Julia

One

May 1953

Lady Margaret’s let out earlier than the other schools, at three thirty. The girls spilled out into the empty streets of mid afternoon. All the world was at work. The only traffic was a few delivery vans and a trolley bus moaning past under the tall plane trees. A row of tradesmen’s carts queued up for the horse trough across the road, the ponies’ ears limp at half mast in the bright heat.

The senior girls – upper fifth, lower and upper sixth – were allowed to use the front entrance, a great and gravely-bestowed privilege. Most of them seemed conscious of it as they dawdled down the steps. They walked with an air, as if expecting to be looked at; chatted to each other loudly, as though someone might be taking down their words for posterity.

Julia came down with the rest, neither leading nor holding back, somewhere near the middle of the flow, but always a little apart. No one chatted to her.

At the foot of the steps, the flow split into distributaries as girls walked off to various bus stops, to the underground station, to their nearby homes. Some headed for Fred’s, the transport café down the road, which they used as a coffee bar, though the coffee was made with Camp syrup and the comfort was meagre. The proprietor was a misogynist with one eye and several fingers missing. He hated schoolgirls using his premises, and if they lingered too long he would drive them out, complaining they were taking up room wanted by honest working men – though there was rarely anyone else in there at that time of day. Once Rhoda Edwards, the sixth form bad girl, had boldly told him so. He had scowled and cursed her and waved his stumps at her, and told her he hadn’t fought a war to take cheek from the likes of her. His unpredictability gave an added zest to proceedings. Not that any was needed, for Fred’s was where girls from Lady Margaret’s met their peers from St Anthony’s, the local boys’ grammar.

At the foot of the steps the girls called cheerful goodbyes, confirmed plans to meet later, over the weekend.

‘See you outside the Gaumont at half past seven.’

‘I’ll come round tomorrow about fiveish.’

‘Are you going to the Palais tomorrow night?’

‘Are you coming to Fred’s?’

No one said goodbye to Julia. She had no arrangements with anyone, and she never went to Fred’s. She walked off alone, and the lingering, chattering girls bent their sapling bodies to let her pass without looking at her. She was an outsider, she knew that. She had always been different, so she was used to it, and what you are used to, you come hardly to notice. The other girls did not treat her with hostility – most of them didn’t. Once or twice she had overheard cruel remarks, or glimpsed the bright-eyed malice of a group that stopped talking abruptly as she passed. But on the whole they were not unpleasant to her. They simply ignored her, not deliberately but as if she didn’t impinge on their awareness.

It was another hot day. The heat seemed to stand motionless between sun and earth like an enervated dog. The air tasted dusty, smelled of hot pavements – a smell Julia liked. She turned her face upwards and felt the sun press on her like a hand. She squinted into the sky, which seemed bleached of colour. As she tilted her head she felt her plaits bump against her back with a familiar, friendly weight, like the nudge of a dog. No one else in the senior school wore plaits. They were old-fashioned, kiddish. She knew the others thought her queer for sticking to them, and even queerer for not minding what they thought.

She couldn’t help it. She couldn’t make herself care about the things they cared about, clothes and lipstick and boyfriends. She had nothing to say when they talked about Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly and Tommy Steele. She had tried listening to that sort of music and she understood why they liked it. She quite liked it herself but it seemed to her too simple and limited to listen to over and over. Just once she had misguidedly tried to explain this to Rhoda Edwards and Gill Gallico and their set when they were twitting her about not liking rock and roll. They had reacted so violently she had recoiled in surprise.

‘You beastly snob!’

‘You think yourself so superior, don’t you?’

‘Smug cow!’

‘I suppose you think you’re better than us!’

The more she protested that it was not conceit or priggishness, the more pathetically she asked weren’t people allowed to be different, shouldn’t people’s differences be respected, the more shrill they grew. At last she had had to beat a hasty retreat before they reduced her to tears, which she knew instinctively would make things worse. She had been bullied at junior school, and had learnt you never let them see you cry.

Now she kept her opinions to herself, and lived mostly inside her head, in the rich and satisfying world of thought. She wasn’t unhappy. Life seemed to her too amazingly full of a number of things for happiness: variety and possibility, books and music. She had no friends, but she wasn’t lonely. Well, hardly ever.

She turned off the main road into a side street of neat Edwardian terraced houses. There was a small flight of shops on the left: ironmonger, grocer, butcher, barber with his striped pole forever magically regenerating, greengrocer spreading out on to the pavement with stacked orange-boxes of fruit and veg, and at the end a tiny shop that sold wool and baby clothes and which she had never seen anyone enter. The shop doors, all except the last, stood open for the air, and their interiors seemed invitingly dark and cool in contrast to the blinding sunlight.

