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

posh sort of voice, and she was wearing a dire coat, and she was asking Mr Patel in the grocer’s for Nice biscuits. Joss didn’t think that was how you pronounced them, she’d always thought they were called that because they weren’t nice at all, but boring.
    â€˜And oxtail soup, if you please,’ Miss Bachelor said to Mr Patel. ‘Just one tin, and some brown boot polish and a pint of milk.’
    Mr Patel was very polite to Miss Bachelor. Other customers, trained by supermarkets, collected their groceries in a wire basket, but Miss Bachelor didn’t seem to have cottoned on to such independence, and Mr Patel humoured her. Mr Patel was a second-generation Christian, his father having been converted in Rawalpindi, before the Second World War, by a missionary who had looked very much like Miss Bachelor, and whose photograph was glued into the Patel family album. It would have distressed Mr Patel very much to know that Miss Bachelor was an atheist.
    â€˜Is that everything now?’ said Mr Patel, putting a carton of milk on the counter. He was keeping an eye on Joss, juggling her chewing-gum packet in her hand. She was just the age, in Mr Patel’s experience, for the least scruple about shop-lifting.
    â€˜A quarter of humbugs,’ Miss Bachelor said. ‘And a tin of Mousemix.’
    â€˜Meowmix,’ said Mr Patel gently.
    Joss snorted. Miss Bachelor turned round. She looked at Joss for some time, then she said, ‘I wonder if you are Josephine?’
    Joss froze. Nobody ever, ever, called her by her real name, her gross, obscene, shameful name. ‘It’s Joss,’ she growled.
    â€˜As we have never been introduced,’ Miss Bachelor said, ‘I am hardly in a position to use your nickname, am I?’
    Joss didn’t know what to do. She looked at the floor and wished she had enough hair to hang over her face in a protective curtain.
    â€˜Put that gum with my groceries,’ Miss Bachelor said. ‘I will pay for it. I dislike it personally, but clearly chewing it is preferable to smoking.’
    â€˜I don’t want you to pay for it,’ Joss said.
    â€˜But I do, because I want you to carry my shopping for me.’
    Mr Patel thought it was just as well there was no-one else needing serving. Joss took a step forward and dropped her gum packet on the counter. She looked stunned.
    â€˜Now,’ said Miss Bachelor, pulling out of her pocket a purse whose size and air of pathos would have distressed James very much, ‘the grand total, if you please.’
    Mr Patel put the groceries into a carrier bag left over from Christmas, bearing a picture of two smudged children building a snowman. He handed it to Joss. Miss Bachelor counted out her money with infinite slowness and care and laid it on the counter.
    â€˜Two more pence, please,’ said Mr Patel patiently.
    Outside in the street, Joss was seized with the violent apprehension that she might be seen accompanying Miss Bachelor. Few of her schoolfriends lived in Jericho and, in any case, darkness had fallen at teatime, but Joss thought she would keep her head down, all the same. Awkwardly, with her one free hand, she wound her black muffler high around her cheeks and ears.
    â€˜I’m truly pleased to meet you,’ Miss Bachelor said. ‘I asked your stepfather to send you to see me.’
    â€˜He isn’t my stepfather.’
    â€˜Then how would you describe him?’
    Joss couldn’t think.
    â€˜Would you prefer it if I were to call him your mother’s lover, which is what, I suppose, he literally is?’
    Joss certainly wouldn’t. She gave a little involuntary gasp. She said, in a slightly strangled voice, ‘He’s called James—’
    â€˜I didn’t think you would come, of course,’ Miss Bachelor said. ‘I thought you would be determined not to. I am, after all, so very unfashionable. But I thought we would somehow meet, even if I