Brief Lives (2 page)

She was Margaret Julia Wilberforce, and she always referred
to herself as Wilberforce, although to her mother she was Meg. On stage, of course, she was simply Julia. Yet it meant almost as much to her to be a Wilberforce as to be Julia, and I was given to understand that to be a Wilberforce was to have access to a certain magnificence. This was never made explicit. The only reason she regretted not having children was that there was no one to carry on the name, for the unfortunate brother was unlikely to marry, being given to all the excesses except those pertaining to love and responsibility. The magnificence of the Wilberforces, now reduced to that of Julia herself, resided in those great-grandfathers, grandfathers, and uncles in the army, together with the cherished memory of her father, also in the army, whose photograph, in a silver frame, had pride of place both in the drawing-room and on the table by Julia’s bed. This honour was awarded to neither of her two husbands, Simon Hodges, always referred to as Hodge, and Charlie Morton. When Julia’s father was mentioned, both she and her mother would have tears in their eyes, after which, shakily, they would pour themselves more whisky. Hodge, whom I never met, had also been in the army but had otherwise proved unsatisfactory, and had been fairly summarily divorced. ‘We were too young,’ Julia would say, with a rueful self-indulgent smile: somehow one gathered that the interlude—for it had been an interlude rather than a true marriage—had meant very little to her.

Charlie was different. ‘Charlie is my prop and mainstay,’ Julia would say, and it was neither less nor more than the truth. Soft-voiced, soft-footed, bulky, vague, and charming, Charlie was the ideal husband for a woman like Julia, though, not being a Wilberforce, he remained somewhat marginal when in the presence of Julia and her mother. I suspected him of maintaining the mother, in her service flat
somewhere off Sloane Avenue: he certainly kept the entire household supplied in Onslow Square, for if ever Julia went to a shop, which was rarely, it was to produce a hopelessly shattered clock to be mended (‘But you must! It was Granny’s! Promise me that you’ll try’) or, very occasionally, to visit the hairdresser if her regular man, who came to her at home, was on holiday. She insisted that her wants were immaterial, so it was Charlie who telephoned Harrods or Selfridges with a quite substantial order, or, his jacket off, cooked Julia an omelette in the evening. She lived on omelettes and whisky, maintaining that she liked neither, and appeared none the worse for it.

I was indignant that she should make Charlie wait on her, but he accepted it as a natural obligation. I think he was always conscious of having married a great beauty, of having taken her out of the running, as it were, and therefore had in a sense to enter her service. She treated him as her suitor, was all reminiscence of how he had waited for her at the stage door, had sent flowers night after night, and had finally written a letter, to be delivered to her dressing-room, saying, ‘You are the woman of my life. There will be no other.’ This was recalled several times in my hearing. I thought it overdone, beneath the dignity of a man like Charlie, who was, after all, a reasonably eminent and certainly fashionable solicitor, with offices in Hanover Square, where my own husband, Owen Langdon, was a junior partner. Yet he would acquiesce uncomplainingly in Julia’s little performances, as if he were conscious of being somehow not quite up to the mark, would sometimes pad round unobtrusively with a duster, although a Mrs Wheeler was supposed to clean thoroughly every morning. He was a nice-looking man, tall, broad, perhaps a little plump, with warm brown eyes and a cheerful expression, always ready
to break into a smile. Occasionally his face would take on a faraway look, as if he might welcome a change of subject, but he was too good-hearted ever to feel irritation, and it was more natural, even pleasant, for him to smile and to concur than to strike out on his own. It occurred to me to wonder whether he were lonely, or whether he felt the burden of not being a Wilberforce. I never believed that Julia had much of an inner life. She was quite extraordinarily self-sufficient and therefore had a natural authority. She depended on no one, not even Charlie, for all that he was her prop and mainstay. Her brain, I sometimes thought, was perhaps sharper than his, and he was a very intelligent man, certainly more subtle than his wife. They were a handsome couple. He always stood a little behind her, throwing her into relief. It was only fitting that his greying hair should show off her own dark auburn bob. Artfully wrought, and a subject of intense discussion with Bobby, her hairdresser, her short sleek dark pageboy (also old-fashioned, now that I come to think of it) remained a fixed feature of her appearance until the end of her life.

