The Men and the Girls

by Joanna Trollope

  ‘Promise.’

  ‘Twenty minutes. I’ll be twenty minutes. Don’t drink any more.’

  He put the telephone back and stood up. ‘I’m so terribly sorry,’ he said to Kate, ‘and on your birthday.’ He paused. On Kate’s birthday, and his birthday, as well as on numerous other particular days and days of no consequence at all, they made love. If he drove over to Hugh, he would not now be back again until after midnight, and Kate would be asleep, or at least, sleepy, too sleepy for sex. He said, ‘I’m painfully conscious this has been a thoroughly wrong-footed birthday from start to finish. I’d hoped I could at least get one thing right, later on, but Hugh—’

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ Kate said, interrupting.

  ‘Give me a kiss. Give me a kiss before I go.’

  She came around the table and kissed him quickly, impersonally.

  ‘You’re cross.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What is the matter, then? Shall I ring Hugh back and tell him to pull himself together and I’ll see him some other time?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Kate—’

  ‘I don’t like birthdays,’ Kate said. ‘I don’t like milestones. You go to Hugh. Poor Hugh.’ She gave James a shaky smile. ‘Drive carefully.’

  He said, ‘Katie, I wish you’d talk to me.’

  She turned away and unhooked the car keys from their home on a high cupboard knob. ‘I expect I’ll be asleep when you come home.’

  ‘Will you? Couldn’t we—’

  ‘I’ll be asleep,’ Kate said quickly. ‘I’m pretty tired. I’ve got the restaurant tomorrow. Thank you for my dinner, my birthday dinner.’

  When James had gone out to the street to find the car, Kate climbed the stairs with a heavy heart. Leonard’s door was half open, and Kate could see Joss, sitting on the floor on the red rug Mrs Cheng had found for Leonard at a jumble sale. Joss was wearing the frayed tweed coat she used as a dressing-gown.

  ‘Ask her round,’ Leonard was saying. ‘Ask her to see me. I’ll give her atheism.’

  ‘She’s a good arguer,’ Joss said.

  ‘So’m I,’ said Leonard.

  ‘She doesn’t lose her temper—’

  ‘Nor do I.’

  ‘Yes, you do. You get baity all the time. And you say “I” all the time too.’

  ‘Cheeky baggage—’

  ‘You should learn to stretch the muscles of your mind,’ Joss said.

  ‘Hah!’ Leonard cried. ‘Caught you out. You never thought a thing like that. Too sodding stupid. You’re just parroting Old Bat Bachelor.’

  ‘Don’t call her that—’

  ‘Oh,’ said Leonard suggestively, maddeningly, ‘joined the James camp, have we?’

  Kate crept past to her own room. She turned the handle softly and opened the door on to a chill wall of cold air. She put the light on, and closed the door behind her, and leaned against it. She looked at the bed, the bed which she and James had shared, for sex and for sleeping, since before she was thirty. Now she was thirty-six. In four years, she would be forty; and James would be sixty-five. She looked at the bed with apprehension. It’s all my fault, Kate thought, all this not understanding each other, this coldness, this atmosphere. It’s something that’s happened to me, that’s the matter with me, and I’m making everyone miserable. How dare I? I haven’t got real troubles, not troubles like Hugh, poor Hugh with no future.

  She crossed the room slowly, and looked at herself in the mirror that hung above the chest of drawers where James kept his clothes. She had to stand on tiptoe, because James, being so much taller than she, had hung the mirror at his eye-level. She didn’t like the look of herself. Her hair looked dry and her face looked pinched and the dark-lashed eyes she had inherited from her mother looked like black beads. I’m going to hurt something soon, Kate thought. I’m going to damage something because something in me has got broken, and until it’s mended I’m a liability to everyone else and I mustn’t be that, nobody should ever inflict their brokenness on other people, on the innocent.

  She went over to the windows to pull the curtains across. The street was empty, blue-black with pools of ugly orange light from the street lamps. In the house opposite, the white man and the black woman, who lived on the first floor and who never drew their curtains, were sitting either side of a table, among papers and files. The woman had plaited her hair with little coloured beads and they shone in the light over her head. Kate was filled with envy of her, working away across the street so peaceably, with her exotic beaded hair and her absorbed companion. She drew the curtains across abruptly, to shut the scene out, and hung there, gripping the edges, her forehead against her fists.

