Never such innocence, p.7
Never Such Innocence, page 7
‘Julia?’ The voice was oddly tentative, but she would have recognised it among a thousand others.
‘Anthony,’ she answered and knew her own voice was high and slightly shaking. ‘How are you?’
He laughed at the banality of her question and said nothing, but he came towards her. As he got closer she could see even less of him than before with her eyes dazzled by the brilliantly lit doorway, but it did not matter. In the darkness she felt his arms going round her and his hands against her back pulling her towards him. The skin of his face felt warm and resilient against her cold cheek, but slightly scratchy, too. She pressed forward and lifted her hands behind his back to hold his head closer to hers. They were almost the same height. For the first moments they stood in silence, feeling the beat of each other’s blood and relearning the sensations of the other’s breathing and scent and touch. At last he pulled slightly away so that he could look her. Julia, her eyes having adjusted to the dark, could make out the outlines of his face and see the gleam of his eyes and the curve of his lips.
‘Welcome home,’ she said, breathless but happier than she had been for years. He moved his head forward again and kissed her. As his lips moved, hers opened. She felt completely overwhelmed, her knees weak and her mind blank. She let her hands drop from his head so that she could cling to his back.
‘Are you two going to be out there all night?’ Comfort’s sharp voice from the doorway stiffened Julia’s knees and started her mind working quickly.
‘Of course not,’ she said with deliberate gaiety. ‘I want to look at him, and there’s no light here. Come on, Anthony.’
He kept one arm round her waist as they walked together into the warmth and light of the drawing room. Julia had swept away all the dust and cobwebs that had accumulated during the war and stripped the dustsheets off the pale-yellow brocade chairs. She had polished the big looking glass over the white marble mantelpiece and Comfort had arranged a long dish of holly and ivy on it. The dark-green leaves of the ivy drooped over the marble and the red-berried holly fanned upwards against the gilded frame of the glass. Christmas garlands of fir and mistletoe and ivy, garnished with red ribbons Comfort had hoarded throughout the war, hung from painting to painting against the silver-grey walls, and there was a silver bowl of perfect Christmas roses on each of the semi-circular tables that stood in recesses on either side of the fireplace. There was a resinous scent in the air, which seemed to come from the garlands.
‘It looks lovely, Comfort,’ Julia said. The contrast between the room as it was then and the way it had looked when she had come back to it after her Bristol case was astonishing, and the contrast between its civilised welcome and the misery of the Brixton remand prison was such that she added: ‘Aren’t we lucky?’
Anthony hugged her and kissed her hair, but Julia was distracted by the sight of the fire. Despite the blissful warmth of the room it had only just struck her that wild extravagant flames were leaping in the grate.
‘What have you done?’ she asked, turning to Comfort with a face of horrified shock. ‘There isn’t nearly enough coal for a fire that size …’
Comfort’s face closed in and her slaty eyes narrowed.
‘That’s not coal,’ she said. Even before she finished her sentence, Julia guessed the truth and realised that the odd scent filling the room was the resinous smell of burning paint and not the garlands at all.
‘It’s the abstract. Doesn’t the paint burn and crackle nicely?’ said Comfort. The brittleness of her voice and the way she held her head, as though her neck had a steel rod driven through it, surprised Anthony, but he did not know enough about the abstract or the coal situation to understand all the unspoken messages that flashed between his wife and his sister.
‘Oh, Comfort,’ said Julia with real sympathy in her voice. ‘Couldn’t you have got it right?’
Comfort shrugged.
‘I don’t know why you’re so worried. You never liked it. And it’s giving Anthony some proper warmth for his homecoming.’
Julia looked at her husband, feeling almost ready to weep. Comfort had put such an enormous amount of work, not to speak of scarce paint and turpentine, into the painting that her burning it for him seemed like a deliberate sacrifice. Julia did not know what she wanted him to say to Comfort, but she knew it had to be something dramatic. He looked back at her, worried and unable to understand the signals in her brown eyes. Rather than make a mistake, he said nothing and so Julia turned away from him to face Comfort, who was still standing rigid by the fire.
