At dinner she tried to get him to talk about Vienna.
But he was reticent.
‘Oh, I just did the usual things, you know.
I saw the sights and worked hard at my German.
I knocked about in beer places.
I went to the opera a good deal.’
She wondered if he had had any love affairs.
‘Anyhow, you haven’t come back engaged to a Viennese maiden,’ she said, thinking to draw him out.
He gave her a reflective, but faintly amused look.
You might almost have thought that he had seen what she was driving at.
It was strange; though he was her own son she did not feel quite at home with him.
‘No,’ he answered, ‘I was too busy to bother with that sort of thing.’
‘I suppose you went to all the theatres.’
‘I went two or three times.’
‘Did you see anything that would be any use to me?’
‘You know, I never thought about that.’
His answer might have seemed a little ungracious but that it was accompanied by a smile, and his smile was very sweet.
Julia wondered again how it was that he had inherited so little of Michael’s beauty and of her charm.
His red hair was nice, but his pale lashes gave his face a sort of empty look.
Heaven only knew where with such a father and such a mother he had got his rather lumpy figure.
He was eighteen now; it was time he fined down.
He seemed a trifle apathetic; he had none of her sparkling vitality; she could picture the vividness with which she would have narrated her experiences if she had just spent six months in Vienna.
Why, already she had made a story about her stay at St Malo with Aunt Carrie and her mother that made people roar with laughter.
They all said it was as good as a play, and her own impression was that it was much better than most.
She told it to Roger now.
He listened with his slow, quiet smile; but she had an uneasy feeling that he did not think it quite so funny as she did.
She sighed in her heart.
Poor lamb, he could have no sense of humour.
Then he made some remark that led her to speak of Nowadays.
She told him its story, and explained what she was doing with her part; she talked to him of the cast and described the sets.
At the end of dinner it suddenly struck her that she had been talking entirely of herself and her own interests.
She did not know how she had been led to do this, and the suspicion flashed across her mind that Roger had guided the conversation in that direction so that it should be diverted from him and his affairs. But she put it aside.
He really wasn’t intelligent enough for that.
It was later when they sat in the drawing-room listening to the radio and smoking, that Julia found the chance to slip in, apparently in the most casual fashion, the question she had prepared.
‘Have you made up your mind what you’re going to be yet?’
‘No.
Is there any hurry?’
‘You know how ignorant I am about everything. Your father says that if you’re going to be a barrister you ought to work at law when you go to Cambridge.
On the other hand, if you fancy the Foreign Office you should take up modern languages.’
He looked at her for so long, with that queer, reflective air of his, that Julia had some difficulty in holding her light, playful and yet affectionate expression.
‘If I believed in God I’d be a priest,’ he said at last.
‘A priest?’
Julia could hardly believe her ears.
She had a feeling of acute discomfort.
But his answer sank into her mind and in a flash she saw him as a cardinal, inhabiting a beautiful palazzo in Rome, filled with wonderful pictures, and surrounded by obsequious prelates; and then again as a saint, in a mitre and vestments heavily embroidered with gold, with benevolent gestures distributing bread to the poor.
She saw herself in a brocaded dress and string of pearls.
The mother of the Borgias.
‘That was all right in the sixteenth century,’ she said.
‘It’s too late in the day for that.’
‘Much.’