  ‘The only thing,’ Kate whispered to herself, ‘the only thing that I can do now is simply to go away.’

  She let go of the curtain and slid down to the floor. So what, really so what? She’d always known she’d have to, in the end.

  Five

  Beatrice Bachelor sat on a blue velvet sofa in the Randolph Hotel. She didn’t think she had been inside the hotel in twenty years, despite living ten minutes’ walk from it, and so she had, in its honour, put on new stockings and her Cairngorm brooch.

  James Mallow had asked her to have tea there, to meet a friend of his who needed, James said, to have his sense of proportion restored to him. Beatrice, whose social horizons had widened dizzyingly in the month since James had knocked her over, had found herself agreeing to tea in the Randolph Hotel.

  ‘You’re an old fool,’ her sister-in-law said sourly. She stood in the kitchen doorway and watched Beatrice tie her everyday Paisley headscarf over her grey knot of hair. ‘You’re being made a monkey of.’

  Beatrice said nothing. She looked at herself in the hall mirror without affection, and hummed a little tune, ‘O Lord and Father of mankind’. How irritating hymns were, burrowing about persistently in one’s subconscious when one didn’t subscribe to a word of them.

  ‘I shall be home by six,’ Beatrice said. ‘Cat is in my room. Please don’t let him out.’ Cat was not, in fact, in her room, but safely in the airing cupboard, on the clean towels, and Beatrice knew it. ‘Goodbye, dear Grace,’ said Beatrice annoyingly to her sister-in-law.

  She did not, to her surprise, feel a fool at all, sitting in the Randolph Hotel. She felt perfectly ordinary, and rather pleased. Tea was a meal she liked in any case, and always had. If you ate enough tea, you didn’t need to trouble with further sustenance that day, which allowed for a wonderfully long, uninterrupted evening. These had never alarmed Beatrice, accustomed as she was to associating evening with books and music and solitude. It was, however, delightful to think of eating a hotel tea in company. When James came in, he stooped over Beatrice and kissed her cheek. He had never done such a thing before, and, for a few seconds afterwards, she was disconcerted, and stumbled over her greeting of James’s friend, a glamorous man, a healthy-looking, rather brightly coloured man, in smart clothes.

  ‘You must have a forgiving nature,’ Hugh said to Beatrice, ‘to allow this idiot anywhere near you, after he knocked you flying.’

  ‘Only flat,’ said Beatrice, recovering herself, ‘not flying.’

  Hugh smiled his wonderful smile at her. ‘I want a real tea, don’t you? The works. Proper tea.’

  Beatrice gave him a clear look to indicate she declined to be either humoured or patronized. ‘Naturally,’ she said.

  ‘So dull,’ James said, picking up a menu. ‘It’s a standard set thing, selection of this, selection of that. I’m going to find a waitress to say that we’ll do the selecting, thank you. What sort of sandwiches?’

  ‘Cucumber,’ said Beatrice.

  ‘Egg and cress,’ said Hugh, still playing his role, ‘and a cream horn. Or an éclair.’ He sat down in an armchair.

  ‘Be firm with him,’ James said to Beatrice, and left them together, taking half of Hugh’s audience away with him.

  ‘I feel,’ said Beatrice, ‘that I am meeting James’s friends in the wrong order. I
think I should have met Miss Bain before I met you.’

  ‘Haven’t you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Kate’s wonderful,’ Hugh said exaggeratedly. ‘Kindest heart in Christendom.’

  ‘I hope her heart is not exploited.’

  ‘Why should you say that?’

  ‘Because in my experience,’ said Beatrice, ‘people assume that a kind heart in someone else is a bottomless well into which it is their right, almost their duty, to dip. My mother, when she was dying, once said to me, “How fortunate it is, Beatrice, that you have an opportunity to exercise your cherishing gifts.” I went down to the kitchen after that, and simply shook with rage.’

  Hugh forgot his wonderful smile, and leaned forward. ‘You were nursing her?’

  ‘And my father. They took seven years, between them, to die. It was quite unnecessary.’

  ‘Unnecessary?’

  ‘They were both afflicted with cancer. Their lives dwindled to mere existences, but they resisted me, all the same. They preferred pain and humiliation and loss of all bodily and mental appetites to the obvious solution.’

