10

Peter was worried his mother was sick. Ever since he’d come home for the Easter holidays, she hadn’t been herself. There was a strange look on her face all the time. She wasn’t paying any attention to him. As an only child, he wasn’t used to being ignored. She wasn’t paying any attention to the new puppy either.

Mothers did die. They died in books, and they died in real life.

Last term, Oulton’s mother had got sick and the first time Oulton had known about it was when he had been summoned to the headmaster’s study to be told she was dead. The news had got round Plantagenet. It wasn’t supposed to, but it did. Afterwards everyone avoided Oulton and pretended not to hear him crying. You weren’t supposed to cry in Plantagenet. They cried a bit in Windsor, but Windsor was a wet sort of house and always came last.

Peter wondered if they would avoid him too if his mother died. They probably would. He began to dread going back to school and being summoned to the headmaster’s study. He could picture it. The cups of tea and the niceness.

These days his mother was always playing the piano and what she played was always sad. When he was younger she had tried to teach him to play but he wasn’t good at it. The notes wouldn’t sort themselves out. He was good at cricket and maths. He was bad at geography, but that was because they had a rotten teacher, Mr Beadell, who threw chalk at them when they got a capital wrong.

‘Going out now,’ he said, over the breakfast table.

His mother was reading a letter. The new puppy was scratching herself in the old dog’s basket, which was surrounded by newspaper.

‘Going out now,’ he said again.

She looked up and smiled, but the smile was not in her eyes. She didn’t even ask where he was off to. ‘Have a nice time,’ she said.

The puppy whined. Julia picked up the small warm round body, opened the back door and set her down outside. Wet brown eyes beseeched hers. Mabel: her birthday surprise. Not you, too, she thought. Don’t you reproach me.

She closed the door and had a sudden yearning for her mother, her thickened arthritic knuckles, her dry papier poudré skin, the voice that still came out of the mirror to issue judgements. ‘Patent is dreadfully common.’ ‘I do think a little colour at the neck brightens the face.’ ‘You could do anything if you put your mind to it.’ She wanted her mother so badly, but she didn’t want to hear what she would have had to say to her.

‘Julia, would you mind playing something else?’ said Richard, coming through to the drawing room from his study. ‘You’ve played that piece three times.’

‘That piece’ was Chopin’s ‘Raindrop Prelude’. She rested her hands on the keys. ‘Have I? I’m sorry.’

‘It’s hard to concentrate.’

‘Of course. I don’t know what I was thinking.’

The ‘Raindrop Prelude’. One day during the week she’d spent with Dougie they’d happened to be passing the Bechstein showroom in Wigmore Street, and he’d insisted they go in. ‘I’m assuming you have no strong objections to German instruments,’ he’d said as they went through the taped-up plate-glass doors with their bronze handles.

The assistants in the showroom had fussed around; sales were down on account of the war and there was a surplus of stock. The first piano she tried had a split case.

‘How do you know?’ said Dougie.

‘You can hear a buzzing.’

Dougie said, ‘I can’t hear a buzzing.’

‘There is a buzzing,’ said an assistant, nodding.

The second piano was all right, as far as it went. But the third one sang. She had sat down then and played the Chopin, a piece she had known by heart since girlhood. The sweet, sad truth of it, the drumming rain, had borne her away and, when she came back to herself, there was a little ripple of applause from the assistants and a stout woman in a felt hat who had wandered in from the street.

‘You are a constant source of amazement,’ Dougie had said, shaking his head.

Now she became aware that her husband was staring at her from the doorway.

‘What’s the matter?’ she said.

‘You’re wearing that brooch again.’

‘Am I?’

‘Where did you get it?’

‘I told you the other evening. Marjorie gave it to me when I was in London by way of a thank-you. It used to belong to her mother.’

For Richard, most instances of wrongdoing were as banal as the motives that lay behind them. It was an occupational hazard of his profession that you became a little jaundiced in that respect. If he had little to do with out-and-out criminality on a daily basis, other mortal sins were well represented in his filing cabinets: greed, envy, muddle and stupidity – weaknesses of all kinds.

A little jaundiced he might have been, but he was more than capable of seeing past the surface of things: in his working life he had to be. Lately, however, he had found himself forced to exercise this skill where it had never been required before, which was to say at home. His wife was behaving oddly.

Julia was a devoted mother. There was no doubt about that whatsoever. Yet this Easter, Peter came home and the sun failed to shine for her. Her attention was elsewhere. There was a great deal of moping and piano-playing. In short, she was behaving exactly as she usually behaved in the first week or so after their son went back to school – what Richard called her ‘blue period’. For one of these to coincide with the holidays made no sense at all. It was as if the calendar had gone topsy-turvy.

