Bad Girls Good Women. Rosie Thomas
for your stuff? It’s down there.’ He pointed his thick finger down behind a shelf of a desk.
‘Um. I wondered if could leave it here for a bit longer? It’s heavy to carry round.’
He looked carefully at her, examining everything except her face. ‘You a new girl?’
‘Er, yeah,’ Julia said ambiguously.
He clicked his tongue in disapproval. ‘Jesus, where does Monty find them? Infant school? All right, leave your gear here. I’ll keep an eye on it.’
‘Thanks.’
Julia slipped sideways out of the door before he could change his mind, or ask her anything else. The first thing she did was to head up Wardour Street into Oxford Street. Then she made her way to Mattie’s shoe shop. Peering through the plate glass window Julia saw her kneeling in front of a customer, with a sea of shoes spread all around them. She was holding a shoe in one hand and the other gesticulated as she talked. The woman listened intently, then took the shoe and tried it on again. Julia saw her nodding. A minute later she was on her way to the cash till, with Mattie bearing the shoes behind her.
Julia waited until the sale was completed and then she slipped into the shop. Mattie stared. ‘What are you doing in here?’ she hissed, and then added in a louder voice, ‘Black court shoes, madam?’
‘You look like a born saleswoman,’ Julia told her.
‘I’m an actress,’ Mattie said haughtily. ‘I can act saleswoman, of course.’
Julia took her hand and pressed something into it. Mattie looked down at the folded ten-shilling note.
‘It’s for your sandwiches at dinner time.’
‘How …?’
‘Tell you later. I don’t see anything I like the look of, thank you very much.’
Outside, looking between the cliffs of high buildings, Julia could just see trees in the distance. She remembered that it was Hyde Park, the sanctuary that they had failed to reach last night, and the greenness drew her. She walked towards it, slipping through the skeins of traffic at Marble Arch, and then crossing on to the grass. It was brown and parched by the sun, but the softness was welcome after the hot, hard pavements. She walked on, under the shadow of the great trees, until the roar of traffic in Park Lane diminished to a muffled hum. Water glinted coolly, and Julia guessed that the wide stretch of lake must be the Serpentine. There was a scatter of green canvas deckchairs under the trees overlooking it. She sank down in one of the chairs and paid threepence to an old man with a ticket machine. Then she closed her eyes and listened to the faint rustle of leaves over her head.
It was the first comfortable, solitary moment she had had to consider what had happened since leaving home.
She found herself wondering what her mother was doing.
It was easy to picture her. Perhaps she was dusting, picking up the ornaments from the tiled mantelpiece, very carefully, dusting each souvenir and china knick-knack before putting it back in exactly the same place. It was as if the house was always being made ready, cleaned and polished, for some big occasion that never came. Even the furniture, the settee and chairs with their cushions set at exact angles, seemed to wait tensely for inspection by guests who never materialised. Hardly anyone every came into the house, and when she was a little girl Julia was puzzled by her mother’s anxiety in the midst of their eventless lives. She was always being told not to make a mess when she played.
Don’t do that, Julia, it makes such a mess.
Betty wanted her to play neatly, setting her dolls out in rows. Julia’s own inclinations were for sand, and water, and poster paints that sent up plumes of brightly coloured powder when she poured in the water to mix them.
Once, Julia remembered, she had come home from a birthday party with a packet of shiny, coloured stars. With childish cunning she had hidden them from her mother, and then one afternoon she had shut herself into her bedroom and stuck them all over the wallpaper. They looked wonderful, like fireworks, jets of cobalt blue and scarlet against the insipid pink roses. Betty had grown suspicious, and she had forced the door open just as Julia was pressing the last gummy stars into place. Betty had flown across the room and started pulling them off, but the glue was surprisingly strong and it brought little star-shaped fragments of paper with it. Those that did come away left black marks.
Betty was angrier than Julia had ever seen her.
‘You little vandal,’ she hissed at her, and Julia recoiled in shock and surprise.
‘They looked pretty,’ she protested. ‘It’s my bedroom.’
‘Don’t you ever do that. Why do you spoil everything? Why do you?’ There were white flecks at the corners of her mother’s mouth, Julia remembered. ‘It isn’t your bedroom. Your father and I have given it to you, and you’ll keep it how we want it. Look at it now.’ Betty pointed at the wreckage of Julia’s fireworks, and then her face collapsed. She was crying, helplessly. Suddenly Julia caught a glimpse of her mother’s grown-up fears. She half-understood her struggle to keep everything that was lurid, and threatening, and incomprehensible, at bay with the semi-detached walls of their house. For an instant she understood what it must be like to be grown-up and still afraid, like Betty was.
She had run to her mother full of sympathy, but Betty was good at holding on to her anger and she had pushed her away. They had spent the rest of the day in silence, and when Vernon came home from work he turned Julia over his knee and smacked her with a slipper.
There must have been dozens of other times like that, Julia thought, and plenty of times when she had deserved whatever they had doled out to her. But that was the time that she remembered. Perhaps because of the embrace that Betty had rejected. Perhaps because of the glimpse of her mother’s fear.
Sitting in her deckchair, with the sun warming her face and arms, Julia remembered the old men on the Embankment. In the middle of her own night terrors she had recalled her mother’s too. Betty was afraid of everything, afraid that if she let any little detail out of place the long slide might begin, and leave her with nothing. Was that why she wouldn’t allow her daughter anything new, or different, or dangerous?
In the night Julia had determined I won’t let it get me. Not the darkness, nor the fear of it. And she had survived.
I won’t live like Betty, Julia promised herself. I won’t be afraid, and I can risk everything, if I have to.
She shivered a little, trying to imagine, looking ahead, beyond herself. But the sun made coin-bright circles under her closed eyelids, and that was all she could see.
After the stars, or perhaps all along only she couldn’t remember it, rebellion came naturally to Julia. As she grew older, there were more and more things to kick against. Looking back, the years seemed to stretch behind her as a long, entrenched battle against Betty’s strictures. In by eight. Bed by nine. Homework done on the day it was set. Julia challenged her on everything. They disagreed about her clothes, her make-up, the music she played, the hours she came in and went out again, and the places she went to. Betty and Vernon were proud that Julia had won a place at the girls’ grammar, but Mattie and Julia hated the place. They played truant and did no work, but even so Julia always came out near the top of her class.
The fights were tiring and boring, and Julia nearly always won them because she fought from strength. Betty was always forced to retrench and then capitulate.
And when Mattie came along, Julia had a natural ally. Mattie was an equally natural focus for the Smiths’ disapproval. She came from the despised estate, while the Smiths clung to the middle-class isolation of Fairmile Road. She wore her skirts too short, and too tightly belted so that they showed off her surprising breasts. And then there was the defiant mass of her hair. It was Mattie who produced the first Outdoor Girl cake mascara for Julia to try out, and quick-witted Mattie who yelled back at the boys who whistled at them in the High Street. But it was still Julia who was the leader, Julia had the ideas, and the determination to