The Men and the Girls (17 page)

Kate gripped the edge of the kitchen table. She couldn't look at Joss. She said, ‘James couldn't cope with you, Jossie. He couldn't manage, really he couldn't.'

‘I'll go and ask him!'

‘All right,' Kate said tiredly, ‘you ask him, and you'll find he'll say just what I've just said. It's no good screaming at me, you just have to accept. That's all. Just accept.'

James heard the kitchen door crash deafeningly shut, and then came the subdued clatter of all the pictures hanging in the hall reacting to the slam. This was followed by a brief silence. He sat in his chair in his study, and watched the closed door to the hall. After twenty seconds or so, the handle of the door turned, and the door opened six inches, and then stopped.

‘Joss,' James said.

Nothing happened.

‘Come in,' he said.

Very slowly, she sidled in. She looked awful; she looked, indeed, very much as he felt.

‘Come and sit down.'

She hovered far away from him, just inside the door, behind a chair.

‘Mum isn't mad,' James said, ‘nor wicked. She's a young woman, and it's perfectly natural.'

Joss whispered something.

‘What?'

She looked up at him for the first time, her face sick-white. ‘I want to stay—'

‘Jossie,' he said gently, ‘you can't do that. You have to live with your mother. I'm not even your stepfather, legally. It would be, I think, wrong if you stayed. Do you see?'

‘No,' Joss said.

James leaned forward. ‘You'd miss Kate, I promise you. You're angry with her tonight, but when your anger's died down you'll find that you'd be really unhappy without her.'

Joss cried suddenly, ‘Don't make me, don't make me—'

James looked away. Why did Joss, so thorny and unapproachable and frequently purely disagreeable, have to be so touching?

‘Joss, I don't know if I could handle you.'

‘I'll be good,' she said idiotically, beginning to cry, ‘I'll be good, honest—'

James stood up. He came over to Joss and waited beside her awkwardly, wishing it was easy and natural to put his arms round her.

‘It isn't my job to bring you up, Jossie. We may have lived together a long time, but I've never had a child of my own. Kate's always had responsibility for you, you see.'

Joss muttered something. He stooped.

‘What?'

‘I like you,' Joss said.

He said, as kindly as he could, ‘You mustn't blackmail me.'

‘Please,' Joss mumbled. She raised her head and looked at him with wet eyes in dark blotches of smudged mascara. ‘Please, please, please, please—'

Much later, Joss lay in bed under her duvet, with the light on. The house was very quiet. Kate was in her and James's bed, and James had gone to sleep in the spare bedroom. Uncle Leonard had been listening to the radio, but now he had switched it off, and had finished gurgling away at his wash basin, and was quiet too. Joss thought she would probably never be able to sleep again, she felt so wide awake. She'd made, in the end, a bargain with James. She could stay, on trial, for three months. She had tried for six, but he had said no, and from the way he said no she could tell that he might go back on the whole deal if she pushed him. Kate had looked ghastly when they told her, and furious with James, and then they'd gone off into the study and Joss had heard Kate crying and crying and James talking and talking. They went on for so long that Joss grew restless and lonely and went up to see Uncle Leonard, who wasn't his usual self, all horrible and funny, but pathetic, sad and shaky with runny eyes.

‘I'm to blame,' he said to Joss. His voice croaked. ‘It's my fault. I said to her, “Marry him or get out.” So she's going. It's all my fault.'

Joss poured him some whisky. She half-filled a tumbler and didn't put any water in and he choked and spluttered. ‘Sorry,' Joss said. She was trembling and the smell of the whisky made her feel sick.

‘She doesn't want to get married,' Joss said. ‘She just wants to live in this room.'

‘What room?'

‘A room in Osney. I'm supposed to go too, but I'm not going. James says I can stay.'

Leonard stiffened. ‘You can't stay. A young girl and two old men? You can't stay.'

Joss's voice shook. ‘I've got to. I want to.' She looked up at Leonard from where she knelt on the hearthrug. ‘It's where I
live
.'

He stared at her for a long time. His face wobbled. Then he said slowly, ‘Yes. Yes, I suppose it is.'

