by Rosie Thomas
‘There’s beer or vodka,’ he announced. The two girls instinctively looked at Jessie for guidance, and Felix hid his smile.
‘You’d better take vodka,’ Jessie ordered. ‘That beer Felix drinks tastes like piss. Dress it up with some orange for them, Felix, there’s a love.’ Felix poured the drinks while Jessie watched impatiently, and then she raised her glass. ‘Here’s to freedom.’
It was such an incongruous toast, coming from this fat, ungainly old woman wedged in her rooftop room, and yet so apt for them, that the girls just gaped at her. Jessie broke into wheezy chuckles. ‘That’s what you think you want, isn’t it? Come on. I hate drinking alone.’
So Mattie and Julia sipped at their sweet, oily-orange drinks and Jessie downed her neat vodka in a gulp. She held out her empty glass. ‘Come on, Felix, since we’re all here. Let’s have a party.’
As soon as she had said the word, the four of them did become a party. The Sunday morning sun shone in through the windows and danced on the polished frames and the glass faces of the photographs, and Mattie and Julia felt the vodka warming their empty stomachs and loosening their limbs and tongues. Felix was their rescuer and their friend, and although they didn’t know yet what Jessie would mean to them, they felt the warmth of her. After the Embankment, and what had happened before and since, that warmth was doubly welcome.
Julia stood up and wandered round the room, peering at the faces pinned in their photograph frames.
‘Who are they all?’ she murmured. ‘You’ve got hundreds and hundreds of friends. More people than I’ve ever even met.’
She couldn’t have struck a better note. Jessie leaned back in her chair and laced her fingers across her front.
‘Used to have, dear, used to have. Dead, now, most of them. The rest are finished, like me. But we had some good times in our day, we did. Times like you wouldn’t believe. See that picture there, the one you’re looking at? That’s Jocky Gordon with his arm round me, the boxer. I met them all, in my line of business. All of ’em. You’d be surprised, some of the things I’ve seen.’
‘Tell us about it,’ Mattie begged her.
Jessie beamed, and settled more comfortably in her seat.
Still smiling, Felix slipped out into the kitchen. It was on the shaded side of the house, cool and neat and inviting. He could make something to eat, now that he had seen that Jessie was happy.
He opened the cupboard door, his movements economical in the confined space. He had planned to finish the leftovers of a knuckle of ham with Jessie, but that wouldn’t stretch to four. He would make a salad and put the ham into omelettes, instead. Felix unwrapped the lettuce and picked the leaves over carefully. He could hear laughter from Jessie’s room. He was ready to make the omelettes when he felt eyes on his back, and turned round to see Julia leaning against the open door. He gestured uncertainly, not knowing how long she had been watching him.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said softly. ‘I didn’t mean to startle you. I came to say thanks.’
They listened for a second to a third person’s voice in Jessie’s room, and then they realised that it was Mattie, mimicking somebody. Mattie was a wonderful mimic, and Jessie’s choking laugh rose too.
‘I should thank you, for listening to Mum,’ Felix said. ‘She doesn’t have many people to tell her stories to.’
He was moving around the kitchen again, breaking eggs into a blue pottery bowl. The yolks lay in it, a bright yellow cluster.
‘I like her,’ Julia said simply. She was thinking how nice this kitchen was, with its bare wooden tops and white walls. No fuss, and covers, and labels, like there was at home. Felix opened the window. In the angle of the roofs outside stood four clay flowerpots. He picked a handful of parsley and some chives from them, and a few sprigs of thyme. Julia watched as he chopped the herbs and melted a knob of butter in an old copper pan.
‘You’re clever,’ she said. ‘I wish I could do that.’
‘Can’t you cook?’ Felix asked, surprised. He had assumed it was something all girls did, automatically. It was unusual for boys to enjoy it, that was all.
‘My mother tried to teach me,’ Julia said, without enthusiasm. Betty made sponge cakes, and thin stews or flaccid pies, and looked forward to getting cleared up afterwards. There had been nothing as simple and obvious and inviting as the golden puff that materialised in Felix’s copper pan.
