The Men and the Girls (36 page)

‘I have been to see your mother,' Beatrice said.

Joss, having finished her exams, was lying on her back on the grass in a grey singlet and voluminous orange shorts and her ubiquitous boots, reading a magazine. She flipped the magazine down.

‘Hey!'

‘Don't use such meaningless exclamations,' Beatrice said. ‘Does that indicate pleasure or mere surprise?'

‘Pleasure,' Joss said, sitting up. ‘She's great, isn't she?'

‘Yes,' Beatrice said.

‘What did you talk about?'

‘You.'

‘Me?'

‘Yes. You. I said you were a credit to her. I told her I believed you to be resilient.'

‘What?'

‘Look it up,' Beatrice said. She had come to see Leonard, but he had been ordered to rest in the afternoon, and was not yet up. ‘Do you,' Beatrice went on, ‘feel responsible for your mother?'

Joss rubbed the hair on the back of her head upwards towards the crown. ‘Sort of.'

‘Having met her, I think she is one of the rare parents who would not wish you to.'

‘She ought to be kept safe,' Joss said. ‘She needs a bit of looking after.'

‘By you?'

Joss began to unlace one boot, pulling out of the brass eyelets yards and yards of heavy black bootlace. After several minutes, the opening was wide enough to pull out a black-socked foot. Joss took the sock off and looked at her green-white bare foot.

‘Yuk.'

‘Are you listening to me?'

‘I'm thinking,' Joss said. ‘The thing is, she wants her independence and I want mine.'

‘There's such a thing as compromise.'

Joss began to inspect between her toes.

‘Do not do that in front of me, Josephine!'

‘Some things you can't compromise over,' Joss said, lying down again and waving her bare foot in the air. She then raised the booted one and held them there together, side by side, for comparison. ‘You can't compromise about where you live.'

‘Can't you?'

‘Nope.'

‘So what do you do?'

‘One of you gives in to the other,' Joss said. She lowered her feet to the ground and lay there quite flat, with her ribs making faint ridges in her singlet.

‘Josephine—'

‘I don't want to talk about it any more,' Joss said. ‘You can talk things into not happening.'

Leonard appeared in the open doorway from the kitchen. He waved his stick. Then he limped over to Joss and stood looking down at her.

‘Idle trollop. What do you think you look like?'

‘Trendy. Ace trendy.'

‘Where's that spectral youth of yours?'

‘Gone to have his ear pierced,' Joss said, ‘the other one.'

Leonard lowered himself into the chair beside Beatrice's. ‘Hugh's come back to finishing packing. Guess what he brought me. A bottle of brandy. A litre! A whole sodding litre!'

Joss rolled over. ‘What've I got?'

‘Greedy little bleeder. How should I know? He and James are planning a valedictory pint. Sentimental rubbish. Makes you sick, doesn't it?'

‘No,' Beatrice said, ‘it makes me content. I am not in the least ashamed to enjoy a happy ending.'

Joss began tearing up little clumps of grass. ‘Me neither,' she said.

Garth finally cornered Joss by ambushing her on her way to school.

‘Hi,' she said flatly, as if he did it every morning.

‘I need to talk to you,' Garth said. ‘I've been trying to get you alone for days, just to talk to you.'

Joss was chewing gum. She said, still chewing, ‘Talk, then.'

Garth hesitated. They had about four minutes before they reached the bus stop and got inundated by Angie and Emma and Nat and Pete and Trudy and all that lot, which left him no time for a gentle run-up to his central point. He just had to lope along beside her and say it straight out.

‘It's my mother. It's about my mother and James.'

‘Yeah,' Joss said, ‘I know.' She stepped sideways for a second and spat her gum accurately into the gutter.

‘I'm worried, Joss. I'm real worried. I mean, my mother's married and—'

‘You don't have to worry,' Joss said.

‘I don't? But they go places together, I mean, they'll be seen, they'll do things—'

‘Not for long,' Joss said. She turned and gave him a brief, happy smile. ‘Not for long, they won't, because something's going to happen, something to stop it.'

