by Rosie Thomas
Fear turned over like a sick lump in John Douglas’s stomach. He was afraid of everything, the entirety of life beyond this circle of light. And the girl’s hair was close to his mouth, a metallic-shining mass of curls. He shuddered, and then he bent his head and buried his face in it.
She stood still, sturdy, holding him up.
‘Come home with me, Mattie,’ he begged her, knowing that he couldn’t bear it if she refused. She was so warm, so full of bloody life.
‘All right.’
It was as simple as that.
They began to walk, zig-zagging, with Mattie’s arm around his waist. He was too heavy for her, too drunk to be controllable. They reached the sea-front and the wind flattened them against the wall. A ball of screwed-up chip papers scudded past their feet.
‘This way,’ John said grandly, and they leaned forward into the salty blast.
He was staying not in digs but in a small hotel at the far end of the front. They stumbled up the steps and Mattie caught a glimpse of a sign in the front window announcing Vacancies. The doors were locked, and John pressed his fist against the bell push, mumbling.
After a very long time a dim light blinked on over their heads. A yawning boy opened the door and gaped at them.
‘Where is the night porter?’ thundered John. ‘Why should my friend and I be kept waiting on the front steps?’
‘I’m sorry . . Mattie began, and then with a flutter of relief she realised that the boy wasn’t interested in anything except getting back to his bed.
He bolted the door behind them and disappeared. John took a key from a row of wooden pigeonholes and held it up for Mattie to see. ‘Number thirteen. Not a difficult one to remember, luckily.’
She followed him in silence. The hotel smelt pungently of air freshner and boiled vegetables, and then they passed the bar and the hoppy stink of beer was momentarily dominant. Mattie thought of the travelling salesmen congregated in there in the empty evenings. Past the bar they negotiated a flight of stairs, and reached John’s room. After several stabs with the key he found the door and opened it. Mattie looked back down the bare hallway, and then she followed John Douglas into room number thirteen. The ceiling light was very high up, a fringed and bobbled shade pendent in a grey, shadowy space. The room seemed full of shiny brown furniture, ranks of unmatching wardrobes and glass-topped dressing tables. The double bed had shiny wooden head- and footboards, and a green candlewick cover. The curtains were faded green velour and the carpet was a third shade of green.
Mattie wondered, Am I going to do this, here?
John Douglas took off his overcoat, and put his hat and scarf on one of the dressing tables.
‘Excuse me a minute,’ he muttered. He went out of the room, and Mattie heard the clank and flush of a lavatory. She stood motionless, still in her thin coat, waiting. John came back and closed the door. He came to her, and with his big hands began to undo her buttons. When he saw her bare shoulders he was breathing heavily, with his mouth open. He touched the scattered golden freckles with his fingers.
Mattie felt nothing, except the cold air of the room on her skin.
With a sudden blundering movement John pushed her backwards on to the bed. He fell on top of her, squashing her with his weight. Experimentally, Mattie reached up and put her arms around his neck. He kissed her face and told her, puzzled, ‘You taste of salt.’
The wind had blown the sea-spray into her face.
He licked her cheek gently. There was tenderness in it, and it touched her. She turned her head to find his mouth, but he had drawn back a little. He was lying with his eyes closed, and she listened to his breathing. It was a moment or two before she realised that he had fallen asleep.
Mattie looked up at the tiny light above them. Even the feeble speck of it seemed to hurt her eyes, and she realised that she was exhausted. Slowly and gently, inching herself sideways, she extricated herself from John Douglas’s heavy limbs. She went across to the bathroom and washed herself in cold water, then crept back into the bedroom. John hadn’t moved. He looked like a big, crestfallen child. Mattie struggled to pull off his trousers and jacket, and he grunted and pitched away from her. Under his clothes he was wearing long underwear, his big hands and feet protruding from the ribbed cuffs of it. She felt hot with her efforts, and with sadness, and with the burgundy fuming in her head.