‘It’s a wonderful fire,’ said Julia. ‘Like the old days. What a heavenly Christmas we’re all going to have.’ She had the satisfaction of seeing Comfort’s shoulders relax slightly and a smile begin to open her face again. She was breathing a little faster than normal and her face was much pinker than usual. Julia thought she looked wonderful in her peacock-coloured dress.
‘I must change,’ she said hurriedly as she remembered the boxy black suit and plain white shirt she was wearing.
‘Why bother?’ asked Anthony, stroking her arm. ‘We’re not expecting anyone else, are we?’
‘No,’ said Comfort definitely. ‘It’s just us tonight. No guests. There’s no need for Julia to dress.’
‘Yes, I must,’ said Julia. ‘This smells of the prison. Besides with Comfort looking so stunning I feel at a serious disadvantage in my working clothes. I won’t be long.’
Julia ran upstairs to her bedroom. The sight of Anthony’s suitcase lying on the floor of his dressing room gave her a lurch of pleasure as she passed the open door, and she went on to her own room to strip off her clothes and wash away the prison smell and the grime that a long London journey always left on her skin and under her fingernails.
There were no fires in the bedrooms, and so as soon as she had washed she pulled her old grey woollen dressing gown round her shoulders, while she rummaged in her jewel case for her engagment ring. A large emerald surrounded by diamonds, it would have suited Comfort’s colouring far better than Julia’s and she rarely wore it. Then she turned to her wardrobe.
Everything she touched seemed to be either dull or far too formal for an evening at home, even one as special as Anthony’s homecoming. At last she pulled out a long dress she had not worn since 1939. Made of thick, dull gold silk, it was quite high with long sleeves. She put it on, liking the luxurious sensation of the silk swaying about her legs, and then sat down at her dressing table to pull the pins out of her hair. As it tumbled around her face, she heard a footstep behind her.
Pulling aside some of the thick curtain of hair, she watched Anthony’s reflection in the mirror. He came to stand behind her and put his right hand on her shoulder.
‘You don’t need to do this, you know,’ he said, stroking her hair with his other hand. ‘I don’t need celebrations and special treatment. I’ve lived so long with everything reduced merely to a matter of survival that all this seems …’
‘Exaggerated?’ suggested Julia, not having considered that aspect of her desire to dress up for him. He smiled, but it was a rather painful effort.
‘No,’ he said, ‘not that. But it’s enough just to be home.’
Julia twisted round on her stool to look up into his face. She noticed at last how desperately tired he looked, how thin his face had become, and how badly his lips were chapped. There were far more and deeper lines around his grey eyes than she remembered and he had lost the confident sheen that superb health and fitness had always given him in the old days.
‘Really?’ she said doubtfully.
‘Really,’ he answered with determined certainty. Julia wanted to ask him all sorts of questions then, but she suppressed them all. If he wanted to tell her what had happened to him he would do so when he could.
‘I can’t tell you how much I’ve … wanted to see you back here,’ she said. ‘I know I’ve never been the sort of wife who made the care of her husband her life’s work, but I do want to … to look after you, after all you’ve been through.’
‘Hush,’ said Anthony, stroking the hair away from her broad, white forehead, ‘you are just the kind of wife I wanted. And I don’t need looking after.’
Julia smiled up at him and then gently disengaged herself from his stroking hands so that she could turn back to the mirror.
‘I’d better hurry up so that we can go down again. Comfort won’t be pleased if we linger up here,’ she said, brushing her hair energetically.
Anthony moved a little away to give her room to move.
‘What’s happened to her? I’ve never known her so edgy.… I couldn’t believe that little scene about the fire,’ he said.
