Читать книгу Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection: Strangers, Bad Girls Good Women, A Woman of Our Times, All My Sins Remembered - Rosie Thomas - Страница 27

Julia waited for a week. Every evening she ran through the home-going crowds and into the square, certain that Josh would be there. But every evening at the top of the stairs there was only Jessie in her chair.

‘I know he’ll come,’ Julia said, with the light still in her face.

Jessie scowled. ‘What do you mean, you know? The only thing to know about men is that you can’t trust them. You listen to me.’

‘Josh is different,’ Julia said simply. It was unthinkable that he might not come. Another week went by.

Julia stopped talking about her aviator, but Mattie could see from the way that she sat with her head cocked that she was listening to the street noises below their window, willing the buzz of the doorbell to cut through their aimless conversation. Julia wouldn’t go out any more, however hard Mattie tried to persuade her. She sat on her bed, apparently absorbed in a book, but the pages either flicked over too quickly or else they didn’t turn at all.

‘Do you think he’ll come?’ Mattie whispered to Felix one night, but Felix only shrugged and turned away.

Mattie had her own preoccupations. After the party she had dialled the number on the card that Francis Willoughby had given her. She had imagined that such an important man would be shielded by secretaries, and she was faintly surprised when he answered the telephone himself.

‘Come and see me in my office,’ Mr Willoughby said.

‘Shaftesbury Avenue, of course. Address on the card I gave you. Top floor. Tuesday at three sharp.’

On the Tuesday afternoon Mattie told her shoe shop mangeress that she had a headache and would have to go home.

‘You can’t do that,’ the woman said. ‘What if we all went home on the slightest excuse?’ Mattie made her face sag, and swallowed very hard. ‘I feel sick. I might be sick near a customer. Or on some stock.’

‘Oh, go on then,’ the manageress said hastily.

Mattie caught a bus to Piccadilly Circus and began the walk up the enchanted curve of Shaftesbury Avenue. She didn’t see the dusty shop windows, or the advertisement hoardings, or the city-sharpened faces of the ordinary people passing her. She only saw the majestic fronts of the theatres and the names up in lights. She dawdled for a moment, staring greedily at the production stills in their glass cases. She had seen two or three of the plays, perched up in the cheapest seats, but with the talisman of Mr Willoughby’s card in her hand, Headline Repertory Companies, she felt closer to the stage than she had ever done in any audience.

It was further than she thought. She found the Victorian redbrick block housing the Headline company at the northernmost end of the avenue, set amongst a cluster of tiny shops and Italian cafés. She took the ancient lift to the top floor, panting from having run the last hundred yards. Mr Willoughby was sitting alone behind the glass-panelled door of his office. The door announced his name, and the name of his company in full, in not quite evenly painted white letters. Mattie saw at a glance that the office was a green-painted cell, furnished with two deal desks and a pair of battered metal filing cabinets, a telephone and an electric kettle, and a dog-eared copy of Spotlight. It smelt of linoleum and cigarette smoke and, rather strongly, of Mr Willoughby himself.

‘Come in, dear, come in,’ he said. ‘Make yourself comfortable.’

He was looking at Mattie’s flushed cheeks and the corkscrews of blonde hair sticking to her forehead. Then his glance travelled downwards. Mattie was wearing a new circle-stitched bra and her jumper fitted tightly. She stumbled to the empty desk and perched on a typist’s chair with a broken back.

‘What I need, dear,’ Francis Willoughby announced with a show of briskness, ‘is a really efficient girl to help me with all aspects of this business.’ He waved his hand around the office. ‘Bookings, Contracts. Auditions. I’m a very busy man.’ He glanced at the telephone, but it remained silent. ‘There’s answering that thing for me. Are you used to the telephone?’

‘Oh, yes,’ Mattie assured him.

‘Typing, of course …’

‘I’m afraid I can’t type.’ I can’t pretend about that, Mattie thought desperately. Mr Willoughby glanced at her jumper again and ran his thumb to and fro over his thin moustache.

‘Well. Perhaps you could pick it up as you go along?’

‘I’m sure I could.’

‘The job pays six pounds ten a week.’

Less than at the shoe shop. Mattie looked over Mr Willoughby’s shoulder and through the sweaty green walls. Beyond them was the stage.

‘Could you make it seven pounds?’

Mr Willoughby’s smile showed his teeth, too white and even to be real.

‘Lots of girls want to do theatre management, dear. It’s not like ordinary office work, is it?’

‘All right,’ Mattie said quickly. ‘Six pounds ten.’

She started work with Headline Repertory Companies the following Monday, leaving the shoe shop without a backward glance.

While Julia listened to the clamour inside herself and waited, trying to contain it, Mattie went out to explore the limits of her new job. It seemed to consist mostly of explaining to angry-sounding voices on the telephone that Mr Willoughby was auditioning and couldn’t speak to anyone now.

Mattie quickly understood that most of the anger related to the non-appearance of money. Francis would look up from his desk, squinting against the smoke from his cigarette, and hiss, ‘Cheque’s in the post, tell ’em.’

Mattie knew that there was nothing of the kind in the post, because she did Francis’s few letters too, but she made a convincing job of lying for him, and he grinned approvingly at her.

