Never such innocence, p.38
Never Such Innocence, page 38
He did not ask her why she had come, only taking her coat while Felicity fetched plates, glasses and cutlery and more food.
‘Sit down, Julia,’ she said, ladling a helping of rabbit stew on to her plate. Peter poured wine into her glass. Having felt sick and certain that she could not eat anything, Julia shook her head, but they paid no attention, merely finishing their own food. Almost absent-mindedly she picked up her knife and fork and then found that she was hungry. When she had finished the stew and drunk the wine, Peter at last said:
‘What’s happened?’
‘Anthony’s back,’ said Julia. ‘I don’t terribly want to talk about it, so I’m not sure why I came.’ She looked from one to the other and then smiled helplessly, looking lost and years younger than they had seen her before.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Flixe, putting a hand on Julia’s arm. ‘You needed help. We’re here. Do you want to stay the night?’
‘Oh could I?’ said Julia, realising how badly she had needed help and how difficult it was for her to ask.
‘Of course,’ said Suvarov. ‘I’ll go and telephone your husband. Presumably he doesn’t know where you are?’
‘No, he doesn’t,’ she said. ‘But what will you say?’
‘Don’t worry,’ answered Suvarov. ‘I’ve made lots of difficult telephone calls in my time. This won’t be hard. You look exhausted. Why don’t you let Flixe take you up to the spare room?’
‘All right,’ Julia said, unused to having anyone giving her orders and taking all responsibility from her. She was too tired to be anything but grateful for it and did as she was told.
When she was lying in bed in the pretty spare room, Julia knew with complete certainty that whatever else happened she could never allow David’s child to be brought up in Brunswick Square, believing Anthony to be his father and having Comfort pretending to be his mother. That decision made, she pushed everything else out of her mind and let sleep overwhelm her.
Downstairs Felicity was washing up in the kitchen and trying to persuade her husband to telephone David Wallington. Inexpertly but willingly drying up, Peter refused.
‘She has to sort it out herself,’ he said. ‘No one can impose a solution on her. We can only offer her sanctuary – and advice if she asks for it.’
‘Such as?’ asked Flixe curiously.
‘To tell David, of course. She has to do that, and she’ll come to it herself in the end. She is too accustomed to carrying all the responsibility for her life and she has to realise that in this case at least she can’t do that. Protecting David from the knowledge of his own child is a bad mistake.’
‘Then why won’t you help her to put it right?’ asked Flixe, as nearly cross with him as she ever became.
‘I love you, you know,’ he said, tweaking her chin. ‘You’d go charging in to help, wouldn’t you? But, darling Flixe, that would be hellishly dangerous. Unless Julia does it herself and sees how David receives the news, she will never believe in the genuineness of anything he says to her. If he cares for her …’
‘I’m sure he does,’ said Flixe, remembering the condition he had been in when he thought that Julia was dying in Venice.
‘Probably, but we don’t know. No, my darling, this is something we cannot interfere with.’
Flixe was silent then, apparently accepting his prohibition, but that night she lay beside him as he slept and knew that he was wrong. Without some intervention, Julia’s determined self-reliance could be a disaster for herself, for the baby, and for David. Flixe hated waste, and wasted love most of all, and she was determined to prevent it.
As soon as Peter had left the house the following morning, she made certain that Julia would keep out of the way by taking her a tray of breakfast in bed and then telephoned Allegra Wallington, whom she hardly knew.
Upstairs, Julia had finished breakfast and woken up properly. She felt deeply ashamed of her melodramatic flight from Brunswick Square and was thankful that she had at least not poured the whole story out to the Suvarovs. She got up and dressed quickly, before stripping the bed and remaking it with sheets she found in a vast lavender-scented linen cupboard on the landing. The dirty ones she left neatly folded on a stool at the foot of her bed.
Then she went downstairs to find Flixe so that she could thank her and go. Pushing open the door of what was obviously the drawing room, she was confronted by a large, airy room, decorated in pale, elegant colours that made the most of a wonderful if faded Aubusson rug. There seemed to be no one there, but just as she was wondering where to try next, she heard voices from the other side of the hall.
A door opened and Flixe emerged.
‘There you are,’ she said. ‘Do you feel better this morning?’
‘Much better,’ said Julia politely and then in a rush of frankness added: ‘and idiotic for appearing on your doorstep like an orphan of the storm.’
‘Don’t worry. Come on in. We’re having a cup of coffee,’ said Flixe.
Julia had no time to protest that she did not want to disturb Flixe and whatever guest was waiting for her. Flixe almost pushed her into the room, went out and shut the door behind her. Julia, surprised, looked back. When she saw that Flixe had disappeared, she turned round and recognised David’s mother, standing in front of an empty fireplace.
They stood, looking at each other in silence until Allegra nodded her dark head.
‘Now I understand,’ she said. ‘Come and sit down, Julia.’
‘I don’t understand what you mean,’ Julia said, once more doing as she was told. ‘What is going on?’
Allegra smiled.
‘I understand why Mrs Suvarov summoned me here this morning and would not say why, and I understand at last why you told David that you did not love him.’
‘Do you?’ said Julia quietly. Allegra nodded again.
