‘Good evening, sir,’ Garth Acheson said to James.
James had come out of Mr Patel’s shop with a box of groceries. He gave Garth a nod. Garth was wearing an American baseball jacket and very clean jeans and an expression of imperfect confidence.
‘May I help you with that?’
‘No thank you,’ James said. The sheer healthiness of Garth Acheson’s face seemed to him a mark of insensitivity.
‘Sir,’ Garth said, ‘may I come round and see Joss?’
‘I shouldn’t think so,’ James said.
‘You wouldn’t wish it?’
‘I think she wouldn’t wish it.’
‘I’m really sorry,’ Garth said. His shoulders sagged a little. ‘I never meant—’
‘Don’t bleat,’ James said crossly, interrupting him. ‘You can’t inflict a hurt and then whine because the consequences are disagreeable.’
‘She’s a great kid.’
‘I know. Now, if you would excuse me, I’m going home.’
He set off down Walton Street. Garth ran after him for a pace or two.
‘Would you give her – would you tell her you’ve seen me?’
‘I saw Garth,’ James said to Joss while they unpacked the groceries.
Her head went up. ‘What did he say?’
‘He wants to come and see you.’
‘Wow.’
‘Do you want him to come?’
Joss stared down at the bag of carrots in her hand. ‘No. But I don’t mind him wanting to.’
James reached across the kitchen table and ruffled her hair. ‘That’s my girl.’
Joss tried to duck his hand. ‘Geroff,’ she said.
It was Sandy’s day off. Julia sat on the playroom floor while the twins climbed over her aimlessly and whined. They had whined a good deal recently, and clung to her legs and done ludicrously babyish things like wanting a spoon to eat with, or failing to get to the lavatory in time, when they had been perfectly trained to forks and the lavatory for well over a year. Though as gleaming clean as usual, they didn’t somehow look as robust as they used to and their clothes, in Sandy’s care, had an air of being well-used, almost over-used, the fabrics faded and rubbed.
‘Don’t,’ Julia said tiredly, as Edward’s sandal buckle caught her leg. ‘Please be careful.’
Edward dragged himself across her, and lay with his thumb in across her knees, pressing them painfully to the floor. George began to crawl up her shins and across Edward.
‘Hurts,’ Edward said, on a long, drawn-out grizzle.
‘Doesn’t,’ George said at once.
‘Does, does, hurts, Mummy, hurts, Mummy—’
‘Shh,’ Julia said. She pushed George away and lifted Edward off her legs and on to the floor. Then she scrambled up and sat on the sofa where, on happier days, she nestled with the twins for a story. They crawled inexorably after her, gurning.
‘Stop it,’ Julia said suddenly, furiously. ‘Leave me alone. Just stop it.’
They halted, briefly. Then Edward began again, and Julia burst into tears.
‘Don’t!’ George said in panic. He lunged at her, his own mouth trembling dangerously.
She gave herself a shake and sniffed loudly. ‘Sorry, darlings, sorry—’ They regarded her apprehensively. ‘I’m a bit tired, Mummy’s rather tired. That’s all.’ She blinked down at them and managed a hopeless smile.
‘Not cry,’ George said uncertainly.
‘No, of course not. Silly Mummy.’
They looked relieved. ‘Silly Mummy!’
Julia stood up. ‘Let’s go and find some tea, shall we? Shall we make toast?’
The telephone rang. Julia flew. It might be Hugh, it must be Hugh, having finished opening his supermarket, ringing to say it had been terrific and he was on his way home . . .
‘Mrs Hunter?’
‘Yes—’
‘Julia, it’s Vivienne Penniman here.’
‘Oh,’ Julia said, smiling into the receiver, ‘how nice. How are you?’
‘Well, thank you,’ Vivienne said. ‘I wonder if I could speak to Hugh?’
‘I’m afraid he isn’t back yet. He went to Coventry, to that—’
‘I know,’ Vivienne said. Her voice was not particularly friendly. ‘The supermarket has just telephoned me. That’s why I was ringing Hugh.’
‘Is he all right?’ Julia said in sudden panic.
