Bad Girls Good Women

by Rosie Thomas

  In her first lunch-break, Julia dashed back to World’s End. Lily was eating baked beans on toast amidst a clutter of toys. She clung to Julia on first sight, but then she let her go happily enough when it was time for her to return to work.

  It was at the end of the first week that Mrs Forgan suggested that it wasn’t necessary for Julia to come back in the middle of every day. ‘It’s unsettling for her and for the other one, you see, you coming in every day at dinnertime. Best to let her be with me for the whole day.’

  ‘All right,’ Julia said reluctantly. She was thinking about dinnertime, and the irony of returning, full circle, to Betty and Fairmile Road. With its faintly threadbare neatness, Mrs Forgan’s house was beginning to remind her very strongly of Fairmile Road.

  Gordon Mansions, Mrs Forgan’s and Tressider Designs marked the beginning of a long, drab time.

  In the mornings, Julia and Lily took the tube and bus to World’s End, and then Julia rushed back up the King’s Road to be in time for work. It was her job to open the shop to the first of the day’s avid setting-prospectors. In the evenings at about six o’clock she collected Lily again, and they made their way back home through the rush hour. Julia realised very early on that she should have found a minder near to the flat rather than near to her work. It would have meant longer hours apart, but Lily would have been spared all the travelling. Now that she was settled with Mrs Forgan, Julia didn’t want to uproot her.

  As soon as they reached home in the evenings, it was time for Lily’s supper and bath. It was a time when they were both always tired and irritable. Julia knew that she saw far, far too little of Lily during the week, but yet by the end of the day even the brief hour that she did have seemed too long. She shouted at Lily when she fumbled and spilled her food or her beaker of juice, and she cut down the length of story time because she found herself nodding over the pages as she read.

  Lily caught a succession of colds. Mrs Forgan explained that Warren, the other child, was sickly, and that, in her words, he passed the germs on to everyone else. When Lily had fallen asleep at last, Julia would stand over her bed, listening to her thick breathing and touching the back of her hand to her flushed cheeks. A stab of guilt and love and anxiety would pass through her chest then, so sharp and burning that it would double her up. She would bend over to kiss Lily, almost waking her up again with the oppression of her silent apology.

  Without clearly realising it, Julia was lonely. She had enough friends in London, from the early days of the square and the later times with Alexander, but none of them seemed to be leading a life anything like Julia’s own. Most of them weren’t married; none of them had children. Julia was well liked and there were plenty of invitations, but babysitters were an expense she couldn’t always afford, and she refused more offers than she accepted. Soon they began to dwindle, and she spent more and more evenings alone at home, reading, escaping into other worlds.

  At weekends, Julia tried to assuage her guilt by devoting herself entirely to Lily. They went to play in Coram’s Fields, and to the Regent’s Park Zoo, which Lily loved. They would spend whole afternoons sitting on a bench in the monkey house, watching the sad gorilla. They went to the local baths, and Julia painstakingly taught Lily to swim. When the weather grew warmer they went to Hampstead Heath for picnics, and they even started visiting Betty and Vernon again.

  Lily thought that the short train ride was the best adventure, and that the tidy, draped and ornamented interior of Fairmile Road was wonderfully glamorous and mysterious.

  ‘Like Granny Smith’s,’ was one of her favourite terms of approbation. Betty would let her throw open cupboard doors and prospect through the orderly contents for treasures, as Julia herself had never been allowed to do. Lily could drape the dining table with fringed chenille tablecloths to make a tent, and pile up the interior with cushions and blankets, while Julia watched in disbelief.

  ‘She’s only a baby,’ Betty said fondly. ‘Poor little thing. Let her play.’

  Poor little thing, Julia understood, referred to Lily’s life without the regular, visible presence of a father who went to an office and came home at exactly half past five, as Vernon did. Lily’s lucky. Luckier than I was, she might have retorted, but she didn’t.

  ‘Whatever’s happened?’ Betty had whispered, nervous and fascinated and faintly gratified, even in the midst of her disappointment, to be proved right in her belief that the classes didn’t mix.

