by Rosie Thomas
Mattie gulped, swallowed the pill. Her eyes met Julia’s and Julia was relieved to see her smile, the old Mattie.
‘I’m all right, I promise. I just need to work through it in my own way.’
Julia hesitated. ‘All right, Mat. If that’s what you want.’ She picked up the pad from the bedside table, wrote her number, left it beside the cream telephone. ‘I’m going to ring in the mornings and in the evenings. And any other time, you’re to ring me.’
‘I will,’ Mattie murmured.
‘Mrs Hopper knows where I am. I’ve talked to her.’
‘Good.’
Their hands met, Julia’s squeezed. ‘Go to sleep, then.’
Mattie lay down. They smiled at each other, then Mattie obediently closed her eyes. Julia crept out of the room, closed the door behind her.
As soon as she had gone, Mattie’s eyes snapped open again. Sleep didn’t come as easily as that. No matter how she stalked it and tempted it. And when she did fall asleep there were the dreams, and after that there was the waking up again.
Julia made her morning call to Mattie. Mattie told her that she was still in bed, reading the newspapers.
‘Fine. I’ll talk to you tonight.’
Julia put the receiver down, picked it up again at once. She dialled Directory Enquiries. The number they gave her was the same as the one Lily had written down in the Town Hall. Margaret Rennyshaw did live at sixty Denebank. There was no question about that. Julia dialled the number. She didn’t wait, or think about it again, in case her courage deserted her.
‘Hello?’
It was her, she knew it was. It was a thick, rather husky voice.
‘May I speak to Mrs Rennyshaw, please?’
‘This is Mrs Rennyshaw.’ She had a strong London accent. She sounded suspicious, and defensive.
‘Mrs Rennyshaw, I’d like to talk to you about a personal matter. A very private, personal matter.’
There was a long silence. Julia wondered if she had even heard her, or if she had heard her and gone away.
Then she said, ‘You’re Valerie, aren’t you?’
‘Yes,’ Julia whispered. ‘Yes, I’m Valerie.’ To her dismay tears began to roll out of her eyes. They ran down her cheeks and she scrubbed them away with her wrist.
‘I knew it was you. I knew, as soon as my neighbour told me you were asking. A woman in a posh white car, talking about a Mrs Rennyshaw. They call me Mrs Davis round here.’
‘I know. Do you mind? Do you mind me finding you?’
There was another pause, a shorter one. ‘No, my love. I don’t mind, if you don’t.’ Julia thought she wasn’t going to say anything else. She was about to start talking, wildly, to fill the silence, when Margaret added slowly, ‘I thought you’d come some day. After they changed that law. I didn’t give you up, you know. Not in my head. I thought about you. Wondering what you were like and what you were doing, all that.’
‘I know. I know you did. I was thinking about you, too. More and more, as the time went. I needed to find you so badly. I can’t believe it, now I have. Now that we’re talking.’ It was so strange, Julia thought. To talk like this, and to cry, with a woman she had never known. Never even seen.
‘How have you been?’ Margaret asked. She sounded awkward now, embarrassed by Julia’s tears. Just as suddenly, Julia wanted to laugh. What has your life been like, for almost forty years?
‘Fine. Lucky, I think.’ Too late, Julia caught herself. ‘I didn’t mean lucky that you had to give me up. Lucky in what came after. Only I didn’t realise it at the time.’ That was her acknowledgement to Betty. She owed her that.
‘I know what you meant.’ The husky voice had gone flat. Julia thought her mother sounded as resigned as the rest of Denebank.
‘Can I come to see you?’ she asked. ‘It’s hard to talk on the telephone.’
‘You know where I am,’ Margaret answered, neither encouraging nor forbidding her.
‘Would you like me to come?’ Julia persisted.
There was another of Margaret’s silences, then she said, brusquely, ‘Yes, I would. Don’t come this week. Eddie’s on evenings and he’s in the house all day. Eddie’s the man I live with. He’s on the buses.’
‘I think I saw him.’
‘Yes. Well, come next week. Monday if you like. Twelve o’clock, he’ll be out by then. He … doesn’t know about you, Valerie.’
