by Rosie Thomas
‘I’ve got to ring for help.
Julia tried to push past her, to Bliss’s little office on the right of the stairs, and the nearest telephone.
‘No,’ Mattie screamed. ‘Julia!’
Then at last she saw Bliss. He ran towards her from the stone archway that led through to the back of the house. His face was the colour of ice.
Julia stumbled towards him. ‘The fire brigade,’ she shouted helplessly.
‘They’re coming.’
Alexander was methodically throwing open every door to check that the room beyond was empty. He slammed the doors shut again and the roar of the fire devoured the sound. Another obliterating blanket of smoke rolled around them and he caught at her arm.
‘Is everyone out of there?’
She nodded, and at once he was pulling her over the stone flags to the big door. She tripped in her tight dress and the thin fabric ripped, freeing her to run. The arched portico framed the night beyond, then it was overhead, and then with Alexander’s arm supporting her they escaped into the darkness. The cold hit them and Julia saw ahead of her the dark, glossy’ ovals of the clipped yews reflecting an ugly red glow. The crowd of people milled at the foot of the shallow flight of steps, their faces turned upwards to the house. Julia and Alexander looked the same way, and understood how quickly and how terribly the fire had taken hold.
The windows of what had been the drawing room, where only a few minutes ago they had been dancing in the flow of candlelight, were now blind eyes from which the smoke coiled in the thick ropes. The flames had reached the first floor, and came darting lasciviously from the windows. The crash of breaking glass and falling timber was just audible through the voice of the fire itself.
‘Is everyone out?’ Bliss shouted hoarsely. ‘Is anyone missing?’
The panic had subsided. The guests were numb with shock, and silent in awe of the fire’s horrible vitality. They muttered to one another, and shook their heads. It seemed that everyone was accounted for.
Julia stood motionless, watching. Bliss’s fingers were like iron hooks digging into the flesh of her arm. Looking upwards at the windows in the gable end of the near wing, she thought of the magnificent beams that supported the roof of the Long Gallery, and the floor of broad oak boards that separated the gallery from the burning bedrooms beneath.
She shivered violently in the city air. And then she remembered.
The words stuck in her throat at first. Bliss looked at her, then gripped her other arm and pulled her closer.
‘What is it?’
‘Flowers. Flowers was upstairs, with a girl.’
They whirled apart and went blundering through the silent huddles of people. ‘Has anyone seen Flowers?’
No one had seen him. There were only white, shocked faces, and none of them was Johnny Flowers.
Julia remembered, with a beat of horror, what he had said in the shadows at the top of the stairs. The party to end all parties. She dared not look up at the lurid windows.
Fear crystallised into certainty within her. She finished her desperate circuit and collided with Bliss again.
‘Not here.’
Alexander turned his face to the house. Julia saw the reflected light of the fire in his eyes.
‘They must still be inside.’
He was already running towards the steps. Two or three other men left the shelter of the crowd and ran with him.
‘No.’ Her scream tore Julia’s throat.
‘No. Don’t go back in there.’
Without stopping to think she began to run too, gathering up the ruined tail of her dress. She had only gone half a dozen steps when more people caught up with her and pulled at her arms, dragging her backwards. She struggled to break free, swearing blindly at them. They held her too tightly, and she was reduced to impotent kicking and writhing.
Her last glimpse of Bliss was as he ran back under the portico, one arm held crooked against his face in a vain attempt to shield it from the fire’s fierce heat.
‘Stop him,’ she whispered to the people holding her. ‘Don’t let him go in there.’
But he had already gone.
The men who had dashed forward with Bliss seemed to be driven back by the smoke, but Alexander was engulfed by it.
Nobody moved or spoke. The fire possessed the whole house now and the malevolent smoke hung over it, obliterating the starry winter sky.
Julia stepped away from the restraining hands and then stood motionless. No one could do anything. Impotent anger swept over her.
‘Where is the fire brigade? Why don’t they come? He’s going to die in there.’ She screamed again at the smoky mouth of the door, ‘Bliss!’
