Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection

by Rosie Thomas

  And when Julia did reappear they were waiting at the front door for her. The boy had come to see her to the gate, and Vernon marched out to confront him. Julia never knew what he said to him, because Betty dragged her indoors. Vernon came in a moment later and locked and bolted the door as if he was shutting out evil itself.

  Even as she described it to Jessie, Julia could smell the wet privet outside the window and feel the soft stinging of her mouth after the boy’s kisses in the cinema. She could still taste the shame, too, in the back of her throat like nausea. She was too ashamed even to look at the boy the next time they met. It was a long time afterwards, because Betty and Vernon had made her stay in for a month, and he never spoke to her again.

  Jessie sighed and shifted her bulk in the chair. If Julia had expected Jessie to deplore her parents with her, Jessie refused to do anything of the kind.

  ‘It’s a shame, but there’s plenty of boys coming your way, duck, and kisses as well. Don’t tell me you don’t know that. It sounds to me as if your mum and dad were trying to do their best for you, that’s all, in their own way.’

  ‘What would you have done, Jessie?’

  She laughed. ‘Asked the boy in first, so’s I could have a good look at him. And smacked your backside for lying to me, as soon as I got a chance.’

  Mattie talked about her home too. Jessie soon knew all about Ricky and Sam, and Marilyn and Phil, and all their particular talents, and the funny things that they had done as babies and little children.

  It was the things that Mattie left out that made Jessie’s little dark eyes peer shrewdly at her.

  ‘What about your ma?’

  ‘I told you. She died, three years ago.’

  ‘Miss her still?’

  ‘Yes. No. I don’t know. She never said very much, Mum didn’t. I know she loved us all, but she was ill a lot, for a long time, almost all the time I can remember. We got used to managing, Rozzie and me.’

  ‘And your dad?’

  ‘He’s all right.’

  Mattie looked down, or away and out of the window, or got up on some pretext and left the room. Jessie didn’t ask that particular question more than two or three times. If Mattie didn’t want to talk about her father, then that was her own business. When Mattie came back into the room the last time, Jessie startled her with a sudden enveloping hug.

  ‘There’s my girl,’ she murmured, and Mattie smiled again.

  Jessie loved physical warmth, and she was demonstrative in her affection. Julia was surprised by her weighty arms around her shoulders, and the relish of her smacking, vodka-wet kisses on her cheek. It was more surprising because neither Betty nor Vernon ever touched her, nor each other, seemingly.

  ‘Oh, I like a bit of a cuddle,’ Jessie beamed. ‘And Felix never lets me have one these days. He used to be such a lovely, affectionate little boy, but he’s that touchy about himself nowadays.’

  It was Felix, oddly, who the girls found the more difficult to live with in those early days.

  On one of the very first evenings, they found him standing at the door of their room looking in at the mess. The floor and the beds were strewn with tangled clothes and make-up and crumpled papers and discarded shoes.

  ‘Do you always live like this?’ he asked, raising one black eyebrow.

  Mattie had muddled through in domestic chaos all her life, and Julia copied it as part of her rebellion against Betty.

  ‘Always,’ they chorused.

  ‘You don’t here,’ Felix said coldly. He watched as they sheepishly picked up their belongings and folded them away, and when he was satisfied he said, ‘The bathroom’s full of dripping stockings and things.’

  ‘Knickers and bras, you mean?’ Mattie tried to tease him.

  ‘I know what they are, thank you. Just don’t leave them slopping everywhere.’

  They tried to make a joke between themselves about his old-maidishness but for some reason it didn’t amuse either of them particularly. The found themselves trying to be tidier, in order to please him.

  Julia found it more confusing than Mattie did. Part of her resented Felix’s authority, but she submitted to it just the same. She wanted to challenge him, but she didn’t quite know how to do it. She found herself watching him covertly, admiring the way that he looked and dressed, trying to adopt some of his style for herself. She would stand in the kitchen doorway when he was cooking, looking at the way his hands moved amongst the pots and pans.

  ‘I wish I could do that,’ she said. Felix put down his boning knife and looked at her.

