Bad Girls Good Women (66 page)

The house was quiet, except for the bells. Julia stood watching the water and the movement of the leaves, and when the bells had wound after each other through the last peal and into humming silence, she turned away from the window and went slowly downstairs. As it always did, the scented, insistent stirring of English springtime made her feel restless.

The ground floor had been opened out, at Felix’s suggestion, into one big, L-shaped space, kitchen and living room and dining room all together. There was a chesterfield under the tall windows that looked out over the garden, and an old pine table with a wicker-shaded lamp pendent above it. The sun shone in through the windows that faced on to the quiet street, making yellow squares on the floor, and the stripped and polished boards felt warm under Julia’s bare feet.

Lily was sitting at the table, in the T-shirt she slept in instead of pyjamas, reading. She looked up when Julia came in. Her hair was cut short now, emphasising the shape of her face. Lily was almost nine, and the adult lines were beginning to emerge from the babyish roundness. Her colouring was her mother’s but her features, even to the high bridge of her nose, were Alexander’s. She resembled him in other ways, too. She could be reserved to the point of detachment, and then blaze into sudden anger. Alexander and his daughter were very close. Julia and Alexander had been divorced for four years but with Lily she lived, schizophrenically, with his constant presence.

‘I’ve had my breakfast,’ Lily said.

‘That’s good,’ Julia answered, refusing to interpret her daughter’s words as a complaint or as a criticism of her own late appearance. Some days, they could make the simplest remark into material for a battle.
Not today
, Julia thought,
not with the spring sun shining
. On good days, Lily’s company was more enjoyable than anyone else’s. Julia went to the hob to heat herself up some leftover coffee. Lily had brought in the Sunday newspapers and they were lying in a neat pile on the table. With her mug of coffee in one hand, Julia flipped through them. Then she stopped short. Mattie’s face stared up at her from the cover of the
Sunday Times
magazine. The picture must have been taken last year, in Mattie’s high hippy phase. Her hair was knotted with flowers and colourful scarves, and she was wearing some sort of flowing ethnic robe. Julia looked at it carefully, and then held it up for Lily to see. ‘Look at this.’

Lily’s face broke into smiles. She loved Mattie. ‘Hey, that’s great. D’you think Marilyn’s seen it? Shall I take it down?’

The basement of the house was Marilyn’s separate domain. Hastily, Julia said, ‘Wait until I’ve read the article. Anyway, it’s a bit early for Marilyn on a Sunday.’

She wasn’t quite sure who Marilyn might have down there with her, and she preferred Lily not to know either. Or at least, to appear not to know. There was very little going on around her that Lily missed.

‘What’s it say?’ Lily asked now. They sat down side by side on the chesterfield and read the piece together. It was a standard showbiz interview, pegged to the release of Mattie’s latest film. It touched only lightly on Mattie’s reputation as a feminist and political activist, and made no mention of her private life at all. Julia guessed that her PR agent had seen to that. The interviewer did retell the story of her Oscar nomination for her last role as the heroine of a lush Thomas Hardy adaptation. Mattie had made no secret of her intention to refuse the reward as a protest against American involvement in Vietnam, but in the event the Oscar had been shared by Woodward and Streisand, and Mattie had been deprived of the chance to make her defiant gesture.

‘Not very interesting,’ Lily pronounced. ‘It doesn’t make her sound like Mattie.’

‘These things never do,’ Julia answered. ‘Not to those of us who know her.’

She closed the magazine again and studied Mattie’s face. Seeing it there reminded her of Mattie’s first spurt of fame, with
One More Day
. Kitchen sink dramas, and Jimmy Proffitt. How long ago, and how quaintly archaic, viewed through the distorting glass of the Sixties. Julia remembered how equivocal she had felt about Mattie’s success, and how guilty for not being able to rejoice completely. She was just married to Alexander then, just pregnant with Lily. Before the fire. When Ladyhill was seemingly invulnerable, and Flowers was still alive.

Julia tried to remember why her memories were of unhappiness.
I could have been happy. There was no reason not to be, except for Josh
.

When she thought of him now, still too often, it was with a mixture of impatience and scepticism, but with much more powerful elements of sadness and loss. There was a kind of reverence, too, for something that had once been valuable, and was still too precious to bundle up and throw away like an outmoded dress.

