The Kindness (29 page)

Freda takes her hands from Julia’s shoulders, sticks out her lower lip. ‘No, finding out like that, poor man. And he was such a good soul.’

Julia’s eyes well. ‘Oh Freda, don’t. Remember he was shagging that Katie.’

Freda resumes kneading her shoulders. ‘Was he really?’ she says. ‘I mean, are you really sure about that?’

Julia sighs, says: ‘Oh Freda, it’s what I thought at the time.’

Freda rolls her own shoulders, checking for stiff muscles. Her face remains doubtful.

Julia places a hand over her heart. ‘Sometimes I think about Firdaws and wonder if we could’ve been happy there. If things had been different. It was such a beautiful place. You never came, did you?’

Freda shakes her head: ‘We had to keep putting my visit off.’

‘Oh, yes, I remember now,’ Julia says. ‘Mira was ill both times. Shame, I wish you’d seen it. I’m not sure I ever truly appreciated it, how peaceful it was, no people or cars, nothing but birdsong and trees. I remember being led around by Julian, his love was infectious, every nook, every tree had a story from his childhood. The garden sort of drifted into the fields, seedy grass and wildflowers, apple trees, and around the house every sort of climber covered the bricks like damask. At night the clearest skies: I’ve never seen so many shooting stars nor made so many wishes.’

Freda smiles at her to go on.

‘When he took me there, I was quite overwhelmed. For the first time I understood why he wanted to sink everything we had to buy it back. You know, he never knew his father, and Firdaws connected him with all that. It was all beams and nooks and window seats, the walls were so thick and ancient that the doorways sort of bulged and you felt hugged each time you entered a room.’

‘It was a gamble,’ Freda says. ‘With all your futures.’

‘But it might have worked. There was a primary school in the village for Mira, so no fees, and she loved having a dog and running about. Maybe I would’ve become less stubborn about continuing with you and Arbour.’ Julia gives Freda a rueful shrug. ‘There was an old granary in the grounds and he showed me the place up against its wall that he’d thought of for my glasshouse. It couldn’t have been a more perfect spot, with full sun and this lovely old granary for potting up. He’d done his research.

‘We hadn’t been there long before his mother – remember fearsome Jenna? – arrived with an entire team and a removal van full of furniture. It was everything from before, rugs, curtains, furniture, pictures, everything. Julian was crazy-happy to see it all again. “You sure this is OK?” he kept asking me and I told myself it would be piggish to object as they started unloading stuff, unfurling carpets, humping huge chintz-covered sofas through the door. His mother was re-creating their home, complete with dog-bitten carpets and rags. Our few bits and pieces from Cromwell Gardens were swamped. The men were uncomplaining, young, Australian. Jenna directed everything into its rightful place.’

‘I bet she did,’ says Freda.

‘I started to feel a bit wobbly and lost when Julian took me to the attic room he’d earmarked as my workroom. He showed me where my drawing board would go, my pinboards, he had it all worked out. And while he was over by the bed clearing up a cluster of dead flies, Jenna popped her head around the door. “Julian’s right,” she whispered to me. “This is the perfect place to work. I can vouch for it.” She pointed to the louvre window. “The light is good. I did all my drawing here . . .” And as she left she let slip that the granary he wanted for my potting shed had been her ceramics workshop, her kiln was still there . . .’ Julia tails off as Freda opens her notebook and starts to catalogue the trees.

‘Yes. You were always pretty wrung out after Jenna had been to stay,’ Freda says. ‘It’s strange to think of the lives we could’ve led. I often wonder what would’ve happened if I hadn’t left my husbands.’

‘Oh, Freda. Do you really?’

‘Yes. All my mother-in-laws despised me. I imagine myself in all sorts of depressing situations, going mouldy in that great big house in Dublin, or drinking myself into the grave with Monty, or, worst of all, having to bring up the boys with Eddie. Ugh. No. I much prefer things the way they are. Just me and the cat and whoever rocks up.’

Julia laughs. ‘I think I’m prone to imagining my alternative futures every time Karl pisses me off.’

‘Not surprising if you’re feeling let down. He should be here, it would be the normal thing to do.’

