up, if you want to.’ Julia would have given him anything, if only she could.
‘No, we’ll go walking instead.’
He took her arm, and led her out to the little black car. The spring came back to Julia’s step, matching itself to Josh’s.
It was an idyllic afternoon. They walked through a beechwood where the falling leaves made ochre and gold tapestries under their feet and the sun slanted in fretted bars through the trees. Josh didn’t talk about aeroplanes or ski-slopes now. He told her about the little town in Colorado where he had grown up, and his mother and father, and the men who worked in his father’s timber business, and their wives and the children who had gone to school with him. Julia imagined the place as a huddle of wooden-framed houses under a mountain ridge, set amongst black pines and empty snowfields. The lights spilling from the windows would look very warm on the snow.
‘Were you happy?’ she asked.
He thought for a moment. ‘I guess so. It was a good life. But I always had itchy feet.’
‘Why?’
He put his arm round her shoulders and the leather sleeve creaked against her ear.
‘I don’t know why,’ he said softly, ‘but I have to keep moving on.’
Julia knew that it was a warning. And it was a warning he had delivered often before. She jerked her head up and looked at the sky through the canopy of beech. It was fading to pearly grey as the light went. She didn’t need a warning, and she would take whatever came. A fierce determination took hold of her. She would spend tonight with Josh. She would make him hers, somehow. She could do it because she wanted it so badly.
She listened carefully to the sound of their feet brushing through the leaves. She had the sense of crossing some divide, here, under the beech trees. I’ve grown up, she thought simply.
Josh felt the set of her shoulders. He was looking at the angle of her face, turned away from him. The skin of her cheek and throat was silky white under her dark hair. Josh knew that he had frightened her and made her ill, and he felt protective as well as drawn to her.
His arm tightened. ‘Come on,’ he ordered her. ‘Let’s go home now.’
They drove a short distance through the lanes, and came to a field gate. Josh heaved it open and the car bumped into a rutted track. Peering into the dimness ahead Julia saw a little house at the end of the track, fitted into a corner of woodland. It had two windows below and two gables above, and a door in the middle.
‘It’s like the three bears’ house.’
Josh laughed. ‘It isn’t big enough for three of anything.’
Outside the front door it was cold, and the air smelt of frost and smoke. Julia shivered but it was a shiver of anticipation.
She was certain of what she was doing, and she was exhilarated by it.
Inside, the little house was less like a fairytale. It was furnished with utilitarian, modern furniture and there were contemporary print curtains, a telephone and a gramophone, and a scatter of books and papers. Julia wandered around, trying to gain an impression of Josh’s life from the thin layer of his possessions.
‘Is it your house?’ she called. Josh had gone through into the kitchen.
‘Nope. It’s rented, for as long as I need to be here.’
No roots, of course. How long would be as long as he needed?
Josh was making tea, whistling and moving briskly from the cupboards to the stove. ‘Let’s have anchovy toast. I love it, it’s so British.’
‘Is it? I’ve never had it in my life.’ Julia remembered Betty’s teas. Betty favoured Robertson’s jams and thin, sweetish lemon curd. She seemed a very long way away from here, and what was going to happen.
‘Don’t disappoint me.’
Josh lit the fire. It was already laid, and the flames shot up through the dry kindling. The room looked more homely in the firelight, with the tea tray on the coffee table. Julia perched on the red and black sofa.
‘Shall I pour the tea?’
She was reminded of Betty and Vernon again, Betty pouring out the tea and handing Vernon his special cup.
Now Julia was pouring the tea herself, and she would give herself to Josh. She felt her own power, and fear and anticipation and excitement dissolving deliciously inside her. The anchovy toast tasted salt and exotic on her tongue. And she knew that Josh was watching her. She felt beautiful, and a little in awe of herself.
Josh took her plate away, and her cup. The fire had settled into a red glow. He knelt in front of her for a moment and they looked at each other. Then Josh took her hand, turning it over very gently, as if to ask, Well?
Julia leaned forward and kissed his mouth.
‘Julia,’ he said softly. ‘Do you know what you’re doing?’
There was no need for her to answer. In the fireplace a log fell, sending up a scarlet fountain of sparks.
Josh was very gentle, and very deliberate. He unbuttoned her clothes, understanding the hooks and fasteners, and laid them gently aside. In the past, in her awkward grapples with boys, Julia had wondered why it was all so uncomfortable and undignified. It was different with Josh, of course. He made undressing seem simple and natural. Yet when she felt the cool air on her skin, she was suddenly embarrassed. She wrapped her arms around herself, to defend her nakedness.
‘I would like to look at you,’ Josh whispered. ‘May I do that?’
Slowly, Julia let her arms drop. She faced him, innocence overlaid with boldness. The firelight brought a glow of colour to her pale skin. Josh heard his own breathing in the stillness.
He looked at her, greedy, but holding himself back.
Josh loved women, but Julia wasn’t like the girls he usually chose. He liked full-breasted girls with rounded hips and peachy flesh that he could bury himself in. For Josh, ever since he had turned twelve, the varied appeal of women’s bodies had depended on their utter difference from his own. But Julia had no opulent curves, and her hips and stomach were as flat as a boy’s. She was tall and he was surprised now, seeing her naked, by her fragility. Her bones looked fine enough to snap under his hands, and her breasts were tiny, with pale pink nipples. The separate parts of her were like a boy’s, and yet they added up to nothing like a boy at all. Just in the way that her legs crooked, in the way that her shoulders sloped, and the way she looked at him under her dark eyelashes, she was more female than any woman he had ever seen.
And just as knowing. She had picked him out, after all, with total conviction. There was an added charge in that.
Josh breathed out, a long breath. He couldn’t hold himself back from her any longer. He put his mouth to one of her small, hard breasts. Her skin tasted faintly sweet, like honey. He felt her breath warm in his hair, and then he pulled her against him, she was supple, like a sappy willow wand.
Josh took her hand, guiding it.
‘You could take off my clothes, too.’
Julia drew back a little, and undid the buttons of his plaid shirt.
She saw the curling blond hair on his chest, the sun-reddened hollow at the base of his throat, and then the developed muscles of his shoulders and arms.
‘Go on,’ Josh ordered her.
She undid the buckle of his belt.
When Josh was naked too he laid her against the sofa cushions, very carefully, as if she was precious. Over his shoulder, through half-closed eyes, Julia watched the fire’s glow. The silky feel of bare flesh against her own was surprising, exciting. She had though that when the moment came she might be afraid. She wasn’t afraid, at all. She felt hot and clear-headed at the same time, and there was a