by Rosie Thomas
‘That’s good.’ Their mouths did find each other then, and another riverboat carried its noisy cargo past them unnoticed.
Julia and Alexander knew that they had simplified their confessions, that the years couldn’t be scraped away so easily and that there were layers, accretions of misunderstanding and failure and obstinacy that they would have to penetrate. But they knew also that there was still time. Miraculously, there was still time left to them.
Alexander put his hands up to her face, holding her so that he could fix his eyes on hers. ‘Will you come back to Ladyhill?’
He remembered Josh outside the Actors’ Church. It seemed much longer ago than only this morning. He had known then that he must make certain of her.
Urgently, he said, ‘Come with me now. We can drive down, and be there when the sun comes up.’
Julia was going to say again, ‘But Lily …’ Lily was still at the Rocket, with Josh. Alexander had said She’s her own self. Instead of the protest she said simply, ‘Yes, I’ll come with you. I’d like to see Ladyhill in the dawn.’
A river patrol boat swept past, the beam from its searchlight slicing a path ahead of it over the black ripples. On either side of them the traffic rolled over the bridges, the bright red of the buses and the orange of the street lights incongruous over the water’s impenetrable depths. Julia and Alexander didn’t look back. They walked quickly, retracing their steps, back to where Alexander’s dusty car was waiting.
Light came before the sun. Julia watched the sky as Alexander drove, and she saw the dark turning to washy grey in the east. The shadows rolled away behind them as they drove westwards. The light strengthened, and colour crept back into the fields. The trees were raggedly yellow and brown, spiky branches showing, and there were drifts of russet leaves over the grass verges. Beyond the hedges the bare fields were winter-furrowed. Julia wound down her window. There was a frosty savour in the air that she had never encountered in Italy. She watched the countryside, thinking that it was more beautiful now with the bones showing than it ever was in its summer opulence.
They reached the old signpost. Ladyhill, 3. The sun was up behind them, and the tops of the hedges were spangled with sudden brightness. Alexander put his hand over Julia’s. They drove between the Ladyhill stone gateposts and along the curve of the drive. The trees laced overhead were losing their leaves, and the tunnel they formed seemed no longer threatening. When they turned the corner Julia faced the house. It looked mild and unemphatic in its fold of land, soft pink and grey against grey-green.
She kept her eyes fixed watchfully on it as they came closer, but she could see nothing more. It was a manor house of English brick and stone, unpretentious but beautifully proportioned, carefully preserved and comfortable in its wide gardens, neither threatening nor demanding anything more than a due acknowledgement of its history.
There was no flicker of flame behind the windows, no taint of smoke.
The fire had been put out and Julia knew that the guilt and fear that had blazed as damagingly for much longer had also been extinguished. Johnny Flowers was dead, but Sandy had divorced and remarried and her children were growing up. Mattie and Mitch were dead, but Julia was alive, and Alexander and Felix and Josh, and Lily was growing up. Ladyhill was just a house, a particularly beautiful house, and it was only a home if they could make it one.
Alexander stopped the car. They climbed out, stiff with the long drive and blinking in the strengthening light. Julia looked at the yew trees enclosed in the courtyard, and at the stone portico with its carved motto, Aeternitas. They made no move to go inside. Instead they walked away, across the wet grass and into the garden. In the sunken centre they came to the sundial, and they stood looking down at the long shadow cast by the uplifted metal finger.
Julia lifted her head. ‘I’m glad we came today,’ she whispered. ‘I’m glad to be here. It looks more beautiful than it ever did.’
‘Julia,’ he said abruptly, ‘we don’t have to stay here. If you don’t want to live at Ladyhill, I’ll sell it and we can find somewhere else. Wherever you would like.’
She took that, that went beyond generosity, to hoard for the future as if it was solid gold. ‘I want to stay at Ladyhill. If you will have me.’
Alexander drew her closer, his hand at the hollow of her back, holding her against him. ‘I’m getting an old man. I’m nearly fifty …’ Julia put her hand over his mouth, an impulsive gesture that made her seem almost a girl again. He took her wrist and drew it away. ‘… and if you don’t stay with me now, I don’t know what I can do.’
Very slowly, Julia let her head fall against his shoulder.
‘Are you afraid?’ he asked her again. She had been afraid of Ladyhill, even before the fire had devoured it and their love together. She wasn’t afraid any more, but she knew that he was asking her something else too, much more important now. He was asking her if she was afraid to try again, after all they had done to one another.
‘No,’ Julia told him. She felt the last, cold touch of fear, and the need to dispel it.
‘Are you afraid, Alexander?’
He smiled. ‘I love you,’ he told her.
‘I love you too.’
