Abdication: A Novel (21 page)

Julian knew all this past history from Mr. Bellington, his old headmaster and his father’s closest friend. Newly qualified after passing his medical exams with first-class honours, Julian’s father had decided not to go into practice as a family doctor but to follow an academic career instead. The two years he had spent teaching at Balliol College, in the convivial and stimulating company of Bellington and other clever men and boys, had been the happiest of his life. Even Dr. Richardson’s tiresome wife seemed content enough, basking in the invitations to cocktail parties that North Oxford enjoyed giving on most days of the week.

The outbreak of war in 1914 had meant that Dr. Richardson left his teaching post to become a medic in the trenches where, with instinctive calm and professionalism, he treated injuries so dreadful that no amount of training could have prepared him. It was this spirit of getting things done in situations at which others had balked that had compelled him, just after Armistice Day, to take the lift down one of the local mine shafts to help release a miner buried beneath a sudden coal fall. Inching his way out from beneath the sooty mass of fallen rocks, encouraged by reassuring words from the doctor, the trapped man finally emerged. As he leant across a small precipice, clinging to the doctor’s hand below him, he made one final and successful leap to safety. But the agitation of the rock had dislodged another huge section of the coalface, which fell directly on top of the doctor, killing him instantly. The rich and philanthropic owner of the mine, on hearing of the accident, had put into trust a sum of money to cover the education of the doctor’s three-year-old son, up to and including university
fees, as well as a small allowance to permit Julian to concentrate on his studies without the distraction of financial worries. Julian’s mother was prohibited from touching her son’s settlement but would be taken care of by her widow’s pension.

The widowed Mrs. Richardson had never remarried, even though she had once made an undisguised play for her husband’s old friend Mr. Bellington, who had moved to Yorkshire after the war and become the headmaster of the local school. But Mrs. Richardson’s clumsy attempts at seduction backfired. The combination of an inappropriately low-cut blouse and a blatantly hollow bluff that she could use her “position” to get a minor member of the royal family to “grace,” as she put it, the school sports day, had repulsed Dr. Richardson’s old Balliol friend. The headmaster’s lingering contempt for Mrs. Richardson surfaced during a lengthy farewell conversation in his study with Julian at the end of Julian’s final term. Urging the young man to become a credit to his much-missed and much-admired father, Mr. Bellington had indicated that Julian’s mother was a considerably less worthy parent. In that one conversation Julian’s respect for his mother was given the final death sentence. He wished he had been lucky enough to have a mother like Joan Blunt, despite her fragility of mind. He had seen something reminiscent of her heartbreaking pain in the club in Pall Mall where he sometimes went for a drink with Rupert and Sir Philip. Hunched up in leather armchairs beside the fireplace, old soldiers lay lost in the reverie of their war, their minds filled with pictures of a destruction too dreadful to forget, and yet too awful to speak of.

Julian would escape from Mrs. Richardson’s cramped courtyard flat in Victoria as soon as he could and walk quickly towards the river. Sometimes he would jump on a passing bus and find that he had reached St. Katherine’s Docks way down the Thames in the East End. There he would see small groups of men standing together, leaning against a warehouse wall, not in a comradely way but more as if
each one was waiting for something to happen, someone to arrive, and someone to offer them a job, and a bit of a life. Sometimes Julian went into a pub, ordered a glass of neat whisky (“That’s right, my lad, why ruin it with water?”) and handed over tuppence for a packet of Woodbines before sitting down in a corner, his hat pulled down over his eyes. This vital place was a welcome contrast from the throttling atmosphere of Julian’s mother’s flat. In the pub, the chat was as real as the clashing smells of pipe smoke and sweat. Boxing was a popular topic. Success or failure on the horses was another. Bad practice at the pawnbroker was a familiar point of discussion. Cigarettes were inhaled deeply; royalty was acknowledged but not glorified. Mosley was condemned. War was feared.

Before arriving at Oxford, Julian had barely given
real
life a thought, freewheeling his way through a minor public school, courtesy of the charitable mine owner, wearing a nice flannel suit and playing a lot of cricket and a lot of football. Oxford had changed everything though. He had at last begun to ask questions. And Oxford challenged him to decide whether to devote himself to pleasure or to principle. Choosing to abdicate from a
duty
to do the right thing by society seemed increasingly to Julian to be the wrong option.

He had met Rupert Blunt on the first day of his first week of his first term at Oxford. Freshmen together, both undergraduates were in the university outfitters on Broad Street trying on their college gowns. The obsequious salesman was trying to convince them both to buy a tailcoat.

“Delightful young men such as yourselves are
destined
to be invited to all the most important formal occasions in university life,” the salesmen flattered transparently. Rupert rolled his eyes at Julian behind the man’s back and they left the shop together without making any further purchases. Rupert, an old Etonian, already owned a tailcoat from his school days and Julian could not have afforded to buy one even
if he had wanted to, which he did not. But a friendship between the two men had been established there on Broad Street. Rupert was a generous-minded young man and enjoyed sharing his privileges with his clever new friend. Halfway through that first Michaelmas term he invited Julian to stay at Cuckmere for a weekend.

“My father is an MP and I know you and he would get on like the blazes, what with you being so obsessed with politics.”

Rupert had been right. Sir Philip Blunt had taken to Julian immediately, as had his wife, who was touched by the way Julian welcomed the maternal advice and encouragement that her own children rejected. Once a month, sometimes more, Julian had gone with Rupert to stay at the lovely grey flint house in Sussex. With his charming manners and eagerness to learn, as well as the respect and admiration he demonstrated for his friend’s parents, Julian had been unofficially adopted by the Blunt family and the household that served it. Julian sometimes felt he had landed in clover. Rupert’s parents fulfilled for him all that Voltaire’s “best of all possible worlds” promised.