‘I’ll be there,’ Julia said. ‘My name’s Julia now.’ She hadn’t yet called her mother anything.
Margaret tried it out. ‘Julia?’ Then she gave a wheezy laugh. ‘Better class of name than Valerie, isn’t it? Well then, Julia, I’ll see you on Monday.’
After she had talked to her mother, Julia sat for a long time in the window of the flat. Looking out, she could see the ordinary comings and goings of the quiet street. A woman went by pushing a pram, and a builder’s van stopped to unload bags of plaster. Two girls of Lily’s age passed, arm in arm, and the builders whistled after them. Julia liked the ordinariness. Life was ordinary, after all. The discovery of Margaret confirmed that. Julia was still watching the street when Alexander’s car drew up, and Lily and Alexander got out. She knew that he had been working in London, but she hadn’t seen him since the day of Mitch’s funeral. He was going to drive Lily back to Ladyhill, and the new school term.
It was almost May. Soon it would be summer. Julia thought of Montebellate, telling herself that she should go back. It drew her, but less strongly than before.
‘I talked to her. I just dialled her number and spoke to her,’ Julia said, when they came in. Lily had told Alexander about the hunt, she knew that. They looked at her, expectant. Lily gave a little snort of excitement. ‘What did she say? Was she amazed?’
‘Not exactly. She sounded … resigned, I suppose. Curious about what I might be like.’
Lily ran across the room to her. Over her shoulder, Julia looked at Alexander. She saw that they were concerned for her, and the concern made her feel warm, and strong. Life was ordinary like the street outside, but it was precious too.
‘It’s all right. I wanted to find her, and now I have. I’m going to see her on Monday. I’m glad I’ve done it,’ Julia reassured them.
‘I think we should go out to lunch,’ Alexander said. There was to be a celebration, but nobody tried to explain what they were celebrating.
They went to an Italian restaurant, because Lily loved Italian food.
‘It’s not as good as real Italian food,’ Julia insisted, and Lily groaned.
‘Mum, you always say that.’
Round the table, Julia thought, they were a family. Enough of a family for anyone. More than she deserved, she told herself. Whatever she discovered at Denebank, and whatever came after that. Her eyes met Alexander’s and she felt her luck, the luck that she had clumsily tried to explain to Margaret, and a strengthening pulse of happiness.
Alexander lifted his glass to her and they drank, without pledging anything.
‘I wish Mattie was here with us,’ Julia said. It was hard to think of being happy without Mattie’s happiness.
‘Is she all right?’
She shook her head. ‘She did her best to convince me that she is. All she did make me believe is that she wants to be left alone. I ring her in the morning, and at night. I don’t know what else to do, except to let her know that we’re here for her.’
When she looked up she saw that Alexander was still watching her. There was the softness of affection around his mouth and eyes.
Julia understood that Alexander was there for her.
The revelation changed the colours and the contours of everything. It filled the bustling, crowded restaurant with light and gilded the heads of the Kensington shoppers, and it made Lily and Alexander look as beautiful and serene as Olympians.
Julia blushed. She looked away again, suddenly as shy as a girl.
‘Ahem,’ Lily said, out of mischief, seeing everything. ‘Can I have zabaglione for pudding? Does anyone car
e?’
‘Not a jot,’ Alexander answered. ‘Today you may have twenty zabagliones.’
Afterwards, when Lily was already sitting in the car ready for the drive back to Ladyhill, Alexander and Julia turned to face each other. It was almost the end of the afternoon and office workers were beginning to stream past them towards the tube station.
‘There have been so many times like this,’ Julia offered him. ‘Too many to count. They always did make me sad.’
‘There needn’t be any more. Don’t be sad.’
She looked straight at him, smiling. ‘I know. I won’t be.’
Alexander leaned forward and touched the corner of her mouth with his own. Then he got into the car and drove away with Lily. This time Julia knew where he was going, and she knew that he would come back. They had grown up, and they knew one another, and there was no need to hurry or to be afraid.
Julia stayed on in Felix’s flat.
