The Men and the Girls (13 page)

Mark said, ‘There are stages in our lives when different things seem important. Don't you think?'

She looked at him. ‘I was twenty-two when I had Joss.'

‘So I'm younger than you, but I've already had ten years more freedom.'

‘I wouldn't be without Joss—'

‘That's not what I'm saying. I'm just saying you might be due your freedom later than sooner.'

‘Due,' Kate said. ‘Freedom.' She picked up a pink-and-scarlet cushion embroidered with rough wool birds and hugged it. ‘This room feels free.'

‘It is.'

‘Sometimes,' Kate said, ‘sometimes, you can get so covered with people, you can't breathe. I've always thought that listening to people, helping them, is the very least you can do, the very least, if you're OK yourself. But at the moment—' Her voice trailed away. She laid her cheek on the cushion in her arms.

‘As I said,' Mark said, watching her, ‘there are different stages. You don't stay the same for ever. You're organic after all.' He came across to where she was standing. ‘You don't have to lie down and just take things, you know, you don't simply have to accept. You can turn protagonist, you have the right to decide your own life. Thirty-six isn't very old. It certainly isn't too late to start.'

Kate sighed. She released the cushion and laid it back with its fellows on the low sofa.

‘I want to take you to bed,' Mark said.

‘Now?'

‘Preferably.'

She gazed at him. He was charmed by her lack of flirtatiousness.

‘I won't claim you,' he said. ‘I won't just add to your pile of people.' He waved his arm at the room. ‘Here's proof: my life, my separate identity.' He held his hands out to her and he was laughing.

‘Come on,' he said to Kate, ‘come on. We'd have a lot of fun.'

She shook her head.

‘No.'

‘Don't you fancy me?'

She hesitated. She certainly felt a longing but she was aware it wasn't lust.

‘You're really attractive,' Kate said. ‘Really. But—'

‘Not yet?'

‘Maybe.'

He turned away, clenching his fists. ‘What a disappointment.'

‘Is that why you asked me here?'

‘Partly,' he said, his back still towards her, ‘and I wanted you to see where I live.'

‘I love it. I think you're – lucky.'

He gave himself a little shake, and turned round again.

‘What do you want to do, then?'

‘I'd like to look at the rest of Osney.'

‘It'll take you ten minutes.'

‘Fine,' Kate said. She felt uneasy, anxious to be gone.

‘Tell you what,' Mark said, ‘you go out for a quarter of an hour and I'll make some tea. I'll have tea ready when you come back.'

‘Lovely,' Kate said, ‘great. Thank you.'

She went down the stairs. In the hall, the Indian postgraduate was talking on the communal telephone in his strong Scottish accent. Kate slid past him and went out into the street, the street whose further side was in part so charmingly provided by water. There was a moorhen on the water, and a coot, and, on the grassy triangle on the far side, a patch of snowdrops. There were also trees.

Kate walked Osney's five little streets with mounting delight and incredulity. How, she asked herself, could she have lived in Oxford all her life and never known that just beyond the station lay this little water-girt place, these cottage streets of brick and painted stucco with their oddly, unmistakably foreign air, an island of distinct character protected from the surrounding schools and factories and newspaper offices by the quiet, olive-green barriers of river and canal? There were several pubs, a closed bric-à-brac shop, a little supermarket, a milkman humming past in his float, and, in those front windows right on the narrow pavements, were spider plants and giant shells and families of brass and china animals. In South Street a child waved to her from an upstairs window; in East Street she met a man carrying a bird cage and a loaf of bread; and in Swan Street, a tiny cul-de-sac ending in a white bridge over the water, she met an exotic woman in a brocade hat leading a vast and fluffy white chow on a strip of purple leather. Kate returned to West Street glowing.

‘It's so lovely! I never knew it was so lovely!'

Mark had made China tea in a pot with a bamboo handle.

‘After Jericho, it's like another world,' Kate said. ‘The water, the light, the atmosphere! You can't breathe in Jericho—'

Mark said, ‘I owe you an apology.' He held out a thin black mug of tea to her.

‘Forget it.'

