After Julius (10 page)

‘I’m off: good-bye ducks. Have a nice week-end, Felix – Christ! What
have
you
let
her get hold of now?’

The baby had reached the cat-food which she was cramming on to her face with those slow-motion movements that in babies betoken real interest and pleasure.

‘Let!’ said Mary pouncing on her: ‘let!’

‘Roll on next week,’ said Jack. He bent to kiss his wife’s ear and looked at his daughter with loathing. ‘Little vitamin-packed
pet
! I’ll prolong your active
life for you.’ He ran a casual hand over his wife’s belly. ‘Isn’t fecundity wonderful!’

‘I’ve finished!’ roared Barney from above. ‘I’ve finished!’ he yelled as though he had thought of something else, or something quite different had
happened.

Mary heaved the baby on to her right hip and followed Jack out of the room. Felix was left alone in the large kitchen. It was also the Lewises’ dining-room, but had clearly been converted
to these functions: the children’s night nursery in a Victorian household had probably been its original use. Two large sash windows with bars outside; a big fireplace with blue-and-white
(and nasty) tiles, and heavy, old, fitted cupboards either side; high ceiling and an elaborate frieze of acanthus leaves swollen and muddled by years of repainting. Walls and ceiling were now
covered with yellow emulsion paint which made the fog outside look like evening. Felix walked to one of the windows. It was the kind of day which in the East he had thought of with morbid
nostalgia: dank, windless air with that intoxicatingly evil taste when one inhaled it through the mouth: the sun like a scarlet moon but seeming to burn cold instead of monotonous heat; frost and
fog and London soot and sidelights on cars. He thought of his drive to Sussex with pleasure. The drive, anyway – he was uncertain about what he expected at the end of the journey; was not,
indeed, at all sure why he was going. Duty? Curiosity? Part of this new and extraordinary need to attach himself to a situation which cut him down to size? He’d had enough of king-sized
situations, he’d only to watch Jack and Mary in their small, overworked world to see that it took a remarkable amount of energy and intelligence to hold down a personal place in the scheme of
things. Now, instead of trying to combat famine over hundreds of square miles, he was going to spend two weeks of his professional time giving an old friend the first holiday he had been able to
have with his wife since they were married. The children were going to Mary’s sister, and he was acting as unpaid locum for Jack who had never been able to afford one. This wasn’t much
to do for anybody, but on the other hand there hadn’t seemed to be anybody else to do it. Jack had insisted upon buying a private practice from a doddering old tyrant who had reluctantly
retired just over two years ago. While he had retained any control, he had refused Jack a holiday, and since Jack had taken over, his debts were such that a holiday had been out of the question.
Felix had come to distrust his own motives so chronically that now he wondered whether he hadn’t taken on the job of locum (to begin on Monday) simply in order that he should have a cast-iron
reason for escaping whatever he might find in Sussex. She had not been the kind of woman whom it was easy to imagine either ageing or poor: but all he had been able to discover about her (by an
anonymous telephone call to her husband’s firm) had been that she had not married again, and lived in the same house. And so he had written to her saying – untruthfully – that he
was going to be in her part of the world and wondered if he might come and see her. She should have got the letter yesterday, and she was to telegram or ring up if it was not convenient –
i.e. if she did not want to see
him
. She had done neither. He had stayed in the whole of Thursday evening to make sure: the telephone had been working because Jack had had a late night call,
but there had been nothing from her. The clumsiness of these arrangements struck him again, exactly as they had done last night. Jack had put down the telephone saying: ‘I’m genuinely
sorry that call wasn’t for you. I’m off. Watch her: she gets very sexy when she’s pregnant. Leave me a shot of your lovely Scotch.’ When he had gone, Mary had said:
‘Give
me
a shot of your lovely Scotch,’ and held out her glass.

She was lying on their battered old sofa, barefoot, and wearing Jack’s ancient camel-hair dressing-gown and the plain gold ear-rings Felix had brought back for her as a wedding present.
Her hair was tied back with a limp piece of crimson chiffon; she looked wholesome and somehow glamorous and astonishingly young.

‘You look tired,’ he had said.

