Bad Girls Good Women

He glanced around at the handful of other students. They were drawing intently. The tutor strolled between them, watching. When he reached Felix’s chair he stopped and murmured, ‘Your execution is good, Lemoine, but there’s no feeling. Loosen up.’

Felix mumbled his reply, and the tutor looked at the big clock on the wall. He nodded briskly to the model. She stood up, stretching unconcernedly, and pulled on a pink wrap. Then she lit a cigarette and unfolded a newspaper. She would rest for fifteen minutes and then resume her position.

Felix put his pencil away. He waited until the tutor was on the other side of the room, and then he slipped outside. Two of the other students followed him.

‘Coming outside for a fag, Felix?’ one of them asked cheerfully.

‘No, thanks. I think I’m going home.’

‘Yeah. Bit of an old dog, isn’t she? See you Monday, then.’ They strolled away with their jackets over their shoulders and their hands in the pockets of their jeans.

Felix went outside. The air smelt hot and tarry, but the faint breeze was welcome after the enclosed studio. He would walk home, he decided.

Felix liked walking in London. He enjoyed the anonymity of the streets, and the endless variety of faces streaming past him. He set off quickly through the afternoon crowds. When he reached Hyde Park he turned northwards, his pace slowing in the cool beneath the trees. As he crossed the dirt paths little whorls of dust lifted under his feet. He forgot the dislocation that he had felt in the life class, and after a moment he forgot the art school altogether. He wasn’t close enough to home, yet, to need to focus on that either, and his thoughts slid easily, disconnected, as they always did when he was walking. Felix usually felt most comfortable in the vacuum between one place and another. It was being there, almost anywhere nowadays, that was the problem. At Marble Arch he emerged into the traffic again, and turned down the long tunnel of Oxford Street. He was within reach of home now. Another few minutes, and he reached a featureless square to the north of Oxford Street. He paused beside a row of iron railings, and emerged from the journey’s limbo. He thought of home, and Jessie, as he looked across the square at their windows.

Most of the shabby Regency stucco houses in the square were occupied by offices, but a few still housed one or two flats, stranded amongst the solicitors and small import-export companies. Felix crossed to a gaunt, peeling house and went in through the black front door. As he climbed the stairs he could hear a typewriter clicking in one of the offices below, but otherwise the house seemed oppressively silent.

At the top of the last flight of stairs he unlocked a door, and peered across the five square feet of lobby into Jessie’s room. She was sitting in her chair by the window, and the sunlight beyond stamped out her dark, sibylline profile.

Then Felix’s mother turned her face to look at him. ‘Hello, duck,’ she said. ‘You’re early.’

He saw at a glance that the vodka bottle was on the table beside her, and judging by the level in it it was still early in the day for Jessie.

‘Why are you home so early? Not missing classes, are you?’

Still just as if he was a little boy, even though it was Jessie who was the helpless one now.

‘No,’ he lied, ‘I’m not missing classes. I’m hot, I’m just going to change my clothes.’

‘Go on then, be quick. Then come and talk to me. I think it might thunder. I hate thunder. Reminds me of the Blitz, with none of the fun. Oh, you wouldn’t remember.’

Her voice followed him into his bedroom. He took some clean clothes, neatly folded, out of his cupboard. He changed, and combed his black hair.

Jessie went on talking, but she broke off when he reappeared in the doorway. She looked at him over the rim of her glass, her eyes very bright and sharp in her shapeless face.

‘God, you’re a looker all right, my boy,’ Jessie said. ‘Just like your dad. Only a better colour.’ She laughed, her massive shoulders shaking silently.

‘Have you had anything to eat?’ Felix asked.

His mother shrugged.

‘I’ll make some soup.’

Jessie didn’t answer. She wasn’t interested in food any more.

The kitchen was very neat, Felix’s domain. He had made the cupboards and the shelves, and painted everything white.

‘I don’t call that very cosy,’ Julia had sniffed.

‘Well, I like it,’ Felix told her. ‘And you don’t cook, do you?’

He took a covered bowl out of the minute larder now and tipped the contents into a saucepan. He opened a cupboard and peered in at the tidy contents, then took a handful of dried pasta shells and dropped them into the pan. He was humming softly as he worked.

