The Men and the Girls

by Joanna Trollope

  ‘Am I allowed to ask if you’re in love with him?’

  ‘I was.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘You can’t ask any more,’ Kate said, ‘I don’t know you.’

  ‘Then I’ll tell you about me, shall I, to help things, to help you to know me?’

  She looked at him. He was smiling but his eyes looked anxious, almost pleading.

  ‘All right.’

  ‘I didn’t really want to teach,’ Mark said, ‘but I couldn’t bear to be away from Oxford either, and you know what Oxford is, what a bullying kind of place, and stuffed with education. I’ve got a little house at Osney and I let a couple of rooms in it, and I have this nice enough job. The girl you saw me with was an affair of the loins rather than the heart – I’ve hardly ever been in love, only once, perhaps, several years ago. I like jazz and the cinema and cooking and now I like red-headed women.’

  Kate smiled at him. ‘I can’t reciprocate. I haven’t got a neat little catalogue like that.’

  ‘I don’t want you to. I’d rather find out. In time.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Which I’ve now run out of.’ He looked at her. ‘I have a half-day on Monday. Can I see you on Monday? Did I pass the coffee test?’

  She hesitated. He stood up and pulled on his coat, and then bent over her for a moment.

  ‘Come on,’ Mark said, ‘come on, Kate. Take your fingers out of your ears and hear the call of the wild.’

  Kate caught a bus out to North Oxford. She hadn’t been to Mansfield House for over a week and her conscience was heavy with the knowledge of her neglect. In addition to that, she felt that Mansfield House would set her in order, put her the right way up again, by reminding her of familiar patterns and priorities. She could also talk to Helen.

  That Helen was wonderful went without saying. Strong-minded, tireless, colourful, she aroused admiration in those who wanted to help her and terror in those who didn’t. She had never had children, and her marriage had foundered under the demands of the causes she espoused, leaving her believing that men, on the whole, simply weren’t up to relationships that required them to fulfil a fair half of a bargain. Being sexually energetic, however, a series of lovers passed through her hands, mostly much younger lovers who were apt to wear expressions of stunned acquiescence during their spells of being in favour, but none of them lasted long. After their dismissal, they would hang about Mansfield House for a while, hoping for a glimpse of Helen, or they would waylay Kate or any available inmate, to ask, uh, if, uh, she could help a bit with what went wrong. Kate had learned that, harsh though it was, the kindest thing in the long-run was to tell the truth.

  ‘Sorry, Matt. She got tired of you.’

  ‘Tired of me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But she doesn’t get bloody tired!’

  ‘Not of Mansfield House, not of her work.’

  ‘Just me—’

  ‘Yes, Matt, just you.’

  ‘What if I got a job?’

  ‘It wouldn’t make any difference. When she’s tired of someone, that’s it.’

  ‘Tired of blokes, that is. She doesn’t get tired of women—’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So she’s a bleeding dyke.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I give up.’

  ‘Yes. That’s what you’ve got to do. Give up and go away.’

  Kate had grown fond of Helen. She was the kind of woman who can only lead, who is poor at follow-through. Kate didn’t mind following through, didn’t mind taking orders, being second in command. At least, for five years she hadn’t minded that. There was, after all, the luxury in waltzing into Mansfield House knowing that at the end of the day she could waltz out again; indeed, that very knowledge had driven Kate to feel that she must come as often as she could. It was also, without question, something she was good at; she was calm, unbossy, patient in persuading the women to run the refuge for themselves in order to give them the independence to learn to run their own lives again.

  ‘You don’t know what it’s like,’ the women said, often and often. ‘You don’t know how it feels to have such a low opinion of yourself that you never look higher in life for anyone than another woman-beater.’

  She didn’t know, of course. How could anyone living with courteous, warm-hearted James know, with the thumping blood of experienced recognition, what it felt like to live with such self-disgust, with such nauseating apprehension?

  ‘It was always a relief when he hit me,’ someone once said to her, ‘because at least then the waiting to be hit was over. The waiting was always the worst.’

