Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection

by Rosie Thomas

  ‘She’s my age, or a bit younger. Quite pretty, in an insipid way. A good committee woman. Sensible and responsible, not very clever.’

  ‘Gawd,’ Mattie said.

  ‘She’ll be good at looking after Lily’s school uniform, I suppose. And Alexander says that it will be safer for Lily to do her growing up at Ladyhill, anyway. No dope or acid in Ladyhill village, is there?’

  ‘More’s the pity,’ Mattie drawled. ‘Shh. Don’t let Mitch hear that. So what will you do, Julia?’

  ‘I thought I might sell the house. It’s too big for me, and it’s worth a shocking amount of money. Oh, don’t worry about Marilyn. I’ll fix her up with another flat, and she’s such a good nanny she could get a job anywhere.’

  ‘I wasn’t worrying about Marilyn. I don’t worry about Ricky, or Sam and Phil, either. Do you remember that night in the doorway, and the two of us huddled there in the dark worrying about what would happen to them? We should have been saving all our worrying for ourselves. And so should you, Julia.’

  Julia smiled, but somehow in the Coppins garden even the memory of the Savoy doorway didn’t draw them close together again.

  ‘What about your business?’

  Julia told her about Suki. Mattie put her head back and laughed. ‘I love the sound of the teapot, and the toilet ashtrays as well. I’ll take six of each.’

  ‘I think I’m going to take a break from it,’ Julia said abruptly.

  Mattie stared. ‘And do what?’

  ‘I don’t know. Felix asked me not long ago if I felt too old for Garlic & Sapphires. What I do feel is tired. I’m tired of myself, most of all.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound like you.’

  They looked at each other, separated by sun-warmed stones.

  ‘No,’ Julia said quietly. ‘I think it’s time I wasn’t like myself any more.’

  Mattie sat up, wrapping her arms round her knees. ‘Are we still friends?’ she asked.

  With the big house looming above her, and the suburban scents of mown grass and roses thickening the air, Julia said, ‘Of course we are,’ and the reassurance denied itself. Mitch came out again, and drew up his deckchair to make a circle. They wouldn’t talk now. Julia knew that. A sense of her own smallness oppressed her.

  Mattie and Mitch pressed her to stay to dinner, or at least to have some tea before driving back, but Julia said she must get home. Before she climbed into the car they both kissed her, and then they waved, standing shoulder to shoulder in their gravelled driveway, until she had gone.

  Julia had no reason to hurry back to the house by the canal, but it was a relief to be alone again.

  Perhaps I’m learning, she thought. Not to depend, after all. Bloody freedom takes a lot of earning. Or does it only come when you know that you don’t want it?

  The exhausted irony seemed too stale to bear thinking about.

  The first thing that Julia did the next morning was to put the house by the canal on the market. Within four days she had a buyer who offered a higher price than the agent’s recommendation. The speed disconcerted her briefly, but the momentum pushed her on. Very quickly, hardly even bothering to view it properly, Julia made an offer for a flat in Camden Town. It had two bedrooms; she would need somewhere for Lily’s visits. Julia described it to her on the telephone.

  ‘It sounds fine,’ Lily said.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes, Mum. I’m fine. Are you?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Busy, that’s all.’

  Arranging to have her business taken care of proved to be no more difficult. Julia took the most senior of her shop managers out to lunch, and suggested to her that she might like to try her hand at managing the entire business for an unspecified period of time.

  ‘I’d like it very much,’ the woman said promptly. ‘I know I can do it.’

  Julia nodded. She had deputised for her successfully in the past.

  The manageress was looking curiously at her. ‘But why do you want me to do it?’

  ‘I’m just tired,’ Julia told her, unable to find a better answer.

  After that there was a transition period during which she worked side by side with her deputy, handing Garlic & Sapphires over to her. Julia went through the motions of ordinary life, but she felt as if she was watching herself from some way off. She looked like a stiff little marionette.

