Never Such Innocence, page 36
He shrugged again, but he also turned back to face her.
‘There is not much to tell,’ he said.
‘Never mind. Let’s have some breakfast and you can tell me what there is,’ said Julia. She looked at her watch. ‘It’s only half-past six. You must have something to eat before you go. Come on.’
Together they went back to the kitchen, where Tibor made Julia sit down while he brewed a pot of coffee and put two slices of bread under the grill. When they were toasted he brought them to her with the marmalade jar and the coffee pot. When Julia had poured them each a cup, without even noticing that she no longer felt sick, she said:
‘What’s happened?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Tibor. He drank a little coffee and then put the cup down. ‘I don’t understand what she wants. She has been so good to me since we met in the winter and even when we have had misunderstandings they have not lasted. And last night she was so happy – it was good that, because she is often not happy.’
‘I know,’ said Julia, ‘and I have been very impressed with the way you have understood her and not allowed her moods to make you angry and hurt her. She has been badly hurt, you see.’
‘Why should I be angry?’ asked Tibor, genuinely surprised, and Julia thought again that he would have made a wonderful husband for Comfort.
‘Most people find themselves angry with Comfort’s moods at times,’ said Julia with a smile. ‘What changed?’
‘This morning early I heard her moving in the studio and knew she was awake,’ he said, ‘and I went to make a cup of tea. She likes this in the morning. And she told me very quietly that I must go … like a servant dismissed. I thought she was joking and I reminded her that I loved her.’ He broke off and just before he hid his face by drinking some more coffee Julia thought that she saw an expression of anguish in his eyes. When he put the cup down the expression he revealed was serious and unhappy, but nothing more. Julia waited.
‘She said that did not matter,’ said Tibor at last. ‘That I was a sponger. I did not know this word until today,’ he added bitterly.
‘But, Tibor,’ Julia protested, ‘she can’t have been serious. You’ve made her so happy.’
‘I thought so. Oh yes. But I am wrong. It seems I am a sponger, a third-rate amateur painter who is using her influence to get attention I do not deserve, a man who thinks … Oh, what is the use? Even if she does not mean any of it tomorrow, she meant it today and that is enough for me. I must go. I shall miss you, Julia. I hope all goes well with you and the child.’
‘And I you, Tibor,’ answered Julia. ‘But if you love her, isn’t it worth trying to –’
‘To “sponge” a little longer?’ he said with extreme if understandable bitterness. ‘No.’ He got up and stood for a moment with both fists on the table, looking at Julia.
‘Comfort often does things,’ she began carefully, ‘that make people very angry. I don’t always understand, but I think it may be that she cannot believe that people really care for her and so she tests them, doing worse and worse things until they prove …’
‘That they don’t care enough,’ said Tibor, draining the big flowered breakfast cup. ‘I must go before she comes down.’
‘I suppose that is the inevitable end,’ said Julia. ‘Will you be all right?’ He nodded and his full lips were twisted into a self-mocking smile. ‘Where will you go?’ Julia asked.
‘I have friends,’ he answered. ‘Hungarians. And there is Marcus, who does not think I am a third-rate Sunday painter. I will be all right, but will you?’
‘I?’ said Julia, surprised. ‘Why yes.’
‘You are too … fair to her. I think she is not wounded, but treacherous,’ said Tibor. ‘And selfish, and not able to share for very long. I did not let myself believe the people who said it, but it is true.’
‘Ah no,’ said Julia. ‘Don’t say that, Tibor. She is terribly generous, but she finds it difficult …’
‘She is generous for her own ends only,’ he said, ‘not for other people. I worry for you.’
‘You need not,’ said Julia, propping her head up on her clasped hands. ‘I’ve known her since I was nineteen. But I can’t bear it if you think so harshly of her. I thought you loved her.’
‘I thought so too,’ he said. When Julia looked up she saw that he was smiling again, but his teeth were clenched. ‘I think you have forgiven her too many times.’ He turned then and left the house without another word.
