left Rozzie lighting another cigarette. The Orioles, ‘Cryin’ in the Chapel’, was on the wireless.
Mattie walked quickly, with her head up. The old widower in the house on the corner was cutting his square of grass and the scent of it mixed with the faint smell of flowers from the gardens. She looked past him as he paraded carefully with his mower, and she saw a man coming round the corner.
It was her father, and he saw her in the same instant. Mattie whirled round, looking for somewhere to run to, and he saw that too. He came towards her, past the old man and the patchy gardens. He was carrying a white paper bag, and there was a bottle under his arm. It wasn’t whisky, she saw. It was Tizer. He was bringing pop and sweets, an offering for his children.
He came closer, never taking his eyes off her, and then he stopped. He was so close that his body almost touched hers. Mattie stood rigidly.
‘You were going to run off, without even speaking to me. I’m still your dad, you know.’
There it was, the old, cajoling mock-severity. But less sure of itself now. There was wariness in his face. He was afraid, but he was still greedy. Mattie knew, and she shrank from what she remembered. He was guilty, and too weak to stop himself from compounding the guilt.
‘I’ve got to go,’ she whispered.
‘Where to? You’re here, aren’t you? You set the welfare people on me, didn’t you?’
She tried to square up to him. ‘I couldn’t leave Marilyn and Phil with you.’
‘Mat, what do you think I am?’
She knew him so well. His anger fronting his pathetic desires.
‘I know what you are,’ she said quietly.
She felt a momentary, viciously physical hatred of all men. But it was gone as quickly as it had come.
‘I wanted to say I was sorry, but you haven’t given me the chance,’ he said.
The creases in her father’s face touched her, and the sight of his big hand, dirty from work, still gripping the pop bottle. She loved him too, and she was exhausted by the obligations of love that pinioned her here amongst the boxy houses.
‘I’ve got to go.’ She was shouting, and the old man on the corner peered towards them.
Ted stared at her, stupidly. ‘Go where? I thought you were back. We can’t manage the place without you. We …’
‘You’ll have to manage. All of you.’
I’m not giving myself to you. I’m not going to sink down like Rozzie. I won’t. I can’t. I deserve better than that. I’m free now, aren’t I? In her head she was already running, the words pounding with her. I’m free, aren’t I? Ted hadn’t touched her, but she felt as if she had to wrench herself out of his grasp.
‘I’ll come and see the kids when I can.’ Mattie was breathless with the effort.
‘What about me?’ Like a baby, his face puckering.
‘Nothing about you. Don’t you understand? Nothing.’
She broke past him then, and started to run. Her legs carried her around the corner and away. She ran as far as she could and then walked, not wanting to stop and wait for a bus, all the way to the station. She took the return ticket out of her pocket and held it in her clenched fist, the torn edge of it digging into her palm. The train came almost at once and she climbed into it and stumbled to a seat. The dust puffed out from the cushion behind her head.
Sitting there, watching the backs of the houses and the factories and warehouses peel away past her, Mattie promised herself, I will do it. I’m going to be successful, and rich, and happy, and I won’t let that place pull me back again. None of the things that have happened matter at all, from now on. Only the things that are going to happen.
She felt the resolution stiffening her, as if her spine was a steel shaft. She leaned forward to peer through the grimy carriage window, as if she could see more clearly what was coming.
The party was originally Julia’s idea, but Mattie seized on it with insistent enthusiasm. She seemed to light on everything now, Julia noticed, making whatever they did important just by concentrating very hard on it.
‘Give a party for Jessie? Of course we must do it. Listen, we’ll make it just like the old evenings that Jessie talks about. Squeeze everyone in, make sure everyone has a good time …’ Mattie snatched a piece of paper and a pencil, and began making a list. ‘Friends of ours, not too many, but enough. Felix will have to help us to round up Jessie’s friends. As many as we can. We’ll have singing, and vodka martinis …’
Mattie had been taken out once or twice by a dubious club owner, and he had introduced her to vodka martinis. Under the influence of three or four of them Mattie had had more trouble than usual in fending him off, and she had only managed the last time by jumping out of his Ford Zephyr and running away. The girls thought that the cocktails were the height of sophistication.
Plans for the party took off with surprising speed. Slightly to their surprise, even Felix plunged into them. ‘We’ll have to have it at home,’ he agreed. ‘Jessie won’t go out anywhere else. Leave it to me to invite the people she would like to see.’
They kept it a secret from her as long as they could, but they were too excited and the girls wanted to share the pleasure of anticipation with her.
‘Don’t be so silly,’ she snapped. ‘I’m past the age for all that nonsense.’ But they knew from the way that her eyes brightened that she was delighted.
Felix said that he would provide the food. Julia and Mattie, without thinking much about it, had imagined sandwiches.
‘Meat paste sandwiches, I suppose?’ Felix scoffed.
They realised that all the vodka martinis they could afford wouldn’t go far either.
‘Tell everyone to bring a bottle,’ Felix advised.
‘And what about the music?’ Felix’s record player was unreliable, and there was no piano in the flat so there was no point in Mattie and Julia dreaming of the kind of pianist who thumped out the old songs in Jessie’s stories.
‘Don’t worry,’ Felix answered. ‘Bish is coming.’
Jessie had told them all about that. Freddie Bishop played the mouth-organ to compete with a twenty-piece dance band.
On the day of the party, Felix went out very early, to Soho. He came back with two bulging shopping baskets and shut himself in the kitchen. Mattie and Julia contented themselves with pushing back the furniture in Jessie’s room, the only decently sized space in the flat. Then they turned their attention to Jessie herself. They rummaged mercilessly in her wardrobe, exclaiming and pulling out dresses and holding them up against her.
‘You’re wasting everyone’s time,’ Jessie said. ‘None of those things will go anywhere near me now.’
‘This red skirt will, look, it’s loose.’
‘And this coat with the sequins. You’ll look like Ella Fitzgerald.
