The Men and the Girls (20 page)

‘Can't,' Joss muttered. She inserted a tiny spoonful of porridge into her reluctant mouth and held it there, in disgust.

‘Do you wish to continue living there?'

Joss swallowed. Tears surged into her eyes. From upstairs came the sound of ferocious plumbing, as Grace Bachelor performed her lengthy morning ablutions. ‘I do live there.'

‘Not necessarily,' Miss Bachelor said.

Joss dug again at her porridge. ‘I do. James said I could.'

‘Only temporarily. If you misbehave and are selfish and troublesome, he will turn you out.'

‘He won't.'

‘He will. You are being elaborately childish.'

Joss felt childish. She gulped another spoonful of porridge and seized her cup of tea to wash it down.

‘If you do not behave with more co-operation and generosity, you will be turned out, and quite right too. He has no obligation towards you. You are not his child nor even, as you insist upon telling me, his stepchild. He is not responsible for you.'

Joss raised her head and looked at Miss Bachelor.

‘If you want to stay in Richmond Villa,' Beatrice said, ‘you will have to earn your right to stay. There is no relationship on this earth worth having that does not have, in some way, to be earned.' She stood up. ‘I am going to telephone James and tell him that you are safe, and that I am escorting you home. And when I return, you will have eaten your porridge. If I find the porridge in the waste bin, I shall order you a taxi for Osney.'

Joss gazed at her. On her white exhausted face there was an unmistakable mixture of resentment and relief.

‘Thank God,' James said.

‘I am sure you were worried.'

‘I didn't sleep at all. How dare she? How dare she make me lose a night's sleep? Is she at all sorry?'

‘I believe so. She does, of course, lack any grace of expression, but I sense fear and a mild repentance.'

‘I'm not sure,' James said, changing the telephone receiver to the other ear, ‘I'm not sure I can go on coping with her. Not her and Leonard.'

‘Then you must give her up.'

‘Beatrice, it isn't so easy, I feel responsible, I feel I've been involved in making this insecurity for her—'

‘Nonsense,' said Miss Bachelor. ‘She is her own person, she is not simply a victim.'

‘But she's so young. I feel I ought—'

‘Stop it,' said Miss Bachelor, interrupting. ‘Just stop it. Clear your mind of conscience. Why is it up to you to put this right?'

‘Because I suppose I think every child has a right to a proper family life. And I feel guilty.'

‘Guilty?' shouted Beatrice.

James held the telephone receiver away from his ear.

‘Nonsense!' shouted Beatrice. ‘Don't behave as if you were the first! Agamemnon had a terrible family life, remember! It isn't original sin!'

She banged the telephone down.

‘Who was that?' Leonard called.

‘Beatrice. She's got Joss—'

‘Damn,' Leonard said, dizzy with relief.

‘She says my troubles aren't a patch on Agamemnon's—'

‘Hah!' Leonard said. He began to laugh, his wheezing, creaking laugh. James leaned against the kitchen wall beside the telephone and closed his eyes. He would have given, at that moment, anything to feel frankly, luxuriously, furious with Kate.

Kate was humming as she laid tables in Pasta Please. Downstairs, in the basement kitchen, Benjie was cursing steadily into a new batch of pizzaiola sauce, working off simultaneously a weekend hangover and a reluctance for Mondays. They had the restaurant to themselves as Christine had gone to watch her son in some county fencing trials. She had telephoned in her instructions, which Kate had taken down with precision. Now, laying the tables and putting a new spray carnation in a glass tube on each one, Kate was pretending that the restaurant was hers.

She had been, the night before, to a wonderful party. She had been to wonderful parties very occasionally, long, long ago, but not for ages, ten years or more. She had forgotten how a party could make you feel, how elated and free and happy, and full of air after all that dancing. After the party, she and Mark had walked home through quiet Sunday midnight Oxford, singing the words of the songs they had been dancing to. Oxford seemed magical then, full of sleeping life that would burst out in the morning and spread energy along all the streets, like sunlight. She had held Mark's hand, and made him run with her down Queen Street, past the foolish posturings of the mannequins in shop windows. The most modish of them had no heads. only polished wooden knobs, like tailors' dummies, and for some reason this had seemed terribly funny.