Mattie half undressed herself and pulled the covers up over both of them. The weight of him in the bed beside her felt strange, but it comforted her. She fell asleep at once.
When she woke up again it was daylight. She frowned at the tall rectangle of light in front of her, and then it resolved itself into a window, with thin sunshine filtering through greyish net curtains. There were green velour curtains framing the net. She remembered, and turned under the bedcovers to look for him.
The bed was empty, although the pillows on the other side were dented and creased. He had been here, then.
Not a dream.
The room was empty too, for all the lowering, shiny furniture. Mattie drew her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. She lay and listened to the sounds of doors opening and closing, distant hoovering, a car passing outside. She was thirsty and her head felt muzzy.
The door opened. John came in and closed it with a gentle click, before he looked and saw that she was awake. He stood at the side of the bed, peering down at her. Then he sat down heavily on his own side. He was wearing a startling, red paisley dressing gown.
‘I’m sorry,’ he offered at last. ‘That wasn’t a very attractive display, was it? I don’t often drink like that, although it may surprise you to hear it. Can’t afford it, for one thing. And when I did I used to be able to hold it. But I’m an old man now. Failing in every direction.’
Mattie broke into his monologue. ‘Fifty-four isn’t old. Not if you don’t let it be.’
She remembered how he had looked last night, in his underclothes. She felt pain for both of them, but John laughed. He was snorting a little, running his fingers through his hair so that it lay back flat, like a badger’s. He stood up again and walked restlessly around the room, then stopped at the window to stare through the mist of grey net towards the sea.
In a low voice he asked her, ‘Do you want to try again?’
Mattie tried to blot out the room and its depressing furnishings, and the dusty, heavy green folds of fabric shrouding them.
The room didn’t matter. They were here, that was all.
She was troubled more by the sense that nothing else mattered, either. Whether John Douglas made love to her against this shiny wooden headboard, or not. It wouldn’t make any difference. It wouldn’t be a cataclysmic moment, not like in the stories. Except that there had been that moment of tenderness last night. That stayed with her, like warmth and wetness still on her cheek.
Afterwards she had undressed him and he had been vulnerable.
In the restaurant’s sickly warmth, with the wine in her head, she had wanted to come here to his bedroom. This morning she only knew that she liked John Douglas, rumpled and hung-over in his cherry-coloured dressing gown. Liking unclouded by longing or lust.
Mattie thought fleetingly of Julia’s aviator. With his broad back and strong arms and blond head, his potency like a spell cast over Julia. Mattie’s mouth curved. She didn’t long for Josh Flood either.
What difference, then?
Without speaking she lifted her bare arm from the musty shelter of the blankets and held it out to him.
He came to her quickly, pulling at the paisley cloth. He was naked underneath it and Mattie saw white corded flesh and thickly matted grey hair. Then he was beside her, on top of her, his tongue in her hair and in her ears and in her mouth. He pulled at the layer of clothes she had slept in and she helped him where she could, wriggling awkwardly beneath him. He hoisted himself up so that he could see her.
‘Oh God, you’ve got a beautiful body.’
He seized her breasts, kneading and squeezing and
bumping them, and then taking them in his mouth with the nipples between his teeth. Mattie lay perfectly still and let him do what he wanted to her. For a moment everything seemed simple. He just does it, she thought with relief. But it wasn’t enough.
‘Hold me,’ he ordered her. He fixed her fist over himself. She felt thin, shiny skin stretched perilously tight over hard flesh. Mattie moved her hand tentatively up and down, wanting to do it right for him. He hissed hotly in her ear, ‘Hold it tighter. And do it hard, like this.’ His hand pumped with hers, big, long strokes that he thrust into.
Is that right? she wanted to ask. Is that right?
His fingers tweaked at her, rubbing and probing. ‘You like, that don’t you?’
‘Yes.’ Her breath came in a suffocating gasp, and she felt him smile.
‘Good. Yes. There’s nothing bloody like it.’
Mattie felt nothing. She had never felt anything with the boys outside the dance halls, or in the back row of the cinema, either.
