and that this was in fact no young man but a girl. In the next moment I further realized that it was a girl whom I knew. It was Julian Baffin, Arnold and Rachel’s teenage daughter and only child. (So named, I need hardly explain, after Julian of Norwich.)
I describe Julian here as teenage because that was how I still thought of her, though at this period she was I suppose in her earliest twenties. Arnold had been a young father. I had felt a modest avuncular interest in the fairy-like little girl. (I had never wanted children of my own. Many artists do not.) With the approach of puberty however she lost her looks and developed an awkward sulky aggressive attitude to the world in general which considerably diminished her charm. She was always fretting and complaining, and her little face, as it hardened into adult lines, grew discontented and secretive. That was as I recalled her. I had not in fact seen her for some while. Her parents adored her, yet were at the same time disappointed in her. They had wanted a boy. They had both assumed, as parents do, that Julian would be clever, but this appeared not to be the case. Julian took a long time growing up, she took little part in the self-conscious tribalism of the ‘teenage’ world, and still preferred dressing her dolls to dressing herself at an age when most girls are beginning, even pardonably, to interest themselves in war paint.
Not notably successful in exams and certainly not in the least bookish, Julian had left school at sixteen. She had spent a year in France, more at Arnold’s insistence than out of her own sense of adventure, or so it had seemed to me at the time. She returned from France unimpressed by that country and speaking very bad French which she promptly forgot, and went on to a typist’s training course. Fledged as a typist she took a job in the ‘typing pool’ at a Government office. When she was about nineteen she decided that she was a painter, and Arnold eagerly wangled her into an art school, which she left after a year. After that she had entered a teachers’ training college somewhere in the Midlands where she had been, I think, for a year or perhaps two when I saw her on that evening strewing the white petals in the path of the oncoming motor cars.
Only now I realized, with yet another shift of gestalt, that the whirling white blobs were not petals at all, but fragments of paper. The wind of a passing vehicle carried one of these fragments right to my feet and I picked it up. It was part of a handwritten document whereon I could decipher, amid scrawl, the word ‘love’. Perhaps this eccentric ceremonial had indeed some sort of religious purpose ? I crossed the road and began to walk along the pavement behind Julian. I wanted to hear what it was that she was chanting, and would not have been surprised to find that it was in an unknown tongue. As I came close to her the murmured words sounded like the same constantly repeated phrase. There’s no telling? Masquerading? Are you ailing? He’s compelling?
‘Hello, Bradley.’
Owing to her absence at college and the demise of our Sundays I had not seen Julian for nearly a year, and before that indeed infrequently. I found her older, the face still sulky but with more of a brooding expression, suggestive of the occurrence of thought. She had a rather bad complexion, or perhaps it was just that Arnold’s ‘greasy’ look looked less healthy on a woman. She never used make-up. She had watery-blue eyes, not the flecked hazel-brown of her mother’s, nor did her secretive and dog-like face repeat Rachel’s large bland freckled features. Her thick undulating mane, which had no trace of red, was streakily fair with that dark blonde colour which is almost suggestive of green. Even at close quarters she still slightly resembled a boy, tallish, dour, who had just cut himself in a premature attempt to shave his first whisker. I did not mind the dourness. I dislike girls who are
I describe Julian here as teenage because that was how I still thought of her, though at this period she was I suppose in her earliest twenties. Arnold had been a young father. I had felt a modest avuncular interest in the fairy-like little girl. (I had never wanted children of my own. Many artists do not.) With the approach of puberty however she lost her looks and developed an awkward sulky aggressive attitude to the world in general which considerably diminished her charm. She was always fretting and complaining, and her little face, as it hardened into adult lines, grew discontented and secretive. That was as I recalled her. I had not in fact seen her for some while. Her parents adored her, yet were at the same time disappointed in her. They had wanted a boy. They had both assumed, as parents do, that Julian would be clever, but this appeared not to be the case. Julian took a long time growing up, she took little part in the self-conscious tribalism of the ‘teenage’ world, and still preferred dressing her dolls to dressing herself at an age when most girls are beginning, even pardonably, to interest themselves in war paint.
Not notably successful in exams and certainly not in the least bookish, Julian had left school at sixteen. She had spent a year in France, more at Arnold’s insistence than out of her own sense of adventure, or so it had seemed to me at the time. She returned from France unimpressed by that country and speaking very bad French which she promptly forgot, and went on to a typist’s training course. Fledged as a typist she took a job in the ‘typing pool’ at a Government office. When she was about nineteen she decided that she was a painter, and Arnold eagerly wangled her into an art school, which she left after a year. After that she had entered a teachers’ training college somewhere in the Midlands where she had been, I think, for a year or perhaps two when I saw her on that evening strewing the white petals in the path of the oncoming motor cars.
Only now I realized, with yet another shift of gestalt, that the whirling white blobs were not petals at all, but fragments of paper. The wind of a passing vehicle carried one of these fragments right to my feet and I picked it up. It was part of a handwritten document whereon I could decipher, amid scrawl, the word ‘love’. Perhaps this eccentric ceremonial had indeed some sort of religious purpose ? I crossed the road and began to walk along the pavement behind Julian. I wanted to hear what it was that she was chanting, and would not have been surprised to find that it was in an unknown tongue. As I came close to her the murmured words sounded like the same constantly repeated phrase. There’s no telling? Masquerading? Are you ailing? He’s compelling?
‘Hello, Bradley.’
Owing to her absence at college and the demise of our Sundays I had not seen Julian for nearly a year, and before that indeed infrequently. I found her older, the face still sulky but with more of a brooding expression, suggestive of the occurrence of thought. She had a rather bad complexion, or perhaps it was just that Arnold’s ‘greasy’ look looked less healthy on a woman. She never used make-up. She had watery-blue eyes, not the flecked hazel-brown of her mother’s, nor did her secretive and dog-like face repeat Rachel’s large bland freckled features. Her thick undulating mane, which had no trace of red, was streakily fair with that dark blonde colour which is almost suggestive of green. Even at close quarters she still slightly resembled a boy, tallish, dour, who had just cut himself in a premature attempt to shave his first whisker. I did not mind the dourness. I dislike girls who are
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