by Rosie Thomas
Josh had gone somewhere for Christmas, only promising ‘See you in the new year.’ Julia turned irritably away from the magazines and paced up and down the station concourse. Sometimes she thought she hated Josh, but even when she hated him she longed for him so intensely that her stomach writhed and she twisted her head to and fro to escape the pain of it.
Mattie’s train pulled in and she turned in relief to the barrier. The passengers poured out, their faces bobbing as they jostled towards the ticket collector. Julia didn’t recognise Mattie at first and then when she glanced back at her face, and it sharpened, coming into focus, she thought, Mattie’s changed too. She had been looking forward to her company almost desperately, and she felt an instant of resentful disappointment. Then the crowd surged forward and deposited Mattie in front of her. Mattie dropped her suitcase and flung her arms out, and then they were hugging each other, hopping and swaying and laughing. Mattie still smelt the same. Coty perfume and a faint whiff of cigarette smoke.
‘You look different,’ Julia accused, and Mattie grinned and fluffed up her fake-fur collar.
‘Must be the new coat. Do you like it?’
‘I don’t know.’ She grabbed her arm and pulled. ‘Come on, let’s get the bus. Then we can talk.’
They ran, and when they reached the bus they clambered up to the top deck. They squashed into the front seat and lit cigarettes, exactly as they had done hundreds of times on the way home from school. The familiarity of it, and the pleasure of seeing each other, dissolved Julia’s resentment and the new worldliness that Mattie was rather proud of. At once they were back on the old footing.
‘What has happened?’ Julia asked.
‘Guess.’ Mattie’s eyes were wickedly sparkling.
‘You …’
‘Yes, I have.’
‘Mattie.’ Julia’s head jerked round to see who was listening. She pressed even closer and then implored, ‘Tell me. Tell me what it was like.’
Mattie tilted her head against the black fur and pursed her lips, as if she was considering it. At last, judiciously, she said, ‘It was all right.’
Julia thought of Josh, and the cottage, and the brief, blurred glimpse she had been allowed of something that was momentously strange, and different, and important. And then she exploded, ‘All right?’
Mattie was half laughing, but she was serious too. ‘Exactly. It wasn’t wonderful. But it wasn’t awful either.’
Julia took her hand in the black suede glove and held it tightly. ‘Tell me. Tell me about him, for a start.’
Mattie smiled. ‘He’s nothing like Josh,’ she began.
Then, while the bus jolted and swayed down Gower Street, Mattie told her. She described room thirteen and the tall brown furniture, and the smell of Air-Wick. She told Julia about the theatre office and Sheila Firth and the burgundy in the restaurant, and about John Douglas’s rubber-tipped stick and the moment of tenderness when he had licked the sea-salt off her face. She also described the warmth and comfort she had felt the next morning, afterwards, when they lay quietly together. She didn’t say anything about how she had felt when she had asked about Jennifer Edge.
Julia nodded at everything, but she was clearly still waiting. ‘But what did it feel like?’ she ventured, at last, when Mattie didn’t volunteer it.
Mattie tried for the words. She knew what Julia was expecting. Like fireworks going off. Like a waterfall. Waves breaking. Something like that. What she had really felt was so far from any of those things that she couldn’t even manage to make it up.
‘I told you,’ she said softly. ‘It was all right.’
They stared at each other for a minute, resignation confronting disbelief.
Julia whispered anxiously, ‘Is he … is he nice to you?’
Mattie held up the hem of her coat. ‘Sometimes. But do you know what? He’s going to give me a part. That’s what I really want …’
Julia snorted with laughter and put her arm round Mattie’s shoulder. Mattie laughed too.
‘Oh Mat, I’m so happy you’re home.’
‘I’m happy to be home.’
‘I thought you were different. But you aren’t.’
‘Do you know, on the first morning I thought it must be written on my face? I walked past everyone thinking, They all know. They can see.’
They laughed so much then that all the other passengers stared at them.
Julia rubbed the condensation off the window with her sleeve and peered out.
‘Oxford Street. Hurry up, Felix is making you a wonderful dinner.’
The flat over the square was warm and welcoming.
‘Home,’ Mattie murmured.
Jessie was immobile in her corner, and her clothes compressed the flesh beneath into swollen ridges. It was an effort for her to reach up and plant one of her resounding kisses on Mattie’s cheek, but the Christmas tree that Julia and Felix had bought and decorated glowed beside her and the soft light made her look rosy.