Julia sat with her head in her hands, ignoring the toughening toast and the cooling coffee, wondering whether it was possible for human beings to be happy with each other for more than a day or two at a stretch. It ought to be so easy. Everyone wanted it. With a modicum of decency, kindness, unselfishness and tact, it ought to be possible for any number of people to live together and be happy, and yet she could not think of anyone among her friends and relations who had managed it for long.
There were the Heathwoods, unable to give each other anything they wanted and looking to other people for it. There were herself and Anthony; his parents, who had given up the struggle to live together and so made both their children too aware of the fallibility of love too young; and her parents, who had decided that it was better to live in a state of irritable misery rather than to give in and try to learn to please each other. Of everyone she had ever met, only Allegra Wallington seemed to have had a truly happy marriage, and that had been smashed.
‘Oh David,’ she said into her hands, just for one illicit moment, letting herself remember Fiesole and think of what it would be like if he were to come back to her.
The front-door bell shrilled and Julia lifted her head, pushing the uncombed hair away from her face.
‘I’ll get it,’ called Comfort from halfway down the stairs and Julia got up to wash her face at the stone sink and comb her fingers through her hair to try to reduce it to some kind of order before she faced Comfort.
‘Telegram, Julia,’ she said from the top of the basement stairs.
‘Anthony,’ said Julia before she could stop herself. She stayed with her back to the sink as Comfort ran down the stairs and handed her the envelope.
Her fingers felt as clumsy as they had when she had wasted the week’s egg trying to reproduce Annunziata’s delectable pasta and ended with a mess of sticky, inedible paste that had to be thrown away.
‘Here, let me do that,’ said Comfort, putting out a hand to take the crackling envelope back. Julia held it to herself.
‘It’s all right. I’ll do it,’ she said, thrusting a shaking finger under the glued flap and ripping it open. She looked down and, as she read the first words, they flashed in front of her eyes and moved, jogging up and down so that she needed all her concentration to read them.
We must talk stop Do nothing until I come stop Arriving London July 10 stop Anthony.
‘He’s coming home,’ she said dully to Comfort, who stood in front of her.
Light broke over Comfort’s anxious face and made it beautiful again.
‘I knew he would,’ she said. ‘Didn’t I tell you last night that everything was all right now? We can be happy again, Julia my darling. At last. The war and his disappearance and your illness and that wretched peasant girl – it’s all over.’
‘You mean you knew about Raffaella?’ said Julia, who forgot what she had meant to say about Tibor in her astonishment.
Comfort smiled at Julia’s naivety.
‘Of course I knew,’ she said. ‘Anthony told me while I was in Venice, and I thought it was sweet of you to try to protect me from knowing, although …’
‘Yes?’ said Julia, beginning to understand the odder parts of Jack French’s elliptical announcement at the exhibition.
‘For a while I thought you were being unnecessarily critical of poor Anthony,’ said Comfort. ‘You see, I thought you’d come home alone and told him that he couldn’t come back because of her. I hadn’t realised it was for your health – yours and the baby’s.’
‘I must get dressed,’ said Julia, thinking that she could not talk to Comfort properly until she knew exactly what it was that Anthony was coming home to say. She could not even make the necessary practical arrangements for actually having the baby.
When she had dealt with the immediate tasks awaiting her in chambers, she telephoned the agents who had let the house she had bought in Kensington, to tell them that she would need it herself as soon as the tenants could be moved. Whatever Anthony was going to say, she could not go on living with Comfort in Brunswick Square.
It became more and more difficult as they waited in mutual dissatisfaction for Anthony’s return. One morning at breakfast Comfort asked for about the tenth time who were to be the child’s godparents and Julia snapped at her.
‘I’ve already told you that nothing can be decided until Anthony’s back,’ she said. ‘I must go or I’ll be late for my meeting.’
