8

Peter was home for half-term, unidentified stickiness in his tuck box, Aertex shirt gone missing again. ‘Do you want mustard in your sandwich?’ asked Harry. ‘“Mootard”, as the Frenchies say.’

‘No,’ said Peter. ‘Mustard is foul.’

‘“No, thank you,”’ said Julia.

‘No, thank you,’ said Peter. ‘Shall I tell you a joke?’

‘Go on.’

‘What did one wall say to the other?’

‘I give up,’ said Julia, sitting herself down at the kitchen table. ‘What did one wall say to the other?’

‘I’ll meet you at the corner!’

Julia laughed because he found it so funny. ‘Good joke.’

‘I read it in my comic,’ said Peter. ‘Do you want to hear another one?’

‘Perhaps after lunch,’ she said. ‘Your scar wouldn’t show, you know, if you didn’t sweep your fringe across like that. I swear it’s redder now than when you went back to school. Does it bother you?’

‘No.’

Mothers, thought Peter, hadn’t the first idea. His scar was a badge of honour and much admired for its many and varied fictitious causes. He wasn’t going to hide it away.

Richard, who had been working at home that morning, came into the kitchen.

‘Sandwich, Mr C?’ asked Harry.

‘Thank you, no,’ said Richard. ‘I’ll have a bite at the Crown later.’ He handed Julia a letter. ‘This came for you in the second post. I must say, Marjorie’s quite the correspondent.’

‘Yes, she is,’ said Julia, leaving the letter lying by her plate and trying not to look at it. It was from Dougie.

That morning she had woken up determined to put a stop to it, as she had woken up on other mornings with the same resolution. Dougie’s timing was uncanny. She didn’t need to read the letter to be drawn right back to him. His handwriting accomplished that all by itself. It didn’t seem to matter how often she decided there wouldn’t be a next time when the next time was all she could think about. Along with the last time, its details now blurred smooth by too much remembering.

On the other hand, why should she assume that he wanted there to be a next time? One weekend wasn’t much to go on. Perhaps he was writing to tell her it was over. A man like that – there would be other women. Wouldn’t there? Yet – ‘my own Sinclair’ – how could that be true? Now her fingers itched to open the envelope.

‘Who’s Marjorie?’ said Peter.

‘Sorry, darling, what did you say?’

‘She’s an old college friend of your mother’s, whose husband is in the forces,’ said Richard. ‘Your mother is being a great support to her.’

‘Not really.’ Julia took the letter and got up from her seat. ‘She just needs a bit of hand-holding.’

‘A violinist, isn’t that right?’

‘Viola,’ said Julia. ‘She plays the viola.’ Marjorie Askew: whatever had become of her? she wondered as she went out the door.

Peter didn’t understand how hands could be held with letters. His letters, which they were made to write on Sunday afternoon after chapel, were equal parts requests and boasts. Those he received from home asked too many questions. That was the long and short of letters.

Late afternoon in the drawing room, and the light was going. Soon it would be time to black out the windows, to shut out the sea views. From the kitchen came the smell of baking.

Here was the thing, thought Julia, putting on the record. How do you make that from this?

This was the sheet music of ‘Tea for Two’. On the page was the melody, the notes, the key signature, the tempo. Simple enough. Child’s play. Yet on the gramophone, what was being done to the melody, the key signature, the tempo, was of a different order altogether.

A pity she hadn’t been at the club with Dougie when he’d seen Art Tatum. She’d have liked to have taken a good look at his fingering. But she knew that what she was hearing was nothing as simple as dexterity. What she was hearing was speed of thought, the ability to expose harmonic relationships and create new ones. The inventiveness dazzled her.

When the record finished, she tried to reproduce what she had heard. It was hard. Harder than Rachmaninov, harder than Liszt. Even Liszt, they said, could not always play Liszt.

The front door opened and closed.

‘Peter?’ she said.

Richard came into the drawing room. ‘Not your usual repertoire,’ he said.

‘No,’ said Julia. ‘It’s jazz.’

‘Is that what you call it.’

That was ungenerous of him, she thought. ‘You’re home early.’

