The Men and the Girls Read online

‘Not really.’

  Julia said nothing. After a while, Hugh said against her shoulder, ‘My contract’s up for renewal again in the summer.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Kettle’s boiling—’

  ‘It’ll switch itself off.’

  ‘Maurice is a good friend,’ Hugh said, a little heavily.

  ‘He’s as weak as water,’ Julia said. ‘Only serving time now until retirement.’

  ‘Still Chairman, sweetie—’

  Julia let go of Hugh, and went over to the kettle. She unhooked, as she passed it, a blue-and-white mug from the dresser and dropped into it a sachet of camomile tea.

  ‘Maurice won’t let me down,’ Hugh said.

  Julia poured boiling water into her mug.

  ‘Know something?’ Hugh said. He had straightened on his bar stool and now took a confident swallow of wine.

  ‘Tell me,’ Julia said, her mind winding itself lovingly about the memory of her evening, about the director’s praise . . .

  ‘The Kevin McKinleys of this world,’ Hugh said, looking straight at Julia with that directness of gaze so effective on camera, ‘come, and go. Mostly go, having no bottom. But you can be sure of one thing, absolutely sure. And that is that the tide in the affairs of television is swinging back my way.’

  Long after Hugh had fallen asleep, Julia was still wakeful. When she heard the long case-clock in the hall strike two, she realized that it was a serious wakefulness, and slid quietly out of bed and went down to the kitchen.

  The kitchen was warm, even at two in the morning, because of the Aga, the dark-blue Aga which Julia had chosen with such grave care. Hugh had teased her about it; Hugh was one of the few people in her life who had ever teased her, and she had stopped feeling shy about it, had grown even to like it. ‘Miss Immaculate Conception,’ he called her. ‘Miss Perfect Understatement. Miss Shiny Shoes.’ He could still, with light-hearted physical suggestiveness, make her blush.

  She had blushed that evening, out of pure pleasure.

  ‘Great,’ the director had said to her, when they had finished. ‘I’ve hardly a complaint. What it is to work with someone who uses their intelligence.’ Later still he said, ‘You’ll be going places, Julia.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, this is just an experiment. I’m really a mother of two.’

  They had both laughed. He’d said, ‘You mean mothers aren’t people?’ and then he said, ‘See you next week. I’ll look forward to it.’

  Julia sat down in one of the Windsor armchairs and put her slippered feet against one of the Aga’s heavy hot doors. She had not, she reflected, been quite truthful when she told the director that she was experimenting. She was not, by nature, an experimenter. It had become perfectly plain to her, since the twins were born, that Hugh’s career was going to run out of fuel quite soon, and glide gently to a halt. This was going to be a fearful blow to him, and Julia, while bracing herself for it, was not quite sure how best she could help him bear it. In her eyes, his fading glamour as a television face had had nothing to do with falling in love with him; she’d done that because he wasn’t in the least afraid of her, and he made her laugh. He was more musical than she was, more broadly educated, inevitably more experienced. He also had, in all kinds of directions, truly catholic tastes. Once, when they had known each other only a week or so, she had asked him what kind of music he liked best and he had said at once, quite seriously, ‘Mozart for the morning and Tina Turner for the afternoons.’

  ‘What do you see in him?’ Julia’s mother had demanded. She had wanted Julia to marry a country landowner and have Labradors.

  ‘He delights me,’ Julia said.

  I wouldn’t mind if he didn’t work at all, Julia told herself, now, moving her feet to a cooler door, I’d only mind for him. But we’ve got to live, and we’ve got to live properly. I’m not going backwards. We’ve all got to be clothed and fed and the twins have got to be educated. It’s as simple as that. Hugh’s got no pension and no capital outside this house. It’s up to me.

  Her thoughts, which could never help themselves, began to form into a plan. If the Night Life series was generally considered a success, and led to something else, preferably under contract, then she would look about for a responsible girl who could drive, to look after the twins . . .

  The kitchen door opened. Hugh said, ‘Can’t stand not sleeping.’

  Julia put a hand out to him.

  ‘What are you up to,’ Hugh said, ‘sitting down here looking all of fourteen? What are you plotting?’

  ‘I’m not plotting—’

  ‘No?’

  ‘I’m planning.’

  ‘Yes,’ Hugh said, his voice dropping. ‘Yes. I was afraid of that.’

