right.’
She steered Mattie up the cramped stairs, with Betty fussing behind them.
Vernon still wanted to impose his own order. ‘I should telephone your father, at least, to say where you are. I wouldn’t want him made anxious on our account.’ He lifted up a china doll with an orange net skirt from the hall table. The telephone sat underneath the skirt. At lot of things in the Smiths’ house had covers. Even Mr Smith’s Ford Popular, parked outside, had a mackintosh coat.
‘We’re not on the telephone,’ Mattie said.
Betty made Julia go back to bed. In the white tiled bathroom Mattie washed her face with the wholesome Pears soap laid out for her. Her distorted face in the mirror looked older under its tangle of hair. Betty knocked on the door and handed her a bottle of TCP.
‘Put some of this on your poor mouth,’ she said.
The small kindness brought Mattie to the edge of tears again.
She went into the spare room and climbed under the turquoise eiderdown. She fell asleep at once.
In the morning, at six o’clock, Julia came in with a cup of tea. She opened the curtains and looked out. In the early light the row of back gardens was tidy and innocent, its squares of lawn surrounded by pink hybrid tea roses. Julia turned her back as if she hated them.
‘What happened?’ she asked.
Mattie looked away, and Julia climbed in at the bottom of the bed, pulling the eiderdown around her. ‘What happened?’ she persisted.
And then, lying there wrapped in the eiderdown and enclosed by the room’s sprigged wallpaper, whispering so that Betty and Vernon wouldn’t hear, Mattie told her.
Julia listened, with anger and disgust and sympathy mounting inside her. Afterwards, with two bright spots of colour showing in her cheeks, she held Mattie’s hand between both of hers.
‘Why didn’t you ever tell me before?’
‘I don’t know,’ Mattie said. She was crying now, tears pouring down her cheeks and making a dark patch on the turquoise cover. She had told Julia everything, the smallest details that she had kept boxed up for so long. And at once, amazingly, she had felt her guilt lifting. Julia hadn’t cried out in horror, or accusation, of course. Had she been afraid for all this time that it was really her own fault?
‘It’s all right.’ Julia hugged her, making inarticulate, comforting noises. ‘Mat, it’s all right. You’ve got me. We’ve got each other.’
At last, the storm of crying subsided. Mattie sniffed, rubbing her eyes with the back of her hand.
‘Sorry. Thanks. Look at me.’
‘No thanks.’
They laughed, shakily. Julia was relieved to see Mattie lifting her chin up again. She would be all right. Everything would come back to her, once they had got away. Excitement, a fierce heat, was beginning to boil inside Julia, fuelled by her anger. It was hard to talk calmly as the idea took hold of her.
‘Listen, Mattie, this is what we’ll do. You don’t have to go back there to him. We’ll just go. We’ll leave all of this …’ She waved through the bedroom window, and the gesture took in the bland gardens, the grid of streets with their semi-detached houses that made up the nice part of town, and the sprawling, featurelessly brutal estate beyond, where Mattie lived. It included the High Street, with its Odeon showing East of Eden, and the single milk bar with half a dozen teds lounging outside it, the red-brick church that Betty and Vernon belonged to and the Youth Club hall behind it, the grammar school where Mattie and Julia had met, and where they had made their first small gestures of defiance. The gestures had grown as they got older. Mattie and Julia would have been expelled, if they hadn’t been much cleverer than their anxious counterparts.
Julia’s grand gesture took in the whole of the dull, virtuous suburb, and rejected it. ‘We’ll go to London. We’ll find ourselves jobs, and we’ll find a flat. Then we can live, can’t we? We always said we would, didn’t we?’
Up to London was where they went when they skipped off school for the day. They went up on Saturday nights now, when they had enough money to go dancing at a club. It was a glittering, covetable world, distant, but now, suddenly, within reach.
‘We’ve talked about it so often.’ Sitting in the park, with their backs against the green railings. Trailing slowly home from school. Whispering, over slow cups of coffee.
Carefully, Mattie said, ‘I could pack in my job easily enough.’ Since leaving Blick Road Grammar she had worked as a filing clerk in an estate agency, and she hated every minute of it. Mattie wanted to be an actress. She wanted it so much that Julia teased her about it. ‘But you’re still at school.’
‘Bugger school,’ Julia said triumphantly. ‘Dad wants me to be a secretary. Not a typist, you know. A private secretary, to a businessman. Mum wants me to be married to a solicitor or a bank manager. I don’t want to be either of those. Why should I stay at school to do typing and book-keeping? We can go, Mattie. Out there, where we belong.’
She flung her arm in a dramatic gesture.
Mattie and Julia travelled in their imagination together, away from Fairmile Road and the colourless suburban landscape.
‘What about your mum and dad?’ Mattie persisted.
Julia clenched her fists, and then let them fall open, impotent. Mattie knew some of how she felt, but it was still difficult to put it into words. Even more difficult now, because it sounded so trivial after Mattie’s confession. But Julia felt that this little, tidy house wound iron bands around her chest, stopping her breathing. She was confined by her parents’ love and expectations. She knew that they loved her, and she was sure that she didn’t deserve it. Their disapproval of Mattie, and of Julia’s own passions, masked their frightened anxiety for her. Perhaps they were right to be anxious, Julia thought. She knew that she couldn’t meet their expectations. Vernon and Betty wanted a replica of themselves. Julia wanted other, vaguer, more violent things for herself. Not a life like Betty’s, she was sure of that.
‘I’m like a cuckoo in this house,’ Julia said.
They looked around the spare bedroom, and smiled at each other.
‘If I go now, with you, they’ll be shocked but perhaps it’ll be better in the end. Better than staying here, getting worse. And when we’re settled, when we’ve made it, it will be different. We’ll all be equal. They won’t have to fight me all the time.’
It was all when, Julia remembered, sitting on the Embankment with all her possessions at her feet, and afterwards, years afterwards. We never thought if, in those days, Mattie and me.
Mattie had smiled suddenly, a crooked smile at first because of her broken lip, but then it broadened recklessly. ‘When shall we go?’
‘Today,’ Julia said. ‘Today, of course.’
Later, when Vernon was at work and Betty had gone shopping, Julia gathered her belongings together and flung them into two suitcases. Mattie wouldn’t go home even for long enough to collect her clothes, so Julia’s would have to do for both of them.
There was no time to spare. Betty was seldom out of the house for more than an hour. In the frantic last minute, Julia scribbled a note to her. There was no time to choose the words, no time to think what she was saying. I’m going, that was all.
She remembered the carelessness of that, later.
The girls caught the train from the familiar, musty local station. On the short journey they crammed into the lavatory and made up their faces in the dim mirror.
Liverpool Street station seemed larger, and grimmer than it had looked on their earlier adventures. Mattie flung out her arms.
‘The Big City welcomes us.’ But she was looking at Julia with faint anxiety. Julia smiled determinedly back.