Julia took his head in both her hands and pressed his lips with hers.
Then she gave a sigh.
‘Darling, you’re wonderful and you’re as beautiful as a Greek god, but you’re the biggest damned fool I’ve ever known in my life.’
They went to a theatre that night and at supper drank champagne to celebrate their reunion and toast their future.
When Michael accompanied her to her room she held up her face to his.
‘D’you want me to say good night to you in the passage?
I’ll just come in for a minute.’
‘Better not, darling,’ she said with quiet dignity.
She felt like a high-born damsel, with all the traditions of a great and ancient family to keep up; her purity was a pearl of great price; she also felt that she was making a wonderfully good impression: of course he was a great gentleman, and ‘damn it all’ it behoved her to be a great lady.
She was so pleased with her performance that when she had got into her room and somewhat noisily locked the door, she paraded up and down bowing right and left graciously to her obsequious retainers.
She stretched out her lily white hand for the trembling old steward to kiss (as a baby he had often dandled her on his knee), and when he pressed it with his pallid lips she felt something fall upon it.
A tear.
7.
THE first year of their marriage would have been stormy except for Michael’s placidity.
It needed the excitement of getting a part or a first night, the gaiety of a party where he had drunk several glasses of champagne, to turn his practical mind to thoughts of love.
No flattery, no allurements, could tempt him when he had an engagement next day for which he had to keep his brain clear or a round of golf for which he needed a steady eye.
Julia made him frantic scenes.
She was jealous of his friends at the Green Room Club, jealous of the games that took him away from her, and jealous of the men’s luncheons he went to under the pretext that he must cultivate people who might be useful to them.
It infuriated her that when she worked herself up into a passion of tears he should sit there quite calmly, with his hands crossed and a good-humoured smile on his handsome face, as though she were merely making herself ridiculous.
‘You don’t think I’m running after any other woman, do you?’ he asked.
‘How do I know?
It’s quite obvious that you don’t care two straws for me.’
‘You know you’re the only woman in the world for me.’
‘My God!’
‘I don’t know what you want.’
‘I want love.
I thought I’d married the handsomest man in England and I’ve married a tailor’s dummy.’
‘Don’t be so silly.
I’m just the ordinary normal Englishman. I’m not an Italian organ-grinder.’
She swept up and down the room.
They had a small flat at Buckingham Gate and there was not much space, but she did her best.
She threw up her hands to heaven.
‘I might be squint-eyed and hump-backed.
I might be fifty.
Am I so unattractive as all that?
It’s so humiliating to have to beg for love.
Misery, misery.’
‘That was a good movement, dear.
As if you were throwing a cricket ball.
Remember that.’
She gave him a look of scorn.
‘That’s all you can think of.
My heart is breaking, and you can talk of a movement that I made quite accidentally.’
But he saw by the expression of her face that she was registering it in her memory, and he knew that when the occasion arose she would make effective use of it.
‘After all love isn’t everything.
It’s all very well at its proper time and in its proper place.
We had a lot of fun on our honeymoon, that’s what a honeymoon’s for, but now we’ve got to get down to work.’
They had been lucky.
They had managed to get fairly good parts together in a play that had proved a success.
Julia had one good acting scene in which she had brought down the house, and Michael’s astonishing beauty had made a sensation.