.

him in private.

      ‘Do you think he’s queer?’ Julia asked. They could usually divide men up between them. Most of them went for Mattie, with her seemingly uninhibited voluptuousness, but Julia had her share of admirers too. But Felix was mysterious, fastidious, uninterested in their messy femininity.

      Mattie considered. They weren’t sure, either of them, that they had ever seen a real homosexual.

      ‘No. He can’t be, can he? They’re all like this.’ Mattie stood with one hand on her hip, the other dangling limply. Her face puckered up into a faint simper and Julia laughed.

      ‘Felix isn’t one, then.’

      One afternoon he found them lolling on Mattie’s bed reading. Mattie had the Stage folded carefully so that she could read every column, and Julia, with her head propped on one hand, was reading Gone With The Wind. She went through phases of burying herself in books, creating her own temporary oblivion inside an imaginary world.

      Felix took out his sketch pad and drew them.

      When he had finished he let them look at the pencil sketch.

      There was a moment’s silence as they looked at themselves as Felix saw them. Mattie was all loose, blowsy curves, her bare thigh showing between the flaps of her dressing gown, her hair rolling over her shoulders. Beside her Julia was angular, darkfaced and scowling.

      ‘You haven’t made us look very pretty,’ Julia said at last.

      ‘Is that what you want to be? Pretty?’

      ‘Of course.’

      ‘Well, you aren’t. You’ve got more than that, both of you. You’ve got style, although you don’t know how to use it yet.’

      They forgot their momentary pique and scrambled at him. Mattie locked her arms around him, affectionate, just as she would have been with Ricky or Sam. Julia hung back, only a little.

      ‘Show us, then, if you’re so clever.’

      ‘I might.’

      Julia retrieved the drawing and smoothed the creases out of it. She pinned it carefully over the tiny black cast-iron fire grate in their bedroom.

      That night, the three of them went back to the Rocket Club. Before they went out the girls presented themselves for Felix’s approval.

      ‘Too much stuff on your faces, as usual,’ was his verdict. So they rubbed the make-up off again and, giggling, let him reapply it. Julia kept her eyes turned down as he worked on her face, inches away.

      When he had finished they stared at the result in the bathroom mirror.

      ‘Naked. As though we’ve just got up,’ Mattie declared.

      In fact they just looked younger, and less knowing. As they really were, Felix thought, instead of how they wanted to be.

      ‘What about the clothes, then?’

      They had picked through their outfits with care, but Felix only glanced at them and shrugged.

      ‘You should buy one good, simple thing instead of five shoddy ones. That’ll take time.’

      ‘That’s stupid. Cheaper things mean you have more to wear,’ Mattie protested. But Julia suddenly saw the point. Felix himself owned hardly any clothes. He had just two jerseys, one black and one navy-blue, but they were both cashmere. His trousers and jacket were well cut, on fashionable but subdued lines, and his shoes were expensive, glossy Italian slip-ons. He kept them well polished, and he put them away with shoe trees in them when he took them off, instead of letting them lie where they fell on the floor. Julia thought Felix always looked wonderful, and she recognised the contrast with her own and Mattie’s reckless scruffiness.

      That was the beginning of Julia’s longing for exquisite, expensive, unattainable luxuries.

      ‘Enjoy yourselves,’ Julia called out. ‘My God, I wish I had my time over again.’

      They headed for the Rocket, three abreast, with their arms linked.

      The cellar welcomed them like a second home. The girls abandoned themselves to the music, to the frenetic jiving, to the packed mass of bodies and the overpowering heat. Felix held himself apart for a moment longer. He had spent so many solitary evenings in places like this that it was disorientating, for an instant, to find himself possessed by Mattie and Julia. Yet in the past, sometimes, he had longed for company on his lonely expeditions.

      He had company now, he told himself, whether he liked it or not. He sometimes resented the invasion that these girls had made into his home, and their noisy, shrill, intrusive presence in the tidy flat. But they had done more for Jessie in a matter of days than he had been able to do himself in a year. He was grateful for that. And almost in spite of himself he liked them for themselves too, consolidating the way that he had been drawn to them from the beginning.

      ‘Come on, don’t stand there,’ Mattie ordered him. ‘Dance with me.’

      Felix took hold of her, feeling the peculiar softness of her flesh under his fingers. He was glad that it was Mattie first. She was completely foreign to him, the whole scented spread of her, and in a way that was easy for him to deal with. He could treat her like Jessie, with affection that kept her at a physical distance, even in the tiny flat.

      It was Julia who disturbed him.

      He watched her narrow hips as she went up the stairs ahead of him, and he found himself wanting to reach out and touch the knobs of her spine when she bent her head and exposed the nape of her neck.

      Felix had no idea what girls expected or understood, and he was incapable of making the movement that would bring his fingertips to rest on those fragile bones. His uncertainty made him try harder to be impersonal, to keep the space between them cool and clear and neutral.

      Felix knew that he was a coward.

      Across the room, with a flickering candle throwing odd shadows upwards into the hollows of his face, Julia saw Johnny Flowers. He was wearing a black leather jacket over a white vest, and he saw her at the same instant. He shouldered his way across to her.

      ‘Like I said, I’m always around.’

      ‘I’ll still have to owe you your pound. I haven’t got it.’

      Julia and Mattie spent everything they earned, instantly. Everything that was left over from the much-needed rent went on clothes.

      Johnny Flowers grinned. ‘Dance with me and we’ll call it quits.

      The next afternoon was Mattie’s first half-day. She had had to wait her turn for a weekday afternoon off, and it had seemed a long time coming. Now it had arrived, she knew where she must go.

      Without telling Jessie and Felix, without mentioning it even to Julia, she made her way back on the tube to Liverpool Street station. At the clerk’s little glass porthole she bought a ticket, a day return. She tore the ticket in half at once and she put the return portion in the pocket of her blouse, next to her heart, like a talisman. At the same time she smiled, privately and bitterly. It wasn’t so easy to escape that a small oblong of green pasteboard could achieve it for her.

      The estate, lying baldly under a grey sky, was exactly the same. Mattie walked the familiar route, trying to pretend that her breath was coming easily instead of in panicky gasps.

      The house, when she came to it, looked the same too. The windows were closed and the stringy curtains were drawn, but that was nothing unusual. No one had remembered to open them, Mattie thought. Then she opened the front door. She smelt stale air and sour milk, and listened to the oppressive silence.

      A different fear swelled up, bigger, threatening to choke her.

      Ted wasn’t here.

      None of them was here. Where were the children, and what had he done to them?

      She half turned, not knowing whether she was going to stumble on into the