The Men and the Girls (19 page)

‘Oh,' she said to James, turning bright eyes on him. ‘James Mallow! I love your pieces. I agree with every word you say.'

‘What a pity,' James said. ‘Now we can't argue.'

‘I wish you'd write more about education. I'm terrifically committed to education, you see.'

‘I'm afraid I know nothing about it.'

Frederica's voice softened. ‘Don't you have children?'

A sudden, absolutely unbidden homesickness for Joss thickened James's throat. ‘Not a child.'

Frederica was very startled. ‘But,' she said, trying to retrieve the situation, ‘you look like a father.' She turned to the man standing on her other side. ‘Doesn't he?'

The man was about James's age, thin and yellow-toothed in a pink shirt under a fancy tweed jacket. He winked at James and put a hand out. ‘Terence Gray. Old chum of Hugh's.'

‘Me too,' James said.

‘Surely not television?'

‘No. Nothing to do with television.'

Terence Gray clasped his hands round the bowl of his champagne glass and rolled his eyes heavenwards. ‘
Sensible
man. It always was a madhouse and now it's a purgatory.'

‘It's been enormously influential in education,' Frederica said.

Terence eyed her. ‘Has it, sweetie?' he said languidly. ‘Like our friend here, I know nothing about it. Do you think I look like a father? Too amusing.'

‘I think you look like an actor,' James said.

‘Do I? Bull's-eye, actually. Actor turned freelance director. In my next life, I shall come back as a highly paid employee with a chauffeur-driven car and a pension plan.' He dropped his voice, and indicated Kevin McKinley's sharply clad back three feet away. ‘Like him.'

‘Who's he?'

‘My dear,' said Terence Gray, leaning forward and showing his yellow teeth, ‘he's the reason for this party. He's the new man at Midland Telly. Hugh's whole future hangs on Mr McK.'

At lunch, James found himself in the kitchen at a table beautifully laid in white and pale yellow with posies of narcissi down the middle, between Frederica and a worn-out looking woman who said she was Zoë Hirshfeld. James thought Frederica neither attractive nor interesting, so he decided to leave her to another of Hugh's cronies on her far side, a vastly overweight man with dark hair almost to his shoulders who had gained a national reputation for his producing of comedy series. Across the table, just too far away to speak to, sat Kate's friend, Helen. She looked at James as if he were both despicable and pitiable and James resolved to avoid her. He looked down at his plate. On it lay a little golden pouch of pastry filled with something white and speckled.

‘Goat's cheese,' said his neighbour.

He turned to her. She was probably about his age too, and had the dry, faded air of an exhausted moth. Her face and hair and clothes were all palish and fawnish, and her eyes had no life in them at all.

‘How elegant.'

‘This house is,' Zoë Hirshfeld said. ‘Isn't it?'

‘If a cottage can be elegant—'

‘Julia's elegant.'

‘Oh yes.'

She poked at her pastry with a fork. ‘And young,' she added.

‘Is elegance a matter of age?'

‘Everything's
a matter of age. And sex.' She put a fragment of cheese into her mouth and stared at him. ‘I mean, are you happy?'

‘No.'

‘There you are, then. I bet you were happy when you were Julia's age.'

‘Yes, I think I was.'

‘I was,' Zoë Hirshfeld said. ‘I'd only been married a couple of years and I thought television was wonderful. I can't bear experience, I can't bear what you have to learn, and age brings experience whether you like it or not. This needs black pepper.'

James looked down at his plate. It was empty.

‘I don't seem to have noticed—'

‘Which is your wife?'

‘I haven't got one.'

‘I should have known,' Zoë said. ‘I shouldn't even have asked. You'd think I'd have learned, wouldn't you, after all these years mixing with telly people—'

The fog cleared. ‘I'm not gay,' James said.

Zoë looked at him again. ‘Well, why haven't you got a wife?'

James couldn't bring himself to mention Kate. He said, ‘I had one. She died.'

After a long time, Zoë took her eyes away from his face. ‘I'm looking forward to widowhood,' she said.

