Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection: Strangers, Bad Girls Good Women, A Woman of Our Times, All My Sins Remembered
She remembered that she had done exactly the same thing when she had read the first note, the few words that Julia had scribbled before she disappeared. It had made no sense then, and she had turned the envelope over in her fingers. The gum on the flap was still damp and she saw her daughter licking it to seal in her goodbye, with her dark hair loose about her face.
‘No,’ Betty had said aloud into the quiet of the house. ‘Oh, no. Julia, where are you?’ The words echoed back at her. Betty had dropped the note and run up the stairs. In Julia’s pretty, schoolgirl bedroom the drawers and cupboards were half empty. The neat cardigans and pinafore dresses that Betty had bought for her were still there, and the strange, defiant clothes that they had quarrelled about were all gone.
Betty stood in the silent room, trying to understand what had happened. It was as if her Julia, the pretty, clever schoolgirl, was still there in the house, with all her clothes and the white furry lamb that always sat on her candlewick counterpane. It was someone else, a stranger who she didn’t know or understand, who had run away from her.
‘Julia!’
Betty turned and ran frantically through the house. A series of pictures danced in front of her eyes, faster and faster, like a slide show running out of control. Her first sight of Julia, a bundle of blankets put into her arms. Julia’s first steps, wobbling across the hearthrug towards her. Picnics, and an outing to the sea. Julia making her first cake, frowning solemnly over the mixing bowl. Then Julia in her new grammar school uniform, when Vernon had said, ‘She’ll be someone, Betty. She’s got a head on her shoulders.’
And then, darker pictures slipping between the sunlit ones, there was another Julia who looked at Betty as if she hated her. Betty saw more and more of that Julia, a sullen, silent interloper in her skirts that were too short and too tight, her pretty face shadowed by too much make-up.
‘Julia!’
Betty had searched in every room, flinging open the cupboard doors. The tidy contents displayed themselves, yielding nothing. The garden, grass and roses in the sunshine, winked emptily back at her.
Julia had gone.
She remembered all that, because it had replayed endlessly in her head in the weeks that had gone by since then. And now there was this new message, hardly any more words, but they were headed by the reality of an address, after all Betty’s imaginings. She read it again, London W1, fixing it in her memory in case the letter should disappear. And then, for the first time in twenty-five years, she did something important without waiting to consult Vernon first. She put on her brown coat, and the hat she always wore with it, and went up to London to look for her daughter. To look for her, and to bring her back home.
The square surprised her, when she reached it at last. People didn’t live in places like this. They lived in houses set behind clipped hedges, or else they lived on the estate. She faltered for an instant, the first time since leaving Fairmile Road, but then she collected herself and marched round the railings, under the plane trees, counting the house numbers. When she reached the right door she saw that it was already standing open, revealing a hallway with a strip of shabby carpet and a shelf piled with circulars and manila envelopes.
These were offices, then, and not homes at all. She could hear typewriters, and a telephone ringing somewhere. She looked at the number on the peeling, black-painted door to make sure that she hadn’t made a mistake, and then beside her left shoulder she saw a single bell-push. It was labelled Lemoine, Top Flat.
Julia hadn’t mentioned anyone called Lemoine, but Betty pressed the bell anyway. She waited for a long time and then pressed it again, harder and longer.
Nobody came.
Jessie never answered the bell during the day when Felix was out. Even if it was someone she wanted to see, she couldn’t manage to negotiate the stairs to the front door.
Betty was undeterred. She had plenty of time to wait, if that was what was needed. She looked round and saw that the iron railings sprouted from a foot-high wall with a stone coping. She wrapped her coat carefully round herself and sat down on the stone, her hands clasped over her handbag on her knees.
The occasional passing secretary or messenger looked oddly at her, but no one spoke, and the afternoon went slowly by.
It was Felix who saw her.
He had been to meet the developer, Mr French, in the block of run-down flats, and his head was teeming with ideas and impressions as he walked through the square. He passed the small, brown woman sitting quietly outside the front door with barely a glance, and he was in the dusty hallway before something, perhaps her eyes on his back, made him turn round again.
‘Can I help you?’ he asked.
‘I’m looking for Miss Julia Smith,’ the woman said. ‘Does she live here?’
Felix’s hand cupped the bell-push, an instinctive, shielding movement, but he said, ‘Yes. She lives here.’
The little woman’s face changed. He saw exhausted relief taking the place of determination.
‘I’m her mother,’ she said.
Felix looked at her, and then he thought of Jessie, waiting for him upstairs. The images of mothers collided, hopelessly.
‘You’d better come in,’ he said quietly. Betty followed him meekly up the stairs.
As soon as Julia came in, she felt the change in the atmosphere. She had been singing as she climbed the stairs, but the song trailed away as she opened the flat door. It was very quiet, and Jessie didn’t call out Come here. Tell me the news, and pour me a drink while you’re about it.
‘Jessie?’
Julia ran the two steps to her door, and then she saw. Jessie was sitting in her chair, with her bottle at her elbow. Felix was by the window, enigmatically dark against the light pouring in. And facing Jessie, with her knees and her lips drawn together as if she was afraid of touching anything or breathing in the air, sat Betty.
She looked so incongruous amongst Jessie’s photographs and souvenirs and Felix’s objects, that Julia couldn’t find anything to say at all. Her first thought was, I should have known. I should have known she’d come straight here.
‘Mum,’ she acknowledged awkwardly, at last. She bent down and her cheek brushed the brown felt crown of the hat. Betty wouldn’t look straight at her but her mother’s hand took hold of hers, kneading it, making sure that she was really there. To Julia’s shame, the restraint of it made her want to pull away and run across the room to stand in the light, by Felix.
She realised that they were all waiting for her to say something. Jessie and Felix were waiting too. Julia’s thoughts darted helplessly. What justification was there? Except what she wanted, for herself? Wasn’t it just a truth of life that it was so different from what Betty dreamed, confiningly, for her?
‘I’m all right, you know,’ Julia said. Her voice came out sounding colder, further away, than she had meant it to. ‘I’ve got a job. In an accounts office. Just like Dad.’
Betty didn’t move.
‘And I’m living here. With friends.’
‘Friends?’ Betty did look up then. And her voice could be venomous, when she wished it to. Julia knew all the prejudices that lurked behind the single word. She could have recited them. Dirty blacks. Drunkards and thieves. No better than a common prostitute.
That her mother could even think such things, sitting here with Jessie and Felix, ignited a sudden, violent anger. She jerked her hand away.
‘Yes, friends. Good friends, who’ve been kind to me and Mattie. You and Dad would hardly let Mattie in the house, would you? Do you think you’re better people, or something?’
Anger against Betty’s prejudices found a shape in the words and they spilled out of her, regardless. ‘You aren’t any better. You’re narrow. You condemn anything you don’t understand.