The Men and the Girls (30 page)

James came round the table and put his arm across Joss's shoulders. She stiffened, then relaxed.

‘I oughtn't to say I'm pleased, but I'm going to. I'm pleased you're back.'

‘Me too,' Joss said, furiously turning.

‘What's the deal, part-time here, part-time with Kate?'

‘Nope,' Joss said. ‘I'll see her like before, but I live here.' She bent over the counter beside the cooker. ‘I said she ought to come back too. But she wouldn't.'

There was a pause, then, ‘No,' James said. Joss shot a look at him.

‘What d'you mean?'

‘I mean – maybe that's over—'

‘Over?'

‘I asked her to come back. When she came for you. She was very clear that she didn't want to, so I'm learning, trying to learn, to live without entertaining any hopes like that ever again.'

‘Jesus,' Joss said.

The door to the garden still stood open. There was a stumbling clatter outside and Leonard stood, framed in the doorway.

‘Ah! There you are. What d'you make of this, then? Bloody child.'

The bloody child now lay, to James's great contentment, in her room across the landing, rolled in her duvet. Her return could not, of course, be as simple as all that because there would have to be discussions with Kate, and arrangements, but the bottom line was that Joss's flattened toothbrush was back in the bathroom and that the nine o'clock news on television had been interrupted constantly by Joss and Leonard squabbling as of old about the volume. Hugh had been quite kind to Joss at supper, and had only grown huffy when James had refused to elaborate, in every detail, on his afternoon with Bluey Acheson.

It had been a very happy afternoon. At the exhibition of modern art – her choice, not his – they had wandered through a cornfield twelve feet high made of burnished metal and hung with immense coloured-glass butterflies and flowers. Bluey had adored it; James had thought it was very silly.

‘But silly is adorable sometimes.'

‘Not when it masquerades as serious.'

‘But this doesn't! It's a tease.'

‘Then it's a very pretentious tease.'

‘James!'

‘I don't have to like it, you know, just because you do.'

‘I don't need you to like it, I just don't want you to dismiss it.'

‘Oh,' James said, taking her hand, ‘I do like this kind of amiable bickering. I've missed it.'

Bluey didn't take her hand away, and tried, unsuccessfully, not to let James drop it a few minutes later. He didn't attempt to take it again, either, all the way back to Observatory Street, but just walked beside her holding his jacket over his shoulder, because of the sunshine, and talking to her and smiling and being, oh dammit, thought Bluey, just so dear and delicious.

She led him through her little house to her tiny garden, and sat him by a wall, in order to admire her clematis, and brought him iced lemon tea in a glass. She told him about her childhood in Chicago and about going to college and getting married because all her friends were getting married (‘That sounds improbably old-fashioned,' James said, and Bluey cried, ‘But it's true! It's true for girls brought up like me! Feminism didn't really touch us.') and then about coming to England and finding it all so foreign. She smiled at James.

‘You seem really foreign. Even though we both speak English.'

He looked at her consideringly. ‘You don't seem so foreign to me, just extremely fresh and new.'

‘New enough to get away with a bit of impudence?'

‘Try it.'

‘Would you talk to me about Kate?'

‘Ah,' James said. He put his tea glass down on the little white wooden table at his elbow. ‘I think I wouldn't. I don't think it's impudence to ask at all, but I'm at the stage of convalescence where I don't much want to remember being ill.'

‘I just can't help being curious.' She looked at James. ‘Are you curious about Randy?'

He began to laugh. ‘Oh dear,' he said, ‘I'm afraid I'm not. Oh Bluey,' James said, ‘you really are so sweet,' and then he leaned forward, and took her shoulders in both his hands and kissed her on the mouth.

Fifteen

Mr Winthrop lay in wait for Kate. He had turned Peggy Lee down to a whisper and the electric fan heater right off, and left the conservatory door ajar, so that he wouldn't miss the sound of her key in the lock.

Mr Winthrop had had a visitor that day. An extremely respectful, bespectacled, soberly dressed young Nigerian had knocked at the door, and asked if Mr Winthrop had rooms to let. Mr Winthrop said he might have, he couldn't say. The young Nigerian had opened his briefcase and showed Mr Winthrop all his papers; he was a postgraduate law student, whose course was to start the next academic year, but who had come to Oxford early, to work in the law libraries all summer. There was, Mr Winthrop noticed, a Bible in his briefcase, and he looked both clean and studious.