There was a tiny pause, then, ‘There’s nothing to worry about, dear,’ Vivienne said, much more cosily, ‘just some little administrative hitch. Could you get him to call me, when he gets in?’
‘Of course.’
She put the receiver down. The twins were dragging chairs across the kitchen towards the cupboards on which stood the bread bin, and the toaster.
‘Don’t touch the bread knife—’
The chairs collided and crashed and there was a shriek as George caught his fingers between them.
‘Ow, ow, ow, ow—’
Edward tried to move the chairs apart and moved them the wrong way. George gave a piercing scream. Julia fled round the table, and, as she did so, heard through the wails the slow crunch of tyres on the gravel. Hugh was home, thank God, thank—
‘Bleeding!’ screamed George.
‘No, it isn’t, darling, it’s just bruised, poor fingers, just bruised. We’ll put them in hot water and it’ll make it better—’
‘Not me!’ Edward wailed. ‘It wasn’t me!’
‘I know it wasn’t, darling, I know it was a mistake.’
The back door opened slowly. They all turned in relief. Hugh stood there, supported as if he were an invalid, by the driver who had taken him to Coventry, and from their attitudes and expressions it was immediately plain that Hugh was not ill, but hopelessly drunk.
Twelve
‘Shh,’ said Benjie. He sat on a kitchen stool and held his head.
‘What’s the matter now?’ Kate said. She had an exasperated affection for Benjie on account of a clumsy innocence that his wayward ways could never quite dispel, but his constant preoccupation with himself was very trying.
‘Went out on the piss,’ Benjie said.
‘Oh, not again. Why are you so stupid?’
‘It was me birthday. You never remember me birthday—’
‘I didn’t know it was your birthday. And why get drunk on your birthday?’
He looked offended. ‘I always get drunk on me birthday.’
‘More fool you.’
He gazed past her at the wide stainless-steel mouth of the pizza oven. ‘Tequila slammers,’ he said dreamily.
‘What?’
‘You put in the tequila and then you add the lemonade and then you slam it down on the bar and you have to drink it all quick before it fizzes right over. I had dozens. Dozens and dozens and dozens.’ His eye swung slowly away from the oven and took in Kate. ‘You’d love a tequila slammer.’
‘What does it taste like?’
‘Dunno. Can’t remember. Hey,’ he said, his blurred gaze suddenly focusing, ‘you don’t look up to much.’
Kate was refilling the wooden pepper-grinders. Her hands didn’t seem very steady and stray peppercorns kept bouncing off the sides of the mills and pattering down on to the counters and the floor. ‘I’m OK. I just didn’t sleep very well.’
‘Trouble with lover boy?’ Benjie said, for whom trouble always came in the form of booze or lover boys.
‘No,’ Kate said, though this was not strictly true. Mark was busy being offended at the moment, touchy and wounded, and Kate couldn’t give him the attention he wanted because of her other, greater, preoccupation which was Joss.
‘Money?’
‘Not really,’ Kate said. ‘I mean, I can’t not think about it, but it isn’t keeping me awake.’ She paused. There was no particular point in telling Benjie about Joss, since family life was as relevant to Benjie as life on Mars would have been; but there would be no harm either. And it would be nice to tell someone, someone who was not another woman
with, invariably, strong female views. She had begun on the subject of Joss with Helen, at the cinema, and Helen had been emphatic. ‘You must get legal help if you can’t retrieve Joss any other way. Tomorrow. Start tomorrow. Honestly, Kate, what’s the point of making a bid for freedom if you don’t use that freedom and act independent?’ Kate had attempted to explain that Joss’s wishes had to be taken into account, and that she, Kate, had, somehow, got wholly out of touch with James, but that had only made Helen angry. What was worse was that Kate understood her anger. Of course she was being pathetic and feeble, or, at least, of course that was how she seemed, but, equally strongly, she felt that she couldn’t, as Helen did, just march about all over other people’s lives instructing them as to what they should do and think. Helen and Kate had parted that evening with a technical friendliness that had no heart to it.
‘I asked my daughter to come and live with me,’ Kate said now, ‘and although she didn’t say so in so many words, she turned me down.’
