Bad Girls Good Women

Three days later, Julia and Felix were seeing her off from Euston Station. There had been a surprise addition to the send-off party – at the last minute Josh had turned up too.

Mattie leaned out of the carriage window. Sprouts of wet, stale steam separated her from Julia and Felix, and now that the time had come she didn’t want to leave them. In the last weeks in the square they had become a family. But Felix had heaved her one suitcase into the rack over her seat, and her single ticket was stowed in her purse.

‘Goodbye,’ she called. ‘I’ll write, lots and lots.’ As if she was going to Australia. It felt like it, suddenly. She wanted to whisper to Julia, ‘Be as happy with him as you like. Just don’t make him be your happiness.’ There was no chance of saying anything of the kind now, even if she could have found words precise enough to express her uneasiness. Julia was smiling, waving, with Josh’s arm round her shoulder.

Mattie wanted to whisper to Felix, too, but she had even less idea of what she might have said. There was just something in his face, behind his smile. Perhaps bewilderment. Josh’s other arm rested on Felix’s shoulder, drawing the three of them together, into a little circle of light. Josh’s vitality and charm had that effect, Mattie thought.

They might have been a picture, the three of them on the platform. Called something like Au Revoir, or We’ll Meet Again. That was another effect of Josh’s. He didn’t seem to belong, quite, to reality.

The guard’s whistle blew. Steam was thickened with smoke, and the train jolted forwards. She was going, anyway. She would miss them, but she wouldn’t miss her chance.

‘Goodbye! Good luck!’

‘Be a good girl, Mattie!’

She leaned out as far as she could, and blew kisses. ‘Not if I can help it!’ Julia and Felix stood waving, linked by Josh, until the guard’s van of Mattie’s train swayed out of sight.

‘I wish she hadn’t gone,’ Julia said, but she could only make herself aware of Josh. When he was with her everything else faded into insignificance, even the bleakness that she suffered when he wasn’t.

Since the flying weekend he had come to see her two or three times, appearing as if he had just thought of the idea five minutes earlier. His seeming casualness hurt Julia, but she accepted it because there was nothing else she could do.

Josh fitted well into the family in the square. Jessie always had time for good-looking young men, and although Mattie was wary of him for Julia’s sake, her touchiness disappeared when he brought a pile of American records in their paper sleeves and lay on the floor beside her to play them. One of the records was by Bill Haley, and that was the first that Mattie and Julia heard of rock and roll. From that time on, the sound of it belonged to their bedroom over the square, and to Josh.

Julia watched him with admiration, and pride, and such unmistakable love that made Jessie sigh for her. Only Felix held himself apart. He almost never looked straight at Josh. Whenever he was there, Felix was busy in the kitchen or in his own room. If Jessie insisted that he join them, he spread his work out on the table so that he could keep his head bent over that. He did one drawing, of Julia and Josh and Mattie listening to ‘Rock Around the Clock’, and he kept it pinned to the wall in his room.

Felix walked all the way from Euston to the block of flats in Ladbroke Grove. He walked quickly, with his head bent, and the rhythm helped to drum some of the impatience out of him. He didn’t enjoy being with Julia and Josh, but when he was apart from them he found himself thinking about them.

Felix shrugged so angrily that two girls who were passing giggled and stared. He didn’t suppose that Julia and Josh thought about him. He didn’t have any reason to suppose that Joshua Flood thought about anything at all except his various appetites. So why did he occupy Felix’s own consciousness like a splinter under a ball of flesh?

Deliberately, with an effort of will, Felix turned the thought away. He was going to work, and he would concentrate on that.

Felix had given up the pretence of studying art on a formal basis. The building work on the flats belonging to Mr Mogridge’s friend was almost complete, and there were six empty shells waiting to be fitted. Felix discovered that he was expected to be designer and decorator, and he was enjoying the challenge. On a tiny budget, and with his employer’s instructions to make the flats look ‘classy, you know the kind of thing, but not overpowering’, he was struggling to turn his ideas into cupboards and curtains.

