The Men and the Girls

by Joanna Trollope

  When Julia left, she said, ‘Don’t forget about the job. Think about it.’

  The trouble is, Kate thought, lying behind her closed eyelids, that I don’t quite know where to start thinking. Everything seems asleep, even my instincts. All I know, the only petty irrelevant little thing I know is that I can’t stand Sonia much longer; I’m even beginning to feel a twinge of sympathy for her dead husband. I suppose that’s a start, I suppose that at least shows I’m still alive.

  ‘Miss Bain?’

  Kate’s eyes flew open. In the doorway to Sonia’s room stood an elderly woman in wire-rimmed spectacles and a brown-print summer dress. She carried a sad brown cardigan over one arm and was slightly out of breath.

  ‘Miss Bachelor!’ Kate cried, springing off the bed.

  ‘I don’t wish to disturb you. Please don’t get up. I simply wished to reassure myself about you.’ She moved the cardigan from her right arm to her left and held out her free hand. ‘How do you do? We have never met.’

  Kate looked round. ‘There’s nowhere for you to sit!’

  ‘And what is the matter with a bed?’

  ‘Do you mind?’

  ‘Why should I mind?’

  Kate’s hands went to her face. ‘I – I don’t know what to do with you, I’ve been so – so—’

  Beatrice sat on Sonia’s bed. ‘We should have met long ago. I wish you would lie down again. I’m sure you have a headache.’

  ‘A bit—’

  ‘Please,’ Beatrice said, ‘we must dispense with getting to know each other. We must simply know.’

  Kate subsided on to her bed again. She pushed herself back until she was leaning against the wall. Opposite her, Beatrice sat upright.

  ‘Miss Bain—’

  ‘Kate.’

  ‘Thank you. Kate, my conscience is not at all clear. I feel in a way – and this is one reason for my coming – that your leaving Richmond Villa had something to do with me, and I am most anxious that your return is not impeded by my continued presence there. I shall not visit the house any longer.’

  Kate gazed at her.

  ‘Am I right?’

  ‘Yes,’ Kate said. She had a sudden longing to put down her burden, to return candour for candour. ‘I was jealous of you. You were so clever and unusual. You caught James’s imagination. But there was more to it than that.’

  Beatrice’s face betrayed nothing. ‘Of course. You felt you had lost control.’

  ‘How do you know? I did, but how could you possibly know that?’

  ‘I am a human being too,’ Beatrice said with a glimmer of a smile, ‘even though I may scarcely look like one. I know the terror of feeling the power to choose is slipping away. So little of what we do is governed by free will, although we like to tell ourselves the very opposite. It makes us feel superior beings. The truth is that we are in large measure victims of our genes. Hence the struggle, the unending struggle.’

  Kate moved forward on her bed until she was leaning towards Beatrice. ‘I’m so stupid, so stupid not to have got to know you—’

  ‘You can only decide what seems right at the time. Hindsight is a menace to self-respect.’

  ‘You mustn’t stop going to Richmond Villa,’ Kate said suddenly. ‘They love you there, you’re so good for them. Joss loves you, even though you call her Josephine.’

  ‘I have no taste for affected androgyny,’ Beatrice said. ‘She is a credit to you. You are an admirable mother.’

  Kate ducked her head. ‘I don’t want her to be scared by what’s happened.’

  ‘Of course she must be scared. Scared enough to realize that there are still men around who cannot accept that society has moved on in its attitude to a woman’s place. But you need have no fear that Josephine will be damaged by what has happened to you. She is a very resilient person. She is also much attached to you. If it is possible not to take her electing to live at Richmond Villa too personally, I should try to do so. Sometimes it is impossible for two people endeavouring to be similar protagonists to live together.’

  ‘Oh,’ Kate said impulsively, ‘you are such a comfort!’

  Beatrice looked away. She put out a hand and brushed at the caterpillars of candlewick on Sonia’s bedspread. ‘And you need not worry about that charming and competent American person either.’

  ‘Garth’s mother?’

  ‘Indeed.’ Beatrice gave a little smile.

  ‘Could you explain more?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh,’ Kate cried, ‘you are tantalizing!’

  ‘I mean to be comforting.’