‘D'you have friends?' Mr Winthrop demanded.

‘Not yet,' the young Nigerian said, ‘but I will make friends at the church.'

Mr Winthrop took him up to Kate's room, using the key he kept for occasions such as this.

‘Fifty-five pounds a week, electricity and telephone extra,' Mr Winthrop said.

The young Nigerian looked at Kate's room, at her cushions and pictures and her breakfast coffee mug sitting on the table among papers and books and an empty milk bottle holding a single orange lily. He said, ‘It's a good room. When is the present tenant going?'

‘Any day,' Mr Winthrop said. ‘She's given me a lot of trouble.' He looked up at the smooth black face behind the shining spectacles. ‘I don't want any trouble. No women or children.'

The young man moved his dark clean hands in a deprecating gesture. ‘I live a quiet life. You can always refer to my college.'

Mr Winthrop thought of the glimpsed Bible. ‘No singing? No tambourines and praise de Lord nonsense?'

The Nigerian was quite unoffended. He smiled. ‘Very quiet,' he said.

Mr Winthrop led him downstairs again.

‘Come back on Thursday and I'll let you know for certain.'

‘Deposit?' the young man said.

Mr Winthrop's eyes bulged. He made an immense effort at self-control. ‘Thursday'll do,' he said.

He ushered the young man out into Swan Street.

‘I wouldn't like,' the young man said gently, ‘to inconvenience a lady.'

Mr Winthrop thought of Kate. He snorted. ‘Don't you worry,' he said. ‘She's no lady.'

Now that Joss was back at Richmond Villa, Angie and Emma came home with her after school a lot. Garth, for some reason, didn't. Privately, Joss thought it was because it embarrassed him to find Bluey there, cutting Uncle Leonard's hair or making chicken pie. Joss had some sympathy with Garth's feelings; she also had some plans for Bluey.

Whether Bluey was cooking or not, Joss retrieved her share of the shopping responsibilities, and usually took Angie and Emma with her, to help carry and so form an audience for her growing housewifely accomplishment. They shopped partly in supermarkets and partly in the covered market, where the atmosphere was jollier and produce didn't lie gasping under plastic. When they had finished, Joss treated them to a Coca-Cola or an ice-cream with money taken from the wooden barrel in the kitchen at Richmond Villa. The barrel had quite a lot of money in it these days, because of Hugh's contribution, and could easily, Joss considered, run to cans of Coke or Italian-style cornets.

On their way to receive their rewards one day, Angie said, ‘Hey, look at that kid.'

They stopped and looked. Inside a hamburger bar a small boy was pressing his nose and tongue against the plate glass. As his mouth was partly full of whatever he was eating, the sight was repulsive. It was also, to Joss, oddly familiar. She craned forward.

‘Hey,' she said, ‘it's the twins.'

‘What twins?'

‘Hugh's twins.' She turned and thrust her carrier bags at the other two. ‘Take these home. I gotta see the twins.'

‘Bloody hell—' Angie said, in indignation.

‘Go on,' Joss said, ‘I won't be long. Don't be a pain.'

She darted away from them across the pavement and into the hamburger bar. Sandy sat at a window table, smoking and reading the paper. Beside her Edward drew in a pool of ketchup with a potato chip, and George drooled against the window. Their table was littered with used plates and paper cups and trails of salt and sugar.

‘Hi, twins,' Joss said.

Edward turned round and squealed. George peeled himself off the window and flung himself at Joss in ecstasy.

‘I'm Joss,' Joss said to Sandy. ‘I know the twins.'

‘Rather you than me,' Sandy said.

‘Joss!' the twins shouted, ‘Joss, Joss, hello, Joss, hello, hello!'

Fielding them, Joss slipped into the fixed seat opposite Sandy.

‘Are you the nanny?'

‘I'm Sandy,' Sandy said. ‘D'you want a coffee?'

‘I'd like a milk shake,' Joss said, ‘banana.'

‘Me too,' said the twins at once.