When the soup was simmering he laid a wicker tray with blue and white Provençal bowls. Felix had found the bowls in a little shop in Beak Street, and had brought them triumphantly home. More of his discoveries were dotted about the flat – a tiny still life of oranges in a basket, in an ornate gilt frame, a pair of pewter candlesticks, a batik wall-hanging, contrasting oddly with the battered furniture.

‘Dust-collectors,’ muttered Jessie, not that dusting occupied her at all.

Felix finished his preparations with a twist of black pepper from a wooden peppermill, and carried the tray through to Jessie. He laid the table in front of her, swinging the vodka bottle out of reach. His mother eyed the food.

‘You’ve got to eat,’ he told her patiently.

Jessie ate almost nothing, but her body seemed to grow more bloated and less mobile every day. She could only shuffle round the flat with difficulty now, and she never went outside. She lived for her vodka bottle, for her occasional visitors, who stirred up her already vivid memories, and for Felix. He felt sorry for her, and loved her, and he knew that she kept him prisoner. He watched her like a mother with a child as she spooned up her soup.

‘What did you do today?’ she demanded. ‘Tell me all about it.’

Felix looked out over the plane trees locked inside the railings of the square garden.

‘It was life class today.’

‘Nude model, does that mean? A woman?’

‘That’s right.’

Jessie chuckled coarsely. ‘Must make it hard for you boys to concentrate.’

‘Do you want some bread with your soup?’

She peered at him. ‘You’re a funny boy, sometimes. Are you all right at that college? Doing well at your drawing?’

Felix couldn’t have begun to explain to Jessie that he had no idea what he was doing there. The models embarrassed him, but setting that aside, the aridity of life drawing, and the other exercises that the students were required to undertake, seemed to have no relevance at all to the kind of painting that Felix wanted to do. He needed to shout, and to splash himself on to the canvases in violent colours. At the college he didn’t know how to do anything of the kind. He was silent, and he worked in cramped spaces with tiny pencil strokes. He knew that he had been much happier in the year and a half after he had left school, working during the day in an Italian grocer’s in Soho, and going to night class. But after night class, with his teacher’s encouragement, he had won his place at the Slade, and he had wanted to be a painter for as long as he could remember. Only he didn’t think that any of the work he was doing now would help him with that.

He couldn’t explain any of this to Jessie, who didn’t even understand what painting meant.

‘Of course I’m all right,’ he said softly.

Jessie pushed her food away. ‘Pour me a drop more of the good stuff, there’s a duck.’ Felix filled her glass for her and she sat back with a sigh of relief. ‘That’s better. God, it’s nice to have a talk. I can’t bear the quiet, all day long.’

‘You could listen to the wireless.’ The old-fashioned model in a bakelite case stood in a corner of the room.

‘All that rubbish? Noisy music. That’s what your dad liked. Loud music, all day and all night. We used to dance, anywhere, any time. God, we used to dance.’

Felix let her reminisce. That was what Jessie enjoyed. It was almost all she had, he understood that. He had his own memories, too, as he sat watching her. They were mostly of upstairs rooms, with the sound of music and laughter, and sometimes shouting, drifting up to him. Felix used to sit for hours, drawing and waiting. When Jessie had finished work, at all sorts of strange hours, and if she was alone, she would bustle in and sweep him off somewhere to eat. In those days she had a healthy appetite, and the meals were the best of their times together. Usually they went to one of a handful of cafés, where everyone knew her and greeted her.

‘Hello, Jess, my love. What’s it to be tonight? Extra portion for that Felix, and we’ll see if we can fill him out a bit.’

