by Rosie Thomas
They lay together, tangled in stillness, with Julia’s head heavy on Alexander’s shoulder.
That was right, she thought.
But already she was losing her sureness of how and why it had been right. If she had imagined equality or made it materialise with their bodies’ needs, its absence was reality, and reality always returned. Confusion gathered around her as surely as consciousness itself.
Alexander stirred and settled her head in the crook of his arm. She couldn’t see his face, but she thought she could guess what his expression would be. He had a calmness, not quite complacency but a certainty, that she was utterly lacking herself. She didn’t want to see that expression. Not now, tonight. They had been right, and the surprising satisfaction of it was still with her.
‘Alexander?’
‘Yes.’
‘What were you talking about? You and China, this evening, when you were walking back from the garden. I saw you, out of the window. You were so busy talking.’
She heard the faint murmur of laughter in his chest. ‘I don’t know. I can’t remember. Lily, perhaps. Or the house, or the garden. The ordinary things we talk about.’ His voice was blurring with drowsiness. Julia nodded, her cheek against his skin.
‘It must be nice,’ she murmured.
She watched the white curtains stirring at the dark square of the open window and listened to Lily making her tiny, satisfied noises in her sleep. Alexander’s breathing was deep and regular. After a moment or two, Julia fell asleep herself.
‘Oh shit.’ Mattie had thought that it was the alarm clock, but now she realised it was the telephone.
She couldn’t answer it. She couldn’t even open her eyes, but it still went on ringing.
‘Go away. Leave me alone.’ Even the silent words stabbed through her head, and the external noise assaulted her with renewed brutality.
Wincing, Mattie stretched out her hand. There was nothing there, only crumpled sheet. No solid, grunting flesh. She had got to bed alone, then, somehow or other. That was something.
Fortified by the discovery, she opened one eye. The room was too bright, even though the curtains were lopsidedly drawn. There were clothes all over the floor and the bed; the contents of her handbag were tipped in a heap on the table next to an open half-bottle of whisky. That was right, she remembered that much. She had wanted to smoke a last cigarette with a last drink, and then hadn’t been able to find any matches. At the thought of whisky Mattie’s stomach heaved and her mouth filled with bitter slime. And still the telephone went on ringing.
Mattie took a deep breath and sat up. Trying to move her head as little as possible she leaned over sideways and groped amongst the discarded clothes. Her fingers connected with the receiver and she struggled with the weight of it.
‘Is that you, Mat?’
‘Who else would it bloody well be?’
‘I don’t know, you sound funny. I thought you must be out.’
‘I was. Out for the count. I feel much worse now. What time is it?’
‘Mattie,’ Julia said. ‘It’s nearly eleven o’clock.’
‘So what? You’re not exactly an early bird yourself, are you?’
‘Lily woke up this morning at half past six. She wakes up every morning at half past six.’
‘Oh. Yeah. Sorry. How is she? I’m sorry I missed the birthday. Work. You know how it is.’
‘I know how it is,’ Julia said crisply. ‘What is the matter?’
Mattie sighed. With her free hand holding the front of her head in place she levered herself to sit up against the pillows. The room swung round and then settled again. She wanted tea, two pints of it, but there was no one to make it. ‘Hangover. A real peach.’
‘Wish I’d been there. What were you doing?’
‘God knows. I wish I could remember. No, I don’t. It’s probably better forgotten. Not having a show to do in the evenings, that’s the trouble. Rehearsing’s awful anyway, and there’s so much more time left over to fill with drinking.’
Julia looked over the side of the bureau. Lily was happily playing with her wooden blocks, balancing one on top of another and then pushing them down with a yodel of triumph. Alexander had gone across the garden to the half-overgrown summerhouse. He would spread his notebooks and sheets of music across a white Lloyd Loom table and work in there for hours.
‘Go easy, Mat, will you?’ Julia’s voice sounded concerned.
Mattie shrugged. If only she had a cup of tea. ‘Julia, what is this? Just a chat? Because if it is …’
‘No.’ The sharpness even made Mattie forget her headache for a minute. ‘I need to talk to you. Josh has come back. He wants to see me again.’