And who could ignore a puppy?

But it was a conversation he had with Fiona that finally solidified his disquiet into suspicion. The week after Easter he ran into her on the high street. Later, he wondered if she had been waiting for him.

Richard was a little wary of Fiona. She was Julia’s friend, and women talked to one another. Then there had been the way Geoffrey had repeatedly made a fool of her over some secretary or another, which struck him as unsavoury.

Julia always laughed about how elliptically Fiona spoke, as if her thoughts were racing on ahead and it was up to you to join the dots. It was the same on this occasion. After a meandering preamble he couldn’t quite follow, she made the odd suggestion that he should take Julia away on holiday.

‘A little break. Before they stop us from going anywhere. I think it would do her the world of good to be spoiled a little,’ said Fiona. ‘I don’t know whether you’ve noticed, but she doesn’t seem to be herself lately.’ She glanced to one side. ‘In my experience, getting away on your own, just the two of you, can be just the ticket.’

Richard was bemused. Why should Fiona concern herself with their holiday arrangements? Then on the way home, somewhere between the florist’s and the greengrocer’s, he joined the dots in a different fashion and the floor fell out of his life.

In my experience. Fiona’s experience of married life, as he understood it, was one of repeated betrayal.

Jazz. Smoking. That brooch. To cap it all, the way she was behaving to Peter. Singly, perhaps explicable. Together, perhaps a pattern. A nasty little worm in his brain suggested that Julia’s trips to London might be part of the same picture.

Suspicion is torture to those who keep their minds in order and their emotions well in check. Suspicion demands evidence. Sunday afternoon, when his wife was out, Richard went looking for it.

He found nothing in the little bureau she used as a desk, except his own self-loathing in searching it. Nothing in the canterbury where she kept her sheet music. Nothing in her wardrobe or under the felt-lined tray of her jewellery box. Each successive location a sickening reproach to his lack of faith in her.

He was on the point of lifting up the mattress of their bed – something Julia had once said about Fiona’s daughter hiding her diary had sprung to mind – when he sat down on it instead and applied his mind to the problem.

If I were Julia, he thought, where would I put something I didn’t want anyone else to find? Where is off limits to me, to Harry, to Peter? Where would none of us dream of intruding on her privacy? (And yet all the while, as he was asking himself these questions, he was convinced there was nothing to find, could be nothing to find. Of course not, because she was his dearest wife and he loved her.)

He got up from the bed and went over to the wardrobe again, where he turned out all her hatboxes and shoeboxes. Nothing but hats and shoes.

On her dressing table beside the jewellery box was a bottle of perfume, L’Heure Bleue, which she had brought back from London. He unstoppered it. She always smelled of it nowadays.

And that was when the back of his mind told him where to look.

The bottom drawer of the dressing table on the right-hand side was where she kept what he described to himself as her ‘women’s things’. He eased the drawer open, as if to shield his own ears from any proof of what he was doing, and could almost taste his disgust.

‘Modess’ said the blue-and-white packet. It was half full of sanitary towels. ‘Modess’ said the blue-and-white packet underneath. It was stuffed with letters. Letters from Marjorie.

‘I did warn you, darling,’ said Fiona. ‘Repeatedly.’ Rain trickled down the Regency windows with their fine glazing bars. ‘You should have listened to me and put a stop to this months ago.’

Julia, trying to square circles in a pretty chintzy sitting room with striped wallpaper and amusing cushions, cried into her teacup. She had said nothing to Fiona about the conversation that she’d overheard in the club; that would mean lifting the rock under which she’d buried it.

‘I love him so much. So much. What am I going to do?’

‘Are you sure this is love, darling?’

‘What else could it be?’ said Julia.

Fiona lit a cigarette. ‘Lust, for a start.’

Julia didn’t want to hear this. ‘He wants me to leave Richard.’

Fiona shook her head. ‘Are you completely mad? You hardly know the man.’

‘I didn’t say I would,’ said Julia. ‘But I’ll lose him if I don’t find a way of being with him more often.’ Here she was being somewhat disingenuous. If her week with Dougie had taught her anything, it was that she could no longer stow him into a compartment that she opened whenever it took her fancy and kept closed the rest of the time. She blew her nose.

