Bad Girls Good Women. Rosie Thomas

lonely too; how cut off we all are, living so close together.

      She leaned down, very gently, and let her cheek rest against the top of his head for a second. He didn’t move, either to shake her off or draw her closer, and Mattie’s courage deserted her. She was hardly in a position to comfort John Douglas as if he was Ricky or Sam. She went back round the table and picked up her drink.

      John drank in silence for another moment or two, and then he roused himself. ‘Come and have some dinner,’ he boomed at her. ‘Would you like that?’

      ‘Yes, please,’ Mattie said simply.

      He looked surprised, but he heaved himself out of his chair and shuffled around with his stick. He put on an outsized overcoat and a khaki muffler, and a hat pulled down over his eyebrows. Immediately he looked like an old man.

      They went down the stairs to the stage door. Mattie turned the lights off behind them and John produced a bunch of keys from his inner pocket and locked the door. Outside in the street, with the wind slicing off the sea, into their faces, he asked her, ‘Where are your outdoor things?’

      ‘I’m wearing them.’

      It was much colder in the bleak northern towns than in the cocoon of London streets. Mattie had discovered that very early on. But she needed every penny of her wages to keep herself sheltered and fed, and there was nothing left over for thick winter coats.

      John Douglas exhaled, and Mattie saw his cloudy breath dispelled by the wind. ‘You’d better see Vera at the end of the week, then. Get a loan before you get pneumonia.’

      Mattie raised her eyebrows, but he was already walking away and she had to move quickly to keep pace with his fast, lopsided steps.

      They went to a little French restaurant, tucked away in the angle of two streets behind the sea-front. It was the kind of place that Mattie and Lenny and Vera would have passed without a second glance, knowing that it was out of their league. The head waiter showed them to a table laid for three. The third setting was quickly removed and Mattie pretended not to have noticed it. She looked round instead at the red flocked wallpaper and the little wall lamps with pink-fringed shades. The handful of other diners, red-faced men and permed women, were already finishing their meals. A waiter brought the menus. They were bound in red leather and hung with gold tassels.

      ‘What do you want to eat?’ John asked her.

      ‘Steak,’ Mattie said at once. ‘And chips. And soup to start with.’ She was always hungry, and she wasn’t going to hold back in ordering a free meal in a place like this.

      John frowned. ‘And ice-cream to follow, I suppose.’ He ordered the food rapidly. ‘And bring me the best bottle of burgundy you’ve got. Do you like wine, Mattie?’

      She thought of Felix and his careful bottles of Beaujolais and Chianti stored under the kitchen sink. ‘I love wine.’

      It wasn’t an easy meal, to begin with.

      Mattie was sharply conscious that her company failed to compensate for John’s missing friends. He leaned back in his chair, watching her without seeing her, turning his glass in his fingers in between draughts of wine.

      ‘Tell me about yourself,’ he ordered. ‘Isn’t that what usually happens on these occasions?’

      ‘I haven’t experienced an occasion quite like this,’ Mattie said. She wouldn’t let John Douglas browbeat her. But she talked anyway, to fill the silence, to distract him. She glossed over her childhood, but she embroidered her escapades with Julia and she described Jessie and Felix in lengthy detail. The bottle of burgundy was emptied and John called for another. Once or twice he laughed, the loudness of it making the other diners peer covertly at him.

      Their food came. John barely touched the cutlets he had ordered, but he drank steadily. Mattie ate because she was ravenous, but she thought privately that this food was nothing like as good as the meals that Felix cooked at home.

      ‘It’s your turn now,’ she said, with her red meat cooling on the plate in front of her. ‘You talk, while I eat.’

      John Douglas’s thick, grey eyebrows drew together. ‘I was an ac—tor,’ he said. The dark, resonant voice seemed to fill the room. Mattie resolutely didn’t glance at the surrounding tables. John picked up his stick and thumped it on the floor. ‘But there aren’t many parts for cripples. You can’t play Dick the Bad for ever. I did have five or six good years, after the War. I was at Bristol Old Vic, Stratford for a couple of seasons.’

      ‘Tell me,’ Mattie implored.

      ‘Ah, it’s all bollocks. All of it. That’s my consolation. But I’ll tell you, if you want to hear.’

      Mattie chewed her way through her tough steak and the floury chocolate pudding that followed, listening, entranced. He told her stories of Alex, and Sybil, and Larry, stories of first nights and tours and try-outs, triumphs and disasters.

      When the burgundy was all gone he started on brandy, in a fat balloon glass. He had become briefly animated, embellishing his stories with comic accents and breaking into his thunderous belly-laugh, but the brandy seemed to puncture his euphoria. He sank back into his chair again, staring over Mattie’s head.

      ‘And now here we are. Washed up in fucking Yarmouth, dining out with a little girl stage manager.’

      ‘I’m not a little girl,’ Mattie said softly.

      After a moment he said, ‘I know that. I’m sorry.’

      Their eyes met, and it was Mattie who looked away first. She saw the waiters standing impatiently by the door. The chairs were stacked on all the other tables.

      ‘I think they want us to go.’

      ‘Who gives a fuck what they want?’

      But he fumbled for the bill that had been placed at his elbow an hour ago. He slapped the pound notes on to the plate, and they stood up together. The waiter opened the door for them with an ironic bow.

      Outside, the air broke over them like an icy sea-wave.

      Even Mattie gasped, and John lurched sideways. His legs seemed to buckle under him and he clawed at Mattie for support. She leaned into him, trying to support his weight.

      ‘Oh, Christ,’ he murmured. ‘A cripple. A fucking legless cripple.’

      They tottered together to the nearest lamp-post and leaned against it, washed by the impartial yellow light. John stared into the gloom. The waves crashed dully in the distance, but there was no other sound. They were alone, cut off by the lateness, the dark, and the muffled sea.

      Fear turned over like a sick lump in John Douglas’s stomach. He was afraid of everything, the entirety of life beyond this circle of light. And the girl’s hair was close to his mouth, a metallic-shining mass of curls. He shuddered, and then he bent his head and buried his face in it.

      She stood still, sturdy, holding him up.

      ‘Come home with me, Mattie,’ he begged her, knowing that he couldn’t bear it if she refused. She was so warm, so full of bloody life.

      ‘All right.’

      It was as simple as that.

      They began to walk, zig-zagging, with Mattie’s arm around his waist. He was too heavy for her, too drunk to be controllable. They reached the sea-front and the wind flattened them against the wall. A ball of screwed-up chip papers scudded past their feet.

      ‘This way,’ John said grandly, and they leaned forward into the salty blast.

      He was staying not in digs but in a small hotel at the far end of the front. They stumbled up the steps and Mattie caught a glimpse of a sign in the front window announcing Vacancies. The doors were locked, and John pressed his fist against the bell push, mumbling.

      After a very long time a dim light blinked on over their heads. A yawning boy opened the door and gaped at them.

      ‘Where