  ‘How is Leonard?’

  ‘Very shocked over you, but better now. What, I wonder, in his young life, persuaded him to masquerade as a monster when he is nothing of the sort? The English public school system? Would you,’ Beatrice said, ‘would you come and see me?’

  ‘In your room? With all the Marys—’

  ‘All the Marys?’

  ‘Joss said your room was full of Jesuses and Marys.’

  ‘Ah,’ Beatrice said. She stood up. ‘Just one more thing.’ She looked down at Kate. ‘You are a person in your own right, you know. You don’t necessarily – not necessarily at all – need a man to complete the equation, any more than I consider myself to be only half a human because I am childless.’ She held a hand out to Kate. ‘Please don’t see me out, I can quite well find my own way. Come and visit me soon. And take heart.’

  Kate stood up and took her hand. It was thin and dry, the palm like smoothed out, once crumpled tissue paper.

  ‘Suppose,’ Kate said, holding Beatrice’s hand, ‘suppose I find that I’ve – that I’ve broken something?’

  ‘That, of course, if it’s the case, can’t be helped. But you will never know unless you take the trouble to ask.’ Then Beatrice took her hand away and went out of Sonia’s room, and Kate heard her going carefully down the stairs.

  Garth Acheson had been only a little soothed after his Indian supper with James. There was no doubt that James was a great guy, but his greatness made things harder for Garth because he could quite see, and didn’t want to, how James’s greatness appealed to Garth’s mother. Garth admired his father very much, but he would never have said that his father was approachable. He never had been; he just wasn’t the kind of dad you could mess around with. Garth thought that you could probably mess around with James quite easily, and with that Hugh guy, who’d been living there, and they were both years older than Randy, so clearly the ability to fool around was not a matter of age, but of temperament.

  Garth adored his mother. He had seen from the beginning that she hadn’t liked Oxford much and he felt that Oxford was at fault for not appreciating her. Thus he was truly grateful to James for doing what Oxford had declined to do, but he now felt that James was doing too much of it, and he wasn’t at all sure that he had made this plain to James, out of his own gaucheness and ineptitude.

  That Bluey adored being appreciated by James was absolutely evident. Garth couldn’t believe that his father hadn’t noticed, but his father noticed things round the house, like Garth’s running shoes lying in the hallway or a dripping faucet, rather than human things. Garth longed to say something to Bluey, but he was afraid to, not least because he didn’t want her to stop looking like she was looking at the moment. The person to tackle, the only person to tackle, was Joss.

  But Joss wasn’t the easy prey she once had been. Garth couldn’t believe what had happened to her in six months; it was wonderful, but it was a bit scary too, and sometimes he thought about the first time he’d noticed her, carrying Miss Bachelor’s shopping, when she was just a scruffy kid. Quite a little kid. Now she was surrounded by friends at school, and seemed to take half of them home each day, including a thin, dark boy called Nat Temple who was hopeless at sport. Nat Temple didn’t seem to be very far from Joss ever, these days. Twice, Garth had noticed, they were wearing identical sweatshirts. However, Nat Temple or no Nat Temple, Garth had to get Joss on her own, somehow, to discuss w
ith her the problem of Bluey and James.

  ‘I have been to see your mother,’ Beatrice said.

  Joss, having finished her exams, was lying on her back on the grass in a grey singlet and voluminous orange shorts and her ubiquitous boots, reading a magazine. She flipped the magazine down.

  ‘Hey!’

  ‘Don’t use such meaningless exclamations,’ Beatrice said. ‘Does that indicate pleasure or mere surprise?’

  ‘Pleasure,’ Joss said, sitting up. ‘She’s great, isn’t she?’

  ‘Yes,’ Beatrice said.

  ‘What did you talk about?’

  ‘You.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Yes. You. I said you were a credit to her. I told her I believed you to be resilient.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Look it up,’ Beatrice said. She had come to see Leonard, but he had been ordered to rest in the afternoon, and was not yet up. ‘Do you,’ Beatrice went on, ‘feel responsible for your mother?’

  Joss rubbed the hair on the back of her head upwards towards the crown. ‘Sort of.’

  ‘Having met her, I think she is one of the rare parents who would not wish you to.’

