The Men and the Girls (29 page)

‘I'm unhappy here,' Joss said. ‘Why can't I choose as much as you?'

‘Becuse you're still a child,' Kate said, without either meaning to, or much conviction.

‘Don't give me that,' Joss said with scorn.

‘Is it Mark?'

Joss sighed. ‘No.'

‘You don't like him—'

‘I think he's a creep, but that's not why. I
told
you why.'

Kate stood up. She looked fragile and wounded, and the sight of her made Joss feel terrible. ‘You want to go because even though I'm your mother I can't make you feel that this is home.'

Joss was silent. She wanted to say something affectionate, but didn't know how without sounding apologetic, and that, some strong instinct told her, would be fatal. She looked down at the carpet, an old imitation Turkey-patterned carpet, and began to count the stiff flowers in its border.

‘Oh Joss,' Kate said brokenly, ‘Jossie—'

Nine, ten, Joss counted. She ached to say sorry. Eleven, twelve, thirteen, turn the corner . . .

‘What has James got I haven't got?'

Anger spurted up in Joss, drowning all softness. She leapt from her chair, turning it over.

‘He doesn't ask for things!' she yelled at Kate. ‘He doesn't ask me, and he didn't ask you, either!'

Then she flung herself out of the room, and down the dark stairs to the hall, and the front door to the street. From behind the closed door to the conservatory, she could hear Mr Winthrop's passion for this week, Peggy Lee, who was singing, ‘Where did they go, all the good times, all the flowers and the wine?' Joss opened the front door and let it slam behind her so deafeningly that Peggy Lee stammered and Mr Winthrop came out of his lair and began to shout abuse at Kate, up the stairs.

Joss had forgotten Hugh. When she had paid off the taxi and lugged all her bags and her duvet up the steps, and pressed the doorbell, she expected James to open the door. She was just going to say, ‘I'm back,' and then wait. But it wasn't James who opened the door, it was Hugh, in a pale-blue shirt and white trousers. James, Joss thought contemptuously, wouldn't wear white trousers, not white, not at his age.

‘Good Lord,' Hugh said.

‘I've come back—'

‘So I see. Does Kate know?'

‘She gave me the money for the taxi.'

‘Hell's teeth, she
sent
you back.'

‘No, she didn't,' Joss cried, growing angry. ‘She wanted me to stay, but I wanted to come back.'

Hugh stooped for the nearest bags. ‘I suppose you'd better come in.'

‘I
live
here,' Joss said furiously.

‘Yes, but I thought you'd stopped—'

‘Why are you still here?'

‘Oh God,' Hugh said, ‘I don't think I can stand this.'

Muffled by her duvet, Joss pushed past him into the hall. ‘Where's James?'

‘Out.'

‘Where's Uncle Leonard?'

‘In the garden, having tea. With Beatrice—'

Joss ran down the hall, dropping her duvet on the floor, and out through the kitchen into the garden. Uncle Leonard and Miss Bachelor sat under the willow tree at the corner of the little lawn. Uncle Leonard was wearing his panama hat with the black ribbon and the split brim.

‘I'm back!' Joss shouted. ‘I'm back!'

They both looked up.

‘What a bloody awful surprise,' Leonard said. He put out shaking, speckled hands.

‘Josephine!' Beatrice called. ‘How stupendous.'

Joss ran across the grass and collapsed at their feet.

‘Why's he still here?'

‘Hugh? Can't think. Perfect nuisance—'

‘Josephine, is this an orthodox visit, does your mother—'

‘Where's James, when will James be back?'

‘You look worse than ever. Miserable child. What d'you want to come back for? Had some peace without you—'

‘James has gone to an exhibition of modern art with Mrs Acheson—'

‘
Bluey—
'

‘Extraordinary name.'

‘Nice little bum, though, not like—'

‘Leonard!'

‘I really tried living there,' Joss said. ‘I did, honest. It was nice with Mum but it wasn't—'

They waited.

‘We were pretending,' Joss said.

Beatrice beamed at her. ‘You have been tremendously missed.'

‘Not by me.'

