The Men and the Girls

by Joanna Trollope

  She said, ‘You ought to go home,’ and marched out of the kitchen.

  James had come in then and attempted, in a maddening, Jamesish way, to say anodyne soothing things that both calmed Hugh and exonerated Joss from interference and rudeness. But even Hugh could see his heart wasn’t in it, that, if hung upside-down out of a high window with the threat of being dropped if he didn’t confess honestly, James would have admitted he thought Joss was right. He dawdled about the kitchen for a while, putting things away, or at least going through the motions, and then suggested a drink, but the suggestion was plainly made in the spirit of offering a child with a hurt knee a lollipop.

  ‘No thanks,’ Hugh said, and went up to his room.

  It was still quite light because supper at Richmond Villa was always early. Hugh hated eating early and nobody could explain to him why they did eat early here. James had said perhaps it was a hangover from when Joss was small. Or perhaps it was better for Leonard’s ancient digestion. He hadn’t sounded as if it were at all important, but it was important to Hugh because it seemed to him deeply uncivilized not to treat eating, especially at night, as some kind of celebration. Julia always . . . Hugh unfolded his hands and reached for his cigarettes. If he thought about it, Richmond Villa wasn’t really very civilized anyway, there was no coherence to life in it, no elegance, and even its chief attraction, James, wasn’t really concentrating, especially now Joss was back and that pretty little American was in and out doing her domestic science diploma bit. Oh hell, Hugh thought, thinking suddenly of the twins and rolling up into a ball on his side in agony, oh hell, oh bloody, fucking hell.

  The door opened softly.

  ‘Are you all right?’ James said.

  ‘Of course not,’ Hugh said. He reached out and crushed his cigarette stub into an ashtray.

  James came into the room and stood looking down at him. He remembered doing the same thing once, over forty years ago, in Cambridge, and finding that there wasn’t just the hump of Hugh in the bed, but the hump of a girl too, a girl wearing nothing except, James recalled with sudden vividness, a green ribbon round her neck.

  ‘Julia just rang,’ James said.

  Hugh flipped over and half-sat up. ‘Julia? Why didn’t you call me?’

  ‘She didn’t want to speak to you.’

  ‘Christ—’

  ‘She wanted to speak to Joss. The twins told her they had seen Joss. She wanted Joss’s reaction.’

  Hugh began to scramble off the bed. ‘I’ll ring her back—’

  ‘No,’ James said, ‘you can’t.’

  ‘Can’t?’

  ‘She’s gone out to dinner.’

  Hugh stood up. ‘Gone out to dinner? Bloody dinner? Who with?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘A man?’

  ‘She didn’t say.’

  They looked at each other.

  ‘Do you,’ James said, ‘want that drink after all?’

  A customer had been rude to Kate. He wasn’t drunk and he wasn’t, Benjie said, a sadist, he was just someone who’d had a bloody awful day and was simply on the look-out for an innocent person to vent his fury on. Kate had listened to him, white-faced, and then had collected up the rejected dishes of food in silence and returned with them to the kitchen. Then she and Benjie listened while the customer turned on Christine and refused to pay for what he had ordered, and slammed out of the restaurant.

  Christine came down the spiral staircase.

  ‘What did you say to him?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘He said you were offensive.’

  ‘I said nothing at all!’

  ‘He said you accused him of muddling his order and being in the wrong about what he had ordered.’

  Kate cried, ‘I never spoke to him after his order! I just stood and took it while he called me incompetent and stupid and not fit to hold down a job!’

  Christine, who could never bear the smallest incident that might in any way threaten her business which represented, as she often said, her identity as much as her livelihood, said disagreeably, ‘Well, perhaps he had a point.’

  ‘Oy,’ Benjie said, ‘steady on. Cool it.’

  ‘I brought him what he ordered!’ Kate shouted. ‘You can look at my order pad!’

  Christine glanced upward. ‘Please do not shout.’

  ‘Leave it,’ Benjie said. He glanced at Kate. ‘Why don’t you? There’s always some awkward buggers, aren’t there? We’re just lucky we don’t get more.’