  ‘She ought to be kept safe,’ Joss said. ‘She needs a bit of looking after.’

  ‘By you?’

  Joss began to unlace one boot, pulling out of the brass eyelets yards and yards of heavy black bootlace. After several minutes, the opening was wide enough to pull out a black-socked foot. Joss took the sock off and looked at her green-white bare foot.

  ‘Yuk.’

  ‘Are you listening to me?’

  ‘I’m thinking,’ Joss said. ‘The thing is, she wants her independence and I want mine.’

  ‘There’s such a thing as compromise.’

  Joss began to inspect between her toes.

  ‘Do not do that in front of me, Josephine!’

  ‘Some things you can’t compromise over,’ Joss said, lying down again and waving her bare foot in the air. She then raised the booted one and held them there together, side by side, for comparison. ‘You can’t compromise about where you live.’

  ‘Can’t you?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘So what do you do?’

  ‘One of you gives in to the other,’ Joss said. She lowered her feet to the ground and lay there quite flat, with her ribs making faint ridges in her singlet.

  ‘Josephine—’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it any more,’ Joss said. ‘You can talk things into not happening.’

  Leonard appeared in the open doorway from the kitchen. He waved his stick. Then he limped over to Joss and stood looking down at her.

  ‘Idle trollop. What do you think you look like?’

  ‘Trendy. Ace trendy.’

  ‘Where’s that spectral youth of yours?’

  ‘Gone to have his ear pierced,’ Joss said, ‘the other one.’

  Leonard lowered himself into the chair beside Beatrice’s. ‘Hugh’s come back to finishing packing. Guess what he brought me. A bottle of brandy. A litre! A whole sodding litre!’

  Joss rolled over. ‘What’ve I got?’

  ‘Greedy little bleeder. How should I know? He and James are planning a valedictory pint. Sentimental rubbish. Makes you sick, doesn’t it?’

  ‘No,’ Beatrice said, ‘it makes me content. I am not in the least ashamed to enjoy a happy ending.’

  Joss began tearing up little clumps of grass. ‘Me neither,’ she said.

  Garth finally cornered Joss by ambushing her on her way to school.

  ‘Hi,’ she said flatly, as if he did it every morning.

  ‘I need to talk to you,’ Garth said. ‘I’ve been trying to get you alone for days, just to talk to you.’

  Joss was chewing gum. She said, still chewing, ‘Talk, then.’

  Garth hesitated. They had about four minutes before they reached the bus stop and got inundated by Angie and Emma and Nat and Pete and Trudy and all that lot, which left him no time for a gentle run-up to his central point. He just had to lope along beside her and say it straight out.

  ‘It’s my mother. It’s about my mother and James.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Joss said, ‘I know.’ She stepped sideways for a second and spat her gum accurately into the gutter.

  ‘I’m worried, Joss. I’m real worried. I mean, my mother’s married and—’

  ‘You don’t have to worry,’ Joss said.

  ‘I don’t? But they go places together, I mean, they’ll be seen, they’ll do things—’

  ‘Not for long,’ Joss said. She turned and gave him a brief, happy smile. ‘Not for long, they won’t, because something’s going to happen, something to stop it.’

  Eighteen

  Hugh and James sat at a small table on the pavement outside the King’s Arms. As it was after the end of the university term, the pub had more tourists in it than students and, in consequence, a less energetic atmosphere. They were both drinking bitter, which they had now drunk together for over forty years.

  Hugh had told James he’d been a lifeline and James had said that the feeling was mutual.

  ‘I’m horrified at how close I got to thinking I could easily lose a wife and children—’

  ‘In a manner of speaking,’ James said, ‘I’ve lost a wife. And I seem, in another manner, to have gained a daughter.’

  ‘There’s a self-sufficiency about you, James.’

  ‘Is there?’

  ‘It’s what draws us all like magnets. We think you’ve got the secret, the elixir, so we think if we come and live right next to you we’ll somehow learn how you do it.’

  James took a swallow of beer. ‘When Kate first left, I thought I’d die. I wanted to.’

  ‘Why the hell didn’t you say?’

  ‘The only person there was any point saying it to was Kate. Nobody else could have helped.’

  ‘And now?’

