The Men and the Girls (18 page)

‘Shut up,' Julia said, but she was laughing.

Hugh put his glass down, and swung himself sideways to lie down on the sofa with his head on Julia's lap. ‘Let's have a party.'

‘A party!'

‘Yes. You know. You cram a whole lot of people and bottles into a room and let them out again after midnight.'

‘We haven't had a party for ages—'

‘We haven't been this successful and happy and perfectly wonderful for ages, either.'

Julia smiled down at him. ‘OK, then.'

‘Can we have balloons?'

‘No. Nor party poppers either.'

‘Darling. Why are we so silly? Could it be because we're happy?'

Julia stooped so that she could kiss him and her hair fell silkily over his face. He put his tongue in her mouth.

‘You're awful—'

‘I know. You love it. Let's ask James.'

Julia sat up. ‘James!'

‘Yes. Why not? Do him good, poor fellow, to forget his troubles and come to a party.'

Every day seemed to James like an endurance test that had to be painfully completed before he was allowed the brief oblivion of a night's sleep. It wasn't simply the pain of Kate's absence, but also the additional administrative burden her departure had laid upon him. He had grown used to her domestic sustaining, however haphazard, of Richmond Villa, and was appalled to discover how much there was to do. A greedy demanding procession of meals and laundry and shopping bore down on him in the day, and haunted his sleeping-pill-induced dreams at night.

He had not spoken to Kate for almost a month. He had seen her once, by chance, as he was driving up the High Street, and she was coming out of the covered market. She had looked young and carefree, wearing a cream jacket he didn't recognize, and black trousers and a lot of silver jewellery, and her palpable air of happiness struck at his heart's core. Joss had been to see her once, but would say nothing about it, except that she didn't like the room and she didn't like Osney. She declined to add that she had met Mark Hathaway, and that she didn't like him either, on principle. If it hadn't been for the benevolent influence of Garth Acheson's continuing, if inexplicable, interest in Joss, James thought he might have strangled her.

She was, as James came to suppose she always had been, just an inert lump in the household, a creator of mess and washing, a consumer of food at all times but mealtimes. Infatuation with Garth caused her to monopolize the bathroom, locking herself in for hours to perform such rites as dying her hair purple which she did very badly, managing, in the process, to spatter the towels, the curtains and James's toothbrush with random splashes. As Garth understandably objected to the purple, she repeated the process with henna and left the bathroom looking as if it had been rinsed in tea. James lost his temper and shouted, so Joss sulked and stayed out, as was strictly forbidden, until eleven. Only two months to go, James told himself, hauling a spaghetti-like tangle of socks and tights out of the washing machine. Only eight weeks, and then I'm shot of her.

Leonard, on the other hand, he couldn't be shot of. Kate's absence was making Leonard querulous. He fussed and made objections, and poked suspiciously at his food.

‘What's this, then?'

‘Chicken.'

‘Could have fooled me.'

‘It's the kind of chicken I've been cooking for you about forty per cent of the time you've lived here.'

‘Doesn't look the same.'

‘Smells funny,' Joss said.

James shouted, ‘Go to hell, the pair of you!'

They stared at him.

‘C'n I have ketchup?' Joss said.

James sighed. ‘I don't care. Have what you want.'

‘Wicked,' Joss said, squirting ketchup.

Leonard watched her. ‘I'll have some of that.'

James went into the study and sat in his chair with his eyes closed. Kate, he cried to himself, oh Kate, oh Kate. He opened his eyes and looked at the swivel chair by his desk, the chair she had sat in the first day she had come to Richmond Villa, and again the day she had agreed with him, yes, she did want to leave. He couldn't blame her, but oh how could she have left him to this terrible, pointless, miserable wasteland of time and life? I've got to go on, James told himself, but by God, I don't want to. How could anyone want to, with the great sustaining love of their lives having removed itself elsewhere? Perhaps it's a punishment for not having valued her enough, not having loved her enough, or told her I loved her enough. But I did, I do. I yearn for you, James told the absent Kate, I yearn for you to be here in my arms and content to be there, as you used to be. He turned his head sideways and his glance fell on a book Miss Bachelor had lent him, a translation of the odes of Pindar. Perhaps Beatrice was right in her beliefs; she certainly seemed so at the moment. At the moment, James thought, at this very moment, all I want to do is to die.