She wrote to the Mother Superior and explained that she would stay in England for a little longer; she didn’t know yet how long exactly. With the letter she enclosed a lengthy list of instructions and advice for Tomaso. But she finished up by writing, ‘You don’t really need me to tell you any of this, do you? We learned it together, and you’re ready to do it yourself. Good luck, Tomaso.’
She also telephoned Nicolo Galli. His voice sounded thin and brittle, but she heard him chuckle. ‘I miss you, Julia. But you are doing what is right. I am glad of it.’
‘I think I am right. I’m happy to be here. Nicolo?’
‘What is it?’
‘I miss you too.’
Three or four more times, Julia went down to Coppins. Each time Mattie tried to fend her off, greeting her with blank silences or with angry outbursts, and then retreating into incoherence as that day’s whisky took hold.
Julia could do little more than sit with her, or try to persuade her to eat, and Mattie objected even to that. She insisted that Julia didn’t really want to be there, that she was only doing it out of a sense of duty, and that she herself didn’t need her.
‘I’m all right on my own. I need to be by myself, don’t you understand? I’m no good for anyone,’ Mattie cried. Her face was blotched and swollen.
‘You don’t need to be anything for me,’ Julia told her. ‘You don’t believe it will get better, Mattie, but I know it will. I’ll stay with you until it does. Won’t you let me come and live here, so that I can look after you?’
‘No,’ Mattie whispered. ‘No, Julia, please.’
Julia ached for her, wishing that she could take on some of her suffering. She tried to see beyond the vehemence of Mattie’s rejections, accepting the rebuffs with what she hoped was some of the sisters’ calm.
On one of the days, Mattie wouldn’t even open the door to her. Either the housekeeper was out, or Mattie had persuaded her that she didn’t want to see Julia. Julia waited on the gravel path for a long time, imagining Mattie inside the dark house, pierced with pain for what she was enduring. At last she stepped back and called up to the dead windows, ‘Mat, I’m here if you want me. It doesn’t matter if you don’t, I just want you to know that I am. I’ll be back tomorrow. And if you won’t let me in then, I’ll keep on coming back until you do.’
The next day, Mattie opened the door at once. Julia could only guess at how much she had already had to drink.
‘I’m sorry,’ Mattie whispered. ‘I’m hurting so much I don’t know what I’m doing.’
Julia put her arms around her. ‘I know. Let me help, Mattie.’
Mattie shook her head wearily. ‘You can’t.’ But that day she let Julia make them some food, and sat down with her in the kitchen to eat it. They talked about Felix and William, and Julia saw a ghost of the old Mattie. She left her that evening with a lighter heart.
To fill in the time when she couldn’t be with Mattie, Julia went shopping. She had forgotten how to buy things, even if she had had the money, but she enjoyed looking in the shop windows. Everything seemed very new, and bright and shiny. She also had dinner at Eaton Square with Felix and William, and she admired William’s paintings that hung on the freshly dragged walls in place of the old, important landscapes and sombre portraits. She liked William, and guessed that he was very good for Felix. She saw other old friends too, and remembered some of the London she had loved in the old days. Her fear of it receded, and she began to feel at home again.
She telephoned Mattie every morning, and every evening, whether they had seen each other that day or not.
‘I’m all right,’ Mattie would lie. ‘I have to work my own way through it.’
‘Call me if you need me,’ Julia said on the Monday morning. She didn’t say that she was going to meet Margaret Rennyshaw, nor did she mention Alexander. There were things she felt she couldn’t say to Mattie. Not now, not yet, until she was better.
Julia was getting ready to leave for the station. This time she would go to Ilford by train. She didn’t want to take Felix’s car down to Denebank again. But even before she saw his shadow blurred by the rippled glass in the door, even before the bell rang, Julia had half guessed that Alexander would come.
She opened the door to him. He was wearing corduroys and a sweater that was unravelling at the shoulder seam, as if he had just walked in from the garden at Ladyhill. He was completely familiar, and welcome to her, and she could only stand and smile at him.
‘I thought that if you were going to meet your mother, you might like me to come with you.’
‘I would like it,’ Julia said. ‘I’d like it very much.’
