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Bad Girls Good Women
Rosie Thomas
From the bestselling author of The Kashmir Shawl. Available on ebook for the first time.In London, on the brink of the Sixties, two runaways plunge into the whirl of Soho nightlife.Mattie faces the hard slog of repertory companies and a sleazy strip-club in search of fame as an actress. But, when it comes, stardom is not enough, and the love that Mattie desires seems to elude her.Julia choose marriage and Ladyhill, a beautiful Dorset manor house. Then, after the tragedy, she realises that to achieve true independence she will have to risk her marriage and her child.Though each has to make her own choices, their friendship – despite the guilt and betrayal – endures over three turbulent decades.



Bad Girls, Good Women
BY ROSIE THOMAS


Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in the United Kingdom in 1988 by Michael Joseph
Copyright © Rosie Thomas 1988
Rosie Thomas asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Ebook Edition © APR 2014 ISBN: 9780007560561
Version: 2018-10-25

Contents
Title Page (#ud5e28a79-492e-53d5-98de-2100dbf52eb6)
Copyright (#u4933ea92-8849-57d2-9431-b44f54f8e67e)
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
Twenty-five
Twenty-six
Twenty-seven
Keep Reading
About the Author
Also by Rosie Thomas
About the Publisher (#u9827eb19-7196-5e5b-b4e8-8f5217067369)
The music, very loud music, filled the corners of the old house.
In the big room where the musicians in their corner were lapped by a sea of dancers, it was as solid as a wall. Overhead, where Julia stood in the shadows at the top of the stairs, it penetrated the thick stone walls and the oak-boarded floors as an insistent bass beat. She stood for a minute to listen to it.
Beneath her was the blaze of lights and the noise of people, laughter and shouting all knitted together by the throb of the music.
Julia swayed dreamily, moving her hips inside the silky tube of her dress. She was smiling, because she loved parties and her own parties were always the best of all. She loved this particular moment, when the party was off and running on its own, and she could step back to admire it, her creation.
Somewhere behind her, in the dimness of the gallery, a door opened. A thin finger of light reached past her. Julia didn’t look round, but she heard a man’s voice and then a woman’s low laugh before the door closed again. The man walked quickly along the gallery and stopped beside her at the head of the stairs. Turning to look now, Julia saw that it was her old friend Johnny Flowers. He had arrived hours ago in one of the packed cars that had raced each other from London to Julia’s party.
She smiled, and saw the whiteness of his teeth as he smiled back at her.
‘Good time, Johnny?’ she whispered.
He leaned forward to kiss the corner of her mouth and his hand rested lightly on her waist.
‘Mmm. The very best time. The party to end all parties, this one.’
Julia murmured, ‘Good. But it’s early yet.’
Johnny’s hand slid over her hip as he passed her, and fleetingly she remembered other times. Other places, a long way from this big house beached in its dark gardens.
She tilted her head backwards at the closed bedroom door.
‘Who?’
‘Sssh.’ The white smile came again as he put his finger to his lips. ‘You haven’t seen me.’
‘I haven’t seen you.’
Julia watched him run downstairs and disappear into the brightness. A swirl of laughing people poured out into the hallway and the colours of the girls’ dresses blurred exotically against the wood panelling.
Someone called out, ‘Ju—lia!’ and the faces turned to look up at her. She stood on the top stair for a moment longer, surveying the scene, smiling with satisfaction. Then, with the tips of her fingers just touching the smooth, curving warmth of the banister rail, she floated down to join them.
In the doorway, someone shouted, ‘Be Bop A Lula!’
Out of sight, in the room where the dancers surged past the huge Christmas tree, the lead guitarist mopped the sweat out of his eyes and obligingly struck the first chord.
‘She’s my baby,’ Julia sang.
A chain of people formed and swayed in front of her, and arms came round her waist. She could feel the heat of the man, whoever he was, through her thin dress. Julia stumbled forward and steadied herself in the crush by flinging her arms around someone else. Everyone was singing now, ‘Don’t mean maybe.’
The conga line snaked around the hallway and back into the big room. Before it jerked her away Julia saw Johnny Flowers again. He was slipping back up the stairs, holding a champagne bottle by its gold foil neck. She looked away quickly, thinking, I wanted this, didn’t I? To be able to give parties in a big house for all my friends. To have everyone around me, enjoying themselves …
Happy New Year, she wished herself. But it didn’t suppress the little beat of loneliness that she had felt, in the middle of all the people.
The dancers swept her along, into the heat of the drawing room where the carpets had been rolled back and the log fire in the huge stone fireplace crackled unnecessarily. Inside her head, all around her, the music thudded on.
Julia saw a whisky bottle on a windowsill. As they swooped past she reached for it and titled it to her mouth. They circled the Christmas tree. It was so tall that the silver star on the top touched the high ceiling, and there was a real candle burning on every branch. Julia had insisted on real candles, because they were so beautiful. The blaze of them and the flames in the hearth gave the only light in the packed room now.
Julia’s oldest friend Mattie was lying along the back of a sofa, her head propped on one hand and the other waving a cigarette in a long holder. The cigarette holder was a recent affection, adopted since Mattie had begun to be famous. The cluster of men around her was nothing new, because Mattie had attracted men effortlessly ever since Julia had known her. She waved the cigarette holder at Julia now, and closed one eye in a slow wink.
‘Seen Bliss?’ Julia mouthed at her, and Mattie pointed the holder.
Julia’s husband was on the far side of the room. He was bending over the radiogram in its cabinet, twiddling the knobs. Although his back was turned to her, Julia could imagine his mildly preoccupied frown, like a small boy’s intent on a puzzle. Alexander Bliss was a tall, spare, elegant man. He was ten years older than his wife, and he had chosen to wear a dinner jacket for her party. Most of his country neighbours had dressed too, but the influx of London guests wore sharp Italian suits, studded leather, evening dresses that were hardly dresses at all.
The contrast wouldn’t have struck Alexander. He had seen it often enough before. If he had bothered to make any comment, he would have shrugged amiably. ‘Anything goes, nowadays.’
Julia wriggled out of the grasp of the conga man. She didn’t know him but she thought that he had arrived with Johnny. There were lots of strange faces tonight, mixed with the familiar ones, and she liked that because it meant that anything could happen. Julia still believed that’s what parties were for.
She thought back, in an instant of painful, irresistible nostalgia. Parties in bedsitters and parties in cellars. Crowded parties with hot jazz, and warm booze drunk out of chipped cups, and an endless, wonderful parade of new faces. It was at the time of those parties that Julia had met the aviator. Mattie had nicknamed him your aviator. Where was he now?
I’m twenty-one years old, she thought suddenly, and I’m looking back like an old woman. Julia tipped the whisky bottle again. Happy New Year.
‘C’mon baby. What about a dance?’ Johnny’s friend, if he was Johnny’s friend, had a nice face enlivened by louche sideburns. She grinned at him. ‘Later,’ she shouted over the music. ‘Promise.’
Then she threaded her way through the dancers to Alexander, crouched beside the radiogram. He looked up when she touched his shoulder and smiled at her, the corners of his eyes creasing. ‘It’s nearly twelve. Listen.’
He pressed his ear to the speaker and then leapt up, turning the volume control sharply. ‘It’s midnight!’
The guitarists finished the number with a deafening chord and the drummer brandished his sticks in a drum roll. In the sudden silence that followed, Big Ben struck the quarters and then the hour. Twelve booming peals, and Julia imagined them echoing through the house and rolling over the trees and lawns beyond the windows. At the twelfth stroke the room erupted into shouts and cheers, kissing and clapping.
It was 1960.
Alexander turned Julia’s face up to his, and kissed her. ‘Don’t look so sad. It’s a new decade. Happy New Decade.’
With the warmth of Alexander’s kiss still on her mouth, Julia said, ‘I liked the old decade.’
He touched her cheek, lifting the curl that lay against it. ‘You’ll like this one too.’ He took her hand, and drew her into the huge, smiling circle to sing ‘Auld Lang Syne’. Julia sang with everyone else, and when the hugging and shouting was over the music started to pound again.
‘Dance with your husband?’ he asked her. Alexander was a very good dancer. It was one of the first things she had noticed about him, long ago. She had been surprised, to begin with, that someone like Alexander Bliss should like rock and roll.
‘Delighted.’
When the number finished, so quietly that she could hardly hear him, Alexander asked her, ‘Are you happy?’
And Julia faced him squarely, looking straight into his eyes. ‘Of course I am.’
Alexander turned her to face the room. ‘Go on then. Enjoy your party.’
The man with the sideburns was waiting. Mattie had left her sofa to dance, her long diamond earrings swinging. The house was full of friends. It was a good party. My party, Julia thought. Alexander wouldn’t say our party. Nor would he invite all these people of his own accord, but he would never stop his wife from doing whatever she wanted to do.
Julia wound her way back across the room to Johnny Flowers’s friend. She picked up a full glass on her way and drank the contents, not stopping to notice what they were. The man was still waiting for her, and she accepted his admiring glance. Julia was tall, with pale, perfect skin and a mass of dark hair. Her evening dress, a satin tube cut high at the front and into a deep V at the back, showed off her figure. She smoothed the fabric over her hips, satisfied that her stomach was still flat.
‘You promised me a dance,’ the man said.
‘So here I am.’ When Julia smiled her face melted.
The man took her in his arms, his cheek against hers. Julia smelt cologne, whisky, and warm skin. She closed her eyes, and danced.
The house was made for parties. She had seen it as soon as Alexander had brought her to visit it, before they were engaged. She couldn’t remember whether that was when she had begun to take him seriously. Bliss had begun by being a bit of a joke, to Mattie and Julia. After the aviator Julia hadn’t cared what she did or with whom, and if it hadn’t been Bliss it would have been someone else. Then, almost without her noticing it, he had begun to be important to her.
In London, Bliss lived in a chaotic flat in Markham Square, not noticeably different from anyone else’s. But then, one weekend, he had driven her to Ladyhill. Even Julia, to whom houses were just places for sleeping in, set out in rows in city streets, even Julia could see that Ladyhill was beautiful. They rounded a curve in the drive and it faced them, a Jacobean manor house in warm brick faced with stone, the sun reflected in fiery sheets from the tall windows. Two short wings projected on either side of the arched stone doorway, and in their paved shelter were two huge yew trees, clipped into perfect ovals. It was late March, the first day of spring weather, and Julia looked at the pale blue washed sky behind the high chimneys.
‘Who lives here?’ she asked.
‘My father.’
‘And who’s your father, when he’s at home?’
‘Sir Percy Bliss, Bart.’
‘Hot dog,’ Julia had said.
Alexander left his car slewed at an angle in the driveway and they went inside. They walked through the rooms together. Sir Percy was away, and there was no one at Ladyhill. Julia was impressed in spite of herself. It wasn’t so much by the dim rooms with their panelled walls hung with English pictures, or by the Long Gallery with views over the gardens beyond the house, or even by the great half-tester bed with its yellow brocade hangings that Alexander called the Queen’s Bed, but by the difference in Alexander himself. In London he was vague, almost diffident.
Julia had seen him once or twice glancing uneasily around Markham Square, or the Rocket, as if he was wondering what he was doing there. But as he showed her around Ladyhill he seemed more solid, as if the place and his love for it defined him. He did love it, she could see it in his face, and in his hands as they rested on a carved newel or measured the depth of a window embrasure.
Suddenly, startling, Julia liked Alexander Bliss. She liked him, and envied him. She felt that she was adrift, not anchored like Alexander to his old house and its gardens. At Ladyhill, the freedom that she had set such store by seemed no more than rootlessness.
She shivered in the silent house.
‘It needs people,’ she announced. ‘Lots and lots of people. Mad parties.’
Alexander smiled. ‘Perhaps it does.’ He put his arms around her, and kissed her demandingly. Lots of people, Julia remembered.
After her dance with the sideburns man someone else had claimed her, and then one of Mattie’s retinue of men. She drank some more whisky and then some champagne, and reached the elusive stage of being drunk when everything seemed warm, and simple, and deliciously funny. The crowd began to thin out a little as the staider guests left. Alexander stood at the foot of the sweep of stairs, saying goodbye. When he looked back at the dancers he realised that the stayers were going to stay all night. The music was coming from the radiogram now, and the group had put down their guitars to join the dancers. One of them took off his shirt to dance bare-chested, with the sweat shining on his shoulder blades. Mattie reached our reflective to touch the muscles in his back with her fingertips, and Julia laughed. At that moment everyone was her friend, but she loved Mattie for all the years that had just slipped out of her reach with the strokes of Big Ben. It was just New Year’s Eve that was troubling her. She didn’t want to celebrate the death of a year, let alone a decade.
She looked for Bliss, wanting to put her arms around him, but she couldn’t see him anywhere. She turned instead, smiling back at the laugher around her, ready to plunge into the party once more.
She never knew how the next thing happened. The crush was much less than it had been at midnight, and she couldn’t remember afterwards who had been at that side of the room. Someone must have stumbled, or swung an arm too wildly and reached out to steady themselves. Julia saw her Christmas tree shiver as if it was alive, and then it titled, slowly at first, and then it fell in an arc of fire. The candle flames licked through the dark branches, and the branches crackled fragrantly as the scarlet tongues devoured them.
For an instant, still in the grip of euphoria, Julia thought how beautiful it was. The blazing tree hit the floor, with its glass balls splintering around it. The dancers scattered backwards and a girl screamed. The record was still playing but it seemed that there was a long moment’s silence. And then the heavy velvet curtains caught fire. A sheet of flame sprang upwards from the floor, blindingly bright in the dim room. A second later the dusty velvet drapes and braided tassels were blazing like the demolished tree.
There was another scream, but this one was caught and stifled by a belching pall of smoke. The horrified stillness in the room broke into a panicky scramble of bodies. Julia was carried towards the door, almost falling and then clawing her way upright again. The smoke billowed out, as acrid as her sudden terror, and she choked on it. There was a babble of shouts and screams now and a man’s voice rising over them commanding, ‘Don’t push. Don’t panic.’
