The Men and the Girls (27 page)

Christine had a headache, and a meeting with her accountant later that day. She scowled at Kate. ‘What does she want with you, then?'

‘I don't know what to do,' Julia said simply. ‘I just do not know what to do next.'

She sat with Kate in the window of a big café in St Giles, and pressed a slice of lemon down to the bottom of her cup of tea.

‘He says he is desperate without the twins and that he loves me, but he won't come home because my attitude is killing him.'

‘What is your attitude?' Kate said. She felt fond of Julia and sorry for her and, by comparison, for once strong and capable.

‘I just want to help,' Julia said. ‘I love him and I miss him and I just want to help him come to terms with this terrible unfairness. And—' she stopped.

Kate waited. She took a mouthful of warm, sharp tea and watched Julia. At last as if after a little internal wrestle with herself, Julia said, ‘You see, I can't cope without him. I thought I could but I can't. There isn't any point to anything without him. I need him. I've discovered that.'

‘Have you told him so?'

‘He won't let me,' Julia said sadly. She had telephoned constantly, for brief, unsatisfactory conversations, and once she had gathered up all her courage, and gone round to Richmond Villa, which had seemed to be full of people and very lively, with an American woman in the kitchen showing Leonard how to make real hamburgers with a little plastic mould. Leonard had looked like a happy child in a sandpit. James had been sweet to Julia and Hugh had been kind, but politely kind, and she hadn't achieved anything.

‘I begged him to come home,' Julia said now, remembering. ‘I went round there and simply asked him outright. It was difficult to see him alone because there were so many people there, including an American woman I didn't know. I said please come home for the twins' sake even if you won't for mine. He said it was too soon. I tried to talk about the twins but he got terribly upset, and I don't want to upset him.'

Kate, meaning to say something sympathetic, said instead, by mistake, ‘What American woman?'

‘The mother of a boyfriend of Joss's, I think. James said she was a woman designed to do charitable work and that they had become her charity. She didn't seem to mind when he said that. She laughed.'

Kate pulled herself together. ‘And the twins? How are the twins?'

Julia swallowed. ‘Terribly difficult. They keep asking when Daddy's coming home and every time the phone rings they rush at it shouting “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy”. And they've started wetting their beds. I thought Sandy was wonderful—'

‘Isn't she?'

‘I think she's exploiting me, now Hugh's away.'

‘Julia,' Kate said, leaning forward, ‘can you work?'

‘It's a relief,' Julia said solemnly. ‘It's the only thing that's ordinary, that's all right.'

‘So you're OK for money—'

‘Oh yes,' Julia said, ‘I'm earning more than Hugh did.' Her face twisted briefly. ‘I'm so ashamed of myself. I used to think money mattered so much, that it was security, that our kind of life depended upon having enough of it. But now I've got enough of it, and I haven't got Hugh, I feel—' She stopped again.

‘He'll come back, you know,' Kate said gently.

Julia gazed at her. ‘But
will
he? You should see him and James together.'

Kate looked up. They stared at one another.

‘Was there ever any, I mean, did they ever—?'

‘No,' Julia said, ‘I don't think so. But the way they love each other is worse than sex, somehow, it's got more of a hold, they're such
friends
.' She spread her hands. Her big, beautiful old engagement ring from Hugh, a half-hoop of opals and tiny diamonds, glittered and gleamed. ‘I feel shut out. Did you ever? Did you ever feel Hugh mattered to James more than you did?'

Kate thought. If she was scrupulously honest, it was only at the end that she had been irritated by James's affection for Hugh, and by then she had been ready to be irritated by anything. ‘Not really.'

‘I feel that at the moment I can't compete, that I've become smug and prissy and I haven't a sense of humour. Beside me, James is so warm and easy and human, and he doesn't make Hugh feel as if he'd let him down. I don't feel that Hugh's let me down either, but he feels he has and it's somehow my fault. It's like being in a maze,' Julia said, fishing out her lemon slice and dropping it in an ashtray. ‘It's like going round and round the same paths in a maze, and never getting to the middle, and never getting out, either.'