This is where I live, Joss said again to herself now, looking up at the ceiling where all the cracks ran about. This is where Garth came to collect me this evening. I didn't want him to, I didn't want him to see, but he just came and he said it was great. He said James was neat. Mum wasn't here. Joss caught her breath. Mum – wouldn't be here, either, in the future. James had said, ‘You can go and see her every day. You can stay the night when you want to. It's only a walk away.' Joss suddenly felt very shy of James, he seemed different to her, not so familiar. She yawned. She wondered if Uncle Leonard was still awake, lying quite straight in his bed, as he did, in those weird pyjamas that he buttoned right up to his chin. She leaned across to their common wall and tapped it. Silence. She knocked again. Silence. Pity. She would have liked, she discovered, to tell Uncle Leonard that Garth had put his arm round her in the cinema and said, ‘You know something, Joss? You know what? You're a real lulu.' She wanted to laugh out loud thinking of it. A lulu! Well, one thing was certain and that was that she bloody well wasn't going to tell Kate.

Beatrice Bachelor was also awake. She was not in her bed – it was Cat who was comfortably in her bed – but in a chair by the fire. She had never been much good at sleeping, but, at the moment, with so much to think about, sleep was more elusive than ever. It didn't trouble her. She had, after all, she told herself, the kind of rational personality that wasn't prey to 3 a.m. bogeys and glooms.

All the same, she was anxious. She wasn't in the least anxious about the television programme, being perfectly certain both about her views and her legal position, but she had grown anxious about James's household. None of them had openly confessed to dismay or unhappiness, but an open confession was hardly necessary. It was quite plain that things were simply falling apart, and in a way that Beatrice's logical and decided mind did not care to dwell on, any more than it cared to dwell on the precise nature of her feelings for James. Uncharted waters, those, uncharted and dangerous waters where the map of reason that Beatrice swore by wasn't much use.

It all hinged, it seemed, on this person Beatrice hadn't met, this young woman, Kate Bain. James had shown her a photograph and Beatrice had seen a small, supple woman with a sharp, appealing face and slightly slanting eyes and a wild mop of hair. James said her hair was red, pale-red. ‘Carrots,' Beatrice had said to herself. It had become very apparent that Kate was avoiding her, somehow, and Beatrice, although intellectually so confident, did not feel socially confident enough to force a meeting on anyone so patently reluctant. Yet she knew she ought to because she also knew, with that intuition which she so despised as being unworthy of an academic mind, what was the matter with Kate. Kate felt as Beatrice herself had felt, though for different reasons, when she was nursing her parents. Kate plainly felt herself to be a victim, and, when you feel that, Beatrice thought, you believe that you have lost power over your own life and that is the very worst thing you can possibly feel, and is one of the reasons why I believe so strongly in euthanasia because you must, you
must
, have that power to the end.

She looked across at her bed. Cat had burrowed under the quilt, leaving only the end of his fat striped tail showing. The quilt heaved gently with his satisfied slumbering.

‘Can't stand cats,' old Leonard had said that afternoon, and then, twenty minutes later, wistfully, ‘Wish I had a cat.'

Wishing! What did she wish! Beatrice got up and looked at herself in the unhelpful little mirror behind the door. The trouble about the dreadful frailty of being human was that one went on, stupidly, wishing.

‘Grace is right,' Beatrice told her grey-pigtailed reflection. ‘Quite right. You're a foolish old woman.'

Then she switched off the light, turned out the fire, and padded across the worn carpet to join Cat under the covers.

Nine

Sandy the nanny arrived in the Easter holidays, and was given a pretty room at Church Cottage with its own wash basin and a view over the garden and the sheep-filled fields beyond. She brought very little luggage – her wardrobe seemed to consist solely of jeans and sweatshirts – and was downstairs within ten minutes of having been shown upstairs, calmly unloading the dishwasher. The twins, eating their tea at the kitchen table, solemnly watched her large denim bottom bent over the dishwasher, and mutually, instinctively, resolved to withhold a large measure of their co-operation.