As she reached the grocery, she saw the grocer himself standing in his doorway, rolling himself a cigarette. He was a tall, lean man who had been handsome in his youth and had retained the automatic expectation of being found attractive by the opposite sex. Julia found him attractive without in the least knowing why; assumed, if she ever thought about it, that it was simply because he was a nice man. She got on better with grown-ups anyway: she knew how to please them, while her peers remained a potentially hostile mystery. As to many a bright child before her, adults seemed her natural constituency, so she was disposed to like him even without his extra, mysterious allure.

‘Hello, Mr Johnson,’ she said.

He paused, the thin roll-up half way to his lips. ‘Hello, love. Early, aren’t you?’

‘Not really. We always get out before the other schools, because we start earlier.’ She had twigged by now that adults asked questions just as a way of making mouth-music, but she had not quite yet got out of the child’s habit of answering them properly, as if the information were really required.

‘Belter of a day, isn’t?’ he said, wetting the end of his cigarette before putting it between his lips. She watched his lips and his tongue without realising it, but he saw the direction of her eyes. Still got it, he thought. Still got the old magic. And little Julia Jacobs was growing up. Got a bust somewhere under that school uniform. Ugly clothes. Shabby too – second hand. There was no money in that family. Queer set-up. No wonder Julia was such a queer little thing. Not shy, quite – you couldn’t say she was shy – but a bit of a loner. She’d be – what? – fifteen or sixteen now. Didn’t look it, not in those clothes, but put her in something a bit more modern … His practised eye made the transformation. Yes, she was growing up.

He came back from his thoughts to meet her frank open gaze, and embarrassed himself. He became brisk by way of compensation. ‘I’m glad I caught you – can you take a bit of shopping home for your mum? I said I’d drop it round, but my boy hasn’t come in.’

Julia nodded. ‘I’d have had to come for it anyway.’

‘Can you wait while I slice the bacon? The rest is all ready.’

She followed him into the dim, fragrant interior. There was no one else inside, and she was vaguely glad. She didn’t like it when his wife was present – a smart, rather hard-faced woman who had kept things going alone through the war when her husband was away, had seen a thing or two, and was coolly suspicious of all other women. Julia had not yet worked out why, but she was always glad when Mrs Johnson wasn’t there. He seemed nicer when she wasn’t. He went behind the counter now and she stood looking round and sniffing appreciatively.

‘You are lucky to be here all day with these lovely smells,’ she said.

‘I don’t notice it,’ he said, amused at her idea of luck. ‘What is it, then – tea?’

‘Oh, tea, and bacon and sawdust and cheese and furniture wax,’ she said. She paused, and added, ‘And some other things I can’t identify. Lovely!’

He had put the piece of green streaky in the machine and was setting the blade. ‘What is it, number four your mum has?’ He wound the handle and the regular whirr and hiss deposited thin rashers on to the greaseproof paper on his palm. There was a good joke he’d heard the other day about a grocer’s shop with a big sign on the wall: ‘Would customers kindly stand further away from the bacon slicer. We’re getting a little behind in our orders.’ He considered telling it to Julia, but then thought better of it. She mightn’t get it – and if she did, it might embarrass her.

He weighed the bacon, wrapped it and put it on top of the rest of the order, already packed in a cardboard box. As he lifted the box up on to the counter something caught his attention and he said, ‘Here, if it’s smells you like, how about this one?’

Julia looked at him expectantly. He rummaged around out of her sight and then brought up, like a trophy, a small package about the size and shape of a sugar-bag, but brown instead of blue. She raised it to her nose, and snuffed delightedly at the hot, maddening, glorious smell.

‘Coffee,’ she said. ‘It’s wonderful.’

‘Yes, one of the best smells there is, I reckon – that and bacon frying. Used to do a lot of it before the war, but people got out of the habit, I suppose, when you couldn’t get it. Only two or three of my customers take it now.’

‘We only have tea,’ Julia said. But hadn’t they used to have coffee, before? She couldn’t quite be sure, but the smell seemed to trigger something in her, some vague remembered sensation of pleasure and comfort. ‘Who’s it for?’

‘Mrs Kane.’ He took the package back and snuffed at it himself. ‘D’you know her? She lives in your street.’

‘No,’ Julia said. ‘At least, I don’t know the name.’

‘They live in that big house with gables, down the end, corner of Milton Street and Spenser Road – there now!’ He stopped himself, and looked at Julia speculatively.

‘Yes?’

‘I wonder, now, how would you like to earn yourself a few bob?’

‘What would I have to do?’ Julia remembered his saying that his boy hadn’t come in, and supposed he wanted her to deliver for him. She wondered what her parents would think about that. She guessed her mother wouldn’t approve.