  Three

  ‘My lotus flower,’ Uncle Leonard said to Mrs Cheng. ‘My little yellow peril, where the bloody hell have you put my slippers?’

  ‘Under bed,’ said Mrs Cheng. ‘Alway’ under bed.’

  ‘And how,’ said Leonard, leaning on his stick and snorting at her down his nose, ‘how am I, with a gammy hip and a ticker on the blink, supposed to get them? Grovel about on the floor to find the sodding things?’

  Mrs Cheng went on dusting, flick, flick, like a mechanical doll.

  ‘Alway’ do.’

  ‘Never do. Shall I spend the day in my bleeding socks?’

  ‘S’pose so.’

  Leonard was very happy. He adored the days Mrs Cheng came, and heaven knows, this week needed a little light relief.

  ‘There’s been an atmosphere here,’ he said confidingly. ‘An atmosphere like nuclear fall-out. James knocked some old bat off her bike and pow – mushroom cloud.’

  ‘Not interested,’ said Mrs Cheng. She began to move all the pill bottles off the glass shelf above Leonard’s basin.

  ‘Mind you,’ Leonard said, poking about under his bed and fishing out his slippers with the hooked end of his stick, ‘it was a pretty damned stupid thing to do, driving without specs.’

  Mrs Cheng ran water into the basin and began to polish the taps.

  ‘He’s gone to see her again today, the old bat. Kate doesn’t like that. Now, why doesn’t she? Loves the halt and the lame but doesn’t like James trotting round to see a harmless old bat. What’s the reason?’

  ‘None of your business,’ Mrs Cheng said. ‘Want coffee?’

  ‘Yes, but not yours. Never yet met a Chink who could make coffee. Do you realize what filthy coffee you make?’

  Mrs Cheng put the pill bottles back.

  ‘Good ‘nough for you.’

  ‘Love a woman with spirit,’ Leonard said. ‘Love a bit of fight. Kate’s got spirit. D’you think she thinks James and Old Bat Bachelor have too much in common as to age? Hah!’

  ‘You older than either,’ Mrs Cheng said. ‘You more trouble than all put together.’

  Leonard looked pleased. ‘You bet I am. Where’s my coffee? It’s ten past eleven. What does Kate pay you for, you useless peasant?’

  Mrs Cheng picked up her dusters and cloths and began to wind the flex round the Hoover handle.

  ‘I paid double,’ she said, ‘to put up with you.’

  Miss Bachelor kept the very dull biscuits she offered James with his coffee in an octagonal tin patterned with vaguely oriental herons and peonies. It was a very battered tin, as battered as everything else in Miss Bachelor’s crammed, first-floor bed-sitting-room, except for her precious radio, which was brand-new, and on which she could, to her delight, get the BBC World Service during her long, sleepless nights.

  Her room was not only crammed, but cheerless. She had no more idea of how to make it charming than she had of how to dress, and she calmly knew it. ‘As you observe,’ she said to James, ‘I seem to have no practical visual sense. The rapture I feel in seeing beautiful things is something I am quite unable to translate into my life.’ Her furniture was either late-Victorian, heavy and overbearing, or what James’s mother would have called boarding-house, gimcrack and slightly fancy, overlaid with
a varnish like thin gravy. Her bed had a counterpane of tired maroon candlewick, and her unwelcoming chairs were covered in terrible blankets of sewn-together crochet squares, in the screaming colours associated with acrylic paint. The carpet was muddy, the sad curtains unlined; only the walls relieved the ugliness, being covered with postcards and larger reproductions of all the Italian works of art Miss Bachelor so loved – paintings by Bellini and Giorgione, statues by Michelangelo, bas reliefs by Ghiberti and della Robbia.

  Miss Bachelor’s sister-in-law owned the house in Cardigan Street, and allowed her the room. She had opened the door to James three times by now. She was a depressed, grim woman, a widow, who lived only for her hypochondria. She resented Beatrice’s cleverness, just as she had resented her husband’s, and for Beatrice to have a personable male caller bringing sherry and a pot of hyacinth bulbs just coming into flower was a fine cause for fresh resentment.

  ‘Mrs Bachelor,’ said James heartily to her on the third visit. ‘How exceptionally well you’re looking.’

