After Julius (3 page)

This was a long way from Cressy and her problems. The advantage of a disciplined mind was supposed to be that if you chose, you could think one thought for a very long time, but apart from not
having such a mind herself, she didn’t think that she had ever met anyone who had. Most people’s thoughts, even when they were supposed to be concentrating, hopped about with the tame
apathy of domestic rabbits. The best she had ever achieved had been when she had been able to think in waves – coming in, draining away, coming back just a little farther about every third
wave. That had been when she was trying to paint, and only sometimes then, with a particular picture: years ago. And now, having failed to do anything which she privately thought worth while, here
she was, trying to be a reliable reader and editor in the family business. Holborn. She got up and walked the routine yards to Great Queen Street.

The packers in the basement and the back of the ground floor were hard at it, with the Light Programme twice life-size. The girl on the switchboard had finished her salmon-pink jersey and was
doing the ribbing on something acid mauve with a lurex thread. The smell of new books – like very distant daffodils – plus central heating and a whiff of Californian Poppy, were always
in the tiny ground-floor hall. She said good morning, and started the long climb up. The first floor was the Accounts Department – a seething mystery with which she had nothing to do
excepting when Miss Heaver, who had been with the house for twenty-eight years, came round with a donation list for a leaving present for somebody. On the next floor – the last with nice
ceilings and unspoiled chimney-pieces – were her uncle, his partners, and their secretaries. Up again to what must once have been a bedroom floor, now housing Production, Art Department and
Publicity, all jealous of one another’s rooms. And finally – and really it was quite a haul – up to Editorial at the top of the house – three small rooms for them of which
one was hers, and one smaller, a kind of box room in which once a week the travellers held their smoke-ridden and unexpectedly hilarious conferences: for what on earth book travellers found to
laugh at week after week she simply couldn’t think. But like the packers, they were always cheerful, at least when she saw or heard of them.

Her room faced south on to the street and there was a parapet where pigeons sometimes sat and ate the dull pieces of bath buns. It was very small, permanently dirty, and either stuffy or
freezing, depending upon the window, but as she had apparently no creative ability (her efforts in other directions besides painting had made this agonizingly plain), this was the place where
– apart from her bed – she spent most of her life.

The scripts that morning presented a choice of a romantic and powerfully unconvincing novel about the Aztecs; an account of crossing the Sahara in a pre-war London taxi (a saga of homespun
inefficiency which it made her yawn to think of); and the ruminations of a sullen young man who was living a life of such self-imposed freedom that nothing whatever happened to him, a fact which he
resented on every single page. And there was plenty more where that came from. Oh, give me somebody good, she thought: just let one writer occur today whose capacity matches his heart, and who
isn’t entirely living on other people’s experience . . .

CHAPTER 2

ESME

H
ER
bed was like a nest, large and soft and warm as though it had been made of feathers. Her paunchy pillows were so downy
that she needed three of them: all the bed-clothes were peach pink, and a bed-jacket edged with white swansdown lay at the foot of the eiderdown quilt. She lay on her side, her head neatly shaped
by the Lady Jayne hairnet which tied under her chin. The room, which was zagged with oak beams (genuine, but with that look of hypocrisy that ensued from efficient worm-treatment), had four fussy
little windows with ugly steel frames, peach chintz curtains and frilly pelmets. A great many photographs were tilted about the room: her parents, the house in Portugal where she had been a child,
herself being presented (black lipstick and fat, white gloves); her husband; darling Sambo with an idiotic ribbon round his neck, and her children at various ages; the ones of Cressy were always
good, and of Emma always disappointing. The dressing-table was painted buff and apple-green with tiny pink rosebuds and an artificially cracked surface, and was littered with pink enamel, silver
and organdie. The rest of the house – excepting for her passion for anonymously flowered chintzes – had somehow slipped past the ’thirties, was much more the result of family
accumulation, prosperous, thoughtless and good-natured, but no amount of teasing either from Julius or subsequently the girls had shaken her conviction that hers was the prettiest and comfiest
bedroom in the world, and she adored waking up in her delicious bed.

