Brief Lives (7 page)

I could see that with Julia one’s natural position was one of subservience, and I was no exception to the rule. I got into the habit of going round to visit her, since this was encouraged by both Owen and Charlie, for different reasons. Charlie was worried that she might feel lonely without the theatre to go to, and Owen was keen to please Charlie. I liked Julia well enough in those days, although I thought her selfish and outrageous, and no substitute for Millie. But Millie had married and gone to live near Oxford, and I felt the need of a female companion. My own state of mind was unstable. Mother, on my recent visits, had seemed to me so much more frail, so removed from my life and the world I had come to inhabit, though not comfortably, far from that. Fortunately I was able to secure the services of a neighbour, Mrs Barber, Joan Barber, who had a small child at school and was glad to go into Mother every day and sit with her. That way, at least I knew that she was not alone, although my heart ached for her and I could hardly wait for the opportunity to see her to come round. As always, I felt for her a mixture of love and pain, and I only hoped that as she drifted away from me she felt easier in her mind than I did.

But there was another cause for concern. I had found, in Owen’s sock drawer, several bundles of twenty-pound notes, which were evidently not destined for the household budget, and I was frightened. I assumed that this money was some kind of payment for services of a private nature, an investment, if you looked at the matter in an indulgent frame of mind, on the part of his clients, who would then have access to him for whatever purposes were under discussion.
I knew that he was declaring this money neither to the Inland Revenue nor to the partners, and I was alarmed, so alarmed that I closed the drawer with a blush and never asked Owen where the money had come from. He was noticeably more short-tempered these days, as if his conscience, so much more malleable than I had ever suspected, was making him very slightly uneasy. Communication between us was reserved to whatever had to be said, which was convenient, for we had few evenings on our own. Owen was rarely at home; when he was not abroad he was dining with clients in London restaurants, which he found easier than entertaining in Gertrude Street. Thus my role in our marriage was reduced even further. When we got to bed it was to sleep, for which I now had an enormous desire. I got into the habit of taking a nap in the afternoons, and even then I slept deeply. When I awoke it was with a familiar feeling of oppression, and I was anxious to get out of the house. On some days I was happy to go round to Julia, who never seemed to worry about anything and whose preoccupations were confined entirely to herself. When I did not go round she would telephone.

‘Now look here!’ This was her usual greeting. ‘It’s no good my sitting here and your sitting there. Why don’t you come round? I was thinking I might go through some of my clothes. I’ll never wear any of them again.’

‘Oh, nonsense, Julia.’

‘No, I mean it. They ought to go to the Red Cross.’ She pronounced it ‘Crorss’. ‘You could help me; I’m sure you’re clever about these things. And you’re out and about so much more than I am, you could tell me what’s in and what’s out. Not that I ever went by that. But then I always had dressmakers to tell me. And I suppose I ought to cut down now that I’m no longer earning.’

She would sigh, and I knew the sigh to be genuine. So I went. At the end of the afternoon there would be piles of dresses all over the drawing-room. As far as I know Maureen put them all back again: at any rate the same process was repeated several times. The Red Cross, so frequently invoked, never got anything out of it.

It is always hard for a woman who has been well known to drop out of sight. In a very real sense she loses significance. This had happened in my own case, although my own case was modest compared to Julia’s. I suppose this is why so many women are ambivalent about marriage these days: they are reluctant to give up the independence for which they have worked so hard and which they occasionally feel as a burden. They are not being frivolous: they fear that genuine loss of significance. It is all the harder for them if they have had to postpone their own desires, for these desires dwindle and are experienced as pain. Julia’s case was less harsh, of course, for she already had Charlie, the perfect partner for a woman with a famous presence, and the least self-serving of men. But the higher the achievement the greater the regret. And although I thought that Julia exaggerated her own fame—she never, for example, acknowledged anybody else’s—there was no doubt that she had achieved an enormous visibility. Julia was iconic, featured in
Vogue
, known for her amazing elegance as well as her rather
louche
performances. Her appearance in a restaurant turned heads and subdued conversations. She had the fearlessness of the true aristocrat: her announced intention of becoming middle-class was in fact a jeer at those who already were. Being of more modest condition myself I kept quiet, another little cowardice of mine, but with Julia one had to protect oneself as best one could. She was genuinely devoid of shame. Or of humility. Yet I could see that it
pained her to sit at home in Onslow Square, with such a reduced audience. It pained her, but she was resolute. Nowadays she rarely went out.

