The Men and the Girls

by Joanna Trollope

  ‘The gnocchi,’ Kate said, ‘made an hour ago.’

  ‘How’s Joss?’

  ‘Dear, but horrible. I expect the twins are just dear.’

  ‘Yes,’ Julia said. ‘Yes, they are,’ and then Kate had felt she should melt away, so she had melted, to watch Julia and Rob intermittently and covertly while they ate and talked, with utter absorption, and Rob made copious notes in a reporter’s notebook.

  When they left, Julia had kissed Kate and said give her love to James and Kate had been left standing oddly on edge. Why, she asked herself, stacking plates in the dishwasher, why, when it all too evidently wasn’t a remotely romantic occasion? Why should it affect her that Julia should have lunch with a television director in this patently above-board and businesslike way, any more than that James had found an innocent human curiosity that amused him for the moment? He might be getting older, Julia might be setting out on a career, but so what? Kate had always known James would get older, and that getting older would probably change him a little, just as getting middle aged would doubtless change her. She had always felt affectionately about this, knowing that the essence of James would never change, and believing that the periphery didn’t matter. As for Julia, Kate and James had often talked about her, and her very real competence, and how heaven-sent it was that someone like Hugh, with career prospects dependent on age, should have someone like Julia to take over quietly when he was forced to stop. Now, faced with Julia appearing to be embarking on doing exactly that, and James behaving with all the imagination and warmth of heart that she had always so loved in him, why wasn’t she rejoicing? Why? She always rejoiced at other people’s achievements, she always had, she relied upon being able to do so. But stacking plates in the restaurant’s basement scullery that afternoon, and standing at the sink at Richmond Villa now, she felt cold with resentment. She also felt scared by her feelings.

  She dried her hands and inspected them. ‘Little hands,’ James always said, folding the pair of them up in one of his. They looked wretched. She thought she would go upstairs and find the cream that the doctor had prescribed for Leonard the winter he had had bronchitis, to prevent his getting bedsores. Kate had nursed him then, at least, as much as he’d allowed her to.

  ‘I’ve got my dignity still, though I mayn’t have hair or teeth. When I look at myself in the bath I think: Leonard, old boy, you need ironing. And I’d rather only I saw that.’

  Kate went out of the kitchen and along the hall. James’s study door was shut, and from behind it came the steady reluctant drone of a pupil reading an essay, a gloomy, stooped boy, trying to retake his A-level English examination, to whom James, being James, was very encouraging. Kate went up the stairs slowly and tiredly. The split in the carpet on the seventh step was widening, exposing old-fashioned, matted brown underfelt. The usual music was hammering away behind Joss’s door and the radio news quacking behind Uncle Leonard’s. Kate knocked.

  ‘Wait.’

  Kate waited. There was shuffling and grunting and the radio was turned off.

  ‘Come!’ Leonard shouted.

  ‘Look,’ Kate said, holding out her hands.

  Leonard peered. ‘You need my bum stuff. What’ve you been doing?’

  ‘Chopping chillies.’

  Leonard began to rummage in a drawer. ‘You’d earn more money on the streets.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘James back?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Know where he’s been?’

  ‘Yes,’ Kate said steadily.

  Leonard found a huge white plastic pot with ‘Oily Cream B.P.’ stamped on the side, and held it out to Kate. ‘Why d’you reckon he goes?’

  ‘She interests him and he feels guilty.’

  ‘Why don’t you like that?’

  Kate looked at him. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘But you don’t.’

  ‘I’m tired,’ Kate said. ‘It’s January.’ She unscrewed the lid of the pot and took out a dollop of cream on her finger. ‘I’d forgotten what slimy stuff this is.’

  ‘Kate,’ Leonard said. He watched her sliding her hands round and over one another in the slippery thickness of the cream. ‘Kate. If you’d only bloody marry him, you’d have the authority to object.’

