Bad Girls Good Women (35 page)

‘Don’t they?’ Julia murmured.
How do you know anything about girls, pretty or not?
she added in silence.

‘Mmm. I can offer you another two pounds a week. We could make your work more interesting. Flexible.’

Julia was confident enough that George wouldn’t make demands that were too interesting, or called for too much flexibility.

‘Thank you,’ she murmured meekly.

She wasn’t elevated to the same status as the young men, of course, but for the first time in her working life she didn’t dread Monday mornings as a return to slavery. Betty called it ‘a real job’.

Very gradually over the last year Julia had started visiting Fairmile Road again. It was the finality of Josh’s disappearance that had made her feel she was being too harsh in cutting herself off altogether from Betty and Vernon. It seemed a long time since she had run away and in those years the house, and her parents’ strictures, and the threat of both, seemed to have shrunk sadly in importance. When she saw it again the house seemed to have shrunk too. It was poky, and shabbier than she remembered, in spite of Betty’s protracted polishings. Even the Smiths themselves seemed smaller, and older.

The first two or three visits were awkward, but slowly a pattern was established. Julia went home about once a month, always on a Sunday, arriving after Betty and Vernon came home from church and staying for dinner and tea. Once, unthinkingly, she called their midday meal
lunch
. She saw Betty look at her with a new expression and recognised respect in it, with resignation, and timid approval. After that it was always
lunch
that Betty invited her to. The way that they had both noticed the little distinction and resolutely left it uncommented on underlined the speed with which Julia was marching away from Fairmile Road. The fact that Julia imagined she despised class distinction, and only used the words she did because she was more used to hearing them from George and his people, seemed only to emphasise the difference.

But it was just enough, for all of them, that Betty had found a way to be proud of her daughter again. After all, Julia worked with a smart decorator in Chelsea, and she talked to people with titles. Betty was always eager to hear about that, and it provided a safe topic of conversation while Vernon sat behind the
Sunday People
. ‘Thirty square yards of pure white Carrara marble,’ Julia would say, ‘in the master bathroom.’

‘Imagine,’ Betty would breathe. ‘The master bathroom.’ Julia was oddly touched by the simplicity of her mother’s pride, and her view of her mother’s life was softened by her own experiences. The two women would never be friends, that was understood, but they were polite and considerate to each other for the few hours of Julia’s Sunday visits. Vernon mattered less to Julia. She had never understood her father and she doubted that she ever would.

The fact of her adoption was never, ever mentioned.

On Sunday evenings Julia took the train back to Liverpool Street with composed relief. She was far enough away, now, not to feel the old, frightened jubilation. On those short, familiar journeys she often thought of Jessie. If Betty Smith had possessed any of Jessie’s qualities, what would the difference have been? Julia did know that Jessie would have approved of the bloodless truce that had been called.

Between the opposite poles of Tressider’s and Fairmile Road, there was the square, and Mattie. Julia wondered if this was real life; if this was what she should be living instead of waiting through. In the year since Josh had left for good Julia had done her best to distract herself. She existed at a pace that raised even Mattie’s eyebrows. There was usually a party, and when there wasn’t Julia set out to create one. At a party, or at the Rocket, or wherever else she went that was crowded enough, there was always the chance of meeting someone new; someone who would survive the comparison.

The ripples of meetings spread wider and wider. Mattie and Julia had installed a telephone in Jessie’s room, and it rang constantly. The men they met as they sliced their way through the parties still looked at Mattie first, but more often it was Julia who finally commanded their attention. Her hunger was indefinable, but potent. She could look at the latest possibility as if there was no one else in the world, and then sooner or later she would look through him as if he didn’t exist. Many of them found the treatment irresistible, but Julia seemed hardly to notice. She went to bed with two or three of them, but she did it more because Josh had stirred her sexual needs than because she particularly wanted any of his successors. She took her sharp physical pleasure, and then felt painfully guilty.

She was always comparing. But no one ever came close to Josh. Josh had made her feel alive, as though thick, dead layers of skin had been peeled back to leave all her senses sharpened. She missed him every hour of the day, every night.