Benjie drew a long breath in through his teeth. He got up, his hangover apparently forgotten, and began his practised chef’s ritual of assembling boards and pans and knives.
‘She still with James, then?’
‘Yes. I think—’ Kate stopped and then said sadly, ‘I think she likes it there now, I think—’ She stopped again.
‘How old is she?’
‘Fourteen.’
‘I expect,’ Benjie said, reaching for his rope of garlic, ‘she just wants to get up your nose. She says she likes it there just to aggravate you, give you a bit of grief.’
‘James is kind, you know.’
‘He’s old, though, i’n’t he?’
‘No,’ Kate said, without thinking. ‘He isn’t very old.’
‘I seen him,’ Benje said, chopping rapidly and minutely. ‘He’s got grey hair.’
‘Joss has known him since she was six.’
‘Yeah. But she’s known you since she was born. She’s just trying to get at you. I did it all the time, get at me mum. Now she’s gone, I wish I hadn’t, but when she was here I never gave over tormenting her. You want to call Joss’s bluff.’ He turned round from his board and gave Kate a direct look. ‘Don’t you take it, Katie. You go round there and have it out with both of them, face to face. Everybody needs their mum, whatever they say.’
The May sunshine lay like a blessing on the garden of Church Cottage. In the borders, planted by Julia, were bright clumps of colour, cushions of polyanthus and pansy, ranks of tulips, spikes of rosemary. Julia had planted the garden very deliberately as a cottage garden, referring to countless books. ‘Nothing too formal,’ she had said. ‘Nothing too sophisticated.’ Hugh had agreed, without really listening. He was not, and never had been, a gardening man. ‘Give me a nice terrace,’ he’d said, to tease Julia, ‘something you can dust rather than mow. Something with plenty of flat surfaces to park my drink on.’
He sat now in a sheltered corner, a straw hat tipped over his eyes, and looked at Julia’s garden. It was exceedingly pretty, as she was pretty, and its very prettiness was, to his present state of mind, a reproach. It lay before him, charming and innocent, exactly as she presented herself to him just now, understanding and forgiving, innocent of his folly yet an automatic and helpless victim of it. She had uttered no word of censure, not a syllable of criticism over his behaviour at Coventry, and had staunchly taken his side in the face of Vivienne Penniman’s furious condemnation. He had told her how they had reached Coventry early, and how he had told the driver he’d go to the Cathedral for an hour, but had not, and had gone to a pub instead, and drunk whisky steadily, and how the effect of the whisky hadn’t really hit him until he was at the supermarket when he had felt the full force of it, and of his anger and unbearable disappointment with Midland Television. ‘I did everything reprehensible,’ he told Julia, ‘except throw up. Everything.’ She had sat and listened, her eyes full of pity. Vivienne said later on the telephone that she doubted she could get Hugh more work immediately, and Julia’s eyes had filled with tears then, tears for Hugh. All that evening, all that night, and all the subsequent days and nights, she had been perfectly, utterly, sweet to him. Looking at her garden, sitting uselessly in his deck-chair. Hugh thought he couldn’t stand any more of her sweetness, he simply could not take it.
It was, he knew, a reflection of his own sense of guilt and shame. The better she behaved, the worse he felt he was behaving by comparison. She had never been as spontaneously loving to him as she had been recently, and he couldn’t lay his hand on his heart and say with any honesty that she was loving because he had become the shorn Samson. There was no triumph in her love, no sense of power or superiority; if anything, she seemed more dependent, more pliant, less sure of herself. In the face of this openly demonstrated love, this ideal, romantic-story love, it made him feel even more of a bastard to realize that he didn’t want this kind of perfect emotion just now, this absolutely beautiful behaviour. It was more than that, too. He felt that the beauty of her behaviour did him, obscurely, an injury, and then he was consumed with guilt for the glaring injustice of this feeling.
‘Mr Hunter!’
He raised the brim of his hat and turned his head. Sandy stood outside the open garden door, drying her hands on a tea towel and shouting. She always shouted, never came close enough to be able to say anything.
‘Yes?’
‘Telephone.’
He struggled up. Even the telephone seemed only a threat now, never a possible messenger of hope. He plodded tiredly into the sitting-room and picked up the receiver.
