by Rosie Thomas
‘What am I going to do?’ she whispered.
To answer her he rubbed the tears away with the tips of his fingers.
‘How much time have we got? Now, here?’
‘Two days, three days. I’ve stolen them.’ And after that, what would there be? Wild, intoxicated hope fluttered. With Josh. She couldn’t think of Lily and Alexander now. Not now. ‘Mattie will tell some lies for me.’
Josh turned away from her to look up at the blank ceiling. He lay very still.
‘Don’t lie for me,’ he said. ‘Don’t lie for anyone, but yourself and Lily.’
Coldness gathered around Julia’s heart.
And if all I want from all my lies is you, Julia thought, what then?
Sixteen
The white house was a haven, and also a cruel taunt.
They spent four days in it together, going out to eat, or to walk in Holland Park, and coming back again to the silence, and the mocking intimacy. Julia lay beside Josh in the white bed and looked at the blank room, trying to imagine a connubial life lived between these walls, picturing her own clothes, and Josh’s, hanging side by side behind the white doors. However sharply she longed for it, the vision stayed dim.
Josh was a perfect companion as well as the breathtaking lover she remembered. His material success seemed to have rounded him. He talked to her about all kinds of things, bridging the spaces of time that had separated them, and he listened intently to her own more halting contributions. He made her laugh, and Julia knew that the fabric of immediate happiness that they wove between them should have furnished the little house for her as comfortably as it did for Josh. But it didn’t, and the failure made the happiness seem all the more desirable, and as thin as gossamer. She listened so hard for any mention of their future together that Josh’s words began to distort inside her head, changing their significance, becoming almost unintelligible. There never was any mention of it.
She wanted to shout at him, Yes, this is a magical time. But I want next week with you too. Next year. Ordinary times, Josh, like your friends will share in this house. She listened to everything he said until her head throbbed, and watched him, but there was nothing beneath the surface except a kind of wariness that frightened her. She said nothing, and she was reminded of the desperation she had felt at Montebellate. It was intensified because there was everything to lose now, and because she didn’t understand what she was trying to gain.
On the third day, at the limit of the time she had allotted herself without thinking carefully enough about what would happen when it was over, she telephoned Mattie. ‘Has Bliss called?’
‘Of course,’ Mattie said evenly. ‘Twice, yesterday. In the morning I told him you’d gone shopping. And in the evening I told him you’d bumped into an old friend and gone out to dinner. If I’d known where you actually are, I could have rung and passed on your husband’s messages. I take it you’re still with the aviator?’
‘Yes,’ Julia said. They had eaten dinners in quiet restaurants, holding hands and watching the reflections of the candles. They had filled the white bath with bubbles and soaked in it together. They had slept and woken up again, and reached out for one another. But yet not together. Julia’s fingers tightened around the white shell of the receiver. She managed to repeat, ‘Yes. I’m with the aviator.’
‘Do you want to give me some instructions about what to say next time Bliss calls? I don’t really want to tell him any more lies. He doesn’t believe them, in any case.’
‘I’ll call him right now,’ Julia said. ‘I’m sorry, Mattie.’
‘That’s all right,’ Mattie answered before she rang off. ‘I hope it’s worth it.’
The happiness hung in shreds now, but the fragments of it were so beautiful.
Julia lifted the telephone again, intending to dial the Ladyhill number. She thought of Lily in her cot, her round face turning up and her fingers stretching out to catch her mother’s hands. Julia’s shoulders hunched as another kind of longing swept over her. She wanted to lift her baby, cupping her damp, hard head to keep it safe and burying her face in the folds of sweet skin. She knew that Lily would chuckle, and wind her fists in her mother’s hair. In that instant Julia missed her so much that it was like an intolerable pain.
For three days, she reflected, she had been using the walls of the little white house like a screen, shutting out reality. Even closing out Lily, who mattered more to her than all the rest of the world.
Mattie had said, I hope it’s worth it. And Josh had told her, don’t lie for anyone but yourself and Lily.
