Julia looked around the Soho studio. Stacked all around the walls were originals and prints by the three young artists who shared the loft, but there was none of the other familiar painters’ clutter. Instead there were drawing boards and airbrushes, plan chests and a boy in very clean OshKosh dungarees frowning at a computer terminal. The neat beige space looked more like the art department of a glossy magazine than anything else, Julia thought.
‘I like this stuff,’ Julia said. ‘I’m tired of flowers and beads.’
The boy looked up. ‘Yeah. All that faded shit.’
She prowled back along the line of pictures. The ones that interested her particularly were gleaming, airbrush paintings of jukeboxes, cars with grilles like sharks’ teeth, girls with overpointed breasts and tight dresses that emphasised the vee between their thighs. They were all more real than the real thing, sharp and shiny and cynical. There was nothing gentle or optimistic or pretty about them, and they made psychedelia seem as dated as the pennyfarthing. Julia smiled with satisfaction. She liked the prickle down her spine when she recognised a seller.
And interleaved with the super-realist paintings of space-age artefacts, there were computer graphics in which a circle composed of circles and dots transformed itself by stages into a leaping panther, and then back to a circle again. By the same progression, a Coca-Cola bottle became the Apollo 11 space-rocket that had, in that week, deposited Armstrong and Aldrin on the moon.
It was a wonderful week to be in America.
‘And these,’ Julia said. ‘These are brilliant. Is there anything you can’t do with that computer?’
‘Nope.’ The boy leaned back in his chair. ‘Or at least, not much.’
Julia took out her notebook and unscrewed her fountain pen. It was gold-nibbed, and filled with sepia ink. Mattie had given it to her for Christmas. ‘Biros don’t go with silk suits and leather briefcases,’ she had pronounced. Julia smiled at the memory, and held the pen poised.
‘I’d love to buy some of your work, of course,’ she murmured now. ‘But I can only think of unlimited editions for my market. I’ve got a chain of shops in England, not a gallery.’
‘Posters?’
‘That’s right.’
The boy yawned. ‘Well, I guess it’s not out of the question if the price is right. You’d have to hack all that out with my agent.’
Cheerfully, Julia clipped the cap back on to her pen. She liked dealing with agents, and enjoyed the almost formal gavotte of agreeing terms. There was always a deal to be made, and she was good at getting what she wanted. She knew that the Fifties Pontiacs and Coke bottle Apollo 11 would hang well on the walls of Garlic & Sapphires, and would sell as fast as she could see them produced.
‘Thank you for showing me your work. I’ll call your agent this afternoon. Can I take you somewhere for lunch now?’
The artist looked under his long eyelashes at Julia in her buttercup-yellow tussore silk safari suit. ‘Sure you can,’ he murmured. ‘Let’s go right away.’
They went out into the street, and Julia felt the sun striking hot on her head. She had been almost cold in the air-conditioned studio, and the noise of traffic seemed doubly loud after its humming quiet. The constant contrasts of the city stirred her blood. She had to make conscious efforts not to dash to and fro, admiring and exclaiming, as if she was Lily’s age.
‘Where shall we go?’ she asked. The heat of the sidewalk struck up insistently through the soles of her buttercup-yellow pumps.
‘I know a place.’
They went uptown, to a bar restaurant called Al’s. It was cool and dim inside, and Julia blinked at the further contrast. She blinked again, when her eyes readjusted themselves to the light. The interior was a cavern of Thirties deco, and it was impossible to tell at a glance whether it was original or a clever recreation. There were peachy-pink walls lit by fan-shaped lights, cream leather and chrome sofas and barstools, and a white piano complete with a black pianist playing Cole Porter.
It was muted, and opulent, and so modish that Julia laughed out loud. ‘Oh, joss-sticks and bean-bags and temple bells, where are you now? I should be wearing a cream crêpe-de-chine teagown with a river of pleats, and marcel waves in my hair. I feel out of place in this.’ She held out her arms in the yellow suit. Her companion laughed with her, and stuck his thumbs in the braces of his dungarees.
‘And a white tux for me. But who gives a shit? Let’s get ourselves a drink.’
He greeted ten people on the way to the bar, and they settled themselves at last on the tall chrome stools. There was a cocktail menu, with deco lettering and a silhouette of a sinuous dancing couple. Julia sighed over the White Ladies and Manhattans and Deep Seas. ‘It’s got to be a Manhattan, hasn’t it?’
The bartender mixed their cocktails in a silver shaker, and poured them into black-stemmed cocktail glasses with frosted rims.
Julia said, ‘I want everything. I want the shaker, and the glasses, and the lights and the ashtrays and the barstools, all shipped back to Garlic & Sapphires, right now. Off with the old, and on with the new. Or the retro-new.’
The painter lifted his glass in an admiring toast. ‘You Brits. You’re supposed to be cool. But when you like something, you get out and get it. Here’s to your enthusiasm.’
‘I like your graphics.’ Julia lifted her glass in return. The frosted rims touched with a faint ping. The painter’s long eyelashes lifted again.
‘And I like you.’
Oh, New York, Julia thought. You’re very good for me.
It made her feel young, and hungry again, as she hadn’t done for a very long time. They had another cocktail apiece, and Julia ate a BLT and her new friend had a hamburger, and they talked about Warhol and the men on the moon.
When they had eaten, two or three of the painter’s friends came to join them, and one of them said that there was a party that night, and why didn’t they both come along? The painter raised one of his thick, black eyebrows at Julia, and she said yes, that sounded like fun. In the evening she put on her Ossie Clark dress of flowered crêpe with ribbons and panels of silk, and wide trumpet sleeves, and took a cab to another loft. Moving between huge polished-metal sculptures she met and talked to more painters, and potters, and poets, and their friends who were television directors and copywriters and script editors. They were friendly and interesting, and she told them about her shops, and in her handbag she collected a little sheaf of cards and addresses. There were new designers, and artists, and people who other people insisted she must meet, and talk with, because their stuff was just so great, she’d be crazy not to go and see it for herself.
Julia drank her white wine, ate dolmades and shared a joint or two, and at the end of the evening her painter friend didn’t seem too perturbed when she told him that, on the whole, she thought it would probably be better if she just went quietly back to her own hotel bedroom.
‘Another time, baby,’ he said.
In the peace of her room in the Algonquin, Julia took off her dress and hung it up in the closet. She felt tired, and drunk, and thoroughly satisfied. That was how her trip had been. The few names she had armed herself with via friends in London had been the pebble dropping into the pond. The ripples had spread outwards, carrying her with them. She had seen more things that she wanted to buy than she could ever hope to ship home, and she had seen the direction she wanted Garlic & Sapphires to follow into the Seventies. It had been a thoroughly satisfactory expedition.