They would sit down to huge platefuls of eggs and bacon, or sausages and mash. Occasionally when his mother was feeling flush, it would be a restaurant and Felix learned to enjoy lasagne and tournedos Rossini and kleftiko while she told him stories of the day’s work, and the people who drifted endlessly in and out of the Soho clubs. In the comfortable times they were afternoon clubs, that filled the empty time for their customers between the pubs closing and opening again. Felix had a dim impression from his brief glimpses into smoky rooms of a twilight world where curtains closed out the daylight and where men sat around drinking small drinks under Jessie’s benevolent, despotic eye. For a brief period, he remembered, there had been a club called Jessie’s Place, and his mother had talked about sending him away to a ‘proper’ school. He had refused to go, and one of the periodic upheavals had taken over their life, leaving them with no more Jessie’s Place. She had gone to work in a nightclub then, which meant that there were no more cosy suppers together either. Felix came back from school and spent his evenings alone, in one of the succession of rented rooms that they used as home. He listened to music, and drew. He painted too, when he could get hold of the materials. One of Jessie’s regular friends, a dealer of some kind who was still known to Felix as Mr Mogridge, told him that he could be good. Sometimes he brought him paintings, and canvas. It was Mr Mogridge who had introduced him to the night school, and Felix was grateful for that, even though he disliked the man. The rest of his spare time, until he left school and started work in the grocer’s, Felix filled up with walking in Soho. He rummaged in the strange little shops for decorative treasures, and watched the people as they passed him in the streets.

There were other men of Jessie’s too, of course. There were plenty of them when Felix was young, fewer as Jessie aged and her body grew more cumbersome. Felix knew for sure that his mother had once been a singer, and then, because she had not been quite good enough, she had become a club hostess. Not a prostitute. He knew most of the real girls by sight, and quite a lot of them by name, because he saw them in Old Crompton Street and Frith Street, and down at the bottom end of Wardour Street. Jessie wasn’t one of them. She had men friends, that was all. Felix ignored them as far as he could. He had never been able to bear the thought of what they did together. Now, looking back over the years of moving with Jessie from one set of cramped rooms to another, waiting and watching and drawing in exercise books, Felix realised that he must have been a strange, withdrawn, prim little boy. How different from Jessie herself, and how baffling for her.

She had done her best for him, he saw now, through what must often have been difficult times. He had been lonely, but he had never felt neglected. They had never had much, but he had never gone without.

Felix had no memories of his father at all.

He knew that Desmond Lemoine and Jessie Jubb had been married, because Jessie always kept her marriage certificate with her. The wedding pre-dated his own birthday by two and a half months. Apart from that, Felix only knew what Jessie had told him. The wedding certificate stated that he was a musician, but Jessie was unreliable about exactly what sort of musician. Sometimes he was the greatest sax player there had ever been, the forgotten star of every big band of the Thirties. At other times he was a trombonist, once or twice even a trumpeter.

‘He played that sax – or trombone, or trumpet – like an angel,’ Jessie would say mistily. And then she would snort with laughter and add, ‘He looked like an angel, too. God, he was beautiful. A big, black angel.’

Desmond had come from Grenada. Felix knew that he must have been tall, because he had grown to six foot himself, towering over Jessie. But the colour of his skin was only a dim reflection of his father’s blackness.

What would I be? Felix wondered. An angel the colour of cold English coffee? He also wondered if it was his half and half-ness, the awareness of being neither one person nor the other, that gave him his sense of separation.

Desmond and Jessie had met when they were both working in a club off Shaftesbury Avenue. Within a few months Jessie was pregnant, and a few months after that her musician obligingly married her. He had also insisted on the boy’s Christian name, although Jessie had preferred Brian.

‘It means the lucky one, girl,’ he told Jessie. ‘We all need a bit of luck, don’t we?’ He disappeared for good about a year after Felix was born.

‘He went on tour, with a new band, up north somewhere,’ Jessie said. ‘Going to be his big break, it was. He never came back.’

‘Why not?’ Felix would demand. When he was small boy his father’s absence made him silently, unnervingly angry.

Jessie would only shrug. ‘Liked his drink, Des did. And pretty faces, especially if they were white ones. Plenty of those in Manchester, or wherever he was. Fell for someone else, I expect. He’s got two or three wives to his name by now, I should think.’

At sixteen, Felix had calculated, he could move away from Jessie and begin to live his own life. He dreamed of going to Rome, or Florence, to find some kind of menial job that would still give him time to paint.

Then, in the same week as the King died, Jessie fell ill.