Eighteen

Hugh and James sat at a small table on the pavement outside the King's Arms. As it was after the end of the university term, the pub had more tourists in it than students and, in consequence, a less energetic atmosphere. They were both drinking bitter, which they had now drunk together for over forty years.

Hugh had told James he'd been a lifeline and James had said that the feeling was mutual.

‘I'm horrified at how close I got to thinking I could easily lose a wife and children—'

‘In a manner of speaking,' James said, ‘I've lost a wife. And I seem, in another manner, to have gained a daughter.'

‘There's a self-sufficiency about you, James.'

‘Is there?'

‘It's what draws us all like magnets. We think you've got the secret, the elixir, so we think if we come and live right next to you we'll somehow learn how you do it.'

James took a swallow of beer. ‘When Kate first left, I thought I'd die. I wanted to.'

‘Why the hell didn't you say?'

‘The only person there was any point saying it to was Kate. Nobody else could have helped.'

‘And now?'

James raised his head and looked past Hugh, towards the Sheldonian Theatre, against whose railings a group of French schoolchildren were trying to pile themselves into a pyramid, for a photograph.

‘Things change,' James said. ‘It's part of the healing process, I suppose. You wrench your feelings about to try and heal yourself, and then you alarm yourself by finding that, at least in part, you've succeeded.'

‘You mean you can train yourself out of loving someone.'

‘I mean,' James said, ‘that the agony of loving more than you are loved can abate if the source of its nourishment is quite cut off. To persist deliberately in loving without return seems to me selfish and self-indulgent. If someone you love tells you, in so many words, that you injure them by insisting on going on loving them, isn't it purely loving, in the most generous sense, to try and curb yourself? And then, are you to blame if, to some degree at least, the curbing works?'

Hugh leaned forward. ‘I want to be sure, for my own peace of mind, that you're OK. You look OK—'

‘I am,' James said. ‘Sometimes I think it's very odd that I should ever feel happy, and of course there are many times when I don't but fundamentally I—' he stopped. He glanced at Hugh. ‘Perhaps my self-sufficiency is really just detachment, that male sort of detachment that makes women so wild.'

‘Women!'

They smiled at each other. Then they pushed their chairs back, grating them on the pavement, and got up and picked up their jackets, and sauntered away together down the Broad, to where Hugh had parked his car.

A young woman at the next pavement table watched them. ‘See those two?'

Her companion took off her dark glasses and peered.

‘What about them?'

‘I've been watching them and it was really weird, the way they were talking. Like two women. But you know, I don't think they were gay. Isn't it odd? I really don't think they were.'

Her companion put her glasses back. ‘Too old, I shouldn't wonder,' she said.

When Kate went round to see Beatrice, she took a slim sheath of deep-blue iris, and a packet of shortbread. Beatrice put the iris into a brown-glazed jug, the kind Kate remembered her mother using for making custard.

‘The last flowers I was given,' Beatrice said, ‘were also blue. James gave them to me, three hyacinth, growing in a pot.'

‘Yes,' Kate said, ‘I remember.' She sat in one of Beatrice's unwelcoming chairs and Cat sat on the rug at her feet and surveyed her, and weighed up the chances of being rejected if he sprang on to her knee.

‘All your Marys,' Kate said, looking round. Cat sprang. ‘Ow,' Kate said.

‘Throw him off,' Beatrice said. ‘I am afraid he is overindulged.'

‘I like him. He just surprised me.'

Beatrice was making tea with water from the electric kettle she had brought up from the kitchen for the purpose. ‘He is a professional surpriser. He devotes much thought and energy to surprising my sister-in-law, but I fear,' Beatrice smiled into the teapot, ‘that those surprises are deliberately malevolent.'

‘Joss told me. Joss told me that you and your sister-in-law don't get on—'

‘Ah,' said Beatrice, stirring the tea, ‘ah, but what I am sure she didn't tell you was that we are sustained by our little feud. She has the power of a superior financial position and I have the power of a superior intellect combined with Cat. We are really very well matched.' She came and sat down opposite Kate. ‘I am pleased to say that I can hardly see a bruise left on you.'

