The Men and the Girls

by Joanna Trollope

  ‘When things change,’ he’d said, ‘you simply have to learn to adapt to them, don’t you? And I suppose, if you’re lucky, you might learn to like the change, or at least get perfectly used to it.’

  James, Mrs Cheng told herself, had a lot of assets. Who would leave such a man? Kind man, she said to herself, steady man, and wise. Her father had been wise; he had told her not to marry Mr Cheng, but her mother had wanted it because of the takeaway shop. Her father had been wise, but weak. James Mallow, Mrs Cheng had come to believe, was wise and not weak at all.

  ‘James grown up,’ she said to Leonard. She swept a handful of dead flies into her dustpan. ‘He not spoilt old baby like you.’

  Mark Hathaway noticed that he was losing weight; not much, perhaps only a few pounds, but enough for his extremely expensive Italian jeans (he had been to London to buy them) not to sit on his waist and hips with quite such perfect snugness as they once had. He also thought his face looked thinner, but that suited his mood, to look mildly haggard and melancholy. What average man, after all, would not look haggard and melancholy if messed about quite as appallingly as Kate was messing him?

  The trouble was that he was in love with her, he was certain of it. He had never been so preoccupied with a woman; it amounted almost to an obsession. He couldn’t satisfactorily analyse to himself precisely why she held so powerful an allure for him because, if he was ruthlessly candid, she was neither as intelligent nor as good-looking as almost every other girlfriend he had had. But she had a mixture of fragility and sturdy independence that was tremendously attractive, and she was gentle and seldom lost her temper, and she had a wonderful capacity for happy enjoyment of things and for making him enjoy those things too. He also felt, in a slightly strutting way, proud of having released her from the sterile habit of a worn-out relationship, and set her free. It frustrated him that she had never turned her extremely appealing slanting eyes on him and said thank you quite directly, for doing so.

  But even that didn’t frustrate him as much as Joss did. There he and Kate were, just getting through the first sticky patch inevitable in any relationship, and then along comes Joss, quite unannounced by Kate. Very, very occasionally on the nights Kate wasn’t working, Joss would be out too, but usually Kate was with Joss on those nights because that was, she said, where she wanted to be. Of course, Mark could join them; he’d be more than welcome. She had to be joking. Joss and Mark made it perfectly plain to one another, without actually saying so, that there was to be nothing warmer between them than a truce.

  There was nothing for it, Mark discovered to his dismay, but to wait for Kate outside Pasta Please, like some travesty of a stage door johnny, and walk her home. He started these walks by complaining to her of her neglect of him, but then she simply refused to speak to him at all, and his resentment at her preferring Joss was engulfed by a genuine fear of losing Kate altogether. He burrowed beneath all the feelings that seethed in the forefront of his mind for some genuine charm.

  ‘OK,’ he said to Kate, taking her hand, ‘I accept that your being a mother must come first. But may I ask, in the spirit of the sweetest reason, what comes next, for us?’

  Kate was uncertain. She didn’t want Joss to have the smallest excuse for thinking life in Osney was boring or that she was being ignored, yet she didn’t, either, want to say goodbye to Mark Hathaway. She liked him and enjoyed being with him and he represented something very significant to her, a person to have a relationship with who did not simultaneously become dependent. ‘I won’t add to your pile of people,’ he had said. But he had added to her experience; he’d given her modern novels, and music, and taken her to jazz clubs and Irish pubs and a tapas bar in Bristol. These things, and his friends, and his radical ideas and opinions, had made Kate feel that she had, in some way, been given back eight years of her youth. She wasn’t at all ready to give up this source of mental stimulation and pleasure, and the growing self-esteem that went with it.

  She said, ‘Joss has only been with me two weeks. We’re just getting somewhere, in fact, I think I owe quite a lot of the improvement in our relationship to you because I’m so much happier and she catches it. Can you be patient a bit longer? She’ll be fifteen in a month and I expect she’ll start staying with friends more soon—’

  She had, in fact, asked if she could stay away already. She had asked if she could stay with Angie, and Kate had said of course, although she had been horrified to discover how much she didn’t want to say it. Then Angie’s mother had had to go into hospital suddenly, and the household was thrown into turmoil and Joss didn’t go. She hadn’t made a fuss about it either, to Kate’s relief. In fact at the moment she was making almost no fuss about anything, and Kate almost dared to believe that she was happy.

