by Rosie Thomas
‘Not very interesting,’ Lily pronounced. ‘It doesn’t make her sound like Mattie.’
‘These things never do,’ Julia answered. ‘Not to those of us who know her.’
She closed the magazine again and studied Mattie’s face. Seeing it there reminded her of Mattie’s first spurt of fame, with One More Day. Kitchen sink dramas, and Jimmy Proffitt. How long ago, and how quaintly archaic, viewed through the distorting glass of the Sixties. Julia remembered how equivocal she had felt about Mattie’s success, and how guilty for not being able to rejoice completely. She was just married to Alexander then, just pregnant with Lily. Before the fire. When Ladyhill was seemingly invulnerable, and Flowers was still alive.
Julia tried to remember why her memories were of unhappiness. I could have been happy. There was no reason not to be, except for Josh.
When she thought of him now, still too often, it was with a mixture of impatience and scepticism, but with much more powerful elements of sadness and loss. There was a kind of reverence, too, for something that had once been valuable, and was still too precious to bundle up and throw away like an outmoded dress.
She hadn’t seen Josh since the days in the little white house that had marked the effective end of her marriage to Bliss. Julia frowned at the rawness of the memory. They had written to each other, once in a while, but they had never met. Strangely, Julia had once been invited to a party in the little mews house. She had recognised it with a painful shock. Josh’s friends, whoever they were, must have sold up and moved on long ago. The white walls had been overpainted with psychedelic designs and the white furniture had been replaced with Afghan rugs and beaded cushions. The cushions had come from Julia’s shop. The new owners were customers of hers. The odd cycles that life moved in. Julia felt old as she leaned forward and laid the magazine on the floor; Mattie still stared at her sideways through the tangled hair and scarves.
At least, she reflected, she felt only pride and pleasure in Mattie’s success nowadays. Perhaps greater equanimity was one of the few compensations for getting older. At the height of a generation’s youth-worship, to turn thirty had seemed almost a criminal offence. And Julia had her own success, too. If she was neither as rich nor as famous as Mattie, she was at least established and comfortably off. She had opened a second Garlic & Sapphires in Kensington High Street, then others in Brighton and Oxford. Astutely Julia had recognised the appeal of Eastern mysticism almost as soon as the Maharishi did. She travelled to India and on to Afghanistan, buying up the necessary beads and fringes, mirrorwork fabrics and tinkling bells. The prevailing scent in Garlic & Sapphires now was slow-burning joss sticks. Even the shop name, so ridiculous to her first bank manager, had the right hippy-mystical overtones.
Julia travelled widely, searching out stock, leaving the shops in the care of capable managers and Lily in the care of Marilyn or Alexander, depending on whether it was term time or holidays. Marilyn had come to Gordon Mansions and she had stayed. She was neither a nanny nor a companion nor a housekeeper, but she was good for Lily and, in her own way, she managed to organise the house in NW1 that Julia had bought with her business profits.
Usually, Julia and Marilyn worked together amicably. Julia could make up the domestic shortcomings herself, shopping when Marilyn had forgotten to do it, scrubbing the bathroom floor when she could no longer stand the grime.
‘I’m glad you’re not my real wife, Marilyn,’ she would joke, still able to acknowledge that the younger sister’s presence, a pale imitation of Mattie even down to the domestic slovenliness, was welcome for the sake of the reminder. Especially when Mattie was away, which she often was. It was only over Lily that they disagreed. Once, at the beginning, Julia had had to work late even though Lily had been ill with a feverish cold. She had come home to find the Gordon Mansions flat empty. She had leapt to the conclusion that Lily must be worse, and that Marilyn must have rushed to the doctor’s with her. She was dialling the surgery number when the two of them came in. They had been out to a boxing match. Marilyn’s current love was an amateur boxer, and they had been to see him fight at a hall in Finsbury. Lily had sat on Marilyn’s knee in the front row and had been petted and fussed by all the managers and their female hangers-on. Her eyes were wide open with excitement and the reflected drama.
