Читать книгу Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection: Strangers, Bad Girls Good Women, A Woman of Our Times, All My Sins Remembered - Rosie Thomas - Страница 25

On Monday morning, on their way to work, Mattie and Julia found a public telephone box and squeezed into it together. They found the number they wanted, at last, through the operator.

‘Do you want me to talk to them?’ Julia asked, but Mattie shook her head.

‘I should do it.’

She dialled their local council offices and she explained to the official at the other end that she was ringing anonymously, and she had something very important to say. Speaking very slowly and carefully she gave her father’s name and address, and the names and ages of her brothers and sisters.

‘They aren’t safe with him,’ she said clearly. ‘I know they aren’t. Please will you send someone to see them? There’s no one left to look after them now.’

Julia heard the man’s voice crackle at the end of the line as he tried to make Mattie give him some more information.

‘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.

The terse abbreviations themselves seemed to breathe a world of backstage glamour. Experience was the difficulty.

Before leaving home, Mattie had belonged to an amateur theatrical group that staged twice-yearly productions like Peter Pan and Charley’s Aunt. The group was run by a spinster teacher who called Paris Paree and who disapproved of everything about Mattie. She kept her parts to a minimum, for all Mattie’s enthusiasm. So Mattie had nothing that she could dress up as theatrical experience, even adopting the kind of wishful expanded truth that she and Julia specialised in.

So Mattie bought the Stage and read every word, and went on dreaming of the day when she could call herself Leading F.

The flat in Manchester Square was an oasis away from work for them both. It was too small, there was nowhere for them to sit in the evenings except with Jessie in her room or on the makeshift beds in their own tiny bedroom. But Mattie and Julia weren’t particularly interested in sitting, and the flat became home in a matter of days. Jessie would wait for the girls to come home from work, and call out as soon as she heard one of them at the door.

‘Come on in here, let’s have a look at you. Tell me what’s going on out there, and pour me a drink while you’re about it.’

Julia and Mattie both acquired a taste for vodka under Jessie’s direction, but there was never enough to spare for them to do them much damage. With their wage packets at the end of the first full week’s work they bought Jessie two bottles, and a pair of the sheerest twelve-denier nylons.

‘What’re you trying to do to me?’ she demanded, pretending to be angry with them. But Jessie had surprisingly slim, pretty ankles. They made her put the stockings on at once and she stretched her feet out narcissistically to admire them.

‘I’ll do your hair for you, if you like,’ Mattie offered.

‘What’s the matter with my hair?’

‘You’ll see, when I’ve done it for you.’

Jessie didn’t just talk about herself, although the girls were fascinated by her stories. She talked to them about themselves, listening with genuine interest and prompting them with questions.

Julia described Betty and Vernon. She told Jessie about the coloured stars that she had innocently stuck on her bedroom walls, and about another time, only two years ago, when she had gone out on her first date. She knew that Betty wouldn’t allow her to go the pictures with a boy. That sort of thing was for much older girls, Betty believed, an awkward but necessary preliminary to being presented with the diamond ring. But the boy who had asked Julia out was much admired by the girls in her class, and by Julia herself. She went, and she told her mother that she was spending the evening with a girl from school. At five minutes past the time Julia had promised to come back, Vernon telephoned the girl’s mother.

And when Julia did reappear they were waiting at the front door for her. The boy had come to see her to the gate, and Vernon marched out to confront him. Julia never knew what he said to him, because Betty dragged her indoors. Vernon came in a moment later and locked and bolted the door as if he was shutting out evil itself.

Even as she described it to Jessie, Julia could smell the wet privet outside the window and feel the soft stinging of her mouth after the boy’s kisses in the cinema. She could still taste the shame, too, in the back of her throat like nausea. She was too ashamed even to look at the boy the next time they met. It was a long time afterwards, because Betty and Vernon had made her stay in for a month, and he never spoke to her again.

Jessie sighed and shifted her bulk in the chair. If Julia had expected Jessie to deplore her parents with her, Jessie refused to do anything of the kind.