Julia stopped brushing for a moment to think about the best way of explaining to him what had been happening in Brunswick Square during the war. At last she smiled at his reflection and said:
‘I think I told you in one of my letters that she’s been very unhappy, and she seemed to find me more and more tiresome as the war went on. Everything I tried to do to help her cope seemed wrong. When I asked her about her work she couldn’t bear to speak to me, but if I didn’t ask she accused me of not caring what happened to her. The cold gave her awful migraines and chilblains, which meant she couldn’t work even when she had time. And she has suffered badly under all the restriction.’
Something in her husband’s expression made her add: ‘She was terribly unhappy, Anthony. It wasn’t as trivial as it must sound to you.’ He smiled ruefully at that.
‘You always could see everyone’s point of view,’ he said. ‘I must say that her sufferings do seem a bit trivial compared to what people in Europe are putting up with … Annunziata, for example.’
‘Your housekeeper?’ said Julia, applying a thin film of scarce lipstick to her mouth. She dusted a little powder over her face and then started to wind her hair into its accustomed roll and skewer it into place at the back of her head. ‘Have you managed to get any news of her family yet?’
‘No,’ said Anthony, watching her. ‘I think it’s unlikely that they have survived, but getting any facts is horribly difficult. There are so many displaced people struggling home, stuck in camps and lingering in inadequate hospitals that it’ll be months – years probably – before everyone has been accounted for.’
‘What, none of her children?’ Julia asked, looking at him in the mirror again. He shook his head and ran both hands through his short, blond hair.
‘When I think of the agony people like her are going through – and the even worse agony of the ones from the Nazis’camps – Comfort’s trials do pale into insignificance.’
Julia was silent for a moment. She understood exactly what he meant, but she felt as though she could not bear it if he hurt Comfort by telling her the same things. She stood up and faced him.
‘She would be the first to agree with you if it was put to her like that,’ she said. ‘But it would make her even more unhappy to have to face it and to know that she had upset you. Can you try to put up with it?’
Anthony nodded slowly.
‘Let’s go down,’ said Julia, tucking her hand into his arm. ‘She’s scoured London for delicacies for your dinner. Don’t let’s spoil it by …’
‘No. All right,’ he said and together they went down to the dining room, where Comfort was waiting for them by a table spread with an almost worrying amount of food.
Julia watched in admiration and pleasure as Anthony tucked into the feast without saying anything at all about the straits of the DPs or the starving women and children in Rome who were reduced to snatching food off peoples’plates in restaurants. They ate caviare and smoked goose breast and tiny fillet steaks before Comfort brought in the pineapple.
She had slit it down the middle, scooped out the flesh, cut it into squares and sprinkled it with half her sugar ration for the week, before piling it back in the thick, prickly shells, which she had laid side by side on a heavy silver dish.
‘Goodness, that looks exotic!’ said Anthony. ‘You ought to draw it, Comfort, as a symbol of post-war luxury.’
They all helped themselves and as Julia put a spoonful of fruit into her mouth she remembered the slightly acid sweetness of it. Juice spurted into her mouth as she chewed and she savoured the unfamiliar taste.
After dinner they finished the wine and talked a little about Comfort’s work and Julia’s cases. She had a strong impression that Anthony did not want to say anything about his life in Italy, but when Comfort asked about Venice he talked readily enough about its buildings and the extraordinary feeling they gave anyone who had seen the devastation of Milan or Turin.
‘You’ve said nothing about Rome,’ Comfort said, draining the last of her claret. She turned to Julia. ‘I’ve always loved Rome, because it’s the place where Anthony and I had our first holiday after Father’s death brought us together again. Do you remember it, Anthony?’
‘Naturally,’ he said with a smile that looked a little forced to Julia. ‘We were still so strange to each other then, one American and one English, but …’
‘But Rome taught us to know each other again, didn’t it?’ Comfort said and then without waiting for an answer went on: ‘Have you been back? Seen that charming little hotel again? And the Albergo Sebastiani, and the jeweller’s where you bought me my pin?’ She touched a small gold stickpin she wore at the neck of her frock. Julia had seen her wear it so often that she had never even thought about its origins. It took the form of a coiled snake, gold with delicate green enamelled scales and a tiny scarlet tongue. Anthony said nothing.
