The Men and the Girls (33 page)

He went down the stairs very carefully and slowly, planting the rubber bung at the end of his stick on each step before he lowered himself on to it. He thought he might do a little watering, in the garden, of the pots of petunias that Beatrice had planted so that, when she watered them this afternoon, he could wait until she had finished and then say, ‘I did those this morning, you blind old bat.' He reached the hall floor at last, and began to chuckle.

The doorbell rang. At once, the kitchen door flew open and Mrs Cheng sped out, drying her hands on the overall she always wore for working.

‘I'll go,' Leonard said.

She hesitated. ‘You mind your manners—'

The bell rang again. ‘Impudence!' Leonard said and creaked towards it.

On the step outside stood a large handsome woman dressed, to Leonard's mind, like a member of the Anvil Chorus, all scarves and shawls and jewellery. She said, ‘Are you Mr Mallow?'

‘Yes,' he said, ‘and I don't want it, whatever you're selling.'

She had a formidable air. She said, ‘My name is Helen Ferguson. I'm a friend of Kate's. May I come in?'

‘Why?' said Leonard.

‘Because I've something to tell you about Kate that I'd prefer not to tell the whole street.'

Leonard felt an unwilling surge of admiration. He stood back to allow Helen in – all of her, he noticed with satisfaction, just the kind of amplitude he had always gone for, if only she hadn't been dressed apparently in bedclothes – and then led her into James's study. He pointed to a chair with his stick.

‘Sit down.'

She sat, in a gust of some exotic scent Leonard couldn't identify, and looked at him composedly.

‘Mr Mallow, I run Mansfield House, the refuge where Kate used to help out, if you remember.'

‘And?' Leonard said.

Mrs Cheng made Leonard sit down at the kitchen table. He was mauve-white and his face was working.

‘Hit her about the face,' Leonard muttered, ‘banged her head on the wall! Kate!'

‘I get you brandy,' Mrs Cheng said. She went to the cupboard where the drinks were kept. She felt none too steady herself, and the sight of Leonard scared her. She took the brandy bottle over to the table and poured a thumping measure into a glass. Then she sat down and gazed at Leonard.

‘No bone broken?'

‘No,' he said, ‘but what can she be feeling?'

He reached out and took one of Mrs Cheng's hands. ‘I've got to tell James now. And Joss. Joss!'

‘Miss Bachelor help you.'

‘Yes,' he said, ‘yes.' He took a gulp of brandy and then brushed his eyes with the back of his hand. ‘It's a wicked world,' he whispered, ‘it's a wicked,
wicked
world.'

Mrs Cheng covered his hand with her other one, and pressed it hard.

‘You don' need to tell me,' she said.

Julia left it until nine o'clock before she telephoned Richmond Villa. With luck, by nine o'clock Hugh would be watching the television news and Joss would answer the telephone. Joss did. She answered it in a tiny, far-off voice which Julia assumed to be Joss's notion of sounding laid-back.

‘Joss? It's Julia. I'm so pleased to catch you because I heard you'd seen the twins in Oxford and I just wanted to ask how you thought they were.'

There was a pause and then Joss said, ‘Oh fine,' in a dull, empty voice.

‘Really? Oh, I'd be so pleased to hear that because Sandy said they got terribly upset and cried all the way home.'

‘Did they?'

‘Yes. She said they had started to get upset while you were all together, but she wasn't very helpful about what you'd all been saying that might have upset them, so I wondered if you could tell me a bit more?'

‘No,' Joss said. ‘Sorry,' and burst into tears.

‘Joss, what is it? What've I said, what's the matter?'

‘It's Mum,' Joss said. Her voice shook. ‘She's got beaten up. Mark hit her. I went to see her and she looks awful,
awful
, and she won't say much and James isn't back until later—'

‘Oh Joss,' Julia said in horror. ‘Oh poor you, poor Kate. Are you alone? Where is she?'

‘She's at Mansfield House,' Joss said. ‘She says she's OK. Hugh's here. Uncle Leonard's gone to bed, we had to get the doctor—'

‘I'll come,' Julia said. ‘Sandy's here and you shouldn't be alone.'

