They Do the Same Things Different There (9 page)

Julian hadn’t gone to war. He’d been born just too late. And of course he said he was disappointed, felt cheated even, he loved his country and whatever his country might stand for, and he had wanted to demonstrate that love in the very noblest of ways. He said it with proper earnestness, and some days he almost meant it. His two older brothers had gone to fight, and both had returned home, and the younger had brought back some sort of medal with him. The brothers had changed. They had less time for Julian, and Julian felt that was no bad thing. He was no longer worth the effort of bullying. One day he’d asked his eldest brother what it had been like out there on the front. And the brother turned to him in surprise, and Julian was surprised too, what had he been thinking?—and he braced himself for the pinch or Chinese burn that was sure to follow. But instead the brother had just turned away; he’d sucked his cigarette down to the very stub, and sighed, and said it was just as well Julian hadn’t been called up, the trenches were a place for real men. The whole war really wouldn’t have been his bag at all.

When Julian Morris first met Karen Davison, neither was much impressed. Certainly, Julian was well used to girls finding him unimpressive: he was short, his face was too round and homely, his thighs quickly thinned into legs that looked too spindly to support him. There was an effeminacy about his features that his father had thought might have been cured by a spell fighting against Germans, but Julian didn’t know whether it would have helped; he tried to take after his brothers, tried to lower his voice and speak more gruffly, he drank beer, he took up smoking. But even there he’d got it all wrong somehow. The voice, however gruff, always rose in inflection no matter how much he tried to stop it. He sipped at his beer. He held his cigarette too languidly, apparently, and when he puffed out smoke it was always from the side of his mouth and never with a good bold manly blast.

But for Julian to be unimpressed by a girl was a new sensation for him. Girls flummoxed Julian. With their lips and their breasts and their flowing contours. With their bright colours, all that perfume. Even now, if some aged friend of his mother’s spoke to him, he’d be reduced to a stammering mess. But Karen Davison did something else to Julian entirely. He looked at her across the ballroom and realized that he rather despised her. It wasn’t that she was unattractive; at first glance her figure was pretty enough. But she was so much older than the other girls, in three years of attending dances no man had yet snatched her up—and there was already something middle-aged about that face, something jaded. She looked bored. That was it—she looked bored. And didn’t care to hide it.

Once in a while a man would approach her, take pity on her, ask her to dance. She would reject him, and off the suitor would scarper, with barely disguised relief.

Julian had promised his parents that he would at least invite one girl onto the dance floor. It would hardly be his fault if that one girl he chose said no. He could return home, he’d be asked how he had got on, and if he were clever he might even be able to phrase a reply that concealed the fact he’d been rejected. Julian was no good at lying outright, his voice would squeak, and he would turn bright red. But not telling the truth? He’d had to find a way of mastering it.

He approached the old maid. Now that she was close he felt the usual panic rise within him, and he fought it down—look at her, he told himself, look at how
hard
she looks, like stone; she should be
grateful
you ask her to dance. He’d reached her. He opened his mouth to speak, realized his first word would be a stutter, put the word aside, found some new word to replace it, cleared his throat. Only then did the girl bother to look up at him. There was nothing welcoming in that expression, but nothing challenging either—she looked at him with utter indifference.

“A dance?” he said. “Like? Would you?”

And, stupidly, opened his arms wide, as if to remind her what a dance was, as if without her he’d simply manage on his own in dumb show.

She looked him up and down. Judging him, blatantly judging him. Not a smile upon her face. He waited for the refusal.

“Very well,” she said then, though without any enthusiasm.

He offered her his hand, and she took it by the fingertips, and rose to her feet. She was an inch or two taller than him. He smelled her perfume, and didn’t like it.

He put one hand on her waist, the other was left gently brushing against her glove. They danced. She stared at his face, still quite incuriously, but it was enough to make him blush.

“You dance well,” she said.

“Thank you.”

“I don’t enjoy dancing.”

“Then let us, by all means, stop.”

He led her back to her chair. He nodded at her stiffly, and prepared to leave. But she gestured toward the chair beside her, and he found himself bending down to sit in it.

“Are you enjoying the ball?” he asked her.

“I don’t enjoy talking either.”

“I see.” And they sat in silence for a few minutes. At one point he felt he should get up and walk away, and he shuffled in his chair to do so—and at that she turned to look at him, and managed a smile, and for that alone he decided to stay a little while longer.

“Can I at least get you a drink?”

