Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection: Strangers, Bad Girls Good Women, A Woman of Our Times, All My Sins Remembered
head abruptly to pick the knives and forks out of a wicker tray.
Felix bent down too, and took a dark red bottle from its resting place under the sink. ‘Let’s drink this,’ he said. ‘Mum will stick to her vodka, so the three of us can share it.’
It was a wonderful, convivial lunch.
Felix pulled out the flaps of the table and drew it into the sunny place in the window. He spread a festive white cloth over the pocked surface. Jessie sat queenly at the head of the table, with Mattie and Julia on either side.
They ate ravenously, while Jessie talked, capping and recapping her own stories. She was too engrossed even to drink more than a few tots from the glass beside her hand. The girls had never tasted wine before, and it made them talkative too. The chatter and laugher rose in the sunny room, with Felix’s quiet voice prompting them all.
At last, when they had eaten all the omelette and wiped the last of the oily dressing out of the salad bowl, and Julia and Mattie had demolished the remains of a chocolate cake, Jessie tinkled her fork against her glass.
‘I’ve thought of another toast,’ she declared. ‘A more important one.’
Felix hastily drained the last of the Beaujolais into the three wine glasses and filled Jessie’s to the brim with vodka. She lifted it without looking at it, not spilling even a drop.
‘To friendship.’
They echoed her, ‘To friendship,’ and drank again.
‘And I don’t imagine,’ Jessie went on, with feigned annoyance, ‘that having proposed that, I’m going to be able to get rid of you quite so easily. Am I?’
The girls waited, not looking anywhere.
‘So I suppose you’d better stay on here. Just till you find your own place, mind. Till then, and not a minute longer.’
She shot a glance around the table, to Felix, to Julia and Mattie, and back again to Felix.
‘Not a minute longer,’ he repeated, softly. Whatever Jessie was plotting, if it made her happier, that was enough.
‘Good,’ she said, with firm satisfaction.
Suddenly they were laughing again, the four of them, drawn even closer around the table under the window.
On Monday morning, on their way to work, Mattie and Julia found a public telephone box and squeezed into it together. They found the number they wanted, at last, through the operator.
‘Do you want me to talk to them?’ Julia asked, but Mattie shook her head.
‘I should do it.’
She dialled their local council offices and she explained to the official at the other end that she was ringing anonymously, and she had something very important to say. Speaking very slowly and carefully she gave her father’s name and address, and the names and ages of her brothers and sisters.
‘They aren’t safe with him,’ she said clearly. ‘I know they aren’t. Please will you send someone to see them? There’s no one left to look after them now.’
Julia heard the man’s voice crackle at the end of the line as he tried to make Mattie give him some more information.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I can’t say any more.’
And then she replaced the receiver with a click that made the bell jingle faintly in its casing. She pushed open the heavy door of the kiosk and the girls stepped out into the street. Mattie was shivering.
‘I’ve abandoned them, haven’t I?’ she said bitterly. ‘I feel so bad. Like a traitor.’
‘You aren’t a traitor.’ Julia tried to soothe her.
‘I shouldn’t have left them. Phil’s only seven. What does she know? But I couldn’t stay in that house with him, could I? If he did it again …’
My fault, Mattie began thinking, as she had done a thousand times before. It must have been my fault, some of it. But if I went back, and he did it again … there was the bread knife, lying beside the waxed wrapper of the sliced loaf. She heard a scream – her own or her father’s? – and saw the blood … Mattie shuddered, and felt Julia’s hand on her arm. Warm and friendly, that was all, not twisting or cajoling.
‘Mattie, it’s all right.’
‘Is it?’
She had to leave. After the vision of violence she thought of Ted with a queasy mixture of pity and revulsion and, still, a kind of love. She couldn’t have stayed. Julia was right, of course.
Julia said, ‘You’ve done what you can for now. And you have done, ever since your mum died. It’s Rozzie’s turn to take some of the responsibility now.’ When Mattie didn’t answer she added, ‘You can’t be everything to everyone.’
Mattie stopped shivering, and her shoulders dropped.
‘No, I suppose I can’t. I didn’t even know I was trying to. I wish I saw things as clearly as you do. I wish I saw Ted clearly.’ It was the first time since they had left home that Mattie had spoken his name. As if it was a physical link with him, she snapped the words off and she didn’t talk about him again. Mattie’s face was white and taut under the heavy mass of hair.
Julia wanted to say something else, to show her that she understood, but she couldn’t because she couldn’t even imagine what Ted Banner must have been like. The gulf between what had happened to Mattie and Vernon’s rigid correctness was too wide. She had the sense that she had failed Mattie, and she was reduced to mumbling, ‘It’ll be all right. I know it will.’
Mattie’s expression didn’t change, but in a different, warmer voice she said, ‘We’d better go to work, hadn’t we? Sell some shoes.’
‘Type some accounts.’
Make our way, Julia thought, with a touch of wryness. That’s what we’ve come for, isn’t it?
‘See you later, at home.’
The word sprang hearteningly between them as they waved goodbye. Felix, and Jessie, and the rooftop flat stood between them and the Embankment now, and that was a good beginning. Julia saw Mattie’s blonde curls swallowed up by the throngs of people heading for work, and she turned round herself, more cheerfully, and began to walk briskly to the accounts office.
The thoughts of the Sunday they had enjoyed together remained with Julia as she slid into her typist’s chair and started work. They had stayed sitting round the table, talking and laughing, until the vodka was all gone. Jessie had slipped by stages through excited volubility to dignified, precisely enunciated drunkenness, and then into sudden sleep.
The girls liked her more and more. She had told them the story of Desmond Lemoine. ‘He played the sax, dear. In all the big bands, he was. Even better looking than him,’ with a wink at Felix, who was looking out of the window. ‘Not that Felix uses his looks to much advantage.’ She told them about other lovers, too, with an impartial enthusiasm that deeply impressed Mattie and Julia. At home they had cast themselves as the bad girls, although in fact neither of them had ‘gone all the way’, as they described it in whispers. Julia had come close, in an uncomfortable, awkward grapple, with a boy from the technical college who was supposed to look like Dirk Bogarde. It was harder to tell with Mattie. Mattie was the best at sharp, suggestive repartee on the dance floor, but she was reticent about what happened outside, afterwards, even to Julia.
But Jessie’s stories, as the vodka slipped down, gave them an insight into a world they had never even glimpsed before. It was a salty, indoor world of smoky rooms and overflowing glasses and itinerant musicians. It was a world where, it seemed, you could do whatever you liked provided everyone was enjoying it.