Julia was anxious that Sandy shouldn't know she had never employed anyone domestically before, except for Mrs Phelps, who came two mornings a week from the village to help clean the house. Julia and Mrs Phelps saw eye to eye in the matter of tidiness and gleaming surfaces, and Mrs Phelps was also a fan of Hugh's, and had gained great stature at the village Wednesday Club meetings by working for a television personality. Mrs Phelps was not talkative, and prided herself on never sitting down, so she had been, in terms of efficiency, a most trouble-free employee. Watching Sandy stack clean plates in the cupboard as instructed, Julia hoped and prayed that she would turn out to be as effortless as Mrs Phelps.

Julia explained to Sandy about the twins' diet. She then explained about the washing machine and the necessity of handwashing all woollens in liquid soap and about the days the milkman and travelling fishmonger called. Sandy listened with every appearance of good humour and then she said to the twins, ‘Come on, then, lads. Time for the telly.'

The twins caught their breaths.

‘Only on Mondays and Thursdays,' Julia said.

Sandy gazed at her. ‘What do they do on the other days?'

‘They draw and paint and play with their toys, and in summer they play in the garden.'

‘And what do I do?'

‘You,' said Julia crisply, ‘play with them.'

Sandy scratched her head. Then she grinned. ‘OK,' she said, ‘I'll give it a whirl.'

The twins got off their stools and looked at her. She looked back at them. ‘Right,' she said, her comfortable Suffolk voice overlaid with the merest hint of mocking gentility, ‘let's go and play, then, shall we?'

‘She's wonderful,' Julia said to Hugh.

‘No beauty—'

‘What does that matter? The boys think she's heaven. You should have heard them in the bath.'

He smiled at her. They were having such a happy time together just now, so optimistic and confident. He leaned sideways on the sofa and bit her ear lightly.

‘Ouch.'

‘Nonsense.'

‘Isn't it amazing,' Julia said, ‘you and me down here having drinks in this civilized way, with Sandy doing all the chores. She offered to get supper, even. She says her mother's the star cook for their local WI and she's taught Sandy.'

‘Hurray,' Hugh said. He looked admiringly at Julia. For the first few weeks of her new contact lenses he had missed her spectacles – or at least, he had missed taking them off before he kissed her – but now he loved her new, free face. She looked pretty enough at the moment to verge on the beautiful. He said, ‘I'm a lucky dog.'

She blushed. She looked down into her champagne glass. They were drinking champagne to celebrate Sandy's arrival, and the conclusion of the highly successful editing of the euthanasia programme – ‘It is, quite frankly, a corker,' Hugh said. It was to be transmitted at the end of April, and at the beginning of May Hugh's contract was due for renewal; it would now, of course, go through on the nod. In addition, the preview of the first series of
Night Life
had pleased so many people that Rob Shiner, Julia's producer, was planning a second. There were, indeed, myriad reasons for drinking champagne. They had offered some, of course, to Sandy but she said no thanks, she only drank lager. At bathtime, Edward had cried because he didn't want to sit on her knee and become physically involved with her rolls of stomach and bosom, but Sandy said nothing of that to Julia. ‘You'll get used to it,' she told Edward. ‘I've had to, and you will.'

‘Poor James,' Hugh said suddenly.

‘I know.'

‘Seems wrong, somehow, toasting ourselves in fizz while James is left coping with all that.'

‘I gather Joss begged to stay. I suppose you can't blame her for wanting to cling to what she knows. She's only fourteen, after all.'

Hugh frowned at his glass. ‘You know James. Won't let on, won't say his household is a living hell, but what else can it be? Have you seen Kate?'

‘No,' Julia said carefully. ‘I know she's stopped going to Mansfield House because when I went there no-one had heard a word from her for three weeks.' She stopped. She didn't want to say that Kate was irresponsible and selfish, because Hugh was always so defensive about James and anything pertaining to James, and it was, amazingly, plain that James had not himself said one derogatory word about Kate.

Hugh grinned at her. ‘Penny for your thoughts.'

‘Stop it—'

‘Irresponsible is one thought, isn't it? Selfish another.' He adopted a teasing, mocking voice, imitating an outraged suburban housewife. ‘How she could leave a kiddy, I don't know, and with no call to go either. It's that women's lib, that's what it is. Me, I've always been proud to keep a lovely home.'