‘It’s a shame, but there’s plenty of boys coming your way, duck, and kisses as well. Don’t tell me you don’t know that. It sounds to me as if your mum and dad were trying to do their best for you, that’s all, in their own way.’

‘What would you have done, Jessie?’

She laughed. ‘Asked the boy in first, so’s I could have a good look at him. And smacked your backside for lying to me, as soon as I got a chance.’

Mattie talked about her home too. Jessie soon knew all about Ricky and Sam, and Marilyn and Phil, and all their particular talents, and the funny things that they had done as babies and little children.

It was the things that Mattie left out that made Jessie’s little dark eyes peer shrewdly at her.

‘What about your ma?’

‘I told you. She died, three years ago.’

‘Miss her still?’

‘Yes. No. I don’t know. She never said very much, Mum didn’t. I know she loved us all, but she was ill a lot, for a long time, almost all the time I can remember. We got used to managing, Rozzie and me.’

‘And your dad?’

‘He’s all right.’

Mattie looked down, or away and out of the window, or got up on some pretext and left the room. Jessie didn’t ask that particular question more than two or three times. If Mattie didn’t want to talk about her father, then that was her own business. When Mattie came back into the room the last time, Jessie startled her with a sudden enveloping hug.

‘There’s my girl,’ she murmured, and Mattie smiled again.

Jessie loved physical warmth, and she was demonstrative in her affection. Julia was surprised by her weighty arms around her shoulders, and the relish of her smacking, vodka-wet kisses on her cheek. It was more surprising because neither Betty nor Vernon ever touched her, nor each other, seemingly.

‘Oh, I like a bit of a cuddle,’ Jessie beamed. ‘And Felix never lets me have one these days. He used to be such a lovely, affectionate little boy, but he’s that touchy about himself nowadays.’

It was Felix, oddly, who the girls found the more difficult to live with in those early days.

On one of the very first evenings, they found him standing at the door of their room looking in at the mess. The floor and the beds were strewn with tangled clothes and make-up and crumpled papers and discarded shoes.

‘Do you always live like this?’ he asked, raising one black eyebrow.

Mattie had muddled through in domestic chaos all her life, and Julia copied it as part of her rebellion against Betty.

‘Always,’ they chorused.

‘You don’t here,’ Felix said coldly. He watched as they sheepishly picked up their belongings and folded them away, and when he was satisfied he said, ‘The bathroom’s full of dripping stockings and things.’

‘Knickers and bras, you mean?’ Mattie tried to tease him.

‘I know what they are, thank you. Just don’t leave them slopping everywhere.’

They tried to make a joke between themselves about his old-maidishness but for some reason it didn’t amuse either of them particularly. The found themselves trying to be tidier, in order to please him.

Julia found it more confusing than Mattie did. Part of her resented Felix’s authority, but she submitted to it just the same. She wanted to challenge him, but she didn’t quite know how to do it. She found herself watching him covertly, admiring the way that he looked and dressed, trying to adopt some of his style for herself. She would stand in the kitchen doorway when he was cooking, looking at the way his hands moved amongst the pots and pans.

‘I wish I could do that,’ she said. Felix put down his boning knife and looked at her.

‘Why shouldn’t you be able to do it?’

He made room for her at the scrubbed worktop and she tried to copy him, but her fingers felt thick and stiff and the meat slithered awkwardly in her fist.

‘No. It’s like this,’ he said, and put his hand over hers. The knife moved, neatly severing the lean meat from the fat and glistening connective tissue. Felix’s skin was tawny against Julia’s whiteness, but his touch was light and dry, deliberately without significance.

Mattie and Julia speculated about 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 house or turn and run, and then she heard a sound. It was completely familiar, a tinny rattle and then a plop. It was a record, falling from the stack poised over the turntable of Ricky’s prized Dansette.

‘Ricky!’

A clatter obliterated the first tinny bars of music, and Ricky appeared at the boys’ bedroom door.

‘Mat?’