‘No,' he said. ‘I shouldn't have asked you to sleep with me. Not yet. And I shouldn't have reacted how I did when you refused.'

‘It's all right,' Kate said. Her eyes strayed to the western window, to the water and the white-faced coot idling about on it.

‘Thing is,' Mark's voice deepened, ‘I'm so scared of being rejected. I rush in and then I can't stand it when I don't succeed.'

‘I didn't reject you,' Kate said, ‘I just postponed you.'

‘I know, I know. I'm not blaming you, I'm blaming myself.'

Kate sipped her tea.

‘Let it go,' she said. She felt happier than she had felt in weeks. ‘Lovely tea.'

‘Will you come again?'

‘Of course.'

She walked to the eastern window. Across two tiny gardens were the backs of the Bridge Street houses, and at a first-floor window directly opposite a young woman was hanging curtains.

‘Look,' Kate said. ‘Mark. Come and look.'

He came to stand beside her. Kate pointed across to the woman.

‘I wish,' Kate said suddenly, ‘I wish that was me.'

Seven

Helen had always declined to have an office at Mansfield House. It was one of her abiding principles that the refuge was both the home and the democratic responsibility of the inmates, and therefore there should be no particular room where problems might be brought. ‘It stops people dealing with their own,' she said, ‘and makes them prone to the seduction of buck passing.' When she was at Mansfield House, she was usually in the kitchen where she could guarantee that nobody could corner her alone.

It was a big kitchen in the back wing of the house that stuck out into the neglected garden. A series of assorted cookers stood against one wall, there was a vast table in the centre, and double glass doors, smeary with fingerprints for the lower four feet, opened out on to a rough rectangle of paving stones on which a sad, black barbecue stood, awash with winter rain. The room was never empty; it filled the function, in every sense, of a common room.

When Mrs Cheng had fled to Mansfield House, the kitchen had much shocked her. The almost tribal sharing of everything from instant coffee to children, the noise, the cluttered table and full ashtrays and unswept corners filled her with dismay and confusion. Living, as she always had, in a tightly – and, in her case, brutally – controlled family environment above a takeaway shop down the Iffley Road, she was initially quite at sea in this humming and free-form community. Cleaning up the kitchen became an anchor for her, a spar to which she clung in those first few weeks when she wondered if she had only escaped one hell for another, albeit of a different kind.

‘Leave it,' the other women would say, as she vigorously washed away at the floor around their feet. ‘Don't keep on. Let it go. We don't care.'

It was Kate who understood what the kitchen represented to Mrs Cheng, who saw that for her the cultural strangeness of her new life held alarms almost as great as the systematic violence of her old one. She had fled from the takeaway shop (pretending to be going next door to the newsagent, to buy a racing paper for her husband, his sole reading matter) because she had believed that soon she would quite simply be killed. She had gone to Mansfield House because, only a month before, she had stood at a city centre bus stop where a torn, hand-printed poster about the refuge had been crudely pasted across the glassed-in timetable. The two decisions had quite drained her and had robbed her of all sense of identity. Keeping the refuge kitchen as orderly and clean as she had once kept both the takeaway shop and the rooms above it was a desperate attempt to remember, by repeating a familiar function, who she was.

Before her scrubbing and polishing drove the rest of the Mansfield House insane, Kate took Mrs Cheng away to expand her energies on Richmond Villa. It was soon after Leonard's arrival, and the house had not yet assimilated itself to his presence, nor to his depressing underclothes appearing in the laundry, his faddishness about food, his lingering, peppery, elderly smell.

‘I need you,' Kate said to Mrs Cheng, ‘I need your help. Everybody in this house requires different things and I can't manage alone.'

Mrs Cheng had certainly been needed before, as slave labour, but she had never been needed in a human way. Being childless – one of the many reasons her husband gave for beating her – her instincts for nurturing lay dormant. Leonard seized at once upon them, greedily, like a cantankerous baby, but it was Kate who really needed them, Kate who, Mrs Cheng came to see, to her astonishment, required support.

