The Men and the Girls Read online

  About the Book

  Julia Hunter and Kate Bain have found true happiness with men old enough to be their fathers. Julia organises her husband Hugh and their cherubic twins with ruthless efficiency and Kate has lived with James for eight years, and although she refuses to marry him, she’s apparently devoted to him. Hugh and James, lifelong friends, feel blessed indeed.

  But age differences cannot be ignored forever and when James accidentally knocks a fiercely independent elderly woman from her bicycle, a chain of events is set off in which many suppressed discontents and frustrations emerge. Kate begins to seek out friends of her own age and Julia’s career begins to blossom just as her husband's starts to decline...

  The tranquil lives of the men and the girls seem shattered as new relationships develop and old anxieties surface.

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Joanna Trollope

  The Men and the Girls

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  About the Author

  Joanna Trollope is the author of many highly-acclaimed bestselling contemporary novels. She has also written a study of women in the British Empire, Britannia’s Daughters, and a number of historical novels.

  Born in Gloucestershire, she now lives in London. She was awarded the OBE in the 1996 Queen’s Birthday Honours List.

  For more information on Joanna Trollope and her books, visit her website at www.joannatrollope.com

  Also by Joanna Trollope

  THE CHOIR

  A VILLAGE AFFAIR

  A PASSIONATE MAN

  THE RECTOR’S WIFE

  A SPANISH LOVER

  THE BEST OF FRIENDS

  NEXT OF KIN

  OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN

  MARRYING THE MISTRESS

  GIRL FROM THE SOUTH

  BROTHER & SISTER

  SECOND HONEYMOON

  FRIDAY NIGHTS

  THE OTHER FAMILY

  and published by Black Swan

  By Joanna Trollope writing as Caroline Harvey

  LEGACY OF LOVE

  A SECOND LEGACY

  PARSON HARDING’S DAUGHTER

  THE STEPS OF THE SUN

  LEAVES FROM THE VALLEY

  THE BRASS DOLPHIN

  CITY OF GEMS

  THE TAVERNERS’ PLACE

  and published by Corgi Books

  Joanna Trollope

  The Men and the Girls

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Epub ISBN: 9781409011583

  Version 1.0

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  THE MEN AND THE GIRLS

  A BLACK SWAN BOOK : 9780552994927

  First published in Great Britain

  in 1992 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  Black Swan edition published 1993

  Copyright © Joanna Trollope 1992

  Joanna Trollope has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

  This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Addresses for Random House Group Ltd companies outside the UK can be found at: www.randomhouse.co.uk

  The Random House Group Ltd Reg. No. 954009

  For Andrew

  One

  Because he wasn’t wearing his spectacles, he didn’t see her pedalling painfully along the gutter beside him in the dark and the rain, and, in consequence, he knocked her gently off her bicycle. He stopped the car at once, dead, and the rush-hour queue in Beaumont Street leant angrily on its collective horn, and blasted him.

  He sprang out of the car, and hurried round the bonnet.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ James said, stooping over her. ‘I’m so desperately sorry.’ Lit by his headlamps, she glared up at him from the wet pavement. He saw, with a shock of tenderness, that she was a true Oxford spinster, one of that dwindling band of elderly, dignified, clever women living out frugal lives in small flats and rooms, sustained by thinking. He seized the handlebars of her bicycle, to free her, and, in so doing, emptied out the contents of her wicker bicycle basket.

  ‘Oh God,’ he said in despair. He attempted to pick the objects up; a plastic carrier bag of books, a bicycle lock and chain, a tin of cat food.

  ‘Should you be driving?’ she said furiously, struggling to her feet. She peered at him in the rain, through Schubert spectacles. Her glance travelled to his grey hair. ‘Are you safe to drive?’

  Holding her bicycle awkwardly with one hand, he grasped her arm with the other.

  ‘Are you hurt? Have I hurt you?’

  ‘Only my feelings,’ she said with emphasis.

  ‘I forgot my glasses—’

  ‘I’m not interested!’ she cried, her voice sharp with shock. ‘Why should I care?’

  ‘Come home with me,’ James pleaded. ‘I live two minutes away. We’ll put your bike in the boot. I can give you some brandy.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘No. I have an appointment.’

  ‘Let me drive you to it.’

  ‘It’s here. It’s in Beaumont Street. I have an appointment with the doctor—’

  ‘Then let me take you in and explain.’

  She said something incoherent, scrabbling in her pocket. ‘My handkerchief—’

  ‘Take mine. Out of my breast pocket. I’d give it to you, only my hands are full.’

  She shook her head. He began, with infinite tenderness, to guide her and her bicycle along the pavement.

  A man wound down his car window and yelled, ‘You just leaving that bloody thing there?’ jabbing his thumb angrily at James’s car.

  ‘Yes,’ James called.

