Bad Girls, Good Women

‘What law? I’ve been away a long time. There must be all kinds of things I don’t know about.’

Julia and Lily were perched at opposite ends of the makeshift dining table in the Tressider & Lemoine Kensington flat. They had been drinking instant coffee and talking. George Tressider’s marquetry box was open on the table between them. Lily looked up from Valerie Hall’s birth certificate.

‘The adoption law. If you’re adopted, you’re allowed to try to find your real mother. They give you all the papers and files, and help you.’

Julia shook her head. ‘I didn’t know that,’ she said softly. ‘I’ve wanted to find her, you know, with part of myself, ever since you were born.’

Lily stood up, came round the table to Julia, and gave her the birth certificate. Julia folded it up and put it back in the box, on top of the envelope that held her two rings, and Pia’s Rapunzel book. In all the haste of packing to get back to Mattie as quickly as possible, Julia had still remembered to put the marquetry box in her suitcase. The box and its contents had become a kind of talisman.

‘I’ll come with you, to start looking for her, if you want me to,’ Lily offered.

Julia looked up at her in gratitude. Since she had been back in London, since Lily had come up from Ladyhill to stay with her for a few days, Julia had noticed yet another change in their relationship. Julia had found that London was different, and that it seemed more than ever like a foreign city. It seemed bigger, dirtier, and vaguely threatening. Lily noticed her uncertainty and she had become oddly protective, almost maternal to her own mother. The gap in years between them seemed to have diminished. They were more nearly equals, now. And in their most recent hours together, Julia had observed her daughter with a mixture of incredulity, amusement and pride. At almost seventeen, Lily seemed to have made the transition into adulthood with admirable panache. She had her own life, her own well-considered opinions, and a startling sense of style. To make the trip to London to stay with her mother, she had chosen her haute punk mode. She was wearing tight black plastic trousers, a torn black vest and a festoon of chains and pins. Her dark hair was teased into sticky points, each one tipped with what looked like an arrowhead of red ink.

Julia had eyed the ensemble, knowing that she should probably disapprove of it. But the effect was much too reminiscent of her own and Mattie’s early Juliette Greco phase. In fact, Julia reflected, with her pale face and black eye make-up Lily probably didn’t look much more outlandish than she had done herself twenty years ago.

She felt a moment of sharp, sweet nostalgia for the Rocket, and her own girlhood. ‘What does Alexander say about your clothes?’ she asked.

Wordlessly, Lily had rolled her eyes and bared her teeth. They had both laughed.

‘You’re okay, Mum,’ Lily had added. ‘Lots of people’s mums would go spare.’

Julia put her hand up to touch Lily’s now. The chains round Lily’s wrist rattled merrily. ‘I’d like it if you would help me. We’re looking for your grandmother, too.’

Lily stood with her head on one side, twisting one of the red-tipped points of hair. ‘Don’t do it for me, Julia. Do it for yourself.’ She smiled, a sudden pretty smile that was entirely at odds with her fierce maquillage. ‘Besides, I’ve got three grandmothers already.’

Julia put her hands on the warm, satiny wood of George’s box and sighed. ‘Where do we start? “Colchester, Essex” isn’t very much to go on.’

‘Granny Smith will know the name of the adoption agency. If the agency still exists, they should have kept your file.’

I’m sure you do, Julia thought. Only don’t tell me all of them. I don’t think I’m ready for that. I trust you, Lily. Is that enough?

So it was, with Lily’s encouragement, that Julia embarked on the search for Margaret Ann Hall. The provisions of the 1975 Children’s Act were in her favour.

They began by visiting Betty at Fairmile Road, and sat drinking tea at the blue Formica table while the television boomed from the living room. Julia tried to assure her that even if the search was successful, finding her real mother would make no difference to her feelings for Betty.

Betty pursed her lips and glanced at Lily. And Lily, who had toned down her appearance for Granny Smith’s sake, nodded slightly. At once, the lines of anxiety in Betty’s face eased a little, and her eyes stopped darting nervously around the room. Watching, Julia remembered that she had always been surprised by Betty and Lily’s fondness for one another. Surprised, and faintly resentful, in her heart. But now, it seemed both natural and thoroughly pleasing. Getting older, she reflected, was like seeing baffling and frustrating pieces of some vast puzzle beginning to fit smoothly together, to make a recognisable picture.

Betty found a sheet of paper and wrote something down for them. It was the address of a private adoption agency in Southwark. Julia noticed that she remembered the address perfectly. Over the years, it must often have been in her head.

The adoption agency had vanished without trace from the Southwark address. The site had been redeveloped, and was occupied by a new supermarket. They were deeply disheartened, until Julia hit on the idea of contacting the borough Social Services. She clung to the telephone, being transferred from department to department, until at last she was put through to the right social worker. Betty’s agency had been amalgamated with another, larger concern. The business had been transferred, along with all its records, to Guildford. Julia wrote down another address.

She made a second, lengthy telephone call, and this time she was successful. She had found the right place, and the records of her adoption were indeed available.

She was advised that she would have to attend for counselling before any further details could be released to her.

When she replaced the receiver her hands were shaking. She seemed close enough to her mother to be able to reach out and touch her.

‘Yippee,’ shouted Lily, her eyes sparkling with the excitement of the hunt. ‘I know we can do it.’

Julia went to see a social worker for the obligatory counselling session. The woman faced her across a desk, on which lay a file with a faded blue cover. Julia could hardly take her eyes off it. Inside it, written on those slips of yellow-edged paper, was her mother’s story. The old, romantic dreams and fantasies seemed a long way off. All she could think of now was how she would find her, an ordinary woman and a stranger, yet as close to her as she was to Lily. She had to force herself to listen to and answer the counsellor’s questions.

At last the woman nodded. She told Julia that she seemed to have thought out her reasons for searching for her mother very clearly. Julia felt dimly surprised. She wasn’t aware of anything as cogent as reasons, only of a pull that grew more intense the closer she came, and which she knew must be satisfied.

Her counsellor put her hand on the blue file, opened it and sighed. ‘I’m afraid we can’t give you very much to go on.’

The first document was a fuller version of the birth certificate that Betty had kept hidden amongst her underwear. Julia saw that Valerie Hall had been born at St Benet’s Home for Unmarried Mothers in Goodmayes Road, Colchester. She had been Valerie, there was no mistake. The date of birth was her own. Her mother was Margaret Ann Hall, of 11 Partington Street, Ilford, Essex.

Julia stared in amazement. Her real mother had lived only a few miles from Fairmile Road and her date of birth was given as 17 January 1923. She had been sixteen when she had given birth to her daughter in St Benet’s Home. She would now be only fifty-four. Almost twenty years younger than Betty Smith.

Julia lifted her eyes from the certificate. The counsellor was watching her with sympathy, but the sympathy seemed almost an intrusion in this moment of revelation. ‘She was very young,’ Julia said softly.

In the space for the father’s details the words Father not known had been written. Whoever he had been, he had left Margaret Ann Hall to go through her ordeal alone. Julia put the certificate aside. Underneath it was the letter that Betty had written to the agency, asking for herself and Vernon to be considered as prospective adoptive parents. A note clipped to it stated Accepted.

Next was a copy of the certificate of adoption, on which the baby girl’s name was given as Julia Smith. And from the last document in the little pile, Julia learned that she had been fostered for the first six weeks of her life by a couple in Colchester. She had been collected from their house by an employee of the adoption agency, and taken to Fairmile Road.

There were tears in Julia’s eyes. She felt no pity for the six-week-old baby who had been handed over to Betty and Vernon and a safe life of dull security. Her sadness was all for sixteen-year-old Margaret, in the bleak-sounding church home, who had been forced to give up her child. She must have wanted to keep me, Julia thought. But how could she? Sixteen was the age she herself had been when she found her way with Mattie to Jessie and Felix. They had been barely able to take care of themselves, let alone a baby. How could Margaret Ann Hall have done anything different?

