‘I know, it’s okay. That’s why they made these carpets dark. Think of the wine that’s been spilled in here, Aunt Helen. Why don’t you take your tea to the sitting room and have a listen to the radio? Come on, I’ll bring it through…’
Simon, blending desperately into the furniture, wondered what room this was if not the sitting room; the house he was raised in had just one small lounge, and he envied for a moment the wealth of parlours and drawing and living and morning rooms that he knew a house such as this was stuffed with. He noticed that he had adopted an indulgent smile that he was hating his face for, not knowing what to do with it or any other part of himself. Julia led her aunt out and the twenty elastic bands that were holding his limbs together simultaneously snapped. Poor Simon. He only wanted to look at the butterflies and here he was, immersed in the terrible embarrassment of a stranger’s ageing, and also falling in love, which was not something he was accustomed to or would have encouraged in others. Edward, at his wife’s side, looked on fiercely from above the fireplace at the limp figure pressing his head back into the hard sofa.
Julia came back in. She looked shaken. He sat up quickly, and stood.
‘I’m sorry, perhaps this was a bad time. I hope I haven’t troubled you… Thank you for showing me around. I think I should go, I do hope your aunt is all right.’
‘Oh, but you haven’t seen the butterflies.’
‘Another time, maybe…’
‘You came all this way and they’re so beautiful. Please, do come and see them,’ said Julia, extremely brittle, the ease with which she’d ushered him around the house now vanished. ‘Really, they’re just so lovely, you must… have some tea anyway… oh, there’s none left. I’ll make more, it won’t take a moment, I’ll just go and… I’ll just clean this up and then…’
Julia, on her knees now with a hopelessly inadequate paper tissue, was dabbing at the carpet with her back to him. He stood, useless, his arms hanging awkward at his sides like those of his lanky boyhood, which he thought he had long since mastered. Then she stopped, with a slump of her shoulders and a dip of her head; then, alarmingly, she blew her nose loudly on the tea-soaked tissue. And at last Simon sprang into action. He had a handkerchief in his pocket, how stupid not to have thought of it! He bent behind and beside her, put a hand on her shoulder and pressed it gently into her palm with the other. The handkerchief had a blue stripe around its edge and had been ironed, neatly, into quarters. Julia shook it out, scrumpled it up and pressed it to her damp nose before looking up at him — and her brave smile was so charming that he almost didn’t mind the soggy ball she handed back.
‘God, what an idiot,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t suppose this is quite what you were expecting from this afternoon.’
Simon smiled back.
‘Do you think I could see the butterflies?’
So Simon found himself standing in a tiny room which clings to the end of a corridor on the second floor; it was once Emily’s maid’s bedroom, and the blue
floral print that papers the walls peels at the corners. A faint smell of damp rises from the sheets, so long unslept in, still neatly turned on a single bed that occupies most of the floor. It is chilly here, now, despite the heat of the afternoon; rooms grow forlorn and fade like printed cornflowers when there are no bodies to warm them, and the memory of the butterflies is barely a flutter now, having been remade elsewhere. Julia has entered only once in the ten years since she came here with Simon, and that was to lift them from the wall. There is only a sad browned rectangle left behind, framing a field of brighter blue blossom. But all those years ago, when Simon came to see them, they hung there still and he thought they were wasted in that lonely little room. He was also very much aware of the bed, taking up so much space that the backs of their knees almost pressed against it and they were forced to shuffle together into what little gap there was between it and the dressing table, precariously close to touching. He gazed for a long time at the bluish tint he had come for but his mind, truth be told, was elsewhere, as if those serried ranks had flittered free to batter about his ribcage. His left side tingled to Julia’s nearness as he pointed to that particular specimen he’d come for, and she stretched her face upwards to follow his finger, which longed then to trace the hollows of her long throat and instead kept foolishly pointing.
As he stood by the front door ten minutes later, stammering thanks, he didn’t think once of that precious blue tint on the wing; he thought only of the woman before him that he wouldn’t meet again, tawny and gold. And then Aunt Helen emerged from the sitting room (which, it transpired, was down the hall on the left) and rescued him; quite recovered from her earlier confusion, she seemed twenty years younger again, eyes clear and lipstick refreshed, and informed him that since she had behaved so badly today, he would be
coming to tea next Sunday so that she could make up for it; and she looked at Julia with an eyebrow raised as if daring her to back out of it.