‘Are you all right, Jessie?’
‘As right as I’ll ever be. Give us another kiss. What’s your news, then?’
‘Lots of news. I’m going to be an actress.’
‘That’s what they call it?’
Felix materialised from his room, like a shadow in his black jersey. He kissed Mattie too, brushing her cheek with his mouth. She looked older, he thought, as if some experience had rubbed off on her. That made him glance at Julia, and for the hundredth time he noticed her gnawing impatience. Julia hadn’t had Mattie’s luck, whatever that was.
‘Felix? Get some glasses, there’s a duck. It’s Christmas.’
Felix went into the kitchen for a bottle of wine and a corkscrew. At least it was easier to live here with Julia when her aviator was away. He isn’t mine, Julia had once snapped viciously when Felix said that. Why do you call him mine?
He isn’t mine either, Felix might have answered. But he said nothing and Julia had stood up, walking to the door and then twisting back again in the confined space. It was better at times like this when Josh wasn’t here, although Felix still thought about him. He thought about aeroplanes too, imagining flying at night and the pilot’s face lit up by the red glow of the instrument panel.
As he tore the capsule off the wine and twisted the point of the corkscrew downwards Felix heard the women laughing. Jessie wheezed and coughed delightedly, and then Mattie said something that set off a fresh burst of laughter.
Carefully Felix eased the cork out and wiped the neck of the bottle with a clean cloth. He felt the women’s mysterious femininity as solid as a wall.
The next day, Christmas Eve, Mattie put the presents she had bought for Ricky and Sam and Marilyn and Phil into a string bag. There were presents for Rozzie and her husband and the babies too, even something for Ted, and the red and gold paper bulged cheerfully through the netting.
‘I’m going home to see them all,’ Mattie told Julia. ‘Are you coming?’
‘I have to work today. The bloody office doesn’t close until four o’clock.’
There would be mince pies, and the mangers would come into the typing pool to wish them all a Merry Christmas. Julia was dreading it.
‘We could go after you finish.’
Julia had been thinking about Fairmile Road. Christmases there were easy enough to remember, although she couldn’t distinguish between any of them once she had stopped believing in Father Christmas. Betty and Vernon didn’t have close relatives or friends, and the celebrations had only ever involved the three of them. Julia had opened her presents beside the tree, with Betty and Vernon watching her. Once that was done, it was hard to know how to keep the festive atmosphere going right through into evening. There was church, and Christmas dinner afterwards. Vernon always put on the paper hat out of his cracker and read the mottoes and riddles aloud. After Christmas tea, when the red and brown plaster robin and the tiny metal-spined Christmas tree had been taken off the cake and stored away until next year, it felt like any other day. Julia went u
p to her bedroom and read her new Bunty annual, and dreamed of lavish, exotically scented, faintly Victorian family Christmases with plump mothers and twinkling fathers and broods of children who played charades after supper. Later there would be dancing around a towering tree decorated with real candles.
Sentimentally now, Julia wondered if she had a real family somewhere, preparing for the kind of Christmas she had dreamed of as a child. Did her real mother think of the daughter who should have been there, as she watched the dancers around the tree?
‘It’s all right,’ she said to Mattie. ‘You go.’
Julia had bought a pretty blouse for Betty using her staff discount at the store, and a camel-coloured cashmere scarf for Vernon, and she had wrapped and posted them in good time.
She had written to Betty too, in the weeks since Mattie had gone away, almost as many times as she had written to Mattie herself. But she didn’t want to go back to Fairmile Road. Not yet. Certainly not for Christmas. She remembered the silence in the house, that heavy silence that was unlike quietness anywhere else, and Vernon wearing a purple paper crown.
Julia leaned over quickly to turn the wireless up louder. The music was Dickie Valentine’s ‘Christmas Alphabet’. She whistled the tune, and ran to finish getting ready for work.
Mattie went home on her own. It was a relief to find that although the house on the estate was cold and chaotically filthy, the boys seemed to be living safely enough with their father. Ricky looked taller. He talked about when he would leave school and find a job, and he told Mattie that Ted had fallen down drunk on the path late one night, and he and Sam had hauled him in and put him to bed between them.
