We’ll find ourselves jobs, and we’ll find a flat. Then we can live, can’t we? We always said we would, didn’t we?’
Up to London was where they went when they skipped off school for the day. They went up on Saturday nights now, when they had enough money to go dancing at a club. It was a glittering, covetable world, distant, but now, suddenly, within reach.
‘We’ve talked about it so often.’ Sitting in the park, with their backs against the green railings. Trailing slowly home from school. Whispering, over slow cups of coffee.
Carefully, Mattie said, ‘I could pack in my job easily enough.’ Since leaving Blick Road Grammar she had worked as a filing clerk in an estate agency, and she hated every minute of it. Mattie wanted to be an actress. She wanted it so much that Julia teased her about it. ‘But you’re still at school.’
‘Bugger school,’ Julia said triumphantly. ‘Dad wants me to be a secretary. Not a typist, you know. A private secretary, to a businessman. Mum wants me to be married to a solicitor or a bank manager. I don’t want to be either of those. Why should I stay at school to do typing and book-keeping? We can go, Mattie. Out there, where we belong.’
She flung her arm in a dramatic gesture.
Mattie and Julia travelled in their imagination together, away from Fairmile Road and the colourless suburban landscape.
‘What about your mum and dad?’ Mattie persisted.
Julia clenched her fists, and then let them fall open, impotent. Mattie knew some of how she felt, but it was still difficult to put it into words. Even more difficult now, because it sounded so trivial after Mattie’s confession. But Julia felt that this little, tidy house wound iron bands around her chest, stopping her breathing. She was confined by her parents’ love and expectations. She knew that they loved her, and she was sure that she didn’t deserve it. Their disapproval of Mattie, and of Julia’s own passions, masked their frightened anxiety for her. Perhaps they were right to be anxious, Julia thought. She knew that she couldn’t meet their expectations. Vernon and Betty wanted a replica of themselves. Julia wanted other, vaguer, more violent things for herself. Not a life like Betty’s, she was sure of that.
‘I’m like a cuckoo in this house,’ Julia said.
They looked around the spare bedroom, and smiled at each other.
‘If I go now, with you, they’ll be shocked but perhaps it’ll be better in the end. Better than staying here, getting worse. And when we’re settled, when we’ve made it, it will be different. We’ll all be equal. They won’t have to fight me all the time.’
It was all when, Julia remembered, sitting on the Embankment with all her possessions at her feet, and afterwards, years afterwards. We never thought if, in those days, Mattie and me.
Mattie had smiled suddenly, a crooked smile at first because of her broken lip, but then it broadened recklessly. ‘When shall we go?’
‘Today,’ Julia said. ‘Today, of course.’
Later, when Vernon was at work and Betty had gone shopping, Julia gathered her belongings together and flung them into two suitcases. Mattie wouldn’t go home even for long enough to collect her clothes, so Julia’s would have to do for both of them.
There was no time to spare. Betty was seldom out of the house for more than an hour. In the frantic last minute, Julia scribbled a note to her. There was no time to choose the words, no time to think what she was saying. I’m going, that was all.
She remembered the carelessness of that, later.
The girls caught the train from the familiar, musty local station. On the short journey they crammed into the lavatory and made up their faces in the dim mirror.
Liverpool Street station seemed larger, and grimmer than it had looked on their earlier adventures. Mattie flung out her arms.
‘The Big City welcomes us.’ But she was looking at Julia with faint anxiety. Julia smiled determinedly back.
‘Not only does it welcome us,’ she announced, ‘it belongs to us.’
To make their claim on it, they rode to Oxford Circus on the underground. When they emerged, Oxford Street stretched invitingly on either side of them.
In the beginning, it had been a huge adventure, and they had felt delighted with themselves. They started by looking for work, and they both found jobs at once. Mattie camouflaged her bruises with Pan-Stik make-up and was taken on as a junior assistant in a shoe shop. Julia had learned to type as part of her commercial course at school, and she presented herself for an interview as a typist in the accounts department of a big store. The supervisor set her a spelling and comprehension test that seemed ridiculously simple.
‘That’s very good,’ the woman told her, looking surprised. ‘I’m sure you would be useful here. When would you like to start?’
‘Tomorrow,’ Julia said promptly.
The words accounts department made her think of her father. She had often looked at him and wondered how he could go off every day, year after year, to the same dull, meaningless job. It’s only for a little while, for me, she told herself. Everything is going to happen, soon. After the interview Julia walked out into the street, and she saw the sunshine reflecting off the shop windows like a greeting. I can work, she was thinking. I can keep myself. I don’t have to ask for anything.
It was a moment of intense pleasure.
Julia could feel her freedom, like expensive scent or floating chiffon, drifting around her as she walked. It was as though she had already travelled a long, long way from home.
When she met Mattie later, they were both almost dancing with triumph. ‘How much?’ Mattie demanded.
‘Eight pounds a week.’
‘And I get seven pounds, ten shillings. Thirty bob more than the last place. We’ll be rich.’
It was more money than either of them had ever had before, and they told each other incredulously that they would have that much to spend every week. They bought some sandwiches and a bottle of cider to celebrate, and picnicked in Trafalgar Square. When they had drunk the cider they sat and beamed vaguely at the tourists photographing the fountains.
‘The next thing is somewhere to live,’ Mattie said.
‘A flat,’ Julia agreed, tipping the bottle to make sure it was empty. ‘Simple, but elegant. Mattie Banner and Julia Smith, at home.’
The difficulties began after that.
They found jobs, but the days until they could expect to be paid stretched awkwardly ahead of them. The landlords of all the flats they went to see demanded rent in advance, and deposits, and the girls couldn’t muster even a fraction of the money. The ones who didn’t ask for money eyed the two of them suspiciously, and asked how old they were. Mattie always answered defiantly, ‘Twenty,’ but even so the rooms turned out to be let already.
They stayed in the cheapest hotel they could find, and scoured the To Let columns of the Evening Standard every morning as soon as the paper came on the streets, but by the third day they still hadn’t found anywhere that they could afford. The first euphoria began to evaporate.
