by Rosie Thomas
Betty stood in the silent room, trying to understand what had happened. It was as if her Julia, the pretty, clever schoolgirl, was still there in the house, with all her clothes and the white furry lamb that always sat on her candlewick counterpane. It was someone else, a stranger who she didn’t know or understand, who had run away from her.
‘Julia!’
Betty turned and ran frantically through the house. A series of pictures danced in front of her eyes, faster and faster, like a slide show running out of control. Her first sight of Julia, a bundle of blankets put into her arms. Julia’s first steps, wobbling across the hearthrug towards her. Picnics, and an outing to the sea. Julia making her first cake, frowning solemnly over the mixing bowl. Then Julia in her new grammar school uniform, when Vernon had said, ‘She’ll be someone, Betty. She’s got a head on her shoulders.’
And then, darker pictures slipping between the sunlit ones, there was another Julia who looked at Betty as if she hated her. Betty saw more and more of that Julia, a sullen, silent interloper in her skirts that were too short and too tight, her pretty face shadowed by too much make-up.
‘Julia!’
Betty had searched in every room, flinging open the cupboard doors. The tidy contents displayed themselves, yielding nothing. The garden, grass and roses in the sunshine, winked emptily back at her.
Julia had gone.
She remembered all that, because it had replayed endlessly in her head in the weeks that had gone by since then. And now there was this new message, hardly any more words, but they were headed by the reality of an address, after all Betty’s imaginings. She read it again, London W1, fixing it in her memory in case the letter should disappear. And then, for the first time in twenty-five years, she did something important without waiting to consult Vernon first. She put on her brown coat, and the hat she always wore with it, and went up to London to look for her daughter. To look for her, and to bring her back home.
The square surprised her, when she reached it at last. People didn’t live in places like this. They lived in houses set behind clipped hedges, or else they lived on the estate. She faltered for an instant, the first time since leaving Fairmile Road, but then she collected herself and marched round the railings, under the plane trees, counting the house numbers. When she reached the right door she saw that it was already standing open, revealing a hallway with a strip of shabby carpet and a shelf piled with circulars and manila envelopes.
These were offices, then, and not homes at all. She could hear typewriters, and a telephone ringing somewhere. She looked at the number on the peeling, black-painted door to make sure that she hadn’t made a mistake, and then beside her left shoulder she saw a single bell-push. It was labelled Lemoine, Top Flat.
Julia hadn’t mentioned anyone called Lemoine, but Betty pressed the bell anyway. She waited for a long time and then pressed it again, harder and longer.
Nobody came.
Jessie never answered the bell during the day when Felix was out. Even if it was someone she wanted to see, she couldn’t manage to negotiate the stairs to the front door.
Betty was undeterred. She had plenty of time to wait, if that was what was needed. She looked round and saw that the iron railings sprouted from a foot-high wall with a stone coping. She wrapped her coat carefully round herself and sat down on the stone, her hands clasped over her handbag on her knees.
The occasional passing secretary or messenger looked oddly at her, but no one spoke, and the afternoon went slowly by.
It was Felix who saw her.
He had been to meet the developer, Mr French, in the block of run-down flats, and his head was teeming with ideas and impressions as he walked through the square. He passed the small, brown woman sitting quietly outside the front door with barely a glance, and he was in the dusty hallway before something, perhaps her eyes on his back, made him turn round again.
‘Can I help you?’ he asked.
‘I’m looking for Miss Julia Smith,’ the woman said. ‘Does she live here?’
Felix’s hand cupped the bell-push, an instinctive, shielding movement, but he said, ‘Yes. She lives here.’
The little woman’s face changed. He saw exhausted relief taking the place of determination.
‘I’m her mother,’ she said.
Felix looked at her, and then he thought of Jessie, waiting for him upstairs. The images of mothers collided, hopelessly.
‘You’d better come in,’ he said quietly. Betty followed him meekly up the stairs.
As soon as Julia came in, she felt the change in the atmosphere. She had been singing as she climbed the stairs, but the song trailed away as she opened the flat door. It was very quiet, and Jessie didn’t call out Come here. Tell me the news, and pour me a drink while you’re about it.
‘Jessie?’
Julia ran the two steps to her door, and then she saw. Jessie was sitting in her chair, with her bottle at her elbow. Felix was by the window, enigmatically dark against the light pouring in. And facing Jessie, with her knees and her lips drawn together as if she was afraid of touching anything or breathing in the air, sat Betty.
She looked so incongruous amongst Jessie’s photographs and souvenirs and Felix’s objects, that Julia couldn’t find anything to say at all. Her first thought was, I should have known. I should have known she’d come straight here.
‘Mum,’ she acknowledged awkwardly, at last. She bent down and her cheek brushed the brown felt crown of the hat. Betty wouldn’t look straight at her but her mother’s hand took hold of hers, kneading it, making sure that she was really there. To Julia’s shame, the restraint of it made her want to pull away and run across the room to stand in the light, by Felix.
She realised that they were all waiting for her to say something. Jessie and Felix were waiting too. Julia’s thoughts darted helplessly. What justification was there? Except what she wanted, for herself? Wasn’t it just a truth of life that it was so different from what Betty dreamed, confiningly, for her?