‘I'm not alone, I'm OK—' She broke off. She was not OK. She felt desperate, guilty as well as shocked because she hadn't wanted to stay with Kate, even though Helen had suggested it, she'd wanted to get home, away from all those little kids and the women and the smoking and Kate's terrible, unrecognizable face and hopeless eyes. ‘I'll get Hugh,' Joss said frantically to Julia. ‘He's right here, I'll get him—'

‘Julia?' Hugh said, a few seconds later. He sounded quite normal, neither defensive nor melodramatic.

‘Oh Hugh,' Julia cried, ‘what's happened, what's going on?'

‘Quite terrible. Kate has been beaten up by a lover and thrown out of her digs and is at that refuge she used to help at, the one you filmed. Joss is like a scalded cat, Leonard's had to be put to bed because his blood pressure went through the roof and he began to hyper-ventilate. Mrs Cheng is still furiously hoovering because she says she has to, to keep her mind off things, Miss Bachelor has finally gone home after three-quarters of a bottle of sherry and no-one knows when James will be back. Julia,' Hugh said, ‘I am not unsympathetic to any of this at bottom, but this particular evening isn't one I'm in a hurry to repeat.'

‘Aha,' Julia said.

‘What d'you mean, “aha”?'

‘I mean, the biter bit,' Julia said. ‘You expect the whole world to make your problems a priority but are thoroughly put out when anyone else tries to do the same.'

‘Julia!'

‘Well, it's true, isn't it?'

There was a pause. Hugh found himself exceedingly anxious both to keep the conversation going and to avoid a row. The crisp Julia at the far end of the telephone line was disconcerting.

‘I was wondering—'

‘Yes?'

‘If – if I could come and see you and the boys. On Saturday, perhaps?'

‘Sorry,' Julia said, ‘I'm editing all Saturday.'

‘Sunday?'

‘Sunday would be fine.'

‘For lunch?'

‘After lunch. About three.'

‘Who's coming to lunch, then?'

‘Nobody is. I just don't want to have to cook Sunday lunch when I've been working until late the day before.'

Hugh longed to ask if she had enjoyed going out to dinner, and even more, to know who she had been out to dinner with. He said instead, ‘Julia, I've been doing a lot of thinking—'

‘Not now,' Julia said briskly, ‘now is poor Kate. And Joss. I offered to come over. Shall I?'

Hugh could not bear her not to come for
him
. ‘We're OK,' he said with difficulty, ‘we'll manage. Nobody can do anything for Kate for a couple of days, and Joss'll be all right when James is back.'

‘I'll ring James in the morning,' Julia said. ‘Will you tell him? And I'll see you on Sunday.'

‘Yes,' Hugh said. From nine miles away, Julia could visualize his face as he said it. She strove for a sensible tone in her own voice.

‘Good night, then. And love to everybody. And sympathy.'

She put the receiver down and went to sit at the kitchen table, her head buried in her arms. She tried to picture Kate, and the scene in which Kate had been beaten up; she felt she owed it to Kate to try and sympathize as vividly as she could with what had happened. Poor Kate, poor little defenceless, damaged Kate, whom she used to feel so wary of because of what seemed to Julia too many deliberate and purely fashionable unorthodoxies in the way Kate lived. I know different now, Julia thought, I know so much I never knew before even if I hate how I've had to learn it. She had said this to Rob Shiner over dinner and he had replied that there was a William Blake quotation to that effect, a quotation about wisdom being bought in a desolate market where none came to buy, and Julia had thought that William Blake had got it precisely.

It had been a pleasant dinner with Rob Shiner, but no more than that. Away from his professional setting he seemed cosier and duller, as if he couldn't bring the adrenalin that fuelled his working days to charge time off as well. He had taken her to a very glamorous restaurant and given her delicious things to eat and drink, and been kind and attentive and flattering and, in the end, boring. She didn't want to laugh once, all evening and when, inevitably, he tried to kiss her good night with some fervour, she found she certainly didn't want to laugh; she wanted to groan. She had gone up to bed leaden with food and drink and gloom and had lain awake for a long time thinking about William Blake, and that there were few things she could think of at that moment that were as desolate as plain old disappointment. Nobody, she thought, shoving her pillow about in the hope of making it into a soporific shape, nobody ever gives disappointment the credit of being a prime force behind wayward behaviour. But it is. Disappointment is what's the matter with most of us and Kate at the moment must be absolutely consumed by it.

