Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection: Strangers, Bad Girls Good Women, A Woman of Our Times, All My Sins Remembered
She didn’t say anything about how she had felt when she had asked about Jennifer Edge.
Julia nodded at everything, but she was clearly still waiting. ‘But what did it feel like?’ she ventured, at last, when Mattie didn’t volunteer it.
Mattie tried for the words. She knew what Julia was expecting. Like fireworks going off. Like a waterfall. Waves breaking. Something like that. What she had really felt was so far from any of those things that she couldn’t even manage to make it up.
‘I told you,’ she said softly. ‘It was all right.’
They stared at each other for a minute, resignation confronting disbelief.
Julia whispered anxiously, ‘Is he … is he nice to you?’
Mattie held up the hem of her coat. ‘Sometimes. But do you know what? He’s going to give me a part. That’s what I really want …’
Julia snorted with laughter and put her arm round Mattie’s shoulder. Mattie laughed too.
‘Oh Mat, I’m so happy you’re home.’
‘I’m happy to be home.’
‘I thought you were different. But you aren’t.’
‘Do you know, on the first morning I thought it must be written on my face? I walked past everyone thinking, They all know. They can see.’
They laughed so much then that all the other passengers stared at them.
Julia rubbed the condensation off the window with her sleeve and peered out.
‘Oxford Street. Hurry up, Felix is making you a wonderful dinner.’
The flat over the square was warm and welcoming.
‘Home,’ Mattie murmured.
Jessie was immobile in her corner, and her clothes compressed the flesh beneath into swollen ridges. It was an effort for her to reach up and plant one of her resounding kisses on Mattie’s cheek, but the Christmas tree that Julia and Felix had bought and decorated glowed beside her and the soft light made her look rosy.
‘Are you all right, Jessie?’
‘As right as I’ll ever be. Give us another kiss. What’s your news, then?’
‘Lots of news. I’m going to be an actress.’
‘That’s what they call it?’
Felix materialised from his room, like a shadow in his black jersey. He kissed Mattie too, brushing her cheek with his mouth. She looked older, he thought, as if some experience had rubbed off on her. That made him glance at Julia, and for the hundredth time he noticed her gnawing impatience. Julia hadn’t had Mattie’s luck, whatever that was.
‘Felix? Get some glasses, there’s a duck. It’s Christmas.’
Felix went into the kitchen for a bottle of wine and a corkscrew. At least it was easier to live here with Julia when her aviator was away. He isn’t mine, Julia had once snapped viciously when Felix said that. Why do you call him mine?
He isn’t mine either, Felix might have answered. But he said nothing and Julia had stood up, walking to the door and then twisting back again in the confined space. It was better at times like this when Josh wasn’t here, although Felix still thought about him. He thought about aeroplanes too, imagining flying at night and the pilot’s face lit up by the red glow of the instrument panel.
As he tore the capsule off the wine and twisted the point of the corkscrew downwards Felix heard the women laughing. Jessie wheezed and coughed delightedly, and then Mattie said something that set off a fresh burst of laughter.
Carefully Felix eased the cork out and wiped the neck of the bottle with a clean cloth. He felt the women’s mysterious femininity as solid as a wall.
The next day, Christmas Eve, Mattie put the presents she had bought for Ricky and Sam and Marilyn and Phil into a string bag. There were presents for Rozzie and her husband and the babies too, even something for Ted, and the red and gold paper bulged cheerfully through the netting.
‘I’m going home to see them all,’ Mattie told Julia. ‘Are you coming?’
‘I have to work today. The bloody office doesn’t close until four o’clock.’
There would be mince pies, and the mangers would come into the typing pool to wish them all a Merry Christmas. Julia was dreading it.
‘We could go after you finish.’
Julia had been thinking about Fairmile Road. Christmases there were easy enough to remember, although she couldn’t distinguish between any of them once she had stopped believing in Father Christmas. Betty and Vernon didn’t have close relatives or friends, and the celebrations had only ever involved the three of them. Julia had opened her presents beside the tree, with Betty and Vernon watching her. Once that was done, it was hard to know how to keep the festive atmosphere going right through into evening. There was church, and Christmas dinner afterwards. Vernon always put on the paper hat out of his cracker and read the mottoes and riddles aloud. After Christmas tea, when the red and brown plaster robin and the tiny metal-spined Christmas tree had been taken off the cake and stored away until next year, it felt like any other day. Julia went up to her bedroom and read her new Bunty annual, and dreamed of lavish, exotically scented, faintly Victorian family Christmases with plump mothers and twinkling fathers and broods of children who played charades after supper. Later there would be dancing around a towering tree decorated with real candles.
Sentimentally now, Julia wondered if she had a real family somewhere, preparing for the kind of Christmas she had dreamed of as a child. Did her real mother think of the daughter who should have been there, as she watched the dancers around the tree?
‘It’s all right,’ she said to Mattie. ‘You go.’
Julia had bought a pretty blouse for Betty using her staff discount at the store, and a camel-coloured cashmere scarf for Vernon, and she had wrapped and posted them in good time.
She had written to Betty too, in the weeks since Mattie had gone away, almost as many times as she had written to Mattie herself. But she didn’t want to go back to Fairmile Road. Not yet. Certainly not for Christmas. She remembered the silence in the house, that heavy silence that was unlike quietness anywhere else, and Vernon wearing a purple paper crown.
Julia leaned over quickly to turn the wireless up louder. The music was Dickie Valentine’s ‘Christmas Alphabet’. She whistled the tune, and ran to finish getting ready for work.
Mattie went home on her own. It was a relief to find that although the house on the estate was cold and chaotically filthy, the boys seemed to be living safely enough with their father. Ricky looked taller. He talked about when he would leave school and find a job, and he told Mattie that Ted had fallen down drunk on the path late one night, and he and Sam had hauled him in and put him to bed between them.
‘Ricky …’ Mattie began, wanting to say something as an excuse for their father and as a warning, but Ricky cut her short.
‘Stupid bugger, isn’t he? That’s all. But he can’t help it. And we couldn’t leave him out there to freeze to death, could we?’ Mattie nodded, and then laughed. ‘I don’t think I need to worry about you, Rick.’
‘‘Course you don’t. I need to worry about you, more like. How are you doing?’
‘Getting along. So slowly you’d hardly notice, but I think I can see the way now.’ John Douglas seemed surprisingly distant. Mattie told herself that that was all right because he certainly wasn’t thinking much about her, either. ‘You’ll see my name in lights in the end.’
‘When I do, I’ll expect you to buy me a guitar.’
‘Pleasure. In the meantime, you’ll have to make do with a Bill Haley record.’
Mattie went on to see