‘Look at me,' Mark had said beseechingly to one of them through the plate glass. ‘Just one look from those bewitching eyes—'

Of course, he had come home with Kate, taking off his shoes and matching his tread to hers up the stairs.

‘Does old Winthrop care? Why should he care? You pay the rent, you do what you like—'

‘I want there to be no bother about having Joss here, no chance of bother.'

‘Oh,' Mark had said. ‘Joss.' He kept hoping that the Joss question would simply resolve itself by dissolving. He had thought Joss, in their one brief encounter, most objectionable, and, at the same time, disconcerting. He did not like thinking of Kate as a mother; he wanted to think of her as an independent spirit, a caged bird that he had set free. Free, that is, for himself.

She was not, however, proving entirely tractable about becoming his. She was delightful with him, carefree, light-hearted, but he had got to the stage of wanting her to express more commitment. This she seemed disinclined to do, either verbally or in bed. She was acquiescent in bed, but Mark wanted more than that, much more, even a little violence, which to himself he called abandonment. ‘Trust me,' he said to Kate, urging her further, ‘trust me.' But she didn't seem to. Once he yelled, ‘Are you thinking of bloody James?' and she had looked amazed and said, ‘Of course not,' but he wasn't sure. Last night he had made a huge effort to be slow and gentle, but, as usual, he couldn't control or pace himself. ‘Ow,' Kate said at one point, and then a bit later, ‘Not so fast, not so fast.'

Thinking about it now, laying the tables, Kate resolved to give herself a week without sex with Mark. It wasn't that she didn't find Mark attractive, nor that she didn't like sex with him (or did she really?) but simply that she didn't want sex with anyone just now, she wanted to live peacefully, with herself, alone. She was working four evenings this week anyway, and was going to the cinema with Helen on another (this was a daunting prospect because of her desertion of Mansfield House, but it had to be gone through, otherwise there'd be an irretrievably bad feeling between them), so there wasn't time to see Mark, since two evenings out of seven to oneself were perfectly reasonable in anyone's book. And on the eighth evening, she'd arranged to see Hugh's euthanasia programme with Mark anyway, in his flat. Until then, Kate told herself, her life would be hers, and it was this thought that made her hum.

Benjie's head appeared up the spiral stairway from the basement.

‘Guess what, Katie?'

Kate knew Benjie. Without turning round from the table where she was spiralling napkins into wineglasses, she said, ‘You've had a sex change.'

‘No such luck. Try again.'

‘Princess Di's just rung—'

‘Give over,' Benjie said, ‘I've run out of bloody oregano.
Oregano
. I ask you.'

‘So?'

‘So I haven't time to go and get any more, Katie darling, precious, sweetheart, love, sexpot.'

‘I see.'

‘Four ounces minimum. Freeze-dried.'

‘You're useless.'

‘Not at some things,' Benjie said inevitably. ‘You ask the lads.'

He disappeared downwards. Kate raided the petty cash box for change and went out into the street, still humming. It was a charming day, pale, clean blue sky and cotton wool clouds, an optimistic day. Turning down the side street in which Pasta Please stood, Kate made for Cornmarket Street at a run.

She dashed across it, and through the arcades of the Clarendon Centre into Queen Street, pausing on the pavement there to wait for a gap in the traffic. Then she saw them. They were standing on the opposite pavement also waiting to cross, James and Joss, laden with supermarket food bags. Elation died out of Kate in an instant. James and Joss stood there together, opposite her and not seeing her, not looking particularly happy or at all pleased to be together, but looking – and this tore at her heart – just bored and deeply ordinary and natural, like, oh God, thought Kate, like any old fed-up father and daughter sent out to do the shopping together. They began to cross the street and James put out an instinctive, burdened, protective arm in Joss's direction. Kate turned on her heel and fled.

