Bad Girls Good Women (26 page)

‘You’re right, Teddy,’ the friend answered.

Mattie walked to the station and caught the last train back to London.

It was a warm, cramped, happy Christmas in the flat over the square. Felix had money from his decorating work, and he had bought smoked salmon and crystallised fruits and baskets of nuts as well as a goose. He had also made red felt Christmas stockings for Jessie and Mattie and Julia, and in the morning they found them at the end of their beds. There were tiny bottles of scent and little tablets of soap, and sheer nylons and fanciful earrings that he had made himself from beads and feathers bought from the little haberdashers down Berwick Street market.

Julia fixed her earrings on and turned her head to and fro.

‘You are clever, Felix. How do you know about so many things?’

‘I use my eyes,’ Felix said mildly. ‘Those earrings suit you.’ He was pleased with the plain silk handkerchiefs that Julia had bought him from Liberty’s. The electric-blue Teddy boy socks from Mattie were less well received.

‘Have you ever seen me wearing anything of the kind? You don’t use your eyes, Mattie.’

‘They’re supposed to be a joke.’

Felix looked amazed. ‘Who wants to look like a joke? And while we’re on the subject, that coat of yours …’

‘I like it,’ Mattie said, in a voice that invited no argument. ‘Your present’s the best of the lot, my duck,’ Jessie said, putting it on to prove her point. Mattie had found it in a crumbling second-hand clothes shop in Nottingham. It was a hat, and when she bought it it was still enveloped in yellowing tissue paper in its round black hatbox. It was a little shell of black velvet, with sequinned wings and quivering ostrich feathers, the whole creation swathed round and round with spotted veiling and skewered with an enormous peal-handled hat pin. As soon as Jessie put it on, tilting it instinctively over one eye, she was transformed into a risqué Edwardian grande dame.

Julia and Mattie clapped with delight, and Felix murmured, ‘That was a better choice.’

Later, Felix retired to the kitchen to cook. Julia put her head around the door and asked, ‘Can I help?’

Felix nodded and they worked side by side, enjoying a silent companionship that had been missing since the arrival of Josh. In Jessie’s room, Mattie and Jessie began by singing carols and under the influence of Jessie’s vodka soon moved on to the old music hall favourites. The two voices competed gleefully for the top notes. It was already dark outside when they sat down to their Christmas dinner. Jessie only ate one or two mouthfuls of goose but she presided majestically over the table, lifting her glass and setting the wings and feathers of her hat quivering with her wheezy laughter.

Felix brought the pudding in, set in a nimbus of blue flame. They pulled crackers, and unwrapped their paper hats.

Watching Felix with his yellow crown pulled down over his dark olive forehead, Julia thought that he looked like a real king. He would never look ridiculous, like Vernon, even in a paper hat. Narrowing her eyes so that the candlelight softened into a golden blur over Jessie’s hat and Mattie’s anarchic hair, Julia breathed in the scents of tangerines and brandy and candle wax. At last she had come close to the Christmases she dreamed of in Fairmile Road.

Only Jessie had drunk too much.

Sometimes, when she was drinking, Jessie drifted away until her memories became more real than the solid room around her. ‘I was thinking about
my
first time. I was just as old as you. Like Mattie here, with her theatre man. I don’t like the sound of him, dear. I told you, didn’t I?’

‘You told me,’ Mattie murmured, but Jessie ignored her.

‘Your first one should be young, and handsome. Prince Charming, for you to dream about afterwards when they’ve all turned old and useless, like yourself. Julia’s boy is one, isn’t he? And if not him, then somebody else. There’s plenty of them. Like my Felix.’

Felix stood up, as silent and elegant as a black cat.

‘I’m going for a walk,’ he said softly. ‘I need some air. Julia and Mattie will look after you.’ As he slipped out of the door, they heard him say ‘Happy Christmas.’

