The Men and the Girls (8 page)

‘Is that everything now?' said Mr Patel, putting a carton of milk on the counter. He was keeping an eye on Joss, juggling her chewing-gum packet in her hand. She was just the age, in Mr Patel's experience, for the least scruple about shop-lifting.

‘A quarter of humbugs,' Miss Bachelor said. ‘And a tin of Mousemix.'

‘Meowmix,' said Mr Patel gently.

Joss snorted. Miss Bachelor turned round. She looked at Joss for some time, then she said, ‘I wonder if you are Josephine?'

Joss froze. Nobody ever, ever, called her by her real name, her gross, obscene, shameful name. ‘It's Joss,' she growled.

‘As we have never been introduced,' Miss Bachelor said, ‘I am hardly in a position to use your nickname, am I?'

Joss didn't know what to do. She looked at the floor and wished she had enough hair to hang over her face in a protective curtain.

‘Put that gum with my groceries,' Miss Bachelor said. ‘I will pay for it. I dislike it personally, but clearly chewing it is preferable to smoking.'

‘I don't want you to pay for it,' Joss said.

‘But I do, because I want you to carry my shopping for me.'

Mr Patel thought it was just as well there was no-one else needing serving. Joss took a step forward and dropped her gum packet on the counter. She looked stunned.

‘Now,' said Miss Bachelor, pulling out of her pocket a purse whose size and air of pathos would have distressed James very much, ‘the grand total, if you please.'

Mr Patel put the groceries into a carrier bag left over from Christmas, bearing a picture of two smudged children building a snowman. He handed it to Joss. Miss Bachelor counted out her money with infinite slowness and care and laid it on the counter.

‘Two more pence, please,' said Mr Patel patiently.

Outside in the street, Joss was seized with the violent apprehension that she might be seen accompanying Miss Bachelor. Few of her schoolfriends lived in Jericho and, in any case, darkness had fallen at teatime, but Joss thought she would keep her head down, all the same. Awkwardly, with her one free hand, she wound her black muffler high around her cheeks and ears.

‘I'm truly pleased to meet you,' Miss Bachelor said. ‘I asked your stepfather to send you to see me.'

‘He isn't my stepfather.'

‘Then how would you describe him?'

Joss couldn't think.

‘Would you prefer it if I were to call him your mother's lover, which is what, I suppose, he literally is?'

Joss certainly wouldn't. She gave a little involuntary gasp. She said, in a slightly strangled voice, ‘He's called James—'

‘I didn't think you would come, of course,' Miss Bachelor said. ‘I thought you would be determined not to. I am, after all, so very unfashionable. But I thought we would somehow meet, even if I didn't think it would be so soon.'

‘What for?'

‘Explain yourself.'

‘Why d'we have to meet?'

‘We don't have to. But I thought we might like it if we did. I knew I should like it and I imagined you could put up with it. I have a cat, and even if you don't like me you will like my cat.'

They turned the corner into Cardigan Street. A sharp wind met them and Miss Bachelor stooped into it. ‘I detest the winter.'

‘Yeah,' Joss said. She planned to dump the carrier bag, say hi to this cat, and run. Miss Bachelor said, ‘I will turn on my gas fire, and we will make toast.'

‘I got homework,' Joss said.

‘You will do it better after toast,' Miss Bachelor said. ‘And another time, we might do it together.'

‘I don't need that,' Joss said rudely. ‘I've got Uncle Leonard for that.'

Miss Bachelor stopped in front of a narrow door, and fumbled inside her coat for a key on a string round her neck.

‘I shall keep you fifteen minutes, Josephine, and then you may go, and if you dislike it that much you need never come again.'

Joss was late for supper. She was not only late, she had clean forgotten it was going to be something of a celebration, because it was Kate's birthday. It was only when she burst into the kitchen and saw the three of them sitting there, with candles and a bottle of wine, that she remembered. They all looked up when she came in.

‘Where've you been?' James said.

‘Doesn't matter,' said Kate quickly.

‘Where've you been?' Uncle Leonard demanded as if James hadn't uttered.

‘Miss Bachelor's,' Joss said. She drooped. ‘I forgot.'