‘I think you just have to wait.'

‘Do you? Do you honestly?'

‘I did,' Kate said, ‘I waited and waited for Joss, and then the time was suddenly right to act, and I acted. It was Benjie, the chef at work, actually, who suddenly spurred me to act. The same will happen to you.'

‘Will it?'

‘Oh yes. Because, you see, Hugh will be missing you. He mightn't be able to feel it but he is. He's too wounded to feel anything just now, but he will in time.'

Julia put out a hand and took Kate's. ‘You do comfort me. How can you be so sure?'

A shadow crossed Kate's face. She said, ‘I'm not proud of this, but I know for certain that James is still missing me. Hugh will be just the same. And now I've got Joss—'

Julia smiled. ‘It's so lovely, that you've got Joss back.'

‘Yes,' Kate said. ‘Yes. Lovely's the word.'

James asked Mrs Cheng to work extra hours at Richmond Villa; he said Mr Hunter would pay her. Mrs Cheng disapproved of Hugh. She liked Beatrice Bachelor, whose age, in any case, made her worthy of respect, and who treated her with courtesy and had asked her how to say several simple things in Cantonese; but Hugh was another matter. He made stupid jokes and he kept James up too late and there were too many empty whisky bottles. Mrs Cheng ironed his shirts – much better quality than James's – and cleaned his room and wiped over all his bottles and potions and lotions in the bathroom, but she did it purely and entirely for the money. She would do nothing extra for Hugh, and she wouldn't speak to him either.

‘Bloody rude,' Uncle Leonard said.

‘You fine one to talk.'

‘What've you got against the poor sod, anyway?'

‘Shouldn't
be
here.'

‘Why not?'

‘Not right,' Mrs Cheng said, brushing clots of fluff out from under Leonard's bed. ‘Not right, all you men. Should be Kate back. Should be Joss.'

‘We've got Bluey now,' Leonard said, to be annoying.

‘Not same.'

‘No,' said Leonard, thinking of Kate and Joss, ‘not the same at all.'

Mrs Cheng had spring-cleaned Joss's room. She had washed the windows, and then the curtains, and prised all the chewing-gum off the carpet with a kitchen knife. She had made the bed up with everything but the duvet, and then covered it with a clean old double sheet, to be ready for Joss. When she couldn't bear Hugh, she went into Joss's room for a quiet moment. Although she had no concrete reason for suspecting it, she sometimes thought James did the same thing. James had only spoken of the matter to her once, and then in a roundabout sort of way, but all the same, Mrs Cheng knew what he meant.

‘When things change,' he'd said, ‘you simply have to learn to adapt to them, don't you? And I suppose, if you're lucky, you might learn to like the change, or at least get perfectly used to it.'

James, Mrs Cheng told herself, had a lot of assets. Who would leave such a man? Kind man, she said to herself, steady man, and wise. Her father had been wise; he had told her not to marry Mr Cheng, but her mother had wanted it because of the takeaway shop. Her father had been wise, but weak. James Mallow, Mrs Cheng had come to believe, was wise and not weak at all.

‘James grown up,' she said to Leonard. She swept a handful of dead flies into her dustpan. ‘He not spoilt old baby like
you
.'

Mark Hathaway noticed that he was losing weight; not much, perhaps only a few pounds, but enough for his extremely expensive Italian jeans (he had been to London to buy them) not to sit on his waist and hips with quite such perfect snugness as they once had. He also thought his face looked thinner, but that suited his mood, to look mildly haggard and melancholy. What average man, after all, would not look haggard and melancholy if messed about quite as appallingly as Kate was messing him?

The trouble was that he was in love with her, he was certain of it. He had never been so preoccupied with a woman; it amounted almost to an obsession. He couldn't satisfactorily analyse to himself precisely why she held so powerful an allure for him because, if he was ruthlessly candid, she was neither as intelligent nor as good-looking as almost every other girlfriend he had had. But she had a mixture of fragility and sturdy independence that was tremendously attractive, and she was gentle and seldom lost her temper, and she had a wonderful capacity for happy enjoyment of things and for making him enjoy those things too. He also felt, in a slightly strutting way, proud of having released her from the sterile habit of a worn-out relationship, and set her free. It frustrated him that she had never turned her extremely appealing slanting eyes on him and said thank you quite directly, for doing so.

