Free After Julius by Elizabeth Jane Howard

But the difficulty about those months was that, apart from their brevity, none of her memories of them
seemed to be connected in the least with marriage, and Miles dying had set a seal of unreality upon the whole affair.
    If she had been asked what was her sharpest memory of those few months of being married to Miles, she would unhesitatingly have answered ‘homesickness’. (She never was asked,
as people made a whole set of false assumptions, based on sentiment, lust, and a kind of jingoistic nostalgia for the brave boys and their splendid little wives and widows of the last war, and mere
homesickness would have shocked them.) It had come as a shock to her, and at the time, of course, she suffered it without a word to Miles – or anyone else.
    Miles had been commanding an MTB which was building at Cowes, and until the trials were completed, he was able to lie ashore with his wife. This meant that he could at least dine and sleep with
her, leaving her at eight o’clock in the morning, sleepy, warm as a bird, and, he fondly imagined, contented. But Cressy had never stayed in an hotel in her life. The first morning it took
her at least five minutes to understand that he would be out for the whole day – would not see her until late in the evening. ‘But what shall I do ?’ she had asked in
panic.
    He looked nonplussed. ‘I should look at the Island. It’s very pretty, really,’ he added: he had sailed there before the war.
    ‘But how do I have lunch?’
    ‘Go down to the dining-room and ask for it. Damn!’ He was shaving fast with a cut-throat razor, and the simplicity of her question had made him cut himself. ‘Really,
darling!’ he had said, as he stuck a piece of cotton wool to the blood.
    She had lain in bed watching him cover himself with expert speed: vest and pants – he looked like somebody in the Gaumont British News; black socks and suspenders added a circus air as he
jabbed his cuff links through the starched holes of a clean white shirt: buttoned into it, he became like the charming dope in a glossy American film comedy; a pause while he combed and parted and
smoothed his fine blond hair, and then, after knotting the rather greasy black tie, stared into the shaving-glass with that intimate but curiously unseeing gaze that congeals to intensity in
certain kinds of self-portraits. He seized the black trousers that chinked of money, and dragged them on: the braces hitched added an appearance of outrage or farce. It was not until he was in the
black jacket with its two wavy rings of gold lace that he assumed his usual daytime recognizable anonymity. She had watched him, begging inside that he wouldn’t be so quick, and wondering how
on earth to get through the day on such scant information; then he had bent over her, kissed her ear and a strand of hair – ‘Have a good day’ – and gone, and she was
watching the shut door. ‘Like dogs,’ she thought. ‘It isn’t that they love people so much: they’re just lost indoors without them.’
    She had lain on her back for the first crowding minutes of his absence. Lying on her back was not natural to her; she slept like that, and the position – since everything that Miles did to
her occurred in the dark with the additional unreality of no intelligible sound – simply engendered thoughts of death, thence the war, the facts that Miles might get killed and that she was
now married to him, and finally, that she was committed (among other things) to the mystery of living in an hotel. It was only five past eight: very nearly twelve hours had somehow to be spent. The
bedroom was not particularly small, but she had the uneasy feeling that one was only meant to be in bed in it. Better get up and go out to look at the Island.
    But outside were nothing but men: in fact – she later discovered – about sixty thousand of them, although they seemed more because there were hardly any women. She made her way
through the narrow main street of