Sandy regarded them. ‘Shut up,' she said. She heaved herself to her feet. ‘Mrs H. can stand you a milk shake.'

Joss watched her lumber off to the counter. ‘Want to know something?' she said to the twins.

They lolled against her, and waited. Their faces were filthy.

‘You know where your dad is?'

They looked at once alert and apprehensive. ‘Daddy? Our Daddy?'

‘He's at my house,' Joss said. ‘He's staying with me.'

Their faces filled with wonder. ‘In your house?'

‘Yeah. Just for a while.'

‘In the house where you live? The house with steps on?'

‘That house.'

They began to giggle, their eyes as bright as squirrels.

‘Is he in your bed?'

‘No fear. He's got his own bed.'

‘Our daddy? The daddy of us?'

‘Your very own daddy.'

Sandy came back with a tall glass of foaming creamy stuff, and three straws. She put the glass down and handed a straw to Joss and one to each of the twins. ‘You don't mind them having a suck, do you?'

Edward knelt up on his seat in order to plunge his straw in deeply. Through sucking, he said, ‘Daddy's in Joss's house.'

‘I know,' Sandy said.

‘Then why,' Joss said indignantly, ‘didn't you say?'

‘I didn't know who you were, did I? I didn't know to say—'

‘Will he come back?' George said.

Joss took a deep draught of milk shake. It tasted just as she expected, deliciously, powerfully, synthetic. ‘Yes. He'll come back.'

‘You better watch it,' Sandy said warningly. ‘Who are you to get them all excited?'

‘Joss is a big girl,' Edward said.

‘I'm fifteen.'

Sandy gave a mild snort. ‘Fifteen!'

‘Our daddy's called Hugh.'

‘I know.'

‘Can we see him?'

‘Soon,' Joss said, suddenly guarded. They were only babies, poor twins, only babies. ‘But I'll tell him I've seen you. I'll tell him we had a milk shake.'

George suddenly dropped his straw and began to scramble off his seat. He clutched Joss's sleeve. ‘Coming with you.'

‘Me too, Edward coming too,' Edward said desperately.

‘God,' Sandy said, ‘now look what you've done. Of course you can't go with Joss, you've got to come home to Mummy.'

Joss put her arms round the twins. They were crying now, huge round tears sliding down their smeary pink cheeks.

‘I haven't finished,' Joss hissed at Sandy. ‘I know what I'm doing. I just haven't finished, that's all!'

Mark Hathaway was marking an indifferent set of essays on Sylvia Plath's poetry. Mark adored Sylvia Plath and prided himself on teaching her illuminatingly, so that when a class failed to respond to her, as this one clearly had, he was inclined to tell himself that he was wasted teaching second- and third-rate minds in a provincial tutorial college. He thought he would mark just over half the essays, and then reward himself with a glass of wine before he struggled on to the end. If he finished before ten-thirty, he would go round to Swan Street to see Kate.

Things with Kate were going much more satisfactorily since Joss had gone. Immediately after Joss's departure, Kate had been very thorny and unapproachable, but without Joss there to rival him Mark had been content to wait, with an air of sympathetic understanding, until Kate felt better. After five or six days, Kate had come round to West Street, and, without actually saying sorry (which Mark would have preferred) was very sweet and pliant and affectionate. The next night, he had waited for her after work, and gone home with her and they had met Mr Winthrop in the hall.

‘Where are you going?' he'd said to Mark.

Mark opened his mouth to answer, but Kate was too quick for him. ‘To my room, which, as I pay rent for it, is my
private
room.'

That had been a very successful night; one of the most successful they had ever had, and Kate had not even mentioned Joss. It had left Mark with the feeling that their relationship was entering a new phase, a phase in which Kate would be as interested in him, for the first time, as he had been in her, for a long time. This feeling made him very much less resentful that last week's magnificent teaching of Sylvia Plath's poetry had fallen on stony ground.

At the end of the ninth essay he wrote, ‘I wonder if you have deliberately misunderstood the imagery?' It seemed to him an elegant rebuke. He put his red pen down, and ran his hands through his hair and tipped his chair back so that he could stretch luxuriously. Someone knocked at his door, a small knock, not familiar. Without moving, he shouted, ‘Come!' and it was Kate.