Suddenly John pulled the pillows down from behind their heads. He thrust them under Mattie’s hips, lifting her into the air. She felt stripped and exposed and tried to roll aside but he bent his head over her, probing with his tongue. Mattie tried to respond. She screwed her eyes up so tightly that stars exploded behind her eyelids. John leaned over the side of the bed and fumbled in his dressing gown pocket. He unrolled the rubber over himself and balanced over her on all fours.
You can do what you want, Mattie repeated childishly inside her starry head. I don’t mind. You can do what you want.
He pushed her legs so far apart that the tendons strained in her groin. Then he took hold of himself with his fist and guided it into her. He did it quite gently, but Mattie felt the resistance inside her, and the pressure of him jabbing in and down. There was a sharp tear and she yelled out, an aggrieved shout of pain.
John held himself still.
‘Jesus Christ. Is this your first time?’
She nodded blindly. ‘I’m sorry.’
He took her face in his hands and kissed it, rubbing her mouth with his lips.
‘You should have told me, you bloody silly girl. Oh, Mattie.’
His gentleness salved her a little, but he seemed to forget it quite quickly. He began to saw up and down inside her, all the way in and then almost out again. Mattie felt nothing. The soft, melting, warm-watery sensations that her father gave her when they were alone in the house together were all that Mattie knew. And she had buried those feelings so deeply and defensively that it would take more than John Douglas to disinter them.
It seemed to go on for a long time. The weight of him ground against her hip-bones, and her soft membranes felt bruised and assaulted. Mattie concentrated on his thick white shoulders sheeny with sweat, on the creases in his neck, and the tufts of grey hair that sprouted from his ears.
He began to move faster, his breath coming in hoarse gasps. He went rigid and shouted out, ‘Jesus,’ and then gave a long, wailing cry. Mattie was afraid for him, and then she realised that it was all over. She held his head between her hands, supporting him until he stopped thrashing over her.
Milky silence folded over the room and they lay limply in the knotted blankets.
There, Mattie thought. I was right it didn’t matter.
She thought that John had fallen asleep again, but he lifted his head to look at her. ‘I wish you’d told me that you were a virgin.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she whispered.
His face looked different, she noticed. Softer, perhaps.
‘You made me very happy, this morning, Mattie Banner,’ John said.
She smiled then, a quick flickering smile, but she felt warmer inside.
‘Good,’ Mattie said.
They lay comfortably together, listening to the world moving outside. It was nice, Mattie thought, to share a moment like this. Private, just to themselves. John reached for his cigarettes and lit one for each of them, fitting Mattie’s between her fingers for her. She inhaled deeply, knowingly. She felt wiser, almost happy.
‘John?’ she asked suddenly.
‘Mm?’
‘Did you go to bed with Jennifer Edge?’
A laugh rumbled in his chest, under her ear. ‘Yes. Everyone did, it was more or less obligatory. I’m not sure about Doris and Ada.’ Mattie laughed too, but the little glow of warmth faded. She could cope with his Burford wife. But Jennifer Edge, whom she had never seen and cared nothing about, she made a difference. She put Mattie herself into perspective. One in a line. It probably went with the job.
She tried to banter. ‘What? Lenny, too?’
‘Almost certainly.’
It was hard to laugh. Mattie saw the room again. Green and brown, hideous in the livid winter daylight. She butted out her cigarette in the tin ashtray beside the bed.
‘I should be at the theatre now.’
‘Come here for one more minute.’
He put his thick arms around and pulled her closer. The woolly hairs on his chest crinkled against her skin.
‘Jennifer’s nothing like you, you know. You’re a nice girl, Mattie.’ He kissed her thoroughly and when he let her go again Mattie said softly, ‘I used to be a nice girl.’
They both laughed, then. Mattie took the opportunity to slide out of bed. She put her crumpled clothes on and combed her hair in front of the greenish mirror.
‘I’ll see you later, my love, at the theatre,’ John said.
‘Of course.’
