The Men and the Girls (21 page)

‘Oh Lord. It's just perfect. What a giveaway—'

‘I was really frightened. I was just going to telephone you.'

He looked at her. ‘Were you?'

‘Yes.'

‘How dear and dependent. I like that.'

Julia said, ‘I didn't like the way Sandy didn't seem sorry, either. It scared me.'

‘But I thought you said Sandy was wonderful—'

Julia hesitated. She had, she did think Sandy reliable and competent, she did. She just hadn't liked Sandy's expression in the kitchen. She put her chin up. ‘I expect she was as scared as me and it made her surly, because she felt responsible.'

‘Darling,' Hugh said, putting an arm round her and his face close to hers. ‘Darling. It wasn't a big deal, was it? Come on now. They weren't even lost.'

Julia turned huge eyes on him and then bent her head to rest on his shoulder. ‘No. No, of course.'

‘We're on a winning streak,' Hugh said firmly. He took Julia's hand and led her downstairs to the kitchen. The table had been laid for the two of them, and a note from Sandy lay beside the pepper mill which read. ‘Stuffed pancakes in bottom oven. Gone out to play darts.' On a pad of newspaper on the Aga, like a peace offering, lay Julia's shoe, the shoe the twins had peed in, washed and drying.

‘There,' Hugh said in triumph, indicating it. ‘There you are! What more could you ask for than that?'

Leonard began to wash up. It was plain, on Joss's return, that things in Richmond Villa had to change a little, and washing up, he decided, would be his contribution, being both a public activity and one that offered plenty of scope for pantomime. Several times a day, he dragged a three-legged stool up to the sink to sit on, and made a tremendous mess and performance with water and soapsuds, drying everything afterwards with the same tea towel, day after day.

‘There are plenty of clean ones—'

‘Wicked waste. What's the matter with this one? I only dry clean things, and any germs are our germs. If you can't take your own sodding germs by now, you're a poor fish.'

He liked best to wash up in the afternoons, listening to radio drama. He shouted at the characters in plays and sometimes threw his sodden tea towel at the radio in rage. Mrs Cheng, who saw no point in his washing up since he was so incompetent that most of it had to be done again, regarded the radio as an ally since it deflected so much of Leonard's abuse from her. She moved swiftly about the house with her cloths and brushes, listening to the roars and crashes from the kitchen with the detachment she felt about everything except Kate. After her early visit, she could not bear to go back to Osney again. It had terrified her to see Kate so happy in a situation which only seemed to her mad and wrong. All she felt she could do about it was to look after Richmond Villa with redoubled zeal, and particularly Joss's bedroom. It was noticeable, even to Mrs Cheng, that in the last week Joss had been much less ungrateful about her straightened bedroom, much less inclined to plunge into the mild order Mrs Cheng imposed and recreate chaos.

‘Don't touch her room,' James said to Mrs Cheng. ‘Leave it. It's an expression of anarchy and the only thing to do is to ignore it.'

But Mrs Cheng couldn't do that. The thought of what lay behind Joss's bedroom door goaded and drove her until she had confronted it and attacked it with her desire for cleanliness and regularity. In the school holidays, this was made even more difficult by Joss's intermittent presence, and, when the first day of term came, and Joss's consequent absence, Mrs Cheng opened the bedroom door with the exalted, pent-up zeal of the true reformer. There was a hump in the bed.

Mrs Cheng went over to the bed and peered. Joss's eyes were tightly closed. Mrs Cheng prodded her.

‘Why you not at school?'

‘I had a headache,' Joss whispered. ‘They said I could go home. Miss Gale sent me.'

‘Why you have headache? You have period?'

‘No,' Joss said, ‘just headache.' She turned her face into the pillow.

Mrs Cheng went out and downstairs to the kitchen. Uncle Leonard was drying forks and shouting, ‘Don't give in, you fool, don't give in!' at a dramatization of
The Forsyte Saga
on Radio Four. Mrs Cheng hurried across the kitchen and turned it off.

‘What d'you do that for?'

‘You hear Joss come in?'

‘No. Joss is at school. Turn that back on. Never heard anyone so bloody wet as Michael Mont—'

‘She upstairs. With headache.'

