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8

The Law Society Ball

JULIA KNEW THAT Lydia had always admired her. It suited Julia that Lydia did so and it suited her even more to know that Lydia also depended upon her. What Julia did not know was that she also depended on Lydia and at no time did she depend on Lydia quite so much as on the night she came into her sister’s bedroom and announced, amid howling and sobbing, that there would be ‘no dance, no party, no twenty-first. None. Ever.’

Lydia was astonished by the statement. She had been caught up in all the arrangements for the dance and, as she had none of her father’s worries that Julia’s plans were too extravagant and few of Julia’s anxieties that her Pappy’s concerns were too restrictive, she had been borne along on a cloud of enthusiastic impartiality as all the details were decided. Even if it had been her own coming of age that was being planned, Lydia could not have been more excited and so Julia’s news that all was to evaporate and everything be abandoned came as an unwelcome shock and, for a moment, the thought entered her head that Julia was being slightly selfish. It was obvious that Julia was very upset but Lydia had no notion what she could be so upset about and nor was it easy to see what could possibly have occurred to make her jettison her plans so precipitously. With her sister’s tears drenching the bodice of her nightdress, Lydia searched for some answers and, in allowing the scope of her reasoning fairly wide boundaries, it crossed her mind that Julia’s sudden decision might have been influenced by precedent.

‘Is it something to do with Mama?’ she said.

She remembered it often being told that their mother had never had a twenty-first. Without lifting her head from where it was burrowed into Lydia’s chest, Julia shook it vigorously.

‘How could it have anything to do with Mama?’ she whimpered.

Lydia remained lost.

‘… Edward then?’ she said.

Julia shook again.

After a while she sat up. Her face, without her mascara and as a result of her tears, was but a relic of its normal mien, and white and sunken as a cadaver. She gaped at Lydia.

‘I’ve done something very foolish …’ she said.

Lydia, unaccustomed to such a frank declaration from her sister, awaited further elucidation.

‘… although I’m not in any way to blame.’

This was more like Julia, thought Lydia.

‘But I’m going to have to pay the price,’ said Julia, ‘and it’s so unfair.’

She started to snivel again.

‘The price of what?’ said Lydia.

She imagined that Julia must have broken or lost something belonging to one of her friends. Julia leant forward and hugged Lydia again.

‘Someone has got me into trouble,’ she sobbed. The words were almost inaudible.

Like everything else about the scene that was taking place, Lydia found this statement very unexpected. Nor did she immediately grasp what it signified. But before she had a chance to enquire, Julia continued.

‘He took advantage of me and now …’

‘Julia dearest, do you mean …?’ said Lydia.

‘Yes,’ said Julia, ‘a baby …’

‘Oh! Julia,’ said Lydia, ‘I had no inkling that you had met someone wonderful and that you were in love and doing a line. You never mentioned him. Who is he and what’s he like?’

‘I’m not in love, Lydia, and I’m not doing a line and the rat whose child I am now going to have is not going to stand by me. He denies he has anything to do with it and I’m so, so frightened.’

The two stayed talking for hours as Julia went over and over what had happened and Lydia tried to provide comfort and offer advice. The father, as Lydia – to Julia’s annoyance – inadvertently referred to him, was a law student, English, and only in his second year, and Julia had met him when some of her friends had asked her to make up a table for the Law Society Ball in the Shelbourne Hotel.

‘He hadn’t even paid for my ticket,’ said Julia, ‘but that didn’t stop him insisting on leaving me home. I thought he was dashing, very dashing in fact, and then before I knew what, it was all over.’

‘He had his way with you?’ asked Lydia.

It was a phrase she had picked up from her recent reading.

‘But how did you bring him back to your flat without the other girls knowing?’

‘I didn’t,’ said Julia. ‘We did it on the floor of the doctor’s waiting room downstairs.’

When she first discovered her predicament Julia, by her own account, was very ashamed at what she had done but then, as she thought about it and without telling a soul, she became almost proud that she had such a secret and that she had been so modern and naughty. Although she had not cared for the experience very much, she thought she might like it more if she tried it again. She had hoped to see more of Tarquin but, to her astonishment, when she ran into him in Front Square, he barely acknowledged her. When she noticed the first sign that something might be amiss, she gave it little thought and it was only the following month that she became alarmed. She went to a doctor in Harold’s Cross. When the doctor explained her condition, she became very scared and did not know where to turn but after a few days decided that she had better tell Tarquin. She dropped him a note asking him to meet her in Slattery’s pub.

By the time he arrived, she had already had two gin and tonics and then she just told him straight out.

‘What’s that to do with me?’ he said. ‘From what I know, it’s not here that you should be drinking gin, but in a hot bath.’

At that he walked out and there was the end of it.

‘It’s a love child,’ said Lydia. ‘That’s what it is.’

‘I want to sleep now,’ said Julia. ‘I’m very, very weary. Can I stay here for tonight?’

Lydia tucked her up, climbed into bed beside her, and turned out the light.

‘I’m going to be an aunt,’ she thought. ‘“Aunt Lydia” or will it be “Auntie Lydia”? Both sound nice.’