  Julia was home ten minutes before she had promised to be. Thursdays were Hugh’s empty days, and he had agreed, without particular grace, to look after the twins while Julia had lunch with Rob Shiner. Julia had thought of asking Hugh to come too, for his sake, and then had decided against it, for her own, and for the sake of their future. She had left a shepherd’s pie in the bottom oven, vegetables ready prepared in saucepans, and a tub of Greek yoghurt in the fridge which her note said the boys could have for pudding with a teaspoonful of clear honey. Hugh told them they didn’t have to have honey. They always had honey, so at first they didn’t know what else to suggest until Hugh said what about jam, which they were seldom allowed. Then the possibilities of this game dawned on them and they thought of marmalade and peanut butter and then (much funnier) bubble bath or mud and then (so funny that George fell off his chair and lay shaking on the floor) poo. After that, they became extremely wild and silly and rushed round the kitchen like express trains shouting lavatory words, and Edward put a cushion on his head in order to be the bees knees of a joke and it fell off into the puddle of yoghurt he hadn’t eaten. That sobered them all up, because the sticky cushion made them think of Mummy. Sticky cushions and Mummy didn’t somehow go together.

  ‘I’ll wash it,’ Hugh said.

  The twins dragged up chairs to the sink to help him and squirted washing-up liquid all over the cushion in looping yellow squiggles and the cushion went from being a light, soft, coloured, dry, comfortable thing to being a sad, dark, heavy wet lump. They squeezed it and shook it, and laid it on the hot lid of the Aga, where it flopped like an omelette.

  ‘It’ll be fine,’ Hugh said. ‘When it’s dry, it’ll be just like before.’

  The twins weren’t sure about this. When Hugh took them into their little playroom – bright and clean with a big cork pinboard, and a huge low table for playing trains and painting on – for an after-lunch story, they became babyish and jostled all over him and put their thumbs in. They didn’t really listen to their story, a particularly soppy tale they had insistently chosen about a bad puppy and a good kitten, being far more intent on their wriggling battle to occupy the prime place on Hugh’s lap. After the bad puppy had chewed a little girl’s new bedroom slipper, Hugh gave up and said they were going out for a walk. They immediately shouted ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah’ and began to stand on their heads. For a fraction of a second, even Hugh had to remind himself that he loved them.

  The walk was not a success. George had a sock that wouldn’t stay up in his gumboot and Edward said his ears hurt in the wind but he wouldn’t wear his hat. It was a sullen, raw day, with the flat Oxfordshire fields in a mid-winter sulk. By the river they met a disagreeable swan and an ordinary duck or two, but the landscape was otherwise devoid of interest and life. Hugh plodded on for a dutiful mile while the twins skirmished round him tripping him up, or trailed in the rear, grizzling about their socks and their ears, and these were, he told himself, his good, cheerful, biddable twins who were universally agreed to be the least trouble it was possible to be if you were four, and a boy, and multiplied by two.

  When they got home, the twins clamoured for television, which they were allowed to watch on selected days only. Hugh felt rebelliously that he didn’t care if it was a selected day or not. He turned it on – the boys were forbidden to touch anything electrical – and a purple gorilla lunged out of the screen and brandished a panga at them, shouting ‘Kill, kill, kill!’ Sighing with rapture, the twins subsided in a heap together on the carpet and put their thumbs in. They looked as Hugh imagined he used to look long ago, when he smoked dope, serene and inwardly concentrated.

  He went out to the kitchen. After the post-lunch rampage, the chairs had been left all anyhow, like abando
ned dancing partners, and half the crockery they had used was still on the table among the spills and smears. On the Aga, the cushion had baked into a thin dry biscuit. Hugh picked it up and shook it, and the feathers inside rustled like cornflakes and fell into a little heap at one end, leaving him holding an almost empty bag. He tried to pump it full of air, and then arranged it artfully back in its Windsor chair and casually threw a folded newspaper across it.

  He began to clear the table. Everything seemed coated with stick, even the rush mats. He aimed washing-up liquid at the table, to unsticky it, but it was the concentrated kind, and the surface of the table vanished under a dense blanket of unconquerable foam. Hugh rinsed and rinsed and rinsed. The foam dissolved into clouds of bubbles which were lighter but thicker, and began to blow about the room and make him sneeze. He scraped them off the table surface with a fish slice, and then dried it vigorously with several clean, ironed tea towels, and stood back to admire the effect. The surface of the table, usually as pale and gleaming as the twins’ and Julia’s hair, looked dull, smeared and unhealthy.