  ‘Alexander and I didn’t make each other very happy, in the end,’ Julia said clearly. ‘We separated, and I suppose we’ll get divorced when the time comes. We’ll share the responsibility for Lily, of course.’

  Vernon, sitting in his armchair with his thin shanks in Sunday slacks and his feet in tartan slippers, said that divorce was a sin. Having delivered his verdict he folded and refolded the Sunday People and went on reading it. Betty nodded, her old, automatic confirmation of Father’s right, but she also looked at Julia with anxious sympathy.

  Julia didn’t try to argue or to make them understand. There was no point in making trouble. She was grateful to her parents for the Sunday outing that Fairmile Road provided. The realisation depressed her, but she accepted it. But Lily enjoyed it. She told herself that that was what mattered most.

  ‘Look at her,’ Betty would say fondly as Lily dragged more cushions across the floor, wrinkling the mats and causing the china spaniels on the coffee table to rock dangerously in her wake. ‘Bless her lively little heart.’

  On the train on the way home, Lily said, ‘I love Granny Smith.’

  Julia smiled at her. ‘That’s good. Granny Smith loves you, too.’

  It was too late to ask Betty, ‘What about my lively heart, when I was her age?’ Nor would asking have provided any answer. Julia reminded herself of Mattie’s criticism, and smiled again.

  She didn’t always succeed, but she was trying.

  In the first two or three months Alexander came regularly to see Lily. Before the first visit Julia worked frantically to decorate and furnish and turn Gordon Mansions into what would match Alexander’s idea of a suitable home.

  When he came, she was half eager for him to approve, half resentful that she should need his approval. Alexander looked at the serviceable second-hand furniture, and the freshly painted white walls. In Lily’s bedroom, where her latest drawings were pinned to the walls, he stood for a long time staring at the colourful blobs and outlines. ‘She’s changed,’ he said at last. Just in this short time.’

  ‘I know.’

  They turned away from each other. Lily swung from Alexander’s hand. She was shy and excited at the same time, and flirtatious, glancing up at him from under her eyelashes.

  ‘You’ve made the flat very comfortable,’ Alexander said. ‘Is there anything you need?’

  ‘The allowance you make is very useful,’ Julia answered. ‘Other than that, there’s nothing we need.’ She was wondering how it was that they had once been close, and now were stiff and distant. She knew that it was her own doing, and she felt guilty and helpless.

  ‘Come on then, Lily. Let’s go and see Granny.’ They were going to see China. Alexander was buttoning Lily’s coat, his fingers touching each button as if it was precious. Julia waved them off from the doorway. She stood there, rigid, watching them go away together. She wanted to run to Alexander and have him wrap his arms around her too. Dependent, she rebuked herself. Dependent. You have to find a way to stand on your own. Perhaps, she thought, her need for Josh as well as her need for Alexander were only different facets of her own inadequacy.

  I can survive, she repeated.

  Julia went back into the silent flat and closed the door firmly behind her. She did some paperwork that she had brought home from Tressider’s. Then she listened to a play on the radio because she felt too restless to read, and waited for Lily to come home again.

  After the first one, Alexander’s visits were fairly frequent, but they were always to collect or deliver Lily. He took her on ou
tings, or to China’s flat in a grand block overlooking Albert Bridge, because Markham Square was let. Sometimes, for a whole weekend, he took her home to Ladyhill. Julia watched her carefully when she came back, as if she was expecting Ladyhill itself to have seduced her daughter’s loyalty. But Lily seemed exactly as she always was – lively and inquisitive and impartially lavish with her love.

  Spring came, at last, and the time that Julia had agreed with Alexander, right at the beginning, for Lily to go to Ladyhill for a whole month. She notified Mrs Forgan, who pursed her lips, and she washed and ironed Lily’s clothes and packed them with her favourite toys and books in a big suitcase. The night before Alexander was to come to collect her, Julia sat by Lily’s bed for a long time, watching her sleep. She reached out and twisted one of her black curls around her finger, trying to unravel the knots of love and possessiveness, jealousy and. responsibility and resentment, that tangled inside her.