  ‘Why shouldn’t you be able to do it?’

  He made room for her at the scrubbed worktop and she tried to copy him, but her fingers felt thick and stiff and the meat slithered awkwardly in her fist.

  ‘No. It’s like this,’ he said, and put his hand over hers. The knife moved, neatly severing the lean meat from the fat and glistening connective tissue. Felix’s skin was tawny against Julia’s whiteness, but his touch was light and dry, deliberately without significance.

  Mattie and Julia speculated about him in private.

  ‘Do you think he’s queer?’ Julia asked. They could usually divide men up between them. Most of them went for Mattie, with her seemingly uninhibited voluptuousness, but Julia had her share of admirers too. But Felix was mysterious, fastidious, uninterested in their messy femininity.

  Mattie considered. They weren’t sure, either of them, that they had ever seen a real homosexual.

  ‘No. He can’t be, can he? They’re all like this.’ Mattie stood with one hand on her hip, the other dangling limply. Her face puckered up into a faint simper and Julia laughed.

  ‘Felix isn’t one, then.’

  One afternoon he found them lolling on Mattie’s bed reading. Mattie had the Stage folded carefully so that she could read every column, and Julia, with her head propped on one hand, was reading Gone With The Wind. She went through phases of burying herself in books, creating her own temporary oblivion inside an imaginary world.

  Felix took out his sketch pad and drew them.

  When he had finished he let them look at the pencil sketch.

  There was a moment’s silence as they looked at themselves as Felix saw them. Mattie was all loose, blowsy curves, her bare thigh showing between the flaps of her dressing gown, her hair rolling over her shoulders. Beside her Julia was angular, darkfaced and scowling.

  ‘You haven’t made us look very pretty,’ Julia said at last.

  ‘Is that what you want to be? Pretty?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Well, you aren’t. You’ve got more than that, both of you. You’ve got style, although you don’t know how to use it yet.’

  They forgot their momentary pique and scrambled at him. Mattie locked her arms around him, affectionate, just as she would have been with Ricky or Sam. Julia hung back, only a little.

  ‘Show us, then, if you’re so clever.’

  ‘I might.’

  Julia retrieved the drawing and smoothed the creases out of it. She pinned it carefully over the tiny black cast-iron fire grate in their bedroom.

  That night, the three of them went back to the Rocket Club. Before they went out the girls presented themselves for Felix’s approval.

  ‘Too much stuff on your faces, as usual,’ was his verdict. So they rubbed the make-up off again and, giggling, let him reapply it. Julia kept her eyes turned down as he worked on her face, inches away.

  When he had finished they stared at the result in the bathroom mirror.

  ‘Naked. As though we’ve just got up,’ Mattie declared.

  In fact they just looked younger, and less knowing. As they really were, Felix thought, instead of how they wanted to be.

  ‘What about the clothes, then?’

  They had picked through their outfits with care, but Felix only glanced at them and shrugged.

  ‘You should buy one good, simple thing instead of five shoddy ones. That’ll take time.’

  ‘That’s stupi
d. Cheaper things mean you have more to wear,’ Mattie protested. But Julia suddenly saw the point. Felix himself owned hardly any clothes. He had just two jerseys, one black and one navy-blue, but they were both cashmere. His trousers and jacket were well cut, on fashionable but subdued lines, and his shoes were expensive, glossy Italian slip-ons. He kept them well polished, and he put them away with shoe trees in them when he took them off, instead of letting them lie where they fell on the floor. Julia thought Felix always looked wonderful, and she recognised the contrast with her own and Mattie’s reckless scruffiness.

  That was the beginning of Julia’s longing for exquisite, expensive, unattainable luxuries.

  ‘Enjoy yourselves,’ Julia called out. ‘My God, I wish I had my time over again.’

  They headed for the Rocket, three abreast, with their arms linked.

  The cellar welcomed them like a second home. The girls abandoned themselves to the music, to the frenetic jiving, to the packed mass of bodies and the overpowering heat. Felix held himself apart for a moment longer. He had spent so many solitary evenings in places like this that it was disorientating, for an instant, to find himself possessed by Mattie and Julia. Yet in the past, sometimes, he had longed for company on his lonely expeditions.