He sat heavily in his chair. ‘Yes.’

She turned on the piano stool. He was staring at the floor, his hands braced on his knees. Her heart skipped. ‘What’s the matter?’

Did he know? Had she been found out? She glanced at the bureau where she had sat reading Dougie’s letter earlier – ‘When can you get away again?’; and where she had written her reply – ‘Soon, soon, I promise’; but the desktop was neat and clear. Caution was second nature now.

‘Perry Clayton,’ he said.

She had forgotten all about Perry Clayton. ‘I thought the trial was next month.’

‘There won’t be a trial.’

He raised his eyes. His expression was beaten, hollow. ‘He’s hanged himself in his cell.’

‘Oh no!’

‘I’m afraid so.’ Richard took a deep breath and pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘The governor rang me this afternoon. There’ll be an inquest, of course, and a few rapped knuckles, I suppose. He used the bedclothes.’

‘I’m so sorry, Richard.’ She knew how much effort he had made to ensure that Perry Clayton was properly represented and what a point of principle this was for him. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘A waste of a life. Two lives.’

‘He was guilty, though, wasn’t he?’ she said.

‘Yes,’ Richard said. ‘Yes, he was.’ He got up, crossed the room and stood looking out of the window. ‘The last time I saw him he was full of remorse.’

‘You couldn’t have predicted this.’

‘Couldn’t I?’ he said. ‘You know, his wife never once visited him. Sometimes I think passion is a terrible thing.’

Passion was a terrible thing. It tore you in half. Julia had never felt divided against herself before. The pain was physical, insupportable at times.

Some days she tried to walk it out of herself. But this did not work. In one direction, a walk might take her past the Martello tower, where she had first laid eyes on Dougie; in the other to the cottage where they had first made love. She saw these points on the shingle coast as hallowed ground, glowing with meaning. When the postmistress rented the cottage out to a pair of elderly brothers, she felt the desecration keenly.

One bleak Sunday afternoon in mid-November, when she could stand it no longer, she took her distress to Fiona. It was risky, she knew. Yet, of all people, she thought her friend might be sympathetic. That she might be entertained was also a distinct possibility, which she would just have to deal with.

Fiona lived down by the green in a Regency house with smart paintwork, arched windows and fine glazing bars. If dogs could resemble their owners, so too could houses.

The unburdening proved easier than Julia expected. Once she started, staring at the striped wallpaper, it all came out in a stammering rush.

There followed a little silence. Then Fiona said, ‘I suspected something was up.’ She smoothed her skirt. ‘Drink, darling?’

‘Please.’

Fiona went over to the sideboard and busied herself with bottles and glasses. Her mind was reeling. Never Julia, she thought. Never her dearest friend. Never in a million years.

She remembered that time a little while ago when she had caught sight of Julia in the street looking like someone had given her the most enormous present. Her immediate assumption was that she was anticipating a happy event and wasn’t yet ready to share the news. Then, lately, with Julia so distracted, she had put the change of mood down to miscarriage.

The truth was beyond her wildest imaginings. This was precisely the sort of foul behaviour she’d once been on the receiving end of, a fact that Julia seemed to have forgotten about.

‘I just don’t know what to do with myself,’ she was saying from the sofa. ‘It’s driving me insane. I’ve never felt like this before.’ Julia was clearly of the opinion that no one had ever felt like this before.

‘Lemon?’

‘Please.’ Julia paused. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know who else to turn to.’

‘What are friends for?’ Fiona handed her the gin and sat opposite. ‘Let me be sure I’ve got this absolutely straight. This man you spent the weekend with in London is the same one who filmed you that day on the beach?’ Fiona had it absolutely straight; she was only buying time to compose her reactions.

Julia bristled a little. Her friend might have been talking about any Tom, Dick or Harry who whistled under their breath when you went past. ‘He works for a government film unit. Quite high up in it, actually.’

Fiona lit a cigarette. ‘I see.’

‘I know it’s wrong,’ Julia said, helping herself to a cigarette, ‘and I keep meaning to put an end to it, then another letter comes. He writes the most wonderful letters.’ And here, remembering the language of the letters, she flushed to the roots of her hair.

