Lily looking back at her, with her father’s level eyes and Julia’s own mouth, shaping those words.
‘What kind of life will it be, if you make me?’
Too old for her age, and yet still a little girl. The weight of all that had happened, pressing on them both.
And then Lily turned lightly away from her, while Julia wanted to run after her and hold her as she would once have been able to do, keeping her, loving her now that it was too late.
The door closed.
Julia saw the oranges then, and the old sofa, and the squirled feathers of the paisley.
In the close attic room she moved slowly, as if the air around her hand turned solid.
‘What do you mean?’ the words slurred in her mouth. Like being drunk, only she knew she wasn’t drunk.
Betty grown old, with all her life of fear naked in her eyes now, fear and a kind of last exultation. Power, after all. Not quite done yet.
‘You’re not my daughter. Not Vernon’s either. We took you when you were just a few weeks old. I’d lost one of my own, couldn’t have another. And the War was coming.’
All Julia could think of, the only thing as she struggled to form the words, was, ‘My real mother? Who was she?’
Betty’s face dancing in front of her eyes, ageing as the seconds ticked past, a stranger’s.
‘I don’t know. I never knew. Some silly girl, I suppose, who got herself into trouble.’
That was all.
It was Felix who came forward to put his arms around Julia. Her head fell against his shoulder and she began to shiver. The sudden stripping away of it all, Fairmile Road and Betty and Vernon, left her icy cold. Her teeth chattered and Felix’s hands felt dangerously hot through her thin blouse. He held her close to him. For a moment even Jessie was silenced, but Julia laughed. It was a little, tuneless noise that none of them recognised as laughter. She lifted her head from Felix’s shoulder and said, ‘I’m glad you told me. It explains a lot of things, doesn’t it?’ She looked past Betty as if she had stopped existing and repeated, ‘Some silly girl.’
Jessie leaned forward to Betty. ‘You shouldn’t have told her like that,’ she said sharply. ‘Don’t you know better than that?’ Betty ignored her. Her eyes were fixed on Julia, held in Felix’s arms. With her last shot gone, Betty was defenceless. Felix thought painfully that she looked like a dismembered creature, ‘We did our best for you,’ she whispered. ‘We loved you.’
‘Love?’ The word sounded like an intricate puzzle to Julia, turning inwards on itself until it was finally empty, without meaning. ‘Yes, it doesn’t make any difference, you know. I won’t come home.’
She was more brutally certain now’. Her own strength surprised her. Betty made a last effort. ‘We’re still your parents. Your mother and father. Legal guardians. And you’re only sixteen. We can make you come back if we have to.’
Jessie’s big, grey head lifted, but she said nothing.
Julia laughed again, just recognisably now.
‘You could, but what difference will it make in the end? I will be twenty-one one day, you can’t stop that, and even before then you don’t own me. You can’t change what you’ve just told me.’ Carefully but deliberately she detached herself from Felix. She went across to the sofa and sat down, her back against the warm paisley shawl. ‘I’m all right,’ she said to Felix and Jessie. She was smiling when she turned to Betty again.
‘It’s funny, in a way, isn’t it? Ironic, I think that’s the word. I wanted to be free, and you’ve set me free by telling me the truth.’
There was a moment of silence. Felix thought, It isn’t as simple as that.
Then Betty stood up. Her coat seemed bigger, too loose for her frame inside it, and her handbag looked like a dead weight over her arm.
‘You won’t come?’ she asked childishly.
‘No,’ Julia repeated. ‘I live here now.’
There was no more talk of guardianship, no suggestion of ownership. Betty’s head nodded stiffly, just once.
Watching her, Jessie tried to promise, ‘We’ll look after her for you. I’ll see she’s all right.’
Betty swung round to her, bitterness only heightened by defeat.
‘You? You and him?’ She jerked her head at Felix. ‘My Julia might just as well be on the streets.’
No one said anything then, not even Julia, even though her fists clenched in her lap. She watched her mother plod slowly to the door, fumble with the catch. There was still an instant when she could have said, Wait. Yet she didn’t, and afterwards she believed that she was right.
They heard Betty’s footsteps going away down the stairs.
Julia had stopped shivering. To Jessie and Felix she said almost triumphantly, ‘I told you, didn’t I? You’re my family now. You and Mattie.’
Mattie was at the front door when Betty passed her. She caught a glimpse of her face and automatically put her hand out, but Betty never wavered. Mattie watched her go, away under the plane trees with her brown hat held upright. She seemed to carry the smell of Fairmile Road with her, Air-Wick and polish and ironing.
Betty sat quite still, all the way back on the train to the local station. She crossed the High Street, quite blind, although she nodded to the people who greeted her. Everything inside her was focused on her longing to reach home. Outside the front door she groped for her key, not even noticing that the panels of the door were coated with street dust. But when the door swung open there was none of the relief of sanctuary. She saw Vernon’s mackintosh hanging from its pegs on the hallstand, and his black briefcase on the floor beside it.
Of course, it was past the time for Vernon to be at home. It was strange, she realised now, that she hadn’t thought about him all the way back.
He appeared in the living room doorway, at first only a dark shadow seen out of the corner of her eye, and then she looked full at him. He was wearing his navy-blue office suit, shiny at the cuffs and turn-ups.
‘Betty? Where have you been?’
She always had his tea on the table by half past five, always. Her eyes met his.
‘I went up to Town. To look for Julia.’
His stiff face, frowning, measuring her.
‘And did you find her?’
‘Yes.’
‘Where?’
She told him, awkwardly, stumbling over the words while he frowned. ‘She won’t come back to us, Vernon. She says she won’t come home.’ She wanted to go to him and have him put his arms around her, as that black boy had done with Julia, but neither of them moved. That wasn’t part of what happened
