Bad Girls Good Women (43 page)

‘Might have. Just one or two,’ was the gloomy response. ‘We’ll have to manage somehow with what we’ve got. That’ll be all for today, Julia.’

They were all dabbing tenderly at the suit as if it was far more important than she was.
Of course, it is more important
, Julia thought furiously.

When her feet were dry and back in her own shoes the photographer said, ‘All over now. Cheer up, dear.’

‘I’m quite cheerful,’ Julia responded, with dignity. ‘I just hate dogs.’

He pursed his lips and raised his eyebrows, reminding her infuriatingly of George.

There was no one at home, of course, when she reached the square. Mattie had already left for the theatre, and Felix was absent increasingly often, nowadays, about his own mysterious business. Julia made herself a hot drink and sat down beside the fire, snuffling a little and reflecting that no one would care if she caught pneumonia.

When the telephone rang, she almost didn’t answer it because she was so sure it would be for Mattie. But she was wrong. It was Bliss, ‘Would you like to have dinner with me?’

Julia beamed. ‘Bliss, wonderful Bliss. I’d like to have dinner with you more than anything else in the world.’

‘Good God. I was going to suggest a spaghetti, but I’d better revise my intentions after a response like that.’

Julia smiled. She could just see his ironic expression. Bliss was exactly what she needed after a day like today. And the empty flat had begun to feel almost creepily silent.

‘I’ll pick you up at eight o’clock.’

Julia took extra care in getting herself ready. She soaked in a long, hot bath with plenty of L’Air du Temps bath essence. Miraculously, her snuffles dried up. She had recently had her hair cut into a neat, dark cap and she brushed it into gleaming feathers around her face. Finally, she put on her new Bazaar outfit, a short grey flannel tunic with a mustard polo-necked jumper and matching tights.

When Alexander came in he looked at her for an extra moment. ‘You look lovely,’ he said, and kissed her lightly on the cheek.

He took her to a place she particularly liked, in Kensington. It was small, noisy and fashionable, full of people who paraded between the tables and stopped to exchange fulsome greetings with one another. Julia knew that it was far from being Bliss’s favourite, and she was touched that he had chosen it for her. In return, she tried extra hard to be lively and to make him laugh. He watched her face through the candlelight, seeing the darkness in her eyes. He put his hand over hers and the fingers laced in his, almost greedily.

But they did laugh a good deal over their meal, and later they saw some friends of Sophia’s and joined their table for coffee and brandy. Julia thought it had been an excellent evening, and that she had been faultlessly happy and carefree.

But when they were back in the little cocoon of Alexander’s red Mini, heading home towards the square, he asked her, ‘What’s the matter, Julia?’

They had stopped at some traffic lights and he put out his hand to turn her face to his. There was no question of resisting him. She tried hard to find something light to say, but Bliss’s stare was too direct.

‘I don’t know what I’m doing,’ Julia whispered.

‘Work?’

‘Yes, but not just that. I don’t have any bearings. Not like Mattie. Or Felix, or you. Everything seems like an empty sea.’ He was looking at her so closely that she blinked, and bent her head to escape him.

The lights changed and Bliss turned his head too. The car slid forward again.

‘Shall I tell you what happened to me today?’ she asked.

He nodded gravely. ‘Yes, please.’

She told him the story about the dog, and the Dior suit, and the Serpentine. She made it as amusing as she could, exaggerating the details a little. But at the end he didn’t laugh. ‘Not all that funny,’ he commented.

Julia was touched. He had seen through her flippant story and understood her humiliation, even though she had imagined it was well hidden. That was perceptive of him, and the power of his perception seemed suddenly at odds with his vagueness. She looked at him, her eyes wide open, wondering if she had looked before without ever really seeing. ‘No, I suppose not,’ she agreed. ‘Messing things up isn’t ever funny, is it?’

Alexander reached out and took her hand again. His felt very large and firm. ‘I was wondering,’ he said casually, ‘if you’d like to come with me to Ladyhill for the weekend. There won’t be anyone there. I’d like to show it to you.’

‘To Ladyhill? All right,’ Julia said. And then, thinking how lukewarm that sounded, she added hastily, ‘I’d love to see it, of course. I’ll look forward to it.’