  ‘Please mind your own business,’ Christine said.

  Benjie made a face at Kate, and ambled back to his stoves. Christine stood aside and made a gesture towards the staircase. ‘I believe you have work to do.’

  ‘I don’t have to do it,’ Kate said angrily, ‘for people who won’t stand up for me when I’m blameless.’

  ‘Too true,’ Christine said. ‘Hurry up.’

  Kate climbed the staircase in a turmoil. The most luxurious thing of all, at that moment, would have been to have walked out, through the crowded tables, and into the street, and not come back. But even in the midst of the blaze of anger at Christine’s injustice, Kate felt a small, cold core of misgiving. She was in the right, certainly, but oh – oh, she was still so vulnerable. She picked up her order pad, and moved to the window table where a young couple had just settled themselves, jacket and bag all over the floor just as Christine hated, and not hung up on the hatstand.

  ‘I wonder if you’d mind if I hung up your things for you?’

  The young man looked up from the menu at her. He had sandy hair and small round spectacles, and he looked at her as if she were not a person at all, but just a waitress.

  ‘Suit yourself,’ he said, and shrugged.

  Later Benjie said he would walk Kate home.

  ‘I’m OK, really, I’m fine now.’

  ‘I’ll come all the same,’ Benji said. He stopped on the pavement to light a cigarette. ‘You don’t want to pay any attention to her, you know. Susie never did.’

  ‘I’m not as tough as Susie.’

  Benjie took her arm. ‘She always gets windy if she thinks she’s lost a customer. She thinks it’ll spread like wildfire round Oxford, that she runs a lousy restaurant. You don’t want to bother, Katie. It’s only a job.’

  ‘But with Joss gone, it’s a bit more than that—’

  ‘You watch it,’ Benjie said, steering her past a swerving clump of cyclists. ‘You don’t want to think like that. You get in people’s power if you think like that. Me, I do a job to pay for my fun. No job, no fun. Simple as that.’

  ‘I was having fun—’

  ‘Sure you were!’

  ‘I’m moving in with Mark,’ Kate said.

  ‘You never!’

  ‘He’s got a lovely flat, we get on really well—’

  Benjie dropped her arm. ‘You want to be careful, you want to be really sure.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, you lived with James, didn’t you, and it didn’t work out and you really knew James, steady sort of bloke, but you’ve only known this Mark guy a few months. I think,’ Benjie said, taking her hand this time, ‘I think you gotta hang free for a bit. That’s what I think.’

  The room in Swan Street felt as if it knew she was leaving it, so it had withdrawn itself, ready for Mr Akwa. In any case, since Joss’s departure it hadn’t felt the same, it had felt full of disappointment rather than promise and optimism. The last few days, while Kate had imagined, with a nervous excitement, living with Mark Hathaway, she had felt a certain indifference to Swan Street, almost a callousness. This evening, the room simply felt fragile, as if it represented no security at all beyond the purely physical shelter to be found in any old hotel room.

  Kate sat down and took her shoes off. After a while, she got up again and turned the light off, and sat there in the not-quite darkness of the light coming in from the street outside. Benjie was of course right. You had to see elements of your life – your job, your rel
ationships, your home – quite straight, for what they really were, not for what you wished them to be. She was used to Pasta Please and she liked Benjie, and she had liked Christine, but that was all. She had adored Swan Street, but it had died on her. As for Mark – Kate closed her eyes. Was she trying to make Mark into something that he wasn’t? A Joss-Mark, even a James-Mark? Was she, if she was scrupulously, beautifully, honest, going to live with Mark because he had decided she would and she was absolutely sick of making decisions?

