Bad Girls Good Women (94 page)

‘I’m so glad, Mat,’ Julia said.

They held on to each other again, wordlessly, as they had done under the waiters’ eyes in the Naples restaurant.

‘I wish you didn’t have to go,’ Julia whispered.

‘Come with me.’ Mattie gripped her arms. ‘Why don’t you come home?’

There was a silence, and then Julia shook her head. ‘No, Mattie. I’m going to stay here.’

I know where I am, here. I know that, because there’s no further to go
.

They had drunk a lot of wine, on that last evening, and before they went to bed they went out into the little street to breathe in the cold air. There were lights in Nicolo’s windows, and the voices and music of a television programme were audible through another window beyond it.

‘The joint is really humming tonight,’ Mattie murmured. ‘Hoo. Wow.’

They were giggling, leaning against the wall with their hands pressed to their mouths, like schoolgirls. Then they heard someone coming towards them. Julia recognised the faint click of beads before she saw the nun’s grey and white habit. It was Sister Maria degli Angeli.

‘I’ve been trying to take Julia away from you, Sister,’ Mattie called boldly. ‘Telling her to come home.’

Julia’s voice was much lower. ‘I’ve told her I won’t go. I’m going to stay here for ever.’ She knew that the nun must have heard their laughter; and that she saw their unsteadiness as they held on to each other. Sister Maria’s face was a calm oval in the darkness. Nothing would surprise or shock the Sisters of the Blessed Family, Julia thought. Nothing that she or Mattie could do.

‘For ever? There is only one certainty about for ever,’ Sister Maria said tranquilly.

In the morning, Julia went back to Naples with Mattie. She stood watching the Alitalia jet as it tipped its nose upwards, kept her eyes on it until it slid into the clouds. Mattie was gone, and Julia was left standing on her small patch of ground. She tried to fix her thoughts on it; on the gardens, waiting for her, and the safe horizons of Montebellate.

Mattie opened her eyes and saw Mitch. He was standing beside the bed, holding a cup of tea. ‘Hello, my love,’ he smiled at her. ‘Tea.’

Mattie sat up and took the cup. Mitch often brought her tea in the mornings. They would sit together, drinking it and talking about the day. Mitch sat down on the edge of the bed. He was still in his pyjamas and his tartan robe, and his thin hair stood up in feathers at the back of his head, where he had slept on it. Mattie stroked it flat for him.

‘It was a stormy old night,’ Mitch told her. ‘The wind’s blown some tiles off the roof.’

‘What a nuisance,’ Mattie said comfortably. They looked after Coppins with as much care as if the house was alive. It was part of their cosiness together.

‘I might go up and have a look at the damage later on.’

‘Be careful,’ Mattie warned him, and he leaned across to kiss her.

She drank her tea, and watched Mitch go across to the bathroom for his shower. When the tea was finished she lay back against the pillows and drifted into sleep again.

She didn’t know how much later it was when she woke up again. She lay on her side, with her arm crooked under her head, looking at the room. The blue silk peignoir that Mitch had given her was folded over the dressing table stool, where she had left it last night when she undressed for bed. His plaid robe now hung behind the door that led into the bathroom. While she was asleep, Mitch must have put his clothes on and gone outside.

The room was full of thin, bright light. It gleamed on the row of gold-topped bottles ranged on her dressing table, then faded, then strengthened again. It was windy outside, she could hear the wind, and there must be March clouds raggedly crossing the pale sun. Mattie didn’t like windy weather. It made her feel cross-grained and restless.

She pushed back the covers and swung her legs out of bed. She went across and picked up her peignoir, wrapping it around herself and tying the belt, luxuriating in the folds of the silk as they fell against her skin. She turned to the window.

The bare branches of the trees lashed and writhed in the wind. The capricious gusts flattened the grass beyond the bare rosebeds, and drove dead brown leaves out of their winter drifts under the laurel bushes. Mattie saw that the clumps of daffodils would be beaten flat too. She frowned, with her fingers at her throat, then looked back into the room.

Afterwards she remembered its stillness after the tossing branches outside. Its stillness, and the order of everything, her bottles and brushes mirrored in the shiny glass table top, the line of Mitch’s jackets on their hangers, just visible past the open door of the dressing room.

