The Men and the Girls (6 page)

‘I won't go,' Joss said.

‘Of course you don't have to,' Kate said. She felt tired and irritable. She had spent the day helping in the restaurant kitchen, because the chef was off sick, and she had chopped up a mountain of chillies without rubber gloves, and her fingers and cuticles blazed and throbbed.

‘I hate old women. What's the point, anyway?'

‘I said, you don't have to go.'

But Joss wanted to. ‘What's he on about? Why does he want to make me?'

I'm lonely, Joss thought. She turned the little silver stud she had just had inserted in the side of her nose. Uncle Leonard had said, ‘Good God. Looks like a bloody great boil,' sending Joss flying to the bathroom mirror. ‘It looks great!' she'd shouted. She spun it carefully now, defiant and uncertain.

‘I'm not going. I'm not. He can go if he wants to, but I'm not.'

I wish, Kate thought, holding her burning hands under the kitchen tap, I wish he didn't want to. I wish he wasn't so fascinated. It makes him seem so peculiar, somehow, a bit dotty,
old
dotty. I know I'd go mad if he fancied anyone young, but somehow this mental fancying of someone old has got me too, it really has, and I shouldn't feel it, I shouldn't.

‘I'm not—' Joss began again.

Kate spun round, Kate who never shouted, and shouted, ‘Oh for God's sake, Joss, go away!'

Joss stared. Then she swore. Kate turned back to the sink, trembling. The kitchen door banged behind Joss, and her aggressive boots went up the stairs with challenging thuds.

I'm tired, Kate thought. It's January and I'm tired. I don't suppose I'm worth much more than four pounds an hour but, at the end of a day like this, I can't help feeling that there must be easier ways to earn twenty-five pounds. In between chopping chillies, she had helped in the restaurant, waiting on the three back tables which the regular girl, Susie, disliked because no-one could see her, away from the front window, and she lived in hope of being seen, and, as a consequence of being seen, of being rescued from being a waitress and taken away to be a princess instead. Nobody interesting had come to Kate's tables that lunchtime, only a dull pair of tidy women, and a man on his own with a book, and three whispering students, but two couples had come to the front tables who had, in their various ways, upset Kate even more than the savage chillies. That poor man, Kate thought now, taking her dripping hands away from the stream of water to see if they still hurt, that poor young man. And then Julia.

The young man had come in first, a postgraduate, perhaps, not young enough to be an undergraduate, with a dramatic girl in bold earrings and thigh boots. She was laughing as they came in and Kate thought how lovely, what a relief on a glum day like this to see people so happy that they're laughing. But she wasn't laughing with him, she was laughing at him, and soon, even while they wound up forkfuls of
tagliatelle alla Carbonara
, they were quarrelling. It seemed that the girl not only liked quarrelling, but she liked doing it in a public place where other people, even the lone man with a book, could look up and see her flinging her hands out, tossing her hair. The young man had not been much more controlled. Kate had heard him say, ‘Not here. You mustn't say these things here.' Finally the girl had leapt up and thrown herself out into the street, and the man had said no thank you, he didn't want any coffee, and had paid the bill and followed her.

Five minutes later, while Susie was downstairs in the kitchen and Kate was pouring out coffee for the two tidy women, he came back in. Kate thought he had forgotten something. He came up to her, by the espresso machine, and she looked at him enquiringly. He said, ‘I've just come back to say sorry.'

‘What?'

‘We were very anti-social.' He turned to the restaurant. ‘I'm so sorry, everyone. It was extremely rude.'

They gazed at him.

‘It's nice of you to come back,' Kate said.

‘I feel badly, I feel—' he stopped. He had a narrow face and thick dark hair and his eyes were, Kate thought, so sad. He said, ‘I'll go now. I just wanted to say that I'm sorry if we – if we spoiled anyone's lunch. That's all.' He backed away. Kate smiled at him. He smiled too and his smile illuminated his face and made it puckish, delightful. He gave a little nod to Kate and opened the door to go out just as two other people pushed at it to come in. They were a man in a black leather jacket and Julia.

Julia came straight up to Kate. She was smiling. She said, ‘I brought Rob here deliberately. He said he was Italy-sick, so I said I knew where to go.'