‘Hugh Hunter.’
‘Hugh, it’s Maurice—’
‘Maurice!’
‘I meant to ring a week ago but we’ve been so frightfully busy. I just wanted to congratulate Julia and say how sorry—’
‘That’s quite all right,’ Hugh said interrupting.
‘—absolutely not my wish, as you know, but of course I don’t have the executive power I’d like—’
‘I’m thrilled for Julia,’ Hugh said. ‘She deserves it. What does it matter which of us has it?’
‘Splendid,’ Maurice said, relieved. ‘I knew you’d understand. I told Kevin—’
‘He seemed to like Is the Choice Yours—’
‘Oh yes, absolutely, loved it—’
‘So I don’t quite see—’
There was a small pause. ‘Anno Domini, Hugh. Simply that. Me next.’ He gave a tiny laugh. ‘I’ll be joining the club in the autumn. What are your plans?’
‘Plans?’
‘Why don’t you get away for a bit?’ Maurice said. ‘Take a break.’
‘Julia’s so busy—’
Maurice, who had not shared a holiday with Zoë, by mutual consent, for nineteen years, said, ‘I didn’t mean with Julia. She’s too busy as you say, anyway. Why don’t you go off by yourself?’
‘I’m not very good company for myself just now,’ Hugh said, suddenly tired of pretending he was all right. His voice shook a little. Maurice heard the tremble and prepared to end the call.
‘Go and find a friend, then. That’s what friends are for. Find a friend and go off and make hay, get a new perspective. Trouble with this television world of ours is that you get so close to it you can’t see a damned thing. We’ll meet when you’re back, have a drink. Chin up, old boy. And my congratulations to your lovely wife.’
Hugh put down the receiver. He was shaking and felt cold and unsteady. The room was dim and cool, but through the windows he could see that bright and sunny garden, that heartless garden, heartless like all the world was, who didn’t know what it was like to be turfed out at sixty-one with the door barred against you.
‘Mr Hunter?’
He turned to the door. ‘Yes?’
‘I’m just off to collect the twins and then after lunch, Mrs Hunter said, would you mind them for a couple of hours while I go to Sainsbury’s?’
Kate stood on the doorstep of Richmond Villa and rang the bell. James had tried
to make her keep a key but she had refused, feeling it was not proper, as she was closing the Richmond Villa chapter of her life. When she had telephoned to say she would like to come and see him, James had sounded startled; startled, but pleased. ‘Come on Tuesday,’ he said. ‘Come for a drink.’ And then he had paused. ‘Leonard will be out. He’s taken to going out on Tuesdays, to play bridge, of all things. Beatrice takes him somewhere, in a taxi.’
On Tuesdays, Kate knew, Joss now stayed at school for drama club, a development which had resulted from her friendship with Angie and someone called Emma who Kate hadn’t met either. This was all quite convenient since, Kate had worked out, if she arrived at Richmond Villa at about five-thirty, she could have it out with James before Joss got home at six, when they could both talk to Joss. Kate did not dare hope that Joss would come home with her that night, but she had thought the hope several times before she had put it from her.
It was not easy, standing on the doorstep, in fact it was dreadfully difficult and Kate was stiff with apprehension. She had not seen James for almost three months, at least not to talk to, and so much had happened to her and to her feelings in those months that she felt he was now a stranger. When he opened the door to her, the shock was not of strangeness at all, but of familiarity. He put out a hand and took her arm and drew her in, smiling. ‘Kate,’ he said, and then he stooped to kiss her cheek. She turned her head away and his mouth caught only her hair.
‘Oh dear,’ James said.
She glanced up at him and said with bright friendliness, ‘How are you?’
He gestured. ‘As you see.’ He looked exactly the same, neither fatter nor thinner, older nor younger. He wore a blue checked shirt she recognized (it had a mend in the elbow, she remembered) and the rust-coloured corduroy trousers she had given him two Christmases before. Had he, she wondered, dressed deliberately?
He said, ‘You look lovely.’
She turned her head aside. This was not what she had come for, not what she had bargained for; she had come to talk about Joss.
The Men and the Girls Page 18