  Nobody had ever hit Kate. Nobody had ever hit Helen either. ‘That’s why,’ Helen said to Kate, ‘it behoves us to help.’ Kate had always agreed, had done more than agree, had felt powerfully that she was thankful to have a chance to help. But now . . . Now, sitting on the bus as it toiled its way up the Woodstock Road, she felt reluctant, not eager. It wasn’t that she wasn’t sorry for battered women any more, any less than she couldn’t see what was excellent in James any more, it was just that she couldn’t really feel either. ‘I can get my mind round it,’ she said to herself, ‘I just can’t get my feelings round it too. I’m not afraid, am I? I’m not afraid of helping Helen? I don’t think so. But I am afraid of age, suddenly, I’m terrified of it. I don’t know why. All I know is that it makes me draw back from James.’

  The bus stopped close to the end of St Margaret’s Road. Kate got off and stood for a moment on the bleak, late-morning pavement. She was filled with an irrational envy of the rest of the people on the bus, sailing cosily on northwards to covetable humdrum lives that weren’t racked with confusions and anxieties. There was a sharp wind, and it blew little eddies of grit and litter about Kate’s ankles. She thought of Mark. Mark was thirty-two. Four years ago she had been thirty-two, and when she was thirty-two she had been happy. Oh, she thought crossly, you whingeing cow, you spoilt, whingeing cow. She swung her bag on to her shoulder, and set off towards Mansfield House.

  Mansfield House was in uproar. A husband, a small, pale husband whom a casual observer would not have thought physically capable of even swatting a fly, had taken advantage of the front door being left open by mistake, and had come to claim his wife. He had found her in the bedroom she shared with her children and another family, and she had been alone, with only a toddling child, making the beds. First he had pleaded, and then he had shouted, and, although she could resist his pleading, she crumbled at the shouting and had been finally rescued as she was towed sobbing downstairs. It had taken three women to get him off her and out of the door, and all the children in the house had seeped out of other rooms to watch this spectacle that was so familiar and so terrible to them, and one of the husband’s small sons, in an agony of confusion, had attempted to go with his father, and the row had redoubled.

  When Kate reached Mansfield House, the husband was sitting outside, on the pavement, shouting for his son. ‘Come to Daddy, Paul, come to Daddy. Daddy’ll look after you, Paul. Daddy loves you, Paul.’ Kate stepped over him.

  ‘Bitch,’ the man said. Inside, the staircase was swarming. Everybody was agitated; nobody could find Helen.

  ‘Kate!’ someone shouted. They turned to her. She looked up. She stood in the hall, just inside the front door, and looked up at the mass of faces, the mass of crying, distracted faces. The din rose and rose.

  ‘Kate!’ they cried. The mass seemed to surge forward, as if it would pour down the staircase and engulf her in all its despair and greedy dependency, all its noise and helpless brokenness. She stepped back.

  ‘Kate! Oh, thank God you’ve come. Oh Kate—’

  She put a hand out to feel for the doorknob behind her, turned it and, twisting round, pulled the door open and fled down the steps to the pavement, almost stumbling over the man, still waiting there. Then she ran.

  The man looked after her. ‘Bitch!’ he shouted.

  Beatrice Bachelor sat in the basket chair in Leonard’s room. Joss had brought he
r. Joss had arrived at the house in Cardigan Street and explained that Leonard wanted her to bring Beatrice to see him.

  ‘What is your uncle like?’ Beatrice had said.

  ‘He’s not my uncle.’

  ‘What, then,’ said Beatrice, turning the tables on Joss’s literalness, ‘is your mother’s lover’s uncle like?’

  ‘Thin,’ Joss said. ‘Old.’

  ‘And as to personality?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Joss said. ‘Old. A bit weird.’

  ‘How banal you are. How dull your conversation is. How limited.’

  Joss watched Beatrice tying on her headscarf. She didn’t mind, somehow, when Beatrice was sharp with her, though she couldn’t think why. She nursed Cat, who clung to the slope of her knees with claws like scimitars.

  ‘Ow,’ said Joss.

  ‘It’s your idleness of mind I can’t be doing with,’ Beatrice said. ‘The way you just let your brain loll around with its tongue hanging out.’

  Joss grinned. ‘It gets you worked up, though.’

  ‘If you wish for such a cheap goal, you have reached it, of course—’

  ‘Don’t be cross,’ Joss said. She laid her cheek on Cat’s broad-striped head. ‘You can be cross with Uncle Leonard. He loves arguing.’