Mattie frowned, trying to disentangle what she thought about that. It didn’t take long, even in her debilitated condition.
‘I hope you told him to fuck off.’
There was a brief silence. Then, in a low voice, Julia said, ‘No. I didn’t. I want to see him too.’
‘What d’you expect me to say? You’re married, Bliss is a good guy. You’ve got Lily, you’re lucky.’
‘Don’t say anything.’ Julia’s voice had gone flat. ‘I’m still me, remember. We’re friends. I’m coming up to see you for a couple of days, if anyone asks. That’s all.’
‘Tell a few lies for you, is that it?’
‘Will you?’
Mattie closed her eyes. Then she laughed, even though it hurt. ‘You know I will. It won’t be the first time, will it?’
The memories linked them, all the way back to the days of playing truant from Blick Road. The bond seemed indissoluble, even though everything separated them now. They would always have each other, they thought, whatever external circumstances kept them apart.
‘Thanks, Mattie.’
‘I’ll just have to hope that you’re not really being as bloody stupid as I think you are, won’t I? When are you coming?’
‘Tomorrow. I’m going to have dinner with him.’
Mattie could hear the same old happiness and incredulity and intoxication in her voice. Julia had always been the same about her aviator, from the moment she had set eyes on him in Leoni’s. Mattie felt a dull premonition of the hurt that would inevitably come, and also a much keener pang of envy. She wanted to say, Don’t do it, both to save Julia the pain and to spare herself something too. She could countenance her best friend’s marriage, and motherhood, and her possession of Ladyhill, however scarred by the fire, but it was harder to witness passion and ecstasy, even if they were short-lived. I am a bitch, Mattie thought wearily. Julia was right. It was better to say nothing at all.
‘See you tomorrow, then. You can come here to doll yourself up first, if you want. I’ll be back from rehearsal by six. Are you bringing Lily?’
‘Don’t be daft. Faye’s going to help to look after her. She doesn’t like doing it because it interferes with her jam-making or choir practice or whatever it is that keeps everyone so furiously busy down here. But I told her I had to see my gynaecologist and that guaranteed acceptance and silence. Doctors are sacred and we don’t talk about down there, do we?’
Mattie grinned. ‘Heaven forbid. I’ll see you tomorrow, you adventuress. Ciao.’
After Julia had rung off, Mattie lay still and tried to gather some shreds of strength. Now that she was wide awake there was no point in staying in bed, she knew that from experience. The best thing to do was to get up and pretend that everything was all right, and usually after an hour or two it did turn out to be all right and she could get on with what she was supposed to be doing. There were some days that didn’t turn out well, but those were still infrequent enough not to be worth worrying about. Today she was due at rehearsal at two o’clock, so there was plenty of time to discover which sort of day it was going to be.
Very carefully, Mattie sat up and lowered her feet on to the floor. Her head and stomach protested, but not enough to prevent her from standing up. Once upright, she shuffled over to the window and pulled back the curtain. S
quinting in the bright light she rested her face against the cool glass and looked down. There was the usual handful of purposeful-looking people striding past the little row of shops opposite. The second-hand bookseller had lowered his faded blue awning to keep the sunlight off his stock, and the jeweller next to him was standing in his shop doorway watching the passers-by. Beneath Mattie’s flat there was a dairy, and when she craned forward she could see the empty milk crates stacked up on the black and white tiled frontage, waiting to be returned to the depot. If she looked up again, to the end of the street, she could see a slice of the railings and the pedimented front of the British Museum.
Mattie liked living in Bloomsbury. It was an unfashionable and untheatrical enclave of small booksellers and shabby publishers’ offices, conveniently furnished with corner shops and dowdy cafés. She had learned to be at home in the jumbled streets, and felt that they offered a safe retreat. The familiar scene below was pleasing and soothing, and she felt better at once. Mattie hitched her nightdress around her and went across to her kitchen. Her cooking facilities consisted of a Baby Belling and an electric kettle perched side by side on a narrow shelf beside the sink, but Mattie hardly ever used the Belling. She ate biscuits and drank tea, and when she needed to or remembered to she went out to a café and ordered poached eggs or beans on toast. Unlike Julia, she had never acquired Felix’s taste for fancy foreign food. After she had eaten her meal she liked to sit in the café, smoking and listening to the conversations around her.