‘Ricky …’ Mattie began, wanting to say something as an excuse for their father and as a warning, but Ricky cut her short.
‘Stupid bugger, isn’t he? That’s all. But he can’t help it. And we couldn’t leave him out there to freeze to death, could we?’ Mattie nodded, and then laughed. ‘I don’t think I need to worry about you, Rick.’
‘‘Course you don’t. I need to worry about you, more like. How are you doing?’
‘Getting along. So slowly you’d hardly notice, but I think I can see the way now.’ John Douglas seemed surprisingly distant. Mattie told herself that that was all right because he certainly wasn’t thinking much about her, either. ‘You’ll see my name in lights in the end.’
‘When I do, I’ll expect you to buy me a guitar.’
‘Pleasure. In the meantime, you’ll have to make do with a Bill Haley record.’
Mattie went on to see Roz.
The children swarmed ecstatically over her, and Rozzie eyed the black coat. The new baby lay in his pram and Mattie hung over it, slotting her finger into his minute fist to feel the surprising strength of his grip. The baby’s unwinking dark eyes stared up into hers. Mattie wanted to scoop him up and wrap him against her body.
‘He’s so lovely. Can I pick him up?’
Rozzie shrugged. ‘If you want. Mind he’s not sick on your fur. Feeling broody, are you?’
‘I love babies. Just smell him.’ She rubbed her face against his downy head.
Rozzie lit a cigarette. ‘You could have one. All you need is a man.’
The baby kicked in Mattie’s arms, and nuzzled against her breast. Mattie felt the pull of it, underneath her stomach. ‘They’re easy enough to come by,’ she said flippantly, hiding her feelings.
Rozzie turned her attention to the coat again. ‘I can see that.’
Mattie stayed for tea, and saw that Marilyn and Phil were as uncontrollable as any children on Christmas Eve. They looked taller too. They bathed the baby between them, demonstrating self-importantly to Mattie, and Marilyn gave him his bottle.
‘Bed,’ Rozzie said and they went, wanting the morning to come quicker. They included Mattie in the general goodnights, just. She saw that they didn’t need her, or miss her very much.
‘I thought I’d go and have a Christmas drink with Dad,’ she said to Rozzie.
‘Good luck to you.’
Mattie found her father in the nearest of the four barnlike pubs that served the estate. There were coloured paper streamers and tinsel shapes suspended everywhere, and a pianist was playing ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer’, but the crowded room seemed bleak after the cosy, firelit corner pubs that Mattie had frequented in the last weeks with John and the others.
I’ve got away, Mattie thought exultantly. I’ve done it.
Ted was sitting at a beer-ringed table near the piano. He greeted her with a mixture of surprise and awkward familiarity.
He was only half drunk. Mattie bought him a pint of beer with the money that Vera had handed her at the last Treasury call – minus the ten shillings that she owed for the coat. She sat beside Ted and told him about what she was doing, watching his face as he drank. She wasn’t afraid of him any more, she realised. Even when she talked about John Douglas, the old, terrifying, bleary jealousy didn’t swell up at her. She thought that it must be because she had walked clean out of his world. Her father’s view was limited. He couldn’t be jealous or angry about what he didn’t know or understand.
They had another drink, and Ted’s eyes lost their wandering focus. A man pushed up to the table, and Ted pulled at his sleeve. They hardly knew each other, but they fell on one another like old friends. Five minutes later their arms were around each other’s shoulders and they were reminiscing about the best days of the War. Mattie listened for a little longer, and then she stood up. She bent down and kissed her father on the grey stubble that masked his mottled cheeks. His head sawed up and down and he proclaimed to his friend, ‘Kids today. They know nothing.’
‘You’re right, Teddy,’ the friend answered.
Mattie walked to the station and caught the last train back to London.
It was a warm, cramped, happy Christmas in the flat over the square. Felix had money from his decorating work, and he had bought smoked salmon and crystallised fruits and baskets of nuts as well as a goose. He had also made red felt Christmas stockings for Jessie and Mattie and Julia, and in the morning they found them at the end of their beds. There were tiny bottles of scent and little tablets of soap, and sheer nylons and fanciful earrings that he had made himself from beads and feathers bought from the little haberdashers down Berwick Street market.
Julia fixed her earrings on and turned her head to and fro.