On the way she told him about the short, unromantic search for Margaret Ann Hall that Lily had called their treasure hunt. She described Denebank to him, so that he wouldn’t be shocked when they reached it.
‘Do you mind?’ Alexander asked, looking ahead at the traffic and the unlovely shopfronts of the outer urban high streets.
Julia thought. ‘I mind for her, if I find that she isn’t happy. How can I mind for myself?’
He put his hand over hers, covering it where it lay in her lap, without looking at her. Julia glanced down and saw the glazed, discoloured skin of the old scars. She was overtaken by a sudden longing to make him happy, in compensation, and to wipe out all the sadness of the years.
They passed the end of Denebank and Alexander stopped the car further away, in another street. Alexander drove an unremarkable, mud-splashed estate car, but Julia felt his tact.
‘I’ll wait for you,’ he promised.
Julia got out and slowly retraced the way to Denebank. She felt conspicuous as she turned into her mother’s street, as conspicuous as she had done in Felix’s car and without the polished shelter of it. The two or three people that she passed looked blankly at her. It seemed a long way to number sixty. When she reached it she went up the path, past the broken-down metal fence, and knocked on the door. She had only a moment to stare at the splitting wood under the flakes of old paint before it opened. Margaret Rennyshaw must have been waiting in the hallway.
They looked at each other, greedy, defensive, eager and appraising all at once. No one seeing them together would have guessed at their relationship, but Julia and Margaret knew immediately that there was no mistake. Julia was Margaret’s daughter, as incontrovertibly as Lily was her own.
‘You’d best come in,’ Margaret said in her husky voice. ‘We don’t want the whole street knowing our business, do we?’
Julia followed her in and the door closed behind her.
Beyond the hallway was a front room, filled up with a three-piece suite in black leatherette with red piping and a big television set. On a low coffee table with upcurved ends two cups were laid out with chocolate biscuits arranged in a fan-shape on a chrome dish.
In this enclosed space they could look at each other. Julia saw dark hair like her own, only seamed with grey. She saw a strong face with deep lines running from nose to mouth, dark eyes that had begun to fade with age, a body that was indeterminately shape
d under a colourless jumper and skirt. She had imagined herself comparing their features, cataloguing the precious similarities that would prove their relationship, finding triumphantly that their hands or their mouths were the exact same shape. She was dismayed, now, to find that there was no need to do so. Their features were different, but the underlying physical resemblance was clear. Her mother looked an older, wearier version of herself, or as she might have become already if she had been different, less lucky.
Until the last moment, Julia thought with a wry sadness, she had clung to the romantic dreams. It was only now that the rosy clouds finally drifted away.
‘Let’s get a look at you,’ Margaret said. And after a moment, ‘You look fine.’
‘And you too,’ Julia answered. ‘So do you.’
‘Sit down, then,’ Margaret ordered. ‘I’ll make a cup of coffee.’ She was formal, as if Julia had come from some authority to inspect the life that she shared with Mr Davis. She went out into the kitchen, leaving Julia to look around her, and came back very quickly. Julia sat with her cup and saucer balanced on her lap. A chocolate biscuit that she didn’t want was thick and sticky in her mouth.
‘I’m sorry about the state of the place,’ Margaret began. Julia glanced around her, noticing for the first time that the embossed wallpaper was stained, and ripped away in places. The orange and brown patterned carpet was threadbare, and from the worn patches in it it appeared that it had come from another, bigger room. ‘Only Eddie’s had some money problems over the years. We haven’t got ourselves straight, yet.’
Julia felt the exhaustion and the hopelessness of the street outside creeping in, and lying heavy in her mother’s house.
‘It’s a nice room,’ she lied. Margaret didn’t waste her energy in contradiction. She lit a cigarette, inhaled, then tapped the non-existent ash in her saucer. She looked at Julia under lowered eyelids through the smoke. Then she smiled. The smile made her seem warmer, and suddenly familiar, then Julia realised that it was because it was like her own. There would be other similarities that would catch at her too. This was what it meant. This was what she had come looking for. A confirmation of where and what she had sprung from.