by Rosie Thomas
It was a wonderful, convivial lunch.
Felix pulled out the flaps of the table and drew it into the sunny place in the window. He spread a festive white cloth over the pocked surface. Jessie sat queenly at the head of the table, with Mattie and Julia on either side.
They ate ravenously, while Jessie talked, capping and recapping her own stories. She was too engrossed even to drink more than a few tots from the glass beside her hand. The girls had never tasted wine before, and it made them talkative too. The chatter and laugher rose in the sunny room, with Felix’s quiet voice prompting them all.
At last, when they had eaten all the omelette and wiped the last of the oily dressing out of the salad bowl, and Julia and Mattie had demolished the remains of a chocolate cake, Jessie tinkled her fork against her glass.
‘I’ve thought of another toast,’ she declared. ‘A more important one.’
Felix hastily drained the last of the Beaujolais into the three wine glasses and filled Jessie’s to the brim with vodka. She lifted it without looking at it, not spilling even a drop.
‘To friendship.’
They echoed her, ‘To friendship,’ and drank again.
‘And I don’t imagine,’ Jessie went on, with feigned annoyance, ‘that having proposed that, I’m going to be able to get rid of you quite so easily. Am I?’
The girls waited, not looking anywhere.
‘So I suppose you’d better stay on here. Just till you find your own place, mind. Till then, and not a minute longer.’
She shot a glance around the table, to Felix, to Julia and Mattie, and back again to Felix.
‘Not a minute longer,’ he repeated, softly. Whatever Jessie was plotting, if it made her happier, that was enough.
‘Good,’ she said, with firm satisfaction.
Suddenly they were laughing again, the four of them, drawn even closer around the table under the window.
Three
On Monday morning, on their way to work, Mattie and Julia found a public telephone box and squeezed into it together. They found the number they wanted, at last, through the operator.
‘Do you want me to talk to them?’ Julia asked, but Mattie shook her head.
‘I should do it.’
She dialled their local council offices and she explained to the official at the other end that she was ringing anonymously, and she had something very important to say. Speaking very slowly and carefully she gave her father’s name and address, and the names and ages of her brothers and sisters.
‘They aren’t safe with him,’ she said clearly. ‘I know they aren’t. Please will you send someone to see them? There’s no one left to look after them now.’
Julia heard the man’s voice crackle at the end of the line as he tried to make Mattie give him some more information.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I can’t say any more.’
And then she replaced the receiver with a click that made the bell jingle faintly in its casing. She pushed open the heavy door of the kiosk and the girls stepped out into the street. Mattie was shivering.
‘I’ve abandoned them, haven’t I?’ she said bitterly. ‘I feel so bad. Like a traitor.’
‘You aren’t a traitor.’ Julia tried to soothe her.
‘I shouldn’t have left them. Phil’s only seven. What does she know? But I couldn’t stay in that house with him, could I? If he did it again …’
My fault, Mattie began thinking, as she had done a thousand times before. It must have been my fault, some of it. But if I went back, and he did it again … there was the bread knife, lying beside the waxed wrapper of the sliced loaf. She heard a scream – her own or her father’s? – and saw the blood … Mattie shuddered, and felt Julia’s hand on her arm. Warm and friendly, that was all, not twisting or cajoling.
‘Mattie, it’s all right.’
‘Is it?’
She had to leave. After the vision of violence she thought of Ted with a queasy mixture of pity and revulsion and, still, a kind of love. She couldn’t have stayed. Julia was right, of course.
Julia said, ‘You’ve done what you can for now. And you have done, ever since your mum died. It’s Rozzie’s turn to take some of the responsibility now.’ When Mattie didn’t answer she added, ‘You can’t be everything to everyone.’
Mattie stopped shivering, and her shoulders dropped.
‘No, I suppose I can’t. I didn’t even know I was trying to. I wish I saw things as clearly as you do. I wish I saw Ted clearly.’ It was the first time since they had left home that Mattie had spoken his name. As if it was a physical link with him, she snapped the words off and she didn’t talk about him again. Mattie’s face was white and taut under the heavy mass of hair.
