Bad Girls Good Women

Mattie lowered the magazine. ‘While she can?’

‘That’s right. What did you think I said? The boy’s big and beautiful, but he’s not a stayer. Any more than your old man, Felix Lemoine. Let Julia go while he’s here, that’s all.’

Mattie and Felix didn’t look at each other. Mattie stood up and said, ‘I’ll do the tea, if you like. You’ll have to tell me what needs doing, Felix.’

‘Supper,’ he corrected her, automatically.

Josh took Julia to an Italian restaurant where they sat and let their plates of fettucine go cold in front of them. They drank Chianti from a bottle with a raffia case, and stared at each other, sometimes not even talking.

When the bottle was empty Julia said, daringly, ‘I was afraid that you weren’t going to come. Three weeks is a long time.’ Josh’s face changed, darkening a little, and she wished immediately that she hadn’t said anything.

‘I was flying,’ he said. ‘For Harry Gilbert. I needed the money, but Harry expects good value for it.’

It was partly true. Harry’s air-freight business was doing well, and Josh had flown several trips to the Mediterranean for him, lifting materials for a hotel development in Malta. But the real reason was that Josh had been disturbed by the strength of the attraction he had felt for the thin dark girl he had watched in Leoni’s. Josh liked his girls to be willing, decorative accessories who didn’t ask too much of him. By choosing carefully, Josh could be sure of a warm welcome when he needed it, and no fuss when he didn’t. Julia clearly didn’t belong to the right category. She was hungry, and eager, and too vulnerable. Julia meant trouble for both of them, and Josh thought that she was too young for it.

But he had thought about her, as he watched the instruments in the Lancaster’s cockpit. He had decided that he wouldn’t go looking for her, but he still hadn’t forgotten her. Harry Gilbert asked him, and he shrugged. ‘She’s only a kid. When I need a kid of my own I’ll get one the interesting way.’

And then, without letting himself think about it, he had found himself at the door in the square. It was the first night he had been back in London since the dinner at Leoni’s.

As soon as he saw Julia, Josh didn’t want to think anyway. He wanted to look at her, and listen to her voice, and smile at her mixture of naivety and wilful, calculated knowingness.

He lifted her hand from the tablecloth and kissed the knuckles.

‘I’m here now.’

‘Yes. I don’t care about anything else.’

She looked at him, her head on one side, the absurd earrings winking in the candlelight. Josh imagined how he would lift the green jersey over her head and fit his hands around the narrow ridges of her ribcage. He would taste her skin, quartering it inch by inch with his tongue. Josh shifted in his chair, and let go of her hand again. She was sixteen, he reminded himself.

After their dinner, he took her to a party. It was in a flat in Bayswater, and the high rooms with their peeling cornices were packed with people. Everyone seemed to know Josh. He cut an avenue of welcome through the crowd.

‘Hey, Josh. How ya doing, man?’

‘Josh, darling. Why so long?’

Julia might have been shy amongst so many smart strangers, but with Josh she felt that they were all friends.

‘Who’s this? Your kid sister?’

‘I’m nobody’s sister,’ Julia said briskly, and a man laughed and put a drink into her hand. She floated through the party, made invulnerable by her happiness. Sometimes the crowd carried her away from Josh and she talked, or danced, and then across the room she saw his blond head turning to look for her.

I love you, Julia thought again. The happiness was so perfect that she didn’t question it. It fitted around her, as if it had always been there.

She had no idea what time it was when the party ended. Josh took her home and she watched the street lamps flick past the taxi window, shining their brief nimbus of gold light through the glass, with her head against his shoulder. Outside the door in the square Josh put his arms around her. They stood without moving, their faces not quite touching. They seemed already to have travelled a long way from the nightclub, from the streets where they had walked and talked on the first evening.

Julia knew where they were going. She felt certain of it, her certainty like a warm, pleasurable weight under her ribs.

‘Can I see you tomorrow?’ Josh asked formally.

