The Men and the Girls Read online

  ‘What she’d really like,’ Uncle Leonard said, ‘is to live here, in the cupboard under the stairs, and cook fish heads in a bucket.’

  ‘I’ll start supper,’ James said now, moving towards the fridge.

  ‘Good,’ said Joss. James was a better cook than Kate. His food stayed separate, in its own colours and textures. Kate’s always tended to look and feel the same, so that the taste was a surprise; not always, either, a very nice surprise.

  ‘I bought a hat,’ Joss said suddenly. She had not meant to admit this, and blushed at her mistake. Her buying of hats from the second-hand shops in Walton and Little Clarendon Streets was a solemn passion which she tried to keep as secret as her photographs of hair and shoes.

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What sort of hat? Can I see it?’

  Furious with herself, Joss kicked a carrier bag towards James. It was an old supermarket bag, worn and crumpled. James picked it up and took out a little black velvet hat, like a Highlander’s bonnet, with a coarse black veil pinned to it with two diamanté bows.

  ‘It’s lovely. Really glamorous.’

  ‘I hate it. I wish I hadn’t gone and bought it.’

  James knew better than to call her bluff and say take it back then.

  ‘I wish women still wore hats like that. So sexy.’

  ‘Yuk,’ said Joss.

  James put the hat back in its bag. He opened the fridge – far too small, as it had been for eight years – and squatted in front of it.

  ‘What about a giant stir-fry of everything I can see in here?’

  Joss drew the hat bag towards her, with infinite stealth.

  ‘I’m not hungry.’

  ‘I am. Uncle Leonard always is. Mum’s bound to be.’

  ‘I’m going to take this hat back. It’s gross.’

  James stood up and began to unload things out of the fridge on to the table.

  ‘Why don’t you give it to Mum for her birthday?’

  ‘What birthday?’

  ‘Her birthday in two weeks. Her thirty-sixth birthday.’

  ‘You said that hat was sexy—’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘I can’t give a sexy hat to Mum!’

  They stared at each other. Joss pictured Kate in the hat and James looking at her in it, and felt sick. James pictured the same thing and felt stirred. He was the first to turn away. ‘Suit yourself,’ he said, picking up a punnet of tired mushrooms.

  The front door opened, letting a wild draught shoot in under the closed kitchen one, and then slammed.

  ‘Ah,’ James said with satisfaction. Joss stuffed the hat bag hurriedly into the black sack she used to lug her school books about in.

  Kate opened the kitchen door and blew in, glistening with rain. She had put nothing on her head, and her wiry red hair held the drops like a maze of twigs.

  ‘Disgusting,’ Kate said, and dropped her bag on the floor, and a carrier of groceries, which sagged sideways and spilled tangerines and a huge tawny Spanish onion.

  James went over to kiss her.

  ‘Careful. I’ll drench you. I’m wet through to my knickers. Hello, Jossie.’

  ‘Have a bath. I’m about to cook supper. Have a bath while I do it.’

  ‘Where’ve you been?’

  ‘At the home. Where d’you think? Usual post-Christmas flood of the poor things. They all say they dread Christmas more than any other day of the year.’

  James began to extract Kate from her mackintosh.

  ‘You’re quite right, you’re soaked through. Joss, go and run Mum a bath, would you? And say supper in half an hour, to Uncle Leonard?’

  Joss got up. ‘Can I go skiing? Can I go with the school?’

  Kate glanced at her. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I haven’t the money.’ She gave James a quelling look to forestall his offering. ‘You know I haven’t. But I’m sorry. I’m sorry I haven’t.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Joss said. She’d held out little hope in the first place, and, although she’d promised herself she would make a scene, she hadn’t the heart for it when it came to it. She went out of the kitchen, leaving the door open, knowing that James would have to close it after her.

  ‘I’m so glad you’re back,’ James said.

  Kate squatted on the floor by her bags, a supple little figure in black dungarees. ‘Me too. It was so sad today. I suppose it’s as much the gloom of early January as anything, but somehow the home didn’t feel like a refuge today, more like some sort of bleak waiting room, all form-filling and queues. And everyone was smoking. I’m ashamed when I feel ratty, but sometimes I do, really ratty.’ She put the last rolling tangerines back in the carrier and stood up.

