and little tablets of soap, and sheer nylons and fanciful earrings that he had made himself from beads and feathers bought from the little haberdashers down Berwick Street market.
Julia fixed her earrings on and turned her head to and fro.
‘You are clever, Felix. How do you know about so many things?’
‘I use my eyes,’ Felix said mildly. ‘Those earrings suit you.’ He was pleased with the plain silk handkerchiefs that Julia had bought him from Liberty’s. The electric-blue Teddy boy socks from Mattie were less well received.
‘Have you ever seen me wearing anything of the kind? You don’t use your eyes, Mattie.’
‘They’re supposed to be a joke.’
Felix looked amazed. ‘Who wants to look like a joke? And while we’re on the subject, that coat of yours …’
‘I like it,’ Mattie said, in a voice that invited no argument. ‘Your present’s the best of the lot, my duck,’ Jessie said, putting it on to prove her point. Mattie had found it in a crumbling second-hand clothes shop in Nottingham. It was a hat, and when she bought it it was still enveloped in yellowing tissue paper in its round black hatbox. It was a little shell of black velvet, with sequinned wings and quivering ostrich feathers, the whole creation swathed round and round with spotted veiling and skewered with an enormous peal-handled hat pin. As soon as Jessie put it on, tilting it instinctively over one eye, she was transformed into a risqué Edwardian grande dame.
Julia and Mattie clapped with delight, and Felix murmured, ‘That was a better choice.’
Later, Felix retired to the kitchen to cook. Julia put her head around the door and asked, ‘Can I help?’
Felix nodded and they worked side by side, enjoying a silent companionship that had been missing since the arrival of Josh. In Jessie’s room, Mattie and Jessie began by singing carols and under the influence of Jessie’s vodka soon moved on to the old music hall favourites. The two voices competed gleefully for the top notes. It was already dark outside when they sat down to their Christmas dinner. Jessie only ate one or two mouthfuls of goose but she presided majestically over the table, lifting her glass and setting the wings and feathers of her hat quivering with her wheezy laughter.
Felix brought the pudding in, set in a nimbus of blue flame. They pulled crackers, and unwrapped their paper hats.
Watching Felix with his yellow crown pulled down over his dark olive forehead, Julia thought that he looked like a real king. He would never look ridiculous, like Vernon, even in a paper hat. Narrowing her eyes so that the candlelight softened into a golden blur over Jessie’s hat and Mattie’s anarchic hair, Julia breathed in the scents of tangerines and brandy and candle wax. At last she had come close to the Christmases she dreamed of in Fairmile Road.
Only Jessie had drunk too much.
Sometimes, when she was drinking, Jessie drifted away until her memories became more real than the solid room around her. ‘I was thinking about my first time. I was just as old as you. Like Mattie here, with her theatre man. I don’t like the sound of him, dear. I told you, didn’t I?’
‘You told me,’ Mattie murmured, but Jessie ignored her.
‘Your first one should be young, and handsome. Prince Charming, for you to dream about afterwards when they’ve all turned old and useless, like yourself. Julia’s boy is one, isn’t he? And if not him, then somebody else. There’s plenty of them. Like my Felix.’
Felix stood up, as silent and elegant as a black cat.
‘I’m going for a walk,’ he said softly. ‘I need some air. Julia and Mattie will look after you.’ As he slipped out of the door, they heard him say ‘Happy Christmas.’
‘I remember the day,’ Jessie repeated. ‘I was still living with my ma and pa. It was Hartscombe Terrace, Hoxton. I was working in the market, singing at nights in the clubs. They were good days. I met Tommy Last and we started walking out together. He took me to the Empire. Up West, on the train. Walking, under the trees in the park. Black hair, he had, smooth as glass. Black eyes, too, and a little moustache that tickled your skin when you kissed. This day, he came for me, and he’d brought me a bunch of marigolds in white paper. They were so bright and hot, like the day itself. We walked down by the canal, and Tommy was in his shirtsleeves with his arm round my waist. I remember how hard his arm seemed, and the black hairs on it. We walked under a bridge and it was cool, all shadowy, and then we came out into the sunshine again. We climbed up the bank a little way and sat down, and there were bushes and tall grass all around us. No one could see we were there. There was only the grass stalks, and the sun over our heads. Tommy pushed my skirt up. I helped him. I was wearing white drawers with blue satin ribbon that I’d threaded myself. I thought I was the Queen of England, and I lay down in the grass with Tommy Last on top of me. That moustache. It felt like silk against my neck.’
Mattie was looking away, into the candlelight. She said nothing, and it was Julia who asked, ‘What was it like?’
Jessie laughed, her old rich chuckle. ‘It only lasted about two minutes. Tommy Last wasn’t much more than a boy, even though he seemed a man to me. But I knew then that there would be nothing else like it. Nothing like that day, even though the best times came afterwards.’
They were quiet for a moment. Jessie was staring ahead of her, and Julia and Mattie knew that she was seeing the grass shelter and the blue sky, and Tommy Last’s face, darkened by the sun behind his head, bending over her.
‘What happened to him?’ Mattie asked.
Jessie shook her head. ‘What happened to any of them? Like that bunch of marigolds. I can see them now, orange petals in the white paper. But they’re gone, aren’t they?’ Her eyelids drooped and then closed. ‘I had so many good times. So many.’ They thought she had gone to sleep, but after a moment her eyes flicked open again and she pointed at Julia. ‘Make sure you enjoy your own times.’
‘I will,’ Julia said, but Jessie frowned.
‘All your talk about freedom. Then you go and make your own bars for yourself. Shutting yourself in for that boy. He’s almost the first one you’ve seen, so don’t mope for him. Enjoy him and then forget him, or just forget him. Like I did.’ She smiled then, lacing her fingers over her stomach.
Mattie looked sideways at Julia. Her face was hollowed with shadows, and the bones sharp with hunger. Jessie’s right, Mattie thought. Bloody Josh.
But Julia didn’t move. ‘I can’t help it,’ she said sadly.
Mattie reached out for her hand and held it. They sat silently beside Jessie’s chair, listening to her breathing thicken into snores and with the glassed-in faces of her photographs staring down at them. Much later, when the candles had burned out, they lifted her up between them and settled her in her bed.
In Fairmile Road Vernon had locked the doors and closed the windows. He stood in the doorway waiting, but Betty still sat in her armchair.
‘I’ll go on up then,’ Vernon said, fingering the bookmark in his library book.
She listened to his footsteps going up the stairs, and heard the floorboards creak as he passed overhead. Betty was staring at the Christmas tree. It was an artificial one that she brought out every year and decorated with fairy lights in the shape of Chinese lanterns. It stood on the table in front
