Read Online Bad Girls Good Women by Rosie Thomas - Free Book Online Page B

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