by Rosie Thomas
‘I’m here,’ Julia managed to say, her eyes fixed on Mattie in disbelief. ‘I’m here, Lily.’
A moment later, Lily appeared at Mattie’s side. She had grown. Her brown legs, netted with bramble scratches, looked longer and thinner than ever. Julia felt a treacherous space of jealousy and secrecy yawning between them. She wanted to rush into it, headlong.
‘Mummy, why are you here? Is everything okay?’ Lily was surprised, not alarmed.
Julia said, ‘I thought I’d surprise you all. I did, didn’t I?’
She was tired now. Exhaustion and misery pulled at her, dragging at her limbs. Lily came and hugged her, the perfunctory, dismissive greeting of security.
‘It’s a fab surprise. Isn’t it, Mattie?’
‘Yes, love,’ Mattie said. Julia wouldn’t meet her eyes. They could hear Alexander coming along the gallery towards them.
Twenty-one
For Lily’s sake, they made the necessary pretences.
Alexander held out his hands to Julia, large warm hands that enveloped her own cold ones, and she saw the concern in his face. She also saw that he was awkward, and unhappy at the position that she had put him in. She had never seen Alexander awkward before, and she knew that when her anger and shock had subsided she would be sorry for having made him so. She withdrew her hands and pushed them, defensively, into her pockets.
‘Did you have a successful trip?’
The question was so strangely formal that she stared, uncomprehending, for a moment. ‘Oh. Yes, very successful. I met all sorts of people, saw all kinds of interesting things for the shops.’
They were like polite strangers, Julia thought bitterly, newly introduced at some less than successful cocktail party. This reality, compared with the rosy, romantic dreams that she had permitted herself as she drove through the summer country, made her want to duck her head to hide her shame and embarrassment. She held it up defiantly, and saw Mattie gathering up her rolls of hair that had escaped from their combs. She was straightening herself, putting on a public face after the intimate scene that Julia had glimpsed in the orchard.
A public face for me. The sense of exclusion cut through her, sharp as a knifeblade.
Mattie as châtelaine, graciously dispensing the hospitality of Ladyhill. Furiously, childishly, Julia hated her, knowing that there were no grounds for hating Mattie except for puncturing an illusion. She turned away from the sight of her, to Lily, who was hopping with impatience by her side.
‘Mummy, come to the paddock and see Marco Polo. You’ve never even seen him.’ She took her mother’s hand, swinging it. ‘Alexander put up some jumps. I’m so pleased you’re here.’
Julia looked down at her oval face, noticeably printed with Alexander’s features as well as her own. Lily was pleased. She made herself smile, feeling it as a grimace. ‘Of course I’ll come. I’d love to see Marco Polo.’
It would help to leave this bedroom, with its little bits of sordid evidence. Had Lily seen them? she wondered. What had Lily guessed? Perhaps she would be able to breathe more easily, outside these walls. Perhaps she would be able to straighten the tangle of jealous questions without Mattie confronting her, without the gold sandal lying on the floor between them.
She held out her hand to Lily. ‘Come on then. Show me the famous Marco Polo.’
They went down the stairs together, out into the sunshine. Lily led the way, skipping, talking, full of the news of the summer.
We went to Weymouth … we had a picnic … Julia half listened, not daring to ask the questions that throbbed in her head.
When they reached the paddock Lily climbed the gate and ran to put her arms around her pony’s neck. He nuzzled at her hand, looking for sugar. Julia heard Lily telling him, ‘Mummy’s here.’
She watched her scramble on to the pony’s back and then urge him to a trot. There was a circuit of little jumps made of brushwood and fencing poles, and Lily and Marco Polo hopped neatly over them. Julia stretched her arms along the top of the gate, feeling the splintery wood against the palms of her hands. Lily looked so happy. Her face, and the pink shirt she was wearing, made her a bright, moving spot of light in the soft green landscape.
I was a fool to come here, Julia thought.
She had been right not to come before, through all the years. Even to see Lily’s happiness. Because that brought her face to face with her own jealousy. She could feel it, shifting and rolling its weight inside her, ignited by what she had glimpsed this afternoon. The only possibility is to get away again, she told herself, as quickly as possible. And to take Lily with her.