Her head was still against his shoulder. It was the greatest luxury she had ever known to let it rest there. Now that it was lifted, the weight of hoping seemed too heavy to bear. Looking back, the threads between them looked much too fragile to hold, too thin to draw them back together again. But they had held, and the drawing was done. Alexander lifted his hand and smoothed her hair.
The sundial shadow seemed to point away to the long border. The dead arms of the summer plants were tangled with bindweed, and spiders’ webs stretched between dry brown spikes that had once been flowers. Julia saw that there was work to be done, and the simplicity and satisfaction of it, turning with the seasons, filled her with pleasure. The earth was rich, and she enjoyed the fruits of it.
Alexander’s arms were still around her. ‘I never saw your Italian garden,’ he said.
‘It’s very different from this one. And it’s Tomaso’s garden now.’ Julia spoke of it fondly, without regret. ‘We could go to see it one day.’
‘One day,’ Alexander agreed. ‘Do you know what I would like now?’
Thinking that he was going to say, some breakfast, or, a cup of hot coffee, she smiled at him and asked, ‘What would you like?’
‘I’d like a son. For Ladyhill.’
Julia stood very still. Alexander’s hand moved to rest over her stomach, as gently as if there was already a son inside it. She thought, I’m not forty yet. It’s possible. She had believed that she was empty and dry, like the old leaves, but suddenly she understood that if she wanted it, she could be as rich as the earth itself.
‘A baby. Is that what you really want?’
‘I do.’
Julia laughed, amazed and delighted. She let the idea carry her. ‘Sir Felix Bliss,’ she murmured, joking.
Alexander went one better. ‘Sir Joshua Bliss. No, perhaps not. And I’m afraid that at least one of his names must be Percy.’
‘Sir Percy Alexander Bliss,’ Julia echoed. ‘And what if it’s a girl?’
‘You know that Lily has given me more happiness than almost anything else in my life. I can’t imagine loving any other child as much as I love Lily, but I know that other fathers succeed.’
Julia looked into his face. There were lines, and the corners of his eyelids had begun to droop, intensifying his sardonic air. His hair was grey at the temples, and thinning, but Alexander wasn’t an old man. She felt that he was still young, that they both were, and that she loved him unreservedly. She wanted to give him happiness, and to set the sadness of the years behind them. That was in her power. It had always been in her power, if only she had known it. The muted, English gardens would grow green again, and they would make the lovely, silent house alive once more.
If Alexander wanted a son to run through the rooms, and out under the trees, then s
he wanted the same with all her heart.
She looked beyond him, at the sweep of the garden and at the tall chimneys and pointed eaves of the house.
Ladyhill. Home.
‘Well,’ Julia said, composed in her delight. ‘Well. We’ll have to see what we can do, won’t we?’
A Woman of Our Times
BY ROSIE THOMAS
Copyright
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in the United Kingdom in 1990 by Michael Joseph
Copyright © Rosie Thomas 1990
Rosie Thomas asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Ebook Edition © APR 2014 ISBN: 9780007560646
Version: 2014-03-20
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
One
London, 1985
Harriet looked at her watch.
In less than an hour, the car would come to take her to Heathrow. In a little more than twelve hours she would be in Los Angeles, with Caspar.
For a moment, she let herself think about him. She didn’t expect that he would be waiting for her in the crowd at the barrier. Of course he would not. But there would be another car, and then a suite or an apartment somewhere with a view of the ocean, or the blue on blue geometry of a pool. Caspar would be there, wearing a white shirt, with the beginnings of a tan. He would say something, nothing significant, ‘Baby, are you dead from the flight? Come here to me,’ and the resonance of his voice would make it important. He would put his arms around her.
The television reporter, sitting across the desk with her list of questions ready, saw how Harriet’s face softened and brightened. The electrician noticed it too, and glanced at his lights.
Then Harriet checked her watch again. She was used to apportioning her time and care, and the technicians’ business with lighting and sound levels was taking too much of it.
‘Are you going to need very much longer?’ she asked. ‘The car is coming for me at three.’ The producer’s assistant gave her an encouraging smile. ‘Nearly ready for you now.’
While she waited, Harriet looked at the wide expanse of her office. The producer of documentaries and his PA murmured together on one of the pair of low sofas, while the sound man and the electrician hovered over their metal boxes. The cameraman waited too, behind the cold eye of his lens. It was a bright day outside, but the brighter television lights dimmed the glow of it. They created, within their circle, an artificial atmosphere of intimacy.
The PA stretched her long legs in dark stockings, stood up and came across to the desk. She produced a hand-mirror and gave it to Harriet.
‘Do you want to make a quick check before we begin?’ At the same moment the reporter cleared her throat, sat upright in her chair. Harriet looked dispassionately at her own reflection. Her face, unremarkable, looked the same as always, except that it wore more make-up than usual. She handed back the mirror.