He hurtled down the stairs, a skinny boy of fifteen with Mattie’s hair, brutally cut so that it stood up in tufts all over his head.

‘Are you all right?’ she demanded.

He hugged her and they clung together, briefly, while Mattie stared fiercely at him.

‘’Course. Where’ve you been?’

Relief was making Mattie shake. ‘Where is he?’

Ricky knew what she meant, of course. ‘He’s out. He’s working, unloading crates at the Works. What are you shivering for?’

‘Nothing. It’s all right. Come on, let’s have some coffee.’

‘Bit of a mess in there,’ Ricky warned her.

The kitchen was a morass of dirty pans, plates and food. The smell of sour milk was almost overpowering.

‘Ricky …’

‘I know. Look, it doesn’t matter. Me and Sam’ll get around to it. It doesn’t bother us, you know.’

It didn’t, Mattie thought. And she had left them. So she had no right to come back and fuss about details. She cleared a space and filled the kettle, rinsing out two cups from the filthy stack. There was no fresh milk so they drank their coffee black, sitting out on the back step and looking across the hummocks of dandelions to the backs of the next row of houses. Ricky told her what had happened. A woman had come from the Council, a bossy woman with papers. Ted had refused to see her at first, telling Ricky and Sam to say that he was out, but she had come back, and then she had simply sat down to wait for him. She had looked at the house, and she had talked to Marilyn and Phil.

In the end Ted had appeared. Ricky and the others had been sent out of the room, but they had heard Ted shouting, and then mumbling. The woman had gone at last, and Ted had come to find them.

‘He looked,’ Ricky said, groping for the words, ‘he looked like Phil does when someone’s pinched her sweets, and then yelled at her for creating.’

Mattie knew that look of her father’s. Unwieldy anger, too big for him, subsiding quickly into cringing weakness. She had seen it that last time, here in the kitchen, with the kettle whistling. Only when he looked at Mattie there was something else, too. That hot, anxious longing. Mattie wrapped her fingers round her coffee cup to stop the shudder.

The woman from the Council had announced to Ted that there was evidence of neglect. Either the young ones must go to live with a relative, in more suitable circumstances, or a place would be found for them in a council home.

Ricky relayed the details with matter-of-fact calmness. He had worked out a way of living for himself, Mattie understood. Ricky would be all right, and Sam too. Sam was the family survivor, happy so long as he could play football on the scuffed fields beyond the estate. The younger ones, the girls, were living with Rozzie.

‘They’re okay,’ Ricky said. ‘It’s better than here.’

‘I know that,’ Mattie said heavily.

‘The council woman asked about you. Dad said you’d done a runner. He didn’t know where to, and didn’t care either.’

Mattie stood up quickly and put her cup with the rest of the dirty dishes. It seemed a pointless gesture to bother to wash it out.

‘I’m going to Rozzie’s to see them. Walk round there with me?’

Rozzie lived a mile away, further into the estate. They walked together, past the effortful gardens bright with zinnias and lobelia, and the rows of windows guarded by net curtains. Rozzie’s house was almost identical to the one they had just left, but better kept. The window frames and the door were painted maroon and there were marigolds growing under the windows.

Rozzie opened the door to them. Her flowered nylon housecoat hardly buttoned up over her stomach. She was eight months’ pregnant and her two-year-old son, runny-nosed, peered out from the shelter of her skirt. She didn’t smile.

‘So you’re back, then?’

Mattie nodded. Her sister had every right to be sullen, and Mattie had been expecting it. Rozzie was nineteen, and she had had to marry her car mechanic boyfriend two and a half years ago. The enchantment with one another had worn off almost before the wedding, and now they were confined here together with their baby. Then, suddenly, they had found themselves responsible for Rozzie’s little sisters, as well. ‘Just to see that you’re all right.’ Mattie added awkwardly, ‘And to say I’m sorry.’

‘Sorry?’

There was a silence, and then Rozzie jerked her head. ‘Well, you’d better come in. Phil? Marilyn? Mat’s here.’

