Julia went to the window, and sat down in an armchair with a high back that shut her off from the rest of the room. She was wanting Alfie as she had not wanted him for months. This death which had brought them all together to-day was so unimportant compared with his, and yet who had there been to give even this semblance of mourning to Alfie? His parents were dead. He had no brothers or sisters. Ruby had been sorry after her easy fashion. But it was really only Julia, though she hadn’t, after all, loved him, who was the poorer for his loss. Alfie was dead before, thought Julia, he had never had the chance to be alive, but at least he had left her with this legacy of unrest, and that was more than poor Constance Starling had been able to leave to anyone.
Julia ached for what Alfie’s hands had promised her, as she stared out through the autumn mistiness at the trees in the Square. Their yellow leaves drooped, and beneath them the mute Apollo seemed to droop also, his hand vainly striving to touch the unresponsive air to music.
v
Two Beresford and Saint Clement’s Square
Nothing, as Mrs. Almond always declared, ever came singly, and although the death of Mr. Almond occurred eighteen months later than the death of Mrs. Starling, yet Mrs. Almond kept on repeating this remark, with the air of a fatalist pronouncing an inevitable law.
Poor Mr. Almond hadn’t put up much of a fight for his life. The weather was cold and wet, and he went off, as most elderly people go off, with pneumonia. He had been a querulous and rather ineffectual man, but a good man according to his lights; that is to say, whenever he made money he had spent it on his wife and daughter, and now they were left as helpless as a hermit crab denuded of its shell.
Julia was now earning fifteen shillings a week, of which she gave seven to her mother; but Two Beresford couldn’t be run on seven shillings a week, and eight shillings was very little for her fares and clothes, now there was no Dad to help her out when she needed a new coat or shoes. There were some two hundred pounds to come in from his life insurance, and that would be all.
Again Julia went to a funeral, wearing the same black frock, but not savouring as much the importance of being a mourner as she had at the funeral of Mrs. Starling, for this, after all, was serious. She knew she couldn’t expect much help from Mum, who sat and cried, and said, what were they going to do now?
The problem was solved in a manner that was practical enough, but to Julia, very unsatisfactory—Uncle George, Aunt Mildred, and Elsa of the plaits were to give up the house at Dulwich and come and share expenses at Two Beresford. The house at Dulwich had been too expensive anyway, since the son, Albert, had got married and set up on his own, and Uncle George and Aunt Mildred were only too glad of an excuse to be rid of it.
Julia knew that and resented all the more that the Beale family should pretend that an arrangement which was highly satisfactory to them should be entirely an act of charity on their part.
The rent of Two Beresford was only thirty pounds a year; that of the Dulwich house had been double. Uncle George, too, had lately been transferred to another office —he had been made manager of the office where Dad had been chief clerk. It was Uncle George who had got Dad the job in the first place, that was the worst of it; it was always Uncle George who succeeded in doing things, and Dad who had always failed, until this last job of all, which had been of Uncle George’s finding. Further, by coming to live at Two Beresford, Uncle George would save train fares from Dulwich. Mrs. Almond would do most of the cooking, so the Beales would be able to do with only a day woman, and Julia, of course, was expected to turn in her seven shillings a week. Oh yes, thought Julia, it was all very pleasant for everyone but herself. Mr. Almond’s “workroom” was now to be turned into Mum’s room, and Uncle George and Aunt Mildred were to have the conjugal chamber. Julia supposed that the box-room would be turned into a room for Elsa, though what would happen to all the boxes of the two families she couldn’t imagine. Some of the Almonds’ furniture was sold, and some of the Beales’, and everyone except Julia, and perhaps poor Mrs. Almond, seemed pleased with the arrangement. She, Julia knew, was not pleased, but what could she do, an elderly and tired woman with no resources? It wasn’t much fun for her, thought Julia, having to become a sort of general servant in her own house, even if it was her own brother and sister-in-law who were to share it with her. Besides, Uncle George bullied women. He bullied his sister, and bullied his wife, and it was only pert little Elsa, with her turned-up nose and her ready tongue, who was able to keep him in his place at all.