  ‘Oh dear,’ the woman said suddenly. ‘Oh dear, oh dear. I do so detest upsets, disagreeableness—’

  ‘Me too. Even more if I’ve caused them.’ He remembered he had left his spectacles in the lavatory at home, on the pile of old copies of Private Eye. He could hardly confess this.

  ‘It’s here,’ she said, pausing at a doorway, and pressing a plastic bell.

&
nbsp; ‘Will you tell me your name? And where you live? May I come and see you, to apologize, to see if you are all right?’

  She hesitated. Fright had made her cross and then tremulous. ‘My name is Bachelor. Beatrice Bachelor.’ She paused and then added, ‘I live in Cardigan Street.’

  James said, ‘I live close to you, so close—’

  The door opened. A receptionist in a jersey so vibrantly patterned it quite overshadowed her face said, ‘Oh Miss Bachelor, what a night, whatever have you done to yourself?’

  ‘It was my fault,’ James said. ‘I knocked her over.’ He looked down at Miss Bachelor in the light. She had mud on her cheek and her headscarf had fallen back exposing thin grey hair that was escaping from its knot. ‘My name,’ said James, feeling the need to confess it as a pointless act of contrition, ‘is James Mallow.’

  ‘Yes,’ said the receptionist taking Miss Bachelor firmly by the arm. ‘Yes, I expect it is.’ Then she shut the door on him.

  When James got home, the house was still dark, except for Uncle Leonard’s window on the first floor, which glowed redly. When Leonard Mallow had come to live with them five years before, Kate had asked him what colour curtains he would like and he had said at once, ‘Oh red, dear. Really red. As red as you can get them.’ He was a man of decided tastes. He loved cricket and the works of John Buchan and anchovy paste and Mrs Cheng, the small, impassive Chinese woman who helped Kate with the cleaning; he hated progress and materialism and girls with short hair. He had been a schoolmaster for almost fifty years of his long bachelor life and said, with the utmost benevolence, that he was sick of boys.

  James let himself in. The hall was dark, but there was a line of light under the kitchen door and the thump of rock music. Uncle Leonard hallooed from upstairs. ‘That you?’

  ‘It’s me. It’s James.’

  ‘Sodding awful night—’

  ‘Telling me. I’ll be up in a sec.’

  ‘No hurry,’ Leonard shouted amiably. ‘Take your time. Never any hurry.’

  James opened the door on the left and switched on the light. His study – his study now for over a quarter of a century – sprang to familiar and beloved life; the wide sash windows at either end, the green carpet, the lamps and cluttered little tables, the scuffed leather armchairs, the desk (his father’s mahogany desk, brought from South Africa), and the books, the shelves and shelves and shelves of books, floor to ceiling, running unbroken down the two long walls of the room except for a space above his desk where a painting hung, a painting which Kate loved, of a sleek Mogul prince in a flowered coat and silver shoes. James went from one window to the other, pulling curtains. Mrs Cheng had hoovered the carpet today, and the grass-green pile lay in stripes, like a lawn. The room smelled as he liked it to, of leather and paper and polish. He looked at the leather chairs, and wished that Miss Bachelor was in one of them, warming her spinstery limbs at his gas fire, cradling a cup of tea or a glass of brandy in her not quite steady hands. He felt miserable with remorse. If he was going to knock someone over, why couldn’t it have been a robust, resilient person who sprang up from the pavement and yelled healthy abuse at him? Why did it have to be a Miss Beatrice Bachelor in woolly gloves with legs like brittle sticks? He sighed. He wished Kate was at home; he needed her warmth and understanding.

  Slowly, he went out of his study and climbed the stairs to the landing, switching lights on as he went. The door to Leonard’s room was ajar, a sign that he was available for company. When he wished to sleep, or do the crossword, or perform the long, complex ritual of dressing or undressing, he closed the door firmly and shouted ‘Go away!’ if it was knocked upon.

  ‘Ah,’ he said, as James came in. He sat in his usual chair, an upright armchair of singular charmlessness, with wooden arms and a deep seat which looked as if it hid a po. ‘Ah. You look all in.’

  ‘I’ve just knocked someone over,’ James said. ‘Very slowly. I didn’t hurt her but I frightened her. I feel awful.’

  ‘Whisky,’ Leonard said, flapping a long hand at a cluster of bottles on his chest of drawers. ‘Help yourself.’

  ‘I left her at a surgery,’ James said, picking up Leonard’s toothglass and inspecting it for signs of toothpaste before pouring whisky into it. ‘I’ll go and see her tomorrow. She lives near St Barnabas.’

  ‘No, no,’ Leonard said, flapping again. ‘Soak my gnashers in that one. Perfectly good glass by the bottles.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Left your specs behind. Saw them in the lav.’

  ‘That’s why I knocked her over. That and the dark and rain.’

  ‘Only sixty. Aren’t you?’

  ‘Sixty-one.’

  ‘No call for things to drop off at sixty-one. Eyes should still work at sixty-one.’