One caller was particularly insistent. His voice was deep and resonant, the perfect actor’s voice as far as Mattie was concerned. His name was John Douglas, he told her, and he was the manager of Francis’s number one company, currently on tour in the north of England.

‘Tell fucking Francis,’ the rich voice issued from the telephone mouthpiece, ‘that unless I get fucking paid in full and unless I get cash in hand to pay the fucking company every Friday night as well, I don’t take them or sodding Saint Joan to fucking Gateshead next week. Got that?’

‘I think so,’ Mattie murmured.

Wincing as if it hurt him, Francis at last unlocked the big company cheque-book from the safe.

‘It’s all cash-flow, dear,’ he told her as he wrote a cheque. ‘If you don’t get the takings during the week, it isn’t there to pay the actors at the end of the week, is it?’

When she bent down to find the company’s current address in the filing cabinet, Francis put his hand up her skirt. His fingers squeezed her thigh and then slid up over her stocking top. Mattie jerked away from him.

‘Six pounds ten a week doesn’t cover that, Francis,’ she told him wearily, and he chuckled. A large proportion of Mattie’s time was spent dodging his hands, but the more brusquely she shook him off the more Francis seemed to enjoy it. Sometimes, especially after one of his lengthy lunches, the atmosphere in the little office was so highly charged with his erotic tension that Mattie was half-afraid the spurt of flame from his cigarette lighter would set fire to it. But most of the time she felt sorry for Francis and his beleaguered existence. Were all men pathetic, she wondered, under the armour plate of their aggression?

Mattie sighed and directed her attention back to whatever non-task Francis had set her between fumbles and phone calls. This was the theatre, that was the thing to remember. However marginally, she was involved in the magic world at last.

At the end of the third week, Josh came. Mattie opened the door to him, and Felix saw Julia’s face when she heard his voice. It was as though a soft light had been turned on under the skin of her face. It shone out of her eyes and glowed through her bones. The blurring of familiarity lifted for an instant, and Felix saw her as if she was a stranger again. She’s beautiful, he thought.

He went on calmly slicing the aubergines he had been preparing for their meal. Their rich colour made the backs of his hands look ashy by contrast.

‘You see?’ Julia whispered, to nobody. ‘I knew he would come.’ A moment later Josh stood in the kitchen doorway with his arm round Julia’s shoulder. He seemed to fill the space with his height and the breadth of his shoulders, although in reality he was no taller than Felix. Julia was laughing at something he had said to her in the hallway, gasping a little, as if she was short of breath.

‘Hi, there, Felix,’ Josh said easily. ‘What’s new with you?’

The kitchen was so tiny that Felix noticed the sun-bleached tips of his eyelashes. He looked down at the worktop and saw the dark moon of his own face reflected in the blade of the knife.

‘Hello. Nothing new.’ He sounded stiff, but Julia and Josh were too engrossed in each other to notice. Josh swung her round so that he could look at her.

‘I’ve come to take you out. Is that okay? Or have you got a date already?’

‘If I did, I’d stand him up for you. Shall I change?’

Julia had learned from Felix. Her clothes were simpler now, and she took more care with them. She was wearing a vivid green polo-neck jumper and tight black matador pants with flat black pumps. Jessie had lent her a pair of jet earrings that Julia coveted, and they swung when she turned her head.

Josh touched one of them with the tip of his finger. ‘Don’t change,’ he said softly.

Felix felt their intimacy like an electric charge. In the second’s silence he leaned against the sink, hating the scummy detritus of potato peelings, hating his own jealousy.

‘Let’s go, then,’ Julia said.

Felix went on standing at the sink after they were gone. He saw that the enamel was badly chipped, and the shelf above it where he kept his saucepans was speckled with city soot. Suddenly he swept the potatoes and the aubergines and the chopping knife in a pile on top of the peelings in the sink. The clatter of the knife against the enamel didn’t change his feelings.

‘What the bloody hell’s the matter with you?’ Jessie shouted from her room.

‘I don’t feel like cooking tonight, that’s all.’

‘Don’t cook, then. Mat and I don’t care, do we, duck? And I don’t suppose Julia and that young man have got their dinners on their minds right now, either.’ Jessie laughed, her deep, coarse laugh, and Felix smiled in spite of himself and went through into her room. She was sitting with her bottle, and Mattie beside her with her nose in a film magazine.

‘Don’t be a dog in the manger, son,’ Jessie ordered. ‘If you were going to do anything with Julia you’d have done it by now, wouldn’t you?’

Yes, Felix thought. Yes, I would. Jessie’s right, as usual.

‘So you let her go off and enjoy herself while she can, without pulling a long face.’

Mattie lowered the magazine. ‘While she can?’

‘That’s right. What did you think I said? The boy’s big and beautiful, but he’s not a stayer. Any more than your old man, Felix Lemoine. Let Julia go while he’s here, that’s all.’

Mattie and Felix didn’t look at each other. Mattie stood up and said, ‘I’ll do the tea, if you like. You’ll have to tell me what needs doing, Felix.’

‘Supper,’ he corrected her, automatically.