The joyous crackle of leaping flames was louder than anything else, drowning out the music and the shouting.
The first dancers to escape stumbled out into the hallway.
Julia saw that the man with the sideburns had wrapped himself in one of the rolled-back rugs. Under this protection he was trying to tear down the flaming curtains. They fell in a shower of vicious sparks, and the heavy wooden cornice pole crashed with them. It was already alight and before Julia’s eyes the whole of the panelled wall beside the dark gape of the window flowered into bright tendrils of flame.
She heard herself scream too. ‘Bliss!’ The roar of the fire grew deafening as it took hold. ‘Bliss. Where are you?’
She couldn’t see him anywhere. The room was thick with smoke now, and she coughed and gasped as it filled her lungs. The door seemed so far away. She was sure that she would never reach it and fear spread through her as fast as the fire itself. A hand grabbed her wrist and pulled her forward. Her tight dress hobbled her and she almost fell again, but the surge of people pushed her forward. Half carried and half dragged there, she lurched through the doorway into the hall. Cold, fresh air bit into her lungs and she gulped at it, her eyes steaming. She rubbed the palms of her hands into her eyes and turned to look where she had come from.
The last of the dancers tumbled out after her, retching, and blinded by the smoke. A great black cloud of it licked after them. Julia could see nothing beyond it, but she could hear the fire as it leapt upwards and onwards. Water. She must get water to quench it. She imagined ducking through the smoke to pour water where the Christmas tree had collapsed into flame, and half turned to run for the kitchens.
The heavy main door banged open and she smelt the frosty purity of the night air rushing past her as the fire sucked it inwards. Julia felt it like a living thing now. It gave a great roar of satisfaction as the air fed it. Through the smoke she glimpsed its red heart, and sparks that cascaded downwards in a mocking torrent. No one could get into that room now.
Telephone. She must telephone for help instead.
‘Get everyone outside,’ someone shouted. ‘Then for Christ’s sake shut the doors.’ Julia’s guests began to stream out into the darkness. She saw Mattie, her fact blackened with smoke.
‘Come on,’ Mattie yelled at her. ‘Get out.’
‘I’ve got to ring for help.
Julia tried to push past her, to Bliss’s little office on the right of the stairs, and the nearest telephone.
‘No,’ Mattie screamed. ‘Julia!’
Then at last she saw Bliss. He ran towards her from the stone archway that led through to the back of the house. His face was the colour of ice.
Julia stumbled towards him. ‘The fire brigade,’ she shouted helplessly.
‘They’re coming.’
Alexander was methodically throwing open every door to check that the room beyond was empty. He slammed the doors shut again and the roar of the fire devoured the sound. Another obliterating blanket of smoke rolled around them and he caught at her arm.
‘Is everyone out of there?’
She nodded, and at once he was pulling her over the stone flags to the big door. She tripped in her tight dress and the thin fabric ripped, freeing her to run. The arched portico framed the night beyond, then it was overhead, and then with Alexander’s arm supporting her they escaped into the darkness. The cold hit them and Julia saw ahead of her the dark, glossy’ ovals of the clipped yews reflecting an ugly red glow. The crowd of people milled at the foot of the shallow flight of steps, their faces turned upwards to the house. Julia and Alexander looked the same way, and understood how quickly and how terribly the fire had taken hold.
The windows of what had been the drawing room, where only a few minutes ago they had been dancing in the flow of candlelight, were now blind eyes from which the smoke coiled in the thick ropes. The flames had reached the first floor, and came darting lasciviously from the windows. The crash of breaking glass and falling timber was just audible through the voice of the fire itself.
‘Is everyone out?’ Bliss shouted hoarsely. ‘Is anyone missing?’
The panic had subsided. The guests were numb with shock, and silent in awe of the fire’s horrible vitality. They muttered to one another, and shook their heads. It seemed that everyone was accounted for.
Julia stood motionless, watching. Bliss’s fingers were like iron hooks digging into the flesh of her arm. Looking upwards at the windows in the gable end of the near wing, she thought of the magnificent beams that supported the roof of the Long Gallery, and the floor of broad oak boards that separated the gallery from the burning bedrooms beneath.
She shivered violently in the city air. And then she remembered.
The words stuck in her throat at first. Bliss looked at her, then gripped her other arm and pulled her closer.
‘What is it?’
‘Flowers. Flowers was upstairs, with a girl.’
They whirled apart and went blundering through the silent huddles of people. ‘Has anyone seen Flowers?’
No one had seen him. There were only white, shocked faces, and none of them was Johnny Flowers.
Julia remembered, with a beat of horror, what he had said in the shadows at the top of the stairs. The party to end all parties. She dared not look up at the lurid windows.
Fear crystallised into certainty within her. She finished her desperate circuit and collided with Bliss again.
‘Not here.’
Alexander turned his face to the house. Julia saw the reflected light of the fire in his eyes.
‘They must still be inside.’
He was already running towards the steps. Two or three other men left the shelter of the crowd and ran with him.
‘No.’ Her scream tore Julia’s throat.
‘No. Don’t go back in there.’
Without stopping to think she began to run too, gathering up the ruined tail of her dress. She had only gone half a dozen steps when more people caught up with her and pulled at her arms, dragging her backwards. She struggled to break free, swearing blindly at them. They held her too tightly, and she was reduced to impotent kicking and writhing.
Her last glimpse of Bliss was as he ran back under the portico, one arm held crooked against his face in a vain attempt to shield it from the fire’s fierce heat.
‘Stop him,’ she whispered to the people holding her. ‘Don’t let him go in there.’
But he had already gone.
The men who had dashed forward with Bliss seemed to be driven back by the smoke, but Alexander was engulfed by it.
Nobody moved or spoke. The fire possessed the whole house now and the malevolent smoke hung over it, obliterating the starry winter sky.
Julia stepped away from the restraining hands and then stood motionless. No one could do anything. Impotent anger swept over her.
‘Where is the fire brigade? Why don’t they come? He’s going to die in there.’ She screamed again at the smoky mouth of the door, ‘Bliss!’
An arm came round her, and she saw that it was Mattie beside her. He friend’s eyes reflected the demonic red glow, as Bliss’s had done. Looking wildly around, Julia saw that all their faces were lit by it. The black shadows thrown by the firelight in the hollows of their cheeks and eyesockets made all of them look like skulls. She felt an instant of wild, almost exultant terror.
The fire would come for all of them. Bliss was already gone, and it was Mattie and Julia standing to face it together, as they had always done.
A bubble of hysterical laughter broke out of Julia’s mouth.
Mattie held her harder, shaking her, hurting her shoulders. ‘Hold on. They’re coming now. You’ve got to hold on.’
Julia heard it then. Only just audible through the roar of the flames were the bells of the fire engines as they raced towards Ladyhill.
The mad laughter died in her throat and Julia gave a long shuddering sigh.
She stood waiting, one hand holding on to Mattie. The fingers of her other hand just rested on the concave space between her hip-bones.
Julia Bliss was twelve weeks’ pregnant. For some reason that she didn’t even understand herself, she hadn’t told her husband about the baby yet.

One (#u8add3495-316b-5c45-aa1e-1c95b6ce887a)
Summer, 1955
‘It’s cold,’ Julia said.
She looked at the scuffed suitcase at her feet, but it hardly seemed worth opening it and rummaging amongst the grubby contents for warmer clothes. She shivered, and hunched her shoulders.
Mattie didn’t even answer.
They sat side by side on the bench, silently, and the pigeons that had gathered in the hope of sandwich crumbs waddled away again. Over the stone balustrade in front of them the girls could just see the flat, murky river. A barge nosed slowly upstream and they watched it slide past them. A sluggish wash fanned out in its wake.
‘We could go home,’ Julia whispered.
Even to suggest it punctured her pride, but she wanted to be sure that Mattie’s resolve was still as firm as her own. Even though their defiance had brought them here, to this.
The rumble of the evening traffic along the Embankment seemed to grow louder to fill the silence between them. It was the first time either of them had mentioned going home, but they knew that they had both been thinking about it. It was three nights since they had run away. Four nights since Mattie had appeared at Julia’s parents’ front door, back in Fairmile Road, with her face bruised and puffy and her home-made blouse torn off her shoulder.
Julia’s father had stared past Mattie at the police car waiting in the road. Then his eyes had flicked to and fro, checking to see if any of the neighbours might be witnessing the spectacle. He had opened the door by another inch, as Julia watched from the top of the stairs.
‘Don’t you know that it’s one o’clock in the morning?’ he had asked his daughter’s best friend.
‘I’m sorry,’ Mattie said.
‘I suppose you’d better come in.’
Mattie stepped into the hallway. Mr Smith looked almost unrecognisable without his stiff collar, and his wife’s curlers sat on her head like thin sausages. Only the house looked the same. Little slippery rugs on the slippery floor, flowery papered walls and spiky plants in pots, and a framed Coronation picture of the Queen. And then Julia was the same, looking anxiously down at her, with her hair very dark against her pink dressing gown. Mattie was so relieved to see her, and the concern in Julia’s face touched her so directly, that she was almost crying again.
Mattie hitched the torn pieces of her blouse together and faced Julia’s parents squarely. They had always hated her, of course. They thought she led Julia astray, although that wasn’t the truth. It didn’t matter, she told herself. If they threw her out into the street again, at least the policeman had gone.
‘Whatever’s the matter?’ Betty Smith asked. Julia came down the stairs, pushing past her parents, putting an arm around Mattie’s shoulders. Mattie felt her comforting warmth. She would keep the story simple, she decided. Tomorrow, later today, whatever the time was, she would tell Julia what had really happened.
‘I’m afraid that there was an argument at home. My father … my father thought that I was out too late. I’d been to see East of Eden, that’s all. Julia didn’t want to come again.’
‘Julia was at home, doing her homework,’ Mr Smith said. ‘As she should have been every other night this week, instead of running around goodness knows where.’ With you, he might as well have added.
Julia is sixteen years old, Mattie thought savagely. What does bloody homework matter? And I’m seventeen. I’m not going to cry. Not after everything that’s happened. Not just because of these people, with their little, shut-in faces.
‘There was an argument,’ she went on. ‘I came out for a walk. To keep out of the way, you see? And a policeman saw me. He thought I was up to no good.’ She tried to laugh, but it drained away into their stony silence. Clearly Mr and Mrs Smith thought she was up to no good as well. ‘He offered to take me to friends, or relatives. I thought of here. I thought perhaps you wouldn’t mind helping me. Just for one night.’
I’m not here because of you. I came to Julia. And what gives you the right to judge me?
‘You’d better stay, then,’ Vernon Smith said brusquely. He left it unclear whether it was for Mattie’s own sake, or in case of another visit from the police. Betty began to flutter about dust and boxes in the spare bedroom.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Mattie said. She realised that she was exhausted. To go to sleep, that was all that mattered. ‘Anywhere will do.’
Julia was shocked by Mattie’s appearance. It wasn’t just the bruises, and the oozing cut at the corner of her mouth. More disturbingly, Mattie’s verve and defiance seemed to have drained out of her, leaving her as shapeless as a burst balloon. Julia had never seen that, in all the years that they had been friends.
‘Come on,’ she whispered now. ‘It’s all right. Tomorrow, when you wake up, it’ll be all right.’
She steered Mattie up the cramped stairs, with Betty fussing behind them.
Vernon still wanted to impose his own order. ‘I should telephone your father, at least, to say where you are. I wouldn’t want him made anxious on our account.’ He lifted up a china doll with an orange net skirt from the hall table. The telephone sat underneath the skirt. At lot of things in the Smiths’ house had covers. Even Mr Smith’s Ford Popular, parked outside, had a mackintosh coat.
‘We’re not on the telephone,’ Mattie said.
Betty made Julia go back to bed. In the white tiled bathroom Mattie washed her face with the wholesome Pears soap laid out for her. Her distorted face in the mirror looked older under its tangle of hair. Betty knocked on the door and handed her a bottle of TCP.
‘Put some of this on your poor mouth,’ she said.
The small kindness brought Mattie to the edge of tears again.
She went into the spare room and climbed under the turquoise eiderdown. She fell asleep at once.
In the morning, at six o’clock, Julia came in with a cup of tea. She opened the curtains and looked out. In the early light the row of back gardens was tidy and innocent, its squares of lawn surrounded by pink hybrid tea roses. Julia turned her back as if she hated them.
‘What happened?’ she asked.
Mattie looked away, and Julia climbed in at the bottom of the bed, pulling the eiderdown around her. ‘What happened?’ she persisted.
And then, lying there wrapped in the eiderdown and enclosed by the room’s sprigged wallpaper, whispering so that Betty and Vernon wouldn’t hear, Mattie told her.
Julia listened, with anger and disgust and sympathy mounting inside her. Afterwards, with two bright spots of colour showing in her cheeks, she held Mattie’s hand between both of hers.
‘Why didn’t you ever tell me before?’
‘I don’t know,’ Mattie said. She was crying now, tears pouring down her cheeks and making a dark patch on the turquoise cover. She had told Julia everything, the smallest details that she had kept boxed up for so long. And at once, amazingly, she had felt her guilt lifting. Julia hadn’t cried out in horror, or accusation, of course. Had she been afraid for all this time that it was really her own fault?
‘It’s all right.’ Julia hugged her, making inarticulate, comforting noises. ‘Mat, it’s all right. You’ve got me. We’ve got each other.’
At last, the storm of crying subsided. Mattie sniffed, rubbing her eyes with the back of her hand.
‘Sorry. Thanks. Look at me.’
‘No thanks.’
They laughed, shakily. Julia was relieved to see Mattie lifting her chin up again. She would be all right. Everything would come back to her, once they had got away. Excitement, a fierce heat, was beginning to boil inside Julia, fuelled by her anger. It was hard to talk calmly as the idea took hold of her.