They had been in the garden at the back, and they came pelting through to leap on to Mattie. She hugged them fiercely, pulling them close and burying her face against them.

They were well, and they looked happy enough. That was something.

For half an hour, they took all of Mattie’s attention. Then suddenly they were off, taking the little boy and Ricky with them. Mattie and Rozzie sat in the kitchen, drinking more watery coffee. The house was bleak and under-furnished, but it was clean. Mattie suddenly thought of Felix’s flat, with its simple, definite style and the bright touches of pottery and exotic Soho vegetables. She had got away, after all, and Rozzie hadn’t. Guilt dropped around her, weighty and sour with familiarity.

‘Do you need money?’ she blurted out. ‘I can send you my wages.’

‘We always need money, Barry and me. But Ted’s giving us plenty for the girls. Guilt money, isn’t it?’ They both knew that it was, of course. It would last for as long as he could hold on to the job. ‘You keep your wages. Until your plans work out, that is.’ Rozzie was teasing her, and they both laughed.

It was the right time for Mattie to leave. She didn’t want to stay to say difficult goodbyes to the younger ones.

‘Give them a kiss for me,’ she said abruptly. ‘Tell them I’ll be back to see them as soon as I can.’

She left Rozzie lighting another cigarette. The Orioles, ‘Cryin’ in the Chapel’, was on the wireless.

Mattie walked quickly, with her head up. The old widower in the house on the corner was cutting his square of grass and the scent of it mixed with the faint smell of flowers from the gardens. She looked past him as he paraded carefully with his mower, and she saw a man coming round the corner.

It was her father, and he saw her in the same instant. Mattie whirled round, looking for somewhere to run to, and he saw that too. He came towards her, past the old man and the patchy gardens. He was carrying a white paper bag, and there was a bottle under his arm. It wasn’t whisky, she saw. It was Tizer. He was bringing pop and sweets, an offering for his children.

He came closer, never taking his eyes off her, and then he stopped. He was so close that his body almost touched hers. Mattie stood rigidly.

‘You were going to run off, without even speaking to me. I’m still your dad, you know.’

There it was, the old, cajoling mock-severity. But less sure of itself now. There was wariness in his face. He was afraid, but he was still greedy. Mattie knew, and she shrank from what she remembered. He was guilty, and too weak to stop himself from compounding the guilt.

‘I’ve got to go,’ she whispered.

‘Where to? You’re here, aren’t you? You set the welfare people on me, didn’t you?’

She tried to square up to him. ‘I couldn’t leave Marilyn and Phil with you.’

‘Mat, what do you think I am?’

She knew him so well. His anger fronting his pathetic desires.

‘I know what you are,’ she said quietly.

She felt a momentary, viciously physical hatred of all men. But it was gone as quickly as it had come.

‘I wanted to say I was sorry, but you haven’t given me the chance,’ he said.

The creases in her father’s face touched her, and the sight of his big hand, dirty from work, still gripping the pop bottle. She loved him too, and she was exhausted by the obligations of love that pinioned her here amongst the boxy houses.

‘I’ve got to go.’ She was shouting, and the old man on the corner peered towards them.

Ted stared at her, stupidly. ‘Go where? I thought you were back. We can’t manage the place without you. We …’

‘You’ll have to manage. All of you.’

I’m not giving myself to you. I’m not going to sink down like Rozzie. I won’t. I can’t. I deserve better than that. I’m free now, aren’t I? In her head she was already running, the words pounding with her. I’m free, aren’t I? Ted hadn’t touched her, but she felt as if she had to wrench herself out of his grasp.

‘I’ll come and see the kids when I can.’ Mattie was breathless with the effort.

‘What about me?’ Like a baby, his face puckering.

‘Nothing about you. Don’t you understand? Nothing.’

She broke past him then, and started to run. Her legs carried her around the corner and away. She ran as far as she could and then walked, not wanting to stop and wait for a bus, all the way to the station. She took the return ticket out of her pocket and held it in her clenched fist, the torn edge of it digging into her palm. The train came almost at once and she climbed into it and stumbled to a seat. The dust puffed out from the cushion behind her head.

