Bad Girls Good Women (34 page)

She had lingered outside for a moment, looking at the blue haze hanging in the sky. It was like a veil over the land.

Suddenly Julia didn’t want to look at the view any more. She walked quickly up the hill, hugging the high stone wall that enclosed the palazzo grounds. It was so steep that she was panting when she reached the top. There was a little square with plane trees just coming into leaf, and a seat built round the trunk of one of them. Julia sat down, painfully picking at the tree bark. It made her think of the London square, and going unwillingly back to it.

There was a beating need inside her and she knew that there was no outlet for it. She jumped up, trying to contain the pressure, and ran across to the palazzo gates. The iron curlicues were rusty. Beyond the pink walls she could see the corner of a garden. There were dark trees and hedges, breathing neglect. The nuns didn’t work the gardens, after all.

Julia’s fingers wound round the metal bars and she stared through, trying to catch her breath in even gasps that would half fill her lungs.

She stood for a long time, looking in at the glimpse of overgrown garden.

When she turned back to the square again she saw that one of Montebellate’s black-clad old women had appeared. She had driven a goat up with her, and now she tethered it to a post driven into a tiny square of grass. The goat put its head down at once. The old woman nodded to Julia and shuffled to the seat. She fumbled in her black pouch bag and produced her crochet-work. Julia saw that it was a tiny, lacy diamond. The white thread was as fine as a cobweb. The crochet hook flickered and the old woman stared with milky eyes over the goat’s back to the blue line beyond the roofs.

Very slowly Julia let her head fall back against the gates. Nothing moved, and there was no sound except the goat’s rhythmic cropping.

She had a sense of years, stretching away, waiting for her. The enormity of it frightened and frustrated her, because it lay out of her grasp. Yet the prospect soothed her. It was all far distant, immense and hazy, like the view from the hill. Julia wondered for how many years the old woman and her goat had looked at their own view before achieving their postures of perfect mutual calm.

She watched them for a little while longer until her breath came smoothly. The hammering inside her body had stopped. The tears still lay behind her eyes but she knew that she could go back to the Flora and face whatever Josh would tell her.

She went back down the hill, listening to the steady clopping of her shoes over the cobbles. Josh was sitting on the wall opposite the pensione, looking down, and Julia went and stood beside him. They watched the view in silence for a moment, but it was just a view again, opaque, almost over-familiar now.

In a clear voice Josh said, ‘I can’t give you what you want. There isn’t anything of me. Nothing that you should want, or need, anyway. You’ll see that for yourself before long, but I don’t want you to be hurt while it happens.’

Clumsy, inept words
, Josh thought. But for once he meant them.

Julia’s answer came at once, violent, spilling out of her. ‘How could you hurt me except by not letting me be with you? I do want you. I love you and I need you. No one has ever made me happy like you, and I don’t want anything else. Nothing at all, nothing out of life if you aren’t there. Don’t you understand?’

It helped, to abase herself. It made her feel that there was no more she could do. She had held out the offering for Josh to take.
Take it
, she implored him.
Don’t say what I’m afraid of
.

‘No,’ Josh said, very gently.

There.

Julia nodded her head, just once. The words had been said, all their words. She discovered that she had pride, too.

‘What will happen?’ she asked.

Josh said, ‘I’ll take you to Agropoli and put you safely on the train.’

‘The train to where?’

‘To London.’

London. There was nothing in London. Julia’s eyes were dry and hard. She wouldn’t cry now. There would be enough time for crying later.

‘And what about you? What will you do?’

‘I don’t know yet. Some flying. Something.’

Julia lifted her hands from the crumbling stonework of the wall. ‘I’d better go and pack my things up.’

They turned to each other then. She buried her face against his shoulder and he held her, and then he lifted her face between his hands and kissed her eyes and her mouth. They knew that the signora could see them out of her lace-hung window and they stepped awkwardly apart again.

‘Will we … will I see you any more?’

‘I hope so,’ Josh whispered. Faltering, at the end.

Julia looked at him. She was remembering that way his hair fell over his forehead, the lines that his eyes made with his mouth and cheekbones. The same as the first time she had seen him.