Somehow he divined her thoughts. ‘Oh, nothing for me. Mrs Kane was in here today with a card for the window, and what with one thing and another I forgot about it until just this minute. She’s looking for a babysitter.’

He reached behind him to the part of the shelf beside the till where he kept odds and ends like his order book, pen, and tobacco tin, and picked up a white postcard that was lying there.

‘She wants a babysitter one or two evenings a week so’s she can get out a bit. Two young kids and her husband works evenings. She asked me if I knew anyone. I suggested a card in the window – business is business even if it is only thruppence.’ He gave her a very professional wink that left the rest of his face immobile. ‘What do you think?’

‘I’d like to,’ Julia said, ‘if my mother and father would let me.’

He nodded, pleased with the idea of doing her a bit of good. He didn’t suppose she ever had any pocket money. No money in that family, he thought again. Of course, they might not let her do it. People like that sometimes got a bit sniffy about their girls working, especially if they thought it was anything like going into service. He didn’t actually think ‘decayed gentry’, but the shape of the idea was in his mind.

‘You tell your mum it’s quite respectable. My young niece does it. Sits and does her homework for a couple of hours, and gets paid for it – and her couple give her supper too. I should think the Kanes would see you all right – they aren’t short. Here, I’ll give you the card. You can bring it back if you don’t get the job.’

‘Thanks very much,’ Julia said. It sounded very easy, undemanding – enjoyable, even – and it would be lovely to have money to spend. The grocer was right that there was no pocket money. Even if she had been keen on lipstick and clothes and records like the other girls, there would have been nothing she could have done about it anyway. It was one of the things that made her different. Scholarship girl, poor girl, hand-me-down-clothes girl – that was her. The others disliked her for being clever and for not liking what they liked, but she knew they also despised her for being poor – something, she reasoned, she couldn’t be expected to help. She thought the attitude ridiculous and therefore contemptible, like despising Fred of Fred’s café for having only one eye. But that didn’t stop it hurting.

But the grocer must like her, to be doing her this favour. And he looked at her as though he liked her.

‘You’re very kind to think of me,’ she said.

He came to attention and gave the sketch of a salute. ‘N’tall. The pleasure, as they say, is all mine.’ She turned to go, and he recollected himself. ‘Here, your mum’s shopping.’

‘Oh, yes, sorry. I forgot.’ She received the grocery box into her arms, balanced it for a moment on the edge of the counter while she picked up her school briefcase and put it on top, and then with another smile of thanks took up the burden again and went out into the dazzling sunshine.

Milton Street was a long one and, perhaps simply because it had presented a larger target, seemed to have taken most of the bombs that fell in that area. One side was almost untouched, and presented the long-familiar façade of Victorian semi-detached houses, each with a minute front garden bound by a half-wall, along the top of which the row of metal stumps showed where the railings had been amputated for the War Effort. Some showed the remains of minor damage – cracks in the stucco, missing chimneys or garden walls – but the road was wide enough for them to have escaped most of the blast that had almost flattened the other side.

Living opposite the ruins – only now beginning to be rebuilt – made the war an omnipresent memory, like the men one saw on crutches with one trouser leg pinned up, the men with an empty sleeve, with an eyepatch, the men in wheelchairs. The war was always there, in the background of thought; an assumption that coloured and supported everything, a taken-for-grantedness which united everyone at a certain level – just as rarely-seen relatives at a family ‘do’ were joined together by the fact of their cousinhood, however little they had in common.

Julia’s father had been too old to be called up – another factor in her differentness. Other girls’ fathers had served in one way or another; one or two in her class had a widowed mother; one had a divorced and remarried one, a war casualty of a different sort. But Julia’s father was much older than theirs. It was only recently that she had begun to notice her parents’ age as an influence in her life, though there had always been those occasions when classmates had come to school excitedly announcing that their mother had just had a baby, and she had thought wonderingly what that must be like. Having another baby would surely make your mother seem suddenly different, mutable; would alter everything in the household. To have another baby would be a very human and living thing to do. But she had come to realise that she did not see her parents as real in that sense at all. They seemed to her as static as granite statues. Nothing about their family would ever change. Certainly there would be no more siblings, and she, Julia, was the end of the line, so to speak, the terminus at which the bus turned off its engine and fell silent. From here onward there could only be her life – hers and her sister’s. Her parents had no future, in the sense that future was change. They had said the last word about themselves and that was that.

She would have loved to be part of a large family, to live with noise and movement and personality. Perhaps in a large family she would have had someone – surely must have had one sibling she could feel close to and confide in. But there was only her and Sylvia. There had been another sister, Lydia, but she had died in infancy long ago, before she or Sylvia had been born. She did not know in what circumstances Lydia had died. Her mother did not say, and she could not ask. It was impossible to talk to her mother about quite simple things; how much more impossible to ask about something so personal and, she supposed, distressing as the death of a child.