Sitting there, watching the backs of the houses and the factories and warehouses peel away past her, Mattie promised herself, I will do it. I’m going to be successful, and rich, and happy, and I won’t let that place pull me back again. None of the things that have happened matter at all, from now on. Only the things that are going to happen.

She felt the resolution stiffening her, as if her spine was a steel shaft. She leaned forward to peer through the grimy carriage window, as if she could see more clearly what was coming.

The party was originally Julia’s idea, but Mattie seized on it with insistent enthusiasm. She seemed to light on everything now, Julia noticed, making whatever they did important just by concentrating very hard on it.

‘Give a party for Jessie? Of course we must do it. Listen, we’ll make it just like the old evenings that Jessie talks about. Squeeze everyone in, make sure everyone has a good time …’ Mattie snatched a piece of paper and a pencil, and began making a list. ‘Friends of ours, not too many, but enough. Felix will have to help us to round up Jessie’s friends. As many as we can. We’ll have singing, and vodka martinis …’

Mattie had been taken out once or twice by a dubious club owner, and he had introduced her to vodka martinis. Under the influence of three or four of them Mattie had had more trouble than usual in fending him off, and she had only managed the last time by jumping out of his Ford Zephyr and running away. The girls thought that the cocktails were the height of sophistication.

Plans for the party took off with surprising speed. Slightly to their surprise, even Felix plunged into them. ‘We’ll have to have it at home,’ he agreed. ‘Jessie won’t go out anywhere else. Leave it to me to invite the people she would like to see.’

They kept it a secret from her as long as they could, but they were too excited and the girls wanted to share the pleasure of anticipation with her.

‘Don’t be so silly,’ she snapped. ‘I’m past the age for all that nonsense.’ But they knew from the way that her eyes brightened that she was delighted.

Felix said that he would provide the food. Julia and Mattie, without thinking much about it, had imagined sandwiches.

‘Meat paste sandwiches, I suppose?’ Felix scoffed.

They realised that all the vodka martinis they could afford wouldn’t go far either.

‘Tell everyone to bring a bottle,’ Felix advised.

‘And what about the music?’ Felix’s record player was unreliable, and there was no piano in the flat so there was no point in Mattie and Julia dreaming of the kind of pianist who thumped out the old songs in Jessie’s stories.

‘Don’t worry,’ Felix answered. ‘Bish is coming.’

Jessie had told them all about that. Freddie Bishop played the mouth-organ to compete with a twenty-piece dance band.

On the day of the party, Felix went out very early, to Soho. He came back with two bulging shopping baskets and shut himself in the kitchen. Mattie and Julia contented themselves with pushing back the furniture in Jessie’s room, the only decently sized space in the flat. Then they turned their attention to Jessie herself. They rummaged mercilessly in her wardrobe, exclaiming and pulling out dresses and holding them up against her.

‘You’re wasting everyone’s time,’ Jessie said. ‘None of those things will go anywhere near me now.’

‘This red skirt will, look, it’s loose.’

‘And this coat with the sequins. You’ll look like Ella Fitzgerald. When did you wear all these wonderful things?’

‘In my heyday, dear, in my heyday.’

Mattie wound Jessie’s hair up on to rollers, and they practised painting her face with their Outdoor Girl cosmetics. By early evening she was giggling with them, as over-excited as a schoolgirl. Felix emerged from the kitchen with a blast of spicy cooking smells, and helped them to lay out the glasses and plates borrowed from a restaurant, one of Jessie’s old haunts. The proprietor and his wife had promised to come to the party after closing time. Then, when everything else was ready, Julia and Mattie retired to prepare themselves.

Mattie had made herself a dress, from a bolt of greeny-black shot taffeta with a bad flaw in it, picked up for a few shillings from one of the stalls at the top end of Berwick Street market. The bodice was strapless, and she had sewn it tight to show more of her cleavage. The skirt was full, puffed out with layers of net petticoats. Using her staff discount, she had bought herself a pair of wicked black stiletto-heeled shoes. They were so high that they made her almost as tall as Julia. Mattie brushed her hair out into a froth of curls, and then spun round, admiring herself, until her skirts whirled up to show her black stocking tops.

