Free After Julius by Elizabeth Jane Howard Page A

Cowes with the notion that if she reached the river, she might see Miles on his ship; but the sheer weight of masculine interest, both strident and irresponsible,
turned her back. Being stared at by people she did not know was far worse than the whistles, cat-calls, unintelligible asides and the kind of laughter which implied greater knowledge of her than
she cared or dared to have of them. Thoughts like: ‘My legs are bare’, ‘My hair is too long’, ‘Well, anyway, I’m wearing a ring’, ‘I could do up
another button on my shirt’ succeeded one another with discomforting speed. (‘I don’t know anybody on the whole island excepting Miles, and I don’t know where he is.’)
All these men, unassailably sheltered behind the distinction of being men and the anonymity of wearing the same clothes, presumably knew who they were and seemed to know what they thought about her
. . . Her legs were trembling above her steps as though she wasn’t quite sure how far away the pavement was; she felt breathless and there seemed nowhere safe for her eyes. She wasn’t
seeing the Island at all: better go home. (‘But I can’t spend the whole day in bed !’)
    Turning back involved encountering some of them again: now they pretended that they knew her, which was different, but worse. Round a sharp corner, she came upon a small sweet shop: the door was
open and because there was an old woman behind the counter she went in and decided to buy pear drops. They were the first thing that she had bought with Miles’s money and she wondered whether
he would mind. ‘Perhaps I needn’t tell him.’ He didn’t like sweets, but ninepence wasn’t much.
    When she got back to the hotel, the chambermaid was doing their room; she wandered down to somewhere marked Lounge. Lounge ? It was filled with very uncomfortable chairs, large framed
photographs of J-class racing yachts labelled Rainbow, Endeavour, Astra and so on; there was also an upright piano which was locked. She sat down with an eight-weeks-old copy of the Yachting World – and she didn’t see how it could have been very interesting when it came out – and a pink pear drop. There was a clock with a boring tick. It was a quarter
past nine, and as her hair caught in one of the brass studs on the back of her chair, she suddenly felt sick, and longed for home, for Emma, her own bedroom and their yellow Labrador, for the
beautiful, gentle Blüthner that had been her father’s last present to her, for the known intimacies of family life when privacy had been an adventure instead of this out-of-her-element
isolation marked by visits of a friendly but incomprehensible stranger. That was how the home- sickness began – and it actually made her feel sick as well as frightened and sad. Perhaps
it was the war that made it so difficult to see the point of marriage; after all, dozens – probably millions – of people got married when they were eighteen. ‘It
can’t be my age.’ Well, she couldn’t have stayed at home, so it was silly to be homesick. She got the pencil out of her pocket and began making a list of possible things to
do out on this limb. ‘Read books; knit pullover for Miles; see if piano will unlock; go on trying to go for walks.’ She couldn’t think of anything else, and it was twenty past
nine . . .
    It was ten o’clock, and Dick would now be at his office: she was safe from being able to telephone him. She had a bath, and steeled herself to go into the sitting-room,
where they had spent that interminable, circuitous evening – round and round something so painful, and true and small , that neither had the courage to touch it.
    ‘I hate the way things stay the same,’ she thought, when she had opened the door. Cushions stayed dented; handkerchiefs thrust and crumpled, the sugar in the bottom of cups,
the Haydn sonatas open at the F major: it could all stay like this for a hundred years: tactless, immutable, triumphantly inanimate, lending