Julia sniffed hard and rubbed her face with the palm of her hand. There was one item left in her file. It was a folded sheet of writing paper, the cheap grey kind with ruled lines. She picked it up, feeling a tightness in her chest.

The counsellor said, ‘It’s not much, but I think it gives you your best chance of finding her. St Benet’s closed down years ago.’

It was written from another address in Ilford, and dated August 1942. Margaret Ann Hall had become Margaret Rennyshaw, and she was writing to the adoption agency to ask for some news of Valerie. The short sentences were hastily scrawled, with words misspelt or missed out altogether, but the urgency of the plea was clear and painful to read.

Me and Derek have got our own little lad now, but I still think all the time about what happened to my Valerie.

On my birthday, Julia thought. At Christmas, and New Year, and all the other times.

I no that I did wrong, but I just want to no that she is alright now. Derek is in the Navy. He doesn’t no nothing about Valerie. If I could just see her the once, Id be happy.

There was no copy of any answer to Margaret’s letter in the file. Julia looked up again. Her mother had wanted to see her. She had a mother, and a half-brother, and while she had been growing up in Fairmile Road they had been so close to her.

The woman pursed her lips. ‘Nothing very enlightened, I’m afraid, in those days. I’ve seen similar cases. I imagine the copy of the reply to your mother isn’t in the file because it wasn’t something to be proud of. She would have been reminded, rather brusquely, exactly what adoption meant. She would have been told that she could not hope to see or hear from you ever again.’

‘If you are certain that it’s best for you, and for her.’ The counsellor was kindly, but only doing her job.

Julia was reminded suddenly of Montebellate, and Sister Maria’s calm face. She smiled. ‘Only one thing in life is certain. But I must find her. I know that.’

The counsellor held out her hand. ‘Good luck, then. I’m here if you need me.’ The interview was over. Julia pointed to the letter.

Lily was waiting in a café across the road. To pass the time she had been shopping. Another ripped and zipped black garment protruded from the carrier bag at her feet.

‘Well?’ she demanded cheerfully. Julia sank down on a mushroom stool. She took out the sheet of greyish paper and handed it to Lily. When they looked at each other again their faces were sombre.

‘She’s real,’ Lily breathed. ‘Until right now, I’d only thought of her as the prize in a treasure hunt. Granny Smith was your mother. But this Mrs Rennyshaw is a person. You were her Valerie.’

‘It’s sad.’ Lily reached across the table to Julia. She seized her hand in both of hers. Underneath the black warpaint her face had crumpled like an anxious child’s. ‘Julia, you won’t go and leave me, will you? Will you always be here?’

Julia smiled again. Not everything had changed. She was still mother, as well as daughter. Lily was still her child, as well as her friend. ‘I’m thirty-eight, and you’re nearly seventeen. We’ve done our leaving and our coming back to each other. We’re here now because we like each other, not because we owe each other things. I’ll always be here.’

‘What are we waiting for, then?’ Lily demanded. ‘Let’s go,’ she glanced down at the letter, ‘to seventy-six, Forrester Terrace, Ilford, Essex.’

It was Julia who wanted to hold back, now that they had come closer still. She wanted to give herself some time, but she was afraid that she didn’t have very much to spare. She thought guiltily that she ought to be back in her gardens, working with Tomaso to make them ready for the summer. She was in London, where she could no longer really afford to live, and she was holding up the work on Felix’s flat. It was almost the end of the Easter holidays, and Lily would have to go back to Ladyhill, and to school.

It was years since Julia had felt herself to be making a crossing, observing the distances between one life and another. Anxiety, and a timid desire for the certainty of Montebellate, gripped her again.

But in the face of everything else, Julia knew that she was in London for Mattie’s sake, and that she would do her best to stay until she was sure that Mattie didn’t need her any longer.

It wasn’t easy to know what Mattie did need. She had retreated to Coppins, and had politely refused to let anyone come to stay with her. She insisted that Mrs Hopper would look after her, and that she would soon, in any case, be going back to work. Two weeks after Mitch’s funeral she had agreed to do a television commercial.

‘It’s for knickers, or deodorant, or something,’ she told Julia on the telephone.

‘Does it matter which?’ Mattie’s voice sounded blurred. She had admitted that she was sleeping badly.

‘Are you all right?’ Julia asked, impotently. ‘Can’t I come down and keep you company?’

After a little pause Mattie said, ‘I’m not all right. But I’m trying hard, you know. I’m better on my own, just now. Mitch loved this house.’

Julia pressed her. ‘Have you got this number written down? Will you promise to ring if you want anything? Even if it’s in the middle of the night?’

‘What? Oh, yes.’ Mattie was vague, as if in her mind she had already hung up and immersed herself again in Coppins and its memories.

‘Oh Julia,’ Mattie whispered. ‘If only he wasn’t dead. If only he was still here. But there’s nothing you can do. Even you. You can’t bring him back, can you?’

So Julia stayed on in the half grandeur and half desolation of Felix’s flat, and Lily kept her company. And one afternoon they went out to Ilford together.

They quickly discovered what they could equally well have found out without leaving the Kensington flat. The even-numbered side of Forrester Terrace had suffered a direct hit from a wartime bomb, and what was left of it had been cleared in the post-war years. A line of early Fifties council houses stood in its place, facing the odd-numbered houses that had survived. The terrace showed signs of gentrification, with brightly painted front doors and plants in tubs beside the doorsteps. The houses would be mostly owned by young couples, who would spend their weekends cleaning the layers of distemper out of the cornices in the cramped Victorian front rooms. Julia had no hope that anyone now living in them would remember Margaret and Derek Rennyshaw and their baby son.

They walked the mile and a half to Partington Street, to what must have been Margaret’s family home. My grandparents, Julia thought, without much conviction. Her apprehensive eagerness was almost entirely fixed on Margaret herself.

Partington Street was intact, but it was less prosperous-looking than the good half of Forrester Terrace. There was a run-down newsagent’s at one end, and a bare pub with empty crisp packets blowing about on the pavement at the other. Number eleven was four houses down from the pub.

Julia and Lily glanced at each other, took a breath, and marched up the cracked path. There was no bell. Julia’s knock was answered, after a very long time, by an Asian woman in a sari. She held a baby with shiny brown eyes against her chest. She spoke almost no English, but it took very few words to convince Julia and Lily that the present occupants of number eleven had never heard of Mr and Mrs Hall from 1939, nor of Margaret and Derek Rennyshaw. ‘Let’s try next door,’ Lily insisted.

There was no one at home at number nine. The door of number thirteen was opened by a glowering skinhead. He had swastikas tattooed on his pallid forearms, and a studded dog-collar around his neck. He ignored Julia, but eyed Lily with a degree of approval.

‘Ain’t no one livin’ in this street now but fuckin’ Pakis,’ he told her. ‘You from the Social, or what?’

‘’Ere,’ he yelled after them. ‘You can come back any time you fancy. Don’t bother bringing yer friend, though.’

Julia and Lily were too disappointed even to catch each other’s eye. They turned the corner by the pub and gazed down another, identical, littered street. Julia wondered if it had always been so ugly here, and if so why she had never noticed it before. But she was sure that violence like the boy’s was new, and it chilled her. ‘What now?’ Lily asked.

‘I don’t know,’ she said sadly. ‘I don’t know where to go from here. There must be millions of Halls. But Rennyshaw isn’t a common name, is it?’

‘Isn’t there some sort of list of all the people living in a place? That they would be on if they still live in the area?’

Julia’s head jerked up. ‘Of course. The electoral roll. I should have thought of that.’ They went to the Town Hall and asked to see a copy of the roll. And they found her at once.

There were three Rennyshaws listed, and the third was Mrs Margaret A. Rennyshaw, of 60 Denebank.

Margaret Ann was alive, still living in Ilford. Now that the search was over, Julia realised how slim their chances had been, and their great luck that the trail had been such a short one. She felt a retrospective despondency that had never touched her while they were still searching. It made her legs weak and heavy and she sat down suddenly on a bench in the busy hallway. One or two of the passers-by eyed her curiously.