Julia turned to him with an awkward flap, insisting it wasn’t necessary, that he must be busy, but Aunt Helen was stubborn and she gave in; with a smile she said, ‘Of course we’d love to have you round. My aunt makes very good carrot cake. Will you?’
And Simon, urbane, amazed at himself, said, ‘Well, if there’s cake,’ and they waved him off at the door and he held her smile cupped in his palm all through the week until Sunday.
In hopeful, nervous increments, each succeeding visit brought new intimacies to add to his hoard; she kissed him goodbye on the cheek, squeezed his hand, kissed him closer to his mouth, held his gaze a moment longer each time, kissed him on closed lips and said she tasted aniseed, the bronze in her eyes warming. They met always at weekends, always at the house, a sanctuary. Since they did not meet in the city, he did not have to see her dimmed; he did not know until later how she faltered there.
One week they went for a walk in the park, with Aunt Helen again as chaperone. They stopped to look out over the pond; it was late April, it had been a fine, wispish day, and now the sun was lowering, softening into the sky as it sank. It was no flashy summer sunset: a pale yellow, silvered over and reflected in the water which was silvery too under the surface. And as the sun began to vanish behind the buildings, it warmed to gold, and left behind it a last elegant wash of brightness, salmon, apricot, peach, into pale blue and darkening to indigo above them.
‘The light fades so slowly, you don’t notice it going, do you?’ said Aunt
Helen, lucid as the evening, with a rueful smile. She linked an arm through each of theirs and they walked home. She was a tall woman, but stooped now, and the bone of her wasting forearm pressed heavier on Simon’s as they walked; by the time they were home she had begun to glaze and wander. She couldn’t remember where the plates were and stood in the middle of the kitchen as if helpless or lost until Julia showed her and she said, ‘Yes, that’s right, in here, dear’ in a voice like a quivery old woman’s, not her own. It was sad and, for Julia, frightening, to see her neck craned forward awkwardly, her uncertain hands held out slightly and shaking before her, unsure what she’d meant to do with them. She would move sometimes with a sudden start, as if she’d just remembered something she’d forgotten, or the way that cats do, startled by some unseen ghost. Over tea she called him only Jonathan or Edward until Julia gave up correcting her. As the evening drew in, Julia made the thick hot chocolate she liked to take before sleeping and saw her to bed.
‘Going to bed at eight like an old lady. Oh, Maggie, don’t ever get old, it’s desperate. Dull. I am tired, though, it’s true enough. Goodnight.’ Simon hadn’t meant to stay so late and, embarrassed, would have left then, and might have shuffled awkwardly out of Julia’s ambit for ever. But when she descended to find him waiting in the hallway, she came to him dry-eyed, wordless, and it was then, when they were alone for the first time together, that Julia’s head first found its place on Simon’s chest. They did not kiss; she came to him and leaned her head against him, her arms hanging by her sides, leaving a cautious space between their bodies so that there was only this heaviness against his breastbone and no other contact between them, and he wanted to gather her in but only let his mouth rest on her hair.
There was a period of stillness, in which everything slowed to the
ponderous tempo of the old grandfather clock, time and his heart alike; after this long unreckoned pause, without raising her head she said:
‘Maggie was my mother, in case you were wondering. She didn’t get old, as it happens. At least there is that, I suppose, that little mercy.’ And she drew back from him with a smile to reassure him. There: this is the Julia that Simon thought he could reach out for and rescue; he fell in love first with light and laughing, shoeless Julia, who met him in the doorway, but there is also this — strength, sadness, restraint.