It pained me too. I felt that we were in a similar situation. I missed my singing days, now long gone, and even looked back wistfully to the time when the boys in the orchestra were so kind to me. And sometimes it was an effort to maintain my appearance. Julia was invaluable on that score. Always immaculate, she kept me up to the mark. She would gaze at me quite impersonally. ‘Shorter hair,’ she would pronounce. ‘And you need a manicure. And you might ask whoever does it if she could come round and do mine. Tell her the morning is my best time. Tell her to telephone about ten-thirty.’ And I would be off on another errand, but one which benefited myself as well as Julia.

It was Julia who had the idea that we should take a holiday together, the four of us. The winter was cruel to her incipient arthritis, and although she rarely went out, her flat, in which she spent so much of her time, was not quite warm enough. Actually I think—indeed I know—that she exaggerated her disability, as she exaggerated everything else. Once I saw her take a jar of marmalade that Maureen had been trying to open and give the lid a sharp wrench. ‘Why, Julia!’ I made the mistake of saying. ‘Your hands!’ She looked at me impassively, under the eyelids. ‘I just fancied a little piece of bread and marmalade,’ she said. ‘But it doesn’t matter. I’ll go without. You can take that away now,’ she said to Maureen, waving away the plate she had brought in. ‘I’ll have it later.’ She also exaggerated the fact that she never went out. She would sometimes go out to take one of her many defunct clocks and watches to the jeweller’s near South Kensington station, but these occasions were occasions for getting into character. She would
take a wicker basket, like a milkmaid going to market, which she thought appropriate for the environs of the Fulham Road, and smile prettily at passers-by. The basket was always empty. She never seemed to have time to buy the more humble commodities on which a household runs. Members of her entourage—Charlie, Maureen, myself—would be used for this purpose.

She deplored the cold, which she said made her hands ache, but in fact she was antagonistic to most forms of weather. She liked the artificial climate of her dressing-room rather than anything more natural or more variable. She would sigh for the sun, but when it came it did not always meet with her approval. ‘Just pull that curtain, would you? I can’t stand a glare in my eyes.’ This from a woman who could spend twenty minutes to half an hour examining her face in the light of the bulbs round her dressing-room mirror. But I have heard many women sighing for the sun, and I am inclined to take their longing seriously. What they are really saying is, ‘I am weary, even frightened. I look tired, and plain. Why have I changed so? Is it age that is doing this to me, or is it just the winter? If only the summer would come! Then I might look young again!’ For the sun is the symbol of all that has been lost, a great capricious god who might restore one to oneself, if only he were so minded. I too sighed for the sun, and I had reason to in those cruel dark rooms which I knew I could never transform into anything of my own. It was a relief to go to Onslow Square, although I found Julia’s flat almost equally unwelcoming. She liked colours which contained no warmth, and the white curtains and the mustard walls, the white carpet and the white and yellow lilies in the enormous vases of clear glass seemed to reduce the temperature, which was always chilly, even further. She had some quarrel
with the central heating, so that more often than not it had to be turned off completely. When it was stone-cold Maureen was despatched to the telephone to summon assistance. If none came, they would sit there, resigned, until Charlie came home, when all that was needed was someone to make the most minor adjustments, which they could easily have done for themselves. They could even fail to understand that they had to turn the knob and switch on the radiators. I myself have performed this function times without number. ‘You’re so clever, Fay,’ Julia would say. ‘What should we do without you?’