Julia had flown to Toronto, and out to the Coast. But in comparison with New York, Canada had seemed provincial, and San Francisco was still tangled in hippiedom. She had come back to the East Coast, with a sense of relief and renewed energy, to fix up a last two or three deals before going home. She was beginning to look forward to seeing Lily, and seeing Lily would also mean meeting Alexander. But she knew that she needn’t go yet, not quite yet. She had a little time, and enough money, and she was in the same country …
Lying back on her bed, with her eyes fixed unseeingly on the Celia Birtwell print of her dress inside the open closet, Julia picked up the telephone beside her. She spoke to Long-distance Information, and a minute later wrote down the number on the headed pad next to the telephone. She didn’t dial the number at once. Instead she stood up, and walked to the window. She stood for a moment, looking down into West Forty-fourth street. The city’s electricity seemed to crackle up to her. She breathed in sharply, and stretched upwards, as though a line through her body drew tauter.
Then she went back to the bedside telephone and picked out the digits. She listened to the ringing tone. She was already thinking, He’s not there, when he answered.
‘Josh Flood.’
Josh, it’s Julia.’
A pause, and then laughter. The same lazy, warm laughter that she remembered. ‘Well, what d’you know? When can we see each other?’
That was like Josh, too. No How are you? or Where are you? No mention, either, of how long it had been, or how much had been missed. Just Hey, here you are. Now was what mattered to Josh, now, this minute.
And, charged with the potency of success and freedom, Julia felt, at last, that she could match him. She smiled at the empty hotel bedroom.
‘Tomorrow, if I can get a flight.’
‘From London?’
‘New York.’
‘Here I am, waiting for you. Hearing your voice is the best thing that’s happened to me for months.’
‘Oh Josh.’
‘Julia Bliss.’
‘Julia Smith. Alexander and I are divorced.’
He cut her short. ‘Don’t tell me any more now. Save it for tomorrow when I can see your face.’
‘I’ll look forward to it.’
‘Me too. Julia? I’m glad you called.’
The next day, Julia flew to Denver.
Josh met her at the airport. He stood at the barrier, waiting for her to come through, and although he saw her at once, walking briskly in the midst of a mixed convoy of nuns and businessmen, he had to look again to assure himself that she really was Julia.
And then she was standing in front of him, smiling, her head on one side. Josh held out his arms and she stepped into them. He held her tightly for a long moment, before moving back to look at her again.
Julia had discarded her miniskirts, although only a year ago she had sworn she never would. Now she was wearing a sand-coloured Saint Laurent suit with a slim, knee-length skirt. She had a plain white shirt, and pearl studs in her ears. Her five-point Vidal Sassoon bob had grown out long ago, and her hair waved thickly around her face, as it had done when Josh first saw her in Leoni’s. Her face was thinner but there seemed to be a new luminosity beneath the surface of her skin. She looked older, but she also looked as if she had grown into herself. She was no less beautiful than she had ever been, but she was different, and that was why he had had to look again, as she came towards him, to make sure. If he had to choose a single word for this Julia, Josh thought, it would be formidable.
They stood there, holding hands, while the departing passengers ebbed away from them. Julia was thinking, So I did it. I turned up in Josh’s life, instead of he in mine. I’m the traveller, the initiator. And Josh is the same as he always was. He looked exactly the same. The bright fairness of his hair might have faded a little and there might be an almost invisible net of fine lines in the tanned skin at the corners of his eyes, but he was as lean and muscled and quick-moving as he had always been. Even the clothes were the sarne, jeans and a thick leather belt, and a denim work-shirt. He looked tough, and handsome, with a streak of warm good-humour, as he always had done.
Deliberately she put her hand behind his head, and drew his face down to kiss the corner of his mouth. His eyes half closed, and she saw the sun-bleached tips of his eyelashes. The current hadn’t flickered either. It ran between them, as powerfully as it ever had.
‘Come on,’ Josh said. ‘The car’s outside. Give me those bags.’
He hoisted her neat, executive luggage and Julia followed him.
The car, negligently parked at the doors, was an open white Mercedes 220SL. Julia whistled at the sight of it and Josh grinned.
‘Neat, hey?’
She settled into her red leather seat, sighing. ‘How senior we all are. Cars, and houses, and businesses.’
Josh looked sideways at her, amused. ‘Don’t class my car with all that other shit. This is a pair of racing skis, or a jetplane. Watch.’
They had left the tangle of airport traffic behind them. The car’s long white nose pointed on to a freeway, and Josh accelerated. They whirled past a truck, and another, and howled past a line of family sedans. Julia felt herself pressed backwards into the seat’s leathery grip. The wind sliced over the screen and pinned her skin to her face, peeling a smile out of it as tears smarted in her eyes. Her hair whipped around her cheeks and she lifted one hand to draw it back into a knot. Josh was smiling too. The wind blew his hair off his forehead and his eyes narrowed with concentration as they sped faster. Julia remembered that that was how he had looked when he was skiing. Absorbed, and exultant.
They went faster. The roar of the engine drowned out the rest of the world, and speed enveloped the sight of it in a featureless blur. Suddenly Julia thought, He’s like a boy, showing off his car to impress his girl. If we were in a plane, he’d, be looping the loop. He did that once, didn’t he? The realisation touched her, and made her want to laugh, but it was also oddly startling. She filed it away, in the back of her mind, to re-examine later. Then she reached out and put her hand on Josh’s arm.
Josh! I’m sorry!’ she yelled. ‘Forgive my classing your car with the other trappings of middle age. It’s faster than a jet, more frightening than skis. Now, will you bloody well slow down?’
She had been watching the speedometer. The needle had held steady, somewhere, way past the 100 mark. Now Josh lifted his foot and the red finger obligingly fell back again.
‘Are you a trapping of middle age, my Julia?’
‘It looks like it,’ Julia said drily.
‘In that case, I forgive you everything.’
At a sedate sixty miles per hour, Julia could look around her. They were outside the city now and the clear air shimmered. Ahead of them, between the billboards that lined the freeway, she saw mountains. Even in midsummer, the peaks were seamed with white.
‘The Rockies?’ she asked Josh.
He nodded, whistling, his forearms lazily crossed over the wheel.
‘Where are we going? To Vail?’
Through all the years, summer and winter, she had somehow imagined him out on the ski-trails, or in the glittering powder snow of some huge mountain bowl.
‘No. I try to keep out of it for some part of the summer. I’ve got a place up here, although I don’t use it much. How did you know to call me there?’
‘I didn’t. That was the number Information gave me, that’s all.’
He looked at her again, an open, reflective glance this time, undisguised by laughter. ‘Then it must be fate,’ he said softly.