‘Listen, Mattie, this is what we’ll do. You don’t have to go back there to him. We’ll just go. We’ll leave all of this …’ She waved through the bedroom window, and the gesture took in the bland gardens, the grid of streets with their semi-detached houses that made up the nice part of town, and the sprawling, featurelessly brutal estate beyond, where Mattie lived. It included the High Street, with its Odeon showing East of Eden, and the single milk bar with half a dozen teds lounging outside it, the red-brick church that Betty and Vernon belonged to and the Youth Club hall behind it, the grammar school where Mattie and Julia had met, and where they had made their first small gestures of defiance. The gestures had grown as they got older. Mattie and Julia would have been expelled, if they hadn’t been much cleverer than their anxious counterparts.
Julia’s grand gesture took in the whole of the dull, virtuous suburb, and rejected it. ‘We’ll go to London. We’ll find ourselves jobs, and we’ll find a flat. Then we can live, can’t we? We always said we would, didn’t we?’
Up to London was where they went when they skipped off school for the day. They went up on Saturday nights now, when they had enough money to go dancing at a club. It was a glittering, covetable world, distant, but now, suddenly, within reach.
‘We’ve talked about it so often.’ Sitting in the park, with their backs against the green railings. Trailing slowly home from school. Whispering, over slow cups of coffee.
Carefully, Mattie said, ‘I could pack in my job easily enough.’ Since leaving Blick Road Grammar she had worked as a filing clerk in an estate agency, and she hated every minute of it. Mattie wanted to be an actress. She wanted it so much that Julia teased her about it. ‘But you’re still at school.’
‘Bugger school,’ Julia said triumphantly. ‘Dad wants me to be a secretary. Not a typist, you know. A private secretary, to a businessman. Mum wants me to be married to a solicitor or a bank manager. I don’t want to be either of those. Why should I stay at school to do typing and book-keeping? We can go, Mattie. Out there, where we belong.’
She flung her arm in a dramatic gesture.
Mattie and Julia travelled in their imagination together, away from Fairmile Road and the colourless suburban landscape.
‘What about your mum and dad?’ Mattie persisted.
Julia clenched her fists, and then let them fall open, impotent. Mattie knew some of how she felt, but it was still difficult to put it into words. Even more difficult now, because it sounded so trivial after Mattie’s confession. But Julia felt that this little, tidy house wound iron bands around her chest, stopping her breathing. She was confined by her parents’ love and expectations. She knew that they loved her, and she was sure that she didn’t deserve it. Their disapproval of Mattie, and of Julia’s own passions, masked their frightened anxiety for her. Perhaps they were right to be anxious, Julia thought. She knew that she couldn’t meet their expectations. Vernon and Betty wanted a replica of themselves. Julia wanted other, vaguer, more violent things for herself. Not a life like Betty’s, she was sure of that.
‘I’m like a cuckoo in this house,’ Julia said.
They looked around the spare bedroom, and smiled at each other.
‘If I go now, with you, they’ll be shocked but perhaps it’ll be better in the end. Better than staying here, getting worse. And when we’re settled, when we’ve made it, it will be different. We’ll all be equal. They won’t have to fight me all the time.’
It was all when, Julia remembered, sitting on the Embankment with all her possessions at her feet, and afterwards, years afterwards. We never thought if, in those days, Mattie and me.
Mattie had smiled suddenly, a crooked smile at first because of her broken lip, but then it broadened recklessly. ‘When shall we go?’
‘Today,’ Julia said. ‘Today, of course.’
Later, when Vernon was at work and Betty had gone shopping, Julia gathered her belongings together and flung them into two suitcases. Mattie wouldn’t go home even for long enough to collect her clothes, so Julia’s would have to do for both of them.
There was no time to spare. Betty was seldom out of the house for more than an hour. In the frantic last minute, Julia scribbled a note to her. There was no time to choose the words, no time to think what she was saying. I’m going, that was all.
She remembered the carelessness of that, later.
The girls caught the train from the familiar, musty local station. On the short journey they crammed into the lavatory and made up their faces in the dim mirror.
Liverpool Street station seemed larger, and grimmer than it had looked on their earlier adventures. Mattie flung out her arms.
‘The Big City welcomes us.’ But she was looking at Julia with faint anxiety. Julia smiled determinedly back.
‘Not only does it welcome us,’ she announced, ‘it belongs to us.’
To make their claim on it, they rode to Oxford Circus on the underground. When they emerged, Oxford Street stretched invitingly on either side of them.
In the beginning, it had been a huge adventure, and they had felt delighted with themselves. They started by looking for work, and they both found jobs at once. Mattie camouflaged her bruises with Pan-Stik make-up and was taken on as a junior assistant in a shoe shop. Julia had learned to type as part of her commercial course at school, and she presented herself for an interview as a typist in the accounts department of a big store. The supervisor set her a spelling and comprehension test that seemed ridiculously simple.
‘That’s very good,’ the woman told her, looking surprised. ‘I’m sure you would be useful here. When would you like to start?’
‘Tomorrow,’ Julia said promptly.
The words accounts department made her think of her father. She had often looked at him and wondered how he could go off every day, year after year, to the same dull, meaningless job. It’s only for a little while, for me, she told herself. Everything is going to happen, soon. After the interview Julia walked out into the street, and she saw the sunshine reflecting off the shop windows like a greeting. I can work, she was thinking. I can keep myself. I don’t have to ask for anything.
It was a moment of intense pleasure.
Julia could feel her freedom, like expensive scent or floating chiffon, drifting around her as she walked. It was as though she had already travelled a long, long way from home.
When she met Mattie later, they were both almost dancing with triumph. ‘How much?’ Mattie demanded.
‘Eight pounds a week.’
‘And I get seven pounds, ten shillings. Thirty bob more than the last place. We’ll be rich.’
It was more money than either of them had ever had before, and they told each other incredulously that they would have that much to spend every week. They bought some sandwiches and a bottle of cider to celebrate, and picnicked in Trafalgar Square. When they had drunk the cider they sat and beamed vaguely at the tourists photographing the fountains.
‘The next thing is somewhere to live,’ Mattie said.
‘A flat,’ Julia agreed, tipping the bottle to make sure it was empty. ‘Simple, but elegant. Mattie Banner and Julia Smith, at home.’
The difficulties began after that.
They found jobs, but the days until they could expect to be paid stretched awkwardly ahead of them. The landlords of all the flats they went to see demanded rent in advance, and deposits, and the girls couldn’t muster even a fraction of the money. The ones who didn’t ask for money eyed the two of them suspiciously, and asked how old they were. Mattie always answered defiantly, ‘Twenty,’ but even so the rooms turned out to be let already.
They stayed in the cheapest hotel they could find, and scoured the To Let columns of the Evening Standard every morning as soon as the paper came on the streets, but by the third day they still hadn’t found anywhere that they could afford. The first euphoria began to evaporate. Friday morning came, and as they were leaving the grubby hotel on their way to work, the manager waylaid them. He announced that it was time for them settle their bill to date, handing the folded slip of paper over to them. It came to much more than had reckoned for, and even by pooling all their resources they were only just able to meet it. They were left with a few shillings between them. Julia smiled brightly at the manager to hide her concern.
‘And how much longer are you planning to stay with us?’ the man asked.
‘Oh. Two, perhaps three more nights. Just until we’ve found ourselves a nice flat.’
‘I see.’ The manager examined his nails, and then he said, ‘I’m afraid that I shall have to ask you for a deposit on your room. The weekend is our busy time, you see. We do have to be quite sure …’ He broke off, the picture of regret.
‘How much?’
‘Five pounds. That will cover both of you, of course.’
‘Oh, of course.’
There was a pause. At last Mattie said desperately, ‘We’ll let you know this evening.’
‘No later than this evening, then.’
As they scurried away to the tube station Mattie burst out furiously, ‘He knows we haven’t got it. The miserable bugger.’
‘You can’t blame him.’ Julia was practical. ‘We’ll have to ask them at work to pay us for these two days.’
‘It still won’t be enough.’
‘It’ll be better than nothing, won’t it?’
Mattie grinned at her suddenly. Her bruises were fading, and it no longer hurt her to smile. ‘Don’t worry. Something’ll turn up.’
They parted at Oxford Circus and went their separate ways.
Julia waited until her supervisor came back from her dinner-break, and then mumbled her request.
‘Oh no, dear, I don’t think we can do that. You have to work a full week first. Your money will come next Friday, with the three extra days, which will be nice, won’t it? Otherwise it makes it too complicated for the payroll people, you know. Is there some trouble, dear?’
Julia hesitated, but she was too proud to confide in this wispy, middle-aged stranger.
‘Oh no, I just wanted to buy something, that’s all.’
‘Well. I’m sure your parents will be glad to help it it’s something important. Ask your mother tonight.’
Julia had told them at the interview that she still lived at home. It had seemed that kind of job.
She went back to the typewriter, which she was already beginning to hate, and started to thump at the keys.
‘What did they say?’ Mattie asked when they met.
‘Nothing until next Friday.’
‘Oh shit. Mine’ll pay me tomorrow afternoon, though.’
A whole night and a day to get through until then.
They collected their luggage from the hotel. ‘We’ve found the perfect flat,’ Julia told the manager who came out of his lair to see them off. ‘Absolutely huge, and terribly cheap.’
The truth couldn’t have been more different. They had divided their remaining change between them that morning, and they agreed that they would allow themselves one cup of coffee and a sandwich for lunch. When they found themselves outside the hotel with their luggage they were at a loss, and achingly hungry. They took a bus, the first one that came along because the manager was standing in the doorway watching them, and rode as far as a fourpenny fare would take them. When they reached the Embankment, they had just three shillings left.
They sat on their bench for a long time, just watching the river. The sky faded from blue to pearl grey, with a green glow that deepened to rose pink behind the chimneys of Battersea Power Station. It would have been beautiful if they had had the heart to look at it.
At last, the sky and water were completely dark.
‘We could go home,’ Julia whispered.
Mattie turned her head to look at her. ‘No,’ she said at last. ‘We can’t go back. I can’t.’ She drew her knees up and rested her chin on them, looking out over the river again. Julia wished that she had never said it, even if it was only to test Mattie’s resolve.
‘Something will turn up.’ Julia tried to be comforting, but their rallying cry had no effect this time.
After another long silence Mattie said, ‘We’ll have to find somewhere to sleep outside.’
‘What about that park we walked through last night?’
They had eaten fish and chips sitting on the grass in Hyde Park. The idea of lying in the soft grass under the shelter of rustling trees seemed almost inviting.
‘How far is it?’
‘Quite a long way.’
They turned away from the black river and the necklace of lights lacing its banks and started to walk. After a few hundred yards they realised that the suitcases were impossibly heavy.
‘All this junk,’ Mattie grumbled. ‘We don’t need it. We should throw it away, and then we’d really be free.’
‘You could throw it away if it was yours,’ Julia pointed out. They went on in silence, irritable with one another, and then stopped again. A huge building blazed in front of them, its tiers of windows opulently draped. Julia peered at the big silvery letters on the sweep of canopy that faced the river.
‘It’s the Savoy Hotel,’ she whispered.
‘Oh, that’s perfect. Let’s take a suite.’
For no particular reason they turned their backs on the river and walked up a tiny, steep side alley. There was big, recessed doorway in the wall of the hotel, with heavy padlocked bars holding the doors shut. A ventilator grille was set high up and warm air that smelt of cooking pulsed out of it.
‘I’m not going any further,’ Mattie said. ‘We can lie down here.’
The alley was lit by one old-fashioned street lamp, and it was completely deserted. Mattie sank down on the step and drew her legs up. She curled up sideways and closed her eyes.
To Julia, she looked suddenly as if she was dead, a body abandoned in a huddle of clothes.
‘Mattie! Don’t do that.’
The sharp note of fear in her voice brought Mattie struggling upright again.
‘What’s the matter? It’s all right. Look, there’s room for us both. Come in here behind me and I’ll shield you.’
Julia looked up and down the alley. The city waiting beyond its dark mouth seemed threatening now. Reluctantly she stepped past Mattie and hauled the suitcases into the grimy space. She opened one and took out some of the least essential clothes, bunching them up to make pillows and a scrap of a bed. She lay down with the suitcases wedged behind her for safety, and Mattie squeezed herself in too. Julia tucked her knees into the crook of Mattie’s and hunched up to her warm back. Mattie’s mass of curls, still surprisingly scented with her Coty perfume, fell over her face.
‘I’m so glad you’re here,’ Julia whispered.
‘You helped me to get away,’ Mattie said simply. And then, ‘We’ll be all right, you know.’
‘I know we will,’ Julia answered.
They lay quietly, hoping to sleep. After a while a smartly dressed couple came up the alley. The yellow light from the street lamp glittered briefly on the woman’s necklace. They glanced at the figures in the doorway as they passed, and looked quickly away again, separating themselves.
‘I’ve done that,’ Mattie whispered, when they had gone.
‘Me too.’
It seemed such a small step, now, from that world, padded with food and insulated with little tokens of security, to this doorway.
I’m so hungry.’
‘We must save the money for breakfast.’
The smell of food wafting from the ventilator made them feel ravenous, and sick at the same time. There were other smells lingering in the doorway too. Mattie and Julia clung together, and after a while they drifted into an uncomfortable sleep.
Mattie had no idea how long she had been dozing for. She woke up, confused and aching, with the panicky certainty that someone was watching them. She lifted her head from the nest of clothes and a gasp of terror shook her. A man was leaning over her. His face was covered with grey whiskers and his matted grey hair hung down to his shoulders. He was grinning, his lips drawn back to reveal black stumps of teeth. It was his breath that frightened Mattie most. It smelt rawly of drink and she recoiled, trying to escape from the memories that that close, fetid smell stirred in her. She felt Julia go stiff behind her, and her fingers digging into her arms.
‘Two lassies,’ the apparition mumbled and then cackled with laugher. ‘Two lassies, is it? Ma’ pitch, ye know, this is. Mine.’ He thrust his face closer and they tried to edge backwards.