  Leonard did not intend arguing with Beatrice. He wanted to inspect her. He couldn’t imagine what kind of person she could be to have caused such waves of unease at Richmond Villa. He sent James out to buy a fruit cake and he tried to make Joss make sandwiches.

  ‘Make them yourself.’

  ‘Idle hussy. What else are women for?’

  He limped down to the kitchen and made a crumby, buttery mess and got jam on his cardigan. His pile of sandwiches looked like a tent that had collapsed with a whole lot of people inside. There was jam on the underside of the plate.

  ‘Sodding cooking,’ Leonard said, carrying his efforts upstairs.

  ‘Did you slice or spread first?’ said Beatrice Bachelor, looking at her rhomboid sandwich.

  ‘Sometimes one, sometimes the other,’ Leonard said. He grinned at her. She was no looker, that was for sure, and never had been. Like taking a bag of golf clubs to bed, he shouldn’t wonder. Leonard’s experience of sex had been very limited, but as he grew older he believed more and more that what he wished had happened actually had, with those deep-bosomed, shapely legged women he had always fancied, slightly brassy women with ginny voices who knew what was what. The last time he’d been on a train, he’d sat opposite one, plumply stuffed into an elaborate blue suit with gold buttons. Throughout the journey, she’d read a copy of the Reader’s Digest, and steadily eaten milk chocolate buttons out of a shiny plastic envelope, while Leonard devoured her with his eyes and imagined her in her corset thing, a corset thing with suspenders. Beatrice would never wear a corset.

  ‘I rather hoped to meet Miss Bain,’ Beatrice said.

  ‘Gone to her refuge. Won’t be back till suppertime.’

  ‘Refuge?’

  ‘Battered women. Goes to listen. And take the children to the lavatory.’

  ‘How very good of her.’

  Leonard took a bite out of a sandwich and the jam oozed out at the sides and fell in small dark blobs on his trousers.

  ‘You know she won’t marry James.’

  ‘Should she?’

  Leonard scowled. ‘’Course.’

  ‘Because it’s tidier?’

  ‘No,’ said Leonard, scrubbing at his trousers with a disgusting handkerchief, ‘no. Because they won’t relax until they do.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Beatrice. She leaned back and looked at Leonard. To her eye, he resembled a drawing by Ronald Searle. ‘I have never been married. Have you?’

  ‘Never!’

  ‘Then perhaps neither of us knows very much about it.’

  Leonard looked faintly sneering. ‘What do you know about, then?’

  ‘Old age,’ said Beatrice.

  He stared at her. Then he leaned forward. ‘What d’you think of it?’

  Beatrice took a sip of tea. ‘I think old age is treacherous.’

  ‘Nothing to be said for it?’

  ‘Very little.’

  Leonard drooped. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘Detestable. Terrifies me sometimes.’ He eyed her. ‘That’s why I wanted you to come.’

  Beatrice waited. She watched his mouth working loosely for a while and then it was no surprise to her at all when he said, ‘I want to talk about euthanasia.’

  Later, Leonard waylaid Kate in the kitchen. Kate had been walking, endlessly walking, all across Port Meadow in its gloomy, late-winter drabness, and had come home tired and on edge. Leonard said, ‘Guess who I had to tea.’

  ‘The Queen,’ Kate said, wondering if half a pound of minced beef could be made into a) enough for four and b) something that might fool everyone it wasn’t just mince again.

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘The Pope,’ Kate said. ‘Marilyn Monroe.’

  ‘Close,’ Leonard said, ‘very close. Beatrice Bachelor, actually.’

  Kate said wearily, ‘You don’t give up, do you, you never give up—’

  ‘Thing is,’ Leonard said, craning towards her, ‘she’s nothing to be alarmed by. Nothing. Old stick of a thing. Old schoolmarm.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘She’s got courage, I’ll grant you. And spirit. Cracked a joke or two. But she’s just a funny old woman, Kate, that’s all.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Then what in the devil’s name is there to get worked up about in James being kind to a funny old woman?’

  Kate looked at him.

  ‘Exactly that,’ she said.