Julia wanted to say something else, to show her that she understood, but she couldn’t because she couldn’t even imagine what Ted Banner must have been like. The gulf between what had happened to Mattie and Vernon’s rigid correctness was too wide. She had the sense that she had failed Mattie, and she was reduced to mumbling, ‘It’ll be all right. I know it will.’
Mattie’s expression didn’t change, but in a different, warmer voice she said, ‘We’d better go to work, hadn’t we? Sell some shoes.’
‘Type some accounts.’
Make our way, Julia thought, with a touch of wryness. That’s what we’ve come for, isn’t it?
‘See you later, at home.’
The word sprang hearteningly between them as they waved goodbye. Felix, and Jessie, and the rooftop flat stood between them and the Embankment now, and that was a good beginning. Julia saw Mattie’s blonde curls swallowed up by the throngs of people heading for work, and she turned round herself, more cheerfully, and began to walk briskly to the accounts office.
The thoughts of the Sunday they had enjoyed together remained with Julia as she slid into her typist’s chair and started work. They had stayed sitting round the table, talking and laughing, until the vodka was all gone. Jessie had slipped by stages through excited volubility to dignified, precisely enunciated drunkenness, and then into sudden sleep.
The girls liked her more and more. She had told them the story of Desmond Lemoine. ‘He played the sax, dear. In all the big bands, he was. Even better looking than him,’ with a wink at Felix, who was looking out of the window. ‘Not that Felix uses his looks to much advantage.’ She told them about other lovers, too, with an impartial enthusiasm that deeply impressed Mattie and Julia. At home they had cast themselves as the bad girls, although in fact neither of them had ‘gone all the way’, as they described it in whispers. Julia had come close, in an uncomfortable, awkward grapple, with a boy from the technical college who was supposed to look like Dirk Bogarde. It was harder to tell with Mattie. Mattie was the best at sharp, suggestive repartee on the dance floor, but she was reticent about what happened outside, afterwards, even to Julia.
But Jessie’s stories, as the vodka slipped down, gave them an insight into a world they had never even glimpsed before. It was a salty, indoor world of smoky rooms and overflowing glasses and itinerant musicians. It was a world where, it seemed, you could do whatever you liked provided everyone was enjoying it.
While Mattie and Julia sat still, amazed and enchanted, Felix watched with an air of having heard it all before. He didn’t contribute anything, but he seemed perfectly at ease.
‘I’ve had a good life,’ Jessie said at last. A vast yawn stretched her face into a series of overlapping circles. ‘You listen to me, you girls. You make sure you enjoy yourselves. But don’t act stupid, will you?’
Felix’s face was almost hidden in the shadow. Mattie and Julia glanced at each other. And then they saw that Jessie’s head had fallen forwards on her chest. Her breathing deepened and fluttered on the edge of a snore.
Felix stood up, silently, and arranged the cushions behind his mother’s head. He lifted her feet on to a stool and put a blanket over her legs. Julia picked up the bottle, empty, intending to tidy it away. She had noticed how punctiliously Fel
ix had cleared away the plates after their meal.
‘Should she drink all that?’ she asked.
Felix looked at her. ‘No. But I’m not going to dictate to her about it, because it wouldn’t do any good.’
Jessie wasn’t a person to dictate to, of course. They left her asleep and went outside. The three of them walked companionably through the empty Sunday streets, and Felix took them into Regent’s Park. They wandered past the heavy, musky roses in Queen Mary’s Garden, talking about ordinary things, what they did and what they enjoyed and believed in, making the beginnings of friendship, as they had pledged over their meal.
‘Miss Smith?’
Julia’s supervisor was standing in front of her, looking pointedly at her fingers resting idly on the typewriter keys.
‘I’m sorry,’ Julia muttered, and bent to her work again.