Joss looked at Leonard. ‘I didn't miss you either.'

‘What d'you come back for?'

‘To get away from Mr Winthrop.'

‘Who is Mr Winthrop?'

‘Mum's landlord. He smells.' She grinned at Leonard. ‘Nearly as bad as you.'

‘Bloody impertinence.'

‘Why has James gone out with Bluey? She's married.'

Leonard and Beatrice exchanged glances.

‘She has been very kind and she is extremely accomplished domestically.'

‘Yeah?' Joss said. She scrambled to her feet. ‘Which room's he in? Not mine, I hope—'

‘Hugh? No. Mrs Cheng has guarded yours like a lion.'

‘I'm going to look at it. At my room. Then I'll phone Garth and Angie.' She went skipping off across the grass.

They watched her. ‘Dear child,' Beatrice said in a voice not at all like her usual one.

‘Give over,' Leonard said in disgust. He glanced at Beatrice. ‘If you get sentimental, you old fool, I'll spit in your tea.'

Julia sat in the sitting-room, and reread Hugh's letter, for the eighth or ninth time. It was hardly a comforting letter. It was full of reproach, it seemed to Julia, reproach thinly disguised as self-reproach. He was only writing, Hugh said, because she had begged him to, because she had said she needed something more tangible and permanent than these unsatisfactory telephone calls which left her so distressed.

‘You would be much less distressed,' Hugh wrote, ‘if you could just leave me alone for a little while. I can only behave badly, in your terms, at the moment, and it would cause much less pain if you didn't provoke me into any behaviour at all. Don't get me wrong – I'm not happy here, I'm just in a kind of limbo and that's all I can ask for, just now, all I can cope with.'

The whole letter was like this, elusive and circular. It came back in the end simply to a rejection, a rejection of her, Julia, and, by implication, all she stood for, the home she had made, the standards she had kept up. The only element excluded from this wholesale rejection was of course the twins, and Julia had begun to feel, with a faint stirring of spirit, that Hugh couldn't just indulge himself over the twins and not accept what went with them, i.e., her, and their life together. She didn't doubt for a moment that he genuinely adored and missed them, but the longer he was away, the vaguer, for him, grew the reality of the twins, and the stronger their appeal as little perfect, forbidden, angel children. They were, in fact, far from being angels just now; they were being simply frightful. They had decided to disobey even Sandy, and to revert to a kind of anarchic baby behaviour, refusing to talk properly and tearing books up and throwing food about. The sadder Julia became, the worse their behaviour grew. Julia's newest fear was that Sandy would give notice which, unsatisfactory though she was in many ways, would be just another upheaval in the twins' desperately disturbed lives.

Julia put the letter down. She took a gulp of wine from the glass she had brought into the sitting-room with her. When she had first read the letter, locked in the lavatory after breakfast, she had wept bitterly and felt all the old familiar anguish and despair. But now, after so many rereadings and a day at work, she felt distinctly less abject. She considered this. Why should she feel any different? Hugh, after all, had said nothing different in his letter, he'd simply reiterated his own helplessness, the helplessness she had found so touching and poignant, so heart-breaking to watch. But she didn't feel so touched tonight. She looked at the letter, but did not pick it up again. She found she didn't want to pick it up, that the sight of it made her feel rather cross.

She went out to the kitchen. Sandy hadn't cleared away the twins' supper properly and there were crumbs and stray peas and milk spills on the table. Julia walked past the mess, and opened the fridge to find the white wine and refill her glass. She considered boiling herself an egg, and decided she couldn't be bothered. She opened the fridge again, and found the end of a wedge of Brie and a tomato, and carried these, without a plate, back into the sitting-room. On the way back to her chair, she trod on Hugh's letter, and this gave her a tiny flicker of triumph. I do believe, she said to herself, biting into the Brie, I do believe that he's now as sorry for himself as I was for him, even this morning. Why aren't I now, why don't I feel like I felt in the loo after breakfast? What is it, Julia thought, letting tomato juice and seeds run down her chin, what is it that suddenly makes worms turn?

