Never such innocence, p.33
Never Such Innocence, page 33
‘So am I,’ said Julia, smiling widely. ‘And I haven’t even had a chance to see any of the paintings. Will you take me round?’ she went on, remembering that the Americans were both knowledgeable about modern painting and admirers of Comfort herself.
‘Sure,’ said John, offering her his arm. The two men walked her slowly round the big room, pausing before paintings that they particularly liked. Of them all Julia liked best the series of ink and wash drawings of the London ruins that Comfort had been working on before she went to Venice, but she dutifully admired many of the bigger oils.
‘And Tibor Smith’s paintings?’ she said, when they reached the end of the main rooms. ‘Aren’t they here too?’
‘Upstairs. Shall we go? They’re very exciting,’ said Bob. ‘Much more interesting than Comfort’s in a way, though not as saleable.’
The first painting they saw at the top of the stairs was the portrait of Comfort herself. Julia saw at once why Comfort had smiled so happily at the thought of it. It was an unusual pose that Tibor had arranged, with Comfort apparently lying flat on her back on a plank floor with her luxuriant blonde hair spread out all round her head. Her eccentric beauty was unadorned by any jewels or props or brocade hangings and Tibor had painted her with ruthless, almost photographic, accuracy. Comfort looked magnificent, and Julia’s first thought was that she must buy the portrait at once.
‘Clever, isn’t it?’ said Bob. ‘He’s caught the glamour and a considerable part of the serpent-like character of the matchless Comfort.’
‘What do you mean by serpent-like?’ said Julia, suddenly angry.
‘Oh come on, Mrs Gillingham,’ said Bob. ‘You know what a monster she can be.’
‘I thought you were her friends,’ said Julia, adding with a courtesy that showed none of her outrage at what he had said, ‘Thank you for taking me round.’
She left them standing by Comfort’s portrait to walk slowly down the wide, gracious staircase. Halfway down she stopped to look at her sister-in-law, still surrounded by an admiring crowd. Almost as though she could feel Julia’s attention, Comfort looked up and waved. Julia waved back. She hated to think that Comfort’s so-called friends were criticising her in such terms, but she also wondered what it was that Comfort had done to provoke them.
Julia’s back ached and so did her head and she wondered how soon she could leave without upsetting either of the painters or their dealer. She glanced down at the glass in her hand.
‘May I get you another of those?’ said a soft, gentle Virginian voice. She looked round and recognised Jackson French, the young man from UNRRA. For a moment she could not think what he was doing there and then remembered Comfort’s making him promise to visit her in London.
‘Thank you, Mr French,’ said Julia. ‘I didn’t know you were back.’
‘I’ve been here nearly a month, although I had to go back to Italy last week to help sort out a nasty little mess. Comfort’s been very good to me since I’ve been here in London,’ he said. ‘I’d have been lost without her. Would you like a drink?’
‘Yes, I’d love one,’ said Julia, glad to be with someone who seemed to appreciate Comfort, ‘if there’s any left that is.’
When he had brought her another drink, Jack French urged her to one of the few empty corners of the great room. They chatted for a while about Venice and Julia asked about the mess he had had to clear up.
‘Rather a tricky business,’ said Jack French, wrinkling his nose. ‘A woman who’s done a lot of good with refugees in the city was found to be dealing in the black market. We’d thought she was merely a minor customer and let her alone, but she was too deeply implicated. It had to be done.’
‘I’m sure it had,’ said Julia in a tight, cold voice. Before she could ask any questions, Jackson French started to talk again.
‘Mrs Gillingham,’ he said, having taken a deep breath, ‘may I say something rather cheeky?’
‘If you must,’ said Julia, taken aback and wondering whether he was about to ask her questions about the Venetian black markets and what she knew of Giovanna and her protégées.
‘I’m worried about Comfort,’ he said, surprising her. ‘Like I said, I owe her a lot and I’d like to do something to help her.’
‘Yes?’ said Julia, when he said no more.