Julia was sorry for her mother; although she didn’t really love her, she had always been sorry for her—she was such a helpless little withered leaf of a woman, blown about by circumstance, but Julia could not but be sorry for herself as well. She was getting on so well at the shop. There was talk of another rise in her pay, but power was more important to Julia than pay, and she knew already that she had power. Marian was often away; workgirls came and went, only Gipsy and Mrs. Santley, the hat expert, were always at the shop on time, and, of course, Julia herself.
Julia loved business. She loved the planning and contriving, she loved being clever with the customers, and the travellers, and she loved the beauty of the fabrics with which she had to deal. Already she knew Gipsy looked on her as her chief prop and stay, and Julia was passionately determined never to let her or the business down. The business had saved Julia in the dreadful months that had followed since Alfie had been killed. It had not allowed her time to think too much about herself, or to listen too much to the insistent memories of the body, those reverberating echoes of the pulses. Of course, there had been times when she had suffered, still without admitting to herself what it was she wanted. She had made friends here and there, gone out dining and dancing, as every attractive young woman went out dining and dancing, but no one had yet taken Alfie’s place, chiefly because the demands of the shop had made it too difficult. Julia did a lot of the buying now, and a lot of the interviewing. Customers who knew the shop, not those who came in from the street, would always ask for Miss Almond if Gipsy was not available; some of them even asked for Miss Almond straight away.
Julia had one flirtation with a young man of about her own age, and one with a colonel, whom she afterwards discovered to be married, and whose wife wished to divorce him, but with neither of the men did she go to the lengths to which she had gone with Alfie. She couldn’t resist flirting with them, but she didn’t really want them, not as she had wanted Alfie. With her body she still wanted passion, but not with any one human being; with her imagination she still wanted the sentiment of love, and it evaded her, as it had evaded her even with Alfie.
After all, if she wanted an admirer, there was always Herbert Starling at hand—good-natured, masculine, attracted by her, as she had always known him to be through those sensitive nerves of hers, which hardly ever told her wrongly. Herbert also was different nowadays. He had enlisted under the Derby scheme—his firm had promised to keep his job open for him—and at the moment he was expecting to get his commission and to be a real officer and wear a soft collar and tie, instead of one of those up-and-down tunic collars that Julia hated.
Yes, the world was interesting, what with the war, and these changes always going on in people, although it wasn’t the glamorous excitement now that Julia had dreamt of in Heronscourt Park, or that her flesh had told her of in the days of Alfie. The war—it affected Julia probably as little as it affected any human being, and yet she was intensely conscious of a difference, as was everyone else. It was the background of her life, a background splashed with brilliant colours and by strange gleams, and clamorous with the sounds of an awful orchestra. She herself might have no one out there in all the mud and misery, but she knew many people who had. Life was penetrated by the excitement of vicarious sorrows. Julia sometimes wished that she had been free to go out to France, to be a W.A.A.C. or a Wren, but in the first place, she wasn’t old enough, and in the second place, she thought the uniforms
very unbecoming, and in the third place, she didn’t really want to go. She loved her life at the shop; she loved her rare evenings of gaiety, generally with Ruby or Ruby’s friends. She was becoming a person of importance where she was, she might be nobody out there. Men might fight and curse and agonise in the mud of France and Flanders, but in London trade was booming, people had money to spend upon clothes who had never had money before—wives of clerks were now wives of officers, whose pay accumulated at Cox’s and was spent in one glorious burst when leave-time came.
Most of the people Julia knew in her shop-life had lives utterly distinct from the sort that was known at Two Beresford. Dances every night, and that meant frocks and silk stockings. Nearly every woman she met in her shop-life was having a love-affair, or a hasty marriage, and these meant crêpe de Chine underclothes, which had replaced the embroidered lawn threaded with pink or blue ribbon, that it had once been Julia’s highest ambition to possess. Many of the wives, and many unmarried girls, were working in various ministries, and drawing good pay, and this good pay meant clothes, and still more clothes. What was the good of saving in a world gone mad? True, the customers were not of the class which during the first months of existence had come to l’Etrangère’s, but what did that matter? They paid better than the Darlings had ever paid. Some of the Darlings still came, but they still didn’t pay.
