The Men and the Girls (24 page)

‘I didn't know it was your birthday. And why get drunk on your birthday?'

He looked offended. ‘I always get drunk on me birthday.'

‘More fool you.'

He gazed past her at the wide stainless-steel mouth of the pizza oven. ‘Tequila slammers,' he said dreamily.

‘What?'

‘You put in the tequila and then you add the lemonade and then you slam it down on the bar and you have to drink it all quick before it fizzes right over. I had dozens. Dozens and dozens and dozens.' His eye swung slowly away from the oven and took in Kate. ‘You'd love a tequila slammer.'

‘What does it taste like?'

‘Dunno. Can't remember. Hey,' he said, his blurred gaze suddenly focusing, ‘you don't look up to much.'

Kate was refilling the wooden pepper-grinders. Her hands didn't seem very steady and stray peppercorns kept bouncing off the sides of the mills and pattering down on to the counters and the floor. ‘I'm OK. I just didn't sleep very well.'

‘Trouble with lover boy?' Benjie said, for whom trouble always came in the form of booze or lover boys.

‘No,' Kate said, though this was not strictly true. Mark was busy being offended at the moment, touchy and wounded, and Kate couldn't give him the attention he wanted because of her other, greater, preoccupation which was Joss.

‘Money?'

‘Not really,' Kate said. ‘I mean, I can't not think about it, but it isn't keeping me awake.' She paused. There was no particular point in telling Benjie about Joss, since family life was as relevant to Benjie as life on Mars would have been; but there would be no harm either. And it would be nice to tell someone, someone who was not another woman with, invariably, strong female views. She had begun on the subject of Joss with Helen, at the cinema, and Helen had been emphatic. ‘You must get legal help if you can't retrieve Joss any other way. Tomorrow. Start tomorrow. Honestly, Kate, what's the point of making a bid for freedom if you don't use that freedom and
act
independent?' Kate had attempted to explain that Joss's wishes had to be taken into account, and that she, Kate, had, somehow, got wholly out of touch with James, but that had only made Helen angry. What was worse was that Kate understood her anger. Of course she was being pathetic and feeble, or, at least, of course that was how she seemed, but, equally strongly, she felt that she couldn't, as Helen did, just march about all over other people's lives instructing them as to what they should do and think. Helen and Kate had parted that evening with a technical friendliness that had no heart to it.

‘I asked my daughter to come and live with me,' Kate said now, ‘and although she didn't say so in so many words, she turned me down.'

Benjie drew a long breath in through his teeth. He got up, his hangover apparently forgotten, and began his practised chef's ritual of assembling boards and pans and knives.

‘She still with James, then?'

‘Yes. I think—' Kate stopped and then said sadly, ‘I think she likes it there now, I think—' She stopped again.

‘How old is she?'

‘Fourteen.'

‘I expect,' Benjie said, reaching for his rope of garlic, ‘she just wants to get up your nose. She says she likes it there just to aggravate you, give you a bit of grief.'

‘James is kind, you know.'

‘He's old, though, i'n't he?'

‘No,' Kate said, without thinking. ‘He isn't very old.'

‘I seen him,' Benje said, chopping rapidly and minutely. ‘He's got grey hair.'

‘Joss has known him since she was six.'

‘Yeah. But she's known you since she was born. She's just trying to get at you. I did it all the time, get at me mum. Now she's gone, I wish I hadn't, but when she was here I never gave over tormenting her. You want to call Joss's bluff.' He turned round from his board and gave Kate a direct look. ‘Don't you take it, Katie. You go round there and have it out with both of them, face to face. Everybody needs their mum, whatever they say.'

The May sunshine lay like a blessing on the garden of Church Cottage. In the borders, planted by Julia, were bright clumps of colour, cushions of polyanthus and pansy, ranks of tulips, spikes of rosemary. Julia had planted the garden very deliberately as a cottage garden, referring to countless books. ‘Nothing too formal,' she had said. ‘Nothing too sophisticated.' Hugh had agreed, without really listening. He was not, and never had been, a gardening man. ‘Give me a nice terrace,' he'd said, to tease Julia, ‘something you can dust rather than mow. Something with plenty of flat surfaces to park my drink on.'

