“Never, never never,” said Julia. “You don’t understand, Anne.”
“Well, if you can’t, you can’t,” said Anne practically. “Have you heard any news from the shop?”
“I had a letter this morning from Mrs. Danvers,” answered Julia. “She was awfully nice. She thinks I’ve got the flu.”
“I know,” said Anne, “I’m afraid I let her gather that on the telephone.”
“Well, anyway, she says I mustn’t come back until I feel quite well. I can have ten days or a fortnight.”
“Well, take the whole fortnight, Julia. And I’ll send you some stuff in a bottle which will stop all this business you’re suffering from now. Mind you drink it, or I’ll throw up the case.”
“All right,” said Julia, “I promise to be good.” She pulled Anne down to her, and for the first time for years—for neither of them was demonstrative—kissed her.
“You have been good, Anne,” she said unsteadily.
“Oh no,” said Anne, “my job, that’s all. Try and think of your job, Julia. You’re keen on the shop, I know, and being married to Herbert’s a job—although it’s turned out all wrong. I must sound an awful prig, but I don’t mean it that way. I’ll look in to-morrow, and mind you take the tonic.”
Julia leaned back against her cushions after Anne had gone, feeling very weak and shaky. Herbert had a bad heart! Perhaps there was hope for her and Leo after all, even if he wouldn’t agree to a divorce? Things might have been worse. Anne had found out, of course, but she’d never tell, and, anyway, the great dread was over. It had been worth it. Of Bobby she could not bear to think; that she would never again see him, never fondle his satiny brown head, look into his yellow eyes, hear the high whine of delight, or ease his stiff, rheumaticky old legs down the stairs just once more, all this knowledge was terrible. Tears came to her eyes. She had loved Bobby truly, devotedly, and unselfishly, and he was gone—without even a memory of good-bye between them. She felt no rancour towards Herbert now that her trouble was over. She felt, indeed, very little when she thought of him. She knew he had been kind about Bobby, but when one human being has frayed another’s nerves for as many years as Herbert had frayed Julia’s a solitary act of kindness seems of small account. Even Leo did not seem very real to her, far away as he was. He would be past Gib. by now, in that blue Mediterranean of which he had told her so often. There would be letters coming to her to the shop. She must do something about them. They mustn’t be forwarded to Saint Clement’s Square.
A few days later, when the nurse was a thing of the past, she crawled downstairs and rang up Gipsy.
“I’ll be coming in a few days to see you, Mrs. Danvers. I’ll be quite all right to come back to work in a week or ten days, the doctor says. I’m so terribly sorry to have let you down.”
“That’s all right, Julia,” said Gipsy. “After all, you’ve been away ten days before now with one of your colds. Is it a bad one this time? Because if so, don’t come near the shop. You know what the customers are, if they hear anybody sneezing.”
“Well, perhaps I’d better not come for a few days,” said Julia, “the doctor’s sure it’s influenza. I’ve been very ill, and I was terribly sick … and I fainted.”
“That sounds very like influenza,” agreed Gipsy. “By the way, there are two letters here for you. Shall I send them on?”
Julia was still very weak, and at the thought of the letters her heart began to beat as though it would suffocate her. She longed to say: Yes, yes, send them by special messenger, but she forced herself to reply:
“If you don’t mind, Mrs. Danvers, I’d rather you kept them. I’ll be along in a few days to fetch them before I come back to work. I must go out once or twice, anyway, and I may just as well come to the shop.”
“Very well. Take care of yourself,” said Gipsy.
Julia had already written to Leo to tell him that all was well. I was horribly ill, darling, she wrote. You can’t think what it felt like. It’s the sort of thing no man can ever imagine. But it’s all right now, thank goodness.
She could only write a short note, as she found any exertion tired her. When she had read Leo’s letters she wrote again.
All those things I bought to take weren’t any good, though you know I tried any amount. That’s why I don’t believe you can buy any drugs in England worth anything. So you must help me with something, for the purpose you know.
By the way, I bought myself a bottle of chlorodyne, because I thought it would help me when I got the pain, but I didn’t use it because Anne looked after me. He can’t bear anybody to be ill but himself, and he has already said he has had an attack of indigestion; so I gave him ever such a lot of the chlorodyne in sherry and told him I had only given him the ordinary dose, but it hasn’t done anything except make him sick, although the doctor says he has a very bad heart. I was warned not to worry him. But isn’t it cheering, because I’ve asked him again for the divorce, and told him I won’t have anything to do with him again, and he still won’t listen to me. Darling, you can’t think how I’m longing for your first letter.
She had been to the shop towards the end of the week and collected the two letters. The first, written on the way out to Gibraltar, was full of the ardour and the excitement she had communicated to him in their farewell. The second told more of the bright sunshine and the fact that the Fleet was going to pass some time at Ste. Maxime, one of their favourite Mediterranean ports. He had often told her of it, not a posh place, he said, like Monte Carlo, but they had a ripping time, and everybody turned out to do them proud, from the Mayor downwards.