Felix hated almost everything to do with modern design. He disliked splashy prints in harsh colours, and spindle-legged furniture, and synthetic materials. Felix dreamed of country houses and acres of brocade, Aubusson carpets and crystal chandeliers and the faded splendours of inherited treasures. It was hard to know how to translate that yearning into the reality of six spectacular conversions in Ladbroke Grove, or even how to recreate the particular atmosphere of the flat above the square, but Felix was going to do his best. By the time he reached the site he had almost forgotten Julia and Josh. On a Saturday afternoon the flats would be empty of builders and their sneering foreman, and he could walk around and think in peace.

So long as he was working, he could keep the darker anxieties at bay.

It was dark, with the sudden depressing weight of a northern November, when Mattie reached Leeds. She stood beside the ticket barrier with her suitcase, peering around her. Even under the station lights, fog thickened the air, and her breath hung in a cloud in front of her.

There was no one to meet her.

Mattie squared her shoulders and went out to the taxi rank beyond the station. She gave the taxi-driver the address of the theatre and they started off into the murk. The driver called something to her over his shoulder, in an accent so impenetrable that Mattie could hardly understand him. She felt as if she was in a foreign land.

But the theatre, when they reached it, reassured her a little. It was a huge grey edifice, seemingly big enough to seat a thousand playgoers. Lights streamed out and the taxi slid forward into the yellow glow. Mattie paid off the driver and went up the semicircle of shallow steps into the foyer. It was hung with playbills from past shows, and with grainy photographs of the two Headline productions.

It was completely deserted, except for a bored girl staring vacantly out of a glass-fronted booth. Mattie strode up to her.

‘I’m here to see Mr Douglas. I’m the new stage manager for Headline.’ It was the proudest sentence that Mattie had ever uttered, but the girl’s face didn’t even flicker.

‘They’re halfway through t’second act. You want stage door. Or mebbe e’ll be oopstairs. You can tek that door.’

She nodded across the expanse of darned carpet to a door marked Staff.

‘Can I leave my things here?’

‘Suits yersen.’

Behind the door was a narrow staircase of bare boards. It was almost pitch dark. Mattie groped her way upwards, with no idea where she was heading.

Then she heard the voice. It was unmistakably John Douglas, and he was shouting. While Mattie hesitated a woman’s voice screamed back. She couldn’t make out the words, but it was clearly a full-blown row. Making her way towards the noise Mattie came to a dingy corridor lit by a bare bulb, and a door marked Office. The door banged open and a woman stumbled out. Her greying hair was falling out of a bun and she was crying.

‘You’re a monster,’ she sobbed. ‘No less than a monster. Not a human being at all.’ Then she pushed past Mattie without glancing at her and ran down the stairs.

‘Yes, yes,’ said John Douglas from inside the office. ‘Tell me something new, Vera.’

Mattie tiptoed forward and tapped on the open door.

‘I thought you’d bloody gone,’ John Douglas said.

‘She has,’ Mattie answered. ‘I’m Mattie Banner.’

John Douglas looked up from the one chair in the room. There was a long pause, and then he said, ‘Is that supposed to mean anything to me?’

Mattie quailed.

He was a big man with a lion’s head of shaggy grey hair. Mattie saw a rubber-tipped walking stick leaning against his chair.

‘I’m your new stage manager.’

His sudden shout of laughter was even more disconcerting. ‘Oh, sweet Jesus Christ.’

It was the same rich voice that she had admired, but how could such a voice belong to this creased, belligerent man?

‘What’s funny about it?’ Mattie asked, stung by his rudeness.

‘Just that Willoughby said he was sending me his own personal assistant, as a great favour.’

‘I am – I was – Francis’s assistant.’

John was still laughing as he looked her up and down. It made Mattie feel hot and angry.

‘Yes, of course. It’s just that I was expecting a lady of a certain age and certain capabilities. Give that we’re talking about Francis I should have known better. I’m sure you’ve got your own talents, love, but I doubt that they’ll be the ones I need for eight shows a week. How old are you?’

Twenty-two.’

John Douglas’s mouth twisted. ‘Of course you are. Kids and cripples, that’s what we are in this company. They should give us special billing.’ He took hold of his stick, and stood up. He was tall, but his body screwed over to one side. ‘I provide the cripple element, in case you were wondering. Usually I tell pretty girls it’s a war wound, but I can’t be bothered tonight. It’s osteoarthritis, and I blame my vile temper on it.’

‘I thought there must be a reason for it,’ Mattie murmured.