—

‘I wonder which is the more horrible,’ I said, ‘Celia’s Art and Fashion or Rex’s Politics and Money.’

‘Why worry about them?’

‘Oh, my darling, why is it that love makes me hate the world? It’s supposed to have quite the opposite effect. I feel as though all mankind, and God, too, were in a conspiracy against us.’

‘They are, they are.’

‘But we’ve got our happiness in spite of them; here and now, we’ve taken possession of it. They can’t hurt us, can they?’

‘Not tonight; not now.’

‘Not for how many nights?’

CHAPTER THREE

‘Do you remember,’ said Julia, in the tranquil, lime-scented evening, ‘do you remember the storm?’

‘The bronze doors banging.’

‘The roses in cellophane.’

‘The man who gave the “get-together” party and was never seen again.’

‘Do you remember how the sun came out on our last evening just as it has done today?’

It had been an afternoon of low cloud and summer squalls, so overcast that at times I had stopped work and roused Julia from the light trance in which she sat – she had sat so often; I never tired of painting her, forever finding in her new wealth and delicacy – until at length we had gone early to our baths and, on coming down, dressed for dinner, in the last half-hour of the day, we found the world transformed; the sun had emerged; the wind had fallen to a soft breeze which gently stirred the blossom in the limes and carried its fragrance, fresh from the late rains, to merge with the sweet breath of box and the drying stone. The shadow of the obelisk spanned the terrace.

I had carried two garden cushions from the shelter of the colonnade and put them on the rim of the fountain. There Julia sat, in a tight little gold tunic and a white gown, one hand in the water idly turning an emerald ring to catch the fire of the sunset; the carved animals mounted over her dark head in a cumulus of green moss and glowing stone and dense shadow, and the waters round them flashed and bubbled and broke into scattered flames.

‘…So much to remember,’ she said. ‘How many days have there been since then, when we haven’t seen each other; a hundred, do you think?’

‘Not so many.’

‘Two Christmases’ – those bleak, annual excursions into propriety. Boughton, home of my family, home of my cousin Jasper, with what glum memories of childhood I revisited its pitch-pine corridors and dripping walls! How querulously my father and I, seated side by side in my uncle’s Humber, approached the avenue of Wellingtonias knowing that at the end of the drive we should find my uncle, my aunt, my Aunt Phillippa, my cousin Jasper, and, of recent years, Jasper’s wife and children; and besides them, perhaps already arrived, perhaps every moment expected, my wife and my children. This annual sacrifice united us; here among the holly and mistletoe and the cut spruce, the parlour games ritually performed, the brandy-butter and the Carlsbad plums, the village choir in the pitch-pine minstrels’ gallery, gold twine and sprigged wrapping-paper, she and I were accepted, whatever ugly rumours had been afloat in the past year, as man and wife. ‘We must keep it up, whatever it costs us, for the sake of the children,’ my wife said.