  ‘Look,’ Mark said. He swung Kate’s hand across him so that he could hold it in both of his. ‘Look, I accept all that. Great. But I must point out that there is me, too. And us. So how does the timetable for the future look?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Kate said.

  ‘One month? Two? My thirty-fifth birthday?’

  ‘I can’t tell. I wish I could, but I can’t.’

  ‘Do you want it to go on like this?’

  ‘No,’ Kate said candidly.

  ‘Ah. Well, at least that’s something.’

  ‘But I do want to be with her and have a good relationship with her.’

  ‘And – me?’

  ‘And you.’

  ‘So how are you going to resolve it?’

  ‘Why do I have to?’

  ‘Because it’s your dilemma and you made it.’

  Kate wrenched her hand free and marched ahead of him. He was seized, quite suddenly, with the urge to spring after her, and slap her. He rammed his hands into the tight hip-pockets of his jeans, and broke into a run until he had caught up with her.

  ‘Kate. Sorry.’

  ‘You said you wouldn’t be possessive. You said you were an individual, that you were free—’

  ‘I am. I’m not possessive.’

  She stopped and swung round. The light from the street lamp turned her face pale-green and her hair bronze; she looked like a nymph or a dryad.

  ‘Oh Kate,’ Mark said in longing, ‘have some pity.’

  She watched him.

  ‘I miss you,’ Mark said. His voice cracked a little. Bother the charm, the manner, why shouldn’t she see what she was doing to him? ‘I love you, I’m mad about you. I know about Joss, but can’t you, just occasionally, imagine what it’s like for me, wanting you, thinking about you, planning things we can do together? I’m not asking for now, Kate. I’m only asking for soon. Surely you haven’t the heart to refuse me that?’

  She moved forward slightly. He took his hands out of his pockets and put his arms around her. Then he bent his head down and kissed her with no hurry whatsoever. Oh, Kate thought, sinking into the kiss, oh magic, and then, help, no, Joss is waiting . . . She pulled back abruptly.

  ‘What now?’

  She could have cried. ‘Joss,’ she said.

  He stepped back. ‘Of course,’ he said politely, coldly, ‘Joss.’

  ‘I’ll decide,’ Kate said. She felt thoroughly shaken up. ‘I promise I will. I won’t keep you hanging about. I’ll work something out soon. Honestly I will—’

  ‘Good,’ he said.

  Joss saw them pause on the corner of Swan Street; then she let the curtain fall back in case they kissed each other good-night, which she certainly didn’t want to see. She looked round the room, which she had tidied for Kate, and then made up her bed for her, on the sofa, as usual. Then she went to her own bed, and pulled from under the mattress a rectangle of cardboard cut from a cereal box. On the blank side, she had drawn a grid of little squares. Some were coloured in, about half. Joss coloured in one more. Fifteen nights now, fifteen nights in Swan Street.

  Fourteen

  Randolph Acheson came home from his lecture tour of Holland, and found that his wife Bluey had made a group of new frien
ds. He was mildly surprised to find that they all seemed to be between twenty and forty years older than she was, but that was as far as his adverse reaction went. It was a relief, if the truth be known, that she had made friends because she was by nature gregarious but at the same time hadn’t seemed able to get the hang of Oxford socially. Randolph was afraid it was because Bluey was a lapsed academic and all Oxford could see it. The budding marine biologist he had married seventeen years before had gradually exchanged her laboratory and scientific dissertations for recipe books and clothes catalogues. Although she had never confessed it openly, Randolph suspected now that Bluey had never, ever had a truly academic mind, and that she had only been to college because all the girls of her age and class in the affluent Chicago suburb where she grew up went to college. What Bluey really liked was baking, and people, and parties. As she got older, Randolph noticed, she was getting to have no shame at all, either, about acknowledging this.