  Some things pierced her detachment. There was the day when Lily should have come back from Ladyhill. There was another day too, when she happened to pass the school that should have been Lily’s new one. The street outside it was flooded with girls in bottle-green uniforms. Julia sat in her car, watching them as they passed. Twice, she thought she saw Lily amongst them. She had to rub her eyes savagely so that she could see to drive on.

  Compared with that, leaving the house by the canal seemed easy. She kept just enough of her furniture to furnish the new flat sparsely, and sold everything else. She almost sold the mutilated kelim, but in the end she rolled it up and took it with her. When she closed the door on the empty house for the last time, she walked away without looking back. She felt lighter as she did it.

  She kept the white walls of her new home completely bare. It was easier to look at clean, empty spaces.

  By the middle of December, at the height of the Christmas rush, Julia knew that the shops no longer needed her, and that she was only getting in the way of her replacement. At the end of one afternoon she cleared her desk, and said the briefest goodbyes. She walked out of her offices into the icy wind. A Salvation Army silver band was playing carols at the end of the street. Julia stopped to listen, and then emptied her purse into the collecting bag. She walked home to Camden Town, and the feeling of lightness grew stronger. Watching herself, Julia thought how small she looked as she threaded her way through the jostling shoppers.

  Julia spent Christmas Day with Felix, at Eaton Square.

  He had decorated the high drawing room with dark ivy and branches of blue spruce, frosted with silver, as George had always done. The tree was the same too, hung with silver and sparkling with white light. It made her see again how much Felix missed him.

  They were deliberately light-hearted. They exchanged their small, well-chosen presents and drank champagne. They ate Felix’s wonderful Christmas dinner off the gold-rimmed Meissen china, and filled George’s crystal glasses with Chateau Latour. It was a long time since Julia had had so much to drink. She kicked off her shoes and sank back into the sofa cushions, holding out her brandy glass for a refill.

  ‘Perhaps we should get married, Felix. D’you think we’d make each other happy?’ Julia laughed, but she meant it.

  He came to sit beside her, lacing his fingers through hers. Julia rested her head against his shoulder but the movement made her spill her brandy.

  ‘Whoops.’

  ‘Would we make each other happy?’ he repeated. ‘I don’t think so. Not in the way that counts.’

  She laughed at that, but then he put his hand up to stroke her hair, and the unexpected tenderness made the laughter dissolve into tears.

  ‘Oh dear. I’m sorry, Felix. I’m not crying because you don’t want to marry me.’

  ‘I know that.’

  He gave her a silk handkerchief, too beautiful for Julia even to contemplate blowing her nose on it. She sniffed firmly instead. ‘I’m going back to Italy,’ she said. ‘For good, I think. I don’t really want to live here any more. And there doesn’t seem to be any point, without Lily.’

  ‘I’ll miss you very much,’ Felix told her.

  They held on to each other tightly. After a few minutes, Julia fell asleep. Much later, when she woke up again, she found that Felix had covered her with a blanket. He used to look after her in just the same way, years ago, when she and Mattie collapsed after their sorties into Soho.

  ‘I can’t drink like I used to,’ she moaned, putting her hand to her head.

  Felix was prim. ‘I’m relieved to hear it.’

  Lily came for two weeks of the Chr
istmas holidays.

  She seemed to be delighted with the spare, compact Camden Town flat. ‘It’s like a ship,’ she announced. ‘Sailing over the street. My room’s like a cabin on a liner.’

  Before she came, Julia was nervous. She didn’t have work to go to, any more, and she wondered how they would fill in their time together. She worried that they might not have enough to say to each other, that Lily might have edged even further away from her, even become like Clare.

  But Lily was just the same. She unpacked, and scattered her own room and the living room with clothes and records, and seized the telephone to call her friends. Julia loved her for her ability to make easy what she herself had looked forward to with apprehension.

  ‘Still my daughter,’ Julia said.

  Lily grinned up at her. ‘What did you expect, Mum?’

  They enjoyed their time together. Looking back on it, Julia thought it was the happiest they had ever known. She took Lily shopping, and to the ballet, and to see Felix. They visited Marilyn in her new flat, and admired the newborn baby she was looking after. ‘You were exactly like that,’ Julia told Lily. ‘You’re much nicer now.’

