Bad Girls Good Women (44 page)

Alexander sat down at the piano and struck up a Scott Joplin rag. Julia beamed her approval, twirled in the middle of the Turkey carpet, and launched herself into a Charleston. Alexander played, faster and faster, until she was panting for breath and then she collapsed sideways against the piano, gasping and laughing. ‘Mercy. I can’t Charleston like Mattie.’

Alexander glanced up at the ceiling. The music seemed to reverberate there still. ‘I think you’re right,’ he mused. ‘The old house is too quiet. Lots of people. Lots of parties. Would you like that, Julia?’

Julia didn’t know what to say. She didn’t look at him, and then when the moment was past she wished that she had.

‘I always like parties,’ she mumbled.

‘Hmm.’ Alexander closed the lid of the piano. ‘Let’s go and forage for some dinner, shall we?’

They found some cold chicken in the refrigerator, and vegetables in a rack in the immense, chilly larder.

‘I don’t suppose Pa and Faye will mind,’ Alexander said.

‘Where are they?’ Julia asked curiously.

‘In London. The housekeeper has the weekend off too. Nobody else lives in. There are only a couple of cleaning ladies who come in from the village, anyway. Everything has to run on a shoestring nowadays.’ He nodded cheerfully at the chipped cream paintwork, and then his expression changed. ‘I like being here alone with you.’

‘I like it too,’ Julia said.

‘Where shall we eat?’

‘In the dining room. Properly.’

The room was cold, but Alexander turned on an electric fire and Julia laid the table. There were fourteen high-backed chairs around the length of blackened oak, and she set their two places one at either end. Ransacking the baize-lined drawers of the sideboard she found the heavy silver cutlery with a worn ‘B’ squirling the handles, and made an elaborate setting with too many knives and forks. Alexander brought up a bottle of hock, and she put out tall glasses with a cloudy spiral trapped in the stems. She enjoyed playing at chatelaine in the sombre magnificence of the room.

They sat down, facing each other, so far apart that they almost had to shout. They found it irresistibly funny, and laughed so much that the boiled potatoes went cold in front of them.

Afterwards they went back and sat in front of the drawing room fire again, their fingers twined tightly together.

‘Will you live here, one day?’ Julia asked.

‘One day,’ he told her. ‘After my father dies. That’s the understanding. ‘

His London detachment was more comprehensible now. That wasn’t his real life. Even his music wasn’t quite real, perhaps. His life was here, at Ladyhill. Envy nibbled at Julia again. What was her own freedom, except being adrift?

When they went upstairs, and Alexander showed her into a guest room hung with peacock-patterned fabric, he didn’t say goodnight. Julia undressed, cleaned her teeth and brushed her hair, and took her diaphragm out of its pink box. She put it in place and lay down between the chilly sheets. Alexander knocked at the door and came in, closing the door behind him with a faint click. When he slid into the bed beside her he seemed larger, and strange because of it, but his warmth struck through her and she stopped shivering and turned to him.

Bliss was gentle, more gentle with her than he need have been, and his care heated her response to him. Their love-making was good, and she knew that she shouldn’t have been so surprised by it.

In the privacy of the dark Julia wondered,
Why did he choose me to love? Why not Mattie, or any of the girls from the Rocket, or Blue Heaven …
She contemplated her own ordinariness, and the narrow confines of her background compared with Alexander’s. Then she thought,
You don’t choose. I didn’t choose Josh. It takes hold, and you can’t shake it off
.

Beside her Alexander breathed deeply, warming her cheek. He tightened his arms around her. ‘I love you,’ he said, as if he could hear her thoughts.

‘I love you too,’ she answered, offering it hopefully, as if hope could change everything.

Alexander fell asleep. Julia lay very still, her head in the hollow of his shoulder, her physical contentment giving her a sense of stasis, of welcome tranquillity. The wind creaked and groaned in the elm trees beyond the windows and she tried to imagine the dark gardens, spreading away from the walls of the house. More territory, unexplored. Alexander’s territory. She put her hand out to touch him, spreading her fingers over the firm flesh of his thigh.

‘I love you,’ she said again, to the safety of his closed ears.

