Never such innocence, p.4
Never Such Innocence, page 4
When he had left England, they had been married for four years. Now they had been apart for six. He had left her when she was a barrister not long out of pupillage struggling to make her mark in a demanding profession. Now, as he knew from Comfort’s first letters, his wife was an established and successful common law junior. For six years they had lived lives that could hardly have been more different. How could he expect her to understand and not be hurt?
Opening his wallet he picked out the small, creased photograph of Julia that he had carried throughout the war. It was a picture he had always liked, because it showed her at her most relaxed. The two-by-one-inch rectangle of grey and black card could give no idea of the depth of her brown eyes or the rare warmth of her dear creamy skin, but it showed the alert carriage of her head, the strength of her square-jawed face and the generosity of her smile as she tossed her thick long hair back with one hand. It had been a hot summer’s day when Comfort had taken the photograph, and Julia had been wearing a short-sleeved linen shirt with an open neck, which showed off the fine lines of her throat and shoulders.
Looking down at her photograph, Anthony found himself smiling involuntarily. They had been friends in those days. Whatever might have happened to the passion that had briefly flowered between them, that friendship might have survived even the war. He pushed aside the supper tray and picked up his pen again to write to the girl in the photograph; the girl whose common sense and straightforwardness he had always trusted, whose intelligence had never been tainted with arrogance; the girl he had learned to love.
My dearest Julia [he wrote carefully],
Your letter filled me with delight. After so long without news, it is wonderful to know that you and Comfort are well and safely through all the things about which we have only dimly heard here. It seems strange that the three of us, who once did everything together, should have lived such completely different lives for so long. I can hardly imagine yours and I don’t see how you could possibly imagine mine.
I could write you pages and pages of descriptions of fighting in North Africa, of life in prison camp, of the exhilaration and utter terror of the escape … of the misery of being on the run, the desperate cold and hunger we all lived with in the partisans, the thrilling moments of a successful raid, the bitter battles with disease and wounds that I had to treat without drugs or equipment, the amputations I had to carry out without anaesthetics, the terrible choices we all had to make all the time, and you would still not be able to imagine any of it. One day, perhaps, we’ll be able to talk about it all together.
But that can’t be for some time. You were right when you wrote in your letter that we oughtn’t to be too optimistic about an early demobilisation, although I think this time they’ll do better than after the last war. Whatever happens I won’t be coming home just yet.
I have accepted a job running a hospital and orphanage here in Venice. Julia, try to understand if you can: there are 10,000 orphans of partisans in Venezia Giulia alone. They are malnourished and ill and many of them have terribly neglected wounds, too, from shells and bullets and mines. Life here has been completely disrupted first by the Fascists and then by the war. They haven’t enough doctors. I have to stay.
Much as I want to come home to you and Comfort, I cannot leave this country until I’ve done my small bit to help it on its feet again. I am sure you would understand if you could only see the children …
He broke off then, wondering how to end the letter. He had already begged her to understand. To tell her that he knew she would be disappointed would be presumptuous: she might well be relieved to have more time to herself. To tell her that he was disappointed would be a lie: he had, after all, chosen to stay.
Will you tell Comfort? I’ll write to her in a few days’time [he wrote]. ‘I long to see you. Is London very battered? You say the house has had its windows blown out once or twice. If that’s all, it sounds as though you were lucky.
Anthony.
Having read the letter through, he thought that it would just do, put it in an envelope and addressed it to Julia at her chambers. He knew that Comfort did not subscribe to conventional ideas about the privacy of other people’s letters and it was possible that if she saw a letter addressed in his handwriting she would open it, irrespective of the name on the envelope. He wanted Julia to have the news of his delayed homecoming first. That seemed to be the least he could do for her.
The letter reached Julia two weeks later when she went back to her desk in chambers after losing a case. Her client had been convicted of grievous bodily harm and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment. She had been feeling as depressed and inadequate as she always did when she had failed to prevent a client being sent down, but the sight of the letter lying in the middle of her blotter brought a smile to her wide mouth. She had recognised her husband’s writing from the door.
Pulling off her wig with one hand as she ran to her desk, she seized the envelope and ripped it open. The delighted smile on her face stiffened as she read, and slowly died. When she reached the end of the letter she let her hands fall into her lap, still holding it, and swivelled in her chair to look out of the dusty window over the square. She closed her eyes and tried to deal with the unacceptable emotions that were bombinating in her mind.
When the buzzing in her head had stopped and every last trace of resentment had been scoured away, Julia stood up and went to hang up her gown. She then combed her hair, brushed a few stray hairs from the shoulders of her black suit, pulled the seams of her stockings straight and went to see whether Mark Heathwood was in his room.
He looked up from his papers when she walked in and the quick, intimate smile that flooded his face gave her a moment of intense pleasure, which dismayed her.
‘Hello,’ he said, gesturing to the chair on the opposite side of his desk. ‘What can I do for you?’
Julia sat down, keeping her long back very straight.
‘I just wondered,’ she said, ‘whether you have found anyone to go to Nuremberg yet?’