‘You won't like it.'

‘You're quite wrong there,' she said. Her voice dropped. ‘It's all I'm hanging on for, it'll be my revenge.'

James drove home in the lowest spirits. Full of irreproachable food, and generous drink, he felt nothing but downcast by his first foray into social life on his own without Kate. His table at lunch had gradually been taken over by Hugh's cronies who had begun, during pudding, on an interminable sequence of anecdotes of the old days, when television had been the preserve of the autonomous amateur. They bellowed with laughter and lit cigarettes and blew smoke all over their neighbours and went into a schoolboy teasing routine with Hugh when he came in with a bottle of brandy and a fistful of glasses. Frederica had made many brave attempts to lure James into the irresistible topic of primary education, and Zoë had pushed her food around her plate and told him that the only thing worth living for was finally getting even with someone who'd ruined your life, until James could bear no more and had escaped, with his coffee, into the dining-room. There he had been captured by Fanny McKinley. She talked at him for a long time about the aspirational markets for modern magazines, and he sat and looked at her and thought how perfect she was, like something carved and polished, and also how her eyes lacked all vulnerability, all humanity, and that this made her, in the end, repulsive.

‘Had a good time?' Hugh said, as James was leaving.

‘Lovely,' James said.

Hugh looked unnatural, shining with an exaggerated bonhomie. ‘You OK?'

‘Yes,' James said.

‘I'll be in touch,' Hugh said, and slapped him on the shoulder.

It was a relief to be back in the car, in his ruined glasses, and to be leaving the Hunters' cosmetic corner of the countryside for beloved, ugly Jericho. For a brief moment, he thought of turning the car south, to skirt the city towards Osney, and then he thought that this would be the emotional equivalent of prodding an aching tooth, and continued homewards. When he got home, he told himself, he would go out into the garden for an hour and maybe prune something. It was Kate who had done the pruning in the past; Kate, who liked the garden.

Leonard had left his beans saucepan congealed and unwashed up on the draining board. He had left his dirty plate on the table too, and a scatter of Sunday newspapers, and he had helped himself to a glass of red wine, leaving the cork out of the bottle. It was difficult to decide whether he or Joss was the more chronically adolescent. How, James wondered, running water into the saucepan and jabbing at the clinging mess in it with a wooden spoon, did women stand families? No wonder housewives sometimes clamoured for payment; who could think of a sum adequate to recompense for the steady attrition of the nerves consequent upon living with two people like Joss and Leonard?

He went up to Leonard's room. Leonard was doing the crossword with exaggerated concentration.

‘Couldn't you even have cleared up?'

Leonard took no notice. He began to hum, just faintly.

‘Where's Joss?'

Leonard scented a welcome deflection from his own guilt. ‘Still out.'

‘When did she say she'd be back?'

‘Didn't.'

‘Any more of this,' James said, ‘and she's going to Osney, and you're going into a home.'

Leonard drooped. The hand holding the newspaper shook.

‘I mean it.'

Leonard squinted at him. ‘You wouldn't have the heart—'

‘If you had any consideration whatsoever for my heart,' James said, ‘you'd be doing something, just some tiny thing, that showed even an atom of consideration. You can get your own tea.'

He marched out and slammed the door.

‘Going to anyway,' Leonard muttered to the crossword.

Joss was not back by eight, her Sunday-night deadline. She was not back by nine, either, nor by ten. Leonard was sulking, and would not share first James's concern, and then his anger.

‘Should I ring the police?'

‘Not your child—'

‘No, but a child in my care.'

‘Ring Kate.'

‘Kate!'

‘Her child, after all. Her wretched child.'

Shaking with weariness, anxiety and emotion, James dialled Mr Winthrop's number in Osney.

‘Yes?' said Mr Winthrop, shouting above the strains of the US Navy Band of Sam Donahue.

‘I wonder if I could speak to Kate Bain?'

‘She's out,' yelled Mr Winthrop. ‘Gone to a party.'

‘Do you know when she'll be back?'

‘Couldn't say, couldn't possibly say!'