I was no longer happy, and in the restless state that this realization brought into being it was a welcome reprieve for me to sit in Julia’s drawing-room, uncomfortable though it was, and cold as it even more frequently was, and to calm myself down in the atavistic pleasure of purely female company. It is a resource of women to exclude men from time to time, to take a break from being on the alert and looking one’s best. It is a resource which can outlive its usefulness, as alliances are made and broken, and jealousies begin to peak. But at that particular period of my life, when Owen was away and winter turned the rooms in Gertrude Street into malevolent caves I would hurry round to Onslow Square as if to a sanctuary, a harem or zenana, where the half-maternal instincts of women could be deployed and the vagaries of men seen for what they really were. Women in such a situation will unite in deploring the childishness of men, their deceptions, and their frivolity, although, if questioned by an outsider, all would pride themselves on having such a fragile creature as their protector. Unmarried women come off worst in such company, and I began to feel sorry for Maureen, although I had never liked her, and I did not find that she improved on acquaintance.

Maureen, Julia’s slave, was about thirty-five at this time and thus considerably younger than the rest of us—Julia, her mother, Mrs Chesney, Julia’s former dresser, and myself. Maureen struck me as fairly hysterical in her devotion to Julia, who was dependent on her but who probably liked her as little as I did. Maureen was simply not very likeable, an eager hapless creature with permed hair and rimless glasses, usually dressed in a pair of shapeless navy blue trousers and a fairly juvenile sweater which she had knitted herself. Maureen’s furious knitting was an accompaniment to Julia’s more tasteless revelations: bent over the needles Maureen could thus hide the blushes which rose in unison with her nervous laughter. One stubby finger, with a childishly bitten nail, would push her glasses back up the bridge of her nose from time to time. She was extremely religious, according to Julia, and I suppose it was true, although Maureen herself made no reference to anything of a churchly nature. Why did she stand such a life of slavery? She had a free room in Onslow Square, and I am sure that Charlie must have paid her quite well, but she had given up her independence, and also her profession, for although she had been a very minor sort of journalist, there was no reason why she should not have gone on and made something of herself. I think she was enormously frightened of the outside world, and instinctively took refuge with the strongest person she could find. This happened to be Julia, met, not entirely by chance, in the days when Maureen was working on the local paper.

I felt uncomfortable with Maureen, who blushed and writhed and laughed at Julia’s remarks, although she must have heard them at least a hundred times: it occurred to me, in an idle moment, that with all her physical silliness and suggestibility, she was probably quite highly sexed, which
made her doubly unfortunate. The thought surprised me, for in those days I was not given to speculating about other people’s emotional lives. I assumed that they were all like my own: faulty. What I saw of Charlie made me think differently, but then Charlie was the exception. Whatever Julia was like as a wife, or even as a woman, she was successful in surrounding herself with an atmosphere of gallantry, and this had to be maintained by women as well as by men. In this respect Maureen was invaluable, and so, to a very much lesser extent, was I.

Nevertheless, I felt more relaxed when the five of us—Julia, Mrs Wilberforce, Mrs Chesney, Maureen and myself—were all present, because the absence of any one of us would encourage Julia to examine, with the others, some tiny fault which she would mention deprecatingly, and which only perverseness, it seemed, stopped us from rectifying. Thus, after an absence of a few days, when Owen was at home, I went round to Onslow Square, on one occasion, to hear myself accused of morbidity. ‘It’s such a little thing,’ said Julia, smiling. ‘But I had to mention it. I said to Mummy the other day, “Have you noticed how morbid Fay has become?” And Mummy was forced to say that she had. And Pearl (Mrs Chesney) was worried that something might be wrong. But I said, “Nonsense, I’m sure there’s nothing wrong. Why should there be? As far as I know Owen hasn’t got another woman, although of course he has plenty of opportunity, and no one would know if he kept a mistress in Monte Carlo or Málaga or wherever he goes, but I somehow don’t think that’s the trouble.” ’ She paused here and I trembled for Owen, though not as Julia would have wished. She continued. ‘I think you’ve just developed a morbid outlook, Fay, and you’ve got to guard against it. Heaven knows I’ve got more to be morbid about than you
have, but being on the stage teaches you to keep going, in spite of your feelings. That’s what I try to do. With some success, I hope.’