‘I hope so,’ she echoed. Her longing was already touched with bitterness. ‘I hope so too, my aviator.’

Ten

London, 1958

‘What other work d’you suggest I do?’ Mattie demanded.

Without looking at Julia she opened a leatherette holdall and threw a red satin slip into it. On top of the slip went a red bra and a red G-string stitched with a trail of sequins. A shapeless billow of red feathers was thrust in on top of that, and then some folds of dusty black stuff and a thin, whippy cane.

Julia looked sourly at the cane. ‘Miss Matilda, indeed.’

Mattie zipped the bag up and leaned over to look at herself in the mirror. She licked her forefinger and brushed her eyebrows into shape before finally turning to Julia.

‘Listen, love. If they were begging me to give my Ophelia at the Old Vic, it would be different. In fact if anyone offered me so much as a two-line walk-on in a kids’ show in Wigan, I’d go down on my knees and give thanks. But no one has, have they? If I go to one more audition and the fat slobs say “Thank you, dear, we’ll let you know”, I’ll push their scripts down their throats.’

Julia said nothing and Mattie sighed patiently. ‘An even more important fact is that Miss Matilda earns me nearly thirty quid a week, cash, and it’s not exactly the hardest work I’ve ever done. It’s easier than selling shoes. It’s easier than working for John Douglas, too, most days of the week.’

‘Taking your clothes off for a lot of dirty old men?’

Mattie laughed then and sat down on the bed beside her. ‘I’m an
artiste
, remember. I don’t just take my clothes off. I do a dance routine, very tasteful. I act, as well. I become a schoolmistress, with the heart and soul of a courtesan trapped within her.’

Julia was laughing now. They sat side by side with their arms round each other’s shoulders, shaking with it.

Mattie stood up. ‘Oh, what the hell. Let’s have a drink before I
go.’

Julia sighed and took the glass of gin Mattie gave her. She looked around the bedroom at the twisted stockings and heaps of discarded clothes with sudden distaste. Without Felix, Mattie and Julia had reverted to their old ways. She frowned, annoyed with herself.

‘Hey.’ Mattie touched her arm. ‘Who are you really worrying about?’

‘Both of us, Mat. Both of us.’

The gin had warmed Mattie up and she leaned forward confidingly. Julia was reminded of Jessie. They missed Jessie every day, even now.

‘Don’t worry. I’m a brilliant actress, temporarily filling in as a stripper. My turn will come. You are rather smartly employed at George Tressider Designs, and you also have the chance of a modelling contract …’

‘Some pervert wants to photograph me. They always call it a modelling contract, didn’t you know?’

‘… Don’t be cynical. And you’ve got lovers, admirers and friends. What more could you ask?’

Julia opened her mouth but Mattie dived forward and clapped her hand over it.

‘I know, I know. But until he flies back again you’ll just have to make do with what you’ve got. Who is it tonight, by the way?’

Julia acknowledged the interruption with a twisted smile. ‘Flowers.’

‘Flowers, faithfully unfaithful Flowers.’ Mattie was springing around the room gathering up the last pieces of her costume. ‘D’you know, it’s your fault, and Flowers’s, that I’m working for Monty now? You were the ones who left our luggage at the Showbox. I was the one who was shocked, remember?’

‘Right at the beginning. The day Flowers bought me a coffee and a doughnut in Blue Heaven. We met Felix that night, and Jessie. More than three years ago.’

Mattie straightened up slowly and they looked at each other. ‘Do you feel old?’ Mattie asked.

They were twenty and twenty-one.

‘Very, very old.’

They didn’t laugh, for some reason.

Mattie hoisted her holdall over her shoulder and made for the door. Julia watched her go and then called after her, ‘You missed something off your list. We’ve got each other.’

Mattie’s head reappeared, a mass of waves, now bleached white-blonde. ‘And always will have. Listen, I finish at twelve on the dot tonight. I’ll meet you and Flowers at the Rocket.’

