Bad Girls Good Women (72 page)

Julia thought of her little house by the canal. It was full of things, reminders and pleasurable acquisitions, arranged and laid out as if to reassure her of some necessary permanence.

Josh had none of that. This cabin on the side of the mountain was the same as the cottage in the angle of the Kentish woods, uninhabited by memories, a place to sleep in and then leave behind.

‘Is this all there is?’ she asked, and then blushed. ‘I didn’t mean that, exactly …’

He smiled at her, undeterred. ‘There’s a kitchen out back and a perfectly good bathroom, if you aren’t too particular. There’s water from the well, and that only runs dry if there’s a drought. I’ve got electricity, canister gas for cooking, and the telephone. As you know. What more could anyone want?’

‘What do you do here, Josh?’

‘I fish, do a little shooting and stalking, drink a few beers. That’s all.’

Julia tried, and failed, to imagine herself in such self-contained isolation. ‘Don’t you feel lonely?’

He laughed. ‘You always like to be with people.’

To reflect myself back at me?
Julia wondered.

‘No, I’m not lonely. My nearest neighbour is only a quarter of a mile on up the track. These woods are full of people vacationing, trying to get away from each other. If I need company I can drive down into Honey Creek and sit in a bar, talking about baseball.’

Honey Creek must be the little town with the trucks and the shuttered storefronts. Thinking about it, and about Josh sitting in a bar with the farmers and loggers, Julia had wandered across the room. She put the toe of her city shoe in the powdering of wood-ash around the legs of the stove.

‘What’s your proper home like?’ she asked. ‘In Vail?’

‘Oh, it’s a modern apartment. If you’re asking me whether it’s got pictures on the walls and ornaments on the mantel, then, no, it hasn’t.’

She went back across the room to him, put her fingers on the rolled-back cuff of his shirt. ‘Don’t you ever want to put down roots?’

Josh looked down at her. She thought that she was seeing his face, clearly, without the camouflage of good humour or detachment or charm, for the very first time. She wondered if she had ever really known Josh at all.

He said, ‘I have spent so long evading it, I don’t think I know how to begin, now.’

She asked him again, ‘Are you lonely?’

And this time he thought about it, and then he answered, very quietly, ‘Not all the time. Not even most of the time.’ After a moment, he added, ‘I’m glad you called when you did.’ Then he touched his forefinger to the tip of her nose, the old, teasing Josh again. ‘I’m not looking after you very well. My cabin isn’t as primitive as you think it is. There’s no English tea or anchovy toast, I’m afraid …’

‘Do you imagine I spend my life sitting on rolling lawns sipping Lapsang Souchong and nibbling toast?’

‘… But there’s cold beer, or coffee. Which would you like?’ Julia accepted the deflection. For Josh, even so much openness was startling.

‘I would like a beer, please.

‘Let’s sit on the porch.’

He brought two cans of beer from the kitchen refrigerator, and settled Julia in the wicker chair. For himself he dragged out one of the upright chairs and sat with his feet hooked over the porch rail.

The light was fading from blue to dove-grey, and the splash of the waterfall below them sounded louder in the stillness.

Julia was watching the dusk thickening under the trees, and she sighed with satisfaction. ‘It seems a long way from New York.’

Josh’s eyes had been on her face. ‘Tell me about it. Tell me everything you’ve been doing. And about lovely Lily. And Mattie. I saw one of her movies. The girl I was with wouldn’t believe me when I said I knew her.’

Julia took a long gulp of her beer. ‘All kinds of things have happened,’ she said. ‘And yet in another way, hardly anything has happened at all.’

While the darkness crept out from under the branches of the trees, she told him about Lily and Alexander and Ladyhill, about Mattie and Chris, and about Garlic & Sapphires and Thomas Tree and the house by the Regent’s Canal.

Josh listened, and nodded, and when their beers were finished he went in and brought two more.

The sky over their heads lost the last pinky-grey glimmer, and he lit the lamp in the window of the cabin. The glow of it lay thickly on the old boards under their feet, and big, pale moths came drifting out of the darkness to bat their wings against the glass.

