My Fair Man. Jane Gordon
and bathroom upstairs so that Hattie had to fashion Jimmy a room by putting together two Japanese screens and offer him a foldaway futon to sleep on.
‘There is one thing, Jimmy. Toby really doesn’t like smoking. I don’t mind, in fact I used to smoke before I met him …’
‘Aye?’ he said.
‘So when you want a cigarette, do you think you could go and stand outside the front door … so the smoke doesn’t pollute the flat…?’ she said nervously.
Then she turned her attention to Rex. The dog, she explained, would need to be a little more house-trained if he were to live with them.
‘But he pittles in street,’ said Jimmy.
‘I know he does but he, well, he smells rather dreadful, Jimmy. Couldn’t we give him a bath?’
‘Rex hates water,’ said Jimmy.
Rex, Hattie was beginning to suspect, hated everything apart from food and Jimmy. He growled every time Hattie or Claire inadvertently went near him, and he barked in a shrill, neurotic fashion every time the doorbell or the phone went. Worse, he clearly had a digestive problem which – perhaps aggravated by the sushi he had eaten for breakfast – resulted in regular emissions of offensive ozone-eroding wind. Hattie had grown up with dogs – her father had always had a brace of Labradors for shooting and her mother was never parted from her beloved West Highland terrier – but try as she might she could find nothing about Rex that was remotely attractive. She accepted, though, that the dog represented the closest thing to family in Jimmy’s life and she supposed she would have to establish some sort of relationship with him.
‘We have to clean him, Jimmy. We’ve got to do something to try and remove the bad smell from under Toby’s nose,’ she said, although she doubted if pickling the dog in Chanel No. 5 or Eternity would make Toby more tolerant of him.
Hattie ran a bath filled with pungent bubbles and Jimmy carried the reluctant, whimpering dog and immersed him in the warm water.
There followed a terrible scene in which Rex fought, scratched, clawed and finally bit his way out of the bath, displacing gallons of water over Hattie, Jimmy and the floor, before disappearing back into his favourite place under the kitchen table.
Hattie was touched by the way in which Jimmy tried to calm him, singing to him and gently drying him with one of her expensive white waffle towels. When he had finished and the dog had calmed down enough to stop shivering and whining Jimmy turned to Hattie.
‘I’ll need me stuff, like,’ he said, ‘if I’m staying a while.’
‘Your stuff?’ said Hattie, who had assumed that all Jimmy had in the world were the clothes he had once stood up in, his sleeping bag and the couple of carrier bags she had noticed when she had first encountered him.
‘Yeah, me bits an’ pieces, like. They’re in a left luggage box at King’s Cross,’ he said, pulling a key from the pocket of Toby’s jeans.
‘Well, of course we should get them,’ Hattie said, smiling at him. ‘Now, if you want.’
‘OK,’ he said, jumping up.
Outside in the street Hattie hailed a black cab, to the astonishment and wonder of Jimmy who had not, it quickly emerged, ever travelled in one before. On the journey to the station he was enchanted by the two pull-down seats and moved from one to the other in the excited fashion of a small child on a big adventure.
Indeed, Hattie thought as she paid off the taxi and followed Jimmy through to the dirty, depressing station interior, he had many of the more endearing qualities of a child. He was enthusiastic, questioning, responsive and direct. He said what he meant, even if on occasion she could not quite understand his dialect or comprehend the words he used.
‘This is where I came when I left home, like,’ he said thoughtfully, pointing up at the departure board on which a dozen or so inter-city trains – coming from Northern towns she had never heard of, let alone visited – were indicated.
‘When was that? How old are you, Jimmy, and how long have you been in London?’
‘Must be going on five years now. I’m twenty-three,’ he said, lighting up his third cigarette since they had left the flat.
‘And what did you think of this place when you arrived?’
‘Big,’ he said simply, drawing on his cigarette.
Hattie wondered what he had expected of London, and if he was disappointed by what he did find.
‘Where did you go when you arrived? Did you know anyone here?’ she asked him gently.
‘Na,’ he said.
‘So what did you do?’
‘I got by, did a bit of labouring, like, now and then. There’s people, like, that offer you a place to stay.’ He paused and looked across at Hattie. ‘Not people like you, mind. Hard people, mean people, what pretend they’re going to help you and just sook ya in, like …’
She was aware of the fact that the young and homeless were often preyed on by unscrupulous shadowy men who led them into desperate and corrupt lives. She wondered a little guiltily, too, if what she was doing – in going along with Jon’s bet – wasn’t just another form of the kind of exploitation Jimmy had encountered since he arrived here.
‘But you didn’t get sucked in by those people, Jimmy?’ she said.
He looked at her with those penetrating blue eyes and shook his head. ‘Not for long, hinny.’ He glanced away quickly.
She sensed that he did not want to talk about his past and she stopped her questioning and followed him silently towards the left-luggage area.
Inside his box was a cheap black leatherette holdall, a cardboard box that was tied together with string and a small zipped child-sized canvas case. Hattie was moved by his evident excitement at his reunion with this odd collection of possessions. She held out her hand to grasp hold of the black bag but he would only allow her to carry the small case, and then not before he had gravely warned her that its contents were ‘breakable, like’.
In the taxi he was rather more subdued than he had been on their outward journey. He didn’t attempt to open any of his luggage but he glanced at the three pieces that he had carefully placed on the floor of the cab as if their reappearance in his life was an unexpected piece of good fortune.
Hattie felt like an intruder and, when they were inside the flat, she left Jimmy stowing away his booty, and made her way to the kitchen where a dour-faced Toby was sitting reading the papers.
‘Picked up the Vuitton cases, I see,’ he said, raising an eyebrow sarcastically in the direction of Jimmy’s Japanese screened room.
Hattie looked at him with contempt. She was beginning to think that Toby was even more insensitive to the feelings of others than she had ever realised (although, of course, their sex life had been a bit of a clue). The thought of Jimmy’s few material possessions – probably worthless in Hattie and Toby’s terms – being pored over in the corner of her elegant home had touched something deep within her. Perhaps even sparked in her, she thought as she remembered the childlike qualities she had noticed in him earlier that evening, some sort of frustrated maternal instinct.
In her work she regularly came across injured children who would arouse a strong need to nurture in her, but she was never able to indulge it. She could only go so far in helping them which, for her, was never quite far enough. At the end of their sessions she could only send them back to their foster homes or their families. With Jimmy it was different. He wasn’t a patient; she wasn’t restricted by the rules and regulations of her profession. She could go further, do more, nurture in the way she wanted.
She was already conscious that Claire’s approach to Jimmy was, rather like Claire herself, a little superficial. She even suspected that her friend might have some hidden agenda in her own interest in Jimmy’s transformation. But Hattie felt