In the morning, with Julia’s feet in Lady Bliss’s gumboots, they went out to look at the gardens. There was a high wind, and fretted clouds raced across the cold blue sky. They were both elated and they shouted like children, and ran across the winter-pocked lawns until the blood pounded in Julia’s rosy cheeks. She slowed down beside Alexander as they paced along the flowerbeds, and she listened as he recited plant names like a litany. ‘Mahonia, magnolia. Anemone, forsythia.’

They all looked the same to Julia and she beamed fondly at him. ‘Are you a gardener?’ Nothing she could have learned about Bliss would have surprised her today.

He laughed. ‘Pa would be pleased if I was. No, China is the gardener of the family. She restored the old gardens, laid out most of these beds.’

Hosta, hellebore. Salix, sambucus
.

In a birch spinney at the furthest point from the house lay a sheet of pale gold. The daffodils shivered and swayed, profligate in the sharp chill.

‘That is beautiful,’ Julia murmured, drinking in the sight. Alexander watched her until she turned again, almost high with their colour and with the thin, sweet scent. They stood side by side, with the shelter of the birch trees behind them, looking at the house. The shifting sky was reflected in the windows now, so that the house itself seemed to move, sailing before the wind.

Alexander took her hand, weighing it in his own. She had a sense that he had been waiting, waiting for a long time with a kind of calculating patience that had utterly escaped her attention, and that now, at Ladyhill, he judged that the time had come. She felt outguessed and outmanoeuvred, and it was an oddly exciting sensation. She looked at him with minute attention, oblivious of the house and the gardens, of everything except Alexander himself.

Even so, she didn’t guess what was coming.

‘I wanted to ask if you would like to marry me.’

The wind took his words and seemed to spread them over the grounds, seeding them richly, and the house seemed to dip and shimmer in its stately progress. But the ground felt solid under Julia’s feet, and the cold still stung her face.

She was thinking,
Not me. You should choose someone better than me. Someone good, like you, not a survivor, which is all I am
.

She was going to say,
I can’t marry you
, but she swallowed the hasty words as they took shape in her mouth. With sudden perfect clarity she understood that Bliss did love her, and she began to comprehend the importance of that. To be loved by a man like Alexander made her more than a survivor. It made her full and strong, no more a dirty little baby or even a bad girl, and it made her long to return his love with her own. She did love him now, with an untroubled conviction that was nothing like her grinding passion for Josh. It was simple, and comfortable, and good.

A huge sense of relief washed over her, and happiness swelled up in the wake of it. She was afraid that it would shatter if she moved, but she did move, going to him. The anxiety in his eyes changed to delight. Alexander’s arms wrapped round her. The happiness was still there, intact.

‘Yes,’ Julia said. ‘Yes, if you really want me.’

‘I want you,’ Alexander assured her. ‘I wanted you from the moment I first saw you.’

Julia murmured, with her face against his, ‘I’m here. I always want to be here, wherever you are.’

Thirteen

Julia and Alexander were married in the little church in Ladyhill village. After the ceremony Lady Bliss, or Faye as she had briskly instructed Julia to call her, gave a small reception for their guests in the Long Gallery at Ladyhill. They were mostly family, villagers and tenants. Sophia recalled that at her own wedding there had been five hundred guests and a marquee in the garden.

‘At least I’m escaping that,’ Julia said with relief.

She had wanted to marry in London, in a register office, and to give her own kind of party afterwards in the Rocket Club. Alexander wouldn’t hear of it. He wanted them to be married properly, as he put it, at Ladyhill, and for the rest of the fuss to be kept to a minimum. Loving him, and anxious to do whatever pleased him, Julia agreed. She was fitted for a ballerina-length dress of cream wild silk, and chose two small Brockway cousins to be her bridesmaids.

‘We can have a big celebration for all our friends later, in London, can’t we?’ she begged Alexander.

‘Of course we can,’ he promised. ‘Let’s just be married, first.’

The wedding preparations were tedious to both of them, for different reasons, but they were happy and in love, and they cheerfully performed the expected rituals. Once it was over, Julia remembered very little about her wedding day. Betty looked timid and overawed, swamped by a new two-piece that was too big and too bright for her. Vernon seemed to be leaning on Julia’s arm, rather than the other way round, as they made their way down the aisle. Julia recalled Sir Percy’s poker-straight back in the family pew, and Faye beside him, mistily smiling beneath the tulle-swathed brim of her hat. China was there too, sitting on the bride’s, half empty, side of the church. Her self-possession was as formidable as a weapon, but Julia warmed to her for her evident pleasure at Alexander’s happiness.

