'I think you'll find that he can and he will.'
Oh, no, no, Julia, please not. '
' Very well then, goodbye. '
Julia did not set eyes on Frances again until after Johnny had returned from the war, and Philip, who was by then ill and would shortly die, said he was worried about Frances and the children. Her memories of that visit caused Julia to protest that she was sure Frances did not want to see her, but Philip said, ' Please, Julia. To set my mind at rest. '
Julia went to the flat in Notting Hill, which she was convinced had been chosen because of the area's seediness and ugliness. There were two children now. The one she had seen before, Andrew, was a noisy and energetic toddler, and there was a baby, Colin. Again, Frances was breastfeeding. She was large, shapeless, slatternly, and the flat, Julia was convinced, was a health hazard. On the wall was a food safe, and in it could be glimpsed a bottle of milk and some cheese. The wire net of the safe had been painted, the paint had clogged: air therefore could not circulate properly. Babies' clothes were strung on fragile wooden contraptions that seemed about to collapse. No, Frances said, in a voice cold with hostility and criticism. No, she didn't want any money, no, thank you.
Julia stood there unconsciously all appeal, hands a-flutter, eyes full of tears.
'But, Frances, think of the children.'
It was as if Julia had deliberately touched an already sore place with acid. Oh, yes, Frances thought often enough of how her own parents, let alone Johnny's, must see her and how she lived, with the children. She said in a voice stiff with anger, ' It seems to me that I never think of anything else but the children. ' Her tone said, How dare you!
'Please let me help you, please Johnny's always so wrong-headed, he always has been, and it's not fair on the children. '
The trouble was, by now Frances agreed unreservedly about Johnny's wrong-headedness. Any shreds of illusion had dissolved away, leaving a residue of unresolvable exasperation about him, the comrades, the Revolution, Stalin, Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all. But what was in question here was not Johnny, it was herself, a small, threatened sense of identity and of independence. That was why Julia's Think of the children went home like a poisoned bullet. What right did she, Frances, have to fight for her independence, her own self at the cost of... but they were not suffering, they were not. She knew they were not.
Julia went away, reported back to Philip, and tried not to think of those rooms in Notting Hill.
Later, when Julia heard that Frances had gone to work in a theatre, Julia thought, A theatre! Of course, it would be! Then Frances was acting and Julia thought, Is she acting servants' parts then?
She went to the theatre, sat well back where she could not be seen, she hoped, and watched Frances in a small part in a quite nice little comedy. Frances was thinner, though still solid, and her fair hair was in frilly waves. She was a hotel owner, in Brighton. Julia could not see anything of that pre-war giggler in her tight uniform, but still, she was doing the part well enough, and Julia felt encouraged. Frances knew that Julia had been to watch her, because it was a small theatre, and Julia was wearing one of her inimitable hats, with a veil, and her gloved hands were on her lap. Not another woman in the audience wore a hat. Those gloves, oh those gloves, what a laugh.
All through the war, particularly at bad moments, Philip had kept the memory of a certain little glove, in Swiss muslin, and those dots, white on white, and the tiny frill at the wrist, seemed to him a delicious frivolity, laughing at itself, and a promise that civilisation would return.
Soon Philip died of a heart attack, and Julia was not surprised. The war had been hard on him. He had worked to all hours and brought home work at nights. She knew he had been involved in all kinds of daring and dangerous ventures, and that he grieved for men he had sent into danger, sometimes to their deaths. He had become an old man, during the war. And, like her, this war was forcing him to relive the last one: she knew this, from the small dry remarks he did allow himself to drop. These two people, who had been so fatally in love, had lived always in patient tenderness, as ifthey had decided to protect their memories, like a bruise, from any harsh touch, refusing ever to look too closely at them.
Now there was Julia alone in the big house, and Johnny came and said he wanted the house, and she should move out into a flat. For the first time in her life Julia stood her ground and said No. She was going to live here, and she did not expect Johnny or anyone else to understand her. Her own home, the von Arne house, had been lost. Her young brother had been killed in the Second World War. The house had been sold and the proceeds had come to her. This house, where she had been so reluctant to live, was now her home, the only link with that Julia who had a home, who expected to have one, who was defined by a place, with memories. She was Julia Lennox, and this was her home.