Bad Girls Good Women (58 page)

But Julia didn’t believe that it was waiting for her. It was Alexander’s room. She had even seen him run the tips of his fingers over the smooth joints in the floor, as if he was stroking living flesh. It was Alexander’s house, and his life enclosed within it, and she was bitterly convinced that she didn’t belong in either. She didn’t know, after so long, if she hated Ladyhill because she and Alexander had failed in it together, or whether it was because of the destruction and renewal of Ladyhill that they had come to this, their final point, tonight. All she did know was that they had no point of contact left, except Lily. Lily, oddly quiet, with her fist still folded in her mother’s. And that Christmas here was unthinkable, impossible. She couldn’t stay here any longer.

Julia bent her head, looking down at Lily’s dark curls and the vulnerable, childish line of her parting drawn through them. She thought what it would mean to Lily and she felt her heart contract.

‘I can’t,’ Julia said.

Stubbornly, Alexander took her literally. His voice was brusque. ‘Julia. The fire was three years ago. We’ve mourned enough for it, and what happened. It’s time for Ladyhill to come alive again.’

In this very room, Julia remembered, she had said,
Lots of parties. Crowds of people
. At the beginning, when she had made herself believe that she would love Alexander Bliss.

Numbly, she shook her head. ‘I said I can’t. Don’t you understand what I’m saying?’ Even now, she saw, he didn’t. All he was thinking about was Ladyhill, and bringing it to life once more.

Julia turned away. Her hand tightened on Lily’s and then she stooped down and hoisted the child into her arms. Holding her with her head tucked under her chin, Julia ran out of the room and up the bare wooden skeleton of the stairs.

First, in Lily’s room, Julia scooped her clothes out of the white-painted chest of drawers. She flung the little woollen jumpers and kilts into a suitcase. Lily sat on the edge of her bed, watching her mother with wide-open eyes. Pausing and looking desperately around her, Julia saw all the safe, cosy accretions of her daughter’s life lining the room. She swept an armful of toys off a shelf and into the suitcase, then lifted Lily’s precious toy dog off her pillow.

‘Not doggy,’ Lily said accusingly.

Julia understood that Lily thought her possessions were going somewhere without her. It was as if she already regarded herself as inseparable from Ladyhill. Her father’s child.

‘It’s all right, darling. You’re coming with doggy and me. We’re going to have a nice time.’

Stupid words, an empty promise.

Julia went into the next room and piled haphazard armfuls of her own clothes into another holdall. At the bottom of the wardrobe she saw the presents she had bought for Lily’s Christmas stocking. With cold hands she picked them up and put them on top of the clothes. Then she closed the bags and lifted Lily in one arm. As she went down the stairs again, the two heavy cases gripped in one hand, the edges banged against her legs and rattled the banisters.

Alexander must have heard the noise. He came out into the echoing hallway, a screwdriver hanging in his fingers. He had bought fairy lights for the tree, and he had been wiring them up. Julia almost fell down the last few stairs.

‘What are you doing?’

Julia thought she had seen Alexander angry before. But now he was incandescent with it. It was impossible to believe that he had ever seemed cold, or had ever been the mild, sardonic Bliss that she had married. His face was burning, twisted with anger. ‘I can’t stay here any longer,’ Julia managed to say. ‘We make each other too unhappy.

‘Unhappy?’ The scorn in his voice bit into her. ‘What does our relative happiness matter? Have you thought about Lily? Or about everything we’re trying to do here?’

The two suitcases slid out of Julia’s grasp and banged to the floor, but she managed to hold on to Lily. She tightened her arm protectively around her again.

‘Lily will be safe with me. And as for here, I don’t care about that. I hate Ladyhill. I hate everything about it. Most of all I hate it because it doesn’t matter, and you make it matter so much. It’s only a thing, isn’t it? Only a house. Bricks and stones and pieces of wood.’ The words, at last, came pouring out of her. Her face was wet and her tongue was too big for her mouth. ‘You love it more than me,’ she said, almost inaudibly.

‘Where are you going?’ Alexander demanded.

‘I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. To London, I suppose.’

He came closer. One hand gripped her elbow, then wrenched it so that she almost cried out.

‘You are a fucking stupid, selfish little bitch.’

