Felix understood, and he wished that he hadn’t dragged these waifs back here with him.
‘It’s just for one night,’ he soothed her. ‘There’s not much of it left, anyway.’
Jessie peered at the two girls. They were hardly more than children, and she thought that she recognised the type. And then the one with the terrible ratty tangle of curling fair hair said softly. ‘Please.’
Jessie was angry, but she knew that she had lost. She couldn’t deny that appeal. It was characteristic that she accepted her defeat and moved swiftly on.
‘You’ll be out of here by twelve o’clock sharp. There’ll be no noise, no waste of hot water, and no funny business of any sort.’
Mattie grinned at her. Their relief was like a light being turned on.
‘We’re the quietest sleepers in London. And we’re too tired to wash or think of anything funny, I promise.’
Jessie turned her massive back and shuffled away to her chair.
The room that Felix showed them into had one single mattress and a sleeping bag. He brought them some pillows and blankets, and they murmured their thanks and burrowed into them, fully clothed.
They were asleep, like small animals, even before he had draped a blanket over the dormer window.
‘Well, where do you live?’ Jessie demanded.
The girls had slept for six hours, and they only woke up at midday because Felix rapped on their door. They tried to slip into the bathroom, but Jessie was too quick for them.
‘Don’t sneak around,’ she shouted from her room. ‘Come in here and let me have a look at you. Then you can be off and leave us in peace.’
They stood in front of her, like schoolgirls facing the headmistress. Glancing round the room, Julia saw that it was full of photographs. There were dozens of laughing faces and raised glasses, and most of the groups showed a younger version of Felix’s mother beaming somewhere in the middle. It was hard to reconcile that conviviality with this huge, formidable woman.
‘You must live somewhere,’ Jessie was insisting. ‘Why d’you have to turn up at my place in the middle of the night? Although that boy’s just as much to blame for bringing you.’
They looked round for him, but Felix was prudently keeping out of the way. They could hear him rattling plates in the kitchen. The homely noise reminded them that they were hungry.
‘Well?’ Jessie demanded.
Julia decided rapidly that there was no point in attempting anything but the truth. Jessie would certainly recognise anything that wasn’t.
‘We haven’t got anywhere to live,’ she said. ‘Just at the moment, that is. The night before last we slept on the Embankment. Last night we were going to stay up, dancing, but somehow there’s a gap between night and morning, you know?’
‘I remember,’ Jessie said, a shade less grimly.
‘Felix rescued us, and brought us here.’
‘I know that already. What I’m trying to find out is why you had to sleep on the Embankment in the first place.’
Very quickly, putting in as little detail as possible, Julia told her. In Julia’s version of the story, Mattie had had an argument with her father about staying out too late. That was all. But Jessie’s little round eyes, sunk in the cushions of flesh, were shrewd as they darted to and fro. They lingered on Mattie for a minute longer.
When Julia had finished her speech, Jessie said, ‘I see. And now you’ve done your running away and found out how nasty it is, you’ll be going back home where you belong, won’t you?’
Mattie spoke for the first time. ‘No. We can’t do that.’ Her voice was quiet and steady and utterly definite, and Jessie’s glance flickered over her again.
‘We’ve both got jobs,’ Julia told her quickly. ‘Well-paid jobs. As soon as we’ve got some money we can rent a flat. Everything will be all right then.’
Jessie had seen enough. They looked so vulnerable, both of them, still sleepy, with their eyes smudged round with their unnecessary make-up, and their strange, young-old clothes all rucked up with the weight of sleep. But they weren’t so young, either, Jessie thought. A shadow of something, the beginning of experience perhaps, had touched both their faces, and sharpened them out of the softness of childhood. And they had a defiance in them, a determination, that touched her. The way they stood, the way they looked around, stirred memories in Jessie. They reminded her of friends she hadn’t seen for a long time, most of whom she would never see again. And, just a little, they reminded her of herself.
Jessie sighed.
‘Oh, bloody hell. You’d better have a drink and something to eat before I really do kick you out. Felix! Bring that bottle and some glasses in here.’
And Felix came in, awkwardly tall in the low room, but moving as gracefully as a cat in his black jersey. The girls watched him and he smiled at all three of them, as triumphantly as if he had called the truce himself. With a flourish, he took four glasses off a tray.
‘There’s beer or vodka,’ he announced. The two girls instinctively looked at Jessie for guidance, and Felix hid his smile.
‘You’d better take vodka,’ Jessie ordered. ‘That beer Felix drinks tastes like piss. Dress it up with some orange for them, Felix, there’s a love.’ Felix poured the drinks while Jessie watched impatiently, and then she raised her glass. ‘Here’s to freedom.’
It was such an incongruous toast, coming from this fat, ungainly old woman wedged in her rooftop room, and yet so apt for them, that the girls just gaped at her. Jessie broke into wheezy chuckles. ‘That’s what you think you want, isn’t it? Come on. I hate drinking alone.’
So Mattie and Julia sipped at their sweet, oily-orange drinks and Jessie downed her neat vodka in a gulp. She held out her empty glass. ‘Come on, Felix, since we’re all here. Let’s have a party.’
As soon as she had said the word, the four of them did become a party. The Sunday morning sun shone in through the windows and danced on the polished frames and the glass faces of the photographs, and Mattie and Julia felt the vodka warming their empty stomachs and loosening their limbs and tongues. Felix was their rescuer and their friend, and although they didn’t know yet what Jessie would mean to them, they felt the warmth of her. After the Embankment, and what had happened before and since, that warmth was doubly welcome.
Julia stood up and wandered round the room, peering at the faces pinned in their photograph frames.
‘Who are they all?’ she murmured. ‘You’ve got hundreds and hundreds of friends. More people than I’ve ever even met.’
She couldn’t have struck a better note. Jessie leaned back in her chair and laced her fingers across her front.
‘Used to have, dear, used to have. Dead, now, most of them. The rest are finished, like me. But we had some good times in our day, we did. Times like you wouldn’t believe. See that picture there, the one you’re looking at? That’s Jocky Gordon with his arm round me, the boxer. I met them all, in my line of business. All
