The Men and the Girls

by Joanna Trollope

  ‘When will Joss be back?’

  ‘About six,’ James said. He moved past her to open the study door for her as if she were a stranger. ‘Come in.’

  His study looked exactly the same too, and smelled the same. It was the smell that afflicted Kate with an unbidden nostalgia. She looked round quickly, to distract herself, and stifle the nostalgia; the grass-green carpet, the plump prince, the battered chairs, the ragged piles of books and papers, all as they had been eleven weeks ago. The only thing that was unfamiliar was a bowl of peonies on the cluttered table by the window the garden end. These had been given to Joss by Garth Acheson’s mother, who rejoiced in the name of Bluey, and who had grown them in her garden in Observatory Street.

  ‘Take these home to your mother,’ Bluey had said. ‘They’ve such a short life we all have to make the most of them.’

  Joss had not troubled to say she hadn’t got a mother at home to give them to. She had simply thanked Bluey, and given the peonies to James.

  ‘I’ve never been given flowers in my life,’ James said, very pleased.

  ‘Haven’t you?’

  ‘No. I don’t think men, on the whole, get given flowers. Not English men, anyway.’

  ‘Well, I don’t want them,’ Joss said graciously, ‘so you might as well.’

  ‘Lovely flowers,’ Kate said formally, like a guest.

  ‘They came from the mother of a friend of Joss’s.’

  ‘Angie?’

  ‘No, not Angie. Garth.’

  ‘Garth! I thought Garth had thrown her over!’

  ‘Garth,’ said James with an in-the-know satisfaction that irritated Kate, ‘is trying to throw himself back. She’s handling him with wonderful cool.’ He crossed the room to his desk, on which stood a small tray with a bottle of white wine and two glasses, all ready-prepared. ‘Let me get you a drink.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Kate said. She sat down in one of the armchairs by the fire. She was beginning to feel better, stronger, more resolute. Something about James’s manner, the assumptions he seemed to be making, was reminding her anew of why she had left.

  ‘Do you know,’ James said, handing her a glass of wine, ‘do you know, I’m really beginning to appreciate Joss. I’ve always been fond of her, of course, but now I value her, I really do.’

  Fury flared in Kate. How dare he? How dare he sound so – so proprietary? She took a swallow of wine and temper and said shortly, ‘That’s why I’ve come.’

  He smiled. He seemed not to understand her. He stood looking down at her, holding his own wineglass. ‘Sorry?’

  She looked back at him. ‘I’ve come to take Joss home with me. This charade has gone on long enough. She’s my child and we should be together. She’s only trying to provoke me by staying here, and you shouldn’t encourage her.’ She stopped suddenly, conscious of an expression of utter dismay on James’s face. He turned away from her and went to the window.

  ‘Well?’ Kate demanded.

  He said nothing. She couldn’t see his face now, but the set of his shoulders and back was eloquent of profound emotion. My God, Kate thought, My God, he thinks he’s going to keep her, he thinks he’s going to fight me for her! My daughter, mine! She said out loud, in a rush, ‘I wouldn’t stop you seeing her, James, she could come here as much as she wanted, but we can’t go on like this any longer, it was stupid to set the three months, like being on trial at a new job. She’s had her way, she’s been treated like an adult so there’s no loss of face. But she has to come and I rely on you’ – dear heaven, thought Kate, I sound like Helen – ‘I rely on you to make it easy for her, not to make her feel she’s being treated like a child, or that she’s got to divide her loyalty between us—’

  ‘Shut up,’ James said.

  Kate sprang up from her chair. ‘How dare you tell me to shut up! We are talking, James, about my child—’

  He said turning, ‘I’m not arguing with you. I shall miss her like anything but of course she should live with you. I thought so at the beginning and I still think it.’

  ‘Then—’

  ‘Kate,’ James said, looking at her with a face full of love, ‘I hoped you wanted to come and see me for quite another reason.’

  She was horrified. ‘Oh no,’ she said, stammering. ‘How could you – no. I didn’t, I don’t – James, I can’t—’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I see you can’t. I shouldn’t have hoped and I’ll try not to do it again, for my own sake as well as for yours.’

  Kate subsided on to the arm of the nearest chair. ‘I’d no idea, I feel awful, I’m so sorry—’

  ‘Don’t be sorry.’