She nearly always began her day with twenty minutes’ cosy dreaming about the past – not because the whole of her life had been so very happy, so much as that she needed to reassure
herself that it had been worth while before starting upon another day. As she lived mostly alone, this rather curious habit had easily taken root, so that now she felt rather cheated if the
telephone or people interrupted her. She called herself ‘she’ in these dreams – it made her feel less egocentric.

After a time, she would switch on her electric kettle to make tea on the tray beside her bed, and when she had drunk one cup, she would put on her feathered mules and tap downstairs hopefully in
search of post. She was a great letter-writer, and her letters were surprisingly shrewd and funny and observant. If there were no letters she would make lists: lists of people to ask for week-ends,
lists of bedding plants, lists of things that she wanted to get mended in London, lists of books she wanted to read, lists of programmes she wanted to hear on the wireless, lists of household
stores to be ordered from Battle, lists of odd jobs that she thought Hanwell should do when it rained too much for him to work out, and things that she meant to say at the next WI meeting . . . she
could always find something, she had had so much practice.

This morning she lay longer than usual, partly because the room was a little cold, partly because it was Friday – the beginning of a week-end, the beginning of what after all these years
she still felt was a tiny holiday. On Fridays Mrs Hanwell stayed and cooked until the washing-up on Sunday evening. On Fridays she got in drink, and did the flowers – it would be
chrysanthemums and berries today – and got out soap and arranged suitable bedside reading for her guests. This week-end was a quiet one – just the Hammonds and Brian for dinner on
Saturday, and of course Emma. She usually re-read three Austen novels each winter; at the moment it was
Pride and Prejudice
, which meant that whenever she thought of Emma she worried about
whether she was really just like Mrs Bennet (about this daughter), as the one thing that she wanted for Emma was that she should make a good marriage; nothing spectacular, but something charming
and secure. At twenty-seven (Mrs Bennet would have given up
years
before) Emma showed no signs of marriage, or even of any particular interest, and she felt that this was anxious-making and
unnatural. It was possible, she supposed, that Emma led some kind of secret life in London, but if she did so it was ineffective – she came regularly every weekend, and she never looked, as
her mother privately put it, ‘enhanced’ in any way. Just neat and calm and much too pale. She wasn’t a beauty, like Cressida, but she had a nice little face – a lot of
people found odd eyes most attractive – and pretty legs and a lovely skin . . . ‘But she didn’t seem to find the
excitement
I used to have when I was young.’

The excitement had come out of the secret, perpetual clash between her desires and her as passionate love for appearances, and only when it was raging did she feel really
alive. On those stretches in her life when it had subsided, she felt that she had ‘given in’ to something – was either vegetating or going to the devil. Life, she felt, had to
have this edge on it, and if, as once it had, the edge became too sharp, well, in retrospect, at least, it was all part of the excitement. From the age of sixteen she had simply adored being in
love. Competition for young men had been pretty strong in those days: so many of them were dead, you had to be fun if you wanted a gay time. Dancing with somebody new and attractive – the
inquisitive bantering compliments and the provocative defence, with the possibility of that thrilling moment when one might get a message in oneself telling one to go ahead . . . Then, the
exquisite, suspended boredom of the times between meeting, enlivened only by whatever subterfuge was necessary, for in spite of many and unbelievable risks she had kept her actual reputation
mysterious. And of course there were the longer times when she had had to live on recreated moments of somebody’s voice or hands, or to exist in a dreamy state of erotic curiosity about what
would happen next. That was when she had been living with an aunt in Chester Square, going to classes for household management and learning French; long after her parents had died, after she had
done her Season and worked for the Red Cross. Of course, all those years she had hoped that someone really stunning would turn up; sometimes for brief moments she had even thought that they had
– somebody who would change everything and begin a new life for her. Once she had thought that she had started a baby, and oh! the unspeakable terror of it! She had taken castor oil for three
days running, and somebody had said that boiling up parsley was a good thing and she had tried to do this in the middle of the night in the cavernous kitchen at Chester Square, had been caught, and
pretended that she was making some preparation for her skin. Thank goodness that had been a false alarm because she felt that her aunt would have died of horror if she had found out, and a good
deal of the time Esme loved her. (It never occurred to her that her aunt had had a shrewd idea of what was going on, felt that it was high time that Esme married, and had set about collecting
chances until they accumulated into a fate.) It was at the fourth dinner party given by her aunt that Esme met Julius; back from the war three years now, but still with any provocation at all
describing himself as ‘the one that got away’. It was years before she understood the self-derogation implicit in this remark, which had seemed to come out with a kind of jovial
cynicism that she had privately labelled bad taste. It was odd, but she could remember Julius exactly at their first meeting and exactly on that last morning when he had caught the 8.32 for London,
but only with difficulty in between.