  That was what freedom came down to, in the end, wasn’t it? Making decisions, one after the other, huge ones and trivial ones, day in, day out; what to eat and wear and do, who to love, where to go and where to live, whether to emigrate or to buy red shoelaces instead of brown. And if you gave up on deciding because you simply couldn’t go on, for misery and fatigue, and you said to another person – as she was saying to Mark – OK, you take over, you decide for me now, then you were surrendering your self-control, a measure (how big a measure?) of your independence. That’s what I’m doing, Kate thought, that’s exactly what I’m doing. Because I’ve lost over Joss, I’m letting myself just give in. I don’t have to live here or work there, in fact, I mustn’t. If I start giving in, I won’t stop because I’ll think it’s all a punishment for failing over Joss, that I’m not fit to have her, that I shouldn’t have had her, that I should be grateful for anyone who’ll have me. She opened her eyes. The room swam a little and then steadied itself into familiarity, armchair and table, upright chairs, lamp, cushions, chair print. She felt about for her shoes. It was after eleven; late, but not too late.

  ‘What are you saying?’ Mark said. He had showered just before Kate came in, and he was wearing a dark-blue cotton dressing gown, cut like a short kimono, and his hair was wet.

  ‘I’m saying that I am very sorry to change my mind, and to disappoint you, but I’ve decided that I can’t come and live here, after all.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it would be wrong and it would ruin our relationship.’

  ‘Wrong?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He moved towards her. ‘What sort of wrong?’

  This was taking more courage than she had reckoned on. Kate said, ‘Because I don’t want to make that kind of commitment. I’m not ready for it, and perhaps I never will be. I think I agreed to come because I was reacting from having lost Joss. I ought to tell you the truth. It’s only fair.’

  ‘Fair?’ he said.

  ‘Stop it—’

  ‘Stop what?’

  ‘Asking these little questions like someone in an American police movie. I’m really sorry, Mark, but I’m also very sure. I shouldn’t have agreed to come and I—’

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘Mark, I’m trying to explain—’

  He said, ‘You aren’t coming because you don’t love me,’ and then he hit her.

  She felt the blow thud into the side of her face. She was perfectly astonished. She opened her eyes and mouth in protest, but he hit her again, on the other cheek, and then he seized her by the shoulders, and ran her backwards, stumbling, against the blank wall by the bed, and began to bash her head against it rhythmically, bang, bang, bang. Her eyes flew open and shut and her breath came in gasps, and she could see his face quite clearly but miles away, dark and set. Then all of a sudden, he wrenched her sideways and flung her across the bed, the bed where they had often made love, and walked slowly across to the opposite wall and leant against it, his back to her, and simply waited in silence for her to gather herself up, and to go.

  Sixteen

  ‘Where is she?’ Helen said. She stood in the kitchen at Mansfield House, still holding her car keys and her bag.

  ‘We put her up in Pat’s room. With Pat and the baby. It was all the space there was.’

  ‘When did she come?’ Helen said, slowly letting the bag and keys fall on to the table among the cereal packets and toys.

  Midnight, they said, or a bit after. She’d woken them up, Linda and Ruth said, they’d heard her from their room above the front door and they’d thought it was Pat’s boyfriend again who’d been a menace all week. Ruth had looked out of the window and seen a woman waving, a woman she didn’t know, having only been at Mansfield House a month, but Linda knew her.

  ‘It’s Kate!’ Linda said in amazement. ‘It’s Kate!’ and flew downstairs to undo all the bolts and chains and let her in. They had taken her into the kitchen and made her tea, and Ruth had found some arnica ointment and had smeared it on Kate’s face. She didn’t say much, she just shook. All she said that made complete sense was that she had a headache, so, when Pat came down to make up the baby’s feed, they said could Kate doss down on the extra mattress in Pat’s room.

  ‘’Course,’ Pat said, yawning. She peered at Kate. ‘I see I don’t need to ask what happened to you.’

  They had given her aspirin, and a hot water bottle because of the shaking, and had put her to bed on the floor of Pat’s tiny room while Pat fed her baby and read one of the holiday brochures which were her passion. Then Pat had gone to sleep and Kate had lain awake listening to her breathing, and the baby snuffling, and stared out into nothing for hours and hours and hours. When she fell asleep at last, it was into that racked and unnatural slumber to which even the most protracted wakefulness is preferable, haunted by menace, through which the wails of Pat’s baby wanting its first feed of the new day came thin and anguished, like the screams of a cat being tortured.

  ‘Who’s seen her today?’ Helen said sharply. She sounded as if she was annoyed, as if someone in the room was to blame.