She had double pneumonia, and for five days Felix was sure that she was going to die. He sat by her bed, waiting again, and all the waiting he had done all through the years of his childhood, seemingly for nothing, welled up out of the past and crushed the hope out of him. Later, he remembered the stillness of that week. All the music had been silenced for the King, and the faces in the street outside the hospital were sombre.

He didn’t believe the doctors when they told him that his mother would live. She seemed so fragile, with all the energy and liveliness that he had taken for granted drained out of her.

Jessie did recover, very slowly, but it was as if her illness had quenched some hope of her own. She struggled back to the current club as soon as she could, but the work exhausted her. The customers noticed and commented on her low spirits. They were allowed, even expected, to have their problems, but Jessie had to be cheerful for them. Not long afterwards she was ill again, and missed more days off work. At last the boss, the latest in a long line of owners to whom Jessie had devoted her energy, took her aside. She would have to be more like her old self, he warned her, his special girl, our Jessie, or he couldn’t promise to keep her on.

Felix was incandescent with anger when Jessie told him. He wanted to burst into the club and hit the man square in his puffy face.

‘Don’t upset yourself, love,’ Julia advised him wearily. ‘It isn’t worth it.’

Two months later Jessie was fired. A salvo of bouquets and fulsome good wishes followed her into exile from the only world she knew.

‘There are other places. Other jobs,’ Felix said savagely, but Jessie only shrugged.

‘It isn’t worth it,’ she repeated.

Already she was drinking heavily, and her bulky body seemed more of a burden for her to propel to and fro. But Jessie had dozens of friends and they rallied round her now, almost against her will. One of them, a man like Mr Mogridge but even shadier, owned a block of property to the north of Oxford Street. It was out of their old territory, but Jessie and Felix gratefully accepted his offer of a short tenancy, at a tiny rent, of the flat overlooking Manchester Square.

‘It won’t be for ever,’ Mr Bull said crisply. ‘It’s due for development, all that. But you can have it for now, if it’s any help to you.’

They moved into the flat, and Felix decorated it. He enjoyed arranging the cramped space more than he had enjoyed anything since Jessie fell ill.

‘You’ve done a good job,’ Mr Bull said. ‘Made the place look like something.’ He looked hard at Felix, and then smirked.

By that Saturday afternoon, they had been living in the flat for two and a half years. As a temporary measure, it felt more permanent than anywhere they had ever lived before.

Felix heard his mother’s chair creak, and a long, exhaled breath. He looked across at her and saw that she had fallen asleep, with her chin on her chest and her glass tipped sideways in her fingers. He took it gently away and put the top back on the bottle. His face was expressionless as he lifted her swollen legs on to a low stool, and slipped a cushion behind her head. Then he brought a blanket from her bed and tucked it securely around her.

Felix carried the wicker tray of dirty dishes back into the kitchen, and washed up. He put each plate and bowl back in its proper place, and dried the old-fashioned wooden drainer. When everything was satisfactorily tidy he went into his bedroom and put on a dark blue sweater.

He looked at Jessie once more, and then he went out and closed the door softly behind him.

The threat of thunder had lifted, and the sky was clear. The lines of chimneys and rooftops were sharply defined against it. Felix walked for a long time, watching the darkness as it gathered softly in narrow alleyways and in the corners buttressed by high buildings. He enjoyed listening to the hum of the city changing as night came and the lights flickered and steadied.

He had been idling, not thinking, when he passed the Rocket Club. He loitered for a moment, incuriously, reading the notice on the door. Then he heard the music, drifting up to him through the cellar grating at his feet. He hesitated, and then he thought that there was nothing to hurry home for. Jessie would certainly be still asleep, and the little flat would be quiet and dark. He could go in for an hour, to drink a Coke and listen to the music. Felix went to the door and handed over his entry money.

‘Just one?’ the doorman asked, without interest.

Felix had to duck his head under the low ceilings as he went down the stairs into the cellar. He bought a drink, and found a place at a table against the wall.

He noticed the two girls almost at once.