Julia had to know the truth now. The question must be asked, whatever answer it provoked.
Very carefully, Julia replaced the receiver and walked through into the kitchen. Josh was leaning against the Formica counter-top, reading a newspaper.
In a low voice Julia asked him, ‘What are we going to do?’
He lowered the crackling pages and looked at her. ‘Shall we go to the Tate and see some pictures?’
There was a summer’s day outside. The sun was shining impartially on red London buses and Japanese tourists and George Tressider’s shop frontage in the King’s Road. It didn’t penetrate into the mews house. It was a limbo, without light or shadow, and Julia longed suddenly to burst out of it. She saw Josh very clearly. His eyelids drooped protectively, the wariness much more obvious now.
‘I didn’t mean now, today. Today we’ll do what we did yesterday, and the day before. Hide, and pretend. I want to know about next week, next year.’
Adrenalin surged through her. Now that she had asked the question aloud she felt almost elated. She realised how much the waiting and hoping and straining to hear had oppressed her. She wanted to give and take equally, she thought, and not to be meek and submissive. She almost laughed aloud. What hope was there of that, even now? But she could at least ask for what she wanted, and she would do it without pride or pretence. She faced Josh squarely.
‘I left Alexander and Lily behind to come to London, to you. I don’t think I should have married Alexander, and I shouldn’t have had his baby, but I did do it and I can’t change that now. I can change the need to have to lie to them, at least, because of you. I should have told them that I was coming here, you see, but I didn’t, because I was too cowardly. I know I’m a coward. I’m trying not to be now. I came here because I love you, and I always have loved you. Right from the beginning, you know that. So I’m asking if I can come with you.’ Julia put her hand up to her face, rubbing it over her eyes as if in disbelief. ‘No. I’m asking if we can come with you, Lily and me. I can’t leave her behind. I’m not as bad as that, you see. If we can come with you, back to the States. Not to be married, if you don’t believe in that. To live with you. To have an ordinary life.’ Julia lifted her hand and pointed at the kitchen shelves, the new white oven. ‘Like these people. Because we can be happy. I know that.’
The long speech had left her breathless. The last words came out as a gasp. Josh folded the newspaper, two and then three folds, and laid it beside him. His eyes lingered on it instead of turning to Julia. ‘What about Alexander?’ he asked.
‘Don’t ask me about Alexander.’ Julia’s voice sounded harsh in her anxiety. Images jumped up in front of her again. The fire. Their wedding in Ladyhill church. Alexander’s bandaged hands, Alexander holding Lily when she was a tiny baby. His work spread out on the table in the summerhouse, Sandy’s face.
Julia knew that it was imperative to keep the guilt inside herself for everything that had happened. It was for her to suffer. If she let it leak out, even once, it would taint Josh and herself as surely as it had tainted all the last years. She must not let him even guess at it.
‘I’ll worry about Alexander,’ she whispered.
Josh began walking around the kitchen. She watched him, noticing the exact gold of his tanned skin, the tiny red tag on the back pocket of his jeans, the way his fingers clenched, the shadow cast by the vee of his open-necked shirt. She felt the square, mon
olithic fact of her love for him, almost angry at its unshakeability.
‘Do you remember Montebellate?’ Josh asked.
‘I’ve thought about it all the time since we’ve been here.’
Josh nodded. ‘Of course. It’s the same, isn’t it? You were so hungry, then. It was frightening. You wanted everything you hadn’t had. Love, experience, the whole lot.’
‘I’ve had experience now,’ Julia said sadly.
Josh smiled at her, and there was so much warmth in it that she remembered why she liked him as well as loving him. ‘Nothing finishes,’ Josh said. ‘Life is very economical. It recycles the same material, over and over again. It’s rather comforting. Don’t imagine that you’ve seen everything because you’ve reached the age of twenty-three.’
Julia sighed. She felt prematurely exhausted. ‘What are you telling me? Plain words, Josh.’
