The Men and the Girls (2 page)

‘Whisky,' Leonard said, flapping a long hand at a cluster of bottles on his chest of drawers. ‘Help yourself.'

‘I left her at a surgery,' James said, picking up Leonard's toothglass and inspecting it for signs of toothpaste before pouring whisky into it. ‘I'll go and see her tomorrow. She lives near St Barnabas.'

‘No, no,' Leonard said, flapping again. ‘Soak my gnashers in that one. Perfectly good glass by the bottles.'

‘Sorry.'

‘Left your specs behind. Saw them in the lav.'

‘That's why I knocked her over. That and the dark and rain.'

‘Only sixty. Aren't you?'

‘Sixty-one.'

‘No call for things to drop off at sixty-one. Eyes should still work at sixty-one.'

‘I'm not falling apart,' James said, settling himself in Leonard's other chair, a creaking basket-work bucket, with a lumpy cushion covered in cretonne. ‘I'm as absent-minded as I ever was, that's all. I mean, I am permanently deep in thoughts unconnected with driving the car or mowing the lawn. It drives Kate mad. She says why can't I apply my intelligence as much to loading the washing machine as to writing and teaching.'

‘Why can't you?'

‘I suppose I'm not as interested.'

Leonard slapped the folded newspaper on his knee.

‘Liked your piece today. Don't agree, of course. Can't stand subsidies. No wonder the theatre's gone all namby-pamby.'

‘I wasn't entirely pro-subsidy in that piece. I said there should be a balance—'

‘Best thing I ever saw,' Leonard said suddenly, ‘was
Journey's End
. Wonderful stuff. Guts. That's what it had. Guts.'

‘Where's Kate?'

‘No idea. Here one minute, gone the next. Wham, bang, slam the door. You know.'

James regarded his uncle levelly. In all Leonard's life, nobody had ever been kinder to him than Kate. It was Kate's idea that they should take him in when it became plain that years of institutional living had rendered him totally unable to cope on his own. But Leonard, although he was keenly aware of what he owed Kate, and although he had come to love her, could not forgive her for two faults. One was her class. He knew he couldn't voice his opinion, and he knew he was unfashionable to hold it, but James had been born a gentleman, in Leonard's view, and Kate's father was a college groundsman; her mother was an emigrant Irishwoman from County Cork. These facts stuck in Leonard's mind like stones in sand, these facts – and, of course, that other one, which was more of a boulder than a stone.

‘Leonard—' James said warningly. He finished his whisky. ‘I'd better go down and see Joss.'

‘We've done her homework,' Leonard said, picking up the paper to show James that he wanted him to go anyway. ‘Polished that off in no time.'

‘Is that a good idea? How does it help her in class, if you zip through her prep and create such a false impression of her capabilities?'

Leonard adored doing Joss's homework. He put his face into the newspaper. ‘Mind your own business.'

James went out on to the landing. Kate had repainted it last winter, a pale, soft corn colour. She had painted it with her usual energy, and James had gone round after her, removing the splashes of yellow paint from the white woodwork, and tidying up the edges round light switches. She didn't mind, she never took things like that personally, she just laughed. The landing was one of the few things she had changed since she came; for the most part, she seemed either too absorbed by the business of living to fuss about decor, or too delicate in feeling to impose her taste on James's house.

It was his house. He had bought it nearly thirty years before, long before the carelessly built Victorian area of Oxford, called Jericho, had risen from a near slum to gentility. It was a low, double-fronted red house with a Gothic doorway and wide sash windows edged in blue-and-yellow brick. Above the door it said firmly in black, ‘Richmond Villa'. It had perhaps been built for one of the master printers at the great university press in Walton Street, and James loved it. He loved, too, Kate's tact about it.

He went downstairs. The thump of music from behind the closed kitchen door had given way to a sad, plaintive wail in a nasal voice, like a voice heard over a high wall in a North African souk. James paused. He put his hand on the doorknob. Behind the door, no doubt messily eating cornflakes, on which she seemed to exist, he would find Joss, his stepdaughter. Except that she was not truly his stepdaughter since her mother, throughout the eight years they had lived with James in Richmond Villa, had staunchly refused to marry him.

