After Julius Read Online Free PDF

barging in like this, but I can’t do without a last smoke before sleeping.’
    ‘Not at all. Do take a seat – Miss –’
    ‘Upjohn: Ruby Upjohn.’
    ‘What a pretty name.’ His face was impassive as he handed her his case.
    ‘What a pretty case!’
    ‘You think so?’ He gave a modest laugh. ‘As a matter of fact if that case could talk, it could tell us a thing or two.’
    ‘Ooh – could it?’
    ‘To cut a long story short, it was given by King Edward to my father in gratitude for some highly confidential service. Do you see?’ And he showed her the ER (the case had been her
engagement present to him in the days when she was Esme Roland).
    ‘You must be ever so proud, to own a valuable thing like that.’
    ‘Naturally I wouldn’t have told you if you hadn’t seemed so interested.’
    In a minute he would start asking her questions, so she crossed her legs, blew out her smoke in a manner which she hoped was beguilingly inexpert and said:
    ‘Actually I’m running away!’
    ‘Miss Upjohn!’
    ‘Oh do call me Ruby –’ and she launched into her tale about a cruel theatrical manager, at the end of which he exclaimed with glowing eyes:
    ‘Ruby, what a splendid little girl you are! I think this calls for a drink.’ He had unscrewed the cap of his silver flask, and handed it to her: ‘Let’s drink to the brave
new life opening out before you in Inverness.’
    As she drank some, and choked prettily, he added: ‘Don’t ask me where the flask came from: it conjures up painful memories never far from my mind, which I should be happier to
forget.’
    ‘Ooh, I am sorry: I can’t imagine a man like you having troubles.’
    ‘Little Ruby! How touching that you should think that.’ He gave a bitter laugh and stared moodily between her breasts.
    By the time he had finished telling her about his wife whose whole nature was given to her rock garden, and who consequently had not a spare second over for beginning to understand him
‘and I’m a funny, complicated sort of chap’ the brandy was drunk, and she could say that it was funny they’d met wasn’t it, both lonely, both in trouble. Well –
she stood up – she thought that perhaps she’d better be getting back to her bed now. Ruby – Ruby – he had seized her in a vice-like grip, wasn’t there anything else
she couldn’t do without before she went to sleep? ‘Captain Fortescue!’ ‘Call me Valentine!’ and she swooned neatly on to the bed, pulling him with her . . .
    Sixty miles further north she murmured: ‘Dear Captain Fortescue: I like trains –’
    ‘And?’
    ‘I like no poetry –’
    ‘And?’
    ‘I want a son not called Valentine.’
    And that was when Emma was conceived.
    But after that, everything seemed to tail off into a mist of routine, fatigue, anxiety and hectic, immemorable celebration. He grew perceptibly more concerned with the state of the world: he
worried about unemployment, disarmament, and Hitler and the monarchy; he insisted on Cressy being educated at home; he worried about China and Spain and Abyssinia; he would not let either of the
children listen to the wireless. A good deal of this was reflected in his publishing: he stopped building up his list of young poets for which both he and the house had begun to be distinguished,
and started upon symposia of political thought, aspects of international economy, the effects of science and philosophy upon industry, the distinctions between racial and religious prejudice, the
psychological implications of leadership and freedom – books which she couldn’t even try to read and which in any case hardly sold at all. (His brother, Mervyn, kept the whole thing
going with what Julius described either as nice novels or pot-boilers.) He seemed to work harder and harder, had chronic indigestion, slept badly and was only occasionally fun – with the
children. By now she had grown accustomed to his ways and the mechanics of their domestically hectic life: traffic