Bad Girls Good Women. Rosie Thomas

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.