Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection: Strangers, Bad Girls Good Women, A Woman of Our Times, All My Sins Remembered
presence in the tidy flat. But they had done more for Jessie in a matter of days than he had been able to do himself in a year. He was grateful for that. And almost in spite of himself he liked them for themselves too, consolidating the way that he had been drawn to them from the beginning.
‘Come on, don’t stand there,’ Mattie ordered him. ‘Dance with me.’
Felix took hold of her, feeling the peculiar softness of her flesh under his fingers. He was glad that it was Mattie first. She was completely foreign to him, the whole scented spread of her, and in a way that was easy for him to deal with. He could treat her like Jessie, with affection that kept her at a physical distance, even in the tiny flat.
It was Julia who disturbed him.
He watched her narrow hips as she went up the stairs ahead of him, and he found himself wanting to reach out and touch the knobs of her spine when she bent her head and exposed the nape of her neck.
Felix had no idea what girls expected or understood, and he was incapable of making the movement that would bring his fingertips to rest on those fragile bones. His uncertainty made him try harder to be impersonal, to keep the space between them cool and clear and neutral.
Felix knew that he was a coward.
Across the room, with a flickering candle throwing odd shadows upwards into the hollows of his face, Julia saw Johnny Flowers. He was wearing a black leather jacket over a white vest, and he saw her at the same instant. He shouldered his way across to her.
‘Like I said, I’m always around.’
‘I’ll still have to owe you your pound. I haven’t got it.’
Julia and Mattie spent everything they earned, instantly. Everything that was left over from the much-needed rent went on clothes.
Johnny Flowers grinned. ‘Dance with me and we’ll call it quits.
The next afternoon was Mattie’s first half-day. She had had to wait her turn for a weekday afternoon off, and it had seemed a long time coming. Now it had arrived, she knew where she must go.
Without telling Jessie and Felix, without mentioning it even to Julia, she made her way back on the tube to Liverpool Street station. At the clerk’s little glass porthole she bought a ticket, a day return. She tore the ticket in half at once and she put the return portion in the pocket of her blouse, next to her heart, like a talisman. At the same time she smiled, privately and bitterly. It wasn’t so easy to escape that a small oblong of green pasteboard could achieve it for her.
The estate, lying baldly under a grey sky, was exactly the same. Mattie walked the familiar route, trying to pretend that her breath was coming easily instead of in panicky gasps.
The house, when she came to it, looked the same too. The windows were closed and the stringy curtains were drawn, but that was nothing unusual. No one had remembered to open them, Mattie thought. Then she opened the front door. She smelt stale air and sour milk, and listened to the oppressive silence.
A different fear swelled up, bigger, threatening to choke her.
Ted wasn’t here.
None of them was here. Where were the children, and what had he done to them?
She half turned, not knowing whether she was going to stumble on into the house or turn and run, and then she heard a sound. It was completely familiar, a tinny rattle and then a plop. It was a record, falling from the stack poised over the turntable of Ricky’s prized Dansette.
‘Ricky!’
A clatter obliterated the first tinny bars of music, and Ricky appeared at the boys’ bedroom door.
‘Mat?’
He hurtled down the stairs, a skinny boy of fifteen with Mattie’s hair, brutally cut so that it stood up in tufts all over his head.
‘Are you all right?’ she demanded.
He hugged her and they clung together, briefly, while Mattie stared fiercely at him.
‘’Course. Where’ve you been?’
Relief was making Mattie shake. ‘Where is he?’
Ricky knew what she meant, of course. ‘He’s out. He’s working, unloading crates at the Works. What are you shivering for?’
‘Nothing. It’s all right. Come on, let’s have some coffee.’
‘Bit of a mess in there,’ Ricky warned her.
The kitchen was a morass of dirty pans, plates and food. The smell of sour milk was almost overpowering.
‘Ricky …’
‘I know. Look, it doesn’t matter. Me and Sam’ll get around to it. It doesn’t bother us, you know.’
It didn’t, Mattie thought. And she had left them. So she had no right to come back and fuss about details. She cleared a space and filled the kettle, rinsing out two cups from the filthy stack. There was no fresh milk so they drank their coffee black, sitting out on the back step and looking across the hummocks of dandelions to the backs of the next row of houses. Ricky told her what had happened. A woman had come from the Council, a bossy woman with papers. Ted had refused to see her at first, telling Ricky and Sam to say that he was out, but she had come back, and then she had simply sat down to wait for him. She had looked at the house, and she had talked to Marilyn and Phil.
In the end Ted had appeared. Ricky and the others had been sent out of the room, but they had heard Ted shouting, and then mumbling. The woman had gone at last, and Ted had come to find them.
‘He looked,’ Ricky said, groping for the words, ‘he looked like Phil does when someone’s pinched her sweets, and then yelled at her for creating.’
Mattie knew that look of her father’s. Unwieldy anger, too big for him, subsiding quickly into cringing weakness. She had seen it that last time, here in the kitchen, with the kettle whistling. Only when he looked at Mattie there was something else, too. That hot, anxious longing. Mattie wrapped her fingers round her coffee cup to stop the shudder.
The woman from the Council had announced to Ted that there was evidence of neglect. Either the young ones must go to live with a relative, in more suitable circumstances, or a place would be found for them in a council home.
Ricky relayed the details with matter-of-fact calmness. He had worked out a way of living for himself, Mattie understood. Ricky would be all right, and Sam too. Sam was the family survivor, happy so long as he could play football on the scuffed fields beyond the estate. The younger ones, the girls, were living with Rozzie.
‘They’re okay,’ Ricky said. ‘It’s better than here.’
‘I know that,’ Mattie said heavily.
‘The council woman asked about you. Dad said you’d done a runner. He didn’t know where to, and didn’t care either.’
Mattie stood up quickly and put her cup with the rest of the dirty dishes. It seemed a pointless gesture to bother to wash it out.
‘I’m going to Rozzie’s to see them. Walk round there with me?’
Rozzie lived a mile away, further into the estate. They walked together, past the effortful gardens bright with zinnias and lobelia, and the rows of windows guarded by net curtains. Rozzie’s house was almost identical to the one they had just left, but better kept. The window frames and the door were painted maroon and there were marigolds growing under the windows.
Rozzie opened the door to them. Her flowered nylon housecoat hardly buttoned up over her stomach. She was eight months’ pregnant and her two-year-old son, runny-nosed, peered out from the shelter of her skirt. She didn’t smile.
‘So you’re back, then?’
Mattie nodded. Her sister had every right to be sullen, and Mattie had been expecting it. Rozzie was nineteen, and she had had to marry her car mechanic boyfriend two and a half years ago. The