An arm came round her, and she saw that it was Mattie beside her. He friend’s eyes reflected the demonic red glow, as Bliss’s had done. Looking wildly around, Julia saw that all their faces were lit by it. The black shadows thrown by the firelight in the hollows of their cheeks and eyesockets made all of them look like skulls. She felt an instant of wild, almost exultant terror.
The fire would come for all of them. Bliss was already gone, and it was Mattie and Julia standing to face it together, as they had always done.
A bubble of hysterical laughter broke out of Julia’s mouth.
Mattie held her harder, shaking her, hurting her shoulders. ‘Hold on. They’re coming now. You’ve got to hold on.’
Julia heard it then. Only just audible through the roar of the flames were the bells of the fire engines as they raced towards Ladyhill.
The mad laughter died in her throat and Julia gave a long shuddering sigh.
She stood waiting, one hand holding on to Mattie. The fingers of her other hand just rested on the concave space between her hip-bones.
Julia Bliss was twelve weeks’ pregnant. For some reason that she didn’t even understand herself, she hadn’t told her husband about the baby yet.
One
Summer, 1955
‘It’s cold,’ Julia said.
She looked at the scuffed suitcase at her feet, but it hardly seemed worth opening it and rummaging amongst the grubby contents for warmer clothes. She shivered, and hunched her shoulders.
Mattie didn’t even answer.
They sat side by side on the bench, silently, and the pigeons that had gathered in the hope of sandwich crumbs waddled away again. Over the stone balustrade in front of them the girls could just see the flat, murky river. A barge nosed slowly upstream and they watched it slide past them. A sluggish wash fanned out in its wake.
‘We could go home,’ Julia whispered.
Even to suggest it punctured her pride, but she wanted to be sure that Mattie’s resolve was still as firm as her own. Even though their defiance had brought them here, to this.
The rumble of the evening traffic along the Embankment seemed to grow louder to fill the silence between them. It was the first time either of them had mentioned going home, but they knew that they had both been thinking about it. It was three nights since they had run away. Four nights since Mattie had appeared at Julia’s parents’ front door, back in Fairmile Road, with her face bruised and puffy and her home-made blouse torn off her shoulder.
Julia’s father had stared past Mattie at the police car waiting in the road. Then his eyes had flicked to and fro, checking to see if any of the neighbours might be witnessing the spectacle. He had opened the door by another inch, as Julia watched from the top of the stairs.
‘Don’t you know that it’s one o’clock in the morning?’ he had asked his daughter’s best friend.
‘I’m sorry,’ Mattie said.
‘I suppose you’d better come in.’
Mattie stepped into the hallway. Mr Smith looked almost unrecognisable without his stiff collar, and his wife’s curlers sat on her head like thin sausages. Only the house looked the same. Little slippery rugs on the slippery floor, flowery papered walls and spiky plants in pots, and a framed Coronation picture of the Queen. And then Julia was the same, looking anxious
ly down at her, with her hair very dark against her pink dressing gown. Mattie was so relieved to see her, and the concern in Julia’s face touched her so directly, that she was almost crying again.
Mattie hitched the torn pieces of her blouse together and faced Julia’s parents squarely. They had always hated her, of course. They thought she led Julia astray, although that wasn’t the truth. It didn’t matter, she told herself. If they threw her out into the street again, at least the policeman had gone.
‘Whatever’s the matter?’ Betty Smith asked. Julia came down the stairs, pushing past her parents, putting an arm around Mattie’s shoulders. Mattie felt her comforting warmth. She would keep the story simple, she decided. Tomorrow, later today, whatever the time was, she would tell Julia what had really happened.
‘I’m afraid that there was an argument at home. My father … my father thought that I was out too late. I’d been to see East of Eden, that’s all. Julia didn’t want to come again.’
‘Julia was at home, doing her homework,’ Mr Smith said. ‘As she should have been every other night this week, instead of running around goodness knows where.’ With you, he might as well have added.
Julia is sixteen years old, Mattie thought savagely. What does bloody homework matter? And I’m seventeen. I’m not going to cry. Not after everything that’s happened. Not just because of these people, with their little, shut-in faces.