  James came back to hear Hugh say, ‘What obvious solution?’

  Beatrice glanced at James. Then she said calmly to Hugh, ‘To euthanasia. I believe in euthanasia. I helped my brother to die.’

  ‘God Almighty,’ Hugh said, and fell back in his armchair.

  James sat down silently, and stared at Beatrice.

  ‘I joined the Voluntary Euthanasia Society in 1937.’ Beatrice said, ‘when I was twenty. I was taken to an asylum in Esher by a university friend whose brother was confined there, and the spectacle of those wretched inmates caused me unutterable anguish. I was an agnostic then, so of course I did not recognize human spirituality, but now that I do, I am even more convinced of the wrong done to damaged humanity in prolonging a life that has neither autonomy nor any capacity for the pleasures.’

  A small Malaysian waitress appeared with a laden tray and began to unload cups and plates.

  ‘If you would put the teapot here,’ Beatrice said, ‘I shall pour out.’

  The men said nothing. The waitress put down cucumber sandwiches and egg and cress sandwiches and a plate of biscuits. ‘Sorry,’ she said to Beatrice, ‘no éclair. No cream cakes.’ She smiled. Half her teeth were gold.

  ‘It’s of no consequence, thank you,’ Beatrice said. She began to pour the tea. The waitress moved away and Beatrice said, ‘I appear to have disconcerted you.’

  ‘Of course you have,’ James said. ‘I’m reeling.’

  ‘You helped?’ Hugh said with difficulty. ‘You helped your brother to die?’

  ‘Milk? Sugar? Indeed I did. At his request and with the help of a most excellent doctor. My brother had cancer too. His experience of chemotherapy left him unwilling to endure it again for what could only be another few years of diminished life. He died in his sleep, without pain. I cannot imagine how we have plunged into these deep waters.’ She picked up the egg and cress sandwiches and offered them to Hugh. ‘I think you should eat one of these, and I also think we should change the subject.’

  ‘On two conditions,’ Hugh said, seeming to pull himself together. He took a sandwich.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘That we can return to it one day. And that you will consider, even for a moment, talking about it, on television.’

  ‘Hugh!’ James said, outraged.

  ‘Why not?’ Hugh said to Beatrice.

  She looked at him. She thought of her brother’s face that last evening, the calm on it, the relief. He had held her hand. ‘Thank heavens it’s nearly over,’ he’d said. ‘Don’t ever tell Grace, don’t ever tell her, or you will suffer, and no-one who has acted as you have done, with such courage and understanding, deserves to suffer.’

  ‘Why not indeed,’ Beatrice said. ‘After all, it is a very private matter, but it is not a secret. And there is a world of difference between the two.’ She helped herself to a sandwich and inspected it. ‘How excellent. They have cut off the crusts.’

  For some reason, Pasta Please was full, all day. Customers had begun to come in as early as midday, and there were still people spooning sugar crystals out of the bottom of their espresso cups at four o’clock. Susie the waitress went home early, complaining of agonizing period pains.

  ‘Her stomach cramps,’ the owner of the restaurant said to Kate, ‘happen quite regularly in the first week of every month when a certain software salesman is in town. I’d sack her, except she’s quite good at her job the rest of the time, and, to be quite honest, my heart fails me at the prospect of looking for someone to replace her.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have to look far,’ Kate said.

  The restaurant owner, who was called Christine, and who had met Kate during a series of sessions at the Marston Ferry swimming pool, stopped writing out a bill. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Me,’ said Kate. ‘I need a full-time job.’

  ‘Wait,’ Christine said. She put the folded bill on a saucer and weighted it, as was the restaurant’s custom, with two Italian almond biscuits done up in screws of tissue paper. Then she went across to the last of the customers and put the saucer on their table. ‘I do hope,’ Kate heard her say, ‘that you enjoyed your meal.’

  Yes, they said, polite and obedient, they had. Lovely ravioli, one of them added. Christine said it was all fresh, you see. She unhooked their coats from the bentwood hat stand by the door and helped them into them, then she opened the door to let them out. When they had gone, she closed the door, and bolted it, and turned the ‘Open’ sign back to front. Then she came back to Kate.

  ‘What’s happened?’ she said.