‘You are pregnant. So of course you can’t leave your husband,’ she said. Then her voice turned almost cold. ‘But why didn’t you tell David? Wouldn’t it have been more fair to tell him instead of leaving him to think that you did not care?’
‘So Felicity didn’t tell you,’ said Julia slowly. She pulled herself up out of the deep armchair, which was upholstered in thick, russet-coloured corduroy. ‘I wish she hadn’t troubled you with this,’ she added, looking down at Allegra’s tired, beautiful face.
‘I was troubled anyway,’ Allegra said. ‘I have been staying in London with David while we decide what we’re going to do about the estate and where I am going to live, and I have never seen David so unhappy before. I knew that I could not leave him here alone in that state; and I could not understand it. It was so clear that you loved him when you were both with me in Fiesole, and so clear that he loves you. I made him go to see you: did he tell you?’
Julia shook her head silently.
‘I thought that perhaps you did not believe how much he needed you,’ said Allegra simply. ‘When he came back, he told me that we had both made a terrible mistake. Now I am not sure. I think you do love him.’
‘Yes, I love him,’ said Julia, staring at a small bronze of a rearing horse that stood on the mantelpiece. ‘But I don’t think he loves me. He asked me to marry him because he would never shirk what he thought was duty. I understand that.’
‘Oh Julia, my dear child, of course he loves you. Was that why you sent him away that day? Did you think he only asked you to be his wife because of the baby?’
Julia had not been called ‘my dear child’for years and the warmth and kindness of Allegra’s voice as she said it reached down into some essential loneliness that only David had touched before. Julia turned her back to the little statue and told the truth.
‘The child is David’s,’ she said. ‘And I can’t bear to cause a scandal that might ruin his life.’ She felt Allegra’s arms around her shoulders.
‘No scandal could be worse than the two of you making yourselves and each other as unhappy as you have,’ said Allegra gently. ‘Come and sit down again. We are two intelligent women. Between us we can sort it all out.’
At that, Julia managed to smile and let herself be led to a large sofa. They talked for a long time and in the end Allegra said:
‘I’m staying in David’s house here for a few days. Will you come back there with me now and tell him?’
‘I can’t,’ said Julia instinctively. Then she thought of an acceptable reason. ‘I have to go to chambers. I’m going to be appallingly late as it is.’
‘Then come this evening and stay with us until your plans are settled,’ said Allegra, laying a hand on Julia’s knee as they sat side by side. ‘Please, Julia. You owe it to him.’
There was a long silence as Julia struggled with her needs and desires and her determined, solitary stoicism.
‘All right,’ she said at last.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
That evening David was walking from the tube station to Kensington Square, depressed and wondering whether he was ever going to be able to forget Julia. There were twin images of her in his mind: the dauntingly serious woman he had collected from the airport at Venice and met again in her London chambers, and the warm, touchingly unsure lover he had found in Fiesole. She had unlocked in him feelings he had never believed he could have and was quite sure that he would never have again. Reaching the dusty lilacs that guarded the path up to his house, he felt in his pocket for his keys.
‘David!’ A breathless voice and the sound of running footsteps stopped him and he wheeled round. Coming towards him through the stuffy London dusk was Julia, impeccably dressed in black and white, with her hair pinned back in its austere bun but with her eyes alight and her smile whole. David began to breathe faster.
‘Julia,’ he said, dropping his briefcase on the grubby pavement and holding out both hands to her.
With her doubts about his feelings disappearing fast, Julia took his hands.
‘Why have you come?’ David asked, bracing himself for the ultimate denial of his hopes.
‘Because I need you and I can’t pretend any more,’ she said.
A smile broke the mask of careful detachment over David’s thin face and revealed the lively eagerness that she loved so much. He stared at her for a long time and then suddenly became aware that they were still standing in the street.
‘Come on in. We can’t talk here,’ he said, releasing one of his hands to pull out his keys.
Julia picked up his briefcase and followed him into the house. He took her into a small book-lined room at the back of the house. There was a desk in one corner, a glazed cabinet holding some old glass in the other, a small squashy sofa in front of the fire and four superb oils on the terracotta walls. The deep rusty-pink carpet that had been spread over the polished parquet floor was badly worn, but even to Julia’s inexpert eye it was identifiable as an antique Bokhara.
The room presented her with a side of David that she had never considered since the earliest days in Venice when he had taken her sightseeing and told her a little about his family. Since she had fallen in love with him, she had thought of him only as a young lawyer with political aspirations, whose integrity and good name she would have gone to almost any lengths to protect. His house reminded her that there was far more to him than that, that he had resources and probably power that she had underestimated.
As she turned to tell him how much she liked the room, she saw him looking at her and thought that perhaps she had underestimated him altogether.
‘Well, Julia?’ he said with a smile that looked a lot more confident than the one with which he had greeted her in the street.
‘I’ve come to tell you that I am pregnant with your child,’ she said.
David said nothing as he absorbed the news that ought not to have surprised him as much as it did.
‘I never thought of that,’ he said eventually. ‘How long have you known?’
‘Since the end of May,’ she said. David watched her face, trying to understand her.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ he asked, at last realising that he could not understand.