  Pat was sorting out an immense plastic basket of communal washing. She didn’t look up when she spoke. ‘I left her asleep. I put Jason in Linda’s room for the morning. She was dead to the world an hour ago.’

  ‘I’ll go up,’ Helen said. ‘I’ll go up and see her. Someone make a mug of tea I can take up to her, would you?’

  Kate lay on her less-damaged side with her eyes shut. Her head throbbed and banged and the skin of her face felt raw and several sizes too small. Helen bent over her.

  ‘Kate?’

  Kate turned, very slowly, wincing.

  ‘Ow.’

  ‘Oh Katie,’ Helen said, kneeling by her on the floor. ‘Oh poor love. You poor love. What happened?’

  Kate shut her eyes again. ‘Mark,’ she said.

  ‘I’ve brought you some tea. Here, I’ll help you sit up. Did he only get your face?’

  ‘Only my face!’

  Helen slid an arm under Kate. ‘Remember Linda? Two cracked ribs and a broken wrist as well as a face like yours.’

  It was terribly difficult to sit up. Kate’s head felt as if it were a huge, wobbling, painful balloon only lightly attached to the rest of her.

  ‘Was it sex?’ Helen said. ‘Was he one of them?’

  Kate said, ‘No. I changed my mind about living with him, moving in with him. That’s all.’

  ‘Living with him!’

  ‘I got Joss back. But she wouldn’t stay. So I thought I’d live with Mark.’

  Helen groaned. She settled herself beside Kate and handed her the mug of tea. Kate took it and held it tightly, to stop her trembling from spilling it.

  ‘Don’t lecture me,’ Kate said. She tried to look at Helen, but her neck was stiff and wouldn’t turn, and the eye nearest to Helen was so swollen she couldn’t see out of it properly. ‘Remember telling me how lucky we were because we’d never been hit? Well, now it’s only you that’s still lucky.’

  ‘We’ll get you down to the surgery later. Get John Pringle to have a look at you.’

  ‘It’s only bruises.’

  ‘Kate!’

  Kate’s voice rose. ‘It isn’t the bruises that hurt! At least, they do, of course, but they don’t hurt like what’s going on in my mind hurts!’

  ‘You must stay here, of course.’

  ‘I’m supposed to be at work—’

  ‘You can’t work like this, Kate.’

 
; Kate remembered. ‘I had a row with Christine last night—’

  Helen stirred to a kneeling position. ‘I’ll sort out Christine. You leave Christine to me. D’you want someone to collect your stuff? I’m sure Linda would.’

  ‘I don’t know, I don’t know what I want—’

  ‘Would you like to come back to my flat?’

  Kate tried to smile. ‘No. No thanks. I’m better here with the others.’

  Helen got clumsily to her feet. Even through her own distress, Kate felt that Helen’s authoritativeness was not exactly in top gear this morning.

  ‘We’ll organize your stuff, Kate. And I’ll go round to Jericho and tell Joss.’

  ‘Joss!’ Kate almost screamed.

  ‘Of course,’ Helen said, ‘of course she’s got to know.’

  Kate’s face puckered like a child’s. ‘Oh my God,’ Kate wept. ‘Oh, what have I done now, what stupid bloody mess have I made now?’

  Leonard had cut himself, shaving. He often did this now, so James had offered to shave him which had made Leonard furious. He had agreed, with torrents of foul language, to allow a nurse from the health centre to come in twice a week to bathe him, but the suggestion that he could no longer shave himself was an insult not to be borne. He was so angry and upset that James cursed himself for even having mentioned it.

  ‘I’m sorry. Really I am. I should have kept my trap shut.’

  ‘Bloody right you should! Bloody right! I may not be as steady on my pins as I once was, but I’m not a drooling imbecile!’

  The result was that Leonard remembered James’s tactlessness every morning when he started to shave, and his unsteady hands shook further with rage. His thin old skin tore like tissue paper, and by the time he had finished – a very irregular business anyway – the basin in his bedroom was spattered with blood, and his furious face was tufted with blobs of cotton wool.