Bad Girls Good Women (55 page)

‘I left Alexander and Lily behind to come to London, to you. I don’t think I should have married Alexander, and I shouldn’t have had his baby, but I did do it and I can’t change that now. I can change the need to have to lie to them, at least, because of you. I should have told them that I was coming here, you see, but I didn’t, because I was too cowardly. I know I’m a coward. I’m trying not to be now. I came here because I love you, and I always have loved you. Right from the beginning, you know that. So I’m asking if I can come with you.’ Julia put her hand up to her face, rubbing it over her eyes as if in disbelief. ‘No. I’m asking if we can come with you, Lily and me. I can’t leave her behind. I’m not as bad as that, you see. If we can come with you, back to the States. Not to be married, if you don’t believe in that. To live with you. To have an ordinary life.’ Julia lifted her hand and pointed at the kitchen shelves, the new white oven. ‘Like these people. Because we can be happy. I know that.’

The long speech had left her breathless. The last words came out as a gasp. Josh folded the newspaper, two and then three folds, and laid it beside him. His eyes lingered on it instead of turning to Julia. ‘What about Alexander?’ he asked.

‘Don’t ask me about Alexander.’ Julia’s voice sounded harsh in her anxiety. Images jumped up in front of her again. The fire. Their wedding in Ladyhill church. Alexander’s bandaged hands, Alexander holding Lily when she was a tiny baby. His work spread out on the table in the summerhouse, Sandy’s face.

Julia knew that it was imperative to keep the guilt inside herself for everything that had happened. It was for her to suffer. If she let it leak out, even once, it would taint Josh and herself as surely as it had tainted all the last years. She must not let him even guess at it.

‘I’ll worry about Alexander,’ she whispered.

Josh began walking around the kitchen. She watched him, noticing the exact gold of his tanned skin, the tiny red tag on the back pocket of his jeans, the way his fingers clenched, the shadow cast by the vee of his open-necked shirt. She felt the square, monolithic fact of her love for him, almost angry at its unshakeability.

‘Do you remember Montebellate?’ Josh asked.

‘I’ve thought about it all the time since we’ve been here.’

Josh nodded. ‘Of course. It’s the same, isn’t it? You were so hungry, then. It was frightening. You wanted everything you hadn’t had. Love, experience, the whole lot.’

‘I’ve had experience now,’ Julia said sadly.

Josh smiled at her, and there was so much warmth in it that she remembered why she liked him as well as loving him. ‘Nothing finishes,’ Josh said. ‘Life is very economical. It recycles the same material, over and over again. It’s rather comforting. Don’t imagine that you’ve seen everything because you’ve reached the age of twenty-three.’

Julia sighed. She felt prematurely exhausted. ‘What are you telling me? Plain words, Josh.’

‘At Montebellate, I told you that I can’t give you what you want. I couldn’t marry you, or promise to love you for ever, or give you security and stability then. I still can’t. I can’t take you back with me because there isn’t anything there. It’s just a place, work, circumstances, and you expect a home. Don’t you? All there is is what we have already shared, in this house.’ His hands, suddenly unbearably familiar, made a round shape in the air. She could have laughed, again, at the neatly fabricated completion when the truth was so ragged. ‘I thought you understood that, Julia.’

She looked blankly at him, unable to reply.

He went on, floundering a little now. ‘I thought you came here to enjoy … what we have enjoyed. Being friends and lovers. Taking some time together, because we matter to one another.’

And then moving on, when it was convenient, of course. Josh was right, life did recycle the same material. Only it wasn’t comforting. Julia despised the desperation in her own voice when she pleaded, ‘I can make us a home. It’s because your mother left, because you’ve never had one, you don’t know what it’s like. We will be happy. I’ll make sure we are. Josh, I promise you.’

He stepped forward then, taking her by the wrist, folding her against him. His hand stroked her hair, cradling her head to his chest. She heard the vibration of his voice when he spoke again.

‘I couldn’t promise you, don’t you see? I don’t want to stay in one place, with one person. It’s not my life. I couldn’t make you happy. And the last thing I want is to hurt you, or see you hurt. I told you that at Montebellate, too.’