James put the telephone down. Then he put his head down on the telephone. He stayed like that for some moments, eyes closed, fists clenched. Then he raised his head and crossed his study to his desk and found a piece of scrap paper and wrote on it, blackly.

‘Door locked. Don't ring the bell. Go to Osney.'

He carried the paper and a drawing pin outside and pinned the note in the centre of the front door where it was plainly visible. Then he went inside, shot both bolts and fastened across the door the heavy, old-fashioned security chain that he had hardly used in thirty years.

Joss stood unsteadily on the pavement. It was one-thirty, and she had definitely had too much rum and Coca-Cola as well as a drag on some joint someone had passed her. She felt sick and tired and very much in need of the consolation of her own bedroom.

The note was so black-and-white that it was perfectly easy to read by the light of the street lamp without even going up the steps. It frightened Joss a little; James hadn't even signed it. She began to whimper, rubbing her party-impregnated sleeve across her eyes. There was no light in Uncle Leonard's window and there was something sufficiently uncompromising in the tone of the note to deter even Joss from chucking up a stone against the glass to wake him.

She subsided, snuffling, on the pavement and leant against the street lamp. She could go back to the squat, where the party had been held, which was inhabited by a shifting population of drop-outs from Oxford's private schools – drop-outs elaborately defying their middle-class upbringings – but she was, without Garth, a little apprehensive of doing that, and Garth had gone home to his liberal, academic parents in Observatory Street. She might go there, except that she'd never met his parents, and parents could be funny about being woken at two in the morning. Joss felt uncertain of her social adequacy in braving Observatory Street.

‘Go to Osney,' the note said. She certainly wasn't going to do that. She'd rather climb the fence at the side of the house, and break into the decrepit shed where the lawn mower and the deck-chairs lived and spend the night there than go to Osney. She didn't mind seeing Kate on neutral ground, but she jolly well wasn't going to have anything to do with Kate's socalled new life. She'd been once, because they'd gone on at her so, but she wasn't going again.

She stood up. She felt awful. Garth had been a bit, well, he'd tried something at the party, he'd tried to – Joss had known he would, sooner or later, and had thought she'd like it when he began, but she hadn't, and at the same time had been too scared to tell him to stop. He hadn't got very far, because someone had interrupted them, and then he'd been too stoned to start again. Joss thought of her pillow and her duvet locked inside the house and slow tears of self-pity rolled down her face and dripped on to her jacket.

She stumbled over to the fence and looked for hand-and footholds. It was made of overlapping upright panels, and it was absolutely smooth, there wasn't a cranny or a crevice. Joss leant against it, and thought: I'll just stay here, I'll just stay here until the morning, I don't care, I don't care about anything, when another thought struck her. She straightened up, and considered it for a moment. Why not? Why not give it a try? Pulling her jacket round her, Joss moved away from the fence, and set off at a steady trot for Cardigan Street, and Miss Bachelor.

Ten

‘I don't eat porridge,' Joss said.

‘This morning,' said Miss Bachelor, ‘you do.'

Joss sighed. She was, she knew perfectly well, in no moral position to object to anything of any kind, nor had she the energy, even over porridge. It lay in her cereal bowl in a grey-fawn pool; her punishment.

She had spent the night on the sofa in Miss Bachelor's sister-in-law's sitting-room, under Cat and a mound of crocheted blankets. Miss Bachelor had seemed unsurprised to see her, and remarkably equable about being disturbed at almost two in the morning. She had made Joss a mug of disgusting cocoa, full of powdery lumps.

‘I am distinctly short of maternal instincts,' she had said to Joss, ‘but if you wanted those, you should have gone to Osney.'

Joss had slept heavily and woken to a hammering headache. Now there was this porridge. What she craved was glasses and glasses of cold blue water and a very dark place to drink them in. She jabbed at her porridge and made lakes and bays for the milk to run into.

‘When you have eaten that,' said Miss Bachelor, spreading jelly marmalade on a triangle of toast, ‘we are going round to Richmond Villa together.'