‘Joss?' Leonard dumped his handful of forks down. ‘Latest wheeze, I suppose. Blasted child. Playing truant.'

‘Look pale,' Mrs Cheng said.

Leonard reached for his stick. ‘She'll look paler when I've finished with her.'

Mrs Cheng watched. Leonard limped out of the kitchen and she heard him go slowly and painfully up the stairs. After a while, she heard a bit of shouting, and then his stick and his shuffle went along the landing to the bathroom and back again. Then, very slowly, he came downstairs and back to the kitchen.

‘Given her an aspirin.'

‘Call doctor?'

‘Certainly not. Doctors are for the dying, not for adolescent malingerers.'

‘Where James?'

‘Gone to the library. He'll be back at six. I,' said Leonard drawing himself up and looking down at Mrs Cheng with an air of superiority, ‘I am going out at six. To watch myself on the television screen, with Miss Beatrice Bachelor, on her sister-in-law's television. I am taking a bottle of sherry. Tonight, my lychee-faced bamboo shoot, my little oriental half-wit, tonight is my big night.'

Mrs Cheng took no notice. ‘Won't leave Joss alone in Villa?'

‘Certainly not,' Leonard said. ‘I know my responsibilities.'

Mrs Cheng put away her cloths and hung the broom behind the cellar door. Then she buttoned and buckled herself into the shocking-pink mackintosh she had bought after much agonizing between it and one in lime-green, and let herself out of the front door. When she had gone, Leonard picked up the kitchen telephone and asked the nearest taxi service to collect him at a quarter to six and take him to Cardigan Street.

The house was quite silent when James let himself in, a little after six. He stood in the hall and listened for the familiar sounds of Leonard's radio, and Joss's rock music. There were neither. He went down the hall to the kitchen where the results of Leonard's washing up lay strewn about the table in what was rapidly becoming a familiar medley of inconsequence; teacups sitting in pudding bowls instead of in each other, big plates balancing on little saucers, spoons lurking in the teapot. He put his briefcase down on a countertop, and opened the cupboard where the drink lived. There was an inch of whisky, two cans of beer and half a bottle of a red wine from Turkey which was all Mr Patel seemed to offer.

‘Another customer says it is very muscular,' said Mr Patel, who didn't drink alcohol despite his Christianity.

James poured the whisky into a glass and sloshed water in after it, from the tap. Then he carried it into his study. Leonard had plainly, in his excitement over
Is the Choice Yours?
, gone out early, and Joss, equally plainly, in defiance of the tiny concessions to more civilized behaviour James believed she had made in the last week, was out also, and not doing her homework. He drank a gulp of whisky. It was difficult to decide if he was depressed anew by Joss, or simply resigned to her, beyond caring, counting the days until she could go to Osney and that would be that. The trouble is, James thought, staring down into his glass, that part of me, which I do not understand at all, doesn't want that to be that.

He put the whisky glass down on the pile of books by his armchair, and lit the gas fire. Then he went upstairs to change his jacket for a jersey, and, as he reached the landing, he became aware that a cat had got in somewhere and was shut in, and was crying. He stopped, turning his head, and realized that the cat was in fact a person, and the person was behind Joss's bedroom door. He leaped forward, flinging the door open, and the noise of the crying rose to a great wail of misery.

‘Joss!'

She reared up at him, swaddled in her duvet, her face distorted with weeping.

‘Oh Joss,' said James, much shocked. He sat on the edge of her bed, and seized her wadded body, pulling it on to his knee. ‘Oh Joss, what is it, what is it?'

She clung to him. Her arms, emerging skinny and naked from a grey T-shirt, crept out of her duvet and fastened themselves round him. Then she turned her hot, slippery face towards him, and clamped it into his neck.

‘Is it Kate, is it Mum, do you want to see Mum?'

‘No!' Joss shouted, choking, rubbing her face violently against him. ‘No!'

James took one hand away from holding her, and prised her face from him so that he could look at her. ‘Joss,' he said gently, ‘is it Garth?'