She hadn’t seen Josh since the days in the little white house that had marked the effective end of her marriage to Bliss. Julia frowned at the rawness of the memory. They had written to each other, once in a while, but they had never met. Strangely, Julia had once been invited to a party in the little mews house. She had recognised it with a painful shock. Josh’s friends, whoever they were, must have sold up and moved on long ago. The white walls had been overpainted with psychedelic designs and the white furniture had been replaced with Afghan rugs and beaded cushions. The cushions had come from Julia’s shop. The new owners were customers of hers. The odd cycles that life moved in. Julia felt old as she leaned forward and laid the magazine on the floor; Mattie still stared at her sideways through the tangled hair and scarves.

At least, she reflected, she felt only pride and pleasure in Mattie’s success nowadays. Perhaps greater equanimity was one of the few compensations for getting older. At the height of a generation’s youth-worship, to turn thirty had seemed almost a criminal offence. And Julia had her own success, too. If she was neither as rich nor as famous as Mattie, she was at least established and comfortably off. She had opened a second Garlic & Sapphires in Kensington High Street, then others in Brighton and Oxford. Astutely Julia had recognised the appeal of Eastern mysticism almost as soon as the Maharishi did. She travelled to India and on to Afghanistan, buying up the necessary beads and fringes, mirrorwork fabrics and tinkling bells. The prevailing scent in Garlic & Sapphires now was slow-burning joss sticks. Even the shop name, so ridiculous to her first bank manager, had the right hippy-mystical overtones.

Julia travelled widely, searching out stock, leaving the shops in the care of capable managers and Lily in the care of Marilyn or Alexander, depending on whether it was term time or holidays. Marilyn had come to Gordon Mansions and she had stayed. She was neither a nanny nor a companion nor a housekeeper, but she was good for Lily and, in her own way, she managed to organise the house in NW1 that Julia had bought with her business profits.

Usually, Julia and Marilyn worked together amicably. Julia could make up the domestic shortcomings herself, shopping when Marilyn had forgotten to do it, scrubbing the bathroom floor when she could no longer stand the grime.

‘I’m glad you’re not my real wife, Marilyn,’ she would joke, still able to acknowledge that the younger sister’s presence, a pale imitation of Mattie even down to the domestic slovenliness, was welcome for the sake of the reminder. Especially when Mattie was away, which she often was. It was only over Lily that they disagreed. Once, at the beginning, Julia had had to work late even though Lily had been ill with a feverish cold. She had come home to find the Gordon Mansions flat empty. She had leapt to the conclusion that Lily must be worse, and that Marilyn must have rushed to the doctor’s with her. She was dialling the surgery number when the two of them came in. They had been out to a boxing match. Marilyn’s current love was an amateur boxer, and they had been to see him fight at a hall in Finsbury. Lily had sat on Marilyn’s knee in the front row and had been petted and fussed by all the managers and their female hangers-on. Her eyes were wide open with excitement and the reflected drama.

‘She enjoyed it,’ Marilyn said. ‘Made her forget her cold. Dave won his bout.’

Julia was furiously angry, and she had vented it on Marilyn. ‘You’re not fit to look after a child,’ she had stormed. ‘You’re thoughtless and selfish and careless.’

But Marilyn had retaliated. She had drawn herself up, looking even more like Mattie, and shouted back, ‘I’m fitter than you are. And you’re supposed to be her mother. Never here, are you? You put your shop first, and your own life, don’t you? Don’t think you can tell me off, just for taking her to see a fight. You could take her a few more places yourself, only you’re afraid she’ll be a nuisance.’

They had stared at each other, shocked into mutual silence.

She’s right
, Julia had thought.
Half right
.

The over-familiar chains of guilt, self-justification and fierce love had clanked morbidly around her. Only it wasn’t that she didn’t want Lily with her. The truth was that she wanted to keep her apart from Thomas Tree. Thomas was her mother’s lover, but Julia believed that the empty space of father, for Lily, could only properly be occupied by Alexander. She didn’t want Thomas even to begin to usurp that place, even if Lily might have let him. She kept her loyalties to Lily and to Thomas separate, doubling her obligations and the necessary efforts to fulfil them. Even when Thomas had lived with them in the house overlooking the canal, she had tried, deviously, to keep a space between them. Julia knew that was one of the reasons why Thomas had moved out, almost two years ago.

‘We just split,’ she told her friends, anyone who asked, even Mattie. ‘One of those things. Time to move on, you know?’

