Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection: Strangers, Bad Girls Good Women, A Woman of Our Times, All My Sins Remembered
my bedroom.’
‘Don’t you ever do that. Why do you spoil everything? Why do you?’ There were white flecks at the corners of her mother’s mouth, Julia remembered. ‘It isn’t your bedroom. Your father and I have given it to you, and you’ll keep it how we want it. Look at it now.’ Betty pointed at the wreckage of Julia’s fireworks, and then her face collapsed. She was crying, helplessly. Suddenly Julia caught a glimpse of her mother’s grown-up fears. She half-understood her struggle to keep everything that was lurid, and threatening, and incomprehensible, at bay with the semi-detached walls of their house. For an instant she understood what it must be like to be grown-up and still afraid, like Betty was.
She had run to her mother full of sympathy, but Betty was good at holding on to her anger and she had pushed her away. They had spent the rest of the day in silence, and when Vernon came home from work he turned Julia over his knee and smacked her with a slipper.
There must have been dozens of other times like that, Julia thought, and plenty of times when she had deserved whatever they had doled out to her. But that was the time that she remembered. Perhaps because of the embrace that Betty had rejected. Perhaps because of the glimpse of her mother’s fear.
Sitting in her deckchair, with the sun warming her face and arms, Julia remembered the old men on the Embankment. In the middle of her own night terrors she had recalled her mother’s too. Betty was afraid of everything, afraid that if she let any little detail out of place the long slide might begin, and leave her with nothing. Was that why she wouldn’t allow her daughter anything new, or different, or dangerous?
In the night Julia had determined I won’t let it get me. Not the darkness, nor the fear of it. And she had survived.
I won’t live like Betty, Julia promised herself. I won’t be afraid, and I can risk everything, if I have to.
She shivered a little, trying to imagine, looking ahead, beyond herself. But the sun made coin-bright circles under her closed eyelids, and that was all she could see.
After the stars, or perhaps all along only she couldn’t remember it, rebellion came naturally to Julia. As she grew older, there were more and more things to kick against. Looking back, the years seemed to stretch behind her as a long, entrenched battle against Betty’s strictures. In by eight. Bed by nine. Homework done on the day it was set. Julia challenged her on everything. They disagreed about her clothes, her make-up, the music she played, the hours she came in and went out again, and the places she went to. Betty and Vernon were proud that Julia had won a place at the girls’ grammar, but Mattie and Julia hated the place. They played truant and did no work, but even so Julia always came out near the top of her class.
The fights were tiring and boring, and Julia nearly always won them because she fought from strength. Betty was always forced to retrench and then capitulate.
And when Mattie came along, Julia had a natural ally. Mattie was an equally natural focus for the Smiths’ disapproval. She came from the despised estate, while the Smiths clung to the middle-class isolation of Fairmile Road. She wore her skirts too short, and too tightly belted so that they showed off her surprising breasts. And then there was the defiant mass of her hair. It was Mattie who produced the first Outdoor Girl cake mascara for Julia to try out, and quick-witted Mattie who yelled back at the boys who whistled at them in the High Street. But it was still Julia who was the leader, Julia had the ideas, and the determination to carry them out.
Betty had once said, with a sadness that Julia couldn’t fathom, ‘You’re not a bit like me.’
She could see her so clearly, in the house that gave Julia claustrophobia. A thin, small woman with a scarf knotted around her head to keep the dust out of her hair. Always stooping to tidy something away, or smooth a crease, or straighten an edge, her head bent so that the knobs in her neck stood out, the corners of her mouth always turned down.
I’m sorry, Julia thought. I couldn’t stay there with you. When Mattie came, after what Mattie had told her, the idea of escape had seemed so magnificent, so obvious and so enticing. There had been no alternative. No question even of waiting. With a single gesture, Betty and Fairmile Road and all the rest had been left behind her.
And yet, in spite of everything, Julia missed her.
I’ll come back, she promised. When I’ve got something worth showing you. You can be proud of me then, if you like. The words sounded grand in her head and she offered them to her mother in expiation.
Vernon was different. Julia had been afraid of her father, or of his slow-burning, malevolent temper. Betty was afraid of him too, she thought. She remembered how her mother cooked his tea, watching the clock all the time so that the food would be ready at exactly half past five. They ate their meal in silence while Vernon read the newspaper and Betty watched his plate, and the clock ticked far too loudly.
Julia didn’t miss Vernon at all.
The sun and her comfortable chair were making her feel drowsy. Her thoughts turned from her own home to Mattie’s. When she had first met her, years ago, Mattie had asked her home to tea. Julia had never ventured on to the estate before. The vast expanse of it startled her. There were thousands of houses, all the same, looking as if they had been dropped from the sky in endless lines. There were no trees to suggest that anything had existed there before the houses came, no corner shops to break the monotony. Mattie’s street was identical to all the others, but her house looked more neglected. The sooty patch of front garden was cluttered with junk and rusty bits of machinery.
Mattie flung the door open. ‘You’d better come in. Don’t take any notice of anything,’ she added, with an odd fierceness.
Julia couldn’t have avoided noticing the noise, and the smell of frying onions. There seemed to be children squirming everywhere, Mattie’s four smaller brother and sisters. Mattie picked the baby up and flung her in the air until she hiccupped with delight. In the kitchen Mattie’s eldest sister was standing at the stove. Mattie didn’t ask, but Rozzie announced, ‘He’s out.’
Mattie’s anxious fierceness disappeared at once. ‘Make yourself at home,’ she said hospitably.
Julia looked round. Every surface in the room was piled up with broken toys and dirty clothes and open packets of food. She had a brief vision of her mother’s kitchen where every jar had its place and the floor was rinsed down every day with a solution of bleach.
‘Where’s your mum?’ she asked. As soon as she had said it she knew that it was tactless. But Betty was such a fixture in Fairmile Road, with her dusters and her sewing and the Light Programme on the wireless, it was hard to understand the absence of a similar figure for Mattie.
‘She’s in the hospital,’ Mattie told her expressionlessly. ‘She’s given up.’ She waved her hand at the mess as she spoke, so that Julia might have thought that it was just tidiness Mrs Banner had given up on.
‘It’s ready,’ Rozzie announced.
They took their places at the table. Mattie hoisted the baby on to her lap and fed her with spoonfuls from her own plate. The children ate ravenously, and in between mouthfuls they asked Julia dozens of inquisitive questions. Mattie made up silly names for the teachers and the other girls at their school, and Julia turned them into impromptu rhymes. Everyone laughed uproariously. The atmosphere in the steamy room was cheerful, in spite of the mess and the variety of smells. The liver and onions tasted good, and the small portions were helped by piles of potatoes.
It was different from everything Julia knew about.
‘I liked it at your house,’ she said afterwards, and Mattie beamed at her, surprised and pleased. That first afternoon made a bond between the two girls that grew steadily stronger. When Mrs Banner died a year later, Mattie turned to Julia for comfort, and it was Mattie who reinforced Julia in her depressing battles with her parents.
But she never told me about her father, Julia thought.
Not until this week.
If it had been wrong to leave Betty so abruptly,