Never Such Innocence, page 29
‘Minds like hell and has the most appallingly prehistoric instincts,’ he went on. ‘But that’s absurd really, because as soon as I’ve … made love to anyone before – and it hasn’t been that often – I’ve lost most of the feeling that led me there straight away, if you see what I mean.’
‘Yes, I think I do,’ said Julia sadly. Anthony had once seemed to want her badly, but that had hardly lasted even through their honeymoon, and he seemed to have seized on any excuse since Flavia’s death to avoid sharing her bed.
David saw the effect his words had had on her and quickly tried to take away the sting.
‘But I have never loved anyone as I love you,’ he said, truthfully.
Julia was about to say something else when they both heard the sound of his mother returning.
‘Perhaps it’s just as well,’ murmured David and then in a quite different voice he said: ‘Mama!’
Julia took one look at her hostess’s face and decided to make some more tea. Picking up the tray, she carried it out to the kitchen and put the kettle on the small bottled-gas stove that stood beside the huge, cold, black range. When the water boiled she made more tea in the silver pot, refilled the milk jug, found clean cups and a plateful of almond biscuits, and carried the tray back to the terrace.
She was surprised to see the two Wallingtons sitting opposite each other, about eighteen inches apart, apparently concentrating hard on something that lay between them. Moving towards the table to lay down her load, she almost laughed when she saw that they were playing cat’s cradle. She put down the tray, poured out three cupsful of tea and sat watching them.
‘Pound of candles, Mama!’ David exclaimed. ‘Well done!’
Mrs Wallington’s tight face relaxed a little as David leaned forward over the criss-crossed string that her hands held taut between them. David’s long fingers plucked carefully at two of the lines, swung them over the outlying strings and took the whole pattern back from her hands to form a new one within his. She gazed at the new arrangement, absent-mindedly reached for the tea Julia had placed near her elbow and drank. As though the heat of the liquid burning her lips reminded her where she was, she looked away from the cat’s cradle and made her eyes focus on her guest.
‘Julia,’ she said, as though she were just waking up. ‘How good of you to make tea. Thank you.’
‘It was a pleasure,’ she said, a little worried by both the intensity of Mrs Wallington’s earlier concentration and her current vagueness. ‘You’re both a delight to watch at that,’ Julia went on. ‘I’ve never got beyond the first two or three rounds.’
‘My husband taught me when we were first married,’ said the elder woman, licking her burnt lower lip. ‘The concentration always helped when I was feeling homesick.’ She released her lip from between her teeth and Julia was horrified to see a speck of blood on it. As though aware that her control was slipping again, Mrs Wallington turned back to the disciplined criss-cross of string and concentrated with almost palpable force. David looked up then and Julia nodded her head in the direction of the drawing room, meaning (as she knew David would understand) that she wondered whether she should leave them alone. He answered with a minute shake of his head and she obeyed, sitting on to watch the fantastic skill with which they wove and rewove their patterns, each keeping the strings taut and symmetrical even as they transformed them into a completely new shape. Neither spoke and Julia understood that David’s mother was on the very brink of breaking down; any little thing might tip her over into outright despair.
Julia, who had come to understand a little of Allegra Wallington’s character in the short time they had spent together, was as anxious as David to prevent that happening. David had obviously always known and Julia had learned that, whatever feelings were churning around inside his mother’s mind, it was vital for her that they remained private.
David was holding the strings in a pattern Julia had never seen before. His face seemed to show nothing except benevolent interest, but Julia could tell from the way that he was carrying his head and a certain tension in his body that they were approaching a crisis point.
Allegra leaned forward a little and delicately laid her fingers and thumbs on either side of the cradle. She performed a complicated manoeuvre, which Julia could not follow at all, and brought her two hands up between the strings held by her son. At once the carefully constructed cradle collapsed; there was no longer any pattern, merely an ugly mass of tangled string hanging from his hands.
