Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection: Strangers, Bad Girls Good Women, A Woman of Our Times, All My Sins Remembered
He didn’t contribute anything, but he seemed perfectly at ease.
‘I’ve had a good life,’ Jessie said at last. A vast yawn stretched her face into a series of overlapping circles. ‘You listen to me, you girls. You make sure you enjoy yourselves. But don’t act stupid, will you?’
Felix’s face was almost hidden in the shadow. Mattie and Julia glanced at each other. And then they saw that Jessie’s head had fallen forwards on her chest. Her breathing deepened and fluttered on the edge of a snore.
Felix stood up, silently, and arranged the cushions behind his mother’s head. He lifted her feet on to a stool and put a blanket over her legs. Julia picked up the bottle, empty, intending to tidy it away. She had noticed how punctiliously Felix had cleared away the plates after their meal.
‘Should she drink all that?’ she asked.
Felix looked at her. ‘No. But I’m not going to dictate to her about it, because it wouldn’t do any good.’
Jessie wasn’t a person to dictate to, of course. They left her asleep and went outside. The three of them walked companionably through the empty Sunday streets, and Felix took them into Regent’s Park. They wandered past the heavy, musky roses in Queen Mary’s Garden, talking about ordinary things, what they did and what they enjoyed and believed in, making the beginnings of friendship, as they had pledged over their meal.
‘Miss Smith?’
Julia’s supervisor was standing in front of her, looking pointedly at her fingers resting idly on the typewriter keys.
‘I’m sorry,’ Julia muttered, and bent to her work again.
She already hated the accounts department. Her typing was good enough in short bursts, but when she had to keep at it for longer it disintegrated. By the end of the day her head and fingers throbbed and she had used a whole bottle of opaque white. The other girls at the rows of desks were the kind Mattie dismissed as ‘pink cardigans’. They did wear cardigans, tidy ones that buttoned up to the neck over their shirtwaister dresses. They wore pink lipstick too, and touches of pale blue eyeshadow, and most of them proudly displayed diamond engagement rings. They stared covertly at Julia in her crumpled black clothes and defiantly flat pumps. Mattie and Julia favoured colourless lips and deadly pale face make-up, and they emphasised their eyes with lashings of black mascara and black eyeliner painted on with an upwards flick at the corners of their eyelids.
Julia stared unsmiling back at the other typists. She knew that she stuck out amongst them, but she was still too young and too awkward to carry her difference off with confidence. She kept mulishly to herself, refusing to acknowledge that she felt lonely and uncomfortable.
It’s only for now, she told herself, over and over again. Until I find, something else. It was not knowing what else, and the suspicion that there might not be anything, that was really frightening.
Mattie wasn’t enjoying her work much more than Julia, but she had the diversion of being able to watch the women who came into the shop all day long. She watched the way they sat, and they way they looked at themselves in the mirrors, and the attitudes they adopted towards herself and the other shopgirls. And Mattie had the consolation of a particular dream. She bought the Stage and pored over the small ads.
Wanted, Huddersfield. With experience. One leading F two M to juv one char. Start immediately.
The terse abbreviations themselves seemed to breathe a world of backstage glamour. Experience was the difficulty.
Before leaving home, Mattie had belonged to an amateur theatrical group that staged twice-yearly productions like Peter Pan and Charley’s Aunt. The group was run by a spinster teacher who called Paris Paree and who disapproved of everything about Mattie. She kept her parts to a minimum, for all Mattie’s enthusiasm. So Mattie had nothing that she could dress up as theatrical experience, even adopting the kind of wishful expanded truth that she and Julia specialised in.
So Mattie bought the Stage and read every word, and went on dreaming of the day when she could call herself Leading F.
The flat in Manchester Square was an oasis away from work for them both. It was too small, there was nowhere for them to sit in the evenings except with Jessie in her room or on the makeshift beds in their own tiny bedroom. But Mattie and Julia weren’t particularly interested in sitting, and the flat became home in a matter of days. Jessie would wait for the girls to come home from work, and call out as soon as she heard one of them at the door.
‘Come on in here, let’s have a look at you. Tell me what’s going on out there, and pour me a drink while you’re about it.’
Julia and Mattie both acquired a taste for vodka under Jessie’s direction, but there was never enough to spare for them to do them much damage. With their wage packets at the end of the first full week’s work they bought Jessie two bottles, and a pair of the sheerest twelve-denier nylons.
‘What’re you trying to do to me?’ she demanded, pretending to be angry with them. But Jessie had surprisingly slim, pretty ankles. They made her put the stockings on at once and she stretched her feet out narcissistically to admire them.
‘I’ll do your hair for you, if you like,’ Mattie offered.
‘What’s the matter with my hair?’
‘You’ll see, when I’ve done it for you.’
Jessie didn’t just talk about herself, although the girls were fascinated by her stories. She talked to them about themselves, listening with genuine interest and prompting them with questions.
Julia described Betty and Vernon. She told Jessie about the coloured stars that she had innocently stuck on her bedroom walls, and about another time, only two years ago, when she had gone out on her first date. She knew that Betty wouldn’t allow her to go the pictures with a boy. That sort of thing was for much older girls, Betty believed, an awkward but necessary preliminary to being presented with the diamond ring. But the boy who had asked Julia out was much admired by the girls in her class, and by Julia herself. She went, and she told her mother that she was spending the evening with a girl from school. At five minutes past the time Julia had promised to come back, Vernon telephoned the girl’s mother.
And when Julia did reappear they were waiting at the front door for her. The boy had come to see her to the gate, and Vernon marched out to confront him. Julia never knew what he said to him, because Betty dragged her indoors. Vernon came in a moment later and locked and bolted the door as if he was shutting out evil itself.
Even as she described it to Jessie, Julia could smell the wet privet outside the window and feel the soft stinging of her mouth after the boy’s kisses in the cinema. She could still taste the shame, too, in the back of her throat like nausea. She was too ashamed even to look at the boy the next time they met. It was a long time afterwards, because Betty and Vernon had made her stay in for a month, and he never spoke to her again.
Jessie sighed and shifted her bulk in the chair. If Julia had expected Jessie to deplore her parents with her, Jessie refused to do anything of the kind.
‘It’s a shame, but there’s plenty of boys coming your way, duck, and kisses as well. Don’t tell me you don’t know that. It sounds to me as if your mum and dad were trying to do their best for you, that’s all, in their own way.’
‘What would you have done, Jessie?’
She laughed. ‘Asked the boy in first, so’s I could have a good look at him. And smacked your backside for lying to me, as soon as I got a chance.’
Mattie talked about her home too. Jessie soon knew all about Ricky and Sam, and Marilyn and Phil, and all their particular talents, and the funny things that they had done as babies and little children.
It was the things that Mattie left out that made Jessie’s little dark eyes peer shrewdly at her.
‘What about your ma?’
‘I told you. She died, three years ago.’
‘Miss