She was the only one left, she explained: her parents were gone, her sister Miranda was in Edinburgh. She was at the house most weekends. The constant flow of visitors had fallen off in recent years, and she worried that Aunt Helen would be lonely (and, although she wouldn’t admit it, she was lonely too; she didn’t belong to the city). Simon would never suggest that it was in any way unusual for her to spend every weekend with her elderly aunt. They were quite content to potter their days away, she said, lying in the garden, smoking, talking, drinking wine in the evenings. And when Aunt Helen started calling Julia Maggie, sometimes, and when she came into a room looking for something she was holding in her hand, or when she stopped in the middle of a sentence and Julia said, ‘And…’ and she said, ‘What’s that, my sweet?’ and Julia said, ‘You were saying…’ and Aunt Helen said, ‘Was I?’, it seemed almost mischievous, almost in character, and easy enough to ignore. Until that day when Simon first came to the house, and Julia came in to find Aunt Helen in the snow goggles, it had been quite possible to pretend there was nothing the matter at all. Julia explained all of this in her quiet, even voice, not crying, and looking at his breastbone; and then met his eye with a sudden bronze brightness and asked:
‘Would you like to stay for dinner?’
Simon appeared in Julia’s life, then, just in time, with a place to lay her head.
Midnight found them in the old morning room, the hour stilled by the unwound clock so that the night might last as long as they needed. Sated by Simon’s henceforth favourite meal of slow-roasted lamb, snug and a little drunk, they sank into the sofa for a last glass. The sofa is low and pillowy and all too easy to reach the floor from. Simon, whose tastes have been trained to run to the minimal, found himself in a deepening ruby-rich haze that felt dangerously bohemian. But when Julia slid onto the white rug, turned back and took his hand, he allowed himself to slip down beside her…
And so again, full circle. It was this that he hoped to recapture when he thought of them living there; after too long watching her pall in the city, after the latter years of loss unbroached, of unremarked emptiness and silence, after the last months of sadness too ice-deep and cold for him to fathom, he hoped to warm her there, to lay her down again upon the fur and see her skin again flush golden, see her again as she had flickered then in the firelight, her eyes widening just before she closed them. In a chilly flat in London where the damp seeped through every crack and the mucky clouds smirched out the stars every dirty wet October night, he remembered that other October ten years gone and hoped, as we all at times long hopelessly, to rekindle the past.
After weeks of rain, they set out on a miraculous Saturday of cold clear November sunshine that Simon, who does not believe in tidings, still took
gladly. They left as the sun was setting and arrived in the evening with a car full of suitcases. Julia had been quiet all day and spent the first part of the journey looking out as London passed away from her. As the roads narrowed and the bare trees began to arc over the road, she grew more animated. She talked about Aunt Helen, and about Miranda, how they must have Miranda to stay for Christmas again, how she would cook a goose, she had never cooked goose but Aunt Helen always said it was easy, she would make the same chestnut stuffing. She grew sad at that; it wouldn’t be the same. She didn’t have the recipe. She’d spent all those hours by her bedside and not once had she thought to ask. She’d have to look online and how could Google possibly bring her aunt back?
‘It had liver in it, from the goose,’ said Simon helpfully.
‘How will I find the liver? What does it look like?’ she wailed.
‘It’ll be in the little bag with the rest of the bits. I’ll help you. It’s the largest organ in the body. I’m sure we won’t miss it.’
‘Is it really?’
‘So I’m told.’
‘By who? How can they be trusted?’
‘I don’t know. It’s an expression.’
Simon hates driving and was trying not to snap at her. She switched on the radio and rejected the contemporary and the classical and settled on something easy, easy listening, and sang along to an old jazz song that Simon, after ten years together, was surprised she knew.
The song ended and they sat through the next two in silence.
‘And definitely sage,’ said Julia, suddenly loud in the darkness.
‘Yes. And onions. Or shallots.’
‘Which?’
Simon bit back ‘Does it matter?’ and offered instead definitely shallots, for the sweetness, which seemed to convince her.
She sang along to ‘Piece of My Heart’, Dusty’s version. Simon was relieved; he can’t bear Janis Joplin. He cannot bear to hear a note screeched, even if it is in tune. Simon, who doesn’t like to sing, has perfect pitch. Julia does not, but she has a low mellow voice that he finds he can forgive, mostly.
‘You know you got it, if it makes you feel good,’ she sang to him, with a playful little nod.