  Her new friends meant that she was out a good deal. This scarcely figured with Randolph since he was in the laboratory by eight-fifteen in the morning, and often – if he dined in the college to which he was attached – not home until ten-thirty. His clothes were still admirably laundered; the supply of fresh oranges in the icebox to be squeezed for his breakfast juice didn’t run out; the little house they had rented collected neither dust nor faded flowers. The only difference was that Bluey didn’t beg Randolph to take her to the movies or out to supper or to London. All in all, Randolph felt that for Bluey to have found her houseful of elderly English eccentrics was only a good thing.

  ‘They’re really neat people,’ Garth said to his father. ‘You’d really like them. They’re like something out of a novel, something else.’

  Bluey had started by thinking they were like something out of a novel herself, the sort of novel set in another, intriguing, age and society. Richmond Villa held her spellbound, with its muddled layers of living, its walls of books and curious pictures, its abundance of sagging comfort, its disregard of fashion. To find James and Leonard and Hugh in this house, and then Beatrice and Mrs Cheng, had seemed quite fitting to Bluey, as if she had stumbled upon a stereotype of a vanished kind of life, and had then discovered that it had breath in it, after all. But as she spent more time in Richmond Villa, she learned all their histories, and her heart went out to them all because she discovered that they had suffered variously in their lives with all the acuteness that she had suffered, in finding herself married to a man whom the passing years only seemed to make more impersonal, more remote, duller.

  She had been deeply dismayed to observe Randy’s shock as her interest in marine biology declined after Garth’s birth, and she had turned, as a refuge, to domestic things, simple things, that seemed to represent a warm reality beside what now appeared to her the cold sterility of science. She knew perfectly well that Randy despised her for making patchwork cushions and reading cookery books, and she had told herself for several years that she didn’t care about his opinion. But when she found that James and Hugh were not simply admiring of her skills, but even interested in them, she admitted to herself that she had been starved by Randy, that she had been dreadfully lonely. To spend an afternoon in the kitchen at Richmond Villa making blueberry muffins and sewing on myriad shirt buttons, while people spoke to her with gratitude and imagination, was like coming out into the sunlight after a long time in the cold and rain.

  The sunlight was particularly warming if James was at Richmond Villa. James had not spoken to Bluey of Kate, but Hugh had. He had also spoken about Joss. Bluey had not initially thought Joss a very appropriate girlfriend for Garth, who was a handsome, well-set up, clean-cut boy and looked, to Bluey’s proud eye, too good for a grumpy little scruff like Joss. But if James was devoted to Joss, and Hugh assured Bluey he was, then there must be more to her than met the eye, however maternally proud. Bluey would have liked to ask Hugh how devoted Hugh thought James remained to Kate, but delicacy forbade that. She had to comfort herself by reflecting that James looked, on the whole, well and happy, and not like a man who was pining. You couldn’t say the same for Hugh. He was terribly attractive, Bluey thought, even if he was too charming to be trusted, but he looked, without doubt, as if he were pining. Bluey had seen his pretty, sad wife and James had told her about the adorable twins. It seemed inevitable that, given time, Hugh would, quite properly and naturally, go home to his wife and children and then James would be left alone in Richmond Villa with only Leonard for permanent company, and James might, in consequence, feel lonelier then, and gladder than ever of somebody to be sweet to him.

  He often said she was sweet. ‘You’re a sweet thing,’ he’d say, looking at the Waldorf salad she’d made for their supper, or a newly darned jersey of Leonard’s or a posy of blue pansies on his desk. ‘I feel rather awful, you doing all this for us.’

  ‘But I like it.’

  ‘I know. That’s what’s so sweet.’

  ‘I haven’t anything else to do. I don’t have a job. Randy and Garth are out all day. Do I get in your way?’

  ‘Not in the least. I simply feel that it isn’t a very equal bargain, and my conscience troubles me about that.’

  She gave him a clear glance. ‘It’s a fine bargain for me.’

  ‘Thank you, then,’ James said. He leaned forward and kissed her cheek. ‘Truly, thank you.’

