Never such innocence, p.6
Never Such Innocence, page 6
‘Comfort,’ said Julia, taking a deep breath, ‘I don’t know what you expected me to do. I had a job to do. It wouldn’t have helped Anthony if I had become a neurasthenic and disappeared into a nursing home – and it would have ruined my chances at the Bar.’
‘But as it is you’ve made use of every opportunity the war has brought and bumped up your annual income to what? Nearly four times the average for a barrister of your experience. The war has done you well, hasn’t it, Julia?’
What she said was true, but the tone in which she had said it – both hostile and insinuating – hurt Julia badly.
‘What’s happened to us?’ she asked Comfort. ‘We used to know each other so well … and trust each other. Why have you decided that you don’t know me at all?’
Comfort turned away and, without another word, disappeared into her studio. Julia sighed, wished that she had not broken her rule of never talking to Comfort about the difficulties between them and shut the window of the dressing room. Before she went to bed she ran the correct five inches of tepid water into the bath and tried not to remember the deep, boiling baths she had always used to relax in when work or exercise had tired her out.
The next morning, to her astonishment, when she reached the basement kitchen at breakfast time, she found Comfort standing in front of the cracked stone sink, surrounded by a wonderful smell of real, freshly ground coffee.
‘Hello,’ Julia said inadequately.
‘The coffee is from my mother’s latest parcel,’ said Comfort without looking round. She was rinsing two large cups with hot water from the kettle. ‘I thought we might share some for breakfast. And there’s a tin of butter, too.’
‘How nice!’ answered Julia. ‘I’ll grill some toast. Did you sleep all right?’
‘Not really,’ said Comfort, turning round at last. Julia saw that her eyelids were swollen and the eyes themselves red.
‘Oh, Comfort,’ she said sadly as she put two slices of bread under the grill. ‘He will come back, you know. He really will. When he can.’
‘I suppose so,’ she answered. ‘I’ve written to say he must come back for Christmas at least and I’m trying to pull strings to get him on a flight, but …’
‘Oh, you shouldn’t have done that,’ Julia began before remembering what a mistake it was to criticise Comfort. ‘I mean, perhaps he’ll think you’re nagging him.’
‘I think Anthony and I understand each other well enough to …’ she was beginning when Julia hastily retracted what she had said.
‘Listen,’ she went on, ‘isn’t that the paper? Will you watch the toast while I fetch it?’ She ran up the stone stairs to the hall to collect The Times from the mat by the front door. Ignoring the personal columns, she turned to the news and was reading it as she went back to the kitchen.
‘Comfort,’ she said from halfway down the stairs. ‘Was there anything on the news last night about the bombing of Hiroshima?’
‘Yes,’ she said casually. She switched off the grill and put the toast directly on to the plates she had laid on the big deal table. ‘An A-bomb. What does The Times say?’
‘“Rain of ruin from the air”,’ Julia read from the headline. ‘“President Truman announced … yesterday that the first atomic bomb had been dropped sixteen hours before by an American aircraft on Hiroshima.”’
She skimmed the rest of the column, sat down at the table, and then read aloud again:
‘“The Allies hesitated to use so great and awful a weapon … The atomic bomb, more surely than the rocket, carries the warning that another world war would mean the destruction of all regulated life.” It is frightful,’ she said.
‘Not if it finishes the war,’ said Comfort, pouring them each a cup of coffee. Julia took a mouthful and savoured the rare, rich taste as she swallowed it.
‘What would you do without us Americans?’ Comfort asked. Julia, who had often argued with her over the behaviour of many of the Americans stationed in England, smiled.
‘I am very grateful for your mother’s parcels,’ she said diplomatically, but truthfully, too. Comfort laughed. They spent the rest of breakfast eating their crunchy toast and reminding each other of things they had done at Oxford and what Anthony had said to each of them about the other. By the time Julia had to leave for chambers, she was feeling happier and more relaxed than she would have imagined possible. She left the house murmuring to herself, ‘the hour is always darkest before dawn’.
