The Men and the Girls (31 page)

Mark sprang up. ‘Kate!'

She looked bothered. She said, ‘I'm sorry just to come round like this.'

‘Why be sorry?' he said. ‘I'm thrilled.' He took her in his arms and kissed her and then he slid her cotton jacket off down her back and arms and led her to the sofa.

‘I've been thrown out,' Kate said.

‘What!'

‘Old Winthrop's thrown me out. He said I had the morals of an alley cat and I made a noise and he could get much more money for the room.'

‘Only the last is true—'

‘He wants me out by Friday.' Kate bit her lip. ‘It was a horrible interview.'

Mark took her hands. ‘Poor Kate. Poor Katie. I'm so sorry.'

She looked at him. His eyes were shining.

‘You don't
look
very sorry.'

‘Well, no—'

She tried to pull her hands away but he held them, and he was laughing.

‘What's so funny? Me being abused by a disgusting old man and having nowhere to live?'

‘You have got somewhere to live.'

Kate's mind flew madly, instinctively, to Jericho. ‘You can't mean—'

‘I mean here.'

‘Here!' Kate screeched. She pulled her hands away and whirled round on the sofa, as if looking at Mark's flat for the first time. ‘But this is yours, I mean, you made this for you!'

‘I expect I'd have made it for you if I'd known you then.'

‘Oh Mark,' Kate said, turning huge eyes upon him. ‘That's so kind, but—'

‘But what?'

‘Doesn't – doesn't it make us a bit permanent?'

‘Sure does,' Mark said grinning. He leapt up. ‘I'm going to find you a drink.'

‘I don't need a drink—'

‘Yes, you do. To celebrate with. Look, there's heaps of space. I'll buy another of those louvred cupboards for your clothes, and fit it in over there, and as you know I already own a nice double bed and at least two spoons and two mugs and two glasses.' He swooped over the back of the sofa and seized her. ‘Katie,' he said, his face alight, ‘Kate, come live with me and be my love
all the time
.'

Kate said faintly, ‘What about independence?'

‘There's no point to independence when you've found the right dependence. I love you, Kate, as if you didn't know.'

He sprang away again and came back with two glasses of pale wine. Kate took hers.

‘Smile at me.'

She attempted to.

‘Hopeless,' he said. ‘Aren't you happy? Aren't you relieved?'

She took a swallow of wine. She thought: Kate, you're being ridiculous, what's the matter with you? It's a lovely flat, you've had fun together, you don't want to live on your own after Joss and you can always leave if it doesn't work. Besides, what else, you stupid, muddle-headed cow, do you intend to do? I hate it without Joss, she cried out silently, I hate it, I hate it, but what else am I to do? How do I keep her if I don't let her go, even if that sounds like advice from the problem page of the tackiest sort of women's magazine? I've got to live, I've got to have some warmth, some kind of contact, someone to matter to, however little or strangely. She took another gulp and looked up at Mark.

‘You're lovely to offer,' she said, ‘I'd love to. I'd love to come here. And I'll try terribly hard to be tidy.'

‘It's Julia,' Julia said down the telephone. ‘I wonder if I could possibly speak to Joss?'

James said, ‘I'm so sorry but she's gone round to see a friend—'

‘The thing is, she saw the twins today, in Oxford. They weren't supposed to be in Oxford at all, as a matter of fact, but that's not really why I rang. I just wanted to know what she thought of them, if they'd said anything to her about anything. They're being awfully difficult just now, somewhat naturally, and I need all the help I can get to try and understand how to—'

‘Julia,' James said gently, interrupting, ‘I'll get her to ring you when she comes in, shall I? Later.'

Julia's voice changed. ‘I'm afraid I won't be here later. Could I ring again tomorrow? The thing is, you see, that I'm going out to dinner.'

Hugh lay on his bed, smoking. The window was open to the street, and, apart from the noise of an occasional passing car, there drifted in the sounds of summer-evening living, people talking and the snip of shears, and music and the hiss of a garden sprinkler. James had suggested to Hugh that they go out for a drink, but Hugh had, to his own surprise, not felt like doing that. He had felt, instead, a desire to be by himself, and to take stock of things.