  Kate began piling plates to take down to the kitchen.

  ‘Stop that,’ Christine said. ‘Stop fiddling about and tell me.’

  ‘I’ve got to leave James,’ Kate said. ‘I’m doing no good staying. I’m going to hurt him soon, and I couldn’t bear to do that. I’ve got to be on my own, I’ve got to live on my own. To sort myself out.’

  ‘Oh Kate,’ Christine said, with a degree of exasperation. She too was a single parent, and she too lived with what she firmly described as a partner. She had met James. She liked him. He looked a loyal type, and, after her own experiences, Christine set great store by loyalty.

  ‘I’m not being neurotic,’ Kate said. ‘This isn’t self-indulgence. It would only be self-indulgence if I stayed.’

  ‘You haven’t lived on your own for years.’

  ‘I’d have Joss. I wouldn’t be quite on my own.’

  ‘Is this temporary?’

  ‘I don’t know. I just know I don’t have a choice.’

  ‘But if I’m going to offer you Susie’s job I have to know it isn’t temporary. I can’t create all the upheaval just to have you turn round and say you don’t need the job after all, you’ve sorted it out with James. I’m not saying I wouldn’t like to employ you, because I would, you’re much better than Susie in every way, but I’d have to have a commitment, Kate, I’d have to.’

  Kate said, ‘I’d be happy to give you one.’

  ‘A year,’ Christine said. ‘At least until next Christmas.’

  Kate swallowed. It shouldn’t be this easy, getting a job, it ought to be part of the punishment that getting a job should be difficult, miserable. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘It’s long hours, Kate.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And no software salesmen.’

  Kate shook her head, trying to smile.

  ‘Where will you live?’

  ‘I haven’t sorted that out yet.’

  ‘You won’t get even a room under forty pounds a week, you know. And that’ll be a student sort of room. Dead grotty.’ Christine thought of Richmond Villa, which she had visited several times. ‘You must be mad.’

  ‘Probably,’ Kate said, ‘but insanity’s preferable to guilt, any day.’

  ‘Why on earth do you feel guilty?’

  ‘Because I’ve changed. I’ve changed, f
or some reason, into someone I don’t like at all, and while I’m like this I’m upsetting everyone.’

  ‘Too young for the change, I suppose.’

  ‘Yes,’ Kate said, ‘I can’t blame it on anyone but myself.’

  ‘What about Joss?’

  Kate thought. ‘Poor Jossie. She’s used to me, and she’s nearly as impossible as I am herself. James will be thankful to see us go.’ She picked up the plates and moved towards the basement stairs.

  ‘Don’t you be so sure,’ Christine said. She followed Kate down to the kitchen, where the chef was changing his blue-and-white-checked working trousers for jeans. ‘Sleep on it, Kate, sleep on it. We’ll talk about it on Friday.’

  ‘She’s coming out with me, Friday,’ the chef said. ‘Aren’t you, Katie? Going for something young and virile.’

  ‘That rules you out then, Benjie.’

  ‘You should see me,’ the chef said, ‘when I gets going. I really gets going, Fridays.’ He zipped up his jeans and reached for his leather jacket. ‘Bloody women. It’s you what drives me into the arms of other blokes, you know. It’s you bloody women.’ He stopped to give Kate a garlic-breathed kiss. ‘Ta-ra.’ The basement door slammed behind him.

  An hour later, Kate followed him up the steps to the street. She and Christine had cleared up and laid the tables for the evening almost in silence, only speaking briefly about Christine’s son, Justin, who might be good enough to get into the junior team to fence for Oxfordshire. When Kate finally took off her apron and put on her jacket, Christine said, ‘Now you think seriously and we’ll talk again on Friday,’ and Kate said, ‘You’re a real friend.’ Christine had smiled and said, ‘The sisterhood,’ and they’d laughed. Then Kate climbed up the basement steps to the street, and sniffed the February dusk, and felt a sudden small lightness of heart, as if a burden was slipping from her.

  ‘Excuse me,’ someone said.

  Kate turned. It was a male someone.

  ‘I didn’t mean to frighten you, but I’ve been waiting. For you, I mean. I couldn’t get the hang of the days you worked here, so I’ve done a lot of loitering about, and it was always that other girl, the blonde—’