by Rosie Thomas
Julia’s fingers wound round the metal bars and she stared through, trying to catch her breath in even gasps that would half fill her lungs.
She stood for a long time, looking in at the glimpse of overgrown garden.
When she turned back to the square again she saw that one of Montebellate’s black-clad old women had appeared. She had driven a goat up with her, and now she tethered it to a post driven into a tiny square of grass. The goat put its head down at once. The old woman nodded to Julia and shuffled to the seat. She fumbled in her black pouch bag and produced her crochet-work. Julia saw that it was a tiny, lacy diamond. The white thread was as fine as a cobweb. The crochet hook flickered and the old woman stared with milky eyes over the goat’s back to the blue line beyond the roofs.
Very slowly Julia let her head fall back against the gates. Nothing moved, and there was no sound except the goat’s rhythmic cropping.
She had a sense of years, stretching away, waiting for her. The enormity of it frightened and frustrated her, because it lay out of her grasp. Yet the prospect soothed her. It was all far distant, immense and hazy, like the view from the hill. Julia wondered for how many years the old woman and her goat had looked at their own view before achieving their postures of perfect mutual calm.
She watched them for a little while longer until her breath came smoothly. The hammering inside her body had stopped. The tears still lay behind her eyes but she knew that she could go back to the Flora and face whatever Josh would tell her.
She went back down the hill, listening to the steady clopping of her shoes over the cobbles. Josh was sitting on the wall opposite the pensione, looking down, and Julia went and stood beside him. They watched the view in silence for a moment, but it was just a view again, opaque, almost over-familiar now.
In a clear voice Josh said, ‘I can’t give you what you want. There isn’t anything of me. Nothing that you should want, or need, anyway. You’ll see that for yourself before long, but I don’t want you to be hurt while it happens.’
Clumsy, inept words, Josh thought. But for once he meant them.
Julia’s answer came at once, violent, spilling out of her. ‘How could you hurt me except by not letting me be with you? I do want you. I love you and I need you. No one has ever made me happy like you, and I don’t want anything else. Nothing at all, nothing out of life if you aren’t there. Don’t you understand?’
It helped, to abase herself. It made her feel that there was no more she could do. She had held out the offering for Josh to take. Take it, she implored him. Don’t say what I’m afraid of.
‘No,’ Josh said, very gently.
There.
Julia nodded her head, just once. The words had been said, all their words. She discovered that she had pride, too.
‘What will happen?’ she asked.
Josh said, ‘I’ll take you to Agropoli and put you safely on the train.’
‘The train to where?’
‘To London.’
London. There was nothing in London. Julia’s eyes were dry and hard. She wouldn’t cry now. There would be enough time for crying later.
‘And what about you? What will you do?’
‘I don’t know yet. Some flying. Something.’
Julia lifted her hands from the crumbling stonework of the wall. ‘I’d better go and pack my things up.’
They turned to each other then. She buried her face against his shoulder and he held her, and then he lifted her face between his hands and kissed her eyes and her mouth. They knew that the signora could see them out of her lace-hung window and they stepped awkwardly apart again.
‘Will we … will I see you any more?’
‘I hope so,’ Josh whispered. Faltering, at the end.
Julia looked at him. She was remembering that way his hair fell over his forehead, the lines that his eyes made with his mouth and cheekbones. The same as the first time she had seen him.
‘I hope so,’ she echoed. Her longing was already touched with bitterness. ‘I hope so too, my aviator.’
Ten
London, 1958
‘What other work d’you suggest I do?’ Mattie demanded.
Without looking at Julia she opened a leatherette holdall and threw a red satin slip into it. On top of the slip went a red bra and a red G-string stitched with a trail of sequins. A shapeless billow of red feathers was thrust in on top of that, and then some folds of dusty black stuff and a thin, whippy cane.
Julia looked sourly at the cane. ‘Miss Matilda, indeed.’
