After Julius (2 page)

She woke at exactly quarter past seven in a back bedroom on the top floor of a house in Lansdowne Road. In fourteen minutes the telephone would ring, and a man’s voice – charged with
that sense of routine emergency that she associated with war films: ‘enemy bearing green 320’ – would tell her that it was seven-thirty, which of course, she would know already.
But when she tried cancelling the telephone, she didn’t wake up at all. These fifteen minutes, which in a sense were some march on the day, could surely be put to some use or pleasure, but
almost always she lay rigidly governed by her anticipation of the tearing ring, and when it came, she picked up the receiver so quickly that there was always a wait for the man’s voice.

Then she 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. It was an attic room, almost the kind which in the country would have been used for storing apples and old finery; and the window had been slightly enlarged by some pirate
builders who regarded draughts as a natural hazard of any alteration. Cold thick air streamed purposefully in from the edges of its frame, but the view, when she had dragged the rusty linen
marigold and butterflies together (her mother had given her the curtains) was pretty for London. 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.

The stain – like spilt coffee – on the ceiling seemed to have got larger in the night. She would have to tell the Ballantynes, which was doubly awful, because the roof was their job,
and they couldn’t afford it, so they got the frightful builder Bill Ballantyne had known in the war, whose face was congested with good living and his chronic, unreliable smile. He smiled and
smiled, and agreed to any suggestion; then weeks later he botched up whatever he had been asked to do and broke something else. He must make a fortune smashing things up, and nearly all his
customers were people who’d known him in the war which made a mysterious difference to their view of his character: like Bill’s, it was always based on some kind of fancy nostalgia.

The bathroom was all the colour of tinned peas, but as it had been painted and tiled by Mr Goad, the tiles were cracking and the paint lay in huge bubbling blisters. He had also chipped the bath
quite painfully when he installed it, but when Bill had remonstrated about this he had countered with a nine months’ wait for a new bath, and the fact that he had bought it cheap – as a
favour to Bill – from a job lot of exports rejected by Venezuela.

She turned on her bath and then went back along the passage to the door opposite her room. It was shut, and when she opened it, a stale haze of smoke, old warmth, and suspended crisis assailed
her. It was their sitting-room, and as she switched on the light she knew that Cressy had been having one of her scenes.

It was really a very nice, enormous attic, with sloping ceilings and a squat black stove – now out. For a moment she looked at the cushions all over the floor, the large, white
handkerchiefs crumpled and crushed into creases of the sofa, the cups of untouched black coffee and the piano open, thanked goodness it was the week-end, and took the coffee pot to the kitchen for
breakfast.

Her sister, as usual, was difficult to wake. She had dumped the breakfast tray, lit the electric fire, drawn the curtains and turned off the light before there was the slightest movement. Cressy
lay on her front with her head turned to the wall, but as the light went out, she muttered something, threw out a beautiful arm and unclenched her fingers: another crumpled handkerchief fell on to
the floor.

‘Coffee,’ said Emma briskly – but her heart sank.

Cressy turned in bed and looked at her. She did not speak, but her eyes, which seemed already full of tears, brimmed over and momentous drops slipped down her face. ‘Oh Lord!’ She
sat up.

Emma picked up the handkerchief: it was sopping.

‘Do you want another one?’

Cressy shook her head, and reached out for a faded old pink cashmere cardigan which she put round her shoulders and wrapped across her like a shawl. Then she took the sherry glass filled with
lemon juice that Emma faithfully squeezed for her every morning, and drank it. Emma, whose teeth could not bear her to watch this, began pouring coffee and wondering whether it was better for
Cressy to talk and cry more, or shut up and probably cry later. She exchanged the sherry glass for a huge Wedgwood mug of black coffee, and said rather hopelessly: ‘Are you warm
enough?’

Cressy nodded, and a flurry of tears fell out. Then she said: ‘He’s going to Rome for the week-end.
Rome!
’ she repeated bitterly.

‘Couldn’t you go with him?’

‘He won’t take me. We might be seen. After all these months of looking forward to this one week-end, which God knows isn’t much to ask, there’s suddenly a conference in
Rome.’

‘I don’t suppose he could possibly help it.’