  Lily looked amazed, and pleased. ‘Am I really?’

  Julia invited friends to the flat, and cooked meals for them. She thought she had forgotten how to cook. If Lily was surprised that none of them seemed to have visited Camden Town before, she kept her surprise to herself.

  The times when they were on their own together, with no particular distractions, were the best of all. It was as if, without responsibilities, they were able to see each other more clearly. They talked to each other, and listened. Julia’s detachment left her. She was Lily’s mother, after all. There was simplicity in the bare fact. Perhaps she could use it as a foundation block.

  Lily was good at listening. Julia explained why she had extricated herself from Garlic & Sapphires as well as selling the old house.

  ‘I don’t care enough about the business, just now.’ Lily nodded wisely. ‘It was a good thing to realise. I’ve cared about it too much. You told me that.’

  ‘Only because I was angry. I was always really proud about it when I was little. You had all those people working for you, and fabulous things in the shops. All the other mothers just made cakes.’

  Julia thought, our perspectives change all the time. Where’s the truth? Where should I stow my guilt, now, and you your resentment? But she only said, ‘I never was any good at baking. And I’m glad the shops are off my hands for a while.’ She took a breath. ‘Lily, I want to ask you something. Are you happy at Ladyhill with Daddy and Clare?’

  Lily stared levelly back at her. Julia remembered the old, wary look. ‘Yes, I am.’

  ‘Will you mind, then, if I go to live in Italy?’

  ‘To where you were before?’

  ‘Yes. To Montebellate.’

  ‘It’s a long way. I’ll miss you.’

  Julia took her hand, It was small and warm, with dirty fingernails. She wanted to crush it against herself, but she made herself let go of it again.

  ‘You can come out there to me whenever you want. Or I’ll come home, any time you need me. I can be home in a day. But I do want to go.’

  ‘Were you happy there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then you should go,’ Lily said. ‘I’ll be all right.’

  ‘I know you will.’

  And so they arranged it between them. Julia let herself think of the palazzo with its iron-framed beds in the shade of the loggia, and the neglected gardens stepping down the side of the hill towards the sea.

  At the end of Lily’s visit, gathering her courage, Julia took her back to Ladyhill. The house looked stark in its winter-bare setting as they approached it. Julia felt Lily’s warm breath on her face as she leaned forward, smiling at the sight of it.

  Alexander and Clare were waiting for them.

  They were very polite to each other, all of them. They drank a glass of sherry, then sat down to lunch like remote relatives gathered for some uncomfortable family ritual. Julia felt suddenly impatient with it all. She was anxious, now, to get on her way.

  Clare was wearing riding clothes, with her hair pulled back in a pony-tail. Julia thought it made her look like a hamster. She longed for Mattie, and then remembered that Mattie was at Coppins with Mitch. After lunch, Clare announced that she would have to go. Julia imagined her pulling on her hard hat and trotting away. Clare shook her hand without looking at her.

  Women as rivals, Julia thought, with a flicker of amusement. Even Mattie and me. Except I’m no one’s rival any longer. I’m non-combatant. The feeling of lightness came back to her, pleasurable now. She was cut loose, ready to float away. She caught sight of Alexander, watching her.

  When Clare and Lily had gone, they went into the drawing room with their coffee. There was a pewter jug filled with wands of winter jasmine on the table in the window. Julia imagined Clare going out into the garden to cut them.

  She told Alexander, ‘I’m going back to Italy.’

  Alexander didn’t say anything. He put his cup down and stood looking out into the garden over the golden spikes of the jasmine. Then he turned round and came to Julia. He stood close to her, and she saw the indentations of fine wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, and the minute fading of fair hair into silver stubble at his cheekbones and over his ears. The collar points of his open-necked shirt were frayed.