Fiona, tapping ash into the ashtray, noted the flush and the smoking.

‘Don’t worry,’ Julia said. ‘I’m not a complete fool. I don’t leave them lying about. They’re quite safe where I’ve put them.’

‘I’m glad to hear it,’ said Fiona. ‘Does he have a wife?’

‘She’s abroad.’

‘Children?’

Julia, whose confession had momentarily lightened her distress – even saying Dougie’s name aloud was a relief – now found her distress deepening to a trough. She reached across to touch her friend on the arm. ‘I don’t want to hurt anyone, least of all Richard. You do see that, don’t you?’

Fiona, shrinking back, disguised her revulsion with a cough. She might have been listening to one of her husband’s heartless little home-breakers burbling on in their heartless little fashion. All those horrid little secretaries.

‘This isn’t sensible, darling. I do hope you realize. You are playing with fire.’

‘I know,’ said Julia. ‘That’s what I keep telling myself.’

‘Then put a stop to it before things get well and truly out of hand.’

Part of the reason Julia had sought out her friend was to be given precisely that advice. Now she had been given it, she found she didn’t want to hear it. ‘I wish it were that simple,’ she said.

How Fiona endured that afternoon she was unable to say. After Julia left, she poured herself another drink and sat numbly drinking it. For the first time she had experienced the inequality of friendship and she didn’t like it at all.

It was three weeks later. On account of the war and the blackout, the yacht-club Christmas dance had been scaled down and shifted earlier in the day to a buffet lunch: there would be no dancing.

The clubhouse was a low building clad in white boarding perched on a short pier down by the estuary. Fiona was a little late. This was intentional: parties made her miss her husband badly. Geoffrey had always been the life and soul. She came into the noisy, overheated room and almost turned back again.

Tired paper chains were looped between race photographs and display cabinets and taped snowflakes were uncurling from the misted windows. By the door, a group of men in brass- buttoned blazers were discussing, with all due male gravity and well-judged equidistance from one another, the recent Soviet invasion of Finland and advance on the Mannerheim Line. Others were talking boats and how much they missed them. She threaded her way through the crowd and spotted Julia over near the drinks table, next to Alan Bateson, the club president.

‘Mrs Compton tells me she is teaching herself to play jazz,’ said Alan Bateson when she joined them. He had a ruddy, weathered face and the unshakeable confidence of a prize-winning helmsman. Many of the trophies in the display cabinets had his name on them. ‘I call that very enterprising and quite possibly a little fast.’ He seemed on the brink of winking, or bottompinching.

Julia laughed. She was animated and glowing. ‘No, I didn’t say I was teaching myself how to play it, I said I was finding it very difficult to play it.’

Gazing round the room, sipping her sherry, Fiona sensed a sharpening of male attention in Julia’s direction, and not only from the Alan Bateson quarter. Sensing it too, his tiny bird-like wife came up and claimed him.

‘Jazz?’ said Fiona, steering her friend to a quiet corner. ‘You might as well hang a sign round your neck.’

‘Saying “pianist”?’ said Julia.

‘You know what I’m talking about.’ If Julia was sending out such signals in public, thought Fiona, the Lord only knew what she was letting slip in the privacy of her own home.

Julia, who had been enjoying herself – so far as someone who disliked sailing could enjoy herself at a yacht club – was brought up short. ‘I thought you understood.’

‘I understand the risk you’re taking, which is more than you appear to.’ Fiona lowered her voice. ‘You don’t know how lucky you are. Men like Richard aren’t ten a penny. You’re putting your whole world in jeopardy. Can’t you see that?’

Her whole world, thought Julia, looking round the room. The Batesons, the Murrays, the Whitakers, Major Lees, Reverend Weir, the Burroughs, the Huntleys, that odd braying woman in the funny hat whose name she had forgotten. Was this her whole world? It wasn’t, not if Dougie wasn’t in it.

‘What happens if this man gets you pregnant? Have you considered that?’

Julia flushed. Dougie used protection.