She already hated the accounts department. Her typing was good enough in short bursts, but when she had to keep at it for longer it disintegrated. By the end of the day her head and fingers throbbed and she had used a whole bottle of opaque white. The other girls at the rows of desks were the kind Mattie dismissed as ‘pink cardigans’. They did wear cardigans, tidy ones that buttoned up to the neck over their shirtwaister dresses. They wore pink lipstick too, and touches of pale blue eyeshadow, and most of them proudly displayed diamond engagement rings. They stared covertly at Julia in her crumpled black clothes and defiantly flat pumps. Mattie and Julia favoured colourless lips and deadly pale face make-up, and they emphasised their eyes with lashings of black mascara and black eyeliner painted on with an upwards flick at the corners of their eyelids.
Julia stared unsmiling back at the other typists. She knew that she stuck out amongst them, but she was still too young and too awkward to carry her difference off with confidence. She kept mulishly to herself, refusing to acknowledge that she felt lonely and uncomfortable.
It’s only for now, she told herself, over and over again. Until I find, something else. It was not knowing what else, and the suspicion that there might not be anything, that was really frightening.
Mattie wasn’t enjoying her work much more than Julia, but she had the diversion of being able to watch the women who came into the shop all day long. She watched the way they sat, and they way they looked at themselves in the mirrors, and the attitudes they adopted towards herself and the other shopgirls. And Mattie had the consolation of a particular dream. She bought the Stage and pored over the small ads.
Wanted, Huddersfield. With experience. One leading F two M to juv one char. Start immediately.
The terse abbreviations themselves seemed to breathe a world of backstage glamour. Experience was the difficulty.
Before leaving home, Mattie had belonged to an amateur theatrical group that staged twice-yearly productions like Peter Pan and Charley’s Aunt. The group was run by a spinster teacher who called Paris Paree and who disapproved of everything about Mattie. She kept her parts to a minimum, for all Mattie’s enthusiasm. So Mattie had nothing that she could dress up as theatrical experience, even adopting the kind of wishful expanded truth that she and Julia specialised in.
So Mattie bought the Stage and read every word, and went on dreaming of the day when she could call herself Leading F.
The flat in Manchester Square was an oasis away from work for them both. It was too small, there was nowhere for them to sit in the evenings except with Jessie in her room or on the makeshift beds in their own tiny bedroom. But Mattie and Julia weren’t particularly interested in sitting, and the flat became home in a matter of days. Jessie would wait for the girls to come home from work, and call out as soon as she heard one of them at the door.
‘Come on in here, let’s have a look at you. Tell me what’s going on out there, and pour me a drink while you’re about it.’
Julia and Mattie both acquired a taste for vodka under Jessie’s direction, but there was never enough to spare for them to do them much damage. With their wage packets at the end of the first full week’s work they bought Jessie two bottles, and a pair of the sheerest twelve-denier nylons.
‘What’re you trying to do to me?’ she demanded, pretending to be angry with them. But Jessie had surprisingly slim, pretty ankles. They made her put the stockings on at once and she stretched her feet out narcissistically to admire them.
‘I’ll do your hair for you, if you like,’ Mattie offered.
‘What’s the matter with my hair?’
‘You’ll see, when I’ve done it for you.’
Jessie didn’t just talk about herself, although the girls were fascinated by her stories. She talked to them about themselves, listening with genuine interest and prompting them with questions.
Julia described Betty and Vernon. She told Jessie about the coloured stars that she had innocently stuck on her bedroom walls, and about another time, only two years ago, when she had gone out on her first date. She knew that Betty wouldn’t allow her to go the pictures with a boy. That sort of thing was for much older girls, Betty believed, an awkward but necessary preliminary to being presented with the diamond ring. But the boy who had asked Julia out was much admired by the girls in her class, and by Julia herself. She went, and she told her mother that she was spending the evening with a girl from school. At five minutes past the time Julia had promised to come back, Vernon telephoned the girl’s mother.