Chapter Five
The fragile truce was damaged the following Friday when Julia incautiously criticised the Americans for dropping a second A-bomb on Nagasaki. The Japanese surrendered at once, and Comfort crowed with delight at her native country’s unparalleled power. Julia shared her relief that the war really was over at last, but she could not help her instinctive revulsion at the devastation of yet another city full of people. But it took another American action to complete the break between the two of them.
On 21 August the new American President, Harry Truman, cancelled Lend-Lease, the long-standing arrangement organised by his predecessor to supply Britain with war materials and food. Britain was plunged at once into a financial crisis of quite desperate proportions.
Even thinking about it reduced Julia to a condition of dizzying rage and frustrated loathing for everything American. Knowing that Comfort would never agree with her, Julia said nothing about it when she met her sister-in-law on her way out of the house, but Comfort was not so restrained.
Comfort believed – and said again and again with ever-increasing bitterness – that America had financed the war, enabled the Allies to win it, and had no reason to go on paying now it was over. Julia, knowing that Britain had sacrificed a great proportion of its export trade (which had given American exporters a superb opportunity to increase their own markets and their fortunes) and had lost something like £700 million of assets during the war, believed that the Americans had a moral duty to help their ally. Lend-Lease had to end with the war, but no one in Britain had believed that it would be stopped so abruptly, with no warning and no period of adjustment.
‘Besides,’ said Julia to Comfort one evening as they shared a pot of tea in the studio, ‘if they permanently reduce us to the level of poverty we’ve reached now we’ll never be able to buy anything from them again, and, since the Continent is in a worse state than we, they’ll be losing a lucrative export market – and probably plunging the whole world into a recession as bad as the thirties. It’s so unsophisticated – as well as being cruel.’
Comfort finished her tea and then turned to her sister-in-law looking more hostile than Julia would have thought possible.
‘Europeans are always saying that about Americans – as though we were all uneducated mid-Westerners – but you ought to know better,’ Comfort said bitterly.
‘Having shared a house with you, you mean?’ said Julia in as pleasant a voice as she could manage. ‘I’ve always thought you the acme of sophistication. But, perhaps unfortunately, you are not in a position to alter Truman’s policy.’
‘You’re just plain ungrateful,’ Comfort exploded. ‘How I hate that British smugness! Thinking that the rest of the world owes you a living because of your traditions and your awful empire and your –’
‘Then how can you bear to go on living here?’ asked Julia quietly.
In the old days Comfort would have laughed, but there was no amusement at all in her face then. She got out of her deep, squashy armchair and stood looking down her bony nose at Julia, who lay on the model’s couch, resting her feet.
‘How could I possibly leave while Anthony is stuck out there?’ she asked, sounding the h in the middle of her brother’s name as though to underline her nationality. ‘Besides,’ she added in a spiteful voice, ‘aren’t you forgetting that I own one-third of this house? And that however rich you have become now, if it had not been for Anthony and me you would never have been anything but a junior solicitor in your father’s firm?’
Julia covered her face with both hands.
‘You know perfectly well that that was not what I meant,’ she said from behind them. She took her hands away and looked up into Comfort’s bitter grey eyes. ‘You also know that I am well aware of everything I owe you – materially and otherwise. All I meant was that I am surprised that, feeling as you do about America, you do not prefer to live there.’
Comfort turned away, her shoulders tautly set under the thin rose-coloured shirt she wore tucked into her flannel trousers. Julia hoped that she was angry rather than miserable, but she could not be certain.
‘I need to work,’ said Comfort. ‘Clear off, will you?’
‘Yes, I’ll go,’ said Julia obediently. ‘Please don’t … Oh, I had a letter this morning; I’ll leave it for you.’
Even before Julia had shut the door, Comfort had seized the letter and pulled it from its envelope.
Julia went slowly downstairs talking to her husband in her imagination as she did increasingly often.