That was in her own, private, Bloomsbury existence.
In the other half of her life, she was taken to restaurants before or after parties, usually by someone who wanted to go to bed with her afterwards. Usually she prodded at the ornate food, and gave her attention to whatever there was to drink with it. She was as good at resisting the subsequent advances as she always had been, except when she was too weary to bother or too drunk to care. She had certainly been drunk last night, but she had clearly escaped somehow.
Mattie boiled the kettle and made a pot of tea. She sat down at the table with a pint mug, feeling almost healthy again. If she had been lonely and sorry for herself earlier because there was no one to bring her tea and sympathy, she was relieved to be on her own now. If there had been a man, she reflected, he would have expected her to bring him the tea. And he would have wanted all the sympathy for himself because he would have felt much worse than she did, of course.
Mattie smiled and gulped her tea. She groped for her cigarettes and then remembered, no matches. She was beginning to remember last night, as well. It had started perfectly straightforwardly, in the pub next to the rehearsal room, with two or three of the other actors. It had been a bad day, and they had bought each other rapid rounds of drinks to cheer themselves up. The opening night was still two weeks off, but it seemed impossible that anyone would be able to darn the gaping holes in the production in time.
The play was Romeo and Juliet, a dissected version of it to be played in modern dress in a black-painted circular space inside a warehouse near Euston Station. The director described it as Shakespeare for the West Side Story generation. Mattie had no particular objection to trying to play Juliet in a black leather jerkin with her hair piled up in an immense beehive on top of her head and finished off with a black ribbon. If that was the director’s vision then she would do her best to interpret it for him. But she was finding it difficult to speak the verse. She had no training, and the rhythms mangled themselves in her mouth, the lines stretching like yawns or telescoping into staccato nonsense. The director was too preoccupied with tinkering with the text and searching for effects to give her the proper pointers, and Mattie was floundering dismally. She knew the director had hated her performance from the beginning, and she suspected that he had only cast her in relentless determination to be avant garde and because he was sourly jealous of Jimmy Proffitt’s huge success. Everything was made much worse by the actor taking the part of Romeo, a RADA-trained pansy with all the affectations of Doris and Ada but none of their wit or resilience.
‘I’m so bloody awful I could die,’ Mattie had groaned to Tybalt and Mercutio in the public bar.
‘Nah, it’s not you,’ Tybalt had comforted her. ‘You’re not much good, but you’re no worse than anyone else. The whole bloody show stinks.’
They had made depressed faces at each other, and there had been nothing for it but to order some more rounds of Guinness.
Later, the gloomy circle had been swelled by the members of a pop group who had turned up to play a booking at a nearby hall and found it cancelled. One of the actors knew one of the guitarists, and more drinks had been bought. The conversation had stopped circling round the miseries of the production, and turned to Chubby Checker. Mattie had cheered up immediately. Sixpences were pressed into the jukebox and she and the lead singer obligingly demonstrated the Twist to the rest of the pub’s customers. After that, someone had suggested a Chinese dinner. They had crammed hilariously amongst the amplifiers in the musicians’ van and driven to Gerrard Street. Mattie didn’t much like Chinese food, but several bottles of only slightly peculiar-tasting wine had appeared with it, and it was after her share of it that everything went hazy in her recollection. They had left the Chinese restaurant intending to go to a party that someone knew about, but on their way through Soho they had stopped off at the Marquee Club to see another group, and Mattie remembered dancing and then falling sideways to sit on somebody’s knee. It was the singer with the group, except she couldn’t remember which group, and he had put his hands up under her jumper to knead her breasts. She had dragged his hands away and more or less stood up again, but she was enjoying the noisy company because it saved her having to think about Juliet, or think about anything at all, so she had stayed to have another drink instead of taking herself home to bed.