Mattie zipped the bag up and leaned over to look at herself in the mirror. She licked her forefinger and brushed her eyebrows into shape before finally turning to Julia.
‘Listen, love. If they were begging me to give my Ophelia at the Old Vic, it would be different. In fact if anyone offered me so much as a two-line walk-on in a kids’ show in Wigan, I’d go down on my knees and give thanks. But no one has, have they? If I go to one more audition and the fat slobs say “Thank you, dear, we’ll let you know”, I’ll push their scripts down their throats.’
Julia said nothing and Mattie sighed patiently. ‘An even more important fact is that Miss Matilda earns me nearly thirty quid a week, cash, and it’s not exactly the hardest work I’ve ever done. It’s easier than selling shoes. It’s easier than working for John Douglas, too, most days of the week.’
‘Taking your clothes off for a lot of dirty old men?’
Mattie laughed then and sat down on the bed beside her. ‘I’m an artiste, remember. I don’t just take my clothes off. I do a dance routine, very tasteful. I act, as well. I become a schoolmistress, with the heart and soul of a courtesan trapped within her.’
Julia was laughing now. They sat side by side with their arms round each other’s shoulders, shaking with it.
Mattie stood up. ‘Oh, what the hell. Let’s have a drink before I go.’
Julia sighed and took the glass of gin Mattie gave her. She looked around the bedroom at the twisted stockings and heaps of discarded clothes with sudden distaste. Without Felix, Mattie and Julia had reverted to their old ways. She frowned, annoyed with herself.
‘Hey.’ Mattie touched her arm. ‘Who are you really worrying about?’
‘Both of us, Mat. Both of us.’
The gin had warmed Mattie up and she leaned forward confidingly. Julia was reminded of Jessie. They missed Jessie every day, even now.
‘Don’t worry. I’m a brilliant actress, temporarily filling in as a stripper. My turn will come. You are rather smartly employed at George Tressider Designs, and you also have the chance of a modelling contract …’
‘Some pervert wants to photograph me. They always call it a modelling contract, didn’t you know?’
‘… Don’t be cynical. And you’ve got lovers, admirers and friends. What more could you ask?’
Julia opened her mouth but Mattie dived forward and clapped her hand over it.
‘I know, I know. But until he flies back again you’ll just have to make do with what you’ve got. Who is it tonight, by the way?’
Julia acknowledged the interruption with a twisted smile. ‘Flowers.’
‘Flowers, faithfully unfaithful Flowers.’ Mattie was springing around the room gathering up the last pieces of her costume. ‘D’you know, it’s your fault, and Flowers’s, that I’m working for Monty now? You were the ones who left our luggage at the Showbox. I was the one who was shocked, remember?’
‘Right at the beginning. The day Flowers bought me a coffee and a doughnut in Blue Heaven. We met Felix that night, and Jessie. More than three years ago.’
Mattie straightened up slowly and they looked at each other. ‘Do you feel old?’ Mattie asked.
They were twenty and twenty-one.
‘Very, very old.’
They didn’t laugh, for some reason.
Mattie hoisted her holdall over her shoulder and made for the door. Julia watched her go and then called after her, ‘You missed something off your list. We’ve g
ot each other.’
Mattie’s head reappeared, a mass of waves, now bleached white-blonde. ‘And always will have. Listen, I finish at twelve on the dot tonight. I’ll meet you and Flowers at the Rocket.’
Julia listened to her thumping away down the stairs. Flowers and the Rocket. The Showbox and Monty. Saturday afternoon in the flat stretching ahead of her, then Sunday, and Monday morning again at Tressider’s scented premises in the King’s Road. Julia’s fists clenched until her fingernails dug into the palms of her hands. Her impatience was no easier to control than it had ever been. A sense of her own purposelessness rose stiflingly around her and she jumped up and went to the window. Mattie was crossing the square on her way to Old Compton Street, and Julia watched her until she was out of sight. It was November, and the last yellow leaves lay in archipelagoes on the wet pavements. Three years ago, she was thinking, Josh had come. And in the spring he had sent her home from Italy. A little time in weeks and months, but it seemed much longer in her memory. Twisted up with what Betty had told her on the day she first saw Josh, with Jessie’s death, and with Felix.