‘Has it changed much? Have you been back?’ Comfort asked. Julia found herself gripping her hands together under the table, the nails of one dug into the palms of the other. She did not know why she felt so uncomfortable. When she looked at her husband she saw that his face was as cold and closed as Comfort’s after a bad day’s work.
‘I’ve been back,’ he said at last. ‘Rome is nothing like it was then.’
Something in his voice made Julia change the subject precipitately. Later they all went to the gloomy kitchen in the basement to wash up and then agreed that they needed an early night. Anthony escorted Julia up to bed, but at the door of her room he hesitated.
‘You must be awfully tired,’ Julia said gently, hating the thought that he might stay with her and make love to her because he believed that she expected it.
‘D’you know, I am rather,’ he answered, obviously relieved. ‘Would you …? I think I might sleep in the dressing room tonight.’
‘Good idea,’ she said, putting one hand on his shoulder and leaning forward to kiss him. ‘Sleep well.’ She turned into her room and shut the door so that he would not think that she was hoping that he would change his mind. Tired herself, she took off her clothes, carefully shaking out the gold dress before she hung it up.
Almost as soon as she had got into bed there was a knock at the door.
‘Come in,’ she said, surprised. ‘Comfort! Are you all right?’
‘I’m fine,’ said Comfort, coming to perch on the edge of Julia’s bed. ‘I just wanted to make sure you were.’
Julia smiled at her.
‘Yes, I am perfectly all right. A bit tired, but all right.’
‘It’s good to have him home again, isn’t it?’
‘Wonderful,’ agreed Julia. ‘Go to bed, Comfort. We all need our sleep. Will I see you in the morning? I have to be in chambers by nine. Someone’s coming in to see me.’
‘I’m not sure when I’ll be up, but don’t worry about Anthony. If he’s still asleep when you go, I’ll give him his breakfast.’
‘Thank you,’ said Julia, not quite sure why Comfort was making such a fuss about things Julia considered merely a matter of course. ‘Good night.’
Chapter Six
The next night was quite different. When Julia arrived home from chambers, tired and cold, she discovered that Comfort had gone out to dinner with the dealer who sold her work. Anthony took one look at Julia’s face, which was greyish white in spite of the bitter chill in the air that ought to have whipped colour into her cheeks, and suggested that they share the remains of the previous evening’s feast on a tray in front of the drawing-room fire instead of fiddling about in the dining room.
‘That would be a relief,’ said Julia, grinning at him. ‘It’s been quite a day. How was yours?’
Anthony shrugged.
‘Odd,’ he said. ‘I didn’t really know what to do with myself. Comfort produced an embarrassingly lavish breakfast and then took me up into the studio to show me the work she’s done since I’ve been away. She settled down to work and I went to see my old consultant at St Michael’s. He gave me lunch at the Savoy, which was good of him and then I walked, thinking …’
‘How far did you get?’ Julia asked when it became clear that he was not going to tell her what he had been thinking.
‘St Paul’s,’ he said. ‘It seems extraordinary that it should have survived when you look at how much has been lost.’
‘There was one bomb there,’ said Julia, ‘way back in 1940, but it didn’t do too much damage.’
‘What was it like?’ he asked. ‘The Blitz I mean?’
Julia went to stand in front of the small fire thawing her fingers.
‘Disagreeable,’ she said at last, trying to be both realistic and moderate. ‘Horribly noisy with the bombs and the fire engines, the ambulances and the ack-ack guns … and so uncomfortable! Trying to work in the cellar night after night and then trying to sleep. We made it quite cosy down there, Comfort and I, with camp beds and piles of eiderdowns and lamps. We used to take sandwiches and Thermoses of soup with us when the sirens went and settle down for the night.’ She was silent for a while and then looked at him directly to say: ‘It sounds so tame compared with what you must have been through, but it was foul at the time. Particularly coming up in the morning, wondering what damage you’d find and whether you’d hear during the day that yet more friends had been killed.’