‘Please go away,’ Julia whispered. ‘We’re not doing any harm. We’ve nowhere else.’
‘Ah can see that.’ He cackled more raucously still. ‘Well, seein’ it’s you ye can be ma guests. Just fer tonight. ’Tis the Savoy, ye know. Act nice. They serve breakfast, just round the corner, first thing.’ He picked up a filthy sack and shuffled away down the hill, still hooting with laughter.
Mattie was shuddering with fright and shock. Julia put her arm over her shoulders. ‘He was only an old tramp. We’ve pinched his place, that’s all. Come on, we’ll change places so that I’m in the front. You can hide behind me.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Mattie mumbled.
They scrambled stiffly to their knees and lay down again. Mattie stopped shaking at last, and she let her eyes close. It wasn’t the tramp who she saw at once against her eyelids. It was only his smell that had frightened her, and repelled her so deeply that all her flesh screamed and crawled in case he touched her.
He had made her think of her father, and of what she had really run away from.
She had been to see East of Eden, just as she had told Vernon and Betty Smith. She came blindly out of the Odeon in the High Street with the image of James Dean more real than the windows of Woolworths across the street, more flesh and blood than the two boys from the technical college lounging in front of them. For a few minutes more, while the spell lasted, the hated suburban shopping street and the teds whistling at her were nothing to do with Mattie.
For two whole hours she had escaped from home and her younger brothers and sisters, from work, and from everything that surrounded her. It was her fourth visit. Julia had come with her three times, but even Julia had balked at a fourth visit. So Mattie had gone on her own, and afterwards she drifted to the bus stop, lost inside her own head with Cal Trask.
The enchantment lasted until she reached home. She walked through the estate, where every avenue and turning was the same as the last and the next, and reached her own front gate. It creaked open, brushing over the docks and nettles sprouting across the path. She stopped for a second outside her own front door. The house was quiet. It must have thundered while she was in the cinema, Mattie thought. It had been a dusty, muggy day but the air was cool and clear now.
She put her key in the lock and opened the front door.
Ted Banner was standing in the dim hallway.
‘Where the bloody hell have you have been, you dirty little madam?’
Mattie smelt sweat and whisky and the indefinable, sour scent of her father’s hopeless anger. She knew what was coming. Her stomach heaved with fright, but she made herself say, calmly and clearly so that he couldn’t possibly misunderstand her, ‘I’ve been to the Odeon to see a picture. It was James Dean in East of Eden. It finished at a quarter to ten and I came straight home.’ As conciliatory as she could be, with as much detail as possible, so that he might believe her. But he didn’t. He came at her, and she glimpsed the patch of sweat darkening his vest as he lifted his fist.
‘Bloody little liar.’
He swiped viciously at her. Mattie flung up her arm to protect her face, but the blow still jarred and she stumbled backwards.
‘Been out with some feller, haven’t you? Taking your knickers off for anyone who asks you in the back of his car, like your sister. All the same, all of you.’
‘I haven’t. I told you, I’ve been to the pictures.’
‘Again?’
Some evenings, Mattie didn’t have the protection of the truth. But it made no difference anyway. Her father hit her again, hard, a double blow with the flat and then the back of his hand. Her teeth sliced into the corner of her lip, and she tasted blood, salty in her mouth. A little part of her, cold and detached and disgusted, heard the rest of herself whimpering with fear. He knocked her sideways and she fell against the rickety coatstand that stood behind the door. It collapsed with her, in a humiliating tangle of clothes and limbs.
‘Please,’ she whispered. ‘Please, Dad.’
I hate you. The words drummed in her head. I hate you.
A door creaked open at the top of the stairs, and Mattie looked up to see her sister Marilyn, nine years old, looking down at them. The girl’s eyes were wide with anxiety, but there was no surprise in them.
‘It’s all right, Marilyn,’ Mattie said. She pulled herself upright, pressing the palm of her hand against her throbbing lip. ‘Go back to bed now. Don’t wake Sam up.’
The child melted away again.
Ted was breathing heavily through his mouth. His cheeks were blotched and treaded with broken veins, and his big moustache was beaded with sweat and spittle.
Suddenly his shoulders sagged. He rolled his head to and fro, as if he was trying to break free of something.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said at last.
Mattie tried to slip past him up the stairs. ‘It’s all right,’ she murmured, pressing herself against the wall so that even her clothes need not brush against him. But his hand caught her wrist.
‘Come in the kitchen,’ he begged her, in a new, wheedling voice. ‘I’ll make us both a nice cup of tea.’
‘All right,’ Mattie said. It was easier to acquiesce than to risk stirring up his anger again.
She watched her father warily as he lit the gas and put the kettle on. She was ready for him when he came at her again. She flinched, and slid out of his reach behind the table.
He held out his big, meaty hands.
‘Mat, don’t run away from me. Don’t, I can’t bear it.’
There was a bottle of whisky on the table and he took a swig from it, wiping his moustache with his fingers. He had gone from anger to self-pitying drunkenness. Mattie knew what that meant too, and it made her even more afraid.
‘Come here.’
Her skin crawled, but she knew that she couldn’t refuse him. She sidled out from the table’s protection.
‘Right here, I said.’
Her father’s hand touched her arm and then her shoulders. It weighed heavily, and the hairy skin of his forearm was hot and prickly against the nape of her neck. With his other hand he turned her face to his. He was very close, and she bit the insides of her cheeks to keep her fear and disgust hidden inside her. Ted’s hand slipped downwards, and his fingers touched her breast. He hesitated for a second, his expression suddenly dreamy, almost tender. Then his hand closed on her, squeezing and twisting, and she cried out in pain.
‘Don’t. Please don’t.’
‘Don’t you like it? Those boys do it, don’t they?’
They didn’t because Mattie wouldn’t let them, but her father didn’t know that. The sweat had broken out on his face again, and a thread of it trickled from his hairline, across his temple. His mouth opened and hung loosely as he rubbed his hand over her breast. He jerked her closer. Holding her so tightly that she knew she couldn’t break away, he thrust his face against hers and kissed her. Wetness smeared her mouth and chin, and then his tongue forced itself between her lips.
Mattie understood how drunk he was.
For years, since she was younger than Marilyn, her father had touched and fondled her.
‘It’s a little game,’ he used to say. ‘Our little game. Don’t tell anyone, will you?’
Mattie hated it, and the feelings it stirred in her frightened and puzzled her. But she also discovered that it was a protection. If she let him play his game, just occasionally, he was less likely to hit her. She would stand, mute and motionless, and let him run his hands over her. That was all. Nothing else. She kept the knowledge of it in a little box, closed off from everything else, never mentioning it to her older sisters, or to her mother while she was still alive. It was just her father, after all, just the way he was. Dirty, and pathetic, and she would get away from him as soon as she could.
She had never even whispered anything to Julia.
But tonight was different. Somehow Ted had slipped beyond control. He didn’t seem pathetic any more, so she couldn’t detach herself in despising him. He was dangerous now. Too close, too dangerous.
Mattie’s fear paralysed her. She couldn’t move, and couldn’t stop him. He was grunting now, deep in his throat. He sat down heavily against the table, pulling her to him. Her legs were trapped between his. His hand went to the hem of her skirt. He wrenched at it, trying to pull it up. But it was too tight, and it caught at the top of her thighs. He squinted at her, his eyes puffy.
‘Take if off.’
Mattie shuddered, struggling in his grip. ‘No. Leave me alone. Leave me …’
He tore at her blouse instead. It was a skimpy, sleeveless thing that Mattie had made herself with lopsided hand stitching. The shoulder seam ripped and Ted forced his hand inside.
‘Let me do it. Just once,’ he begged her. His face was hidden, but she could feel his hot, wet mouth working against her neck. ‘I won’t ask you again. Ever, Mattie. Just once, will you?’
Mattie held herself still, gathering her strength. Then she lashed at him with her hands, and twisted her neck to try to bite any part of him that she could reach. He didn’t even notice the blow, and he was much too quick for her. He caught both her wrists in one hand, and the other tightened around her throat. For a second, they looked into each other’s eyes. Slowly, his fingers unfastened from her neck. She could feel the print of them on her skin.
He fumbled with his own clothes, undoing them.
Somehow, out of her pain and terror and disgust, Mattie found the right words. ‘Look at yourself,’ she commanded in a small, clear voice. ‘Just look at yourself.’
He saw his daughter’s face, paper-white except for the black tear-trails of mascara, her torn clothes, and her swollen, bloody lip.
And then he looked down at himself.
Ted shrank, deflating as if the whisky had found a puncture in his skin to trickle out of.
There was a long silence. Behind them, shockingly cosy, the kettle whistled.
At last he mumbled, ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry I hit you. I’m jealous, see? Jealous of all those lads that hang around you. I don’t mean to get angry with you, don’t you understand? You’ve always been my girl. My special one, haven’t you?’
Mattie saw big, glassy tears gather in his eyes and roll down his cheeks. She felt sick, and dirty, and she turned her face away.
‘You don’t know what I’ve been through since your mum died.’
Oh yes, Mattie thought. Feel sorry for yourself. Not for Mum, or any of the rest of us. Feel sorry for yourself, because I won’t. I hate you.
With the knowledge of that, she realised that he had let go of her. She began to move, very slowly, backing away from him. His hands hung heavily at his sides, and his wet eyes stared at nothing. Mattie reached the kitchen door. In the same clear, cold voice she said, ‘Do yourself up. Don’t sit there like that.’
Then she walked through the clutter in the hall to the front door. She opened it and closed it again behind her, and walked down the path. She held herself very carefully, as if she was made of a shell that might break.
Only when the gate had creaked after her did she begin to run.
In the narrow space of the doorway her legs twitched involuntarily, and Julia stirred in front of her.
‘It’s all right,’ Julia told her. ‘He’s gone, he really has. Are you still scared? Do you want to talk for a bit?’
‘I was thinking about Marilyn, and the others,’ Mattie told her, half truthfully. Marilyn was only nine, and Phil, the youngest sister, was two years younger. Two boys, Ricky and Sam, came between Mattie and Marilyn. The eldest sister, Rozzie, was married to a mechanic and had a baby of her own. She lived on the estate too, but Rozzie kept clear of the house when Ted was likely to be at home.
‘The boys are all right,’ Mattie said, ‘but I don’t want to leave Phil and Marilyn there with him.’
Guilt folded around her again. Even if what her father had done had not been, somehow, all her own fault, Mattie was certain that she shouldn’t have abandoned her younger sisters to him. She had never seen Ted look at them in the way that he looked at her, but she couldn’t be sure that he didn’t touch them. Or if hadn’t done, that he might not now she was gone. Rozzie had never suspected, had she? In her shame, Mattie had kept her secret until she couldn’t hold on to it any longer, but it was unthinkable that Marilyn might have to suffer in the same way … Mattie rolled her head, looking up at the stained walls of her shelter. What could she do to help them, from here?
‘I know what we’ll do,’ Julia said firmly. ‘We’ll ring the Council and tell them what’s happened. There are people there who are supposed to see about kids, you know. They’ll look after them until …’ she was thinking quickly, improvising ‘… until we can have them with us, if you like. We could all live together, couldn’t we?’
Mattie smiled, in spite of herself. ‘Here?’
‘Don’t be stupid. When we’re well off. It might take a year, or something, but we’ll do it. Why shouldn’t we?’
A year seemed like a lifetime, then. When anything might happen.
‘I can’t tell anyone,’ Mattie whispered. ‘It was hard enough to tell you.’
‘It’s not your fault,’ Julia said fiercely. Mattie and Julia hadn’t spent much time at one another’s homes, but Julia had seen enough of Ted Banner to imagine the rest. Sometimes he was fulsomely friendly. At other times, the times when the veins at his temples stood out in ridges and his eyes shrank to little red spots, she thought that he was terrifying. ‘You don’t have to say who you are. Just telephone, anonymously. I’ll do it, if you like. We’ve just got to make sure that someone looks after them, because it can’t be you any more. Perhaps they could go to Rozzie. As soon as we can, we’ll get a really big flat. One with two or three bedrooms, plenty of room. We can play records as loud as we want, invite whoever we want in. The girls will love it. They’ll be safe with us, Mattie.’
Mattie nodded, grateful for Julia’s generosity, letting herself accept the fantasy for now, for tonight at least. She lay still again, listening to Julia’s murmured talk. The plans grew more elaborate, as Julia spun the dreams to comfort herself as well as Mattie.
Cramped in the doorway, listening to her, Mattie drifted to sleep again.
Julia listened to her regular breathing. At first she was relieved that Mattie wasn’t frightened any more, but without the need to reassure her, her own bravado ebbed away. The dim street lamp seemed only to emphasise the terrifying darkness of the alley, and the darkness seemed endless. At last she began to waver in and out of an uncomfortable dream-ridden half-sleep. The dreams were vivid, and horrible, and when she jerked awake again the alley seemed to belong to them, rather than to reality. And then, far from being eerily deserted, a slow tide of hunched figures began to wander through it. To begin with she was sure that they were dream-figures, but then she understood that they were too real and she shrank backwards against Mattie for a shred of protection.
The alley had become a kind of thoroughfare for the derelicts and tramps of the Embankment. They drifted past the doorway, muttering or singing or cursing. Some of them peered at the girls and whispered or shouted at them; others went past, oblivious of everything but their own obsessions.
To Julia, the tide of them seemed a grotesque parody of the Oxford Street shoppers in sunny daylight. This is waiting for all of us, she thought, the dream world half claiming her again. Darkness and despair. And then, out of nowhere, the thought came to her, is this what Betty is so frightened of? She was quite sure of her mother’s fear, whereas in her childhood she had been puzzled by the nameless force that seemed to control her. Darkness. And then, like a chant repeated over and over inside her head, I won’t let it get me. Not me.
She slept, and then woke again. She thought that the night would go on for ever and then, quite suddenly, it was dawn. The spreading of dirty grey light was like a blessing.
Julia sat upright, relief easing her muscles. Leaning against the wall, with Mattie still asleep beside her, she watched the light grown stronger and stronger. In half an hour it was broad daylight once more.