‘She needs her brother back in London,’ he said.
Julia’s cold stare had quelled argumentative lawyers and recalcitrant witnesses, but it seemed to have no effect on Jackson French. Without waiting for her to say anything, he hurried on:
‘She’s afraid you’re very angry with him. And I just wanted to say that we all did things in the war that we regret, and … life was tough up there with the partisans. There was always a pretty good chance that none of us would get out alive. Ordinary life, wives and families, seemed a hell of a long way off. And your husband was in the thick of it. Ah, hell, all I really want to say is: don’t be too hard on the guy. It was a mistake anyone could have made.’
‘I thought you didn’t know my husband,’ said Julia, her voice sounding inside her head as though it came from a long way off. Americans were really too extraordinary, she thought as though fending off the knowledge he was offering her; they plunged without warning into intimacies an Englishman would take years to attempt.
‘I didn’t,’ said French, ‘but it was a small world and it got smaller once most of the guys went home. We all heard things about each other,’ he said. ‘It’s not surprising I got to know about her, and Venice is pretty small, you know. Besides …’
Julia tried to concentrate through the waves of heat that were washing over her. The sound of French’s voice dwindled into the background. Jagged arcs of light began to fizzle in her eyes. She put out a hand to stop herself overbalancing and was overtaken by the nauseating sensation of falling into nothingness.
When she came round it was to hear Jack French apologising, Comfort explaining that Julia had recently suffered from pneumonia and Tibor sensibly sending someone to fetch a taxi. When it came he insisted on accompanying her back to Brunswick Square, despite Comfort’s furiously whispered reminder about all the important critics and collectors whom he ought to have stayed to impress.
He did not talk at all on the journey home, not even to ask how Julia had come to faint, for which she was profoundly grateful. She felt not only ill and bruised from her heavy fall on the hard parquet floor, but also badly shaken by the information Jack French had delivered. It might have been elliptical, but Julia was beginning to understand it and could not imagine how she had misread all the signals she had been given in Venice. Looking back, she saw that there had been a great many of them.
Raffaella had disappeared almost immediately after Anthony had taken Julia’s message to her while David was in Florence. Anthony had always refused to talk about what had happened while he was with the partisans, while David had spoken far more readily about everything except the action that had brought him his MC and the details of his instructions from Peter Suvarov.
Looking even further back, to the Christmas when Anthony had come home to London, Julia remembered that he had reacted very oddly to Comfort’s questions about Rome and what it had been like when he went there after the war. Since he must have recently left Raffaella there to have her baby, throwing a handful of money at her as a sop to whatever conscience he felt, it was not surprising that he felt peculiar about it. Perhaps that episode also explained both his devotion to Flavia and his refusal to have a child with Julia, and even his obvious reluctance to have her living with him in Italy.
Julia found it hard to believe that the fastidious Anthony could really want to spend the rest of his life with a girl like Raffaella, undeniably pretty though she was, and yet it seemed clear that he had removed her from Giovanna’s as soon as he had discovered her there and installed her on the opposite side of Venice, conveniently close to the hospital where he spent his days.
‘Why didn’t he tell me?’ she asked herself, furious, humiliated and disheartened as she thought of the efforts she had made to try to understand him and make him happy. She recognised bitterly that her efforts must have irritated him. It seemed unnecessarily cruel of him to have allowed her to go on doing it instead of explaining himself. She told herself that the conditions in which he had lived with the partisans and the things he had had to do then could have explained almost any behaviour, but she could not make herself believe that they excused the lies he had let her believe once the war was over.
If Julia had only known what it was Anthony really felt and wanted, she would never have gone to Venice and never have got herself in such a muddle over David. The memory of her own coldness to him as she left Venice hurt almost more than anything else, but she could hardly write to David, explain that she had suspected him of fathering Raffaella’s child and now knew that he had not, that she had enough evidence of adultery to divorce Anthony and therefore wanted to resume her love affair with David. Knowing that he must have misunderstood her accusatory questions about Raffaella just as she had misunderstood his answers, Julia covered her face with her hands.