‘Because I couldn’t bear you to think that I was trying to blackmail you into –’
‘Come and sit down,’ he said abruptly. ‘What do you mean, blackmail? Didn’t you believe me when I told you I loved you?’
Julia shook her head.
‘In Florence I knew that you cared,’ she said moderately, ‘but I also knew that you did not want to marry, and when you asked me I thought that someone – Anthony – had told you about the child. I thought that you asked me because you felt you had to,’ she said.
David put his arms around her and leaned his cheek on her soft hair for a moment.
‘For a woman as clever as everyone tells me you are, you are a clot. Couldn’t you tell? Couldn’t you feel that I loved you?’ he asked, sounding worried.
Julia withdrew a little and leaned back against the soft cream-coloured sofa cushions. There were a lot of things she could have told him, all of which were true: that Anthony’s warning had left her afraid that there were aspects of David she had not discovered, that in Venice she had become so muddled by her efforts to make sense of Anthony’s emotions and her own that she had misread almost every piece of evidence and trusted people whom she ought not to have trusted and vice versa, but all those explanations would come later.
‘I wanted to believe it so much,’ she said quietly, telling the most fundamental truth, ‘that I suppose I couldn’t let myself in case it turned out not to be true.’
She looked at David, at the fine lines at the corners of his blue eyes, at his straight nose and firm chin, and smiled at him.
‘Even so, I knew all along that I loved you. I just muddled the rest,’ she said.
They talked then about everything that had happened, stripping away the layers of concealment they had assumed to protect each other and learning at last what the weeks in Venice had meant to each other, and what they might mean in the future. Julia looked progressively happier until she had to tell David what Anthony had said to her as he heaped revelation on revelation during their painful talk. Then David watched her face tighten up and her eyes darken.
‘What is it?’ he asked gently.
‘I’d been letting myself forget that he still stands in the way,’ she said in a tight voice. ‘I’d begun to feel so safe.’ She looked down at the huge, diamond-encircled emerald on her left hand and suddenly gripped David’s hand. ‘David, we can’t lose each other again. Not now.’
‘We won’t,’ he said with a firm confidence that delighted her. ‘Will you let me talk to him?’
‘You? Why?’
‘Because you’ve been hurt enough,’ he said gently. ‘This is something that I can do for you – if you will let me.’
Julia leaned forward again until her head was resting on his shoulder. Many people had helped her during her life, but until that moment she had always felt that in disaster she would be alone. The strength people had divined in her had been partly the rigidity of her defences against that fear. Now, at last, the defences crumbled and she looked at David with all her real vulnerability exposed.
David, who knew her better than anyone, understood and was profoundly touched.
‘We’ll be stronger as two than either of us could ever have been alone,’ he told her. ‘Whatever happens.’
‘I think you’re right,’ she said as seriously as he had spoken. But then her face changed again, her brown eyes took on a mischievous gleam and she said more lightly than he had ever heard her speak: ‘I hope you are, because between us we’ve a lot to do.’
A little later David said:
‘I think I ought to go and see Anthony at once.’
‘Will you take him these?’ asked Julia, pulling off the emerald and her wedding ring as well. She handed them to David, who nodded. As he went to the door, Julia could not help saying:
‘Don’t let him …’ David turned and she could see the confidence in his eyes and in the carriage of his head and the set of his shoulders.
‘I’ll be all right,’ he said.
He was, but he held on to his temper with difficulty and he never told Julia what had been said during the painful interview he had with her husband. Nor did he tell her that as he was leaving the house he was confronted with Comfort, who had obviously been listening to them. She had stood in his way to the front door and said:
‘So you’ve won. I knew that you would make trouble when I first saw you, but what makes you think that a woman who has betrayed one man won’t betray another? You’ll never be sure of her and you’ll never be happy.’
He had looked at her beautiful, hateful eyes and knew that she was wrong. He thought of answering her, but decided that there was no point.
When he got back to Kensington Square Julia and his mother had long since finished dinner and were both in bed. He went to see his mother first and then knocked on the door of the spare bedroom. When Julia asked if he was all right, he simply said:
‘It’s all arranged. Anthony will give you evidence and you’ll have your divorce. It won’t be pleasant, but you will be free.’
Julia sat up in bed, brushing the long hair away from her face.
‘I’m sorry it was so bad, David,’ she said and when she saw his face change, she added quickly: ‘It’s all right; I won’t ask any questions.’
He nodded and felt in his pocket.
‘I don’t suppose it is proper to give you this yet, but nothing we have done has been quite proper has it?’ He held out his hand and in the palm she saw a square-cut ruby ring.
‘When did you get it?’ Julia asked, looking at the glowing jewel and thinking that he could not possibly have had time to buy it since she had handed him her other rings.
David smiled ruefully.
‘As soon as I got back to London,’ he said. ‘I suppose it was an act of faith. I hope you like it; Flixe Suvarov helped me to choose it.’
‘We owe those two a lot,’ said Julia, staring past the ring to the unhappiness that would have been her lot without David. ‘We’d never even have met if you hadn’t worked for him, and she helped me to see … to understand.’
