The Men and the Girls by Joanna Trollope Read Free Book Online Page B

pearl earrings. Kate thought of the sauce stains down her apron and her red unhappy hands.
    Julia said, ‘Rob is my director.’ Rob smiled at Kate. He had a friendly, crumpled face and tinted spectacles.
    â€˜Of course,’ Kate said. ‘Where would you like to sit?’
    â€˜Not next to the lavatory door,’ Rob said.
    â€˜Here then,’ Kate said, leading the way. ‘Here. Susie will look after you.’
    â€˜Not you?’ Julia said. Her face was open.
    â€˜I’m supposed to be skivvying in the kitchen. I shall offend the hierarchy otherwise—’
    Julia smiled again. ‘What do you recommend?’
    â€˜The gnocchi,’ Kate said, ‘made an hour ago.’
    â€˜How’s Joss?’
    â€˜Dear, but horrible. I expect the twins are just dear.’
    â€˜Yes,’ Julia said. ‘Yes, they are,’ and then Kate had felt she should melt away, so she had melted, to watch Julia and Rob intermittently and covertly while they ate and talked, with utter absorption, and Rob made copious notes in a reporter’s notebook.
    When they left, Julia had kissed Kate and said give her love to James and Kate had been left standing oddly on edge. Why, she asked herself, stacking plates in the dishwasher, why, when it all too evidently wasn’t a remotely romantic occasion? Why should it affect her that Julia should have lunch with a television director in this patently above-board and businesslike way, any more than that James had found an innocent human curiosity that amused him for the moment? He might be getting older, Julia might be setting out on a career, but so what? Kate had always known James would get older, and that getting older would probably change him a little, just as getting middle aged would doubtless change her. She had always felt affectionately about this, knowing that the essence of James would never change, and believing that the periphery didn’t matter. As for Julia, Kate and James had often talked about her, and her very real competence, and how heaven-sent it was that someone like Hugh, with career prospects dependent on age, should have someone like Julia to take over quietly when he was forced to stop. Now, faced with Julia appearing to be embarking on doing exactly that, and James behaving with all the imagination and warmth of heart that she had always so loved in him, why wasn’t she rejoicing? Why? She always rejoiced at other people’s achievements, she always had, she relied upon being able to do so. But stacking plates in the restaurant’s basement scullery that afternoon, and standing at the sink at Richmond Villa now, she felt cold with resentment. She also felt scared by her feelings.
    She dried her hands and inspected them. ‘Little hands,’ James always said, folding the pair of them up in one of his. They looked wretched. She thought she would go upstairs and find the cream that the doctor had prescribed for Leonard the winter he had had bronchitis, to prevent his getting bedsores. Kate had nursed him then, at least, as much as he’d allowed her to.
    â€˜I’ve got my dignity still, though I mayn’t have hair or teeth. When I look at myself in the bath I think: Leonard, old boy, you need ironing. And I’d rather only I saw that.’
    Kate went out of the kitchen and along the hall. James’s study door was shut, and from behind it came the steady reluctant drone of a pupil reading an essay, a gloomy, stooped boy, trying to retake his A-level English examination, to whom James, being James, was very encouraging. Kate went up the stairs slowly and tiredly. The split in the carpet on the seventh step was widening, exposing old-fashioned, matted brown underfelt. The usual music was hammering away behind Joss’s door and the radio news quacking behind Uncle Leonard’s. Kate knocked.
    â€˜Wait.’
    Kate waited. There was shuffling and grunting and the radio was turned