  ‘I don’t want to hurt you. I never have, it’s just that—’

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘You think you’d like it better if I didn’t love and miss you. If it’s any comfort to you, I think I’d like it better too. But don’t worry. I’ve coped this far, and I’ll cope further, just as you will with other things.’ He put his wineglass down on the tray. ‘Kate. I’m going out now. I’m going to leave you here to wait for Joss, and I won’t be back until after seven. Say seven-thirty.’ He paused. He was about to say, Tell Jossie to come any time, but he stopped himself, considering it unfair. Instead he came over to Kate and stooped and kissed her forehead. ‘I’ll take a key,’ he said. ‘Just slam the door when you both go.’

  James walked. He thought, as he left Richmond Villa, that he would go into one of the pubs, like the King’s Arms, which could be relied upon to be rowdy with undergraduates, and drink there until seven-thirty, and then return home and drink there until there was no more drink or he passed out, whichever was the sooner. But the evening was lovely, with that late-spring light that is at once soft and clear, and in any case, James discovered that he just wanted to be drunk, that he didn’t want to be bothered with the process of getting it. He thought of his usual, favourite walk, along the canal, but then he thought that the river would be better for his melancholy, the river that on a fine May evening would still have university rowing crews practising on it, shouted at by coaches pedalling along the towpath and bellowing through megaphones. The sight of hearty, unemotional activity, James decided, would be beneficial to one in such a state as he was.

  It was a long walk. It took him through the heart of the city, and then through the quadrangles and cloisters of Christ Church out into the Meadows where the fading sunlight lay mellow on the grass and the wide paths. He walked slowly, impeded by his sadness, stopping every so often to look at a prospect or an angle or a pinnacle silhouetted against the sky. He felt he was seeing nothing, that he was removed from the throb and pulse of life because he was, quite simply, now bereft.

  He had never, resolutely, thought of Joss as his. He knew he had no business to, and he knew now, too, what came of thinking that someone else was yours, as he had finally, fatally, come to believe Kate to be. But something had grown up recently between him and Joss, something that was not yet in any way intimate, but which was certainly there and which they both undoubtedly liked. She wasn’t any more graceful to live with, or courteous, or charming, but she was aware of him now, and that awareness made her conscious of his rights in their joint existence, as well as her own. She had grown more confident with him, more confiding too, as if he were not to be automatically distrusted just because he was an adult. He thought her brave. She also, these days, constantly ticked off by him or by Leonard or by Beatrice, bore surprisingly little resentment. Indeed, if it had not nagged at him all the time that she should be living with her mother and not with him, James might have dared to say that she was happy.

  He came to the towpath, and wandered along it past the modern college boathouses. Several had their doors still open, with people messing about slowly inside, or sitting in front of them on the concrete, idly chatting.

  ‘I mean, I said look, I can’t possibly read the whole of The Faerie Queene by Friday, and he said—’

  ‘And I turned round and there was this weird girl—’

 
‘There just isn’t any point in writing an essay from such a positive angle—’

  ‘Anybody want a jelly baby?’

  ‘Look at that. Rolls of blubber. No wonder we can hardly heave the boat along with you on board—’

  ‘God, you sound absolutely pre-Socratic—’

  James dawdled past. They weren’t very old, those lounging young, not more than five or six years older than Joss. When Joss was their age, he would be not far off seventy and Kate would be over forty and Leonard might well be dead. He paused at the last boathouse and sat down on the bank, with his feet on the gently heaving pontoon from which the boat crews embarked. The sky looked mild and soft, and from across the water came faint, echoing bursts of people’s voices, people walking on the further towpath, people with ordinary evenings ahead of them filled with supper and the pub and the news on the television. Well, James thought, leaning his elbows on his knees and gazing past his rocking feet at the river, I just have to go on. No doubt something will happen, there will be changes and developments I haven’t foreseen, but I mustn’t plan on those, even hope for them. I’ll see Joss and I’ll always have had Kate, even if I can’t have her now. Grief doesn’t go away, I know that of old, but you get used to it, you learn how to live with it.

  He stood up and balanced there for a moment on the movement of the water under the pontoon. Then he climbed on to the bank and set off northwards, back to Richmond Villa.

