A Few Days in the Country (10 page)

‘I can say this much—' John began.

A minute later she interrupted him reproachfully, half-laughing. ‘Darling, darling. I'm an intelligent woman, I hope, but make it a little easier for me. I'm not a scholar, you know, and I don't pretend to be.'

Oh! Her eyes looked so deeply into his, and were so blue, and seemed to mean, to suggest…John condensed his encyclopaedic knowledge of the problems of India into three wise sentences. For her part, Julia seemed to learn them word for word; more, seemed to grasp the exciting ramifications, implications, the whole complex of thought that lay behind them. Rarely had his perceptions been so acutely appreciated.

When Harry Grieve was cornered by her lovely boisterous blue gaze he didn't object at all. He looked at her speculatively over his glass, and Julia said, ‘What's all this about Greek sculpture? No, seriously, Harry. I want to know. There's a museum at Delphi, they tell me—'

She was right! There was! There is! Harry's expression altered. She smelled marvellous. Her make-up was smooth and pearly, though she bore those visible traces of preservation that were natural and becoming to her age. Her way of searching your eyes was not so much provocative as—well, yes, it
was
provocative.

Julia listened to Harry's wise sentences.

The distinguished men she met, about whose interests
Who's Who
was so helpful, were delighted to hear the subjects closest to their hearts—India, Greek sculpture, geology, fishing, the United Nations, cricket—receiving such sensible attention from this good-looking society woman. Now she was appealing to the company for support. What ignoramuses! She was the only one at the table who knew anything about it!

A certain look and two or three smart words she'd learned the week before were enough to convince them all that she knew what they were talking about. And
cared
. These were the world shakers, were they? Internationally known. And she,
she
, little Julia Holt had tricked them.

These formal occasions were all very well, but Julia much preferred an evening at home with a few handpicked visitors from abroad. She loved new people. The Holts diverted them with tales about associates and acquaintances whom the newcomers would soon number in their circle.
Someone
had to give these lambs the lowdown. It was only fair.

‘Oh, you can tell a mile off they commit incest,' Ralph would say with his gentle smile. ‘Ask Julia. She's got an instinct for these things.'

‘Blanche and her son? Listen, sweeties, it's quite common. You know it is.'

Of course they did.

As eyes slid, full of glee, from one face to another, saluting their own kind now that they were
certain
, Ralph would continue with his revelations. He still had the placid country face of a farm boy, which added a peculiar piquancy to the night. ‘Of course, James and Martha—we think they're both queer.'

‘Well, they
are
. No
think
about it. And then—'

Once Julia started ticking them off on her fingers, there was really no end to the newsworthy misdemeanours their friends were guilty of. Obscenity was everywhere! Like spies they searched it out, exchanging clues, drawing inferences, inventing hilarious episodes for their private amusement. It was all good fun, and livened their small parties wonderfully.

If human beings were automatically rendered ideal, creatures of the highest order, as a result of successful sexual relations, the Holts should have been enshrined in a mountain grotto somewhere and worshipped. By their own account, they were uniquely happy in their marriage. Who knew but this was absolutely true?

Looking through a magazine at her hairdresser's, Julia read,
To deny love is the only crime
. The words were written in a box in the centre of the page. She read them again, liked them, remembered them, and introduced them to the company assembled for dinner the following night, thus furthering her reputation as a thinker.

Unluckily, a pedantic oaf called Edward Driscoll—who was
nothing
, yet seemed to consider himself
something
—had the crassness to put her statement on a different plane altogether.

‘I wonder if that's true?' he said—as if it mattered—staring into his claret. ‘Whoever said it would know what he meant, I suppose. He was probably right
then
, for himself. But generally, to deny love you must at some time have affirmed it. Surely, not to have done that would be a greater crime?

‘Although,' he went on, incredibly, as if someone had contradicted him, ‘if you like to say that no one should be held responsible for an inherent disability, you'd have a point.' He seemed to brood. Round about him, heads sank. ‘Of course,' he glanced up quickly at Julia, ‘he—that is, you—may have meant deny in that sense?'