  He had company now, he told himself, whether he liked it or not. He sometimes resented the invasion that these girls had made into his home, and their noisy, shrill, intrusive presence in the tidy flat. But they had done more for Jessie in a matter of days than he had been able to do himself in a year. He was grateful for that. And almost in spite of himself he liked them for themselves too, consolidating the way that he had been drawn to them from the beginning.

  ‘Come on, don’t stand there,’ Mattie ordered him. ‘Dance with me.’

  Felix took hold of her, feeling the peculiar softness of her flesh under his fingers. He was glad that it was Mattie first. She was completely foreign to him, the whole scented spread of her, and in a way that was easy for him to deal with. He could treat her like Jessie, with affection that kept her at a physical distance, even in the tiny flat.

  It was Julia who disturbed him.

  He watched her narrow hips as she went up the stairs ahead of him, and he found himself wanting to reach out and touch the knobs of her spine when she bent her head and exposed the nape of her neck.

  Felix had no idea what girls expected or understood, and he was incapable of making the movement that would bring his fingertips to rest on those fragile bones. His uncertainty made him try harder to be impersonal, to keep the space between them cool and clear and neutral.

  Felix knew that he was a coward.

  Across the room, with a flickering candle throwing odd shadows upwards into the hollows of his face, Julia saw Johnny Flowers. He was wearing a black leather jacket over a white vest, and he saw her at the same instant. He shouldered his way across to her.

  ‘Like I said, I’m always around.’

  ‘I’ll still have to owe you your pound. I haven’t got it.’

  Julia and Mattie spent everything they earned, instantly. Everything that was left over from the much-needed rent went on clothes.

  Johnny Flowers grinned. ‘Dance with me and we’ll call it quits.

  The next afternoon was Mattie’s first half-day. She had had to wait her turn for a weekday afternoon off, and it had seemed a long time coming. Now it had arrived, she knew where she must go.

  Without telling Jessie and Felix, without mentioning it even to Julia, she made her way back on the tube to Liverpool Street station. At the clerk’s little glass porthole she bought a ticket, a day return. She tore the ticket in half at once and she put the return portion in the pocket of her blouse, next to her heart, like a talisman. At the same time she smiled, privately and bitterly. It wasn’t so easy to escape that a small oblong of green pasteboard could achieve it for her.

  The estate, lying baldly under a grey sky, was exactly the same. Mattie walked the familiar route, trying to pretend that her breath was coming easily instead of in panicky gasps.

  The house, when she came to it, looked the same too. The windows were closed and the stringy curtains were drawn, but that was nothing unusual. No one had remembered to open them, Mattie thought. Then she opened the front door. She smelt stale air and sour milk, and listened to the oppressive silence.

  A different fear swelled up, bigger, threatening to choke her.

  Ted wasn’t here.

  None of them was here. Where were the children, and what had he done to them?

  She half turned, not knowing whether she was going to stumble on into the house or turn and run, and then she heard a sound. It was completely familiar, a tinny rattle and then a plop. It was a record, falling from the stack poised over the turntable of Ricky’s prized Dansette.

  ‘Ricky!’

  A clatter obliterated the first tinny bars of music, and Ricky appeared at the boys’ bedroom door.

  ‘Mat?’

  He hurtled down the stairs, a skinny boy of fifteen with Mattie’s hair, brutally cut so that it stood up in tufts all over his head.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she demanded.

  He hugged her and they clung together, briefly, while Mattie stared fiercely at him.

  ‘’Course. Where’ve you been?’

  Relief was making Mattie shake. ‘Where is he?’

  Ricky knew what she meant, of course. ‘He’s out. He’s working, unloading crates at the Works. What are you shivering for?’

  ‘Nothing. It’s all right. Come on, let’s have some coffee.’

  ‘Bit of a mess in there,’ Ricky warned her.

  The kitchen was a morass of dirty pans, plates and food. The smell of sour milk was almost overpowering.

