After Julius (8 page)

She had lain on her back for the first crowding minutes of his absence. Lying on her back was not natural to her; she slept like that, and the position – since everything that Miles did to
her occurred in the dark with the additional unreality of no intelligible sound – simply engendered thoughts of death, thence the war, the facts that Miles might get killed and that she was
now married to him, and finally, that she was committed (among other things) to the mystery of living in an hotel. It was only five past eight: very nearly twelve hours had somehow to be spent. The
bedroom was not particularly small, but she had the uneasy feeling that one was only meant to be in bed in it. Better get up and go out to look at the Island.

But outside were nothing but men: in fact – she later discovered – about sixty thousand of them, although they seemed more because there were hardly any women. She made her way
through the narrow main street of Cowes with the notion that if she reached the river, she might see Miles on his ship; but the sheer weight of masculine interest, both strident and irresponsible,
turned her back. Being stared at by people she did not know was far worse than the whistles, cat-calls, unintelligible asides and the kind of laughter which implied greater knowledge of her than
she cared or dared to have of them. Thoughts like: ‘My legs are bare’, ‘My hair is too long’, ‘Well, anyway, I’m wearing a ring’, ‘I could do up
another button on my shirt’ succeeded one another with discomforting speed. (‘I don’t know anybody on the whole island excepting Miles, and I don’t know where he is.’)
All these men, unassailably sheltered behind the distinction of being men and the anonymity of wearing the same clothes, presumably knew who they were and seemed to know what they thought about her
. . . Her legs were trembling above her steps as though she wasn’t quite sure how far away the pavement was; she felt breathless and there seemed nowhere safe for her eyes. She wasn’t
seeing the Island at all: better go home. (‘But I can’t spend the whole day in
bed
!’)

Turning back involved encountering some of them again: now they pretended that they knew her, which was different, but worse. Round a sharp corner, she came upon a small sweet shop: the door was
open and because there was an old woman behind the counter she went in and decided to buy pear drops. They were the first thing that she had bought with Miles’s money and she wondered whether
he would mind. ‘Perhaps I needn’t tell him.’ He didn’t like sweets, but ninepence wasn’t much.

When she got back to the hotel, the chambermaid was doing their room; she wandered down to somewhere marked Lounge.
Lounge
? It was filled with very uncomfortable chairs, large framed
photographs of J-class racing yachts labelled
Rainbow, Endeavour, Astra
and so on; there was also an upright piano which was locked. She sat down with an eight-weeks-old copy of the
Yachting World
– and she didn’t see how it could have been very interesting when it came out – and a pink pear drop. There was a clock with a boring tick. It was a quarter
past nine, and as her hair caught in one of the brass studs on the back of her chair, she suddenly felt sick, and longed for home, for Emma, her own bedroom and their yellow Labrador, for the
beautiful, gentle Blüthner that had been her father’s last present to her, for the known intimacies of family life when privacy had been an adventure instead of this out-of-her-element
isolation marked by visits of a friendly but incomprehensible stranger. That was how the home-
sickness
began – and it actually made her feel sick as well as frightened and sad. Perhaps
it was the war that made it so difficult to see the point of marriage; after all, dozens – probably
millions
– of people got married when they were eighteen. ‘It
can’t be my age.’ Well, she
couldn’t
have stayed at home, so it was silly to be homesick. She got the pencil out of her pocket and began making a list of possible things to
do out on this limb. ‘Read books; knit pullover for Miles; see if piano will unlock; go on trying to go for walks.’ She couldn’t think of anything else, and it was twenty past
nine . . .

It was ten o’clock, and Dick would now be at his office: she was safe from being able to telephone him. She had a bath, and steeled herself to go into the sitting-room,
where they had spent that interminable, circuitous evening – round and round something so painful, and true and
small
, that neither had the courage to touch it.

