Never Such Innocence, page 3
Comfort was the first person Julia had ever met who had seen through her gaucheries and naïvety to the person that she really was, or might become. Comfort’s encouragement and freely expressed affection had given Julia the confidence to believe in her own abilities and to aspire to far greater achievements than she had thought possible.
She would never be able to forget the debt that she owed to Comfort for that invaluable gift, whatever Comfort did. But Comfort had begun to change once Anthony had left England and she became progressively antagonistic as the months of the war dragged out into years. By the time the last of the maids had left, the two sisters-in-law no longer even ate together. They had drifted apart in the big house until they hardly ever saw each other. Comfort had a double gas ring in her studio and she cooked for herself up there; and she moved her clothes and possessions up into one of the spare bedrooms on the floor above Julia’s. They communicated mainly by notes left beside the telephone in the hall. Only during the Blitz and the doodlebug attacks had they come at all close, huddling in the basement working or reading immensely long nineteenth-century novels until the all-clear rang out. At times they had managed to discuss the books they were reading and talk with as little constraint as they had in the heady weeks they had spent at Oxford, before Julia had even met Anthony, let alone fallen in love with him. But all too often they kept their thoughts to themselves.
At one time life in Brunswick Square had become so difficult that Julia had bought the lease of a much smaller house in Kensington so that she would have a refuge if she ever had to leave Bloomsbury. It was a mad thing to do when so much of London had been bombed and she would probably never be able to sell the house if she decided she did not need it, but its presence was a comfort and knowing that she owned it made it possible to carry on.
A shadow fell across the table in front of her. Julia looked up, so startled that she almost dropped her cup and splashed cooling tea over her hand.
‘Hello, Michael,’ she said as she recognised an old friend. She put the cup down in the slopped saucer and carefully dried her hand on her handkerchief. ‘I didn’t know you were here.’
‘Or I you, Julia. I’ve been prosecuting a grimy black-market spiv for stealing petrol and nylons from the local Yanks, and I need to take the taste of it out of my mouth. Can I get you another cup of tea? That looks horrible.’
‘It does, doesn’t it?’ she said, looking down at the grey-brown scum that lined the thick white pottery cup. ‘Yes, I’d love another. Thank you.’
‘What have you been doing?’ he asked when he came back with two fresh cups of tea.
‘A bigamist. Defending,’ said Julia, putting out a hand for her cup.
‘Get him off?’
Julia just nodded with a small, pleased smile. Whatever life was like in Bloomsbury, however desperate she felt about her missing husband, at least she had huge satisfaction in her work; and in her friends, she reminded herself, smiling across the table at Michael Hendrick. He had been called to the bar a year after she had, and unlike some of the older barristers had always taken her presence for granted. They had met often and he had occasionally asked her advice. Over the years they had become friends. Like George Wilson, he had not been fit to go to war, and there had been many times when Julia had blessed the ailments or weakness that had kept both of them at home.
They discussed their cases and crowed over their particular triumphs for a while, but eventually Julia’s enthusiasm dwindled as she thought more and more about the big house that seemed full only of solitude and anger.
‘Are you all right?’ asked Michael, stirring the last dregs of his tea round and round. ‘You look a bit down in the mouth.’
‘As one of my grandmother’s American friends used to say, “I feel so low I’d need a ladder to look into a snake’s eye”,’ Julia confessed.
‘Why? You should be rejoicing. The war’s nearly over. We’ll get … Oh God, I’m sorry,’ he said, remembering at last. ‘Is there still no news?’
Julia shook her head.
‘But it’s not just that. In a way, I’ve learned to live with that. Provided I don’t let myself think of all the awful things that might be happening to him, I can contain my feelings about it. After all, there’s nothing I can do except wait to hear, and so I wait …’
‘Except, presumably to write to the Red Cross, the prisoner-of-war department at the War Office,’ said Michael, ‘and –’
‘I’ve done all that,’ said Julia. ‘Long ago, and I badger them at intervals. No, what’s been making me gloomy is the thought of Comfort.’
‘A most inappropriately named female, I’ve always thought,’ said Michael bravely. Julia’s brown eyes narrowed and the first signs of the celebrated cold stare began to harden her pale face.
‘Don’t do it to me,’ said Michael as he recognised the phenomenon. ‘I’m not a hostile witness or a misogynist judge. I’m on your side.’
‘So you are,’ said Julia, deliberately letting her face relax. She put both elbows on the table and rubbed her forehead with both hands as though she could rub away the nagging headache that seemed to have settled over her left eyebrow. She looked up. ‘Things have just been very difficult with Comfort recently, and yet …’
‘I know: she’s your best friend,’ said Michael, swallowing the last of his well-stirred tea. ‘That’s better. I can’t decide which is worse: rationing or the black marketeers it spawns. And there’s no sign of an end to it.’
‘It’s a bit more than just being friends,’ said Julia, ignoring his attempt to cover his gaffe. Working as she did almost entirely with men, she had hardly any women friends except for Comfort. Until the war had destroyed their utterly satisfying affection, she had never needed any others.