So Julia, sitting alone in Saint Clement’s Square, began to write the first of a stream of letters, with which she was quite sure she could keep Leo attached to her and excited by her. In the days during which she rested, and gathered herself together again, she had very little to do except to dream and think of Leo. She did not ask herself how she could live up to the dream of the letters when he came back. She knew in the back of her mind there could be no living up to it. But this delightful, mad game that she had started to play, this game of writing about Herbert as “him” and “he,” referring to him as somebody who could not be allowed to stand in the way of such a wonderful love as theirs—this game was, in itself, absorbing enough to fill the time until Leo should return; and, after all, anything might happen. Accidents happened every day; Herbert might get a shock and his heart give out; he might get run over—anything might happen. She did not visualise to herself the details of any accident. If a magician had appeared before her and offered to have Herbert crushed out of life for her benefit, she would have refused in sick horror; but it was another thing to write about what life would be like if only Herbert were not there. And supposing by any chance “something happened” and she and Leo were free to marry, he would always admire her for the courage she had been ready to show for his sake, had it been necessary. He would look at her always, surely, with something of awe, as one of the great lovers of the world, ready to do anything for his happiness.
That was the thing. They had to be happy together. And happiness was assuming more and more of a domestic shape for Julia. The glow and beauty of those days on the mere, although they were all the love-making that she and Leo had ever had, yet did not represent what she really wanted. The Julia who had made of love a pagan festival was only a very small part of the whole Julia.
Now we will be together always some day, won’t we, darling? and don’t let it be too far off, will you? Life goes by so terribly quickly. Do you know we have never yet done the thing I want to do most in the world—to go away with you, just for one night if we can’t manage any longer, to some place where people will think we are really married. We’ve had so little really, darling, haven’t we—just that time in Essex. I’d love to stay at a hotel—I wouldn’t mind how simple it was with you—and sign the book “Mr. and Mrs. Carr.” If only you were ever on l
eave when I was going to Paris, it would be quite simple, but you never are. We could stay the night at some hotel in Dover. It wouldn’t be any good in France because they would be sure we weren’t married there, even if we were. They’d see how in love we are. I’d like—don’t laugh at me, my heart—I’d like to put our shoes outside the door, and be called with early tea in the morning by the chambermaid. It would show us what it would be like when we really belong to each other in the eyes of the world for always. It would show you I could make it just as lovely as the time in Essex.
Thus wrote Julia, forgetting that she had once praised France because there the hotel-keepers were sympathetic towards unmarried lovers. More and more as her imagination became obsessed by pictures of Leo leaving her, her letters were filled with some urgent plea for permanency. It was sometimes in the projection of what life would be like together when they were married, and sometimes she reverted again to the fantastic idea of “doing something to him.”
Leo wrote back and played both games with her, amused, proud, only faintly uneasy, swaggering a little when he read the letters, and looked at himself in his little shaving-mirror. There must be something about him to make a girl like Julia so wild about him; and, after all, when he got tired of her—one couldn’t go on for ever—then he had got the letters. She couldn’t make a row when he had got the letters. Of course, he had promised to destroy them, but he would be a silly ass to do that. Oh no, thought Leo, stowing the passionate, eager, foolish letters away in his box, I know a trick worth two of that. I’m keeping those letters, my dear. And Julia, after reading and re-reading Leo’s answers, would creep downstairs at night and burn them in the parlour grate after Herbert had gone to bed in the back room.
Of course, her letters were not only about themselves, their happiness, the necessity of “arranging something” if fate did not arrange it for them, or if Herbert still refused the divorce. All this was merely the spice, the sharp and biting flavour which Julia added; but for the rest she spent the time when she was writing to him, and very often the hours when she was going back and forth, in a sort of dream, between the shop and Saint Clement’s Square; in building up for him a picture of herself and her life as she felt sure it was. Amusing little stories about the customers, and the work-girls, that showed her humour; little flashes of description, and, above all, accounts of the theatres she went to. Ruby was still the casual, good-natured friend she had always been, and often she took Julia to the theatre if she had been given free seats herself, and was “resting.”
The theatre held a glamour for Julia that “the pictures” had never quite succeeded in giving her, and it was difficult to get Herbert to go to the movies, and practically impossible to get him to go to the theatre. For one thing it meant going “up West” again after he had come home from his work, unless he met Julia somewhere and they dined in Town—a thing from which his increasingly thrifty mind revolted.
Neither did Julia like going out with Herbert. She was doing her best, according to a promise given to Anne, to be pleasant to Herbert, and she was succeeding. She had a naturally pleasant temperament, and she loathed ugly words and sharp speech. But here it was Herbert who was the offender. In his family it had always been the prerogative of the man to criticise without cease, and the women were supposed to put up with it. Carping, as Julia called it, was Herbert’s chief notion of domestic conversation. She bore with him patiently, however, for at least she had her nights to herself. He had been too alarmed by her illness, and the intensity of her dislike of him now as a lover was too obvious an affront even to his nerves, for him to attempt any violation of her privacy.