Julia's eyes swivelled. Her mouth opened, then closed.

Driscoll resumed his monologue somewhat moodily. ‘I suppose one is apt to blame people unfairly for blankness of feeling.'

Behind this lunatic's back, Ralph signalled to Julia:
What's he talking about?
She cast up her eyes.

‘The trouble is,' Driscoll went on, ‘there are people, and
people
, all looking very much like human beings.'

The smooth lid of Julia's left eye descended in a wink. It evoked five responsive smiles in the five who saw it.

‘The total absence of empathy that you could assume in a cat in relation to a human being exists everywhere between people who are allegedly of one species,' Driscoll said. He wasn't bad-looking, either.

‘And so what do you make of it all?' Julia asked soothingly, with a tremendous bending of her personality over the young man.

He raised his eyes from the glass in his hand and smiled at Julia, obviously, disconcertingly, stone-cold sober.

‘Maybe a new race of non-human people?' He seemed to consult her. ‘Or the old race of non-humans increasing their numbers? Anyway, there are more and more of them all the time, and all disguised to look like humans.' His eyes were a striking sandy-gold colour.

In other circumstances, Julia felt she might have let rip, might have said something gigantically coarse and relieved her contempt. But she only said, ‘Where are they coming from, do you think? Outer space?'

‘Oh, yes.' He smiled. ‘I should think so. Definitely.'

Inevitably, there were small failures in Julia's life but, as Ralph said, the tender-hearted ones of this world have always laid themselves open to failure, without ever letting it change them. If Julia had taken the Anne-Marie affair to heart, for instance, she wouldn't have been Julia.

Ralph and Julia were on the committee of an organisation dedicated to the relief of the needy. Through this charity they were brought into touch with Anne-Marie Grant, a neglected child of sixteen, the daughter of an alcoholic father, recently killed, and a mother, classified in the family's case history as ‘weak and feckless', who had run off with a bus conductor to Melbourne after her husband's fatal accident.

Having decided to employ some young person to help the help in the house, Ralph and Julia interviewed and hired Anne-Marie for the job. As Julia put it to the girls, they fell in love with her on sight. She was beautiful. People who had only heard of girls with faces like flowers, seeing Anne-Marie, understood for the first time what the words meant and stopped to stare.

Moreover, as it appeared, she was sweet-natured, and innocent and quick to learn. Elsie adored her, and so did the cleaners, and Ralph and the boys.

If Anne-Marie had a fault, it was that she was a fraction cold and uncommunicative. Oh, she was intelligent, and even sensitive in a way, but there was a lack of heart somewhere in her that repelled Julia. Time and time again she failed to respond to Julia's sincere efforts to draw her out. And it wasn't—God knew—that Julia was prying. She only hoped the little soul would unburden herself of that dreadful past, shed as many tears as need be, and then take up her life like any normal girl.

‘Don't worry, pet,' Ralph said. ‘She'll come to you like all the others. She'll be your little disciple for life, wait and see.'

But, as the weeks continued to pass, the number of small wounding incidents began to mount. Anne-Marie took to avoiding Julia's eyes. She would not give smile for conspiratorial smile. Alternatively, she had a habit of looking at Julia out of those blue-grey eyes that were, in truth, like stars, and flowers, and precious stones. She looked at Julia with these wonderful eyes and seemed to think at her, or about her, in some disconcerting way.

Elsie did her share of damage by passing on to Julia one afternoon the details of a series of conversations
she
had had with Anne-Marie.

As hurt as she had ever been, indescribably bleak, Julia listened while painful revelations of deep feeling on the part of the child were repeated to
her
, by her own cook.

‘Ah, she's had a hard time,' said Elsie. ‘But I mustn't talk about that.'

It emerged that Anne-Marie saw herself as a nurse or a social worker like the one who'd rescued her. She wanted not to be left helpless and without skill in middle age, the way her mother had been. She wanted to learn all about the world, and not to marry till she was twenty-seven.