She wanted Lily. She wanted to see her happy at home, in the house by the canal, as well as trotting in the Ladyhill paddock. And she didn’t want Mattie and Alexander to have her.
She’s mine, Julia reassured herself fiercely. My daughter.
Lily and the pony wheeled in a tight circle and trotted back to the gate. Lily was pink with pride and pleasure. The pony snorted and tossed its head and she bent over its neck, patting it and praising it. ‘What d’you think, Mum?’
‘I think you’re very clever. I didn’t know you could jump half as well as that.’
‘I’ve been practising, Elizabeth and I have jump-offs, we do three circuits each and Alexander times us …’ She swung down off the pony’s back, vaulted the gate again, put her arm through her mother’s, still breathlessly chattering.
She’s only a child, even now, Julia realised. How much longer have I got her for, like this? A sense of the preciousness of time gnawed at her. She drew Lily’s hand through her arm more tightly, turning her away from the house. ‘Let’s have a walk. Tell me everything.’
They swished through the grass. Julia listened carefully now. There was no hint, in any of Lily’s outpourings, that Mattie had become anything different from what Mattie always had been. A friend, part of the family.
My friend. Julia remembered how, with Josh, she had reflected on the durability of that. Well, then. That had been wrong.
At least they had concealed their love affair from Lily. Even though Mattie had carelessly left her underclothes and her face powder strewn in Alexander’s bedroom.
‘What’s the matter?’ Lily asked. Julia saw her clear eyes.
‘Nothing’s the matter. I sat on an aeroplane all night, and so I’m tired.’
Such necessary lies.
They had reached the point beyond the walls of the garden where the land sloped gently down to the village. Julia stopped short, staring ahead of her. ‘What’s that?’
She could see what it was. There was a rash of tiled roofs and rendered walls. It was a cluster of bungalows, their picture windows looking out on to neat plots of garden, a child’s swing in the nearest fenced square. Once there had been only a field. Dimly, Julia remembered that Alexander had called it the lower Four Acres.
Lily scowled. ‘Horrible houses, on our fields. I don’t look at them. Daddy just said that people need somewhere to live, and he and Felix needed the money for Ladyhill. Since the fire, you know.’
‘I know.’
Julia turned away. So Alexander had sold land to pay for the restoration work. Of course, he would have had to.
The lurid images swirled up, unwanted, inescapable. Flowers, and Sandy. Alexander running, away from her, into the smoke.
‘They make everything look different,’ Lily complained. ‘I wanted Ladyhill to be the same, always.’
We all want things to be the same, Julia thought sadly. It takes a long time to understand that they can’t be. Alexander, I’ve done everything wrong. I’m so sorry.
‘They’re perfectly nice houses,’ Julia said, automatically. ‘And people do need somewhere to live. If Daddy needed the money for Ladyhill, he was lucky to have something that he could sell, wasn’t he?’
‘You sound just like him,’ Lily sniffed.
They began to walk back, towards the house. They could just see the tops of the high chimneys, over the sheltering screen of trees.
/> ‘Why did you come?’ Lily said abruptly. ‘You never have, before, have you?’
‘I wanted to see you and Daddy. Here, together, at Ladyhill. And now I have done.’ A measure of adult truth, Julia decided, just a measure, to be added. ‘Perhaps it would have been better not to come, not even this time. I don’t seem to belong at Ladyhill, like you do. It makes me feel … left out.’
There was a small silence. ‘Mattie doesn’t feel like that,’ Lily said, after a moment.
Julia answered, ‘Mattie’s only a guest. She isn’t part of the family.’ How much too much sharpness in her voice?
Lily nodded. ‘Like Felix, when he comes?’
‘I suppose so.’ Julia took a deep breath. ‘Lily, I’m going back to London in the morning. I want you to come with me.’
There was a long, protesting wail. ‘But there’s another whole week. I can’t go yet. I want to take Marco to the Middleham show …’
Julia listened in grim silence, all the way back to the house, to the remonstrances that Lily flung at her. As they passed through the garden, Julia saw Mattie in the distance, apparently engrossed in studying the flower border. She wondered what hasty colloquy she and Alexander had had.