‘At Montebellate, I told you that I can’t give you what you want. I couldn’t marry you, or promise to love you for ever, or give you security and stability then. I still can’t. I can’t take you back with me because there isn’t anything there. It’s just a place, work, circumstances, and you expect a home. Don’t you? All there is is what we have already shared, in this house.’ His hands, suddenly unbearably familiar, made a round shape in the air. She could have laughed, again, at the neatly fabricated completion when the truth was so ragged. ‘I thought you understood that, Julia.’
She looked blankly at him, unable to reply.
He went on, floundering a little now. ‘I thought you came here to enjoy … what we have enjoyed. Being friends and lovers. Taking some time together, because we matter to one another.’
And then moving on, when it was convenient, of course. Josh was right, life did recycle the same material. Only it wasn’t comforting. Julia despised the desperation in her own voice when she pleaded, ‘I can make us a home. It’s because your mother left, because you’ve never had one, you don’t know what it’s like. We will be happy. I’ll make sure we are. Josh, I promise you.’
He stepped forward then, taking her by the wrist, folding her against him. His hand stroked her hair, cradling her head to his chest. She heard the vibration of his voice when he spoke again.
‘I couldn’t promise you, don’t you see? I don’t want to stay in one place, with one person. It’s not my life. I couldn’t make you happy. And the last thing I want is to hurt you, or see you hurt. I told you that at Montebellate, too.’
Julia closed her eyes. Made stupid by disappointment, it took her a moment or two to grasp what he was really telling her. There wasn’t any future at all. No wonder she had had to listen until her head hurt. The few hours in the blank house were all there was. Out of her misery, she could only whisper, ‘Why did you come back, then?’
He tilted her chin in his fingers, looking down at her, so close to her that she felt dazed.
‘Because I love you, because I wanted to see you.’ He hesitated for a second, and then he added, ‘If there was going to be one person, in one place, it would be you.’
Anger twisted inside Julia, anaesthetising the hurt for a moment. If. But Josh’s consideration of himself came first. For the very first time, it occurred to her to wonder whether Josh was worth loving as much as she did love him.
She didn’t ask herself whether she could stop, because she knew that she never had. But the brief flash of anger helped her to lift her head, and to produce a smile. ‘Poor Josh. It must be boring, having women asking you to marry them all the time, when all you want is a few hours of fun.’
She had a bitter sense of herself as one of Josh’s ports of call, strung out along the line of his travels, and then wondered why the image had never occurred to her before.
‘They don’t ask, as it happens,’ Josh said.
‘Only the very reckless or the very stupid ones?’
‘Don’t, Julia. You hurt us both.’
But her anger and bitterness had already disappeared. She let her head fall forwards against his shoulder again and he held her tightly, rocking her a little in his arms. She clung to him, thinking that he was still Josh, and nothing had changed from an hour ago except her own expectations, and Josh wasn’t to blame for those. He had never been less than honest.
Julia smiled crookedly and, sensing it, Josh kissed the top of her head. ‘I’m going to telephone Alexander,’ she told him. He let her go and she went into the other room, closing the door firmly.
Alexander’s voice was very cold. He didn’t ask her where she was or what she had been doing.
‘I’ll be home tomorrow afternoon,’ Julia said. She thought, I’m going to take one more day, calculatedly, just like Josh would.
‘Which train?’
‘There’s no need to meet me. I’ll get a taxi from the station.’
‘Lily has missed you,’ Alexander said abruptly.
Julia hunched her shoulders against the pang that his words gave her. ‘I’ve missed her too.’
After he had rung off she waited for a moment or two, listening to the empty line. In the kitchen again she said to Josh, ‘Let’s go to the Tate. I’d like to see some pictures today.’ As if nothing had happened, because nothing was going to happen. And with evident relief, Josh followed her lead.
