Free After Julius by Elizabeth Jane Howard Page B

itself to the pathetic hysteria of people like Miss
Havisham and Queen Victoria. She cleared up the room with a burst of energy which became progressively more savage, until she reached the F major. But you couldn’t, she found, after trying,
be savage with any opening statement of such graceful confidence: she stopped playing and read the rest of the open pages. Haydn defied ill nature. ‘I love him,’ she thought:
‘it’s a calm, respectful business.’ If only, last night, she could have simply said: ‘Do you love me?’ then, perhaps, he would have been able to say, ‘Not
enough.’ Why hadn’t she done that? Perhaps then she would have found that it was all right – even better – with his not loving her enough, so long as they both knew it:
better than this emotional jockeying for even more precarious false positions. He wanted her, and he was the kind of man who was rather proud of feeling affectionate about people he wanted:
‘I’m so fond of you!’ he would say, with an air of near complacent surprise, as one showing off a rare talent just discovered: his back and her head. Well –
she was no better. She wanted him, and she wanted him to be in love with her, and her failure nagged at and damaged all pure feeling, consideration – let alone love – for him. He was
not – and she knew it – honestly the man for her, but when she was with him, or even talking to Emma about him, something (perverse? starved?) insisted on pretending that he was.
She wanted attention and pity for that because her real deprivation ran too deep for anyone to see, and alone with it she became extremely frightened. ‘Anything really good has the appearance
of ease,’ she thought sadly, and resolutely turned her attention to Haydn.
    The telephone rang at twelve. She had worked two hours; that muscle in her right forearm was aching again – working too long on the four-bar trill had done it – and anyway, she had
to lunch with her sister-in-law. She picked up the telephone and spoke to it: there was a pause, and then she heard the button being pressed and the sound of coins dropping. Dick! She was back
where she had started her day.
    ‘Cressy? Is that you? I thought you’d like to know that the conference is due to end at four on Sunday afternoon: I’ll try to catch a plane back about six. See you then.
Don’t be disappointed if I can’t make it.’
    ‘No – I won’t be.’ Something fiendishly stupid in her made her add: ‘But you will try, won’t you?’
    ‘Of course. Everything fine?’ It couldn’t be less than that: couldn’t just be all right.
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Good.’ He sounded heartily unconvinced. ‘Things always seem better in the morning.’
    Oh no, they don’t. She said: ‘I don’t know.’
    ‘Take care of yourself.’
    ‘I’ll probably go ho – away for the week-end.’
    ‘Splendid idea. I shall have had dinner on the plane, so don’t worry about that.’ She knew that he called living alone in the flat moping: she was hating him –
simply hating him.
    ‘Anything you’d like me to bring you?’
    ‘A bottle of Alpestri.’ She knew that that would be a nuisance.
    ‘Alpestri?’
    ‘Al-pes-tri.’
    ‘Do my best. Must go now. Is it a scent?’ he added.
    ‘A drink. It settles the stomach.’
    ‘What’s wrong with your stomach?’
    ‘Nothing. My stomach’s all right. Fine.’
    ‘Fine,’ he repeated. ‘Well – I must be off.’ Where to ? For God’s sake, at twelve o’clock, where to ?
    ‘Have a good lunch,’ she said, and put down the receiver. That had not been at all all right. I’m turning into a first-class bitch. I just hate him when he’s breezy; I
can’t be breezy back: only bitchy or hurt. And I bet he prefers me bitchy. This has got to stop: it’s no good each of us wanting the other to be somebody else. But I wish he was, she
thought later, rummaging hopelessly in her untidy drawers for a belt: I wish we were both quite different: completely