‘I’m sorry, Anthony. I try and try to keep her happy, but nothing works now.’ On the first floor, she turned into her study to write to him directly.
His letters were becoming more relaxed each week as he told her in detail about his patients, about the rather miserable rooms he inhabited near the hospital, about the sad predicament of his housekeeper, and about the frightful state of Europe. It seemed that large numbers of officers awaiting demobilisation wangled their way into Venice and gave him vivid reports of the sights they had seen on the way.
Starving children lined the railway lines near Allied bases, crying monotonously for chocolate and cigarettes that they could barter for food. Bread was being sold by the slice in many parts of Italy, and the black market was everywhere. Soap was almost unobtainable. Anarchy threatened to overturn the few remnants of law and order. Girls were turning to prostitution in order to survive, and crime – from petty thieving to murder – seemed ineradicable. Collaborators were hunted out and treated with summary justice and sometimes without justice at all. Anthony wrote sadly that he had hoped the ending of the war would see the ending of cruelty, but it was quite clear that cruelty, too, was ineradicable.
Julia was able to write in perfect sincerity that, having read his letters, she understood better why he felt that he had to stay and help the children who were such pitiful victims of a war of which they were quite innocent. Having put that down, she also felt able to add that she missed him desperately and longed to see him, but she said nothing to suggest she knew of Comfort’s efforts to get him home for Christmas.
She felt that her restraint was rewarded three months later when he announced that he would be coming back to London the day before Christmas Eve. Those months had passed quickly, because she was very busy indeed with a libel case, which she successfully defended, several trials for theft, grievous bodily harm and assault, in which she acted for the Crown, three divorces and an offer of the junior brief in an important murder trial that was due to be heard in the New Year. The KC who had been briefed was one of her favourites and so both she and her clerk were pleased. The silk’s brief was marked at eight hundred guineas and, as his junior, Julia could expect to receive two-thirds of that sum.
Unlike most of the other silks with whom she had worked, James Norgrove always discussed the strategy of the case with his junior counsel and welcomed suggestions, instead of merely handing out menial tasks and keeping all the really interesting parts of the case to himself.
Because of his exemplary attitude to his juniors, the case involved Julia in a great deal of work. She not only appeared in the police court when the man was committed for trial, and dealt with all the necessary paperwork about the committal, but she analysed the solicitor’s reports of his interviews with possible witnesses and drafted her own reports for James Norgrove on the ways in which he might use them, interviewed the two expert witnesses the prosecution would be calling, and visited the accused in prison to discuss his alibi and ask every question she could think of that the prosecution might throw at him in court. It was work that she enjoyed, but it took up a great deal of time while she was already having to work hard on all the cases that were being heard in the current term.
Her relations with Comfort improved, too. It was as though they had reached the nadir in August and then, as autumn started to crisp up the stuffy London air and turn the plane leaves yellow in the streets, the two of them began slowly to make friends again. Comfort was working hard too, making beautiful ink-and-wash drawings of the London ruins, as well as experimenting with a large abstract oil painting. Julia loved the London drawings, but was not at all sure about her reaction to the oil. Its colours sang and sizzled against each other, but the lack of form worried her, and she had no idea what to say about it. Fortunately Comfort seemed not to expect any comment.
They had begun to go about together in the few evenings when Julia had time between her cases and had sat enthralled at Sadler’s Wells watching Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes, which had opened in June; they went to the cinema, to the theatre and to occasional concerts. On other evenings, when they had eaten their miserable dinner of sardines or baked beans or the omnipresent and slimy Spam, they would retreat to the studio and listen to the wireless or talk about Anthony. There was a short recurrence of hostilities when the Economist published an article about the terms the United States was demanding for a loan of $375,000 million, which was desperately needed if Britain was to survive financially. The writer of the article shared Julia’s views on the subject, and she allowed herself to read just one sentence out to Comfort over the breakfast table:
‘“Our present needs are the direct consequences of the fact that we fought earliest, that we fought longest and that we fought hardest. In moral terms we are the creditors.” You see, Comfort, it’s not only me who thinks like that,’ she said ungrammatically.