Josh took Julia to an Italian restaurant where they sat and let their plates of fettucine go cold in front of them. They drank Chianti from a bottle with a raffia case, and stared at each other, sometimes not even talking.

When the bottle was empty Julia said, daringly, ‘I was afraid that you weren’t going to come. Three weeks is a long time.’ Josh’s face changed, darkening a little, and she wished immediately that she hadn’t said anything.

‘I was flying,’ he said. ‘For Harry Gilbert. I needed the money, but Harry expects good value for it.’

It was partly true. Harry’s air-freight business was doing well, and Josh had flown several trips to the Mediterranean for him, lifting materials for a hotel development in Malta. But the real reason was that Josh had been disturbed by the strength of the attraction he had felt for the thin dark girl he had watched in Leoni’s. Josh liked his girls to be willing, decorative accessories who didn’t ask too much of him. By choosing carefully, Josh could be sure of a warm welcome when he needed it, and no fuss when he didn’t. Julia clearly didn’t belong to the right category. She was hungry, and eager, and too vulnerable. Julia meant trouble for both of them, and Josh thought that she was too young for it.

But he had thought about her, as he watched the instruments in the Lancaster’s cockpit. He had decided that he wouldn’t go looking for her, but he still hadn’t forgotten her. Harry Gilbert asked him, and he shrugged. ‘She’s only a kid. When I need a kid of my own I’ll get one the interesting way.’

And then, without letting himself think about it, he had found himself at the door in the square. It was the first night he had been back in London since the dinner at Leoni’s.

As soon as he saw Julia, Josh didn’t want to think anyway. He wanted to look at her, and listen to her voice, and smile at her mixture of naivety and wilful, calculated knowingness.

He lifted her hand from the tablecloth and kissed the knuckles.

‘I’m here now.’

‘Yes. I don’t care about anything else.’

She looked at him, her head on one side, the absurd earrings winking in the candlelight. Josh imagined how he would lift the green jersey over her head and fit his hands around the narrow ridges of her ribcage. He would taste her skin, quartering it inch by inch with his tongue. Josh shifted in his chair, and let go of her hand again. She was sixteen, he reminded himself.

After their dinner, he took her to a party. It was in a flat in Bayswater, and the high rooms with their peeling cornices were packed with people. Everyone seemed to know Josh. He cut an avenue of welcome through the crowd.

‘Hey, Josh. How ya doing, man?’

‘Josh, darling. Why so long?’

Julia might have been shy amongst so many smart strangers, but with Josh she felt that they were all friends.

‘Who’s this? Your kid sister?’

‘I’m nobody’s sister,’ Julia said briskly, and a man laughed and put a drink into her hand. She floated through the party, made invulnerable by her happiness. Sometimes the crowd carried her away from Josh and she talked, or danced, and then across the room she saw his blond head turning to look for her.

I love you, Julia thought again. The happiness was so perfect that she didn’t question it. It fitted around her, as if it had always been there.

She had no idea what time it was when the party ended. Josh took her home and she watched the street lamps flick past the taxi window, shining their brief nimbus of gold light through the glass, with her head against his shoulder. Outside the door in the square Josh put his arms around her. They stood without moving, their faces not quite touching. They seemed already to have travelled a long way from the nightclub, from the streets where they had walked and talked on the first evening.

Julia knew where they were going. She felt certain of it, her certainty like a warm, pleasurable weight under her ribs.

‘Can I see you tomorrow?’ Josh asked formally.

She nodded, smiling at him.

‘Be ready early and wear warm clothes. We’ll be away until Sunday.’

A night, away with Josh.

‘Where are we going?’

‘Flying.’

He kissed her, his mouth very warm against hers.

‘Until tomorrow.’

Julia went slowly up the stairs. The flat was in darkness, but the blackness seemed full of stars.

Felix’s door was closed, and when Julia turned the light on in her bedroom she saw Mattie curled up under her bedclothes with her arm up over her face. Julia watched her, trying to imagine going to sleep herself. It seemed impossible, the surrender of what she felt now to wasteful unconsciousness. She turned off the light and went out, closing the door with a soft click behind her. She stood in the hallway, hesitating, wondering whether to perch in the kitchen or to go down and walk under the trees in the square. Then she heard Jessie, calling out to her.

Jessie was sitting up in bed. She had slept for a few hours, numbed by vodka, but now she was awake again, facing the empty time until daylight. Until recently she would have levered herself out of bed and shuffled up and down the room to ease the restlessness, but now she felt too heavy and too exhausted to get up. Insomnia was like a grub inside her, gnawing, exposing her tiredness. This was the time when her memories assailed her, so vividly that it was hard to distinguish between what was real and what was remembered.

‘Julia?’ she begged. ‘Is that you? Come in here to me, will you?’

Or was it Felix, a little boy pattering in the night, or Desmond, creeping in from she didn’t know where …

Julia slipped into the room. Of course it was Julia. Back from her night out. She brought the old scent of cigarettes and closed rooms and perfume with her, and Jessie felt the past stirring like a massive body in the bed beside her.