‘Lay the table, Julia, will you?’
It was the first time that he had called her by her name, and they smiled shyly at each other. Julia bent her head abruptly to pick the knives and forks out of a wicker tray.
Felix bent down too, and took a dark red bottle from its resting place under the sink. ‘Let’s drink this,’ he said. ‘Mum will stick to her vodka, so the three of us can share it.’
It was a wonderful, convivial lunch.
Felix pulled out the flaps of the table and drew it into the sunny place in the window. He spread a festive white cloth over the pocked surface. Jessie sat queenly at the head of the table, with Mattie and Julia on either side.
They ate ravenously, while Jessie talked, capping and recapping her own stories. She was too engrossed even to drink more than a few tots from the glass beside her hand. The girls had never tasted wine before, and it made them talkative too. The chatter and laugher rose in the sunny room, with Felix’s quiet voice prompting them all.
At last, when they had eaten all the omelette and wiped the last of the oily dressing out of the salad bowl, and Julia and Mattie had demolished the remains of a chocolate cake, Jessie tinkled her fork against her glass.
‘I’ve thought of another toast,’ she declared. ‘A more important one.’
Felix hastily drained the last of the Beaujolais into the three wine glasses and filled Jessie’s to the brim with vodka. She lifted it without looking at it, not spilling even a drop.
‘To friendship.’
They echoed her, ‘To friendship,’ and drank again.
‘And I don’t imagine,’ Jessie went on, with feigned annoyance, ‘that having proposed that, I’m going to be able to get rid of you quite so easily. Am I?’
The girls waited, not looking anywhere.
‘So I suppose you’d better stay on here. Just till you find your own place, mind. Till then, and not a minute longer.’
She shot a glance around the table, to Felix, to Julia and Mattie, and back again to Felix.
‘Not a minute longer,’ he repeated, softly. Whatever Jessie was plotting, if it made her happier, that was enough.
‘Good,’ she said, with firm satisfaction.
Suddenly they were laughing again, the four of them, drawn even closer around the table under the window.
Three
On Monday morning, on their way to work, Mattie and Julia found a public telephone box and squeezed into it together. They found the number they wanted, at last, through the operator.
‘Do you want me to talk to them?’ Julia asked, but Mattie shook her head.
‘I should do it.’
She dialled their local council offices and she explained to the official at the other end that she was ringing anonymously, and she had something very important to say. Speaking very slowly and carefully she gave her father’s name and address, and the names and ages of her brothers and sisters.
‘They aren’t safe with him,’ she said clearly. ‘I know they aren’t. Please will you send someone to see them? There’s no one left to look after them now.’
Julia heard the man’s voice crackle at the end of the line as he tried to make Mattie give him some more information.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I can’t say any more.’
And then she replaced the receiver with a click that made the bell jingle faintly in its casing. She pushed open the heavy door of the kiosk and the girls stepped out into the street. Mattie was shivering.
‘I’ve abandoned them, haven’t I?’ she said bitterly. ‘I feel so bad. Like a traitor.’
‘You aren’
t a traitor.’ Julia tried to soothe her.
‘I shouldn’t have left them. Phil’s only seven. What does she know? But I couldn’t stay in that house with him, could I? If he did it again …’
My fault, Mattie began thinking, as she had done a thousand times before. It must have been my fault, some of it. But if I went back, and he did it again … there was the bread knife, lying beside the waxed wrapper of the sliced loaf. She heard a scream – her own or her father’s? – and saw the blood … Mattie shuddered, and felt Julia’s hand on her arm. Warm and friendly, that was all, not twisting or cajoling.
‘Mattie, it’s all right.’
‘Is it?’
She had to leave. After the vision of violence she thought of Ted with a queasy mixture of pity and revulsion and, still, a kind of love. She couldn’t have stayed. Julia was right, of course.
Julia said, ‘You’ve done what you can for now. And you have done, ever since your mum died. It’s Rozzie’s turn to take some of the responsibility now.’ When Mattie didn’t answer she added, ‘You can’t be everything to everyone.’
