Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection: Strangers, Bad Girls Good Women, A Woman of Our Times, All My Sins Remembered
finger into his minute fist to feel the surprising strength of his grip. The baby’s unwinking dark eyes stared up into hers. Mattie wanted to scoop him up and wrap him against her body.
‘He’s so lovely. Can I pick him up?’
Rozzie shrugged. ‘If you want. Mind he’s not sick on your fur. Feeling broody, are you?’
‘I love babies. Just smell him.’ She rubbed her face against his downy head.
Rozzie lit a cigarette. ‘You could have one. All you need is a man.’
The baby kicked in Mattie’s arms, and nuzzled against her breast. Mattie felt the pull of it, underneath her stomach. ‘They’re easy enough to come by,’ she said flippantly, hiding her feelings.
Rozzie turned her attention to the coat again. ‘I can see that.’
Mattie stayed for tea, and saw that Marilyn and Phil were as uncontrollable as any children on Christmas Eve. They looked taller too. They bathed the baby between them, demonstrating self-importantly to Mattie, and Marilyn gave him his bottle.
‘Bed,’ Rozzie said and they went, wanting the morning to come quicker. They included Mattie in the general goodnights, just. She saw that they didn’t need her, or miss her very much.
‘I thought I’d go and have a Christmas drink with Dad,’ she said to Rozzie.
‘Good luck to you.’
Mattie found her father in the nearest of the four barnlike pubs that served the estate. There were coloured paper streamers and tinsel shapes suspended everywhere, and a pianist was playing ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer’, but the crowded room seemed bleak after the cosy, firelit corner pubs that Mattie had frequented in the last weeks with John and the others.
I’ve got away, Mattie thought exultantly. I’ve done it.
Ted was sitting at a beer-ringed table near the piano. He greeted her with a mixture of surprise and awkward familiarity.
He was only half drunk. Mattie bought him a pint of beer with the money that Vera had handed her at the last Treasury call – minus the ten shillings that she owed for the coat. She sat beside Ted and told him about what she was doing, watching his face as he drank. She wasn’t afraid of him any more, she realised. Even when she talked about John Douglas, the old, terrifying, bleary jealousy didn’t swell up at her. She thought that it must be because she had walked clean out of his world. Her father’s view was limited. He couldn’t be jealous or angry about what he didn’t know or understand.
They had another drink, and Ted’s eyes lost their wandering focus. A man pushed up to the table, and Ted pulled at his sleeve. They hardly knew each other, but they fell on one another like old friends. Five minutes later their arms were around each other’s shoulders and they were reminiscing about the best days of the War. Mattie listened for a little longer, and then she stood up. She bent down and kissed her father on the grey stubble that masked his mottled cheeks. His head sawed up and down and he proclaimed to his friend, ‘Kids today. They know nothing.’
‘You’re right, Teddy,’ the friend answered.
Mattie walked to the station and caught the last train back to London.
It was a warm, cramped, happy Christmas in the flat over the square. Felix had money from his decorating work, and he had bought smoked salmon and crystallised fruits and baskets of nuts as well as a goose. He had also made red felt Christmas stockings for Jessie and Mattie and Julia, and in the morning they found them at the end of their beds. There were tiny bottles of scent and little tablets of soap, and sheer nylons and fanciful earrings that he had made himself from beads and feathers bought from the little haberdashers down Berwick Street market.
Julia fixed her earrings on and turned her head to and fro.
‘You are clever, Felix. How do you know about so many things?’
‘I use my eyes,’ Felix said mildly. ‘Those earrings suit you.’ He was pleased with the plain silk handkerchiefs that Julia had bought him from Liberty’s. The electric-blue Teddy boy socks from Mattie were less well received.
‘Have you ever seen me wearing anything of the kind? You don’t use your eyes, Mattie.’
‘They’re supposed to be a joke.’
Felix looked amazed. ‘Who wants to look like a joke? And while we’re on the subject, that coat of yours …’
‘I like it,’ Mattie said, in a voice that invited no argument. ‘Your present’s the best of the lot, my duck,’ Jessie said, putting it on to prove her point. Mattie had found it in a crumbling second-hand clothes shop in Nottingham. It was a hat, and when she bought it it was still enveloped in yellowing tissue paper in its round black hatbox. It was a little shell of black velvet, with sequinned wings and quivering ostrich feathers, the whole creation swathed round and round with spotted veiling and skewered with an enormous peal-handled hat pin. As soon as Jessie put it on, tilting it instinctively over one eye, she was transformed into a risqué Edwardian grande dame.
Julia and Mattie clapped with delight, and Felix murmured, ‘That was a better choice.’
Later, Felix retired to the kitchen to cook. Julia put her head around the door and asked, ‘Can I help?’
Felix nodded and they worked side by side, enjoying a silent companionship that had been missing since the arrival of Josh. In Jessie’s room, Mattie and Jessie began by singing carols and under the influence of Jessie’s vodka soon moved on to the old music hall favourites. The two voices competed gleefully for the top notes. It was already dark outside when they sat down to their Christmas dinner. Jessie only ate one or two mouthfuls of goose but she presided majestically over the table, lifting her glass and setting the wings and feathers of her hat quivering with her wheezy laughter.
Felix brought the pudding in, set in a nimbus of blue flame. They pulled crackers, and unwrapped their paper hats.
Watching Felix with his yellow crown pulled down over his dark olive forehead, Julia thought that he looked like a real king. He would never look ridiculous, like Vernon, even in a paper hat. Narrowing her eyes so that the candlelight softened into a golden blur over Jessie’s hat and Mattie’s anarchic hair, Julia breathed in the scents of tangerines and brandy and candle wax. At last she had come close to the Christmases she dreamed of in Fairmile Road.
Only Jessie had drunk too much.
Sometimes, when she was drinking, Jessie drifted away until her memories became more real than the solid room around her. ‘I was thinking about my first time. I was just as old as you. Like Mattie here, with her theatre man. I don’t like the sound of him, dear. I told you, didn’t I?’
‘You told me,’ Mattie murmured, but Jessie ignored her.
‘Your first one should be young, and handsome. Prince Charming, for you to dream about afterwards when they’ve all turned old and useless, like yourself. Julia’s boy is one, isn’t he? And if not him, then somebody else. There’s plenty of them. Like my Felix.’
Felix stood up, as silent and elegant as a black cat.
‘I’m going for a walk,’ he said softly. ‘I need some air. Julia and Mattie will look after you.’ As he slipped out of the door, they heard him say ‘Happy Christmas.’
‘I remember the day,’ Jessie repeated. ‘I was still living with my ma and pa. It was Hartscombe Terrace, Hoxton. I was working in the market, singing at nights in the clubs. They were good days. I met Tommy Last and we started walking out together. He took me to the Empire. Up West, on the train. Walking, under the trees in the park. Black hair, he had, smooth as glass. Black eyes, too, and a little moustache that tickled your skin when you kissed. This day, he came for me, and he’d brought me a bunch of marigolds in white paper. They were so bright and hot, like the day itself. We walked down by the canal, and Tommy was in his shirtsleeves with his arm round my waist. I remember how hard his arm seemed, and the black hairs on it. We walked under a bridge and