Never such innocence, p.37
Never Such Innocence, page 37
‘Are you surprised?’ he said in a voice of detached inquiry. ‘You are my wife, after all.’
‘Anthony,’ she said, looking at him with what he irritably recognised as pity, ‘don’t let’s play games with each other. I am your wife, but hardly the wife you want. It’s taken me a long time to admit that, but I have recognised it at last. You didn’t want to come back here to live with me after the war and I realised too late that you didn’t want me to come to Venice either. Now I know why. You were determined that we shouldn’t have children and did everything you could to separate us from each other. Isn’t it a bit undignified to play dog-in-the-manger now?’
‘You have grown hard, haven’t you?’ he said, watching her through narrowed eyes. ‘Comfort’s right.’
Julia winced, but she said nothing. After a moment, Anthony visibly pulled himself together and said:
‘I was angry enough to discover you had seduced David, but it was your suggestion that you should bring up a child without a father that was so shocking. You really can’t do that, Julia.’
‘I don’t see why not,’ she said, furious at his assumption that she had inveigled a reluctant David into her bed. She looked sideways at the pile of work on her desk and tried not to let herself sound either angry or defensive. She decided to treat Anthony’s objection as a practical rather than an emotional one. ‘My fee income has risen dramatically since you were last at home; I can afford a very good nanny –’
‘As a matter of interest,’ he said, interrupting with a sharper voice than before, ‘do you think a very good nanny would agree to live in such a household and look after a bastard child?’
Julia felt suddenly desperately tired. She had not expected the confrontation to be easy, but she had banked on Anthony being reasonable and wanting to be free of their unsatisfactory marriage as much as she did.
‘I can’t see why she should have any objection,’ Julia said carefully, ‘if she did not know of its illegitimacy. If you are prepared to help me avoid a scandal, there should be no problem. I know that I have landed us in this situation, but avoiding a scandal seems to be in the best interests of every one of us.… It’s not just selfishness.’
Anthony took his hands out of his pockets and started to fiddle with a big bunch of keys, turning each one over and examining it before dropping it with a clatter against the next. Julia felt increasingly puzzled. She had never seen him so restless or – she realised with surprise – so uncertain of himself, despite the anger that showed so clearly.
‘Anthony, this feels like cat-and-mouse teasing,’ she said. ‘What is it that you’ve come all this way to say to me?’
He got out of the chair then, still jiggling his keys in his left hand, and walked about the small square room, picking things up at random, squinting at the titles of the books in the mahogany shelves on either side of the fireplace, straightening the carriage clock on the mantelpiece and stopping at last in front of a framed drawing of his sister that Julia had hung over it. Julia could see his reflection in the glass, lying over Comfort’s face. Their eyes matched and so did their impressive noses, but in the drawing Comfort smiled. Anthony’s delicately modelled lips were taut and straight. He turned back to face his wife.
‘I agree that we need to avoid scandal over your child,’ he said coldly, ‘but that can’t be achieved with a divorce, however quiet. I am not prepared to divorce you or let you divorce me.’
‘But Anthony –’ Julia began. Before she could finish her protest he went on:
‘And I can make an appalling scandal if you try. I can’t agree to your living alone with the child – even with the best nanny in the world. It is simply not fair to bring up a child in such circumstances. I have decided that we should continue as we are, with the child living here with us all, knowing that it has both father and mother,’ he said, looking over Julia’s head.
For a moment Julia could neither speak nor distinguish among the violent emotions that were making her mind reel.
‘But you don’t want a child,’ she said at last, seizing one distinguishable feeling from the mass. ‘In Venice you were adamant that we could not have one. What on earth has made you change your mind to the extent that you are prepared to pretend to be the father of someone else’s? Have you gone mad?’
‘Certainly not,’ he said, sounding far more sure of himself than before. ‘The idea of a child in the abstract is entirely different from the reality of one you are already carrying, a child who is nearly halfway to term. Whatever it is that you want to do, you must admit that the child’s interests should come before your own.’
Never in all her married life had Julia felt so angry with her husband. Even when she had understood the truth about his dealings with Raffaella, what she had felt had been complicated by her determination to see the best in him and to make allowances for the circumstances that had caused him to do what he had done. Always in the past, any irritation or resentment she had felt towards him had left her feeling tired and inadequate, but she had lost that feeling for ever. He had set her free.
Julia suddenly felt stronger than she had done for months and more determined. For the first time since they had met at Oxford, she managed to look at Anthony as though he were a client or a witness, to try to discern the weaknesses behind his actions and the hidden motives for his words.
As though he recognised some change in her, Anthony shrugged slightly, put away the keys that he had been rattling so maddeningly and went back to his chair.
‘What is it,’ Julia asked carefully, ‘that makes you think a child would be so badly off being brought up as I propose? Most of the people you and I know were brought up by nannies, seeing their mothers only once or twice a day and their fathers far less than that. What is so different?’
‘Most of the people we know were aware that they had both mother and father,’ said Anthony.
Julia noticed that he looked pleased that she had asked that particular question and added it to the facts and inferences in her mind.
