All the women in the kitchen had stopped stirring things and hissing at their children. Everyone was looking at Julia and Helen.
‘Television,’ someone said. All the eyes that had been examining her clothes were now fixed on her face, and her smile hid a lurch of inward panic – and pity – at the contrast between the children in the kitchen and George and Edward, safely and cosily at their irreproachable nursery school’s Easter party.
‘The aim of the programme,’ Julia said as gently as she could, ‘is to look at all sorts of lives that go on when more conventional lives have gone home from work and consider everything finished until the morning.’
There was some laughter at this.
‘Never bloody stops here.’
‘You want to come and film bathtime?’
‘It’s when the telephone begins, after six—’
‘Would you pay us?’ Helen said, regarding Julia. ‘We have no income here. We can’t afford to do anything for free, even though we’d like the publicity.’
Julia opened her mouth to say that such a decision was the producer’s, and said, ‘Of course,’ instead.
‘OK,’ Helen said. She gestured at the women standing round them. ‘Let’s talk. Let’s discuss it.’
Much later, Helen walked Julia out to her car. Her opinion had shifted a little while listening to Julia, away from feeling that Julia was a kind of undercover policewoman, and towards an appreciation of Julia’s usefulness to the refuge.
‘You said you know Kate,’ Helen said now.
‘Yes,’ Julia said, ‘our husbands are lifelong friends.’
Helen eyed her. If anything, she looked even younger than Kate, though this could be accounted for by her childlike colouring.
‘Another one—’
‘Sorry?’
‘Another child bride.’
Julia took her car keys out of her bag. To her mind, Hugh bore no resemblance to James and their mutual age was merely coincidental. James, after all, hadn’t taken any care of himself for years, and it showed.
‘What an impertinent and uncalled-for remark.’
‘Is it?’ Helen said, unperturbed.
Julia put the car key into the driver’s door, and turned it. This Helen person, so big and bohemian and sure of herself, was just the kind of woman Kate wouldn’t mind, might even like. Julia swallowed. Perhaps you couldn’t do a splendid thing like run Mansfield House if you weren’t pushy and three-cornered. She gave Helen the best smile she could manage.
‘I’ll be in touch to firm up dates,’ she said, across the roof of the car.
‘And the money,’ Helen said.
She watched Julia drive away. Interesting. What was it that made some women choose men old enough to be their fathers? Was it, Helen wondered, climbing the steps back to Mansfield House front door, could it be that women like Kate, like this Julia Hunter, hoped that by so doing they could always think of themselves as girls?
Julia collected the twins from their party. They were scarlet with over-excitement, their shirts had come untucked in an unaesthetic frilly manner and they were clutching party bags adorned with Easter rabbits with daffodil-yellow fur and sticking-out teeth.
‘Pow!’ George yelled at the sight of Julia.
‘I do hope they’ve been good,’ she said anxiously to Frederica MacBride, who ran the nursery school. ‘Perfectly,’ said Frederica, who said that to all the mothers in order to emphasize that no child ever misbehaved with her. Julia knelt to tuck in Edward’s shirt while he jiggled up and down and biffed her lightly on the head with his party bag.
‘Enough,’ Julia said quietly, looking at him.
He gave a loud sigh, and let his party bag fall to his side.
‘Pow!’ shouted George again, rushing up. Julia looked at him too, and so did Edward. ‘Pow,’ said George in a smaller voice, and then, in a whisper, ‘Pow.’
On the way home, Julia asked them what they had done at the party and what they had eaten. They said they’d had sausages and cake and played musical cushions and had an Easter egg hunt. She asked them if they’d had a nice time and they said yes. Then she asked them a whole lot of other things and they said yes, yes, yes to her, because they were really preoccupied with taking off their trousers and their pants, impeded both by their child-safety belts, and by keeping their four round blue eyes fixed on the driving mirror in order to meet Julia’s if she glanced at them. When they arrived at Church Cottage, they were haphazardly dressed again, and strangely serene. Julia unbuckled them from their seat belts and they stampeded into the house, to find Hugh in the kitchen, roaming about at the end of the telephone cable, and laughing and talking into the receiver. He was wearing jeans, and a pink shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and he was smoking and his hair was ruffled, and Julia coming in and seeing him so confident and happy felt a rush of love for him and, in addition, that pleasurable internal sinking that heralded a hope he would think of making love to her.