‘I’m all right, you know,’ Julia said. Her voice came out sounding colder, further away, than she had meant it to. ‘I’ve got a job. In an accounts office. Just like Dad.’
Betty didn’t move.
‘And I’m living here. With friends.’
‘Friends?’ Betty did look up then. And her voice could be venomous, when she wished it to. Julia knew all the prejudices that lurked behind the single word. She could have recited them. Dirty blacks. Drunkards and thieves. No better than a common prostitute.
That her mother could even think such things, sitting here with Jessie and Felix, ignited a sudden, violent anger. She jerked her hand away.
‘Yes, friends. Good friends, who’ve been kind to me and Mattie. You and Dad would hardly let Mattie in the house, would you? Do you think you’re better people, or something?’
Anger against Betty’s prejudices found a shape in the words and they spilled out of her, regardless. ‘You aren’t any better. You’re narrow. You condemn anything you don’t understand. You …’
‘Julia.’ It was Jessie, warning her. ‘That’s enough.’
The hot, rancorous words dried up at once. Julia’s fists had been clenched at her sides. They opened now and the fingers hung loosely.
Betty looked in bewilderment from the fat, over-painted old woman who seemed able to command her daughter in a way that she had never mastered, to Julia herself. She seemed taller, thinner than ever, and her face had lost the last blurred roundness of childhood. In the days since leaving home, Julia had grown up. Grown up here, in this horrible attic flat that smelt of drink and cigarettes, with a woman who looked like a madam and half-caste son. Here, instead of in the home that she and Vernon had made for her, and where they had made such plans for her for sixteen years.
Jealousy bit into Betty, and the pain of exclusion, and with them came the terrible fear that she had lost Julia. She pulled her coat tighter around her and shielded herself with her handbag.
Fear made her
desperate.
‘I want to talk to you, Julia.’
‘Here I am.’
‘To you, not to these people.’
It was Betty’s mistake to let her hostility show. Julia’s face, the new, grown-up face, didn’t change, but she said, ‘I don’t have any secrets from Jessie and Felix. Or from Mattie.’
‘That girl …’ Betty was sure that it was Mattie’s influence that had brought Julia here, but she made herself bite back the accusation. The moment of control strengthened her, and her fear ebbed a little. She looked fiercely at Jessie and the fat woman’s chair creaked as she began to labour to her feet.
‘You talk to your mother,’ Jessie murmured to Julia. But Julia whirled across to the chair and her hands descended on Jessie’s shoulders, holding her in her place.
‘Please,’ Julia whispered. She looked across to the window, trying to see the shadowed face against the sunshine. ‘Please, Felix.’
Jessie hovered for a moment, almost on her feet. And then she sighed. Her weight sagged backwards against the cushions. She knew that Julia was fighting, and the battle clearly mattered so much to her. If Julia wanted herself and Felix to stay for it, then they would do it for her. Jessie could read the vulnerability in Julia’s face, even though Betty was blind to it. She sighed again, silently aligning herself. Over by the window, Felix was looking out at the plane trees. Their leaves were beginning to curl and turn brown, the first premature autumn in August. He didn’t turn, but he didn’t try to leave the room either.
Julia faced Betty again.
‘Go on,’ she said.
Betty’s brown hat bobbed in front of her.
‘I want you to come home.’
The words dropped into the room’s stillness.
Julia said nothing and Betty, with the fear lapping up in her again, began to talk faster. ‘Come home. We’ll forget all this. Dad and I won’t mention it, if that’s what you want. We’ll all forgot it. They’ll take you back at the school, in the new term. You can finish your course, and then get a job, a real job, a good one. You needn’t think that everything has gone wrong, just because of this.’
She was trying to say, if it’s out of pride that you won’t come back, don’t be proud. I’m not too proud to come here and beg you, am I? But Betty had never been any good at words.
‘You can come back. Everything is at home, waiting for you.’
Julia seemed to be waiting politely for her mother to finish. But at last she said, ‘I’m not coming home.’
Betty sprang up and ran to her. She put her hands on Julia’s sleeves and twisted them, trying to move her, trying to find her. Julia thought, she’s so small. like a dry leaf. She had no memories of Betty having been the source of warmth and strength in their childhood. She couldn’t remember her childhood at all. All she could focus on was this, a little, thin woman who clung to her, and whose bones felt brittle.
Suddenly all the perspectives changed.
The great battle that she had prepared herself for, the battle for her own freedom to be fought out to the sound of trumpets in front of Jessie and Felix, had never even begun. It was a nothing, a foregone conclusion, her own strength brutally crushing Betty’s.
Julia wished now that she had made the small concession of letting her mother take her defeat in private.
‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘I’m very sorry.’
And Betty, who was just beginning to understand what her loss really was, with bitterness eating through her fear, rounded on Julia for the last time.
‘Sorry? You’re sorry, is that all? After what we’ve done for you, and given up for you, ever since you were a baby? A dirty little baby who wasn’t wanted …’
Betty’s mouth made a circle of pain, and her hand went up to cover it. She heard the warning creak as Jessie leaned forward in her chair, and out of the corner of her eyes she saw the shadow move as Felix swung away from the window.