Tibor watched her as he leaned back against the corner of the taxi. He did not want to add to her burdens by making her tell him about them, but he wanted to help or somehow to comfort her. When the cabbie drew up outside the big house, Tibor paid and tipped him and then helped Julia into the house and upstairs to her room.
‘Lie down,’ he said, ‘and I will fetch you some tisane.’
‘I’d rather have a drink,’ she said with a hint of a smile. She had only once drunk the herbal brew he had concocted in the studio and had thought it disgusting.
‘You ought not to drink too much now,’ he said severely and went out, shutting the door carefully behind her.
Julia lay down on her bed, trying to ease her aching back and for once letting herself think of David. Through her physical weakness and her shame at having assumed – on so little real evidence – that he had been responsible for Raffaella’s plight, she felt an unexpected happiness. Whatever Jack French’s revelation told her about Anthony and her marriage, it had also told her that David had not lied to her. He was the man she had thought when she fell in love with him. She was no closer to him than she had ever been, she would probably never see him again except by chance meeting, but she was glad to know and to be able to look back on their few ecstatic days together without bitterness.
The sound of the door’s opening stopped her meandering thoughts. Tibor gave her a large cup of steaming hot water vaguely flavoured with dried herbs and flowers and she tried to look properly grateful.
Waking late the next morning, Julia tried to get up in good time to do all the work she needed for her meeting with the KC, but she was overtaken by nausea and had to rush to the bathroom, where she was disgustingly sick. When the spasms had passed and she had carefully rinsed her mouth and wiped the sweat off her face with a cool flannel, she peered at her face in the mirror. Her skin was pale, and there were huge dark semicircles under her brown eyes, but otherwise she looked perfectly normal. Her tongue, when she stuck it out, looked healthy enough. But she felt ghastly.
‘It must have been that peculiar drink last night,’ she said aloud, going down to the big basement kitchen to make herself some breakfast, ‘or perhaps Tibor’s disgusting tisane.’
She boiled a kettleful of water for tea and toasted her usual two pieces of grey, austerity bread. When she had spread them with her share of the marmalade ration, she found that the very thought of eating them made her feel sick again. Almost in tears at the thought of wasting so much food, she tried to choke down the sweet, soft toast, but was sick again.
Drinking her tea with a spoonful of sugar but no milk seemed to control the nausea, and after two cups she managed to clear up the kitchen and get herself out of the house without being sick again. Taking a taxi to chambers instead of walking, she was afraid that she might disgrace herself by being sick all over the silk who had insisted on having her as his junior and losing her most important chance of re-establishing her practice. But as the morning wore on she began to feel better and during the meeting the effort of concentrating on what he and their instructing solicitor were saying banished her malaise.
She spent the rest of the afternoon working on the papers they left with her and it was not until well after five that she remembered it was her turn to buy and cook some food for supper. Putting away her papers and collecting her hat, she thought with regret of the servants who had worked in Brunswick Square before the war, and of all the empty hours she had had to fill in Venice while the efficient Annunziata did the marketing and all the cooking.
All that was left for Julia to buy that evening was either snoek or whale steaks. The one had a flavour she hated and the other tasted of nothing so much as cod-liver oil. Deciding that it would have to do she bought enough for three and hoped that there might be some tins of tomatoes left from Comfort’s last American parcel to help it down.
When she got back to Brunswick Square, she felt so tired that she thought she might lie down for a few minutes. Putting the whale on a dish in the larder, she dragged herself up to bed and lay down on her unmade bed.
She must have fallen asleep almost at once, for she woke with a tremendous shock. The room was still light and she grabbed blindly for her illuminated alarm clock, forgetting the gold watch she wore on her wrist. Seeing that it was half-past seven, Julia wondered what could have woken her so sharply. Then came a knock at her bedroom door.