‘Listen to me, darling,’ Fiona said. ‘Men wander. They can’t help themselves. It’s different for us. We’re not free agents. We have our homes and families to consider.’

‘Ladies?’ It was one of the young sea cadets, handing round the mince pies.

Fiona waited until he had moved out of earshot. ‘Just because you got away with it once, it doesn’t mean you’ll get away with it again.’

‘I have done.’

‘When?’

‘Last weekend.’ Julia was in no mood to be lectured. If she wanted to be taken to task for cheating on her husband or warned about the risks she was running, she could do those jobs herself, and better than anyone else. ‘Stuffy, isn’t it? I’m going outside for a bit.’

A few minutes later Fiona was thinking of leaving when Richard came over, with the mild air of abashment with which he usually approached her. ‘Good turnout.’

‘Yes,’ said Fiona. ‘Remarkably good.’

The sea cadet came past again and Richard helped himself to a mince pie. ‘Where’s Julia?’

The poor lamb, thought Fiona. ‘Gone out for some air.’

‘Quite a chinwag you two were having earlier.’ He bit into the pie. ‘Gosh, this is hot.’

He couldn’t have heard anything. Could he?

‘Oh, we were just discussing the usual. The trials of motherhood. The trials of Christmas shopping – especially in wartime.’

‘Ah,’ said Richard. ‘I can’t speak for the trials of motherhood but so far as Christmas shopping is concerned you should think about a little jaunt to London. Julia went to town last weekend, with remarkable success.’

‘Yes,’ said Fiona. ‘She did say.’

The sky was indigo and cerise, with greenish streaks on the horizon. You had these skies sometimes on late-winter afternoons and for the life of her she couldn’t remember what the fishermen made of them, what they were supposed to herald or foretell. (There was no one more superstitious than a fisherman.)

Unnatural, she thought, leaning on the railing outside the clubhouse, listening to the lapping water, smoking a cigarette.

‘Nothing natural about nature,’ Dougie had said, the previous weekend. ‘The Fauvists knew this.’

The Fauvists?

They had gone along to an exhibition of modern British art at the National Gallery. All the treasures – the Titians, Rembrandts, Raphaels, Van Eycks – had been shipped out of the museum for safe-keeping. Great grubby tidemarks on the walls announced their illustrious absence. The exhibition, which was small, had been thrown together in a room off the main entrance.

‘I don’t know whether these artists should be flattered or dismayed,’ said Dougie. ‘On the one hand, I suppose they should be pleased that the MOI have drafted them in to fill the cultural vacuum in which we find ourselves. On the other, it does rather suggest they’re expendable. No one’s hiding these works in Wales.’

‘I like this one,’ said Julia.

They had stopped in front of a still life, the forms fractured, reassembled.

‘Why?’

‘It reminds me of your paintings, for a start.’

She had forgotten her gloves and they were holding hands in his coat pocket, the same coat that later at a bus stop he was to open and wrap round her, to scandalized glances in the queue. Or perhaps it was the coat, not the gesture, that was shocking: it was an alarming shade of orange.

‘It’s like jazz,’ she went on. ‘It’s not elaborating on something simple for the sake of it. It’s a kind of exploration, an investi- gation.’ She turned to him. ‘Pulling something apart is a good way of putting it back together again, don’t you think?’

‘Yes, Sinclair,’ he said. ‘I do.’

‘You seemed to enjoy yourself tonight,’ said Richard, getting under the covers.

‘It was all right,’ she said. The party was over and the doubts were back, the terrible guilt, the fear. They ate away at her like wild animals. They wouldn’t leave her alone.

A squeak of bedsprings. ‘I think I’m going to have to move the boat somewhere drier. Alan said those sheds on the north side aren’t sound.’

Her throat tightened. ‘Richard, do you love me?’

He turned over in bed and put his arms around her. He smelled of clean pyjamas. ‘What sort of question is that?’

His embrace was comforting and familiar. So was his love-making. When it was over, she wondered, as she had on previous occasions, who she was betraying now. Tears seeped out of her eyes and fell.

No more weekends in London, she told herself. No more Dougie. No more tug of war in her head. Tomorrow she would write and put a stop to it.