He sat now in a sheltered corner, a straw hat tipped over his eyes, and looked at Julia's garden. It was exceedingly pretty, as she was pretty, and its very prettiness was, to his present state of mind, a reproach. It lay before him, charming and innocent, exactly as she presented herself to him just now, understanding and forgiving, innocent of his folly yet an automatic and helpless victim of it. She had uttered no word of censure, not a syllable of criticism over his behaviour at Coventry, and had staunchly taken his side in the face of Vivienne Penniman's furious condemnation. He had told her how they had reached Coventry early, and how he had told the driver he'd go to the Cathedral for an hour, but had not, and had gone to a pub instead, and drunk whisky steadily, and how the effect of the whisky hadn't really hit him until he was at the supermarket when he had felt the full force of it, and of his anger and unbearable disappointment with Midland Television. ‘I did everything reprehensible,' he told Julia, ‘except throw up. Everything.' She had sat and listened, her eyes full of pity. Vivienne said later on the telephone that she doubted she could get Hugh more work immediately, and Julia's eyes had filled with tears then, tears for Hugh. All that evening, all that night, and all the subsequent days and nights, she had been perfectly, utterly, sweet to him. Looking at her garden, sitting uselessly in his deck-chair. Hugh thought he couldn't stand any more of her sweetness, he simply could not take it.

It was, he knew, a reflection of his own sense of guilt and shame. The better she behaved, the worse he felt he was behaving by comparison. She had never been as spontaneously loving to him as she had been recently, and he couldn't lay his hand on his heart and say with any honesty that she was loving because he had become the shorn Samson. There was no triumph in her love, no sense of power or superiority; if anything, she seemed more dependent, more pliant, less sure of herself. In the face of this openly demonstrated love, this ideal, romantic-story love, it made him feel even more of a bastard to realize that he didn't want this kind of perfect emotion just now, this absolutely beautiful behaviour. It was more than that, too. He felt that the beauty of her behaviour did him, obscurely, an injury, and then he was consumed with guilt for the glaring injustice of this feeling.

‘Mr Hunter!'

He raised the brim of his hat and turned his head. Sandy stood outside the open garden door, drying her hands on a tea towel and shouting. She always shouted, never came close enough to be able to say anything.

‘Yes?'

‘Telephone.'

He struggled up. Even the telephone seemed only a threat now, never a possible messenger of hope. He plodded tiredly into the sitting-room and picked up the receiver.

‘Hugh Hunter.'

‘Hugh, it's Maurice—'

‘Maurice!'

‘I meant to ring a week ago but we've been so frightfully busy. I just wanted to congratulate Julia and say how sorry—'

‘That's quite all right,' Hugh said interrupting.

‘—absolutely not my wish, as you know, but of course I don't have the executive power I'd like—'

‘I'm thrilled for Julia,' Hugh said. ‘She deserves it. What does it matter which of us has it?'

‘Splendid,' Maurice said, relieved. ‘I knew you'd understand. I told Kevin—'

‘He seemed to like
Is the Choice Yours
—'

‘Oh yes, absolutely, loved it—'

‘So I don't quite see—'

There was a small pause. ‘
Anno Domini
, Hugh. Simply that. Me next.' He gave a tiny laugh. ‘I'll be joining the club in the autumn. What are your plans?'

‘Plans?'

‘Why don't you get away for a bit?' Maurice said. ‘Take a break.'

‘Julia's so busy—'

Maurice, who had not shared a holiday with Zoë, by mutual consent, for nineteen years, said, ‘I didn't mean with Julia. She's too busy as you say, anyway. Why don't you go off by yourself?'

‘I'm not very good company for myself just now,' Hugh said, suddenly tired of pretending he was all right. His voice shook a little. Maurice heard the tremble and prepared to end the call.

‘Go and find a friend, then. That's what friends are for. Find a friend and go off and make hay, get a new perspective. Trouble with this television world of ours is that you get so close to it you can't see a damned thing. We'll meet when you're back, have a drink. Chin up, old boy. And my congratulations to your lovely wife.'

