Bad Girls Good Women

Julia said nothing and Betty, with the fear lapping up in her again, began to talk faster. ‘Come home. We’ll forget all this. Dad and I won’t mention it, if that’s what you want. We’ll all forgot it. They’ll take you back at the school, in the new term. You can finish your course, and then get a job, a real job, a good one. You needn’t think that everything has gone wrong, just because of this.’

She was trying to say, if it’s out of pride that you won’t come back, don’t be proud. I’m not too proud to come here and beg you, am I? But Betty had never been any good at words.

‘You can come back. Everything is at home, waiting for you.’

Julia seemed to be waiting politely for her mother to finish. But at last she said, ‘I’m not coming home.’

Betty sprang up and ran to her. She put her hands on Julia’s sleeves and twisted them, trying to move her, trying to find her. Julia thought, she’s so small. like a dry leaf. She had no memories of Betty having been the source of warmth and strength in their childhood. She couldn’t remember her childhood at all. All she could focus on was this, a little, thin woman who clung to her, and whose bones felt brittle.

Suddenly all the perspectives changed.

The great battle that she had prepared herself for, the battle for her own freedom to be fought out to the sound of trumpets in front of Jessie and Felix, had never even begun. It was a nothing, a foregone conclusion, her own strength brutally crushing Betty’s.

Julia wished now that she had made the small concession of letting her mother take her defeat in private.

‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘I’m very sorry.’

And Betty, who was just beginning to understand what her loss really was, with bitterness eating through her fear, rounded on Julia for the last time.

‘Sorry? You’re sorry, is that all? After what we’ve done for you, and given up for you, ever since you were a baby? A dirty little baby who wasn’t wanted …’

Betty’s mouth made a circle of pain, and her hand went up to cover it. She heard the warning creak as Jessie leaned forward in her chair, and out of the corner of her eyes she saw the shadow move as Felix swung away from the window.

Julia didn’t hear anything or see anything. There were only the words, inside her head. A dirty little baby who wasn’t wanted.

Afterwards she remembered a bowl of oranges, Felix’s sea-blue bowl, on the table in the window. She remembered a paisley shawl draped over the sofa back, and the sagging cushions and protruding springs of the sofa itself. The precise images came back to her, afterwards, in the moments of deepest shock.

Lily. Lily, standing in a drawing room in jeans and a torn T-shirt. Bare, tanned feet with chipped silver polish on the toenails.

‘You can’t go,’ Julia heard herself saying.

Lily dug her hands deep into the pockets of her jeans. Her shoulders hunched forward to make shadowed deep hollows at the base of her throat.

‘I want to go. I want to go with Daddy and Clare.’ That clear, high voice, cutting her.

‘You can’t. You have to live with me.’

And Lily looking back at her, with her father’s level eyes and Julia’s own mouth, shaping those words.

‘What kind of life will it be, if you make me?’

Too old for her age, and yet still a little girl. The weight of all that had happened, pressing on them both.

And then Lily turned lightly away from her, while Julia wanted to run after her and hold her as she would once have been able to do, keeping her, loving her now that it was too late.

The door closed.

Julia saw the oranges then, and the old sofa, and the squirled feathers of the paisley.

In the close attic room she moved slowly, as if the air around her hand turned solid.

‘What do you mean?’ the words slurred in her mouth. Like being drunk, only she knew she wasn’t drunk.

Betty grown old, with all her life of fear naked in her eyes now, fear and a kind of last exultation. Power, after all. Not quite done yet.

‘You’re not my daughter. Not Vernon’s either. We took you when you were just a few weeks old. I’d lost one of my own, couldn’t have another. And the War was coming.’

All Julia could think of, the only thing as she struggled to form the words, was, ‘My real mother? Who was she?’

Betty’s face dancing in front of her eyes, ageing as the seconds ticked past, a stranger’s.

‘I don’t know. I never knew. Some silly girl, I suppose, who got herself into trouble.’

That was all.

It was Felix who came forward to put his arms around Julia. Her head fell against his shoulder and she began to shiver. The sudden stripping away of it all, Fairmile Road and Betty and Vernon, left her icy cold. Her teeth chattered and Felix’s hands felt dangerously hot through her thin blouse. He held her close to him. For a moment even Jessie was silenced, but Julia laughed. It was a little, tuneless noise that none of them recognised as laughter. She lifted her head from Felix’s shoulder and said, ‘I’m glad you told me. It explains a lot of things, doesn’t it?’ She looked past Betty as if she had stopped existing and repeated, ‘Some silly girl.’

Jessie leaned forward to Betty. ‘You shouldn’t have told her like that,’ she said sharply. ‘Don’t you know better than that?’ Betty ignored her. Her eyes were fixed on Julia, held in Felix’s arms. With her last shot gone, Betty was defenceless. Felix thought painfully that she looked like a dismembered creature, ‘We did our best for you,’ she whispered. ‘We loved you.’

‘Love?’ The word sounded like an intricate puzzle to Julia, turning inwards on itself until it was finally empty, without meaning. ‘Yes, it doesn’t make any difference, you know. I won’t come home.’

She was more brutally certain now’. Her own strength surprised her. Betty made a last effort. ‘We’re still your parents. Your mother and father. Legal guardians. And you’re only sixteen. We can make you come back if we have to.’

Jessie’s big, grey head lifted, but she said nothing.

Julia laughed again, just recognisably now.

‘You could, but what difference will it make in the end? I will be twenty-one one day, you can’t stop that, and even before then you don’t own me. You can’t change what you’ve just told me.’ Carefully but deliberately she detached herself from Felix. She went across to the sofa and sat down, her back against the warm paisley shawl. ‘I’m all right,’ she said to Felix and Jessie. She was smiling when she turned to Betty again.

‘It’s funny, in a way, isn’t it? Ironic, I think that’s the word. I wanted to be free, and you’ve set me free by telling me the truth.’

There was a moment of silence. Felix thought, It isn’t as simple as that.

Then Betty stood up. Her coat seemed bigger, too loose for her frame inside it, and her handbag looked like a dead weight over her arm.

‘You won’t come?’ she asked childishly.

‘No,’ Julia repeated. ‘I live here now.’

There was no more talk of guardianship, no suggestion of ownership. Betty’s head nodded stiffly, just once.

Watching her, Jessie tried to promise, ‘We’ll look after her for you. I’ll see she’s all right.’

Betty swung round to her, bitterness only heightened by defeat.

‘You? You and him?’ She jerked her head at Felix. ‘My Julia might just as well be on the streets.’

No one said anything then, not even Julia, even though her fists clenched in her lap. She watched her mother plod slowly to the door, fumble with the catch. There was still an instant when she could have said, Wait. Yet she didn’t, and afterwards she believed that she was right.