Lily was dancing with delight and triumph. ‘We could go and see her now, right away.’

‘We can’t, Lily. We can’t possibly. Think of the shock it would give her.’

‘Well then, we could look up her number in the directory, and telephone her.’

Lily saw a row of call boxes in the Town Hall foyer and ran across to them. A moment later she was back, holding out an envelope with the number printed on it in big red numerals. Julia looked at it, thinking, In one minute from now, I could be speaking to her. Then she took it, folded the envelope in half, and put it away with Margaret’s letter and her present address. Lily’s face fell.

‘Lily, I need to prepare myself. And I should try to prepare her …’ Julia couldn’t call her Margaret, or my mother. She realised that, in truth, she hadn’t thought much beyond just finding her. Different, newer fears began to assert themselves.

Lily nodded, mastering her disappointment. ‘It’s okay, Mum. I understand.’

‘I’ll take you to see … her, as soon as I can,’ Julia promised, aware of her own evasion. She felt guilty because of Lily’s generosity, but she wanted to make this very last step on her own. She wanted to see Margaret alone, for the first time. And Julia was impatient. She had meant to wait and think a little longer, perhaps to write a careful letter. But just two days later, she was on her way back to Ilford. She borrowed Felix’s car, thinking that she could hide herself in a car, rather than standing exposed in the open street. It wasn’t until she turned into Denebank itself that it occurred to her that a brand-new white Alfa Romeo might provide more advertisement than camouflage.

Denebank was a long, straight cul-de-sac. The double row of council houses looked flat and tired. Some of the windows were dressed with bunched frills of nylon curtain, greyish white or bright pink, but just as many were bare and dusty. There were cars, parked with their wheels half on the pavements, but none of them was anything like Felix’s. The front gardens of the houses sloped into the road, separated from the neighbours’ by low wire fences. Some of the fences had sagged, in other places they had rusted away altogether, giving all the gardens a dispirited air. Some of them were planted with rose bushes and tiny circles of grass, but the rest sprouted weeds and drifts of litter.

Julia let the Alfa slide slowly forward, conscious of its gleaming white shell around her. The children stared at her as she passed them. She counted the house numbers. Forty, forty-two. She stopped the car well short of number sixty, but as she shrank back against Felix’s black leather upholstery, feeling like a dirty voyeur, she could see it clearly.

A dull, stale feeling of perfect familiarity possessed Julia as she gazed at it. This house was just like the one that Mattie had run away from, back on the old estate. This estate was much newer, and stained high-rise blocks poked up beyond it instead of hundreds of identical roads spreading in unrelieved flatness. But exactly the same air of exhausted inertia stalked between the houses. None of the people who lived here were going anywhere else.

Julia closed her eyes, then opened them again. Nothing had changed. The children had edged closer, but they ran off when they saw her watching them.

Oh Mattie, Julia thought. Full circle. If you were here. She wanted Mattie badly then, and knew a moment’s selfish resentment of the grief that had taken Mattie into itself. It shouldn’t, she resolved. I won’t let it, however much you try to fend me off. You need me, and I need you. Love and sympathy for her friend spilled over inside her, gratefully warm in the chilly street.

She sat in the car for a long time, wanting to move but rooted by fascination. At about half past five a man walked past. He was wearing a donkey jacket, carrying a bag over his shoulder that might have held an empty lunch-tin. He was greying, bulky, with a wide, pale face. He went up the sloping path to number sixty and let himself in.

Julia shifted in her seat, afraid that he might be staring out at her through the dusty windows. She started the car’s engine, swung the wheel and turned away down Denebank. She was stiff and cramped from sitting too long in the same position.

She saw a woman walking along the pavement towards her. She was black, very fat, with a headscarf, and a coat gaping across her front. She had a cheerful face, the only one that Julia had seen in Denebank. Julia stopped the car again and wound down the window, confident that she wasn’t unknowingly approaching Margaret Rennyshaw.

‘Excuse me. Number sixty.’ She nodded covertly back at the house. ‘Is that where Mrs Rennyshaw lives?’

The woman shifted her heavy basket to her other hand and peered along the road. ‘Let’s see now. Sixty? No, my love, that’s the Davises’ house.’

‘Oh.’ Julia gripped the steering wheel. ‘Has Mrs Rennyshaw moved, then? I’m sure that was her house.’

The woman shook her head. ‘Don’t know no Rennyshaws. Them’s the Davises, living there. Been there since the estate was built, same as me. Thirteen years next month. Gawd help us.’

Julia was stunned. She couldn’t even make herself return the woman’s smile. ‘Thank you,’ she whispered. ‘I must have made a mistake.’

She drove slowly on, turning into clogged high streets, past garish shopfronts, not knowing where she was going. A wild, silly hope fluttered inside her, that she would find her mother living somewhere else altogether, in a pretty cottage in the country with lavender and hollyhocks in the garden. The old, romantic dream twisted with the fear that she had lost her again and that there were no more clues to follow up. And lying over it all she felt a heavy certainty that Margaret Rennyshaw did live at number sixty Denebank, and that for some reason she couldn’t explain the cheerful neighbour was wrong and she had been right all along.

‘It must be a mistake,’ Lily said sadly. ‘The list thing must be wrong, mustn’t it?’

Julia hesitated. ‘It reminded me of Mattie’s old house. Where she lived with her father, and Marilyn and Ricky and the others, right at the very beginning.’ Julia could see the two houses, one superimposed on the other. The similarity was eerie. ‘Lily. Will you be all right here on your own if I go to Coppins tomorrow, to see Mattie? I must go and see her. Whatever she says.’ As she spoke she felt sharp, irrational anxiety. ‘Ma,’ Lily exhaled patiently. ‘You know I’ll be all right.’

She didn’t know, or wouldn’t admit to herself what she was afraid of. But she craned forward to see the house as she swung through the gates. It looked much the same as it had always done, except that the curtains were drawn at some of the windows. The grass had started to grow in the April sun, and the lawns needed mowing.

Mattie answered the doorbell. She was dressed, but she didn’t look as if she had given much regard to her choice of clothes.

‘Julia? We didn’t fix anything, did we?’ Mattie looked round in bewilderment. She had been in the empty kitchen, telling herself that she should eat some of the food that Mrs Hopper had made for her. And now Julia was here, standing bright and urgent and out of place in the listening garden.

Julia took her arm, and Mattie let her guide her back inside and across the hallway Mattie didn’t like crossing the hall. She always thought that she could feel the crackle of dead leaves underfoot, and see the post lying neatly where Mitch had left it on the hall table.

In the kitchen she made a vague gesture intended to be hospitable. ‘I was just going to have something to eat. Do you want it? It smells quite good,’ she added, in encouragement. She decided that she would get a drink for herself. It was only the second, or perhaps the third of the morning. The bottle was standing handily on the countertop. Mrs Hopper tended to tidy it away, but Mattie always got it out again. She poured herself a full glass, and another for Julia. She held Julia’s out to her, carefully, not spilling a drop.

Julia took the glass, but put it aside without tasting it. She came across the kitchen and wrapped her arms around Mattie. Mattie held herself stiff for a second, then let her head fall forward to rest against Julia’s shoulder. Julia stroked her hair. When she spoke again, her voice was muffled for Mattie by the stroking.

‘No. Yes, I suppose I am. It helps.’ And then, after a moment, ‘Actually it doesn’t even bloody help, but I don’t know what else to do. I miss him so much that I hate him.’

Julia went on rhythmically stroking her hair. ‘Poor Mat. Poor Mattie, poor love.’ After a while, Mattie sniffed. At once the mucus in the back of her throat tasted of stale whisky. ‘Give me my drink,’ she begged. ‘There’s a dear.’

She drank, and straightened up. Julia led her to the kitchen table and made her sit down. She poured two bowls of soup out of the pan on the stove and set them on the table. ‘Go on. Eat some,’ she ordered. She began spooning up her own, setting an example, but Mattie left hers untouched. She lit a cigarette instead and let the smoke curl up through her thick hair. Julia watched her.

