The Men and the Girls (15 page)

Her name! He'd said her name!

‘You have the manners of an alley cat,' Miss Bachelor said, when he'd gone. ‘And a very gauche alley cat at that.'

Joss didn't care. She went home that night in a daze, a daze which turned to a waking dream the next day when Garth approached her coming out of the dining-hall and said he thought she was great to help that old lady.

‘I liked that,' he said, ‘I really liked that.'

She ventured the smallest glance up at him. He blazed above her like a god.

‘I like your stud,' he said, ‘I really go for it. When you see a girl with a nose stud, you know you've got a really funky babe on your hands.'

Joss said, ‘They hate it at home.'

‘Of course they do,' he said. He paused. He gave her a long look. Then, ‘You're cute,' he said, and asked her to go to the movies with him.

‘OK,' she said, in a voice tight with joy.

Now, lying on her bed, the prospect of the cinema hung before her like the gates to paradise. He was sixteen. Sixteen! He'd been at the school since September and he hadn't asked anyone out, except Sue Fingall, and everyone asked Sue Fingall out as a matter of course, she was so stunning, so it hardly counted. Now he had asked her, Joss Bain, and, if she hadn't been so entirely convinced of her physical repulsiveness, she would have been able to be sure she was happy. As it was, she had just this evening to look forward to, this one evening before he discovered how boring she was, as well as repulsive, and inevitably decided not to have anything more to do with her. Joss turned on her side and felt under the bed for her cuttings box. She dragged it out on to the rug, and pulled out the photographs that lay on top, two of them, cut from magazines printed on laminated paper. She looked at the girls in the photographs. They had long, shining hair and firm flexible bodies in tiny, clinging clothes. Joss sighed. Her own body was only to be borne if shrouded in layers of ragged black, shirts and T-shirts piled on in gloomy, holey layers until, as Uncle Leonard said, she resembled a bag lady. Panic gripped her. She dropped the photographs. The one and only evening of her entire life was twenty-four hours away, and what was she going to
wear
?

Next door, Leonard sat and wondered at her silence. She had come in to see him, after school, and they had quarrelled mildly over the last chocolate biscuit in his tin – ‘You ought to give it to me because I'm your guest.' ‘You aren't a guest, you're an infestation' – and he thought she had looked very, very slightly pretty. Nobody, of course, could look even half-way pretty with hair like a nailbrush, and a scowl and navvy's boots, but none the less Joss had looked a little better than usual to Leonard. He'd even said so, and she had raised to him a glance of unquestionable happiness, a dreamy glance, full of light.

Was she smoking something? He shouldn't wonder. Kate was so absent-minded these days, Joss might as well not have a mother, for all the use Kate was. Leonard fretted about it, just as he fretted about running out of denture powder with no-one in the house to send out for more, or about the time, soon coming, he feared, when his gaunt old arms simply would not pull the rest of his gaunt old self out of the bath any longer. The only thing at the moment that diverted him from fretting was the television programme. It was fascinating, he hadn't been as interested in anything for years; he couldn't remember, either, when anyone had been as interested in him, in what he thought, in what he had to say.

That Hunter chap, friend of James, had been here for hours already, with a camera and all the paraphernalia and a crew (that's where all the chocolate biscuits had gone), and before that, there'd been all the discussions with Beatrice and with James, and a few lovely rows about God, whom Beatrice had no time for but who Leonard suspected was probably lurking about somewhere, built into the fabric of things, like cricket and the rule of law, a sort of institution. They'd had one quarrel on camera. Beatrice had wanted it cut afterwards, but Hugh had talked her round.

‘You're naturals,' he kept saying to them, ‘absolute naturals.'

Hugh was talking to a doctor, too, and several people Beatrice had put him on to. They'd had surprisingly little trouble getting people to agree, not even the old people's homes where they were going to do the opening shots, all those poor old vegetables just sitting there, smelling of pee and staring at the telly with their mouths open and no teeth in. Leonard shuddered.

‘I'll take the poisoned umbrella any time,' he'd told the camera. ‘Stuff the medics. Whose sodding life is it anyway?'