But even that didn't frustrate him as much as Joss did. There he and Kate were, just getting through the first sticky patch inevitable in any relationship, and then along comes Joss, quite unannounced by Kate. Very, very occasionally on the nights Kate wasn't working, Joss would be out too, but usually Kate was with Joss on those nights because that was, she said, where she wanted to be. Of course, Mark could join them; he'd be more than welcome. She had to be joking. Joss and Mark made it perfectly plain to one another, without actually saying so, that there was to be nothing warmer between them than a truce.

There was nothing for it, Mark discovered to his dismay, but to wait for Kate outside Pasta Please, like some travesty of a stage door johnny, and walk her home. He started these walks by complaining to her of her neglect of him, but then she simply refused to speak to him at all, and his resentment at her preferring Joss was engulfed by a genuine fear of losing Kate altogether. He burrowed beneath all the feelings that seethed in the forefront of his mind for some genuine charm.

‘OK,' he said to Kate, taking her hand, ‘I accept that your being a mother must come first. But may I ask, in the spirit of the sweetest reason, what comes next, for us?'

Kate was uncertain. She didn't want Joss to have the smallest excuse for thinking life in Osney was boring or that she was being ignored, yet she didn't, either, want to say goodbye to Mark Hathaway. She liked him and enjoyed being with him and he represented something very significant to her, a person to have a relationship with who did not simultaneously become dependent. ‘I won't add to your pile of people,' he had said. But he had added to her experience; he'd given her modern novels, and music, and taken her to jazz clubs and Irish pubs and a tapas bar in Bristol. These things, and his friends, and his radical ideas and opinions, had made Kate feel that she had, in some way, been given back eight years of her youth. She wasn't at all ready to give up this source of mental stimulation and pleasure, and the growing self-esteem that went with it.

She said, ‘Joss has only been with me two weeks. We're just getting somewhere, in fact, I think I owe quite a lot of the improvement in our relationship to you because I'm so much happier and she catches it. Can you be patient a bit longer? She'll be fifteen in a month and I expect she'll start staying with friends more soon—'

She had, in fact, asked if she could stay away already. She had asked if she could stay with Angie, and Kate had said of course, although she had been horrified to discover how much she didn't want to say it. Then Angie's mother had had to go into hospital suddenly, and the household was thrown into turmoil and Joss didn't go. She hadn't made a fuss about it either, to Kate's relief. In fact at the moment she was making almost no fuss about anything, and Kate almost dared to believe that she was happy.

‘Look,' Mark said. He swung Kate's hand across him so that he could hold it in both of his. ‘Look, I accept all that. Great. But I must point out that there is me, too. And us. So how does the timetable for the future look?'

‘I don't know,' Kate said.

‘One month? Two? My thirty-fifth birthday?'

‘I can't tell. I wish I could, but I can't.'

‘Do you
want
it to go on like this?'

‘No,' Kate said candidly.

‘Ah. Well, at least that's something.'

‘But I do want to be with her and have a good relationship with her.'

‘And – me?'

‘And you.'

‘So how are you going to resolve it?'

‘Why do
I
have to?'

‘Because it's your dilemma and you made it.'

Kate wrenched her hand free and marched ahead of him. He was seized, quite suddenly, with the urge to spring after her, and slap her. He rammed his hands into the tight hip-pockets of his jeans, and broke into a run until he had caught up with her.

‘Kate. Sorry.'

‘You said you wouldn't be possessive. You said you were an individual, that you were free—'

‘I am. I'm not possessive.'

She stopped and swung round. The light from the street lamp turned her face pale-green and her hair bronze; she looked like a nymph or a dryad.

‘Oh Kate,' Mark said in longing, ‘have some pity.'