  James was not, by nature, confiding. He was perfectly open, but not inclined to offer private information. In his relationship with Hugh, he had invariably been the listener, except on the very rare occasions, such as the death of his wife, when he found he needed to say a great deal, and a great deal of the same things at that, over and over. Now, perplexed and unhappy about Kate, he found he didn’t much want to talk to anyone, not even to Hugh. What was there to say, after all, except that he was perplexed and unhappy, and that he believed Kate to be so too? The only person he wanted to talk to was Kate herself, and she either wouldn’t or couldn’t. James missed her. He lay in bed beside her and sat across tables from her and missed her.

  ‘I love you,’ he had said to her, trying to catch her in a doorway. ‘I love you. Isn’t that any comfort? Isn’t that enough?’

  Sadness lay on James like a cold cloak. Sometimes he thought it was worse than sadness; it was grief. He imagined, writing his articles, teaching his pupils, going about the usual daily round of domestic chores, of talking to Leonard, of trying to talk to Joss, that his cloak was only visible to himself. It was therefore a great surprise to him to have Hugh come to Richmond Villa. He took him into his study.

  Hugh looked buoyant. He walked up and down James’s green carpet and told him about Rapswell, and what a success it had been. He’d got a supermarket to open next, and then a health club, it was actually all rather a doddle.

  ‘Now,’ Hugh said, swinging round to face James.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You.’

  James waited.

  ‘I want you to help me, James. I want your help on this euthanasia project. My producer likes it. Likes it a lot. Beatrice has agreed to talk, once we’ve got the lawyers cleared. And guess who else. Guess who rang me yesterday.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Leonard.’

  ‘Leonard?’

  Hugh smiled. ‘Says he’s been converted.’

  ‘He’s just longing to be on telly.’

  ‘Does it matter? Will you help? Will you persuade Beatrice to go further, find other people, best of all, a doctor?’

  ‘Why are you asking me?’ James said. ‘You never have before. Why now?’

  Hugh regarded him. He put his hands in his pockets. ‘Because there’s no remedy for sorrow like work.’

  ‘I’m n
ot sorrowful,’ James said.

  ‘No?’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘So you’re not interested—’

  ‘Of course I’m interested, it’s a – a fascinating subject—’

  ‘Friendship’s a two-way thing, James. You have to take as well as give, and vice versa. I’d be the better for having you. And you’d be the better for working with me and so might – Kate.’

  ‘Kate.’

  There was a silence. Then Hugh said, ‘Come on, dear fellow. Come on. What’ve you got to lose?’

  Mark Hathaway’s house at Osney seemed to Kate full of charm, a light-hearted charm, a kind of gaiety. It was in West Street, facing a narrow canal, and across the canal was a triangle of grass, between the water and St Frideswide’s Church. The scale was tiny, like a play place. Mark had made himself a flat out of the first floor, and the two ground-floor rooms were let out to an Indian postgraduate from Edinburgh, and a girl who worked for a firm of Oxford architects.

  Mark had made one room out of the two principal bedrooms. When Kate walked in, there seemed to be light bouncing in from all directions, and falling on the clean, new modern furniture, and the bright rugs, and the bronze bust of someone who was wearing an American baseball cap.

  ‘Robespierre,’ Mark said. ‘I bought him in the market for a tenner.’

  There were posters by David Hockney on the walls, and sophisticated, moody black-and-white photographs of street landscapes, and other landscapes of human limbs, and all the books lived in bookcases which looked like cages of scarlet-painted steel.

  ‘D’you like it?’ Mark said.

  ‘Oh yes.’ She turned slowly, taking in the brilliant Latin American embroideries, the shining wood floor, the air of economy. ‘Oh yes. It’s lovely. You can breathe.’

  It was like being on a balcony, Kate thought, or a ship. She walked about, touching chairbacks and cushions, marvelling.

  ‘It’s all so light.’

  ‘That’s being up a floor.’

  ‘I’ve never done up a house,’ Kate said, suddenly realizing that it was true. ‘Not like this, I mean, not from scratch. I’ve just taken on other people’s things. It never seemed to matter—’ She stopped. She picked up an Indian candlestick of twisted brass. ‘It must be wonderful, getting somewhere of your own to look as you want it to, to be yours.’