Julia had no doubt that she was far from being the kind of daughter-in-law that Sir Percy and the second Lady Bliss would have chosen, had Alexander offered them a choice. Rather sensibly, she thought, they had decided to make the best of her. Probably they were relieved that Alexander had decided to marry at all.

As she stood demurely at her new husband’s side, listening to the dull speeches and wishing she could take off the flowered headdress that was pinching her temples, Julia decided that they could have been even less lucky. Alexander might have wanted to marry Mattie, for example. Julia had to bite the inside of her cheek to stop herself giggling at the idea. Mattie had already drunk a good deal of champagne, and was creating a disturbance amongst the bachelor cousins and uncles at the far end of the gallery. Julia felt Alexander’s arm pressing against hers in sympathy, and she kept her face perfectly straight.

After the wedding, Mr and Mrs Bliss flew to Paris for a week’s honeymoon. When it was over they came back to Alexander’s flat in Markham Square. Julia unpacked their wedding presents and tidied up the worst of the bachelor mess. One morning, when Alexander had gone out to a business meeting, she sat down and wrote a letter to Josh Flood.

I’m married now
, she wrote.
Isn’t that strange? I still think of you, although I love Alexander very much. Is that wrong, do you think?

When she had finished the letter she read it through, and then tore it up. It was all finished, she told herself. It was gone, like Blick Road and the old square and the frustrating days at Tressider Designs.
The sadness and the sense of loss, of unfinished business, must just be part of being grown-up
, Julia thought.
She would learn to live with that, like everything else
.

The next thing she did, with her Tressider experience to back her, was to apply for a job in the Homes department of a glossy magazine. To her surprise, she got the job. Alexander was pleased and proud, which made her feel proud of herself. She started work, and their life began to settle into a comfortably bohemian routine. Alexander wrote his music, and played his trumpet or the piano. In the evenings they gave messy, prolonged dinner parties, mixing new friends with the old ones, or went out to jazz-clubs, or sat holding hands in little bistros before hurrying home to bed.

It was a happy, deeply satisfying time.

‘I like being married,’ Julia said to Mattie. ‘Who’d have guessed it?’

‘I would,’ Mattie said promptly. ‘I wish I could find someone half as decent as Bliss.’

‘You will,’ Julia promised. ‘Just wait.’ Neither of them mentioned Jimmy Proffitt.

Then, barely three months after their wedding, Alexander’s father had a stroke. It seemed at first that he would survive it, but he died a week later, with Alexander sitting at his bedside.

At first, Julia didn’t understand what the old man’s death meant. It didn’t occur to her that after the funeral, after the dismal formalities of wills and settlements had been attended to, they wouldn’t be going back to Markham Square to pick up the cheerful threads of their life again.

Alexander was gentle, but he was quite firm.

‘We’ll have to spend much more of our time down here, now that my father has gone. I have to run the estate, and the farm.’

Julia said, ‘How much more time? Weekends, and so on?’

Alexander put his arm round her. ‘More than that, Ladyhill is my home.’ He caught himself, corrected himself almost before the words were out. ‘Our home. I can’t be an absentee landlord, Julia.’

She knew, now, what was coming, but she would make him admit it to her.

‘What does that mean, exactly?’

‘I want us to live here.’

There was a silence, the particular Ladyhill silence in which there were no sounds of traffic, no voices from a busy street beneath the windows. The quiet was oppressive to Julia and she broke it by asking, ‘What about my job, Alexander? I like my job. I thought you liked me to do it?’ It struck her now as the only work she had ever shown any talent for, as her great chance, impossible to give up.

Alexander didn’t hedge, at least.

‘I thought that Ladyhill might be a job, too. For both of us, together.’

He was looking straight into her eyes, concerned, but with the clear expectation that she would do as he asked. Men like Alexander Bliss – Sir Alexander, she reminded herself, just as she, unthinkably, was now Lady Bliss – were brought up to expect agreement from their wives. Faye would always have agreed. China, presumably, had not. Alexander was clever, and sensitive, and all the other things Julia had learned to love him for, but he had his father in him too. She straightened her back, ready to fight him.