After Julius Read Online Free PDF Page A

shock to her vanity! But if he hadn’t put the dress in she might never have known and goodness knows, everything might have been different. They married when she was
twenty, in May, and it was not until he cast himself upon her with lines from a sonnet relevant to that month, but to little else, and which anyway turned out to have been written by Shakespeare,
that it dawned upon her that it was poetry that was his prevailing passion. This was a discovery upon which the sun never set. In all moments of emotion he resorted to poetry; and this included
making love to her. She had pleaded ignorance, but this only provoked hours of tender instruction, and every time he reached out for some slim calf-bound volume from a shelf, or threw back his head
and half shut his eyes (he knew a fantastic amount of stuff by heart) the same wave of unwilling reverence and irritated incomprehension swept over her. By the time she was having Cressy, she hit
upon a counter-interest with which he might at least sympathize. She had developed a passion, she said, for really good novels (and she found, after a certain amount of perseverance, that this
became true).
    The publishing prospered, a partner retired and Julius succeeded him; they bought the house in Sussex and kept a small flat in town; went for trips to Paris and Rome and New York, apart from
ordinary holidays. Julius adored his daughter: it was he who had named her Cressida as a compromise between their disparate choices of Zenocrate and Joan. Everything was very pleasant, and if you
had stopped her in the street, or driven her into a corner at a cocktail party, she would have been most unlikely to admit that poetry had spoiled her sex life with Julius – although this in
fact was the case. What Julius had felt about it, she had never really understood.
    When they had been married about ten years, however, she had begun to see the contrast between what she wanted and what she was expected to want, in a light which was both lurid and alarming.
She took to Russian novels, but the discontent of the sad and beautiful creatures she discovered in them had either some quality of resigned melancholy with which she felt herself out of century,
or a spirit of sheer recklessness which part of her, jealous of their heartfelt opportunities, could only deplore. Out of all this, because she was primarily a physical creature, because Julius so
much adored their daughter, because she felt uncomfortably detached from her body and because nobody then appeared to sweep her off her feet (which in this sense were beginning to kill her), she
conceived the desire for a son. Once envisaged, this seemed a perfect solution, providing physical engagement, using her affections, and certainly not running counter to the society which was her
world. She was thirty-one; still a year younger than Julius had been when they married.
    And so, early in September, on the night train to Inverness, she lay in her bed and called to him in the adjoining sleeper. They had dined, with a bottle of burgundy; it was the beginning of a
short holiday, and for a while she had lain simply enjoying the rhythmic rocking of the coach and beneath it the wheels racing over the track with a mathematical roar. The charm of sleeping
compartments, she thought, was entirely masculine; the white paint and much mahogany, the navy blankets with scarlet stitching, the heavy glass water-bottle and coarse white linen floor drugget
– everything was ingenious, simple and solid, and surprisingly satisfactory. But when she called to Julius, he didn’t answer – he was in the next compartment, after all, and the
communicating door was only just ajar. Suddenly, she leapt out of her bed, spilt some scent down her neck, took off her wedding ring and knocked on his door.
    ‘I wonder if I might trouble you for a light?’
    ‘But of course.’ He had been hanging up his suit and was in his dressing-gown.
    ‘You must think it funny of me,