The Men and the Girls

by Joanna Trollope

  ‘’Course—’ Hugh said.

  ‘Bye, then—’

  ‘Bye,’ Hugh said, still smiling. ‘Bye.’

  Then he went out into the corridor and Kevin McKinley’s office door was shut behind him so quickly that it almost caught his heel.

  Eleven

  Kate had asked Joss to meet her after school in the covered market. She had chosen the market because it was only two minutes from the restaurant and because it was busy. After her last telephone call to Joss, some instinct had told her that to meet in a busy place would be better for both of them. Also, Kate had something she wished to say to Joss. She intended to suggest that Joss come to Osney at once, that they abandon the farce of Kate and Joss living apart, now that Joss had made her statement of independence, and had had it honoured for two months.

  She had said she would meet Joss by the hot little shop that baked huge American cookies on the spot, which you could carry away, warm and scented in an excitingly unEnglish kind of paper bag. Joss was late. Kate put her hands in her trouser pockets, and leaned against a blind wall of the cookie shop, and watched the people throng past, the local people buying cabbages and pounds of sausages, and the tourists, drifting in the mildly, aimlessly inquisitive way peculiar to all tourists. Everybody was carrying something, bags and cameras and plastic carriers and folded mackintoshes and babies and books and newspapers and paper cones of flowers and . . .

  ‘Hi,’ said Joss. She too was burdened. Over her shoulder was slung her black school sack, and in one hand she held a plastic bag out of which protruded the bright leaves of a head of celery, and the end of a cucumber. Joss was wearing a pink sweatshirt which startled Kate as much as if Joss had been naked. She let Kate kiss her.

  ‘What’s all that?’ Kate said, indicating the vegetables.

  ‘Celery,’ Joss said, ‘a cucumber.’

  Kate gave her a broad, deliberate smile. ‘I can see that. I mean, why are you carrying it?’

  ‘Why not?’ Joss said. ‘James can’t do all the shopping and Uncle Leonard’s so rude to Mr Patel we can’t let him go in there.’

  Kate remembered Mr Patel’s perfect courtesy with a sudden pang.

  ‘Tea?’ she said to Joss.

  ‘OK,’ Joss said, ‘but I can’t be long.’

  ‘Nor can I—’

  Joss looked at her. ‘Well, that’s all right then.’

  Across the tiny, plastic-topped table in the café, Kate said, ‘You look different.’

  ‘No, I don’t—’

  ‘Yes, you do. Brighter, somehow.’

  ‘Thanks a million!’

  ‘It’s nice to see you in pink.’

  Joss plucked at her sweatshirt with scorn. ‘It’s Angie’s. We did a swap.’

  ‘Angie? I don’t know Angie—’

  Joss took a messy bite of bun and said through the crumbs and sugar, ‘She’s at school.’

  ‘New?’

  ‘Nope.’

  Kate leaned forward. ‘What’s she like?’

  ‘She’s OK.’

  ‘Joss.’

  ‘I told you,’ Joss said, sucking her fingers, ‘she’s at school, she’s OK, she swapped this sweatshirt.’ She paused, then she added, ‘She’s coming to supper. She’s a veggie.’

  ‘She’s coming to supper! At Richmond Villa!’

  Joss stared. ‘Why not?’

  ‘You never brought anyone home—’

  ‘Well, Angie’s coming.’

  Kate said bravely, ‘What on earth will Uncle Leonard say to a vegetarian?’

  ‘Oh,’ Joss said dismissively, ‘you don’t want to take any notice of him.’

  ‘Joss,’ Kate said. ‘Joss, I want to ask you something, suggest something.’

  Joss looked wary.

  ‘It’s about you and me.’

  Joss ducked her head. ‘Don’t get heavy—’

  ‘It’s not heavy, but it’s serious.’

  ‘That’s heavy,’ Joss said, pushing back her metal chair.

  ‘Please—’

  ‘Leave it, Mum,’ Joss said, ‘just leave it.’ She stood up and began to gather up her burdens.

  ‘Joss, you must listen to me.’

  ‘No, I mustn’t. I got to go. Honest.’

  ‘Don’t you miss me?’

  Joss looked appalled. ‘I said, don’t get heavy—’

  ‘I don’t know what’s going on any more,’ Kate cried. ‘I don’t know what you’re doing, who you’re seeing! What about Garth?’