After that they were outside again and trying to find the van to go on to the party. There were lots of people, although hardly any of them were the ones she had started the evening with, and it was at that moment that Mattie had noticed they were standing right in front of the Showbox. Monty was looming in the doorway, looking for punters. Someone must have paid, or perhaps Monty had let her in with her friends to fill out a thin night, and they had all flocked in to see the show. The rickety chairs and the tatty curtains and the music were all nightmarishly familiar. Mattie had looked round wildly, searching for the way out, but the singer had his arm round her shoulders, dragging her down, and his other hand was crawling up her thigh like a snake. He had muttered something about a cigarette, and she had given him one of hers, and her box of matches, to keep his hands busy for a few seconds. The girls came on and did their routines, just as they always had done. Staring at their creased, unresisting bodies Mattie felt unbearably sad, for them and for herself. Oily, heavy tears welled up and ran down her face.
Poor women, she thought. Why should men do this to them? Why should we let them?
With boozy, sodden ferocity she had lurched to her feet, swiping at the singer and connecting with him so forcibly that he had almost fallen off his chair. Then she stumbled to the front of Monty’s dim cavern and shouted something. Something like, ‘You won’t enjoy this as much as girls’ tits, but you can bloody well listen.’
Sitting at her table with her mug of tea, Mattie put her hands up to hide her face, remembering what she had done.
She had declaimed Juliet’s death speech.
… I will kiss thy lips.
Haply some poison yet doth hang on them
To make me die with a restorative …
‘Oh, Jesus,’ Mattie murmured. ‘I wish I really was dead.’
Monty had rescued her. He had swept her away, bundled her into a taxi, and she had managed to convey herself from the taxi and into bed.
Mattie lifted her head again, very slowly, and peered round the room. At least there was no one here to witness her shame. Then the corners of her mouth twitched, and she began to laugh. She laughed until she had to gasp for breat
h, the thought of declaiming Shakespeare in the Showbox was so irresistibly funny. When she had finished laughing she rubbed her eyes and poured herself some more tea.
‘I know one thing for sure,’ she said aloud. ‘I’m never going to touch another drop. Never. Not ever.’
The resolution lasted all the way through what was left of the morning, and until she set off for rehearsal. Then she was just passing the pub opposite the Museum, on her way to the bus stop, when it occurred to her that she had had nothing to eat. She went in and bought herself a cheese sandwich, and one drink to go with it. There was no harm in just one, Mattie thought. Afterwards, feeling suitably virtuous, she caught the bus to the rehearsal room.
The afternoon was the usual round of bickering and recrimination, and they managed to work their way through barely two scenes.
Mattie had only just reached the sanctuary of her rooms in Bloomsbury when Julia arrived.
Looking at her, it struck Mattie that Julia looked exactly as she had done on the day they ran away from home. Hungry and defiant, yet also glowing with anticipation. Ready to be set alight, Mattie thought bleakly. What was that like?
For two or three seconds they confronted each other. Then they swooped together, hugging and exclaiming. ‘I miss you, Mat.’
‘I miss you, too.’ Then they held one another at arm’s length.
Julia shrugged, a little awkwardly. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I know this is different from the old days. I wouldn’t have asked you to cover for me, if it wasn’t so important. But it is, you see …’ She broke off and turned away. It was unlike Julia not to finish what she wanted to say.
‘Is it so important?’ Mattie whispered. ‘Is he?’
Julia turned back then and looked full at her. Mattie saw luminous happiness in her eyes.
Very deliberately, Julia answered, ‘Oh, yes. I haven’t seen him for a long time. But I know exactly what he’s like, I know him so well it’s as if he’s just gone out of this room. Because he’s always been with me, even when I’ve tried to pretend I’ve forgotten. I know the shape of his head and the sound of his voice and the smell of his skin, and I love every part of him. It’s not an illusion, Mattie. I know what’s wrong with him, as well as I know everything else.’ Julia lifted her head and spread her hands out. ‘The existence of Josh, for me, makes the light seem brighter. It’s the difference between being alive, shivering and trembling with it, and being a machine. And I’m going to see him tonight. In an hour.’ As if it explained everything she finished, in a soft voice, ‘You know what being in love is like.’