Her strength flowed back again. With the return of light, she felt that the world belonged to her, and that she could take it, and make what she wanted from it. They had survived the night, and the little victory made her triumphant. She shook Mattie’s shoulder, and Mattie yawned herself into consciousness again.
‘Look,’ Julia said, ‘it’s daytime. Isn’t it beautiful?’
Mattie stretched, and grumbled, and let Julia drag her to her feet. They collected their belongings and stuffed them into the suitcases, then made their way on up the alley. Neither of them looked back at the doorway.
Before they reached the corner they heard doors banging, and a metallic rumble, almost like thunder. At once there was a babble of voices, and the sound of shuffling feet. The girls turned the corner and saw what was happening. Huge metal bins had been wheeled out of the hotel kitchens to wait for emptying. A dozen or so old men were clustering around them, picking out the scraps of food.
‘That’s what he meant about breakfast,’ Mattie said.
‘What?’
‘The old tramp, last night. Breakfast is served round the corner.’
‘Not for me, thanks.’
They stood watching the derelicts for a moment, remembering the night’s fears. Warmed and restored by the daylight, Julia felt an ache of pity for the filthy, hungry old men as they scraped up the food relics and stowed them in their tattered pockets. They weren’t dark, terrifying figures waiting for her to join them. They weren’t waiting for anything, except their sad breakfast.
‘Let’s find somewhere to wash,’ Mattie said.
They crossed the road and walked by on the opposite side. Just like the couple in the alley last night, Julia remembered. By crossing the road she had moved from the night world back into the other. Relief and a renewed sense of her own power flowed through her, warmer than the early morning sunlight.
‘I can’t wait to get clean again,’ Julia exulted. ‘Water and soap, how heavenly.’
Mattie eyed her. ‘You’re more like your mother than you think,’ she teased. ‘You can’t bear a bit of muck.’
The public lavatories near Trafalgar Square didn’t open until seven o’clock. They waited beside the green-painted railings, amongst the scavenging pigeons. The attendant who came to unlock the doors stared at them disapprovingly, but the girls were too busy even to notice. They ran cold, clear water out of the polished brass taps while she mopped around their feet. They drank their fill and then washed themselves with Julia’s Pears soap. It smelt oddly of Fairmile Road. Julia tried to dip her head into the basin to wash her hair, but the attendant darted out of her cubbyhole.
‘You can’t do that in ’ere. You’ll ’ave to go to the warm baths in Marshall Street for that.’
The girls made faces when she turned away, and then collapsed into giggles. Their high spirits were almost fully restored.
They made do with washing as much of themselves as they could undress under the attendant’s sour gaze, and picking the least crumpled of Julia’s clothes out of the cases. Then they perched in front of the mirror and defiantly made up their faces, with lots of mascara and eyeliner to hide the shadows left by the night in the doorway. Then they struggled out with their suitcases to the taxi-drivers’ coffee stall. They bought a mug of coffee and a ham roll each, and the simple food tasted better than anything they had ever eaten. The tide of people began to flow to work. Mattie and Julia had just enough money left between them for Mattie’s bus ride to her shoe shop. It was Saturday, and Julia’s accounts office was closed.
‘What will you do?’ Mattie asked, when they had eaten the last crumb of their rolls. They hadn’t nearly satisfied their hunger – Julia felt that she was even more ravenous than she had been before.
‘I don’t know. Sit in the park. Plan what we’re going to eat when you get your money tonight. Every mouthful of it.’
‘Oh, I’m so hungry,’ Mattie wailed.
‘Go on. Get your bus. They’ll sack you if you’re late, and then what’ll we do?’
Neither of them mentioned the problem of where they would sleep. They didn’t want to think about that, not now when the sun was getting brighter and the day seemed full of possibilities.
‘How do I look?’
Julia put her head on one side, studying Mattie carefully before she answered. Mattie struck an obligingly theatrical pose. She wasn’t conventionally pretty, but she had a lively face with wide-set eyes and a pointed chin. Her expression was bold and challenging. Mattie’s best features were her hair, a foaming mass of curls like a Pre-Raphaelite heroine, and her figure. She had been generously developed when Julia had first seen her, at eleven years old. Julia herself was still almost as flat as Betty’s ironing board.
‘You look,’ Julia said carefully, ‘as if … you’ve just spent a night in a doorway.’
‘And so do you, so there.’ They laughed at each other, and then Mattie ran, scrambling for the bus as it swayed towards them.
Julia felt deflated when she had gone. She picked up the cases yet again, and began to walk, aimlessly, looking into the windows of shops and offices as she passed by.
It was going to be a hot day. She felt the sun on the back of her neck, and the handles of the suitcases biting into yesterday’s tender patches. She slowed down and then jumped, startled by the sound of a horn hooting at the kerb beside her. She turned her head and saw a delivery van and a boy leaning out.
‘Where you going?’
Julia hesitated, then put the cases down. Why not the truth?
‘Nowhere much.’
‘Didn’t look like it. Come on, get in. I’ve got to make a delivery, then I’ll buy you a coffee.’
Julia smiled suddenly. It was easy to be friendly in the sunshine, with the people and traffic streaming around her. Her spirits lifted higher.
‘Okay.’ She perched in the passenger seat. They spun round Trafalgar Square where the fountains sparkled in the bright light. The boy whistled as they wove in and out of buses and taxis, and then they turned into a network of smaller streets. Julia saw little restaurants with waiters sweeping the steps ready for the day, and grocers’ shops with goods spilling out on the pavement, darker doorways, and a jumble of little shops selling everything from violins to surgical appliances. Julia had been here before, with Mattie. There were two cellar jazz-clubs in the next street, the goals of their Saturday night pilgrimages from home.
‘I know where we are. This is Soho.’
‘Right.’ The boy glanced at her, then jerked his head at her suitcases. ‘What are you doing, arriving or leaving?’
‘Oh, I’m arriving,’ Julia said firmly.
The van skidded to a stop in front of a window hung with dusty red plush curtains. Between the glass and the red folds there were pictures of girls, most of them, as far as Julia could see, adorned with feathers and nothing else. A sign at the top read GIRLS. NON-STOP GIRLS. GIRLS. A string of coloured light bulbs, unlit, added to the faintly depressing effect. The driver had jumped out, and he was heaving crates of drinks out of the back of the van. As soon as the stack was completed he began ferrying the crates in through the curtain-draped doorway. He winked at Julia. ‘Lots of ginger beer,’ he told her. ‘The girls drink it and charge the mugs for whisky.’
A swarthy man in a leather jacket came out and counted the crates in. The last one disappeared and Julia’s new friend tucked away a roll of pound notes.
‘Blue Heaven suit you?’ he enquired.
Anywhere with food and drink would have suited Julia at that moment, but she knew Blue Heaven because she had squeezed in there with Mattie, late at night. It looked the same as all the other coffee bars, with plastic-topped tables and spindly chairs, a long chrome-banded bar and a jungle of plants absorbing the light, but because of the crowds that packed into it, it seemed the model for the rest.
‘Suits me fine,’ Julia said. She left her suitcases in the van and crossed the road with him. It was still early, and Blue Heaven was almost empty. Julia chose a table, and sat down. The Gaggia machine hissed sharply and steam drifted between the rubber plants. The coffee came, creamy froth in a shallow glass cup, and a doughnut for Julia. She tried not to eye the glossy, sugary ball too greedily.
‘Go on,’ he ordered her. Julia didn’t need to be asked twice. Sugar stuck to her chin, and jam oozed deliciously.
‘You’re only a kid,’ he laughed, watching her.
‘I’m sixteen.’
‘Exactly.’
He stood up and leaned over the juke box, putting a coin in and stabbing the buttons without reading the tides. The record was Johnny Ray, ‘Such A Night’. Julia sighed happily, and licked her fingers.
‘I love Johnny Ray. Do you?’
‘Nope. It’s girls’ music. I put it on for you.’
‘What do you like, then?’
‘Jazz, of course.’
‘Trad?’
The bands played trad jazz in the packed clubs around the corner. Julia and Mattie could dance to it all night, if they were given the chance.
‘Modern, you goon. Dizzy Gillespie. Thelonius Monk.’
They talked about music, testing each other, until he looked at his watch.
‘Hey, I’ve got to get a move on.’
‘Who do you work for? Do they let you sit in coffee bars all morning?’
He frowned at her. ‘I work for myself, baby. It’s my van. I specialise in supplying anything to anyone who needs it.’ He was on his feet now. ‘I’m a fixer. And I’d better get fixing.’ He turned to go, then a thought struck him. ‘Are you short of money?’
Julia murmured, ‘A bit. Just until tonight. My friend will …’
He put his hand into the pocket of his blue jeans and peeled a note off the roll. ‘Here.’
‘I couldn’t—’
‘You could, and you will. Pay me back when you see me. I’m always around.’
He had reached the door before Julia called out, ‘I don’t even know your name.’
‘It’s Flowers. Johnny Flowers.’ He winked at her. ‘Sounds like a queen, doesn’t it? But I’m not. See you, kid. I’ll leave your bags with Mickey, across the road.’
He left Julia sitting at the table, wishing that he’d asked her what her name was. She watched him handing over her suitcases to the swarthy man behind the red curtain. Julia had liked Johnny Flowers enough to be sure that her bags would be safe wherever he left them. The van’s engine roared, and it rocketed away down the street. Julia sat still for a little while, listening to the juke box and watching the faces passing the windows of Blue Heaven. Then, with the security of Johnny Flowers’s pound note in her pocket, she ordered herself another cup of coffee and another doughnut. Later, she crossed the road again to Mickey’s. He peered at her from a cubbyhole off the entry. The place was very dark, and silent except for the sound of distant hoovering. Not quite non-stop girls, Julia thought. The strip club smelt of beer, smoke and dust.
‘Come for your stuff? It’s down there.’ He pointed his thick finger down behind a shelf of a desk.
‘Um. I wondered if could leave it here for a bit longer? It’s heavy to carry round.’
He looked carefully at her, examining everything except her face. ‘You a new girl?’
‘Er, yeah,’ Julia said ambiguously.
He clicked his tongue in disapproval. ‘Jesus, where does Monty find them? Infant school? All right, leave your gear here. I’ll keep an eye on it.’
‘Thanks.’
Julia slipped sideways out of the door before he could change his mind, or ask her anything else. The first thing she did was to head up Wardour Street into Oxford Street. Then she made her way to Mattie’s shoe shop. Peering through the plate glass window Julia saw her kneeling in front of a customer, with a sea of shoes spread all around them. She was holding a shoe in one hand and the other gesticulated as she talked. The woman listened intently, then took the shoe and tried it on again. Julia saw her nodding. A minute later she was on her way to the cash till, with Mattie bearing the shoes behind her.
Julia waited until the sale was completed and then she slipped into the shop. Mattie stared. ‘What are you doing in here?’ she hissed, and then added in a louder voice, ‘Black court shoes, madam?’
‘You look like a born saleswoman,’ Julia told her.
‘I’m an actress,’ Mattie said haughtily. ‘I can act saleswoman, of course.’
Julia took her hand and pressed something into it. Mattie looked down at the folded ten-shilling note.
‘It’s for your sandwiches at dinner time.’
‘How …?’
‘Tell you later. I don’t see anything I like the look of, thank you very much.’
Outside, looking between the cliffs of high buildings, Julia could just see trees in the distance. She remembered that it was Hyde Park, the sanctuary that they had failed to reach last night, and the greenness drew her. She walked towards it, slipping through the skeins of traffic at Marble Arch, and then crossing on to the grass. It was brown and parched by the sun, but the softness was welcome after the hot, hard pavements. She walked on, under the shadow of the great trees, until the roar of traffic in Park Lane diminished to a muffled hum. Water glinted coolly, and Julia guessed that the wide stretch of lake must be the Serpentine. There was a scatter of green canvas deckchairs under the trees overlooking it. She sank down in one of the chairs and paid threepence to an old man with a ticket machine. Then she closed her eyes and listened to the faint rustle of leaves over her head.
It was the first comfortable, solitary moment she had had to consider what had happened since leaving home.
She found herself wondering what her mother was doing.
It was easy to picture her. Perhaps she was dusting, picking up the ornaments from the tiled mantelpiece, very carefully, dusting each souvenir and china knick-knack before putting it back in exactly the same place. It was as if the house was always being made ready, cleaned and polished, for some big occasion that never came. Even the furniture, the settee and chairs with their cushions set at exact angles, seemed to wait tensely for inspection by guests who never materialised. Hardly anyone every came into the house, and when she was a little girl Julia was puzzled by her mother’s anxiety in the midst of their eventless lives. She was always being told not to make a mess when she played.
Don’t do that, Julia, it makes such a mess.
Betty wanted her to play neatly, setting her dolls out in rows. Julia’s own inclinations were for sand, and water, and poster paints that sent up plumes of brightly coloured powder when she poured in the water to mix them.
Once, Julia remembered, she had come home from a birthday party with a packet of shiny, coloured stars. With childish cunning she had hidden them from her mother, and then one afternoon she had shut herself into her bedroom and stuck them all over the wallpaper. They looked wonderful, like fireworks, jets of cobalt blue and scarlet against the insipid pink roses. Betty had grown suspicious, and she had forced the door open just as Julia was pressing the last gummy stars into place. Betty had flown across the room and started pulling them off, but the glue was surprisingly strong and it brought little star-shaped fragments of paper with it. Those that did come away left black marks.
Betty was angrier than Julia had ever seen her.
‘You little vandal,’ she hissed at her, and Julia recoiled in shock and surprise.
‘They looked pretty,’ she protested. ‘It’s my bedroom.’