  ‘Garth?’ Joss said, almost sneering.

  ‘Yes, yes, are you still seeing Garth?’

  ‘Not him,’ Joss said, ‘I wouldn’t see him.’ She shouldered her sack.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Can’t remember,’ Joss said. She stopped to brush her face against Kate’s in the echo of a kiss, and her bag crashed against the table.

  ‘Careful—’

  ‘See you Mum,’ Joss said. ‘Take care.’ Then she was gone.

  ‘He wants to see you,’ the secretary said.

  ‘Are you sure? Are you sure it isn’t my husband he wants, my husband Hugh?’

  ‘No,’ the secretary said. Her eyes ran over Julia’s clothes as if she were labelling and pricing every garment. ‘He said he’d be grateful if you’d spare him ten minutes before lunch. Twelve-thirty, he said.’

  ‘Of course.’

  There was a little pause. The secretary, who had come down to Julia’s office rather than telephone on the off-chance of seeing Rob Shiner, on whom she had her eye, waited to be thanked. All Julia did was smile. Snotty cow, thought the secretary, and went out. Rob Shiner’s office door stood open, but he was not inside. Who cares, the secretary said to herself, who bloody cares? Not me. She walked slowly back to the lift. Julia dialled Hugh at home.

  ‘He’s sent for me!’

  ‘Kevin?’

  ‘Yes. At lunchtime! He actually sent his secretary down to ask me to go up and see him before lunch!’

  Hugh blew kisses down the telephone. ‘Hold on to your hat, my darling!’

  Kevin McKinley’s office had been redecorated, under Fanny’s eye, to suggest being both in power and in touch. It contained sleekly sculpted plywood furniture, magnificent black-and-gold curtains printed with a neo-classical design, and banks of telephones and computer screens. The only pictures were Francis Bacon prints. By the window, an immense weeping fig in a terracotta urn cast dappled shadows on the carpet.

  ‘Good to see you, Julia,’ Kevin said. He stood up behind his modern maplewood desk, and held his hand out to her. He was smiling. ‘I wanted to see you personally.’

  She inclined her head. The room made her feel elated and apprehensive all at once. She took his hand, and then the chair he indicated.

  ‘I’ve been talking to Rob Shiner. I hear good things.’

  Julia waited. She suddenly remembered sitting in her headmistress’s study at school when she had thought she was going to be made head girl and she hadn’t been, only deputy head. It had been a salutary lesson, and one that she had taken to heart. Kevin McKinley was going to say that he was pleased with the Night Life series, but that he didn’t want to over-egg the cake and therefore there wouldn’t . . .

  ‘I want to offer you a contract, Julia. Two years.’

  She gazed at him.

  ‘You don’t look very thrilled.’

  ‘Oh, I am, I am—’

  ‘I want more documentary stuff, you see, and from a nineties angle, a softer, more serious approach. You fit the bill.’

  ‘I’m delighted, absolutely delighted—’

  He gave her part of a smile. ‘So glad.’ There was a little pause, and then he said, ‘We can’t renew Hugh’s contract, you see. On account of his age. But at least this way, it keeps it in the family. Don’t you think?’

  Hugh was very quiet but Julia didn’t think he was asleep. As for herself, she felt sleep was for ever out of the question. There simply couldn’t, ever, have been a more terrible evening for any coupl
e anywhere, not because of quarrelling, but because of agony. It was an agony that had begun in Kevin McKinley’s office and had grown as Julia drove home and then had grown and grown still further all evening until it had landed them in bed, silent, separate, and wretched.

  ‘Shall I refuse it?’ Julia had said. ‘Shall I turn it down?’

  Hugh shook his head. ‘What good would that do? He’d never hand it to me instead. It’s you or nothing. You go for it, sweetheart,’ he’d said, not looking at her. ‘You go for it.’

  Once, Julia had believed that she would be able to go for it, when she had to, and that she would firmly, kindly, make it plain to Hugh that he had to accept it. She remembered sitting by the Aga, and planning the future calmly and sensibly to herself. She couldn’t do that now, not because she had lost her sensibleness, but because she hadn’t taken into account how she would feel to see Hugh crushed. She felt so badly, so keenly, about it that she wasn’t sure she could bear it, but the one person she wanted to turn to in her pain – Hugh – was the one person she couldn’t turn to. He hadn’t shouted or sworn or cried or hit the bottle. He had even tried to eat his supper, and he had certainly tried to be generous.