  ‘You will have annoyed her exceedingly,’ Beatrice said.

  ‘Will she take it out on you?’

  ‘She will try. She will hide my butter or shut my cat out, but I have developed a mantle of imperviousness to defend myself. It irritates her beyond all telling.’

  Beatrice had several dark bruises on her legs, visible through her unlovely stockings. James had vowed he would keep coming until those bruises had vanished. After the first few minutes of the first visit, Beatrice had said she didn’t want the accident referred to again.

  ‘It involved us both in a loss of dignity, and we shall only suffer it anew if we remind ourselves of it.’

  She was tremendously pleased with the hyacinths, and shy about the sherry. ‘There was a period in my life,’ she said unexpectedly, ‘when I drank a great deal of it, a very great deal. It coincided with a time of going to Greece alone, and of having adventures. The memory of that time is rather – stimulating. But it disconcerts me too.’

  James leaned forward. ‘What adventures?’

  Beatrice looked away.

  ‘Lorry drivers?’ said James.

  Beatrice said nothing.

  ‘Oh Miss Bachelor,’ James said. ‘I begin to feel so glad I knocked you over.’

  She was, he discovered, sharp as well as brave and unconventional. She had taught classics at an Oxford girls’ school, but had had to retire early to look after her old parents who both took an interminable and fretful time to die. ‘I loved them,’ she said serenely to James, ‘but I didn’t like them in the least.’ They had left a tiny estate, just enough for Beatrice’s brother and his wife to buy the little Jericho house, and give Beatrice a room in it. ‘My brother was hopelessly impractical, an antiquarian and, I must confess, a very weak character. My sister-in-law kept him by working as a secretary in a solicitor’s office, and I contributed out of my pension which, I have to admit, is very nearly invisible to the naked eye.’

  ‘Not enough to go to Greece any more?’

  ‘Greece,’ said Beatrice, ‘never cost me very much. Not, that is, in money.’

  James longed to share this with Kate. ‘Do you think she had a series of rough-trade romps? Do you think they paid for her? Took her all over the Peloponnese in the cabs of their trucks, and fed her ouzo and olives and made love to her under taverna tables?’ But Kate wouldn’t respond. She looked mulish and cold. She said she thought James was making a fool of himself and of Miss Bachelor, and then she said she didn’t want to hear any more about it.

  ‘Jealous,’ Uncle Leonard said.

  ‘Jealous? Of Beatrice Bachelor? Don’t be daft.’

  ‘I’m not daft. I’m a wiser old bugger than I’m given credit for.’

  ‘You’re certainly an old stirrer.’

  Leonard put down the paper and looked at him.

  ‘You’re an odd cove, James.’

  Was he odd? Was it odd to feel curiously at peace in this ugly room, with its little banners of beauty and civilization pinned to the walls, in the company of Beatrice Bachelor? Was it any odder than spending time in the places Kate chose to frequent, the places inhabited by all those poor wretches whom modern society had made so hopelessly dependent? And if he was odd – or she was – why wouldn’t she talk about it?

  ‘I live with a woman twenty-five years younger than I am,’ he told Beatrice. ‘She has a fourteen-year-old daughter. And we also have my eighty-five-year-old uncle.’

  ‘A rich household.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I suppose it is. When you live something, it doesn’t of course feel rich, it merely feels commonplace.’

  ‘You must learn to value dullness,’ Miss Bachelor said. ‘And you must send me that fourteen year old. I like girls. I particularly, having been one myself, like difficult girls. Fourteen year olds, if they’re worth their future salt, are always difficult.’

  ‘I won’t go,’ Joss said.

  ‘Of course you don’t have to,’ Kate said. She felt tired and irritable. She had spent the day helping in the restaurant kitchen, because the chef was off sick, and she had chopped up a mountain of chillies without rubber gloves, and her fingers and cuticles blazed and throbbed.

  ‘I hate old women. What’s the point, anyway?’

  ‘I said, you don’t have to go.’

  But Joss wanted to. ‘What’s he on about? Why does he want to make me?’

  I’m lonely, Joss thought. She turned the little silver stud she had just had inserted in the side of her nose. Uncle Leonard had said, ‘Good God. Looks like a bloody great boil,’ sending Joss flying to the bathroom mirror. ‘It looks great!’ she’d shouted. She spun it carefully now, defiant and uncertain.