‘Good,' Kate said faintly. Julia wore grey flannel trousers and a tweed jacket and a cream jersey and pearl earrings. Kate thought of the sauce stains down her apron and her red unhappy hands.

Julia said, ‘Rob is my director.' Rob smiled at Kate. He had a friendly, crumpled face and tinted spectacles.

‘Of course,' Kate said. ‘Where would you like to sit?'

‘Not next to the lavatory door,' Rob said.

‘Here then,' Kate said, leading the way. ‘Here. Susie will look after you.'

‘Not you?' Julia said. Her face was open.

‘I'm supposed to be skivvying in the kitchen. I shall offend the hierarchy otherwise—'

Julia smiled again. ‘What do you recommend?'

‘The gnocchi,' Kate said, ‘made an hour ago.'

‘How's Joss?'

‘Dear, but horrible. I expect the twins are just dear.'

‘Yes,' Julia said. ‘Yes, they are,' and then Kate had felt she should melt away, so she had melted, to watch Julia and Rob intermittently and covertly while they ate and talked, with utter absorption, and Rob made copious notes in a reporter's notebook.

When they left, Julia had kissed Kate and said give her love to James and Kate had been left standing oddly on edge. Why, she asked herself, stacking plates in the dishwasher, why, when it all too evidently wasn't a remotely romantic occasion? Why should it affect her that Julia should have lunch with a television director in this patently above-board and businesslike way, any more than that James had found an innocent human curiosity that amused him for the moment? He might be getting older, Julia might be setting out on a career, but so what? Kate had always known James would get older, and that getting older would probably change him a little, just as getting middle aged would doubtless change her. She had always felt affectionately about this, knowing that the essence of James would never change, and believing that the periphery didn't matter. As for Julia, Kate and James had often talked about her, and her very real competence, and how heaven-sent it was that someone like Hugh, with career prospects dependent on age, should have someone like Julia to take over quietly when he was forced to stop. Now, faced with Julia appearing to be embarking on doing exactly that, and James behaving with all the imagination and warmth of heart that she had always so loved in him, why wasn't she rejoicing?
Why?
She always rejoiced at other people's achievements, she always had, she relied upon being able to do so. But stacking plates in the restaurant's basement scullery that afternoon, and standing at the sink at Richmond Villa now, she felt cold with resentment. She also felt scared by her feelings.

She dried her hands and inspected them. ‘Little hands,' James always said, folding the pair of them up in one of his. They looked wretched. She thought she would go upstairs and find the cream that the doctor had prescribed for Leonard the winter he had had bronchitis, to prevent his getting bedsores. Kate had nursed him then, at least, as much as he'd allowed her to.

‘I've got my dignity still, though I mayn't have hair or teeth. When I look at myself in the bath I think: Leonard, old boy, you need ironing. And I'd rather only I saw that.'

Kate went out of the kitchen and along the hall. James's study door was shut, and from behind it came the steady reluctant drone of a pupil reading an essay, a gloomy, stooped boy, trying to retake his A-level English examination, to whom James, being James, was very encouraging. Kate went up the stairs slowly and tiredly. The split in the carpet on the seventh step was widening, exposing old-fashioned, matted brown underfelt. The usual music was hammering away behind Joss's door and the radio news quacking behind Uncle Leonard's. Kate knocked.

‘Wait.'

Kate waited. There was shuffling and grunting and the radio was turned off.

‘Come!' Leonard shouted.

‘Look,' Kate said, holding out her hands.

Leonard peered. ‘You need my bum stuff. What've you been doing?'

‘Chopping chillies.'

Leonard began to rummage in a drawer. ‘You'd earn more money on the streets.'

‘I know.'

‘James back?'

‘Yes.'

‘Know where he's been?'

‘Yes,' Kate said steadily.

Leonard found a huge white plastic pot with ‘Oily Cream B.P.' stamped on the side, and held it out to Kate. ‘Why d'you reckon he goes?'

‘She interests him and he feels guilty.'

‘Why don't you like that?'

Kate looked at him. ‘I don't know.'

‘But you don't.'