Julia closed her eyes. Made stupid by disappointment, it took her a moment or two to grasp what he was really telling her. There wasn’t any future at all. No wonder she had had to listen until her head hurt. The few hours in the blank house were all there was. Out of her misery, she could only whisper, ‘Why did you come back, then?’

He tilted her chin in his fingers, looking down at her, so close to her that she felt dazed.

‘Because I love you, because I wanted to see you.’ He hesitated for a second, and then he added, ‘If there was going to be one person, in one place, it would be you.’

Anger twisted inside Julia, anaesthetising the hurt for a moment. If. But Josh’s consideration of himself came first. For the very first time, it occurred to her to wonder whether Josh was worth loving as much as she did love him.

She didn’t ask herself whether she could stop, because she knew that she never had. But the brief flash of anger helped her to lift her head, and to produce a smile. ‘Poor Josh. It must be boring, having women asking you to marry them all the time, when all you want is a few hours of fun.’

She had a bitter sense of herself as one of Josh’s ports of call, strung out along the line of his travels, and then wondered why the image had never occurred to her before.

‘They don’t ask, as it happens,’ Josh said.

‘Only the very reckless or the very stupid ones?’

‘Don’t, Julia. You hurt us both.’

But her anger and bitterness had already disappeared. She let her head fall forwards against his shoulder again and he held her tightly, rocking her a little in his arms. She clung to him, thinking that he was still Josh, and nothing had changed from an hour ago except her own expectations, and Josh wasn’t to blame for those. He had never been less than honest.

Julia smiled crookedly and, sensing it, Josh kissed the top of her head. ‘I’m going to telephone Alexander,’ she told him. He let her go and she went into the other room, closing the door firmly.

Alexander’s voice was very cold. He didn’t ask her where she was or what she had been doing.

‘I’ll be home tomorrow afternoon,’ Julia said. She thought,
I’m going to take one more day, calculatedly, just like Josh would
.

‘Which train?’

‘There’s no need to meet me. I’ll get a taxi from the station.’

‘Lily has missed you,’ Alexander said abruptly.

Julia hunched her shoulders against the pang that his words gave her. ‘I’ve missed her too.’

After he had rung off she waited for a moment or two, listening to the empty line. In the kitchen again she said to Josh, ‘Let’s go to the Tate. I’d like to see some pictures today.’ As if nothing had happened, because nothing was going to happen. And with evident relief, Josh followed her lead.

At the gallery they wandered through the Pre-Raphaelite collection, examining the wide-eyed maidens with their swollen lips and intricate masses of hair. They reminded Julia irresistibly of Mattie trying to look suitably solemn, and she remembered Mattie’s wordless disapproval. Julia jerked her head up defiantly and pretended to be studying Ophelia in her bathtub full of floating blossoms. Today was today; Josh was still here. There would be more than enough time to reflect on everything else. She put her arm through his and tried to stop her fingers clawing into his arm.

‘Let’s have lunch in the gallery restaurant,’ Josh said.

They sat facing each other, talking about the pictures and then about other things that they had seen and done, like any couple. Julia felt the minutes like beads on a thread, slipping through her fingers. Josh ordered a special bottle of wine, and when the waitress poured it he held up his glass to Julia. The silence was awkward because neither of them could think of a toast.

It was only three days since the Ritz, Julia remembered, when they had drunk to understanding. The gulf between their two poles of understanding gaped between them now, and Julia still wanted to launch herself across it and twist her arms around his neck. She lifted her glass and drank half the wine instead, and the skin of her face felt taut and puffy with uncried tears.

Later, in the afternoon heat, they walked along the Embankment in the hope of a river breeze. The slow-running water made Julia think of the night in the Savoy doorway, and of walking with Alexander after their first meeting. The accumulation of memories was like lumber piled around her, too bulky to disperse.
I wanted to be free
, she thought. And then,
I was deceiving myself. I wanted to belong to Josh. Am I so conventional, then, after all?
The realisation of how little she knew herself, coupled with her blindness in running to Josh, oppressed her more than the day’s sticky heat. Her feet seemed glued to the melting pavements. There wasn’t even the faintest breath of air blowing off the river.

‘It’s too hot,’ Josh said. ‘Let’s go back home.’

Home. For a day, then.