  Alexander came to take her away, and Lily threw her arms around him. ‘See the cows?’ she asked, and Julia realised with a pang that she remembered Ladyhill, and already understood that the pleasures of it were to be shared with Alexander, not with her mother.

  ‘Yes, we’ll see the cows. And there are baby lambs as well. Granny Faye’s feeding one with a bottle, because it’s lost its mother. Are you all ready?’

  ‘Ready now,’ Lily beamed. ‘See Granny Faye.’ Lily accepted it as part of life’s natural generosity that she had three grandmothers.

  Julia hugged her, then let her go.

  When she had gone the empty rooms seemed full of imprints of her. Julia had told herself that she was looking forward to a month of freedom. She had made plans, and promises. Now she sat on Lily’s bed, holding one inside-out white ankle sock, and cried out of loneliness and despondency.

  When she had finished crying, Julia found that it took an effort to relearn the ground rules of a life of freedom.

  ‘Relax,’ Mattie told her. ‘You can’t pack everything into one evening. Leave something for tomorrow.’

  Julia wanted to go to a restaurant, then to go to a party to dance, then as soon as she had arrived and restlessly scanned the room, to move on somewhere else, another party, another place. She seemed fuelled by a kind of wild energy that was close to desperation. Privately, Mattie thought she looked gaunt and feverish.

  ‘I can’t keep up with you,’ she complained.

  Julia stared at her. ‘But you’re used to it. This is what you do, isn’t it?’

  ‘Not really.’

  Men gathered round Julia, drawn like moths to the bright light of her new energy. She hadn’t slept with anyone for months and months. She thought that motherhood had obliterated sex. Now, in quick succession, she had several lovers. It was exciting to discover that she could have whoever she wanted, choosing with deliberate care or with reckless rapidity from the King’s Road parade. Suddenly, it seemed, that springtime, everyone was doing the same thing. Julia was shaken by the depths of erotic intensity that the rediscovery stirred in her. She woke up in the mornings and reached out for whoever was lying beside her, greedy for a feast of lips and fingers and warm, unfamiliar flesh. All day long, at Tressider’s, she hummed and crackled with the electric charge of sex. She looked out of the tall plate glass windows of the shop-front at the men going by, noticing the length of their legs and the bunch of muscles under tight jeans. George Tressider arched a disapproving eyebrow. But Felix remembered the time that he had spent in Florence and what had happened to him there and was briefly, piercingly jealous. And then when the evening came and Julia left work, going to a bar with Felix or meeting Mattie somewhere, it was time to choose again. She chose a cleft chin or an outré pigtail or a glimpse of a suntan under an open-necked shirt, and she spread herself out like a feast for the favoured one.

  Her appetite lasted for almost the whole of the time Lily was away.

  Then she woke up one morning and after they had made love she discovered that she couldn’t think of anything to say to the blond boy in bed beside her. She hadn’t cared to talk before, but this morning she wanted to share confidences, and lovers’ laughter. The blank-faced boy confronted her instead.

  ‘Wasn’t it any good?’ he asked her.

  ‘Oh yes, it was fine,’ Julia lied. She got rid of him as soon as she could.

  You’re still dependent, she told herself. A mass of men, that’s no different from one, is it?

  She went to Soho, to a shop displaying surgical corsets and bottles of patent medicine with faded labels in its dusty window. A sign in the corner of the window announced Marital Aids. The irony of that didn’t seem particularly amusing. She bought a vibrator and used it, grimly conjuring up faceless fantasies. The charge running through her rapidly lost its electricity, then disappeared altogether.

  ‘Come with me to rehearsal tomorrow,’ Mattie said.

  ‘They won’t want spectators hanging round at rehearsal, will they?’

  ‘This is different,’ Mattie told her.

  She had finished work on Girl at the Window. It had been a relief to kiss goodbye to her own vapid role, even more of a relief not to have to simulate passion for Tony Drake every day. Mattie had been out of work for weeks afterwards. Deliberately, she had turned down the parts her agent had tried to persuade her to audition for. There had been a supporting role in a silly West End musical, only being staged as a vehicle for a much older, bigger star, and the chance of playing a student nurse in Emergency Ward Ten.