She left Comfort bemused and sore that Julia seemed incapable of understanding the importance of the child she was carrying. That she should worry about her work instead of concentrating on the child seemed perverse and positively dangerous. Comfort had almost given up hope of Anthony having children and in the excitement of discovering that there was still hope had looked forward to being involved in every aspect of Julia’s pregnancy and plans for the baby. It seemed oddly cruel of Julia to keep it all to herself.
Julia, meanwhile, was walking briskly to chambers, delighted to be relieved of the almost permanent nausea that had affected her and determined not to allow herself to quarrel with Comfort whatever she said. Once at her desk, surrounded by urgent work, Julia managed to put most thoughts of the child out of her mind and worked with virtually unbroken concentration until she was interrupted soon after twelve.
There was a knock at the door and her clerk popped his head round to ask whether she would see a Mr Wallington. Julia felt the blood rushing to her face. She pulled herself together and nodded to Tomkins. A few moments later he ushered David into her room.
Julia got up and walked round her desk to shake his hand, trying not to allow herself to feel the intense pleasure that flooded her at the sight of him. He looked so exactly like her memories of him that it was hard to believe he was not some image conjured up by her fantasies.
‘How are you, David?’ she asked formally.
‘Well,’ he said in the same tones. He did not smile. ‘And you?’
‘I’m fine now. Won’t you sit down?’ It was all she could do not to reach out and touch him and she thought that if they were sitting on the opposite sides of her wide desk it might be easier to keep herself as distant as she knew she must.
‘Thank you. You said “now”,’ David said, much less distantly. ‘Have you been ill again?’
‘No, just convalescent,’ said Julia with a slight laugh in her voice. Then she added abruptly: ‘David, why have you come?’
He looked down at his long hands in silence and then raised his head to look straight at her. His blue eyes were duller than she remembered and there was no hint in them of the warm light that had first told her that he cared for her. She tightened her grip on her own emotions.
‘Because I’m starting in Michael Farewell’s chambers next month and we’re bound to meet,’ he said in a rather abrupt voice. ‘I thought we ought to talk in private before that happens. I’m not –’
‘About what?’ asked Julia, suddenly afraid that Anthony or Felicity Suvarov had told him about the baby.
‘About us,’ said David, sounding surprised. ‘I know that I promised you once that I wouldn’t importune you.’ He stopped there and went back to studying his hands.
‘Yes,’ said Julia gently.
‘Julia, it’s so impossibly difficult,’ he said, leaning both elbows on her desk and resting his head in his hands. His voice sounded angry.
‘I know,’ she answered, almost certain then that someone had told him about the child. As calmly as she could, she added: ‘But I’m afraid I can’t change it.’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘I also know that I should never have allowed myself to tell you that I had fallen in love with you. I just …’ He dropped his hands and looked at her again and smiled wryly. ‘It’s just the kind of thing that gets said in those circumstances.’
‘Yes,’ said Julia rather stiffly. ‘I rather thought so. David, what is it that you have come to say?’
‘That I want to marry you,’ he said in a despairing voice that told her how much it had cost him to come.
‘I can’t,’ she said, gritting her teeth against the pain. Her resolution slipped a little and she added: ‘I wish that I could, but it isn’t possible.’ She loved him far too much to take advantage of him.
David said nothing and she waited for him to tell her that he knew about the child, wondering whether she could bring herself to lie and say that it was Anthony’s if he did. But he did not. Instead he picked up his hat and stood up.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, sounding almost bitter. ‘I ought never to have come. I’ll try not to embarrass you when we meet in court – or anywhere else.’
‘You mustn’t apologise,’ said Julia, keeping control of herself with difficulty. ‘No one was ever paid a greater compliment.’
David’s face lightened then and one of his hands reached out towards her as though he could not help himself. As soon as he noticed what he was doing he withdrew it.
‘I hope we can be friends,’ said Julia, her resolution slipping a little more. ‘I would value that so much.’