‘A long time,’ Julia said, at the end.

Josh stood up. He came to perch on the rail beside her, and the old wood creaked in protest. He leaned over and kissed the top of her head.

‘What now?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Julia said softly.

But she was thinking,
I do know
. She wanted to go home, to Lily and Alexander. The thought of them, together at Ladyhill, pulled sharply at her. And the thought of Alexander himself was more important still. It seemed to have grown in her consciousness, always demanding more of her attention, although, superstitiously, she had refused to give it. He had been in her head in New York and he was present even more strongly, now, while Josh sat beside her on the porch rail. She had dreamed of coming here, of seeing Josh again, but with sharpened perception she wondered if she had come out of a need to knit up loose ends. To draw a neat line, freeing herself. So that she could see Alexander again? She didn’t expect him to say anything, or to do anything, any more than he ever did. She knew his mild, dry, English demeanour well enough by now. But she suddenly understood that she was ready, at last, to go to Ladyhill again, without fear of the black fingers of the old terrors snatching at them again.

She would like to visit them, to see Lily and Alexander happy together in the old house. That was all, wasn’t it?

But she could no more confess to Josh what she felt now than, in London, she could have told Alexander that she was going to look for her comic-book hero.

Subterfuges
, Julia thought suddenly.
I’m tired of them. I want everything to be simple
. She turned her face up to look at Josh in the yellow light of the lamp.

It was Josh who was here with her. He was still her aviator, and she felt the force of the old attraction. It had followed her like a shadow for so long, but now she felt that she had the power to reach down and roll up the shadow, to put it away in a drawer with the other, musty keepsakes from long ago, or to take it out, and examine it, at her own pleasure.

The recognition of that power released an erotic charge inside her.

Deliberately, she reached up and put her mouth to his. She held herself still for an instant and then she leaned back again, breaking the connection.

It was an added satisfaction for both of them, she understood, to play with the moment before it overtook them. They were old enough, now, to postpone it, and so to heighten the eventual satisfaction. Once, they would have fallen on each other, incapable of any delay.

‘Do you remember the Swann Hotel?’ Julia asked, her voice ripe with amusement.

‘And the Pensione Flora. And the Signora in the next room, who must have heard everything.’ His fingers touched her cheek. ‘Shall I cook you some dinner?’

Postponement, imagination, recollection; the delicate refinements of adulthood.

‘Yes, please,’ Julia said.

Josh made a simple meal in the bare kitchen, and Julia watched him, leaning against the door frame and sipping the glass of red wine that he gave her. He moved economically in the cramped space, and she knew that she liked watching the turn of his wrists, and the set of his head on his tanned neck.

They sat facing each other across the small table, talking, leaning back in their creaking chairs to look at one another. From the darkness outside the moths went on batting against the windowpanes. When they had eaten they carried the dishes out into the little kitchen. Julia washed them and Josh took them from her and dried them and put them neatly away. She remembered how the parody of domesticity had been so painful in the empty white house in London, and she wondered how the pain could have evaporated. She understood that the net of longing and wishing that she had tangled around herself had simply dropped away, and set her free.

She was glad to be with Josh. She felt a girl’s excitement, and an adult’s satisfaction in their closeness, but she didn’t want, or expect, any more. Not any longer. She felt just as Josh must have done, she thought, in Wengen and in Montebellate and in the times afterwards. And all through those times she had been beating herself against his indifference to the future as hopelessly as the big, pale moths beat themselves against the glass.

Well, now, Julia thought, she wasn’t indifferent to the future herself, but simply understood that her hopes for it lay elsewhere.

The recognition of her own blindness, and the simplicity of the vision that replaced it, dazzled her, for a moment. And the happiness that came after it added to her pleasure in her freedom and her power.

Josh was looking at her. He took her hands, twisting his fingers in hers, and kissed the skin inside her wrists.

‘I love you,’ he said.

‘I love you too,’ she answered, and for the first time she thought that she was recognising the different kinds of love, subtle and infinite and changeable gradations, instead of dreaming of one shining version that would transcend everything else, if only she could catch it, and make it.

