He would play backgammon with Michael, or patience with Julia, and when they turned on the gramophone he was always there to change the records.
‘He’ll be a nice friend for Roger,’ said Michael.
‘Tom’s got his head screwed on his shoulders the right way, and he’s a lot older than Roger.
He ought to have a good influence on him.
Why don’t you ask him to come and spend his holiday with us?’ (‘Lucky I’m a good actress.’) But it wanted an effort to keep the joy out of her voice and to prevent her face from showing the exultation that made her heart beat so violently.
‘That’s not a bad idea,’ she answered.
‘I’ll ask him if you like.’
Their play was running through August, and Michael had taken a house at Taplow so that they could spend the height of the summer there.
Julia was to come up for her performances and Michael when business needed it, but she would have the day in the country and Sundays.
Tom had a fortnight’s holiday; he accepted the invitation with alacrity.
But one day Julia noticed that he was unusually silent.
He looked pale and his buoyant spirits had deserted him.
She knew that something was wrong, but he would not tell her what it was; he would only say that he was worried to death.
At last she forced him to confess that he had got into debt and was being dunned by tradesmen.
The life into which she had led him had made him spend more money than he could afford, and ashamed of his cheap clothes at the grand parties to which she took him, he had gone to an expensive tailor and ordered himself new suits.
He had backed a horse hoping to make enough money to get square and the horse was beaten.
To Julia it was a very small sum that he owed, a hundred and twenty-five pounds, and she found it absurd that anyone should allow a trifle like that to upset him.
She said at once that she would give it to him.
‘Oh, I couldn’t.
I couldn’t take money from a woman.’
He went scarlet; the mere thought of it made him ashamed.
Julia used all her arts of cajolery.
She reasoned, she pretended to be affronted, she even cried a little, and at last as a great favour he consented to borrow the money from her.
Next day she sent him a letter in which were bank notes to the value of two hundred pounds.
He rang her up and told her that she had sent far more than he wanted.
‘Oh, I know people always lie about their debts,’ she said with a laugh.
‘I’m sure you owe more than you said.’
‘I promise you I don’t.
You’re the last person I’d lie to.’
‘Then keep the rest for anything that turns up.
I hate seeing you pay the bill when we go out to supper.
And taxis and all that sort of thing.’
‘No, really.
It’s so humiliating.’
‘What nonsense!
You know I’ve got more money than I know what to do with.
Can you grudge me the happiness it gives me to get you out of a hole?’
‘It’s awfully kind of you.
You don’t know what a relief it is.
I don’t know how to thank you.’
But his voice was troubled.
Poor lamb, he was so conventional.
But it was true, it gave her a thrill she had never known before to give him money; it excited in her a surprising passion.
And she had another scheme in her head which during the fortnight Tom was to spend at Taplow she thought she could easily work.
Tom’s bed-sitting room in Tavistock Square had at first seemed to her charming in its sordidness, and the humble furniture had touched her heart. But time had robbed it of these moving characteristics.
Once or twice she had met people on the stairs and thought they stared at her strangely.
There was a slatternly housekeeper who made Tom’s room and cooked his breakfast, and Julia had a feeling that she knew what was going on and was spying on her.
Once the locked door had been tried while Julia was in the room, and when she went out the housekeeper was dusting the banisters. She gave Julia a sour look.
Julia hated the smell of stale food that hung about the stairs and with her quick eyes she soon discovered that Tom’s room was none too clean.
The dingy curtains, the worn carpet, the shoddy furniture; it all rather disgusted her.