  ‘I am proud of you.’

  ‘Don’t—’

  ‘Julia, I am. This is great news.’

  ‘Please—’

  ‘Every dog has his day.’

  In her turn, she had been as understanding as she knew how, as gentle and sympathetic as possible. It was no effort, because she felt it; she wanted to hold him and soothe him and admire him. But he hadn’t seemed to want that. He hadn’t touched her or let her touch him. He lit cigarette after cigarette and sat staring across the room. Julia had tried to analyse Kevin McKinley’s reasons for giving her the contract, to reassure Hugh that he was the victim of cockeyed malevolence and not a failure, but Hugh wouldn’t let her.

  ‘I mean, it’s mad, you got eleven million people watching and they haven’t even shown Night Life yet!’

  ‘Leave it, sweetie.’

  ‘I’m sure you can argue. Why don’t you ring Maurice, why don’t you—’

  ‘Julia,’ said Hugh, looking at her, ‘there is nothing to be done. This has been coming at me for years, and now it’s arrived.’

  ‘But you’ve still got your supermarkets. And that health club.’

  His face twitched. Was he smiling? ‘Yes. I’ve still got those.’

  ‘I love you,’ she said to him later, over and over. ‘It doesn’t matter what you do, I love you. And I need you. I can’t manage without you. When I thought the twins were lost, my first instinct was to telephone you—’

  ‘Shh,’ Hugh said, not unkindly.

  ‘Nothing need be different between us, nothing can touch that.’

  He looked at her. His glance was quite affectionate but also a little appraising. She felt suddenly young, young and uncertain and a trifle silly. She put a hand out to him. ‘Hugh?’

  He took her hand and kissed it lightly. Then he gave it back to her and stood up. ‘I’m going to look at the twins.’

  ‘I’ll come—’

  ‘No. No, I’ll go alone.’

  He went upstairs and she sat and looked at the full ashtray by his chair, at the dented cushion that had held him. She felt so full of love and pain for him that she could scarcely endure it. She got up and went out into the hall and looked up at the pretty cottage staircase. The twins’ door was open. She stood and waited for a long, long time and then Hugh came on to the landing and saw her, looking up.

  He said, gently, ‘Don’t watch me.’

  ‘But I’m worried—’

  ‘Don’t be. I’m fine.’

  She started up the stairs. ‘Of course you’re not, how could you be, Hugh, oh please—’

  He leaned down towards her. ‘I’m going to have a bath. Alone. I just need to be alone.’

  ‘Of course,’ she said, thankful to be able to do something he wanted, even if it was to stay away from him.

  He went into their bathroom and locked the door. Julia climbed the remaining half of the stairs and went into the twins’ room. They lay as they always did, turned towards one another, and Edward had thrown off his duvet so that Julia could see he was wearing mismatched pyjama tops and bottoms. She found she didn’t care; she couldn’t help noticing, but she had no urge to go and find the missing co-ordinating half. She knelt on the floor between the beds.

  ‘Poor Daddy,’ she said in a whisper to the sleeping boys. ‘Poor darling Daddy.’

  Hugh was in the bathroom for almost half an hour, and when he came out he went straight to bed. Julia followed him, to ask him if he would like some tea, or some whisky, but he smiled and shook his head, and slid down under the sheet, turning off his bedside lamp in a way that made it plain he still wanted to be alone. So she had locked up the house, leaving the back door unbolted for Sandy, and plumped cushions, and swept crumbs off surfaces, and switched off lights, and had then gone to have a bath herself.

  She wondered if it would help to have a tremendous cry in the bath, to sob and wail in the steam and the privacy; but she found she couldn’t cry, she couldn’t even let go sufficiently for that. She washed conscientiously and cleaned her face and brushed her teeth and hair hoping for the small comfort of ritual, because it was quite beyond her previous experience to feel so desperate. She found a clean nightie and pulled it over her head, then she went through to their bedroom, and very quietly slipped into bed beside Hugh. She put a hand out to touch him, tentatively. He didn’t move.

  ‘Hugh,’ Julia said, so softly it was hardly a whisper. Silence. She reached out to her bedside light and turned it off, and then she lay there, beside him, and felt his suffering and her own to be like two identical magnetic fields, repulsing one another.