They went out on to the porch, and in the doorway the moths swooped around their heads and plunged towards the yellow lights. The blackness was thick enough to make Julia feel that she could reach out and touch it, pressing the cool, earthy folds of it against her skin, disturbing the unimaginable creatures that rustled and stalked under the invisible trees. Listening to the sound of them she shivered in her thin shirt.

Josh turned abruptly and put his arms around her.

They felt one another’s heat through the thickness of their clothes.

The bedroom of the cabin was so small that there was only room for the bed, the chair with Josh’s folded clothes, and a rickety chest of drawers. In the eagerness that they had kindled between them Josh bumped against the chest and knocked over the lamp that stood on it. The light went out, leaving them in the dense dark. Josh swore, but Julia put her hand to his mouth.

‘Leave it. I like the dark.’

He felt for her instead. His fingers moved over her neck to her throat, and to the vee of bare skin below it. He unbuttoned her shirt, and discarded it. The white linen glimmered as it fell at their feet. Impatience made him clumsy. He whispered, ‘Julia’, and she helped him, stepping out of her city clothes and letting the wisps of silk and lace underclothes drop after them.

They lay down together, matching their bodies, touch intensified by the absence of sight.

Julia remembered the weight, and the taste, and the texture of him, as vividly as if they had been lying together like this last night, instead of years ago, in the sad little white house. But the old Josh had been imperious, taking the lead and letting her follow, because there had been no question that she wouldn’t follow, giving whatever she could offer, because she wanted him to have everything. That had been part of their contract in bed, and it had fuelled their physical pleasure. This different Josh was more tentative. With unusual gentleness his hands touched the points of her hips, and the tips of his fingers smoothed the white skin inside her thighs. It was as if he was afraid that she might not respond.

There had never, before, been any element of doubt.

With her mouth against his she whispered, ‘Josh, I’m here.’

His arms tightened around her. The word he whispered back might have been
Stay
. Julia smiled. She lifted herself and lay down on top of him, taking his wrists and pinioning them above their heads. With small, precise movements she kissed his cheeks and the corners of his mouth, his eyelids and his throat and the curling mat of hair on his chest. She stretched and their toes touched, their faces and their mouths, blind, rediscovering hunger. Julia sat up and with one movement she fitted herself around him. The pleasure was as intense as it had ever been. For an instant she crouched over him, motionless, possessing him. She remembered other times, the Swann Hotel with the shouts and laughter in the snow under their window, the Pensione Flora when she had longed to possess him without understanding that she already did, and London, and the sadness there, and all the years since.

Josh’s hands gripped her waist and lifted her, triumphantly, holding her poised before he drove upwards into her again.

The tentativeness, if it had been there, was gone.

Julia gave herself up to him, as she always had, and if there was a part of her that she held back, then that little separateness only heightened her pleasure in what they could and did give to one another.

And at the end, when the fierce waves possessed her and her eyes opened without seeing the dark, there was only Josh. She called his name and heard him answer, whispering and shouting, the intimate voice that she had forgotten. It was over so quickly.

There’s no reason to be sad
, she told herself.

Afterwards they lay companionably with their heads together, watching the darker square of the window at the end of the tiny room. The unknown animals in the trees sounded louder, and closer. There was the call of a bird, perhaps an owl, and then a high, eerie sound that was neither a bark nor a yelp.

‘What are they?’ Julia asked.

She felt Josh’s smile against her cheek. ‘Deer. Perhaps coyote.’

‘Not wolves?’

‘No, darling. Not wolves.’

‘Aren’t you ever afraid?’

‘Of wild animals?’

‘Just afraid, I meant.’

He was silent, thinking.

‘Sometimes. More than I used to be. What are you afraid of, Julia?’

‘I think I’m afraid of making mistakes.’ Looking back, there seemed to have been so many. Made almost wilfully. She wondered if recognising the ones that had gone made any difference to the ones that would come. If there were enough chances left, now, to put any of it right.