‘I just hope the top stays up,’ she murmured, hitching at it so that the creamy skin with its faint powdering of freckles bulged even more precariously over the taffeta.

Julia hated sewing. She had planned to make do with one of her own or Mattie’s dancing outfits, but in Jessie’s wardrobe she had discovered a red embroidered silk kimono. She wound it round herself, tighter and tighter, until it was a twisted column of scarlet splashed with fronds of abstract colour. She found a black silk shawl and tied it around her waist, letting the fringed ends trail down at the back. And, with a touch of last minute inspiration, she fasted her hair up on the top of her head, and stuck the poppies from an old hat into a comb at the back.

When they emerged, Jessie was sitting in her chair, dressed up, ready to hold court. Felix had been sitting beside her, filling her glass. He looked at Mattie and Julia, his eyes travelling critically up and down, while they held their breath.

And then he smiled.

‘At last,’ he pronounced. ‘You’re getting the idea.’ Mattie was like Turkish Delight, he thought. Scented and powdery and overpowering. Julia was a tall, white-skinned geisha, as clean and sappy as a peeled willow wand. His eyes slid back to her.

There was a moment’s silence and then, from far down at the bottom of the house beyond the empty offices, they heard the bell ringing.

‘People!’ Mattie yelled, and ran to the door.

By some miracle, the party, so casually and sketchily planned, was a roaring success from the very beginning.

The people flowed in and filled Jessie’s room, and overflowed into Felix’s bedroom and the kitchen and even the bathroom. Freddie Bishop perched on Mattie’s bed and played the mouth-organ, someone else had brought a guitar and a banjoist arrived after the pubs closed, and the guests danced and swayed and spilled down the stairs past the deserted offices. Most of them were Jessie’s old friends from her club days. There were men who brought their own whisky bottle and held firmly on to it, women who laughed a lot and shook their lacquered heads, singers and barmen and waiters and painters, and even one or two policemen. They mixed with big black men in trilby hats and coloured shirts, regulars from the Rocket, Felix’s student friends, and Johnny Flowers and his coterie who devoted themselves to pursuing Mattie and Julia, all together in a big, hot, happily drunken mêlée.

That first party became the prototype, in their memories, for all the others that followed it through the short Soho years.

There was never enough food. That night Felix had made chilli, in a huge saucepan, with red kidney beans and chopped steak, hot chorizo sausage and chillies, and it vanished in an instant, with a great vat of rice. But there was always drink, from the bottles brought in instead of invitation cards, and noisy music, familiar faces and beguiling new ones to focus on.

Jessie sat in state in her chair, presiding like a queen over the stream of people who came to greet her. Felix had done a wonderful job in searching them all out. Mattie and Julia danced, talked and laughed, and drank whatever was put into their hands. Even Felix, for once, was more of a participant than an observer.

Johnny Flowers was drunk, but Julia thought she must be drunker. Everything seemed wonderfully funny and her legs kept twisting around themselves inside the tight kimono.

‘I saw you first,’ Johnny complained, as he tried to extricate her from the arms of one of his friends. ‘And you still owe me a pound.’

‘You said we were quits. Dance with Mattie.’

‘Everyone else in the room is falling over Mattie.’

It was true. Mattie was in the middle of a tight circle. Her face was flushed, but she was in perfect control. She was very good at keeping the onslaught at arm’s length.

‘Sit down here with me, then.’

Julia and Johnny slid down to the floor together. They sat with their backs propped against the wall, their knees drawn up to keep there feet from being trampled on. Felix saw them, but he didn’t let his attention wander from his conversation with a friend of Mr Mogridge’s.

‘You two,’ Johnny said admiringly. ‘Have you always been friends?’