  ‘I’m not falling apart,’ James said, settling himself in Leonard’s other chair, a creaking basket-work bucket, with a lumpy cushion covered in cretonne. ‘I’m as absent-minded as I ever was, that’s all. I mean, I am permanently deep in thoughts unconnected with driving the car or mowing the lawn. It drives Kate mad. She says why can’t I apply my intelligence as much to loading the washing machine as to writing and teaching.’

  ‘Why can’t you?’

  ‘I suppose I’m not as interested.’

  Leonard slapped the folded newspaper on his knee.

  ‘Liked your piece today. Don’t agree, of course. Can’t stand subsidies. No wonder the theatre’s gone all namby-pamby.’

  ‘I wasn’t entirely pro-subsidy in that piece. I said there should be a balance—’

  ‘Best thing I ever saw,’ Leonard said suddenly, ‘was Journey’s End. Wonderful stuff. Guts. That’s what it had. Guts.’

  ‘Where’s Kate?’

  ‘No idea. Here one minute, gone the next. Wham, bang, slam the door. You know.’

  James regarded his uncle levelly. In all Leonard’s life, nobody had ever been kinder to him than Kate. It was Kate’s idea that they should take him in when it became plain that years of institutional living had rendered him totally unable to cope on his own. But Leonard, although he was keenly aware of what he owed Kate, and although he had come to love her, could not forgive her for two faults. One was her class. He knew he couldn’t voice his opinion, and he knew he was unfashionable to hold it, but James had been born a gentleman, in Leonard’s view, and Kate’s father was a college groundsman; her mother was an emigrant Irishwoman from County Cork. These facts stuck in Leonard’s mind like stones in sand, these facts – and, of course, that other one, which was more of a boulder than a stone.

  ‘Leonard—’ James said warningly. He finished his whisky. ‘I’d better go down and see Joss.’

  ‘We’ve done her homework,’ Leonard said, picking up the paper to show James that he wanted him to go anyway. ‘Polished that off in no time.’

  ‘Is that a good idea? How does it help her in class, if you zip through her prep and create such a false impression of her capabilities?’

  Leonard adored doing Joss’s homework. He put his face into the newspaper. ‘Mind your own business.’

  James went out on to the landing. Kate had repainted it last winter, a pale, soft corn colour. She had painted it with her usual energy, and James had gone round after her, removing the splashes of yellow paint from the white woodwork, and tidying up the edges round light switches. She didn’t mind, she never took things like that personally, she just laughed. The landing was one of the few things she had changed since she came; for the most part, she seemed either too absorbed by the business of living to fuss about decor, or too delicate in feeling to impose her taste on James’s house.

  It was his house. He had bought it nearly thirty years before, long before the carelessly built Victorian area of Oxford, called Jericho, had risen from a near slum to gentility. It was a low, double-fronted red house with a Gothic doorway and wide sash windows edged in blue-and-yellow brick. Above the door it said firmly in black, ‘Richmond Villa’. It had perhaps been built for one of the maste
r printers at the great university press in Walton Street, and James loved it. He loved, too, Kate’s tact about it.

  He went downstairs. The thump of music from behind the closed kitchen door had given way to a sad, plaintive wail in a nasal voice, like a voice heard over a high wall in a North African souk. James paused. He put his hand on the doorknob. Behind the door, no doubt messily eating cornflakes, on which she seemed to exist, he would find Joss, his stepdaughter. Except that she was not truly his stepdaughter since her mother, throughout the eight years they had lived with James in Richmond Villa, had staunchly refused to marry him.

  Joss had a small white face and a horrible haircut. Her hair was the same reddish colour as Kate’s, and she had had it cut brutally short, to appease the prevailing fashion in her class. Secretly, her haircut appalled her, so she defended it with hysteria. On her bedroom wall, she had stuck posters of girl rock stars with hair like convicts, but under her bed she kept a box of cuttings from magazines, photographs of fashion models with curtains of luxuriant hair, swinging and shining. Those girls wore beautiful shoes. Joss wore heavy black boots with thick soles and eyelets rimmed in brass.

  ‘Uncle Leonard says he’s done all your prep.’

  Joss yawned. ‘He can do it. I can’t. So.’

  James did not feel equal to a battle.

  ‘Where’s Mum?’

  ‘I dunno. The home, I suppose.’

  The home was a refuge for battered women, set up by a friend of Kate’s, near St Margaret’s Church. Kate helped there, on a voluntary basis, looking after the children and listening, endlessly listening. It was where she had found Mrs Cheng, looking like a little pansy with her yellow face blurred by purple bruises. She had given Mrs Cheng a part-time job at Richmond Villa, and had then found her a room in a hostel and a second job, cleaning a dentist’s surgery in Beaumont Street. Mrs Cheng’s gratitude manifested itself in tireless zeal for Kate, a zeal that took the form of trying to subdue the mountains of muddle that grew up round Kate wherever she alighted. Joss had been to Mrs Cheng’s room in the hostel. She said it was very bare and smelled funny.