  In the last hundred yards home, he had a wild hope. He thought, with a sudden leap, that Joss would have refused to go with Kate, that there would have been another row and that he would find Joss in the kitchen, eating cereal and reading a rock music magazine, looking mulish and triumphant. But he knew, as soon as he turned the key, that the house was empty. He went into his study, and then the kitchen, and found that Kate had rinsed their wineglasses, and left them upside-down by the sink to drain, and put the rest of the bottle of wine in the fridge. The kitchen table was quite clear of everything except the huddle of marmalade and honey jars that now lived permanently in the middle. He went upstairs. Leonard wasn’t back, wouldn’t be back until at least nine, and his door was shut. Joss’s was open. James went in. It looked as if she had packed in a tearing hurry, leaving drawers and cupboards open with garments trailing from them. James tried to visualize her as she had done it; had she been screaming at Kate, or excited, or simply resigned? He noticed she had taken her duvet, leaving her bed looking denuded and impersonal, and couldn’t decide whether this was a bad sign that she had finally departed, or a good one that she had taken it to comfort her in strange surroundings.

  He went round the room, looping T-shirts and jerseys back into drawers, and closing them, picking up socks and knickers and magazines from the floor, chucking screwed-up balls of chocolate-bar foil into the already stuffed wastepaper basket. He started to strip the bed and abruptly couldn’t bear it. It reminded him of the night Kate had actually gone, and he had climbed into their bed later and foolishly, helplessly, put his face into her pillow, still redolent of her. Mrs Cheng could deal with Joss’s room. James dropped the armful of dirty laundry he held and went out of the room, and closed the door. Bloody Joss. Bloody Kate. They might at least have left him a note.

  He went down to the kitchen and opened the cupboard where the drink lived. The Turkish wine still stood there, but it stood alone. Something about the Turkish wine made James think of bird-and-bottle parties of the sixties, and that thought was thuddingly depressing. He closed the cupboard. Instead of just drinking, he would eat. He would make himself something to eat, and drink the remaining white wine with it, and then Leonard would come home and he, at least, would be a diversion. James wondered how he would tell Leonard that Joss had gone.

  He opened the fridge. There was a sad chicken carcass, a glum lettuce, and several dispirited odds and ends in bowls and dishes. There were also several idiotic yoghurts Joss had bought, in pots with little plastic feet. James shut the fridge. This was no evening for a martyred sandwich; he would go out and buy fish and chips and a bottle of stout. He went to the little wooden barrel on the counter where the change for housekeeping lived, and was picking it up when the doorbell rang.

  Damn, James thought. He glanced at the clock. Seven forty-five. The witching hour for Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses and other pests. He remembered Hugh opening the door to one once, and the missionary had said earnestly, ‘Do you know God?’ ‘Intimately,’ Hugh said. ‘I am He,’ and shut the door. James went down the hall, and opened the door with his, Not this evening or ever, ready on his lips, and it was Hugh, Hugh with a chic dark canvas bag in one hand and a bottle, wrapped in brown paper, in the other.

  They sat there together in the failing light, in the two armchairs in James’s study. The fish-and-chip wrapping, translucent with pools of grease, lay on the floor between them. The whisky bottle was half empty. In the spare bedroom upstairs, the companion front room to Leonard’s, Hugh’s canvas bag lay on the bed, where he had thrown it.

  ‘You can’t stay,’ James had started by saying. ‘You must go back. To Julia and those little boys. You can’t run away simply because she is behaving like a dream.’ But later he had gone combing his bookshelves in search of something, and had at last found it, a volume of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s letters.

  ‘Listen,’ he said to Hugh, finding the page. ‘Listen to this. Is this the trouble?’ And then he read a passage. ‘“I say it with my true heart,”’ James read, ‘“the worst injury one can do to the person who loves one is to cover oneself from head to foot in a shining impenetrable condom of irreproachable behaviour.”’

  ‘Yes,’ Hugh said, nodding, ‘that’s it. That’s it exactly.’

  ‘Thank God,’ James said, ‘thank God you came, even if it’s only for a night. While I had Joss, I not only had her, I had Kate too, in a sense. I was pretty deep in self-pity when you came, and if there’s any quality I detest, it’s self-pity.’

  They looked at each other for a long moment. A car drew up in the street outside.

  ‘Leonard,’ James said. ‘Leonard and Beatrice. She brings him in, has a cup of tea and then I walk her home.’

  Car doors slammed and voices came unevenly up the steps.

  ‘What happened?’ Leonard’s said. ‘What happened to her?’