‘She enjoyed it,’ Marilyn said. ‘Made her forget her cold. Dave won his bout.’
Julia was furiously angry, and she had vented it on Marilyn. ‘You’re not fit to look after a child,’ she had stormed. ‘You’re thoughtless and selfish and careless.’
But Marilyn had retaliated. She had drawn herself up, looking even more like Mattie, and shouted back, ‘I’m fitter than you are. And you’re supposed to be her mother. Never here, are you? You put your shop first, and your own life, don’t you? Don’t think you can tell me off, just for taking her to see a fight. You could take her a few more places yourself, only you’re afraid she’ll be a nuisance.’
They had stared at each other, shocked into mutual silence.
She’s right, Julia had thought. Half right.
The over-familiar chains of guilt, self-justification and fierce love had clanked morbidly around her. Only it wasn’t that she didn’t want Lily with her. The truth was that she wanted to keep her apart from Thomas Tree. Thomas was her mother’s lover, but Julia believed that the empty space of father, for Lily, could only properly be occupied by Alexander. She didn’t want Thomas even to begin to usurp that place, even if Lily might have let him. She kept her loyalties to Lily and to Thomas separate, doubling her obligations and the necessary efforts to fulfil them. Even when Thomas had lived with them in the house overlooking the canal, she had tried, deviously, to keep a space between them. Julia knew that was one of the reasons why Thomas had moved out, almost two years ago.
‘We just split,’ she told her friends, anyone who asked, even Mattie. ‘One of those things. Time to move on, you know?’
Back at the beginning, Julia had accepted Marilyn’s criticism. It had never been mentioned again, but she never forgot it. On her part, Marilyn tried harder to fulfil Julia’s conventional ideas of how Lily should be looked after.
All through that one argument that they had had in front of her, Lily had watched them in silence. Even then, she seemed to have the mature ability to watch, and assimilate, and judge for herself. Lily’s ideas and opinions were always all her own. Julia was sometimes frightened by the vehemence of them, more often made angry by her calm stubbornness. She was like Alexander in that, too.
‘What are you thinking about, Mum?’ Lily stretched her legs, hitching the T-shirt around her. She was already tall for her age; she would have long legs and a slim figure. Teazle, the fat little pony kept at Ladyhill for her to ride, had long ago been replaced by a neat cob that Lily adored. There was a photograph of Lily cantering, in a hard hat and a hacking jacket, in a silver frame on the mantelpiece. Julia joked about it and called it the National Velvet, but she was proud of the picture.
‘What am I thinking about? Nothing. Time. Getting old. Boring things like that.’
Lily looked critically at her. ‘You aren’t old. Not compared with some people’s mothers. You’re still quite with it.’
‘Thank you, darling.’
Lily was fidgeting, pirouetting around the room, picking things up and putting them down again.
‘What can we do today?’
Julia sighed. Sundays like this one should be peaceful, empty of obligations. But Lily needed to be busy. Julia knew where her daughter’s restlessness came from.
‘We could ring someone up; ask some people to come to lunch. Would you like that?’
There were plenty of friends. She had made sure that the house was always welcoming, that it was often filled with people who came to eat and to talk. Nor, after the years that had just gone by, did many of them belong to tidy, static families. Even Sophia and Toby had separated. Almost as soon as Sophia’s boys had gone off to boarding school, Sophia had met a painter and m
oved in with him. Lily had never felt odd because her father and mother happened to lead separate lives. Nor had she ever felt trapped with Julia in an empty house. Julia remembered too vividly how no one had ever come to Fairmile Road, and how Betty had kept the little rooms stiffly arranged for a celebration that never happened.
‘Can I cook something?’ Lily asked.
‘You’d better. I’m not doing everything. Well, who shall we ask?’
But before they had decided, the telephone rang.
Julia? It’s Mat.’ There was a busy silence before the words, static crackling over them.
‘Mattie? How fabulous, where are you?’
‘New York, of course.’