And Julia felt her tender, innermost muscles secretly contract and loosen again. Her response to the aviator was just the same as it had always been. He disarmed her effortlessly, and left her helpless. But I didn’t come here to defend myself, Julia thought. I came because I wanted to, and because I wanted Josh. Because I’m old enough to understand that if you want something you have to gauge how badly you want it, and then you have to reach out and take it.
Surely we both know why I’m here. We don’t need to dissemble, after so long. She knew that her face had reddened, and she stared ahead at the green and blue and grey rockfolds of the mountains.
They left the freeway and followed a smaller road past scattered motels and diners, linked by the taut black lines of telegraph wires like apron strings. They were climbing steadily. They passed through a small town and Julia glimpsed the storefronts and two trucks pulled up on the forecourt of a filling station. Beyond the town, higher up, there were fewer buildings along the roadway. They passed farm waggons and timber trucks, and the driver of one of them raised his arm and waved to Josh.
‘Almost there,’ Josh said.
They turned off again, along a road that was hardly more than a rutted track. They were in trees now, a heavy green canopy that knitted over their heads. Josh slowed the car to walking speed, and they bumped slowly over the grassy ridges. The engine’s echo thrummed back at them. Through the beat of it Julia could hear birdsong, and the splash of water.
Josh swung the wheel again, and the car nosed past a rough timber gate. He drove up a track for a little way, and then they stopped. When he reached and turned off the ignition the silence suddenly yawned, seemingly immense.
Ahead of her, Julia could see the wall of a timber shack.
Josh came round and opened her door for her, helping her out. She stood up in the green stillness, stretching, her legs stiff after the long flight and the drive. Josh folded her arm through his. ‘It’s up here,’ he said gently.
They walked on up the steep track, leaning against each other. The low, dark wall of the shack looked like a frown amongst the greenery. Julia caught her foot in a hollow and stumbled.
‘City shoes,’ she said.
‘City girl,’ Josh teased her.
They reached the shack wall and skirted round it, Josh leading the way. Julia was breathing heavily after the uphill scramble. He pushed the branches aside as they walked, so that the fingers of them didn’t catch at Julia’s clothes. Then they turned the corner. Julia looked up and gasped. Josh’s summer house was built on a little plateau in the side of the mountain. The trees grew up to each side of it, and reared above and behind. But in front of the cabin a space had been cleared, and the magnificence of the view dropped away, unobstructed, beneath their feet.
Julia stood at the edge of the clearing and looked down over the variegated canopy of trees, over the silver thread of a waterfall that broke between them, and on down to the yellow-green expanse of open grassland, rolling away further to the bluish hump of a little town in the distance and, beyond that, a blue haze that melted into the indistinguishable skyline. The colours were different, and the air had a sharper bite to it, but the memories stirred just the same. It was like Montebellate, and she had half turned to Josh to say it when she felt the warmth of his breath on her neck.
‘I know,’ he said, reading her thoughts. ‘It reminds me of it, too.’
‘Only there’s no old woman in a black dress, and no tethered goat up here,’ Julia said softly. ‘No cracked bell ringing the hours.’
Josh touched her arm. ‘Come inside,’ he said.
Julia followed him. Under the shallow pitch of the shingled roof there was a porch, open on three sides. There was one wicker chair, facing outwards. Josh had to stoop to pass under the lintel of the door. The inner part of the cabin was divided into two rooms. The larger was furnished with a table and a couple of upright chairs, two armchairs, and some shelves and a wood-burning stove. Through an open door beside her Julia could see a bed with a turned-back blanket, and some of Josh’s clothes laid neatly on a chair. In a corner, propped against the wall, were two fishing rods and a shotgun. On the shelves were a handful of paperback thrillers, a radio, and a telephone, incongruous even though it was a heavy, old-fashioned black one. There was almost nothing else. No patina of accumulated possessions, no pictures or photographs or mementoes, nothing to decorate the bare walls.
Julia thought of her little house by the canal. It was full of things, reminders and pleasurable acquisitions, arranged and laid out as if to reassure her of some necessary permanence.
Josh had none of that. This cabin on the side of the mountain was the same as the cottage in the angle of the Kentish woods, uninhabited by memories, a place to sleep in and then leave behind.
‘Is this all there is?’ she asked, and then blushed. ‘I didn’t mean that, exactly …’
He smiled at her, undeterred. ‘There’s a kitchen out back and a perfectly good bathroom, if you aren’t too particular. There’s water from the well, and that only runs dry if there’s a drought. I’ve got electricity, canister gas for cooking, and the telephone. As you know. What more could anyone want?’
‘What do you do here, Josh?’
‘I fish, do a little shooting and stalking, drink a few beers. That’s all.’
Julia tried, and failed, to imagine herself in such self-contained isolation. ‘Don’t you feel lonely?’
He laughed. ‘You always like to be with people.’
To reflect myself back at me? Julia wondered.
‘No, I’m not lonely. My nearest neighbour is only a quarter of a mile on up the track. These woods are full of people vacationing, trying to get away from each other. If I need company I can drive down into Honey Creek and sit in a bar, talking about baseball.’
Honey Creek must be the little town with the trucks and the shuttered storefronts. Thinking about it, and about Josh sitting in a bar with the farmers and loggers, Julia had wandered across the room. She put the toe of her city shoe in the powdering of wood-ash around the legs of the stove.
‘What’s your proper home like?’ she asked. ‘In Vail?’
‘Oh, it’s a modern apartment. If you’re asking me whether it’s got pictures on the walls and ornaments on the mantel, then, no, it hasn’t.’
She went back across the room to him, put her fingers on the rolled-back cuff of his shirt. ‘Don’t you ever want to put down roots?’
Josh looked down at her. She thought that she was seeing his face, clearly, without the camouflage of good humour or detachment or charm, for the very first time. She wondered if she had ever really known Josh at all.
He said, ‘I have spent so long evading it, I don’t think I know how to begin, now.’
She asked him again, ‘Are you lonely?’
And this time he thought about it, and then he answered, very quietly, ‘Not all the time. Not even most of the time.’ After a moment, he added, ‘I’m glad you called when you did.’ Then he touched his forefinger to the tip of her nose, the old, teasing Josh again. ‘I’m not looking after you very well. My cabin isn’t as primitive as you think it is. There’s no English tea or anchovy toast, I’m afraid …’
‘Do you imagine I spend my life sitting on rolling lawns sipping Lapsang Souchong and nibbling toast?’
‘… But there’s cold beer, or coffee. Which would you like?’ Julia accepted the deflection. For Josh, even so much openness was startling.
‘I would like a beer, please.