‘Can’t you sleep?’ Julia whispered. She saw that Jessie’s face was grey, mottled with mauve, and her scalp showed through the strands of grey hair. In the daytime, with her face painted and her glass in her hand, Jessie was like a rock. It was a shock to see her so clearly at the night’s mercy. ‘Do you want a cup of tea?’

Jessie shook her head. ‘Just sit with me for a bit.’

Julia sat down on the edge of the bed. She felt the mattress dip sharply away from her, sagging under Jessie’s weight.

‘Well? How was it?’ Jessie demanded. That was more like her, and Julia’s anxiety ebbed a little.

‘I had a wonderful time,’ she said simply.

‘Dear God, I can see that. Tell us about it.’

Julia told her and Jessie listened, Julia’s talk interweaving with her own times, the fair-haired American boy with his ready smile and his man-like evasions all mixed up with a big black man who played the saxophone under a blue light and a boy from a long time ago who came knocking on a terrace-house door in Hoxton with a bunch of marigolds in his hand …

Jessie’s eyelids had dropped, but they opened again as soon as Julia leaned forward.

‘I thought you’d gone to sleep.’

‘No. Go on.

‘That’s all. Jessie, he’s going to take me flying tomorrow.’ Just like a little girl, promised a treat. The seaside, or a film show. Jessie looked at her face. Her mouth, and her eyes, belonged to a woman. But the way her arms wrapped round her chest, to keep the excitement in, that was what a child did. Jessie thought of the little woman in her brown coat and hat who had come to look for a child, and had found Julia.

‘D’you ever think about your ma?’ she demanded roughly. Julia stared at her, and then she said, ‘Yes, I think about her.’ In the silent, feverish weeks that had gone by since meeting Josh, Julia had tried to imagine her mother. Why had she made her a dirty little baby? Why hadn’t she wanted her? Perhaps she had been in trouble, not just that ordinary trouble. Or in some kind of danger, and so had given up her baby rather than let her inherit that. Perhaps she was someone special, nothing to do with the world of Fairmile Road. How much had it cost her, to give her daughter away to Betty and Vernon? Julia had let herself imagine a big house at the end of a curving avenue of trees. Even a face at one of the windows, a pale but exact replica of her own. She wondered if her mother was looking out, praying for a sight of the child she had lost.

‘I wonder about what she’s like. Why she had to give me away.’

‘I didn’t mean her,’ Jessie said.

Julia bent her head and picked at a loose thread in the bedcover. ‘My adopted mother?’

‘Of course. She counts as your mother, my girl, whatever other nonsense you’re letting yourself run away with.’

Julia flared back at her, ‘They’ve tried to turn me into someone else. Tried to turn me into themselves. A reflection of themselves. They didn’t want me. If they’d just loved what they got, it would have been different. Wouldn’t it?’

Jessie saw the hurt then. Julia had kept it to herself, but it was there. They had rejected each other, the mother and the daughter. No one’s fault, and everyone’s fault. She felt sorry for the little brown woman with her pulled-in mouth, and she felt a different sadness for Julia, who was just beginning everything.

The weight of Jessie’s memories heaved again beside her, pulling her down. She wanted to cry, for herself and Felix, and for the two silly, fresh, blank young women who had been washed up here with them.

The tears felt greasy under her eyelids, and then on her cheeks.

‘Jessie, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.’ Julia moved quickly, putting her arm round Jessie’s big, doughy shoulders, hugging her. ‘I’ve got you. I don’t need Betty or the other one. Don’t cry, do you hear? You’ve got us two, me and Mattie, as well as Felix. What else do you need?’

Jessie wiped her face with the corner of the sheet, an angry scrubbing movement. ‘Need? Nothing. Everything. Oh, don’t listen. I’m just an old windbag with indigestion and insomnia. And you can’t sleep because you’re too happy. Funny, isn’t it?’

They sat and looked at each other, and then suddenly they laughed. The daytime Jessie was there again.

‘Look at the time,’ she said sharply. ‘If you’re going flying with that boy tomorrow, and I’m glad I’m not, you’d better go to bed for a few hours first. Go on. Do what I tell you.’

Julia leaned over her first and kissed her cheek. Jessie’s skin was cold and dry. ‘Goodnight. Jessie …?’

‘What is it now?’

‘Thank you for letting Mattie and me, you know, do what we want.’

‘Go to the bad, you mean? That’s up to you. Nothing to do with me. Go on.’

Julia went, and Jessie lay back against her flattened pillows to watch the window, where the light would begin again.

Josh came in the morning. Julia ran down the stairs to meet him, the bag containing her overnight things bumping a tattoo against her legs. There was a little black open MG parked in the square, and Josh held the passenger door open for her with a flourish.

They climbed in, and the car roared through the Saturday morning traffic. Julia looked up at the red buses looming over them, the pigeons strutting on ledges and the boys on Vespas trying to outpace the MG, and sank back into her leather bucket seat with a sigh of satisfaction. It was like being in an Audrey Hepburn film.

They left London behind, and wound out through the neat suburbs that reminded Julia of Fairmile Road. It was an added satisfaction to be zipping past the identical semi-detached houses where men were sweeping the fallen leaves off the paths. Josh was beside her in his brown leather jacket with the worn sheepskin collar turned up around his chin. The wind blew his hair back off his forehead and sharpened the handsome lines of his face. He was whistling as he drove.