‘I remember the day,’ Jessie repeated. ‘I was still living with my ma and pa. It was Hartscombe Terrace, Hoxton. I was working in the market, singing at nights in the clubs. They were good days. I met Tommy Last and we started walking out together. He took me to the Empire. Up West, on the train. Walking, under the trees in the park. Black hair, he had, smooth as glass. Black eyes, too, and a little moustache that tickled your skin when you kissed. This day, he came for me, and he’d brought me a bunch of marigolds in white paper. They were so bright and hot, like the day itself. We walked down by the canal, and Tommy was in his shirtsleeves with his arm round my waist. I remember how hard his arm seemed, and the black hairs on it. We walked under a bridge and it was cool, all shadowy, and then we came out into the sunshine again. We climbed up the bank a little way and sat down, and there were bushes and tall grass all around us. No one could see we were there. There was only the grass stalks, and the sun over our heads. Tommy pushed my skirt up. I helped him. I was wearing white drawers with blue satin ribbon that I’d threaded myself. I thought I was the Queen of England, and I lay down in the grass with Tommy Last on top of me. That moustache. It felt like silk against my neck.’

Mattie was looking away, into the candlelight. She said nothing, and it was Julia who asked, ‘What was it like?’

Jessie laughed, her old rich chuckle. ‘It only lasted about two minutes. Tommy Last wasn’t much more than a boy, even though he seemed a man to me. But I knew then that there would be nothing else like it. Nothing like that day, even though the best times came afterwards.’

They were quiet for a moment. Jessie was staring ahead of her, and Julia and Mattie knew that she was seeing the grass shelter and the blue sky, and Tommy Last’s face, darkened by the sun behind his head, bending over her.

‘What happened to him?’ Mattie asked.

Jessie shook her head. ‘What happened to any of them? Like that bunch of marigolds. I can see them now, orange petals in the white paper. But they’re gone, aren’t they?’ Her eyelids drooped and then closed. ‘I had so many good times. So many.’ They thought she had gone to sleep, but after a moment her eyes flicked open again and she pointed at Julia. ‘Make sure you enjoy your own times.’

‘I will,’ Julia said, but Jessie frowned.

‘All your talk about freedom. Then you go and make your own bars for yourself. Shutting yourself in for that boy. He’s almost the first one you’ve seen, so don’t mope for him. Enjoy him and then forget him, or just forget him. Like I did.’ She smiled then, lacing her fingers over her stomach.

Mattie looked sideways at Julia. Her face was hollowed with shadows, and the bones sharp with hunger.
Jessie’s right
, Mattie thought.
Bloody Josh
.

But Julia didn’t move. ‘I can’t help it,’ she said sadly.

Mattie reached out for her hand and held it. They sat silently beside Jessie’s chair, listening to her breathing thicken into snores and with the glassed-in faces of her photographs staring down at them. Much later, when the candles had burned out, they lifted her up between them and settled her in her bed.

In Fairmile Road Vernon had locked the doors and closed the windows. He stood in the doorway waiting, but Betty still sat in her armchair.

‘I’ll go on up then,’ Vernon said, fingering the bookmark in his library book.

She listened to his footsteps going up the stairs, and heard the floorboards creak as he passed overhead. Betty was staring at the Christmas tree. It was an artificial one that she brought out every year and decorated with fairy lights in the shape of Chinese lanterns. It stood on the table in front of the window, and Betty knew that if she half-closed her eyes the lights would blur prettily and the tree would look almost real. She remembered Julia kneeling beside it to tear the paper off her doll’s house. They had given it to her the year the War ended, so Julia would have been six then.

It was so quiet.

The kitchen was clean and tidy after their meal, Betty had seen to that. Behind the wire-mesh door of the meat-safe the remains of the turkey sat waiting for her. It was too big, of course. They had made hardly any impression on the splintery white meat. There would be cold for tomorrow, and a pie for the day after. Then rissoles, and soup from the bones.

Meals, Betty thought. To be cooked, and eaten with Vernon’s newspaper folded beside his plate, and cleared up afterwards. She saw herself, suddenly, as a caged rodent pattering a circuit between the cupboards, the table, the sink, and back to the cupboards again. The thought made her flush with quick, uncomfortable anger. She stood up and went to the window behind the Christmas tree, pulling the curtain aside to look out. The rooftops of the other houses, identical to her own, just showed against the sky. Some of the windows stood out as patches of orangey light, but most of them were already dark. Behind the dark windows people were asleep. The last steps of her own circuit for the day remained to be taken. She would pull the plugs from the sockets, as Vernon liked her to do, and turn off the lights. Wash her face in the clean bathroom, and lie down beside her husband in their bed. He wouldn’t reach out to touch her, nor would she reach her hand out and let it rest against his solid, obdurate warmth.

