the kind, but Bim’s muttered warnings had sunk in. Josh had developed his own code in the years since then. He wasn’t faithful, or reliable, but he wasn’t callous either. And yet, in the bed upstairs with Stella’s legs round his waist, he had let her whisper, ‘Don’t use that thing. I want to feel you inside me. It’ll be all right. It’s my safe time.’
Josh remembered. He had come like a dive from thirty thousand feet.
He rubbed his hand over his face. ‘Oh, Jesus. I’m sorry. Look, don’t worry. We can fix things up. It happens you know.’
‘You don’t understand, do you? You don’t know what it’s like.’ She was almost screaming now. ‘Ring me, Josh. Ring with a doctor’s name.’
Stella hung up.
Joshua put the receiver back in its cradle. He unwrapped his shirt and put it on properly, buttoning the cuffs. He was thinking about a baby. Not a baby yet. A mysterious sliver of life, like a tadpole, inside Stella. He had put it there, on an evening like this.
He saw that Julia was sitting up, her arms folded on the back of the sofa and her chin resting on them. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘Nothing. Some bad news.’ It wasn’t nothing. Only nothing to do with this Julia. He walked round the end of the sofa and stood looking down at her. Her arms and legs suddenly seemed childlike and her face had lost its dreamy, feminine mystery. She was hardly more than a baby herself.
What had he been doing?
Josh bent down and picked up the tidy pile of her clothes. He held them out to her. ‘Here you are,’ he said gently. ‘Put them on.’
Julia was bewildered. Surely a telephone call couldn’t change everything so disastrously?
‘What’s wrong? What have I done?’
You asshole, Josh repeated to himself. You stupid jerk.
‘You haven’t done anything.’ He stooped down so that their faces were level. ‘Listen. You’re a virgin, aren’t you?’
She nodded, biting her lip. ‘Does it matter?’
‘It matters. Don’t give yourself to me. Stay the way you are for a bit longer, okay?’
‘I want you. Josh, I …’ She held her hand out to him. He took it, and replaced it in the shadowed fold of her lap.
‘Do what I say.’
There was a note in his voice that stopped her even trying to argue. Julia stood up with her cheeks burning. She turned away from him and dressed herself, her fingers stiffly fumbling with the buttons that Josh had undone so deftly.
When they were both ready he said lightly, ‘Good girl. Now I’ll take you out and buy you some dinner. You must be hungry after losing your breakfast on the airfield.’
Julia fought back her humiliation. Obediently, she followed him out to dinner.
They went to a pub, with oak settles and beams and another log fire in the welcoming dining room, but the spontaneous happiness of their day together was gone. Julia talked as brightly as she could but she felt awkward and miserable, afraid that she had disappointed him in some way that she didn’t understand.
And Josh was preoccupied with thoughts that didn’t concern her.
At the end of the evening Josh took her back to the cottage at the end of the track. Courteously he showed her the bathroom, and the bedroom opposite his at the top of the stairs. There was a single bed in it that looked as if it had never been slept in.
He kissed her goodnight, as if he was her uncle.
‘Josh, please …’
‘Don’t.’ He was warning her off again. ‘I was a jerk to bring you here. It’s not your fault, it’s all mine. You’re so nice, Julia. Don’t get things all wrong, like I do.’
He turned abruptly and went into his own room, closing the door on her.
Julia lay down on her bed. She was crying, hot tears of hurt, and frustration, and love.
But she did know that she wanted Josh Flood, her aviator, more than she had ever wanted anything and more than she could imagine ever wanting anything else in the world. She promised herself that she would get him, somehow.
John Douglas was on the telephone again.
Mattie listened to his wonderful voice. She was doodling on her notepad with her free hand, a proscenium arch and curtains, a single spot shining on the empty boards …
‘Tell him what I said, won’t you?’ John Douglas finished.
‘As soon as he comes in,’ Mattie promised.
‘Good girl. Be seeing you.’
If only, Mattie thought wistfully. Did he look like he sounded? She went back to her one-fingered typing, frowning at the keyboard in search of elusive characters.
Francis appeared a few minutes later. He looked cheerful, and he was smoking a cigar so big that it threatened to overbalance him.
‘It’s a cruel world, my love,’ he told her. ‘A big cruel world, and you have to go with it or go under.’
Mattie deduced that he had satisfactorily done somebody down. His instincts were predatory and self-seeking, but Mattie didn’t condemn him for that. She was beginning to like Francis, and through him to see a picture of the theatre that wasn’t all glitter. She was glad of it.
She ripped a completed letter to a theatre manager in Durham out of her machine and pushed it across for Francis’s signature. ‘What have you done? Stabbed your grandmother in an alley for two per cent of the takings?’ She had discovered that Francis loved to be teased about his ruthlessness.
‘That’s enough cheek from you. Look at your bloody spelling. Is this supposed to be “commencing”? Any phone messages?’
‘My spelling’s as good as yours. Just different.’ They smiled appreciatively at each other. ‘Just one message. From John Douglas. He says that Jennifer Edge has left the company. He also said, as far as I can remember, that she’s gone off with the fucking Italian chef from some poncy caff, and you’d better send him up someone else who isn’t going to fall on her back every time some fucking dago unbuttons his equipment and waves it at her. And you’d better do it right off, or he’s wrapping the whole fucking show and sod ’em. And sod you.’
Francis sat down behind his desk and rubbed his hand over his face. ‘Language, language.’
‘I quote,’ Mattie said crisply, and rolled a fresh sheet of paper into her typewriter.
‘That fat bitch,’ Francis sighed. ‘I should have known better than to send Douglas off with a middle-aged nympho for a stage manager. Once she’d had him and everything else in the company in trousers,