Hugh fielded the twins inadequately with one hand. ‘Must fly, the team’s home. Sure, sure. Wonderful. Ready to roll, then? Good to hear you. Ciao.’ He put the telephone down and scooped up the boys.
‘Don’t burn me!’ Edward shouted, squirming theatrically away from Hugh’s cigarette.
‘I will if I like,’ Hugh said, kissing him. ‘I’ll do anything I like. I’m the father.’
He glanced at Julia. Her shy, excited expression was unmistakable. He came across the kitchen to her, still holding the twins, and bent forward to kiss her.
‘Anything I like?’
She coloured and laughed.
‘Oh Hugh—’
‘Had a good day?’ he said, his face still close.
‘Oh yes. Kate’s refuge has agreed to be filmed. It’s run by a terrifying woman, one of those bossy independent women who think men are pathetic, but it’ll make wonderful television.’
‘Did you talk to her about Kate?’
‘Down,’ Edward said firmly. He slithered out of Hugh’s grasp to the floor.
‘Me too,’ George said, following.
‘No, I didn’t. Should I have?’
‘James is very worried. Kate seems miserable. She’s withdrawn.’
‘Oh dear,’ Julia said, but she wasn’t thinking about Kate. ‘Was – was that a good call?’
‘It was. It was the final budget assessment for the programme. Well within limits.’
‘Oh good—’
Hugh leaned across to the table and stubbed out his cigarette in an ashtray painted with a blue cockerel, that they had bought on holiday in Portugal. Then he took off Julia’s glasses and put his arms round her.
‘Am I right,’ he said into her hair, ‘in thinking that you aren’t listening to a word I’m saying?’
She gave a tiny giggle.
‘Because you are, aren’t you, simply calculating how long it will take you to get the twins to bed, so that—’ His hands moved down her back to her bottom.
‘Stop it,’ she said happily, wriggling.
He pushed his fingers between her legs. ‘So that I can get you to bed and fuck the hell out of you?’
‘What?’ said George.
‘Fuck the hell out of Mummy,’ Hugh said, more conversationally.
‘Hugh!’ Julia said, enchanted and scandalized.
‘I can see Mummy’s pants,’ George said.
‘Can you?’ said Edward, hurrying over.
They looked.
‘Black ones,’ Edward said to George.
Julia wrenched herself free and tugged her skirt down. She was flushed and laughing.
Hugh looked down at himself. He grinned. He looked back at Julia.
‘Come on,’ he said, ‘these boys are going to have the century’s fastest bathtime. At least bathing children is something I can do perfectly well bent double.’
Joss lay on her bed in the early spring dusk. She thought that, for the very first time in her life, she might very nearly be the least little bit happy. As this was not a s
ensation she was either used to, or had trained herself to admire (it being much more cool to be depressed), she was not quite sure what to do with it, so she was lying on her bed in the dim room, without music, for once, just doing a little savouring.
The weird thing, the really bizarre, weird thing, was that the beginning, the first cause of this wonderful feeling, lay with Miss Bachelor. If it hadn’t been for Miss Bachelor, Garth would never have noticed Joss and Joss would not now be lying on her bed vowing not to bite her nails again and conjuring up his face in the dusky air. There she’d been, taking Miss Bachelor and her usual awful shopping home, when what she’d always dreaded had happened, and someone from school had suddenly appeared, out of the delicatessen in Albert Street, and what’s more, it was that new American boy from the first-year sixth, that really cool boy who looked like Tom Cruise. Joss had wanted to die. She’d wanted to murder Miss Bachelor and then just die, shrivel up and simply disappear down one of the drain grids in the gutter.
Garth had brought a French loaf from the deli. He’d got it propped against one shoulder, like a rifle. For a second, Joss thought he wouldn’t see them and, if he did, he’d never recognize her because she was just one of the fourth year and looked gross anyway, she knew it, just gross. But he’d stopped in front of them, and smiled his beautiful, wide, white American smile and said, ‘Hi, there.’