‘I don’t want you to go on living here on your own, Mattie, when you’re like this.’

‘I’m better on my own.’ There was a sharp edge in her voice. Mattie knew it was the truth, and she was defending it.

Julia reddened slightly, but she didn’t look away. Mattie leaned awkwardly across to her. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that. Take no notice, I don’t mean anything. You see? I am better on my own.’

‘It doesn’t matter what you say, Mattie. Say anything. Just listen to what I’m saying, too. Won’t you sell this house? Buy yourself somewhere else, on your own if you must, but in Town. I’d rather you came with me, though. Come back to Montebellate. Just for a little while, won’t you?’

She didn’t love it herself any more. There was nothing in it that she could look at without seeing him, nowhere in it to hide from his absence. But she couldn’t sell it, or even leave it. To sell it would be to sell Mitch himself. She felt the house sucking her into itself.

Julia did bend her head now, to hide her face. She finished her soup, not even noticing what it was. Mattie ate nothing, but she drank her whisky.

Afterwards Julia made some coffee. She carried the tray through into the drawing room and Mattie brought the whisky bottle. The thick velvet curtains were closed, but otherwise the room was formally neat. The cushions were all smooth and the silver-framed photographs were set squarely on their tables. Julia felt the atmosphere and shivered a little. She went to the windows and pulled back the curtains. Mattie squinted in the shafts of sunshine, but said nothing. When she sat down Julia pulled up another chair so that she could be close to her.

She asked gently, ‘What are you doing here, all by yourself? You’ve got friends who love you. We want to look after you.’

Mattie frowned down at her hands. ‘What do I do? Try to go to sleep. Wake up again. I watch television quite a lot.’

Deliberately, wilfully, she took the question at its literal value. She knew that Julia was asking Why? Why not come and grieve with us? but Mattie didn’t want to give her that answer. The truth was that the performances of friendship called for more than she could give. Mattie felt that the loss of Mitch had left her with no assets, no store of emotions, even selfish ones, that she could offer as currency in return. And worse. With the sharp perceptions of grief – perceptions that stayed painfully sharp however much she tried to blunt them with whisky – she could hear the silent demands under Julia’s kindness. Look, see here, I’m your friend. Don’t pull away, because I need to help you. I’ll make you feel better, and that will make me fell better. That’s how it works, isn’t it?

In her desolation Mattie couldn’t hand over anything, but she didn’t want Julia to know what she was thinking. Because that might hurt her, mightn’t it?

‘What did I say?’ The laugh wasn’t a good idea. But perhaps Julia would just think it was the drink. I’m better on my own. I knew I was. ‘Sorry. I’m not thinking very straight.’

Julia left her chair and knelt down in front of Mattie. She was too close, looking at her too hard.

‘It’s going to take a long time, I know that, Mattie. Try to be gentle with yourself.’ For her own part, Julia felt the clumsiness of her attempts at condolence. In frustration she felt that the right words, the key to the help that Mattie needed, lay close at hand, somewhere just out of her reach. But every word that did come into her mouth shouted its inadequacy at her.

Mattie stared miserably over her head. This distance from her oldest friend made the hurt worse, if that was possible. Only it couldn’t be possible, because it was already the most terrible thing in the world.

But to be alone, she must convince Julia that she was all right. That was the token that she must hand over, wasn’t it? ‘I have been doing things other than drinking and watching the telly. I went to do the knicker commercial, for a start.’

Mattie couldn’t help the laugh this time. ‘Not all that brilliantly. I was rather pissed, actually. They were quite nice about it.’

‘I’m reading a script just now. It’s quite good.’ And if I don’t work, what else is there? Has it come to this? She stood up abruptly.

‘This room’s getting on my nerves, a bit. Whenever I try to mess it up, Mrs Hopper comes in and tidies. Let’s go and walk round the garden.’

They went outside. The April sun was thin but bright. They walked slowly over the uncut grass, passing between the rose bushes with their swelling red knobs. Mattie kept her face turned away from the corner of the house, from the patch of colourless gravel. ‘Talk to me about something else,’ she ordered, without much hope.

She described the adoption agency, and the first two Ilford streets. Mattie walked beside her, her head down and her hands pushed deep into the pockets of her woollen jacket. Julia came to the point, only the day before, when she had sat in Felix’s car in Denebank. Mattie listened, trying to imagine it. She couldn’t think what it must have been like for Julia to sit outside a stranger’s house, a stranger who was also her mother. It occurred to her that her perceptions of herself were hideously clear, those concerning other people blurred, or non-existent. She tried to care about that, and couldn’t. Her sense of isolation deepened.

Julia was talking about the street her real mother lived in. She said it had reminded her of Mattie’s old home. Mattie tried to grasp why it seemed so significant.

‘Full circle,’ Julia said in wonderment. ‘It was as if we tried so hard to get away from it, the estate and Fairmile Road, and all the time it was lying in wait for us. You can’t run away. Perhaps that’s what we’re supposed to learn. Perhaps you haven’t ever really got away, until you know it. And afterwards, you’re free.’

‘Free,’ Mattie echoed. She had no sense of circularity. She imagined that it would be comforting to recognise such a definite pattern. For herself, the estate, and Ted Banner, and everything else lay dimly, a long way off, reduced to irrelevance. Life seemed like a long, dull thread, perilously thin, easily severed.

She couldn’t see that it would make much difference, now, whether Betty Smith or Mrs Rennyshaw was Julia’s real mother. Not after almost forty years. And it mattered even less than that a street on a council estate in Ilford looked like another street, on another estate, from almost as long ago. After all, everything, all of it, came to this. And this was what? As little as nothing?

Mattie nodded. ‘Of course. Yes, of course.’ They made another circuit of the lawns before Mattie shivered. ‘It’s cold out here. Let’s go inside again.’

In the dusted and polished drawing room she made straight for the whisky bottle, ‘Don’t frown, Julia. It keeps out the cold. Cheers.’

Mattie didn’t remember much about the rest of the day. She dimly recalled Julia and Mrs Hopper fussing in the kitchen, and then sitting down at the kitchen table with Julia for more food. She might even have eaten some of it, because she wanted Julia to know that she was all right.

And then it must have been the end of the day, at last, because Julia had helped her upstairs. She found herself lying on the bed, but she sat up at once. Her head had cleared for a moment. Treacherous. She didn’t like these clear intervals, and she didn’t like waking up after being sleep. The hurt swung in harder, then.

Julia went, and came back with a halved tablet and a glass of water. ‘Here, Mattie,’ she begged. ‘Won’t you let me stay?’ Lily needed her less, she was sure of that.

Mattie gulped, swallowed the pill. Her eyes met Julia’s and Julia was relieved to see her smile, the old Mattie.

Julia hesitated. ‘All right, Mat. If that’s what you want.’ She picked up the pad from the bedside table, wrote her number, left it beside the cream telephone. ‘I’m going to ring in the mornings and in the evenings. And any other time, you’re to ring me.’

Mattie lay down. They smiled at each other, then Mattie obediently closed her eyes. Julia crept out of the room, closed the door behind her.

As soon as she had gone, Mattie’s eyes snapped open again. Sleep didn’t come as easily as that. No matter how she stalked it and tempted it. And when she did fall asleep there were the dreams, and after that there was the waking up again.

Julia made her morning call to Mattie. Mattie told her that she was still in bed, reading the newspapers.

Julia put the receiver down, picked it up again at once. She dialled Directory Enquiries. The number they gave her was the same as the one Lily had written down in the Town Hall. Margaret Rennyshaw did live at sixty Denebank. There was no question about that. Julia dialled the number. She didn’t wait, or think about it again, in case her courage deserted her.

‘This is Mrs Rennyshaw.’ She had a strong London accent. She sounded suspicious, and defensive.

‘Mrs Rennyshaw, I’d like to talk to you about a personal matter. A very private, personal matter.’