‘Oh, I know that. That’s just Life!’ She said it with a kind of savage intimacy, as though she had always known it lay in wait to wreck her: ‘He could have taken me with
him if he’d wanted to badly enough. But if things are at all difficult, he simply doesn’t care enough to cope.’

And if they weren’t difficult,
you
wouldn’t care enough, Emma thought uncontrollably; but like everything about Cressy (and probably everyone else) this wasn’t strictly
true.

‘When does he get back?’

‘Sunday night – he thinks. It’s just that I did so desperately want – so terribly – just – ’

‘A bit of time with him.’

‘It’s odd – they don’t seem to mind at all. Like going to a concert, but never practising. It’s like an entertainment – kind of fringe on life, but not the
actual stuff.’

‘If he wasn’t married would you marry him?’

‘Marry,’ she repeated dreamily: ‘I don’t know. I’ve tried to be realistic about it, you see, and he’s always been married. That’s the point.’

‘But, if you could find the right person, you would like to be married to them?’ Emma felt a sudden panic that this question might be answered the wrong way – leaving no way
out, and spoil all sympathy, kindness or anything that one could feel.

But Cressy said immediately:

‘It is the only thing I really want in the world. If I could find the right person, I’d do anything to keep things good and make them better. I just feel all wrong by myself: you
don’t; I suppose that’s why I have affairs and you don’t? But
you
would marry, wouldn’t you – if you found someone?’

She shrugged, because an almost tangible weight of hopelessness descended with this question. ‘Oh – I expect whoever I was supposed to marry got killed in the war.’

Cressy looked shocked. ‘Really, Em, that’s just pure neurosis. You’ve got plenty of time. Ten years younger than me – phew!’

‘I’m much older than you were when you were married. Anyhow, I’m not so sure as you are that it would make me so terribly happy. Look, I’ll have to go in a minute. Are
you coming home for the week-end?’

‘Perhaps – I’ll think – there might be a fog – I don’t know – I’ll ring you.’ She suffered from the chronic disability of the lovesick to
make any plan outside that orbit. Emma left her – out of tears, at least, and combing out her coarse, black, glossy hair which hung in pointed waving locks to her shoulders, like a young
witch. She certainly didn’t look her age.

Poor dear – she really
was
unhappy, thought Emma as she dressed. Probably not for the reason that she imagined, which she felt, after all, could be changed, but for a much worse,
deeper, more creeping reason. I suppose people who are invariably serious about something end up by boring the other person about whatever it is. She tried this theory out: food, poetry, politics,
love; well, it seemed true of the first three and so – but of course, being really serious about something would mean seeing it all round, in which case there would be some part of it to take
lightly. Perhaps Cressy wasn’t serious
enough
? If one took oneself seriously, on the other hand, one never found anything to laugh at, which implied a partial view. That is what I
would like, she thought, turning off her gallant little fire which seemed to have had some sort of fit in her absence and was purple and flickering. I would really like to find more things to laugh
at. I’d like people to come up to me and say, ‘This is a laughing matter’, and mean it.

She had dressed in a pleated skirt, a heavy navy-blue boy’s jersey and her new navy-blue openwork stockings in which she felt both warm and dashing. She hauled her heavy red coat out of
the cupboard, checked the typescripts in her music case and looked out of the window to see whether it had begun to rain. The seagull was now sitting on a chimney stack, looking dank and dirty and
lonely; it wasn’t raining but the air was loaded with greasy black moisture; she could imagine the drops beading its feathers, and got out a thick woollen square for her head. Her head made
her remember the ceiling, and she went back to Cressy’s room.

Cressy was standing at her window, barefoot, shivering, and as she turned towards Emma, streaming again with tears.

‘Thought you’d gone. It
does
look like fog, though. There’s some hope. Or do you think it’s
craven
of me to want there to be fog?’

‘Of course not. But if there isn’t
do
come down. It would be a popular move. You could come back on Sunday.’

‘I know. I’d thought of that. Have you got just
one
cigarette? Dick smoked all mine last night.’

While she hunted in her large, packed handbag, she said: ‘If you see either Ballantyne, could you mention my ceiling? It’s getting bad again – different place to last time. Oh
dear, I’m afraid I haven’t. Ask Bill for one.’

‘So that I’ll be sure to remember the ceiling. Do you really want Goad padding about your room when you’re away?’