There was a little brick-paved courtyard behind the mews house, overgrown with dusty ivy and decorated with leggy scarlet geraniums in clay pots. Josh brought out two white chairs, and he made iced tea and carried two glasses outside on a tray. Julia drank hers and then went to sit on the warm bricks beside him. She rested her head exhaustedly against his knee and he lifted the damp strands of hair from her face. To Julia, the little vista of empty glasses, scattered red petals, Josh’s bare feet crossed at the ankles and the legs of the empty white chair, seemed unbearably intimate. His fingers against her face were painfully gentle.
We are as tender with each other
, Julia thought sadly,
as we would be if one of us was going to die
.

They sat in silence, listening to the monotonous hum of distant traffic, aware that they were holding on to each other in a kind of desperation.

Julia wanted to plead with him,
Why? When we could make each other happy, just if you changed a word
… But she had asked once, and she was too proud to go back to it again.

At last, as the patch of sky overhead lost its brassy light and turned smoky-pale, Josh murmured, ‘Let’s not go out again. Let’s stay here together. I’ll make us some food.’

All right, Julia agreed silently. Let’s bury our heads in this play-house for the last few hours.

Josh went out briefly, and came back with a delicatessen bag. He unpacked the contents, displaying steaks and the ingredients of a salad. ‘You didn’t know I could cook, did you?’

She watched him preparing the steaks. ‘I don’t know anything about you, Josh. I just thought I did.’

He looked up at her. It was a direct, unveiled gaze that disarmed her all over again and her heart knocked uncomfortably. The impossibility of not loving him was like a vast obstacle, blocking the way to everywhere she turned.

‘You know all there is to know,’ he told her simply. ‘There isn’t anything else. You are the one who wants and imagines more. You are the complicated one.’

Julia could find no answer to that.

They ate their meal, and they tidied the plates and bowls away afterwards, cleaning the kitchen carefully to leave no trace of their occupation.
As if we’d never existed
, Julia thought. In the clean white space that was all that was left, Josh took her hand. He separated the fingers with his own and then kissed the thin skin between them. There was no possibility of resisting him. She knew that she couldn’t have done it, even if she had intended to. When he drew her closer to him and kissed her, she felt his momentary hesitation. She couldn’t have denied her own response, and it was enough of an answer. They went up the stairs to the white bedroom together. Josh could make her forget, as he had always been able to do, even the existence of tomorrow.

A long time afterwards, Julia realised that he had fallen asleep. She lay for a while listening to his breathing, and then she slid away from him. Their skin had seemed fused with heat, but it separated with a tiny sound like a faint, final kiss. Julia went and stood at the window, parting the curtains a little so that she could look out into the mews. With a slight shock of surprise, she realised that it was pouring with rain. It fell in opaque sheets, and the fat drops bounced up again, silvered by the glow of the street lamps. The noise of it drummed and gurgled, and the curtains of water closed in, cutting her off behind her pane of glass in total isolation.

Julia shivered, but the day’s thundery heat still lay thickly against her bare skin, and she understood that what she felt was loneliness. It intensified as she stood there, until she could have believed that she was the only person in the world left to look at the sudden rivers sluicing over the cobbles of the mews. Josh made a small sound and stirred in his sleep.

Julia let the curtain fall again to close out the rain. She was thinking about the almost deliberate steps she had taken to create such piercing loneliness for herself, even though she had a husband and a baby, a lover, and a friend like Mattie. Her mouth twisted as she crossed the room again to the bed. Josh was deeply asleep, one arm stretched out where she had been lying, his fingers loosely curled. Silently, Julia bent down and picked up his discarded shirt. She put it on, wrapping the folds of it around her. Then she went downstairs to the kitchen and made herself some tea. She sat for a long time, staring at the white countertop and listening to the monotonous pounding of the rain.

In the morning, they were still gentle with each other. They even moved too carefully around the little kitchen, as if they were afraid to bump into and bruise each other.

After breakfast Julia went upstairs and folded up the red and white polka-dot dress that she had worn to the Ritz, seemingly years ago. She put it into her suitcase with the few other things on top of it. She was just about to snap the fastenings when she sensed Josh behind her. He was leaning against the door frame and she was struck by his half-penitent, half-wary expression. He looked like a small boy who knew that he was about to get away with misbehaviour. He looked sad, truthfully sad, but also relieved. He held out the big doll, her plaits flopping. There was a faint, protesting
Mama
.