When they reached the front door Julia said, ‘Just the same, Lily, I want you to be ready to come back with me in the morning.’
To get away from here, that was the important thing.
Alexander was sitting in the drawing room. His arms hung loosely on either side of the chair’s arms. He looked baffled, and exhausted. Julia wanted to walk across and touch his shoulder, but she stood stiffly in the doorway. Lily rushed past her.
‘Mum says I’ve got to go with her, in the morning. I haven’t, have I? Tell her I haven’t.’
‘If your mother says you must go, then you must,’ Alexander told her.
Lily never argued with him. She whirled round and ran out of the room. They listened to her feet thudding up the stairs, and their eyes met. When a door had slammed, somewhere a long way off, Alexander stood up. He crossed the room to the drinks tray and held up a bottle of whisky, enquiringly.
Julia nodded wearily. ‘Thanks.’
They sat down with their drinks, facing each other, unthinkingly taking up the places that had always been theirs. Julia drank half of her whisky, and then let her head fall back against the cushions, closing her eyes.
‘I shouldn’t have arrived without telling you. I’m sorry, Alexander.’
‘There’s no reason why you shouldn’t have come, if you wanted to. It would just have been easier if we could all have pretended that nothing was happening. Nothing has happened, by the way, as far as Lily is concerned.’
‘I gathered that. Thank you.’
‘Julia? None of this was planned, you know. Mattie came to stay, with Felix …’
Julia cut him short, ‘I don’t want to hear about it. I don’t want to be told.’
She sensed rather than heard a movement, knew that he was leaning forward, looking at her. It was comforting to keep her eyes closed, like being under a warm, red veil.
‘Mattie would tell you the same.’
‘I particularly don’t want to hear about Mattie.’
She heard him sigh. ‘You hurt yourself, you know. Couldn’t you learn to be kinder to yourself?’
‘I don’t see how,’ Julia said coldly. And then, after a second, ‘Do you love her?’
It seemed to take him a long time to consider. ‘Not in the way that you mean.’
‘And does she love you?’
Much quicker, this time. ‘No. I’m sure she doesn’t.’
Julia opened her eyes. The room looked golden, the late sun pouring through it like syrup. It was different now, Felixified, but it was still the room where they had sat on her very first visit to Ladyhill, still the room where her Christmas tree had shone in its nimbus of candlelight.
‘So it was just a casual fuck?’
Alexander was cold now. ‘You know it wasn’t that.’
She did, and she was ashamed, but she wouldn’t let him see the shame. It seemed, suddenly, imperative to hide the fact of being hurt, too. If she could only be dignified, she thought, just until she could extricate herself from here. After that, where they couldn’t see her, it wouldn’t matter. She drank the rest of her whisky.
‘I don’t know anything,’ she said, and it struck her that it was the truth. ‘May I stay the night, Alexander? I only got in from New York this morning. I don’t think I could drive back now. Lily and I will go first thing in the morning.’
‘Of course. Whatever you like. Does Lily have to leave before the end of her holiday?’
‘Yes,’ Julia said, very softly. She put her glass down, carefully, stood up, noticing with detachment the ache of tiredness in her arms and legs. ‘I think I’ll go and …’ what to do, to fill in the painful time? ‘… have a bath, tidy myself up. It’s been, it’s been a long day.’
‘There are three bathrooms now,’ Alexander said. ‘All of them bearing Felix’s signature.’
They smiled at each other, briefly forgetting.
‘The whole house does. It looks very beautiful,’ Julia told him. ‘You must be proud of it.’
‘Less proud than I thought I would be.’ He said it so quietly that she wondered, afterwards, if she had heard correctly.
Julia reached the door, and then turned back again. She was driven by some impulse to tell Alexander the truth so that, out of all this unhappiness, she would have at least that small satisfaction.
‘I saw Josh Flood when I was in America.’
He nodded. ‘I thought you would.’