  Julia nodded, almost imperceptibly. The animosity had faded. Alexander put his hands on her shoulders, looking into her face. She met his eyes, and she felt the lightness that lifted her up also sharpening her sight. She knew that she was seeing Alexander clearly. And she knew that she still loved him. Anger and bitterness had been her own smokescreens. She hoped that she had learned enough, at last, not to let them obscure her sight any longer. There was that self-awareness, at least; an achievement of a kind. She had lost Alexander first to Ladyhill and then to Clare – not to Mattie, because of course Mattie had never really betrayed her, even though her own anger and jealousy had convinced her of it – but it occurred to Julia that she could finally accept her loss, so long as Alexander himself was happy.

  ‘Are we still friends?’ he asked her. The question was half ironic, because Alexander had always deflected the truth with irony. The echo of Mattie, unconscious, twisted the knot of it tighter in Julia.

  Not less than friends, she thought. Not more than that, not now.

  ‘Of course.’

  His arms came round her. His hand stroked her hair, holding her head against his shoulder, and she let it rest there. He held her differently from Felix.

  With her eyes closed, without moving, she recited the instructions about how to reach her in Montebellate if Lily should need her. And then, when there was no reason to stay there any longer, she stepped back again.

  ‘Lily’s all right, you know,’ Alexander said.

  ‘Yes. Thank you. It will be good for her to come to Italy to see me,’ she added. ‘She’ll be able to learn the language.’ They smiled at each other, acknowledging their mutual pride in her.

  I am her mother, and Alexander is her father. Simplicity in the bare fact.

  Then, all over again, it was time for her to go. Alexander stood with his arm round Lily’s shoulders, then Lily ran forward to Julia. Julia held her, then let her go. The wrench was like a pain in her chest. She thought of her own mother and the vaguest intention crystallised, in that moment, into determination.

  ‘When do you leave?’ Alexander asked.

  ‘Almost straight away. I just have to go and see Betty about something.’

  She was on her way again, turning away from the square face of Ladyhill. ‘Be happy, all of you,’ she ordered them.

  ‘See you soon,’ Lily called after her. ‘Bon voyage.’

  Julia smiled as she turned the corner under the bare trees. Bon voyage. She must have read that in a book.

  Alexander and Lily stood watching until the car was out of sight, then we
nt back into the house under the stone arch.

  ‘Do you miss her?’ Lily asked abruptly.

  ‘I always miss her,’ Alexander answered. ‘I expect I always shall. There’s no one like your mother, Lily. No one at all.’

  Vernon was in his usual chair, drawn up in front of the television. He smiled vaguely at Julia, then returned his attention to Top of the Pops. She wondered if he remembered who she was.

  The only place for Betty and Julia to talk was in the kitchen. Julia sat at the blue Formica-topped table with the cup of tea that Betty had handed to her. Betty was wiping the draining board. Every worn surface gleamed.

  ‘Won’t you mind living with all those foreigners?’ Betty asked her.

  ‘I’ll be the foreigner,’ Julia said.

  ‘I’ll miss seeing our Lily.’

  Julia felt guilty. They had only managed a brief visit to Fairmile Road during Lily’s holiday. But there was no resentment in Betty’s voice. She went on rhythmically wiping, looking out over the net half-curtain at the backs of the houses in the next road.

  ‘I’ll tell Alexander to bring her to see you as often as he can.’

  ‘It’s funny, for a man to be bringing up a young girl.’

  ‘He has Clare there with him.’

  But Betty shook her head, as if she couldn’t be expected even to try to understand such oddity.

  ‘There’s something I want to ask you,’ Julia began. ‘I’ve wanted to for a long time. I want to try to find my mother.’

  Betty didn’t turn round. Julia wasn’t even sure that she had heard, except that the wiping stopped. ‘Every time I part with Lily, I think about her,’ Julia went on, knowing what she must do, now that she had begun. ‘I wonder what she felt, when she gave me up. I try to imagine what she feels now. I told you that, didn’t I? I just want to know. I’ve felt the need of it ever since … ever since Lily went to live with her father. It isn’t that I don’t think of you as my proper mother. I do. I always will.’

  She didn’t mention the adolescent dreams she had had, of tragedy and aristocracy, and Victorian family Christmases with one empty place kept in memory of a lost baby girl. Those were over, but the intense, visceral pull that she felt towards an unknown woman was not. It grew stronger every day.