‘Must be telepathy. We were talking about you. Also your face is all over the colour mag.’
‘Is it this week? Is it that picture that makes me look like a freaked-out gippo?’
‘’Fraid so.’
‘Bloody hell. Just when I’m trying to look straight so someone’ll offer me some Shakespeare or something decent.’ Mattie was talking too quickly, and laughing a lot. She sounded slightly drunk, or high. Julia peered at the kitchen clock. A bar of yellow sunlight lay across the face of it.
‘Mattie, what’s the time there?’
‘Umm. Ten past six. In the morning, dear.’
‘Up early, aren’t you?’
Mattie laughed louder. ‘How many dollars a minute is this chat about my bedtimes costing? I haven’t been to bed, actually. Came back from a party, and knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep in this hotel room. So I’ve watched an old movie on the TV – they have old movies on all night, isn’t it clever of them? – and then I thought I’d telephone my old friend.’ Mattie’s real voice suddenly broke through. ‘I just wanted a talk. Felt a bit lonely, to tell the truth. It was a straight choice between ringing you and having another Scotch. What’s it like in London this morning?’
Smiling, Julia told her. She told her the news of mutual friends, and the snippets of gossip that Mattie loved. She told her about Lily’s part in the school play.
‘That’s my girl. She’ll knock their socks off,’ Mattie crowed. She was never afraid to let her pride or partiality show, as Julia was. Mattie thought Lily could do no wrong, and regularly said so.
‘Go on,’ Mattie prompted. ‘What else is new?’
And so Julia told her about the latest buying she had done for the shop, about the house Felix was decorating for Bill Wyman, anything else she could think of that would make Mattie feel closer to home. They had always been able to do it. All through their successful years that had kept them apart more than they had been together, they had kept the links by telephoning each other. Even when Mattie had been inseparable from Chris Fredericks, and Julia had been wary and awkward with the two of them, they had been able to talk on the telephone when they couldn’t do it face to face.
At last Mattie sighed, ‘That’s better. I feel a bit less mad now. Hey, there’s something I haven’t told you. I’m coming home, to dear old Bloomsbury. I can’t bear this town any longer.’
And into the hum of the transatlantic connection, as if the idea was fully formed instead of just having stirred in her head with the restless reminders of spring and the enticing sunshine, Julia said, ‘Well, that’s a pity. Because I’m coming to the States.’ Across the room, blurred by the bright light that showed the winter’s accumulation of dust, Julia saw Lily’s head jerk up. Just for an instant, her small face seemed set in an alarming mask of anger and anxiety.
‘I haven’t been before, that’s why,’ she answered into the receiver. ‘I want to look for some new ideas, make a few contacts. Look ahead to the next decade, like a shopkeeper should.’
‘And see the aviator.’
Lily had bent her head again, seemingly to her book. Julia was relieved, because she could feel the foolish flush of colour rising in her own cheeks. Like a teenager, she thought angrily. Watching Lily’s dark, smooth head she thought that the strange expression must have been a trick of the light.
‘I honestly hadn’t thought of that. It’s very old history, Mat.’
Far away, Mattie chuckled. ‘D’you know how often you still talk about him? And you’ve sat there all these years, just like Patience on her bloody monument, waiting for him to come back for you. Not very liberated of you, is it?’
‘That’s your department, not mine,’ Julia said tartly, but Mattie only laughed again.
‘Think about it. D’you know, I think I could go to sleep now. Thank God for that. Can I have a talk to Lily first?’
‘Sleep well, my love. I will think about it, although I wish you’d never mentioned it.’ She held the receiver out to Lily. ‘Here. Talk to the wild woman.’
Julia went out of the room, and when she came back Lily had already finished the conversation. She was sitting calmly on the sofa, cross-legged, waiting. Julia opened the address book she had been upstairs to fetch.
‘Who would it be nice to see today?’
‘I don’t mind,’ Lily said politely. ‘You can choose, if you like.’