‘There was an argument,’ she went on. ‘I came out for a walk. To keep out of the way, you see? And a policeman saw me. He thought I was up to no good.’ She tried to laugh, but it drained away into their stony silence. Clearly Mr and Mrs Smith thought she was up to no good as well. ‘He offered to take me to friends, or relatives. I thought of here. I thought perhaps you wouldn’t mind helping me. Just for one night.’
I’m not here because of you. I came to Julia. And what gives you the right to judge me?
‘You’d better stay, then,’ Vernon Smith said brusquely. He left it unclear whether it was for Mattie’s own sake, or in case of another visit from the police. Betty began to flutter about dust and boxes in the spare bedroom.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Mattie said. She realised that she was exhausted. To go to sleep, that was all that mattered. ‘Anywhere will do.’
Julia was shocked by Mattie’s appearance. It wasn’t just the bruises, and the oozing cut at the corner of her mouth. More disturbingly, Mattie’s verve and defiance seemed to have drained out of her, leaving her as shapeless as a burst balloon. Julia had never seen that, in all the years that they had been friends.
‘Come on,’ she whispered now. ‘It’s all right. Tomorrow, when you wake up, it’ll be all right.’
She steered Mattie up the cramped stairs, with Betty fussing behind them.
Vernon still wanted to impose his own order. ‘I should telephone your father, at least, to say where you are. I wouldn’t want him made anxious on our account.’ He lifted up a china doll with an orange net skirt from the hall table. The telephone sat underneath the skirt. At lot of things in the Smiths’ house had covers. Even Mr Smith’s Ford Popular, parked outside, had a mackintosh coat.
‘We’re not on the telephone,’ Mattie said.
Betty made Julia go back to bed. In the white tiled bathroom Mattie washed her face with the wholesome Pears soap laid out for her. Her distorted face in the mirror looked older under its tangle of hair. Betty knocked on the door and handed her a bottle of TCP.
‘Put some of this on your poor mouth,’ she said.
The small kindness brought Mattie to the edge of tears again.
She went into the spare room and climbed under the turquoise eiderdown. She fell asleep at once.
In the morning, at six o’clock, Julia came in with a cup of tea. She opened the curtains and looked out. In the early light the row of back gardens was tidy and innocent, its squares of lawn surrounded by pink hybrid tea roses. Julia turned her back as if she hated them.
‘What happened?’ she asked.
Mattie looked away, and Julia climbed in at the bottom of the bed, pulling the eiderdown around her. ‘What happened?’ she persisted.
And then, lying there wrapped in the eiderdown and enclosed by the room’s sprigged wallpaper, whispering so that Betty and Vernon wouldn’t hear, Mattie told her.
Julia listened, with anger and disgust and sympathy mounting inside her. Afterwards, with two bright spots of colour showing in her cheeks, she held Mattie’s hand between both of hers.
‘Why didn’t you ever tell me before?’
‘I don’t know,’ Mattie said. She was crying now, tears pouring down her cheeks and making a dark patch on the turquoise cover. She had told Julia everything, the smallest details that she had kept boxed up for so long. And at once, amazingly, she had felt her guilt lifting. Julia hadn’t cried out in horror, or accusation, of course. Had she been afraid for all this time that it was really her own fault?
‘It’s all right.’ Julia hugged her, making inarticulate, comforting noises. ‘Mat, it’s all right. You’ve got me. We’ve got each other.’
At last, the storm of crying subsided. Mattie sniffed, rubbing her eyes with the back of her hand.
‘Sorry. Thanks. Look at me.’
‘No thanks.’
They laughed, shakily. Julia was relieved to see Mattie lifting her chin up again. She would be all right. Everything would come back to her, once they had got away. Excitement, a fierce heat, was beginning to boil inside Julia, fuelled by her anger. It was hard to talk calmly as the idea took hold of her.