There was a long silence. Julia wondered if she had even heard her, or if she had heard her and gone away.

‘Yes,’ Julia whispered. ‘Yes, I’m Valerie.’ To her dismay tears began to roll out of her eyes. They ran down her cheeks and she scrubbed them away with her wrist.

‘I knew it was you. I knew, as soon as my neighbour told me you were asking. A woman in a posh white car, talking about a Mrs Rennyshaw. They call me Mrs Davis round here.’

There was another pause, a shorter one. ‘No, my love. I don’t mind, if you don’t.’ Julia thought she wasn’t going to say anything else. She was about to start talking, wildly, to fill the silence, when Margaret added slowly, ‘I thought you’d come some day. After they changed that law. I didn’t give you up, you know. Not in my head. I thought about you. Wondering what you were like and what you were doing, all that.’

‘I know. I know you did. I was thinking about you, too. More and more, as the time went. I needed to find you so badly. I can’t believe it, now I have. Now that we’re talking.’ It was so strange, Julia thought. To talk like this, and to cry, with a woman she had never known. Never even seen.

‘How have you been?’ Margaret asked. She sounded awkward now, embarrassed by Julia’s tears. Just as suddenly, Julia wanted to laugh. What has your life been like, for almost forty years?

‘Fine. Lucky, I think.’ Too late, Julia caught herself. ‘I didn’t mean lucky that you had to give me up. Lucky in what came after. Only I didn’t realise it at the time.’ That was her acknowledgement to Betty. She owed her that.

‘I know what you meant.’ The husky voice had gone flat. Julia thought her mother sounded as resigned as the rest of Denebank.

‘Can I come to see you?’ she asked. ‘It’s hard to talk on the telephone.’

‘You know where I am,’ Margaret answered, neither encouraging nor forbidding her.

There was another of Margaret’s silences, then she said, brusquely, ‘Yes, I would. Don’t come this week. Eddie’s on evenings and he’s in the house all day. Eddie’s the man I live with. He’s on the buses.’

‘Yes. Well, come next week. Monday if you like. Twelve o’clock, he’ll be out by then. He … doesn’t know about you, Valerie.’

‘I’ll be there,’ Julia said. ‘My name’s Julia now.’ She hadn’t yet called her mother anything.

Margaret tried it out. ‘Julia?’ Then she gave a wheezy laugh. ‘Better class of name than Valerie, isn’t it? Well then, Julia, I’ll see you on Monday.’

After she had talked to her mother, Julia sat for a long time in the window of the flat. Looking out, she could see the ordinary comings and goings of the quiet street. A woman went by pushing a pram, and a builder’s van stopped to unload bags of plaster. Two girls of Lily’s age passed, arm in arm, and the builders whistled after them. Julia liked the ordinariness. Life was ordinary, after all. The discovery of Margaret confirmed that. Julia was still watching the street when Alexander’s car drew up, and Lily and Alexander got out. She knew that he had been working in London, but she hadn’t seen him since the day of Mitch’s funeral. He was going to drive Lily back to Ladyhill, and the new school term.

It was almost May. Soon it would be summer. Julia thought of Montebellate, telling herself that she should go back. It drew her, but less strongly than before.

‘I talked to her. I just dialled her number and spoke to her,’ Julia said, when they came in. Lily had told Alexander about the hunt, she knew that. They looked at her, expectant. Lily gave a little snort of excitement. ‘What did she say? Was she amazed?’

‘Not exactly. She sounded … resigned, I suppose. Curious about what I might be like.’

Lily ran across the room to her. Over her shoulder, Julia looked at Alexander. She saw that they were concerned for her, and the concern made her feel warm, and strong. Life was ordinary like the street outside, but it was precious too.

‘It’s all right. I wanted to find her, and now I have. I’m going to see her on Monday. I’m glad I’ve done it,’ Julia reassured them.

‘I think we should go out to lunch,’ Alexander said. There was to be a celebration, but nobody tried to explain what they were celebrating.

‘It’s not as good as real Italian food,’ Julia insisted, and Lily groaned.

Round the table, Julia thought, they were a family. Enough of a family for anyone. More than she deserved, she told herself. Whatever she discovered at Denebank, and whatever came after that. Her eyes met Alexander’s and she felt her luck, the luck that she had clumsily tried to explain to Margaret, and a strengthening pulse of happiness.

‘I wish Mattie was here with us,’ Julia said. It was hard to think of being happy without Mattie’s happiness.

She shook her head. ‘She did her best to convince me that she is. All she did make me believe is that she wants to be left alone. I ring her in the morning, and at night. I don’t know what else to do, except to let her know that we’re here for her.’

When she looked up she saw that Alexander was still watching her. There was the softness of affection around his mouth and eyes.

The revelation changed the colours and the contours of everything. It filled the bustling, crowded restaurant with light and gilded the heads of the Kensington shoppers, and it made Lily and Alexander look as beautiful and serene as Olympians.

‘Ahem,’ Lily said, out of mischief, seeing everything. ‘Can I have zabaglione for pudding? Does anyone care?’

‘Not a jot,’ Alexander answered. ‘Today you may have twenty zabagliones.’

Afterwards, when Lily was already sitting in the car ready for the drive back to Ladyhill, Alexander and Julia turned to face each other. It was almost the end of the afternoon and office workers were beginning to stream past them towards the tube station.

‘There have been so many times like this,’ Julia offered him. ‘Too many to count. They always did make me sad.’

Alexander leaned forward and touched the corner of her mouth with his own. Then he got into the car and drove away with Lily. This time Julia knew where he was going, and she knew that he would come back. They had grown up, and they knew one another, and there was no need to hurry or to be afraid.

She wrote to the Mother Superior and explained that she would stay in England for a little longer; she didn’t know yet how long exactly. With the letter she enclosed a lengthy list of instructions and advice for Tomaso. But she finished up by writing, ‘You don’t really need me to tell you any of this, do you? We learned it together, and you’re ready to do it yourself. Good luck, Tomaso.’

She also telephoned Nicolo Galli. His voice sounded thin and brittle, but she heard him chuckle. ‘I miss you, Julia. But you are doing what is right. I am glad of it.’

Three or four more times, Julia went down to Coppins. Each time Mattie tried to fend her off, greeting her with blank silences or with angry outbursts, and then retreating into incoherence as that day’s whisky took hold.

Julia could do little more than sit with her, or try to persuade her to eat, and Mattie objected even to that. She insisted that Julia didn’t really want to be there, that she was only doing it out of a sense of duty, and that she herself didn’t need her.

‘I’m all right on my own. I need to be by myself, don’t you understand? I’m no good for anyone,’ Mattie cried. Her face was blotched and swollen.

‘You don’t need to be anything for me,’ Julia told her. ‘You don’t believe it will get better, Mattie, but I know it will. I’ll stay with you until it does. Won’t you let me come and live here, so that I can look after you?’

Julia ached for her, wishing that she could take on some of her suffering. She tried to see beyond the vehemence of Mattie’s rejections, accepting the rebuffs with what she hoped was some of the sisters’ calm.

On one of the days, Mattie wouldn’t even open the door to her. Either the housekeeper was out, or Mattie had persuaded her that she didn’t want to see Julia. Julia waited on the gravel path for a long time, imagining Mattie inside the dark house, pierced with pain for what she was enduring. At last she stepped back and called up to the dead windows, ‘Mat, I’m here if you want me. It doesn’t matter if you don’t, I just want you to know that I am. I’ll be back tomorrow. And if you won’t let me in then, I’ll keep on coming back until you do.’

The next day, Mattie opened the door at once. Julia could only guess at how much she had already had to drink.

‘I’m sorry,’ Mattie whispered. ‘I’m hurting so much I don’t know what I’m doing.’

Mattie shook her head wearily. ‘You can’t.’ But that day she let Julia make them some food, and sat down with her in the kitchen to eat it. They talked about Felix and William, and Julia saw a ghost of the old Mattie. She left her that evening with a lighter heart.