Thus she was thinking as she let herself in at the front door, the box of groceries balanced on her hip and cutting into the flesh of her waist in a way that was oddly almost pleasurable. She had a rare moment of seeing her parents as separate from her, not just familiar shapes labeled ‘Mother’ and ‘Father’. What was it like to be them? She paused, trying to imagine, but the effort was beyond her. She lacked not imagination but information. They were both so reserved, so formal, so withdrawn, that she had nothing to go on to estimate their feelings or requirements as individuals. Perhaps, she thought tentatively, they didn’t have any? Perhaps one could outgrow them? Did age rub away passion and longing and even opinion, as wind and rain eroded stone and made it smooth and featureless?

The house was a typical London dog-leg semi: narrow hall with stairs straight ahead, front room with bay window, back room – the original dining room – with French windows, and back addition comprising kitchen, scullery and servant’s lavatory. They had no servant, though she thought she remembered that before, there had been. At any rate, she remembered someone who came in daily, a woman in a flowered cotton overall who she associated with yellow dusters and the smell of lavender wax. The door to the back room was closed, as always. It was her father’s study, and one did not go in there without invitation. The back addition, originally the kitchen, was now their dining room, and the scullery had become the kitchen by the installation of a gas stove against one wall, an enamel-topped wooden table against another, and a hot-water geyser over the porcelain sink.

Her mother was sitting at the dining-room table reading the paper over a cup of tea – something about the forthcoming Coronation, Julia saw. She did not look up as Julia walked past her into the kitchen to put down the grocery box.

‘Mr Johnson asked me to bring the shopping. His boy didn’t come in.’

‘Hmm,’ said Mrs Jacobs.

Julia came to the kitchen door and stood there, looking at her mother, trying to see her as a separate person. She was neither fat nor thin – what Julia thought of as a grown-up’s shape, bulky and hard with no ins and outs, the effect enhanced by a grown-up’s shapeless clothes: a dress with buttons down the front and a cloth belt, usually with a cardigan over it, but not today, because of the hot weather. When she did anything around the house she thought of as ‘dirty’ work, she wore a sleeveless wrap-around flowered cotton overall instead of an apron. She had three, one in shades of yellow and orange, one in shades of green, and one in shades of pink and mauve. Julia was aware, without actually thinking about it, that her mother hated doing those things, and that doing them put her in a bad temper. By transference, therefore, Julia had come to hate the overalls and always felt a lifting sense of relief when she came home and they were not in evidence.

Mrs Jacobs was tall for a woman, and her arms seemed powerful – muscular below the elbow and almost meaty above. She was thirteen years younger than Julia’s father, which made her fifty-three. Her hair, which had been blonde, was now faded-fair mixed with grey, what was sometimes called pepper-and-salt. It was brushed smooth over the crown and curled up and pinned in a roll from ear to ear around the back of the neck. Julia didn’t remember it ever being in any other style. Her face was smooth, unwrinkled, with fine arched brows, a straight nose, a wide, thin-lipped mouth that always seemed clamped shut lest anything should escape: an incautious word, a smile perhaps?

Julia realised, without actually feeling it, that she must have been beautiful as a girl; but it was hard to visualise her mother as a girl. She was this, as if she had always been: the woman who kept house, cleaned, cooked, served meals, sat reading or knitting in the evenings, and sometimes, if Father was working late in his study, tuned the wireless in to dance music, turned down low not to disturb him, and tapped her feet to it while her fingers flew unregarded, knit-one-purl-one-knit-two-together, with her eyes fixed blankly on some other time or space.

She felt Julia’s eyes on her now and looked up from the paper, raising an eyebrow in question. Her eyes were blue, like Sylvia’s, but faded like her hair. They unnerved Julia, seeming so expressionless, concealing what might be coming. Sometimes in her early childhood it had been a slap. Now it was usually a denial or a criticism – differently but equally painful.

Julia knew in some dimly-sensed way that her mother did not like her. It had to be dimly-sensed because mothers loved their children, that was the way things were. As a child she had neither been able to suppose anything so unnatural as, nor bear the thought of, her mother not liking her. But she saw the difference in the way her mother was with Sylvia. She liked Sylvia. Sylvia was like her. Sylvia was not ‘clever’ as Julia was. Sylvia had gone to the secondary modern, left school and gone to a commercial college to learn typing and shorthand with a view to getting a job in an office, which was what Julia knew her mother thought of as a ‘good’ job. Sylvia was pretty, as her mother had been. She was nice and ordinary and conventional, did not think or say strange things, or have strange desires. Her mother liked and approved of Sylvia, but Julia was an alien thing to her. Julia was like her father, and it should have been he who loved her, to balance things up and make everything fair and all right. But her father loved no one, and Julia was left feeling cheated of what should have been hers. She was the outsider even within the four walls of ‘home’, where she should have belonged.