She gave him a look of utter desolation, and tears began to pour down her cheeks again in a stream. James laid her face back against him and began to rock her, back and forth, back and forth, like a baby with wind.

‘Oh Joss, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry.'

‘Immature,' Joss said incoherently, her voice muffled, ‘he said I was. Just a kid, a little kid. He said I was boring.'

James went on rocking. He found he had a lump in his own throat. He said unsteadily, ‘People often call other people rude things when it's what they are themselves, you know.'

‘I – I
liked
him!' Joss cried in a strangled scream.

‘Of course you did. I know. But there'll be others.'

‘Never,' Joss said.

‘Jossie! What nonsense. Come on, now. Nose-blow time.'

She sat up a little straighter, and smeared her face with the back of her hand.

‘Don't be so disgusting. Here. Have my handkerchief.'

The telephone began to ring. Joss stiffened slightly.

‘Telephone—'

‘Leave it,' James said. ‘If it's important they'll ring back. It can't be as important as this, whatever it is. Come on, now, tell me what happened.'

‘He said it after lunch,' Joss said, sounding a bit stronger. ‘In front of everyone. They all heard. Everyone heard.'

‘What a coward.'

Joss shook her head. ‘I knew it wouldn't last.'

‘Another one will.'

‘Never!'

‘Rubbish.' He put out a hand and ruffled her short, damp hair. ‘Well, old thing. We're in the same sort of boat, aren't we?'

She made no move to get off his knee, but sat there swaddled, sniffling, and regarding him. Then she leaned forward and bumped a clumsy kiss on his chin. He swallowed.

‘You know what we've got to do?'

‘What—'

‘We've got to go down and watch Uncle Leonard and Miss Bachelor talking about death, that's what.' He touched Joss's cheek. ‘I feel about ready for a good laugh like that, don't you?'

Joss leaned forward and laid her cheek on his chest again, and began, very weakly, to giggle.

‘Great stuff,' Mark Hathaway said, pressing the ‘Off' button of the television remote-control panel. ‘Amazing. Amazing old woman.'

Kate said nothing. She was trying to adjust herself to having, as it were, met Miss Bachelor for the first time on television. Miss Bachelor had been most impressive: clear, calm, and even, at times, humorous. ‘Not at all,' she had said crisply to Hugh, the unseen interviewer, several times, and once, briskly, ‘Absolute nonsense.'

‘What did you think, Katie?'

‘I feel a bit stunned—'

Mark got up from the sofa. He said sharply, ‘You were stunned when you came in.'

It was true, she had been. She had tried to ring Richmond Villa, to speak to Joss, and the telephone had just rung and rung, not even Leonard had answered it. For some reason she had no logical explanation for, Kate felt that they had all been in the house, and had heard the telephone and, suspecting it was her, had conspired not to answer it. Such behaviour went against everything she knew of all three of them, but the feeling persisted in her like nausea. She had told Mark this, and he had looked withdrawn and unhelpful, as he had looked when she told him about seeing James and Joss in Queen Street. He was angry with her, she supposed, for refusing to sleep with him for a week. She looked at his marvellous, elegant jawline as he moved about making coffee, and couldn't help but observe that it was set and taut. Damn and blast, Kate thought, more soothing ahead, more explaining and reassuring.

‘I imagine,' Mark said, holding out a coffee mug to her, ‘that your
cordon sanitaire
is still in operation.'

‘If we can't even be very civil to one another out of bed, why should we be any better in it?'

He looked down at her, still sitting on the sofa, with contempt. ‘Sex is a prime form of communication, in case you hadn't realized.'

Kate stared down into her coffee mug. He had made, as he always made, beautiful coffee in a cafetière, and the aroma rose richly upwards and seemed to mock her, as Mark's room suddenly did, for being unable to be a true child of her times.

‘It doesn't matter,' Mark said, turning away, ‘I couldn't make love to a woman who can't think about anything but her damn kid. A kid she abandoned in the first place—'

Kate shut her eyes. In her ears rang Hugh's familiar tones from the television programme, and Beatrice Bachelor's decided ones, particularly when, at one moment, she had rebuked Hugh for suggesting an element of self-dramatization among the supporters of euthanasia.