Allegra leaned even further forward, tears waterfalling down her thin, pale-olive face, until her head was resting on top of the string in her son’s hands. Julia got up from her chair as quietly as she possibly could and left them alone. As she reached the French windows into the drawing room she–heard Allegra’s voice, ugly and distorted by an immense sob:
‘How can I bear it without him, Davy?’
Hating the thought that she was eavesdropping, Julia still could not force herself away and half turned to see David gently pushing his mother upright again. Julia watched him take a handkerchief from his trouser pocket with one hand while shaking the debris of the cat’s cradle from the other. Instead of simply handing his mother the handkerchief, he held her chin with one hand and wiped the tears from her cheeks. Only when she had managed to stop crying and he had dried her face completely did he even attempt to answer.
‘I don’t know how, Mama, but I think you will. And …’ He broke off and Julia knew that he was trying to decide how far to let his honesty take him. His shoulders were taut under his jacket.
‘And terrible though it is, Mama, isn’t it better to feel like this now than never to have known what it was like to love someone so much?’
Tears starting into her own eyes, Julia waited, not wanting to walk away while they were both silent. ‘Wouldn’t it be better to love like that for a little while than never to know what it is like?’ she asked herself silently. She had spent most of her own childhood trying to persuade her parents to fall in love with each other and known how little they really cared for each other or for her, but until recently she had not realised how little real love there had been in her own marriage.
‘E vero, mio figlio’, said Allegra at last in an aching voice that seemed to express both infinite sadness and acceptance. ‘Yes, that is true.’
Julia went to sit in the kitchen, trying to stop applying what she had just heard to her own situation. It seemed very important just then to remember exactly what she had felt for Anthony at the beginning. The difficulty was that the memory seemed to be inextricably linked to her friendship with Comfort. Searching through her mind the only emotions she could recreate from that time were a dizzying pleasure that someone as sophisticated, cosmopolitan, successful and confident as Doctor Anthony Gillingham should appear to want anyone as dull and provincial as she had been and a kind of a triumph that she could present Comfort with Anthony’s declaration of love. Comfort loved him so much herself that his admiration of her friend was a kind of justification of the friendship itself. That was it, Julia said to herself, as she sat at the big scrubbed table in the Florentine kitchen, all those years and a thousand miles away.
A heavy step on the stone-flagged floor made her start.
‘It’s only me, Julia,’ said David as she turned. ‘I’ve been looking for you all over the house.’
‘Sorry,’ she said, smiling at him. ‘I just thought I’d better keep out of the way. How is your poor mother?’
‘As you saw. I’ve given her some of the Veronal her doctor prescribed and she’s gone to bed. Are you all right?’
‘Why?’
‘Your eyes have gone dark, and your mouth looks thinner and you’re pale again; I’ve noticed that that always happens when you’re unhappy,’ he said.
‘I suppose that I’ve just been recognising that the sort of feeling your mother had for your father is …’ she paused as she searched for as unemotive a word as possible. ‘It is so very different from what I feel for Anthony. But I’m sorry, David, I oughtn’t to be bothering you with all this at such a time. You must be missing them both so much.’
‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘But it’s in a different compartment from you and me. I don’t ever want you to think that what I feel for you is a response to –’
‘Don’t, David,’ she said, getting up from the table. ‘I know it’s not.’
He stood looking at her in silence for a few moments and then gave a funny little smile, ruffled her hair and said:
‘Now, you haven’t had anything to eat all day – except for that biscuit – and you must be starving.’
‘Not really,’ she said with a rueful smile. ‘All this emotion seems to be doing instead of food.’
‘Nevertheless, we must both eat. Mama made me promise to feed you before she agreed to go to bed. She said that there was pasta, a couple of eggs and a little ham,’ he said, looking around the big, empty kitchen. ‘And since neither of us is Catholic, there’s no bar to any of that.’