To fill in the time when she couldn’t be with Mattie, Julia went shopping. She had forgotten how to buy things, even if she had had the money, but she enjoyed looking in the shop windows. Everything seemed very new, and bright and shiny. She also had dinner at Eaton Square with Felix and William, and she admired William’s paintings that hung on the freshly dragged walls in place of the old, important landscapes and sombre portraits. She liked William, and guessed that he was very good for Felix. She saw other old friends too, and remembered some of the London she had loved in the old days. Her fear of it receded, and she began to feel at home again.

She telephoned Mattie every morning, and every evening, whether they had seen each other that day or not.

‘I’m all right,’ Mattie would lie. ‘I have to work my own way through it.’

‘Call me if you need me,’ Julia said on the Monday morning. She didn’t say that she was going to meet Margaret Rennyshaw, nor did she mention Alexander. There were things she felt she couldn’t say to Mattie. Not now, not yet, until she was better.

Julia was getting ready to leave for the station. This time she would go to Ilford by train. She didn’t want to take Felix’s car down to Denebank again. But even before she saw his shadow blurred by the rippled glass in the door, even before the bell rang, Julia had half guessed that Alexander would come.

She opened the door to him. He was wearing corduroys and a sweater that was unravelling at the shoulder seam, as if he had just walked in from the garden at Ladyhill. He was completely familiar, and welcome to her, and she could only stand and smile at him.

‘I thought that if you were going to meet your mother, you might like me to come with you.’

On the way she told him about the short, unromantic search for Margaret Ann Hall that Lily had called their treasure hunt. She described Denebank to him, so that he wouldn’t be shocked when they reached it.

‘Do you mind?’ Alexander asked, looking ahead at the traffic and the unlovely shopfronts of the outer urban high streets.

Julia thought. ‘I mind for her, if I find that she isn’t happy. How can I mind for myself?’

He put his hand over hers, covering it where it lay in her lap, without looking at her. Julia glanced down and saw the glazed, discoloured skin of the old scars. She was overtaken by a sudden longing to make him happy, in compensation, and to wipe out all the sadness of the years.

They passed the end of Denebank and Alexander stopped the car further away, in another street. Alexander drove an unremarkable, mud-splashed estate car, but Julia felt his tact.

Julia got out and slowly retraced the way to Denebank. She felt conspicuous as she turned into her mother’s street, as conspicuous as she had done in Felix’s car and without the polished shelter of it. The two or three people that she passed looked blankly at her. It seemed a long way to number sixty. When she reached it she went up the path, past the broken-down metal fence, and knocked on the door. She had only a moment to stare at the splitting wood under the flakes of old paint before it opened. Margaret Rennyshaw must have been waiting in the hallway.

They looked at each other, greedy, defensive, eager and appraising all at once. No one seeing them together would have guessed at their relationship, but Julia and Margaret knew immediately that there was no mistake. Julia was Margaret’s daughter, as incontrovertibly as Lily was her own.

‘You’d best come in,’ Margaret said in her husky voice. ‘We don’t want the whole street knowing our business, do we?’

Beyond the hallway was a front room, filled up with a three-piece suite in black leatherette with red piping and a big television set. On a low coffee table with upcurved ends two cups were laid out with chocolate biscuits arranged in a fan-shape on a chrome dish.

In this enclosed space they could look at each other. Julia saw dark hair like her own, only seamed with grey. She saw a strong face with deep lines running from nose to mouth, dark eyes that had begun to fade with age, a body that was indeterminately shaped under a colourless jumper and skirt. She had imagined herself comparing their features, cataloguing the precious similarities that would prove their relationship, finding triumphantly that their hands or their mouths were the exact same shape. She was dismayed, now, to find that there was no need to do so. Their features were different, but the underlying physical resemblance was clear. Her mother looked an older, wearier version of herself, or as she might have become already if she had been different, less lucky.

Until the last moment, Julia thought with a wry sadness, she had clung to the romantic dreams. It was only now that the rosy clouds finally drifted away.

‘Let’s get a look at you,’ Margaret said. And after a moment, ‘You look fine.’

‘Sit down, then,’ Margaret ordered. ‘I’ll make a cup of coffee.’ She was formal, as if Julia had come from some authority to inspect the life that she shared with Mr Davis. She went out into the kitchen, leaving Julia to look around her, and came back very quickly. Julia sat with her cup and saucer balanced on her lap. A chocolate biscuit that she didn’t want was thick and sticky in her mouth.

‘I’m sorry about the state of the place,’ Margaret began. Julia glanced around her, noticing for the first time that the embossed wallpaper was stained, and ripped away in places. The orange and brown patterned carpet was threadbare, and from the worn patches in it it appeared that it had come from another, bigger room. ‘Only Eddie’s had some money problems over the years. We haven’t got ourselves straight, yet.’

Julia felt the exhaustion and the hopelessness of the street outside creeping in, and lying heavy in her mother’s house.

‘It’s a nice room,’ she lied. Margaret didn’t waste her energy in contradiction. She lit a cigarette, inhaled, then tapped the non-existent ash in her saucer. She looked at Julia under lowered eyelids through the smoke. Then she smiled. The smile made her seem warmer, and suddenly familiar, then Julia realised that it was because it was like her own. There would be other similarities that would catch at her too. This was what it meant. This was what she had come looking for. A confirmation of where and what she had sprung from.

‘Funny, isn’t it?’ Margaret said slowly. ‘We don’t know each other. Don’t know anything. Where do you start, after you’ve said you’re sorry?’

Margaret nodded. ‘But I was sorry, then. Didn’t you think I was? I didn’t want to let you go. I cried, more than I’ve ever cried for anything since. They left you with me for a day after you were born. I held you, and looked at you. Then they came and took you away. I could have stopped them, couldn’t I? I often thought, after, that I could have.’

Margaret looked older than her real age now. Julia felt sad that she had never known her when she was still young, still hopeful. There was a small, lonely silence.

‘Tell me about yourself,’ Margaret said. ‘Go on. Everything, all about it.’

Julia did her best. But as she talked, she knew that she wasn’t doing it right. A divorcee, with one daughter who lived in the country with her father, wasn’t what Margaret wanted. Nor did she much want to hear about a remote job in Italy, with sick people and nuns and an unimaginable garden. Margaret sat listening, and smoking, without comment. Julia saw her glance at her earth-ingrained fingers, and her plain, faintly dated clothes. She seemed not very interested in Lily, or in Julia’s present life. If I had still owned Garlic & Sapphires, Julia thought, it would have been quite different.

‘I used to have a business, a chain of shops. But I sold them. I’ve been much happier since then.’

‘I haven’t got a car. I borrowed that one, from a friend.’ If she had still had the scarlet Vitesse, even, it would have helped. She tried to tell her some more about Montebellate, and the triumph of her gardens.

‘Well,’ Margaret said at last. ‘You’ve had the advantages, haven’t you?’

Have I? Julia thought. And wasted them? Her mother looked baffled, and disappointed. Julia almost told her that she had once been Lady Bliss, mistress of Ladyhill. Margaret would have been proud of that, as Betty had briefly been. She might be impressed too if she talked about Mattie. But Julia didn’t want to bring Mattie back here, to the estate with her, even in words.

Margaret turned down the corners of her mouth, gestured around the room. ‘You can see for yourself. Haven’t had much luck, have I?’

Julia felt suddenly, hotly impatient with her. ‘Why not? Tell me what got you here. Tell me about my father. Your other children.’

Her flash of irritation seemed, oddly, to enliven Margaret. She tossed her head with a touch of coquetry and lit another cigarette. ‘Your father, now. He was clever. Been to college. He was a teacher. Keen on me, he was.’ She chuckled with pleasure at the memory. ‘Dirty devil.’

Margaret must have been attractive once, Julia saw. Not pretty, any more than she was herself. But magnetic. Perhaps even beautiful. Margaret wouldn’t ever have been short of a man to keep her company, Julia guessed.