‘I’m so happy,’ Julia said.

Josh look sideways at her. ‘I’m happy too.’ Then he glanced up into the thin autumn blueness of the sky. ‘It’s a great day for flying.’

Happy because of me, Julia wondered, or because of the sunshine?

They drove on through the Kentish lanes, and then at last they swung through a pair of tall gates and out on to an airfield. There was a cluster of low huts, and a row of light aircraft drawn up with the sun reflecting off their windshields. A windsock hung limp in the mild air. There were men in overalls moving between the huts, and one of them lifted his arm in a half-salute as the MG stopped. In the sudden quiet that followed Julia could hear a plane somewhere overhead. The ones on the ground looked very small and fragile.

Josh was already out of the car, calling out greetings and shaking hands and joking with the men. Julia followed him shyly, not looking at the waiting planes.

Josh put his arm round her shoulders. ‘… and this is Julia. Making her first flight today. I can tell she’s going to be a flier, just by looking at her.’

Julia shook hands. Her knees were going wobbly with fear.

‘Welcome to the Kent Aero Club,’ a man with a handlebar moustache boomed at her.

‘It’s an amateur club,’ Josh explained. ‘I like this kind of flying, as well as the stuff I do for Harry. I started out on planes like these.’

‘Is it safe?’ Julia asked. She hadn’t meant to, but the words just escaped.

The moustache man roared with laughter. ‘You’ll be safer in the air with Josh Flood than you are on the ground with him. She’s all ready for you, Josh.’ He laughed so much at that that his face turned crimson.

‘Let’s go.’ Julia could feel Josh’s eagerness crackling beside her. She turned and followed him, over the wide concreted space of the apron. Josh’s strides in his baseball boots seemed to cover yards at a time. Her own legs were leaden.

They reached a plane parked to one side of the line. It was white with spruce red lines along the fuselage, and the letters G-AERO near the tail. Josh ducked under the wing and opened the cockpit door. The whole aeroplane looked no bigger than the MG.

Jump in,’ he smiled at her. ‘Are you excited?’

‘Oh, yes.’ Julia’s voice was faint.

She climbed into the tiny space and settled herself into her seat. Josh swung in on the other side. He leaned across her and pulled the webbing straps over Julia’s shoulders.

‘This is the quick-release catch, look.’ He showed her the lever on her lap-buckle.

Julia looked at the hump of the instrument panel, and then over the plane’s tilted nose to the stationary tip of the propellor. ‘Don’t I get a parachute?’ She tried to make it sound like a joke.

He looked at her properly then. ‘You don’t need a chute in a crate like this. Didn’t you believe what Jimbo said? You’re quite safe.’ He kissed her on the corner of her mouth and Julia thought, if I’m going to die I’m glad it’s with Josh.

Josh gave the thumbs-up sign to a mechanic waiting at the nose of the plane. The engine coughed and the propeller turned, then spun into a blur as the engine note rose and settled into a steady roar.

‘What kind of plane is this?’ Julia tried to focus on something, anything other than the thought of pitching into the air in this little shell.

‘Auster Autocrat. Powered by a one-hundred h.p. Cirrus Minor Two engine. Okay?’

Josh was busy. He touched the rows of switches and watched the dials, turning his head to look at the tail-flap and the wing-tips. Julia sat and waited, hoping that he couldn’t hear her heart banging. She hadn’t expected to be afraid, and the surprising fact of her terror somehow made it worse.

Josh gave another thumbs-up to the mechanic. He stood to one side and beckoned them on and the Auster taxied forward.

Josh was whistling again, the same tune as behind the wheel of his MG. They reached the end of the tarmac runway.

‘Here we go, baby. Hold tight.’

The plane darted forward and then skipped into the air.

Julia saw the tarmac lurch and drop away beneath them, and then she saw the roofs of the huts and the treetops beyond the perimeter fence, swaying drunkenly, then a scatter of houses and the scarlet blob of a telephone kiosk. The ground seemed to swoop sideways and upwards, pushing the horizon into the wrong place, terrifyingly wrong, so that the empty space of sky was beside her instead of over her head. Julia lurched sideways, wanting to grab hold of Josh, but her seat straps held her down. She was amazed to see that he was still smiling.

The horizon swung again, and then titled into its proper place. The brown and gold and pale green squares of fields unrolled towards it, and Julia looked down to see white threads of roads, thick dark curls of woodland and a village laid out around a church. She could even see the pale flecks of gravestones under the shadow of the spire.

Above the plexiglass cockpit bubble the air shimmered. The air felt solid all around them, bumping against the plane’s skin, lifting them up. They were flying.

Julia opened her clenched fists. Her fingernails had left red arcs in the skin of her palms and she was sweaty between her shoulder blades, but she felt her fear loosening its grip.

Josh took his hands off the controls and casually unfolded a map. The plane hummed on, pointing its nose into the blue haze.

‘I thought we’d head out over the Channel,’ Josh announced, ‘and then take a look at the French coast.’

‘That sounds fine,’ Julia murmured. She thought, France. She had never left England in her life. Fascination overcame Julia’s fear.