  ‘Bloody, fucking hell,’ Hugh said.

  He lit a cigarette and began to slam things into the dishwasher. He broke the handle off a mug. From next door in the sitting-room, the roars of the gorilla were mounting and it suddenly struck Hugh, for no reason, that, in the three and a half hours since Julia had been away, the telephone had been completely silent. It seemed the last straw. He dreaded it when it rang, but he was desolated when it didn’t. Prompted by nothing more than impulse, Hugh pulled the bar stool up to the dresser, settled himself there with his ashtray, and dialled James’s number.

  ‘Richmon’ Villa,’ said Mrs Cheng.

  ‘Is Mr Mallow there, please?’

  ‘James out,’ Mrs Cheng said.

  ‘And Miss Bain?’

  ‘Kate workin’.’

  ‘When will Mr Mallow be back?’

  ‘Don’ know,’ said Mrs Cheng. ‘Never say. You want to leave message?’

  ‘No,’ said Hugh. ‘No. I don’t want to leave a message. I want to talk to someone.’

  Then Julia came home. She brought an apple tart from the French baker in St Giles. She said, ‘Oh Hugh, have they been awful?’ and he said with miserable thankfulness that he thought it was his fault, he’d egged them on. He managed to ask if her lunch had been a success. It had.

  ‘We planned the next three programmes. It’s so amazing, the way that talking to someone who’s brimming with ideas makes you have ideas too. I remember thinking that when I met you, I remember thinking that it was all right to think things that weren’t conventional.’

  ‘And now you’re used to me.’

  ‘Of course I am, in a sense, because you aren’t a stranger any more. What happened to this cushion?’

  ‘It was the victim of a game. Don’t be cross with them.’

  Julia looked from the cushion to him. ‘I’m seldom cross with them. I explain things. Has anyone rung?’

  ‘Not a soul.’

  Julia put the cushion down. She went over to Hugh and put her hands on his shoulders. Her eyes, behind her huge spectacles, were huge too, and serious.

  ‘Darling Hugh, I know this is hard for you, I know it’s hard to change. But we’ve got to live, haven’t we? We’ve got to live and educate the boys and have the nice things we’re used to and the holidays and so on. I suppose it was inevitable that our roles would change a little, over time, that we would have to adapt, that the emphasis would shift. I can cope. I don’t mind shouldering more. I don’t feel any differently about you if I shoulder more. But I don’t think I can shoulder your resentment as well.’

  ‘I’m not resentful. I’m simply in mild despair.’

  ‘But why? You’ve had a wonderful career, you’ve been a household name, you’ve still got a very good job, why do you feel in despair?’

  Hugh took her hands from his shoulders and held them a little and then dropped them. ‘Because, my darling child, I am simply not effective any more. And when we cease to be effective, then it is that the iron enters into our souls.’

  While Julia was bathing the twins, and washing their hair which she always did on Thursdays, she remembered she had not told Hugh about seeing Kate. Kate, Julia thought, had not looked very well, she’d looked pinched and tired, though her manner had been as sweet as ever. Privately, Julia thought working in Pasta Please was a tiny bit affected, though she genuinely admired Kate’s voluntary work. Well, she would tell Hugh about Kate at supper, and then she would have a serious, constructive talk with him about things he could do in life which would restore to him this sense of being effective that he said was so vital.

  After supper at Richmond Villa, Kate’s friend Helen rang. Helen ran the home for battered wives. She spoke for a long time, explaining how the money-raising side was claiming more and more of her time and attention, and that she really did need someone prepared to help much more with the administration, though of course she couldn’t pay such a person more than pocket money, so it would have to be a person well circumstanced enough to feel they really owed it to society to do something difficult for nothing. Then she paused and waited for Kate to volunteer. Kate, winding her legs round the legs of the kitchen chair she was perched on, and feeling a rat, didn’t volunteer. Helen then admired Kate. She said she had such understanding and compassion and humour and that her days at Mansfield House (named after Katherine Mansfield whom Helen particularly respected) were days everyone there looked forward to. Then she stopped again, and waited.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Kate said. She tried to say something else, she tried to say that she would love to help, and, even more, to mean that she would love to, as she would have done, she told herself, only recently, but nothing came.