Mattie stopped shivering, and her shoulders dropped.
‘No, I suppose I can’t. I didn’t even know I was trying to. I wish I saw things as clearly as you do. I wish I saw Ted clearly.’ It was the first time since they had left home that Mattie had spoken his name. As if it was a physical link with him, she snapped the words off and she didn’t talk about him again. Mattie’s face was white and taut under the heavy mass of hair.
Julia wanted to say something else, to show her that she understood, but she couldn’t because she couldn’t even imagine what Ted Banner must have been like. The gulf between what had happened to Mattie and Vernon’s rigid correctness was too wide. She had the sense that she had failed Mattie, and she was reduced to mumbling, ‘It’ll be all right. I know it will.’
Mattie’s expression didn’t change, but in a different, warmer voice she said, ‘We’d better go to work, hadn’t we? Sell some shoes.’
‘Type some accounts.’
Make our way, Julia thought, with a touch of wryness. That’s what we’ve come for, isn’t it?
‘See you later, at home.’
The word sprang hearteningly between them as they waved goodbye. Felix, and Jessie, and the rooftop flat stood between them and the Embankment now, and that was a good beginning. Julia saw Mattie’s blonde curls swallowed up by the throngs of people heading for work, and she turned round herself, more cheerfully, and began to walk briskly to the accounts office.
The thoughts of the Sunday they had enjoyed together remained with Julia as she slid into her typist’s chair and started work. They had stayed sitting round the table, talking and laughing, until the vodka was all gone. Jessie had slipped by stages through excited volubility to dignified, precisely enunciated drunkenness, and then into sudden sleep.
The girls liked her more and more. She had told them the story of Desmond Lemoine. ‘He played the sax, dear. In all the big bands, he was. Even better looking than him,’ with a wink at Felix, who was looking out of the window. ‘Not that Felix uses his looks to much advantage.’ She told them about other lovers, too, with an impartial enthusiasm that deeply impressed Mattie and Julia. At home they had cast themselves as the bad girls, although in fact neither of them had ‘gone all the way’, as they described it in whispers. Julia had come close, in an uncomfortable, awkward grapple, with a boy from the technical college who was supposed to look like Dirk Bogarde. It was harder to tell with Mattie. Mattie was the best at sharp, suggestive repartee on the dance floor, but she was reticent about what happened outside, afterwards, even to Julia.
But Jessie’s stories, as the vodka slipped down, gave them an insight into a world they had never even glimpsed before. It was a salty, indoor world of smoky rooms and overflowing glasses and itinerant musicians. It was a world where, it seemed, you could do whatever you liked provided everyone was enjoying it.
While Mattie and Julia sat still, amazed and enchanted, Felix watched with an air of having heard it all before. He didn’t contribute anything, but he seemed perfectly at ease.
‘I’ve had a good life,’ Jessie said at last. A vast yawn stretched her face into a series of overlapping circles. ‘You listen to me, you girls. You make sure you enjoy yourselves. But don’t act stupid, will you?’
Felix’s face was almost hidden in the shadow. Mattie and Julia glanced at each other. And then they saw that Jessie’s head had fallen forwards on her chest. Her breathing deepened and fluttered on the edge of a snore.
Felix stood up, silently, and arranged the cushions behind his mother’s head. He lifted her feet on to a stool and put a blanket over her legs. Julia picked up the bottle, empty, intending to tidy it away. She had noticed how punctiliously Felix had cleared away the plates after their meal.
‘Should she drink all that?’ she asked.
Felix looked at her. ‘No. But I’m not going to dictate to her about it, because it wouldn’t do any good.’
Jessie wasn’t a person to dictate to, of course. They left her asleep and went outside. The three of them walked companionably through the empty Sunday streets, and Felix took them into Regent’s Park. They wandered past the heavy, musky roses in Queen Mary’s Garden, talking about ordinary things, what they did and what they enjoyed and believed in, making the beginnings of friendship, as they had pledged over their meal.
‘Miss Smith?’
Julia’s supervisor was standing in front of her, looking pointedly at her fingers resting idly on the typewriter keys.