Julia listened to her thumping away down the stairs. Flowers and the Rocket. The Showbox and Monty. Saturday afternoon in the flat stretching ahead of her, then Sunday, and Monday morning again at Tressider’s scented premises in the King’s Road. Julia’s fists clenched until her fingernails dug into the palms of her hands. Her impatience was no easier to control than it had ever been. A sense of her own purposelessness rose stiflingly around her and she jumped up and went to the window. Mattie was crossing the square on her way to Old Compton Street, and Julia watched her until she was out of sight. It was November, and the last yellow leaves lay in archipelagoes on the wet pavements. Three years ago, she was thinking, Josh had come. And in the spring he had sent her home from Italy. A little time in weeks and months, but it seemed much longer in her memory. Twisted up with what Betty had told her on the day she first saw Josh, with Jessie’s death, and with Felix.

After Montebellate, she had crept back to London. There had been office jobs, a succession of them that she could hardly remember now. Josh had come back and gone away again, then come back once more. Julia knew that he should have had the determination to stay away altogether, but she clung to the hope that he couldn’t, and gratefully took the crumbs of time that he bestowed on her. She had been very lonely, in those days, without Mattie or Felix at home.

With one finger, Julia drew a deliberate circle in the condensation on the window. Drops like tears gathered around the clear margin and slid downwards. Two years ago, November 1956. There had been a convulsion then. Julia had read the newspapers and listened to the radio reports with fierce concentration, as if her attention would make some difference to the world. Josh flew refugees from the Russian tanks out over the Austro-Hungarian border, and Felix was one of the few National Servicemen to be sent out to Suez. She was intensely proud of both of them, and she knew equally that the remainder of her feelings were perfectly selfish. But she couldn’t escape the conclusion, or fail to resent it, that it was men who had the chance of action. They could make the choices, bestow or deprive; whether the gift was simply happiness or even, that November, seemingly life itself. Her freedom, women’s freedom, that totem she had upheld with Mattie, enabled her to go to work, to earn enough money to buy herself nylons and fashionable clothes, and to wait.

I have waited
, Julia thought bitterly.

Another year, and then a time came when Josh told her that he was going back to Colorado. Vail was beginning to open up as a ski-resort and Josh, businesslike, saw his chance. The parting had been painful for both of them, but it hadn’t hurt Josh enough to hold him back. Julia had tried to believe that she couldn’t survive without him, but she had survived with dreary adequacy.

It was twelve months since she had last seen him. He wrote, sometimes. Julia turned away from the window again and began picking clothes up from the floor, unseeingly turning them the right way out, then laying them down again.

At about the same time Mattie had been spotted in one of her roles for John Douglas by a Binkie Beaumont scout. On the strength of it she had been offered a part in an ephemeral new play at the Lyric, Hammersmith. Julia had welcomed her back to the flat with relief, and they had fallen back into their old inseparability. But after the play had closed no more parts came up, and Mattie was philosophically performing as Miss Matilda for eight hours a day, six days a week.

Julia drifted into a more permanent job. She had gone to George Tressider Designs as a temporary secretary and stayed there partly because it interested her more than any of the other jobs she had done, partly because she had no ideas about what else she might do with her time.

George Tressider’s sharp eyes noted and approved of her appearance, and he made her his receptionist. He was a velvety man of about fifty, an interior decorator with a list of prosperous or aristocratic clients and what Julia privately considered to be an overblown fondness for the grand English style. No chintzes were chintzier than George’s, no gilt more gilted.

Julia sat at an Empire desk towards the rear of his small shop, surrounded by George’s small selection of hand-picked antique pieces, and guarded the door through to the design offices where George and a handful of young men worked on the clients’ requirements.

In a week when one of the young men was on holiday and two of the others had flu, Julia did some letters for George’s signature. She also put together a selection of silks for a less important customer and interviewed an out-of-town dealer who had a pair of old mirrors to sell, fast. She looked at the photographs and made the man promise to see no one else before Mr Tressider came back from the country that afternoon. She let the man take her to lunch, just to be sure.

At the end of the week George Tressider strolled past her desk and rested one lavender-grey cuff on the back of her chair. ‘You’re quite a clever creature, aren’t you?’ His smooth head tilted to one side as he studied her. ‘A decided asset. Pretty girls don’t usually have as much brain as you do.’