She saw Roger in a long chair with a book.
‘Reading?’ she said, lifting her really beautiful eyebrows.
‘Why aren’t you playing golf?’
Roger looked a trifle sulky.
‘Tom said it was too hot.’
‘Oh?’ she smiled charmingly.
‘I was afraid you thought you ought to stay and entertain my guests.
There are going to be so many people, we could easily have managed without you.
Where are the others?’
‘I don’t know.
Tom’s making chichi with Cecily Dennorant.’
‘She’s very pretty, you know.’
‘It looks to me as though it’s going to be a crashing bore today.’
‘I hope Tom won’t find it so,’ she said, as though she were seriously concerned.
Roger remained silent.
The day passed exactly as she had hoped.
It was true that she saw little of Tom, but Roger saw less.
Tom made a great hit with the Dennorants; he explained to them how they could get out of paying as much income-tax as they did.
He listened respectfully to the Chancellor while he discoursed on the stage and to Archie Dexter while he gave his views on the political situation.
Julia was at the top of her form.
Archie Dexter had a quick wit, a fund of stage stories and a wonderful gift for telling them; between the two of them they kept the table during luncheon laughing uproariously; and after tea, when the tennis players were tired of playing tennis, Julia was persuaded (not much against her will) to do her imitations of Gladys Cooper, Constance Collier and Gertie Lawrence.
But Julia did not forget that Charles Tamerley was her devoted, unrewarded lover, and she took care to have a little stroll alone with him in the gloaming.
With him she sought to be neither gay nor brilliant, she was tender and wistful.
Her heart ached, notwithstanding the scintillating performance she had given during the day; and it was with almost complete sincerity that with sighs, sad looks and broken sentences, she made him understand that her life was hollow and despite the long continued success of her career she could not but feel that she had missed something.
Sometimes she thought of the villa at Sorrento on the bay of Naples.
A beautiful dream.
Happiness might have been hers for the asking, perhaps; she had been a fool; after all what were the triumphs of the stage but illusion?
Pagliacci.
People never realized how true that was; Vesti la giubba and all that sort of thing.
She was desperately lonely.
Of course there was no need to tell Charles that her heart ached not for lost opportunities, but because a young man seemed to prefer playing golf with her son to making love to her.
But then Julia and Archie Dexter got together. After dinner when they were all sitting in the drawing-room, without warning, starting with a few words of natural conversation they burst, as though they were lovers, into a jealous quarrel.
For a moment the rest did not realize it was a joke till their mutual accusations became so outrageous and indecent that they were consumed with laughter.
Then they played an extempore scene of an intoxicated gentleman picking up a French tart in Jermyn Street.
After that, with intense seriousness, while their little audience shook with laughter, they did Mrs Alving in Ghosts trying to seduce Pastor Manders.
They finished with a performance that they had given often enough before at theatrical parties to enable them to do it with effect.
This was a Chekhov play in English, but in moments of passion breaking into something that sounded exactly like Russian.
Julia exercised all her great gift for tragedy, but underlined it with a farcical emphasis, so that the effect was incredibly funny.
She put into her performance the real anguish of her heart, and with her lively sense of the ridiculous made a mock of it.
The audience rolled about in their chairs; they held their sides; they groaned in an agony of laughter.
Perhaps Julia had never acted better. She was acting for Tom and for him alone.
‘I’ve seen Bernhardt and Rejane,’ said the Chancellor;
‘I’ve seen Duse and Ellen Terry and Mrs Kendal.
Nunc dimittis.’
Julia, radiant, sank back into a chair and swallowed at a draught a glass of champagne.
‘If I haven’t cooked Roger’s goose I’ll eat my hat,’ she thought.
But for all that the two lads had gone to play golf when she came downstairs next morning.
Michael had taken the Dennorants up to town.
Julia was tired.
She found it an effort to be bright and chatty when Tom and Roger came in to lunch.