Bad Girls Good Women

Julia decided rapidly that there was no point in attempting anything but the truth. Jessie would certainly recognise anything that wasn’t.

‘We haven’t got anywhere to live,’ she said. ‘Just at the moment, that is. The night before last we slept on the Embankment. Last night we were going to stay up, dancing, but somehow there’s a gap between night and morning, you know?’

‘I remember,’ Jessie said, a shade less grimly.

‘Felix rescued us, and brought us here.’

‘I know that already. What I’m trying to find out is why you had to sleep on the Embankment in the first place.’

Very quickly, putting in as little detail as possible, Julia told her. In Julia’s version of the story, Mattie had had an argument with her father about staying out too late. That was all. But Jessie’s little round eyes, sunk in the cushions of flesh, were shrewd as they darted to and fro. They lingered on Mattie for a minute longer.

When Julia had finished her speech, Jessie said, ‘I see. And now you’ve done your running away and found out how nasty it is, you’ll be going back home where you belong, won’t you?’

Mattie spoke for the first time. ‘No. We can’t do that.’ Her voice was quiet and steady and utterly definite, and Jessie’s glance flickered over her again.

‘We’ve both got jobs,’ Julia told her quickly. ‘Well-paid jobs. As soon as we’ve got some money we can rent a flat. Everything will be all right then.’

Jessie had seen enough. They looked so vulnerable, both of them, still sleepy, with their eyes smudged round with their unnecessary make-up, and their strange, young-old clothes all rucked up with the weight of sleep. But they weren’t so young, either, Jessie thought. A shadow of something, the beginning of experience perhaps, had touched both their faces, and sharpened them out of the softness of childhood. And they had a defiance in them, a determination, that touched her. The way they stood, the way they looked around, stirred memories in Jessie. They reminded her of friends she hadn’t seen for a long time, most of whom she would never see again. And, just a little, they reminded her of herself.

Jessie sighed.

‘Oh, bloody hell. You’d better have a drink and something to eat before I really do kick you out. Felix! Bring that bottle and some glasses in here.’

And Felix came in, awkwardly tall in the low room, but moving as gracefully as a cat in his black jersey. The girls watched him and he smiled at all three of them, as triumphantly as if he had called the truce himself. With a flourish, he took four glasses off a tray.

‘There’s beer or vodka,’ he announced. The two girls instinctively looked at Jessie for guidance, and Felix hid his smile.

‘You’d better take vodka,’ Jessie ordered. ‘That beer Felix drinks tastes like piss. Dress it up with some orange for them, Felix, there’s a love.’ Felix poured the drinks while Jessie watched impatiently, and then she raised her glass. ‘Here’s to freedom.’

It was such an incongruous toast, coming from this fat, ungainly old woman wedged in her rooftop room, and yet so apt for them, that the girls just gaped at her. Jessie broke into wheezy chuckles. ‘That’s what you think you want, isn’t it? Come on. I hate drinking alone.’

So Mattie and Julia sipped at their sweet, oily-orange drinks and Jessie downed her neat vodka in a gulp. She held out her empty glass. ‘Come on, Felix, since we’re all here. Let’s have a party.’

As soon as she had said the word, the four of them did become a party. The Sunday morning sun shone in through the windows and danced on the polished frames and the glass faces of the photographs, and Mattie and Julia felt the vodka warming their empty stomachs and loosening their limbs and tongues. Felix was their rescuer and their friend, and although they didn’t know yet what Jessie would mean to them, they felt the warmth of her. After the Embankment, and what had happened before and since, that warmth was doubly welcome.

Julia stood up and wandered round the room, peering at the faces pinned in their photograph frames.

‘Who are they all?’ she murmured. ‘You’ve got hundreds and hundreds of friends. More people than I’ve ever even met.’

She couldn’t have struck a better note. Jessie leaned back in her chair and laced her fingers across her front.

‘Used to have, dear, used to have. Dead, now, most of them. The rest are finished, like me. But we had some good times in our day, we did. Times like you wouldn’t believe. See that picture there, the one you’re looking at? That’s Jocky Gordon with his arm round me, the boxer. I met them all, in my line of business. All of ’em. You’d be surprised, some of the things I’ve seen.’