‘I’m sorry,’ Julia muttered, and bent to her work again.
She already hated the accounts department. Her typing was good enough in short bursts, but when she had to keep at it for longer it disintegrated. By the end of the day her head and fingers throbbed and she had used a whole bottle of opaque white. The other girls at the rows of desks were the kind Mattie dismissed as ‘pink cardigans’. They did wear cardigans, tidy ones that buttoned up to the neck over their shirtwaister dresses. They wore pink lipstick too, and touches of pale blue eyeshadow, and most of them proudly displayed diamond engagement rings. They stared covertly at Julia in her crumpled black clothes and defiantly flat pumps. Mattie and Julia favoured colourless lips and deadly pale face make-up, and they emphasised their eyes with lashings of black mascara and black eyeliner painted on with an upwards flick at the corners of their eyelids.
Julia stared unsmiling back at the other typists. She knew that she stuck out amongst them, but she was still too young and too awkward to carry her difference off with confidence. She kept mulishly to herself, refusing to acknowledge that she felt lonely and uncomfortable.
It’s only for now, she told herself, over and over again. Until I find, something else. It was not knowing what else, and the suspicion that there might not be anything, that was really frightening.
Mattie wasn’t enjoying her work much more than Julia, but she had the diversion of being able to watch the women who came into the shop all day long. She watched the way they sat, and they way they looked at themselves in the mirrors, and the attitudes they adopted towards herself and the other shopgirls. And Mattie had the consolation of a particular dream. She bought the Stage and pored over the small ads.
Wanted, Huddersfield. With experience. One leading F two M to juv one char. Start immediately.
The terse abbreviations themselves seemed to breathe a world of backstage glamour. Experience was the difficulty.
Before leaving home, Mattie had belonged to an amateur theatrical group that staged twice-yearly productions like Peter Pan and Charley’s Aunt. The group was run by a spinster teacher who called Paris Paree and who disapproved of everything about Mattie. She kept her parts to a minimum, for all Mattie’s enthusiasm. So Mattie had nothing that she could dress up as theatrical experience, even adopting the kind of wishful expanded truth that she and Julia specialised in.
So Mattie bought the Stage and read every word, and went on
dreaming of the day when she could call herself Leading F.
The flat in Manchester Square was an oasis away from work for them both. It was too small, there was nowhere for them to sit in the evenings except with Jessie in her room or on the makeshift beds in their own tiny bedroom. But Mattie and Julia weren’t particularly interested in sitting, and the flat became home in a matter of days. Jessie would wait for the girls to come home from work, and call out as soon as she heard one of them at the door.
‘Come on in here, let’s have a look at you. Tell me what’s going on out there, and pour me a drink while you’re about it.’
Julia and Mattie both acquired a taste for vodka under Jessie’s direction, but there was never enough to spare for them to do them much damage. With their wage packets at the end of the first full week’s work they bought Jessie two bottles, and a pair of the sheerest twelve-denier nylons.
‘What’re you trying to do to me?’ she demanded, pretending to be angry with them. But Jessie had surprisingly slim, pretty ankles. They made her put the stockings on at once and she stretched her feet out narcissistically to admire them.
‘I’ll do your hair for you, if you like,’ Mattie offered.
‘What’s the matter with my hair?’
‘You’ll see, when I’ve done it for you.’
Jessie didn’t just talk about herself, although the girls were fascinated by her stories. She talked to them about themselves, listening with genuine interest and prompting them with questions.
Julia described Betty and Vernon. She told Jessie about the coloured stars that she had innocently stuck on her bedroom walls, and about another time, only two years ago, when she had gone out on her first date. She knew that Betty wouldn’t allow her to go the pictures with a boy. That sort of thing was for much older girls, Betty believed, an awkward but necessary preliminary to being presented with the diamond ring. But the boy who had asked Julia out was much admired by the girls in her class, and by Julia herself. She went, and she told her mother that she was spending the evening with a girl from school. At five minutes past the time Julia had promised to come back, Vernon telephoned the girl’s mother.
