Bad Girls Good Women (67 page)

At last Mattie sighed, ‘That’s better. I feel a bit less mad now. Hey, there’s something I haven’t told you. I’m coming home, to dear old Bloomsbury. I can’t bear this town any longer.’

And into the hum of the transatlantic connection, as if the idea was fully formed instead of just having stirred in her head with the restless reminders of spring and the enticing sunshine, Julia said, ‘Well, that’s a pity. Because I’m coming to the States.’ Across the room, blurred by the bright light that showed the winter’s accumulation of dust, Julia saw Lily’s head jerk up. Just for an instant, her small face seemed set in an alarming mask of anger and anxiety.

‘I haven’t been before, that’s why,’ she answered into the receiver. ‘I want to look for some new ideas, make a few contacts. Look ahead to the next decade, like a shopkeeper should.’

‘And see the aviator.’

Lily had bent her head again, seemingly to her book. Julia was relieved, because she could feel the foolish flush of colour rising in her own cheeks.
Like a teenager
, she thought angrily. Watching Lily’s dark, smooth head she thought that the strange expression must have been a trick of the light.

‘I honestly hadn’t thought of that. It’s very old history, Mat.’

Far away, Mattie chuckled. ‘D’you know how often you still talk about him? And you’ve sat there all these years, just like Patience on her bloody monument, waiting for him to come back for you. Not very liberated of you, is it?’

‘That’s your department, not mine,’ Julia said tartly, but Mattie only laughed again.

‘Think about it. D’you know, I think I could go to sleep now. Thank God for that. Can I have a talk to Lily first?’

‘Sleep well, my love. I will think about it, although I wish you’d never mentioned it.’ She held the receiver out to Lily. ‘Here. Talk to the wild woman.’

Julia went out of the room, and when she came back Lily had already finished the conversation. She was sitting calmly on the sofa, cross-legged, waiting. Julia opened the address book she had been upstairs to fetch.

‘Who would it be nice to see today?’

‘I don’t mind,’ Lily said politely. ‘You can choose, if you like.’

The friends came to lunch, two women and a man, and three children of various ages. Julia made lasagne and they sat around the pine table talking, the adults drinking wine after the children had got down and disappeared upstairs to Lily’s room. At the end of the afternoon they went to Regent’s Park and walked in the sunshine. It was a cheerful, convivial day, like dozens of others Julia and Lily had spent. Julia liked inviting people, and feeding them, and making them feel comfortable in her house. The parties were different now, she reflected, but there still were parties.

Lily was quieter than usual, but if anyone except Julia noticed, no one mentioned it.

The light was fading when Julia went out to see the last pair of guests into their car. After they had driven off she stood for a moment under the plane tree outside the house, watching the lit-up windows of the house opposite, and her neighbours passing to and fro behind the uncurtained glass. The little tableaux made the street seem cosy. She breathed in a satisfying lungful of damp, leafy air and then went back up the five steps to their front door.

It was dim in the big living room after the brighter light outside. Julia blinked and hesitated, and then saw Lily sitting on the rug in front of the chesterfield. Her knees were drawn up to her chin and one cheek rested on one knee. Her shoulders were hunched forward as if to hide something, or protect something. A corner of the rug was pulled up underneath her. Julia was particularly fond of the rug, an old Anatolian kelim in soft, faded garnet-reds and cobalt-blues. It had long, hand-knotted, bobbled fringes, and an expert had told her that the design represented the tree of life. She was proud of the rug, too. She had bought it on one of her first trips, when she was still nervous of travelling alone, from a market in a little hill town. She had haggled and bargained with the old man who was selling it, and then had walked away because his price was too high. Then she had turned back because she knew she wanted it, and he had disarmed her by accepting her offer and rolling the rug up to press it into her arms, as if he knew it was going to a good home. There had been no question, after that, of it going into the shop. It exactly fitted the space on the sanded floor.

Julia went across and put her hand on Lily’s shoulder, intending to say something about supper, and schoolday tomorrow. Then she saw that Lily was methodically snipping off the knotted fringes, one by one, with the big pair of kitchen scissors. A pathetic pile of fraying ends lay on the floor beside her.

