Authors: Elizabeth Jane Howard
After Julius
DEDICATED
TO KINGSLEY
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
E
LIZABETH
J
ANE
H
OWARD
is a writer with a remarkable talent for intimacy. She
makes a confidante of her reader, privately revealing the thoughts and feelings of her characters, particularly of her female characters. Howard is in the tradition of novelists such as Jean Rhys
and Rosamond Lehmann, both of whom possessed an almost extrasensory understanding of the shocks and subtleties, the often painful dissimulations inevitable for women living in a man’s world.
She has a fine feminine sensibility, and we come to know those lovely, untidy girls, those elegant but wretched wives and widows, in detail that is as true as it is poignant. As in two of her
earlier novels,
The Long View
(1956) and
The Sea Change
(1959), Howard shows herself an expert in tracing the effects of deceit and disappointment in human relationships, and yet such
is her appetite for life, her creative vigour, that there is nothing sour in her outlook, nor is she in the least restricted by her alliance with her own sex. Her scope is wide, her horizons large.
She has a strong sense of period and place, a sense that significantly informs and supports all her fiction.
From the start of her writing career Elizabeth Jane Howard showed herself master of a sophisticated technique, expertly dealing with a large cast and effecting difficult changes in time and
location. First published by Jonathan Cape in 1965,
After Julius
, with its complex structure, is no exception, the focus moving from London to Sussex, from the early years of the Second
World War to the 1950s, from one generation to the next. The protagonists are the widowed Esme and her two daughters, Cressida, known as ‘Cressy’, and Emma. Esme’s story is told
partly in flashback, although the unfolding of the present plot takes place over one week-end. Howard’s use of plot to reveal character and chart the shifts in a relationship is highly
accomplished. Esme’s husband, Julius, has been killed in the war, shot in the course of heroic action during the evacuation from Dunkirk. For Esme this is not the tragedy it might have been.
Julius, a publisher with a passion for poetry and public causes, stands on an altitude unattainable to his pretty but ordinary young wife. It is poetry that distances Esme from Julius. ‘In
all moments of emotion he resorted to poetry; and this included making love to her. She had pleaded ignorance, but this only provoked hours of tender instruction, and every time he reached out for
some slim calf-bound volume from a shelf, or threw back his head and half shut his eyes (he knew a fantastic amount of stuff by heart) the same wave of unwilling reverence and irritated
incomprehension swept over her.’
After her two children are born, Esme falls seriously in love for the first time, her lover, Felix, a charming and cultivated man some years younger than she. When Julius is killed, Esme’s
passionate hope is that she and Felix may marry, but Felix, unfortunately inspired by Julius’s noble example, himself goes off to join up and disappears from Esme’s life for nearly
twenty years.
At the time the novel opens Esme, now fifty-eight, is in a state of high tension, waiting in her pretty house in Sussex for Felix to arrive for their first meeting since the war. Her first sight
of him does little to allay her anxiety: ‘He had matured so well, while she had simply decayed as little as she could contrive.’ Also expected for the week-end are Cressy and Emma.
Cressy, a not very successful concert pianist, is a beauty with a messy love life characterized by unhappy affairs with married men. She is in the middle of one such affair now, yet again trying to
find the resolution to bring the miserable business to an end. Emma, on the other hand, sensible and good, has so far shown little interest in the opposite sex. It surprises everyone, therefore,
that it is she who turns up with a boyfriend, the disconcertingly unconventional Dan. Daniel’s eccentricity is vividly established by his first act on entering the house. ‘Daniel moved
to the fire, picking off a blackberry from Esme’s elaborate flower arrangement. “Frostbitten,” he said and spat it neatly into the flames.’
Cressy, the elder of the sisters, has been briefly married and, like her mother, widowed during the war. Howard makes brilliant use of period and place deftly to define the pathos of the
childlike Cressy’s hopelessly inadequate relationship with her husband, Miles, an amiable fellow far more concerned with the building of the motor torpedo boat over which he has command than
with his homesick young wife. Miles takes Cressy with him to the Isle of Wight, where for a time he is able to live with her ashore. The first morning Cressy wakes up in their hotel bedroom,
‘sleepy, warm as a bird . . . it took her at least five minutes to understand that he would be out for the whole day – would not see her until late in the evening. “But what shall
I
do
?” she had asked in panic. He looked nonplussed. “I should look at the Island. It’s very pretty, really,” he added: he had sailed there before the war. “But
how do I have lunch?” “Go down to the dining-room and ask for it. Damn!” He was shaving fast with a cut-throat razor, and the simplicity of her question had made him cut himself.
“Really, darling!” he had said, as he stuck a piece of cotton wool to the blood.’
That comfortless hotel in Cowes, where Cressy sits dismally in the lounge with old copies of
Yachting World
, tellingly conveys the state of her marriage. Such significant detail is
employed also in the description of Esme’s house in Sussex. The reader’s first encounter with her takes place in her bedroom, a room that tells us nearly all we need to know about Esme.