‘I know. I’m sorry. I should never have said it. I know how fond you are of her. But look, we’d better drink up or we’ll miss the train. You are coming back tonight, I take it?’
‘Yes, I suppose so.’
‘Wake up, Julia,’ said Michael, wondering what it was that was really the matter with her. He had never seen her so distraite or so vulnerable before. Throughout the war she had kept going apparently undaunted by the enormous amount of work they all had to do, the miserable food, the lack of heat or reliable transport, the endless news of the death of friends and the fears they all tried to ignore. ‘Where’s your bag? This it? Come on.’
She got up obediently and followed him out of the room as he carried the red bag containing her wig and gown and the clothes she had worn to travel down to Bristol.
They caught the train easily and sat opposite each other in chilly discomfort as it rattled its way across the south of England. Their carriage was full until Swindon, where all the other passengers except for one very old man got out. As the train pulled slowly out of the station, Julia noticed the well-lit sign and commented on how pleasant it was to be able to read the names of stations again.
‘Yes,’ said Michael judiciously, ‘but I’ll be happier when they manage to have restaurant cars again. Eating real food on trains is one of the things I miss the most.’
Julia laughed.
‘After the dinner I had in the hotel last night,’ she said, ‘I’d say that eating real food at all is what I miss.’ The old man in the corner coughed and Julia thought she heard him mutter some kind of agreement.
‘Hasn’t Comfort any relations who can send you delicacies from America?’ asked Michael, ignoring the third passenger.
‘There is her mother, and she has been sending us parcels whenever she could. It’s ungrateful of me to have moaned, because they have always been splendid: tinned ham, chocolate, tinned butter –’
‘I hope you had your fair share of it all,’ Michael said, interrupting briskly.
Julia frowned.
‘I know that you’ve never liked Comfort much, but that was unjust,’ she said severely. ‘We have our difficulties, but she’d never hog something like that to herself.’
‘Glad to hear it. What are you reading?’
Julia held out her book, Time Must Have a Stop by Aldous Huxley.
‘Have you read it?’ she asked. ‘It came out in February, but I haven’t had time until now.’
Michael shook his head.
‘I’ve never got on with his books. I like something with fewer ideas and more grip. What’s this one like?’
‘Odd,’ said Julia shortly. ‘But interesting. It’s less funny than the old ones, but … oh, I can’t make my mind up about it yet. I’m only halfway through.’
‘I’d better stop distracting you from it then,’ said Michael cheerfully, pulling out his own book. Julia, squinting at the cover, saw that it was the new Margery Allingham and smiled. She had a weakness for detective stories herself.
They got into London just over an hour later and parted on the platform, knowing that they would run into each other pretty soon in one or other of the courts. Michael set off for his rooms on foot while Julia took the tube to Tottenham Court Road and walked the rest of the way back to Brunswick Square.
There were no lights in the house when she put her key in the front-door lock and she thought with a mixture of sadness and relief that Comfort must be out to dinner. As she walked into the hall, she sniffed and noticed that the house smelled musty and a little damp despite the warmth of the June day. The long cracks in the Wedgwood-blue walls seemed wider than they had the last time she had looked at them and the black-and-white floor dustier. She dumped her bag on the floor and pushed open the double doors into the drawing room that neither she nor Comfort had used since the earliest days of the war.
All the furniture was covered in the old, pre-war dustsheets and cobwebs were festooned along the cornice. Just as the evergreen swags that Comfort had tied with red ribbon and hung in the rooms each Christmas had celebrated hospitality and warmth and generosity, so these grey, sticky-looking garlands pointed up the emptiness and coldness of the house.
They had used the room chiefly when they were entertaining and its silver-grey walls had proved an ideal background to a room full of people. Now, empty, cold and dusty, it seemed horribly depressing. Julia thought of her small, dark-green study upstairs and retreated. Once there was news of Anthony she would be able to do something to make the grand downstairs rooms habitable once more. Until then, there seemed to be no point.
She collected her bag and carried it upstairs to unpack. That done, she changed out of her suit into an old but comfortable pair of flannel trousers and a jersey and went down to see whether there was anything edible in the larder. Neither she nor Comfort had much time to queue for food and so they depended on the basic rations and what Comfort’s American mother could send across the Atlantic.
A crock of eggs sent by one of Comfort’s admirers and carefully preserved in waterglass looked tempting, but Julia did not feel justified in raiding it. There was, however, plenty of bread and the end of one of the American tins of ham and so she made herself a thick, butterless sandwich and ate it at the kitchen table with a cup of ersatz coffee. Her depressing meal over, she felt restored enough to go and see whether Comfort had left any of her curt messages by the telephone.
They both used old envelopes on which to write their notes instead of squandering untouched sheets of paper and from the top of the basement stairs Julia could see a small stack of them beside the telephone. Half reluctantly she went to pick them up.
As usual Comfort had timed and dated them and Julia ran through them from the top. Her clerk had telephoned apparently, hoping that she would be back from Bristol in time to talk to him that afternoon; a man from whom Comfort bought her paints and canvasses had told her that he could lay his hands on some paint for the house and she wondered whether Julia was interested; the plumber Julia had been hoping to persuade to repair the leaking cistern in her bathroom had telephoned to say that there was no chance ‘this side of Christmas’. Julia shrugged – she had not really expected anything else – and turned to the last note.
