Never Such Innocence, page 24
Julia nodded. Anthony bent down to kiss her hot, tight forehead. She wanted to cling to his hands and say, tell me it’s still all right between us, tell me you still love me, tell me we can have a child one day.
Even in her weakened state, she knew that her desperate need was irrational, but that made it no less important. Why motherhood should have become such an obsession she could not imagine, but she did understand that whatever was the matter with her was contributing to her misery. She wondered how long ago it had begun and how many of her difficulties could be put down to whatever was the matter with her.
‘What have I got, Anthony?’ she whispered, trying not to betray any anxiety. He watched her face carefully.
‘I think it’s just a bad cold, my dear; but in this climate and with all the infections flying about, I’ll keep a close watch on you,’ he said calmly. ‘Don’t be afraid. It’s not too serious whatever it is. You’d be a lot iller if it were. All right?’
She nodded, her eyes locked on his, begging for reassurance and support. He smiled at her with such confidence that she felt comforted.
‘Try to sleep,’ he said. ‘That’s the best thing for you. Sleep. There’s nothing to worry about.’
Julia laid her head back but did not shut her eyes until he had left the room.
The hours until lunchtime limped past. Annunziata looked in to Julia’s room at fairly frequent intervals to turn her pillows or sponge her hot face, but would not let her try to talk. Sometimes Julia slept, dreaming of horribly twisted versions of real life so that it was hard to tell when she was awake and worrying and when asleep and tormented. The pictures Mark had created for her of the Nuremberg trials figured in her dreams and so did the bomb sites of war-torn London. Comfort was there, and Anthony. There was terror and pain.
The ache in her head got worse and she began to imagine a pain under her breastbone. Julia knew that it could not be real because it brought with it even more horrible visions, in one of which Comfort and Anthony had her pinned to the ground and were hitting her with garden rakes with specially sharpened tines.
In the dream all three of them were in the garden of the house outside Oxford. The occasion was an immediately recognisable lunch party, after which Comfort and some of the other guests had gone off to swim in the nearby river, while Anthony and Julia had sat together, digesting and beginning to explore the edges of the feeling that was growing between them.
On the real occasion, Comfort had arrived back from the river and had stood in front of them both, her blonde hair a mass of tangled curls, each curl spangled with water. Water dripped off her hands, too, and her severe black bathing dress. The sun lit the drops and sparkled in sharp bursts of white light; but some of the drops caught and fractured the light so that Comfort appeared to be the source of a million tiny rainbows. The picture in Julia’s dream was so vivid that she could feel the sun on her face, and even in sleep her eyes screwed up as though against the glare. But suddenly reality was distorted and in her dream she was pulled to the ground and the two of them began digging at her chest with the rakes.
She woke at last, sweating and trembling, and struggling to breathe, one hand pressed against her front, to see Comfort standing at the foot of the bed. For a moment, Julia could not bear even to look at her, but at the sound of Comfort’s voice, as gentle as it had ever been, Julia opened her eyes properly.
‘Wake up, Julia sweetie. It’s a dream. Wake up.’ Comfort’s hands were clenched over the carved, gilded footboard of the bed and her big grey eyes were anxious when Julia could at last focus on them. Her responsibility for Comfort brought her back to her senses. Swallowing against the swollen tenderness of her throat, she tried to speak. No sound came out and so she swallowed once more and tried again.
‘It’s all right. I’m awake now. Thank you,’ she managed to say.
‘You’re much worse, aren’t you?’ said Comfort, her voice sharper.
Julia nodded, feeling a pain shooting up her neck. She closed her eyes, too tired even to try to reassure her sister-in-law.
‘I’m going to send a message to Anthony. Have you a fever?’
‘I think I must have,’ whispered Julia. ‘Don’t worry him.’
‘You need him just as much as those orphans. Don’t be afraid of him. He loves you,’ said Comfort, and Julia believed her as she had believed her all those years before when Comfort had been urging her to fall in love with him. Julia tried to ignore the sensations of fear that her nightmare had left behind.
