to sit in the evenings except with Jessie in her room or on the makeshift beds in their own tiny bedroom. But Mattie and Julia weren’t particularly interested in sitting, and the flat became home in a matter of days. Jessie would wait for the girls to come home from work, and call out as soon as she heard one of them at the door.
‘Come on in here, let’s have a look at you. Tell me what’s going on out there, and pour me a drink while you’re about it.’
Julia and Mattie both acquired a taste for vodka under Jessie’s direction, but there was never enough to spare for them to do them much damage. With their wage packets at the end of the first full week’s work they bought Jessie two bottles, and a pair of the sheerest twelve-denier nylons.
‘What’re you trying to do to me?’ she demanded, pretending to be angry with them. But Jessie had surprisingly slim, pretty ankles. They made her put the stockings on at once and she stretched her feet out narcissistically to admire them.
‘I’ll do your hair for you, if you like,’ Mattie offered.
‘What’s the matter with my hair?’
‘You’ll see, when I’ve done it for you.’
Jessie didn’t just talk about herself, although the girls were fascinated by her stories. She talked to them about themselves, listening with genuine interest and prompting them with questions.
Julia described Betty and Vernon. She told Jessie about the coloured stars that she had innocently stuck on her bedroom walls, and about another time, only two years ago, when she had gone out on her first date. She knew that Betty wouldn’t allow her to go the pictures with a boy. That sort of thing was for much older girls, Betty believed, an awkward but necessary preliminary to being presented with the diamond ring. But the boy who had asked Julia out was much admired by the girls in her class, and by Julia herself. She went, and she told her mother that she was spending the evening with a girl from school. At five minutes past the time Julia had promised to come back, Vernon telephoned the girl’s mother.
And when Julia did reappear they were waiting at the front door for her. The boy had come to see her to the gate, and Vernon marched out to confront him. Julia never knew what he said to him, because Betty dragged her indoors. Vernon came in a moment later and locked and bolted the door as if he was shutting out evil itself.
Even as she described it to Jessie, Julia could smell the wet privet outside the window and feel the soft stinging of her mouth after the boy’s kisses in the cinema. She could still taste the shame, too, in the back of her throat like nausea. She was too ashamed even to look at the boy the next time they met. It was a long time afterwards, because Betty and Vernon had made her stay in for a month, and he never spoke to her again.
Jessie sighed and shifted her bulk in the chair. If Julia had expected Jessie to deplore her parents with her, Jessie refused to do anything of the kind.
‘It’s a shame, but there’s plenty of boys coming your way, duck, and kisses as well. Don’t tell me you don’t know that. It sounds to me as if your mum and dad were trying to do their best for you, that’s all, in their own way.’
‘What would you have done, Jessie?’
She laughed. ‘Asked the boy in first, so’s I could have a good look at him. And smacked your backside for lying to me, as soon as I got a chance.’
Mattie talked about her home too. Jessie soon knew all about Ricky and Sam, and Marilyn and Phil, and all their particular talents, and the funny things that they had done as babies and little children.
It was the things that Mattie left out that made Jessie’s little dark eyes peer shrewdly at her.
‘What about your ma?’
‘I told you. She died, three years ago.’
‘Miss her still?’
‘Yes. No. I don’t know. She never said very much, Mum didn’t. I know she loved us all, but she was 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
