Bad Girls Good Women (40 page)

He stuck his hands in his pockets and wandered over to the window. The Saturday afternoon inter-unit football matches were in progress.

‘Look at ’em all,’ Mander sighed. ‘Mud and blood. Shall we go across and get a cup of tea?’

Felix closed up his sketch-pad. ‘I suppose so,’ he said, without enthusiasm.

That afternoon he learned that David Mander was a public school boy from Highgate in north London. His mother was a doctor and his father was a criminal barrister. Their son was a clever and precocious only child. Felix hadn’t intended to like him, but the company of someone as sophisticated and subtle-minded as David was an undeniable pleasure after the four-letter interests of his own squad.

‘Going for a pint tonight?’ David asked casually.

‘Could do,’ Felix responded.

They fell into the habit, after the first evening, of spending their off-duty hours together. They talked about books and films and music, about their own lives and about London. It was glaringly obvious to Felix that they never talked about girls, and the common-currency topic of sex was never raised. It was equally obvious that neither of them ever commented, either, on their lack of interest in everyone else’s obsession.

May turned into June, and they were in the last month of their basic training. The north-country evenings were long and light, and it was a pleasure instead of a routine punishment to be outside. The shaggy majesty of the Yorkshire moorlands and the milky sweetness of the air were a revelation to Felix, brought up a city child. David’s parents had a weekend cottage in Suffolk.

David announced that he was saving his pay for the leave that came at the end of basic training, so instead of going to pubs they took buses up on to the moors and walked, following the Ordnance Survey maps borrowed from the barracks library.

One evening they came down a long hill to a stone bridge over a stream. Felix took off his pack and they leaned over the stone parapet. Brown water curled and slid underneath them, the ripple of it making the only sound. There was a stone barn on the other side of the stream. As they watched, the sun slid behind it, a coppery disc flattened by the black line of the roof, and then a semicircle, then no more than a flare of gold. The shadow of the barn turned violet and Felix was thinking,
If I could paint that
. He turned to look at David and saw his red mouth. David opened his mouth, perhaps to say something, and a tiny glint of light caught on the moist lining. Instantly Felix felt his otherness. It seemed magical that a separate, moving, breathing individual was here in the faint purple dusk. It was the most perfectly erotic moment he had ever experienced.

David was frozen into stillness. It was Felix who put his hand out. He curled it around the nape of David’s neck and felt the stubble of cropped hair under his fingers. Somewhere, no more than a flicker over their heads, a hat rose and fell like a black leaf. Felix bent his head to David’s. They kissed, and Felix tasted the conjunction of coarseness and softness, dissolving moisture, familiarity and perfect difference. David’s face against his own and his tongue, searching Felix out. Felix lifted his head and groaned. It came from his heart and his bowels, a sound he had never thought that he could make.

It was David who said, ‘Let’s go into the barn.’

He unlatched the door and it opened without protest. It was grey inside the barn, with twilight and a thick ruff of dust. But against one raw stone wall there was a heap of hay, left over from the winter feeding of the moorland sheep. David and Felix lay down in the hay.

It was dark outside when Felix groaned again, and he called out too, shouting David’s name. David put his hands over his mouth, silencing him. There might have been ears in the darkness.

Afterwards, in an odd silence, they brushed the hay from their clothes and hair. They dressed themselves and went out, glancing up at the first star. They sat on the parapet of the bridge and smoked. Felix was calm, and he felt as invincible as the stars.

David broke the silence. ‘Have you done that before?’ he asked.

Felix remembered that, at the beginning, he had been sure that he wouldn’t like him. He didn’t know what he felt now, except relief, like a wide, flat sea. ‘No,’ Felix said. ‘Maisie tried it on, once, in the ablutions. I ran away.’ David laughed. ‘Have you?’

‘At school,’ David answered slowly. ‘Everyone did. But I had the impression I was more serious than most of them. I fell in love, with captains of the Eleven and with angelic, dirty little boys. But not like that. Not like what we’ve just done.’

