you know,’ Julia said. Her voice came out sounding colder, further away, than she had meant it to. ‘I’ve got a job. In an accounts office. Just like Dad.’
Betty didn’t move.
‘And I’m living here. With friends.’
‘Friends?’ Betty did look up then. And her voice could be venomous, when she wished it to. Julia knew all the prejudices that lurked behind the single word. She could have recited them. Dirty blacks. Drunkards and thieves. No better than a common prostitute.
That her mother could even think such things, sitting here with Jessie and Felix, ignited a sudden, violent anger. She jerked her hand away.
‘Yes, friends. Good friends, who’ve been kind to me and Mattie. You and Dad would hardly let Mattie in the house, would you? Do you think you’re better people, or something?’
Anger against Betty’s prejudices found a shape in the words and they spilled out of her, regardless. ‘You aren’t any better. You’re narrow. You condemn anything you don’t understand. You …’
‘Julia.’ It was Jessie, warning her. ‘That’s enough.’
The hot, rancorous words dried up at once. Julia’s fists had been clenched at her sides. They opened now and the fingers hung loosely.
Betty looked in bewilderment from the fat, over-painted old woman who seemed able to command her daughter in a way that she had never mastered, to Julia herself. She seemed taller, thinner than ever, and her face had lost the last blurred roundness of childhood. In the days since leaving home, Julia had grown up. Grown up here, in this horrible attic flat that smelt of drink and cigarettes, with a woman who looked like a madam and half-caste son. Here, instead of in the home that she and Vernon had made for her, and where they had made such plans for her for sixteen years.
Jealousy bit into Betty, and the pain of exclusion, and with them came the terrible fear that she had lost Julia. She pulled her coat tighter around her and shielded herself with her handbag.
Fear made her desperate.
‘I want to talk to you, Julia.’
‘Here I am.’
‘To you, not to these people.’
It was Betty’s mistake to let her hostility show. Julia’s face, the new, grown-up face, didn’t change, but she said, ‘I don’t have any secrets from Jessie and Felix. Or from Mattie.’
‘That girl …’ Betty was sure that it was Mattie’s influence that had brought Julia here, but she made herself bite back the accusation. The moment of control strengthened her, and her fear ebbed a little. She looked fiercely at Jessie and the fat woman’s chair creaked as she began to labour to her feet.
‘You talk to your mother,’ Jessie murmured to Julia. But Julia whirled across to the chair and her hands descended on Jessie’s shoulders, holding her in her place.
‘Please,’ Julia whispered. She looked across to the window, trying to see the shadowed face against the sunshine. ‘Please, Felix.’
Jessie hovered for a moment, almost on her feet. And then she sighed. Her weight sagged backwards against the cushions. She knew that Julia was fighting, and the battle clearly mattered so much to her. If Julia wanted herself and Felix to stay for it, then they would do it for her. Jessie could read the vulnerability in Julia’s face, even though Betty was blind to it. She sighed again, silently aligning herself. Over by the window, Felix was looking out at the plane trees. Their leaves were beginning to curl and turn brown, the first premature autumn in August. He didn’t turn, but he didn’t try to leave the room either.
Julia faced Betty again.
‘Go on,’ she said.
Betty’s brown hat bobbed in front of her.
‘I want you to come home.’
The words dropped into the room’s stillness.
Julia said nothing and Betty, with the fear lapping up in her again, began to talk faster. ‘Come home. We’ll forget all this. Dad and I won’t mention it, if that’s what you want. We’ll all forgot it. They’ll take you back at the school, in the new term. You can finish your course, and then get a job, a real job, a good one. You needn’t think that everything has gone wrong, just because of this.’
She was trying to say, if it’s out of pride that you won’t come back, don’t be proud. I’m not too proud to come here and beg you, am I? But Betty had never been any good at words.
‘You can come back. Everything is at home, waiting for you.’
Julia seemed to be waiting politely for her mother to finish. But at last she said, ‘I’m not coming home.’
Betty sprang up and ran to her. She put her hands on Julia’s sleeves and twisted them, trying to move her, trying to find her. Julia thought, she’s so small. like a dry leaf. She had no memories of Betty having been the source of warmth and strength in their childhood. She couldn’t remember her childhood at all. All she could focus on was this, a little, thin woman who clung to her, and whose bones felt brittle.
Suddenly all the perspectives changed.
The great battle that she had prepared herself for, the battle for her own freedom to be fought out to the sound of trumpets in front of Jessie and Felix, had never even begun. It was a nothing, a foregone conclusion, her own strength brutally crushing Betty’s.
Julia wished now that she had made the small concession of letting her mother take her defeat in private.
‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘I’m very sorry.’
And Betty, who was just beginning to understand what her loss really was, with bitterness eating through her fear, rounded on Julia for the last time.
‘Sorry? You’re sorry, is that all? After what we’ve done for you, and given up for you, ever since you were a baby? A dirty little baby who wasn’t wanted …’
Betty’s mouth made a circle of pain, and her hand went up to cover it. She heard the warning creak as Jessie leaned forward in her chair, and out of the corner of her eyes she saw the shadow move as Felix swung away from the window.
Julia didn’t hear anything or see anything. There were only the words, inside her head. A dirty little baby who wasn’t wanted.
Afterwards she remembered a bowl of oranges, Felix’s sea-blue bowl, on the table in the window. She remembered a paisley shawl draped over the sofa back, and the sagging cushions and protruding springs of the sofa itself. The precise images came back to her, afterwards, in the moments of deepest shock.
Lily. Lily, standing in a drawing room in jeans and a torn T-shirt. Bare, tanned feet with chipped silver polish on the toenails.
‘You can’t go,’ Julia heard herself saying.
Lily dug her hands deep into the pockets of her jeans. Her shoulders hunched forward to make shadowed deep hollows at the base of her throat.
‘I want to go. I want to go with Daddy and Clare.’