She told the story willingly, even with some relief. He was a teacher at the secondary modern that had been Margaret’s school until she left at fifteen. And he had lived at the other end of the same street, with his wife.

Partington Street, Julia thought. She remembered the Asian woman, and the skinhead who had shouted after Lily. The street would have been different then, in the last year before the War. It would have been a tight-knit, homogeneous community. One day, Margaret told her, on her way home from her job in a shop, she had met the teacher. They knew each other, and they were going the same way. They met again the next day, by accident, and then by arrangement. Soon they were meeting at times and in places that were nothing to do with the walk home from work.

Margaret was looking out of the window, beyond the dismal road. ‘There was an empty house, on the way back to our street. And it was getting on for winter then. Dark by teatime. We used to slip into the old house together. No one ever knew. He used to call me his wicked little Meg. If I was wicked, it was him who taught me to be.’ Margaret laughed, a throaty, reminiscent, knowing laugh.

A not-very-bad girl, Julia thought. Half knowing, risking it. Like Mattie and me. Circles again.

Margaret shrugged. ‘What I should have known would happen, if I’d had any sense. He got another job. Moved away, before I even knew I’d fallen pregnant. He said he’d write, send for me when he’d told his wife that we loved each other. Never did, of course. And I never gave him away. My dad went mad, but I never told a soul.’

Margaret was proud of her loyalty. She had gone through what needed to be done all alone.

Julia felt no stirring of longing to know the handsome, deceiving teacher who had been her father. She felt that she knew him already, and disliked his weakness.

Their eyes met. There was the first, faint stirring of a real bond between them.

As she talked, her mother seemed to soften. She told her story without the self-pity that Julia had detected at the beginning.

Within three years of the birth of her illegitimate daughter, Margaret had been married to Derek Rennyshaw, with a baby son of their own, They had had a rented house in Forrester Terrace, and Derek’s Navy pay. At home without her husband, Margaret had written her pleading letter to the adoption agency.

Julia took the folded letter out of her bag, handed it over the low table to her mother. Margaret read it, her face expressionless, and then passed it back again.

After Derek’s discharge at the end of the War there had been two more children, both girls. Derek had had a good job as a long-distance lorry driver. And then he had been killed in a head-on collision with a holiday coach.

Margaret had gone out to work as a barmaid. The work suited her, but the family had hardly made their way. Much later, after uncomfortable years, she had met Eddie Davis. He was a builder, with a small company of his own. He was married too, and his wife had never divorced him. Undeterred, Margaret had moved in as Mrs Davis. There had been a brief, prosperous interval. Then Eddie’s business had collapsed.

‘He went bust. In a big way,’ Margaret said flatly. ‘That was it, then.’

Julia learned that Mr Davis was still an undischarged bankrupt. The council house, the telephone and the rented television and the hire purchase agreement on the black suite were all in Margaret’s name, as Mrs Rennyshaw.

Margaret’s mouth went tight again. ‘Easy to end up with nothing, isn’t it? But Eddie’s all right. We’ve been together a long time.’

‘You didn’t have any more children?’ Julia asked, needing the history to be complete.

Julia accepted her own inclusion in the total, and accepted the weariness of the admission. She asked about her half-brother and sisters. The two girls were married. They had moved away with their husbands, one to the North and one to Plymouth. Mark was married too, but he still lived in Ilford.

Mark was clearly the favourite child. Julia accepted that too, as she knew she must and could accept everything else about this family that was hers and not hers at all. There were seven grandchildren. She accepted that Margaret had only a little interest to spare for the unknown eighth, for Lily.

Anyway, I’ve got three grandmothers already, Julia heard Lily say. She felt an unsteadying rush of love and gratitude for her own daughter.

‘So there you are,’ Margaret finished. The softness had gone again. ‘I’m sorry I can’t give you much to be proud of. You were expecting something better.’

‘I wasn’t expecting anything. I’m not what you were looking for either, am I?’

Their cups of coffee had gone cold on the table between them. They had been talking for nearly two hours.

Almost in a whisper Margaret added, ‘I’m glad you came. I’m grateful. It can’t have been easy for you.’

Julia glanced around the bare, chilly room. It was a room that had been given up on. As its centrepiece the chocolate biscuits arranged fanwise on a chrome dish seemed almost unbearably sad. Julia stood up abruptly and went to her mother. She put her hand on her shoulder and Margaret looked up into her face. Then Julia bent down, awkwardly half-knelt, and put her arms around her. Their cheeks touched.

‘I’m glad I found you,’ she whispered. ‘We needn’t lose each other again.’

In that moment, Julia knew that the bond between them would never grow taut. It would never be a lifeline, like hers to Lily, but it would still join them. Their acknowledgement of it over the biscuits and cold coffee, this awkward embrace, was the coda to her years of dreams. There would be no more dreams, and none of the luxury and pain of speculation, because the truth was here.

In time, Julia guessed, she would meet Eddie Davis, and be introduced to Mark and his sisters. The announcement of her existence would be a shock, but the shock would be quickly forgotten. There would be visits to Denebank, as there were to Fairmile Road, perhaps with Lily. There would be exchanges of presents at Christmas and birthdays, telephone calls at the festivals that called for family unity. The times of the year when she had dreamed of her real mother, when she had convinced herself that she was longed for in her turn.

She would be assimilated, as all truths came in the end to be assimilated. Her recognition of that, Julia thought, showed her that she wasn’t young any more. She didn’t feel much regret for youth as she knelt beside her mother’s black leatherette chair.

Margaret patted her shoulder. It was a tentative caress, as if the display of affection didn’t come easily to her. Julia nodded her head. The brief embrace was over. She stood up, went back to her own chair, but didn’t sit down.

‘I think I should go now,’ Julia said quietly. Margaret looked up, but she made no move. ‘Thank you for coming.’ She seemed exhausted. Julia was suddenly tired too. Her bones ached.

She had called her my love on the telephone as well, Julia remembered. It was the barmaid’s casual phrase, nothing special for herself, of course. Jessie had used the same endearment but differently. If Jessie had been my mother, Julia thought, with a moment of intense longing that she quelled immediately. She told Margaret that she mustn’t get up, turned at the door to smile at her, and let herself quietly out of the house.

She went back along Denebank, walking quickly, aware of Margaret’s stricture that the neighbours shouldn’t know all her business. As she walked, Julia’s tiredness left her. Her head came up, and she straightened her shoulders. She felt loose and light. The few people who passed stared at her, and she realised that it wasn’t because she was conspicuous, but because she was smiling.

It was relief that buoyed her up. She had the truth, and her possession of it added another dimension to her freedom. The truth was neither tragedy nor miracle, but as ordinary as life. As precious as life.

Julia turned at the corner, to look back at the street and at her mother’s house. She saw it clearly, stripped clear of the fascination and fear that had shrouded it. The outlines were all sharp, as if a summer thunderstorm had washed the dust from the city air.

He was sitting in his car reading, but he closed his book as soon as he saw her. Julia slid into the seat beside him. When she looked into his face she felt another surge of love. It consumed her, and it burned up her fears. She felt brave, and sure, and grateful. Her face was as bare as the truth and she offered it humbly to him. She knew too that if he refused her now, she was finished.

A moment later the traffic flowed past them, they fumbled with the mechanism of seat belts, Alexander started the car and swung the wheel. They were both smiling, dazed with their good fortune. Light danced on chrome trims and reflected into their eyes from the windows of buses. And when they looked again they saw one another as clearly as Julia had seen Denebank, without the veils of romance but with all the dust of bitterness and jealousy washed away. They had the chance to be new again, and they had learned enough to know that they must take it.

As they drove, without much idea where they were going, Julia described her mother and the house in Denebank, and told the story that had deposited her there.

‘What do you feel?’ Alexander asked. Julia loved him again for his unobtrusive sympathy.

‘I feel relieved?’ she answered. She told him about the circularity that seemed to have brought her back to where she had begun, with Mattie, and her acceptance of those patterns of truth, at last, because she knew that she couldn’t change them.