Of all the things that had happened, all the things that they had said to each other, that was oddly the most shocking and disturbing. Alexander never swore. Suddenly, without warning, Lily gave a long wail of dismay.

‘It’s all right, darling,’ Julia tried to reassure her. The same empty words. Trembling, she bent down to retrieve her suitcases and at the same moment Alexander pulled Lily out of her arms.

‘I can’t stop you going. But you won’t take Lily with you.’

Lily’s head turned. She looked at Alexander, then back at Julia. What she saw must have terrified her. Her face contorted with fright and she began to scream.

‘Mummy. Mummy, here.’

She writhed and struggled in Alexander’s grasp, stretching out her hands to Julia. Her mother’s daughter.

Alexander’s face went stiff. He was older in that instant, almost an old man. He held on to Lily for another second while her screams tore into both of them and then, so painfully that it dug deep lines beside his mouth, he handed her back to Julia. Lily buried her face at once against her mother’s neck. Even as Julia hugged her Alexander leaned foward. He rested his cheek against the back of Lily’s head, closing his eyes, and then he straightened up again.

‘I’ll bring her back again, you know,’ he said dully. ‘Her home is here, at Ladyhill. But once you go, you don’t come back.’

It wasn’t a threat. It seemed more a statement of the truth that they both recognised. To Alexander, the words rang with a dull familiarity.

‘I don’t want to come back.’ Somehow Julia picked up the luggage again, and she struggled to the front door.

It was very cold outside. Over her head the sky was pearl-coloured, and in the west the sun floated like an angry red eye in a pink sea.

Alexander’s car was parked on the gravel between the dark yew trees. Hastily, afraid that he would follow and stop them, Julia bundled Lily into the back seat. She wedged her in with the suitcases and then clambered into the driver’s seat. Alexander always left the keys in the ignition. As the car swung away Julia realised, with a touch of panic, that she didn’t even know the way to get to London. She had only been driving for a few months, no further than to the nearby towns, for shopping. When they were together, Alexander always drove.

She felt even colder with the recognition of how dependent on him she had become.

I’ll have to learn to be independent again, won’t I?

‘Tell you what, Lily,’ she said brightly. ‘We’ll drive to the station and catch the London train. That’ll be fun, won’t it?’

‘Ooo, train,’ Lily beamed.

As they turned the corner in the driveway Julia knew that the windows of the house would be reflecting the blaze of the setting sun again. But she didn’t look back to see.

Alexander listened until he couldn’t hear the Mini any longer. Then, aloud, he said, ‘I do love you.’

It was too late to say it now, of course. Alexander knew that it was his failing, to leave the most important assurances until too late. He threw the screwdriver down, and it rolled away across the floor. As he walked back into the drawing room he remembered why the earlier words had seemed familiar. His father had said exactly the same thing to China, at the end of one of their chilly battles. ‘Once you go, you don’t come back.’

He must have been eight or so, he thought, because he had just come home from prep school for the summer holidays. He had listened, frozen, outside the door. The curious thing was that he couldn’t remember now whether China ever had come back to Ladyhill. After that all he could remember was the fun of staying at her flat in Town, and how he had imagined that his father’s house missed her.

Alexander looked across the drawing room. At the far end, under the propped-up tree in a brilliant, coiled snake, the fairy lights twinkled at him.

Julia parked the car neatly in the station yard. She gave the keys to the station master telling him that Alexander would collect them, and led Lily across to the ticket window. It was then she realised that in her haste she had come without her cheque-book. But she had enough money with her for a ticket to London, and a taxi to Mattie’s. Once she had reached Mattie, then she could stop and think.

The train was a slow one, and it was packed with Christmas travellers. Wrapped presents protruded from their bags, and a man in the corner of the compartment brought in a miniature fir tree and stowed it on the luggage rack. Lily sat on Julia’s lap. She was cheerful and content at first, but as the train crawled on towards London she became irritable, then hungry. Julia had brought no food with her, and there was no buffet on the train. An old woman sitting opposite offered her an apple, and Lily devoured it. At Reading, Julia jumped off the train and bought some milk from the platform buffet. It was after nine o’clock when they reached Paddington, tired and stiff and hungry. Lily hung in Julia’s arms, her arms clasped around her neck. They queued for a long time for a taxi.