  James raised his head and looked past Hugh, towards the Sheldonian Theatre, against whose railings a group of French schoolchildren were trying to pile themselves into a pyramid, for a photograph.

  ‘Things change,’ James said. ‘It’s part of the healing process, I suppose. You wrench your feelings about to try and heal yourself, and then you alarm yourself by finding that, at least in part, you’ve succeeded.’

  ‘You mean you can train yourself out of loving someone.’

  ‘I mean,’ James said, ‘that the agony of loving more than you are loved can abate if the source of its nourishment is quite cut off. To persist deliberately in loving without return seems to me selfish and self-indulgent. If someone you love tells you, in so many words, that you injure them by insisting on going on loving them, isn’t it purely loving, in the most generous sense, to try and curb yourself? And then, are you to blame if, to some degree at least, the curbing works?’

  Hugh leaned forward. ‘I want to be sure, for my own peace of mind, that you’re OK. You look OK—’

  ‘I am,’ James said. ‘Sometimes I think it’s very odd that I should ever feel happy, and of course there are many times when I don’t but fundamentally I—’ he stopped. He glanced at Hugh. ‘Perhaps my self-sufficiency is really just detachment, that male sort of detachment that makes women so wild.’

  ‘Women!’

  They smiled at each other. Then they pushed their chairs back, grating them on the pavement, and got up and picked up their jackets, and sauntered away together down the Broad, to where Hugh had parked his car.

  A young woman at the next pavement table watched them. ‘See those two?’

  Her companion took off her dark glasses and peered.

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘I’ve been watching them and it was really weird, the way they were talking. Like two women. But you know, I don’t think they were gay. Isn’t it odd? I really don’t think they were.’

  Her companion put her glasses back. ‘Too old, I shouldn’t wonder,’ she said.

  When Kate went round to see Beatrice, she took a slim sheath
of deep-blue iris, and a packet of shortbread. Beatrice put the iris into a brown-glazed jug, the kind Kate remembered her mother using for making custard.

  ‘The last flowers I was given,’ Beatrice said, ‘were also blue. James gave them to me, three hyacinth, growing in a pot.’

  ‘Yes,’ Kate said, ‘I remember.’ She sat in one of Beatrice’s unwelcoming chairs and Cat sat on the rug at her feet and surveyed her, and weighed up the chances of being rejected if he sprang on to her knee.

  ‘All your Marys,’ Kate said, looking round. Cat sprang. ‘Ow,’ Kate said.

  ‘Throw him off,’ Beatrice said. ‘I am afraid he is overindulged.’

  ‘I like him. He just surprised me.’

  Beatrice was making tea with water from the electric kettle she had brought up from the kitchen for the purpose. ‘He is a professional surpriser. He devotes much thought and energy to surprising my sister-in-law, but I fear,’ Beatrice smiled into the teapot, ‘that those surprises are deliberately malevolent.’

  ‘Joss told me. Joss told me that you and your sister-in-law don’t get on—’

  ‘Ah,’ said Beatrice, stirring the tea, ‘ah, but what I am sure she didn’t tell you was that we are sustained by our little feud. She has the power of a superior financial position and I have the power of a superior intellect combined with Cat. We are really very well matched.’ She came and sat down opposite Kate. ‘I am pleased to say that I can hardly see a bruise left on you.’

  Kate touched her face. As if in sympathy, Cat put up a broad paw and touched it too.

  ‘Oh, how sweet!’

  ‘Not sweet, I’m afraid,’ Beatrice said. ‘His charm is always calculated.’

  ‘I wanted to show you something,’ Kate said. She stooped over Cat to her bag, which she had left on the floor by her feet, and took out of it a folded newspaper cutting. She held it out to Beatrice.

  ‘St Edmund’s is advertising for an under-matron. For the junior house. It’s residential.’

  Beatrice took the cutting and opened it out, and read it.

  ‘I’d like to be with children,’ Kate said, ‘and I’d have the school holidays free. It’s not at all well paid, but I’ve never had a well-paid job in my life, so that’s no obstacle. And I’m the age they’re looking for.’ She hesitated. ‘I wonder – I wondered if you would help me with a letter of application and – and if you would write a reference for me—’