‘Tell us about it,’ Mattie begged her.

Jessie beamed, and settled more comfortably in her seat.

Still smiling, Felix slipped out into the kitchen. It was on the shaded side of the house, cool and neat and inviting. He could make something to eat, now that he had seen that Jessie was happy.

He opened the cupboard door, his movements economical in the confined space. He had planned to finish the leftovers of a knuckle of ham with Jessie, but that wouldn’t stretch to four. He would make a salad and put the ham into omelettes, instead. Felix unwrapped the lettuce and picked the leaves over carefully. He could hear laughter from Jessie’s room. He was ready to make the omelettes when he felt eyes on his back, and turned round to see Julia leaning against the open door. He gestured uncertainly, not knowing how long she had been watching him.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said softly. ‘I didn’t mean to startle you. I came to say thanks.’

They listened for a second to a third person’s voice in Jessie’s room, and then they realised that it was Mattie, mimicking somebody. Mattie was a wonderful mimic, and Jessie’s choking laugh rose too.

‘I should thank you, for listening to Mum,’ Felix said. ‘She doesn’t have many people to tell her stories to.’

He was moving around the kitchen again, breaking eggs into a blue pottery bowl. The yolks lay in it, a bright yellow cluster.

‘I like her,’ Julia said simply. She was thinking how nice this kitchen was, with its bare wooden tops and white walls. No fuss, and covers, and labels, like there was at home. Felix opened the window. In the angle of the roofs outside stood four clay flowerpots. He picked a handful of parsley and some chives from them, and a few sprigs of thyme. Julia watched as he chopped the herbs and melted a knob of butter in an old copper pan.

‘You’re clever,’ she said. ‘I wish I could do that.’

‘Can’t you cook?’ Felix asked, surprised. He had assumed it was something all girls did, automatically. It was unusual for boys to enjoy it, that was all.

‘My mother tried to teach me,’ Julia said, without enthusiasm. Betty made sponge cakes, and thin stews or flaccid pies, and looked forward to getting cleared up afterwards. There had been nothing as simple and obvious and inviting as the golden puff that materialised in Felix’s copper pan.

‘Lay the table, Julia, will you?’

It was the first time that he had called her by her name, and they smiled shyly at each other. Julia bent her head abruptly to pick the knives and forks out of a wicker tray.

Felix bent down too, and took a dark red bottle from its resting place under the sink. ‘Let’s drink this,’ he said. ‘Mum will stick to her vodka, so the three of us can share it.’

It was a wonderful, convivial lunch.

Felix pulled out the flaps of the table and drew it into the sunny place in the window. He spread a festive white cloth over the pocked surface. Jessie sat queenly at the head of the table, with Mattie and Julia on either side.

They ate ravenously, while Jessie talked, capping and recapping her own stories. She was too engrossed even to drink more than a few tots from the glass beside her hand. The girls had never tasted wine before, and it made them talkative too. The chatter and laugher rose in the sunny room, with Felix’s quiet voice prompting them all.

At last, when they had eaten all the omelette and wiped the last of the oily dressing out of the salad bowl, and Julia and Mattie had demolished the remains of a chocolate cake, Jessie tinkled her fork against her glass.

‘I’ve thought of another toast,’ she declared. ‘A more important one.’

Felix hastily drained the last of the Beaujolais into the three wine glasses and filled Jessie’s to the brim with vodka. She lifted it without looking at it, not spilling even a drop.

‘To friendship.’

They echoed her, ‘To friendship,’ and drank again.

‘And I don’t imagine,’ Jessie went on, with feigned annoyance, ‘that having proposed that, I’m going to be able to get rid of you quite so easily. Am I?’

The girls waited, not looking anywhere.

‘So I suppose you’d better stay on here. Just till you find your own place, mind. Till then, and not a minute longer.’

She shot a glance around the table, to Felix, to Julia and Mattie, and back again to Felix.

‘Not a minute longer,’ he repeated, softly. Whatever Jessie was plotting, if it made her happier, that was enough.