‘Can’t remember when I last felt untired: isn’t it frightful? I expect all I’ll do on the holiday is sleep and sleep and sleep – hey – that’s
enough.’ She gave her gentle sly smile and added: ‘We must seem such domestic vegetables to you.’

Felix thought of the facts that she had worn the ear-rings without stopping ever since he had presented them, and that, according to Jack, she had not slept at all the night after the holiday
had been planned. ‘Not at all,’ he said.

She smiled again, stretched, and said: ‘It’s ages since I had several drinks, and even longer since I could lie about doing nothing but talk to an attractive man who wasn’t my
husband. Jack’s quite right. Pregnancy has all kinds of erotic undertones. The Scotch is going quite literally to my head. So do tell.’

‘What shall I tell you?’

‘Oh! If the lady telephoned, would it be good or bad? Do you want to see her, or do you feel you ought to want to? Why did you stop trying to save the world and come back here to save Jack
and me? Why aren’t you married? Why are you a doctor? Do you feel detached and superior, or attached and frightened?’

‘What do
you
feel?’

‘It’s simple for me. I love Jack, you see: I don’t have to think where that leads me – I just go. You didn’t have to
save
us,’ she added hastily,
‘you’re just making things much, much easier, and God, or something, bless you for that. Oh!
you
talk! Tell me a story: I won’t know the people, so you can say anything
about them.’

‘No, you wouldn’t know them: this was way back in my youth.’

He told her, conscious of the omissions: but also aware as he talked, of how much more he remembered than the private, casual, package memory the affair had ever provoked in his mind. It was the
detail that astonished him; not the basic bone-structure of events – meeting her at Nice Airport when he had been trying to buy scent for his sister – but things like the way in which
she had said: ‘Yes, that is a delicious smell – here!’ and held out an arm. She had been wearing a white jacket, with three-quarter sleeves, and short white gloves which stopped
at the wrists; it was the bronzed gap which she offered him. He could exactly remember the wave of apprehension and excitement and challenge as he bent to smell her burnished skin. This was no
tortuous young girl tinkering with those long division sums of her Experience, Virginity and Future. This was a worldly, womanly woman – what he had imagined his life being fall of all
through his adolescence . . . ‘Are you travelling to London?’ she had asked. ‘Yes: with you.’ ‘How do you know I am alone?’ ‘You’re not alone.’
He remembered dancing in the gents as he ran over this incredibly sophisticated dialogue. She had laughed – but she had not been simply amused. Still in the gents combing his hair, fiddling
with his tie, trying to look forty, and tragic and experienced; experimenting with a little world-weary smile which he somehow could not get to play round his mouth, and being rudely interrupted by
an immense foreign gent who had walked in, taken off his far-collared overcoat which he gave to Felix to hold, and vomited with operatic gusto for what seemed like hours. ‘Cara mia!’
Then he had patted his stomach – one of the largest Felix had ever seen – said, ‘Nott-a-somuch,’ and started to trim his moustaches with a tiny pair of scissors extracted
from a miniature lizard-skin case.

It had been a landmark in their intimacy when he had known that telling her about this incident would amuse her. These details! He apologized for them, but Mary said:

‘Don’t. That’s what’s so fascinating. You must have been in love.’

‘I don’t know. I was terribly young – infatuated . . .’

But she interrupted him: ‘No, in love. Because when that happens you don’t just notice and remember the other person, you notice everything round them. Then what?’

‘Oh – then. We flew back to London together. Had dinner in a small restaurant. I felt she knew all about me by the time we got to brandy, in spite of the efforts at mystery that I
made. She wasn’t only a good listener, she was really good at asking questions.’

‘Better than me?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said with great affection. ‘How can I know that?’

‘Where did you spend the night?’

‘She had a flat in London. Her husband was away. I’d sort of hoped there wasn’t a husband around – I mean I realized that she must have one – she wore a ring
– and when I found he was still about, I decided he must be a brute.’

‘He wasn’t?’

‘Far from it. She told me he wasn’t from the start. That didn’t suit me at all, and I sulked – it didn’t go with my romantic notions of rescue and indispensability.
Then I found she had children, and decided that whatever he was like, she stayed with him for their sake. He certainly neglected her, and she was certainly someone who repaid attention. Anyway, I
was twenty-three, and the mere idea of having a mistress was intoxicating. She was shrewd, entertaining, pretty and neat, and vulgar though this may sound to you, she adored going to bed with
me.’