Mark took off his spectacles and rubbed his eyes with his right hand, ending up gripping the bridge of his nose between finger and thumb.
‘Yes,’ he said, taking away his hand and looking back at her. ‘The appointment was approved last week. Have you changed your mind? Why?’
‘Anthony,’ she started to say with a faint smile and then found that she could not go on.
Mark got out of his chair and came to stand very close to her. He put one hand on her shoulder.
‘Have you had bad news after all?’ he asked quietly. ‘I thought he was all right.’
‘No, nothing like that,’ said Julia, finding that she could speak calmly so long as she kept her mind detached from her rebellious feelings. ‘But he has decided that he cannot desert the Italians. He has accepted a job running an orphanage in Venice and has no plans …’ Her voice cracked again. She took a deep breath: ‘And he has no plans to come back at all.’
‘Oh my dear,’ said Mark, still holding her shoulder.
‘Yes,’ she said, answering his tone rather than his few words. ‘I find that it is absorbing all my energies to take it philosophically. Perhaps it’s just as well that I can’t come to Nuremberg with you.’
Mark removed his hand then and went to the corner cupboard where he kept a bottle of sherry for emergencies or very important clients. There was just enough left to give them each a small glassful and he poured it out.
‘Here, Julia,’ he said, handing her a glass. When she accepted it, he said: ‘It probably is. I’m not sure that I could spend much time with you and go on ignoring it all as we’ve done these last two years.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘And yet it would be a waste of that whole battle if we succumbed now.’
‘Shall you tell Anthony about any of it?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Julia. ‘It so much depends on what happens, why he has really decided to stay away. But I might. He’d understand, I think. You never really knew him, but he is kind and very … very sensible … not possessive at all. Did you ever tell Sylvia?’
Mark shook his head.
‘I didn’t have to.… By the time I realised what had happened to me I’d talked far too much about you at home for her to be under much illusion, and when I suddenly stopped doing that and no doubt exhibited all kinds of peculiar reactions to her she understood at once.’
‘No wonder she dislikes me so much,’ said Julia with a small regretful smile. ‘I never wanted … One of the reasons … Oh, never mind that now.’
‘And yet,’ said Mark looking down at his sherry, ‘it’s not as though she has any feelings for me or wants …’ He, too, broke off. They had never had to put everything into words, even at the time when she was trying to explain to him why she would not become his mistress.
‘It’s all such a waste,’ said Julia with an unusual hopelessness in her voice. ‘All the affection one’s capable of giving: and the people one’s allowed to give it to don’t want it, and the ones who do aren’t allowed it.’
‘I’m sure Anthony does want it,’ said Mark, trying with some difficulty to be fair to her husband. ‘He probably realises that he’s unlikely to be demobbed for ages and decided to do something useful while he’s stuck in Italy.’
Julia smiled and the self-knowledge in her eyes reminded him that she was no sentimental adolescent demanding to be comforted, but a woman of independent mind who could take care of herself perfectly well.
‘What will you do?’ he asked.
‘Carry on, I suppose, and “keep smiling through”,’ she quoted with a derisive note in her usually smooth voice. ‘And first do as he asks and tell his sister. That won’t be easy. If she blamed me for his going to war, she’s not going to be able to forgive me for this. I suppose I’d better go and tackle it now.’
‘Well, don’t forget to vote, will you?’ said Mark, as she pulled her long body out of the chair. She looked at him over her shoulder.
‘Surely it’s hardly necessary?’ she said. ‘Churchill could carry the whole party back into Parliament, let alone enough members to keep a majority.’
Mark considered for a moment and then, with his head slightly tilted to the left, he smiled his familiar smile.
‘Don’t you think after everything women went through to get the vote you ought to exercise the right?’ he asked.
Julia laughed.
‘You’re right, of course, dear Mark. I’ll go on my way home. So long.’
He was laughing when she left his room and she was grateful for the small respite he had given her. She called in at her local polling station on the way back to Brunswick Square and cast her vote for the Conservative candidate. Folding the paper and sliding it into the splintered ballot box she said a silent word of thanks that she had been born in 1914 and not thirty years earlier. At least she had been spared the dilemma of whether to join the marches and the smashing of windows, and the hunger strikes in prison that had led to all the horrors of forcible feeding.
Walking back to Brunswick Square, she tried to plan the best way of telling Comfort that Anthony would not be coming home. It crossed her mind that simply leaving a note by the telephone would be fair retribution for Comfort’s having left her to discover the news of his survival like that, but she dismissed the impulse as petty and unnecessarily cruel.
She let herself into the house and, without waiting to change or even take off her hat, she climbed up the increasingly steep stairs to the attic, where the maids had once slept. Comfort had transformed a series of warren-like rooms into one vast studio with skylights in the roof and windows at either end. She had filled it with some of the best and most comfortable furniture from the rest of the house. There were paintings on the walls, her own and other people’s, and a fine Persian carpet lay under the model’s couch. A handsome screen covered in blue-and-green tapestry hid the gas ring and sink at the opposite end of the huge room from the dais where her easel stood.