Joss had gone purple. She could think of nothing except that she was holding this bloody basket with the lavatory paper and the biscuits and the tins of soup and that Miss Bachelor was wearing her belted brown overcoat which made Joss die of shame just to walk beside.
‘How do you do?’ Miss Bachelor said.
Garth’s smile was still there. ‘I’m just fine,’ he said. ‘Can I help carry that basket?’
He gave ‘basket’ a short ‘a’. Joss was ready to faint. He said, to Miss Bachelor, ‘We’re at school together. My name is Garth Acheson.’
Miss Bachelor looked at Joss.
‘Josephine?’
Joss whispered, ‘I c’n manage—’
‘You sure?’ Garth said.
‘It’s most kind of you,’ Miss Bachelor said, looking penetratingly at Joss, ‘but I think Joss can totter as far as my front door. She has, after all, often done it.’
Garth held out his hand. ‘Pleased to meet you, then, ma’am.’ He bent a little towards Joss. ‘See you tomorrow, Joss.’
Her name! He’d said her name!
‘You have the manners of an alley cat,’ Miss Bachelor said, when he’d gone. ‘And a very gauche alley cat at that.’
Joss didn’t care. She went home that night in a daze, a daze which turned to a waking dream the next day when Garth approached her coming out of the dining-hall and said he thought she was great to help that old lady.
‘I liked that,’ he said, ‘I really liked that.’
She ventured the smallest glance up at him. He blazed above her like a god.
‘I like your stud,’ he said, ‘I really go for it. When you see a girl with a nose stud, you know you’ve got a really funky babe on your hands.’
Joss said, ‘They hate it at home.’
‘Of course they do,’ he said. He paused. He gave her a long look. Then, ‘You’re cute,’ he said, and asked her to go to the movies with him.
‘OK,’ she said, in a voice tight with joy.
Now, lying on her bed, the prospect of the cinema hung before her like the gates to paradise. He was sixteen. Sixteen! He’d been at the school since September and he hadn’t asked anyone out, except Sue Fingall, and everyone asked Sue Fingall out as a matter of course, she was so stunning, so it hardly counted. Now he had asked her, Joss Bain, and, if she hadn’t been so entirely convinced of her physical repulsiveness, she would have been able to be sure she was happy. As it was, she had just this evening to look forward to, this one evening before he discovered how boring she was, as well as repulsive, and inevitably decided not to have anything more to do with her. Joss turned on her side and felt under the bed for her cuttings box. She dragged it out on to the rug, and pulled out the photographs that lay on top, two of them, cut from magazines printed on laminated paper. She looked at the girls in the photographs. They had long, shining hair and firm flexible bodies in tiny, clinging clothes. Joss sighed. Her own body was only to be borne if shrouded in layers of ragged black, shirts and T-shirts piled on in gloomy, holey layers until, as Uncle Leonard said, she resembled a bag lady. Panic gripped her. She dropped the photographs. The one and only evening of her entire life was twenty-four hours away, and what was she going to wear?
Next door, Leonard sat and wondered at her silence. She had come in to see him, after school, and they had quarrelled mildly over the last chocolate biscuit in his tin – ‘You ought to give it to me because I’m your guest.’ ‘You aren’t a guest, you’re an infestation’ – and he thought she had looked very, very slightly pretty. Nobody, of course, could look even half-way pretty with hair like a nailbrush, and a scowl and navvy’s boots, but none the less Joss had looked a little better than usual to Leonard. He’d even said so, and she had raised to him a glance of unquestionable happiness, a dreamy glance, full of light.
Was she smoking something? He shouldn’t wonder. Kate was so absent-minded these days, Joss might as well not have a mother, for all the use Kate was. Leonard fretted about it, just as he fretted about running out of denture powder with no-one in the house to send out for more, or about the time, soon coming, he feared, when his gaunt old arms simply would not pull the rest of his gaunt old self out of the bath any longer. The only thing at the moment that diverted him from fretting was the television programme. It was fascinating, he hadn’t been as interested in anything for years; he couldn’t remember, either, when anyone had been as interested in him, in what he thought, in what he had to say.