Kate's guilt – ‘your ball and chain', Mark Hathaway called it – had gone through a metamorphosis. Instead of feeling guilty about making other people's lives, and particularly James's unhappy, she now felt guilty at being so happy by herself. It was like putting down a great burden, or feeling a chronic headache lift and the subsequent sensation came very close to joy. Kate felt as if she had come in a huge weary circle through life, back to her true self, to the person who could decide for herself, plan for herself, make things happen in a way that was both right and comfortable. Even Joss's absence didn't trouble her, because it was obvious that, at the end of the trial period at Richmond Villa, Joss and James would say goodbye to one another with nothing but relief. The only thing that troubled her was the knowledge, brought by Mrs Cheng, that she had left behind her a misery as profound as her own new delight.

‘He too old for this,' Mrs Cheng said of James. ‘He tired right out.'

‘It'll be better when Joss comes here—'

‘There's still the old devil,' Mrs Cheng said.

Kate looked round her room. ‘I can't go back.'

Mrs Cheng said nothing; her loyalty was badly shaken. Who, in their right mind, would forsake the solid comfort and security of Richmond Villa for a room in a poky house which resounded all day to Glen Miller or The Four Freshmen? Yet, perplexingly, Kate looked better, younger, happier. Her eyes shone. Her room, as Mrs Cheng's appraising eye fell upon it, wasn't tidy, certainly, but it looked the room of someone who was pleased to be in it.

‘I love it here,' Kate said.

It was true. From the moment she opened her eyes in the little segment that would shortly belong to Joss to the moment she closed them again to the sounds of faint late traffic in the Botley Road, she loved it. She loved walking to work, she loved working, she loved the feeling that what she earned was hers to administer so that she seemed to inhabit and to rule a little kingdom of her own. Every week, she sent James a cheque for Joss. He never acknowledged it, and she suspected he didn't spend it on Joss, but saved it for her.

Twice a week, by arrangement, she rang Joss from a call box, and once a week they met for lunchtime sandwiches or a teatime doughnut. Joss looked strange to Kate, half surly, half elated. Kate was in a hurry for the last two trial months to be up, so that she could begin to share her new independence with Joss, and to teach her the value of staying free, and in control. Mark had typed out a quotation for Kate, from an American professor of addiction: ‘The lack of a fully realized perception of personal power and meaning is destructive to anyone.'

Kate loved that, too. She had tucked it into the corner of the mirror in her room, the mirror that reflected a face she was startled and enchanted to be pleased to see. Mark had said he was falling in love with her. Was she, he asked, falling back?

‘Give me time,' she'd said, ‘give me time, just to be me.'

In the end, Hugh and Julia decided on a Sunday lunch party.

‘More gravitas,' Hugh said.

He intended to ask everyone of significance in his life, all his past real cronies from television, as well as those upon whom his future depended. He would include Maurice Hirshfeld and his exhausted longterm wife (but not his current short-term boyfriend), Vivienne Penniman, and even Kevin McKinley, who was married to a formidable-sounding girl, the editor of a magazine for working women. Julia suggested her own producer, Rob Shiner, and Helen, and Frederica, who ran the twins' nursery school and regularly bought the magazine edited by Fanny McKinley. There would be twenty of them in all, which Julia reckoned she could accommodate in two halves, ten in the kitchen and ten in the dining-room.

‘Oh, and James.'

‘Gosh, nearly forgot. Of course. Poor James.'

Sandy could indeed cook. Julia took a vicarious pride in this, and consciously allowed Sandy to help her decide on the food. Sandy said she made a very nice chicken dish with orange and tarragon, and that nobody ever refused her chocolate roulade. Because of this, Julia decided to overlook the fact that she had shrunk Edward's Fair Isle jersey and bought the twins packets of brilliantly coloured chewy sweets at the village shop. Sandy made a trial roulade and Julia told herself that anyone who could cook like that was perfectly entitled to shrink the odd jersey.

In the week before the lunch party, Julia made lists. She made a wine list for Hugh, a shopping list for herself, and a cooking list for Sandy. She worked for Midland Television three days and two evenings and was astonished to discover that she was relieved and pleased to come home and find that the twins were in bed and that something had been done towards supper. True, the kitchen didn't always look as immaculate as she liked it to, and Sandy had an irritating preference for using the tumble dryer rather than the line in the orchard, as well as a stubbornness about ironing underclothes and not eating chocolate in front of the boys, but really, you couldn't have everything, could you? There had to be give and take, after all, just as there had to be a willingness to learn. Julia had learned something recently, from Hugh. Hugh had said that life was unendurable if you didn't feel yourself to be effective, and although Julia had dismissed that at the time, she now knew, being so very effective herself, how very true it was.

James was late for the lunch party. He had forgotten that, if he were out himself, Leonard and Joss still needed to be fed, and there had been a last-minute panic, with Leonard saying ‘Don't mind
me
' with heavy sarcasm and Joss saying she was going out anyway. Then there were cuff buttons missing from his favourite blue shirt – who cared? – and a telephone call to discuss a newspaper piece on a possible Lost Eden philosophy behind the Green movement – who cared about that, either, at this precise moment? – and a hunt for the car keys. In the end, hurtling out of the house leaving Leonard muttering resentfully over a saucepan of baked beans, ‘How the hell do I know when they're ready, sodding things?' James felt that the last thing he needed was any form of social life, and if it hadn't been Hugh's party, he would have cried off.

He drove too fast. It was a pretty, late-April day, and once outside the city the hedges were fuzzy with new green. These were difficult to appreciate properly since James had dropped his spectacles on the kitchen floor two nights ago, and cracked a lens, so that any view resembled the jagged medley at the bottom of a kaleidoscope. He took his glasses off as he approached Church Cottage, anxious to look neither neglected nor half-witted. Getting out of the car, which he decided to leave in the lane, he observed ahead of him a sleek couple in their late-thirties or early-forties, and hastily tucked into his jacket sleeve (should he have worn his suit?) the flapping untethered cuff of his shirt.

Church Cottage looked ravishing. The daffodils in the garden were almost over, but a huge old prunus tree, with its greenish and oriental bark, was extending a vast umbrella of pale blossom among new red leaves. The gravel path was raked, the lichen on the stone urns of dwarf tulips was artistically dappled, and smoke rose hospitably from the brick chimneys set so charmingly in the thatched roof. James surveyed it all in dismay, and wanted to go home.

He tried very hard to dawdle so as not to arrive at the front door at the same time as the sleek couple, but they suddenly took it into their heads to wait for him, and the woman, ferociously urban and elegant in a suede tunic over a brief skirt, turned and held her hand out to him with a wide smile and said that she was Fanny McKinley. She then indicated the saturnine man with her and said that he, of course, was Kevin.

‘Of course,' James murmured. He took her slim, cool hand. He was clearly expected to react, but there was nothing he could think of to say except, ‘Lovely day,' lamely. His clothes felt as if he had not only slept in them, but had had several nightmares in them too.

The front door opened, and there was Hugh, blithe in a gingham shirt.

‘Kevin. Terrific to see you. And the delectable Fanny. Am I allowed a kiss? And James. You've met, I see. Come in, come in. Seize a glass and fight your way into the mêlée.' He took two glasses of champagne from a tray on a small table in the hall and handed them to the McKinleys. ‘To me, men! In we go!'

James helped himself to a glass and followed them. The sitting-room seemed very full, not only of people, but of the steady braying sound of a party working itself up from cold to a cruising speed. Julia, completely pretty in a soft, pale jersey and trousers, came quickly over to him and kissed him with tender solicitude, as if he had fallen over and hurt his knee. She smelt of lily of the valley.

‘Come and meet Frederica.'

Frederica was dark and highly coloured, in a brilliant fuchsia sweater.