eyes the lights would blur prettily and the tree would look almost real. She remembered Julia kneeling beside it to tear the paper off her doll’s house. They had given it to her the year the War ended, so Julia would have been six then.
It was so quiet.
The kitchen was clean and tidy after their meal, Betty had seen to that. Behind the wire-mesh door of the meat-safe the remains of the turkey sat waiting for her. It was too big, of course. They had made hardly any impression on the splintery white meat. There would be cold for tomorrow, and a pie for the day after. Then rissoles, and soup from the bones.
Meals, Betty thought. To be cooked, and eaten with Vernon’s newspaper folded beside his plate, and cleared up afterwards. She saw herself, suddenly, as a caged rodent pattering a circuit between the cupboards, the table, the sink, and back to the cupboards again. The thought made her flush with quick, uncomfortable anger. She stood up and went to the window behind the Christmas tree, pulling the curtain aside to look out. The rooftops of the other houses, identical to her own, just showed against the sky. Some of the windows stood out as patches of orangey light, but most of them were already dark. Behind the dark windows people were asleep. The last steps of her own circuit for the day remained to be taken. She would pull the plugs from the sockets, as Vernon liked her to do, and turn off the lights. Wash her face in the clean bathroom, and lie down beside her husband in their bed. He wouldn’t reach out to touch her, nor would she reach her hand out and let it rest against his solid, obdurate warmth.
Betty’s face was still burning with her anger.
If she were to walk out of the house, now, in the middle of this quiet darkness, she wouldn’t have to go on making her worthless circular loops through the days. She leaned forward and let her forehead rest against the glass. It was wet with condensation and the coldness soothed her, and then sobered her. Betty had the impression of roads radiating away from her, crossing and recrossing, spreading into a vast unmapped and unknowable territory.
There was nowhere for her to go, of course. She knew that at once. She was Betty Smith, almost fifty, a wife and mother, and that was all. Not even those things any more, in truth.
She put her hand up to her throat, easing the collar of her new blouse. It was pretty, but Julia had bought a very small size, as if her mother had already shrunk in her recollection.
But Julia had got away, Betty thought. She straightened up and let the curtain fall back into place. For the first time since Julia had gone, the weight of Betty’s bitterness and loss shifted a little. Julia had gone because she was young and careless, and because she needed to. Suddenly, oddly, standing there beside the artificial tree that Julia had always complained about, Betty felt the comfort of pride, and relief. Julia’s life would be different, at least. Betty saw the bizarre flat over the square, the fat woman and her half-caste son and even Mattie Banner, in a new perspective.
The unexpectedness of it made her smile.
Betty sniffed sharply and turned away from the Christmas tree. She went carefully around the room unplugging the tree lights and the wireless, and then she turned off the main light and went up the stairs to bed.
Mattie and Julia, for their different reasons, devoted themselves to having a good time in the rest of Mattie’s holiday. They went out every night, to the Rocket or to a party or to jazz clubs, sometimes with Felix but more often just the two of them. In the second week Julia faked a stomach complaint and didn’t go to work at all. They sat in Blue Heaven watching the people go by, or wandered through the Oxford Street shops looking at clothes and wishing they were rich. At Jessie’s suggestion they made an early morning excursion to Brick Lane market. They sifted through the heaps of second-hand clothes and came triumphantly back with ratty fox-furs and stained silk blouses and boxy tweed jackets. They dressed up, painted their faces, and pretended they were Marlene Dietrich, and made Felix take them out. They laughed a lot and drank as much as they could afford to and people turned round in the street to stare after them.
For a few days they were just as they had been before Josh and John Douglas came between them. With Mattie, Julia thought, with Mattie’s laughter and mimicry and boldness to arm her, she could even bear to be without Josh.
But then the time came for the Headline company to reassemble. Julia had treacherously been praying that he would not, but Francis Willoughby had agreed to let Mattie continue with the company. The tour was to restart in Chester, and there was a second enactment of the Euston departure. This time Josh wasn’t there. Julia waved Mattie off on her way to become an actress and went back to her typing.
Julia would have felt less sharply jealous if she could have witnessed Mattie’s return to the theatre. John Douglas was liverish after his holiday and he berated Mattie, along with everyone else, for bloody unprofessionalism.
It was two days before she dared to remind him of his promise, and his response was withering.
But then, slowly, routine re-established itself and the company temper improved. One afternoon, sitting in the chilly stalls, Mattie felt the weight of his arm drop round her shoulder. He pushed the weight of her hair back from her neck and mumbled, ‘I’m sorry to bawl at you, love. This company’s a damned shambles, but it’s not your fault.’
Mattie went to bed with him, because he seemed to expect it of her and because she didn’t know what else to do. He did it very thoroughly but without the tenderness that had touched her at the beginning. It occurred to her that it was just something else that she did for him now, like bringing him whisky when he did the money on Friday afternoons.
But he gave her a part.
It was ten lines as a daffy debutante in Welcome Home. The actress who had been doubling it made a fuss, but to Mattie’s relief John Douglas stood firm.
‘Give her a chance, or she’ll go on nagging the balls off everyone.’
She learned the lines, and worked for hours on what she imagined was a cut-glass accent.
In Blackpool, a week later, she went on for the first time.
When she came off she was shaking and the palms of her hands were hot and wet.
Fergus and Alan kissed her and congratulated her, but it was John’s approval she wanted. By a great effort of will she stopped herself from searching him out there and then, but when she saw him leaning against the bar in the pub afterwards, she couldn’t help herself. She pushed through the crowd to him and blurted out, ‘John? Did you see me? Was I all right?’
His grey eyes appraised her. ‘You were just that. All right.’
Mattie flushed. What more had she expected? She nodded, and went back to her place. But she had done it. She had made her professional debut, and she could live without praise if she had to.
The February rain fell like a thin, cold veil. Julia stepped outside reluctantly with a group of other homeward-bound typists who giggled and turned up their collars and skittered away towards the bus-stop. The gutters were grey, pock-marked lakes and the traffic ploughed through them to send plumes of water over the crowded pavement. The rain immediately pasted Julia’s fringe flat to her forehead and poked intrusively into her face. She had no umbrella and she turned sharply away from the streaming, dun-coloured mess of Oxford Street and began the walk home.
The little streets along her route were already taking on the closed-up,