‘Have you ever been close to death?' Hugh asked him. ‘Have you ever been in an accident? Or the War?'

Leonard bared his teeth at him. ‘The closest I've ever been to death is now. And I'll tell you something. I don't mind the look of it as long as I'm allowed to pull my own plug.'

‘Do you really mean that?' Hugh said, off camera.

Leonard looked away. He had fallen in love with his screen personality. ‘Mean what I say,' he mumbled.

Then there had been the lawyers. Beatrice had been amazing, no other word for it, quoted Section 2 of the 1961 Suicide Act at them and said that, even if she was now prosecuted, the most she'd get was a suspended sentence because she'd helped her brother at his own request.

‘I'm not encouraging anyone to commit suicide,' she'd said, ‘I'm simply putting the case for euthanasia.'

Once, she told Leonard privately, the Voluntary Euthanasia Society ran a helpline for would-be suicides. They sent a man round with a plastic bag and a box of pills. Leonard's eyes had bulged. Hugh didn't want that put in the programme.

‘We can be as controversial as we like, but we mustn't commit an offence. Any mention of methods might be an offence.'

Leonard got up from his chair and crept to the wall that divided his room from Joss's. He pressed his ear to it. No sound.

‘What the hell are you doing?' James said from the doorway.

Leonard jumped.

‘Why are you spying on Joss?'

‘She's so bloody quiet. Can't hear that infernal music.'

‘You ought to be thankful.'

Leonard straightened up. He looked at James.

‘Where's Kate?'

‘Why,' said James tiredly, ‘why do you always ask that?'

‘Where is she?'

‘I don't know.'

‘Whisky?' Leonard said.

‘I'm drinking too much—'

Leonard limped over to his clutch of bottles.

‘Medicinal.'

‘Temporarily, I suppose.'

‘What've you come up for?'

‘I don't really know,' James said. ‘It just felt rather empty downstairs. That's all.'

Leonard handed James a tumbler.

‘Bloody madhouse,' he said. ‘Kate never in, Joss gone dead quiet, you like a wet week. What's the matter?'

‘With me?'

‘No.'

‘Who, then—'

Leonard sat down in his comfortless chair and looked at James fixedly.

‘I see,' James said. ‘You mean, what's the matter with Kate.'

Leonard waited. James swirled his whisky round and round its glass for a little, and then he said carefully, ‘The matter with Kate, Leonard, is that I have suddenly become too old for her, and she doesn't know how to tell me.'

Eight

The two rooms Kate had found in Swan Street were strictly speaking a room and a half. They looked north, along the gardens by the canal, and the smaller one, the cupboard-sized one that Kate had set aside, in her mind, for Joss, had only a slice of window, cut off by a partition wall. Because there was only space enough in this second room for a bed and a chair, Mr Winthrop downstairs, who owned the house, said he would only charge Kate forty-five pounds a week, exclusive of services, for both.

Mr Winthrop had been a dealer in antique maps and prints. He dealt a little still, but mostly now he mended old clocks in a tiny creaking conservatory at the back of the house. He played big band music while he worked, the saxophones mingling with the hoarse blast of an electric fan heater which he kept going from dawn to dusk, except in summer. He showed Kate an alcove on the landing where a little old electric cooker stood for her use, with a cracked sink beside it. Then he showed her the bathroom she and Joss would have to share with him. Kate had not entered such a bathroom for a decade.

‘Who cleans this?' she said to Mr Winthrop.

‘You do,' he said, ‘if you care.'

Her rooms, on the other hand, were quite cheerful. The light was cold, but there was plenty of it, and a previous tenant had almost covered a plainly violent wallpaper with cream emulsion. The furniture, though neglected, was Victorian and solid, and there were two comfortable chairs. Kate sat in one and tried to picture Joss in the other, with the electric fire burning cosily and a jug of flowers on the table. Telling Joss was one of the two major hurdles ahead. The other one was telling James.