However, there were aspects of his friendship with Rupert that made Julian uneasy. A life formulated on self-indulgence was surely a wasted life, Julian argued with Rupert and his Bullingdon Club contemporaries, who uniformly believed that life was too short to devote to anyone but oneself and one’s friends. The group of undergraduates who lived in Spartan digs in a house on Beaumont Street near the Randolph Hotel represented a tempting intellectual stratosphere frustratingly far from Julian’s reach. After poetry recitals and talks at the English Club, where Julian had shaken hands with members of this cerebrally rigorous crowd, he would return to the comfortable rooms he shared with Rupert feeling inadequate and angry, convinced he was squandering his Oxford years on inconsequences and misplaced values.

And then there were the girls. Julian’s girlfriend, Charlotte Bellowes, was two years younger than Julian, lived in London and was
in the middle of her coming-out year. She had confessed to him that she wasn’t mad about books: “take them or leave them,” was her view. She and Julian had kissed of course, mainly at coming-out parties in deserted billiard rooms, in long galleries in which ancestral portraits hung beneath gilded ceilings or in the large darkened gardens of smart London houses that belonged to the parents of her fellow debutantes. Once they had found a derelict tennis court at the back of a huge Kensington mansion, and that night, after a great deal of pink champagne, Julian had been allowed to run his hand along the smooth stretch of thigh that emerged from the cuff of Charlotte’s silk cami-knickers. It had been like plunging into a pool of melted chocolate.

Everyone agreed that Charlotte—or Lottie, as her friends called her—was frightfully pretty. But there was something missing in the conversations Julian had with her. He had tried to discuss with her this ever-recurring feeling of guilt as they ate cucumber sandwiches in the Palm Court of the Ritz. But the subject invariably reverted to the next social engagement and to the people who might be invited to attend. To tell the truth, he was bored by her. Lottie didn’t even like going to the movies, pronouncing cinemas to be a hotbed of germs and smelling of vinegar and chips. Chips were Julian’s favourite food. One day he would find someone to love who also shared his passion for chips. And if she didn’t, he would somehow make her.

He longed to actually go to bed with Lottie but the prospect was out of the question. Apart from the moment on the tennis court referred to half jokingly by Lottie as “Lottie’s Lapse,” she had once allowed Julian to bury his face in her neck although he had not enjoyed the experience very much. The bitter smell of her skin surprised him by reminding him of his mother. Lottie had anyhow made it clear that she drew a line at the point where her pretty emerald necklace settled in the hollow of her collarbone and Julian did not object. Once after
another cocktail too many Lottie had slumped against Julian on a pink velvet sofa in a Belgrave Square drawing room and admitted that her mother had told her that not only did “it” hurt quite a lot but that the whole sticky rigmarole was frankly overrated.

If Julian had been older and married, the option of sleeping with another woman would never have arisen. Everyone did it. And even the older single man was able to pursue his options within the legions of bored, cooperative wives that glittered and littered the aristocratic drawing rooms of Britain. How had it come about that the older generation had it easy while Julian’s own younger frustrated age-group was compelled to wait?

Sometimes Julian wondered if he would ever acquire the expertise to become a good lover. The undergraduate women at Oxford, their never-quite-clean hair invariably pinned back to reveal proboscises developed for snouting out fact and never poetry, were universally unappealing. The idea of going to London and paying a tart for the experience did not attract him, although he did kick himself for not having answered the knock on his bedroom door at Cuckmere Park last weekend. Lady Bridgewater, the American wife of a senior member of the cabinet who at fifty-seven was still lovely in a faded sort of way, had squeezed his knee most enticingly under the table at dinner. But Rupert had succumbed to a similar squeeze only recently, and even though Rupert had assured him the experience was a bit of a letdown, Julian did not feel like comparing first-time notes, good or bad, with Rupert.

Reflecting on his misplaced behaviour with Evangeline during that awful evening at Bryanston Court, he was annoyed that he had half intentionally led her on. He could not think what had got into him. She was almost old enough to be his mother, although she seemed quite unbothered by the difference in their ages. Her gauche behaviour suggested she was quite innocent of any physical experience of love (or
lust) although, God knows, by her age Evangeline must surely have had dozens of lovers. He kicked himself that on first sight of the overweight middle-aged woman in the unflattering and revealing dress he had tried to conceal his revulsion by making his usual mistake of going too far the other way and flirting with her. As soon as his fateful wink prompted that look of eager desperation Julian knew it would lead to trouble.

Rather to his relief, Lottie had been unable to come on the Easter expedition to the north of England. There was a stubbornness about her when she made up her mind. She had a dress fitting, she informed him, and two amusing-sounding tea parties already written into her engagement diary. And anyway, she had heard so often from Julian of his determination to see life in those northern towns and felt it might not be her cup of tea; she was bound to be a nuisance and get in the way. Far better that he borrowed May, the Blunts’ driver, who would not interrupt, knew her place and would let Julian concentrate on everything he wanted to find out about up in the North, whatever it was. As the suggestion that May should drive him there had actually come from Lottie, who saw no threat in a servant joining her sweetheart on such a trip, Julian felt quite guiltless when he agreed with Lottie that it was an inspired solution.

C
HAPTER
T
WELVE

T
he trip up north had begun with a minor catastrophe for May. In her anxiety to make sure the car was properly packed, she had left her overnight case behind. Julian could not guess what was so wrong, as his intriguing young companion fell silent. An uneven flush, an unruly series of blotches, was spreading upwards from May’s collarbone. He had an awful feeling she was on the point of tears.