a couple of rather dull written opinions, I heard,’ said the first speaker with a dismissive laugh. The two young men must have walked away then, because their voices became fainter and fainter. Julia, not surprised by their reaction to her, wondered whether they had meant her to hear them. She could not summon up much resentment or even irritation and shrugged off their contempt.
Nothing seemed to matter very much as she set about reestablishing her London routines. She did what work her clerk allowed her and dined in hall to show her fellow members of the Temple that she was back. She called on her tailor and established that she had enough coupons for either a new dress or a new coat and skirt but not both. Plumping for the suit because it would be more use to her, she sadly chose some good quality black barathea and ignored her memories of Comfort’s glowing Parisian dress. She tried to find workmen to repair the remarkably slight bomb damage to the house and the less slight damage to the decorations wreaked by six years’wear and tear and was told over and over again that there was no chance of getting any such inessential work done in the foreseeable future.
She exchanged dutiful letters with her parents and with Anthony, who seemed far more affectionate to her on paper than he had ever been when they were actually together in Venice, and she resisted the temptation to write to David.
In the second week of May she read in the newspapers that the Kesselring trial had come to an end. The Judge Advocate General had summed up the evidence on both sides at considerable length, tackling the defence’s position that the Hague Convention outlawed partisan warfare and permitted reprisals by pointing out that 335 men and boys had been killed in the Ardeatine Caves and that at the rate of ten Italians for every dead German that was five too many. Whether or not the remaining 330 could be judged to have been victims of legitimate reprisals or not, those five had been murdered.
The four colonels who were to judge Kesselring found him guilty and he was sentenced to death. It was announced that there was to be an appeal against the sentence and over the next few days The Times published several letters from people who were outraged at the sentence. Julia wished that she could have discussed it with David, who, unlike some of her London colleagues and friends who expressed their views with great force, would have known exactly what he was talking about.
It was three days after the last letter was published that Tibor asked Julia to sit for a portrait. She agreed listlessly, finding it odd that he should want to paint her but prepared to do what little she could to help his slowly burgeoning career. After the first two evening sessions she discovered that it was the best decision she had made since her return.
Comfort sometimes shared the studio with them, but more often they were alone and then Tibor would talk to her about himself, his work in the resistance and eventual escape from Hungary, his fears of what the Russians might do to his country and the rest of Eastern Europe, waking her curiosity and passion to know.
He answered every question she asked him, partly because he was homesick and loved talking about Hungary (which seemed to bore Comfort) and partly because Julia’s face always lit up when she was interested and became far more paintable. Some evenings when she sat in the old beech-nut-coloured wing chair in which he was painting her, her face looked dragged and plain in its dazed weariness, but once she started talking and forgot herself, her wide lips curled, her eyes brightened and her face revealed both the essential strength of her character and a wistfulness that made it beautiful to Tibor.
There were evenings when she seemed so tired that she could not even summon up the energy to ask him questions and then he would start to cross-examine her. It soon became clear to him that she did not want to talk at all about Venice or her husband and so instead he asked about her childhood.
Liking him, trusting him and wanting to repay him for all the things he had told her about his own past, Julia unbent far more than usual and told him a little about the lonely years she had spent as the only child of a brilliant, acerbic solicitor interested in nothing but his work and a self-absorbed, bored, beautiful woman who could not understand her clever daughter’s lack of interest in clothes and parties and tried to goad her into behaving more conventionally by mockery.
Tibor, listening to Julia’s matter-of-fact accounts, wondered whether her parents had understood the cruelty of what they had done or the extent to which they had driven their daughter into believing herself to be not only plain but also unlovable. Julia never said any such thing, but it seemed obvious to Tibor.
‘I can see now how irritating I must have been to her,’ said Julia one evening. ‘Although at the time I was afraid of her and yet despised her too. All the things she thought were of paramount importance seemed horribly trivial to me and seeing all my life how much she resented my father and how much he disliked her I tried to persuade her to be interested in things that might have given them something to talk about.’
‘She will have enjoyed this!’ said Tibor with heavy sarcasm.
Julia smiled her lopsided smile.
‘Exactly,’ she said. ‘How arrogant I must have been as a child! And yet it was all done with the best of intentions.’
As she said that, her face changed. Tibor watched the curly mouth straighten and her eyebrows draw together across the top of her nose. She looked almost as though she were in pain. Compassionate, and in any case wanting to be able to go on painting her, he changed the subject.
‘Will you explain to me, please,’ he said, ‘about this India of yours and why you have ruled it for 250 years and why there is all this trouble now?’ He was not in the least interested in India or the British attempts to limit the damage their withdrawal from it was bound to cause, or the Viceroy’s friendship with Pandit Nehru or the reasons for Jinnah’s determination to establish an independent Muslim state, but he listened to Julia’s fluent explanations and had his reward as her face returned to normal.
When Comfort was in the studio with them, there was no talk of politics or Julia’s family or the international situation for they all bored her. Instead the three of them discussed Comfort’s work and success, the chances of Anthony’s return, the possibilities of an end to rationing, and whether or not to retrieve the car which had been garaged with Julia’s parents in the North since the beginning of petrol rationing.
Julia asked Comfort one evening after a particularly frustrating search for a pair of new shoes to wear with her suit whether she too found the shop assistants extraordinarily rude.
‘Unspeakable!’ said Comfort with energy. ‘They have such power now and they positively delight in telling you that there are no nylons or whatever it is you want. And that’s nonsense in any case. The spivs always have plenty. If they can get them, the shops could.’