At the gallery they wandered through the Pre-Raphaelite collection, examining the wide-eyed maidens with their swollen lips and intricate masses of hair. They reminded Julia irresistibly of Mattie trying to look suitably solemn, and she remembered Mattie’s wordless disapproval. Julia jerked her head up defiantly and pretended to be studying Ophelia in her bathtub full of floating blossoms. Today was today; Josh was still here. There would be more than enough time to reflect on everything else. She put her arm through his and tried to stop her fingers clawing into his arm.
‘Let’s have lunch in the gallery restaurant,’ Josh said.
They sat facing each other, talking about the pictures and then about other things that they had seen and done, like any couple. Julia felt the minutes like beads on a thread, slipping through her fingers. Josh ordered a special bottle of wine, and when the waitress poured it he held up his glass to Julia. The silence was awkward because neither of them could think of a toast.
It was only three days since the Ritz, Julia remembered, when they had drunk to understanding. The gulf between their two poles of understanding gaped between them now, and Julia still wanted to launch herself across it and twist her arms around his neck. She lifted her glass and drank half the wine instead, and the skin of her face felt taut and puffy with uncried tears.
Later, in the afternoon heat, they walked along the Embankment in the hope of a river breeze. The slow-running water made Julia think of the night in the Savoy doorway, and of walking with Alexander after their first meeting. The accumulation of memories was like lumber piled around her, too bulky to disperse. I wanted to be free, she thought. And then, I was deceiving myself. I wanted to belong to Josh. Am I so conventional, then, after all? The realisation of how little she knew herself, coupled with her blindness in running to Josh, oppressed her more than the day’s sticky heat. Her feet seemed glued to the melting pavements. There wasn’t even the faintest breath of air blowing off the river.
‘It’s too hot,’ Josh said. ‘Let’s go back home.’
Home. For a day, then.
There was a little brick-paved courtyard behind the mews house, overgrown with dusty ivy and decorated with leggy scarlet geraniums in clay pots. Josh brought out two white chairs, and he made iced tea and carried two glasses outside on a tray. Julia drank hers and then went to sit on the warm bricks beside him. She rested her head exhaustedly against his knee and he lifted the damp strands of hair from her face. To Julia, the little vista of empty glasses, scattered red petals, Josh’s bare feet crossed at the ankles and the legs of the empty white chair, seemed unbearably intimate. His fingers against her face were painfully gentle. We are as tender with each other, Julia thought sadly, as we would be if one of us was goi
ng to die.
They sat in silence, listening to the monotonous hum of distant traffic, aware that they were holding on to each other in a kind of desperation.
Julia wanted to plead with him, Why? When we could make each other happy, just if you changed a word … But she had asked once, and she was too proud to go back to it again.
At last, as the patch of sky overhead lost its brassy light and turned smoky-pale, Josh murmured, ‘Let’s not go out again. Let’s stay here together. I’ll make us some food.’
All right, Julia agreed silently. Let’s bury our heads in this play-house for the last few hours.
Josh went out briefly, and came back with a delicatessen bag. He unpacked the contents, displaying steaks and the ingredients of a salad. ‘You didn’t know I could cook, did you?’
She watched him preparing the steaks. ‘I don’t know anything about you, Josh. I just thought I did.’
He looked up at her. It was a direct, unveiled gaze that disarmed her all over again and her heart knocked uncomfortably. The impossibility of not loving him was like a vast obstacle, blocking the way to everywhere she turned.
‘You know all there is to know,’ he told her simply. ‘There isn’t anything else. You are the one who wants and imagines more. You are the complicated one.’
Julia could find no answer to that.
They ate their meal, and they tidied the plates and bowls away afterwards, cleaning the kitchen carefully to leave no trace of their occupation. As if we’d never existed, Julia thought. In the clean white space that was all that was left, Josh took her hand. He separated the fingers with his own and then kissed the thin skin between them. There was no possibility of resisting him. She knew that she couldn’t have done it, even if she had intended to. When he drew her closer to him and kissed her, she felt his momentary hesitation. She couldn’t have denied her own response, and it was enough of an answer. They went up the stairs to the white bedroom together. Josh could make her forget, as he had always been able to do, even the existence of tomorrow.