‘I never thought it was,’ said Comfort, hunching her shoulders defensively. ‘You’re just typically British.’
But they left the argument there, as though each thought peace was more important than forcing the other to admit defeat, and set about preparing the house for Anthony’s return. Comfort began accumulating unrationed and unperishable luxuries and writing to her mother to beg for American delicacies. By the third week of December the larder was full of tins of outrageously expensive caviare and smoked meats, and there was even a pineapple, which had arrived from America just in time. Julia had not seen one since before the war and occasionally went to stare at its spiky dark-orange skin and try to remember what it would taste like.
Anthony’s wine merchant had been persuaded to disgorge some carefully stored bottles of pre-war claret, which he promised would be ‘drinking wonderfully now, Miss Gillingham.’ Comfort paid the huge price, carried the bottles home to Brunswick Square and then took a Green Line bus out into the Surrey countryside to pillage the hedges and coppices for greenery to garland the ground-floor rooms. Julia’s contribution in the time she could spare from her work was to give the house a thorough spring clean, which she knew Comfort would never think of doing, and overhaul the clothes that had been hanging in Anthony’s wardrobes since 1939.
Comfort spent the entire day of his expected arrival downstairs, looking out of the window every half-hour, trying to read, pretending to mend her stockings and becoming more and more terrified that something had happened to prevent Anthony’s arrival. Julia, on the other hand, went to chambers as usual and kept herself distracted with work on the murder case. She even went with her instructing solicitor to visit the defendant in prison, partly to ask him yet again to describe what had actually happened on the day his wife died and partly so that he would not feel completely deserted at Christmas.
The journey back to Bloomsbury from Brixton took far longer than she had expected and she grew colder and colder in the raw, foggy December afternoon. There were no taxis and she had to wait over twenty minutes for a bus, which broke down before it had even crossed the river. Along with the rest of the patiently grumbling passengers, Julia climbed down and joined the queue at the next stop. Fifteen minutes later another bus appeared, splashing their legs as it drove through a muddy puddle in the gutter, but it was so full that only the people in the front third of the queue were allowed on.
Julia ventured to protest, but the conductor called out that there was another one behind and she stood back, silently cursing. Eventually she saw another bus limping and shuddering out of the fog. When it drew up at the stop, she passed her heavy briefcase from her right hand to her left in readiness to grab the handle on the platform and haul herself up on to the bus when it was her turn. She was allowed on, but there were no seats left and so she stood with the briefcase between her feet, clinging on to the bar, for the rest of the forty-minute journey.
At half-past six, with a headache pounding behind her eyes, her back aching and her feet feeling as though they had been rasped raw with a hot steel file, she walked up the steps to her front door. Neither the shutters nor the curtains had been closed in the drawing room and she could see the glow of all the lamps and a flickering, dancing light that suggested Comfort had used some of the scarce coal for a fire. Julia knew that she would never have done that unless Anthony had arrived and pushed her key into the lock with quivering fingers.
Unlocking the front door, she was suddenly nervous. She had pined for Anthony’s return and dreamed of it for so long that she was afraid of an anticlimax. The taunt Comfort had flung at her in the summer came back to her: ‘He’ll never recognise you, you’re so hard.’ What if he disliked what he saw in her? What if he had changed more than his letters had suggested? What if she disliked what she saw in him?
Until that moment she had never considered the last possibility, but it was too late even to think about it. The sound of her key in the lock had alerted Anthony and Comfort. Just as Julia was pulling off her hat in the dark hall, the drawing-room door opened. A spear of light flashed across the black-and-white marble checks of the floor. The door opened a little wider. Silhouetted against the bright yellow light was the tall, slim figure of a man. Julia could see nothing of his face, but the set of his shoulders and the carriage of his head were almost unbearably familiar.
