William Somerset Maugham Fullscreen Theatre (1937)

Pause

‘Panties,’ said Julia.

‘And a soutien-gorge, I suppose.’

‘Certainly not,’ cried Julia tartly.

‘Then, my niece, under your dress you are naked?’

‘Practically.’

‘C’est de la folie,’ said Aunt Carrie.

‘C’est vraiment pas raisonnable, ma fille,’ said Mrs Lambert.

‘And without being a prude,’ added Aunt Carrie, ‘I must say that it is hardly decent.’

Julia showed them her clothes, and on the first Thursday after her arrival they discussed what she should wear for dinner.

Aunt Carrie and Mrs Lambert grew rather sharp with one another.

Mrs Lambert thought that since her daughter had evening dresses with her she ought to wear one, but Aunt Carrie considered it quite unnecessary.

‘When I used to come and visit you in Jersey, my dear, and gentlemen were coming to dinner, I remember you would put on a tea-gown.’

‘Of course a tea-gown would be very suitable.’

They looked at Julia hopefully.

She shook her head.

‘I would sooner wear a shroud.’

Aunt Carrie wore a high-necked dress of heavy black silk, with a string of jet, and Mrs Lambert a similar one, but with her lace shawl and a paste necklace.

The Commandant, a sturdy little man with a much-wrinkled face, white hair cut en brosse and an imposing moustache dyed a deep black, was very gallant, and though well past seventy pressed Julia’s foot under the table during dinner. On the way out he seized the opportunity to pinch her bottom.

‘Sex appeal,’ Julia murmured to herself as with dignity she followed the two old ladies into the parlour.

They made a fuss of her, not because she was a great actress, but because she was in poor health and needed rest.

Julia to her great amazement soon discovered that to them her celebrity was an embarrassment rather than an asset.

Far from wanting to show her off, they did not offer to take her with them to pay calls.

Aunt Carrie had brought the habit of afternoon tea with her from Jersey, and had never abandoned it.

One day, soon after Julia’s arrival, when they had invited some ladies to tea, Mrs Lambert at luncheon thus addressed her daughter.

‘My dear, we have some very good friends at St Malo, but of course they still look upon us as foreigners, even after all these years, and we don’t like to do anything that seems at all eccentric.

Naturally we don’t want you to tell a lie, but unless you are forced to mention it, your Aunt Carrie thinks it would be better if you did not tell anyone that you are an actress.’

Julia was taken aback, but, her sense of humour prevailing, she felt inclined to laugh.

‘If one of the friends we are expecting this afternoon happens to ask you what your husband is, it wouldn’t be untrue, would it? to say that he was in business.’

‘Not at all,’ said Julia, permitting herself to smile.

‘Of course, we know that English actresses are not like French ones,’ Aunt Carrie added kindly.

‘It’s almost an understood thing for a French actress to have a lover.’

‘Dear, dear,’ said Julia.

Her life in London, with its excitements, its triumphs and its pains, began to seem very far away.

She found herself able soon to consider Tom and her feeling for him with a tranquil mind.

She realized that her vanity had been more wounded than her heart.

The days passed monotonously.

Soon the only thing that recalled London to her was the arrival on Monday of the Sunday papers.

She got a batch of them and spent the whole day reading them.

Then she was a trifle restless.

She walked on the ramparts and looked at the islands that dotted the bay.

The grey sky made her sick for the grey sky of England.

But by Tuesday morning she had sunk back once more into the calmness of the provincial life.

She read a good deal, novels, English and French, that she bought at the local bookshop, and her favourite Verlaine.

There was a tender melancholy in his verses that seemed to fit the grey Breton town, the sad old stone houses and the quietness of those steep and tortuous streets.

The peaceful habits of the two old ladies, the routine of their uneventful existence and their quiet gossip, excited her compassion.

Nothing had happened to them for years, nothing now would ever happen to them till they died, and then how little would their lives have signified.

The strange thing was that they were content.

They knew neither malice nor envy.

They had achieved the aloofness from the common ties of men that Julia felt in herself when she stood at the footlights bowing to the applause of an enthusiastic audience.

Sometimes she had thought that aloofness her most precious possession.