Hugh put down the receiver. He was shaking and felt cold and unsteady. The room was dim and cool, but through the windows he could see that bright and sunny garden, that heartless garden, heartless like all the world was, who didn't know what it was like to be turfed out at sixty-one with the door barred against you.

‘Mr Hunter?'

He turned to the door. ‘Yes?'

‘I'm just off to collect the twins and then after lunch, Mrs Hunter said, would you mind them for a couple of hours while I go to Sainsbury's?'

Kate stood on the doorstep of Richmond Villa and rang the bell. James had tried to make her keep a key but she had refused, feeling it was not proper, as she was closing the Richmond Villa chapter of her life. When she had telephoned to say she would like to come and see him, James had sounded startled; startled, but pleased. ‘Come on Tuesday,' he said. ‘Come for a drink.' And then he had paused. ‘Leonard will be out. He's taken to going out on Tuesdays, to play bridge, of all things. Beatrice takes him somewhere, in a taxi.'

On Tuesdays, Kate knew, Joss now stayed at school for drama club, a development which had resulted from her friendship with Angie and someone called Emma who Kate hadn't met either. This was all quite convenient since, Kate had worked out, if she arrived at Richmond Villa at about five-thirty, she could have it out with James before Joss got home at six, when they could both talk to Joss. Kate did not dare hope that Joss would come home with her that night, but she had thought the hope several times before she had put it from her.

It was not easy, standing on the doorstep, in fact it was dreadfully difficult and Kate was stiff with apprehension. She had not seen James for almost three months, at least not to talk to, and so much had happened to her and to her feelings in those months that she felt he was now a stranger. When he opened the door to her, the shock was not of strangeness at all, but of familiarity. He put out a hand and took her arm and drew her in, smiling. ‘Kate,' he said, and then he stooped to kiss her cheek. She turned her head away and his mouth caught only her hair.

‘Oh dear,' James said.

She glanced up at him and said with bright friendliness, ‘How are you?'

He gestured. ‘As you see.' He looked exactly the same, neither fatter nor thinner, older nor younger. He wore a blue checked shirt she recognized (it had a mend in the elbow, she remembered) and the rust-coloured corduroy trousers she had given him two Christmases before. Had he, she wondered, dressed deliberately?

He said, ‘You look lovely.'

She turned her head aside. This was not what she had come for, not what she had bargained for; she had come to talk about Joss.

‘When will Joss be back?'

‘About six,' James said. He moved past her to open the study door for her as if she were a stranger. ‘Come in.'

His study looked exactly the same too, and smelled the same. It was the smell that afflicted Kate with an unbidden nostalgia. She looked round quickly, to distract herself, and stifle the nostalgia; the grass-green carpet, the plump prince, the battered chairs, the ragged piles of books and papers, all as they had been eleven weeks ago. The only thing that was unfamiliar was a bowl of peonies on the cluttered table by the window the garden end. These had been given to Joss by Garth Acheson's mother, who rejoiced in the name of Bluey, and who had grown them in her garden in Observatory Street.

‘Take these home to your mother,' Bluey had said. ‘They've such a short life we all have to make the most of them.'

Joss had not troubled to say she hadn't got a mother at home to give them to. She had simply thanked Bluey, and given the peonies to James.

‘I've never been given flowers in my life,' James said, very pleased.

‘Haven't you?'

‘No. I don't think men, on the whole, get given flowers. Not English men, anyway.'

‘Well, I don't want them,' Joss said graciously, ‘so you might as well.'

‘Lovely flowers,' Kate said formally, like a guest.

‘They came from the mother of a friend of Joss's.'

‘Angie?'

‘No, not Angie. Garth.'

‘Garth! I thought Garth had thrown her over!'

‘Garth,' said James with an in-the-know satisfaction that irritated Kate, ‘is trying to throw himself back. She's handling him with wonderful cool.' He crossed the room to his desk, on which stood a small tray with a bottle of white wine and two glasses, all ready-prepared. ‘Let me get you a drink.'