by Rosie Thomas
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 got 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 privat
ely 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 evenings 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.
Mattie despaired of her. ‘No man is worth loving to distraction,’ she insisted.
‘Josh is,’ Julia said simply.
‘So what will happen?’
Julia shook her head slowly from side to side. ‘I don’t know. But something will. It must do.’
The flat was quiet without Mattie.
Julia finished picking up the discarded clothes and went through into Jessie’s room. The old bed had been exchanged for a third-hand plush-covered sofa, but everything else was almost the same. Julia walked slowly round, picking up the framed photographs and looking down into the mysterious faces, running her fingers over Felix’s eclectic arrangements of bits and pieces. Dust-collectors, Jessie had always called them. They were certainly thick with dust now. The paisley shawl on the sofa back was wrinkled and creased and the water in a vase of long-dead flowers brought by one of Julia’s friends smelt stagnant. The room was stale and neglected. Mattie and Julia hardly ever touched down for long enough to sit in it. Felix would be disgusted, Julia thought, smiling a little.
Felix had completed his National Service. He had seemed even more self-contained afterwards, restrained and economical in his relationship with Mattie and even with Julia. But they had had little enough time to judge. He had gone almost straight to Florence. ‘I always wanted to,’ he told them. ‘Before Ma got ill.’
He supported himself by working as a hotel cleaner, and studied art history. Thinking about him, Julia found a sudden focus for her restlessness. She would fill the afternoon by restoring the murky flat to the pristine condition that Felix would have approved of. She was whistling as she tied her hair up in a scarf and wrapped herself in a faded overall that must have belonged to Jessie. The kitchen sink was full of dishes, and Julia set to work.
When she finished it had been dark outside for more than an hour. The rooms smelt of polish and fresh air, and there was no more dust or washing-up. Julia’s back ached but she was satisfied as she emptied her bucket of water and wrung out her cloths. Felix would approve. She was just putting the kettle on the gas when the doorbell rang. Julia ran downstairs past the locked offices to the front door.
A man was
standing on the step. He had thick grey hair and a lined face, and he leaned heavily on a stick. Julia had no idea who he was. He looked at her without interest, and then peered past her.
‘I’m looking for Mattie Banner,’ he announced.
His voice told Julia what his appearance had failed to.
‘Umm. I’m afraid Mattie isn’t here. She’s working this evening.’
‘In the theatre?’
‘Not … not exactly.’
The man frowned irritably at her. ‘What?’
It just finished, Mattie had said. We ran out of things to need from each other. Or just didn’t find enough of them. That was all she would say.
Julia held the door open wider. ‘You’d better come in.’
‘Thank you. My name’s John Douglas.’
Upstairs, Julia turned on the lamp in Jessie’s newly glowing room. John Douglas was breathing hard after the long climb up the stairs, but he looked around in clear surprise.
‘Hmm. Not what I imagined.’
Julia smiled innocently. ‘What did you imagine?’
‘Less domestic order, knowing Mattie as well as I do.’
‘Ah.’ Julia untied her scarf and shook out her hair, then untied Jessie’s baggy overall. John Douglas stared again, but this time Julia hid her smile.
‘I’m Mattie’s friend, Julia.’
‘I’m sorry, I thought you were the bloody cleaning woman.’
‘I’m both, today. Why do you want to see Mattie?’
John Douglas reached inside his overcoat and took out a big, thick brown envelope. He laid it carefully on the table.
‘I want her to do something. Don’t look at me like that. Not for me, for once. For herself. Where is she?’
Julia sighed. ‘Let me make us both a cup of tea. Then I’ll tell you.’
Mattie leaned against the grimy wall in the tiny changing cubicle behind the stage at the Showbox. It was eleven-thirty p.m. and she was waiting to do her last spot of the night. It would be her fifteenth of the day. The music playing for the girl onstage stabbed monotonously through her skull.