‘Not more snow,’ said Julia, coming into the kitchen. Big white flakes drifted past the window. It was late January and the entire country was in the iron grip of the worst freeze in years.

‘A farm cart’s broke its axle on the Whitmarket road,’ said Harry. ‘And, to save you asking, we’re out of sugar. Mr C had the last of it on his porridge this morning.’

‘Oh.’

Somehow the bad weather made rationing, which had just come in, doubly punishing. Julia could not remember a time when there had not been sugar in the sugar bowl. She wondered how Peter was faring: he liked his tea sweet and his cakes sweeter. But the school would have some way of dealing with it.

She sat at the table and turned over the pages of Harry’s Picture Post. Gay girls in their skating dresses posed on the frozen Serpentine. In London, Dougie was ill with bronchitis. Next week, if the trains were running, he was going to Birmingham to film a factory that made fuselages.

She hadn’t seen him since that weekend before Christmas, but she hadn’t stopped writing to him. The other night she dreamed that he had turned up unannounced on her doorstep to claim her and Richard beat him to a pulp. Halfway through the assault he turned into Perry Clayton. She woke drenched in horror.

There had been other dreams, too, dreams of a sexual nature, which put a shamed warmth in her body for the rest of the day. Were there other women as brazen as her whose minds pictured penises? Particular penises at particular angles?

‘How are you getting on with the socks?’ Harry said.

‘The socks?’ Julia closed the magazine. ‘Oh, the socks.’

These were intended as a donation to the Red Cross. Two hundred thousand troops of the British Expeditionary Force, Marjorie’s fictitious husband included, were now stationed in Belgium and France, strung out along the Maginot Line. All in need of footwear.

‘Not well.’ Julia eyed the tangle of khaki wool. ‘I think the socks might have to become a scarf. There aren’t any corners in scarves.’

Harry wondered, not for the first time, how a pianist could be all thumbs.

‘Popping out for a bit,’ said Julia.

Smoking again, thought Harry. Mr C wouldn’t be pleased, but it was not her place to tell him.

‘Smoking?’ said Richard. ‘You?’

He’d come across her puffing away at the bottom of the garden beside the shed, where he’d gone in search of the shovel to clear the front path.

She dropped the cigarette on the frozen ground.

‘It steadies my nerves.’

‘I wasn’t aware you suffered from nerves.’ He shook his head, more in sadness or disbelief, it seemed, than anger. ‘I suppose you’ve picked this up from Fiona.’

‘Quite possibly,’ said Julia. She gazed around the garden, which was inches deep in snow. ‘There will be a lot of damage after this winter.’

‘Yes,’ said Richard. ‘I’m afraid we must reconcile ourselves to some losses.’

A loss came soon enough. The dog died. Harry found him the next morning, stiff in his dog basket.

Julia sat at the kitchen table and wept into the wood grain. Perhaps she cried a little too much.

‘He had a good life,’ said Richard, patting her shoulder. ‘A long life.’

The dog was older than their marriage. Julia put her handkerchief away. ‘Peter’s going to be very upset.’

‘Peter will take it on the chin,’ said Richard. ‘Poor old thing,’ he said, looking at the dead dog in his dog basket. ‘He can’t have found these last months much fun.’

‘What are we going to do with him?’ Inappropriate hilarity bubbled up in her.

‘Good question,’ said Richard. ‘The ground’s frozen solid.’ In the event, they wrapped him in a blanket and stored him in the shed until the earth was soft enough to dig.

The thaw, when it eventually arrived towards the end of February, coincided with the worrying news that Marjorie was suffering from a bad bout of bronchitis. ‘She sounds very poorly.’

‘Does she smoke?’ said Richard.

‘I’ve no idea.’ The inadvisability of smoking had become quite a theme of late. ‘I think she could use a hand. Can you spare me for a while?’

‘Of course,’ Richard said, bashing the egg in his eggcup. ‘Stay as long as you need.’

‘I may have to be away for my birthday.’

‘Not to worry.’ He smiled to himself. ‘I’m not promising anything, but you might find a little surprise waiting for you when you get home.’