‘I’m afraid my cooking doesn’t extend to much more than scrambled eggs or sardines on toast,’ said Julia, feeling thoroughly useless.
‘Don’t worry,’ he answered with the first real amusement of the day, ‘mine does.’
Watching him finding the food and preparing and cooking it with deft and practised skill, Julia marvelled at his practicality. When they had eaten, sitting companionably at the kitchen table, she told him how impressed she was by his unsuspected talent.
‘It is time that someone began to look after you for a change, Julia,’ he said seriously. ‘You’ve done a long, long stint, haven’t you?’
They managed to part that night with no more than a friendly kiss, but the following evening when Mrs Wallington again went early to bed was more difficult. Once again David and Julia ate together in the kitchen at the scrubbed wooden table. David had lit two squat candles stuck in pottery sticks, and they provided the only light in the room. The rest of the great kitchen was huge and empty around them; the small oval of warm candlelight seemed to hold them together.
At first they talked easily about David’s chances of demobilisation, and the kind of law he would practise when he eventually got back to London, and his prospects of fighting a reasonably safe seat at the next General Election, but inevitably that led on to Julia’s plans.
‘I don’t know, David,’ she said at one moment when they had finished their pasta. ‘One thing these workless weeks in Venice have taught me is that I need my profession. I should go quite dotty without work, and there is none for me in Venice now. I am going to have to go back to London pretty soon.’
‘And Anthony?’
‘God knows. Do you think he can be persuaded to leave his orphans?’ said Julia. When David did not answer, she went on: ‘After all, I suspect that you know him far better than I have ever done.’
David sat looking down at the empty wine glass that he was turning round and round between his hands. He wanted to tell her the whole story then, but he was afraid of what she might think.
‘I don’t think I do,’ he said instead without looking up.
Julia, not wanting to have to think of Anthony any longer, got out of her chair and prowled about the big dark kitchen. David watched her in silence for a while, wondering what she was thinking, longing to persuade her to forget her husband, longing beyond everything to make love to her.
Julia stopped by the cold range and ran her fingers along its surface. Suddenly she lifted her hand and examined the brown, greasy deposit that her fingers had picked up and grimaced in disgust. She went to the stone sink, scrubbed her hands under the single cold tap and set off on her perambulations again, slowly circling the big pine table, moving in and out of the gibbous pool of light shed by the candles.
‘What I can’t understand,’ she said at last coming to a stop again behind David’s chair, ‘is why he married me at all and why he…’
‘I suspect because he loves you, even though he doesn’t always show it,’ said David, trying to be fair. ‘And … Oh Lord, Julia, I’m finding this desperately difficult.’
The raw, rough feeling in his voice was so obvious that Julia forgot all her determined restraint of the previous evening and put her arms around him as he sat at the table, laying her head on his.
‘Oh David, my darling,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.’ He twisted in his chair so that he could look at her, and she leaned down and kissed his forehead. His skin felt very soft and cool under her lips. He turned back and put his hands over hers as they lay across his chest.
‘All my most prehistoric instincts are coming to the surface,’ he said at last, his voice breathless and the words coming out syncopated. ‘I don’t think I can talk any more about your husband. I need you too much.’
Julia’s own needs rose to answer that despairing cry so powerfully that all her carefully nurtured detachment melted away. With her conscious mind telling her what to say and do, her emotions rebelled and she heard herself say something quite contradictory to its orders:
‘David, I think we’d better go to bed.’
‘Do you mean that?’ he said. Standing up, he examined her face with extreme care.
‘Yes,’ said Julia. ‘What harm can it possibly do anyone if we don’t let it invade our lives? Tonight, here, now, we can’t hurt anyone by making love.’
