The Men and the Girls (37 page)

He told her about Leonard insisting that Mrs Cheng should have a pay-rise, and Mrs Cheng trying to show her gratitude by turning out Leonard's drawers and cupboards and being bawled out for it, and about Joss's new campaign that they should have a dog. He told her about a new pupil he had, who was seriously intelligent and a joy to teach, and about a newspaper piece he had been asked to consider writing, about whether society should be encouraged to turn back to loving its neighbours, rather than worriedly, impotently, loving the remote and endangered rain forests of the Amazon, or the faraway threatened dolphins of the Yangtse River. He went on for so long that, in the end, Bluey could bear it no longer and cried out, ‘James! I want to talk to you!'

He looked at her. ‘Dear Bluey,' he said, ‘I know. I want to talk to you. That's why I've come.'

‘I love you,' Bluey said. ‘It's no good, James. I just love you.'

He leaned forward and took her wrists in his warm grasp. ‘I know you do.'

‘And you don't love me back.'

‘Not in the way you want. I'm not in love with you, and I don't want to be in love, Bluey, harsh as that may sound.'

‘With me?'

‘With anyone.'

She thought: I don't feel any pain. What's happening, why don't I hurt? She said, ‘Is it because of Kate? Is it too soon?'

He was still looking at her steadily. ‘Certainly, Kate was not very long ago. But I think, to tell you the truth, I'm rather tired. There's a supposed condition of being heartsick. I think I just may be heart-tired. I've loved being with you, I love your company, you cheer and charm me but I cannot seem to put myself into a higher emotional gear than that.'

‘And you don't want to?'

‘No,' he said, ‘I don't want to.'

She waited for him to say that soon, she wouldn't want him to either, but he didn't. He slid his hands down her wrists until he was holding her hands, which he squeezed before he laid them down together in her lap.

‘Have I made a fool of myself?' she said.

‘Not in the least.'

‘Did you come tonight to stop me starting?'

He smiled at her. ‘I came tonight to stop you building castles in the air, which you had peopled with deeply ordinary old chaps whom you had dressed up in shining armour.'

‘Oh James,' Bluey said.

‘I'm going now. You have made me very happy and done me a power of good and—' he paused, then he said, ‘and I think I've said quite enough.'

When he had gone, Bluey went back out into the garden with a tray, and put the glasses and bowls and the wine bottle on it, and carried it back to the kitchen. She put everything away – guacamole and wine in the fridge, corn chips in an airtight box, glasses in the dishwasher – and then she sat down at the little breakfast bar, because the pain had suddenly, finally, come, and wept and wept into her folded arms.

Sandy the nanny was quite equable about being dismissed. She had seen her dismissal coming, for a long time, slowly over the weeks while Hugh was away, and at a terrific speed since he'd returned, and so it was no surprise. She'd imagined that Julia would tell her, in the kitchen, giving a Julia-ish list of reasons why she had not proved satisfactory, a list on which Edward's shrunken Fair Isle jersey would no doubt prominently figure, and she rehearsed her lazy and impertinent expression for wearing during this scene.

However, it was not Julia who spoke to her, but Hugh. He didn't corner her in the kitchen, either, he summoned her to his study where he said in a perfectly friendly, smiling, rather alarming way that he was quite sure she would be happier in a less isolated job, with more people of her own age about, and that he and Julia were releasing her at the end of the month in order that she might be free to find such a position.

She smiled back at Hugh. It was a smile that hid a degree of confusion that slightly disconcerted her. It was OK, she said to Hugh, lounging elaborately against his desk, she'd go at once, on Friday. A girl at the pub had offered to let her share her flat in Cowley, and she was after another job in any case. Hugh, who didn't believe a word of it, said he was so pleased to hear that, and wrote her a cheque for a month's wages.

Sandy went upstairs and looked at her bedroom. She had never like it; it wasn't the right kind of room for anyone her size. She'd miss the twins a bit, she had to admit it, but Mr Hunter was right; it was lonely working with kids. She hadn't liked the look on his face when she said she'd got another job; at least the part about the flat in Cowley was true, or trueish.