Kate touched her face. As if in sympathy, Cat put up a broad paw and touched it too.

‘Oh, how sweet!'

‘Not sweet, I'm afraid,' Beatrice said. ‘His charm is always calculated.'

‘I wanted to show you something,' Kate said. She stooped over Cat to her bag, which she had left on the floor by her feet, and took out of it a folded newspaper cutting. She held it out to Beatrice.

‘St Edmund's is advertising for an under-matron. For the junior house. It's residential.'

Beatrice took the cutting and opened it out, and read it.

‘I'd like to be with children,' Kate said, ‘and I'd have the school holidays free. It's not at all well paid, but I've never had a well-paid job in my life, so that's no obstacle. And I'm the age they're looking for.' She hesitated. ‘I wonder – I wondered if you would help me with a letter of application and – and if you would write a reference for me—'

Beatrice folded the cutting up again. She looked at Kate.

‘Of course I would. I doubt you would need any help in applying but if you feel you do I should be only too happy. But Kate, I thought that you were proposing—'

Kate made a swift interrupting gesture with both hands. ‘Yes, yes, but this is my insurance policy, this is—' she stopped. Then she said firmly, ‘This job is what I shall do if I find I've burned my boats.'

‘I see,' said Beatrice. She got up to pour the tea. ‘I understand you perfectly.'

Bluey had at last got James to herself. Randy was in London at a two-day seminar, and Garth, who had made a new friend in the son of one of Randy's colleagues, was having his first-ever lesson in real tennis, on the court in Merton Street. Tuesdays were the nights that Leonard went out to play bridge with Beatrice, and Bluey knew – via Garth – that Joss had gone to Angie's house to help paint her bedroom. They were going to do it with something called colour-washing, Garth said, which meant diluting the paint right down and then slapping it on the walls in watery swathes with huge great brushes. ‘She won't make any kind of job of it,' Garth said, but his tone of voice wasn't critical, only wistful and a little sad.

Bluey had chilled some Californian chardonnay, and made a bowl of guacamole, with corn chips to dip into it. She had put a pink cloth on the table in the garden, and the straw-coloured wine and pale-green guacamole looked very pretty on this, with white china, and wineglasses, and three Iceberg roses, from the climber against the house, in a little Victorian vase Bluey had found on an antique stall at the Wednesday open market.

‘You can't refuse just to come and have a drink with me,' Bluey said to James.

‘I don't want to refuse,' James said.

She had tried not to build on this, not to take his five words apart, unpicking them over and over, and then stitching them together, again and again, to see if they couldn't be made to come out larger, more significant. If he said he didn't want to refuse to come, then surely that meant he wanted to come very much, which surely, in its turn, meant that he wanted to be alone with her, which surely . . . Or perhaps he just meant, I don't want to disappoint you as clearly this means a lot to you. Did that then mean that coming wouldn't mean as much to him as he knew it would to her? Honestly, Bluey told herself, you're enough to drive yourself insane.

When James arrived, he kissed her on her mouth, but lightly. He had not brought anything, and although there was absolutely no reason why he should have done, Bluey felt a small disappointment. Even a spray of honeysuckle from his garden:
particularly
a spray of honeysuckle from his garden . . . He admired her garden.

‘I've learned a lot from Beatrice. It's almost incongruous that she should have such an eye for plants, but she does. I even begin to think I could get quite interested. A very suitable interest, no doubt, for an old man.'

‘You're not old,' Bluey said.

‘Well, I'm a lot older than you, and a lot older than I was, and the process continues.'

He made approving noises about the wine and the guacamole and asked the name of the roses in the vase. He told Bluey about Hugh and Julia, and how Hugh had brought the twins round to Richmond Villa to show them where he had slept, and how excited they had been, and awed, not by being where their father had slept, but where Joss did. Joss had let them bounce on her bed and had given them glasses of Coca-Cola with scoops of ice-cream floating in it, which had made them quite drunk.