And when Julia did reappear they were waiting at the front door for her. The boy had come to see her to the gate, and Vernon marched out to confront him. Julia never knew what he said to him, because Betty dragged her indoors. Vernon came in a moment later and locked and bolted the door as if he was shutting out evil itself.
Even as she described it to Jessie, Julia could smell the wet privet outside the window and feel the soft stinging of her mouth after the boy’s kisses in the cinema. She could still taste the shame, too, in the back of her throat like nausea. She was too ashamed even to look at the boy the next time they met. It was a long time afterwards, because Betty and Vernon had made her stay in for a month, and he never spoke to her again.
Jessie sighed and shifted her bulk in the chair. If Julia had expected Jessie to deplore her parents with her, Jessie refused to do anything of the kind.
‘It’s a shame, but there’s plenty of boys coming your way, duck, and kisses as well. Don’t tell me you don’t know that. It sounds to me as if your mum and dad were trying to do their best for you, that’s all, in their own way.’
‘What would you have done, Jessie?’
She laughed. ‘Asked the boy in first, so’s I could have a good look at him. And smacked your backside for lying to me, as soon as I got a chance.’
Mattie talked about her home too. Jessie soon knew all about Ricky and Sam, and Marilyn and Phil, and all their particular talents, and the funny things that they had done as babies and little children.
It was the things that Mattie left out that made Jessie’s little dark eyes peer shrewdly at her.
‘What about your ma?’
‘I told you. She died, three years ago.’
‘Miss her still?’
‘Yes. No. I don’t know. She never said very much, Mum didn’t. I know she loved us all, but she was ill a lot, for a long time, almost all the time I can remember. We got used to managing, Rozzie and me.’
‘And your dad?’
‘He’s all right.’
Mattie looked down, or away and out of the window, or got up on some pretext and left the room. Jessie didn’t ask that particular question more than two or three times. If Mattie didn’t want to talk about her father, then that was her own business. When Mattie came back into the room the last time, Jessie startled her with a sudden enveloping hug.
‘There’s my girl,’ she murmured, and Mattie smiled again.
Jessie loved physical warmth, and she was demonstrative in her affection. Julia was surprised by her weighty arms around her shoulders, and the relish of her smacking, vodka-wet kisses on her cheek. It was more surprising
because neither Betty nor Vernon ever touched her, nor each other, seemingly.
‘Oh, I like a bit of a cuddle,’ Jessie beamed. ‘And Felix never lets me have one these days. He used to be such a lovely, affectionate little boy, but he’s that touchy about himself nowadays.’
It was Felix, oddly, who the girls found the more difficult to live with in those early days.
On one of the very first evenings, they found him standing at the door of their room looking in at the mess. The floor and the beds were strewn with tangled clothes and make-up and crumpled papers and discarded shoes.
‘Do you always live like this?’ he asked, raising one black eyebrow.
Mattie had muddled through in domestic chaos all her life, and Julia copied it as part of her rebellion against Betty.
‘Always,’ they chorused.
‘You don’t here,’ Felix said coldly. He watched as they sheepishly picked up their belongings and folded them away, and when he was satisfied he said, ‘The bathroom’s full of dripping stockings and things.’
‘Knickers and bras, you mean?’ Mattie tried to tease him.
‘I know what they are, thank you. Just don’t leave them slopping everywhere.’
They tried to make a joke between themselves about his old-maidishness but for some reason it didn’t amuse either of them particularly. The found themselves trying to be tidier, in order to please him.
Julia found it more confusing than Mattie did. Part of her resented Felix’s authority, but she submitted to it just the same. She wanted to challenge him, but she didn’t quite know how to do it. She found herself watching him covertly, admiring the way that he looked and dressed, trying to adopt some of his style for herself. She would stand in the kitchen doorway when he was cooking, looking at the way his hands moved amongst the pots and pans.
‘I wish I could do that,’ she said. Felix put down his boning knife and looked at her.
‘Why shouldn’t you be able to do it?’