Joss had a small white face and a horrible haircut. Her hair was the same reddish colour as Kate's, and she had had it cut brutally short, to appease the prevailing fashion in her class. Secretly, her haircut appalled her, so she defended it with hysteria. On her bedroom wall, she had stuck posters of girl rock stars with hair like convicts, but under her bed she kept a box of cuttings from magazines, photographs of fashion models with curtains of luxuriant hair, swinging and shining. Those girls wore beautiful shoes. Joss wore heavy black boots with thick soles and eyelets rimmed in brass.

‘Uncle Leonard says he's done all your prep.'

Joss yawned. ‘He can do it. I can't. So.'

James did not feel equal to a battle.

‘Where's Mum?'

‘I dunno. The home, I suppose.'

The home was a refuge for battered women, set up by a friend of Kate's, near St Margaret's Church. Kate helped there, on a voluntary basis, looking after the children and listening, endlessly listening. It was where she had found Mrs Cheng, looking like a little pansy with her yellow face blurred by purple bruises. She had given Mrs Cheng a part-time job at Richmond Villa, and had then found her a room in a hostel and a second job, cleaning a dentist's surgery in Beaumont Street. Mrs Cheng's gratitude manifested itself in tireless zeal for Kate, a zeal that took the form of trying to subdue the mountains of muddle that grew up round Kate wherever she alighted. Joss had been to Mrs Cheng's room in the hostel. She said it was very bare and smelled funny.

‘What she'd really like,' Uncle Leonard said, ‘is to live here, in the cupboard under the stairs, and cook fish heads in a bucket.'

‘I'll start supper,' James said now, moving towards the fridge.

‘Good,' said Joss. James was a better cook than Kate. His food stayed separate, in its own colours and textures. Kate's always tended to look and feel the same, so that the taste was a surprise; not always, either, a very nice surprise.

‘I bought a hat,' Joss said suddenly. She had not meant to admit this, and blushed at her mistake. Her buying of hats from the second-hand shops in Walton and Little Clarendon Streets was a solemn passion which she tried to keep as secret as her photographs of hair and shoes.

‘Did you?'

‘Yeah.'

‘What sort of hat? Can I see it?'

Furious with herself, Joss kicked a carrier bag towards James. It was an old supermarket bag, worn and crumpled. James picked it up and took out a little black velvet hat, like a Highlander's bonnet, with a coarse black veil pinned to it with two diamanté bows.

‘It's lovely. Really glamorous.'

‘I hate it. I wish I hadn't gone and bought it.'

James knew better than to call her bluff and say take it back then.

‘I wish women still wore hats like that. So sexy.'

‘Yuk,' said Joss.

James put the hat back in its bag. He opened the fridge – far too small, as it had been for eight years – and squatted in front of it.

‘What about a giant stir-fry of everything I can see in here?'

Joss drew the hat bag towards her, with infinite stealth.

‘I'm not hungry.'

‘I am. Uncle Leonard always is. Mum's bound to be.'

‘I'm going to take this hat back. It's gross.'

James stood up and began to unload things out of the fridge on to the table.

‘Why don't you give it to Mum for her birthday?'

‘What birthday?'

‘Her birthday in two weeks. Her thirty-sixth birthday.'

‘You said that hat was sexy—'

‘It is.'

‘I can't give a sexy hat to
Mum
!'

They stared at each other. Joss pictured Kate in the hat and James looking at her in it, and felt sick. James pictured the same thing and felt stirred. He was the first to turn away. ‘Suit yourself,' he said, picking up a punnet of tired mushrooms.

The front door opened, letting a wild draught shoot in under the closed kitchen one, and then slammed.

‘Ah,' James said with satisfaction. Joss stuffed the hat bag hurriedly into the black sack she used to lug her school books about in.

Kate opened the kitchen door and blew in, glistening with rain. She had put nothing on her head, and her wiry red hair held the drops like a maze of twigs.

‘Disgusting,' Kate said, and dropped her bag on the floor, and a carrier of groceries, which sagged sideways and spilled tangerines and a huge tawny Spanish onion.

James went over to kiss her.

‘Careful. I'll drench you. I'm wet through to my knickers. Hello, Jossie.'

‘Have a bath. I'm about to cook supper. Have a bath while I do it.'

‘Where've you been?'

‘At the home. Where d'you think? Usual post-Christmas flood of the poor things. They all say they dread Christmas more than any other day of the year.'