She nodded, smiling at him.

‘Be ready early and wear warm clothes. We’ll be away until Sunday.’

A night, away with Josh.

‘Where are we going?’

‘Flying.’

He kissed her, his mouth very warm against hers.

‘Until tomorrow.’

Julia went slowly up the stairs. The flat was in darkness, but the blackness seemed full of stars.

Felix’s door was closed, and when Julia turned the light on in her bedroom she saw Mattie curled up under her bedclothes with her arm up over her face. Julia watched her, trying to imagine going to sleep herself. It seemed impossible, the surrender of what she felt now to wasteful unconsciousness. She turned off the light and went out, closing the door with a soft click behind her. She stood in the hallway, hesitating, wondering whether to perch in the kitchen or to go down and walk under the trees in the square. Then she heard Jessie, calling out to her.

Jessie was sitting up in bed. She had slept for a few hours, numbed by vodka, but now she was awake again, facing the empty time until daylight. Until recently she would have levered herself out of bed and shuffled up and down the room to ease the restlessness, but now she felt too heavy and too exhausted to get up. Insomnia was like a grub inside her, gnawing, exposing her tiredness. This was the time when her memories assailed her, so vividly that it was hard to distinguish between what was real and what was remembered.

‘Julia?’ she begged. ‘Is that you? Come in here to me, will you?’

Or was it Felix, a little boy pattering in the night, or Desmond, creeping in from she didn’t know where …

Julia slipped into the room. Of course it was Julia. Back from her night out. She brought the old scent of cigarettes and closed rooms and perfume with her, and Jessie felt the past stirring like a massive body in the bed beside her.

‘Can’t you sleep?’ Julia whispered. She saw that Jessie’s face was grey, mottled with mauve, and her scalp showed through the strands of grey hair. In the daytime, with her face painted and her glass in her hand, Jessie was like a rock. It was a shock to see her so clearly at the night’s mercy. ‘Do you want a cup of tea?’

Jessie shook her head. ‘Just sit with me for a bit.’

Julia sat down on the edge of the bed. She felt the mattress dip sharply away from her, sagging under Jessie’s weight.

‘Well? How was it?’ Jessie demanded. That was more like her, and Julia’s anxiety ebbed a little.

‘I had a wonderful time,’ she said simply.

‘Dear God, I can see that. Tell us about it.’

Julia told her and Jessie listened, Julia’s talk interweaving with her own times, the fair-haired American boy with his ready smile and his man-like evasions all mixed up with a big black man who played the saxophone under a blue light and a boy from a long time ago who came knocking on a terrace-house door in Hoxton with a bunch of marigolds in his hand …

Jessie’s eyelids had dropped, but they opened again as soon as Julia leaned forward.

‘I thought you’d gone to sleep.’

‘No. Go on.

‘That’s all. Jessie, he’s going to take me flying tomorrow.’ Just like a little girl, promised a treat. The seaside, or a film show. Jessie looked at her face. Her mouth, and her eyes, belonged to a woman. But the way her arms wrapped round her chest, to keep the excitement in, that was what a child did. Jessie thought of the little woman in her brown coat and hat who had come to look for a child, and had found Julia.

‘D’you ever think about your ma?’ she demanded roughly. Julia stared at her, and then she said, ‘Yes, I think about her.’ In the silent, feverish weeks that had gone by since meeting Josh, Julia had tried to imagine her mother. Why had she made her a dirty little baby? Why hadn’t she wanted her? Perhaps she had been in trouble, not just that ordinary trouble. Or in some kind of danger, and so had given up her baby rather than let her inherit that. Perhaps she was someone special, nothing to do with the world of Fairmile Road. How much had it cost her, to give her daughter away to Betty and Vernon? Julia had let herself imagine a big house at the end of a curving avenue of trees. Even a face at one of the windows, a pale but exact replica of her own. She wondered if her mother was looking out, praying for a sight of the child she had lost.