‘Can I ask you something?’ she said. Her mother waited impassively. She did not waste words. ‘Mr Johnson said there’s a lady down the road who wants a babysitter for a couple of evenings a week and he thought I might like to do it. He said to tell you it’s quite respectable,’ she hurried on, to get all the information out before the expected refusal. ‘His niece does it for another lady and she does her homework there and gets paid and gets supper left her as well, and …’ She ran out of invention. ‘I’d like to,’ she finished feebly. ‘If you don’t mind.’

She waited, standing square before the impassive face, the tightly-tucked lips. She did not often ask for things, knowing that any request usually elicited a negative. Better, she always felt, not to ask than to be disappointed. She knew by now, more or less, what sorts of things were all right and what were not, but babysitting was something new and strange, outside her experience – rather American, even. Her father disliked all things American for being responsible for the erosion of standards and What This Country Has Come To. Once, when she was quite little, another child had given her a stick of chewing gum, which had earned her a more than usually harsh rebuke from her father – delivered, as always, by her mother, along with a slap and a banishment-to-bedroom.

The thin lips unlocked. ‘Who are these people?’ Julia silently offered the postcard. Mrs Jacobs studied it lengthily, as if memorising the details. There was a telephone number as well as the address. ‘They must be well off.’ If it was a question, Julia had no answer, and remained silent. ‘I think I’ve seen her. They’ve got a car. There’s one parked outside sometimes, anyway.’

‘Mr Kane works in the evenings,’ Julia offered. ‘I don’t know what he does. Mr Johnson didn’t say. But he knows them well, so they must be all right.’

At last Mrs Jacobs thrust the card back at her, as though she had lost interest in the matter, and Julia thought it would be ‘no’. But she said, ‘Do it if you like. As long as it doesn’t affect your homework.’

Julia felt a surge of gratitude, absurdly extravagant, out of all proportion to the boon. Why did she care so much? But while her mother had deliberated she had felt suddenly that it was terribly important that she should do this, that it mattered dreadfully, and the more sure she had been that she would be denied it, the more she wanted it.

‘Oh, thank you,’ she said. ‘May I go round now and see them?’ She was aware of a panicky sensation in her stomach that some other girl was this very minute closing in on the Kanes’ house – perhaps a string of girls – and that her chance – of what? Not just a job, surely? Freedom? Hardly. Something new in her life, anyway – was about to be snatched from her.

Her mother made a small waving-away gesture of her fingers, having already gone back to the newspaper. Julia did not wait to change out of her school uniform but went just as she was, before anyone’s mind should be changed.

The corner plot was a large one, the house was detached, and it overlooked the park on the other side of Spenser Road. It was Victorian, red brick to halfway up and stucco above, with a large gable with imitation Tudor black beams on it. It had fancy chimneys and some of the upstairs windows were mullioned and had diamond panes. The front garden was neglected – shaggy grass and overgrown shrubs. They didn’t like gardening, then, or have a gardener. There was a garage joined to the side of the house and Julia noticed that the doors were open and a car was inside. Mr Johnson said that the husband worked evenings – presumably he hadn’t left for work yet. It seemed a quite large car – but ownership of any car was proof of wealth, or at least a way of life above and beyond Julia’s experience.

She walked up the path to the front door, feeling suddenly nervous, and strangely apprehensive, as though she was about to initiate something that would have unforeseen and perhaps dangerous consequences. She shook the feeling away. It was absurd. She should be excited, rather. She was going to meet some new people, see the inside of someone else’s house, do something different, which in a life as static as hers and in a world which valued unchangingness above all else was devoutly to be wished. She knocked, and waited. After a decent period she raised her hand to knock again, and saw the doorbell. It rang distantly. Almost immediately there was an upsurge of noise as if someone had opened a box of it, and then the door was opened and Julia had her first sight of Mrs Kane.

‘I’ve come about the job – I mean, babysitting,’ Julia said nervously. The tall young woman with a stout, solemn-faced child on her hip looked her over for a moment. She was slender – perhaps almost too thin – and very smartly dressed. She had make-up on, and her hair was cut and permed and looked as though she might have had it done by a hairdresser. Julia wondered if she was about to go out somewhere, but then decided, rather bemusedly, that this woman would always dress and look like that, even just for staying home.