Mattie walked down through the Air-Wick-pungent hotel and out through the front door. Nobody shouted an accusation after her. The sea was puckered and steel-grey, but she didn’t stop to look at it. She turned into the town towards the theatre. Women with shopping bags passed her, and errand boys on bicycles.
They must all be able to see, Mattie thought. I know they can tell what I’ve been doing. She held her head up. It doesn’t matter. It’s happened, that’s all. She felt very lonely, and she longed to tell Julia. Not in a letter. Not after the weeks of silence that she had allowed to slip by.
She would have to wait until Christmas. Two weeks, until the company disbanded for the Christmas break.
Everyone in the company knew at once. Vera took her aside when she reached the theatre.
‘Where were you last night? I was so worried.’
‘Were you? I went out to dinner with John,’ Mattie said deliberately. ‘Someone else stood him up.’
Vera’s eyes and mouth made three amazed circles. She scuttled away as soon as she could to spread the news.
It turned out to be a short-lived sensation. Everyone was used to the permutations of company lovers, and when the brief flurry of interest died down Mattie discovered the effects were that the actors treated her more circumspectly and Sheila Firth adopted her as a kind of ally. Only Fergus and Alan didn’t share their jokes quite as generously, and Lenny didn’t expect her to be a friend now that she had John Douglas.
At the next Treasury call Vera handed her a separate envelope with her wages. It contained exactly seven guineas in notes and silver and Mattie was puzzled until she remembered that it was the price of a coat in the middle display window of the High Street department store. John Douglas must have seen it too. Mattie went to look at it again before the Saturday matinée. It was green tweed with big flaps and pockets and when she tried it on she looked like a farmer. She chose a black cloth coat instead. It had a big black fake-fur collar that framed her face, and a wide black patent belt. It was cheaper than the green tweed, and she spent the rest of the money on a pair of black suede gloves.
Mattie put on her new finery and went into the theatre office to see John. He frowned at her through the smoke of his cigarette and muttered, ‘You look like a bloody tart. But that’s your business, I suppose. Is it warm enough?’
‘It’s lovely and warm. Thank you.’
‘Vera’ll take ten bob a week out of your wages until it’s paid for.’
Mattie couldn’t help laughing.<
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The two weeks went by and there were carol singers outside the shops and strings of coloured light bulbs hung bravely from the street lights. Mattie had warned herself not to expect anything from John Douglas, but she was softened by his brusque affection. Sometimes he put his arm round her, almost abesent-mindedly, or touched her hair, as if he liked the feel of her for herself and not just for sex. He took her to bed in his salesman’s hotels too, of course, and she submitted to it because it mattered to him.
The best thing was the way that he talked to her, about books and opera as well as the theatre. Mattie listened thirstily.
The last week ended and she did the get-out with a mixture of relief and regret. The scenery and props were going into store until the tour started up again. There was an impromptu Christmas party for the whole company in the corner pub beyond the theatre. Mattie played darts and drank Guinness, and laughed at John’s stories which he performed for the benefit of everyone in the bar.
She felt that she had come a long way.
She had bought and wrapped a Christmas present for John. It was a book about opera, and she was hoping to impress him with her clever choice. But the afternoon ended, the company separated on a wave of boozy comradeship, and John drove her to the station in the Vanguard without producing a present for her. Mattie kept the book hidden.
He said goodbye absently. Mattie knew that he already belonged to Burford and not to her at all, and she accepted the knowledge uncomplainingly. John kissed her and opened the car door.
There was one thing, a kind of present.
‘When you get back,’ he said, ‘we’ll look at a bit part for you.’
The black car bucked away and Mattie went smiling to the London train.
Seven
Julia was waiting at Euston.
Before the train pulled in she stood in front of the bookstall staring at the models’ faces on the magazine covers. They were shined up for Christmas with glossy lipstick and bouffant hair, and as she looked at them and heard a Salvation Army band playing carols she felt that everyone was full of excitement and expectation, and that everything was in motion, except herself.