‘She's seen too much of marriage to rush into it with maybe the wrong one,' the cook said sombrely.

‘I said,' Julia later told Ralph drily, ‘“Look, don't encourage the girl's delusions of grandeur! She's had all of six years at school, so she isn't eligible to train as a dogcatcher! Do you know how many certificates girls have to have before they'll accept them as trainee nurses? That sort of future is
out
for Anne-Marie, and it's no kindness to her to pretend otherwise.”'

‘How soon people's lives are over and ruined!' cried Elsie.

Julia continued, quite brusquely for Julia, ‘It's obvious she was made to settle down and have babies, anyway.' (If
Julia
had accepted this role as her destiny, was it too much to expect Anne-Marie to do the same?)

But Elsie could be stubborn. She pounded the bit of dough she was mangling about, showing that she meant to continue inciting the girl.

So Julia had no choice but to talk to Anne-Marie herself.

It took forty minutes and several cigarettes to put the matter of her future into perspective for the child. They were in Julia's lovely bedroom, a room coloured mother-of-pearl, with views of trees and lawns and sky. Anne-Marie looked down at her hands throughout, except when ordered to lift her head.

There was something forbidding about the girl's small Mediterranean face. As she noticed and debated this and, inconceivably, felt herself rebuked, a whim tickled Julia. It was just a whim, a silly little notion in a corner of her mind. Then, miraculously, everything was all at once reversed and Julia found that she was just a tiny little person in a corner of the notion. She was impelled to mention the facts of life.

Julia was devoutly frank. It seemed necessary to pass on all the curious customs and practices of a sexual nature that had ever been brought to her attention. Many men and women must have lived their lives without knowing all the facts she bestowed on Anne-Marie. But you can never know too much about anything. It was for the child's own protection. And she did look so surprised.

‘My God, look at the time! Off you run, you baby Cleopatra! You've made me late for my appointment.' Julia laughed, admiring her, and Anne-Marie rose to go.

When she swayed, Julia laughed again and looked closely into the girl's face. She had the dulled look of one who had suffered a shock to the mind. She grasped the back of the chair for balance, her eyes closed, and Julia laughed yet again, indulgently. There was more than one way of skinning a cat, as the old saying went. And more than one way of deflowering a virgin, too. The child was glassy-eyed.

It was typical of a number of disappointments that Julia endured over the years that Anne-Marie should have wandered off shortly after this, leaving no word of thanks or explanation. Everyone was upset, but there was nothing to be done. Ralph was preparing for a short series of television interviews—an ordeal he detested, being a man of action rather than words—and Julia had to help him rehearse. Also the boys' school concert,
the
charity ball of the year, and one of her most lavish parties to date all fell in the same few days.

‘Really, there's never a moment!' Julia said. What with marquees and floodlights in the garden to think about, and workmen tramping up and down the paths, and grouse, salmon, truffles, and pheasants being flown in from Europe for the occasion, and the disciples fleeing about on her behalf when they could escape from their tedious offices, it was impossible to give much thought to Anne-Marie's fate.

That ghastly Edward Driscoll sought her out at a diplomatic party to say, ‘They've invented a death ray, Julia, to kill us all off.'

‘Good on them!' she said, hostile. ‘Who have?'

‘The non-humans, remember? From outer space. They're highly organised.'

Julia humoured him. ‘Why would they want to kill anyone? It's such a lovely night!'

‘Well,' he said, almost apologetically, ‘they
are
insane.' He seemed to know what Julia was thinking. ‘It makes them dangerous.'

Julia cast into the depths. In the most condescending tone she had ever commanded in her life, she asked, ‘Are you afraid of dying, Edward?'

‘Yes,' he said.

With closed lips she smiled and turned away. If only she had had a death ray handy!

Kate (or Alice, or Brenda, or Valerie) spotted Anne-Marie in Hyde Park one day, a few months after she had left the house. She was pregnant, and her hands were ringless. Apparently she was in some bizarre get-up, with her hair straggling down her back, and looking miserable as sin.