Never such innocence, p.5
Never Such Innocence, page 5
Julia put down her cup after the first burning sip. Even the thought of wasting the milk ration could not make her stay any longer to listen to Comfort.
‘I’d better go,’ she said. ‘Thank you for the tea.’
At the door she looked back, a faint pleading expression on her face. Comfort did not see it for she was standing by the window, her shoulders drooping and her head propped against the cracked glass. Julia wanted to say, ‘You were my dearest friend: what have I done to make you hate me so?’ But she could not. It wouldn’t do any good.
Going slowly downstairs again to the small, dark-green study that had become her refuge, Julia tried to persuade herself that if she went on patiently accepting everything Comfort threw at her and never hitting back, then one day things might come right between them again. Hating scenes and arguments as she did, it never occurred to her that Comfort might long for a melodramatic battle of words, after which they could forgive each other magniloquently and construct a new friendship on the smoking ruins of the old.
Not until Julia was sitting at her desk, staring at the photograph of her husband that had stood there in its silver frame since the beginning of the war, did she let herself think of the most hurtful of Comfort’s gibes.
Anthony looked so confidently back at her, with his most characteristic half-quizzical smile, that she could not believe he would find her hard. But it was true that she had changed in the six years since she had seen him. How could she not have? Quite apart from the horrors of the war itself, she had had to learn to live without him, afraid all the time of what might be happening to him; she had had to learn to live with Comfort’s hatred, with Mark Heathwood’s difficult love and her own inevitable response to it.
Julia pulled a piece of carefully hoarded writing paper out of its shagreen box and sat, pen in hand, waiting until she was certain what she wanted to say to her husband. The old days of scribbling luxuriously and throwing away sheet after sheet of paper until the letter was right had long gone.
At last she began to write. The ink had dried on the nib of her pen and so she had to find the bottle and dip the pen in it again to make the ink flow properly.
Dearest Anthony,
Your letter has arrived and I wanted to write at once to say that although I don’t completely understand I can easily see why, having fought for so long for the freedom of Europe, you do not want to leave the most defenceless of its people in the straits you describe.
It would be wonderful to see you. Both Comfort and I miss you terribly. Is there any chance of your getting some home leave soon? I don’t suppose either of us could get permission to travel to Italy for a long time yet.
She was rather upset when I told her your news, but I’m sure she’ll calm down when she’s thought about it. The war has been the most awful strain for her. Apart from the things everyone has had to put up with, she’s rarely had enough time to paint and was hardly ever able to buy new brushes or any turps at all. You of all people will remember how unhappy she gets when she can’t work properly. And all the rules that had to be imposed on us all to keep disruption to a minimum have driven her into a frenzy of frustration.…
I often think of the evening when we’d come out to Cumnor to dine with you for the first time and she wanted us to stay the night; when I said something about having to be back in college, she said superbly, ‘Rules do not apply to me.’ Well, they‘ve had to these last five years, and she has hated it. Dragged away from the studio to work in photographic reconnaissance and knowing that I was allowed to go on doing my own work, she must have felt horribly frustrated. But the good news is that she is painting again, and soon that will wreak its usual smoothing for her and she’ll be all right again.
Perhaps one day we’ll be able to come to Venice to see you, and she can paint there. It would be wonderful. I miss you so much. Will you write and tell me about the children and your work? Even if I wouldn’t be able to imagine the way you’ve had to live with the partisans, I’m sure I could picture your life now and I’d like to be able to do it. All I can think of at the moment are the paintings I’ve seen of St Mark’s and gondolas on the Grand Canal – your orphanage can’t be much like that. Do write when you’ve time.
London is very sad-looking now. All the craters have been filled in and the half-smashed buildings cleared, but the gaps are horrible and nothing will be repaired for years. Comfort seems to be able to find a weird, haunting beauty in some of the ruins she draws. At least you’re spared seeing familiar, beloved bits of the city broken open and burned and scarred and left to rot. Perhaps by the time you’re able to come back they’ll have got on with the reconstruction. They’ve already started building little settlements of flat, boxy houses made from kits prefabricated in America. They look horrid, but whole villages of them can be put up within weeks.
With very much love, Julia.
Chapter Four
On the evening of Monday 6 August Julia left chambers with Mark Heathwood and walked to a tiny restaurant they had always liked near the Aldwych. The proprietor coped with the apparently endless food shortages with imagination and created an atmosphere in his little dining room that was cosier than almost anywhere else. Even in the worst days of the fuel crises, he had managed to make it seem warm, and the food was better than in many grander places.
There was a red candle on each table when they arrived and the champagne Mark had ordered was waiting for them in its silver ice bucket. He was due to fly to Nuremberg two days later and, wanting to say goodbye to Julia in peace, had arranged the dinner a few days earlier. They dined off rabbit, but it had been carefully stuffed with prunes and bacon and gently cooked in a finely balanced sauce and was quite different from the humble, dry dish that was all Julia could produce from the same animal.
‘I wish I could cook properly,’ she said as she ate the last tender mouthful. ‘Perhaps when it’s all over and there’s more time I ought to learn. I don’t suppose we’ll ever have a proper staff again.’