Mrs Kane said unsmilingly, ‘You’d better come in. Michael, will you stop that noise!’ This latter was to another child out of sight who was banging a tin monotonously with some metal implement. Julia followed her into the hall and shut the door behind her. The hall was large and square – a real hall big enough to have furniture in it, not just a passage – and the wide stairs led up and round on the right. She was always sensitive to smells, and the house smelt unexpectedly but pleasantly of rosin and old books. The rosin she remembered from the ballet lessons she had taken when she was very little – that was before, of course, and the classes had broken up when the two women who ran them had packed up and joined the Wrens – and the old-book smell was one she knew intimately from her father’s study which was mostly full of them.

Mrs Kane led her across the hall and into the sitting room. The centre of the floor was covered in a thick, pale-coloured carpet, and Julia felt herself sinking into its pile. She had a brief impression of luxury, thick carpet and thick upholstery, shining wood and lots of space, before her attention was drawn forcibly to the child who was sitting on the floor in front of her beating a biscuit tin with a spoon and smiling with the expression of one who knows he is making an unholy din, perfectly intolerable to all but himself – although it didn’t seem to be upsetting the man who sat on the large sofa with his legs crossed and the evening paper up.

‘Michael, stop this instant!’ Mrs Kane cried with exasperation. She dumped the child she was carrying ungently on the floor and descended like the proverbial Assyrian on the offending tympanist, leaving him spoonless and momentarily nonplussed.

‘How you can just sit there,’ she hissed at the man with an acidity that even Julia noticed.

‘He’s only exercising his musical talent,’ the man responded lazily.

‘I thought he must get it from you,’ she retorted. The man looked up at her, and she closed her mouth and breathed loudly through her nose in a way that was meant to show disapproval.

All this time Julia stood very timidly at the edge of the carpet, looking mostly at the children from embarrassment, for she had never heard grown-ups arguing with each other like that. Her parents hardly spoke to each other at all, and would never have dreamed of quarrelling in front of her and Sylvia, let alone strangers. It was one of the many things Julia knew her mother would have called ‘bad form’.

Now Mrs Kane, pushing the confiscated spoon back and forth through her fingers, said, quite politely, to her husband, ‘This little girl’s come about the babysitting.’

Julia looked at her, indignant at the label, and then at the man to see how he took it. He put down his paper, and as the vividly blue eyes fixed her she had the impression almost of being run through, pierced by a sort of terrible significance, or connection – she could hardly say what, but something, at least, out of the ordinary, which made her feel that she and he were in some way on one side of a line which divided them from everyone else she had ever met. It lasted only an instant, before giving way to a more usual feeling of confusion and weakness as, unable to remove her gaze, she began to blush.

All he said was, ‘Oh, good,’ in a perfectly normal voice, but he continued to look straight into her eyes – something she suddenly realised hardly anyone ever did – while he stood up and went on politely, as if she had been an ordinary guest, ‘Won’t you sit down?’

The contrast between being ‘this little girl’ to Mrs Kane and a guest to Mr Kane left her unsure of her status, and in caution she took the hard upright chair by the door and only sat on the edge of it. Mrs Kane picked up the baby again and sat down in an armchair with it on her lap.

‘You saw the card in the shop, did you?’ she began.

‘Yes, Mr Johnson showed it to me,’ Julia said.

‘I must say I wasn’t expecting quite such a prompt response. What’s your name?’

‘Julia Jacobs.’

‘And do you live near here?’

‘I live at number fifteen – Milton Street.’

‘Oh, just round the corner. That’s handy. Have you lived there long?

‘Ten years, nearly eleven. We used to live on the other side of the park until we got bombed out.’ Used though she was to being questioned by grown-ups, she didn’t quite like it from Mrs Kane. She sensed something – a faint hostility, a desire to catch her out, perhaps? – which she didn’t understand; and she was at the same time burningly aware of Mr Kane looking at her, though she was definitely not looking at him. She wondered suddenly if they had been quarrelling before she arrived and their sharp exchange and the present atmosphere were the leftovers from that.

‘And what does your father do?’ Mrs Kane asked, but her husband interrupted her.

‘Oh, don’t interrogate the poor girl,’ he said. ‘You’ll frighten her off. Offer her some coffee or something, before she takes fright and leaves us in the lurch.’

He stood up as he spoke and crossed the room to a large and gleaming radiogram in the corner. The lid was up and there was a record already on the turntable, and he lowered the needle on to it.

Mrs Kane breathed out through her nose again, and said, ‘Would you like some coffee?’ But she said it in the sort of tone that so clearly expected the answer ‘no’, that Julia would have refused even if she had wanted it, which she didn’t. She had a brief memory of the smell of the packet of coffee; but to negotiate the social hazards of drinking anything in this house at this moment was beyond her.

‘No, thank you,’ she said, and then, as Mr Kane returned from the radiogram to his seat, the music began, and caught her attention. The very first phrase was one of instant delight, and felt familiar to her, fitting down into the spaces of her brain like a jigsaw piece, though she had never heard it before. ‘Oh,’ she exclaimed with pleasure. It drew the attention of Mr Kane to her again, but now that the first shock was over she found his blue gaze less disconcerting – bearable, anyway. ‘What is it?’ she couldn’t help asking.