The Channel appeared beneath them, the sheeny water dotted with tiny ships that drew a white gull’s feather of wake behind them.

Josh pointed ahead and said, ‘Look, there’s France. Cap Gris Nez.’

A headland pointing into the sea, with brackets of beaches on either side of it. Then came the French countryside, bigger fields lined with poplars instead of fleecy elms, whitewashed villages instead of grey ones. When Josh said that it was time to turn back Julia was ready, and the roll of the horizon and giddy veering of the landscape didn’t bring the sweat out on her skin.

‘Do you like it?’ Josh asked her.

She nodded carefully. ‘It makes everything look so beautiful.’

‘We’re almost home,’ he told her at last.

Julia was wondering how he would find the strip of tarmac amongst the little, domestic jungle of the English countryside when she heard Josh say, ‘Shall we have five minutes’ fun first?’

She just caught sight of his face, his white smile and a new glint in his eyes, before everything overturned.

The wing-tip beside her flipped up and the blue, innocent dome of the sky revolved and disappeared under the earth, where fields and trees leapt up at her and she fell helplessly towards them so that her stomach sprang suffocatingly into her mouth, and her mouth opened, gagged by terror. She felt her seat straps bite into her shoulders and she was pressed into the hard contours of her seat, and then they were over and sky was coming up again to take its place over her head.

She heard Josh laughing. ‘Better than the fairground, any day. That’s a sideways roll. Now the other way, and over she goes.’ The same terrifying plunge, the same displacement of earth and sky. Julia closed her eyes and she heard herself whispering, Stop. Please stop.

‘Those are the simplest aerobatics manoeuvres,’ Josh was saying, as if they were strolling safely with their feet on a London pavement. ‘Now let’s try this one.’

Tipping forwards now, so that the ground leapt for them again, greedy beneath them and then over their heads. There was a cough, like the engine’s apology. Then nothing but awesome, whistling silence. Julia saw a blade of the propellor motionless with the exquisite, remote safety of the Kent countryside etched behind it. They swooped downwards in the silence.

Julia screamed, just once. ‘Josh!’

The engine started up again at once. The white wing-tip steadied itself at the edge of the her field of vision and they were flying instead of falling. Julia’s head fell back against her seat. She was cold now, and wet down the length of her back and between her thighs. Josh’s hand touched her fist. How could he be so warm, so sure of what he was doing?

‘The engine …’ she whispered.

‘I cut it out. We were gliding. It’s nothing. I’m sorry to frighten you. Look, I’ll take us down now.’

When Julia opened her eyes again the airstrip was ahead and below, and she could see the Nissen huts and the mechanics in a group, and the MG waiting for them beyond. The ground came closer, and the perspectives were almost right again; she felt a gentle bump as the wheels made contact with solid earth and the huts and trees whisked past them as they slowed, ran to the edge of the strip, and then swung round and taxied back to the line of aircraft.

Julia sat very still, trying to swallow against the pressure that was rising in her throat. Josh cut the engine again and undid her seat buckle for her. Another mechanic opened the cabin door and held out his hand to help her out. The fresh air blew in her face. Julia stood on the tarmac but it swayed under her feet, and then tilted upwards. Her knees were buckling.

‘Josh. Where’s the …?’

He took one look at her face. ‘Over there. Near door in the nearest hut.’

Julia couldn’t run, but she reached the hut somehow. She pushed the door open and saw a roller towel, a cracked mirror and a washbasin.

She ran the last steps, and was sick into the basin.

She was leaning against the wall, empty and shaking, when Josh came in.

‘Oh, darling,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’

He put one arm around her waist, and with his free hand he ran the taps in the basin. He took a handkerchief out of the pocket of his leather jacket and soaked it in cold water. Then he wiped her mouth with it, and held it against her forehead.

Julia closed her eyes. If the lino floor would just open up and swallow her, that would be enough.

Josh smoothed the strands of hair back from her face and murmured, ‘Will you forgive me? I was just showing off to you, like some dumb kid. And you were being so brave.’

She laughed shakily. ‘Brave? That’s not what I’d call it.’

‘Sure you were. Everyone’s scared the first time. I was sick the first time, too.’

‘Did Harry Gilbert sponge your face?’

Joshua grinned. ‘He was nowhere around, thank God. Or else I’d still be hearing about it.’

He’s kind, Julia thought. As well as everything else. Oh, Josh. ‘Do you feel better now?’

‘Yes.’

‘I was going to go up again, but now I won’t, as a penance. Is that good enough?’

‘Go up, if you want to.’ Julia would have given him anything, if only she could.

‘No, we’ll go walking instead.’

He took her arm, and led her out to the little black car. The spring came back to Julia’s step, matching itself to Josh’s.

It was an idyllic afternoon. They walked through a beechwood where the falling leaves made ochre and gold tapestries under their feet and the sun slanted in fretted bars through the trees. Josh didn’t talk about aeroplanes or ski-slopes now. He told her about the little town in Colorado where he had grown up, and his mother and father, and the men who worked in his father’s timber business, and their wives and the children who had gone to school with him. Julia imagined the place as a huddle of wooden-framed houses under a mountain ridge, set amongst black pines and empty snowfields. The lights spilling from the windows would look very warm on the snow.