Mr Winthrop said he didn't mind if she painted the rooms and changed the curtains. Kate made plans and wrote a list. She thought she and Joss might go shopping together for paint and curtain material, and she would borrow Christine's sewing machine. Joss could paint her cupboard room any colour she liked, and cover it with her posters and photographs, and she could have an armful of Indian cushions on her bed to make it, by day, into a sofa. Perhaps Kate might afford a rug for her, too, and a brass lamp. Perhaps, on the other hand, the lamp would have to wait. Kate went out to the supermarket in Bridge Street and bought cleaning things, and a bucket, and a packet of blue-and-white disposable cloths. A sense of a new beginning filled her with elation.

‘I feel,' she said to Mark Hathaway, half embarrassed at herself, ‘that I'm starting to tell the truth.'

He offered to help her paint, in the evenings.

‘When I've told Joss.'

‘Joss,' he said. He was very uncertain about Joss. What greater obstacle to a budding relationship could there possibly be than a girl of fourteen, a girl too old to send to bed and too young to send out into Oxford? ‘I hope she'll like me,' he said, meaning the opposite.

‘Of course she will,' Kate said. She looked at Mark. His appearance was everything Joss would admire; so was his taste, his modern, fresh, fashionable taste.

‘It's wonderful you're coming,' Mark said, ‘it's just wonderful. You look different already, so much happier.'

‘I am,' Kate said. She felt it. She couldn't believe how happy it made her, in a simple, carefree way, to clean the windows and polish the furniture in Swan Street. Mark bought her a poster, a reproduction of a watercolour of a cane chair on a bare floor by french windows opening on to a southern landscape, hazyblue and gold. Kate was enchanted with it; it seemed a symbol, a symbol of her feeling that she was stepping out of some kind of restriction into an environment that wasn't just free, but natural to her as well, natural to her age and personality. Only when she thought honestly about James, about how his life would be without her, did her spirits sink. She was going to hurt him, but not as much, she told herself firmly, brushing at the Swan Street carpet, as she would if she were going to stay.

Walking back to Jericho one day, from one of these furtive visits to Swan Street, a car stopped beside Kate and the passenger door opened.

‘Kate!' Julia said, leaning across from the driving seat. She was smiling, and wore a pair of dark glasses pushed up on her head in place of a hairband. Kate stopped to peer in.

‘You look quite different—'

‘Contact lenses,' Julia said, laughing. ‘The new me.'

‘Hello,' the twins shouted from the back seat. ‘Hello, Kate, hello, hello, Kate, hello—'

She beamed at them. They wore yellow jerseys. ‘You look like ducklings.'

‘Get in,' Julia said, ‘get in and I'll drive you home.'

‘It's fine, really, I'm only ten minutes—'

‘Come on. I haven't seen you in ages, so much to tell you.' She patted the passenger seat. ‘Why are you walking by Hythebridge Street anyway?'

‘Just a variation,' Kate said, buckling her seat belt, her head bent.

Julia put the car into gear and moved it into the traffic. ‘We were at the station. Weren't we, boys? What were we doing at the station?'

‘The girl went on the train,' George said, ‘that blue girl. You know.'

Julia glanced at Kate. ‘I've succumbed to help at last. I think I've found the perfect person. She was nice, wasn't she, boys?'

‘She was a bit fat,' Edward said doubtfully.

‘But it's rather cosy to be fat, isn't it—'

‘And she had funny hair.'

‘Not
very
funny—'

‘It was fat hair.'

‘She had a blue jersey,' George told Kate.

‘And fat hair.'

‘She was a dear,' Julia said to Kate, ‘a farmer's daughter from East Anglia. So capable, drives and everything. She was sweet to the boys. Wasn't she, boys? She'll be a life-saver, quite honestly, with me getting busier all the time and things picking up so quickly for Hugh. I mean, suppose the twins were ill?'

Kate turned round to look at them. They grinned at her. ‘I never saw two chaps look less ill in my life.'

‘No, but suppose they were. There's been a bout of chicken pox at their nursery school, Frederica's been quite frantic, and they could be incubating it right now.'

‘All spotty,' George said, opening his eyes wide.

‘Sam is spotty, isn't he?'