‘Yeah, well he’s not normal, is he.’ Julia chews her lip for a moment, repents. ‘Arghh, Freda. If I’m honest, I think I’m having a jealousy attack.’

Freda turns to her, startled. ‘You? What do you mean?’

‘He’s working with this woman, she’s very sexy, Dutch, single . . . Yesterday Karl wasn’t at the lab and I rang back and found out that she wasn’t there either.’ Julia lets out a wail of self-disgust before continuing. ‘Karl thinks I’ve gone mad questioning his movements; he’s terribly angry. I never used to be like this. Not before Julian. You know, before all that business with Katie, I was so trusting. I mean, I wasn’t thrilled that she was living in the village but, you know, I didn’t really think he would. And then, with Mira in hospital, that just made it all so much worse . . .’

She’s been thinking so fondly of Julian, but she’s talked herself right out of all that now. She forces herself to remember the moment she clicked about Katie, the twist of her heart when she did. It was well past three in the morning when he finally arrived at PICU stinking of her, that bluebell perfume she always wore. As she buried her face in his jacket Julia had told herself she was imagining it, was too swamped by need to consider it, a need which had grown more overwhelming with each frantic call she’d made to him, Mira looking as lifeless as a wax doll wired up to the machines, her liver failing and no one quite saying, ‘Yes, yes, of course she’ll live.’ He was the only person who could hold her. There was no one else.

There were signs along the railings outside the hospital asking people not to smoke. They were both in shock, standing close. He’d been drinking whisky, never a good idea. He slid his tongue along the cigarette paper, his hand shaking, his rolly clumsy with tobacco falling out the end. He had taken a matchbook from his pocket, bent the cardboard match back in that way he did so it was still attached to the book. His top lip curled where it gripped the cigarette. The book of matches was upside down and she was trying to make out the name embossed in tacky gold letters. Julian’s eyes followed her gaze. They both knew where Katie was staying. She’d swanked about it in the hospital playroom, saying she was going to ‘hurt Adrian in the wallet’. Julian looked surprised by the matchbook in his own hand. She had been about to ask him where he’d been all night, but then he struck the match and there was no need.

Twenty-four

Julia sketches out the first draft for the atrium on tracing paper taped over the architect’s drawing. She draws circles where conical holes can be sunk along meandering paths. It answers the brief perfectly –
a surprising green space within a geometrically perfect building
– and as she and Freda work side by side their excitement mounts. ‘I think we’re going to win this,’ Freda says as she leans across to mark the junction spots of the underground watering system. ‘So you think Julian was with Katie when you were at the hospital?’ she asks.

Julia frowns to herself: ‘If I was being kind I’d say he didn’t stand a chance. Did I ever tell you about the letter she sent me, when Julian and I were first together? She was incredibly manipulative, you know.’

‘What sort of letter?’

‘As it happens, an incredibly effective one,’ Julia says.

‘So, go on . . .’

‘I didn’t get a whole lot of post at Mrs Briggs’s – officially I didn’t live there – so any envelope was a surprise and at first I thought it was something pleasant. There it was, the sole occupant of Julian’s pigeonhole in the hall, a blue envelope addressed to me, attractive writing quite large, all hooks and flourishes.

‘I started opening it but other tenants were moving about in one of the rooms off the hall, someone shouting for a loo roll from the bathroom upstairs. I wasn’t dressed apart from Julian’s dressing gown with one of his ties as a belt. I didn’t have to go in to work that day, but I had to be careful not to be caught there too often by Julian’s landlady. Mrs Briggs was a terrifying old toad. God, it was grim.

‘The kettle was boiling as I bolted back up the stairs to Julian’s room, the letter concealed in the folds of his dressing gown. He had his back to me fiddling around with the coffee pot, blending three different beans: for a cash-strapped student he was particular about things like that. I sat on the bed, unfolded three sheets of thick blue paper: her signature was at the bottom of the final page, no wishes or regards.

‘She began by stating that she probably wasn’t the first spurned girlfriend who wanted to set the record straight with her usurper.’

‘Usurper?’ says Freda.

‘Oh, I don’t know, perhaps it was “new lover”, I can’t remember now,’ Julia says. ‘She claimed she was writing not out of spite but out of genuine concern for Julian, who she called ‘Jude’ throughout. She said it was unlikely her letter would ever reach the postbox. I wish it hadn’t.