The Hunter twins were in Julia's wardrobe. They had climbed in, in order to hide from Sandy, but the doors were heavier than they had supposed and had swung shut behind them. Being imprisoned didn't trouble them at all, since they were together in the warm, Mummy-smelling darkness, and the wardrobe was in Julia and Hugh's bedroom, so release was ultimately certain. Also, at the moment, they were beautifully occupied by listening to Sandy blundering about yelling for them, and by putting their heads up Julia's skirts and trouser legs and feeling rude and mischievous.

‘Poo, poo, poo,' said George, muffled in black chiffon.

Edward fell out of a tweed jacket, giggling helplessly.

‘Fatty Sandy, fatty Sandy, fattypoo Sandy,' said George, much encouraged.

Edward stiffened. ‘Shh—'

Heavy footsteps came along the landing and paused. Even Sandy, with her cosy smiling insolence, was reluctant to enter Julia's bedroom. The door opened very slowly. The twins held their breaths, and Edward, lying on the wardrobe floor, watched, through a crack under the door, Sandy's clumsy, trainer-clad feet treading uncertainly over the polished boards and the white Greek rugs. They paused by the bed, and by Julia's dressing-table. The twins could hear things being picked up and put down, pots and bottles, click-click on the glass surface under which Julia kept pictures of them, taken from the time they were just little shrimps in a doll's bath, to now. Sandy seemed to be taking a long time, a terribly long time, and a mutual longing to laugh and to pee began to cramp their muscles. Then Sandy said, ‘Bloody kids,' and went out.

George slid out of Julia's evening dress and lay beside Edward. They clutched each other and shook and then the giggles came over them in a vast, irresistible wave and swept aside all control of their bladders. They peed and laughed until they were empty of everything and the pee ran out of the wardrobe and lay on the clean, shining floor outside, in little pools.

Sandy was not at all afraid of Julia. ‘I went to the toilet. That's all. That's all I did. Three minutes.'

‘Have you looked everywhere? Absolutely everywhere?'

‘'Course I have.'

‘Even in my bedroom?'

‘I wouldn't go in there,' Sandy said, much shocked.

Julia took a deep breath. She was determined that Sandy shouldn't see how terrified she had become, especially as Sandy had said calmly, ‘It's only a lark. They'll come out when they're hungry enough.'

Nothing like this had ever happened to Julia. She had never been lost herself, or lost anyone significant. Her own fright frightened her, made worse by the fact that she had had such a wonderful day, that everything was going so well. Fanny McKinley had telephoned to say she wanted to do an interview with Julia for her magazine, and Hugh had heard that his programme (now titled
Is the Choice Yours?
) was being syndicated across the independent channels simultaneously, and that the press were beginning to sniff enticingly around, and now . . .

‘Shall I put the kettle on?' Sandy said. ‘I'll fry some bacon. They'll smell that.'

‘No,' said Julia, but by mistake she screamed it.

Sandy stared at her.

‘I'm going upstairs,' Julia said. ‘I'm going to search upstairs. They'll – they'll come out for me.'

‘OK,' Sandy said.

Julia went out, trying to believe that Sandy's indifference was calm.

‘Boys?' she called, running up the stairs. ‘Boys? Twins?'

She hurried along the landing, opening doors and calling, coming at last to her own door.

‘George! Edward! Darlings, where are you?'

She went in. The room was quiet, so quiet the silence sounded positive. I want Hugh, Julia thought, I can't manage this, I need Hugh. She threw her jacket on the bed, and ran round it for the telephone. She stepped in something; she looked down. She had trodden in a puddle of something on the floor below the wardrobe, a puddle of – She put her finger down, gingerly, into the puddle, and from inside the wardrobe, tired out and sodden-trousered, the twins began to cry.

Hugh thought it was funny. He held Julia, and laughed and laughed into her hair, and then he went upstairs into the twins' bedroom, to tick them off, and went on laughing up there.

‘Sandy was quite right,' he said, unwisely in front of Sandy.

‘I feel such a fool—' Julia said when they were alone.

‘Don't, darling one, darling maternal thing.'

‘I screamed at Sandy.'

‘She's like an ox. Screams bounce off her like pebbles. I should scream some more, if I were you. Did they pee in your shoes?'

‘Only one.'

‘Oh Lord,' Hugh said, collapsing into laughter again.