Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection: Strangers, Bad Girls Good Women, A Woman of Our Times, All My Sins Remembered
mouth-organ to compete with a twenty-piece dance band.
On the day of the party, Felix went out very early, to Soho. He came back with two bulging shopping baskets and shut himself in the kitchen. Mattie and Julia contented themselves with pushing back the furniture in Jessie’s room, the only decently sized space in the flat. Then they turned their attention to Jessie herself. They rummaged mercilessly in her wardrobe, exclaiming and pulling out dresses and holding them up against her.
‘You’re wasting everyone’s time,’ Jessie said. ‘None of those things will go anywhere near me now.’
‘This red skirt will, look, it’s loose.’
‘And this coat with the sequins. You’ll look like Ella Fitzgerald. When did you wear all these wonderful things?’
‘In my heyday, dear, in my heyday.’
Mattie wound Jessie’s hair up on to rollers, and they practised painting her face with their Outdoor Girl cosmetics. By early evening she was giggling with them, as over-excited as a schoolgirl. Felix emerged from the kitchen with a blast of spicy cooking smells, and helped them to lay out the glasses and plates borrowed from a restaurant, one of Jessie’s old haunts. The proprietor and his wife had promised to come to the party after closing time. Then, when everything else was ready, Julia and Mattie retired to prepare themselves.
Mattie had made herself a dress, from a bolt of greeny-black shot taffeta with a bad flaw in it, picked up for a few shillings from one of the stalls at the top end of Berwick Street market. The bodice was strapless, and she had sewn it tight to show more of her cleavage. The skirt was full, puffed out with layers of net petticoats. Using her staff discount, she had bought herself a pair of wicked black stiletto-heeled shoes. They were so high that they made her almost as tall as Julia. Mattie brushed her hair out into a froth of curls, and then spun round, admiring herself, until her skirts whirled up to show her black stocking tops.
‘I just hope the top stays up,’ she murmured, hitching at it so that the creamy skin with its faint powdering of freckles bulged even more precariously over the taffeta.
Julia hated sewing. She had planned to make do with one of her own or Mattie’s dancing outfits, but in Jessie’s wardrobe she had discovered a red embroidered silk kimono. She wound it round herself, tighter and tighter, until it was a twisted column of scarlet splashed with fronds of abstract colour. She found a black silk shawl and tied it around her waist, letting the fringed ends trail down at the back. And, with a touch of last minute inspiration, she fasted her hair up on the top of her head, and stuck the poppies from an old hat into a comb at the back.
When they emerged, Jessie was sitting in her chair, dressed up, ready to hold court. Felix had been sitting beside her, filling her glass. He looked at Mattie and Julia, his eyes travelling critically up and down, while they held their breath.
And then he smiled.
‘At last,’ he pronounced. ‘You’re getting the idea.’ Mattie was like Turkish Delight, he thought. Scented and powdery and overpowering. Julia was a tall, white-skinned geisha, as clean and sappy as a peeled willow wand. His eyes slid back to her.
There was a moment’s silence and then, from far down at the bottom of the house beyond the empty offices, they heard the bell ringing.
‘People!’ Mattie yelled, and ran to the door.
By some miracle, the party, so casually and sketchily planned, was a roaring success from the very beginning.
The people flowed in and filled Jessie’s room, and overflowed into Felix’s bedroom and the kitchen and even the bathroom. Freddie Bishop perched on Mattie’s bed and played the mouth-organ, someone else had brought a guitar and a banjoist arrived after the pubs closed, and the guests danced and swayed and spilled down the stairs past the deserted offices. Most of them were Jessie’s old friends from her club days. There were men who brought their own whisky bottle and held firmly on to it, women who laughed a lot and shook their lacquered heads, singers and barmen and waiters and painters, and even one or two policemen. They mixed with big black men in trilby hats and coloured shirts, regulars from the Rocket, Felix’s student friends, and Johnny Flowers and his coterie who devoted themselves to pursuing Mattie and Julia, all together in a big, hot, happily drunken mêlée.
That first party became the prototype, in their memories, for all the others that followed it through the short Soho years.
There was never enough food. That night Felix had made chilli, in a huge saucepan, with red kidney beans and chopped steak, hot chorizo sausage and chillies, and it vanished in an instant, with a great vat of rice. But there was always drink, from the bottles brought in instead of invitation cards, and noisy music, familiar faces and beguiling new ones to focus on.
Jessie sat in state in her chair, presiding like a queen over the stream of people who came to greet her. Felix had done a wonderful job in searching them all out. Mattie and Julia danced, talked and laughed, and drank whatever was put into their hands. Even Felix, for once, was more of a participant than an observer.
Johnny Flowers was drunk, but Julia thought she must be drunker. Everything seemed wonderfully funny and her legs kept twisting around themselves inside the tight kimono.
‘I saw you first,’ Johnny complained, as he tried to extricate her from the arms of one of his friends. ‘And you still owe me a pound.’
‘You said we were quits. Dance with Mattie.’
‘Everyone else in the room is falling over Mattie.’
It was true. Mattie was in the middle of a tight circle. Her face was flushed, but she was in perfect control. She was very good at keeping the onslaught at arm’s length.
‘Sit down here with me, then.’
Julia and Johnny slid down to the floor together. They sat with their backs propped against the wall, their knees drawn up to keep there feet from being trampled on. Felix saw them, but he didn’t let his attention wander from his conversation with a friend of Mr Mogridge’s.
‘You two,’ Johnny said admiringly. ‘Have you always been friends?’
‘Mattie and me? Yes, for ever. Since I was eleven and she was twelve. Do you know where I first saw her?’
Johnny let his head fall on to her shoulder. ‘Mmm? Tell me.’
‘Blick Road Girls’ Grammar School. My first day. I can see her now.’ At the other end of a long corridor, Mattie had turned a corner, with the sun behind her. It shone through her hair, turning it into a pale and glamorous halo. But as she came closer, Julia saw that the halo had come to rest on the wrong head. Julia’s own uniform was pin-new, correct and proud in every fold and button. Mattie’s gym-slip was short and cinched in at the waist with a wide elastic belt. She had real breasts. There was no sign of the hideous bottle-green and chrome-yellow striped tie that they were all supposed to wear. Mattie’s grubby shirt was open at the neck, showing a deep V of milky skin powdered with freckles. Her white socks were as dirty as her shirt, and longer than the regulation ankle-length, emphasising the swell of her calves. Her shoes were the triumph. They were bright red, with pert little heels. ‘I thought she was wonderful. I wanted to be her. But I just said, “Excuse me, I’m lost.” Mattie looked me up and down, very very slowly, and then she put her head on one side and smiled at me. She said, “You don’t look lost. In fact you look as if you were manufactured here. Made in Blick Road.” I wanted to rip off my tie, and stuff it in my stupid shiny satchel, and throw the whole lot into the canal.’
‘But I did show you the way.’
They looked up and saw Mattie leaning over them. Her breasts swelled inside the black taffeta and Johnny Flowers groaned. He reached up to cup one of them, but Mattie slapped his hand down.
‘Hands off the goods,’ she grinned.
‘And after that there was the Christmas Party,’ Julia reminded her. ‘Then I knew we had to be friends.’ They laughed delightedly at the memory of it. Fifty little girls in organdie dresses and white