‘But I did not,’ Anthony went on in a voice of frigid disdain. ‘My mother deserted us when I was six and I know what it is like to live without a mother – and Comfort without a father. Neither of us would wish that on any other living soul. We know, you see, and we are determined that it shan’t happen to your child.’
That moving declaration ought to have convinced Julia of his sincerity, but something in it did not ring true. Her brown eyes narrowing, she concentrated on all the things Anthony might be thinking and not saying, on his tension, the way his eyes kept sliding away from her so that he could look at the drawing of Comfort.
‘Does Comfort know about David?’ she asked at last. ‘I haven’t told her, but have you?’
‘Absolutely not,’ said Anthony, looking at her again. Julia believed that. ‘She mustn’t,’ he went on with an extraordinary pleading note mixed with the coldness in his voice. ‘She is so happy about the child.’
‘I know,’ said Julia slowly, ‘but what has that got to do with your refusing to let me leave?’ Even as she put the question an intimation of the truth occurred to her. For a while she could not bring herself to put it into words or to believe it, but it made sense of everything else. They both sat silent, absorbed in their own thoughts.
‘I feel such a fool,’ said Julia at last. Anthony raised his head and looked at her with eyes that seemed at last to be filled with regret. ‘You’re in love with her, aren’t you? That’s what all this has been about ever since Oxford: you and Comfort.’
Anthony’s face as much as the hopeless set of his shoulders told Julia that she was right. For nearly five minutes her mind was wiped clear of every feeling, but then they flooded back with the force and violence of the water that thundered over the Niagara Falls. She felt as though she must always have known and yet refused to know.
‘How stupid I’ve been,’ she said, trying to control the deluge. ‘I’ve thought I wasn’t sophisticated enough for you, that I was too fat or too thin to attract you, that I bored you, or worried you by loving you so much more than you did me. I’ve been afraid that you were in love with Sister Caroline or with Raffaella; that what happened in the war had frightened you out of being able to show any kind of love. I’ve thought of almost every reason for our difficulties except that you were in love with your own sister.’
Anthony said nothing, but stared at the drawing. His face was white and his dark-grey eyes looked huge.
‘I take it that you don’t actually sleep together?’ Julia remarked in a light, sarcastic voice that was designed to rouse him into answering her.
‘Certainly not,’ he said, looking and sounding shocked by the enormity of what she had said.
‘No,’ agreed Julia, coldly angry, humiliated and bitterly hurt. ‘You would hardly have needed me if you had.’
Something of what she felt reached him and he dropped his face into his hands.
‘It’s never been as cold-blooded as that,’ he said at last, when he was sure he could control himself. ‘She loves you: you know that. We both love you.’
‘Do you?’ asked Julia, still cold.
Anthony looked at her and the frank misery in his slate-grey eyes brought back some of her self-control.
‘Perhaps you do in a way,’ she said more gently. ‘Or perhaps not. I sometimes wonder if any of us knows what that so misused word really means. We all think we’ve found it, but it turns out to be a reflection of what we want or a shadow or a mirage. What a ridiculous, bloody awful mess!’
‘Yes, but we’re deep in it,’ said Anthony, sounding a little more like himself, ‘and –’
‘Where does Raffaella fit into all this?’ Julia asked, interrupting him without scruple. ‘I gather you told Comfort all about her, although not me. I ought to have understood when I discovered that, instead of wondering what it was that Raffaella could give you that I could not.’
Once again Anthony shrugged and pulled a face.
‘She doesn’t really fit anywhere. It was one of those unimportant wartime things that made a hideously unpleasant life a little more bearable for both of us,’ he said with a casualness that shocked Julia all over again.
‘And the child? Doesn’t Comfort want that child too?’ Julia could hear the bitterness in her voice, but had no intention of apologising for it. She felt that she had every right to bitterness. But Anthony’s face changed and the pain in it reminded Julia of how much she had loved him once and how hard she had worked to make him happy. A little of her anger and her bitterness died.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said simply.
Anthony heard the sympathy in her voice and saw the old unfailing warmth dawning in her eyes and almost broke down. He felt as though he had been pulled apart on a rack. He had learned that his attempt to save himself and Comfort by staying in Italy had failed when she told him that she had sacked Tibor Smith from her life. He knew that he had failed Julia when he had not been able to give her the kind of love she deserved when she married him. Belatedly he let his anger at what she had done slip enough to accept that he had damaged her, too, and he thought that perhaps what Raffaella had done to him, the fool she had made of him, was a suitable punishment.
‘She has gone back to Rome, where she intends to further her career as a tart,’ he said with a bitterness that excelled even Julia’s. ‘It seems that the child was probably not mine after all and that her unspeakable brother was more accurate than any of us knew. She was not picked up for interrogation at all, but had a regular rendezvous with the German at which she exchanged sexual favours and information for food and a guarantee of protection.’ As he spoke, he could see Raffaella’s cold, green eyes and hear her mocking voice:
‘Yours or the German’s? What does it matter, dottore? I needed you both then; and I needed you again while Paolo was back in Venice. I don’t need either of you now that they have caught him. I’m free of you all.’