She lay back, exhausted, hearing Comfort leave the room and then speak quickly but very quietly in Italian, presumably to Annunziata. Julia had no energy to do anything but wait. She could not shake off the effect of the dream despite Comfort’s kindness, and her muscles still trembled. Her chest ached sharply, too, just as though someone really had been hitting into it. A fat tear seeped out from under each of her eyelids, but she was too tired to wipe them away. She just lay, sore and afraid until Anthony came back.
He touched her burning forehead with firm, cool hands, put a thermometer between her dry lips and later pulled down her nightgown to tap her bare chest with two fingers of each hand. Julia felt too ill to be interested in what he was doing, and in any case her mind came and went as the waves of fever rose and fell, but she heard Comfort say:
‘What is it? I see you’ve reached some kind of diagnosis.’
‘Pneumonia,’ he answered softly. ‘Poor Julia.’
‘You’d better get her to the hospital,’ said Comfort.
Julia opened her eyes again and saw Comfort looking around her as though she expected to see men in white coats with a stretcher appearing through the walls. To Julia’s immense but unspoken relief, Anthony shook his head.
‘She’ll do better here, Comfort. There’s Annunziata to look after her – and you, if you’ll stay – and –’
‘Of course I’ll stay,’ she said impatiently. She gripped his wrist. ‘It’s not dangerous is it, Anthony?’
For a moment he was very still. Julia felt too tired and afraid to speak, but she lifted her heavy eyelids again and looked at him. He saw her expression and smiled confidently.
‘No, it’s not dangerous. All right, darling?’ Julia slowly nodded her head once against the pillow. He went on: ‘I’m going to collect some things from the hospital to make you more comfortable, but first I’ve got to lift you up. There’s some fluid in your lungs and you’ll breathe more easily if you’re propped up.’
Julia let them haul her up and stuff extra pillows behind her head, but the pain sharpened and she was hard put to it not to swear at them for hurting her. The dream came back to her in all its horrible force and the tears re-emerged.
‘It’s all right,’ said Anthony, stroking her face with his fingers. Their coolness was a relief on her burning skin, but the weight of even that light stroking seemed to hurt. Anthony seemed to understand and he took his hand away.
He took Comfort out of the room with him and answered her question more honestly.
‘It is extremely dangerous,’ he said. ‘She’s badly run down anyway – like most of us since the war – and has very little resistance.’
‘Isn’t there anything you can do?’ asked Comfort, her slaty eyes darkening and her nose looking sharp as she absorbed the shock.
‘There must be. You can’t just leave her like that and wait. Anthony, you must…’
‘Oh, yes,’ answered Anthony. ‘There are many things we can and will do. And there’s penicillin, which is infallible … but yet again the Medical Procurement people at UNRRA have delayed the latest delivery and we’ve none left.’
‘Well you must get some,’ said Comfort at once, clutching his right arm. ‘Who’s in charge? Is there a telephone number? Shall I call them?’
‘I’ll deal with that,’ said Anthony, noticing that there were tears in Comfort’s big grey eyes, ‘but I want you to stay here with her. She ought not to be left, and if her breathing gets worse, prop her up. If you’re frightened, send a message for me. All right?’
Comfort nodded, but her face was distraught. Anthony had always known that she loved Julia, but after the things Comfort had said at Christmas he had not expected her to be thrown into quite such terror. He did not know that her vivid imagination had given her a convincing picture of Julia’s death.
‘Keep calm,’ he ordered. ‘You’ll do no good at all to Julia if you get hysterical. I’ll be back as soon as I can. Go and sit with her.’
Comfort obeyed and spent the next two hours sitting beside Julia’s bed, watching her as she slept and bathing her face with cool water whenever she started to thrash about and mumble in delirium.
‘It’s all right, Julia,’ she would whisper then. ‘I’m here. Don’t die. We need you. Don’t die. It’s all right.’ The monotonous litany sometimes seemed to soothe Julia, but more often made no impression at all on her obviously terrifying dreams. Soon after three o’clock, she calmed down and seemed to be sleeping more naturally. Comfort leaned back in her chair in momentary relief.