‘What about you?’

‘I was quite simple about it all. I could just conceive of having an affair with somebody when you only went to bed, but the moment I found myself enjoying her company as well, I got
confused, and assumed that I was irrevocably in love. I hadn’t envisaged the possibility of
liking
the women, you see – I had been brought up to think that apart from any casual
sex I could arrange for myself, I’d inevitably find someone who made me feel I
had
to spend my life with her. Of course I thought she was the one.’

‘Did you see a great deal of her?’

‘Not to begin with. We wrote to each other a lot. She lived mostly in the country, and there were days when I could send letters when her husband wasn’t there. She was very good at
letters. She used to tell me things that were happening; she went to a lot of parties and was good at describing people: if she told me things that involved her husband, I used to make
scenes.’

‘Bore for her.’

‘At first it was. In the end I think she came rather to depend on them. She made me go to their house in the country when he was away, which he nearly always was. I didn’t stay
there, of course, because of the children: we used to take picnics and go to vulgar desolate places like Camber Sands and Pett Level – that was in the spring of 1940: all the winter before
she met me in London, or places like Tonbridge in tea shops. We used to sit with a frightful plate of mixed cakes between us, wishing we could go abroad. I failed my first lot of exams that year,
because I spent so much time either with her or thinking about her.’

‘What about the war?’

‘What about it?’

‘Didn’t it make any difference? You haven’t mentioned it at all.’

He thought for a moment. ‘Of course, it must have. At the time it didn’t seem to – except perhaps to excuse things one did on the grounds that one wouldn’t be able to do
them for very long. No – of course it made a difference. The morning that war was declared – I mean old Chamberlain and the Germans – she rang me up. I was living in digs in
London – Victoria – and the telephone was in a passage so I always felt that everyone could hear everything she said. She said: “Felix, don’t stay in London tonight.”
And I said: “Where else can I go?” And she said: “Come here. You can stay here. They’ll bomb London, and if they’re going to do that, they’ll obviously do it
tonight. You
must
come. Everyone will understand; it’s an emergency.” Then, without the slightest warning she put her elder daughter on the telephone – the schoolgirl one
– so shy I never remembered getting a word out of her before: she said, “You can have my bed to sleep in if only you’ll come, Felix.” Then
she
was speaking again
– a thousand bombers, she said – London would be flat; she’d explained to her husband that I was coming – nothing else, just that I was the son of an old friend of her
aunt’s – the bombers would be flying straight over their house on the way to London – she couldn’t watch that – and suddenly I thought, “Perhaps
she
will
be killed, and I shan’t see her again,” and I went.’

‘What about your family? Or do you regard that as a very Jewish question?’

‘They were in Easter Ross. I’d had rather a quarrel with them – failing to get into Aberdeen, and then failing my first year exams. They weren’t too pleased. The thing
was that
all
the menace seemed to be directed upon London – one didn’t think of people in the rest of the country as in immediate danger. I sent them a telegram and drove to
Sussex. It took hours. Anyway, that’s how I met the husband. Digging an air-raid shelter in the garden.’

‘What was he like?’

‘It’s funny: after all my histrionic fantasies about him, he turned out just to be a man digging. Much older than me, of course. He’d been digging all day – with the
gardener, and the younger child with her sand spade. The older child came out soon after I started digging, and
she
brought us drinks and stuffed olives and things like that.’

He was silent, frowning absently, turning his empty glass round and round in his hands. To Mary it seemed as though there was suddenly much more than he could tell her.

‘That night, at dinner – I only stayed one night,’ he said at last, ‘ – he asked me what I was going to do. I simply hadn’t thought at all. Then
she
said something about my being a medical student, and wasn’t that a reserved occupation? Then he asked me how old I was: I told him. He said, ‘My God, I wish I was your age.’ That
was the first time in my life that I realized I seemed to have absolutely no sense of public responsibility.
I
hadn’t made the war – it was nothing to do with me. But
he
was minding because he was afraid he was too old to be any use at all – that was how he put it – the use part, I mean.’