Betty’s face was still burning with her anger.

If she were to walk out of the house, now, in the middle of this quiet darkness, she wouldn’t have to go on making her worthless circular loops through the days. She leaned forward and let her forehead rest against the glass. It was wet with condensation and the coldness soothed her, and then sobered her. Betty had the impression of roads radiating away from her, crossing and recrossing, spreading into a vast unmapped and unknowable territory.

There was nowhere for her to go, of course. She knew that at once. She was Betty Smith, almost fifty, a wife and mother, and that was all. Not even those things any more, in truth.

She put her hand up to her throat, easing the collar of her new blouse. It was pretty, but Julia had bought a very small size, as if her mother had already shrunk in her recollection.

But Julia had got away, Betty thought. She straightened up and let the curtain fall back into place. For the first time since Julia had gone, the weight of Betty’s bitterness and loss shifted a little. Julia had gone because she was young and careless, and because she needed to. Suddenly, oddly, standing there beside the artificial tree that Julia had always complained about, Betty felt the comfort of pride, and relief. Julia’s life would be different, at least. Betty saw the bizarre flat over the square, the fat woman and her half-caste son and even Mattie Banner, in a new perspective.

The unexpectedness of it made her smile.

Betty sniffed sharply and turned away from the Christmas tree. She went carefully around the room unplugging the tree lights and the wireless, and then she turned off the main light and went up the stairs to bed.

Mattie and Julia, for their different reasons, devoted themselves to having a good time in the rest of Mattie’s holiday. They went out every night, to the Rocket or to a party or to jazz clubs, sometimes with Felix but more often just the two of them. In the second week Julia faked a stomach complaint and didn’t go to work at all. They sat in Blue Heaven watching the people go by, or wandered through the Oxford Street shops looking at clothes and wishing they were rich. At Jessie’s suggestion they made an early morning excursion to Brick Lane market. They sifted through the heaps of second-hand clothes and came triumphantly back with ratty fox-furs and stained silk blouses and boxy tweed jackets. They dressed up, painted their faces, and pretended they were Marlene Dietrich, and made Felix take them out. They laughed a lot and drank as much as they could afford to and people turned round in the street to stare after them.

For a few days they were just as they had been before Josh and John Douglas came between them. With Mattie, Julia thought, with Mattie’s laughter and mimicry and boldness to arm her, she could even bear to be without Josh.

But then the time came for the Headline company to reassemble. Julia had treacherously been praying that he would not, but Francis Willoughby had agreed to let Mattie continue with the company. The tour was to restart in Chester, and there was a second enactment of the Euston departure. This time Josh wasn’t there. Julia waved Mattie off on her way to become an actress and went back to her typing.

Julia would have felt less sharply jealous if she could have witnessed Mattie’s return to the theatre. John Douglas was liverish after his holiday and he berated Mattie, along with everyone else, for bloody unprofessionalism.

It was two days before she dared to remind him of his promise, and his response was withering.

But then, slowly, routine re-established itself and the company temper improved. One afternoon, sitting in the chilly stalls, Mattie felt the weight of his arm drop round her shoulder. He pushed the weight of her hair back from her neck and mumbled, ‘I’m sorry to bawl at you, love. This company’s a damned shambles, but it’s not your fault.’

Mattie went to bed with him, because he seemed to expect it of her and because she didn’t know what else to do. He did it very thoroughly but without the tenderness that had touched her at the beginning. It occurred to her that it was just something else that she did for him now, like bringing him whisky when he did the money on Friday afternoons.

But he gave her a part.

It was ten lines as a daffy debutante in
Welcome Home
. The actress who had been doubling it made a fuss, but to Mattie’s relief John Douglas stood firm.

‘Give her a chance, or she’ll go on nagging the balls off everyone.’

She learned the lines, and worked for hours on what she imagined was a cut-glass accent.

In Blackpool, a week later, she went on for the first time.

When she came off she was shaking and the palms of her hands were hot and wet.