‘Mattie and me? Yes, for ever. Since I was eleven and she was twelve. Do you know where I first saw her?’

Johnny let his head fall on to her shoulder. ‘Mmm? Tell me.’

‘Blick Road Girls’ Grammar School. My first day. I can see her now.’ At the other end of a long corridor, Mattie had turned a corner, with the sun behind her. It shone through her hair, turning it into a pale and glamorous halo. But as she came closer, Julia saw that the halo had come to rest on the wrong head. Julia’s own uniform was pin-new, correct and proud in every fold and button. Mattie’s gym-slip was short and cinched in at the waist with a wide elastic belt. She had real breasts. There was no sign of the hideous bottle-green and chrome-yellow striped tie that they were all supposed to wear. Mattie’s grubby shirt was open at the neck, showing a deep V of milky skin powdered with freckles. Her white socks were as dirty as her shirt, and longer than the regulation ankle-length, emphasising the swell of her calves. Her shoes were the triumph. They were bright red, with pert little heels. ‘I thought she was wonderful. I wanted to be her. But I just said, “Excuse me, I’m lost.” Mattie looked me up and down, very very slowly, and then she put her head on one side and smiled at me. She said, “You don’t look lost. In fact you look as if you were manufactured here. Made in Blick Road.” I wanted to rip off my tie, and stuff it in my stupid shiny satchel, and throw the whole lot into the canal.’

‘But I did show you the way.’

They looked up and saw Mattie leaning over them. Her breasts swelled inside the black taffeta and Johnny Flowers groaned. He reached up to cup one of them, but Mattie slapped his hand down.

‘Hands off the goods,’ she grinned.

‘And after that there was the Christmas Party,’ Julia reminded her. ‘Then I knew we had to be friends.’ They laughed delightedly at the memory of it. Fifty little girls in organdie dresses and white socks. And Mattie, with her hair up in a French pleat, done up in a bright blue shiny low-cut dress of her mother’s, with wedge-heeled peep-toe shoes, and real nylons. Most of the little girls giggled at her. It didn’t occur to them that Mattie might not have a party dress of her own to wear.

There was a talent contest. Most of the contributions were piano duets, or recitations. And then, at the end, Mattie had jumped up on the stage to sing a song.

The song was ‘Ma, He’s Making Eyes at Me’.

Mattie’s singing voice was unremarkable, but the enthusiasm of her delivery made up for that. She went through the volume range from whisper to shout, with a supporting repertoire of winks and smiles. The performance was absurd, but her confidence and a hint of real talent carried it off for her.

The last line of the song, delivered at full-throated roar, was ‘Mama, he’s kissing me!’ In the crescendo of chords that followed as her pianist tried for her share of the limelight, Mattie pursed her red lips and blew a lingering kiss at the girls and teachers.

There was a terrible silence.

‘It was Julia,’ Mattie remembered, ‘who jumped on to her chair and clapped her hands until they nearly fell off. It was after that that we made friends.’

‘And slid down together all the way to here.’

They looked so young, and fresh, and pleased with their loucheness, even to Johnny who was hardly any older, that he laughed and draped his arms around their necks and kissed them.

‘C’mon, you two. I can’t handle you both. Let’s have another drink. By the way, who won the talent contest?’

They stared at him, and then dissolved into giggles. ‘A girl with pigtails and glasses. Who recited Walter de la Mare.’

Later, they weren’t sure how much later, they saw Jessie being helped to her feet, supported by two waiters from there favourite Italian restaurant. Julia was ready to run forward to help her, thinking that she must be overcome by heat or vodka, and then she saw that Jessie was beaming with pride. She held up her hand.

‘Albert’s asked me to sing. I couldn’t say no, could I?’

There was an instant storm of cheers. Freddie Bishop wriggled forward and cupped his hands to his mouth yet again.

Jessie sang.

She loved all the old songs, of course, ‘We’ll Meet Again’, and ‘Tipperary’, and ‘Pack Up Your Troubles’. Everyone, all the people crowded in the smoky rooms, sang with her. Felix saw the rekindled light in her face, and he knew that in her heart she was back in her club bar, with the curtains tightly drawn, and her friends and customers around the piano. He looked across the room, and his eyes met Julia’s.