Kate also paid her. Mrs Cheng had never been paid a penny for anything, in all her forty odd years. She carried her first wages from Kate around with her for a week, incredulous, joyous, and terrified they would be taken from her. In time, James gently managed to teach her the ways of a savings account, but only because he presented it to her as a way of keeping her squirrel's hoard safe; the handing of her first notes across the building society counter was terrible to her. What guarantee was there she would ever see them again?

‘You ask,' the girl said, smiling.

Mrs Cheng held out her hand. ‘Give,' she said.

The girl passed the notes back to Mrs Cheng. Mrs Cheng held them in her hand for a long time, staring down at them, and wrestling with herself. Then she slid them under the glass screen again.

‘You keep,' she said to the girl, ‘you keep safe.'

Five years on, Mrs Cheng would hardly have recognized her earlier self. She had her own room, solid savings (these had now become a passion) and a talent for dealing with Leonard. She walked rather than scuttled, had put on a little weight, and belonged to a Chinese women's group which met regularly on Wednesdays and Saturdays. All that had not changed was the fervour of her feelings for Kate.

Kate's present state of mind weighed upon Mrs Cheng like a stone. Given the circumstances of Kate's life, her misery was incomprehensible to Mrs Cheng, but that in no way invalidated it for her. At the beginning of the change in Kate, Mrs Cheng had attempted to help by ever more thorough cleaning of Richmond Villa, moving heavy pieces of furniture to dust behind them, polishing unlooked-out-of windows, dousing lavatories with so much bleach that the house smelled like a public swimming bath. Not only did these exertions seem to go unnoticed – except by Joss and Leonard who complained bitterly at the dustless order of their rooms – but Kate looked and seemed no better. After a while. Mrs Cheng resolved that something more must be done, another approach tried altogether. Accordingly, she went up to Mansfield House to find Helen, and to convey to her, as best she could, that Kate wasn't – wasn't
well
.

Helen was sitting at the kitchen table with a child on her knee. The child was laboriously drawing on an old newspaper with a felt-tipped pen. He breathed heavily as he drew, and his fingers were blotched with blue and green.

‘Talk private,' Mrs Cheng said to Helen.

‘Come on,' Helen said, ‘you know the rules.' She patted the stool next to her. ‘Sit down and tell me.'

Mrs Cheng admired Helen, but had never warmed to her. Helen was too big, too bright to look at in her dramatic peasant clothes and clashing peasant jewellery, too expansive in gesture and manner.

‘No,' Mrs Cheng said, ‘Kate.'

‘Kate?'

Mrs Cheng nodded. Helen looked up at her. The refuge had been much thrown by Kate's bolting away a few days previously. ‘She looked panicked,' someone had said, ‘as if she couldn't cope, couldn't stand it.' Helen rose to her feet, exuding a cloud of jasmine oil. She set the child down where she had been sitting.

‘OK,' she said to Mrs Cheng, ‘OK. We'll go and sit in my car.'

‘I've got some things to say to you,' Helen said. She was treating Kate to a bowl of French onion soup in a bistro above the covered market. Kate did not seem to be eating her soup, but was simply pushing the croûtons in it round and round like a child playing with ducks in the bath.

‘I want you,' Helen said, ‘to stop feeling so racked with guilt.'

Kate found an onion ring and looped it over her spoon.

‘And I want you to eat that soup.'

Kate ate the onion ring.

‘Listen,' Helen said. She arranged her elbows on the table and brought her hands together in a rattle of bracelets. ‘We are in a transitional stage in the relationship between men and women. There's a long way to go yet, and it's when things are in transition that people get scared and lose heart. Opinion gets polarized. People retreat back into the status quo because, even if that's not what they like, it's what they know.'

Kate waited. Long practice in listening to Helen had taught her that, if you didn't interrupt, Helen reached her goal sooner. Kate ate another onion ring and a tiny piece of croûton.

‘I think,' Helen said, ‘that your relationship with James has simply come to its natural end. James doesn't want to face that, so he is pretending that you are having a little funny phase, and everything will be just the same as before, when you come out of it. You don't want to face it either, so you are taking refuge in guilt. He hasn't thumped you or raped you or persecuted you mentally, so you are falling back into the old stereotyped thinking of being afraid that you have no good reason for leaving, therefore you are the guilty party.'