She lifted her head out of her arms now and looked across the kitchen. On the cork board hanging behind the door she had pinned the boys' latest paintings from nursery school, all ships and aeroplanes and trucks. ‘They won't paint people just now,' Frederica had said, her eyes swivelling significantly. ‘You do understand, don't you? I'm not going to insist, not just yet. You do see?'

I see more than I did, Julia thought, and much more, I begin to think, than people like Frederica. I shall get the twins to do a painting for Hugh, for Sunday. They can do a painting of
me
.

She got up and went back to the telephone and dialled. The other end it rang and rang and rang before it was finally answered.

‘Mansfield House,' a tired voice said.

‘Is that Linda?'

‘No,' the voice said, even more tiredly, ‘it's Janice.'

‘My name is Julia Hunter,' Julia said. ‘I rang up to ask about Kate Bain.'

Janice sighed. ‘Hang on. I'll see if I can find her.'

‘No,' Julia said, ‘don't do that. Just say Julia rang to send love. Just give her my love.'

James said he would stay with Joss until she was asleep. Her room had, by her choice, virtually no orthodox furniture in it beyond her bed and a chest of drawers, so he did his best to make himself comfortable on her bean bag. This wasn't easy. The contents of the bag seemed to him both intractable and elusive, either bunching themselves into rock-hard mounds or running away altogether leaving him sitting virtually on the hard floor. The annoyance of this struck him as a most apt metaphor for the tribulation of his feelings. At least, he thought, looking across at Joss's carefully still body in bed, he knew what he felt about her.

As for everything else, nothing, not even things that looked straightforward, had turned out to be other than complex and delicate. He had had a charming day – at least, nine tenths of it had been charming – going to the Tate Gallery with Bluey Acheson who actually
liked
paintings of the last forty years and could explain why, and then having lunch at a restaurant she had read about and then going (his suggestion) to the Sir John Soane Museum where she had been enraptured by the classical dog kennel. That had all been as easy as pie, sunny, friendly, happy, with just the right amount of flirtatiousness to make the expedition pleasingly different from any that one might undertake with an aunt or a godfather or anyone, indeed, who was not charged with the possibility of emotional or sexual adventure. It was only in the train going home that James had looked up from the evening paper and had caught on Bluey's face an unmistakable look, a mute confession she wanted him to save her the trouble of having to make out loud. As the carriage was absolutely full, James had simply smiled at her and returned to his paper with mingled feelings of delight and despair. Hurray and damnation. Bluey had watched him and thought: He must, he must; everybody else around me is living their lives, so why shouldn't I live mine the way I'm meant to, the loving way?

At Oxford Station, she took his arm. He said they were going to find a taxi.

She didn't want the day to end. ‘Can't we walk?'

No, he said, they couldn't. The taxi ride was a little tense, and at Observatory Street Bluey said in a small sad voice that she supposed he wouldn't stay for supper. He smiled at her. He kissed her cheek, standing there on the pavement in full view of all Observatory Street, and said he wouldn't tonight, but that didn't mean he wouldn't like to, very much, some other night. You coward, he told himself. ‘I've enjoyed myself today,' he told Bluey, ‘more than I have for ages and ages and ages.'

She had smiled gallantly then, and gone into the house, and James had set off for home only to be overtaken after fifty yards by Garth, racing after him and saying sir, sir, may I have a word with you, sir? Of course, James had said, but then Garth could get no further and James, seeing the trouble, spoke to him warmly of his father's academic distinction and then took him to an Indian restaurant on Walton Street for lamb korma and a discussion on the possible futures of the world, the planet and Garth Acheson.

He hadn't got in until after ten o'clock. Half an hour after he got in, he went out again, and drove to Mansfield House. He doubted that he had ever felt more physically or psychologically shocked by anything in his life as he was by – not so much the sight of Kate, as by the realization of how she had come to look like that. He was only there for ten minutes, in the kitchen, sitting at the table with a mug of coffee. Kate sat opposite him. She had tried to smile. She had said she was very tired and very wound up all at once, and that the doctor had given her three sleeping pills for the next three nights because of this. Nothing was broken; she was just bruised.