The moonlight had reached Julia's feet. She had been sitting here for some time, then. Not once had Sylvia so much as stirred. They seemed not to breathe: she could easily believe them lying there dead. She found herself thinking, If you were dead, Sylvia, then you' d not be missing much, you'll only end up like me, an old woman with my life behind me, dwindling into a mess of memories, that hurt. Julia dozed off, the valium at last sinking her into a sleep so deep that she was limp in the hands of Sylvia, who was shaking her.
Sylvia had woken, her mouth dry, to reach out for water, and saw a little ghost sitting there in the moonlight, whom she expected to vanish as she came fully awake. But Julia did not vanish. Sylvia went to her, held her, rocked her as the old woman whimpered, a desolate heart-wrenching sound.
'Julia, Julia,' whispered Sylvia, thinking of the young man who needed his sleep. 'Wake up, it's me.'
‘Oh, Sylvia, I don't know what to do, I'm not myself. '
' Get up, darling, please, you must go to bed. '
Julia got up, unsteadily, and Sylvia, also unsteady, since she was half-asleep, took her out of the room and up the stairs. Now there was no light under Frances's door, not under Andrew's, but yes, there was under Colin's.
Sylvia laid Julia down on her bed and pulled up a cover.
‘I think I'm ill, Sylvia. I must be ill. '
This cry went straight to Sylvia's professional self, and she said, ‘I’m going to look after you. Please don't be so sad. '
Julia was asleep. Sylvia, falling asleep, wrenched herself up and crept across the room supporting herself on backs of chairs, and got down at last to her own room where she found her colleague sitting up. 'Is it morning?' 'No, no, go to sleep.' 'Thank God for that.' He collapsed back and she fell on her bed.
And now they were all asleep except for Colin, who lay with his arms around Sophie, who was asleep, the little dog on her hip, dozing, though its wisp of a tail sometimes fluttered.
He was not thinking of beautiful Sophie, in his arms. Like his mother earlier he was insanely promising: ‘I’ll kill him, I swear I will. ‘Now here's a knot! If Johnny had recognised himself in the poisonous word-spinner, then he was being asked for the heights of dispassionate judgement: only the standards of literary excellence should fuel his thoughts, 'Is this a good novel or isn't it?' — the memories perhaps of those novels he had read when he had been a well-read person, before he had succumbed to the simple charms of socialist realism. As when the victim of a savage cartoon is expected to say, ‘Oh, well done! What a talent you have! In short, from Comrade Johnny was being demanded conduct that his family had long ago agreed he was incapable of. On the other hand, if he had not recognised himself, then he was to blame for suspecting nothing of how at least one of his sons saw him.
Julia grieving, grieving, though she could not have said for what if it wasn't Sylvia, or her whole life, studied newspapers, flung them down, tried again, and when Wilhelm walked her to the Cosmo, she tried to take in what was being said around her. The Vietnam War, that was what they talked about. Sometimes Johnny came in, with his entourage, dramatic, forceful, and he might nod at her, or even give her the clenched fist salute. Often, Geoffrey was with him, whom she knew so well, a handsome young man, like Lochinvar from the West, as she said scornfully to Wilhelm. Or Daniel, with his red hair, like a beacon. Or James, who came to her saying, ‘I am James, do you remember me? But she remembered no one with a cockney accent.
'It's the correct thing, now,’ Wilhelm explained. 'They speak cockney.'
'But what for, when it's so ugly?'
'To get jobs. They are opportunists. If you want to get a job in television or in films, you have to lose your educated voice.'
Around them, cigarette smoke, and often angry voices. ‘Why is it when it's politics, then there's always quarrelling?'
‘Ah, my dear, if we understood that...’
' It reminds me of the old days, when I visited home, the Nazis...'
‘And the communists. '
She remembered the fighting, the shouting, the flung stones, the running feet – yes, waking at night to hear feet running, running. After some atrocious thing, they ran through the streets shouting.
Julia sat in her chair, surrounded by newspapers, until her thoughts pushed her up to prowl around her rooms, clicking her tongue with annoyance as she found an ornament out of place, or a dress anyhow on the back of a chair. (What was Mrs Philby thinking of?) All her sorrows were becoming focused on the Vietnam War. She could not bear it. Wasn't it enough, that old war, the first one, so terrible and then the second, what more did they want, killing, killing, and now this war. And the Americans, were they mad, sending their young men, no one cared about the young men, when there was a war the young men were herded up and driven off to be killed. As if they were good for nothing but that. Again and again. No one learned anything, it was a lie to say we learned from history, if any lessons had been learned, the bombs would not be falling into Vietnam, and the young men... Julia was dreaming about her brothers, for the first time in years. She had nightmares about this war. On the television she watched Americans fighting the police, Americans not wanting the war, and she didn't want it, she was on the side of the Americans who rioted in Chicago or at the universities, and yet when she had left Germany to marry Philip she had chosen America, she was on that side. Philip had wanted Andrew to go to school in the States, and if he had, then by now he would probably be part of that America that turned hoses and teargas on the Americans who protested. (Julia knew Andrew was conservative by nature, or perhaps better say, on the side of authority.) Johnny's new woman, who apparently had abandoned him, was fighting in the streets against the war. Julia hated and feared street fighting, even now she had nightmares about what she had seen in the Thirties, when she went home to visit, in Germany, which was being destroyed by the gangs that rioted and smashed and shouted and ran at nights through the streets. Julia's head and mind and heart were whirling with violently opposing pictures, thoughts, emotions.
And her son Johnny was constantly in the papers, speaking against this war, and she felt he was right. Yet Johnny had never been right, she was sure of that, but suppose he was right now?
Julia, without telling Wilhelm, put on her hat, the one that concealed her face best, with its close-meshed veil, and chose gloves that would not show every mark – she associated politics with dirt – and took herself off to hear Johnny speak at a meeting to oppose the Vietnam War.