At first sight then, he had struck her as romantic and interesting, although what precisely she meant by either of these descriptions she was afterwards not sure. His appearance had about it
that faint, natural carelessness – all features arresting and none perfect – and his manner that touch of civilized bravado which is often confused with originality, at least by young
girls of nineteen. He was of medium height, with dark hair which was trying to curl behind his ears, a forehead with a high, oval hairline which balanced the long upper lip, large black-brown eyes
with almost girlishly fine eyebrows – but these made resolute by the large, rather beaky nose, and by ears whose sheer size would have looked eccentric on a woman. He had a melodious voice,
but laughter was an inappropriately muscular effort, and he held himself so erect that his neat, economical movements were significant and attractive. He was a publisher, in his uncle’s
house, she discovered that evening, unmarried, and just thirty-two. When he asked her whether she enjoyed poetry, of course she said yes. When, a few weeks later, he sent her a poem written out in
pen and ink she dutifully read all the words of it until, nearly at the end, she realized because it described the dress she had worn that first evening, that he had actually written it about her
– an exquisite shock to her vanity! But if he hadn’t put the dress in she might never have known and goodness knows, everything might have been different. They married when she was
twenty, in May, and it was not until he cast himself upon her with lines from a sonnet relevant to that month, but to little else, and which anyway turned out to have been written by Shakespeare,
that it dawned upon her that it was poetry that was his prevailing passion. This was a discovery upon which the sun never set. In all moments of emotion he resorted to poetry; and this included
making love to her. She had pleaded ignorance, but this only provoked hours of tender instruction, and every time he reached out for some slim calf-bound volume from a shelf, or threw back his head
and half shut his eyes (he knew a fantastic amount of stuff by heart) the same wave of unwilling reverence and irritated incomprehension swept over her. By the time she was having Cressy, she hit
upon a counter-interest with which he might at least sympathize. She had developed a passion, she said, for really good novels (and she found, after a certain amount of perseverance, that this
became true).

The publishing prospered, a partner retired and Julius succeeded him; they bought the house in Sussex and kept a small flat in town; went for trips to Paris and Rome and New York, apart from
ordinary holidays. Julius adored his daughter: it was he who had named her Cressida as a compromise between their disparate choices of Zenocrate and Joan. Everything was very pleasant, and if you
had stopped her in the street, or driven her into a corner at a cocktail party, she would have been most unlikely to admit that poetry had spoiled her sex life with Julius – although this in
fact was the case. What Julius had felt about it, she had never really understood.

When they had been married about ten years, however, she had begun to see the contrast between what she wanted and what she was expected to want, in a light which was both lurid and alarming.
She took to Russian novels, but the discontent of the sad and beautiful creatures she discovered in them had either some quality of resigned melancholy with which she felt herself out of century,
or a spirit of sheer recklessness which part of her, jealous of their heartfelt opportunities, could only deplore. Out of all this, because she was primarily a physical creature, because Julius so
much adored their daughter, because she felt uncomfortably detached from her body and because nobody then appeared to sweep her off her feet (which in this sense were beginning to kill her), she
conceived the desire for a son. Once envisaged, this seemed a perfect solution, providing physical engagement, using her affections, and certainly not running counter to the society which was her
world. She was thirty-one; still a year younger than Julius had been when they married.