‘I must say I could do with some new stockings,’ said Julia sadly. ‘But a woman I overheard on the bus the other day said the only hope was to start queueing by half-past five in the morning and hope for a delivery. I just haven’t the strength for that sort of thing yet.’
‘It’s all the fault of this damned government trying to punish anyone who has more than the absolute minimum,’ said Comfort. ‘How I hate them, interfering, punishing, steamrollering people with their wretched “planning”! I’ll get you your stockings: don’t worry.’
‘But not from a black marketeer,’ said Julia. ‘I won’t do that.’
‘Oh, don’t be so prissy,’ said Comfort. ‘You’ve spent too much time listening to that infuriating protégé of Anthony’s. Buying stockings from a spiv is hardly going to damage the health or wealth of the nation.’
‘Nevertheless I won’t do it,’ said Julia.
‘But…’ Comfort was beginning when Tibor laid a hand over hers and stopped her protest.
‘Let Julia do as she wishes. She has enough to worry about without that,’ he said and Julia smiled gratefully at him. ‘What about some coffee, Comfort? Isn’t there some left from your mother’s last parcel?’
Comfort obediently brewed them some American coffee and Tibor picked up his brushes again.
‘Turn your face a little to the left and down, please, before you rest it on your hand,’ he said to Julia, who had lost the position while they talked. ‘And shake your hair forward a bit. Good.’
Julia obeyed and tried to blank every thought out of her mind, but that was as hard as usual. Whenever Tibor did not distract her during these sessions of enforced idleness, memories of David came flooding into her mind: memories of his gentleness, his idealism, his wittiness, his complete lovableness. She made herself remember Raffaella, too, and her dark-haired, blue-eyed baby, and then her face would harden and Tibor would patiently lay down his brushes until he had talked her back into serenity.
‘Here you are,’ said Comfort, bringing Julia’s coffee to the wing chair. ‘I’ve put the sugar in. It’s the last of the ration until next week. Would you like some brandy? You look faint again.’
‘I’m just tired,’ said Julia, accepting the coffee. ‘I’m sorry, Tibor, my face must change each time you try to paint it. Perhaps you ought to use Comfort instead.’
‘He’s done me,’ said Comfort, with a sparkling smile.
‘You look as though you approve of it,’ said Julia, pleased to see Comfort so happy.
‘I do,’ answered Comfort, ‘and so will you. You’ll see it at the opening tomorrow. Don’t forget, will you? Five-thirty sharp.’
Chapter Twenty-Three
Julia did not forget the exhibition, even though her clerk presented her with the first important brief of her return just as she was leaving chambers. She did not make the mistake of sounding too grateful for it, but she was surprised that it had come so soon.
‘Mr Norgrove asked for you especially when he heard you were back,’ her clerk told her. ‘He wants to talk to you tomorrow afternoon. He won’t be in court.’
‘All right,’ said Julia coolly. ‘I’ll read all this tonight. Thank you, Tomkins.’
Feeling slightly cheered, although the usual evening’s lassitude was dragging at her body, Julia went to the washroom to do her face and hair. Then she put on an elegant new hat, the result of her one successful shopping expedition, and sallied forth to the big Bond Street gallery where Comfort’s dealer was greeting the usual crowd of critics, customers, and members of the smart set. Remembering some of the glittering pre-war parties there, Julia felt sad as she noticed the inevitable changes.
The two huge chandeliers in the main room were the same as ever and the parquet floor as glossy, but the shifting crowd looked different. Gone was the old atmosphere of utterly certain wealth and success. That evening many of the people looked as tired and tense as Julia felt. The men’s clothes were indistinguishable from the old days, if a little shabbier, but most of the women’s frocks and hats showed signs of what the magazines called ‘inventive little touches’to disguise their origins. More than one, Julia saw, wore streakily applied leg make-up instead of stockings.
She caught sight of Comfort, looking magnificent in her blue-and-green Dior dress, and thought of going to talk to her, but she seemed occupied by eager and probably important guests. Depressed, Julia walked over to the bravely arranged buffet table to get herself a drink.
At pre-war parties it always used to carry great silver dishes of smoked salmon and foie gras, ice buckets of champagne, and trays and trays of canapes, bottles of whisky, cocktails and every conceivable drink that Marcus’s patrons might demand. Now, the silver dishes were artfully sprinkled with inadequate numbers of cheese straws and sausage rolls, made to look as lavish as possible with bunches of unrationed greenery. In place of the champagne and cocktails was a single anonymous concoction served in long glasses from a series of huge punchbowls.
Julia, sipping it in a gingerly fashion, thought that there was a little gin in it, quite a lot of cider, and probably well-diluted orange squash. Chopped mint leaves cut the sickliness of the orange and made it look prettier but tended to get stuck against the roof of her mouth.
‘Isn’t it Mrs Gillingham? Do you remember us?’ A cheerful American voice made Julia stop her gloomy diagnosis of the drink in her hand. She looked up to see two men dressed in impeccably cut suits smiling at her.
‘You look puzzled,’ said one. ‘Bob Storrington and John Tonsley. We first met at Cumnor all those years ago.’
‘Yes, of course,’ said Julia, holding out her hand. ‘How are you? Are you based in London now?’
‘No, we’re back in Paris these days,’ said Bob. ‘But we couldn’t let one of Comfort’s shows pass without showing up. We’re very proud of her.’