She bent down and put the half-eaten cheese and tomato deliberately on Hugh's letter. Then she crossed to the window and looked out at her early-summer garden, blue-grey and blue-black in the fading light. She leaned forward until her forehead rested on the glass. That lunchtime, she had had a planning meeting with Rob Shiner, about the second series of
Night Life
, and to discuss a new idea Julia had had about following the lives of three Midlands children, from different backgrounds, for five years. After the meeting, Rob had said come and have a sandwich. They were always having sandwiches together, Rob and Julia, and she said yes, gratefully, because having a sandwich with somebody else would prevent her from rereading Hugh's letter. During the sandwich, Rob asked if she would have dinner with him.

‘Dinner?'

‘I think,' Rob said, ‘that you need a bit of cheering up.'

Julia said, meaning it, ‘How nice of you.'

Rob refilled her glass with mineral water. ‘And selfish. I'd like to have dinner with you.' He looked at her. ‘The way you've coped recently, the lack of whingeing, puts you, to my mind, into the wonderful category, and I like taking wonderful women out to dinner.'

Julia had hesitated. Her mind had been so filled with Hugh that it took some time for it to get into another gear and think about Rob. She looked at Rob. He seemed absolutely the same, amiable, slightly battered, middle-aged modish in his leather jacket and jeans. She said, ‘I'm rather out of practice.'

‘Don't be coy.'

‘I'm not—'

‘He left you,' Rob said. ‘He won't say if or when he's coming back. Are you going to live like a nun until he deigns to decide?'

Julia drank her water.

‘I'm divorced and unattached,' Rob said, ‘you're separated. We're free agents. Your self-esteem could do with a little fuel.'

That was what did it, Julia decided now, leaning against the cool glass, that remark about her self-esteem. It had plummeted unquestionably in recent weeks, simply plunged into self-despair, just like the women at Mansfield House she had interviewed for
Night Life
who'd said (and she could hardly comprehend them then) that, in the end, after years of being beaten, you come to believe that it's all you're fit for. In her turn, she had come to believe that Hugh was in the right, and that she had, by her nature, by her very existence, done him an injury and was therefore to blame for his state of mind. But what had she really done? She peeled her forehead away from the window and frowned out into the garden. She had been sympathetic and supportive and had proved herself able enough to earn enough to keep them all. She had not reproached him, not once, not even when he got so disgustingly drunk at the supermarket in Coventry, and she had suddenly discovered, at lunchtime with Rob Shiner, that she wasn't at all averse to being given a pat on the back.

‘If a man had done what I've done,' Julia said loudly to the empty sitting-room, ‘if Hugh had done for me what I've done for him, he'd be a hero. Nobody's going to tell me I'm a heroine, so I'll take any crumbs of praise I can get, even from Rob Shiner.'

She bent down and picked up the letter by its two shorter edges, so that it made a hammock for the remainder of the cheese and tomato, and carried it out to the kitchen waste bin. Then she wrote a stern note for Sandy telling her to clear up the kitchen before she went to bed and left the note leaning very visibly against the milk jug. Tomorrow she would get the twins up herself, and there would be proper breakfast with no snatching and spilling and grizzling, and then she would drive to the studios, and tell Rob Shiner that she would be pleased, really pleased, to have dinner with him.

James lay propped up in bed reading Boswell's account of his Highland journey with Doctor Johnson. They had just had dinner at Inveraray Castle, where the Duchess had snubbed Boswell, and been enchanted with Doctor Johnson. If James didn't exactly feel enchanted, he felt a very great deal better than he had felt for months. He had had a very enjoyable afternoon, and had returned to find the house trembling with rock music and Joss frying sausages in the kitchen.

‘Hi,' she said. She wouldn't look at him.

‘Jossie!'

She said something he couldn't hear. He went over to the radio and pressed the ‘Off switch and silence fell on the room like a douche of cold water.

‘Have you come back for supper?'

‘I've come back.'

‘To stay?'

‘Yeah,' Joss said, turning the sausages unnecessarily.

‘Have – did you quarrel with Kate?'

‘I couldn't live there.'