She sat down on her bed and looked at the cheque. She looked at Hugh's signature; he'd got nice writing. He was a funny bloke, all that trying to stay young and the wisecracks and then going all to pieces when he lost his job. Sandy wasn't ever going to take a job that seriously, not she. She'd make enough to get by, to have a few drinks with, have a good time, anyway for the moment. Maybe in the end she'd go back to Suffolk, but not yet. There were things to do first, things like going down to the pub tonight to see Steph about this offer in Cowley, and doing a bit of ringing round, about jobs. Steph might be able to help about that, too. She'd said, a couple of nights ago, that that Italian place, Pasta Please, was advertising for a waitress. Steph said it was a nice restaurant. Sandy thought she'd heard that too, though she couldn't think where. She got up and looked at herself in the mirror. A prospective employer couldn't object to you any more on grounds of sex or race or colour or religion, but could he, Sandy wondered, object to you on grounds of weight?

Garth Acheson thought real tennis was a bizarre game, but he loved it. He loved all those dozens of tennis balls and that weird, historic-looking old racquet and using terms like ‘Chase the last gallery!' He played as often as his friend Matthew could get the court, and then he went home with Matthew afterwards and they watched television together and teased Matthew's sisters and made themselves extraordinary meals out of whatever food happened to be around. Matthew's parents were not conventional in any way. Matthew's father had a passion for early music, and made the instruments for it, as a hobby; and Matthew's mother had clearly never arranged a flower or sewn a button on in her life.

When Garth got home after several hours in Matthew's house, Observatory Street seemed to him unnaturally orderly and clean by contrast. Matthew's mother was probably not much older than Bluey, but her appearance was clearly of no consequence to her and she was simply letting it fend for itself. Garth had once opened the bathroom cabinet in Matthew's house looking for some Alka-Seltzer after a remarkably unsuccessful culinary experiment he and Matthew had made with onions and bananas and curry sauce, and found that the only shampoo there was labelled ‘For Dogs. Anti-Flea'. Bluey washed her hair every three days, and all their clothes the minute they took them off.

It was therefore something of a shock to come back to Observatory Street one early evening and find that his bed hadn't been made, that the breakfast dishes were still on the kitchen bar, and that Bluey was sitting on the sofa watching television, with her shoes off.

‘Ma?' Garth said.

‘Hello, darling.'

‘You sick?'

‘No,' Bluey said. She held out a hand to him. She looked a little pale, and she hadn't tied her hair back as usual, but otherwise she looked quite normal.

Garth came and sat down beside her. He reached to pick up the remote-control to the television and switched it off.

‘I spent most of the day with Daddy,' Bluey said, ‘and then I got back here and I just couldn't face the chores so I said to hell with them, I'll watch television.'

Garth froze. What had she spent the day with Randy for? She never spent time with Randy. Had she gone to tell him that she didn't love him any more, that she loved James?

‘Why did you have to go see Daddy?'

‘He called me. He called me right after breakfast,' Bluey said sadly. ‘That old college doesn't want Daddy for a second year. The exchange programme has just run out of money. Their guy's coming back from the States and we have to go home.'

‘Oh my God,' Garth said.

‘He's so upset,' Bluey said. ‘He thinks if they'd really wanted to keep him the second year, they'd have found the money somehow. He's really cut up. He just went in this morning as usual and they just told him. Just like that. He said he went straight to find a phone to call me.'

Garth hung his head and stared at the carpet between his feet. He couldn't visualize his father humiliated, he couldn't imagine Randy being checked like this. Randy had always been a man who just went on and on and if there were obstacles, those obstacles knew sure as hell they had to get out of his way.

‘Poor Daddy.'

‘I know,' Bluey said, ‘I took him walking. I don't really know where we went, but I just took him and he just came. We had lunch someplace off Holywell Street, I don't remember the name. He kept saying, ‘I have you, Bluey, don't I, I have you?' He's never said anything like that to me in twenty years. I made him go back to the laboratory in the end. I said, ‘You've just got to go back in there and show them you're still smiling.' He didn't want to go. I had to kind of take him there. It was so sad, Garth, so sad. I felt just awful for him.'