After Montebellate, she had crept back to London. There had been office jobs, a succession of them that she could hardly remember now. Josh had come back and gone away again, then come back once more. Julia knew that he should have had the determination to stay away altogether, but she clung to the hope that he couldn’t, and gratefully took the crumbs of time that he bestowed on her. She had been very lonely, in those days, without Mattie or Felix at home.
With one finger, Julia drew a deliberate circle in the condensation on the window. Drops like tears gathered around the clear margin and slid downwards. Two years ago, November 1956. There had been a convulsion then. Julia had read the newspapers and listened to the radio reports with fierce concentration, as if her attention would make some difference to the world. Josh flew refugees from the Russian tanks out over the Austro-Hungarian border, and Felix was one of the few National Servicemen to be sent out to Suez. She was intensely proud of both of them, and she knew equally that the remainder of her feelings were perfectly selfish. But she couldn’t escape the conclusion, or fail to resent it, that it was men who had the chance of action. They could make the choices, bestow or deprive; whether the gift was simply happiness or even, that November, seemingly life itself. Her freedom, women’s freedom, that totem she had upheld with Mattie, enabled her to go to work, to earn enough money to buy herself nylons and fashionable clothes, and to wait.
I have waited, Julia thought bitterly.
Another year, and then a time came when Josh told her that he was going back to Colorado. Vail was beginning to open up as a ski-resort and Josh, businesslike, saw his chance. The parting had been painful for both of them, but it hadn’t hurt Josh enough to hold him back. Julia had tried to believe that she couldn’t survive without him, but she had survived with dreary adequacy.
It was twelve months since she had last seen him. He wrote, sometimes. Julia turned away from the window again and began picking clothes up from the floor, unseeingly turning them the right way out, then laying them down again.
At about the same time Mattie had been spotted in one of her roles for John Douglas by a Binkie Beaumont scout. On the strength of it she had been offered a part in an ephemeral new play at the Lyric, Hammersmith. Julia had welcomed her back to the flat with relief, and they had fallen back into their old inseparability. But after the play had closed no more parts came up, and Mattie was philosophically performing as Miss Matilda for eight hours a day, six days a week.
Julia drifted into a more permanent job. She had gone to George Tressider Designs as a temporary secretary and stayed there partly because it interested her more than any of the other jobs she had done, partly because she had no ideas about what else she might do with her time.
George Tressider’s sharp eyes noted and approved of her appearance, and he made her his receptionist. He was a velvety man of about fifty, an interior decorator with a list of prosperous or aristocratic clients and what Julia privately considered to be an overblown fondness for the grand English style. No chintzes were chintzier than George’s, no gilt more gilted.
Julia sat at an Empire desk towards the rear of his small shop, surrounded by George’s small selection of hand-picked antique pieces, and guarded the door through to the design offices where George and a handful of young men worked on the clients’ requirements.
In a week when one of the young men was on holiday and two of the others had flu, Julia did some letters for George’s signature. She also put together a selection of silks for a less important customer and interviewed an out-of-town dealer who had a pair of old mirrors to sell, fast. She looked at the photographs and made the man promise to see no one else before Mr Tressider came back from the country that afternoon. She let the man take her to lunch, just to be sure.
At the end of the week George Tressider strolled past her desk and rested one lavender-grey cuff on the back of her chair. ‘You’re quite a clever creature, aren’t you?’ His smooth head tilted to one side as he studied her. ‘A decided asset. Pretty girls don’t usually have as much brain as you do.’
‘Don’t they?’ Julia murmured. How do you know anything about girls, pretty or not? she added in silence.