  ‘Talking of shame,’ James said, returning to his mushrooms, ‘I’m full of it. D’you know what I did?’

  ‘Tell me,’ Kate said.

  ‘I forgot my specs when I went out to fax my piece through to the paper. And I knocked a woman over in Beaumont Street, not badly, not hard, but I knocked her off her bicycle.’ Kate was listening, still, attentive. James warmed to her unspoken sympathy. ‘The worst of it was that she was so vulnerable, one of those frail old academics with a bun. There was cat food in her bike basket. She was going to the doctor’s, luckily, so I escorted her there, and of course I’ll go and see her tomorrow, but, in the meantime, I feel rather haunted, and so sorry.’ He stopped, and waited for Kate to reassure him, even to come over and put her arms round him, and lay her damp cheek against his chest and tell him that it could have happened to anybody, particularly on a night like this. But she didn’t. She said nothing and she didn’t move. He looked across at her, surprised. She was regarding him with a look that was wholly unfamiliar, a cold, almost contemptuous look.

  He opened his mouth to speak, but before he could utter, Kate said, in a voice that matched her expression, ‘You stupid old man.’ Then there was another silence, in which they regarded each other with horror.

  Kate lay in her bath with her eyes closed. She had asked Joss to stay and talk to her, but Joss had said she’d got stuff to do, and clumped away to her bedroom. Kate couldn’t blame her. Joss might only be fourteen, but she was no fool and could easily tell the difference between being asked to stay for a genuine conversation, and being asked to stay to prevent Kate’s being left with her own thoughts. ‘Sorry,’ she’d said, ‘got stuff to do.’ Her voice was faintly cockney, Kate’s was faintly Oxfordshire, James’s was, well, different; Kate’s mother said James had an Oxford accent. James! Why had she said that to him? She hadn’t meant to, she hadn’t even realized she was going to. Stupid was all right, so was man, but old – Kate drew up her knees in the bath in agony. He’d looked stricken, as if she’d slapped him. She’d never slapped him, she’d hardly ever raised her voice to him; he wasn’t that kind of man, nor she that kind of woman. Yet now she had called him a stupid old man, she realized with a shock that she meant it. It was the behaviour of a stupid, myopic, absent-minded old man to drive about in the dark and the rain without glasses and knock people off bicycles. Oh God, thought Kate, suddenly afraid of where her mind was going, what am I doing?

  She never thought about his age when she met him. If anything, the twenty-five years between them had been something of a turn-on, and the whole affair had been so natural and so marvellous, she had never asked herself what she was doing. They had met in a pub off Holywell Street. James had been there with his lifelong friend Hugh Hunter, and Kate had been with a boyfriend, not Joss’s father who had vanished back to Canada the minute he heard she was pregnant, but another boyfriend, with whom Kate was getting bored. Hugh Hunter had spilled a little beer on Kate’s shoulder as he tried to push through the crowd, and James had been the only one with a handkerchief. He looked wonderful to Kate, big and relaxed in a polo-necked jersey under an old tweed jacket. She looked up into his face quite openly and thought of the Duke of Wellington; perhaps it was his nose. He said, mopping her shoulder, ‘My name’s James Mallow.’

  ‘My mo
ther comes from Mallow,’ Kate had said. ‘Mallow in County Cork. In summer, her parents took her and her sisters to paddle in the Glashaboy River.’

  James took her telephone number. Next day, he rang and asked her out to see a film with him. Then he asked her to come and have Sunday lunch with him at Richmond Villa. He wouldn’t let her help, but sat her at the kitchen table with a glass of wine, while he chopped and sliced. She sat there and watched his hands and forearms as he chopped, his shirt-sleeves rolled up to his elbows, until she couldn’t watch any more, being so giddy with the longing to be in bed with him that she could hardly sit upright on her chair. After lunch, James did take her to bed, and it was extraordinary. It was, Kate told herself, like those sex scenes in novels that you scoff at for never happening in life. But this one did. That spring Sunday afternoon when Kate was twenty-eight and James was fifty-three (and Joss was six) the sex was sensational.