She was walking towards the bathroom, thinking of hot water and the way that a trickle of bath essence would puff up into fragrant bubbles, when she heard a noise.

She knew at once that it was a terrible noise.

It was a sliding clatter and then a thump. The sound of something heavy, rolling and thumping. There was a silence and a cry bursting through it, then another thump. The silence that followed it splintered in her head. It had been Mitch’s cry.

Mattie screamed, just once, ‘
Mitch!
’

She ran to the window. Her hands were like melted wax. The catch was stiff, and she couldn’t open it. She pressed her face to the glass. All she could see below was a strip of gravelled path and the crescent of the rosebed. The roses had been pruned and the stumpy twigs stuck up like bony fingers.

Mitch. Oh God, Mitch
.

She looked wildly around her. The room was silent. Mitch wasn’t in the tumbled bed, or in the bath, or standing in front of the empty clothes in the dressing room.

Mattie began to run. Barefoot, she ran down the wide staircase and across the hall where he had picked up the newspapers from the mat and laid them on the side table. The heavy front door with its diamond-shaped light banged open when she fell against it. Outside, the wind whipped into her face, and a spiral of brown leaves blew past her into the hall. She ran over the gravel, unaware of the chippings digging into her feet. Ahead of her, projecting beyond the angle of the house, she could see the end of a ladder lying on the ground.

Mattie’s hand came up over her mouth. As she ran the last few yards she was moaning, ‘Oh please, oh please God.’

She turned the corner.

Mitch was lying with his legs still tangled in the metal rungs of the ladder. She half fell beside him. She put her hands to his cheeks and turned his head so that he looked up at her. His glasses were broken, and they hung at a comical angle. There was blood on his face. Lumps of gravel were embedded in raw flesh.

Oh Mitch
.

Mattie put her arms under his shoulders, trying to lift him. He was a big, warm, familiar weight and she couldn’t move him. Her struggle only shifted the lightweight ladder, and it clanked tinnily against the stones. Mitch’s head fell back.

She was sobbing and gasping, but she scrambled to her feet again.

Mitch. Don’t worry. I’ll get help
.

Where? No Mrs Hopper today. Neighbours. The road, that was it.

Mattie stumbled as she fled, the blue folds of her robe tangling between her legs. She dragged open the ornate gate that had
Coppins
on it in wrought-iron lettering, and ran into the road.

Help me, somebody
.

It was the milkman who found her. He came round the corner in his float and saw a woman standing in the middle of the road. All the front of her dressing gown was darkened with a big, wet stain.

Mattie ran to the float. The milkman was very young, pale and freckled, with ginger hair sticking out under his peaked cap. She looked at him, then put out her hands. Mattie could only think that she must clean the gravel off Mitch’s face. She must clean it off, and bathe the broken skin.

‘Please come,’ she said clearly. ‘My husband is hurt.’

They went back together. The milkman was wearing a leather bag on a strap across his chest and the pouch banged and jingled against his hip as he ran. They knelt down again beside Mitch. When the milkman looked up again his face was whiter still,

‘Where’s the telephone?’

‘Inside, on the hall table.’ Mattie spoke in the same clear voice.

‘Get a neighbour,’ the milkman begged her. ‘The nearest.’ He was running towards the front door, hitching his bag over his shoulder.

Mattie hesitated, wondering which way to go. The big houses were widely spaced behind their high hedges. She couldn’t think of anything except Mitch’s face, and the need to sponge the dirt off it. Then she saw a man in overalls come round the corner from the gate, and a woman following him. She recognised the woman. She lived in the big half-timbered house across the way. Sometimes Mattie and Mitch met her in the supermarket. Mattie’s neighbour and the workman both had the same shocked but inquisitive expressions of lookers-on at an accident. They were staring down at Mitch.
He’ll be all right
, Mattie wanted to say.
He’ll be all right
. She was shaking now, and her teeth chattered. The sensible words didn’t come out of her throat.

The man knelt down beside Mitch. The woman came and put her arm around Mattie. ‘Come on, dear,’ she said meaninglessly. ‘Come on, now.’

The milkman ran out of the house again. ‘They’re on their way,’ he said. He had taken off his leather bag and his white coat and he stood holding the coat out as if he wanted to wrap Mitch in it.