She had forgotten, completely. She had spent the first ten minutes of her allotted fifteen minutes looking steadily and pointedly at Miss Bachelor's clock, and then she hadn't remembered to look at it again until Miss Bachelor had remarked that it was half-past seven.

Kate pulled out the chair beside her. ‘Come and sit down. James has done a chicken, roasted a chicken.'

There was a lump in Joss's throat. She said, ‘I'm not hungry.' She wasn't, she was full of toast, packed with it, slice after slice toasted on an old-fashioned fork, like a devil's fork, in front of Miss Bachelor's gas fire. Miss Bachelor let her spread the butter straight from the packet.

Kate said in a slightly tight voice, ‘Did you have a nice time?'

Joss nodded. It was weird, but she'd liked it, she'd liked it from the moment Miss Bachelor had said, ‘We have something in common, you and I. We are both regrettable to look at, but you are going to improve. Indeed, you are going, in the end, to be lovely, and believe me,' Miss Bachelor said, waving her hand at her postcards and pictures, ‘I am a judge of loveliness.' Joss had knelt on her bed and looked at the Marys pinned above it, Mary after Mary in blue robes, and golden robes and rose-coloured robes, each one holding her Jesus. Joss didn't like some of the Jesuses. She thought Jesuses ought to look like George and Edward Hunter, with soft round baby faces and fair hair, and some of these Jesuses looked middle aged, heavy and knowing. But the Marys were beautiful. Joss supposed Miss Bachelor was churchy; old women like her were always churchy.

‘I am an atheist,' Miss Bachelor said to Joss, ‘but I am thankful to the Christian religion for the inspiration it proved to be to the masters of the Italian Renaissance.'

‘What's an atheist?'

‘Look it up,' Miss Bachelor said, pointing to a dictionary in her shelves. Joss did, with difficulty, not being adept with dictionaries, and then she was amazed.

‘You don't believe in God!'

‘In any god. Once I was that most Victorian of creatures, an agnostic, but then I came to believe in a certain spirituality, just not in a god.'

‘I'd be scared not to,' Joss said.

‘That,' said Miss Bachelor, ‘is superstition.'

They had an argument then. Joss had liked it, because it never seemed to get personal, even though she couldn't seem to see anything except from her own point of view.

‘Stop saying “I” all the time,' Miss Bachelor said.

‘I can't—'

‘Yes, you can. You can with practice. You must learn to stretch the muscles of your mind.'

Joss grew excited. ‘Dim,' she was used to Uncle Leonard shouting. ‘Clod-hopping dim.
Stupid
child.' She knew he didn't mean it, that from Uncle Leonard insults were endearments, but all the same, whizzing across her maths homework with exasperated ease and speed, he made her feel dim.

‘I'm thick,' Joss said to Miss Bachelor.

‘Arrant nonsense,' Miss Bachelor said back. ‘Piffle. All your brain lacks is exercise.'

‘What did you talk about?' James said now, putting a plate of chicken in front of her. There were peas on it too, and roast potatoes, and little rolls of bacon and a splodge of bread sauce. Joss's eyes bulged.

‘God,' said Joss.

‘What?'

‘I can't eat this—'

She looked up at Kate. Kate was looking desolate. Joss said, ‘Oh my God, your present—' and shot from the room.

‘Don't be cross with her,' James said to Kate.

‘I want a looksee at Old Bat Bachelor too, you know,' Uncle Leonard said to James.

‘I'm not cross,' Kate said in a quiet despair to her plate.

Joss returned with an old crumpled supermarket bag. She thrust it at Kate. ‘Sorry it's not wrapped up, sorry it's late, sorry it isn't new, sorry—'

Kate drew out the black hat with its veil and glittering diamanté bows. ‘Oh!'

‘Isn't it delicious?' James said. He picked up his wineglass. ‘Put it on.'

‘No,' Kate said. ‘No.' Her face was working. She held the hat away from her. ‘Thank you,' she said to Joss.

‘You don't like it—'

‘I do, I do—'

‘You don't!' Joss shouted. She tried to snatch the hat. Uncle Leonard shot out a bony hand and gripped her arm. ‘Behave yourself.'