He also felt, which disconcerted him profoundly, rather chastened. If he was honest, he had never much liked Joss Bain, who seemed to him an archetypal adolescent unredeemed by any promise of improvement. When she had reappeared in their clubbish male household at Richmond Villa he had felt at first both exasperated and intolerant about her presence, particularly as James and Leonard appeared, inexplicably, so pleased to see her. But as the days wore on, despite her disordered habits in the bathroom and her ghastly music and her careless lack of feminine grace, Hugh had to admit that there was a considerable personality underneath the oversized jackets and undersized trousers and, what was more, a personality that was – bizarre, this, no other word for it – rather
upright
.

He stubbed his cigarette out and told himself that he couldn't have another one just yet. When was yet? Ten minutes? Twenty? Shut up, Hugh said to himself, shut up. He put his hands behind his head to imprison them, and crossed his ankles.

‘Grown-ups can do whatever stupid thing they like to each other,' Joss had said to him after supper, ‘but they shouldn't do it to kids, not little helpless kids.'

She hadn't been at all afraid of him, not in the least. She had simply started on him, while they were washing up.

‘They kept saying “Our Daddy? Our Daddy?” You should've heard them, they don't understand. How can they? You ought to put them first till they can look after themselves. It's OK for me' – slight swagger here, Hugh observed – ‘I'm old enough to do what I want, but the twins are only little kids. And that nanny. She's OK but it's just a job for her, she doesn't really care what they're thinking. That saucepan isn't half clean, look—'

Hugh had attempted a defence. He had tried to swing the authority of his age and experience, and to point out how little Joss, inevitably, knew of the delicate, dangerous, damaging affairs of the human heart. He thought the discussion would be easier for him if Joss lost her temper. But all she did was ignore him.

‘I'm not interested in you. Or Julia. That's your affair. All I care about is the twins. So'd you if you'd seen them.'

It was, Hugh told himself, the tunnel-vision zeal of the true campaigner; don't admit any secondary evidence, however relevant, in case it confuses the prime issue. Yet even thinking that wasn't much consolation, particularly as it was he, Hugh, who in the end lost his temper, flung the washing-up brush on the floor and shouted idiotically, ‘So what do you suggest, you sanctimonious little prig?'

She said, ‘You ought to go home,' and marched out of the kitchen.

James had come in then and attempted, in a maddening, Jamesish way, to say anodyne soothing things that both calmed Hugh and exonerated Joss from interference and rudeness. But even Hugh could see his heart wasn't in it, that, if hung upside-down out of a high window with the threat of being dropped if he didn't confess honestly, James would have admitted he thought Joss was right. He dawdled about the kitchen for a while, putting things away, or at least going through the motions, and then suggested a drink, but the suggestion was plainly made in the spirit of offering a child with a hurt knee a lollipop.

‘No thanks,' Hugh said, and went up to his room.

It was still quite light because supper at Richmond Villa was always early. Hugh hated eating early and nobody could explain to him why they did eat early here. James had said perhaps it was a hangover from when Joss was small. Or perhaps it was better for Leonard's ancient digestion. He hadn't sounded as if it were at all important, but it was important to Hugh because it seemed to him deeply uncivilized not to treat eating, especially at night, as some kind of celebration. Julia always . . . Hugh unfolded his hands and reached for his cigarettes. If he thought about it, Richmond Villa wasn't really very civilized anyway, there was no coherence to life in it, no elegance, and even its chief attraction, James, wasn't really concentrating, especially now Joss was back and that pretty little American was in and out doing her domestic science diploma bit. Oh hell, Hugh thought, thinking suddenly of the twins and rolling up into a ball on his side in agony, oh hell, oh bloody, fucking
hell
.

The door opened softly.

‘Are you all right?' James said.

‘Of course not,' Hugh said. He reached out and crushed his cigarette stub into an ashtray.