Alexander wouldn’t make a gibe. He would never say Just a casual fuck. But he knew her, far better than she ever allowed for.
‘We usually have dinner at about half past eight,’ Alexander said. That was all.
‘I’ll be down in time.’
We, and usually, Julia thought as she trailed up the stairs. Did that mean Mattie and I? Even if it did, she reminded herself, she had no claim on Alexander. But Mattie should have known what she had stupidly allowed herself to hope for. Mattie should have known, with the osmotic understanding of long-standing friendship. Yet Mattie had either not seen it, or she hadn’t cared.
It felt like a betrayal of all the years.
Julia ran a bath that she didn’t want, in a bathroom tiled with blue-patterned Portuguese tiles. She lay in the water, staring at the blue painted fish.
Afterwards, at half past eight, when Lily had gone upstairs to her bedroom in a ferocious sulk, the three of them had dinner together. They sat, formally, at one end of the long polished table in the dining room. It was a stiff reflection of other, happier meals that they had shared.
Mattie did most of the talking. She had fuelled herself with a hefty gin before they sat down, and while they ate she emptied her wine glass as quickly as Alexander refilled it for her. She talked, apparently at random, about the Ladyhill village fête and the new play she was learning for Chichester and a moth-eaten second-hand shop in Weymouth where she had found an almost perfect 1930s Persian lamb coat for ten pounds. Julia listened, and to Alexander’s brief responses, but she said little herself because she couldn’t think of anything. She watched Mattie’s face, seeing that she was miserable too, and half admired her ability to keep on filling the silence through the wretched meal.
But at the end, when she had drunk too much to hold on to the pretence of civility any longer, Mattie dropped her pudding spoon with a clatter. ‘Oh, Christ, can’t we have a proper bloody row and get it over?’
‘Mattie …’ Alexander warned her, but she ignored him.
‘So, Julia? You don’t like to come down here and find me and Alexander together. Well, no one likes that sort of thing, do they? It’s like not being picked for rounders at Blick Road, isn’t it? But there it is, it happened. I came with Felix, for the ride, and I stayed. We’ve had a happy few weeks here, as a matter of fact. We’ve seen the green fields, sat in
the sun, all that.’ She drank some more wine, spilling a little that collected in a shiny globule on the mahogany table top. ‘Alexander and I also went to bed together. It was very nice, thank you, if you were thinking of asking. I like Alexander very much. He’s one of the minute number of decent men there are in the world.’
‘I know that,’ Julia said, almost inaudibly.
‘But you didn’t bloody want him, did you?’
‘Be quiet, Mattie,’ Alexander said.
Mattie turned to him. She swept her arm out in a big, loose gesture. Her wrist was loaded with gilt bracelets and they glittered dangerously. ‘I’m sorry, darling, if you’re embarrassed to have all this said in front of you. Not very restrained or middle-class, is it? But then Julia and I aren’t. Arrivistes, that’s what we are. Scratch us, and it shows.’
Alexander leaned across the table to take Mattie’s hand, but she shook him off.
‘So, Julia. Here you find us. Not particularly nice for you, I agree, but then not so very terrible either. How long have you and Alexander been divorced, exactly? How much longer have you and I supposedly been friends?’
She stared at Julia, as if she was waiting for the pedantic answers to her questions. Julia shook her head, frozen, and Mattie shrugged. She picked up her glass and emptied it again, but her mouth twisted, as if the taste disgusted her. Then she laughed. ‘Funny, this love and friendship business, isn’t it? It doesn’t seem to mean much. I was lonely when I came down here. I expect Alexander was lonely too, although he’s never quite said so.’
We’re all lonely, Julia thought, remembering Josh. The recognition and the fear of solitude crept round her, chilling her. It made her think of Betty and Vernon, in their separate solitudes inside the tiny rooms of Fairmile Road. The unwelcome insight of the moment convinced her that what lay ahead of all of them, Mattie and Alexander as well as herself, was no more than middle age. The passion of friendship, as well as love, would cool, and go on cooling until it froze altogether. They would move on, all of them, in increasing isolation. Then, finally, they would be old.
The prospect seemed perfectly irrevocable.
