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 if they 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.
‘You are selfish and greedy, like all your class,’ said Johnny.
‘You and Frances may come and live here, but I shall be here.’
‘Thank you so much, Mutti, but we shall decline.’
‘Why Mutti? You never called me that when you were a child.’
‘Are you trying to conceal the fact that you are a German, Mutti?’
‘No, I don’t think I am doing that.’
‘I do. Hypocritical. It’s what we expect from people like you.’
He was really furious. His father had not left him anything, it had all gone to Julia. He had planned to live in this house and to fill it with comrades needing a home. Everyone was poor, living from hand to mouth, after the war, and he was subsisting on the proceeds of work for the Party, some of it illegal. He had been furious with Frances for refusing to accept an allowance from Julia. When Frances had said, ‘But, Johnny, I don’t understand, how can you want to take money from the class enemy?’ Johnny had hit her, for the only time in their lives. She hit him back, harder. She had not meant her question as a taunt or a criticism, she genuinely wanted to have it explained to her.
Julia was well off, but not rich. Paying for the two lots of school fees, Andrew’s and Colin’s, was within her scope, but if Frances had not agreed to move in, she had planned to let part of the house. Now she was economising in ways that would have made Frances laugh, if she had known. Julia did not buy new clothes. She dismissed the housekeeper who had been living in the basement, depended on a woman who came in twice a week, and did a good bit of her own housework. (This woman, Mrs Philby, had to be coaxed and flattered and given presents to go on working when Frances and her ill-bred ways arrived.) She no longer bought food at Fortnum’s, but she discovered now, when Philip was dead, that her own tastes were frugal, and that the standards required of a wife married to a Foreign Office official had never really been hers.
When Frances arrived, to take over all the house except for Julia’s top floor, it was a relief to Julia. She still did not like Frances, who seemed determined to shock her, but she loved the boys, and intended to shield them from their parents. In fact, they were afraid of her, at least to start with, but she never found this out. She thought Frances was keeping her from them, did not know that Frances urged them to visit their grandmother. ‘Please, she’s so good to us. And she’d love it if you did.’ Oh, no, it’s too much, do we have to?’
Frances visited the newspaper to establish her job, and she knew how right she had been to prefer the theatre. As a freelance she had had little experience of institutions, and did not look forward to a communal working life. As soon as she set foot in the building that housed The Defender, she recognised there an atmosphere: this was an esprit de corps all right. The Defender’s venerable history, going back into the nineteenth century, as a fighter for any number of good causes, was being continued, so it was generally felt, and most particularly by the people who worked for it; this period, the Sixties, was able to stand up to any of the great times of the past. Frances was being welcomed into the fold by one Julie Hackett. She was a soft, not to say womanly woman, with bundles of strong black hair fastened here and there with a variety of combs and pins, a resolutely unfashionable figure, because she saw fashion as an enslaver of women. She observed everything around her with a view to correcting errors of fact and belief, and she criticised men in every sentence, taking it for granted, as believers tend to do, that Frances agreed with her in everything. She had been keeping