Julia snatched the scissors. They fell, and slithered out of sight under the chesterfield. Julia gave Lily’s hand a stinging slap. She didn’t flinch, but stared up at her mother, her face, a set, triangular mask of defiant unhappiness. Julia saw the unhappiness, but her own possessive anger was much stronger. After the instant she was ashamed of it, but then it was too late.

She held on to Lily’s hand, and shook her. ‘You stupid girl. Why have you done it? It’s a beautiful rug, and you’ve wrecked it. You’re a thoughtless, stupid vandal. Just to sit there, and cut it up. Don’t you care about people’s things? It’s not your rug to ruin. It’s mine. I …’

Coldly, Lily cut her short. ‘Everything’s yours. Your house, and your shops, and your friends. Well, I’m not yours, so there. I’m Alexander’s. I wish he was here. I hate you.’

Lily broke free and scrambled to her feet. She bent down and scooped up the severed fringes then flung them across the room.

‘It’s only a mat,’ she shouted. ‘It’s not a person.’ The coldness had gone. She was crying now, and the puckering of her face made her look as she had when she was a baby. Helplessly, Julia held her hand out to her, but Lily pushed it away from her and ran out of the room.

I’m Alexander’s
, Julia thought heavily. There had been other times, many other rows, of course, when Julia had forbidden something or enforced some discipline, and Lily had wished for her father. The bond between them had always been strong, and it was strengthening all the time as Lily grew up in her devotion to Ladyhill, and the green, folded countryside around it. Lily’s pride in the rebirth of Ladyhill’s splendour, artfully aged and faded by George and Felix, was no less fierce than Alexander’s. After each visit she came back full of the details of the latest room that had been cleaned and reopened, or of some nineteenth-century oil of the house that had passed out of the family, and Alexander had managed to buy back again. Julia had accepted it all, as she had made herself promise she would at the beginning, and she had encouraged Lily to talk about her father, as well as to think of Ladyhill as home, her other home.

But this was the first time that Lily had said,
I’m Alexander’s
.

I hate you
, Julia comforted herself, that was ordinary enough, wasn’t it? All daughters told their mothers that, sometime. But not,
I’m his, not yours
.

It had begun, then, as Julia had been afraid that it would. The measuring of one of them against the other, and as soon as the measuring had started there would be judging, and then choosing. She didn’t want to think of what that would mean. To push the thought away she moved, stiffly, to pick up the scattered ends of fringing from where Lily had thrown them.

She is mine
, she thought.
I was there when she was born, out of me, even though I don’t remember it. Even though I’m a bad one, I am her mother
. She looked down at the shreds of wool and silk in her hands. They smelt of dust, and there were pieces of fluff trapped with the fibres. It is only a mat. Lily’s right.

She went quickly and threw them into the dustbin. Then she retrieved the kitchen scissors and put them away in their proper place.

Suddenly a memory stirred and revived. A wonderful firework display of coloured stars, spreading across some flowered wallpaper. The gummed stars that she had brought home, as a little girl, from somebody’s birthday party. And then had stuck all over the bedroom wall. Julia remembered Betty’s boiling anger, and her accusations, and the way that she had shouted, ‘It’s our house, not yours.’ Julia realised that always, up to this moment, she had believed that she just thought the stars were pretty, that the bright colours improved the insipid wallpaper.

But now, as if she had become someone else altogether, she realised that she had wanted to deface the order of Betty’s house. She could see herself, licking and sticking the stars, knowing that they would make a mess, knowing what Betty would do. She had wanted to assert herself, and distance herself, testing Betty and rebelling against her at the same time.

Poor Betty
, Julia thought.
All along, I made her the villain of that story. I told it to Jessie, once, and I made myself out to be the innocent little thing who saw no further than the bright, beautiful stars
. How much did Lily understand of what she had done, how much did she mean? The same? The same test, and rebellion?

Julia frowned, trying to tease out the threads of significance. Lily had no need to rebel against petty domestic tyranny. Julia wasn’t houseproud. She had been, briefly, very angry about her kelim, as surely anyone would have been? She liked and valued pretty things, and clearly remembered the days when she hadn’t been able to afford them. But the moment was past, now. It wasn’t the mat that was important.

She could talk to Lily, at least. Betty had never talked to her.