‘Come in,’ she called quickly and was not surprised to see Tibor peering round the door.
‘I know,’ she said. ‘My turn to make dinner. I’ve got some whale. I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be silly, Julia,’ he said, coming to sit in a friendly way on the edge of her bed. ‘I will cook it and bring you some here if you feel too tired to get up.’
‘Of course I’m not,’ said Julia, holding her head, which seemed to be aching fiercely again. ‘And I’m coming up to sit for you, afterwards.’
‘You don’t have to,’ he said, laying one of his short-fingered hands across her forehead. ‘It is bad, yes?’
‘Quite bad, just for the moment,’ said Julia, ‘but never mind; I’m sure it will go off quite soon.’
‘You have been sick too, I think,’ he said, still holding her head.
Finding his hand enormously comforting, Julia rubbed her forehead first one way and then another against his cool palm.
‘Yes,’ she said at last. ‘Did you hear me this morning? How horrible for you. I am sorry. I think it must have been that peculiar drink at the opening last night.’
The Hungarian laughed.
‘You do not really think that, do you?’ he said. ‘Comfort, yes. She would never imagine anything else, but you? You are a married woman.’
‘What is the matter with me?’ said Julia, rubbing both hands over her forehead. Yet again she had ignored something so obvious that an illiterate peasant could have understood it. Tibor, misunderstanding her despairing rhetorical question, said gently:
‘But you have known that you are to have a child, surely?’
For a moment Julia could not answer. Her mind seemed to have stopped working altogether. ‘I can’t think why it never even occurred to me,’ she said at last. ‘I suppose that was why I fainted yesterday too. You haven’t said anything to Comfort, have you?’ she added urgently. He shook his head.
‘Don’t tell her then, please, Tibor,’ Julia begged. ‘She must not know. Will you promise to say nothing?’
‘If you wish it,’ he answered, the amused smile on his face fading into incomprehension. ‘But why?’
‘Because … because it may not be true. I have to see my doctor first. Don’t tell her, Tibor.’
He took both her hands in his and patted them.
‘It’s all right, Julia. I won’t tell until you wish. But she will be happy and that will be … nice for you,’ he said. ‘She has talked so often about wanting your children.’
Chapter Twenty-Four
By the end of that week Julia had her doctor’s confirmation that she was pregnant. He congratulated her, mentioned how pleased Anthony would be and asked her what arrangements she would like to make for the birth.
‘I’m not absolutely sure,’ said Julia, playing for time. ‘Must I really decide now?’
‘The sooner the better,’ said the doctor, who was an old friend of all three Gillinghams. ‘It’s no joke having a first child at your age and you’ll need the best care. Besides, there’s rather a shortage of maternity beds just now: you’re not the only wife who’s woken up to the importance of having children. Why do you want to wait?’
‘Oh, to get used to the idea and to tell Anthony, who is still in Venice, you know,’ said Julia with a smile of deceptive sweetness. ‘But I do want to know a couple of things. How soon will this wretched sickness stop and how soon will it start to show that I’m pregnant?’
‘Well,’ said the doctor, looking at a calendar on his desk, ‘you say that conception must have been in the first week of April. You should stop feeling sick at about twelve weeks, say by the end of the month. And I think you could probably disguise your pregnancy for perhaps two months after that. But you’ll surely stop working now.’
‘I haven’t decided anything,’ said Julia firmly. ‘Thank you. I’ll be in touch when I want to make arrangements.’
‘All right, but don’t leave it too long. This isn’t a time to take risks, and it most emphatically is a time to put your family responsibilities ahead of your job,’ he said, making it quite clear that he severely disapproved of professional women who subordinated the needs of their unborn children to their work.
Julia left the expensive consulting rooms and walked slowly through the streets back to Bloomsbury. She let herself quietly into the house, because she did not want to have to talk even to Tibor just then, and went up to her dark-green study. There she sat, looking out of the dusty window on to the back of the house opposite, trying to decide what to do.