‘Let’s sit on the porch.’
He brought two cans of beer from the kitchen refrigerator, and settled Julia in the wicker chair. For himself he dragged out one of the upright chairs and sat with his feet hooked over the porch rail.
The light was fading from blue to dove-grey, and the splash of the waterfall below them sounded louder in the stillness.
Julia was watching the dusk thickening under the trees, and she sighed with satisfaction. ‘It seems a long way from New York.’
Josh’s eyes had been on her face. ‘Tell me about it. Tell me everything you’ve been doing. And about lovely Lily. And Mattie. I saw one of her movies. The girl I was with wouldn’t believe me when I said I knew her.’
Julia took a long gulp of her beer. ‘All kinds of things have happened,’ she said. ‘And yet in another way, hardly anything has happened at all.’
While the darkness crept out from under the branches of the trees, she told him about Lily and Alexander and Ladyhill, about Mattie and Chris, and about Garlic & Sapphires and Thomas Tree and the house by the Regent’s Canal.
Josh listened, and nodded, and when their beers were finished he went in and brought two more.
The sky over their heads lost the last pinky-grey glimmer, and he lit the lamp in the window of the cabin. The glow of it lay thickly on the old boards under their feet, and big, pale moths came drifting out of the darkness to bat their wings against the glass.
‘A long time,’ Julia said, at the end.
Josh stood up. He came to perch on the rail beside her, and the old wood creaked in protest. He leaned over and kissed the top of her head.
‘What now?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Julia said softly.
But she was thinking, I do know. She wanted to go home, to Lily and Alexander. The thought of them, together at Ladyhill, pulled sharply at her. And the thought of Alexander himself was more important still. It seemed to have grown in her consciousness, always demanding more of her attention, although, superstitiously, she had refused to give it. He had been in her head in New York and he was present even more strongly, now, while Josh sat beside her on the porch rail. She had dreamed of coming here, of seeing Josh again, but with sharpened perception she wondered if she had come out of a need to knit up loose ends. To draw a neat line, freeing herself. So that she could see Alexander again? She didn’t expect him to say anything, or to do anything, any more than he ever did. She knew his mild, dry, English demeanour well enough by now. But she suddenly understood that she was ready, at last, to go to Ladyhill again, without fear of the black fingers of the old terrors snatching at them again.
She would like to visit them, to see Lily and Alexander happy together in the old house. That was all, wasn’t it?
But she could no more confess to Josh what she felt now than, in London, she could have told Alexander that she was going to look for her comic-book hero.
Subterfuges, Julia thought suddenly. I’m tired of them. I want everything to be simple. She turned her face up to look at Josh in the yellow light of the lamp.
It was Josh who was here with her. He was still her aviator, and she felt the force of the old attraction. It had followed her like a shadow for so long, but now she felt that she had the power to reach down and roll up the shadow, to put it away in a drawer with the other, musty keepsakes from long ago, or to take it out, and examine it, at her own pleasure.
The recognition of that power released an erotic charge inside her.
Deliberately, she reached up and put her mouth to his. She held herself still for an instant and then she leaned back again, breaking the connection.
It was an added satisfaction for both of them, she understood, to play with the moment before it overtook them. They were old enough, now, to postpone it, and so to heighten the eventual satisfaction. Once, they would have fallen on each other, incapable of any delay.
‘Do you remember the Swann Hotel?’ Julia asked, her voice ripe with amusement.
‘And the Pensione Flora. And the Signora in the next room, who must have heard everything.’ His fingers touched her cheek. ‘Shall I cook you some dinner?’
Postponement, imagination, recollection; the delicate refinements of adulthood.
‘Yes, please,’ Julia said.
Josh made a simple meal in the bare kitchen, and Julia watched him, leaning against the door frame and sipping the glass of red wine that he gave her. He moved economically in the cramped space, and she knew that she liked watching the turn of his wrists, and the set of his head on his tanned neck.
They sat facing each other across the small table, talking, leaning back in their creaking chairs to look at one another. From the darkness outside the moths went on batting against the windowpanes. When they had eaten they carried the dishes out into the little kitchen. Julia washed them and Josh took them from her and dried them and put them neatly away. She remembered how the parody of domesticity had been so painful in the empty white house in London, and she wondered how the pain could have evaporated. She understood that the net of longing and wishing that she had tangled around herself had simply dropped away, and set her free.
She was glad to be with Josh. She felt a girl’s excitement, and an adult’s satisfaction in their closeness, but she didn’t want, or expect, any more. Not any longer. She felt just as Josh must have done, she thought, in Wengen and in Montebellate and in the times afterwards. And all through those times she had been beating herself against his indifference to the future as hopelessly as the big, pale moths beat themselves against the glass.
Well, now, Julia thought, she wasn’t indifferent to the future herself, but simply understood that her hopes for it lay elsewhere.
The recognition of her own blindness, and the simplicity of the vision that replaced it, dazzled her, for a moment. And the happiness that came after it added to her pleasure in her freedom and her power.
Josh was looking at her. He took her hands, twisting his fingers in hers, and kissed the skin inside her wrists.
‘I love you,’ he said.
‘I love you too,’ she answered, and for the first time she thought that she was recognising the different kinds of love, subtle and infinite and changeable gradations, instead of dreaming of one shining version that would transcend everything else, if only she could catch it, and make it.
They went out on to the porch, and in the doorway the moths swooped around their heads and plunged towards the yellow lights. The blackness was thick enough to make Julia feel that she could reach out and touch it, pressing the cool, earthy folds of it against her skin, disturbing the unimaginable creatures that rustled and stalked under the invisible trees. Listening to the sound of them she shivered in her thin shirt.
Josh turned abruptly and put his arms around her.
They felt one another’s heat through the thickness of their clothes.
The bedroom of the cabin was so small that there was only room for the bed, the chair with Josh’s folded clothes, and a rickety chest of drawers. In the eagerness that they had kindled between them Josh bumped against the chest and knocked over the lamp that stood on it. The light went out, leaving them in the dense dark. Josh swore, but Julia put her hand to his mouth.
‘Leave it. I like the dark.’
He felt for her instead. His fingers moved over her neck to her throat, and to the vee of bare skin below it. He unbuttoned her shirt, and discarded it. The white linen glimmered as it fell at their feet. Impatience made him clumsy. He whispered, ‘Julia’, and she helped him, stepping out of her city clothes and letting the wisps of silk and lace underclothes drop after them.
They lay down together, matching their bodies, touch intensified by the absence of sight.