Annunziata opened the door quietly and checked to see that Julia was asleep before walking silently to Comfort’s chair and whispering that there was a visitor for the signora downstairs.
‘I can’t leave her,’ said Comfort, equally quietly. ‘Can’t you ask them to go away?’
Annunziata shook her head.
‘He is a friend of the signora and of Signor David. Please talk to him. I will sit with her,’ she said. Eventually Comfort yielded her place to the Italian and went downstairs to the salon, where she found a slim, middle-aged man with a lined face and grey-streaked dark hair, whom she had never seen before.
‘Annunziata says you’re a friend of my sister-in-law,’ Comfort said rather abruptly.
‘Peter Suvarov,’ he said, holding out his hand. Comfort shook it automatically and introduced herself.
‘I wouldn’t have troubled you, Miss Gillingham,’ said Suvarov, ‘but that your housekeeper said that Mrs Gillingham is seriously ill. Is there anything that I can do?’
‘God knows,’ said Comfort, having lost all her savoir faire in the face of Julia’s terrifying illness. ‘My brother is trying to get hold of some penicillin. Apparently that’s the only infallible thing for pneumonia, and …’
‘She’s got pneumonia?’ said Suvarov. ‘Good God! Poor Mrs Gillingham. I mustn’t keep you away from her, but will you tell her that my wife and I are very concerned? We both liked her so much.’
‘Everyone does,’ said Comfort, forgetting the times when she had been driven to distracted cruelty by Julia’s unfailing matter-of-factness – and by her concentration on other people. ‘How well do you know her?’ she asked aggressively.
Peter Suvarov looked at Comfort and recognised the shock and fear in her eyes. He urged her to sit down on one of the hard, gilded sofas for a moment. Shrugging her superb shoulders, Comfort sat down and waited for his explanation.
‘You look as though you need a bit of a rest,’ he said. ‘We hardly know her at all. I knew David Wallington well during the war, and he introduced us. We all four had dinner together one night while your brother was at the hospital. That’s all. But when I heard from him that she was ill, I had to …’
‘I see,’ said Comfort more politely as she stood up again. ‘When she is well enough I’ll tell her about your visit.’ And then to her supressed rage she realised that she was crying. She could not convince herself that Julia would ever be well again.
Peter Suvarov smiled, his eyes crinkling up at the corners and his bitter mouth relaxing, and handed her a handkerchief.
‘This is ridiculous,’ said Comfort, muffling her face. ‘I don’t usually cry in front of strangers.’
‘This is hardly a normal time. Cry away. I’m not one of those men who are terrified by female tears.… A lot of people wept over me in the war – and not women only.’
‘The war, the war, the bloody war!’ said Comfort, screwing up his handkerchief and giving it back to him. ‘I hate it. It made us all behave like lunatics but no one except me seems to want to forget it. Why can’t you all shut up about it?’
‘I suppose,’ said Suvarov, paying no attention to her rudeness or the incipient hysteria in her voice, ‘because it was so important … not just fighting it, but being part of it, doing one’s best and living more intensely over a longer time than one had before.’
‘Never mind. I’m sorry. I must go back to her,’ said Comfort a bit more calmly. ‘I’ve been away too long.’
‘Of course,’ said Suvarov. ‘My wife and I are leaving Venice next week. May I call before then to see how Mrs Gillingham is?’
‘If you want,’ said Comfort gracelessly, already halfway to the door. ‘Can you see yourself out? I can’t… I’ll send Annunziata.’
She went out, leaving Peter Suvarov to wait for a more rational assessment of Julia’s state from Annunziata. He knew enough Italian to understand what she told him of Anthony’s diagnosis and prognosis, and to ask her to tell David Wallington that he had called. Annunziata nodded and said slowly:
‘The young signor will be very unhappy.’
‘I know,’ said Suvarov, adding in English as he picked up his hat. ‘That’s why I want him to know he can talk to us. That young woman won’t be much help and the doctor is hardly a suitable confidant in the circumstances.’
