across her front.
‘Used to have, dear, used to have. Dead, now, most of them. The rest are finished, like me. But we had some good times in our day, we did. Times like you wouldn’t believe. See that picture there, the one you’re looking at? That’s Jocky Gordon with his arm round me, the boxer. I met them all, in my line of business. All of ’em. You’d be surprised, some of the things I’ve seen.’
‘Tell us about it,’ Mattie begged her.
Jessie beamed, and settled more comfortably in her seat.
Still smiling, Felix slipped out into the kitchen. It was on the shaded side of the house, cool and neat and inviting. He could make something to eat, now that he had seen that Jessie was happy.
He opened the cupboard door, his movements economical in the confined space. He had planned to finish the leftovers of a knuckle of ham with Jessie, but that wouldn’t stretch to four. He would make a salad and put the ham into omelettes, instead. Felix unwrapped the lettuce and picked the leaves over carefully. He could hear laughter from Jessie’s room. He was ready to make the omelettes when he felt eyes on his back, and turned round to see Julia leaning against the open door. He gestured uncertainly, not knowing how long she had been watching him.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said softly. ‘I didn’t mean to startle you. I came to say thanks.’
They listened for a second to a third person’s voice in Jessie’s room, and then they realised that it was Mattie, mimicking somebody. Mattie was a wonderful mimic, and Jessie’s choking laugh rose too.
‘I should thank you, for listening to Mum,’ Felix said. ‘She doesn’t have many people to tell her stories to.’
He was moving around the kitchen again, breaking eggs into a blue pottery bowl. The yolks lay in it, a bright yellow cluster.
‘I like her,’ Julia said simply. She was thinking how nice this kitchen was, with its bare wooden tops and white walls. No fuss, and covers, and labels, like there was at home. Felix opened the window. In the angle of the roofs outside stood four clay flowerpots. He picked a handful of parsley and some chives from them, and a few sprigs of thyme. Julia watched as he chopped the herbs and melted a knob of butter in an old copper pan.
‘You’re clever,’ she said. ‘I wish I could do that.’
‘Can’t you cook?’ Felix asked, surprised. He had assumed it was something all girls did, automatically. It was unusual for boys to enjoy it, that was all.
‘My mother tried to teach me,’ Julia said, without enthusiasm. Betty made sponge cakes, and thin stews or flaccid pies, and looked forward to getting cleared up afterwards. There had been nothing as simple and obvious and inviting as the golden puff that materialised in Felix’s copper pan.
‘Lay the table, Julia, will you?’
It was the first time that he had called her by her name, and they smiled shyly at each other. Julia bent her head abruptly to pick the knives and forks out of a wicker tray.
Felix bent down too, and took a dark red bottle from its resting place under the sink. ‘Let’s drink this,’ he said. ‘Mum will stick to her vodka, so the three of us can share it.’
It was a wonderful, convivial lunch.
Felix pulled out the flaps of the table and drew it into the sunny place in the window. He spread a festive white cloth over the pocked surface. Jessie sat queenly at the head of the table, with Mattie and Julia on either side.
They ate ravenously, while Jessie talked, capping and recapping her own stories. She was too engrossed even to drink more than a few tots from the glass beside her hand. The girls had never tasted wine before, and it made them talkative too. The chatter and laugher rose in the sunny room, with Felix’s quiet voice prompting them all.
At last, when they had eaten all the omelette and wiped the last of the oily dressing out of the salad bowl, and Julia and Mattie had demolished the remains of a chocolate cake, Jessie tinkled her fork against her glass.
‘I’ve thought of another toast,’ she declared. ‘A more important one.’
Felix hastily drained the last of the Beaujolais into the three wine glasses and filled Jessie’s to the brim with vodka. She lifted it without looking at it, not spilling even a drop.
‘To friendship.’
They echoed her, ‘To friendship,’ and drank again.
‘And I don’t imagine,’ Jessie went on, with feigned annoyance, ‘that having proposed that, I’m going to be able to get rid of you quite so easily. Am I?’
The girls waited, not looking anywhere.
‘So I suppose you’d better stay on here. Just till you find your own place, mind. Till then, and not a minute longer.’
She shot a glance around the table, to Felix, to Julia and Mattie, and back again to Felix.
‘Not a minute longer,’ he repeated, softly. Whatever Jessie was plotting, if it made her happier, that was enough.
‘Good,’ she said, with firm satisfaction.
Suddenly they were laughing again, the four of them, drawn even closer around the table under the window.
On Monday morning, on their way to work, Mattie and Julia found a public telephone box and squeezed into it together. They found the number they wanted, at last, through the operator.
‘Do you want me to talk to them?’ Julia asked, but Mattie shook her head.
‘I should do it.’
She dialled their local council offices and she explained to the official at the other end that she was ringing anonymously, and she had something very important to say. Speaking very slowly and carefully she gave her father’s name and address, and the names and ages of her brothers and sisters.
‘They aren’t safe with him,’ she said clearly. ‘I know they aren’t. Please will you send someone to see them? There’s no one left to look after them now.’
Julia heard the man’s voice crackle at the end of the line as he tried to make Mattie give him some more information.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I can’t say any more.’
And then she replaced the receiver with a click that made the bell jingle faintly in its casing. She pushed open the heavy door of the kiosk and the girls stepped out into the street. Mattie was shivering.
‘I’ve abandoned them, haven’t I?’ she said bitterly. ‘I feel so bad. Like a traitor.’
‘You aren’t a traitor.’ Julia tried to soothe her.
‘I shouldn’t have left them. Phil’s only seven. What does she know? But I couldn’t stay in that house with him, could I? If he did it again …’
My