Back at the beginning, Julia had accepted Marilyn’s criticism. It had never been mentioned again, but she never forgot it. On her part, Marilyn tried harder to fulfil Julia’s conventional ideas of how Lily should be looked after.

All through that one argument that they had had in front of her, Lily had watched them in silence. Even then, she seemed to have the mature ability to watch, and assimilate, and judge for herself. Lily’s ideas and opinions were always all her own. Julia was sometimes frightened by the vehemence of them, more often made angry by her calm stubbornness. She was like Alexander in that, too.

‘What are you thinking about, Mum?’ Lily stretched her legs, hitching the T-shirt around her. She was already tall for her age; she would have long legs and a slim figure. Teazle, the fat little pony kept at Ladyhill for her to ride, had long ago been replaced by a neat cob that Lily adored. There was a photograph of Lily cantering, in a hard hat and a hacking jacket, in a silver frame on the mantelpiece. Julia joked about it and called it the National Velvet, but she was proud of the picture.

‘What am I thinking about? Nothing. Time. Getting old. Boring things like that.’

Lily looked critically at her. ‘You aren’t old. Not compared with some people’s mothers. You’re still quite with it.’

‘Thank you, darling.’

Lily was fidgeting, pirouetting around the room, picking things up and putting them down again.

‘What can we do today?’

Julia sighed. Sundays like this one should be peaceful, empty of obligations. But Lily needed to be busy. Julia knew where her daughter’s restlessness came from.

‘We could ring someone up; ask some people to come to lunch. Would you like that?’

There were plenty of friends. She had made sure that the house was always welcoming, that it was often filled with people who came to eat and to talk. Nor, after the years that had just gone by, did many of them belong to tidy, static families. Even Sophia and Toby had separated. Almost as soon as Sophia’s boys had gone off to boarding school, Sophia had met a painter and moved in with him. Lily had never felt odd because her father and mother happened to lead separate lives. Nor had she ever felt trapped with Julia in an empty house. Julia remembered too vividly how no one had ever come to Fairmile Road, and how Betty had kept the little rooms stiffly arranged for a celebration that never happened.

‘Can I cook something?’ Lily asked.

‘You’d better. I’m not doing everything. Well, who shall we ask?’

But before they had decided, the telephone rang.

Julia? It’s Mat.’ There was a busy silence before the words, static crackling over them.

‘Mattie? How fabulous, where are you?’

‘New York, of course.’

‘Must be telepathy. We were talking about you. Also your face is all over the colour mag.’

‘Is it this week? Is it that picture that makes me look like a freaked-out gippo?’

‘’Fraid so.’

‘Bloody hell. Just when I’m trying to look straight so someone’ll offer me some Shakespeare or something decent.’ Mattie was talking too quickly, and laughing a lot. She sounded slightly drunk, or high. Julia peered at the kitchen clock. A bar of yellow sunlight lay across the face of it.

‘Mattie, what’s the time there?’

‘Umm. Ten past six. In the morning, dear.’

‘Up early, aren’t you?’

Mattie laughed louder. ‘How many dollars a minute is this chat about my bedtimes costing? I haven’t been to bed, actually. Came back from a party, and knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep in this hotel room. So I’ve watched an old movie on the TV – they have old movies on all night, isn’t it clever of them? – and then I thought I’d telephone my old friend.’ Mattie’s real voice suddenly broke through. ‘I just wanted a talk. Felt a bit lonely, to tell the truth. It was a straight choice between ringing you and having another Scotch. What’s it like in London this morning?’

Smiling, Julia told her. She told her the news of mutual friends, and the snippets of gossip that Mattie loved. She told her about Lily’s part in the school play.

‘That’s my girl. She’ll knock their socks off,’ Mattie crowed. She was never afraid to let her pride or partiality show, as Julia was. Mattie thought Lily could do no wrong, and regularly said so.

‘Go on,’ Mattie prompted. ‘What else is new?’

And so Julia told her about the latest buying she had done for the shop, about the house Felix was decorating for Bill Wyman, anything else she could think of that would make Mattie feel closer to home. They had always been able to do it. All through their successful years that had kept them apart more than they had been together, they had kept the links by telephoning each other. Even when Mattie had been inseparable from Chris Fredericks, and Julia had been wary and awkward with the two of them, they had been able to talk on the telephone when they couldn’t do it face to face.