‘Brahms,’ he said. ‘Serenade No. 1 in D major.’

‘Brahms!’ she said. ‘That’s why I felt as if I knew it. I love Brahms.’

‘It’s musicians’ music,’ he said.

She didn’t understand the remark, but it caused a different enlightenment. ‘Are you a musician?’

‘For my sins,’ he said. ‘I am a fiddler and I play for an orchestra. Nothing exciting, just rank and file, lest you leap to the idea that I am a glamorous soloist or something of that sort.’

‘I think it’s very exciting,’ Julia said, interested out of her shyness. She remembered the smell of rosin and slotted that piece in with satisfaction. She liked to understand things.

‘So, you like music, do you?’ he said.

She liked the way he didn’t feel the need to define it – not ‘classical music’ or ‘serious music’ but just music, as if that was all there was.

‘I don’t see how anyone can’t,’ she answered. ‘It’s – like life, isn’t it?’ He seemed to understand what she meant, and nodded, smiling. Mostly when people smiled it was just a different decoration on the same basic façade, but his smile seemed to change his face in some profound way, and it caused a strange small quiver deep in her stomach – something that felt almost like a pang of hunger.

‘Do you play?’ he asked.

‘No,’ she said. She felt bad about saying no, as though she thought he wanted her to be able to play and was disappointing him. Musical instrument lessons could be taken at school, but they were extra, and there was no money for extras. She had never been to a concert, either, and she felt embarrassed about that, feeling it would sound like a snub to his chosen profession to admit it. In explanation, as if he had been privy to her train of thought, she said, ‘My father has a gramophone and I listen to that, and the wireless.’ This sounded so meagre that she added, ‘My father says that music is like mathematics, that the relationship between notes is fixed so you can always work it out logically, like a theorem.’ It was one of the few things her father had ever told her, which was perhaps why it had made such an impression. She understood more than she had words for: principally, that if the relationships were fixed by something other than man’s ingenuity, then music must be part of the ordering of the Universe – like the atomic tables – which meant it came from God. She thought for a moment of voicing this, but it seemed impolite to be bringing God into it in someone’s sitting room at half past four on a weekday afternoon. Instead she finished feebly, ‘I suppose that’s why it’s like life.’

She wanted to keep looking at him to see if he understood, but Mrs Kane said at that moment, ‘And what does your father do?’ She said it in exactly the same tone of voice as she had said it before, as if she had simply torn up all the words in between and was going back to the only ones that mattered.

Julia turned to her. ‘He’s a mathematician,’ she said, and because people always wanted clarification at that point she added without being prompted, ‘He writes text books. Jacobs and Underwood?’

Mrs Kane looked blank, but Mr Kane said, ‘Oh yes! The good old J and U! We used those at my school. So your father is that Jacobs, is he?’ He flung his wife a significant look.

‘We use Townshend at my school,’ Julia said.

‘Just as well,’ he said. ‘As I remember, everyone always hated maths. It wouldn’t make you popular to be the daughter of the chief torturer, would it?’

He and Julia smiled at each other, and she felt the warmth of sympathy, immensely powerful in her solitary life. She thought that if only she had a chance to talk to him, he would understand whatever she said, whether she got the words right or not.

Mrs Kane intervened firmly: ‘Now, Peter, if you’ve quite finished talking nonsense, what about the babysitting?’

Julia almost felt him withdraw, and had an instant’s annoyance with Mrs Kane for spoiling things. His blue gaze had become mocking, and he surveyed both the females from a distance of superiority, on no one’s side but his own.

‘Oh yes, I’d forgotten you came here for a purpose. Well –’ he made an outward gesture with his hands – ‘you see us, you see the offspring. He of the tinny tympani is Michael; he of the unwashed visage is James; that is my wife, Joyce, and I am Peter. Do you think you could bear to babysit for us? Much of my work is evening work and my wife complains of being left so often alone with the children and never seeing me. She would prefer to be present while I draw my horse’s tail across the stretched intestines of lambs, as someone so ably put it—’

‘Never mind the smokescreens,’ Mrs Kane said – to Julia, at least, incomprehensibly. ‘Get on with it.’

‘Well, that’s it really. If you would come and sit in our house now and then and make sure the children don’t play with matches or eat soap or do any of the other things that children are suspected of secretly longing to do, we should be appropriately grateful. To the tune of half a crown, to be exact.’

‘One or two evenings a week,’ Mrs Kane broke in briskly. ‘We should be back by ten thirty at the latest, and we’d leave you your supper.’