  They were often in the kitchen now, when Joss got back from school, and sometimes Miss Bachelor had made sandwiches, or brought some really dull biscuits, like petit beurre or Marie. It was, Joss thought, a bit like having grandparents waiting for you, except that average grandparents, from what she gathered, didn’t grill you about the precise academic content of lessons or tell you that you were certifiably stupid. Joss didn’t want tea – or rather she didn’t want their kind of tea – but she discovered that she quite liked finding them there, messing about with cups and saucers and jars of horrible fish paste.

  ‘You never used to come down,’ Joss said to Leonard. He had made James buy him a yellow knitted waistcoat – ‘For the sodding spring, you fool’ – and had spilled soup down it the very first day, and, as nobody knew how to wash the soup off, they left it there.

  ‘I never came down because there was never anybody bloody in.’

  Miss Bachelor came most days. She had taken to cleaning the brass door-handles and to pruning and weeding the garden and to opening the door to James’s pupils, who were terrified of her. While she was in the house, Leonard sat at the kitchen table, or, on fine days, on a kitchen chair just outside the back door, and argued with her. She tried to give him small tasks to do, but he was resistant to doing anything helpful unless it was on his own terms. He preferred to watch her weeding the narrow borders, kneeling on a folded towel to protect her knees, and shout insults at her. One day he went too far and said she had an arse like a camel, and she went home for three days. He missed her. He was so abusive about her that in the end Joss realized what was the matter and went round to Cardigan Street.

  ‘Is she coming?’ James asked when Joss got back.

  ‘She said never again.’

  ‘I see,’ said James, ‘so she’ll be here tomorrow.’

  Hugh had given them a video of Is the Choice Yours? and Leonard wanted to watch it, over and over. Beatrice refused.

  ‘I know what I think, I know what I said and I have neither wish nor need to remind myself of either.’

  Joss agreed with her. She thought the programme creepy, as well as boring. She’d watched it with James because he wanted to watch it and she had felt obliging –
no, more than obliging really, almost affectionate, as if she wanted to sit next to him and be with him whatever he was watching. She found she agreed with a lot of what Beatrice said, even if she would never have dreamed of admitting it.

  ‘Look at you,’ Leonard said to her one day, ‘just look at you. What a bloody mess. What a scruffy sight. ‘Course, can’t blame you, I suppose, poor sodding child. Broken home and all that. Nowhere to identify with.’

  ‘Rubbish,’ said Miss Bachelor, who was doing the newspaper crossword. Leonard could scarcely bear the fact that she did it so much faster than he did.

  Joss, eating a bowl of chocolate-flavoured cereal while propped against the fridge in her usual semi-slouch, waited for more. Leonard leaned towards Beatrice.

  ‘Not rubbish. What’ll she think of her mother when she grows up? Or her useless father? Or James? What notion of home life has she got? No wonder she’s got no sense and no manners.’

  Beatrice filled in seven-down. ‘She has sense and she’s learning manners. As for a home—’ She raised her head and looked at Joss. ‘Children make their own homes.’

  Leonard snorted. Joss stopped chewing.

  ‘She was at home in the womb, and she had to leave. I expect she was at home in her pram, and she had to leave that too. I imagine her home now is her room here, and her school, and as she gets older she will make homes all along the line. Society will be her home.’

  Joss thought about this. Leonard said, ‘Her home ought to be with her mother.’

  ‘Ought?’

  ‘It’s only bloody natural—’

  ‘What do you think?’ Miss Bachelor said, turning to Joss.

  Joss was embarrassed. ‘I don’t want to say—’

  ‘Of course you don’t. Why should you? One’s sense of home is rightly private. I have no doubt your mother could tell you that.’

  ‘My mother—’

  ‘I am sorry,’ Miss Bachelor said, ‘that I haven’t met your mother.’

  ‘You haven’t—’

  ‘No. I have never met your mother.’

  ‘She’s a good woman,’ Leonard said unexpectedly.

  They both stared at him. He looked suddenly very sad. He caught them looking. Joss waited for him to shout at them, but he didn’t, he just sat there, looking. Then Beatrice picked up the crossword again, and Joss went to the larder to find potatoes to scrub and bake for supper.