‘Don’t you ever do that. Why do you spoil everything? Why do you?’ There were white flecks at the corners of her mother’s mouth, Julia remembered. ‘It isn’t your bedroom. Your father and I have given it to you, and you’ll keep it how we want it. Look at it now.’ Betty pointed at the wreckage of Julia’s fireworks, and then her face collapsed. She was crying, helplessly. Suddenly Julia caught a glimpse of her mother’s grown-up fears. She half-understood her struggle to keep everything that was lurid, and threatening, and incomprehensible, at bay with the semi-detached walls of their house. For an instant she understood what it must be like to be grown-up and still afraid, like Betty was.
She had run to her mother full of sympathy, but Betty was good at holding on to her anger and she had pushed her away. They had spent the rest of the day in silence, and when Vernon came home from work he turned Julia over his knee and smacked her with a slipper.
There must have been dozens of other times like that, Julia thought, and plenty of times when she had deserved whatever they had doled out to her. But that was the time that she remembered. Perhaps because of the embrace that Betty had rejected. Perhaps because of the glimpse of her mother’s fear.
Sitting in her deckchair, with the sun warming her face and arms, Julia remembered the old men on the Embankment. In the middle of her own night terrors she had recalled her mother’s too. Betty was afraid of everything, afraid that if she let any little detail out of place the long slide might begin, and leave her with nothing. Was that why she wouldn’t allow her daughter anything new, or different, or dangerous?
In the night Julia had determined I won’t let it get me. Not the darkness, nor the fear of it. And she had survived.
I won’t live like Betty, Julia promised herself. I won’t be afraid, and I can risk everything, if I have to.
She shivered a little, trying to imagine, looking ahead, beyond herself. But the sun made coin-bright circles under her closed eyelids, and that was all she could see.
After the stars, or perhaps all along only she couldn’t remember it, rebellion came naturally to Julia. As she grew older, there were more and more things to kick against. Looking back, the years seemed to stretch behind her as a long, entrenched battle against Betty’s strictures. In by eight. Bed by nine. Homework done on the day it was set. Julia challenged her on everything. They disagreed about her clothes, her make-up, the music she played, the hours she came in and went out again, and the places she went to. Betty and Vernon were proud that Julia had won a place at the girls’ grammar, but Mattie and Julia hated the place. They played truant and did no work, but even so Julia always came out near the top of her class.
The fights were tiring and boring, and Julia nearly always won them because she fought from strength. Betty was always forced to retrench and then capitulate.
And when Mattie came along, Julia had a natural ally. Mattie was an equally natural focus for the Smiths’ disapproval. She came from the despised estate, while the Smiths clung to the middle-class isolation of Fairmile Road. She wore her skirts too short, and too tightly belted so that they showed off her surprising breasts. And then there was the defiant mass of her hair. It was Mattie who produced the first Outdoor Girl cake mascara for Julia to try out, and quick-witted Mattie who yelled back at the boys who whistled at them in the High Street. But it was still Julia who was the leader, Julia had the ideas, and the determination to carry them out.
Betty had once said, with a sadness that Julia couldn’t fathom, ‘You’re not a bit like me.’
She could see her so clearly, in the house that gave Julia claustrophobia. A thin, small woman with a scarf knotted around her head to keep the dust out of her hair. Always stooping to tidy something away, or smooth a crease, or straighten an edge, her head bent so that the knobs in her neck stood out, the corners of her mouth always turned down.
I’m sorry, Julia thought. I couldn’t stay there with you. When Mattie came, after what Mattie had told her, the idea of escape had seemed so magnificent, so obvious and so enticing. There had been no alternative. No question even of waiting. With a single gesture, Betty and Fairmile Road and all the rest had been left behind her.
And yet, in spite of everything, Julia missed her.
I’ll come back, she promised. When I’ve got something worth showing you. You can be proud of me then, if you like. The words sounded grand in her head and she offered them to her mother in expiation.
Vernon was different. Julia had been afraid of her father, or of his slow-burning, malevolent temper. Betty was afraid of him too, she thought. She remembered how her mother cooked his tea, watching the clock all the time so that the food would be ready at exactly half past five. They ate their meal in silence while Vernon read the newspaper and Betty watched his plate, and the clock ticked far too loudly.
Julia didn’t miss Vernon at all.
The sun and her comfortable chair were making her feel drowsy. Her thoughts turned from her own home to Mattie’s. When she had first met her, years ago, Mattie had asked her home to tea. Julia had never ventured on to the estate before. The vast expanse of it startled her. There were thousands of houses, all the same, looking as if they had been dropped from the sky in endless lines. There were no trees to suggest that anything had existed there before the houses came, no corner shops to break the monotony. Mattie’s street was identical to all the others, but her house looked more neglected. The sooty patch of front garden was cluttered with junk and rusty bits of machinery.
Mattie flung the door open. ‘You’d better come in. Don’t take any notice of anything,’ she added, with an odd fierceness.
Julia couldn’t have avoided noticing the noise, and the smell of frying onions. There seemed to be children squirming everywhere, Mattie’s four smaller brother and sisters. Mattie picked the baby up and flung her in the air until she hiccupped with delight. In the kitchen Mattie’s eldest sister was standing at the stove. Mattie didn’t ask, but Rozzie announced, ‘He’s out.’
Mattie’s anxious fierceness disappeared at once. ‘Make yourself at home,’ she said hospitably.
Julia looked round. Every surface in the room was piled up with broken toys and dirty clothes and open packets of food. She had a brief vision of her mother’s kitchen where every jar had its place and the floor was rinsed down every day with a solution of bleach.
‘Where’s your mum?’ she asked. As soon as she had said it she knew that it was tactless. But Betty was such a fixture in Fairmile Road, with her dusters and her sewing and the Light Programme on the wireless, it was hard to understand the absence of a similar figure for Mattie.
‘She’s in the hospital,’ Mattie told her expressionlessly. ‘She’s given up.’ She waved her hand at the mess as she spoke, so that Julia might have thought that it was just tidiness Mrs Banner had given up on.
‘It’s ready,’ Rozzie announced.
They took their places at the table. Mattie hoisted the baby on to her lap and fed her with spoonfuls from her own plate. The children ate ravenously, and in between mouthfuls they asked Julia dozens of inquisitive questions. Mattie made up silly names for the teachers and the other girls at their school, and Julia turned them into impromptu rhymes. Everyone laughed uproariously. The atmosphere in the steamy room was cheerful, in spite of the mess and the variety of smells. The liver and onions tasted good, and the small portions were helped by piles of potatoes.
It was different from everything Julia knew about.
‘I liked it at your house,’ she said afterwards, and Mattie beamed at her, surprised and pleased. That first afternoon made a bond between the two girls that grew steadily stronger. When Mrs Banner died a year later, Mattie turned to Julia for comfort, and it was Mattie who reinforced Julia in her depressing battles with her parents.
But she never told me about her father, Julia thought.
Not until this week.
If it had been wrong to leave Betty so abruptly, it was unquestionably right to have come away with Mattie. Julia felt a sharp pull of love and sympathy and admiration for her. That, at least, was right.
And now they were here, and there would be no going back.
Together they would make it.
Sitting in her deckchair, frowning a little, Julia fell asleep.
‘I’m half dead,’ Mattie complained.
‘You’ll revive. It’s Saturday night.’
‘Easy for you to say, when you’ve been snoring all afternoon in the park.’
Julia met Mattie outside the shop at closing time. ‘I’ve sold fourteen pairs of shoes. The supervisor says I’ll get a bonus. There’s a perfect pair of black stilettos, you’ll love them. Shall I put them in the back for you?’
‘Don’t try and sell me your shoes, kid. I don’t need ’em.’
They laughed, and Julia put her arm through Mattie’s.
‘So how much have we got?’
With Mattie’s three days’ pay, and what was left of Johnny Flowers’s pound note (‘Why did you let him go?’ Mattie demanded. ‘He sounds just what we need.’) they had almost five pounds. They felt like Lady Docker.
‘Food,’ Mattie said decisively.
They made straight for the nearest fish and chip shop and ordered double portions of everything.
‘That,’ Mattie sighed later as she folded up the last triangle of bread and butter and bit into it, ‘was the best meal I have ever eaten. You’re right. I have revived.’
‘So what shall we do?’
‘We—ll. We could find somewhere to stay the night …’
‘Or we could go dancing, and then we needn’t go to bed at all.’
‘You’re right.’
‘Stick with me.’
It was still early, and they dawdled arm in arm along Oxford Street, then Julia steered them south into Wardour Street.
‘I’ve just thought. Where are the suitcases?’
‘We’re going to get them. This way.’
The strip joint had done its best to shake off its depressing aspect ready for the night’s trade. The coloured bulbs were lit, and flickered bravely. The lights were on inside too, and Mickey was wedged belligerently in the doorway behind a placard reading THE SAUCIEST SHOW IN TOWN.
He spotted Julia at once.
‘Here! Monty doesn’t know nothing about no new girl.’
Julia smiled, trying to dazzle him with charm.
‘I’m sorry. It was a mistake. Can we just take our cases out of your way …’
But Mickey was staring at Mattie. ‘Now you,’ he said, ‘are the sort of girl Monty always goes for. Looking for a job, are you?’
Mattie stuck her chin out. ‘Not your sort of job. Thanks very much.’
Julia retrieved the luggage and they retreated.
‘Come back any time you fancy,’ Mickey yelled after them. ‘You with the hair.’
They turned the corner and then stopped, giggling.
‘I can’t leave you alone for a single day, can I?’ Mattie teased. ‘Without you getting involved in a strip show. Fancy earning your living by taking your clothes off for a crowd of dirty men.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Julia answered light-heartedly. ‘Easier than hammering a typewriter all day. Or selling fourteen pairs of shoes.’
Mattie cocked her head.
‘Listen.’
It was music, drumming out somewhere below their feet.
‘Mmm.’ Julia tried out a few steps on the pavement. ‘And look.’
There was a dingy doorway sandwiched between two shops, with a temporary-looking notice pinned to the door.
NOW OPEN! THE ROCKET CLUB.
That was how they stumbled across it.
They had been heading round the corner to Cy Laurie’s, but the Rocket was there and in its opening week it was offering free membership to girls. Mattie and Julia didn’t need any more encouragement.
A flight of uneven steps led down to a white-painted cellar. There were tables around the walls, a bar selling soft drinks, and travel posters stuck on the walls for decoration. There was a trad jazz combo just hotting up, and people spinning and whirling in the white space.
They forgot everything, and launched themselves into the dance.
It was easy to forget, in those days.
The club filled up, and the heat and the pulsing rhythm and the exhilaration of dancing swept them up and created a separate, absorbing world. They danced with anyone who asked them, not noticing whether they were young or old or white or black, and when the supply of partners temporarily dried up they danced with each other.
It was a long, hot night and it went like a flash.
At a table against the wall, from behind a stub of candle jammed into a wine bottle, Felix Lemoine was watching them.
There were lots of girls a bit like them, he thought, but there was something about these two that singled them out. They were striking enough to look at, although their clothes were grubby and looked home-made. The taller one with the dark hair had an angular, arresting face that was almost beautiful, and a thin, restless body. Her friend was plainer, but her foaming mass of hair shone in the candlelight and she was a better dancer. She moved gracefully, holding her head up.
It wasn’t their appearances that interested him, Felix decided. It was their vitality. He could almost feel the crackle of it from where he sat. The two girls were absorbed in themselves, in their dancing and the world they had created, and they were careless of everything else. Felix liked that carelessness. He had already identified it as style.
He took a notepad and pencil out of his inner pocket, and began to draw.
When the drawing was finished he went on sitting there. It didn’t occur to him to ask one of them to dance.
He just watched, as he always did.

Two (#u8add3495-316b-5c45-aa1e-1c95b6ce887a)
It was quiet in the studio. The Saturday afternoon life class was an unpopular option. The model was a woman, and she had been sitting for an hour. Her face was expressionless and her body looked flaccid, Felix thought, as if she had gone away somewhere and left it behind. Her long hair was pinned up on the top of her head to show the lines of her jaw and throat. He drew carefully, shading in the coils of hair. That was easy enough, but the rest of her body was more difficult. The soft heaviness of it made him feel uncomfortable, wanting to look away instead of spending another whole hour staring at it.
He glanced around at the handful of other students. They were drawing intently. The tutor strolled between them, watching. When he reached Felix’s chair he stopped and murmured, ‘Your execution is good, Lemoine, but there’s no feeling. Loosen up.’
Felix mumbled his reply, and the tutor looked at the big clock on the wall. He nodded briskly to the model. She stood up, stretching unconcernedly, and pulled on a pink wrap. Then she lit a cigarette and unfolded a newspaper. She would rest for fifteen minutes and then resume her position.
Felix put his pencil away. He waited until the tutor was on the other side of the room, and then he slipped outside. Two of the other students followed him.
‘Coming outside for a fag, Felix?’ one of them asked cheerfully.
‘No, thanks. I think I’m going home.’
‘Yeah. Bit of an old dog, isn’t she? See you Monday, then.’ They strolled away with their jackets over their shoulders and their hands in the pockets of their jeans.
Felix went outside. The air smelt hot and tarry, but the faint breeze was welcome after the enclosed studio. He would walk home, he decided.
Felix liked walking in London. He enjoyed the anonymity of the streets, and the endless variety of faces streaming past him. He set off quickly through the afternoon crowds. When he reached Hyde Park he turned northwards, his pace slowing in the cool beneath the trees. As he crossed the dirt paths little whorls of dust lifted under his feet. He forgot the dislocation that he had felt in the life class, and after a moment he forgot the art school altogether. He wasn’t close enough to home, yet, to need to focus on that either, and his thoughts slid easily, disconnected, as they always did when he was walking. Felix usually felt most comfortable in the vacuum between one place and another. It was being there, almost anywhere nowadays, that was the problem. At Marble Arch he emerged into the traffic again, and turned down the long tunnel of Oxford Street. He was within reach of home now. Another few minutes, and he reached a featureless square to the north of Oxford Street. He paused beside a row of iron railings, and emerged from the journey’s limbo. He thought of home, and Jessie, as he looked across the square at their windows.