It wasn’t that she had any difficulty imagining what it would be like to live with him. Over the past months, she’d entertained that fantasy often enough to taste it and feel it and find space for her clothes in his wardrobe. Her imagination was even powerful enough to bring Peter along with her; she pictured Dougie teaching him about filming and chess. What was unthinkable was the rest: the shame, the scandal, the pain she would cause Richard. ‘Oh God, I just don’t know what to do.’

Fiona understood the loss her friend was dreading. It was the same loss that drove her even now, five years since Geoffrey had died, to sleep with his jacket on bad nights, although it had long ago stopped smelling of him. But losing a husband of many years was one thing, losing a lover you shouldn’t have taken in the first place quite another. ‘Sometimes, darling, I do want to shake you.’

Avril, Fiona’s younger daughter, bounced into the sitting room in a horsey way, took in the scene over the teacups and backed out again in a manoeuvre worthy of dressage.

‘Does Richard suspect anything?’

‘He hasn’t the first idea.’ Through blurred eyes Julia stared out of the blurred window, crumpling her handkerchief in her fingers.

Fiona reached across to grasp her hands. ‘Then listen to me. It’s not too late to put this behind you. By some miracle, so far you’ve not been found out. Put a stop to it here and now and go away for a few days with Richard. Just the two of you. Make a fresh start.’

It was the same advice she had given Richard, a suggestion she had made, she told herself, entirely for Julia’s benefit. What Fiona did not admit to herself was her growing fear that she might be discarded too, passed over for a ridiculous affair that was bound to end badly. Now, whenever they saw one another, which was less frequently, another person was in the room, breathing in all the air. In other words, Fiona was both jealous and lonely.

‘Promise me you’ll think about it.’

Julia nodded. There were no answers, she thought, no comfort anywhere.

It was Monday night, a week later, and Harry had roasted a chicken for ‘the last supper’ before Peter returned to school. (Meat rationing, recently introduced, had enforced a scaling down of the tradition from beef: even the chicken had not been easy to come by.) Julia came into the dining room and flinched at the sight of the bird sitting plump and brown among its trimmings. She had lost her appetite and all track of time. The occasion dismayed her on both counts.

Richard pulled out her chair. ‘Thank you,’ she said, then nodded at her son across the table. ‘Isn’t this lovely?’

He nodded back, his hair slicked, his face shining clean.

‘I feel as if I’ve hardly seen you this holiday,’ she said, shaking out her napkin from its bone ring and smoothing it on her lap. ‘Have you enjoyed it?’

Peter did not know how to answer this. ‘Yes, thanks.’

Harry brought in the gravy boat and a dish of peas. Richard slapped the knife against the steel and carved.

‘Just a little for me, please.’

Peter’s eyes flitted to her face.

Moments passed when no one uttered a word. If Julia had been fully present, she might have noticed the silence and said something to fill it. But Dougie had found his way into the dining room and was taking up all her attention.

Harry swung through the door to collect the plates. Julia’s, with its pushed-around food, she registered with a disapproval that came out as a clatter of cutlery and crockery that clearly said: ‘waste’.

‘I’ve baked a cake, if anyone’s the slightest bit interested.’

‘How could we not be interested in your cake, Harry,’ said Richard to her departing back.

Harry returned with the cake, which she set down. ‘Don’t blame me if it’s not as light as maybe. I’ve had to stretch the sugar and all sorts.’ She paused. ‘These are the last sultanas left in England.’

They ate the cake out of duty, although it tasted no different from others they had eaten for pleasure.

‘Well, you’re all packed,’ Julia said to Peter.

‘Thanks, Madre.’

‘Thank Harry. She did it mostly.’ She got up and pushed back her chair. ‘I’ll come up and say goodnight in a while.’

‘Where are you going?’ said Richard.

‘Out for a bit. I have a head.’

‘It’s raining.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

Julia was sitting at her dressing table brushing her hair when Richard came into the bedroom. Over the months, she had schooled herself not to betray the whereabouts of Dougie’s letters by so much as a glance at the drawer where they were hidden, but she felt their existence as heat emanating from it.

‘How was your walk?’

‘Wet.’ The halyards clinking and clanking, the black, deserted cobbled streets, the salty gusts funnelling up from the harbour rocking the creaking pub signs.

Richard’s eyes met her mirrored ones, like a hairdresser. She had the sense he was waiting for something.

‘Did you say goodnight to Peter?’

‘Of course. Why do you ask?’

‘You didn’t seem to take very long. Didn’t you read to him?’

‘Not tonight.’

‘Whore’ crouched in his head like a toad.