Alexander stopped the car. He pulled in very carefully to the side of the road, each movement meticulously completed. Julia waited, and then he turned to face her.

Julia didn’t hesitate. Her face dissolved into a smile that Alexander couldn’t remember ever having seen before.

‘I can come back, if you will have me,’ she told him. ‘I can, can’t I, because I’m free?’

He took hold of her and kissed her then, and a little knot of passing schoolgirls looked into the car and giggled amongst themselves at the glimpse of such old-age, incongruous passion.

Through the haze of oblivious happiness, Julia saw that they had parked beside the tentative spring green of a big public park.

They left the car, and walked through high wrought-iron gates. They followed bare earth paths between the plane trees, and they crossed the wide grass spaces to a lake fringed with weeping willows. Alexander took her hand and held it in his own, protected in the pocket of his coat. They sat on a bench, talking in low voices and watching the silent anglers and the ducks trailing vees of ripples behind them. They knew that the passage of years had left them with yawning spaces to fill, but they only talked about small things, leaving the rest to find their own time.

When the cold wind drove them on, Alexander put his arm around Julia and they walked in step, their hips touching. They passed beds full of scarlet municipal tulips, and Julia thought of the seductive warmth of Montebellate. She loved it still, but she wouldn’t have exchanged the most beautiful place in the world, and all her achievement in it, for the windswept regimentation of the London park, with Alexander. She smiled, and gazed at the tulips. Their brightness seemed to bleed into the air. The colour was as hot and sharp as her own blood. Physical longing took hold of Julia, a sudden need that was fiercer because she had half forgotten it. Alexander saw it, and felt it with her.

The flat in Kensington greeted them like a refuge. Julia and Alexander locked its front door behind them, half laughing and half awed by what was happening. The flat was exciting in its empty anonymity. Here, for now, there were no memories and no reproaches. They felt that they had made an assignation, and had come creeping here to steal their time together. Alexander saw the flush under Julia’s brown skin, and the light in her slanting eyes, turned up to his. The laughter faded, replaced by hunger, and he drew her against him. She was as pliant as a reed, thinner and lighter than he remembered. She was hot, and the taste of her made him want to push himself deeper into her, staking a final, irrefutable claim.

Only Julia drew back, holding him away with her hands. Alexander was briefly certain that, after all, there was another obstacle.

‘Listen. I wanted to tell you that I was always wrong. I was selfish, and I put myself first instead of you and Lily. I never did anything for you, did I? Not one thing. I’m ashamed of that, Alexander. I’m sorry for the fire, and for what I did with Josh Flood, and for trying to take Lily away from Ladyhill. If I could undo any of it, I would.’

Alexander said, ‘I expected you to love my house as much as me. I know you did love me, Julia.’

She seemed very sweet then. He loved the sweetness because it must have been there all along, while he had been too certain of his own rightness to see it.

Julia had been afraid that her body had forgotten its rhythms. She had used it for so long as an instrument of work, instead of pleasure. But the rhythms came back to her, clearer and more intense than they had ever been. There was an added resonance too because they were also Alexander’s, and they found that the music of familiarity was better than any novelty.

Afterwards they lay in the still room together. They studied each other’s faces, seeing the marks that the years had made and triumphantly discounting them. There was no need, yet, to talk very much.

It began to get dark outside, the quick and mysterious spring dusk overtaken by the orange glow of the city night. Julia looked at her discarded watch. It was almost nine o’clock.

Alexander yawned luxuriously. ‘I’ll get us a drink,’ he offered. He padded away to the kitchen, and Julia dialled the Coppins number.

Mattie was sitting on her bed. She didn’t know quite how long she had been there, but her limbs were stiff and heavy. It must be a long time. She looked down, frowning, and saw an empty bottle nestled in the bedcover’s satin folds. As the telephone began to ring she remembered that earlier she had stood by the window, watching the wind tossing the trees. She hated the wind. She had drawn the curtains to shut it out, but she had still heard it clawing at the roof.

‘What is it?’ Her voice came out thickly. Even in her own ears it sounded rusty, as if she hadn’t used it for a long time.

The howling of the wind was so loud, she could hardly hear what Julia was saying. How long was it since her last call? It was impossible that it had only been this morning. A very long time seemed to have gone by since then, only she had no idea what she had done with it. ‘What’s the time?’

‘Nine o’clock,’ Julia answered, in her enviable, clear voice. ‘Mattie, are you a bit pissed? You don’t sound very well. Have you had anything to eat?’

‘Yes, it is.’ The wind had pulled at the willow branches and shaken the red tulips in the park.

‘It’s very windy here,’ Mattie said slowly. She was glad that it was real, at least. She had begun to be afraid that it was only in her head. But now it seemed to threaten its way into the bedroom with her. It stirred the heavy curtains at the windows. Mattie turned away from it, hunching her shoulders. ‘Mrs Hopper’s gone down to the village to a whist drive. I’m okay. I’m going to have dinner now. On a tray in front of the TV. There’s a play I want to see.’ She had used to do that with Mitch. Mattie built up the little details for Julia, as if with her loving accuracy she could make them come true.

‘That sounds nice. What time’s the play? Shall I drive down and watch it with you?’

Mattie stared around her. She didn’t know what was on television. She hadn’t watched anything for days. She looked down again, and saw that there were stains of spilled whisky on her clothes. She felt afraid of Julia’s intrusion. Even Julia was an intruder here, behind the curtains that couldn’t close out the wind. Julia would see the whisky stains. It was difficult enough to allay Mrs Hopper’s suspicions.

Mattie smiled, with a kind of new cunning. ‘No, don’t bother with that. It’ll be over before you get here.’

As they talked, she could hear Julia’s anxiety begin to fade. Regret swam like a quick fish in Mattie’s head, as if she had missed a vital chance. But she didn’t want Julia down here, did she? She was trying to keep them all away, because then it hurt less, didn’t it?

Sitting up in her own bed, listening to Alexander hunting for glasses, Julia made a last try.

‘What? Oh, don’t worry, I’ll miss the beginning of the play. Give him my love, will you?’

Mattie stared unseeingly at the crumpled satin and the Johnny Walker label. Then a thick, wet mist of tears rose up and washed everything out of sight.

Mattie uncurled her stiff fingers. She put the receiver down, knocking it sideways. She pushed the telephone off the bed and on to the carpet. The thick pile muffled the purr of the dialling tone, and the blast of the wind seemed to engulf everything else. The tears ran down Mattie’s face. She shook her head from side to side, too weary even to stop them dripping from her jaw. The wind mocked her with its noise, and she wanted nothing more than to go to sleep. She had hardly slept last night, whenever that had been, and in the intervals of it when it did come she had dreamed of Mitch, lying in his cold steel drawer and then under the earth in the windy churchyard.

Mattie stumbled to her feet. She needed another drink. In her luxurious bathroom she took another full bottle out from under the towels in the linen chest, and unscrewed the cap. Then she took the brown bottle of sleeping pills down from its place on the shelf and ate one with a swig of whisky, and then another.

If I could only sleep, Mattie thought. If I could only sleep, and not have to dream any more.

A little while later, Mattie went downstairs. She knew that she should eat something now. She moved clumsily in the kitchen, knocking a dish off the worktop and sending a knife skidding across the polished floor. She found a loaf, and tore some ragged chunks off it. She put a plateful of bread on a tray, and carried it through into the television room. Then she sat down in front of the dead screen and ate the dry hunks of bread, chewing them slowly until they slipped heavily down her throat. She didn’t think of the other suppers that she had eaten here with Mitch, their trays balanced companionably on their laps. She concentrated on swallowing the bread, lump by lump.

When it was all gone she stood up. The tray and the plate crashed to the floor. Her legs had begun to fold beneath her, but she made her slow, painstaking way up the stairs to her bedroom. Then she lay down across her bed and closed her eyes. The wind had stopped blowing at last.

Twenty-six