Julia remembered the weight, and the taste, and the texture of him, as vividly as if they had been lying together like this last night, instead of years ago, in the sad little white house. But the old Josh had been imperious, taking the lead and letting her follow, because there had been no question that she wouldn’t follow, giving whatever she could offer, because she wanted him to have everything. That had been part of their contract in bed, and it had fuelled their physical pleasure. This different Josh was more tentative. With unusual gentleness his hands touched the points of her hips, and the tips of his fingers smoothed the white skin inside her thighs. It was as if he was afraid that she might not respond.
There had never, before, been any element of doubt.
With her mouth against his she whispered, ‘Josh, I’m here.’
His arms tightened around her. The word he whispered back might have been Stay. Julia smiled. She lifted herself and lay down on top of him, taking his wrists and pinioning them above their heads. With small, precise movements she kissed his cheeks and the corners of his mouth, his eyelids and his throat and the curling mat of hair on his chest. She stretched and their toes touched, their faces and their mouths, blind, rediscovering hunger. Julia sat up and with one movement she fitted herself around him. The pleasure was as intense as it had ever been. For an instant she crouched over him, motionless, possessing him. She remembered other times, the Swann Hotel with the shouts and laughter in the snow under their window, the Pensione Flora when she had longed to possess him without understanding that she already did, and London, and the sadness there, and all the years since.
Josh’s hands gripped her waist and lifted her, triumphantly, holding her poised before he drove upwards into her again.
The tentativeness, if it had been there, was gone.
Julia gave herself up to him, as she always had, and if there was a part of her that she held back, then that little separateness only heightened her pleasure in what they could and did give to one another.
And at the end, when the fierce waves possessed her and her eyes opened without seeing the dark, there was only Josh. She called his name and heard him answer, whispering and shouting, the intimate voice that she had forgotten. It was over so quickly.
There’s no reason to be sad, she told herself.
Afterwards they lay companionably with their heads together, watching the darker square of the window at the end of the tiny room. The unknown animals in the trees sounded louder, and closer. There was the call of a bird, perhaps an owl, and then a high, eerie sound that was neither a bark nor a yelp.
‘What are they?’ Julia asked.
She felt Josh’s smile against her cheek. ‘Deer. Perhaps coyote.’
‘Not wolves?’
‘No, darling. Not wolves.’
‘Aren’t you ever afraid?’
‘Of wild animals?’
‘Just afraid, I meant.’
He was silent, thinking.
‘Sometimes. More than I used to be. What are you afraid of, Julia?’
‘I think I’m afraid of making mistakes.’ Looking back, there seemed to have been so many. Made almost wilfully. She wondered if recognising the ones that had gone made any difference to the ones that would come. If there were enough chances left, now, to put any of it right.
Alexander, she thought. Lily. If I can come home. Just to see you there, at Ladyhill.
Josh settled her head more comfortably against him, drawing the covers around their shoulders. ‘You’re safe in my cabin in the woods,’ he said. ‘Safer than you would be in London, or in New York.’
‘I know,’ Julia said, turning her face to him and closing her eyes. ‘I’m not afraid of the wolves.’
Waiting to go to sleep, she listened to the noises of the trees beyond the wooden walls. There was no resemblance, and there were thousands of miles separating them, but the eddies of wind and the scraping branches and the sudden, mystifying animal cries reminded her of Ladyhill. She had been afraid of Ladyhill, of course. Even before the flames and smoke came. She had imagined that she was mistress of it, playing with the furniture and curtains and dressing it up for her fantasy Christmas, but in reality it had mastered her. She had been too young, and too silly, and too impatient for it.
‘I’m not afraid now,’ she repeated.
Julia stayed with Josh in his forest cabin for three days.
In the Honey Creek store Julia bought Levis and a pair of boots, and they went walking. ‘Scrambling,’ Julia gasped, following Josh up the steep wooded slopes. ‘I’m getting old.’
Josh held out his hand to help her. ‘I don’t think so.’
For all her mild, citified protesting Julia enjoyed the blue, empty days. It occurred to her that she had never spent so many hours at a time out of the shelter of roofs and rooms. Her cheeks and arms flushed in the sunshine, then turned pale gold. She tied her hair back with a piece of string, and wore Josh’s frayed shirts with her Levis.
‘You look about seventeen,’ he told her.
‘I’m glad I’m not,’ Julia said soberly.
In the pale evenings, when the sun’s glare had faded, Josh went fishing. The streams and waterfalls that netted the mountainside ran down into a wide, mirror-faced lake. Julia sat on the bank beside Josh, watching the ripples that spread lazily from his casts. She was surprised by his absorption, and by his ability to sit still for so long.
Her images of him, well defined by re-examination over the years, were all active. She remembered Josh racing in the Inferno, his face briefly turned towards the watchers as he skimmed past, and Josh at the controls of the Auster Autocrat over the green and brown patchwork of English fields. She had no recollections of times like this. Josh had always been a coiled spring; it was his energy that she had fallen in love with. She loved it still, but it was as if the clarity of the mountain air was allowing her to see more clearly what was missing.
Sitting beside the reflecting water, with her chin resting on her knees, Julia tried to unravel the threads. They had been knotted together for so long that they were difficult to unpick, but she made herself do it, dispassionately following the strands.
Of course she loved Josh. She always had done. From the beginning, from the first night. She had fallen in love with the dash and sparkle, but she had wanted to do it. Had almost determined to do it.
It was the day that Betty had come to the flat in the square. Julia could see her hands nervously folded over the clasp of her old handbag, the brown felt hat pulled tightly down over her colourless hair.
A dirty little baby, those were the words.
Julia had lifted her chin and pretended not to care. Pretended relief, even. And that night she had gone out, with Jessie’s five pounds, to dinner with her best friends. Hungry, and defiant, she thought now.
And there Josh had been.
She had transferred all the weight of her love and need to a bright-haired American pilot. He had bought her a bottle of pink champagne, and taken her to a nightclub, and he had been kind to her. He had always been kind to her, Julia reflected, within his own definition of kindness.
She turned her head on her knees so that she could look at him.
Josh was watching the motionless tip of his rod, then glancing away to the black arc of line. His face was half hidden by the peak of his cap, but she knew every line of it. Fifteen years had blurred the sharp angles a little, that was all.
Julia sighed, thinking of her own sixteen-year-old naivety. She had fallen in love in an hour, and she had made Josh carry the weight of it for all the years because the love had seemed too big and deep-rooted to dislodge.
She turned her head sharply again, and stared out over the water. It made her feel guilty to think of the responsibility she had thrust on him. Josh wasn’t made for responsibility. He had told her that, over and over, but she had been deaf.
She thought of the little shock of recognition that she had experienced in his Mercedes, racing up towards Honey Creek. Josh was a boy, showing off his car to impress his girl. He had always been the same, with his aeroplanes and his skis. Not quite grown-up. Your comic-book hero. Alexander’s words.