‘Were you happy?’ she asked.

He thought for a moment. ‘I guess so. It was a good life. But I always had itchy feet.’

‘Why?’

He put his arm round her shoulders and the leather sleeve creaked against her ear.

‘I don’t know why,’ he said softly, ‘but I have to keep moving on.’

Julia knew that it was a warning. And it was a warning he had delivered often before. She jerked her head up and looked at the sky through the canopy of beech. It was fading to pearly grey as the light went. She didn’t need a warning, and she would take whatever came. A fierce determination took hold of her. She would spend tonight with Josh. She would make him hers, somehow. She could do it because she wanted it so badly.

She listened carefully to the sound of their feet brushing through the leaves. She had the sense of crossing some divide, here, under the beech trees. I’ve grown up, she thought simply.

Josh felt the set of her shoulders. He was looking at the angle of her face, turned away from him. The skin of her cheek and throat was silky white under her dark hair. Josh knew that he had frightened her and made her ill, and he felt protective as well as drawn to her.

His arm tightened. ‘Come on,’ he ordered her. ‘Let’s go home now.’

They drove a short distance through the lanes, and came to a field gate. Josh heaved it open and the car bumped into a rutted track. Peering into the dimness ahead Julia saw a little house at the end of the track, fitted into a corner of woodland. It had two windows below and two gables above, and a door in the middle.

‘It’s like the three bears’ house.’

Josh laughed. ‘It isn’t big enough for three of anything.’

Outside the front door it was cold, and the air smelt of frost and smoke. Julia shivered but it was a shiver of anticipation.

She was certain of what she was doing, and she was exhilarated by it.

Inside, the little house was less like a fairytale. It was furnished with utilitarian, modern furniture and there were contemporary print curtains, a telephone and a gramophone, and a scatter of books and papers. Julia wandered around, trying to gain an impression of Josh’s life from the thin layer of his possessions.

‘Is it your house?’ she called. Josh had gone through into the kitchen.

‘Nope. It’s rented, for as long as I need to be here.’

No roots, of course. How long would be as long as he needed?

Josh was making tea, whistling and moving briskly from the cupboards to the stove. ‘Let’s have anchovy toast. I love it, it’s so British.’

‘Is it? I’ve never had it in my life.’ Julia remembered Betty’s teas. Betty favoured Robertson’s jams and thin, sweetish lemon curd. She seemed a very long way away from here, and what was going to happen.

‘Don’t disappoint me.’

Josh lit the fire. It was already laid, and the flames shot up through the dry kindling. The room looked more homely in the firelight, with the tea tray on the coffee table. Julia perched on the red and black sofa.

‘Shall I pour the tea?’

She was reminded of Betty and Vernon again, Betty pouring out the tea and handing Vernon his special cup.

Now Julia was pouring the tea herself, and she would give herself to Josh. She felt her own power, and fear and anticipation and excitement dissolving deliciously inside her. The anchovy toast tasted salt and exotic on her tongue. And she knew that Josh was watching her. She felt beautiful, and a little in awe of herself.

Josh took her plate away, and her cup. The fire had settled into a red glow. He knelt in front of her for a moment and they looked at each other. Then Josh took her hand, turning it over very gently, as if to ask, Well?

Julia leaned forward and kissed his mouth.

‘Julia,’ he said softly. ‘Do you know what you’re doing?’

There was no need for her to answer. In the fireplace a log fell, sending up a scarlet fountain of sparks.

Josh was very gentle, and very deliberate. He unbuttoned her clothes, understanding the hooks and fasteners, and laid them gently aside. In the past, in her awkward grapples with boys, Julia had wondered why it was all so uncomfortable and undignified. It was different with Josh, of course. He made undressing seem simple and natural. Yet when she felt the cool air on her skin, she was suddenly embarrassed. She wrapped her arms around herself, to defend her nakedness.

‘I would like to look at you,’ Josh whispered. ‘May I do that?’

Slowly, Julia let her arms drop. She faced him, innocence overlaid with boldness. The firelight brought a glow of colour to her pale skin. Josh heard his own breathing in the stillness.

He looked at her, greedy, but holding himself back.

Josh loved women, but Julia wasn’t like the girls he usually chose. He liked full-breasted girls with rounded hips and peachy flesh that he could bury himself in. For Josh, ever since he had turned twelve, the varied appeal of women’s bodies had depended on their utter difference from his own. But Julia had no opulent curves, and her hips and stomach were as flat as a boy’s. She was tall and he was surprised now, seeing her naked, by her fragility. Her bones looked fine enough to snap under his hands, and her breasts were tiny, with pale pink nipples. The separate parts of her were like a boy’s, and yet they added up to nothing like a boy at all. Just in the way that her legs crooked, in the way that her shoulders sloped, and the way she looked at him under her dark eyelashes, she was more female than any woman he had ever seen.

And just as knowing. She had picked him out, after all, with total conviction. There was an added charge in that.

Josh breathed out, a long breath. He couldn’t hold himself back from her any longer. He put his mouth to one of her small, hard breasts. Her skin tasted faintly sweet, like honey. He felt her breath warm in his hair, and then he pulled her against him, she was supple, like a sappy willow wand.