The War Office telephoned to say that Anthony is alive and well in the Italian Alps. We should be hearing from him presently.
At first Julia could do nothing but stare down at Comfort’s elegant black italic handwriting, reading and rereading the words in case they did not mean what she thought they meant.
She had waited for two years for the news, never allowing herself to fantasise about what she would feel when it came, and yet always believing that one day it would come. Now that it had, she was surprised that she felt no terrific euphoria. Instead she felt slightly sick and rather unsafe, a little as she felt in lifts that plunged downwards too fast. She sat down on the stool beside the telephone and waited for the odd sensations to pass.
While she was waiting, she looked again at the note and saw that the message had been written the previous afternoon at five-thirty. Furious anger displaced the sickness in her mind. That Comfort could have left her to read such news more than twenty-four hours after it had come seemed worse than anything else she had done. It would have been so easy for her to get a message to Bristol and she had not bothered. Julia suddenly felt as though the battle to remember the magical days of Comfort’s affection was the hardest she had ever fought.
Chapter Three
Anthony Gillingham was sitting at the table that served as both desk and dining table in the rooms he had taken in Venice, struggling to write a letter to his wife. The warm July evening was muggy and the canal that moved so sluggishly outside his windows stank of corruption. He was hot, desperately tired and unable to make his mind work properly.
What he had to tell Julia was simple, but he had to find a way of making her understand it, and that was not simple at all. If he could only remember her properly, he thought, it might be easier to find the words he needed. Put baldly, his message was: ‘Dear Julia, I am not coming home. After six years of war, I am going to stay on in Italy, working in an orphanage. I do not know when the job will end or when I shall see you again.’
Unless she had ceased to care for him, that announcement would hurt her intolerably, and he had never wanted that. Somehow he had to find a way to explain to her what he did not fully understand himself: that the thought of returning to the life he had lived with her and his sister before the war made him feel as though he were suffocating. He was aware of some of the reasons for his reluctance to go back, but was not prepared to look below the obvious ones to the others that might be revealed beneath them.
The door opened and his housekeeper came into the room, carrying a tray with his meagre dinner on it.
‘Dottore,’ she said, scolding him as she so often did, ‘you must not sit by an open window in this weather. It’s so bad for you.’
‘It won’t do me any harm, Annunziata,’ he said, looking up and trying to smile at her. She gave him a look from beneath her half-closed eyelids that told him just what she thought of his views on medicine and health and put the tray down on the table in front of him.
‘How were the poverini today?’ she asked, not having seen him since he came in from his long day’s work at the orphanage.
‘The same,’ he said sadly. ‘Hungry, damaged, afraid, full of infections, needing food and drugs and clothes and homes and hope – all the things that Europe won’t see for months yet … years perhaps.’ He looked at her and saw that she was not even listening to him. He knew what she was going to say next and he braced himself to give her the horribly familiar answer.
‘Dottore, is there any news?’
‘No, Annunziata,’ he said as kindly and patiently as possible, ‘there is no news yet, but you mustn’t give up hope. There are hundreds of thousands of people trying to get home, waiting in camps, trying to get news of their families. It will take time.’
‘I understand. Thank you,’ she said with great dignity and left him to eat his cooling pasta without appetite.
Before the war Annunziata had been the wife of a modestly successful Roman craftsman. They had had three children: one son who had escaped from Italy to England after getting into trouble with the Fascists even before the war broke out, and two daughters. One of the girls had married a German Catholic in the days when Italy and Germany were still allies and had gone back to Germany when he was posted away from the Italian front. At first she had written to her mother as often as she could, but there had been no letters for some time. The other daughter had run away to join the partisans in 1944 at the age of sixteen and had disappeared.
Annunziata’s husband had died three months before the end of the war and she had had no news of her children since then. Anthony had come across her when he was in Rome at the end of the war and had persuaded her to become his housekeeper when he took the job in Venice. Since then he had been doing what little he could to find out what had happened to her children and nearly every day Annunziata asked him for news. It was the pain he could see in her black eyes that made him so wary of hurting his own wife.
Julia was in a happier position than Annunziata, for she had known by then for nearly a month that he had survived the war. He had written to her and she to him. He had tried to tell her a little of what had happened to him and had read her accounts of her own war with disquiet. They, and his sister’s version of the same story, had aggravated the anxiety in his mind that they would never be able to understand what had happened to him and what he felt about the people who had sheltered him and the others with whom he had fought for two dangerous, uncomfortable years.
He sometimes wondered whether it would be easier if he could get back to London and tell Julia what he had decided face to face. But that was not possible. Roads and railways all over Europe had been bombed and mined and sabotaged. The only practical form of transport was by air, and it would be a long time before anyone could hop on an aeroplane for private reasons. Besides, talking directly to Julia might not have helped at all. He was afraid that despite their marriage they would be virtual strangers to each other again.
