She felt him go white. She felt a sudden anguish wring his heartstrings, she felt that his flesh and blood could not support the intolerable pain of hers.
‘Julia.’
His voice was broken.
She slowly turned her liquid eyes on him.
It was not a woman crying that he saw, it was all the woe of humankind, it was the immeasurable, the inconsolable grief that is the lot of man.
He threw himself down on his knees and took her in his arms.
He was shattered.
‘Dearest, dearest.’
For a minute she did not move.
It was as if she did not know that he was there.
He kissed her streaming eyes and with his mouth sought hers.
She gave it to him as though she were powerless, as though, scarcely conscious of what was befalling her, she had no will left.
With a scarcely perceptible movement she pressed her body to his and gradually her arms found their way round his neck.
She lay in his arms, not exactly inert, but as though all the strength, all the vitality, had gone out of her.
In his mouth he tasted the saltness of her tears.
At last, exhausted, clinging to him with soft arms she sank back on the sofa.
His lips clung to hers.
You would never have thought had you seen her a quarter of an hour later, so quietly gay, flushed a little, that so short a while before she had passed through such a tempest of weeping.
They each had a whisky and soda and a cigarette and looked at one another with fond eyes.
‘He’s a sweet little thing,’ she thought.
It occurred to her that she would give him a treat.
‘The Duke and Duchess of Rickaby are coming to the play tonight and we’re going to have supper at the Savoy.
I suppose you wouldn’t come, would you?
I want a man badly to make a fourth.’
‘If you’d like me to, of course I will.’
The heightened colour on his cheeks told her how excited he was to meet such distinguished persons.
She did not tell him that the Rickabys would go anywhere for a free meal.
Tom took back the presents that he had returned to her rather shyly, but he took them.
When he had gone she sat down at the dressing-table and had a good look at herself.
‘How lucky I am that I can cry without my eyelids swelling,’ she said.
She massaged them a little.
‘All the same, what mugs men are.’
She was happy.
Everything would be all right now.
She had got him back.
But somewhere, at the back of her mind or in the bottom of her heart, was a feeling of ever so slight contempt for Tom because he was such a simple fool.
16.
THEIR quarrel, destroying in some strange way the barrier between them, brought them closer together.
Tom offered less resistance than she had expected when she mooted once more the question of the flat.
It looked as though, after their reconciliation, having taken back her presents and consented to forget the loan, he had put aside his moral scruples.
They had a lot of fun furnishing it.
The chauffeur’s wife kept it clean for him and cooked his breakfast.
Julia had a key and would sometimes let herself in and sit by herself in the little sitting-room till he came back from his office.
They supped together two or three times a week and danced, then drove back to the flat in a taxi.
Julia enjoyed a happy autumn.
The play they put on was a success.
She felt alert and young.
Roger was coming home at Christmas, but only for a fortnight, and was then going to Vienna.
Julia expected him to monopolize Tom and she was determined not to mind.
Youth naturally appealed to youth and she told herself that there was no reason for her to feel anxious if for a few days the two of them were so wrapped up in one another that Tom had no thought for her.