‘Thank you,’ he whispered to her through the singing, and she dipped her dark head at him.

Jessie held up her huge, pale arms. ‘I’ve got two new friends,’ she called out, ‘who made this party for me, with my Felix. Come over here, both of you, and sing with me.’ She beckoned to Julia and Mattie. When they reached her Julia whispered, ‘I can’t sing. Mattie’ll do my bit for me. Jessie, do you know “Ma, He’s Making Eyes at Me?” ’

‘Of course I know it,’ Jessie roared.

They sang it together, the two of them, as if they had been rehearsing it for years. Julia saw that Mattie had grown into the ripeness that she had caricatured at Blick Road. The eyes of every man in the room were fixed on her. Of everyone except Felix, because Felix was looking at Julia. Julia didn’t feel even a tremor of jealousy. She closed her eyes, and let the ridiculous song bridge the years back to Blick Road school. She loved Mattie. This was her family now, she thought, prophetically. Mattie, and Jessie, and Felix.

‘Mama, he’s kissing me!’

There was no terrible silence this time. There were whistles and shouts and applause. Near Felix a small, thin man with a little thin moustache was clapping too.

‘That girl packs quite a punch,’ he murmured, to no one in particular. ‘She can’t sing, but she must have plenty of other talents. What can I find for her to do?’

Two important things happened that evening, although at the time they seemed hardly more important than the other snatches of talk, promises and pleas and evasions, that rose with the plumes of cigarette smoke.

Mr Mogridge’s friend eased Felix into a corner. He had looked carefully around the flat, and now he said, ‘Did this place up yourself, didn’t you? Tommy Bull told me. Made quite a nice job of it, I must say. Listen, I’ve got a proposition. I’ve got some flats, I want ’em done up and furnished for letting. Quality letting, mind. Tasteful, but nothing too fancy. Like this place. Do you want to take the job on for me? I pay well.’

Felix studied the man. He didn’t like him any better than he liked Mr Mogridge or Mr Bull, and when the man said quality letting he knew that he meant No Blacks or Irish, like the signs in the landladies’ windows. Then he thought about the life studio, and the art school exercises languishing in his portfolio.

‘All right,’ he said quietly. ‘I’ll take the job on for you.’

The man with the thin moustache went over to Mattie when the storm following her song had died down. He took a card out of his wallet and handed it to her. Mattie read the name, Francis Willoughby, and the title, Manager, Headline Repertory Companies.

‘I’ve got three companies on the road at the moment,’ he said grandly. ‘I need a girl Friday to help me out in our London offices. All aspects of theatre work, on the administration side. You interested?’

‘Yes,’ Mattie whispered. She reached out for the card as if it was the Holy Grail.

‘Give me a tinkle, then.’ The man peeled his lips back in a smile.

Jessie fell into her sudden sleep not long after that, and the crowds began to trickle away.

Julia stood with Johnny’s arms around her. She wasn’t sure that she could hold herself up without his support. His mouth felt very hot on her neck, and he was excited. She could feel him pushing against her. Over his shoulder, she saw Felix. He bent down to pick up an empty glass, and then he walked away.

This wasn’t what she had planned for tonight, Julia realised. It shouldn’t be like this. But she was too tired now, and too drunk, to change anything.

‘Come on, darling,’ Johnny begged her.

‘No. I can’t. Tomorrow.’

‘Okay.’ He sighed. ‘Not tonight. But tomorrow, or sooner. You can’t keep me gasping for you like this, baby. Look. It’s bad for me.’

Julia shut her eyes.

Johnny picked her up and carried her to her bed. He laid her down and pulled the covers over her, kimono and all, and left her there.

Julia opened her eyes once more and saw that she was safe, although Felix wasn’t there. The room was spinning around her but she shut her eyes again anyway, and plunged down into the revolving tunnel of sleep.