  ‘Ricky …’

  ‘I know. Look, it doesn’t matter. Me and Sam’ll get around to it. It doesn’t bother us, you know.’

  It didn’t, Mattie thought. And she had left them. So she had no right to come back and fuss about details. She cleared a space and filled the kettle, rinsing out two cups from the filthy stack. There was no fresh milk so they drank their coffee black, sitting out on the back step and looking across the hummocks of dandelions to the backs of the next row of houses. Ricky told her what had happened. A woman had come from the Council, a bossy woman with papers. Ted had refused to see her at first, telling Ricky and Sam to say that he was out, but she had come back, and then she had simply sat down to wait for him. She had looked at the house, and she had talked to Marilyn and Phil.

  In the end Ted had appeared. Ricky and the others had been sent out of the room, but they had heard Ted shouting, and then mumbling. The woman had gone at last, and Ted had come to find them.

  ‘He looked,’ Ricky said, groping for the words, ‘he looked like Phil does when someone’s pinched her sweets, and then yelled at her for creating.’

  Mattie knew that look of her father’s. Unwieldy anger, too big for him, subsiding quickly into cringing weakness. She had seen it that last time, here in the kitchen, with the kettle whistling. Only when he looked at Mattie there was something else, too. That hot, anxious longing. Mattie wrapped her fingers round her coffee cup to stop the shudder.

  The woman from the Council had announced to Ted that there was evidence of neglect. Either the young ones must go to live with a relative, in more suitable circumstances, or a place would be found for them in a council home.

  Ricky relayed the details with matter-of-fact calmness. He had worked out a way of living for himself, Mattie understood. Ricky would be all right, and Sam too. Sam was the family survivor, happy so long as he could play football on the scuffed fields beyond the estate. The younger ones, the girls, were living with Rozzie.

  ‘They’re okay,’ Ricky said. ‘It’s better than here.’

  ‘I know that,’ Mattie said heavily.

  ‘The council woman asked about you. Dad said you’d done a runner. He didn’t know where to, and didn’t care either.’

  Mattie stood up quickly and put he
r cup with the rest of the dirty dishes. It seemed a pointless gesture to bother to wash it out.

  ‘I’m going to Rozzie’s to see them. Walk round there with me?’

  Rozzie lived a mile away, further into the estate. They walked together, past the effortful gardens bright with zinnias and lobelia, and the rows of windows guarded by net curtains. Rozzie’s house was almost identical to the one they had just left, but better kept. The window frames and the door were painted maroon and there were marigolds growing under the windows.

  Rozzie opened the door to them. Her flowered nylon housecoat hardly buttoned up over her stomach. She was eight months’ pregnant and her two-year-old son, runny-nosed, peered out from the shelter of her skirt. She didn’t smile.

  ‘So you’re back, then?’

  Mattie nodded. Her sister had every right to be sullen, and Mattie had been expecting it. Rozzie was nineteen, and she had had to marry her car mechanic boyfriend two and a half years ago. The enchantment with one another had worn off almost before the wedding, and now they were confined here together with their baby. Then, suddenly, they had found themselves responsible for Rozzie’s little sisters, as well. ‘Just to see that you’re all right.’ Mattie added awkwardly, ‘And to say I’m sorry.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  There was a silence, and then Rozzie jerked her head. ‘Well, you’d better come in. Phil? Marilyn? Mat’s here.’

  They had been in the garden at the back, and they came pelting through to leap on to Mattie. She hugged them fiercely, pulling them close and burying her face against them.

  They were well, and they looked happy enough. That was something.

  For half an hour, they took all of Mattie’s attention. Then suddenly they were off, taking the little boy and Ricky with them. Mattie and Rozzie sat in the kitchen, drinking more watery coffee. The house was bleak and under-furnished, but it was clean. Mattie suddenly thought of Felix’s flat, with its simple, definite style and the bright touches of pottery and exotic Soho vegetables. She had got away, after all, and Rozzie hadn’t. Guilt dropped around her, weighty and sour with familiarity.