‘Listen, Mattie, this is what we’ll do. You don’t have to go back there to him. We’ll just go. We’ll leave all of this …’ She waved through the bedroom window, and the gesture took in the bland gardens, the grid of streets with their semi-detached houses that made up the nice part of town, and the sprawling, featurelessly brutal estate beyond, where Mattie lived. It included the High Street, with its Odeon showing East of Eden, and the single milk bar with half a dozen teds lounging outside it, the red-brick church that Betty and Vernon belonged to and the Youth Club hall behind it, the grammar school where Mattie and Julia had met, and where they had made their first small gestures of defiance. The gestures had grown as they got older. Mattie and Julia would have been expelled, if they hadn’t been much cleverer than their anxious counterparts.
Julia’s grand gesture took in the whole of the dull, virtuous suburb, and rejected it. ‘We’ll go to London. We’ll find ourselves jobs, and we’ll find a flat. Then we can live, can’t we? We always said we would, didn’t we?’
Up to London was where they went when they skipped off school for the day. They went up on Saturday nights now, when they had enough money to go dancing at a club. It was a glittering, covetable world, distant, but now, suddenly, within reach.
‘We’ve talked about it so often.’ Sitting in the park, with their backs against the green railings. Trailing slowly home from school. Whispering, over slow cups of coffee.
Carefully, Mattie said, ‘I could pack in my job easily enough.’ Since leaving Blick Road Grammar she had worked as a filing clerk in an estate agency, and she hated every minute of it. Mattie wanted to be an actress. She wanted it so much that Julia teased her about it. ‘But you’re still at school.’
‘Bugger school,’ Julia said triumphantly. ‘Dad wants me to be a secretary. Not a typist, you know. A private secretary, to a businessman. Mum wants me to be married to a solicitor or a bank manager. I don’t want to be either of those. Why should I stay at school to do typing and book-keeping? We can go, Mattie. Out there, where we belong.’
She flung her arm in a dramatic gesture.
Mattie and Julia travelled in their imagination together, away from Fairmile Road and the colourless suburban landscape.
‘What about your mum and dad?’ Mattie persisted.
Julia clenched her fists, and then let them fall open, impotent. Mattie knew some of how she felt, but it was still difficult to put it into words. Even more di
fficult now, because it sounded so trivial after Mattie’s confession. But Julia felt that this little, tidy house wound iron bands around her chest, stopping her breathing. She was confined by her parents’ love and expectations. She knew that they loved her, and she was sure that she didn’t deserve it. Their disapproval of Mattie, and of Julia’s own passions, masked their frightened anxiety for her. Perhaps they were right to be anxious, Julia thought. She knew that she couldn’t meet their expectations. Vernon and Betty wanted a replica of themselves. Julia wanted other, vaguer, more violent things for herself. Not a life like Betty’s, she was sure of that.
‘I’m like a cuckoo in this house,’ Julia said.
They looked around the spare bedroom, and smiled at each other.
‘If I go now, with you, they’ll be shocked but perhaps it’ll be better in the end. Better than staying here, getting worse. And when we’re settled, when we’ve made it, it will be different. We’ll all be equal. They won’t have to fight me all the time.’
It was all when, Julia remembered, sitting on the Embankment with all her possessions at her feet, and afterwards, years afterwards. We never thought if, in those days, Mattie and me.
Mattie had smiled suddenly, a crooked smile at first because of her broken lip, but then it broadened recklessly. ‘When shall we go?’
‘Today,’ Julia said. ‘Today, of course.’
Later, when Vernon was at work and Betty had gone shopping, Julia gathered her belongings together and flung them into two suitcases. Mattie wouldn’t go home even for long enough to collect her clothes, so Julia’s would have to do for both of them.
There was no time to spare. Betty was seldom out of the house for more than an hour. In the frantic last minute, Julia scribbled a note to her. There was no time to choose the words, no time to think what she was saying. I’m going, that was all.
She remembered the carelessness of that, later.
The girls caught the train from the familiar, musty local station. On the short journey they crammed into the lavatory and made up their faces in the dim mirror.
Liverpool Street station seemed larger, and grimmer than it had looked on their earlier adventures. Mattie flung out her arms.