Don’t fall in love with me
, Felix silently warned him. Aloud, he said, ‘I wondered, when Maisie tried it, how obvious I seemed to him. I didn’t even really know. Bloody stupid, isn’t it?’

David looked at him, his heavy-lidded eyes wide open.

‘As obvious as I was to you.’

That was the only answer he would get, Felix understood. It was invisible, and yet as clear as the features of his face. He looked at his watch.

‘Christ. We’re going to be late back.’

They threw their cigarette ends away. Felix always remembered that they made two crimson arcs before they fell into the water. They half ran down over the next fold of moorland to the main road. They thumbed a ride from a farmer in a pick-up, who obligingly made a detour and dropped them at the camp gates with time to spare.

A week later, David Mander was notified that he had been selected as a potential officer. After basic training he and the other POs would enter a special course, and if he passed he would progress to a War Office Selection Board. Successful candidates passed on to the officer training school at Eaton Hall.

Felix, with most of the rest of his squad, was bound for the Royal Tank Regiment. David was moved out of the squaddies’ barracks into more comfortable accommodation with the rest of the intake’s officer material. His air of being pleased with himself intensified, but he also seemed embarrassed by the divide that had opened between Felix and himself.

‘You’d make a bloody sight better officer than me,’ he remarked.

Felix didn’t bother to disagree. ‘But you don’t see many black officers in the British Army, old boy, do you?’

David chewed one corner of his full lip. ‘Do you mind that?’

Felix laughed. ‘I couldn’t care less.’

It was the truth. He had no desire to be an officer, whereas David clearly did. He had no feeling for the army except a desire to survive it, and he thought that survival would probably be easier in the undemanding company of his barrack-room mates.

Abruptly David said, ‘I thought I’d use my leave for a few days’ camping and fishing in Scotland. D’you want to come?’

Felix thought about it. He had planned to go back to London, to the flat, because he had nothing else to do. Back to Julia and Mattie. Suddenly the memory of their clannish femaleness seemed thoroughly alien. He didn’t want to go there, not yet. ‘Thank you,’ he said to David.

They took David’s pup tent and a few clothes in rucksacks, and hitchhiked to the west of Scotland. It was the beginning of July and every day was cloudless and still. Felix lay in a boat and watched David fishing, or they sat on empty beaches and looked at the sea, or walked for miles through the heather. They ate in pubs, or Felix fried fish on the Primus or a driftwood fire. And at night they lay together under the green ridge of the tent.

At the end of ten days Felix felt the same calmness and strength that he had experienced outside the barn on the moors. He was grateful to David for having made him a present of it. No more than that. They were separate, after all. David was so sure that he was following the right path; Felix was certain of nothing except, now, himself.

When the end of their holiday came David went to officer training school and Felix returned to his unit. They didn’t see one another again but Felix thought of him, sometimes, when a movement of someone’s head or the way a hand gestured touched the same chord that David had sounded on the bridge over the Yorkshire stream.

Some of this, the bones of it, Felix told Julia while she sat watching the fire and the light faded beyond the window.

‘And now?’ Julia asked.

‘I have to find myself a job, of course. Begin a real life.’ Felix was laughing but Julia stared at him. The idea came to her fully formed, as obvious and immediate as all the best ideas. ‘You’ll have to come and work for George.’

One of the young men had left just before Christmas, under a mysterious cloud. Felix had languages, he had his experience from Mr Mogridge’s friend, and he had all the aptitude. In every direction. He would suit George Tressider perfectly. For Julia it was one of those rare flashes of insight in which other people’s paths seem clearly set out, smooth and comfortable for them to follow.

If only
, she thought, forlornly and selfishly,
if only it was as easy for me
.

‘We’ll see.’ Felix responded to her suggestion with what seemed to Julia to be infuriating negligence.

In fact Felix was looking at her, seeing the sharpened angles of her face. Julia had grown up, and she was more beautiful than she had been, but she was unhappy. Yet she had listened to his own confession, accepting it, somehow understanding that she was offering Jessie’s acceptance as well as her own. She was sensitive, as well as generous.

Felix put his arm round her shoulder and she rested her face gratefully against his. She felt fragile, and soft. That was all.