Alexander drove her down to Ladyhill on Saturday morning. They set out very early, into a thin mist that masked a featureless world, but as they drove the sun came out and the countryside emerged in shades of ochre and opal and sharp green. There were new lambs in the fields and Julia stared blankly at them.

It was a long way, and they stopped for lunch in a country pub that reminded her of the one Josh had taken her to. Those days seemed to belong to another life.

‘Are you all right?’ Bliss asked her. They were walking down a lane, stretching their legs before driving the last miles of the journey. Julia noticed that Bliss looked right in the countryside. He wore clothes that were the same colours as the fields, and he held his shoulders squarer, as if there was more space available for his height and breadth. Her own thin shoes slid on the hummocks of wet grass and the pillar-box red of her coat suddenly seemed too bright. But she didn’t want Bliss to have to feel concerned for her.

‘Yes, I’m all right.’ She smiled. ‘It takes a bit of getting used to, all this … space. I can’t remember when I was last out of London.

‘Dear me,’ Bliss said mildly.

They reached Ladyhill when the afternoon sun was shining squarely into the windows of the west face. They turned a corner between tall trees and the house stood in front of them, blazing with reflected light from every tiny pane of the leaded windows. The house seemed to glow with living warmth, and in contrast the clipped yew trees in the paved space enclosed by the wings looked dead black, two-dimensional.

Alexander left his car slewed at an angle in front of the house’s magnificence. They crossed the hollowed paving stones in silence. Alexander opened the front door under its stone arch, and they passed through into the dimness. There was a faint scent of lavender and of the soft accretion, in invisible corners, of centuries of dust. Standing in the hallway, where a shaft of light from the high window at the turn of the stairway struck across their heads, Julia looked upwards. There was carved oak and the dull gleam of gilt picture frames, a great iron hoop with brackets for dozens of candles suspended by a chain from the dim heights, shadows, and silence. Outside the birds had been singing and there had been the wind in the elm trees, but there was no sound inside the house.

She couldn’t raise her voice above a whisper. ‘It’s beautiful.’

To Julia, houses were no more than little boxes like those in Fairmile Road or on the estate, or else they were set out in rows in London terraces, sliced up inside into flats and rooms where the ceiling mouldings ended abruptly at arbitrary new walls. Even the flat in the square was only home because Mattie and Felix were there, not because of her own possessions laid out in it. And Julia, who loved everything new and sharp-edged and iconoclastic, saw how different Ladyhill was. Its beauty was timeless and majestic, dwarfing her and her irrelevant appraisal of it. She followed Alexander obediently through the Long Gallery, looking out at the green view of the gardens beneath the windows, touching the yellow brocade hangings of the great half-tester bed in the room beyond it. Alexander called it the Queen’s Bed.

There were family rooms as well as formal ones, Alexander’s father’s bedroom with silver-backed brushes on the tallboy, Sophia’s mother’s with a lavender silk bedcover, Alexander’s and Sophia’s rooms still decorated with the clutter of childhood. At the end of the corridor there was a nursery with a dappled rocking-horse and shelves of tattered books. They wandered through the rooms together, undisturbed. Julia was glad that he had chosen a time when it was empty of everyone but themselves. The spirit of the house closed intimately around her.

Afterwards, she remembered how all her casually acquired impressions of Bliss changed that afternoon. She was impressed by the house — more than impressed, she was awed by it – but she was struck most strongly of all by the difference in Alexander. His sardonic detachment was gone, and his faint, weary vagueness went with it. He was as gentle as he always was to Julia, but he seemed also more forthright, and more able to show her his feelings. As he talked about the house and told her the stories of it, his love for the place showed clearly. She saw it vividly, and her recognition of it provided a missing piece in her understanding of him. Belonging to Ladyhill defined Alexander, and she realised that in London he was different because he was less than himself.

They came back to the ground floor once more by the back stairs, and threaded their way through a seeming warren of stone-flagged kitchens. The house wasn’t large, but the succession of rooms was bewildering. Julia had lost her bearings, and she exclaimed with surprise when they re-entered the drawing room by a different door. Alexander clicked it shut and the rectangle disappeared into the panelling.