‘Thank you, I’d like that,’ Julia said gravely. Now Mrs Kane was the comfort. Mr Kane, from being as familiar as the inside of her own mouth, had moved back immense distances, and his wife seemed kind and reassuring, a normal sort of grown-up, saying only ordinary, comprehensible things.

‘You have asked your parents, I suppose?’ she went on.

‘Yes,’ Julia said obediently. ‘When would you like me to come, then?’

Husband and wife exchanged a glance, and then Mrs Kane said, hesitantly, ‘Well, I suppose you’ll be going out with your friends tomorrow night.’

‘No, I don’t have any friends,’ Julia said, and thinking how odd that sounded when said out loud, went on quickly, ‘Do you want me to come tomorrow?’

‘Well, yes, that would be very nice, if you don’t mind.’

‘I can do some swotting. I’ve got exams coming up,’ Julia said.

‘If they’ll let you,’ Mr Kane said, following her gaze to the children and jumping back into the middle of her thoughts and disconcerting her all over again.

‘Yes,’ she said, as if she didn’t know what she was saying yes to.

Two

Peter Kane was driving home with Joyce asleep beside him. The concert, a Coronation Gala affair, and the subsequent reception for VIPs and orchestra, had been rather heavy for her and they had left early, though they had half promised Jimmy Hill, Peter’s co-desker, and his wife to dine with them after the reception.

Joyce thought she might be pregnant again. Peter was not sure what he felt about that yet – surprise had been his first emotion, for he could not clearly remember when the evil deed might have been done. Still, if she was pregnant, it was his deed, that he could be sure of – Joyce was not the type to be unfaithful. Apart from doubting whether she had sufficient animal spirits to want to – she seemed to have little enough for him, anyway – he could not imagine her doing anything shifty, underhand, or likely to ruffle her appearance. An affair would simply be too undignified to be contemplated.

He glanced at her as they drove down the well-lit main road. She looked attractive even asleep with her head rolling on the seat-back. Her curly dark hair was short-cropped to show off the length of her neck and her fine shoulders. Evening dress suited her, especially this austere affair of dark-blue silk with its bias-cut bodice and narrow knife pleats; you could never imagine Joyce wearing anything either loose or frilly. She was attractive – handsome, perhaps, with its Austen echoes was the word to use – in a kind of open-air, county way with her long limbs, clear eyes, healthy, high-coloured face. She knew how to dress, and she knew how to behave. He could always be proud of her on his arm. Even pregnant.

Peter Kane had never been in love; he didn’t expect ever to be, and most of his acquaintances would say that he was incapable of it; though in fact there were already two loves in his life – his music, and himself.

The second of these loves had been with him for as long as he could clearly remember. He knew that he was not generally well-liked amongst his own sex: he had heard himself called variously ‘a bit of a rotter’, ‘a cad’ and ‘no fool’ – all of which contained about equal proportions of disapproval and envy. Any man who shows ability to look after his own interests, and ability to pick up any girl he wants, will always be both admired and disliked by his comrades. This was precisely what he wanted. He had little use for male companionship. At his first boarding school he had been miserable and homesick, bullied by the bigger, ignored by the more self-confident boys. Having to make do with his own company for so much of the time, he had soon learned that he was better company for himself than they were.

However, for one with his pride, self-sufficiency was not enough: it had to be obvious to everyone else that he didn’t want or need their company. For that reason, he had to excel at something. Games seemed the obvious choice at first, and for three terms he exerted himself at rugger and cricket, with immediate success, for he had a neat, strong body and good co-ordination. But others were good at games too, and they tended to be the very people he wanted to dissociate himself from – the popular boys, the school stars and heroes. Thrown into their company, he found them beginning to like him and himself beginning to enjoy their liking. Comfortable mediocrity seemed to beckon, and he sheered away from it in instinctive horror. It would not do. He needed to stand apart from and above his peers. He must find something else to excel at, something more individual, where there could be no emulation.

It was this that led him to concentrate on his music, an area in which he had already shown some promise. Out of a desire to lead where his peer group would not follow, he dropped the flute – too easy, reminiscent of junior school recorders, too dangerously popular, and lacking in sufficient intellectual rigour to keep off rivals – and concentrated on the violin. Almost from the first moment of taking it seriously, he found himself captured. To coax out of the indifferent school fiddle not just sounds but music invested him with a power beyond thought, gave him a bone-deep satisfaction which had nothing to do with competing with other boys. It was exciting, fulfilling, yet paradoxically left him hungry, with a sort of hunger that felt as though it could never be satisfied. His rather discreditable desire for superiority, he soon realised, had led him to the place he really wanted to be.

From then on, there had been no doubts, only logical steps. From the school music teacher he progressed to a private tutor. The double circumstance of being only fourteen and immersed in music had meant that