That Hunter chap, friend of James, had been here for hours already, with a camera and all the paraphernalia and a crew (that’s where all the chocolate biscuits had gone), and before that, there’d been all the discussions with Beatrice and with James, and a few lovely rows about God, whom Beatrice had no time for but who Leonard suspected was probably lurking about somewhere, built into the fabric of things, like cricket and the rule of law, a sort of institution. They’d had one quarrel on camera. Beatrice had wanted it cut afterwards, but Hugh had talked her round.
‘You’re naturals,’ he kept saying to them, ‘absolute naturals.’
Hugh was talking to a doctor, too, and several people Beatrice had put him on to. They’d had surprisingly little trouble getting people to agree, not even the old people’s homes where they were going to do the opening shots, all those poor old vegetables just sitting there, smelling of pee and staring at the telly with their mouths open and no teeth in. Leonard shuddered.
‘I’ll take the poisoned umbrella any time,’ he’d told the camera. ‘Stuff the medics. Whose sodding life is it anyway?’
‘Have you ever been close to death?’ Hugh asked him. ‘Have you ever been in an accident? Or the War?’
Leonard bared his teeth at him. ‘The closest I’ve ever been to death is now. And I’ll tell you something. I don’t mind the look of it as long as I’m allowed to pull my own plug.’
‘Do you really mean that?’ Hugh said, off camera.
Leonard looked away. He had fallen in love with his screen personality. ‘Mean what I say,’ he mumbled.
Then there had been the lawyers. Beatrice had been amazing, no other word for it, quoted Section 2 of the 1961 Suicide Act at them and said that, even if she was now prosecuted, the most she’d get was a suspended sentence because she’d helped her brother at his own request.
‘I’m not encouraging anyone to commit suicide,’ she’d said, ‘I’m simply putting the case for euthanasia.’
Once, she told Leonard privately, the Voluntary Euthanasia Society ran a helpline for would-be suicides. They sent a man round with a plastic bag and a box of pills. Leonard’s eyes had bulged. Hugh didn’t want that
put in the programme.
‘We can be as controversial as we like, but we mustn’t commit an offence. Any mention of methods might be an offence.’
Leonard got up from his chair and crept to the wall that divided his room from Joss’s. He pressed his ear to it. No sound.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ James said from the doorway.
Leonard jumped.
‘Why are you spying on Joss?’
‘She’s so bloody quiet. Can’t hear that infernal music.’
‘You ought to be thankful.’
Leonard straightened up. He looked at James.
‘Where’s Kate?’
‘Why,’ said James tiredly, ‘why do you always ask that?’
‘Where is she?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Whisky?’ Leonard said.
‘I’m drinking too much—’
Leonard limped over to his clutch of bottles.
‘Medicinal.’
‘Temporarily, I suppose.’
‘What’ve you come up for?’
‘I don’t really know,’ James said. ‘It just felt rather empty downstairs. That’s all.’
Leonard handed James a tumbler.
‘Bloody madhouse,’ he said. ‘Kate never in, Joss gone dead quiet, you like a wet week. What’s the matter?’
‘With me?’
‘No.’
‘Who, then—’
Leonard sat down in his comfortless chair and looked at James fixedly.
‘I see,’ James said. ‘You mean, what’s the matter with Kate.’
Leonard waited. James swirled his whisky round and round its glass for a little, and then he said carefully, ‘The matter with Kate, Leonard, is that I have suddenly become too old for her, and she doesn’t know how to tell me.’
Eight
The two rooms Kate had found in Swan Street were strictly speaking a room and a half. They looked north, along the gardens by the canal, and the smaller one, the cupboard-sized one that Kate had set aside, in her mind, for Joss, had only a slice of window, cut off by a partition wall. Because there was only space enough in this second room for a bed and a chair, Mr Winthrop downstairs, who owned the house, said he would only charge Kate forty-five pounds a week, exclusive of services, for both.
The Men and the Girls Page 11