‘Mmm. I can offer you another two pounds a week. We could make your work more interesting. Flexible.’
Julia was confident enough that George wouldn’t make demands that were too interesting, or called for too much flexibility.
‘Thank you,’ she murmured meekly.
She wasn’t elevated to the same status as the young men, of course, but for the first time in her working life she didn’t dread Monday mornings as a return to slavery. Betty called it ‘a real job’.
Very gradually over the last year Julia had started visiting Fairmile Road again. It was the finality of Josh’s disappearance that had made her feel she was being too harsh in cutting herself off altogether from Betty and Vernon. It seemed a long time since she had run away and in those years the house, and her parents’ strictures, and the threat of both, seemed to have shrunk sadly in importance. When she saw it again the house seemed to have shrunk too. It was poky, and shabbier than she remembered, in spite of Betty’s protracted polishings. Even the Smiths themselves seemed smaller, and older.
The first two or three visits were awkward, but slowly a pattern was established. Julia went home about once a month, always on a Sunday, arriving after Betty and Vernon came home from church and staying for dinner and tea. Once, unthinkingly, she called their midday meal lunch. She saw Betty look at her with a new expression and recognised respect in it, with resignation, and timid approval. After that it was always lunch that Betty invited her to. The way that they had both noticed the little distinction and resolutely left it uncommented on underlined the speed with which Julia was marching away from Fairmile Road. The fact that Julia imagined she despised class distinction, and only used the words she did because she was more used to hearing them from George and his people, seemed only to emphasise the difference.
But it was just enough, for all of them, that Betty had found a way to be proud of her daughter again. After all, Julia worked with a smart decorator in Chelsea, and she talked to people with titles. Betty was always eager to hear about that, and it provided a safe topic of conversation while Vernon sat behind the Sunday People. ‘Thirty square yards of pure white Carrara marble,’ Julia would say, ‘in the master bathroom.’
‘Imagine,’ Betty would breathe. ‘The master bathroom.’ Julia was oddly touched by the simplicity of her mother’s pride, and her view of her mother’s life was softened by her own experiences. The two women would never be friends, that was understood, but they were polite and considerate to each other for the few hours of Julia’s Sunday visits. Vernon mattered less to Julia. She had never understood her father and she doubted that she ever would.
The fact of her adoption was never, ever mentioned.
On Sunday eveni
ngs Julia took the train back to Liverpool Street with composed relief. She was far enough away, now, not to feel the old, frightened jubilation. On those short, familiar journeys she often thought of Jessie. If Betty Smith had possessed any of Jessie’s qualities, what would the difference have been? Julia did know that Jessie would have approved of the bloodless truce that had been called.
Between the opposite poles of Tressider’s and Fairmile Road, there was the square, and Mattie. Julia wondered if this was real life; if this was what she should be living instead of waiting through. In the year since Josh had left for good Julia had done her best to distract herself. She existed at a pace that raised even Mattie’s eyebrows. There was usually a party, and when there wasn’t Julia set out to create one. At a party, or at the Rocket, or wherever else she went that was crowded enough, there was always the chance of meeting someone new; someone who would survive the comparison.
The ripples of meetings spread wider and wider. Mattie and Julia had installed a telephone in Jessie’s room, and it rang constantly. The men they met as they sliced their way through the parties still looked at Mattie first, but more often it was Julia who finally commanded their attention. Her hunger was indefinable, but potent. She could look at the latest possibility as if there was no one else in the world, and then sooner or later she would look through him as if he didn’t exist. Many of them found the treatment irresistible, but Julia seemed hardly to notice. She went to bed with two or three of them, but she did it more because Josh had stirred her sexual needs than because she particularly wanted any of his successors. She took her sharp physical pleasure, and then felt painfully guilty.
She was always comparing. But no one ever came close to Josh. Josh had made her feel alive, as though thick, dead layers of skin had been peeled back to leave all her senses sharpened. She missed him every hour of the day, every night.