At least, he thought, her announcement had freed him of the guilt he had felt whenever he thought of her child, wondering always whether it might have been his and what its future could possibly be.
‘Anthony, I’m sorry,’ said Julia again and he suspected that she was apologising more for what she had thought about him than for what she had actually said. ‘I think we ought to stop talking now. None of us can decide anything while we’re so … so raw. Let’s leave it for a bit. How long are you staying?’
‘I have to go back on the fourteenth,’ he said. To Julia it sounded like an ultimatum.
‘Four days to make the most important decision of our lives,’ she said slowly.
Anthony looked at his fingernails again.
‘There’s no decision to make. Legally, the child is mine,’ he said.
‘I am well aware of that,’ Julia began and then caught his real meaning. In a voice of complete disbelief she said: ‘Are you telling me that you would invoke your legal rights to keep a child who is no …? Anthony, I do not believe you. I may not have understood your relations with your sister, but you cannot be so different from the man I married.’
‘Comfort wants it,’ he said as though that explained everything.
Perhaps, thought Julia, it did.
She got up. The study that had been her refuge from the war, from depression and loneliness, offered no bulwark against the feelings that were battering her. She knew suddenly that she had to get out of the house, but before she left there was something more to say.
‘Anthony, there is one thing that I have to ask you now. Will you answer realistically this time?’
‘How do I know until you’ve asked?’ he said, assuming that she was going to ask him something about Comfort.
‘What was it that David did to make you so angry just before I came to Venice?’ Julia asked for the third time.
Anthony looked at her, surprised that she should care so much.
‘He insisted on giving evidence on behalf of that lout, Paolo, when he was on trial for murder in Rome,’ he said with a cynical laugh. ‘He even wanted me to do it, too: after what Paolo had done to Raffaella in the war!’
‘That was it?’ said Julia blankly. ‘All those warnings about David’s destructiveness just because he gave evidence?’
‘Think of the ramifications before you so firmly take his part,’ said Anthony in a cool voice. ‘David knew as well as I that Paolo had sworn to kill Raffaella and her child once the war was over. That trial gave an opportunity to have him put away and because of what David did, Paolo was left at large.’
‘David would not have lied,’ said Julia. ‘At a trial like that, he would have told no more than the truth. You can’t blame him.’
‘Oh, yes I can,’ said Anthony. ‘And think what happened because of him: if he had not insisted on telling the court how wonderfully brave Paolo had been in the war, what a hero he had been, he would probably have been safely in prison before he had been able to frighten Raffaella out of Rome; you would never have been troubled with her story; I would never have been led up the garden path for a second time; you would never have been terrified by Paolo chasing you through Venice; and your friend Giovanna Whatsit would not now be in prison for black marketeering.’
‘What?’ said Julia, surprised out of her preoccupations.
‘Oh yes. The reason Paolo discovered his sister in Venice was because he had come to report on his activities to the woman who had set him up in his black-market business – your Giovanna. I have told David so damned often that his ideals will always cause trouble, but this time he excelled himself.’
‘Did he know? About Giovanna, I mean,’ said Julia, trying to grapple with the shock of what Anthony had said. He shook his head.
‘No: as usual too ready to believe the best about people. Though, to be fair, no one else knew either. She successfully disguised her hatred of the Allies from everyone and persuaded everyone who knew her that her only concern was healing the wounds left by the war by housing her refugees. It was bad luck for her, too, that Raffaella should have fled to Venice.’
‘You mean, I take it, that Raffaella told the authorities?’ said Julia.
‘Oh yes. Once she had seen Paolo in the house, she knew the sort of thing that must be going on and saw a way to protect herself and take a little revenge of her own at the same time,’ said Anthony sounding more bitter than before. ‘I don’t know whether she informed on Giovanna as well as on Paolo, or whether it was merely her bad luck that the police uncovered her activities too.’
He had never loved the girl, but they had made love with each other and consoled each other for nearly two years. Thinking of that time, knowing what he did of her real self, he felt as though he had waded through a cess pit.
‘I see what Flixe Suvarov meant when she said that secrets were dangerous,’ said Julia after a long silence. ‘If you had told me about Paolo and the trial, and about yourself and Raffaella; if you and Comfort had told me what part I really played in your lives; if I had told you that I’d fallen in love with David … none of us would be in this mess.’
She crossed her arms protectively across her womb and added silently to herself that if none of that had happened she would not be carrying the child either. Because of that, that one saving grace, the horror of everything she had heard was diminished.
‘I have to go out,’ she said.
Half an hour later Julia’s taxi stopped outside the Suvarovs’small white house in Chelsea. She paid the driver and walked up the four shallow steps, wishing that she had thought to telephone first. But she had not, and she needed them. She rang the bell.
Suvarov himself answered the door, with a white damask table napkin dangling from his hand. Its significance occurred to Julia and she looked at her watch.
‘I am so sorry,’ she said. ‘I hadn’t realised the time. I’ll go.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ he said, reaching across the threshold to draw her into the house. ‘It’s only Flixe and me. Come in.’