Everyone was leading, in a new sense of the term, a double life. Some were working harder than ever before, but playing harder also. Some—those who loved—felt as though half their lives were going on at the Front, because of the under-current of dread that was always theirs. Julia, though she continued to lead the double life of her imagination which she had always known, which all children know, and which had persisted with her beyond childhood, because of the lack of satisfaction in her actual life, yet led it less vividly than ever before. She was too tired most nights, or even at the week-ends, to indulge much in that youthful habit of day-dreaming. The world had got her, the world of the shop, and what she saw of London after hours, though it was not often spread before her.
For Julia took her work very seriously; she was satisfied by it, as every capable person is satisfied by the knowledge of a job well done. And Julia was very capable. There were two Julias, although for the first time they were only leading one life. There was the intensely practical Julia, with a good head for figures and a talent for organisation; and there was the dreaming Julia, who had been loved by Lewis Waller, and an Italian Prince, and Lord Kitchener, and Dennis Eadie, and by a wonderful warrior yet unmet. He was fading away, that man yet unmet, simply because Julia hadn’t the time or the energy left for him. She wanted him as badly, but she no longer believed in him as completely as she had. More and more she was becoming aware that life wasn’t like the story-books after all … the practical Julia was overlaying the dreamer, who was by now almost unaware of her own existence. Even day-dreaming cannot exist if it is crowded out by hard work, and the would-be dreamer is exhausted physically.
One day Julia arrived home later than usual from the shop. One of the most difficult of the customers, “the Brand woman,” had returned a frock, after having worn it at a party for which she had ordered it, on the grounds that it didn’t fit. Gipsy was determined not to let her off as lightly as that. She had happened to be at the party herself, and had seen the customer, triumphant and pleased with herself, in the gown which she now returned. Her mouth grimly set, Gipsy had insisted on the customer putting the frock on, and had shown her how easily it could be altered in the one or two places where, it was true, the fit was not yet perfect.
“I don’t think I’ll have it,” Mrs. Brand kept saying; “once a thing’s altered, it’s never really satisfactory. It isn’t as if I had worn it. It can’t make any difference to you.”
But Gipsy, with Julia’s assistance, had gone on pinning and cutting, until the customer’s resistance had been worn out. If the worst came to the worst, Gipsy had determined to say that she had caught sight of Mrs. Brand at the party the night before, but that would mean losing her for good; and although she occasionally did those unforgivable things, yet, on the whole, she was a fairly decent customer and paid her bills promptly. She was, to everyone in the shop, “that Brand woman.” Only the very nicest customers were spoken of, even by Marian and Gipsy, as “Mrs.” It would generally be: “Is that Brand woman’s dress ready?” “That Smith woman’s coming for her fitting to-day.” “That Lucas woman has rung up to say her hat’s too tight.”
Julia was tired when she arrived at Two Beresford, almost too tired to caress Bobby, and she went straight up to her room to lie down until her mother should call up that supper was ready. She didn’t really care if she had any supper or not, she almost thought she’d go to bed instead Her room … for the last hour she had been looking forward to it, to the quietness of its privacy, to the familiar fumed oak, the familiar blue hangings, though she no longer liked that blue—to the Greiffenhagen “Idyll” that seemed to her now like the vague memory of a dream. With Bobby pressing against her, she opened the door of her room and went in. How odd, the gas was lit already. Julia stood and looked about her, and her heart seemed to miss a beat. Her writing-table had been taken away and instead of it, along the wall, there was another bed. The bed wasn’t made up, a roll of blankets lay on the top of it, and the pillows, indecent in their striped nakedness, were without pillowslips; but evidently the bed had come to stay. A deep red colour of anger flooded Julia’s face. For a moment she stood still, unable to trust her voice. Then she went out on to the landing and called over the stairs: “Mum, where are you? Mum.”
There was no answer, only a distant clattering from the kitchen. She hears me all right, thought Julia, she knows; and, her exhaustion forgotten, she went swiftly down the stairs and out into the kitchen. Mrs. Almond, busy at the stove, didn’t look round.
“Mum, what’s that bed doing in my room?”