Julia was dreaming again when Comfort got back to her bedside and her skin felt hot and dry. Comfort changed the water in the bowl she had filled earlier and sponged Julia’s face and neck and hands and arms again. But it seemed to worry Julia and she cried out:
‘No, Comfort, no, please,’ as though Comfort were actually hurting her.
Increasingly worried, Comfort dried Julia’s face as gently as she could, threw the water away and went back to her chair to watch. Anthony returned soon after five o’clock with the news that there was no penicillin in the city at all, but that he had telephoned everyone he could think of who might supply it and had sent a telegram to UNRRA headquarters.
Julia came round just as he was erecting a kind of tent over her bed. A tall, brown iron cylinder with a wheel and a dial at the top stood beside him. Really frightened, then, she tried to sit up, croaking his name.
‘Lie back, Julia,’ he said at once, coming to push her shoulders back against the pillows. ‘Don’t be afraid. It’s just oxygen to help you to breathe.’
‘You won’t go away,’ she whispered, clinging to his hand.
‘Only if I have to,’ came the reply. ‘Comfort is here and Annunziata. They both know what to do. Lie still, Julia, and try to breathe.’
‘It hurts,’ she said, sounding almost as surprised as complaining.
‘I know it hurts, but it will start to hurt less now. Breathe slowly and carefully. We’re getting the stuff you need and there’s nothing to be afraid of.’
A small conscientious smile lifted the left-hand corner of her dry lips.
‘Well done, Julia,’ said Anthony. ‘That’s the stuff. Keep your spirits up. Now, I know you don’t feel like food, but you must try some of the soup Annunziata has made. She’ll bring it to you in a few minutes and it’ll help you keep your strength.‘
Julia tried to obey, as she tried to do everything he demanded of her over the next few days and as she tried to keep her misery and pain and fear from all of them. For much of the time she was delirious, but there were lucid intervals, during which she was slightly comforted to understand that the nightmares that had tormented her were products of the disease and not of reality.
Dreams of Comfort and Anthony and David mixed with memories of the war and became tangled up with the figures on the painted ceiling above her bed and the work she had been doing for Kesselring’s trial. Sometimes she dreamed that she stood in the dock of some great court, accused of terrible crimes, at others that she was having to use all her skill to free Anthony of a capital charge and failing. Gallows loomed in the shadows of her dreams and dead babies and famine, and a blonde woman with sly green eyes. Only the strong figure of David Wallington seemed to promise any kind of help and she called out to him. But he never came.
Anthony spent as much time with Julia as he could, but there were patients at the hospital who were iller even than she and at times he had to leave her with Comfort and Annunziata. Comfort’s anguished determination to make up for her earlier coldness made her far more interfering than Annunziata, whose calm gentleness provided the only moments of real respite for Julia. Sometimes during her lucid moments, she thought that Annunziata could not have been kinder if Julia had been one of her daughters.
Only David never seemed to come. Julia knew that he might have been in the room while she was unconscious, but his absence during her times awake began to fret her. They had become such friends that it seemed unnecessarily unkind of him to stay away. One evening, when the pain of her laboured breathing had become very bad, she lay watching Comfort as she sketched something on a big white pad. The intensity of Comfort’s concentration was almost palpable and Julia lay as still as she could and breathed as carefully as her sodden lungs would allow so as not to disturb her. Then Comfort looked up, her eyes narrowed and peering. Julia tried to smile, but it was a poor effort. Comfort bent her head again and added a few quick pencil strokes to her drawing. Laying down both pad and pencil on the floor, she looked up again.
‘So you’re awake. How do you feel?’
Julia thought for a little while and then produced one word:
‘Bloody.’
‘You poor thing,’ said Comfort, leaning over to check the pressure gauge on the oxygen cylinder. ‘How –?’
Just as she said that, Julia had started her own question.
‘How’s David?’ she croaked.
‘Very cross that Anthony won’t let him in to share the nursing,’ said Comfort drily. ‘What help he thinks he could give, I can’t imagine. A great clumsy hulk like that in a sickroom!’