Josh was the perfect hero for a girl of sixteen. No wonder she had loved him then; the sadness was that she had made the love into a totem.
And now she was thirty-one, too old for heroes.
Julia contemplated the threads that she had untangled, without pleasure and without liking for the images of herself that were revealed.
She had clung to the romantic ideal of loving Josh, with a schoolgirl’s fervour. She had been sure that it would last for ever, at whatever cost. She had allowed herself to feel tragic. Luxuriating in her own passion.
What it had cost her, she understood, was her marriage.
And because of that, what had Lily lost?
Julia wrapped her arms more tightly around her knees, containing herself. She couldn’t jump up and run to Ladyhill, not yet. The threads must be set straight, finally, so that they could never tangle again.
Alexander had always been too grown-up, that was the difference. He was simply himself, not a hero, except when heroism was necessary. Alexander had run back under the stone arch at Ladyhill, into the smoke and heat. She closed her eyes on the image of that. When she opened them again she saw that the last light had gone. The lake had turned from a mirror into a sheet of cold, black glass.
Has it taken until now, she wondered, all this time, for me to grow up enough myself? The thought shamed her, but it was also an encouragement.
She had needed the struggle, for her own independence and for the success of Garlic & Sapphires. The old restlessness had gone, at least. Only it was Lily who had suffered. Thinking of her, Julia smiled a little. Lily was resilient, almost in the same way as Josh himself.
Perhaps even the flare of sexual energy that had overtaken her in New York had been necessary. It had meant that she had stopped dreaming of Josh, and waiting for him like Patience on her monument – clever, sharp Mattie – and had come to find him instead. And it was coming here, to the cabin under the trees, that had made her see the way that she should go.
If she could follow it, all the way back to Ladyhill, and find Alexander and Lily there, then that would be enough. She didn’t know how much she could hope for beyond that. Slowly, Julia uncoiled her arms. She stood up, stiff with sitting still for so long, and touched her hand to Josh’s shoulder.
‘It’s gone dark,’ she said.
Josh must have been as absorbed in his own thoughts. He started, and then squeezed her cold fingers.
‘Time to pack up.’ He began reeling in his line, the rapid ticktick of the mechanism very loud in the stillness. He seemed more like a boy than ever, frowning intently over his task. Watching him, Julia felt the draught of guilt again.
Don’t be guilty, she warned herself. Josh’s self-protective mechanisms must be well enough developed by now.
She bent to help him to pack the scatter of equipment into the fishing basket. Josh lifted it, and held out his hand. She took it and they turned to walk together, along the rutted track to where the white nose of the Mercedes glimmered in the dimness.
Even in the late evenings, they sat outside on the porch. Josh put away the fishing tackle and came out with two tumblers of Jack Daniels. Julia took hers and wrapped her fingers round it, looking away into the infinity under the trees. The noises that had seemed threatening on the first night were familiar now. She felt that she had been here a long time, and had reached a crossroads. The way that she had glimpsed beside the lake seemed clearer still, beckoning her.
‘Josh, I’ve got to go home soon.’
He didn’t answer for a moment. He stood up and went to lean on the porch rail, staring intently out, as if he could see something that Julia couldn’t. When he turned back again, she could see his face lit by the glow from inside the cabin.
‘Won’t you stay a while longer?’ he asked softly.
Was that what he had asked her, when they were lying with their arms around each other on the first night? Stay?
‘I don’t mean here,’ Josh said, the movement of his hand taking in the cabin and the heights rising behind it. ‘Come to Vail with me, perhaps. You’ve got managers for your shops, haven’t you? Lily could come out. We could teach her to ski, before she gets too old to be a champ …’
‘Josh,’ she interrupted him. ‘What are you asking me?’
‘Well.’ Another movement of his hand. This time it was just for the cabin, the bare shell of it enclosing bareness. Julia knew that the same gesture was for his apartment, where he had told her that there were no pictures on the walls and no ornaments on the mantel.
Josh said, ‘I always told you. If there was ever going to be anyone, it would be you.’ Julia might almost have laughed. The irony was so complete, and so unexpected. But sadness touched her too quickly, and the tiny splutter died in her throat.
She didn’t want to contemplate Josh’s solitude, not now, because she knew that she couldn’t dispel it. Whatever he was hoping for, asking for. The quiet, reflective Josh that she had glimpsed here in the mountains wasn’t hers, not her aviator.
Hastily, she pushed the net of questions aside. Selfish. Her mouth tasted bitter.
‘Josh,’ she repeated, ‘I’ve got to go home.’
She stood up, facing him, and put her hands on his arms.
‘To London?’
She lifted her head, looking at him through the dim yellow light.
‘To Ladyhill.’
At last, he nodded. Julia’s eyes were stinging and she blinked, angry with herself.
‘Lily will like that,’ he said. ‘Did you … did you know what you were going to do when you came here?’
‘No. I didn’t know anything. I know a little bit more, now.’
He put his hands up, cupping her cheeks. ‘Thank you for coming.’
‘Thank you for asking me. I’m glad I came.’
He kissed the corners of her mouth, very gently, and she let her head fall forward to rest against his shoulder. She felt the stolid reality of affection, and the impotence of love.
All the infinite gradations of it, she thought. How long it takes to recognise them. Then Josh kissed her again. She knew, as she had always known, how sharply she wanted him too.
‘Come to bed,’ Josh ordered her. ‘I’ll drive you to Denver tomorrow.’ The old Josh.
‘I’m coming,’ Julia answered him.
In the morning Julia lifted the few clothes she had worn off the hooks behind the door of the cabin’s bedroom and folded them into her suitcase. Their removal emphasised the bareness of the small rooms as she looked round them for the last time. Josh stood watching her, his hands seeming empty and awkward by his sides. She knelt down to snap the locks, then stood up again. Now that the time had come, she felt herself pulled two ways, the clarity that she thought she had achieved deserting her again.
I don’t know, she thought angrily. Why don’t I know, after so long?
She wondered if Josh had felt like this, at their separations in the past, while she had clung to him.
No, she decided. Not like this. Josh’s instincts for self-preservation had been too well developed then. She was less sure about now, and the irony of the reversal touched her again. She might have held out her hand, taking his awkward one, but she didn’t. Instead she gripped the handle of her suitcase, testing its weight.
The means of hurting each other are within such easy reach, she thought. Not just for Josh and me, but for all of us. For a moment, sadness seemed heavier than the real weight in her arms.
Josh looked at his watch. Uncharacteristically, he said, ‘We should go now, if we’re going to make your plane.’ In the past, Josh had never worried about times or days. When he was ready to do what he wanted to do, he did it. Julia knew that he was filling the silence with conventional words, but she still noticed the change, disliking it.
