Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection: Strangers, Bad Girls Good Women, A Woman of Our Times, All My Sins Remembered. Rosie Thomas
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ill a lot, for a long time, almost all the time I can remember. We got used to managing, Rozzie and me.’
‘And your dad?’
‘He’s all right.’
Mattie looked down, or away and out of the window, or got up on some pretext and left the room. Jessie didn’t ask that particular question more than two or three times. If Mattie didn’t want to talk about her father, then that was her own business. When Mattie came back into the room the last time, Jessie startled her with a sudden enveloping hug.
‘There’s my girl,’ she murmured, and Mattie smiled again.
Jessie loved physical warmth, and she was demonstrative in her affection. Julia was surprised by her weighty arms around her shoulders, and the relish of her smacking, vodka-wet kisses on her cheek. It was more surprising because neither Betty nor Vernon ever touched her, nor each other, seemingly.
‘Oh, I like a bit of a cuddle,’ Jessie beamed. ‘And Felix never lets me have one these days. He used to be such a lovely, affectionate little boy, but he’s that touchy about himself nowadays.’
It was Felix, oddly, who the girls found the more difficult to live with in those early days.
On one of the very first evenings, they found him standing at the door of their room looking in at the mess. The floor and the beds were strewn with tangled clothes and make-up and crumpled papers and discarded shoes.
‘Do you always live like this?’ he asked, raising one black eyebrow.
Mattie had muddled through in domestic chaos all her life, and Julia copied it as part of her rebellion against Betty.
‘Always,’ they chorused.
‘You don’t here,’ Felix said coldly. He watched as they sheepishly picked up their belongings and folded them away, and when he was satisfied he said, ‘The bathroom’s full of dripping stockings and things.’
‘Knickers and bras, you mean?’ Mattie tried to tease him.
‘I know what they are, thank you. Just don’t leave them slopping everywhere.’
They tried to make a joke between themselves about his old-maidishness but for some reason it didn’t amuse either of them particularly. The found themselves trying to be tidier, in order to please him.
Julia found it more confusing than Mattie did. Part of her resented Felix’s authority, but she submitted to it just the same. She wanted to challenge him, but she didn’t quite know how to do it. She found herself watching him covertly, admiring the way that he looked and dressed, trying to adopt some of his style for herself. She would stand in the kitchen doorway when he was cooking, looking at the way his hands moved amongst the pots and pans.
‘I wish I could do that,’ she said. Felix put down his boning knife and looked at her.
‘Why shouldn’t you be able to do it?’
He made room for her at the scrubbed worktop and she tried to copy him, but her fingers felt thick and stiff and the meat slithered awkwardly in her fist.
‘No. It’s like this,’ he said, and put his hand over hers. The knife moved, neatly severing the lean meat from the fat and glistening connective tissue. Felix’s skin was tawny against Julia’s whiteness, but his touch was light and dry, deliberately without significance.
Mattie and Julia speculated about him in private.
‘Do you think he’s queer?’ Julia asked. They could usually divide men up between them. Most of them went for Mattie, with her seemingly uninhibited voluptuousness, but Julia had her share of admirers too. But Felix was mysterious, fastidious, uninterested in their messy femininity.
Mattie considered. They weren’t sure, either of them, that they had ever seen a real homosexual.
‘No. He can’t be, can he? They’re all like this.’ Mattie stood with one hand on her hip, the other dangling limply. Her face puckered up into a faint simper and Julia laughed.
‘Felix isn’t one, then.’
One afternoon he found them lolling on Mattie’s bed reading. Mattie had the Stage folded carefully so that she could read every column, and Julia, with her head propped on one hand, was reading Gone With The Wind. She went through phases of burying herself in books, creating her own temporary oblivion inside an imaginary world.
Felix took out his sketch pad and drew them.
When he had finished he let them look at the pencil sketch.
There was a moment’s silence as they looked at themselves as Felix saw them. Mattie was all loose, blowsy curves, her bare thigh showing between the flaps of her dressing gown, her hair rolling over her shoulders. Beside her Julia was angular, darkfaced and scowling.
‘You haven’t made us look very pretty,’ Julia said at last.
‘Is that what you want to be? Pretty?’
‘Of course.’
‘Well, you aren’t. You’ve got more than that, both of you. You’ve got style, although you don’t know how to use it yet.’
They forgot their momentary pique and scrambled at him. Mattie locked her arms around him, affectionate, just as she would have been with Ricky or Sam. Julia hung back, only a little.
‘Show us, then, if you’re so clever.’
‘I might.’
Julia retrieved the drawing and smoothed the creases out of it. She pinned it carefully over the tiny black cast-iron fire grate in their bedroom.
That night, the three of them went back to the Rocket Club. Before they went out the girls presented themselves for Felix’s approval.
‘Too much stuff on your faces, as usual,’ was his verdict. So they rubbed the make-up off again and, giggling, let him reapply it. Julia kept her eyes turned down as he worked on her face, inches away.
When he had finished they stared at the result in the bathroom mirror.
‘Naked. As though we’ve just got up,’ Mattie declared.
In fact they just looked younger, and less knowing. As they really were, Felix thought, instead of how they wanted to be.
‘What about the clothes, then?’
They had picked through their outfits with care, but Felix only glanced at them and shrugged.
‘You should buy one good, simple thing instead of five shoddy ones. That’ll take time.’
‘That’s stupid. Cheaper things mean you have more to wear,’ Mattie protested. But Julia suddenly saw the point. Felix himself owned hardly any clothes. He had just two jerseys, one black and one navy-blue, but they were both cashmere. His trousers and jacket were well cut, on fashionable but subdued lines, and his shoes were expensive, glossy Italian slip-ons. He kept them well polished, and he put them away with shoe trees in them when he took them off, instead of letting them lie where they fell on the floor. Julia thought Felix always looked wonderful, and she recognised the contrast with her own and Mattie’s reckless scruffiness.
That was the beginning of Julia’s longing for exquisite, expensive, unattainable luxuries.
‘Enjoy yourselves,’ Julia called out. ‘My God, I wish I had my time over again.’
They headed for the Rocket, three abreast, with their arms linked.
The cellar welcomed them like a second home. The girls abandoned themselves to the music, to the frenetic jiving, to the packed mass of bodies and the overpowering heat. Felix held himself apart for a moment longer. He had spent so many solitary evenings in places like this that it was disorientating, for an instant, to find himself possessed by Mattie and Julia. Yet in the past, sometimes, he had longed for company on his lonely expeditions.
He had