After Julius Read Online Free PDF Page B

out of London at week-ends was becoming frightful, and two households were a
perpetual strain. In the end she left Cressy and her governess in the country, and very often Emma as well. No son was a private, nagging refrain, and for the rest of her functions she sometimes
felt as though she was endlessly laying an elaborate table for a meal to which nobody in the end sat down. On top of this, some people, at least, began talking of the possibility of another war. It
was too much: to slip quietly into middle age without a son, without a husband whom one could any longer meet as a stranger on a train, without a lover . . .
    And then, the first May of the war, the last morning of her married life. She had woken early, opened her eyes, and gone down alone, out to a milk-and-gold morning, a pale and tender sky,
declining dew, and the sun still rising higher above the exclaiming birds, opening roses with fresh pangs of light, exposing the shabby backs of airy bees and devouring the night sweat of the
ground with radiant consolation. She was never in her life entirely to forget the earthly delight of being in such a morning. Afterwards, she thought: a seed, perfection; a drop of mercury, some
drip from a celestial sphere, and she looked up at the sun and felt blissfully of no account.
    When at last she went back to the house and up to her bedroom, he was standing with his back to her, staring out of the window with a newspaper in his hands.
    ‘Did you hear the guns?’
    She had not heard them. There was a long, choked-up silence, and he did not turn round.
    ‘Esme –’
    ‘What is it, Julius?’
    ‘ Don’t you know? “Now all the youth of England are on fire.” Can’t you imagine? ’
    He turned round, and she saw with an ugly shock that he was crying. The sun from another window shone on him; he stood grey faced, a little paunchy, balding – two deep lines dredged from
his nostrils to below his mouth – a worn and ageing creature now rubbing the dry freckled knuckles of his hands in his eyes – incompatible with his anguish which seemed to her only
unlovely and discomforting. She felt a surge of anger at the discrepancy between his appearance and his feeling, at the pathos of his uselessness; it didn’t matter what he felt
and there was something contemptible in his showing it: he had had his war – why, he did not even have now to face her illicit fears! Aloud, with soothing cruelty she said:
‘There’s nothing you can do.’
    ‘Are you glad of that?’ he answered quietly, and a thrill of uncertainty and fear shot through her and was gone. She didn’t know.
    He picked up the newspaper which had fallen to the ground, and folded it up. ‘I must catch my train.’ Below them, the sounds of Cressy’s morning practice had begun –
fine, heroically measured scales, four octaves, the beginning of her three hours. ‘Well,’ he said again, ‘I must catch my train.’ He had blown his nose, his eyes were no
longer naked; he had withdrawn into his ordinary appearance distinguished by nothing in particular.
    ‘Have a good day. Look after yourself.’ Now that he was asking nothing, she was trying to seem ready and kind. She kissed his cheek: he had cut himself shaving. ‘Wait a minute:
you look awful with blood on you.’ She ran her handkerchief under the cold tap and dabbed him up.
    ‘It would be awkward if I looked better. Don’t let Emma on to the main road with her bike. She shouldn’t do that until she is at least ten. Good-bye Esme.’
    She heard Cressy break off in a scale, and imagined her flinging her arms round his neck: she was going through a dramatic phase. With the piano stopped she could hear an aeroplane –
limping on one engine by the sound of it. And every now and then, that casual, throaty rumble of the guns which she had not heard when she had been in the garden. She went to the window where he
had been, trying to put out of her mind the picture of him which part of her was