Mattie despaired of her. ‘No man is worth loving to distraction,’ she insisted.

‘Josh is,’ Julia said simply.

‘So what will happen?’

Julia shook her head slowly from side to side. ‘I don’t know. But something will. It must do.’

The flat was quiet without Mattie.

Julia finished picking up the discarded clothes and went through into Jessie’s room. The old bed had been exchanged for a third-hand plush-covered sofa, but everything else was almost the same. Julia walked slowly round, picking up the framed photographs and looking down into the mysterious faces, running her fingers over Felix’s eclectic arrangements of bits and pieces. Dust-collectors, Jessie had always called them. They were certainly thick with dust now. The paisley shawl on the sofa back was wrinkled and creased and the water in a vase of long-dead flowers brought by one of Julia’s friends smelt stagnant. The room was stale and neglected. Mattie and Julia hardly ever touched down for long enough to sit in it.
Felix would be disgusted
, Julia thought, smiling a little.

Felix had completed his National Service. He had seemed even more self-contained afterwards, restrained and economical in his relationship with Mattie and even with Julia. But they had had little enough time to judge. He had gone almost straight to Florence. ‘I always wanted to,’ he told them. ‘Before Ma got ill.’

He supported himself by working as a hotel cleaner, and studied art history. Thinking about him, Julia found a sudden focus for her restlessness. She would fill the afternoon by restoring the murky flat to the pristine condition that Felix would have approved of. She was whistling as she tied her hair up in a scarf and wrapped herself in a faded overall that must have belonged to Jessie. The kitchen sink was full of dishes, and Julia set to work.

When she finished it had been dark outside for more than an hour. The rooms smelt of polish and fresh air, and there was no more dust or washing-up. Julia’s back ached but she was satisfied as she emptied her bucket of water and wrung out her cloths. Felix would approve. She was just putting the kettle on the gas when the doorbell rang. Julia ran downstairs past the locked offices to the front door.

A man was standing on the step. He had thick grey hair and a lined face, and he leaned heavily on a stick. Julia had no idea who he was. He looked at her without interest, and then peered past her.

‘I’m looking for Mattie Banner,’ he announced.

His voice told Julia what his appearance had failed to.

‘Umm. I’m afraid Mattie isn’t here. She’s working this evening.’

‘In the theatre?’

‘Not … not exactly.’

The man frowned irritably at her. ‘What?’

It just finished
, Mattie had said.
We ran out of things to need from each other. Or just didn’t find enough of them
. That was all she would say.

Julia held the door open wider. ‘You’d better come in.’

‘Thank you. My name’s John Douglas.’

Upstairs, Julia turned on the lamp in Jessie’s newly glowing room. John Douglas was breathing hard after the long climb up the stairs, but he looked around in clear surprise.

‘Hmm. Not what I imagined.’

Julia smiled innocently. ‘What did you imagine?’

‘Less domestic order, knowing Mattie as well as I do.’

‘Ah.’ Julia untied her scarf and shook out her hair, then untied Jessie’s baggy overall. John Douglas stared again, but this time Julia hid her smile.

‘I’m Mattie’s friend, Julia.’

‘I’m sorry, I thought you were the bloody cleaning woman.’

‘I’m both, today. Why do you want to see Mattie?’

John Douglas reached inside his overcoat and took out a big, thick brown envelope. He laid it carefully on the table.

‘I want her to do something. Don’t look at me like that. Not for me, for once. For herself. Where is she?’

Julia sighed. ‘Let me make us both a cup of tea. Then I’ll tell you.’

Mattie leaned against the grimy wall in the tiny changing cubicle behind the stage at the Showbox. It was eleven-thirty p.m. and she was waiting to do her last spot of the night. It would be her fifteenth of the day. The music playing for the girl onstage stabbed monotonously through her skull.