‘She went on about my great age: honestly, anyone would’ve thought I was an old crone who’d bewitched the poor boy. And to think I wasn’t even thirty. By the second page she even invoked his mother, claiming that Jenna “who I happen to love very much” was heartbroken. “I want you to be aware of what you’re destroying,” she wrote. She described how they met on the first day of comp, how they’d grown from children who raced each other home on their bikes to adults and in great vivid detail of the balmy night that adulthood “came softly” upon them. At sunset in a bluebell wood, apparently. According to Katie, they marked the date every year by visiting the same grassy mound, where she lay in her garlands and he lit a fire. She was clever, her words chosen so carefully. Like Julian, she was studying English, harboured dreams of becoming a writer. She covered each sheet on both sides with that deceptively pretty script of hers, not a single crossing-out or clumsy phrase. She must’ve worked hard getting it right, writing it out many times before this final version.

‘Clever Katie. I only read the letter once before setting fire to it but that image of them lying entwined and naked in the bluebell woods never really left me. One read and it was spliced in, ready to thrive and blossom alongside Julian’s relationship with me. Which is what I’m sure she intended.’

‘Bitch,’ says Freda.

‘Yes,’ says Julia. ‘Bitch.’

‘When Julian joined me on the bed her letter was already cinders in the ashtray. He pulled me close, asked me what she’d written. I couldn’t tell him. His concern was sweet. I was feeling so squalid: old and pregnant and unemployed. No bluebell woods for me and him as we headed on a sea of disapproval to that grimy little room in Burnt Oak. I was on the run. Chris was handy with his fists.’

Freda’s hands rise to her face.

‘Oh, I never told you?’ Julia says. ‘Oh well, let’s not talk about it now. Hadn’t we better get on?’

She is a little out of breath. Freda rests a hand on her shoulder. ‘Julia, you were married to this Chris for what, twelve, thirteen years and from all the time we’ve been friends I have only ever known two things about him. One: he had a hawk and two: he grew dope in his attic.’

Julia chews her lip, picks up a pencil. ‘The hawk was the best thing about him but even that I grew to hate.’

Freda proposes a break before Julia gets stuck into her favourite part of any job: the artist’s impressions. She finds it totally absorbing to commit what she sees in her mind’s eye to the page, meditative. It was always a surprise to Julia when people couldn’t draw: it was one of those things she’d grown up believing anyone could do. In the earlier part of her marriage to Chris she’d completed a foundation year in art. But then the nights were drawing in, and suddenly Chris had to work away; there was the new hawk to train and that ate eight hours a day. It was easier for her not to return to college after summer.

She sees him again, that husband of hers, shouting instructions, his streaky hair lifting in the wind, not one colour or another, a bit like the hawk’s feathers. The spittle that always caught in the cracked corner of his mouth. The weight of the hawk on her arm making it impossible to run after him, the back of his van bouncing away, a temper tantrum because she hadn’t managed to get it to fly to her glove, so they’d had to pull it back from the trees by the creance attached to its leg. He abandoned her there with the hawk in a windy field miles from home. She can never be too far from him, even now.

Freda rootles through a cupboard to find the Caran d’Ache pencils while Julia puts the kettle on. She thinks briefly, reluctantly, of the bony cavity at the junction of Chris’s ribcage, how they used it as somewhere to flick the ash from their spliffs, sunk into piles of pillows in the bedroom at Wychwood, so sated and weak it was impossible to get up and find the ashtray. She cringes now to think of her compliance. He’d got her young; he knew what he could get away with. He bought her motorbike leathers and a silver helmet that matched his and took the corners so fast that their knees skimmed the ground. He made jesses of fine calf which he used to tie her to his bed, he taught her to cook rabbit stew, to skin and to gut. She made cakes and for a while was quite plump. He manned her as he would a hawk, building up trust while he touched her, withholding then rewarding only when she bent to his will. She got pregnant and had an abortion. The dope helped the years to pass while she tried to convince herself of the good in him: his amber eyes, his muscular arms, most of the records he bought. His talent for flipping beer mats had struck her as a mighty thing.