Julia didn’t hear anything or see anything. There were only the words, inside her head. A dirty little baby who wasn’t wanted.
Afterwards she remembered a bowl of oranges, Felix’s sea-blue bowl, on the table in the window. She remembered a paisley shawl draped over the sofa back, and the sagging cushions and protruding springs of the sofa itself. The precise images came back to her, afterwards, in the moments of deepest shock.
Lily. Lily, standing in a drawing room in jeans and a torn T-shirt. Bare, tamed feet with chipped silver polish on the toenails.
‘You can’t go,’ Julia heard herself saying.
Lily dug her hands deep into the pockets of her jeans. Her shoulders hunched forward to make shadowed deep hollows at the base of her throat.
‘I want to go. I want to go with Daddy and Clare.’ That clear, high voice, cutting her.
‘You can’t. You have to live with me.’
And Lily looking back at her, with her father’s level eyes and Julia’s own mouth, shaping those words.
‘What kind of life will it be, if you make me?’
Too old for her age, and yet still a little girl. The weight of all that had happened, pressing on them both.
And then Lily turned lightly away from her, while Julia wanted to run after her and hold her as she would once have been able to do, keeping her, loving her now that it was too late.
The door closed.
Julia saw the oranges then, and the old sofa, and the squirled feathers of the paisley.
In the close attic room she moved slowly, as if the air around her hand turned solid.
‘What do you mean?’ the words slurred in her mouth. Like being drunk, only she knew she wasn’t drunk.
Betty grown old, with all her life of fear naked in her eyes now, fear and a kind of last exultation. Power, after all. Not quite done yet.
‘You’re not my daughter. Not Vernon’s either. We took you when you were just a few weeks old. I’d lost one of my own, couldn’t have another. And the War was coming.’
All Julia could think of, the only thing as she struggled to form the words, was, ‘My real mother? Who was she?’
Betty’s face dancing in front of her eyes, ageing as the seconds ticked past, a stranger’s.
‘I don’t know. I never knew. Some silly girl, I suppose, who got herself into trouble.’
That was all.
It was Felix who came forward to put his arms around Julia. Her head fell against his shoulder and she began to shiver. The sudden stripping away of it all, Fairmile Road and Betty and Vernon, left her icy cold. Her teeth chattered and Felix’s hands felt dangerously hot through her thin blouse. He held her close to him. For a moment even Jessie was silenced, but Julia laughed. It was a little, tuneless noise that none of them recognised as laughter. She lifted her head from Felix’s shoulder and said, ‘I’m glad you told me. It explains a lot of things, doesn’t it?’ She looked past Betty as if she had stopped existing and repeated, ‘Some silly girl.’
Jessie leaned forward to Betty. ‘You shouldn’t have told her like that,’ she said sharply. ‘Don’t you know better than that?’ Betty ignored her. Her eyes were fixed on Julia, held in Felix’s arms. With her last shot gone, Betty was defenceless. Felix thought painfully that she looked like a dismembered creature, ‘We did our best for you,’ she whispered. ‘We loved you.’
‘Love?’ The word sounded like an intricate puzzle to Julia, turning inwards on itself until it was finally empty, without meaning. ‘Yes, it doesn’t make any difference, you know. I won’t come home.’
She was more brutally certain now’. Her own strength surprised her. Betty made a last effort. ‘We’re still your parents. Your mother and father. Legal guardians. And you’re only sixteen. We can make you come back if we have to.’
Jessie’s big, grey head lifted, but she said nothing.
Julia laughed again, just recognisably now.
‘You could, but what difference will it make in the end? I will be twenty-one one day, you can’t stop that, and even before then you don’t
own me. You can’t change what you’ve just told me.’ Carefully but deliberately she detached herself from Felix. She went across to the sofa and sat down, her back against the warm paisley shawl. ‘I’m all right,’ she said to Felix and Jessie. She was smiling when she turned to Betty again.
‘It’s funny, in a way, isn’t it? Ironic, I think that’s the word. I wanted to be free, and you’ve set me free by telling me the truth.’
There was a moment of silence. Felix thought, It isn’t as simple as that.
Then Betty stood up. Her coat seemed bigger, too loose for her frame inside it, and her handbag looked like a dead weight over her arm.
‘You won’t come?’ she asked childishly.
‘No,’ Julia repeated. ‘I live here now.’
There was no more talk of guardianship, no suggestion of ownership. Betty’s head nodded stiffly, just once.
Watching her, Jessie tried to promise, ‘We’ll look after her for you. I’ll see she’s all right.’
Betty swung round to her, bitterness only heightened by defeat.
‘You? You and him?’ She jerked her head at Felix. ‘My Julia might just as well be on the streets.’
No one said anything then, not even Julia, even though her fists clenched in her lap. She watched her mother plod slowly to the door, fumble with the catch. There was still an instant when she could have said, Wait. Yet she didn’t, and afterwards she believed that she was right.
They heard Betty’s footsteps going away down the stairs.