  Beatrice’s reply came clear and crisp. ‘What do you think? Men invariably opt for convenience. He simply cast her aside, like a shilling glove.’

  ‘He’ll be in his study,’ Leonard said, ‘sozzling, no doubt.’

  The door opened; James and Hugh looked up as the two old faces came round it in enquiry.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Leonard said. ‘What’s he doing here?’

  James stood up, and came towards them. ‘I’m sorry to tell you that Joss has gone,’ he said. ‘But I’m glad to tell you that Hugh has come.’

  Thirteen

  Joss lay in the not-quite dark, clutching her duvet. It was reasonably quiet, but not as quiet as Richmond Villa, where her room was at the side, not the front as here, of the house. She didn’t want to think about her room at Richmond Villa, but it lurked about in her mind and upset her because it made her feel babyish and inclined to tears. This room was weird. If she sat up on the left-hand side of her bed, she could pretty well touch the walls on both sides; and the window had been cut off by the partition wall and was much too high for its width. Through the partition wall, on the sofa in the bigger room, Kate was sleeping.

  Kate. Joss felt in such a muddle about everything that she didn’t know if Kate was Mum any more or just Kate, now. When she had found Kate, to her utter amazement, washing up glasses at the sink in Richmond Villa, Joss had felt a sudden surge of being Kate’s child again; there Mum was, in context, familiar and expected, washing up at the sink where she had washed up since Joss was just a little kid. It had knocked Joss off balance to see Kate like that, and made her vulnerable and responsive, so that, when Kate said they were going back to Osney together, Joss had nodded and
said OK, then, no fighting or screams. They had packed together, and Kate had telephoned for a taxi, and it was only when they were getting into the taxi that Joss remembered her duvet.

  ‘But you don’t need it, Jossie, I’ve got you a new one—’

  ‘I do,’ Joss said, suddenly desperate. ‘I’ve got to have it, I’ve got to—’

  She tore back into the house and up the stairs. Her room looked awful, as if it had been burgled, violated. Panic seized Joss. She couldn’t go, she couldn’t leave her room and – and James and Leonard, and then she didn’t want the taxi to drive Kate away from her either. She stood gibbering faintly in the centre of her room, immobilized. From the street, the taxi blew its horn. Joss gasped. She took a deep breath and seized her duvet, and plunged her face into it. ‘Help,’ Joss said into its muffling folds. ‘Help.’ The taxi horn sounded again. Clasping her duvet like a treasured animal, Joss flew down the stairs and out of the door.

  ‘You gave me a fright,’ Kate said. ‘I thought you’d changed your mind. I thought you weren’t coming.’

  In silent pain, Joss bowed her head and buried it in her bedclothes. She couldn’t look at Kate; she couldn’t look at anything until, what seemed like hours later, Kate said gently, ‘We’re here.’

  Kate had put flowers everywhere, and there was a new, black-hooded sweatshirt for Joss in a carrier bag from her favourite shop. ‘You can change it,’ Kate said, ‘if you want something else.’ They had gone out, after they’d made up Joss’s bed, for a pizza and Joss had had some wine and felt rather better, though it was an odd kind of better, giddy and a bit hysterical. They’d laughed a lot and Kate said, ‘Oh, we’re going to have such a good time!’ and Joss began to think that perhaps they were. There were several people in the pizza restaurant who knew Kate and they came over to talk, and were introduced to Joss, and Joss felt excited and at the same time unhinged, because Kate hadn’t known any of these people or talked like this, when she was just Mum, at Richmond Villa.

  The whole evening was OK really, until Joss was alone in bed, alone with her duvet. Then she began to worry. How much longer was it going to take to get to school and which bus would it be? How would Angie be able to come here, and Emma, and what would happen all the nights Kate was working at Pasta Please and left Joss alone with gross old Mr Winthrop who reminded her of something that had got left in a damp corner and gone mouldy? And how would she fit in the rest of her stuff, and where could she be by herself and what did James and Leonard think when they came back and she wasn’t there? Abruptly she remembered the yoghurts she had bought, in the little walking pots, the yoghurts in all the flavours James hated and she loved, like banana and chocolate and fudge. The thought of the yoghurts waiting for her in the fridge at Richmond Villa was too much for Joss. Very quietly, with clumps of duvet stuffed into her mouth to muffle the noise, Joss began to cry.