‘With combined taxes at nineteen-and-sixpence in the pound, I don’t suppose any of us will be able to afford servants,’ said Mark bitterly. ‘I’d assumed that it would be reduced in the next budget and gradually whittled down to a reasonable level once the war debts were paid –’
‘If they ever are,’ said Julia, interrupting him without conscience. He acknowledged her point with a tight smile.
‘But now that Labour is in the saddle, income tax can only go up.’
They had already talked about the extraordinary way the British electorate had repaid their vast debt to Winston Churchill by voting the Labour Party into office. Even in his own constituency, where the Labour Party had declined to offer a rival candidate, an independent had polled over a third of the votes.
‘I still can’t understand it,’ Julia said as she watched the elderly waiter removing their rabbit plates and bringing their sad pudding of bletted medlars and artificial cream to the table. ‘The Labour Party! Wouldn’t you have thought that they’d have let him finish the job? Surely until Japan surrenders …’
‘It can’t be long now,’ said Mark, watching her with eyes that seemed to say all the things that he would not allow himself to put into words. ‘He’s been a supreme war leader, but perhaps they’re right to think that he wouldn’t be so good at organising the peace. Presumably they can’t forget what happened after the last war. You’re too young to remember it,’ he added, smiling, ‘but there was really appalling disillusion when Lloyd George’s promises were ignored then and all they got for their sacrifices were depression and the dole.’
‘Perhaps,’ agreed Julia, plunging her spoon into the gently rotting medlar. ‘These things do taste odd, don’t they? But Beveridge will have to be paid for.… I suppose I am more bothered about what will happen to us all under Labour than about the old man’s feelings … sorry though I feel for him at this moment.’
Mark finished his medlars and then drank the last of his wine, as though to take the taste away, before putting his glass down on the table and saying:
‘Julia, there is something I want to ask you.’ His tone, and the slight hesitation with which he spoke, told her that he thought he was about to annoy her. ‘It isn’t really any of my business, but …’
‘You know that you can ask anything,’ she said, smiling at him in friendship. ‘I can’t promise to say yes, but I promise to listen.’
‘It’s not that sort of question. What are your plans now?’
‘My plans?’ she said, looking just as puzzled as she felt. ‘I haven’t any except to go on working and trying to get the house patched up and perhaps even redecorated by the time Anthony comes home.’
‘And then? When he comes home, I mean?’ Mark asked. When he saw that she was waiting for him to put his question instead of guessing what it was and answering it on her own, he came out with it: ‘Are you planning to have children?’
Julia lowered her eyes then, not out of embarrassment but to give herself time to think about her answer.
‘I don’t know,’ she said slowly, looking up again. ‘I’m not being coy. At the beginning it seemed so important to become established in chambers that the question did not really arise. Anthony was as anxious for me to succeed as I was, possibly even more so. We did sometimes talk about having a family, but there seemed to be so much time that it was never an urgent proposition. Then in the war, I was really glad that I had none.’
‘Yours could hardly have been at an age when they would have been at risk,’ said Mark mildly.
‘Except from bombs or evacuation,’ said Julia, remembering the agony some of her friends and clients had suffered. ‘But now, it is true that I can’t help thinking about having some. Why?’
Mark put both his elbows on the table and looked intently at her.
‘Because I don’t want you to waste everything you’ve worked for,’ he said urgently. ‘You’re good, Julia, really good, and you could go all the way. And I don’t just mean taking silk.’
At that Julia threw back her head and laughed. She had an attractive laugh, without either raucousness or shrillness, but he had rarely heard it. He smiled back in spite of himself.
‘Aren’t you forgetting a little something?’ she asked when she had swallowed the last gurgle of amusement. ‘I’m a woman.’
‘I know. But things are changing already and they’re going to change a lot more now,’ said Mark. ‘I … I’d hate to see you throwing away that chance, just …’
‘Just to have children? Isn’t that a bit dismissive? Without children, what is the point of it all?’ she asked. ‘No, don’t bother to answer that. I can’t promise you anything. Of course I want to make a success of my work, but I can’t help recognising what it might be like to …’ Julia hesitated. ‘To be a mother, too,’ she said at last with a tiny, diffident shrug. ‘Surely it needn’t be either children or the Bar? It must be possible to combine them.’
‘Perhaps.’ Mark picked up his wine glass only to replace it when he saw that there was nothing left in it. ‘And perhaps my terror is not so much that we will lose you from chambers but that I will lose you altogether,’ he said frankly. ‘You have made so much difference to my life that I find I hate the thought of your disappearing from it.’
‘Mark,’ said Julia carefully, ‘have you ever thought that the reason we felt – feel – so much for each other is that we were thrown together at a time when both of us were rather unhappy? If Anthony had still been at St Michael’s and Sylvia had been … had given you what you hoped, wouldn’t we have been no more than friends?’
He watched the familiar lines of her tired face, lit by the flickering candle flame and outlined by the dark-red wall behind her. Her dark-brown eyes were soft and her wide mouth looked rueful. Mark tried to be as objective as she had been, but all he could think of was how desperately he wanted her, how lonely he was going to be without her, how much he envied her husband – and how much he despised him for skulking in Italy instead of facing up to his responsibilities.