When Julia opened the door, she saw that the canvas on which Comfort was working had been covered with a dustsheet and had a moment’s impulse to retreat. Only when Comfort was working satisfactorily could she be relied on to see difficulties in any but the most melodramatic light.
‘Is that you, Julia?’ Comfort’s voice came from behind the screen and sounded a little warmer than usual.
‘Yes,’ she said, keeping up her courage. ‘I’ve heard from Anthony.’
Comfort emerged from her screen with a cup in one hand and a drying-up cloth in the other. Her eyes were alight with happiness and her lips were curled upwards in pleasure. She had obviously been working on a drawing, for there were charcoal smudges on her fine-boned cheeks and between her eyebrows.
‘Tea?’ she said with an easier voice than Julia had heard for a long time.
The first thing anyone ever noticed about Comfort’s face was that it was beautiful. It was only later, after they had taken in the brilliance of her slate-grey eyes, the exciting curve of her lips and the delicacy of her pink-and-white complexion that people wondered about her nose. Like her brother’s it was both large and bony. On him it looked exactly right, austere and slightly noble; on Comfort it looked extraordinary, but it saved her face from being merely pretty, which she would have hated. Her hair was as fair as his, but it was rarely disciplined into the tidiness that was one of his most characteristic features. On that evening the tangled blonde mass hung in wild curls about Comfort’s dusty face: not for her the patriotic dullness of the ‘liberty cut’ or the severity of the chignon Julia always wore.
Julia was tempted to ask Comfort how her work had gone, but she knew what a dangerous question that could be. If it had gone well, Comfort would probably tell her in any case; if it had not the effort of having to say so and perhaps produce an explanation or excuse could cause her acute distress. It had taken Julia some time to understand the mixture of bad temper and moroseness with which Comfort had greeted her well-meant questions, but she had done so, and in those first post-war days rarely said anything unprompted about the paintings.
‘May I see the letter?’ asked Comfort, draping the cloth over her arm and holding out a hand. Afraid that she might be hurt by Anthony’s casual request at the end of it, Julia temporised.
‘I was in such a state that I left it in chambers by mistake,’ she said, summoning up all her skills of advocacy before she began the explanation Anthony had asked her to make.
‘He’s not coming,’ said Comfort before Julia could start. She was distressed to see that Comfort’s slaty eyes narrowed into glimmering slits and sharp lines appeared from the sides of her nose down to her lips.
‘That’s right,’ said Julia carefully. She went to sit on the red velvet-covered chaise longue that served as the model’s couch. ‘Apparently he can’t bring himself to desert the destitute children of people he fought with and so he’s accepted a job running an orphanage in Venice. He doesn’t know how long he’ll be doing it.’
Comfort’s face seemed to shrivel as Julia watched her, and her mouth looked pinched and old.
‘Comfort,’ she went on, making her voice as gentle as she could, ‘he begged us to understand …’
‘Why did he write to you?’ asked her sister-in-law sharply. ‘And why won’t you show me the letter? What else did he write?’
‘Very little,’ said Julia sadly. ‘Just that he could hardly imagine what it’s been like for us and he’s sure we can’t understand what his life has been like. I do wish … I think perhaps I do understand why he wants to finish the job, but I wish we could see him – just for a while.’
‘What do you mean “finish the job”?’ snapped Comfort, turning back to her gas rings, where a kettle had begun to sing. ‘It’s over.’
‘The war, perhaps,’ agreed Julia, ‘but you know what a frightful mess it’s left all over the Continent. Perhaps he just feels it isn’t fair to come back until he’s helped to clear it up.’
‘Don’t be so bloody reasonable!’ Comfort burst out, sounding more American than she usually did. ‘Have you any idea how infuriating it is to have to listen to you every day making excuses for people, explaining the most elementary facts to me as though I was an infant?’
‘I’m sorry,’ Julia said, breathing with difficulty as she absorbed the loathing in her sister-in-law’s voice.
‘Doesn’t anything ever hurt you, Julia? Don’t you ever feel anything at all? Is it impossible for you to understand anything about what real people feel?’ Comfort went on, watching Julia’s calm face with angry eyes.
Taking the tip of her tongue between her front teeth, Julia fought for control. It would do no good to burst into tears or to scream at Comfort that she shared all her misery, humiliation and rejection at Anthony’s refusal to return to them. Just once or twice during the bitterest war years, Julia had allowed herself to put some of her distress into words. It had not helped at all, but only exacerbated Comfort’s fury and led them both deeper into the unhappy solitude that had taken the place of the exciting friendship they had once shared.
‘I understand all right,’ she said, letting her tongue free at last, ‘but since there is nothing we can do to magic him back here, it just seems more sensible to do as he asks and try to understand why he wants to stay.’
Comfort turned away and made a pot of tea with such jerky movements that Julia was afraid she might spill boiling water over herself. The tea made, she poured some into two cups, added a little milk to both, and brought one to Julia. Standing in front of her, Comfort said coldly:
‘I don’t know what’s happened to you but you’ve changed. Anthony would never recognise you even if he did come back. You’re so hard.’
