‘My dear, it’s been such a wonderful evening.
I’ve never felt so close to you before.’
She slowly raised her hands from behind her back and with the exquisite timing that came so naturally to her moved them forwards, stretching out her arms, and held them palms upward as though there rested on them, invisibly, a lordly dish, and on the dish lay her proffered heart.
Her beautiful eyes were tender and yielding and on her lips played a smile of shy surrender.
She saw Charles’s smile freeze on his face.
He had understood all right. (‘Christ, he doesn’t want me. It was all a bluff.’) The revelation for a moment staggered her. (‘God, how am I going to get out of it? What a bloody fool I must look.’) She very nearly lost her poise.
She had to think like lightning.
He was standing there, looking at her with an embarrassment that he tried hard to conceal.
Julia was panic-stricken.
She could not think what to do with those hands that held the lordly dish; God knows, they were small, but at the moment they felt like legs of mutton hanging there.
Nor did she know what to say.
Every second made her posture and the situation more intolerable. (‘The skunk, the dirty skunk. Codding me all these years.’) She did the only thing possible.
She continued the gesture.
Counting so that she should not go too fast, she drew her hands towards one another, till she could clasp them, and then throwing back her head, raised them, very slowly, to one side of her neck.
The attitude she reached was as lovely as the other, and it was the attitude that suggested to her what she had to say.
Her deep rich voice trembled a little with emotion.
‘I’m so glad when I look back to think that we have nothing to reproach ourselves with.
The bitterness of life is not death, the bitterness of life is that love dies. (She’d heard something like that said in a play.) If we’d been lovers you’d have grown tired of me long ago, and what should we have now to look back on but regret for our own weakness?
What was that line of Shelley’s that you said just now about fading?’
‘Keats,’ he corrected. ‘“She cannot fade though thou hast not thy bliss.”’
‘That’s it.
Go on.’
She was playing for time. ‘“For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair.”’ She threw her arms wide in a great open gesture and tossed her curly head.
She’d got it.
‘It’s true, isn’t it?
“For ever wilt thou love and I be fair.” What fools we should have been if for a few moments’ madness we had thrown away the wonderful happiness our friendship has brought us.
We have nothing to be ashamed of.
We’re clean.
We can walk with our heads held high and look the whole world in the face.’
She instinctively felt that this was an exit line, and suiting her movements to the words, with head held high, backed to the door and flung it open.
Her power was such that she carried the feeling of the scene all the way down the stairs with her.
Then she let it fall and with the utmost simplicity turned to Charles who had followed her.
‘My cloak.’
‘The car is there,’ he said as he wrapped it round her.
‘I’ll drive you home.’
‘No, let me go alone.
I want to stamp this hour on my heart.
Kiss me before I go.’
She held up her lips to him.
He kissed them. But she broke away from him, with a stifled sob, and tearing open the door ran to the waiting car.
When she got home and stood in her own bedroom she gave a great whoof of relief.
‘The bloody fool.
Fancy me being taken in like that.
Thank God, I got out of it all right.
He’s such an ass, I don’t suppose he began to see what I was getting at.’
But that frozen smile disconcerted her.
‘He may have suspected, he couldn’t have been certain, and afterwards he must have been pretty sure he’d made a mistake.
My God, the rot I talked.
It seemed to go down all right, I must say.
Lucky I caught on when I did.