  ‘I’m not going. I’m not. He can go if he wants to, but I’m not.’

  I wish, Kate thought, holding her burning hands under the kitchen tap, I wish he didn’t want to. I wish he wasn’t so fascinated. It makes him seem so peculiar, somehow, a bit dotty, old dotty. I know I’d go mad if he fancied anyone young, but somehow this mental fancying of someone old has got me too, it really has, and I shouldn’t feel it, I shouldn’t.

  ‘I’m not—’ Joss began again.

  Kate spun round, Kate who never shouted, and shouted, ‘Oh for God’s sake, Joss, go away!’

  Joss stared. Then she swore. Kate turned back to the sink, trembling. The kitchen door banged behind Joss, and her aggressive boots went up the stairs with challenging thuds.

  I’m tired, Kate thought. It’s January and I’m tired. I don’t suppose I’m worth much more than four pounds an hour but, at the end of a day like this, I can’t help feeling that there must be easier ways to earn twenty-five pounds. In between chopping chillies, she had helped in the restaurant, waiting on the three back tables which the regular girl, Susie, disliked because no-one could see her, away from the front window, and she lived in hope of being seen, and, as a consequence of being seen, of being rescued from being a waitress and taken away to be a princess instead. Nobody interesting had come to Kate’s tables that lunchtime, only a dull pair of tidy women, and a man on his own with a book, and three whispering students, but two couples had come to the front tables who had, in their various ways, upset Kate even more than the savage chillies. That poor man, Kate thought now, taking her dripping hands away from the stream of water to see if they still hurt, that poor young man. And then Julia.

  The young man had come in first, a postgraduate, perhaps, not young enough to be an undergraduate, with a dramatic girl in bold earrings and thigh boots. She was laughing as they came in and Kate thought how lovely, what a relief on a glum day like this to see people so happy that they’re laughing. But she wasn’t laughing with him, she was laughing at him, and soon, even while they wound up forkfuls of tagliatelle alla Carbonara, they were quarrelling. It seemed that the girl not only liked quarrelling, but she liked doing it in a public place where other people, even the lone man with a book, could look up and see her flinging her hands out, tossing her hair. The young man
had not been much more controlled. Kate had heard him say, ‘Not here. You mustn’t say these things here.’ Finally the girl had leapt up and thrown herself out into the street, and the man had said no thank you, he didn’t want any coffee, and had paid the bill and followed her.

  Five minutes later, while Susie was downstairs in the kitchen and Kate was pouring out coffee for the two tidy women, he came back in. Kate thought he had forgotten something. He came up to her, by the espresso machine, and she looked at him enquiringly. He said, ‘I’ve just come back to say sorry.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We were very anti-social.’ He turned to the restaurant. ‘I’m so sorry, everyone. It was extremely rude.’

  They gazed at him.

  ‘It’s nice of you to come back,’ Kate said.

  ‘I feel badly, I feel—’ he stopped. He had a narrow face and thick dark hair and his eyes were, Kate thought, so sad. He said, ‘I’ll go now. I just wanted to say that I’m sorry if we – if we spoiled anyone’s lunch. That’s all.’ He backed away. Kate smiled at him. He smiled too and his smile illuminated his face and made it puckish, delightful. He gave a little nod to Kate and opened the door to go out just as two other people pushed at it to come in. They were a man in a black leather jacket and Julia.

  Julia came straight up to Kate. She was smiling. She said, ‘I brought Rob here deliberately. He said he was Italy-sick, so I said I knew where to go.’

  ‘Good,’ Kate said faintly. Julia wore grey flannel trousers and a tweed jacket and a cream jersey and pearl earrings. Kate thought of the sauce stains down her apron and her red unhappy hands.

  Julia said, ‘Rob is my director.’ Rob smiled at Kate. He had a friendly, crumpled face and tinted spectacles.

  ‘Of course,’ Kate said. ‘Where would you like to sit?’

  ‘Not next to the lavatory door,’ Rob said.

  ‘Here then,’ Kate said, leading the way. ‘Here. Susie will look after you.’

  ‘Not you?’ Julia said. Her face was open.

  ‘I’m supposed to be skivvying in the kitchen. I shall offend the hierarchy otherwise—’

  Julia smiled again. ‘What do you recommend?’