Felix was impressed by the club itself, too. He liked the blurred distinctions of night-time in these places, and he quite often visited the other clubs in the nearby street. He had a loose network of acquaintances based on them, and that suited him because it didn’t trespass on the rest of his privacy. There was a sprinkling of faces here that he knew, and more that he didn’t. It was a pleasing mixture of beats and bohemians, ordinary kids and blacks and Soho characters packing the steaming space. He hadn’t intended to stay but the atmosphere, and the two girls, made him linger. The two of them were dancing with intent, almost fierce enjoyment. It was, Felix thought, as if they were afraid to stop.

The crowd grew thicker and wilder as the night wore on. Felix danced with a girl he knew a little. He bought her a drink, and talked to a group of her friends. All the girls liked Felix, as well as admiring his looks, but they were used to his evasiveness. He glimpsed the girl with the hair laughing, through the press of people, and then he lost sight of them both. The dancers were leaping and shouting now, and the walls of the cellar itself seemed to run with sweat.

In the end it was the exhausted musicians who gave up. They played a last, storming number and then began to pack up their instruments. The crowd booed and protested, but they knew that there was going to be no more that night. They started to flow reluctantly up the stairs, and Felix went with them.

Outside it was already light, a still, pale summer morning. The air was cool and sweet after the smoky cellar. He walked a little way, and then stopped to watch the pearly light lying along the street.

Something made him look back.

The two girls were standing outside the club doorway. There were two suitcases at their feet. All the wild enjoyment had drifted away with the music. They looked tired, and dejected, and very young.

Without knowing why he did it, Felix turned and walked back to them.

‘What’s wrong?’

The dark one lifted her head. ‘We’ve got nowhere to sleep. We thought we’d just stay up all night. But the night didn’t last quite long enough for it to be day again.’

She gestured, wearily, at the sleeping city. The first car of the morning, or the last car of the night, purred past them. The crowd from the club was disappearing, and they began to feel as they were the only people left between sleeping and waking. Mattie looked up too. She noticed that he was tall and slim, with black hair that curled close to his head. He looked foreign and handsome, and exotic, but she was too tired to work out whether that was threatening or not.

‘Do you know anywhere we can stay?’ she asked. ‘Just for tonight? What’s left of it.’ They were both watching him.

Felix thought of home, and of Jessie who would now be prowling heavily, wakefully, in her room.

All his instincts warned him to offer nothing, but the memory of how they had looked inside the Rocket Club made him fight back his instincts. He sighed. ‘There’s a spare room where I live. It isn’t much.’

‘After last night, anywhere with a roof will be a palace,’ the dark one said.

‘Which way?’ the other one demanded. Felix pointed, and they began walking. He noticed that they were both almost falling over with exhaustion. He held his hands out for one of the suitcases, then the other.

‘Hey, what have you got in here?’

The dark one shrugged her shoulders. They were thin and bony, he saw, like a young boy’s.

‘Everything,’ she said.

They came into the square as the light changed from grey to gold. Felix looked up at Jessie’s window. The curtains were open.

‘I live with my mother,’ he said baldly.

The one who called herself Mattie smiled. ‘Mothers tend not to like us very much.’

‘Mine’s different.’

But it was Mattie’s expectations that were proved right. Felix unlocked the door at the top of the stairs and they crowded together into the awkward hall. There was hardly room for the three of them and the two suitcases. There was a slow creaking noise, and Jessie appeared from her room. Her bulk seemed to block out the light. Mattie was at the back, and she saw only an old woman, very fat, who breathed with difficulty. But Julia was closer and she saw that Felix’s mother had quick, sharp eyes that were at odds with her size. Her expression was closed, and hostile. Felix’s heart sank. He had seen Jessie confront unwelcome customers with that face.

‘Who’s this?’

He told her.

‘They can’t stay here. This isn’t a rooming house.’

Jessie was suspicious, and defensive, and she didn’t like strangers any more. The little lair perched at the top of the offices was all she had, and she didn’t want it to be invaded. Felix understood, and he wished that he hadn’t dragged these waifs back here with him.

‘It’s just for one night,’ he soothed her. ‘There’s not much of it left, anyway.’

Jessie peered at the two girls. They were hardly more than children, and she thought that she recognised the type. And then the one with the terrible ratty tangle of curling fair hair said softly. ‘Please.’