Charlie was a darling. When he died Julia remained in control, was undoubtedly desolate, yet never shed the sort of tears that the memory of her father summoned up. She remained dry-eyed, but she must have suffered, or at least registered the heaviness of the blow, for she rarely went out after that. She hardly needed to, for Maureen had moved in by then, but it struck me as odd. Julia was not infirm, although she was very stiff, and she was only in her sixties. It was simply that she felt more in control in Onslow Square than she would have done in the street, where she would have been just another widow.

We rallied round. I was called on to do quite a bit for her in those days, although what I did never quite met with her
approval. ‘Never mind,’ she would say. ‘My standards are probably too high.’ Maureen, and Julia’s former dresser, Pearl Chesney, would laugh sympathetically, for they were nearly always in attendance, together, incredibly, with her mother, now aged eighty-four. It looked as if Julia would also be long-lived: she was protected from the manifold stresses of this life by her reclusiveness and her own steely resolve. I can see her now, sitting in her acid yellow and white drawing-room in Onslow Square, whisky in hand. Through all her various ages she appeared to me unchanged, slender, fine, sardonic, hieratic, heartless. ‘I hear Nigel’s run off again,’ she would say. ‘Well, you can hardly blame him. That wife of his … Did you ever meet such a boring woman?’ She was never on the side of the woman in such a situation. I felt there was something almost masculine in her solidarity with men who behaved badly. One had to be very tough to qualify with Julia, or even to gain her attention. That was why she had so little time for me, although fate had bound us together in a way that my nature could hardly tolerate or withstand.

I would come into that drawing-room, with flowers, or some little trifle—one always brought an offering—which she would take from me with a gesture of palpitating gratitude, and then pause to consider. ‘Oh,’ she would say, on a note of dwindling enthusiasm, pretending to examine it or them more closely. ‘Oh. How charming.’ She would mark a pause, and then the eyelids would fall to half-mast, at which anyone in attendance—her manicurist, Maureen, Pearl Chesney, Mrs Wilberforce—would burst into delighted laughter. ‘Quite charming,’ she would go on, losing interest. ‘Put them there, would you? I’ll see to them later.’ Any flowers I brought her, and I brought her many, always ended up on a side table, sometimes to be put, much later,
into a vase, sometimes to stay there until they ended up in the wastepaper basket.

It was all a long time ago. She was nearly eighty when she died, and I am getting on for seventy. She never came to terms with age: in a sense she never had to, for she never lost her power. For myself things have been different. I was always hapless, timid. Yet age has dealt with me kindly so far. I keep well, and although I have put on a little weight my figure is still quite trim. I make the most of my appearance, follow the fashions, abide by my mother’s rule: brown in the autumn, navy in the spring. One or two people still remember me from the time when I sang on the wireless. I was Fay Dodworth, quite a favourite in those early days. I did the lighter sort of ballad, the serious spot on various comedy shows, before they all became too sophisticated. I had a pretty voice. Some said I was a pretty girl, although standards were lower then: one could be admired for such things as wavy hair or high cheekbones or a small waist or even a straight back. I was not sorry when it all came to an end; I never had the temperament for a performer. But I made a little comeback when I read the serial on ‘Woman’s Hour’: my voice was still musical, and my diction had always been good. That brought me quite a few letters from people who had listened to me in the early days. I felt quite bucked. Nothing of note has happened since then, but I keep busy, and cheerful. I have been complimented on my high standards. I do try to keep them up.