Monty owned four other little clubs in the surrounding streets, and like all his other girls Mattie spent her day working a circuit of them. When one act was over she would pull her clothes on again backstage and haul her holdall with her costume in it through the streets to the next club, and the next invisible audience hunched in the dark beyond the footlights. When her music started, a crackly version of ‘Teach Me Tonight’ that had dinned itself sickeningly into her head, it was time to bundle her hair up under the tasselled mortar-board and sweep through the curtains and on to the stage. Into the cubicle afterwards and dress again. Round and round. Sometimes Monty’s schedule gave her enough time to down a gin in one of the pubs, or to share a sandwich with the other girls. There was a camaraderie between them that was nothing to do with friendship, everything to do with mutually surviving the physical demands and mental stultification of the job. Mattie’s way of getting through the day was to treat each spot as a theatrical performance. She concentrated on injecting fresh nuances into the process of stripping down to her G-string and flinging it triumphantly offstage in the second before the lights went down.

The punters appreciated her work, and Monty loved it.

‘You’re a natural, pet. Born to it.’

He even paid her a pound or two more than the other girls, swearing her to secrecy first.

The music stopped and the girl before Mattie came offstage and slouched into the cubicle. She had big, blue-veined breasts. Neither the girl nor Mattie even glanced round when the boy who worked as backstage factotum dumped her discarded stage costume inside after her. Mattie had told Julia the truth when she said that stripping didn’t bother her. It simply numbed her, somewhere inside herself where she already felt cold. She yawned now, and wished there was somewhere to sit down and wait that wasn’t on the floor.

‘One more tonight,’ she muttered. ‘I’m half dead.’

The other girl was wriggling into her tight skirt. The zipper dragged at her flesh as she pulled it up. She glanced at Mattie and reached for her handbag.

‘Here. Have a blue.’

She held out a crumpled paper cone, just like the ones Mattie used to buy pennyworth’s of sweets in. Mattie dipped into it. She cupped the amphetamine in the palm of her hand and gulped it straight down.

‘Thanks, Vee. Saved my life.’

There had been some shuffling beyond the stage that meant new customers had arrived, but it had settled now into impatient creaking. The audience didn’t like to be kept waiting for too long between turns.

The first bars of Mattie’s music suddenly blared out and the backstage boy jerked his thumb at her. Mattie picked up her cane, made a resigned face at Vee, and pushed through the dusty curtains and on to the stage.

Julia sat between Flowers and John Douglas. The wooden chairs were very small, very hard and upright. She couldn’t see much of the room because it was so dark, but she had the impression that she was the only woman. She folded her hands in her lap, aware of the laughable primness of her posture, and waited. She had never thought of coming to one of Mattie’s performances before this, and Mattie had never suggested it. She wondered now if Mattie would mind.

The music was very loud and distorted. A black-gowned figure materialised on the stage. It was wearing a teacher’s mortar-board and heavy spectacles with no glass in the frames, and it was just recognisably Mattie.

At first Julia wanted to laugh. The pantomime strictness, frowning and cane-waving, was almost irresistibly funny. But then Mattie reached up and swept off her cap. Her wonderful hair fell over her face and down over her shoulders. There was a sigh of indrawn breath, and every man in the stuffy basement room leaned forward on his upright chair. Mattie smiled. She swung the point of her cane down to the stage and balanced it with the tip of one finger. With the other hand, lazily, she opened the front of her gown. Red satin flashed underneath it. With one movement Mattie slid the black stuff off her shoulders and let it fall at her feet. Her skin was so white that it looked blue under the lights.

She took her spectacles off, touching them to her mouth before letting them drop. Miss Matilda was completely gone and it was Mattie on the stage, the shape of her only just veiled by her red slip. Mattie danced, moving as gracefully as she always did. Julia could hear John Douglas’s breathing. Johnny Flowers was leaning forward too, motionlessly watching. The straps of the flimsy thing eased off her shoulders. Under the red slip was the sequined bra and G-string that Julia had made fun of. The dance went on, and the lights caught on the sequins, twinkling points under the bald lights. Mattie took the bra off. She stood still for a moment, her back half turned, black shadows emphasising her curves and hollows. The horrible music reached a crescendo.

Mattie unhooked the G-string and threw it aside. She turned full on, her pretty body fully revealed.

Her expression was defiant, almost taunting.