The next day they woke up to find the war had stopped pretending it wasn’t one. Reports came of the German invasion of Norway and Denmark, no less sudden, no less shocking for the measured tone of the BBC bulletin. Within a matter of hours, swastikas were flying in Copenhagen.

Only Harry, in constant communication with the astral plane, was not surprised. The spirits had warned her about it, she said; like all such warnings she received from the other side, these tended to be announced post facto.

The evening broadcast was over. Richard switched off the wireless and poured himself a drink. A second drink, and a large one, Julia noticed. This was unusual. So was the way he knocked it back. Harry had gone to bed early, but not before checking underneath it. The bad news was telling on them all.

Even Peter, she thought. That morning, when they were packing the car with his trunk and tuck box, he’d made a terrible scene, stamping his feet like a two-year-old. Then, when they had pulled up outside the school, he’d sat in the back seat in his over-large blazer, arms folded, refusing to get out.

‘Come on, old boy,’ Richard had said. ‘Don’t be daft.’

‘Mummy,’ said Peter.

She turned in her seat to give him a pat. ‘Hurry along, darling. Your father needs to get back to work. Be good, and I’ll see you soon.’

On the way home, they drove past an old man walking along the road, red-faced and crooked, carrying a bunch of flowers in a shaking hand. The incongruity of age and blooms would have intrigued Dougie, thought Julia, saving up the image to describe to him.

Now, she thought, her eyes staring unfocused at the blackout as if it were a blank cinema screen where he might appear, all she wanted to hear was what he was making of these invasions; on no real foundation, she had the sense that talking to him would make the news easier to bear. All the conversations she had these days, all the meaningful ones, were with him: in person, on the page or in her head.

If this is the case, she thought, surely it means I should be with him. Surely this tells me where I belong. But just as she reached the brink of a decision, she shrank from it.

It was raining again. Water coursed down the gutter, a desolate sound. When she turned her gaze back to the still, lamp-lit room, she saw that her husband was watching her. Instinctively she rose from her seat to go upstairs, where her face could not be read.

‘Sit down, Julia,’ said Richard.

‘I’m tired, darling, I’m going to bed.’

‘Sit down.’

Something is not right, said her body, which began to tremble and chill. ‘Richard, please, it’s been a long day.’

‘Marjorie,’ he said, his eyes hard like marbles. ‘Let’s call her by her real name, shall we?’

The walls bulged in and out. The floor pitched and tipped.

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

He intercepted her at the doorway and caught hold of her wrists.

‘What are you doing, Richard?’ Her mind was chaos.

‘“D” for David, is it? Or “D” for Dick? Let’s have a name for this “D” who writes such filth to you. This director.’

The letters. Oh God, she thought, he’s found the letters. And it was clear that he had read every word of them.

‘Please let go.’

‘Name him.’

She named him.

‘Oh yes, now it comes back to me. Birdsall. How ridiculous.’

She began to cry.

‘Tears, Julia? Or would you rather I called you Sinclair?’

‘Please, Richard, you have to understand –’

‘Spare me the squalid details.’ He was still clenching her wrists. She could feel her bones under her skin. ‘I’ve had a bellyful of those.’

‘When did you find them?’ Her voice cringed.

‘What difference does it make?’

She saw then what she had done, who she was in his eyes. The two lives she had been at such pains to keep in separate compartments snapped together and became one.

‘How could you do it?’ he was saying. ‘Didn’t I give you enough? Didn’t I provide you with a roof over your head, a family, everything you could possibly want?’

‘I’m so sorry, Richard. I’m so sorry. Please don’t shout.’

The shouting went on, repetitively.

‘Do you take me for a complete fool? Seven months you’ve been carrying on with this man behind my back. Seven months!’

She tried to pull her hands free. ‘Mayn’t we talk?’ She wanted to explain that she had been unable to help herself, that she had not chosen to fall in love, that she had been unable to choose to fall out of it. ‘I didn’t want to hurt you, Richard, I didn’t, I truly didn’t.’

‘You disgust me.’ He pushed her away so roughly her head hit the door jamb.

You could hit your wife, you could beat her: it was permissible and commonplace. Yet this small act of violence stunned them for what they had provoked in each other. Underneath lay scenes of smashings-up and melodrama, and it was no comfort to her that she had placed them there.

‘Get out.’ His face was white. ‘Get out of this house! I never want to see you again!’

Time collapsed. She ran from the room right into Harry, the housekeeper’s look of bewildered dismay, hair net denting her forehead, as sudden and clear as a snapshot in her mind. Shock propelled her up the stairs, where she snatched at things without knowing which things she was snatching at. Shock flung her down the stairs and into the rain.