Josh took her hand, guiding it.

‘You could take off my clothes, too.’

Julia drew back a little, and undid the buttons of his plaid shirt.

She saw the curling blond hair on his chest, the sun-reddened hollow at the base of his throat, and then the developed muscles of his shoulders and arms.

‘Go on,’ Josh ordered her.

She undid the buckle of his belt.

When Josh was naked too he laid her against the sofa cushions, very carefully, as if she was precious. Over his shoulder, through half-closed eyes, Julia watched the fire’s glow. The silky feel of bare flesh against her own was surprising, exciting. She had though that when the moment came she might be afraid. She wasn’t afraid, at all. She felt hot and clear-headed at the same time, and there was a pleasurable painful knot inside her.

‘Julia,’ Josh said.

On the table beside the door, the telephone began to ring.

Under his breath Josh swore, very comprehensively.

He wrapped his shirt around himself and went to answer it. At the other end a girl said, Josh? It’s Stella.’

‘Uh, hello. Hi there.’

He glanced round. Julia was lying where he had left her, hidden from him now by the sofa back.

‘Josh, I’ve got something to tell you. You won’t like it much. I’m pregnant.’

He stared down at the angular black lines of the receiver, blinking, trying to take the words in. ‘You what?

‘I’m pregnant. I’ve been to the doctor. It’s all quite certain. I’m sorry, Josh.’

Josh was usually very careful. His boyhood hero, Bim Hassell the sawmill manager’s son, had told him always to carry rubbers in his wallet. That was long before Josh had needed anything of the kind, but Bim’s muttered warnings had sunk in. Josh had developed his own code in the years since then. He wasn’t faithful, or reliable, but he wasn’t callous either. And yet, in the bed upstairs with Stella’s legs round his waist, he had let her whisper, ‘Don’t use that thing. I want to feel you inside me. It’ll be all right. It’s my safe time.’

Josh remembered. He had come like a dive from thirty thousand feet.

He rubbed his hand over his face. ‘Oh, Jesus. I’m sorry. Look, don’t worry. We can fix things up. It happens you know.’

‘You don’t understand, do you? You don’t know what it’s like.’ She was almost screaming now. ‘Ring me, Josh. Ring with a doctor’s name.’

Stella hung up.

Joshua put the receiver back in its cradle. He unwrapped his shirt and put it on properly, buttoning the cuffs. He was thinking about a baby. Not a baby yet. A mysterious sliver of life, like a tadpole, inside Stella. He had put it there, on an evening like this.

He saw that Julia was sitting up, her arms folded on the back of the sofa and her chin resting on them. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘Nothing. Some bad news.’ It wasn’t nothing. Only nothing to do with this Julia. He walked round the end of the sofa and stood looking down at her. Her arms and legs suddenly seemed childlike and her face had lost its dreamy, feminine mystery. She was hardly more than a baby herself.

What had he been doing?

Josh bent down and picked up the tidy pile of her clothes. He held them out to her. ‘Here you are,’ he said gently. ‘Put them on.’

Julia was bewildered. Surely a telephone call couldn’t change everything so disastrously?

‘What’s wrong? What have I done?’

You asshole, Josh repeated to himself. You stupid jerk.

‘You haven’t done anything.’ He stooped down so that their faces were level. ‘Listen. You’re a virgin, aren’t you?’

She nodded, biting her lip. ‘Does it matter?’

‘It matters. Don’t give yourself to me. Stay the way you are for a bit longer, okay?’

‘I want you. Josh, I …’ She held her hand out to him. He took it, and replaced it in the shadowed fold of her lap.

‘Do what I say.’

There was a note in his voice that stopped her even trying to argue. Julia stood up with her cheeks burning. She turned away from him and dressed herself, her fingers stiffly fumbling with the buttons that Josh had undone so deftly.

When they were both ready he said lightly, ‘Good girl. Now I’ll take you out and buy you some dinner. You must be hungry after losing your breakfast on the airfield.’

Julia fought back her humiliation. Obediently, she followed him out to dinner.

They went to a pub, with oak settles and beams and another log fire in the welcoming dining room, but the spontaneous happiness of their day together was gone. Julia talked as brightly as she could but she felt awkward and miserable, afraid that she had disappointed him in some way that she didn’t understand.

And Josh was preoccupied with thoughts that didn’t concern her.

At the end of the evening Josh took her back to the cottage at the end of the track. Courteously he showed her the bathroom, and the bedroom opposite his at the top of the stairs. There was a single bed in it that looked as if it had never been slept in.

He kissed her goodnight, as if he was her uncle.

‘Josh, please …’

‘Don’t.’ He was warning her off again. ‘I was a jerk to bring you here. It’s not your fault, it’s all mine. You’re so nice, Julia. Don’t get things all wrong, like I do.’

He turned abruptly and went into his own room, closing the door on her.

Julia lay down on her bed. She was crying, hot tears of hurt, and frustration, and love.

But she did know that she wanted Josh Flood, her aviator, more than she had ever wanted anything and more than she could imagine ever wanting anything else in the world. She promised herself that she would get him, somehow.