‘She hates it—'

‘I don't,' Kate said. Her voice was almost a whisper. ‘Oh Jossie, I don't, it's lovely, it's a lovely present.'

‘Then put it on,' James said. He glanced at Joss, green-white and still imprisoned by Uncle Leonard. Poor Joss . . .

‘I can't,' Kate said. She lowered her head and laid the hat carefully on Joss's empty chair beside her. Then she got up and walked slowly out of the room, closing the door behind her.

Leonard dropped Joss's arm. ‘Of all the—'

‘Shut up,' James said. He went round to Joss. They never touched, it was part of their unspoken mutual code of conduct not to touch, but now he longed to put his arms round her. ‘It's not you,' James said to Joss, ‘and it's not the hat. It might be me, and it might be something quite other, but it's definitely not your fault.'

‘You said to give it her,' Joss cried defiantly.

‘I know.'

‘And now look—'

‘Go after her,' James said, ‘go on. She'll be feeling awful. She'll want to talk to you.'

‘I don't want—'

‘Joss,' James said.

She looked up at him with her father's eyes in her mother's face, under her mother's hair.

‘Go on,' James said gently.

She turned away, sighing like a tornado, and slumped out of the room. The door crashed behind her.

Uncle Leonard held out his wineglass. ‘Good riddance,' he said, ‘to the whole boiling of them.'

‘I didn't go because I wanted to,' Joss said to Kate, ‘she asked me. She asked me to carry her shopping, in front of Mr Patel, so I had to.'

‘Of course,' Kate said. She sat on the edge of her bed, her and James's bed, and screwed a tissue up into a scruffy little ball. ‘It was kind, to go.'

Joss stood on the old Afghan rug in front of Kate, and jabbed at a hole in it with her boot toe. ‘The hat was only a joke—'

‘It's lovely. I said so. I love it.'

‘It's awful. I'll take it back.'

‘Please not,' Kate said. She wanted Joss to come a little nearer, so that she could hold her, in this cold bedroom, in her misery. ‘I'm behaving so badly,' she said. ‘I don't know what's the matter. Miss Bachelor—'

‘She's OK,' Joss said, in the encouraging, reassuring voice she sometimes used with the twins.

‘Why does James want to go?'

‘I dunno.'

‘What's it like? What's her room like?'

‘Dreary,' Joss said. ‘Old-looking. Everything's old.'

Old, Kate thought. She shivered. She held her arms out to Joss. ‘Give us a hug.'

Joss came and stood stiffly against her.

‘I wish I was fourteen again,' Kate said into Joss's shoulder, ‘like you.'

Joss said nothing. She only ever thought about age in tiny amounts, like whether a boy you fancied was three months younger or older than you were. Kate was thirty-six now, but that didn't mean anything, it was just the sort of age mums were.

‘We must go down,' Kate said. ‘James bought me a cake. I'll – I'll put my hat on, for the cake.'

‘Jesus,' Joss said, pulling away. ‘Jesus, don't do that!'

Kate stood up. She pushed her hair away from her face, and her bangles, the Indian bangles made of shell inlaid in brass that Joss had given her for Christmas, clacked together.

‘I do like that hat, Joss. I do. I just couldn't bear it when I took it out and I saw James—' She stopped. ‘Come on. Come downstairs with me and help me eat my cake.'

Later, while they were washing up, the telephone rang. As usual, Kate went to answer it.

‘It's Hugh,' she said, holding the receiver out to James. ‘He sounds pissed.'

‘I am pissed,' Hugh said to James, ‘pissed and pissed off.'

James manoeuvred a chair towards the telephone with his foot and sat down.

‘What now?'

‘Want to hear about my new career?'

James closed his eyes. He held the receiver a little way from his ear and Hugh's voice came clearly out of it.

‘I'm going to open garages, James, garages and bowling alleys and lavatories for the disabled. I'm going to be Hugh Hunter, the megastar of the mini-market, I'm going to pull them in in their tens, I shall make hundreds. Oh James—' Hugh's voice cracked. ‘Oh James, what's it all been bloody
for
?'

James opened his eyes and looked at Kate. She finished drying a handful of forks and put them down on the table with a soft clatter. She didn't look back.

‘Where are you?' James said. ‘At home?'