  When at last it was over, James took Kate down to his study, and showed it to her. She was amazed at how clean everything was; not at the cleanliness itself, but because everything that was so clean was also so old. In Kate’s childhood, apart from a few family treasures of her mother’s, only new things had ever been clean. Old things were, by definition, worn, grubby, stained, decrepit. Here everything was the reverse. Old things wore a glow of health. Kate sat in James’s spinning desk chair and looked up at the painting of the smooth, plump, pale-brown prince, with pearls looped in his turban and around his neck, and his hand resting upon a sword slung from a silken sash.

  Two weeks later, she had moved in. She couldn’t now remember if James had precisely asked her, but she was so consumed with longing to live with him, she’d have hardly noticed if he had asked or not. James painted a little bedroom for Joss, who had never slept on her own before and who wouldn’t have the light turned off at night for two years. When he was working, writing articles at his desk, or tutoring pupils in his study, Kate crept about the house with excited reverence. Nothing must be changed, she must respect what James wanted. Even later, when she realized that he had grown to love her, and that she could be quite bold with him, she still had no desire to alter things. The villa was James. Kate, as James was quickly grateful to realize, did not judge; Kate had a huge capacity to accept.

  She accepted the habits of a man accustomed for twenty years to living on his own; she accepted his desire for order, even if she could not match it in her own behaviour; she accepted the need, for James’s sake, for Joss to lead a more disciplined life; she accepted Uncle Leonard; she accepted too, without asking him, that James would give her, in return, all the freedom she needed to do the things she wanted to do. One of those things was to stay single.

  ‘I’m dead scared of being pitied,’ Kate said. ‘And I’m even deader scared of being a burden.’

  ‘But you wouldn’t be. I want to marry you because I love you and I want you to be mine. I want you to be a burden, if you put it that way. I want to be responsible for you.’

  ‘Today, perhaps. Even tomorrow. But not for ever. I couldn’t take the responsibility for disappointing you.’

  ‘But you wouldn’t. I know you. You’re what I want.’

  ‘All the same. No.’

  ‘Your reasons are so flimsy.’

  ‘Not to me. Clear as crystal and solid as rock to me.’

  And so it went on, wrangle after wrangle. Gradually, he ceased to fear that if she wasn’t married to him she would leave him. When she began on her voluntary work, with problem families, with young drug addicts camping out at Horsley, with battered women, she said it was the least she could do. ‘I’m so lucky, I stink.’ Three days a week she worked for a friend in a little pasta restaurant, waitressing, washing up, doing the books. It kept her and Joss in clothes and extras; she would have liked it to have kept them in food and household expenses too, but when she said this to James, he was absolutely adamant.

  ‘No. I’m not even going to discuss it. You can call me antediluvian if you like but I want to support you both. If there ever comes a time when I can’t, I’ll tell you, but until then, shut up and eat up.’

  Kate sat up in the bath and seized the soap. She began to wash vigorously, almost punishingly, as if she were scrubbing away something much more than tiredness and a day’s wear on her skin. When she had finished, she let the bath water out and turned the shower on, to cold, and rinsed herself all over, for longer than was anything but purely unpleasant. Then she towelled herself dry, pulled on jeans, a huge old jersey of James’s, and a pair of thick white seamen’s socks, and padded downstairs.

  James had laid the table, and put candles on it. He had also piled the tangerines in a green glass bowl, cleared the day’s detritus off most of the surfaces and opened a bottle of wine. The air smelled deliciously of supper and Radio Three was kindly playing some Vivaldi. James turned it off when Kate came in, and looked at her.

  Kate bit her lip. ‘I’m so sorry. I don’t know why I said it. I never meant to.’

  He made a little gesture. ‘Forget it. It doesn’t matter. I expect it’s true, anyway.’

  They waited, to see if anything either of them had said would make things feel better. It didn’t. The telephone rang. Out of habit, because James hated the telephone, Kate went to answer it. ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Oh hi. It’s you. I know. Awful. I got wet through. Hang on, I’ll get him for you.’

  She held the telephone out to James as if it were a peace offering.

  ‘It’s Hugh,’ she said.