‘I hate the way
things
stay the same,’ she thought, when she had opened the door. Cushions stayed dented; handkerchiefs thrust and crumpled, the sugar in the bottom of cups,
the Haydn sonatas open at the F major: it could all stay like this for a hundred years: tactless, immutable, triumphantly inanimate, lending itself to the pathetic hysteria of people like Miss
Havisham and Queen Victoria. She cleared up the room with a burst of energy which became progressively more savage, until she reached the F major. But you couldn’t, she found, after trying,
be savage with any opening statement of such graceful confidence: she stopped playing and read the rest of the open pages. Haydn defied ill nature. ‘I love him,’ she thought:
‘it’s a calm, respectful business.’ If only, last night, she could have simply said: ‘Do you love me?’ then, perhaps, he would have been able to say, ‘Not
enough.’ Why hadn’t she done that? Perhaps then she would have found that it was all right – even better – with his not loving her enough, so long as they both knew it:
better than this emotional jockeying for even more precarious false positions. He wanted her, and he was the kind of man who was rather proud of feeling affectionate about people he wanted:
‘I’m
so
fond of you!’ he would say, with an air of near complacent surprise, as one showing off a rare talent just discovered:
his
back and her head. Well –
she was no better. She wanted him, and she wanted him to be in love with her, and her failure nagged at and damaged all pure feeling, consideration – let alone love – for him. He was
not – and she knew it – honestly the man for her, but when she was with him, or even talking to Emma
about
him, something (perverse? starved?) insisted on pretending that he was.
She wanted attention and pity for that because her real deprivation ran too deep for anyone to see, and alone with it she became extremely frightened. ‘Anything really good has the appearance
of ease,’ she thought sadly, and resolutely turned her attention to Haydn.

The telephone rang at twelve. She had worked two hours; that muscle in her right forearm was aching again – working too long on the four-bar trill had done it – and anyway, she had
to lunch with her sister-in-law. She picked up the telephone and spoke to it: there was a pause, and then she heard the button being pressed and the sound of coins dropping. Dick! She was back
where she had started her day.

‘Cressy? Is that you? I thought you’d like to know that the conference is due to end at four on Sunday afternoon: I’ll try to catch a plane back about six. See you then.
Don’t be disappointed if I can’t make it.’

‘No – I won’t be.’ Something fiendishly stupid in her made her add: ‘But you will try, won’t you?’

‘Of course. Everything fine?’ It couldn’t be less than that: couldn’t just be all right.

‘Yes.’

‘Good.’ He sounded heartily unconvinced. ‘Things always seem better in the morning.’

Oh no, they don’t. She said: ‘I don’t know.’

‘Take care of yourself.’

‘I’ll probably go ho – away for the week-end.’

‘Splendid idea. I shall have had dinner on the plane, so don’t worry about that.’ She knew that he called living alone in the flat moping: she was
hating
him –
simply
hating
him.

‘Anything you’d like me to bring you?’

‘A bottle of Alpestri.’ She knew that that would be a nuisance.

‘Alpestri?’

‘Al-pes-tri.’

‘Do my best. Must go now. Is it a scent?’ he added.

‘A drink. It settles the stomach.’

‘What’s wrong with your stomach?’

‘Nothing. My stomach’s all right. Fine.’

‘Fine,’ he repeated. ‘Well – I must be off.’ Where
to
? For God’s sake, at twelve o’clock, where
to
?

‘Have a good lunch,’ she said, and put down the receiver. That had not been at all all right. I’m turning into a first-class bitch. I just hate him when he’s breezy; I
can’t be breezy back: only bitchy or hurt. And I bet he prefers me bitchy. This has got to stop: it’s no good each of us wanting the other to be somebody else. But I wish he was, she
thought later, rummaging hopelessly in her untidy drawers for a belt: I wish we were both quite different: completely different, and madly in love.

