‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I can’t say any more.’
And then she replaced the receiver with a click that made the bell jingle faintly in its casing. She pushed open the heavy door of the kiosk and the girls stepped out into the street. Mattie was shivering.
‘I’ve abandoned them, haven’t I?’ she said bitterly. ‘I feel so bad. Like a traitor.’
‘You aren’t a traitor.’ Julia tried to soothe her.
‘I shouldn’t have left them. Phil’s only seven. What does she know? But I couldn’t stay in that house with him, could I? If he did it again …’
My fault, Mattie began thinking, as she had done a thousand times before. It must have been my fault, some of it. But if I went back, and he did it again … there was the bread knife, lying beside the waxed wrapper of the sliced loaf. She heard a scream – her own or her father’s? – and saw the blood … Mattie shuddered, and felt Julia’s hand on her arm. Warm and friendly, that was all, not twisting or cajoling.
‘Mattie, it’s all right.’
‘Is it?’
She had to leave. After the vision of violence she thought of Ted with a queasy mixture of pity and revulsion and, still, a kind of love. She couldn’t have stayed. Julia was right, of course.
Julia said, ‘You’ve done what you can for now. And you have done, ever since your mum died. It’s Rozzie’s turn to take some of the responsibility now.’ When Mattie didn’t answer she added, ‘You can’t be everything to everyone.’
Mattie stopped shivering, and her shoulders dropped.
‘No, I suppose I can’t. I didn’t even know I was trying to. I wish I saw things as clearly as you do. I wish I saw Ted clearly.’ It was the first time since they had left home that Mattie had spoken his name. As if it was a physical link with him, she snapped the words off and she didn’t talk about him again. Mattie’s face was white and taut under the heavy mass of hair.
Julia wanted to say something else, to show her that she understood, but she couldn’t because she couldn’t even imagine what Ted Banner must have been like. The gulf between what had happened to Mattie and Vernon’s rigid correctness was too wide. She had the sense that she had failed Mattie, and she was reduced to mumbling, ‘It’ll be all right. I know it will.’
Mattie’s expression didn’t change, but in a different, warmer voice she said, ‘We’d better go to work, hadn’t we? Sell some shoes.’
‘Type some accounts.’
Make our way, Julia thought, with a touch of wryness. That’s what we’ve come for, isn’t it?
‘See you later, at home.’
The word sprang hearteningly between them as they waved goodbye. Felix, and Jessie, and the rooftop flat stood between them and the Embankment now, and that was a good beginning. Julia saw Mattie’s blonde curls swallowed up by the throngs of people heading for work, and she turned round herself, more cheerfully, and began to walk briskly to the accounts office.
The thoughts of the Sunday they had enjoyed together remained with Julia as she slid into her typist’s chair and started work. They had stayed sitting round the table, talking and laughing, until the vodka was all gone. Jessie had slipped by stages through excited volubility to dignified, precisely enunciated drunkenness, and then into sudden sleep.
The girls liked her more and more. She had told them the story of Desmond Lemoine. ‘He played the sax, dear. In all the big bands, he was. Even better looking than him,’ with a wink at Felix, who was looking out of the window. ‘Not that Felix uses his looks to much advantage.’ She told them about other lovers, too, with an impartial enthusiasm that deeply impressed Mattie and Julia. At home they had cast themselves as the bad girls, although in fact neither of them had ‘gone all the way’, as they described it in whispers. Julia had come close, in an uncomfortable, awkward grapple, with a boy from the technical college who was supposed to look like Dirk Bogarde. It was harder to tell with Mattie. Mattie was the best at sharp, suggestive repartee on the dance floor, but she was reticent about what happened outside, afterwards, even to Julia.
But Jessie’s stories, as the vodka slipped down, gave them an insight into a world they had never even glimpsed before. It was a salty, indoor world of smoky rooms and overflowing glasses and itinerant musicians. It was a world where, it seemed, you could do whatever you liked provided everyone was enjoying it.
While Mattie and Julia sat still, amazed and enchanted, Felix watched with an air of having heard it all before. He didn’t contribute anything, but he seemed perfectly at ease.
‘I’ve had a good life,’ Jessie said at last. A vast yawn stretched her face into a series of overlapping circles. ‘You listen to me, you girls. You make sure you enjoy yourselves. But don’t act stupid, will you?’
Felix’s face was almost hidden in the shadow. Mattie and Julia glanced at each other. And then they saw that Jessie’s head had fallen forwards on her chest. Her breathing deepened and fluttered on the edge of a snore.
Felix stood up, silently, and arranged the cushions behind his mother’s head. He lifted her feet on to a stool and put a blanket over her legs. Julia picked up the bottle, empty, intending to tidy it away. She had noticed how punctiliously Felix had cleared away the plates after their meal.
‘Should she drink all that?’ she asked.
Felix looked at her. ‘No. But I’m not going to dictate to her about it, because it wouldn’t do any good.’
Jessie wasn’t a person to dictate to, of course. They left her asleep and went outside. The three of them walked companionably through the empty Sunday streets, and Felix took them into Regent’s Park. They wandered past the heavy, musky roses in Queen Mary’s Garden, talking about ordinary things, what they did and what they enjoyed and believed in, making the beginnings of friendship, as they had pledged over their meal.
‘Miss Smith?’
Julia’s supervisor was standing in front of her, looking pointedly at her fingers resting idly on the typewriter keys.
‘I’m sorry,’ Julia muttered, and bent to her work again.
She already hated the accounts department. Her typing was good enough in short bursts, but when she had to keep at it for longer it disintegrated. By the end of the day her head and fingers throbbed and she had used a whole bottle of opaque white. The other girls at the rows of desks were the kind Mattie dismissed as ‘pink cardigans’. They did wear cardigans, tidy ones that buttoned up to the neck over their shirtwaister dresses. They wore pink lipstick too, and touches of pale blue eyeshadow, and most of them proudly displayed diamond engagement rings. They stared covertly at Julia in her crumpled black clothes and defiantly flat pumps. Mattie and Julia favoured colourless lips and deadly pale face make-up, and they emphasised their eyes with lashings of black mascara and black eyeliner painted on with an upwards flick at the corners of their eyelids.
Julia stared unsmiling back at the other typists. She knew that she stuck out amongst them, but she was still too young and too awkward to carry her difference off with confidence. She kept mulishly to herself, refusing to acknowledge that she felt lonely and uncomfortable.
It’s only for now, she told herself, over and over again. Until I find, something else. It was not knowing what else, and the suspicion that there might not be anything, that was really frightening.
Mattie wasn’t enjoying her work much more than Julia, but she had the diversion of being able to watch the women who came into the shop all day long. She watched the way they sat, and they way they looked at themselves in the mirrors, and the attitudes they adopted towards herself and the other shopgirls. And Mattie had the consolation of a particular dream. She bought the Stage and pored over the small ads.
Wanted, Huddersfield. With experience. One leading F two M to juv one char. Start immediately.