‘No, but I thought next week – I
must
go. Leave it – never mind. ’Bye.
Don’t
despair. Every silver lining has a cloud. Think of your career. I’m
catching the four twenty if possible.’ And she escaped.

Down the stairs, past the aura of steamy Floris bath oil, the cracked yellowing paint and the dark-green linoleum of the bedroom landing, down another flight with a dreary etching of some
different part of Venice at each step (what Venice had to put up with! – like the Gospels and Mozart and the sky on calendars), into the hall, coffee-coloured unless the light was on; past
the sensual smell of other people’s breakfast, and the hall table thick with bills and a city hat; past the guns, golf clubs and German helmet (first world war) and an angry, dusty
badger’s head sticking out from the porridge wall like a furry gargoyle. The fanlight had the number of the house painted on it: backwards it had a misshapen, outlandish air. She could never
open the front door with one hand, which meant dumping everything. Down the crazy path, past sodden privet to the gate which seemed always malevolently covered with machine oil. Down the street,
which in spring and summer was edged by front gardens flowing with lilac, laburnum and cherry, with pyracanthus, plum, iris and may, and well-to-do cats packed between the railing spikes, and very
old men being strained on a stroll by ancient Victorian terriers. She remembered this crowded, streamingly scented scene with longing as she hurried through the cold beady air to the Tube, but
forgot the summer misery of being trapped in an airless office throughout the few really ravishing days. She was late for the office in any case, and being late always makes one forget anything
else that has happened.

She thought about her sister on her way to Holborn. In spite of her rather foolish unthinking question about marriage being answered in such a way as to allay her immediate anxieties about
Cressy, she did get waves of panic about Cressy’s future. Thirty-seven seemed to her – although of course she would never have breathed it – an interminable age; it was difficult
to be a promising pianist at thirty-seven, and precarious to be crying your eyes out over detached but married men: the trouble was that the men got in the way of the music, so that it had never
seemed to get established enough to be the comfort and inspiration that Emma was sure it was meant to be. Had Cressy, she wondered, really been unhinged by her early, disastrous marriage? By her
father’s death? Of course, she had married after their father had died – perhaps it had been some kind of Oedipus rebound that had made her marry, suddenly, a man whom she hardly knew.
Poor Miles: he had been fifteen years older than Cressy – struggling with the Wavy Navy: ‘Irregular hours, filthy food, appalling seasickness’ he was quoted as having said on one
of his brief leaves. The marriage lasted barely a year because he had been killed on the Dieppe Raid. She remembered the guns shaking up her tummy and backbone as they sat on the lawn in Sussex
with Cressy – pale-green – skinning rabbits. She had been eight, then, and it had seemed extraordinary to have a raid in the middle of a fine summer’s day. ‘I’ll make
you a pair of gloves, Em,’ Cressy had said, and she had watched while Cressy pegged out the skins on a board in the sun, and showered them with some white powder. But afterwards she had
simply cried a lot and played the piano – sad, stormy, dreary old Brahms – she quite forgot about the gloves. The guns before that had been Dunkirk. Really Emma couldn’t remember
before the war at all, excepting isolated pictures of her father, which were always the same, always memories in the middle of something – never the beginning or the end. ‘We were just
looking for a ball in the bushes at the end of the lawn.’ Couldn’t remember it being lost, or finding it, but the sudden delicious smell of her father’s silk handkerchief when he
wiped her face – lavender and lebanon cedar and the silk as smooth as bottle glass: ‘You blackamoor,’ he said. The long grass had come up to her chest – she couldn’t
have been more than four. Then, doing something called ‘ducks on mud’ with his hands holding her cheeks: she had never heard a duck on mud, but she used to think it was a terribly funny
and difficult noise to make. She had been seven when he died, a few days after her birthday. He had simply gone to London one morning and not come back. ‘He’s gone to London for the
week-end,’ she had said the first breakfast that he hadn’t been there: these were Wednesday and Thursday, but the week-end for her meant two nights – she hadn’t noticed that
they always started on a Friday. The worst thing about that had been her mother’s face, which afterwards she felt had seemed to be charged with something more than grief, and the dreadful,
racking sobs which she had woken to hear coming from her room at night, and which had frightened and horrified her so much (her
mother
– at such a loss?) that Emma had not wanted to
touch her for days . . .