‘Would you?’ David asked a little wistfully. ‘Then of course we shall. I hope that if you change your mind, you’ll tell me.’
‘Yes I will,’ she said, holding out her right hand. ‘Thank you for coming, David.’
He just looked at her and then, with an effort, he smiled.
‘My mother asked to be remembered to you,’ he said.
‘How kind. Will you send her my regards?’
David nodded and on that absurdly formal note they parted. Julia sat back at her desk, feeling as though she had lived through the Blitz all over again. It seemed impossible to believe that only just over three months ago she had slept in his arms. Felicity’s voice echoed in her mind: ‘It would be absurdly quixotic to ruin your own life for a political career that may never happen.’
The temptation to run after David out into the Temple was almost overmastering.
Her office door opened again and Tomkins stood there with a pile of papers in his hands. He brought them to Julia and reminded her that James Norgrove wanted her report on them by the end of the day. She dismissed him gratefully and buried herself in her work.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Anthony came back to London on the day when all the English newspapers were delightedly reporting the engagement of Princess Elizabeth to Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten. The crowd waiting for a glimpse of the couple on the red-draped balcony at Buckingham Palace seemed to be trying to reproduce the euphoria and hope of VE Day, and all over the country people welcomed the chance to revel in spectacle and romance as an antidote to the dreariness of austerity.
Julia hardly noticed the fuss, although she was amused to see a pair of bedraggled children obviously playing ‘Royal Marriages’ on a bombsite amid a group of cheering, flag-waving friends on her way to chambers. She tried to spend the day as she usually did, concentrating on her work, chatting to colleagues and parrying the efforts of her clerk to dump all the most boring work on her desk, but thoughts of Anthony and what he had come home to say kept intruding. She would be distracted from whatever she was reading by imaginary scenes with him and often found herself drafting replies to what he might say.
Eventually, soon after four o’clock, she gave up the unequal struggle to pretend that it was an ordinary day and took a taxi back to Brunswick Square. Anthony’s familiar, battered brown suitcase stood on the chequered floor of the cool hall, but there was no sign of him in any of the ground-floor rooms. Shrugging, Julia went up to her bedroom to take off her hat and change her shoes, and from there she heard the sound of voices coming from the studio.
When she had changed Julia went into her study to unpack the briefcase she had brought back from chambers, knowing that Anthony and Comfort must have heard her arrival. Within ten minutes he was at the door, saying:
‘May I come in, Julia?’
Feeling as nervous as she had ever done facing a hostile judge in court, Julia put down the opinion that she had been drafting, screwed the lid on her fountain pen and turned in her chair to smile at her husband. Only the knowledge that he had not been faithful to their marriage either helped her to keep her voice and eyes steady.
‘Yes, come in, Anthony. How are you? You don’t look well at all,’ she said, sounding quite calm.
‘I’m all right,’ he answered, dropping into the wing chair beside her desk. ‘As far as possible in the circumstances. You? How is it going?’
‘Not too bad. I’ve stopped feeling sick,’ said Julia, assuming that he meant her to introduce the subject of her pregnancy with his vague question.
Anthony looked down at his hands, those beautifully kept surgeon’s hands with their pristine nails that were almost more familiar to Julia than her own, and said slowly:
‘Your letter shocked me.’
Julia raised her eyebrows involuntarily, surprised out of her careful composure by his uncharacteristic lack of finesse.
‘I’m sorry about that,’ she said inadequately. ‘Knowing what it felt like when I learned about Raffaella, I can understand that, but truth seemed more important then than diplomacy. I didn’t want there to be any more fudging between us.’
‘Oh I quite agree,’ said Anthony, looking up with a faint smile. He put his hands in his trouser pockets and leaned against the chair back as though he were relaxing, but Julia could see that all his muscles were tense.
‘You’re angry,’ she said, suddenly recognising what he was feeling without any of her usual difficulty. It was as though in letting herself stop the battle to believe herself in love with him, she had become able to see him properly for almost the first time.