‘She lay on her side, her head neatly shaped by the Lady Jayne hairnet which tied under her chin. The room, which was zagged with oak beams (genuine, but with that look of hypocrisy that
ensued from efficient worm-treatment), had four fussy little windows with ugly steel frames, peach chintz curtains and frilly pelmets. A great many photographs were tilted about the room: her
parents, the house in Portugal where she had been a child, herself being presented (black lipstick and fat, white gloves); her husband; darling Sambo with an idiotic ribbon round his neck . .
.’
Equally effective is the description of the tiny London flat shared by Esme’s daughters, typifying the dingy flavour of genteel urban poverty immediately after the war. The flat has
linoleum on the floor, a nasty stain on the ceiling and a bathroom painted the colour of tinned peas. “[Emma] got up, lit her gas fire which was a contemporary of the earliest Baby Austins;
small, roaring, resolute – gallantly pouring its drop of heat into the bucket of room – and went to the window . . . Rows of back gardens, with battered lawns, an old pear tree now
bleakly articulate and dripping; air like fudge, a pimento sun and an unexpected seagull – at its best in its moving distance – wheeling about in aimless expert circuits. It was cold
and there might be fog.’
Elizabeth Jane Howard is a marvellously sensual writer, responsive and alert to her physical surroundings, to texture, colour, sound; she is intently aware of the natural world, interested in
animals and birds and observant of their habits. Here, for example, is the cat belonging to the cook, Mrs Hanwell: ‘[the cat] was edging his portly fur through the hedge back from one of his
abortive excursions. Mrs Hanwell pretended that he was worth keeping because he was such a good hunter, but he was far too cowardly to catch anything but butterflies in summer which he crunched up
like fairy toast, and then jostled her all over the kitchen for square meals.’ Square meals are a speciality: there are some mouth-watering menus in
After Julius.
For dinner on the
first evening of the week-end, there are ‘chickens, plain roast, with bread sauce, mashed potatoes, Brussels sprouts with chestnuts and thick chicken gravy, followed by a plum tart –
bottled plums – and Mrs Hanwell’s husband’s cream’. This feast is insufficient for Dan, who in the middle of the night goes downstairs to visit the larder. ‘He found a
wedge of blackberry-and-apple pie – just enough for one, and a piece of rather hard, greasy and slippery cheese. He was examining a white can covered by a dear little piece of muslin with
blue beads weighting its edges, when he heard a noise.’
One of Elizabeth Jane Howard’s finest qualities is her unerring instinct for psychological truth. She is frequently very funny, with a good line in delicate irony, but at the same time she
never flinches from the depiction of humiliation, of disappointment and despair. When Esme, for example, finally realizes after a scene of nightmarish misunderstanding that she has lost Felix for
good, she bleakly turns back to her empty life, its emptiness crucially summarized in one unforgettable detail. Esme, having watched her lover leave, slowly walks from the hall into the
drawing-room in search of occupation. She looks over to her desk, ‘neatly crammed with letters she had already answered’. That tells it all, and there the chapter ends.
The novel’s climax, a
tour de force
brilliantly balancing comedy with an almost savage sense of desolation, takes place during a dinner-party given by Esme on the Saturday evening.
The guests are Dick Hammond, who is Cressy’s married lover, his wife, Jennifer, and a much-ridiculed but touching local widower, Major Hawkes. Cressy is appalled when Dick walks into the
room, but tries to save the situation as best she can. We, however, know it is unsaveable as soon as we are introduced to the unknowingly wronged wife. ‘[Jennifer] was wearing a low-necked
beaded sweater and a terrifically hairy skirt. She [Cressy] smiled. It felt like a smile – and offered Jennifer a cigarette. “How
super
! I’m not in the least musical, but
honestly, I should adore to hear you play. I’m so stuck with the children these days, that nothing ever improves my mind.”’ The scene is perfectly paced, with the fact of her
husband’s deception gradually dawning on Jennifer, while Cressy, watching her lover’s patronizing behaviour, begins to feel that she herself may be over the worst. ‘Dan and Emma
had gone ahead to light the candles on the dining-room table. Thus Dick was able to hang back, and as she [Cressy] straightened herself up from the fireplace, he made a quizzical face –
helpless and conspiratorial dismay. She met it with an expression of impassive good humour. He tried harder.
‘“You look so wonderful, darling: God, I’m sorry about this: she insisted on my coming . . .”
‘[Cressy] brushed the lichen off her hands and said: “Don’t let it worry you,” as she started to move for the door . . . She felt about ten feet high and fifty miles
away. Good heavens, it was
easy
.’
Elizabeth Jane Howard is an enormously gifted writer, with a rare understanding both of human nature and of the power and poetry of the English language. Although
After Julius
is in a
sense a novel in a minor key, all her remarkable qualities are evident within it: her humanity, her wit, her powers of observation and description as well as her stylistic grace and technical
expertise. This novel marks an important stage in the development of one of the finest practitioners of our time of the sophisticated comedy of manners, a genre in which Howard was to attain near
perfection in her magnificent tetralogy about the Cazalet family completed in the 1990s.
Selina Hastings, 1994
PART ONE
FRIDAYS
CHAPTER 1
EMMA
N
OW
it is a Friday morning in November.