‘A secret door,’ she exclaimed delightedly.

‘Only semi-secret. For the servants to make discreet exits. Or perhaps for the hostess to escape her guests, for a moment or two?’

With the thought of all the people who must have thronged through this room, all around her like a ghostly pageant in their different clothes, Julia wandered down the length of it. There was a huge open stone hearth, and the scent of woodsmoke lingered pleasantly in the heavy, mulberry velvet drapes of the curtains. There were family photographs clustered in silver frames, but the pictures hanging against the panelling were English landscapes rather than portraits. Books and magazines lay on the tables, and there was a pipe in a rack beside a deep armchair. Julia remembered what Sophia had said about Ladyhill. ‘It’s where we come from, Daddy, Alexander and me. The most beautiful place in the world.’

Julia had thought she was affected, but she understood her words now. For all its size and grandeur, this was a room for living in, redolent of family life. Yet China Bliss had left here, hadn’t she? She must ask Alexander about it. Not now, but sometime.

In the tall bay at the end of the room stood a grand piano, stacked with sheet music. Alexander went to it and began to look through the piles. He took a sheet seemingly at random, and then he opened the piano and began to play. Julia had heard him play often before, at Markham Square, but never like this. She didn’t even know what the piece was, but the notes fell on her as softly as the petals dropping from the scarlet tulips in the vases. As softly as the invisible Ladyhill dust.

Alexander played for a long time and she watched his head, bent intently over the keys. The light began to fade outside. Julia knew that she liked Alexander very much, and that he was important. It was a rare moment of being quite sure of one truth, its existence untouched and unaffected by the network of other conflicting truths that governed her life.

She envied him too.

She envied his roots here in this place, and the sureness that their secure anchorage gave back to him. It was the sureness that had transformed him for her this afternoon. It made her feel the feebleness of her own grip on the world, and the shallowness of the toehold that Betty and Vernon had hollowed for themselves. She understood their fear and their desperation, then, with the solidity of Ladyhill’s centuries rearing around her.

Then she looked back at Alexander’s bent head and smiled, and the music joined them together as surely as if they were lying down together.

It was almost too dark for him to read the music when he lifted his head again.

‘I’ll make some tea,’ he said.

They lit the fire, and then they sat in front of it with the big silver teapot on a tray between them. The logs crackled and shadows thickened in the corners of the room.

Julia said, ‘It’s so quiet. This house needs people. Lots and lots of people. Mad parties.’

‘Perhaps it does,’ Alexander said. He came closer to her and they examined each other’s faces intently. In London, Julia might have said something flippant to make the moment pass. Here, in the firelight, she put up her fingers to touch his face. The glow from the hearth reddened the blond hair over his ears. Her eyes travelled slowly, seeing each of his features in turn. They had become familiar to her without ever seeming especially interesting, but now it was as if he was a different person, to be rediscovered. Not Bliss, who she had giggled about with Mattie. Julia wondered a little at her own crassness. This Alexander was a stranger, faintly awe-inspiring. But as she looked into his eyes, Julia saw that he loved her. How could she have been unaware of it before? It seemed very simple, and reassuring, and welcome. He smoothed the hair back from her face, and kissed her. His mouth was more insistent, and her own opened obediently under it. Her head fell back against the cushions and his tongue traced the arch of her throat.

He said, ‘Julia,’ and the timbre of his voice reminded her of Josh. She lifted her head again and stared at the log in the hearth. The surface of it was crazed with grey ash, but when the draught fanned it red veins ran over it like lava. Julia shivered a little and went to close the velvet curtains on the darkness outside. Released from their dull gilt ropes and tassels, they fell in faded but opulent folds. George and Felix would approve, Julia thought. George devoted his life to recreating for his clients just the dim, negligent grandeur that Ladyhill exuded from every corner. George Tressider would die for this place, she realised. And here she was. The irony tickled her, and with her face bright with amusement she went back to Alexander and took hold of both his hands.

‘Play some more music. Something silly and loud this time. Let’s hear if the house likes the sound of it.’