it, in a telegram, just as he was off again to Canada. At first Julia could not believe he was treating them like this. Philip held her and said, ‘You don’t understand, Julia.’ ‘No, I don’t, I don’t understand anything.’ With humour that made his voice grate, he said, ‘We’re class enemies, don’t you see? No, don’t cry Julia, he’ll grow up, I expect.’ But he was staring over her shoulder with a face set in the dismay that was what she felt – and felt more often and more strongly every day. A weeping, generalised, drizzling dismay, and she could not shake it off.
They knew that Johnny was ‘doing well’ in Canada. What did doing well mean in this context? Soon after he had returned there, a letter arrived with a photograph of him and Frances on the steps of the register office. They were both in uniform, hers as right as a corset, and she was a bright, apparently giggling, blonde. ‘Silly girl,’ judged Julia, putting the letter and photograph away. The letter had a censor’s stamp on it, as if it were out of bounds – which is what she felt. Then Johnny wrote a note to say, ‘You might drop in to see how Frances is doing. She is pregnant.’
Julia did not go. Then came an airletter, saying a baby had been born, a boy, and he felt the least Julia could do was to visit her. ‘His name is Andrew,’ said the postscript, an afterthought, apparently; and Julia remembered the announcements of Jolyon’s birth, sent out in a large white thick envelopes, on a card like thin china, and the elegant black script that said, Jolyon Meredith Wilhelm Lennox. None of the recipients could have doubted that here was an important new addition to the human race.
She supposed she should go and see her daughter-in-law, put it off, and when she reached the address Johnny had provided, found Frances gone. It was a dreary street that had a house sagging to its knees in ruins, because of a bomb. Julia was glad she did not have to enter any house there, but she was directed to another that seemed even worse. It was in Notting Hill; she was let in by a slatternly woman who did not smile, and she was told to knock on that door there, the one with the cracked skylight.
She knocked, and an irritated voice called, ‘Wait a minute, okay, come in.’ The room was large, badly ht, and the windows were dirty. Faded green sateen curtains and frayed rugs. In the greenish half-dark sat a large young woman, her unstockinged legs apart, and her baby sprawled across her chest. She held a book in her hand, above the baby’s head; a rhythmically working little head, the spread-out hands opening and shutting on naked flesh. The exposed breast, large and lolling, exuded milk in sympathy.
Julia’s first thought was that she had come to the wrong house, because this young woman could not be the one in the photograph. While she stood there forcing herself to admit that she was indeed looking at Frances, Jolyon Meredith Wilhelm’s wife, the young woman said, ‘Do sit down.’ She sounded as if having to say this, even to contemplate Julia’s being there, was the last straw. She frowned as she eased her breast out of a discomfort, the baby’s mouth popped off the nipple, and milky liquid ran down over the breast to a sagging waist. Frances eased the nipple back, the infant let out a choking cry and then fastened itself again on the nipple with a little shaking movement of its head Julia had observed in puppies ranged along the teats of a nursing bitch, her little pet dachshund, from long ago. Frances put a piece of cloth Julia could swear was a nappy over the resting breast.
The women stared at each other, with dislike.
Julia did not sit. There was a chair, but the seat was suspiciously stained. She could sit on the bed, which was unmade, but did not care to. She said, ‘Johnny wrote to ask me to find out how you are.’
The cool, light, almost drawling voice, modulated according to some measure or scale known only to Julia, caused the young woman to stare again, and then she laughed.
‘I am as you see, Julia,’ said Frances.
Julia was filling with panic. She thought this place horrible, a lower depth of squalor. The house she and Philip had found Johnny in at the time of the Spanish Civil War misadventure had been a poor one, thin-walled, temporary in feel, but it had been clean, and Mary the landlady was a decent sort of woman. In this place Julia felt trapped in a nightmare. That shameless young woman half-naked there, with her great oozing breasts, the baby’s noisy sucking, a faint smell of sick, or of nappies … Julia felt that Frances was forcing her, most brutally, to look directly at an unclean unseemly fount of life that she had never had to acknowledge. Her own baby had been presented to her as a well-washed bundle after he had been fed by the nurse. Julia had refused to breastfeed; too near the animal, she felt, but did not dare say. Doctors and nurses had tactfully agreed that she was not able to nurse … her health … Julia had often played with the little boy who arrived in the drawing-room with toys, and she actually sat on the floor with him, and enjoyed a play hour, measured by the nanny to the minute. She remembered the smell of soap, and baby powder. She remembered sniffing at Jolyon’s little head with such pleasure …
Frances was thinking, It’s unbelievable. She is unbelievable, and derision was in danger of making her burst out in raucous laughter.
Julia stood there in the middle of the room, in her neat wool crêpe grey suit, that had not a wrinkle, not a bulge. It was buttoned up to her throat where a silk scarf provided a hint of mauve. Her hands were in dove-grey kid gloves, and even though thoroughly protected from the unwashed surfaces around her, were making anxious little movements of rejection, and fussy disapproval. Her shoes were like shiny blackbirds, with brass buckles that seemed to Frances to be locks, as if making sure those feet couldn’t fly off, or even to begin to try out a few prim dance steps. Her grey hat was fenced with a little net veil that did not conceal her horrified eyes, and it, too, was caught with a metal buckle. She was a woman in a cage, and to Frances, under such pressures of loneliness, poverty, anxiety, her appearance in that room, which she loathed, and wished only to escape from, was like a deliberate taunting, an insult.
‘What am I to tell Jolyon?’
‘Who? – oh, yes. But …’ And now Frances energetically sat herself up, one hand cupping the baby’s head, the other holding the cloth over her exposed breast. ‘Don’t tell me Johnny asked you to come here?’
‘Well, yes, he did.’
Now the two women shared a moment: it was incredulity, and their eyes actually did engage, in a query. When Julia had read the letter which commanded her to visit his wife, she said to Philip, ‘But I thought he hated us? If we weren’t good enough to see him married, then why is he ordering me to visit Frances?’
Philip replied, dry enough, but remote too, because as always he was absorbed in his duties with the war, ‘I see that you are expecting consistency. Usually a mistake, in my view.’
As for Frances, she had never heard Johnny refer to his parents as anything other than fascists, exploiters, at the best reactionaries. Then how could he be …
‘Frances, I would like very much to help you with some money.’ An envelope appeared from her handbag.
‘Oh, no, I am sure Johnny wouldn’t like that. He’d never take money from …’
‘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