Of course, I know the truth of how I really look, at night, with my hair down. I watched, almost objectively, the emergence of the asexual body, the body that must be treated with care, until it finally takes over, at the end. As my figure lost its definition, became subject to greater gravity, I knew that love was gone for ever. But it is the same for everyone,
I told myself; everyone is bound by the law of change. One evening, I remember, I looked in puzzlement at my long hair, from which nearly all the colour had gone, and felt the softness at my waist. I wept then, briefly. But I slept that night as usual, and in the morning I woke and thought how foolish I had been. I am always light-hearted in the mornings. The late afternoon is my bad time, when the light goes. I get nervous then, and long for someone to come. At those times I feel fatally like my mother, waiting in the dusk for me to wave to her as I approached the house. But after a while I get up and make a cup of coffee and switch on for the news. There is absolutely no point in giving way to melancholy. There is always another day, or so I like to think.

‘Arcady’ was my song. ‘Arcady, Arcady is always young.’ I sang it at the end of the programme, sometimes as an encore. Such a pretty song. And I sang ‘Only Make-Believe’, and ‘You Are My Heart’s Delight’, and ‘I’ll Be Loving You Always’. Beautiful songs, all of them. Sometimes the words come back to me, even now, but I try not to think about the melodies, which, since I have grown older, strike me as unbearably sad, plaintive, modest, wistful, redolent of everyday disappointments, even tragedies. I try not to brood, although I suppose I have as much to brood over as anyone else. So much gone. So much lost. But then I rally again, somehow or other. I have been lucky, really: nothing drove me off balance, which is so important if one at least tries to keep one’s dignity. On the whole my life has been very easy, very pleasant. I was a pretty girl, I married well … It all seems a long time ago. But what most women want I once had. I try to remember that.

MY FATHER, JIMMY DODWORTH
, was a cinema manager, in the days when cinema managers stood in the foyer every evening in dinner jackets, dress shirts and bow ties. We lived in Camberwell, in one of those narrow Georgian houses now sought after by the sons and daughters of merchant bankers. We thought the house was just an ordinary house, rather dark, with too many stairs, and not much of a garden. My mother, who was highly strung and tired easily, disliked it: she dreamed of a modern flat, in a suburb like Ealing or Golders Green, with a fitted kitchen and central heating. I loved the house, which was the only one I had ever known. I played quite happily, as a child, on the landings or in my small bedroom, bounced a ball against the wall in the garden, which also contained a coal shed and an outhouse. There was an elderberry tree at the end, where the garden overlooked a narrow alley which ran out into the main road, and I would take my chair and sit underneath the tree, pretending I was in the country. I had
no notion of what the country was like, for I rather think we never took a holiday: Father made a point of being on duty, as he called it, and Mother was a nervous traveller. Although restless and over-imaginative, it suited her to stay at home, to leave the house only when necessary, to do her shopping or to see a film. The cinema satisfied her cravings for a better life, revealing to her a world of possibilities, of luxury and extravagance, in which all one needed was a pair of dancing feet, a pretty face, or a singing voice which would captivate the man of one’s dreams and secure one’s heart’s desire. My mother believed in these things, and I did too.

Our lives were shaped by the cinema, both in a physical and a moral sense. The appeal of the cinema in those days was its classlessness. The heroine was, more often than not, a plucky orphan, at most a modest dancer on a chorus line, or a shop-girl with blonde curls and a gift for repartee. The convention was that the hero should be of more elevated rank, that he should be astonished, beguiled, and finally swept off his feet by this spirited little nobody, who nevertheless was always impeccably turned out, spruce and provocative in her puffed sleeves and her silk stockings, as very few real working girls had the energy or the resources to be in those hard times. In virtually every Hollywood comedy there would be a villainous comic chorus of snobs, with cigarette holders and archaic hats—usually the hero’s mother and a discarded fiancée or two—all of whom would be vanquished by the heroine’s pertness and the hero’s sincerity. There would, inevitably, be an offer of marriage, for they were very moral tales. A girl won through by charm, or personality, not by influence, while if the hero ever had any base idea of seduction he was soon reformed by the virtue demonstrated by the object of his fascination—it
was never, ever, passion—until such time as the knot was tied, to the accompaniment of a full-blown song and dance extravaganza.