Most of the shabby Regency stucco houses in the square were occupied by offices, but a few still housed one or two flats, stranded amongst the solicitors and small import-export companies. Felix crossed to a gaunt, peeling house and went in through the black front door. As he climbed the stairs he could hear a typewriter clicking in one of the offices below, but otherwise the house seemed oppressively silent.
At the top of the last flight of stairs he unlocked a door, and peered across the five square feet of lobby into Jessie’s room. She was sitting in her chair by the window, and the sunlight beyond stamped out her dark, sibylline profile.
Then Felix’s mother turned her face to look at him. ‘Hello, duck,’ she said. ‘You’re early.’
He saw at a glance that the vodka bottle was on the table beside her, and judging by the level in it it was still early in the day for Jessie.
‘Why are you home so early? Not missing classes, are you?’
Still just as if he was a little boy, even though it was Jessie who was the helpless one now.
‘No,’ he lied, ‘I’m not missing classes. I’m hot, I’m just going to change my clothes.’
‘Go on then, be quick. Then come and talk to me. I think it might thunder. I hate thunder. Reminds me of the Blitz, with none of the fun. Oh, you wouldn’t remember.’
Her voice followed him into his bedroom. He took some clean clothes, neatly folded, out of his cupboard. He changed, and combed his black hair.
Jessie went on talking, but she broke off when he reappeared in the doorway. She looked at him over the rim of her glass, her eyes very bright and sharp in her shapeless face.
‘God, you’re a looker all right, my boy,’ Jessie said. ‘Just like your dad. Only a better colour.’ She laughed, her massive shoulders shaking silently.
‘Have you had anything to eat?’ Felix asked.
His mother shrugged.
‘I’ll make some soup.’
Jessie didn’t answer. She wasn’t interested in food any more.
The kitchen was very neat, Felix’s domain. He had made the cupboards and the shelves, and painted everything white.
‘I don’t call that very cosy,’ Julia had sniffed.
‘Well, I like it,’ Felix told her. ‘And you don’t cook, do you?’
He took a covered bowl out of the minute larder now and tipped the contents into a saucepan. He opened a cupboard and peered in at the tidy contents, then took a handful of dried pasta shells and dropped them into the pan. He was humming softly as he worked.
When the soup was simmering he laid a wicker tray with blue and white Provençal bowls. Felix had found the bowls in a little shop in Beak Street, and had brought them triumphantly home. More of his discoveries were dotted about the flat – a tiny still life of oranges in a basket, in an ornate gilt frame, a pair of pewter candlesticks, a batik wall-hanging, contrasting oddly with the battered furniture.
‘Dust-collectors,’ muttered Jessie, not that dusting occupied her at all.
Felix finished his preparations with a twist of black pepper from a wooden peppermill, and carried the tray through to Jessie. He laid the table in front of her, swinging the vodka bottle out of reach. His mother eyed the food.
‘You’ve got to eat,’ he told her patiently.
Jessie ate almost nothing, but her body seemed to grow more bloated and less mobile every day. She could only shuffle round the flat with difficulty now, and she never went outside. She lived for her vodka bottle, for her occasional visitors, who stirred up her already vivid memories, and for Felix. He felt sorry for her, and loved her, and he knew that she kept him prisoner. He watched her like a mother with a child as she spooned up her soup.
‘What did you do today?’ she demanded. ‘Tell me all about it.’
Felix looked out over the plane trees locked inside the railings of the square garden.
‘It was life class today.’
‘Nude model, does that mean? A woman?’
‘That’s right.’
Jessie chuckled coarsely. ‘Must make it hard for you boys to concentrate.’
‘Do you want some bread with your soup?’
She peered at him. ‘You’re a funny boy, sometimes. Are you all right at that college? Doing well at your drawing?’
Felix couldn’t have begun to explain to Jessie that he had no idea what he was doing there. The models embarrassed him, but setting that aside, the aridity of life drawing, and the other exercises that the students were required to undertake, seemed to have no relevance at all to the kind of painting that Felix wanted to do. He needed to shout, and to splash himself on to the canvases in violent colours. At the college he didn’t know how to do anything of the kind. He was silent, and he worked in cramped spaces with tiny pencil strokes. He knew that he had been much happier in the year and a half after he had left school, working during the day in an Italian grocer’s in Soho, and going to night class. But after night class, with his teacher’s encouragement, he had won his place at the Slade, and he had wanted to be a painter for as long as he could remember. Only he didn’t think that any of the work he was doing now would help him with that.
He couldn’t explain any of this to Jessie, who didn’t even understand what painting meant.
‘Of course I’m all right,’ he said softly.
Jessie pushed her food away. ‘Pour me a drop more of the good stuff, there’s a duck.’ Felix filled her glass for her and she sat back with a sigh of relief. ‘That’s better. God, it’s nice to have a talk. I can’t bear the quiet, all day long.’
‘You could listen to the wireless.’ The old-fashioned model in a bakelite case stood in a corner of the room.
‘All that rubbish? Noisy music. That’s what your dad liked. Loud music, all day and all night. We used to dance, anywhere, any time. God, we used to dance.’
Felix let her reminisce. That was what Jessie enjoyed. It was almost all she had, he understood that. He had his own memories, too, as he sat watching her. They were mostly of upstairs rooms, with the sound of music and laughter, and sometimes shouting, drifting up to him. Felix used to sit for hours, drawing and waiting. When Jessie had finished work, at all sorts of strange hours, and if she was alone, she would bustle in and sweep him off somewhere to eat. In those days she had a healthy appetite, and the meals were the best of their times together. Usually they went to one of a handful of cafés, where everyone knew her and greeted her.
‘Hello, Jess, my love. What’s it to be tonight? Extra portion for that Felix, and we’ll see if we can fill him out a bit.’
They would sit down to huge platefuls of eggs and bacon, or sausages and mash. Occasionally when his mother was feeling flush, it would be a restaurant and Felix learned to enjoy lasagne and tournedos Rossini and kleftiko while she told him stories of the day’s work, and the people who drifted endlessly in and out of the Soho clubs. In the comfortable times they were afternoon clubs, that filled the empty time for their customers between the pubs closing and opening again. Felix had a dim impression from his brief glimpses into smoky rooms of a twilight world where curtains closed out the daylight and where men sat around drinking small drinks under Jessie’s benevolent, despotic eye. For a brief period, he remembered, there had been a club called Jessie’s Place, and his mother had talked about sending him away to a ‘proper’ school. He had refused to go, and one of the periodic upheavals had taken over their life, leaving them with no more Jessie’s Place. She had gone to work in a nightclub then, which meant that there were no more cosy suppers together either. Felix came back from school and spent his evenings alone, in one of the succession of rented rooms that they used as home. He listened to music, and drew. He painted too, when he could get hold of the materials. One of Jessie’s regular friends, a dealer of some kind who was still known to Felix as Mr Mogridge, told him that he could be good. Sometimes he brought him paintings, and canvas. It was Mr Mogridge who had introduced him to the night school, and Felix was grateful for that, even though he disliked the man. The rest of his spare time, until he left school and started work in the grocer’s, Felix filled up with walking in Soho. He rummaged in the strange little shops for decorative treasures, and watched the people as they passed him in the streets.
There were other men of Jessie’s too, of course. There were plenty of them when Felix was young, fewer as Jessie aged and her body grew more cumbersome. Felix knew for sure that his mother had once been a singer, and then, because she had not been quite good enough, she had become a club hostess. Not a prostitute. He knew most of the real girls by sight, and quite a lot of them by name, because he saw them in Old Crompton Street and Frith Street, and down at the bottom end of Wardour Street. Jessie wasn’t one of them. She had men friends, that was all. Felix ignored them as far as he could. He had never been able to bear the thought of what they did together. Now, looking back over the years of moving with Jessie from one set of cramped rooms to another, waiting and watching and drawing in exercise books, Felix realised that he must have been a strange, withdrawn, prim little boy. How different from Jessie herself, and how baffling for her.
She had done her best for him, he saw now, through what must often have been difficult times. He had been lonely, but he had never felt neglected. They had never had much, but he had never gone without.
Felix had no memories of his father at all.
He knew that Desmond Lemoine and Jessie Jubb had been married, because Jessie always kept her marriage certificate with her. The wedding pre-dated his own birthday by two and a half months. Apart from that, Felix only knew what Jessie had told him. The wedding certificate stated that he was a musician, but Jessie was unreliable about exactly what sort of musician. Sometimes he was the greatest sax player there had ever been, the forgotten star of every big band of the Thirties. At other times he was a trombonist, once or twice even a trumpeter.
‘He played that sax – or trombone, or trumpet – like an angel,’ Jessie would say mistily. And then she would snort with laughter and add, ‘He looked like an angel, too. God, he was beautiful. A big, black angel.’
Desmond had come from Grenada. Felix knew that he must have been tall, because he had grown to six foot himself, towering over Jessie. But the colour of his skin was only a dim reflection of his father’s blackness.
What would I be? Felix wondered. An angel the colour of cold English coffee? He also wondered if it was his half and half-ness, the awareness of being neither one person nor the other, that gave him his sense of separation.
Desmond and Jessie had met when they were both working in a club off Shaftesbury Avenue. Within a few months Jessie was pregnant, and a few months after that her musician obligingly married her. He had also insisted on the boy’s Christian name, although Jessie had preferred Brian.
‘It means the lucky one, girl,’ he told Jessie. ‘We all need a bit of luck, don’t we?’ He disappeared for good about a year after Felix was born.
‘He went on tour, with a new band, up north somewhere,’ Jessie said. ‘Going to be his big break, it was. He never came back.’
‘Why not?’ Felix would demand. When he was small boy his father’s absence made him silently, unnervingly angry.
Jessie would only shrug. ‘Liked his drink, Des did. And pretty faces, especially if they were white ones. Plenty of those in Manchester, or wherever he was. Fell for someone else, I expect. He’s got two or three wives to his name by now, I should think.’
At sixteen, Felix had calculated, he could move away from Jessie and begin to live his own life. He dreamed of going to Rome, or Florence, to find some kind of menial job that would still give him time to paint.
Then, in the same week as the King died, Jessie fell ill.
She had double pneumonia, and for five days Felix was sure that she was going to die. He sat by her bed, waiting again, and all the waiting he had done all through the years of his childhood, seemingly for nothing, welled up out of the past and crushed the hope out of him. Later, he remembered the stillness of that week. All the music had been silenced for the King, and the faces in the street outside the hospital were sombre.
He didn’t believe the doctors when they told him that his mother would live. She seemed so fragile, with all the energy and liveliness that he had taken for granted drained out of her.
Jessie did recover, very slowly, but it was as if her illness had quenched some hope of her own. She struggled back to the current club as soon as she could, but the work exhausted her. The customers noticed and commented on her low spirits. They were allowed, even expected, to have their problems, but Jessie had to be cheerful for them. Not long afterwards she was ill again, and missed more days off work. At last the boss, the latest in a long line of owners to whom Jessie had devoted her energy, took her aside. She would have to be more like her old self, he warned her, his special girl, our Jessie, or he couldn’t promise to keep her on.
Felix was incandescent with anger when Jessie told him. He wanted to burst into the club and hit the man square in his puffy face.
‘Don’t upset yourself, love,’ Julia advised him wearily. ‘It isn’t worth it.’
Two months later Jessie was fired. A salvo of bouquets and fulsome good wishes followed her into exile from the only world she knew.
‘There are other places. Other jobs,’ Felix said savagely, but Jessie only shrugged.
‘It isn’t worth it,’ she repeated.
Already she was drinking heavily, and her bulky body seemed more of a burden for her to propel to and fro. But Jessie had dozens of friends and they rallied round her now, almost against her will. One of them, a man like Mr Mogridge but even shadier, owned a block of property to the north of Oxford Street. It was out of their old territory, but Jessie and Felix gratefully accepted his offer of a short tenancy, at a tiny rent, of the flat overlooking Manchester Square.
‘It won’t be for ever,’ Mr Bull said crisply. ‘It’s due for development, all that. But you can have it for now, if it’s any help to you.’
They moved into the flat, and Felix decorated it. He enjoyed arranging the cramped space more than he had enjoyed anything since Jessie fell ill.
‘You’ve done a good job,’ Mr Bull said. ‘Made the place look like something.’ He looked hard at Felix, and then smirked.
By that Saturday afternoon, they had been living in the flat for two and a half years. As a temporary measure, it felt more permanent than anywhere they had ever lived before.
Felix heard his mother’s chair creak, and a long, exhaled breath. He looked across at her and saw that she had fallen asleep, with her chin on her chest and her glass tipped sideways in her fingers. He took it gently away and put the top back on the bottle. His face was expressionless as he lifted her swollen legs on to a low stool, and slipped a cushion behind her head. Then he brought a blanket from her bed and tucked it securely around her.
Felix carried the wicker tray of dirty dishes back into the kitchen, and washed up. He put each plate and bowl back in its proper place, and dried the old-fashioned wooden drainer. When everything was satisfactorily tidy he went into his bedroom and put on a dark blue sweater.
He looked at Jessie once more, and then he went out and closed the door softly behind him.
The threat of thunder had lifted, and the sky was clear. The lines of chimneys and rooftops were sharply defined against it. Felix walked for a long time, watching the darkness as it gathered softly in narrow alleyways and in the corners buttressed by high buildings. He enjoyed listening to the hum of the city changing as night came and the lights flickered and steadied.
He had been idling, not thinking, when he passed the Rocket Club. He loitered for a moment, incuriously, reading the notice on the door. Then he heard the music, drifting up to him through the cellar grating at his feet. He hesitated, and then he thought that there was nothing to hurry home for. Jessie would certainly be still asleep, and the little flat would be quiet and dark. He could go in for an hour, to drink a Coke and listen to the music. Felix went to the door and handed over his entry money.
‘Just one?’ the doorman asked, without interest.
Felix had to duck his head under the low ceilings as he went down the stairs into the cellar. He bought a drink, and found a place at a table against the wall.
He noticed the two girls almost at once.