‘That’s too reasonable for me,’ he said after a while, ‘but you’re probably right; you usually are. Julia, I think I ought to get the bill now and take you home. If I say any more, I shall certainly regret it and you probably would too.’
She nodded and they left it at that, sharing the bill equally between them as she always insisted. When the taxi drew up outside her house in Brunswick Square she turned to Mark and said:
‘I shall miss you while you’re away. I’ll miss your company just as much as your advice and your support when I’m ground down by a miserable case. You have done an enormous amount for me over the years, taught me so much, and I’m really grateful.‘
He had watched her through those years and tried to help her as she battled with both the prejudice of the more entrenched members of the Bar and the ritual and formality that she found so irritating. At first she had obviously been terrified in court, but she had covered her fear with a cold, unyielding severity that made nonsense of her critics’assumption that no woman could stand up to the rough and tumble of a hard-fought case. Unfortunately it had done little to endear her to juries. But recently, in the last couple of years or so, she had achieved enough confidence to relax in court and to show the judge and jury some of the grave charm that was one of her most appealing characteristics.
She had gradually won the trust of most of the solicitors who had instructed her and one of the silks who had led her in a long case the year before had confided to Mark that Julia Gillingham was one of the brightest and most reliable of the available juniors. The KC had not put the compliment directly to Julia, but he had given her the coveted red bag that all juniors wanted as a substitute for the blue one they were allowed to buy at the beginning of their careers.
‘I’m glad if I’ve helped,’ he said and kissed her hand. ‘But you’ve done most of it yourself. You’re a fine lawyer, and … and a very good friend. Good night, Julia. I hope everything goes well for you.’
‘Good night, Mark,’ she answered. ‘And good luck.’
She got out of the taxi and let herself into the big, quiet house. Walking upstairs to bed, she suddenly felt acutely lonely. Anthony was a thousand miles away in Italy, Comfort was almost as distant in spirit, and now even Mark was leaving London. When she was really busy, Julia could ignore her solitude, but when she was very tired and not supported by a framework of urgent tasks it seemed to gape in front of her like the mouth of some deep cave.
She walked into her study, snapped on the reading light on her desk and stared down at the photograph of her husband, trying – as she had begged Comfort to try – to understand him and his desire to live away from her. Julia had never felt that Anthony belonged to her in any sense at all, but before the war she had always believed that in some sense at least he needed her, which had made her need of him seem less frightening.
He clearly did not need her any longer, and she was left with the uncomfortable feeling that perhaps he never had, that what she had thought was his love for her might have been merely a reflection of her own for him.
Gritting her teeth, she told herself not to give up. What he had been through must have been enough to shake him badly. If he needed time to readjust to the idea of civilian life, then she should not hinder that readjustment by nagging demands of her own.
She walked out of her study towards Anthony’s dressing room. As she crossed the passage she heard the sound of a wireless from upstairs and thought of going to the studio for solace in her loneliness, but it was too long since she had been able to rely on Comfort for that and so she went on into the dressing room.
Apart from fortnightly visits to air the room and do a little necessary dusting, Julia had not been in it since Anthony had left. That evening she opened the wardrobe doors to be assailed by a powerful smell of mothballs. Blowing the acrid smell out of her mouth, like a whale surfacing to breathe, she went to open the window and then returned to the rows of Anthony’s suits and coats. But the sight of them did not bring him any nearer as she had hoped it would. Experimentally she touched the sleeve of one of the black coats he had worn with striped trousers in his consulting rooms, but it seemed dead, as though it had nothing to do with the man she remembered.
At the back of the wardrobe hung his old tweed jackets and one in particular, his favourite, ought to have reminded her of him. He had worn it whenever they had gone to Scotland or the Lake District for holidays. It was very shabby, made of ancient green tweed with leather patches on the elbows and covering the fraying edges of the sleeves. But even that smelled of mothballs and swayed gently on its hanger, empty and almost mocking.
A slight sound made Julia look away from the clothes and she saw Comfort standing in the doorway, her painty linen smock hanging open over a pair of disreputable grey flannel trousers and an old checked shirt of Anthony’s.
‘It doesn’t help much, does it?’ she said quite kindly.
Julia shook her head.
‘I miss him, Comfort, so much,’ she said directly, without thinking of their last conversation.
‘Do you?’ asked her sister-in-law more coldly. Julia turned away and shut the double doors of the wardrobe. When she turned back to face Comfort, she was struck all over again by how like she was to Anthony. Comfort leaned forward to examine her face in the plain antique mirror that stood on Anthony’s mahogany chest of drawers, pulling little bits of oil paint from her darkened eyebrows.
‘What makes you think I don’t?’ Julia asked.
Comfort shrugged.
‘It’s made no difference to you, his being away,’ she said, still examining her face in the glass. ‘You’ve just gone on working and firewatching and seeing that pompous ass Heathwood you’re so fond of as though nothing had happened. It hasn’t bothered you at all that Anthony was in such … such danger,’ she added, turning away from the chest of drawers.