Mattie saw the workman shake his head. She noticed his big hands, grimy with oil. It seemed a very long time since she had heard the noise. She could hear it still in her head, clatter and rolling thump. But she realised that it wasn’t very long at all. A minute or two, just a minute or two ago she had been standing at the bedroom window, watching the wind.

Mattie looked down. Mitch hadn’t moved, he was lying looking up at her with blood on his face.

It came to her, with a rush of terrible fear, that he wasn’t all right at all.

She dropped to her knees, bending over him, but he still didn’t move. She tried to lie down with her head against his chest, to cradle him and comfort him, but the hands of the people she didn’t know took hold of her and held her back.

Blindly, Mattie lifted her head. The March wind blew her hair into her face.

‘I can hear it,’ the milkman said. ‘I’ll go to the gate.’

She wondered what he was talking about, and then she heard the ambulance siren. Of course, it was a part of this tableau, as much as the faces of the people waiting for it. It was Mitch and herself who didn’t belong here. It shouldn’t be anything to do with them, nor with the security of Coppins. She looked round for Mitch to confirm it for her, and then she remembered that he was lying at her feet.

The ambulance swung towards them. It rolled over the gravel, curiously stately except for the urgency of its blue flashing lights. It stopped and two men jumped out. The milkman and the housewife and the man in overalls stepped back to make room for them. Mattie was left, standing with her hands loose and helpless at her sides.

The ambulancemen crouched down beside Mitch. Mattie watched what they did to him, their busy hands and their intent faces. She felt childishly relieved, as confident as a child that these officials would take care of Mitch for her.

But a moment later one of them looked up, then straightened so that he stood close to her. He put his hand on her arm.

‘I’m afraid he’s dead. Death was almost instantaneous.’

Mattie stepped backwards, shaking his hand off her arm. In her clear, strange voice she said, ‘Oh, no, that can’t be right. Mitch isn’t dead.’

And then the housewife came to her again, putting her arm around her shoulders and trying to turn her away. ‘Come on, my love,’ she said. ‘Come in the house, with me.’

Mattie stared at her, without comprehension. Then she looked around again, searching the circle of faces for Mitch’s, so that he could explain to her how this blank horror had descended on the ordinary day.

Mitch had gone. One of the faces had pronounced the words,
I’m afraid he’s dead
. The first, brutal blow of understanding struck her.

‘Oh, no. Please.’

It wasn’t a contradiction now. She was begging them.

The faces closed round her, and another sound came out of Mattie’s mouth. It was an involuntary noise, neither a cry nor a moan. The people took hold of her, one on either side, and they led her away. She looked back, over her shoulder, to where Mitch lay still on the ground. The pain of understanding twisted tighter. He wouldn’t move any more, because he was dead.

The big house with the high roof was empty. Why were they leading her back to it? It was so quiet inside after the bluster of the wind. They walked over the dead leaves that had blown into the hall, past the folded newspapers waiting on the side table. The post was there too. Mitch would pick the letters up again, after they had had breakfast together, and open them in his study. Only not today. He wouldn’t, today, because he was dead.

The hands, unwelcome hands, led her into her own bright kitchen. There were copper saucepans, a neatly diminishing set, hanging on the wall, and flowered roller blinds with scalloped edges. Mitch should be here, humming to himself as he moved to and fro.

They made Mattie sit down at the breakfast table.

She looked down at her own hands and saw that they were shaking. She wanted Mitch to take hold of them. Everything she thought of, everywhere she looked, had Mitch in it. He couldn’t die, he couldn’t simply stop being, while the copper pans stayed in their places on the wall, while all the evidence of their life stayed solidly around her?

She turned her head to look out of the window at the patchy blue sky. There were the same shredded clouds that she had watched from their bedroom window. Mattie frowned, hunching her shoulders against the spreading pain. Just this little loop of time had elapsed. It was still only minutes, surely, since she had heard Mitch fall. That’s what it was, he had fallen. If she could only stop her hands from trembling, she could catch the time between her fingers and wind it back again. She would walk on into the bathroom, and she would hear Mitch pass under the window, whistling, on his way back into the house. Mattie closed her eyes. Inside her head, she took the few steps to the bathroom door, and heard the reassuring scrunch of Mitch crossing the gravel below. But then she opened her eyes again and she was sitting in the cold bright kitchen, the woman from the house across the way was there, and Mitch was dead.