“That bed?” said Mrs. Almond, with would-be deceptive vagueness, and as though all houses were full of strange beds that ran about at their own volition.
“Yes, that bed. Where’s my writing-desk gone, and what’s that bed doing there?”
“Oh, that’ll be Elsa’s bed,” said Mrs. Almond. “You know your Uncle George and Aunt Mildred and Elsa are coming next week. That’s Elsa’s bed.”
“I won’t have her to sleep with me,” cried Julia.
Mrs. Almond fiddled with the taps of the gas-stove and adjusted them to her liking, then turned round and faced her daughter.
“Julia, you’ve got to have her to sleep with you. There’s nowhere else for her to sleep.”
“She could have the box-room.”
“And where do we put the boxes, and all the spare bits of furniture that your Uncle George doesn’t like?”
“Sell them,” said Julia. “We don’t want them. We never go anywhere. Why should we have boxes?”
“Julia, how can you talk that way, and why should you mind having your little cousin in your room? She’ll be pleasant company for you.”
“Company for me! A child like that! I tell you I won’t have it, Mum. I can’t work as I do at the shop, and then come home to find someone in my room. I’ve got to have it to myself.”
Mrs. Almond began to cry. “Oh, Julia, I was afraid you’d hate it. I knew you’d make a fuss. What can I do? We can’t go on living unless George and Mildred come here. You know we can’t live on what you make.”
“Let’s take a lodger,” said Julia. “We can let the room you and Dad used to have to a business man, bed and breakfast; we’d get a pound a week for that.”
“A pound a week! How could we live, both of us, and pay rates and taxes and rent and everything, on a pound a week, and the fifteen shillings you’re earning?”
“Well, then, let’s move somewhere else. I’m not set on this house, and I don’t see why you should be. Let’s take a tiny flat somewhere.”
/> Mrs. Almond began to cry again, and murmured something about being turned out of her home.
“Oh, Mum, what nonsense, you’ve had heaps of homes. We’ve been moving round ever since I can remember.”
Julia’s heart sank. She knew how rock-like was her mother’s obstinacy, and she guessed, too, that her mother was looking forward to having blustering Uncle George to live in the house. Uncle George would take all responsibilities off her shoulders, even if she had to work for him like a general servant. Mrs. Almond had no faith in her own sex. If Julia were making enough to support the whole household, Mrs. Almond would always expect the money to vanish mysteriously like fairy gold. It was always the gentlemen to whom one looked for the solid things of life.
“When are they coming in?” asked Julia.
“Next week, Tuesday, I think your aunt said. They’ve had a great stroke of luck getting rid of their house so quickly.”
Tuesday … five days more in which to possess her soul.
“I don’t want any supper, Mum. No, please don’t bother me. I don’t want anything,” and Julia went back to her room, Bobby at her heels. She undressed and got into bed, neglecting for once the usual careful creaming of her skin, neglecting even to clean her teeth. She tried to read, but as long as the light was on she could not avoid seeing that horrible little bed with its pillows, over which, next week, she would see the scrawny plaits of Elsa lying spread out.
Julia stretched up her arm to the gas bracket and turned out the light. Bobby heaved a deep sigh, and laid his face across her feet. He swallowed once or twice, and she could feel the movement of his lower jaw on her instep, then he lay quiet. It’s too bad, it’s too bad, thought Julia. She could not yet cope with the thought of how she was to meet this disaster, and what she was to do. If only she were earning more, if only she could afford to take a high hand. She wasn’t earning enough upon which to support herself away from home, yet she must, she must, have her own room. She lay awake hour after hour thinking of the preciousness of her own room. Here she had always been able to take refuge. Here she had lain and thought about the wonderful future; here she had lain and ached for Alfie; here she had imagined herself in turn every heroine of whom she had read. This wasn’t a mere room, it was her own soul. Whatever had happened at the shop during the day, however tiresome customers had been; if Marian and Gipsy had spoken sharply, if Dad and Mum had been more than usually uncomprehending and annoying, all those tiresome things had fallen off her like an outdoor garment when she came to her own room. Only Bobby had ever shared it with her.
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