  Two

  Hugh Hunter sat on a rush-seated bar stool in his perfect country kitchen, and talked into the telephone. The kitchen had been made perfect by Julia, who had an unerring eye for not overdoing things. It was a long, low room with white walls and a cork floor and just the right kind of wooden furniture and jars and racks of practical kitchen things. There were terracotta pitchers and cracked blue-and-white plates and old copper pans, but not too many and not obviously displayed. All guests to Church Cottage seeped gradually into the kitchen because the atmosphere was so alluring, and sat by the Aga in Windsor armchairs on patchwork cushions to watch Julia stirring a sauce or giving the twins their tea. Hugh had an office to telephone from, at the back of the cottage, and another telephone, comfortably beside an armchair in the sitting-room, but mostly, and particularly if the call was conversational, he found himself in the kitchen, on a bar stool, with his elbow and wineglass and ashtray on the waxed elm dresser beside him.

  ‘I’ve rung to grizzle,’ Hugh said to his oldest friend, James Mallow.

  ‘It’ll have to be a short grizzle then. We’re about to eat.’

  ‘Julia’s left me boeuf Bourguignonne and gone off to record something. I should never have egged her on to try her hand at interviewing.’

  ‘Rubbish,’ James said, ‘you’re sick with pride.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘And quite right too.’

  ‘Yup,’ Hugh said. He was proud. In one way or another he had been proud of Julia all along. When she had produced boy twins for him, he had thought he would expire with pride.

  ‘Look,’ James said. ‘You eat your boeuf Bourguignonne and read something improving, and I’ll see you on Saturday, in the King’s Head.’

  ‘Condescending prat,’ said Hugh, and put the receiver down. He thought a bit. James had sounded unrelaxed. Probably it was Joss, who was enough, if she tried, to unrelax the most lowly-strung of households. Why were most teenagers such helpless posers? Would the twins be? Would those dear little fair boys with their earnest four-year-old faces turn into stereotypes of elaborately anarchic adolescence? How sad, if so, how sad and how deeply, profoundly, boring.

  Hugh opened the bottom door of the Aga. His casserole sat there in an olive-green glazed pot from Provence. He took it out carefully and put it on the rush mat Julia had left on the table, beside the place she had laid for him. ‘Salad in fridge,’ her note said. ‘Then cheese. Could you bear to finish the Brie first?’ That was typical of Julia, firm but ve
ry polite and charming. They had been married for seven years and, during those seven years, Hugh had frequently been out in the evening without Julia, or in London for the night. Tonight, however, was the first night of their marriage, with the exception of the odd occasion when Julia went to see her parents, when the goose’s accepted sauce applied to the gander.

  Hugh turned on the radio. Vivaldi. He didn’t feel like Vivaldi, he felt like something harsher, Walton or Britten, perhaps. Church Cottage had an elaborate music system, piped throughout the ground floor, but Hugh did not, somehow, feel like going to the trouble of finding the right disc, and feeding it into the player. ‘It’ll take two minutes,’ he told himself. ‘I know,’ he said back. ‘I know, I know, but I don’t want to do it.’

  He found his salad in the fridge, little curly fronds of dark and pale leaves sprinkled with walnuts. There was a brown baguette loaf too, and unsalted butter in a white rectangular china box with a cow reposing peacefully on the lid. He arranged his supper around the laid place at the table. It looked faultless; it smelled glorious. For some reason, Hugh wanted to pick up the butter dish lid by the china cow, and flick ash inside. He poured more wine into his glass – a thick, lovely glass which they had bought together in Venice – and splashed some on to the smooth blond surface of the table. He let the red pool lie there for a while, and then he drew in it with his finger and made it into a red snake. He thought of Joss Bain again. He was behaving like Joss. Joss made him think of James. He sat down on a patchwork cushioned chair, and began to spoon casserole on to his plate, and wished that James was there, eating with him, telling him not to smoke, looking at him with exasperation and affection.

  They had met at Cambridge. They had been tutorial partners, both reading history. James had been born in South Africa, in Grahamstown, in the Eastern Cape, where his father, arriving there from England in the mid-twenties, was a schoolmaster. The family had returned to England just before the Second World War, and James’s father had survived almost the whole war, only to die of a virulent dysentery in Italy, in a prisoner of war camp. His younger, physically frail brother, Leonard, had come to the family’s rescue, helping with James’s school fees and introducing his sister-in-law to the bursar at the public school where he taught himself, whom she subsequently married. James was brought up to believe that there was no career in life to be considered but schoolmastering.