James began to extract Kate from her mackintosh.

‘You're quite right, you're soaked through. Joss, go and run Mum a bath, would you? And say supper in half an hour, to Uncle Leonard?'

Joss got up. ‘Can I go skiing? Can I go with the school?'

Kate glanced at her. ‘No,' she said, ‘I haven't the money.' She gave James a quelling look to forestall his offering. ‘You know I haven't. But I'm sorry. I'm sorry I haven't.'

‘Yeah,' Joss said. She'd held out little hope in the first place, and, although she'd promised herself she would make a scene, she hadn't the heart for it when it came to it. She went out of the kitchen, leaving the door open, knowing that James would have to close it after her.

‘I'm so glad you're back,' James said.

Kate squatted on the floor by her bags, a supple little figure in black dungarees. ‘Me too. It was so sad today. I suppose it's as much the gloom of early January as anything, but somehow the home didn't feel like a refuge today, more like some sort of bleak waiting room, all form-filling and queues. And everyone was smoking. I'm ashamed when I feel ratty, but sometimes I do, really ratty.' She put the last rolling tangerines back in the carrier and stood up.

‘Talking of shame,' James said, returning to his mushrooms, ‘I'm full of it. D'you know what I did?'

‘Tell me,' Kate said.

‘I forgot my specs when I went out to fax my piece through to the paper. And I knocked a woman over in Beaumont Street, not badly, not hard, but I knocked her off her bicycle.' Kate was listening, still, attentive. James warmed to her unspoken sympathy. ‘The worst of it was that she was so vulnerable, one of those frail old academics with a bun. There was cat food in her bike basket. She was going to the doctor's, luckily, so I escorted her there, and of course I'll go and see her tomorrow, but, in the meantime, I feel rather haunted, and so sorry.' He stopped, and waited for Kate to reassure him, even to come over and put her arms round him, and lay her damp cheek against his chest and tell him that it could have happened to anybody, particularly on a night like this. But she didn't. She said nothing and she didn't move. He looked across at her, surprised. She was regarding him with a look that was wholly unfamiliar, a cold, almost contemptuous look.

He opened his mouth to speak, but before he could utter, Kate said, in a voice that matched her expression, ‘You stupid old man.' Then there was another silence, in which they regarded each other with horror.

Kate lay in her bath with her eyes closed. She had asked Joss to stay and talk to her, but Joss had said she'd got stuff to do, and clumped away to her bedroom. Kate couldn't blame her. Joss might only be fourteen, but she was no fool and could easily tell the difference between being asked to stay for a genuine conversation, and being asked to stay to prevent Kate's being left with her own thoughts. ‘Sorry,' she'd said, ‘got stuff to do.' Her voice was faintly cockney, Kate's was faintly Oxfordshire, James's was, well, different; Kate's mother said James had an Oxford accent. James! Why had she said that to him? She hadn't meant to, she hadn't even realized she was going to. Stupid was all right, so was man, but old – Kate drew up her knees in the bath in agony. He'd looked stricken, as if she'd slapped him. She'd never slapped him, she'd hardly ever raised her voice to him; he wasn't that kind of man, nor she that kind of woman. Yet now she had called him a stupid old man, she realized with a shock that she meant it. It
was
the behaviour of a stupid, myopic, absent-minded old man to drive about in the dark and the rain without glasses and knock people off bicycles. Oh God, thought Kate, suddenly afraid of where her mind was going, what am I doing?

She never thought about his age when she met him. If anything, the twenty-five years between them had been something of a turn-on, and the whole affair had been so natural and so marvellous, she had never asked herself what she was doing. They had met in a pub off Holywell Street. James had been there with his lifelong friend Hugh Hunter, and Kate had been with a boyfriend, not Joss's father who had vanished back to Canada the minute he heard she was pregnant, but another boyfriend, with whom Kate was getting bored. Hugh Hunter had spilled a little beer on Kate's shoulder as he tried to push through the crowd, and James had been the only one with a handkerchief. He looked wonderful to Kate, big and relaxed in a polo-necked jersey under an old tweed jacket. She looked up into his face quite openly and thought of the Duke of Wellington; perhaps it was his nose. He said, mopping her shoulder, ‘My name's James Mallow.'