  ‘Bread and butter,’ Francis Willoughby’s successor had murmured, shaking his head. ‘You can’t afford to turn down bread and butter.’

  ‘I’d rather have gin and éclairs,’ Mattie had told him.

  She had stayed at home in Bloomsbury, reading magazines and watching her new television, and going out to eat in her favourite cafés at erratic hours. As an economy measure, because she was out of work, she drank Spanish burgundy instead of gin or whisky. The wine made her sleepy, and she often woke up stiff in her armchair with the blue eye in the centre of the television screen staring balefully at her.

  Then, without any warning or preliminaries, a woman rang her up.

  ‘Mattie Banner?’

  ‘Speaking.’

  ‘My name is Chris Fredericks, of the Women’s Stage Group. We’ve seen your work. Are you interested in coming to read for us? It’s a new play, by a new woman playwright. It’s an all-female production.’ Her low, slightly hoarse voice was attractive.

  Mattie thought for a moment. She had never heard of the Women’s Stage Group. She looked across the room and saw the pile of magazines on top of the television set, and three empty bottles of wine beside it.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I think I would be interested.’

  Chris Fredericks gave her an address, a place that sounded like a warehouse, south of the river, a date and a time. Then she rang off.

  Mattie raised her eyebrows in mock-surprise. ‘I’m supposed to be the famous actress,’ she told the dead line. ‘What happened to please, please come and read for us?’

  She found herself looking forward to the reading more keenly than its relative importance might have warranted.

  When the day came she found her way to the address in Lambeth. It was, as she had imagined, a warehouse. After hammering at the big metal doors and shouting for several minutes without making herself heard, Mattie was beginning to assume that she had come on the wrong day. Then she heard a rattle on the other side of the doors and one of them slid open to leave a narrow slit. A head popped out of it. It was a girl’s, with a bush of curly dark hair.

  ‘Oh, hi,’ the girl said, smiling at her. ‘Sorry. We were talking. Didn’t hear you. Come on in.’

  Mattie followed her. They passed through the shadowy warehouse space, which as far as she could see was still filled with bits of machinery, and through a door in a partition at the far end. The partition closed off a small high room, furnished with a table and a few packing cases. There was a layer of dust over everyt
hing, including a kettle on a tray. Coffee mugs, play-scripts, a relatively undusty bottle of milk and an open packet of chocolate digestive biscuits were scattered over the table. There were perhaps a dozen women perched on the packing cases, all talking. Two or three of them glanced up at Mattie and grinned, one of them stood up and held out her hand. She had a young face, but her black hair was thickly streaked with grey. She was wearing jeans and a man’s shirt.

  ‘You must be Mattie Banner. I’m Chris Fredericks.’

  Mattie was used to recognition and acknowledgement, in professional encounters at least, just as she was used to the studio car and driver. But the members of the Women’s Stage Group hadn’t offered her any acknowledgement beyond ordinary, casual friendliness. Mattie dismissed the twinge of pride and decided that she liked them for it. She shook Chris Fredericks’s hand warmly.

  ‘We’re a women’s group, as I told you. We’re also a democratic group. All decisions, artistic or administrative, are taken collectively. I have been nominated director because only one person can make a telephone call, for instance. But I have no more authority within the group than anyone else.’ Chris pushed a copy of the script across the table to Mattie. ‘Here you are. Everywoman’s Odyssey. Shall we start reading? Is everyone ready?’

  Mattie interrupted. ‘Two questions before we start. Why have you invited me?’

  ‘Alison read an interview with you. You said in it that you think women are more interesting than men. Also, having you in the cast will make sure that we get proper attention.’

  It was the oddest read-through that Mattie had ever attended.

  There was no directorial suggestion or control. As a result everyone chipped in with what they felt and how they thought a line should be spoken. If there was a serious disagreement it was put to a vote. It took five and a half hours to complete a read-through of the piece.

  Mattie thought the play was pungent and funny, in parts. She also thought it was too long and much too wordy, and she said so. By linking a series of short scenes from myth and history, it aimed to illustrate the difference between men and women.