‘I’m ready,’ she said quietly.
He took her suitcase from her and carried it out to the Mercedes. The car rolled smoothly down the track, and the cabin was swallowed up by its curtain of trees. Julia didn’t look back at it. She didn’t want to think of its emptiness. Instead she fixed her attention on the road as it unfolded, in reverse, through the new familiarity of Honey Creek, down again, and at last out on to the freeway. She thought of the distance ahead of her, beyond Denver, and New York, to the village in the hollow of green English countryside.
It was only when they had reached the airport, and found the New York flight already boarding, that Josh said, ‘I’m glad you came. I told you that already.’ And then, abruptly, ‘I shouldn’t have asked you to stay on. Or hoped that you could have. That wasn’t part of the contract, was it?’
‘No, I suppose it wasn’t,’ Julia said.
‘And I think I set the terms of the contract.’ Josh was smiling, making her want to reach out and hold on to him.
‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘We kept to it, more or less, didn’t we?’
And the other contracts? she wondered. With Alexander, and Lily. Betty and Vernon, even. Those were harder to keep. Because they were real. What I imagined with Josh never was real. Gilt, instead of guilt. That was what I was chasing. The recognition made her smile, a small, thin smile.
‘It’s time to go.’ Josh took her hands and kissed the suntanned knuckles, then turned her towards the departure gate.
‘Come and see me in London,’ Julia said. Me, not us, although the plural could have included Lily, or Mattie, or the whole wide spread of the city, rather than herself and Alexander.
‘Of course I will.’
They kissed, touching cheeks, like friends. The contract of friendship, Julia thought. Mattie and I kept ours. That’s one truth. Perhaps Josh and I mil achieve that now. But only perhaps.
She was walking away from him now, patting the pocket of her Rive Gauche suit to check her boarding card, hearing the busy click of her high heels on the wide shiny floor, carried along, a traveller. When she looked round, before turning the corner, she saw Josh’s bright head over the other heads moving past him. He looked exactly as he had done across the room at Leoni’s. When she was sixteen, half drunk, a dirty little baby.
Josh lifted his arm, and waved.
Julia turned the corner, her own click click accompanying her.
She flew back to New York, and transferred to the first available London flight. As soon as she was airborne, she felt the threads of eagerness pulling at her. She leaned forward in her seat, as if that would make the jet fly faster through the curve of blue sky. She reached London in the grey-white light of early morning, but by the time she was climbing the five steps to her own front door the sun was streaming down the length of the street. London was welcoming, a city of top-heavy trees and homely corners, but Julia hardly registered it. The rooms of her house looked pretty and unusually clean and tidy, but she didn’t stop to admire them. She tipped the contents of her suitcases on to her bedroom floor, intending to sort through them, but impatience took hold of her before she had begun and she pushed the heaps into a corner. She went downstairs and flipped through the piles of mail that Marilyn had stacked on the pine table, but there was nothing to catch her attention. She went back up the stairs and ran a bath, scenting it with Floris oil.
Lying in the water, looking through the steam at the coral branches and conch shells ranged on the shelves above her, Julia thought, I couldn’t sleep now, even if I wanted to, I’ve come this far. I’ll go straight on to Ladyhill.
She sat up abruptly, sending a little wave of scented water splashing over the floor. An hour later, with the damp ends of her hair still curling around her neck, Julia turned her scarlet Vitesse into the traffic at the end of the street. She hadn’t telephoned. I’ll surprise them, she thought. Lily will like that.
She hadn’t done the drive to Dorset for so long, but she remembered it without effort. She knew that she was very tired, but the road seemed to unroll in front of her, hypnotic in its steady familiarity. When she had left London behind the fields opened on either side of her, yellow and gold, patched with knobs of trees and little clusters of houses, doll-like after the scale of Josh’s America. Julia laughed, tightening her grip on the steering wheel. She sang to keep herself alert, snatches of songs that she had hummed to Lily on similar journeys, ‘One Man Went to Mow’ and ‘Buttercup Joe’.
Her mind wandered. How did she know songs like that herself? Had Betty or Vernon ever sung to her?
I’m as fresh as a daisy, that grows in the fields, and they calls I Buttercup Joe.
Did Lily still remember the words? They could sing it for Alexander. It would make him laugh.
Basingstoke, Andover, Salisbury. After Blandford, over the Stour, almost there.
‘Nearly home,’ Alexander used to say, almost always at exactly the same point in the road. Julia remembered that his pleasure had irritated her. Why was I so jealous? she wondered. She rubbed her eyes with the knuckles of one hand, yawning. Blinking, looking around, she thought she understood Alexander’s satisfaction perfectly. It was very beautiful, this corner of England. Little hills, and open fields, and wooded hollows, each little valley with its own stream. The villages with their low-browed cottages were sunny and sleepy. How had the vertiginous spaces of Josh’s mountainsides reminded her of this?
Julia knew that she was only two miles from Ladyhill. She had just passed the fingerpost that announced Ladyhill, 3, and that was on down to the village itself. A tractor materialised ahead of her and she slowed to a crawl in its wake. Her memory served up a picture of straight, open road ahead of it, dipping down to the stone gateposts of Ladyhill House.
Julia pressed her foot down and the car surged forward, swinging out parallel with the tractor. The road was clear, as she remembered, of course. The roar of the Vitesse’s engine swirled in through the open window and she caught the scent of hay from the tractor’s load. In the same instant, the threat of it frighteningly at odds with the reassuring country smell, a car shimmered up in her path. It was big and grey, and it swept up out of a dip in the road that her memory had obliterated. It was travelling fast, coming at her like a silvery bullet. She knew that she couldn’t brake hard enough to get back behind the tractor. Its huge wheels turned beside her head.
Julia stamped her foot hard. The car howled in protest, but it leapt forward. The tractor seemed dragged back behind her. She wrenched the wheel and the car rocked under her, slewing across to her own side of the road. The grey car whirled past her in a dazzle of headlights and a deafening blast of the horn. She caught a glimpse of the driver’s angry, red, frightened face, and then he was gone. They had missed each other, she guessed, by less than a yard.
Julia drove on, her hands damp and shaking, and sweat sticky in a patch at the small of her back. Relief made her legs feel weak and her head too heavy for her neck. She was tired, and she had been driving recklessly, but she had been lucky. Lucky this time. Ahead of her were the stone gateposts of Ladyhill.
With an extraordinary, grateful surge, her spirits lifted. She knew that life was precious, she felt it like a smooth stone, miraculously veined, warm in the palm of her hand. She would hold it, keep it safe, value it. From now, this moment.