In all her suppressed longing for David, Julia had never imagined such gentleness as he gave her that night or such freedom. When he had shut the door of her bedroom behind them both, he came to stand in front of her and stroked her face with one finger, tracing her eyebrows, the semi-circular curve of the bones under her eyes, the diagonal lines of her cheekbones, and her lips. Light though his touch was, she found it infinitely exciting and when his fingertip reached the centre of her lips, she opened them and felt his finger on her tongue.
Through his increasingly deep, ragged breathing, he said her name once, twice. She felt his other hand cupping her head and, releasing his finger, she leaned forward until she lay against his chest.
‘Yes, David,’ she said, answering his unspoken plea. ‘I’m here.’
Putting both hands on her head so that he could tilt it up towards him, he said:
‘I can hardly believe it, Julia. Are you really sure?’
‘I’m sure, David. Come to bed.’ Taking his hand, she led him to the bed and lay down.
‘Julia,’ he said, dropping on his knees beside the bed. Before she could do more than smile up at him, he had kissed her eyes, her lips, the soft skin of her neck just below her ear, and then he began to unbutton her clothes.
The delicacy of his touch as he stroked her was such that Julia could hardly feel it at all, and yet it aroused in her a longing for him that she had never before experienced. His face was so unguarded that if she had not loved him as much she would have been afraid for him.
Gradually, as her need became overwhelming and his stroking intensified, she lost all her feelings of protectiveness for him, forgot that she was older than he, forgot everything except his touch, his strength, his love for her and her passionate longing to give him everything. In that giving she found completion and happiness beyond all expectation.
Afterwards, as she lay curled in the crook of his arm, with her head tucked underneath his chin, he said:
‘I won’t be able to regret this, whatever happens. It’s meant too much.’
Hardly able to move at all for the blissful heaviness of her limbs, Julia tried to make her mind work enough to answer him.
‘We shouldn’t either of us have anything to regret, David,’ she said at last, and found that it was true. What they had given each other, dramatic though it had become at the end, had been the inevitable physical manifestation of what had happened between them weeks earlier. It was both an acknowledgement and an easing of the exquisite – almost intolerable – tension that had been built up between them.
They slept then, tucked up around one another, waking several times during the night, but rarely for long enough to do more than acknowledge the other’s presence. It was not until soon after six o’clock that David carefully uncoiled his long body. Julia woke, smiling.
‘Go back to sleep, Julia,’ he said, very quietly. ‘I’m just going back to my own room.’
‘Must you?’ she said, still half asleep and not thinking of anything at all except David. She brought her right hand up out of the bedclothes and held it out to him. He took it in both of his and smiled down at her.
‘I think so.… It seems important not to worry Mama with this just now,’ he said. Julia loved him for that protectiveness, too, and pulled her hand out of his to let him go.
‘Try to sleep a bit more,’ he said. ‘You look very tired.’ He stood looking down at her as she lay with her hair spread out on the pillow, her eyes still half shut by the heaviness of sleep and her lips smiling. ‘I know that we can’t let this mean anything more than itself,’ he said at last, ‘but it has made … you have made me very happy, Julia. Whatever happens, don’t forget that… please.’
‘I won’t forget,’ she said.
Chapter Twenty-One
They said very little to each other on the journey back to Venice, both lost in their own thoughts. Julia was battling with the temptation to make more of what had happened than was justified. She had told David that they could hurt no one by making love, and she knew that to make that true she would have to banish the knowledge of her love for him to the back of her mind and to think of their few short days together as no more than an oasis in the middle of some desert journey. Those days had given her so much that they ought also to have given her the strength to carry on her journey.
The temptation might have been harder to withstand if David had not told her that he could not have married her even if she had planned to leave Anthony. Leaning against the hard back of the seat, swaying with the movement of the train, Julia watched David from under her half-closed eyelids. He was not looking at her and his face was bleak. Julia turned to look out of the window at the green fields and picturesque villages that flashed by the train’s dusty windows, trying to school her mind and emotions into recognising that she had left the oasis behind her for ever. She had not expected to find it so difficult and suddenly she shivered.