‘We’ll soon be at Mattie’s now,’ Julia murmured. ‘Then you can have a nice hot drink and a big sleep.’

They reached the head of the queue at last and their taxi threaded through the evening traffic, past the avenues of glittering shops. Julia looked at the people and the lights, and sighed with a sense of homecoming.

When they reached Mattie’s street she jumped out of the taxi and stood on the black and white tiles in front of the dairy with her finger on Mattie’s doorbell. She stood for a long moment, waiting and then ringing again, and it was only then that she began to be afraid. She stepped back and looked up at the windows.

They were all dark.

Mattie was out. Julia knew that she wasn’t in a show, but of course Mattie would be out anyway. It was Christmas. As soon as she had accepted the obvious, Julia wondered at her own stupidity. She had been concentrating so hard on reaching Mattie that she hadn’t even taken the time to telephone. Julia felt, suddenly, that her last support had been swept away. She had just about enough money in her purse to meet the figure on the taxi meter, and Lily’s round white face was staring at her from the back seat. They were on their own, in London. It was Christmas, and they had no money. Suddenly it didn’t feel like home at all. Unwelcome, unbidden, the memory of the Savoy doorway came back to Julia. The smell, and the shuffling figures passing up and down in the night’s anonymity.

‘I’m afraid my friend seems to be out,’ she said.

‘Where to then, miss?’ the driver asked, not unkindly.

Julia took a deep breath, and then she rattled off the Eaton Square address. She wouldn’t telephone there, either. If Felix wasn’t at home either, well, she would worry about it when they arrived.

When they reached the square she counted off the house numbers, anxiously, as they rattled past them. And then she saw that the tall drawing room windows of the right house were brightly lit behind the elegant first floor balcony.

‘Thank God for that,’ she muttered, and as the cab pulled up again, ‘Could you just wait?’ She hoisted Lily into her arms and ran into the house and up the wide stairs. George Tressider’s door was opened by a man who looked like a butler.

Julia blinked. ‘I’m looking for Felix. Is he at home?’

The man was suitably imperturbable. ‘Of course, madam. If you would follow me.’

Lily began to cry. Along the thickly carpeted corridor, Julia heard music and a babble of voices. They followed the butler towards the noise. He paused, and then flung open the double doors in front of them.

Julia saw a crowd of people. There were cocktail dresses and quite a lot of serious jewels, and men in dark suits or dinner jackets. There were oval silver dishes of complicated canapés, a white and silver Christmas tree, and, right in front of her, George himself in a bottle-green velvet dinner jacket and matching bow tie. George and Felix were giving a Christmas party.

‘Julia. This is a nice surprise,’ George said.

And in the warm, scented room Julia knew that she was grubby and crumpled from the train, that she was white-faced and wild-haired, and that the crying child in her arms was exhausted and bewildered. Everyone in the room seemed to be staring at them, wondering at their bad taste in materialising here and now.

‘It’s a surprise, anyhow,’ Julia answered. Her voice was wobbly, but bright. And then she saw Felix. He came out of the crowd and kissed her on both cheeks, as if he had been expecting her all evening.

‘I expect Lily would like something first, wouldn’t she?’ he murmured. And he led them away into the kitchen. It was empty except for a maid in a black dress. When she had gone out with another tray of food, Felix asked gently, ‘What’s happened?’

Looking straight at him over Lily’s black head, Julia answered, ‘I’ve made a mess of everything. I’ve done everything wrong, and I know what’s happened is my fault. I don’t want to do any more wrong, that’s all. I’ve left Alexander, because all we can do is hurt each other.’ It was then that her face crumpled. ‘I’ve got a taxi downstairs, and I haven’t even got enough money to pay it off. And it’s your party. I’m sorry, Felix.’

To her amazement, and relief, and gratitude, Felix laughed. ‘I can, at least, pay the taxi for you.’ In the doorway, he turned back to her. ‘Do you remember what I said, after Lily was born?’

She nodded slowly.

‘I said, that if you needed me you would know where to find me.’

‘Yes.’

‘Well,’ he smiled at her. ‘I’m glad you found me. Party or not.’

‘Thank you, Felix.’