Felix was impressed by the club itself, too. He liked the blurred distinctions of night-time in these places, and he quite often visited the other clubs in the nearby street. He had a loose network of acquaintances based on them, and that suited him because it didn’t trespass on the rest of his privacy. There was a sprinkling of faces here that he knew, and more that he didn’t. It was a pleasing mixture of beats and bohemians, ordinary kids and blacks and Soho characters packing the steaming space. He hadn’t intended to stay but the atmosphere, and the two girls, made him linger. The two of them were dancing with intent, almost fierce enjoyment. It was, Felix thought, as if they were afraid to stop.
The crowd grew thicker and wilder as the night wore on. Felix danced with a girl he knew a little. He bought her a drink, and talked to a group of her friends. All the girls liked Felix, as well as admiring his looks, but they were used to his evasiveness. He glimpsed the girl with the hair laughing, through the press of people, and then he lost sight of them both. The dancers were leaping and shouting now, and the walls of the cellar itself seemed to run with sweat.
In the end it was the exhausted musicians who gave up. They played a last, storming number and then began to pack up their instruments. The crowd booed and protested, but they knew that there was going to be no more that night. They started to flow reluctantly up the stairs, and Felix went with them.
Outside it was already light, a still, pale summer morning. The air was cool and sweet after the smoky cellar. He walked a little way, and then stopped to watch the pearly light lying along the street.
Something made him look back.
The two girls were standing outside the club doorway. There were two suitcases at their feet. All the wild enjoyment had drifted away with the music. They looked tired, and dejected, and very young.
Without knowing why he did it, Felix turned and walked back to them.
‘What’s wrong?’
The dark one lifted her head. ‘We’ve got nowhere to sleep. We thought we’d just stay up all night. But the night didn’t last quite long enough for it to be day again.’
She gestured, wearily, at the sleeping city. The first car of the morning, or the last car of the night, purred past them. The crowd from the club was disappearing, and they began to feel as they were the only people left between sleeping and waking. Mattie looked up too. She noticed that he was tall and slim, with black hair that curled close to his head. He looked foreign and handsome, and exotic, but she was too tired to work out whether that was threatening or not.
‘Do you know anywhere we can stay?’ she asked. ‘Just for tonight? What’s left of it.’ They were both watching him.
Felix thought of home, and of Jessie who would now be prowling heavily, wakefully, in her room.
All his instincts warned him to offer nothing, but the memory of how they had looked inside the Rocket Club made him fight back his instincts. He sighed. ‘There’s a spare room where I live. It isn’t much.’
‘After last night, anywhere with a roof will be a palace,’ the dark one said.
‘Which way?’ the other one demanded. Felix pointed, and they began walking. He noticed that they were both almost falling over with exhaustion. He held his hands out for one of the suitcases, then the other.
‘Hey, what have you got in here?’
The dark one shrugged her shoulders. They were thin and bony, he saw, like a young boy’s.
‘Everything,’ she said.
They came into the square as the light changed from grey to gold. Felix looked up at Jessie’s window. The curtains were open.
‘I live with my mother,’ he said baldly.
The one who called herself Mattie smiled. ‘Mothers tend not to like us very much.’
‘Mine’s different.’
But it was Mattie’s expectations that were proved right. Felix unlocked the door at the top of the stairs and they crowded together into the awkward hall. There was hardly room for the three of them and the two suitcases. There was a slow creaking noise, and Jessie appeared from her room. Her bulk seemed to block out the light. Mattie was at the back, and she saw only an old woman, very fat, who breathed with difficulty. But Julia was closer and she saw that Felix’s mother had quick, sharp eyes that were at odds with her size. Her expression was closed, and hostile. Felix’s heart sank. He had seen Jessie confront unwelcome customers with that face.
‘Who’s this?’
He told her.
‘They can’t stay here. This isn’t a rooming house.’
Jessie was suspicious, and defensive, and she didn’t like strangers any more. The little lair perched at the top of the offices was all she had, and she didn’t want it to be invaded. Felix understood, and he wished that he hadn’t dragged these waifs back here with him.
‘It’s just for one night,’ he soothed her. ‘There’s not much of it left, anyway.’
Jessie peered at the two girls. They were hardly more than children, and she thought that she recognised the type. And then the one with the terrible ratty tangle of curling fair hair said softly. ‘Please.’
Jessie was angry, but she knew that she had lost. She couldn’t deny that appeal. It was characteristic that she accepted her defeat and moved swiftly on.
‘You’ll be out of here by twelve o’clock sharp. There’ll be no noise, no waste of hot water, and no funny business of any sort.’
Mattie grinned at her. Their relief was like a light being turned on.
‘We’re the quietest sleepers in London. And we’re too tired to wash or think of anything funny, I promise.’
Jessie turned her massive back and shuffled away to her chair.
The room that Felix showed them into had one single mattress and a sleeping bag. He brought them some pillows and blankets, and they murmured their thanks and burrowed into them, fully clothed.
They were asleep, like small animals, even before he had draped a blanket over the dormer window.
‘Well, where do you live?’ Jessie demanded.
The girls had slept for six hours, and they only woke up at midday because Felix rapped on their door. They tried to slip into the bathroom, but Jessie was too quick for them.
‘Don’t sneak around,’ she shouted from her room. ‘Come in here and let me have a look at you. Then you can be off and leave us in peace.’
They stood in front of her, like schoolgirls facing the headmistress. Glancing round the room, Julia saw that it was full of photographs. There were dozens of laughing faces and raised glasses, and most of the groups showed a younger version of Felix’s mother beaming somewhere in the middle. It was hard to reconcile that conviviality with this huge, formidable woman.
‘You must live somewhere,’ Jessie was insisting. ‘Why d’you have to turn up at my place in the middle of the night? Although that boy’s just as much to blame for bringing you.’
They looked round for him, but Felix was prudently keeping out of the way. They could hear him rattling plates in the kitchen. The homely noise reminded them that they were hungry.
‘Well?’ Jessie demanded.
Julia decided rapidly that there was no point in attempting anything but the truth. Jessie would certainly recognise anything that wasn’t.
‘We haven’t got anywhere to live,’ she said. ‘Just at the moment, that is. The night before last we slept on the Embankment. Last night we were going to stay up, dancing, but somehow there’s a gap between night and morning, you know?’
‘I remember,’ Jessie said, a shade less grimly.
‘Felix rescued us, and brought us here.’
‘I know that already. What I’m trying to find out is why you had to sleep on the Embankment in the first place.’
Very quickly, putting in as little detail as possible, Julia told her. In Julia’s version of the story, Mattie had had an argument with her father about staying out too late. That was all. But Jessie’s little round eyes, sunk in the cushions of flesh, were shrewd as they darted to and fro. They lingered on Mattie for a minute longer.
When Julia had finished her speech, Jessie said, ‘I see. And now you’ve done your running away and found out how nasty it is, you’ll be going back home where you belong, won’t you?’
Mattie spoke for the first time. ‘No. We can’t do that.’ Her voice was quiet and steady and utterly definite, and Jessie’s glance flickered over her again.
‘We’ve both got jobs,’ Julia told her quickly. ‘Well-paid jobs. As soon as we’ve got some money we can rent a flat. Everything will be all right then.’
Jessie had seen enough. They looked so vulnerable, both of them, still sleepy, with their eyes smudged round with their unnecessary make-up, and their strange, young-old clothes all rucked up with the weight of sleep. But they weren’t so young, either, Jessie thought. A shadow of something, the beginning of experience perhaps, had touched both their faces, and sharpened them out of the softness of childhood. And they had a defiance in them, a determination, that touched her. The way they stood, the way they looked around, stirred memories in Jessie. They reminded her of friends she hadn’t seen for a long time, most of whom she would never see again. And, just a little, they reminded her of herself.
Jessie sighed.
‘Oh, bloody hell. You’d better have a drink and something to eat before I really do kick you out. Felix! Bring that bottle and some glasses in here.’
And Felix came in, awkwardly tall in the low room, but moving as gracefully as a cat in his black jersey. The girls watched him and he smiled at all three of them, as triumphantly as if he had called the truce himself. With a flourish, he took four glasses off a tray.
‘There’s beer or vodka,’ he announced. The two girls instinctively looked at Jessie for guidance, and Felix hid his smile.
‘You’d better take vodka,’ Jessie ordered. ‘That beer Felix drinks tastes like piss. Dress it up with some orange for them, Felix, there’s a love.’ Felix poured the drinks while Jessie watched impatiently, and then she raised her glass. ‘Here’s to freedom.’
It was such an incongruous toast, coming from this fat, ungainly old woman wedged in her rooftop room, and yet so apt for them, that the girls just gaped at her. Jessie broke into wheezy chuckles. ‘That’s what you think you want, isn’t it? Come on. I hate drinking alone.’
So Mattie and Julia sipped at their sweet, oily-orange drinks and Jessie downed her neat vodka in a gulp. She held out her empty glass. ‘Come on, Felix, since we’re all here. Let’s have a party.’
As soon as she had said the word, the four of them did become a party. The Sunday morning sun shone in through the windows and danced on the polished frames and the glass faces of the photographs, and Mattie and Julia felt the vodka warming their empty stomachs and loosening their limbs and tongues. Felix was their rescuer and their friend, and although they didn’t know yet what Jessie would mean to them, they felt the warmth of her. After the Embankment, and what had happened before and since, that warmth was doubly welcome.
Julia stood up and wandered round the room, peering at the faces pinned in their photograph frames.
‘Who are they all?’ she murmured. ‘You’ve got hundreds and hundreds of friends. More people than I’ve ever even met.’
She couldn’t have struck a better note. Jessie leaned back in her chair and laced her fingers across her front.
‘Used to have, dear, used to have. Dead, now, most of them. The rest are finished, like me. But we had some good times in our day, we did. Times like you wouldn’t believe. See that picture there, the one you’re looking at? That’s Jocky Gordon with his arm round me, the boxer. I met them all, in my line of business. All of ’em. You’d be surprised, some of the things I’ve seen.’
‘Tell us about it,’ Mattie begged her.
Jessie beamed, and settled more comfortably in her seat.
Still smiling, Felix slipped out into the kitchen. It was on the shaded side of the house, cool and neat and inviting. He could make something to eat, now that he had seen that Jessie was happy.
He opened the cupboard door, his movements economical in the confined space. He had planned to finish the leftovers of a knuckle of ham with Jessie, but that wouldn’t stretch to four. He would make a salad and put the ham into omelettes, instead. Felix unwrapped the lettuce and picked the leaves over carefully. He could hear laughter from Jessie’s room. He was ready to make the omelettes when he felt eyes on his back, and turned round to see Julia leaning against the open door. He gestured uncertainly, not knowing how long she had been watching him.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said softly. ‘I didn’t mean to startle you. I came to say thanks.’
They listened for a second to a third person’s voice in Jessie’s room, and then they realised that it was Mattie, mimicking somebody. Mattie was a wonderful mimic, and Jessie’s choking laugh rose too.
‘I should thank you, for listening to Mum,’ Felix said. ‘She doesn’t have many people to tell her stories to.’
He was moving around the kitchen again, breaking eggs into a blue pottery bowl. The yolks lay in it, a bright yellow cluster.
‘I like her,’ Julia said simply. She was thinking how nice this kitchen was, with its bare wooden tops and white walls. No fuss, and covers, and labels, like there was at home. Felix opened the window. In the angle of the roofs outside stood four clay flowerpots. He picked a handful of parsley and some chives from them, and a few sprigs of thyme. Julia watched as he chopped the herbs and melted a knob of butter in an old copper pan.
‘You’re clever,’ she said. ‘I wish I could do that.’
‘Can’t you cook?’ Felix asked, surprised. He had assumed it was something all girls did, automatically. It was unusual for boys to enjoy it, that was all.
‘My mother tried to teach me,’ Julia said, without enthusiasm. Betty made sponge cakes, and thin stews or flaccid pies, and looked forward to getting cleared up afterwards. There had been nothing as simple and obvious and inviting as the golden puff that materialised in Felix’s copper pan.
‘Lay the table, Julia, will you?’
It was the first time that he had called her by her name, and they smiled shyly at each other. Julia bent her head abruptly to pick the knives and forks out of a wicker tray.
Felix bent down too, and took a dark red bottle from its resting place under the sink. ‘Let’s drink this,’ he said. ‘Mum will stick to her vodka, so the three of us can share it.’
It was a wonderful, convivial lunch.
Felix pulled out the flaps of the table and drew it into the sunny place in the window. He spread a festive white cloth over the pocked surface. Jessie sat queenly at the head of the table, with Mattie and Julia on either side.
They ate ravenously, while Jessie talked, capping and recapping her own stories. She was too engrossed even to drink more than a few tots from the glass beside her hand. The girls had never tasted wine before, and it made them talkative too. The chatter and laugher rose in the sunny room, with Felix’s quiet voice prompting them all.
At last, when they had eaten all the omelette and wiped the last of the oily dressing out of the salad bowl, and Julia and Mattie had demolished the remains of a chocolate cake, Jessie tinkled her fork against her glass.
‘I’ve thought of another toast,’ she declared. ‘A more important one.’
Felix hastily drained the last of the Beaujolais into the three wine glasses and filled Jessie’s to the brim with vodka. She lifted it without looking at it, not spilling even a drop.
‘To friendship.’
They echoed her, ‘To friendship,’ and drank again.
‘And I don’t imagine,’ Jessie went on, with feigned annoyance, ‘that having proposed that, I’m going to be able to get rid of you quite so easily. Am I?’
The girls waited, not looking anywhere.
‘So I suppose you’d better stay on here. Just till you find your own place, mind. Till then, and not a minute longer.’
She shot a glance around the table, to Felix, to Julia and Mattie, and back again to Felix.
‘Not a minute longer,’ he repeated, softly. Whatever Jessie was plotting, if it made her happier, that was enough.
‘Good,’ she said, with firm satisfaction.
Suddenly they were laughing again, the four of them, drawn even closer around the table under the window.

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