‘You are clever, Felix. How do you know about so many things?’
‘I use my eyes,’ Felix said mildly. ‘Those earrings suit you.’ He was pleased with the plain silk handkerchiefs that Julia had bought him from Liberty’s. The electric-blue Teddy boy socks from Mattie were less well received.
‘Have you ever seen me wearing anything of the kind? You don’t use your eyes, Mattie.’
‘They’re supposed to be a joke.’
Felix looked amazed. ‘Who wants to look like a joke? And while we’re on the subject, that coat of yours …’
‘I like it,’ Mattie said, in a voice that invited no argument. ‘Your present’s the best of the lot, my duck,’ Jessie said, putting it on to prove her point. Mattie had found it in a crumbling second-hand clothes shop in Nottingham. It was a hat, and when she bought it it was still enveloped in yellowing tissue paper in its round black hatbox. It was a little shell of black velvet, with sequinned wings and quivering ostrich feathers, the whole creation swathed round and round with spotted veiling and skewered with an enormous peal-handled hat pin. As soon as Jessie put it on, tilting it instinctively over one eye, she was transformed into a risqué Edwardian grande dame.
Julia and Mattie clapped with delight, and Felix murmured, ‘That was a better choice.’
Later, Felix retired to the kitchen to cook. Julia put her head around the door and asked, ‘Can I help?’
Felix nodded and they worked side by side, enjoying a silent companionship that had been missing since the arrival of Josh. In Jessie’s room, Mattie and Jessie began by singing carols and under the influence
of Jessie’s vodka soon moved on to the old music hall favourites. The two voices competed gleefully for the top notes. It was already dark outside when they sat down to their Christmas dinner. Jessie only ate one or two mouthfuls of goose but she presided majestically over the table, lifting her glass and setting the wings and feathers of her hat quivering with her wheezy laughter.
Felix brought the pudding in, set in a nimbus of blue flame. They pulled crackers, and unwrapped their paper hats.
Watching Felix with his yellow crown pulled down over his dark olive forehead, Julia thought that he looked like a real king. He would never look ridiculous, like Vernon, even in a paper hat. Narrowing her eyes so that the candlelight softened into a golden blur over Jessie’s hat and Mattie’s anarchic hair, Julia breathed in the scents of tangerines and brandy and candle wax. At last she had come close to the Christmases she dreamed of in Fairmile Road.
Only Jessie had drunk too much.
Sometimes, when she was drinking, Jessie drifted away until her memories became more real than the solid room around her. ‘I was thinking about my first time. I was just as old as you. Like Mattie here, with her theatre man. I don’t like the sound of him, dear. I told you, didn’t I?’
‘You told me,’ Mattie murmured, but Jessie ignored her.
‘Your first one should be young, and handsome. Prince Charming, for you to dream about afterwards when they’ve all turned old and useless, like yourself. Julia’s boy is one, isn’t he? And if not him, then somebody else. There’s plenty of them. Like my Felix.’
Felix stood up, as silent and elegant as a black cat.
‘I’m going for a walk,’ he said softly. ‘I need some air. Julia and Mattie will look after you.’ As he slipped out of the door, they heard him say ‘Happy Christmas.’
‘I remember the day,’ Jessie repeated. ‘I was still living with my ma and pa. It was Hartscombe Terrace, Hoxton. I was working in the market, singing at nights in the clubs. They were good days. I met Tommy Last and we started walking out together. He took me to the Empire. Up West, on the train. Walking, under the trees in the park. Black hair, he had, smooth as glass. Black eyes, too, and a little moustache that tickled your skin when you kissed. This day, he came for me, and he’d brought me a bunch of marigolds in white paper. They were so bright and hot, like the day itself. We walked down by the canal, and Tommy was in his shirtsleeves with his arm round my waist. I remember how hard his arm seemed, and the black hairs on it. We walked under a bridge and it was cool, all shadowy, and then we came out into the sunshine again. We climbed up the bank a little way and sat down, and there were bushes and tall grass all around us. No one could see we were there. There was only the grass stalks, and the sun over our heads. Tommy pushed my skirt up. I helped him. I was wearing white drawers with blue satin ribbon that I’d threaded myself. I thought I was the Queen of England, and I lay down in the grass with Tommy Last on top of me. That moustache. It felt like silk against my neck.’