  The only disconcerting element at Richmond Villa was Miss Bachelor. She wasn’t there all the time, but when she was, Bluey felt a little afraid of her. She made Bluey feel rather as Randy made her feel, and there was something else besides. If Miss Bachelor hadn’t been so old, Bluey would have said she had a soft spot for James, but Miss Bachelor was not only too old but too scholarly and rational to have anything so sentimental as a romantic weakness for anyone. Yet when Bluey looked at James, at his benevolent, human, experienced face, and his thick, never tidy hair, and his hands and the set of his shoulders and his air of being quite comfortable, thank you, with his own body, then she understood with an instinct that had nothing to do with reason that neither age nor cast of character had any effect whatsoever on a susceptibility to romantic weakness. This curious life, this strange foreign life in Oxford that had, until recently, seemed unassailable to Bluey, had suddenly become not only interesting, but explicable. I’m back in the human race, Bluey told herself, brushing her gleaming hair in front of her bedroom mirror, I’m plugged back into the system. I’m in love.

  A week before her fifteenth birthday, Joss filled in the last empty square on her cardboard chart. Then she cut the chart up into a great many neat, small pieces, put them on to an old paint-tin lid she had found on the landing in a pile of Mr Winthrop’s junk, and burned them. Then she did some desultory revision towards the coming school exams – no GCSE until next summer – and waited for Kate. Kate was not working that evening and had said she would be home about five. She said she would bring supper, which meant something from the restaurant. Joss liked pasta, but you could have too much pasta, like you could have too much of other things you put up with for someone else’s sake. Joss had learned a great deal about that sort of endurance in the last month, and she had come to the conclusion that such sacrifice only had any point as long as you knew you were getting somewhere.

  When Kate came in, soon after five, she flopped down in their most comfortable chair and kicked her shoes off and said it had been a non-stop day with the restaurant full of tourists, including what seemed like half a busload of Japanese who all ordered exactly the same thing which put Benjie in a temper. Joss made Kate some tea.

  ‘Bless you,’ Kate said gratefully, holding the mug and sipping, with her eyes closed. Joss watched her for a while. She’d had her hair cut a bit differently, a little shorter, and it suited her. Prior to the last month together, Joss had never looked at Kate dispassionately, as a person rather than just as a mother, but now she did, often, she couldn’t help it even though she didn’t like it much because it wasn’t comfortable. Emma had told Joss she thoug
ht Kate looked quite trendy and Joss had been pleased and proud and disconcerted, all at once.

  ‘Mum—’

  Kate opened her eyes.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Mum,’ Joss said, getting astride an upright chair and leaning on its back. ‘Mum, I’ve got to go now.’

  Kate said easily, ‘I didn’t know you were going out. Where are you going?’

  ‘I’m not going out,’ Joss said steadily. ‘I mean, I’ve got to go home now. Back to Richmond Villa.’

  Kate stared. She put her mug of tea down carefully on the floor beside her chair and leaned forward.

  ‘Joss. This is home.’

  Joss didn’t flinch. ‘For you,’ she said, ‘not me.’

  They looked at each other.

  ‘Haven’t you been happy with me? I thought you were. You seemed to be.’

  Joss said nothing.

  Kate cried, ‘We’ve had fun!’

  ‘Yes,’ Joss said.

  Kate gripped the arms of her chair and leaned out of it towards Joss. ‘Then why?’

  Joss didn’t like the look of Kate, or her tone of voice, but she had to go on. She’d known it wouldn’t be easy, she’d expected Kate not to see, to be hurt, to take it personally. She said carefully, trying not to get excited, ‘I just have to go back. It isn’t you, it’s nothing to do with you, but I can’t live like this.’ She paused, and then said emphatically, ‘It isn’t real.’

  ‘Not real!’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Not real for a mother and daughter to live together and eat together and have jokes and go out together, not real?’

  ‘That’s real,’ Joss said stoutly, ‘but that’s not the truth, is it? Living here isn’t real and you’re acting—’

  ‘Acting?’

  ‘You aren’t living,’ Joss said, amazed at herself. ‘You’re just getting through the days.’