James came into the room and stood looking down at him. He remembered doing the same thing once, over forty years ago, in Cambridge, and finding that there wasn't just the hump of Hugh in the bed, but the hump of a girl too, a girl wearing nothing except, James recalled with sudden vividness, a green ribbon round her neck.

‘Julia just rang,' James said.

Hugh flipped over and half-sat up. ‘Julia? Why didn't you call me?'

‘She didn't want to speak to you.'

‘Christ—'

‘She wanted to speak to Joss. The twins told her they had seen Joss. She wanted Joss's reaction.'

Hugh began to scramble off the bed. ‘I'll ring her back—'

‘No,' James said, ‘you can't.'

‘Can't?'

‘She's gone out to dinner.'

Hugh stood up. ‘Gone out to dinner? Bloody
dinner
? Who with?'

‘I don't know.'

‘A man?'

‘She didn't say.'

They looked at each other.

‘Do you,' James said, ‘want that drink after all?'

A customer had been rude to Kate. He wasn't drunk and he wasn't, Benjie said, a sadist, he was just someone who'd had a bloody awful day and was simply on the look-out for an innocent person to vent his fury on. Kate had listened to him, white-faced, and then had collected up the rejected dishes of food in silence and returned with them to the kitchen. Then she and Benjie listened while the customer turned on Christine and refused to pay for what he had ordered, and slammed out of the restaurant.

Christine came down the spiral staircase.

‘What did you say to him?'

‘Nothing.'

‘He said you were offensive.'

‘I said nothing at all!'

‘He said you accused him of muddling his order and being in the wrong about what he had ordered.'

Kate cried, ‘I never spoke to him after his order! I just stood and took it while he called me incompetent and stupid and not fit to hold down a job!'

Christine, who could never bear the smallest incident that might in any way threaten her business which represented, as she often said, her identity as much as her livelihood, said disagreeably, ‘Well, perhaps he had a point.'

‘Oy,' Benjie said, ‘steady on. Cool it.'

‘I brought him what he ordered!' Kate shouted. ‘You can look at my order pad!'

Christine glanced upward. ‘
Please
do not shout.'

‘Leave it,' Benjie said. He glanced at Kate. ‘Why don't you? There's always some awkward buggers, aren't there? We're just lucky we don't get more.'

‘Please mind your own business,' Christine said.

Benjie made a face at Kate, and ambled back to his stoves. Christine stood aside and made a gesture towards the staircase. ‘I believe you have work to do.'

‘I don't have to do it,' Kate said angrily, ‘for people who won't stand up for me when I'm blameless.'

‘Too true,' Christine said. ‘Hurry up.'

Kate climbed the staircase in a turmoil. The most luxurious thing of all, at that moment, would have been to have walked out, through the crowded tables, and into the street, and not come back. But even in the midst of the blaze of anger at Christine's injustice, Kate felt a small, cold core of misgiving. She was in the right, certainly, but oh – oh, she was still so vulnerable. She picked up her order pad, and moved to the window table where a young couple had just settled themselves, jacket and bag all over the floor just as Christine hated, and not hung up on the hatstand.

‘I wonder if you'd mind if I hung up your things for you?'

The young man looked up from the menu at her. He had sandy hair and small round spectacles, and he looked at her as if she were not a person at all, but just a waitress.

‘Suit yourself,' he said, and shrugged.

Later Benjie said he would walk Kate home.

‘I'm OK, really, I'm fine now.'

‘I'll come all the same,' Benji said. He stopped on the pavement to light a cigarette. ‘You don't want to pay any attention to her, you know. Susie never did.'

‘I'm not as tough as Susie.'

Benjie took her arm. ‘She always gets windy if she thinks she's lost a customer. She thinks it'll spread like wildfire round Oxford, that she runs a lousy restaurant. You don't want to bother, Katie. It's only a job.'

‘But with Joss gone, it's a bit more than that—'

‘You watch it,' Benjie said, steering her past a swerving clump of cyclists. ‘You don't want to think like that. You get in people's power if you think like that. Me, I do a job to pay for my fun. No job, no fun. Simple as that.'