He bought modern pictures and collected old furniture.
He was a lover of music and exceedingly well read.
At first it amused him to go to the tiny flat off the Buckingham Palace Road in which these two young actors lived.
He saw that they were poor and it excited him to get into touch with what he fondly thought was Bohemia.
He came several times and he thought it quite an adventure when they asked him to have a luncheon with them which was cooked and served by a scarecrow of a woman whom they called Evie. This was life.
He did not pay much attention to Michael who seemed to him, notwithstanding his too obvious beauty, a somewhat ordinary young man, but he was taken by Julia.
She had a warmth, a force of character, and a bubbling vitality which were outside his experience.
He went to see her act several times and compared her performance with his recollections of the great foreign actresses.
It seemed to him that she had in her something quite individual.
Her magnetism was incontestable.
It gave him quite a thrill to realize on a sudden that she had genius.
‘Another Siddons perhaps. A greater Ellen Terry.’
In those days Julia did not think it necessary to go to bed in the afternoons, she was as strong as a horse and never tired, so he used often to take her for walks in the Park.
She felt that he wanted her to be a child of nature.
That suited her very well.
It was no effort for her to be ingenuous, frank and girlishly delighted with everything.
He took her to the National Gallery, and the Tate, and the British Museum, and she really enjoyed it almost as much as she said.
He liked to impart information and she was glad to receive it.
She had a retentive memory and learnt a great deal from him.
If later she was able to talk about Proust and Cezanne with the best of them, so that you were surprised and pleased to find so much culture in an actress, it was to him she owed it.
She knew that he had fallen in love with her some time before he knew it himself.
She found it rather comic.
From her standpoint he was a middle-aged man, and she thought of him as a nice old thing.
She was madly in love with Michael.
When Charles realized that he loved her his manner changed a little he seemed struck with shyness and when they were together was often silent.
‘Poor lamb,’ she said to herself, ‘he’s such a hell of a gentleman he doesn’t know what to do about it.’
But she had already prepared her course of conduct for the declaration which she felt he would sooner or later bring himself to make.
One thing she was going to make quite clear to him. She wasn’t going to let him think that because he was a lord and she was an actress he had only to beckon and she would hop into bed with him.
If he tried that sort of thing she’d play the outraged heroine on him, with the outflung arm and the index extended in the same line, as Jane Taitbout had taught her to make the gesture, pointed at the door.
On the other hand if he was shattered and tongue-tied, she’d be all tremulous herself, sobs in the voice and all that, and she’d say it had never dawned on her that he felt like that about her, and no, no, it would break Michael’s heart.
They’d have a good cry together and then everything would be all right.
With his beautiful manners she could count upon him not making a nuisance of himself when she had once got it into his head that there was nothing doing.
But when it happened it did not turn out in the least as she had expected.
Charles Tamerley and Julia had been for a walk in St James’s Park, they had looked at the pelicans, and the scene suggesting it, they had discussed the possibility of her playing Millamant on a Sunday evening.
They went back to Julia’s flat to have a cup of tea.
They shared a crumpet.
Then Charles got up to go.
He took a miniature out of his pocket and gave it to her.
‘It’s a portrait of Clairon.
She was an eighteenth-century actress and she had many of your gifts.’
Julia looked at the pretty, clever face, with the powdered hair, and wondered whether the stones that framed the little picture were diamonds or only paste.
‘Oh, Charles, how can you!
You are sweet.’
‘I thought you might like it.
It’s by way of being a parting present.’
‘Are you going away?’
She was surprised, for he had said nothing about it.
He looked at her with a faint smile.
‘No.
But I’m not going to see you any more.’