‘Do you think it was really the money?'

‘I don't know. I don't know it helps to know. I think all we can do is say bye-bye to Oxford and go home. I wanted to make a nice dinner for Daddy but for once in my life I couldn't face it. We'll go out and pick up something to eat. Later, when Daddy comes back.' She looked up at the clock. ‘He said he'd be back, latest, by seven.'

Garth said, turning to her, ‘I never thought this was what you'd say to me.'

‘No,' Bluey said, ‘I know.'

‘I thought it would be James.'

Bluey slipped her feet back into her shoes. ‘I wanted it to be James, Garth. But he doesn't love me. Maybe he was right to tell me so. Maybe Daddy and me—'

Garth took her hand. She clutched his.

‘It's time we went home,' he said.

She looked at him. She nodded. He gave her a little grin, and moved sideways so she could put her arms around him.

‘Fact is,' Garth said, ‘fact is, Ma, Joss doesn't love me, either.'

Kate set out for a walk across Port Meadow. This was an exercise in nerve-steadying. She walked for a long time, and, because it was the lunch hour and a niceish day, there were lots of people to look at who were walking too, or lying on the grass trying to sunbathe with their office clothes pulled up and down and apart in a way, Kate thought, that contributed nothing to the sum of human dignity. There were also people with dogs. Kate stopped at one point to watch a man talking to his dog, which was whirling round and round like a gimlet, with its head in a hole.

‘Whassat then, whassat?' the man was saying. ‘You gotta mouse there, then? Or a mole? Or a beetle? Whatchew got then?'

The dog took no notice of the man and the man took no notice of Kate. After a while, she left them both, and retraced her steps out of the Meadow, and turned south, walking down the long brick streets to Jericho, past terraces the colour of ochre and beef tea with Gothic detailing and heavy stone architraves, and tiny gardens full of starved shrubs, and bicycles.

It was in her mind to go into Mr Patel's shop and buy something, not so much for the sake of buying something as to see Mr Patel and speak to him and watch his polite dark face light up at the sight of her. But in the end, she couldn't do it, and walked past his shop, and on down Walton Street, past the pillars of the Clarendon Press to the corner she had always liked where the old painted grocery slogans had been left on the walls. ‘Try Lumley's 2/6d Tea' they said, and, ‘The Finest Turkey Coffee 1/4 lb Canisters'. She'd always visualized the canisters, little rectangular tins with pictures of sultans on them, and fountains, and the veiled ladies of the Ottoman court in gold and red.

She walked the last two hundred yards very slowly. By the time she reached Richmond Villa, the sun had gone in and a still, high, grey sky held the early afternoon very quiet. She went boldly up the steps and pressed the bell.

‘Kate,' James said, opening the door. He didn't seem surprised. ‘How nice.' He stood aside to let her come in and then he bent and kissed her cheek. ‘I thought you'd come,' he said. ‘It's been on my conscience that we haven't talked about Joss in an official manner.' He bent again to look at her face. ‘I'm so glad. I see you're much better.'

She followed him. The kitchen looked exactly as usual. On the table lay a broken jug and a tube of glue, and the newspaper.

‘I'm trying to mend that,' James said. ‘I didn't think I awfully liked it, but when it got broken I found I did. Joss's friend Trudy broke it, silly child, trying to demonstrate how easy it is to walk with a pot on your head.'

‘Where's Leonard?'

‘Resting,' James said. ‘He always rests after lunch now, unless there's a Test Match. He'll be so pleased to see you. Would you like some coffee?'

‘I'll make some—'

‘Will you? How nice. Are you really better?'

‘Yes,' Kate said, filling the kettle and plugging it in. She came back to the table and watched James trying to fit the pieces of jug together. ‘Look. That bit goes there. James—'

‘Of course, how dense I am. Yes?'

‘I've been to see Beatrice. I had tea with her. She came to see me at Mansfield House.'

His face lit up. ‘My dear Kate! How terrific. I'm so pleased.'