Miles’s sister was called Ann Jackson. She was tall and bony and faded: even as a young girl (which was when Cressy had met her) she had had that hopelessly muted appearance described by
women who don’t like competition as good taste. Her hair, fine like Miles’s, but lifeless brown; her eyes neither blue nor grey and inhibited to a minimum of expression; her voice both
quiet and flat, her body in the main spare and shapeless, good ankles and beautiful hands failing somehow to redeem it. When Cressy had first met her she had been married to a Major Jackson for six
months. She had been wearing a pale-blue lambswool sweater, a grey flannel skirt with an uneven hem, and a string of graded, rather small pearls. Her husband, a Commando, was away, and somebody
– probably Miles – had commiserated loudly that she had only spent three weeks of her marriage with him. Afterwards, Cressy had sharply remembered Ann’s quiet, unemotional voice
as she said: ‘Actually, we were really awfully lucky to have that.’ Major Jackson had been on the St Nazaire raid under Ryder’s command: he did not return with the task force and
was reported missing. Ann waited until somebody hesitantly got the news to her that somebody else thought they had seen him on board the Hunt class destroyer mined to blow up in the harbour. It was
certain that the destroyer had blown up – with no survivors. So she went down to the beach near Lewes one evening and walked steadily into the sea, and it was only because a fisherman noticed
her neat, well-made shoes on the shore that she was collected at the last possible moment and dragged back to life. Cressy remembered how astonished she had been by this: how profoundly it had
upset her views about people’s appearances, about love, about death – and not least, about Ann herself. Then Major Jackson had returned: it must have been extraordinary for him to live
with somebody who had demonstrated that she would rather die without him, and Cressy had found herself so obsessed with this speculation that she had always felt shy with them. Two years later he
had died of double pneumonia in an assault ship bound for the Mediterranean. Miles had also been killed by then; from that moment Ann had treated Cressy with a kindness as ferocious as it was
unacknowledged, and when Cressy saw that she was necessary to Ann as an unwitting example of how to go on existing with a sense of continuous, total and agonizing loss, she had been able by degrees
to return the kindness. Cressy had no other friends like Ann, Ann had no other friends like Cressy, and in twenty years they seemed to have discovered very little of their essential differences:
but they knew almost everything that happened to each other. Cressy respected Ann while secretly thinking her life unbearably dull (a Magistrate in the Juvenile Courts and a great deal of work for
blind children), and Ann felt protective about Cressy while feeling that her life was a fast-moving series of glamorous and nerve-racking events.

She was late for lunch, but only the amount that Ann had known she would be. They kissed, and Cressy looked apologetic: Ann waved her towards the sitting-room where a low table was set for lunch
before the fire, in front of which lay Ann’s brown Burmese cat in an attitude of affected abandon.

‘Have some sherry,’ Ann called from the kitchen.

As she clinked the bottle against the sherry glass, the cat lifted his head and looked at her with the famous insulting topaz stare he reserved for total strangers: then dropped his cheek back
on the rug; he did not like sherry. Cressy suddenly remembered that she had been wanting a cigarette since she woke up, and took one out of the silver presentation box given to Major Jackson by his
regiment on his unexpected return after St Nazaire. The flat was full of things like that. Ann chain-smoked, and came out of the kitchen now carrying a tray, with a stub expertly poised between her
lips. She said anxiously:

‘Has Saki been nice to you?’

‘He’s pretending we’ve never met, as usual.’

Ann picked him up; he strained in her arms, looking martyred and highly strung, and licking his lips as the only possible well-bred expression of distaste. Cressy felt bound, for Ann’s
sake, to stroke his rich chocolate fur – a gesture he endured with majestic disapproval.

‘He doesn’t like the weather,’ Ann said, sitting in an armchair one side of the tray.

‘He doesn’t have to go out in it.’

‘But he knows it’s there. You’re looking tired, Cressy.’ Cressy knew that whenever Ann said that, she meant, ‘You’ve been crying too much.’ Now, as they
began their lunch, she also began:

‘I ought to leave Dick.’

‘Leave him, then.’

‘You know it’s not like that.’ Ann looked obediently expectant, but it was the obedience that struck Cressy.

‘You must get sick of my problems.’

‘I never really understand them.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Well – are you worrying about leaving Dick for his sake, or for yours?’

Cressy finished her sherry. ‘Mine – I suppose. It’s all got so – nagging – and unimportant.’

‘If it isn’t making you happy, I should stop.’

‘What
does
make one happy? That’s what I want to know. Not knowing makes me inclined to hang on to what I’ve got. Rather a miserly view.’

‘Do you wish you could marry him?’

Here it was again. What was it – a moral question? A solicitous one? Did everyone – well, all women – think that all affairs had to be worth their weight in marriage? She said
flatly: