The Men and the Girls (23 page)

He took her hand and kissed it lightly. Then he gave it back to her and stood up. ‘I'm going to look at the twins.'

‘I'll come—'

‘No. No, I'll go alone.'

He went upstairs and she sat and looked at the full ashtray by his chair, at the dented cushion that had held him. She felt so full of love and pain for him that she could scarcely endure it. She got up and went out into the hall and looked up at the pretty cottage staircase. The twins' door was open. She stood and waited for a long, long time and then Hugh came on to the landing and saw her, looking up.

He said, gently, ‘Don't watch me.'

‘But I'm worried—'

‘Don't be. I'm fine.'

She started up the stairs. ‘Of course you're not, how could you be, Hugh, oh please—'

He leaned down towards her. ‘I'm going to have a bath. Alone. I just need to be alone.'

‘Of course,' she said, thankful to be able to do something he wanted, even if it was to stay away from him.

He went into their bathroom and locked the door. Julia climbed the remaining half of the stairs and went into the twins' room. They lay as they always did, turned towards one another, and Edward had thrown off his duvet so that Julia could see he was wearing mismatched pyjama tops and bottoms. She found she didn't care; she couldn't help noticing, but she had no urge to go and find the missing co-ordinating half. She knelt on the floor between the beds.

‘Poor Daddy,' she said in a whisper to the sleeping boys. ‘Poor darling Daddy.'

Hugh was in the bathroom for almost half an hour, and when he came out he went straight to bed. Julia followed him, to ask him if he would like some tea, or some whisky, but he smiled and shook his head, and slid down under the sheet, turning off his bedside lamp in a way that made it plain he still wanted to be alone. So she had locked up the house, leaving the back door unbolted for Sandy, and plumped cushions, and swept crumbs off surfaces, and switched off lights, and had then gone to have a bath herself.

She wondered if it would help to have a tremendous cry in the bath, to sob and wail in the steam and the privacy; but she found she couldn't cry, she couldn't even let go sufficiently for that. She washed conscientiously and cleaned her face and brushed her teeth and hair hoping for the small comfort of ritual, because it was quite beyond her previous experience to feel so desperate. She found a clean nightie and pulled it over her head, then she went through to their bedroom, and very quietly slipped into bed beside Hugh. She put a hand out to touch him, tentatively. He didn't move.

‘Hugh,' Julia said, so softly it was hardly a whisper. Silence. She reached out to her bedside light and turned it off, and then she lay there, beside him, and felt his suffering and her own to be like two identical magnetic fields, repulsing one another.

They were often in the kitchen now, when Joss got back from school, and sometimes Miss Bachelor had made sandwiches, or brought some really dull biscuits, like petit beurre or Marie. It was, Joss thought, a bit like having grandparents waiting for you, except that average grandparents, from what she gathered, didn't grill you about the precise academic content of lessons or tell you that you were certifiably stupid. Joss didn't want tea – or rather she didn't want their kind of tea – but she discovered that she quite liked finding them there, messing about with cups and saucers and jars of horrible fish paste.

‘You never used to come down,' Joss said to Leonard. He had made James buy him a yellow knitted waistcoat – ‘For the sodding spring, you fool' – and had spilled soup down it the very first day, and, as nobody knew how to wash the soup off, they left it there.

‘I never came down because there was never anybody bloody
in
.'

Miss Bachelor came most days. She had taken to cleaning the brass door-handles and to pruning and weeding the garden and to opening the door to James's pupils, who were terrified of her. While she was in the house, Leonard sat at the kitchen table, or, on fine days, on a kitchen chair just outside the back door, and argued with her. She tried to give him small tasks to do, but he was resistant to doing anything helpful unless it was on his own terms. He preferred to watch her weeding the narrow borders, kneeling on a folded towel to protect her knees, and shout insults at her. One day he went too far and said she had an arse like a camel, and she went home for three days. He missed her. He was so abusive about her that in the end Joss realized what was the matter and went round to Cardigan Street.

‘Is she coming?' James asked when Joss got back.

‘She said never again.'

‘I see,' said James, ‘so she'll be here tomorrow.'

Hugh had given them a video of
Is the Choice Yours?
and Leonard wanted to watch it, over and over. Beatrice refused.

‘I know what I think, I know what I said and I have neither wish nor need to remind myself of either.'

Joss agreed with her. She thought the programme creepy, as well as boring. She'd watched it with James because he wanted to watch it and she had felt obliging – no, more than obliging really, almost affectionate, as if she wanted to sit next to him and be with him whatever he was watching. She found she agreed with a lot of what Beatrice said, even if she would never have dreamed of admitting it.

‘Look at you,' Leonard said to her one day, ‘just look at you. What a bloody mess. What a scruffy sight. ‘Course, can't blame you, I suppose, poor sodding child. Broken home and all that. Nowhere to identify with.'

‘Rubbish,' said Miss Bachelor, who was doing the newspaper crossword. Leonard could scarcely bear the fact that she did it so much faster than he did.

Joss, eating a bowl of chocolate-flavoured cereal while propped against the fridge in her usual semi-slouch, waited for more. Leonard leaned towards Beatrice.

‘Not rubbish. What'll she think of her mother when she grows up? Or her useless father? Or James? What notion of home life has she got? No wonder she's got no sense and no manners.'

Beatrice filled in seven-down. ‘She has sense and she's learning manners. As for a home—' She raised her head and looked at Joss. ‘Children make their own homes.'

Leonard snorted. Joss stopped chewing.

‘She was at home in the womb, and she had to leave. I expect she was at home in her pram, and she had to leave that too. I imagine her home now is her room here, and her school, and as she gets older she will make homes all along the line. Society will be her home.'

Joss thought about this. Leonard said, ‘Her home ought to be with her mother.'

‘Ought?'

‘It's only bloody natural—'

‘What do you think?' Miss Bachelor said, turning to Joss.

Joss was embarrassed. ‘I don't want to say—'

‘Of course you don't. Why should you? One's sense of home is rightly private. I have no doubt your mother could tell you that.'

‘My mother—'

‘I am sorry,' Miss Bachelor said, ‘that I haven't met your mother.'

‘You haven't—'

‘No. I have never met your mother.'

‘She's a good woman,' Leonard said unexpectedly.

They both stared at him. He looked suddenly very sad. He caught them looking. Joss waited for him to shout at them, but he didn't, he just sat there, looking. Then Beatrice picked up the crossword again, and Joss went to the larder to find potatoes to scrub and bake for supper.

‘Good evening, sir,' Garth Acheson said to James.

James had come out of Mr Patel's shop with a box of groceries. He gave Garth a nod. Garth was wearing an American baseball jacket and very clean jeans and an expression of imperfect confidence.

‘May I help you with that?'

‘No thank you,' James said. The sheer healthiness of Garth Acheson's face seemed to him a mark of insensitivity.

‘Sir,' Garth said, ‘may I come round and see Joss?'

‘I shouldn't think so,' James said.

‘You wouldn't wish it?'

‘I think she wouldn't wish it.'

‘I'm really sorry,' Garth said. His shoulders sagged a little. ‘I never meant—'

‘Don't bleat,' James said crossly, interrupting him. ‘You can't inflict a hurt and then whine because the consequences are disagreeable.'

‘She's a great kid.'

‘I know. Now, if you would excuse me, I'm going home.'

He set off down Walton Street. Garth ran after him for a pace or two.

‘Would you give her – would you tell her you've seen me?'

‘I saw Garth,' James said to Joss while they unpacked the groceries.

Her head went up. ‘What did he say?'

‘He wants to come and see you.'

‘Wow.'

‘Do you want him to come?'

Joss stared down at the bag of carrots in her hand. ‘No. But I don't mind him wanting to.'

James reached across the kitchen table and ruffled her hair. ‘That's my girl.'

Joss tried to duck his hand. ‘Geroff,' she said.

It was Sandy's day off. Julia sat on the playroom floor while the twins climbed over her aimlessly and whined. They had whined a good deal recently, and clung to her legs and done ludicrously babyish things like wanting a spoon to eat with, or failing to get to the lavatory in time, when they had been perfectly trained to forks and the lavatory for well over a year. Though as gleaming clean as usual, they didn't somehow look as robust as they used to and their clothes, in Sandy's care, had an air of being well-used, almost over-used, the fabrics faded and rubbed.

‘Don't,' Julia said tiredly, as Edward's sandal buckle caught her leg. ‘Please be careful.'

Edward dragged himself across her, and lay with his thumb in across her knees, pressing them painfully to the floor. George began to crawl up her shins and across Edward.

‘Hurts,' Edward said, on a long, drawn-out grizzle.

‘Doesn't,' George said at once.

‘Does, does, hurts, Mummy, hurts, Mummy—'

‘Shh,' Julia said. She pushed George away and lifted Edward off her legs and on to the floor. Then she scrambled up and sat on the sofa where, on happier days, she nestled with the twins for a story. They crawled inexorably after her, gurning.

‘Stop it,' Julia said suddenly, furiously. ‘Leave me alone. Just
stop
it.'

They halted, briefly. Then Edward began again, and Julia burst into tears.

‘Don't!' George said in panic. He lunged at her, his own mouth trembling dangerously.

She gave herself a shake and sniffed loudly. ‘Sorry, darlings, sorry—' They regarded her apprehensively. ‘I'm a bit tired, Mummy's rather tired. That's all.' She blinked down at them and managed a hopeless smile.

‘Not cry,' George said uncertainly.

‘No, of course not. Silly Mummy.'

They looked relieved. ‘Silly Mummy!'

Julia stood up. ‘Let's go and find some tea, shall we? Shall we make toast?'

The telephone rang. Julia flew. It might be Hugh, it must be Hugh, having finished opening his supermarket, ringing to say it had been terrific and he was on his way home . . .

‘Mrs Hunter?'

‘Yes—'

‘Julia, it's Vivienne Penniman here.'

‘Oh,' Julia said, smiling into the receiver, ‘how nice. How are you?'

‘Well, thank you,' Vivienne said. ‘I wonder if I could speak to Hugh?'

‘I'm afraid he isn't back yet. He went to Coventry, to that—'

‘I know,' Vivienne said. Her voice was not particularly friendly. ‘The supermarket has just telephoned me. That's why I was ringing Hugh.'

‘Is he all right?' Julia said in sudden panic.

There was a tiny pause, then, ‘There's nothing to worry about, dear,' Vivienne said, much more cosily, ‘just some little administrative hitch. Could you get him to call me, when he gets in?'

‘Of course.'

She put the receiver down. The twins were dragging chairs across the kitchen towards the cupboards on which stood the bread bin, and the toaster.

‘Don't touch the bread knife—'

The chairs collided and crashed and there was a shriek as George caught his fingers between them.

‘Ow, ow, ow, ow—'

Edward tried to move the chairs apart and moved them the wrong way. George gave a piercing scream. Julia fled round the table, and, as she did so, heard through the wails the slow crunch of tyres on the gravel. Hugh was home, thank God, thank—

‘Bleeding!' screamed George.

‘No, it isn't, darling, it's just bruised, poor fingers, just bruised. We'll put them in hot water and it'll make it better—'

‘Not me!' Edward wailed. ‘It wasn't me!'

‘I know it wasn't, darling, I know it was a mistake.'

The back door opened slowly. They all turned in relief. Hugh stood there, supported as if he were an invalid, by the driver who had taken him to Coventry, and from their attitudes and expressions it was immediately plain that Hugh was not ill, but hopelessly drunk.

Twelve

‘Shh,' said Benjie. He sat on a kitchen stool and held his head.

‘What's the matter now?' Kate said. She had an exasperated affection for Benjie on account of a clumsy innocence that his wayward ways could never quite dispel, but his constant preoccupation with himself was very trying.

‘Went out on the piss,' Benjie said.

‘Oh, not again. Why are you so stupid?'

‘It was me birthday. You never remember me birthday—'