‘I'm tired,' Kate said. ‘It's January.' She unscrewed the lid of the pot and took out a dollop of cream on her finger. ‘I'd forgotten what slimy stuff this is.'

‘Kate,' Leonard said. He watched her sliding her hands round and over one another in the slippery thickness of the cream. ‘Kate. If you'd only bloody marry him, you'd have the authority to object.'

Julia was home ten minutes before she had promised to be. Thursdays were Hugh's empty days, and he had agreed, without particular grace, to look after the twins while Julia had lunch with Rob Shiner. Julia had thought of asking Hugh to come too, for his sake, and then had decided against it, for her own, and for the sake of their future. She had left a shepherd's pie in the bottom oven, vegetables ready prepared in saucepans, and a tub of Greek yoghurt in the fridge which her note said the boys could have for pudding with a teaspoonful of clear honey. Hugh told them they didn't have to have honey. They always had honey, so at first they didn't know what else to suggest until Hugh said what about jam, which they were seldom allowed. Then the possibilities of this game dawned on them and they thought of marmalade and peanut butter and then (much funnier) bubble bath or mud and then (so funny that George fell off his chair and lay shaking on the floor) poo. After that, they became extremely wild and silly and rushed round the kitchen like express trains shouting lavatory words, and Edward put a cushion on his head in order to be the bees knees of a joke and it fell off into the puddle of yoghurt he hadn't eaten. That sobered them all up, because the sticky cushion made them think of Mummy. Sticky cushions and Mummy didn't somehow go together.

‘I'll wash it,' Hugh said.

The twins dragged up chairs to the sink to help him and squirted washing-up liquid all over the cushion in looping yellow squiggles and the cushion went from being a light, soft, coloured, dry, comfortable thing to being a sad, dark, heavy wet lump. They squeezed it and shook it, and laid it on the hot lid of the Aga, where it flopped like an omelette.

‘It'll be fine,' Hugh said. ‘When it's dry, it'll be just like before.'

The twins weren't sure about this. When Hugh took them into their little playroom – bright and clean with a big cork pinboard, and a huge low table for playing trains and painting on – for an after-lunch story, they became babyish and jostled all over him and put their thumbs in. They didn't really listen to their story, a particularly soppy tale they had insistently chosen about a bad puppy and a good kitten, being far more intent on their wriggling battle to occupy the prime place on Hugh's lap. After the bad puppy had chewed a little girl's new bedroom slipper, Hugh gave up and said they were going out for a walk. They immediately shouted ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah' and began to stand on their heads. For a fraction of a second, even Hugh had to remind himself that he loved them.

The walk was not a success. George had a sock that wouldn't stay up in his gumboot and Edward said his ears hurt in the wind but he wouldn't wear his hat. It was a sullen, raw day, with the flat Oxfordshire fields in a mid-winter sulk. By the river they met a disagreeable swan and an ordinary duck or two, but the landscape was otherwise devoid of interest and life. Hugh plodded on for a dutiful mile while the twins skirmished round him tripping him up, or trailed in the rear, grizzling about their socks and their ears, and these were, he told himself, his good, cheerful, biddable twins who were universally agreed to be the least trouble it was possible to be if you were four, and a boy, and multiplied by two.

When they got home, the twins clamoured for television, which they were allowed to watch on selected days only. Hugh felt rebelliously that he didn't care if it was a selected day or not. He turned it on – the boys were forbidden to touch anything electrical – and a purple gorilla lunged out of the screen and brandished a panga at them, shouting ‘Kill, kill, kill!' Sighing with rapture, the twins subsided in a heap together on the carpet and put their thumbs in. They looked as Hugh imagined he used to look long ago, when he smoked dope, serene and inwardly concentrated.

He went out to the kitchen. After the post-lunch rampage, the chairs had been left all anyhow, like abandoned dancing partners, and half the crockery they had used was still on the table among the spills and smears. On the Aga, the cushion had baked into a thin dry biscuit. Hugh picked it up and shook it, and the feathers inside rustled like cornflakes and fell into a little heap at one end, leaving him holding an almost empty bag. He tried to pump it full of air, and then arranged it artfully back in its Windsor chair and casually threw a folded newspaper across it.