The friends came to lunch, two women and a man, and three children of various ages. Julia made lasagne and they sat around the pine table talking, the adults drinking wine after the children had got down and disappeared upstairs to Lily’s room. At the end of the afternoon they went to Regent’s Park and walked in the sunshine. It was a cheerful, convivial day, like dozens of others Julia and Lily had spent. Julia liked inviting people, and feeding them, and making them feel comfortable in her house. The parties were different now, she reflected, but there still were parties.
Lily was quieter than usual, but if anyone except Julia noticed, no one mentioned it.
The light was fading when Julia went out to see the last pair of guests into their car. After they had driven off she stood for a moment under the plane tree outside the house, watching the lit-up windows of the house opposite, and her neighbours passing to and fro behind the uncurtained glass. The little tableaux made the street seem cosy. She breathed in a satisfying lungful of damp, leafy air and then went back up the five steps to their front door.
It was dim in the big living room after the brighter light outside. Julia blinked and hesitated, and then saw Lily sitting on the rug in front of the chesterfield. Her knees were drawn up to her chin and one cheek rested on one knee. Her shoulders were hunched forward as if to hide something, or protect something. A corner of the rug was pulled up underneath her. Julia was particularly fond of the rug, an old Anatolian kelim in soft, faded garnet-reds and cobalt-blues. It had long, hand-knotted, bobbled fringes, and an expert had told her that the design represented the tree of life. She was proud of the rug, too. She had bought it on one of her first trips, when she was still nervous of travelling alone, from a market in a little hill town. She had haggled and bargained with the old man who was selling it, and then had walked away because his price was too high. Then she had turned back because she knew she wanted it, and he had disarmed her by accepting her offer and rolling the rug up to press it into her arms, as if he knew it was going to a good home. There had been no question, after that, of it going into the shop. It exactly fitted the space on the sanded floor.
Julia went across and put her hand on Lily’s shoulder, intending to say something about supper, and schoolday tomorrow. Then she saw that Lily was methodically snipping off the knotted fringes, one by one, with the big pair of kitchen scissors. A pathetic pile of fraying ends lay on the floor beside her.
Julia snatched the scissors. They fell, and slithered out of sight under the chesterfield. Julia gave Lily’s hand a stinging slap. She didn’t flinch, but stared up at her mother, her face, a set, triangular mask of defiant unhappiness. Julia saw the unhappiness, but her own possessive anger was much stronger. After the instant she was ashamed of it, but then it was too late.
She held on to Lily’s hand, and shook her. ‘You stupid girl. Why have you done it? It’s a beautiful rug, and you’ve wrecked it. You’re a thoughtle
ss, stupid vandal. Just to sit there, and cut it up. Don’t you care about people’s things? It’s not your rug to ruin. It’s mine. I …’
Coldly, Lily cut her short. ‘Everything’s yours. Your house, and your shops, and your friends. Well, I’m not yours, so there. I’m Alexander’s. I wish he was here. I hate you.’
Lily broke free and scrambled to her feet. She bent down and scooped up the severed fringes then flung them across the room.
‘It’s only a mat,’ she shouted. ‘It’s not a person.’ The coldness had gone. She was crying now, and the puckering of her face made her look as she had when she was a baby. Helplessly, Julia held her hand out to her, but Lily pushed it away from her and ran out of the room.
I’m Alexander’s, Julia thought heavily. There had been other times, many other rows, of course, when Julia had forbidden something or enforced some discipline, and Lily had wished for her father. The bond between them had always been strong, and it was strengthening all the time as Lily grew up in her devotion to Ladyhill, and the green, folded countryside around it. Lily’s pride in the rebirth of Ladyhill’s splendour, artfully aged and faded by George and Felix, was no less fierce than Alexander’s. After each visit she came back full of the details of the latest room that had been cleaned and reopened, or of some nineteenth-century oil of the house that had passed out of the family, and Alexander had managed to buy back again. Julia had accepted it all, as she had made herself promise she would at the beginning, and she had encouraged Lily to talk about her father, as well as to think of Ladyhill as home, her other home.