‘That’s fine, if it’s all right for you,’ she said politely.
‘Ready to go,’ the sound man announced with one finger pressed to his headphones. The producer sat forward and his PA held her clipboard like a breastplate.
In the moment before the producer murmured ‘Two, three, and go’ Harriet looked down at her hands, loosely clasped in her lap. The big square diamond in its Thirties platinum setting glittered on her right hand. Harriet wondered fleetingly if she ought to have taken it off for the interview. But then she thought, Rewards. I bought it, I earned it. Why not? She had not taken down the Emma Sergeant portrait of herself from the end wall, nor had she removed the Chinese silk rug from the floor.
Harriet lifted her hands and rested them on the desk. A few inches from her fingertips, on the pale polished wood, lay a cracked and splintered fragment of packing case. It looked like a piece of driftwood that had been battered by the sea before being cast up on a silver beach.
The reporter had been looking at it too. Now the two women lifted their heads and their eyes met. Harriet’s ring shone in the full glare of the lights.
‘… three, two, one …’ counted down the production assistant.
There would be a preamble, of course. Alison Shaw, the reporter, would write it, and record it as a voice-over. To go with her commentary there would be establishing shots of the game, in its resplendent boxes, piled to suitable heights in some suitable store. Perhaps this same crew would film a cash-till in the same store, with a close-up shot of hands passing over money in exchange for Harriet’s box. Then there would be one more establishing shot of the huge peacock’s fantail that was the company logo, on the wall of the reception area outside her office, before the cut to Harriet herself. Harriet, sitting behind her big desk in her Jasper Conran suit, her anxiety about missing her flight to Los Angeles and Caspar entirely masked.
Now the viewer would know that she was a one-woman success story, a girl who had seen an idea and had run with it, taking her own company from a table-top in a borrowed flat to a stock market launch, and winning business and export awards on the way. The programme was one in a series called Success Story. Harriet Peacock, newly declared Entrepreneur of the Year, had been an obvious choice for it.
‘Looking in from the outside, the Peacocks’ success story seems to have an almost fairy-tale quality,’ Alison Shaw began. ‘A game, quite a simple if ingenious game, is launched on an already overcrowded market in the face of cautionary advice and financial problems. It catches the imagination of the public overnight, and becomes a bestseller. Within a year it has sold in hundreds of thousands, within two years its parent company is beginning to diversify into other games, with apparent success, and within three it is thriving, publicly quoted, and one of the darlings of the investors and the financial press. Harriet Peacock, how has all this been achieved?’
Harriet laughed, warmly and quite naturally. She answered, ‘Less easily than you make it sound.’
At the beginning, when she was just starting out and the sharp-nosed reporters had come with their questions, she had been a less confident interviewee. She had been hungry for any crumb of publicity – anything that would help Peacocks, her company, her baby. But she had also been defensive, and defensiveness made her awkward. Now she was on familiar ground. She had fielded all the questions before, in different interviews, and she was ready for them.
‘The first, the only really important thing, was that I knew the game was good. I felt it, I felt the hairs rise at the nape of my neck whenever I looked at it. Because I believed so strongly in it I was ready
to risk everything for it. Any entrepreneur will tell you that is the spark that lights the fuse. Belief, and more than belief. Certainty.’
Out of shot, Alison Shaw was nodding, making little rolling gestures with her hand. More, tell us some more. Fully practised, Harriet swept on.
‘I also believe that you can regard life as a game of chance. You can play it like that, letting the currents carry you, or you can wait for the right current and then paddle furiously with it, as I did when I recognised the potential of the game. Someone said you can reach the same conclusion in life by more or less circuitous paths, by going straight for what you want or by hoping to be swept there. There’s a direct route and an indirect route, and the game itself is a metaphor for that.’
It was Simon who had said it, a long time ago. Harriet’s direct gaze wavered.
The hand-waving had continued, now it stopped. If they were good programme-makers, Harriet thought to distract herself, they would cut away from her to the game board, and the coloured balls rolling.
Taking the straight path, or going the long way round.
Alison Shaw said, ‘Could you define “paddling furiously”? What exactly did you do, after the prickle at the nape of the neck?’
Harriet was on firm ground again. She had described the steps she had taken in setting up her business often enough in other interviews. She went through them fluently, counting them off like beads on a string.
Alison nodded, letting her talk, occasionally prompting her, working through the questions on her list. Harriet had discussed some of them with the programme’s researcher, others were unexpected. Alison was a good interviewer, it went smoothly.
The producer began to make tentative wind-up signals. Harriet was pleased. A useful job had been done for Peacocks, she would easily make her flight.