He wondered about it, poor Herbert, occasionally. Why had she seemed to like him, and not only him, but liked, as he put it, “the whole box of tricks” just for that autumn? and now why did he feel that never again would she soften towards him in that relationship? Women were odd, he supposed, but she must have been disappointed about the baby—though it was funny she hadn’t told him it was on the way. Wanted to make quite sure, he supposed, before she did.
For, though Julia had always insisted that she would not have a child until she was ready, Herbert was firmly convinced that “it would be all right when it came,” and that she would like it when it was there—things which his sister Bertha had impressed upon him. Women were always changing, that was obvious.
For the first year of their married life Julia had been nice to him, although as cold as a fish; then she had begun to quarrel more and more, until at last she had never let him come near her. Then she had had this flirtation with young Carr, and when she had stayed at Torquay, seeing more of him, had suddenly dashed off by herself to Essex. Then for a whole autumn she hadn’t minded Herbert’s attentions, then she had suddenly refused them; started going to the pictures with young Carr, until he had had to put his foot down; and now she seemed happy in an odd sort of way, although Carr was safely tucked away in the Mediterranean. She wasn’t having any letters from him either, though, of course, these might be going to the shop; but Herbert had gone quietly through all Julia’s belongings on several occasions, when she was out of the house, and hadn’t found so much as an empty envelope. And although Carr was gone, she didn’t seem to mind, and seemed happy; and yet she wouldn’t let her husband near her, although he had got rid of Bertha for her sake. Oh, well, Anne had told him that women take a long time to get over a miscarriage, and Herbert always felt oddly guilty himself in the affair of Bobby. If Bertha hadn’t felt she could trust to his support, she would never have dared to do it. He hadn’t been fair to Julia about Bertha, and he knew it. But then, as far as he could see, Julia was hardly ever fair to him, except when she started to argue things out; and then, somehow, in some horribly unaccountable manner, she always seemed to be quiet and reasonable and in the right; he felt helpless before her, although he knew it must be he who was “really” in the right. Yet he was reduced to thumping the table and saying: “After all, I am your husband.”
Well, that was married life, Herbert supposed. But he was uneasy, occasionally desirous, and always discontented with this new Julia, who seemed enwrapt in a world of her own. She had always been prone to be that by fits and starts, but now it seemed to last most of the time, complain and grumble and nag at her as he would.
He announced, half defiantly to Julia, that he should have Bertha to stay with him as usual when she went over to Paris for the spring collection.
“Certainly, if you like,” said Julia, “as long as she isn’t here when I am.”
“There’s Easter, you know,” said Herbert, looking away from her, and cracking his nails after a peculiarly unfortunate fashion which had grown upon him of late. “I suppose you couldn’t make up your mind to overlook it, Julia, and have Bertha for Easter?”
“No, no!” said Julia sharply.
“All right, it’s as you wish. We won’t stay here then. We’ll go away somewhere together, just you and I. I had thought we would have her, and stop in London for Easter and save a bit of money, and patch things up.”
Julia stood thinking. She did not look at him, but stared out at the Square where the pale spring sunlight showed up the naked, dark tracery of the trees. Go away somewhere alone with Herbert … that would be dreadful. Leo would be home for his Easter leave, and if she were away she would not be able to see him at all. He only had ten days. Of course, she could refuse to go away with Herbert, and then he wouldn’t go away either. If Bertha were with them she would insist on a lot of her brother’s company. Bertha’s eyes were sharp, of course, and she would be on the watch for anything between Julia and Leo, but Herbert would be on the watch, anyway. It was really better to have the two of them, so that she could have the excuse for going out alone. It seemed somehow a betrayal of Bobby to forgive Bertha for what she had done, and yet … and yet … if it made things easier, if it made Herbert any less suspicious, if it took up some of his time, if it enabled them to stay in London �
�? Bobby, poor darling, was gone; it was no good having these fanciful feelings about him.
“I … I’ll try, Herbert,” murmured Julia, dropping her eyes. “It’s horribly difficult for me. I can never really forgive her, you know that, even if she is your sister. I’ll think about it when I’m in Paris.”
Herbert was absurdly grateful. His eyes became quite moist, and he poured out two whiskies and sodas.
It seemed to him, in the optimism engendered after he had drunk his, that perhaps everything would be all right. After all, he didn’t ask much—only a little peace and quiet in the home, and to exercise his rights as a husband occasionally. Nobody could call that much; and as to having his own sister staying with him, well, that was only natural, too. It was no good being high and mighty about a dead dog, even if Bertha had behaved as she should not; and it was a good thing that Julia saw it at last. He actually did not try to pick a quarrel with Julia for the remaining four or five days before she went to Paris.
A parcel arrived at l’Etrangère’s for Julia on the Wednesday of Holy Week. It bore the London postmark, but it had Leo’s writing on the label. Julia had learned a great deal of control by now. She put it aside and did not open it until the girls had gone. Then when she untied the thick brown paper, she shook out a heavy grey-blue cloak of a thick smooth cloth. It was quite plain except for silver buckles at the throat. Gipsy, with hat and coat on ready to depart, came into the fitting-room as Julia was trying the cloak on in front of the long glass.
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