She agreed. So he went to fetch her a glass of fizz. Across the room, he watched as another man approached and asked her to dance, and he suddenly felt a stab of jealousy that astonished him. She waved the man away in irritation, and Julian pretended it was for his sake.

He brought her back the fizz.

“There you are,” he said.

She sipped at it. He sipped at his the same way.

“If you don’t like dancing,” he said to her, “and you don’t like talking, why do you come?” He already knew the answer, of course, it was the same reason he came, and she didn’t bother dignifying him with a reply. He laughed, and hated how girlish it sounded.

At length she said, “Thank you for coming,” as if this were
her
ball, as if he were
her
guest, and he realized he was being dismissed. He got to his feet.

“Do you have a card?” she asked.

Julian did. She took it, put it away without reading it. And Julian waited beside her for any further farewell, and when nothing came, he nodded at her once more and left her.

The very next day, Julian received a telephone call from a Mr. Davison, who invited him to have dinner with his daughter at his house that evening. Julian accepted. And because the girl had never bothered to give him her name, it took Julian a fair little time to work out who this Davison fellow might be.

Julian wondered whether the evening would be formal, and so he overdressed, just for safety’s sake. He took some flowers. He rang the bell, and some hatchet-faced old woman opened the front door. She showed him in. She told him that Mr. Davison had been called away on business, and would be unable to dine with him that evening. Mistress Karen would receive him in the drawing room. She disappeared with his flowers, and Julian never saw them again, and had no evidence indeed that Mistress Karen would ever see them either.

At the top of the staircase Julian saw there were two portraits. One was a giantess, a bejewelled matriarch sneering down at him, and Julian could recognize in her features the girl he had danced with the night before, and he was terrified of her, and he fervently hoped that Karen would never grow up to be like her mother. The other portrait, much smaller, was of some boy in army uniform.

Karen was waiting for him. She was wearing the same dress she had worn the previous night. “I’m so glad you could come,” she intoned.

“I’m glad you invited me.”

“Let us eat.”

So they went into the dining room, and sat at either end of a long table. The hatchet face served them soup. “Thank you, Nanny,” Karen said. Julian tasted the soup. The soup was good.

“It’s a very grand house,” said Julian.

“Please, there’s no need to make conversation.”

“All right.”

The soup bowls were cleared away. Chicken was served. And, after that, a trifle.

“I like trifle,” said Karen, and Julian didn’t know whether he was supposed to respond to that, and so he smiled at her, and she smiled back, and that all seemed to work well enough.

Afterwards Julian asked whether he could smoke. Karen said he might. He offered Karen a cigarette, and she hesitated, and then said she would like that. So Julian got up, and went around the table, and lit one for her. Julian tried very hard to smoke in the correct way, but it still kept coming out girlishly. But Karen didn’t seem to mind; indeed, she positively imitated him, she puffed smoke from the corner of her mouth and made it all look very pretty.

And even now they didn’t talk, and Julian realized he didn’t mind. There was no awkwardness to it. It was companionable. It was a shared understanding.

Julian was invited to three more dinners. After the fourth, Mr. Davison called Mr. Morris, and told him that a proposal of marriage to his daughter would not be unacceptable. Mr. Morris was very pleased, and Mrs. Morris took Julian to her bedroom and had him go through her jewellery box to pick out a ring he could give his fiancée, and Julian marvelled; he had never seen such beautiful things.

Julian didn’t meet Mr. Davison until the wedding day, whereupon the man clapped him on the back as if they were old friends, and told him he was proud to call him his son. Mr. Morris clapped Julian on the back too; even Julian’s brothers were at it. And Julian was suitably impressed at how he had been transformed into a man by dint of a simple service and signed certificate. Neither of his brothers had married yet; he had beaten them to the punch, and was there jealousy in that back clapping? They called Julian a lucky dog, that his bride was quite the catch. And so, Julian felt, she was; on her day of glory she did nothing but beam with smiles, and there was no trace of her customary truculence. She was charming, even witty, and Julian wondered why she had chosen to hide these qualities from him—had she recognized that it would have made him scared of her? Had she been shy and hard just to win his heart? Julian thought this might be so, and in that belief discovered that he did love her, he loved her after all—and maybe, in spite of everything, the marriage might just work out.

For a wedding present, the families had bought them a house in Chelsea. It was small, but perfectly situated, and they could always upgrade when they had children. As an extra present, Mr. Davison had bought his daughter a doll—a bit of a monstrosity, really, about the size of a fat infant, with blonde curly hair and red lips as thick as a darkie’s, and wearing its own imitation wedding dress. Karen seemed pleased with it. Julian thought little about it at the time.