The shadow of the trees lining the driveway dappled her face. She slowed the car, lifting her head to the coolness. She turned the corner and saw the house in front of her. Her head held a hundred different images of Ladyhill, but none of them matched this afternoon’s. It was as if she had known but never before acknowledged that it was beautiful.
She let the car drift to a standstill and climbed out. She walked on, up to the house, her eyes fixed on it. The grey stone was gold-tinged in the sunlight, the brick was warm coral-pink. Beside her, now, was the wing where the fire had started. The black stains of it had been cleaned away. The windows had been releaded, and the small panes of glass shone. There was no sign, any more, of the devastation.
The blanket of smoke and fear had drifted away.
Julia’s footsteps scrunched on the gravel. She walked on, to the paved court enclosed by the two projecting wings. Lavender and nepeta had been planted in blue-grey drifts in the beds against the grey walls. The front door, under the portico in the short central arm of the house’s E-shape, stood invitingly open.
Julia wondered where Lily and Alexander could be.
On the threshold, as the shadow of the house fell over her face, she hesitated. She hadn’t been here since she had run away, with Lily in her arms.
Did she have the right, now, to walk past the bees humming in the lavender and into the dim silence of the house?
Julia looked up. Above her head, over the door, was a stone tablet with the family motto carved in it. It was the single word, Aetemitas.
She put out her hand, tentative, as if she was feeling her way in darkness. The heavy door, warmed by the sun, swung open. Julia walked into the stone-flagged hallway. She looked up, surprised. The walls were washed pale ivory, bringing light into the heart of the house. Sunlight streamed through the restored glass of the high stairway window, lying in lozenges over the clean stone flags and the new oak boards of the stairs. The intricately turned banisters looked just as they had always done, instead of the bitten-off black stumps of her nightmares. There were new pictures on the walls, landscapes and a tiny, glowing still life, and a pair of fine Gothic hall chairs faced each other from opposite sides of the front door.
So Alexander had done it, she thought.
He had remade Ladyhill. It was as lovely, more perfect in itself than it had been before.
Julia stepped forward, the lozenges of light breaking over her feet. There was one wrong detail, just one tiny flaw in the picture of perfection. At the foot of the stairs she bent down and picked it up.
It was a high-heeled gold sandal. Not gold, rather. Gilt. Rather a tarty piece of work, Julia thought.
What was it doing here?
Then the answer, satisfyingly obvious, came to her. It must be Lily’s, one of Lily’s dressing-up shoes. At school jumble sales Lily always bought the cast-off evening slippers, and stumbled around in them at home, dragging a wake of chiffon scarves and floppy hats and beads behind her.
Swinging the shoe by its strap, Julia went on through the house. Of course Lily and Alexander would be outside, in the sun. They would be sitting in the orchard, by the white-painted summerhouse.
The back door had been replaced. There were six glass panels in it now, letting new light into the once dingy flower room with its big stone sink and hanging row of gardening jackets and fraying straw hats.
Julia saw them through the glass panels.
Alexander was sitting in a Lloyd Loom chair, reading, and Lily was lying on her stomach, a little way away from him, drawing on a sketch-pad. The tip of her tongue stuck out between her teeth. It was then that Julia remembered that Lily had stopped dressing up years ago.
Mattie was sitting on the grass beside Alexander’s chair. The other gold sandal, discarded like its partner, lay next to her. And as Julia watched, Alexander looked up from his book and let his hand fall on to Mattie’s shoulder. His fingers touched the nape of her neck, where she had bundled up the heavy mass of her hair.
At once, immediately, Julia understood everything.
She stood frozen into stillness, her hand on the latch of the door. A second later, their attention drawn by her guilty, horrified stare, the comfortable trio on the grass looked up and saw her.
Julia turned away and ran.
Without knowing where she was going she ran up the stairs, her feet thudding painfully on the oak boards. She ran down the gallery to the big bedroom that she had shared with Alexander. At the beginning, when they were first married. When Alexander was a boy, he had told her, the room had been his parents’.
The room looked different now. The first thing she saw was a new dressing table, oval, with a looped skirt of unusually pretty chintz. Felix’s touch, she thought dully, automatically. The top of the table was protected by an oval of thick glass, and on the glass there was a dusting of spilled powder. Julia swept her hand over it and stared down at the pinky-white crust edging her palm.
The powder told her everything she already knew, hammering it brutally home. There were, other things too: another pair of high-heeled sandals, a lace-edged slip, turned inside out, flung over a chair with one of Alexander’s familiar Tattersall-check shirts. But the powder on its own was enough.
Julia turned, and saw that Mattie had followed her. Her cheeks were too pink, and her hair was escaping from its combs.
Standing in the doorway, seeing julia’s grey face and burning eyes, Mattie said, ‘Why didn’t you tell us you were coming?’
Julia was shaking. She felt cold and stiff and sick with anger and shame. She found the words, any words, out of the torrent that boiled up in her. ‘And why didn’t you tell me? I thought you were my friend, Mattie. I thought you were.’
‘I am your friend.’
Julia’s hand flew up, and then she found herself looking at it, wondering why, as if it didn’t belong to her. She was still holding the silly gilt sandal. She let her arm drop again, stiff, to her side and the sandal fell at her feet. ‘No. No, you aren’t. How could you be?’
And then they heard Lily and Alexander, coming after them.
Mattie began, ‘Julia, I want to …’ but Julia turned on her, cutting her short.
‘I don’t care what you want. How could you do it, Mat? Here. With Alexander. After … after everything.’
‘It’s nothing,’ Mattie said helplessly. ‘It’s just, friends.’ The blaze of anger in Julia’s face frightened her.
‘Don’t ever say it’s nothing,’ Julia warned.
Lily was shouting, ‘Mummy, Mummy, where are you? Where have you gone?’
‘I’m here,’ Julia managed to say, her eyes fixed on Mattie in disbelief. ‘I’m here, Lily.’
A moment later, Lily appeared at Mattie’s side. She had grown. Her brown legs, netted with bramble scratches, looked longer and thinner than ever. Julia felt a treacherous space of jealousy and secrecy yawning between them. She wanted to rush into it, headlong.
‘Mummy, why are you here? Is everything okay?’ Lily was surprised, not alarmed.
Julia said, ‘I thought I’d surprise you all. I did, didn’t I?’
She was tired now. Exhaustion and misery pulled at her, dragging at her limbs. Lily came and hugged her, the perfunctory, dismissive greeting of security.
‘It’s a fab surprise. Isn’t it, Mattie?’
‘Yes, love,’ Mattie said. Julia wouldn’t meet her eyes. They could hear Alexander coming along the gallery towards them.