‘I love you,’ Felix said.

Julia nodded. She was suddenly afraid that she might cry, and she was trying not to let herself cry these days.

‘Is it still Josh?’ he asked.

She nodded again.

Felix held on to her, wondering how to make her see differently. ‘Do you know that I was in love with him too?’

She jerked around to look at him then, full in the eye, and he glimpsed fury and disgust in her face. There was a second’s silence, and then she began to laugh. It wasn’t comfortable laughter, but it was something.

‘I survived it,’ he told her lightly. ‘And so can you. Don’t carry a candle for him for ever. There are all kinds of other people. There’s Bliss …’

Julia cut him short there. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘No, I don’t think so.’ His hands were still on her shoulders. She looked down at them, frowning a little as if she was wondering how they had come there. Gently he let go of her. They were friends, but there were still defences.

‘So what will you do?’ he persisted.

Julia sighed. ‘Mattie’s doing something, of course. Right at this very minute.’ She held up her crossed fingers. ‘And so will I. Soon. I promise you, Felix.’

Restlessly she stood up and switched on the fairy lights on the Christmas tree. The little Woolworths’ lanterns shone against the brown needles. Julia put out a finger to the tip of the lowest branch and the dry, falling whisper came again.

Twelve

The auditorium of the Angel Theatre was small, and it was filled to capacity. Julia glanced up at the ornamental plasterwork garnishing the red velvet boxes. There seemed to be dozens of faces floating over the gilt cherubs, leaning forward, peering down at the curtain. Mattie had been ghostly with fear when she left for the theatre, and Julia understood now how she must feel, waiting to come out in front of so many pairs of eyes. She groped to her left for Felix’s hand and squeezed it nervously. He nodded at the seats in front of them.

‘All the critics are here. That’s Hobson, on the end.’

Glad to focus on something other than the tension of waiting, Julia wondered how it was that Felix knew so much about everything. She had only heard the critics names through Mattie, and she would never have recognised any of the impassive profiles dotted along the row of stalls.

On Julia’s right-hand side China Bliss sat with her ringless hands folded in her lap. She had arrived at the theatre fifteen minutes earlier, escorted by Bliss. Alexander’s mother was small, swathed in a thick, dark mink coat, with her greying blonde hair drawn up into a neat chignon. She held out a thin, cool hand to Julia and Felix. Her face was smooth, well cared for and impeccably made-up, but when she turned to accept the glass of Tio Pepe that Felix had bought for her in the crowded stalls bar Julia saw that she had the same beaked profile as her son. Her plucked eyebrows made the same sardonic arcs. Her appearance was understated, but Julia understood what Sophia had meant.

People automatically turned to look at China Bliss, even though she stood quite still, sipping her sherry, hardly speaking at all.

Julia thought Bliss’s mother was unnerving. She found herself overtaken by an unfamiliar desire to be approved of, to do and say the right things in front of this small, straight-backed figure. The result was that she felt awkward and oversized, and suspected that she was talking too much. China’s unblinking eyes studied her over the rim of the sherry glass. Julia was relieved when the bell rang and they joined the shuffling crowd making its way into the theatre.

There was another thing, too.

From the way that Bliss looked at her and listened to the few words that she did utter, Julia recognised what she had already suspected, that he adored his mother. Since she had met him, quite unthinkingly, Julia had become used to being the focus of his attention. Now it was divided she was faintly, but surprisingly, resentful.

As she waited for the curtain to go up, Julia sat as still as she could, so that her arm wouldn’t brush unnecessarily against China’s furred one. She didn’t try to look at Bliss, seated on the other side of his mother. And then, without warning, the house lights dimmed. An unusual silence fell at once, and Julia didn’t think of anything except Mattie. The red velvet folds and gold fringe swept upwards, incongruously revealing the set. It was a small, square room, papered with stained wallpaper. There was an old gas-oven, a sink with a pail standing in it, an oilcloth-covered table. Mattie was sitting at the table with her back to the audience. Her hair was pinned up so that the white, childish nape of her neck was revealed. In the breathing quiet she began to hum.