Bad Girls Good Women

‘I can’t leave you alone for a single day, can I?’ Mattie teased. ‘Without you getting involved in a strip show. Fancy earning your living by taking your clothes off for a crowd of dirty men.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Julia answered light-heartedly. ‘Easier than hammering a typewriter all day. Or selling fourteen pairs of shoes.’

Mattie cocked her head.

‘Listen.’

It was music, drumming out somewhere below their feet.

‘Mmm.’ Julia tried out a few steps on the pavement. ‘And look.’

There was a dingy doorway sandwiched between two shops, with a temporary-looking notice pinned to the door.

NOW OPEN! THE ROCKET CLUB.

That was how they stumbled across it.

They had been heading round the corner to Cy Laurie’s, but the Rocket was there and in its opening week it was offering free membership to girls. Mattie and Julia didn’t need any more encouragement.

A flight of uneven steps led down to a white-painted cellar. There were tables around the walls, a bar selling soft drinks, and travel posters stuck on the walls for decoration. There was a trad jazz combo just hotting up, and people spinning and whirling in the white space.

They forgot everything, and launched themselves into the dance.

It was easy to forget, in those days.

The club filled up, and the heat and the pulsing rhythm and the exhilaration of dancing swept them up and created a separate, absorbing world. They danced with anyone who asked them, not noticing whether they were young or old or white or black, and when the supply of partners temporarily dried up they danced with each other.

It was a long, hot night and it went like a flash.

At a table against the wall, from behind a stub of candle jammed into a wine bottle, Felix Lemoine was watching them.

There were lots of girls a bit like them, he thought, but there was something about these two that singled them out. They were striking enough to look at, although their clothes were grubby and looked home-made. The taller one with the dark hair had an angular, arresting face that was almost beautiful, and a thin, restless body. Her friend was plainer, but her foaming mass of hair shone in the candlelight and she was a better dancer. She moved gracefully, holding her head up.

It wasn’t their appearances that interested him, Felix decided. It was their vitality. He could almost feel the crackle of it from where he sat. The two girls were absorbed in themselves, in their dancing and the world they had created, and they were careless of everything else. Felix liked that carelessness. He had already identified it as style.

He took a notepad and pencil out of his inner pocket, and began to draw.

When the drawing was finished he went on sitting there. It didn’t occur to him to ask one of them to dance.

He just watched, as he always did.

Two (#u8add3495-316b-5c45-aa1e-1c95b6ce887a)

It was quiet in the studio. The Saturday afternoon life class was an unpopular option. The model was a woman, and she had been sitting for an hour. Her face was expressionless and her body looked flaccid, Felix thought, as if she had gone away somewhere and left it behind. Her long hair was pinned up on the top of her head to show the lines of her jaw and throat. He drew carefully, shading in the coils of hair. That was easy enough, but the rest of her body was more difficult. The soft heaviness of it made him feel uncomfortable, wanting to look away instead of spending another whole hour staring at it.

He glanced around at the handful of other students. They were drawing intently. The tutor strolled between them, watching. When he reached Felix’s chair he stopped and murmured, ‘Your execution is good, Lemoine, but there’s no feeling. Loosen up.’

Felix mumbled his reply, and the tutor looked at the big clock on the wall. He nodded briskly to the model. She stood up, stretching unconcernedly, and pulled on a pink wrap. Then she lit a cigarette and unfolded a newspaper. She would rest for fifteen minutes and then resume her position.

Felix put his pencil away. He waited until the tutor was on the other side of the room, and then he slipped outside. Two of the other students followed him.

‘Coming outside for a fag, Felix?’ one of them asked cheerfully.

‘No, thanks. I think I’m going home.’

‘Yeah. Bit of an old dog, isn’t she? See you Monday, then.’ They strolled away with their jackets over their shoulders and their hands in the pockets of their jeans.

Felix went outside. The air smelt hot and tarry, but the faint breeze was welcome after the enclosed studio. He would walk home, he decided.

Felix liked walking in London. He enjoyed the anonymity of the streets, and the endless variety of faces streaming past him. He set off quickly through the afternoon crowds. When he reached Hyde Park he turned northwards, his pace slowing in the cool beneath the trees. As he crossed the dirt paths little whorls of dust lifted under his feet. He forgot the dislocation that he had felt in the life class, and after a moment he forgot the art school altogether. He wasn’t close enough to home, yet, to need to focus on that either, and his thoughts slid easily, disconnected, as they always did when he was walking. Felix usually felt most comfortable in the vacuum between one place and another. It was being there, almost anywhere nowadays, that was the problem. At Marble Arch he emerged into the traffic again, and turned down the long tunnel of Oxford Street. He was within reach of home now. Another few minutes, and he reached a featureless square to the north of Oxford Street. He paused beside a row of iron railings, and emerged from the journey’s limbo. He thought of home, and Jessie, as he looked across the square at their windows.

Most of the shabby Regency stucco houses in the square were occupied by offices, but a few still housed one or two flats, stranded amongst the solicitors and small import-export companies. Felix crossed to a gaunt, peeling house and went in through the black front door. As he climbed the stairs he could hear a typewriter clicking in one of the offices below, but otherwise the house seemed oppressively silent.

At the top of the last flight of stairs he unlocked a door, and peered across the five square feet of lobby into Jessie’s room. She was sitting in her chair by the window, and the sunlight beyond stamped out her dark, sibylline profile.

Then Felix’s mother turned her face to look at him. ‘Hello, duck,’ she said. ‘You’re early.’

He saw at a glance that the vodka bottle was on the table beside her, and judging by the level in it it was still early in the day for Jessie.

‘Why are you home so early? Not missing classes, are you?’

Still just as if he was a little boy, even though it was Jessie who was the helpless one now.

‘No,’ he lied, ‘I’m not missing classes. I’m hot, I’m just going to change my clothes.’

‘Go on then, be quick. Then come and talk to me. I think it might thunder. I hate thunder. Reminds me of the Blitz, with none of the fun. Oh, you wouldn’t remember.’

Her voice followed him into his bedroom. He took some clean clothes, neatly folded, out of his cupboard. He changed, and combed his black hair.

Jessie went on talking, but she broke off when he reappeared in the doorway. She looked at him over the rim of her glass, her eyes very bright and sharp in her shapeless face.

‘God, you’re a looker all right, my boy,’ Jessie said. ‘Just like your dad. Only a better colour.’ She laughed, her massive shoulders shaking silently.

‘Have you had anything to eat?’ Felix asked.

His mother shrugged.

‘I’ll make some soup.’

Jessie didn’t answer. She wasn’t interested in food any more.

The kitchen was very neat, Felix’s domain. He had made the cupboards and the shelves, and painted everything white.

‘I don’t call that very cosy,’ Julia had sniffed.

‘Well, I like it,’ Felix told her. ‘And you don’t cook, do you?’

He took a covered bowl out of the minute larder now and tipped the contents into a saucepan. He opened a cupboard and peered in at the tidy contents, then took a handful of dried pasta shells and dropped them into the pan. He was humming softly as he worked.