  ‘I’ve rung you,’ Helen said, not troubling to hide the reproach in her voice, ‘because I thought I could rely on you to see how I’m situated and to want to help.’

  ‘I do want to, but I can’t.’

  ‘Why? What’s happened?’

  ‘There are,’ Kate said carefully, ‘a lot of changes here.’

  ‘Don’t tell me. Don’t tell me James is throwing you out—’

  ‘No. No. Nothing like that.’

  ‘Then—’

  ‘Helen, if I could explain myself properly, I would. I’ll go on helping on my usual days, but I can’t do more. I’m sorry, but I can’t.’

  ‘I see,’ said Helen, who didn’t, and put the telephone down.

  Kate drew her knees up so that her feet were on the seat of her chair, and wrapped her arms round her shins. I’m changing, she said to herself, I’m changing. How could I say no to Helen when I know what she does, how hard she works? How could I? But I did, and I don’t want to ring her and take it all back, either. What’s happening? I feel I’m losing all the things in myself that I value, that I’m hardening, that I’m trapped. Is it because I live with someone a bit inflexible, someone a bit old? I’m mad. Sixty-one isn’t old. Sixty-one’s nothing. It’s very wrong of me to think of James as old. And it’s very wrong of me not to want to help Helen. Help, Kate thought, pushing her knees into her eye sockets, help. Where is all the loving going?

  The door opened. James put his head round it.

  ‘Kate. Are you all right?’

  She raised her head. She looked at him. She managed a smile.

  ‘I’ve just been very unhelpful to Helen, on the phone.’

  ‘Good,’ James said, who thought Helen was bossy.

  ‘No,’ Kate said, shaking her head. ‘No. Not good at all.’

  Four

  The Penniman Agency in London occupied two small but graceful rooms in Bedford Square. Vivienne Penniman, who had been a Rank starlet in the days when Hugh Hunter was first entering television, had set up the agency with all the shrewd realism of an actress whose career manifestly had a certain lifespan, and no afterlife. The purpose of the agency was to organize money-making public appearances for celebrities, in order that they might be able to pu
t something by for the bleaker days ahead when the public, reminded of them by a chance remark, would say, ‘He’s never still alive! Heavens, I thought he’d copped it years ago, you never see him now, do you?’

  Actors and actresses, television personalities, footballers and lesser tennis players came to Vivienne Penniman to be offered things to open or promote, supermarkets, garages, sports complexes, leisure centres. Depending upon the position their star currently occupied in the popular firmament, she could offer them either a four- or more often a three-figure sum for an appearance of not more than two hours, minus her ten per cent. Some of her clients were realistic and cheerful about this, enjoyed joshing around with the public, and had no illusions about the ephemeral nature of their best success. Others were resigned, but professional, and regarded the whole business as a necessary evil, with whining about it being out of court. Yet others felt diminished and resentful, unable to pass up several hundred pounds an appearance, and equally unable to reconcile themselves to how it was earned. Being of this latter group, Hugh Hunter had so far resisted joining Vivienne Penniman’s agency.

  But Julia had talked to him. She had been very sweet, not in the least patronizing, only sympathetic and firm. Hugh had been surprised at how firm she was. She had said look, there’s this problem and here are some of the ways I think we could help solve it. If you have better ideas, fine; if you don’t, perhaps you would look at mine. Julia had reminded Hugh about Vivienne Penniman.

  Hugh reminisced about Vivienne for a bit. ‘She was fearfully pretty. I remember her coming in to the studio with a whole lot of other Rank girls, and it was like having a bunch of flowers sitting there. They were asked to predict their futures, and told that we’d look at them again in ten years, and see where they’d got to. It was terribly funny, not just because they were so innocent and hopeful, but because of the cameras. We only had one set in the studio then, of course, and we had to use them for everything. They’d been taken out on the Solent the day before, filming ocean races, and every time the turret turned you could hear a layer of sea salt crackling.’