Julia went slowly upstairs. Lily was lying on her bed, stiff, looking very small. She had been crying, but her eyes were dry now. Julia sat down at the edge of the bed, looking down at her. ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked gently. ‘Can you tell me why?’

Lily turned her head away, to stare at the wall.

Julia waited, but the silence began to solidify between them. She knew from experience how stubbornly silent Lily could be, when she was angry, or sulking about something. It was quite possible that she wouldn’t speak until tomorrow morning, and Julia didn’t want to let that silence happen, not this time. To break it, she began talking herself. ‘Do you know something that happened when I was a bit younger than you? Something I did to Granny Smith? I went to a birthday party, and I was given a packet of coloured sticky stars. The kind that teachers stick in exercise books, for good work …’ She knew that Lily was listening, although she kept her face turned away. ‘Until tonight, you know, I always thought Granny Smith was wrong. But I’ve just understood that I knew what I was doing. I wanted to serve her right for something, although I didn’t know what it was. Not properly.’

Julia stopped again, and waited. Lily was quick enough and perceptive enough to make her own conclusions.

Without warning, in a little, toneless voice, she said, ‘You didn’t tell me you were going to America.’

It was so unexpected that it left Julia breathless. ‘I …’

‘You didn’t tell me. You just said it on the phone, to Mattie, Like it didn’t matter, whether you were here or not.’

Julia peered into the windy expanse of misunderstanding that seemed suddenly to have opened between them. Lily was still frowning at the wall; her hand lay loosely, palm up, on the bedcover. Julia took hold of it and squeezed it between her own hands. ‘I’ve been away before,’ she said. ‘To Turkey, and India, and Thailand, and all the other places. I didn’t think you didn’t want me to go.’ Julia tried to recall. Lily had always let her go quite cheerfully. Seemingly cheerfully. Sometimes she had said, ‘Wish you weren’t going, Mum,’ but that was all. She had seemed happy with Marilyn and Alexander, relaxed and welcoming when she came home again. Julia had even congratulated herself on that. ‘I didn’t know,’ she said sadly. ‘I’m sorry.’ She was thinking of the cut-up rug, the vehemence of the silent protest.

‘I hate it when you’re not here,’ Lily burst out. ‘You shouldn’t have to go away.’

‘Lily, I’ve had to earn a living, to support us both.’ That was the truth, she reflected, but only the partial truth. Lily ignored it.

‘You’re my mother. You should be here.’

The selfishness made Julia ache for both of them. Lily’s needs and her own, Betty’s and her own. Colliding head on. Poor mothers, she thought. Can’t ever get it right. And poor daughters, too. We want things from each other, and we want to give them, but the gestures are so clumsy that they knock themselves awry. Gently, she let go of Lily’s hand and stroked her hair. As she seemed to do more and more often, she wondered about her own natural mother. Where was she, and what would she say? ‘I won’t go to America,’ she promised.

She felt the stiffness of Lily’s neck and shoulders, knew that she was trying not to jerk her head out of reach of her mother’s hand.

‘Oh, go,’ Lily said, dismissing her. ‘Just tell me properly. I don’t like hearing about it when you’re having a chat with Mattie.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Julia said again, humbly. ‘The idea just came to me there and then, and it seemed a good one, so I said it.’

My own selfishness, equal and opposite
.

Lily had picked up a book and was staring at the jacket picture. Julia knew that she wouldn’t say any more. She stood up, saying something about supper, and went to the door. As she reached it, Lily mumbled, ‘I’m sorry about your rug.’

Julia was surprised, and grateful.

‘You were right, it’s only a thing, not a person. Anyway, it’s our rug.’

‘Not mine. I don’t care about stuff like that.’

Julia half smiled. ‘You do if it belongs to Ladyhill.’

The answer came back without a second’s hesitation. ‘Ladyhill’s different.’

Julia nodded. She waited for a second or two, but neither of them said any more. She closed Lily’s door and went downstairs, moving as if her limbs hurt. The light had faded, and the big room seemed gloomy and cold. Julia wrapped her arms around herself and walked to the window, staring out without seeing anything. She wanted to talk to Alexander. She wanted to pick up the telephone and say, ‘This is happening. What can we do?’