Mary sipped her drink and stubbed out her cigarette. At once Jamie rebrimmed her glass and offered her a fresh cigarette, which he lit.
‘That’s it. You can do it. You can do it, Mary. Now just eat a lot of rich food and don’t take any exercise, and you should pull through this thing okay.’
‘You’re quite manic, Jamie. It’s not funny, you know,’ said Lily, who also lived where Jamie lived.
‘How would you know whether it’s funny?’
‘It doesn’t make me laugh.’
‘But you’re a woman! Women don’t laugh when things are funny. They laugh when they’re feeling well.’
‘Yawn yawn yawn,’ said Lily.
‘Oh what crap,’ said Jo.
‘Give him a Valium, somebody,’ said Augusta.
‘It’s true! Why should you mind? It’s just different for you …’ He turned to Mary with his bowed head and hot eyes. ‘Well. I just think, since none of us does anything, and is never going to do anything, we might as well do the other stuff, that’s all.’
‘Oh Mary,’ said Lily. ‘Are you all right for sheets and towels and everything?’
‘Why, has the little man been?’ said Jo.
‘Did he bring back my shirt?’ said Augusta.
‘Which one?’
‘They lost it. You know, the grey silk one with the—’
‘I think,’ said Jamie, climbing unevenly to his feet, ‘I think I might just manage to tear myself away from this conversation.’ He hesitated in the middle of the room. His eyes were burning with boyish eagerness and shame. ‘I, it’s just…’
Don’t, thought Mary. It’s all right. There’s no need.
‘That stuff about women not laughing,’ he said, and at once the girls started to sigh and mumble and turn away. ‘If I’d said most women, you’d have all agreed and had a laugh on your sisters. But I mean you, because you never read a book or do anything. That’s why you only laugh when you like someone or feel well.’
‘Boring,’ said Augusta.
‘Boring? Oh, it’s boring, is it. Well in that case, man, I’m just fucking fuckin out. Gimme shelter,’ he said, and stumbled from the room.
‘Don’t listen to him,’ Lily told Mary. ‘He’s impossible when he’s drunk.’
‘That man hates women,’ said Augusta with her eyes closed.
Jo shook her head. ‘No, he just needs to get out and do something.’
It was true that no one in the flat did anything. Well, they did things, but they didn’t do anything. They didn’t do nothing, but they didn’t do anything either. Mary soon worked out why: there was no need to. There was no need.
Mary recognized all three girls from the Sunday when she had come to lunch. She wasn’t surprised to find them living here. She wasn’t surprised to find that someone else was living here too, someone who didn’t do anything either: little Carlos.
In a sense, Carlos was what Lily did. Carlos demanded and received almost full-time priming; he needed Lily’s time all the time there was, and she gave it to him. Carlos was learning to walk, or waiting to walk. His burly, milk-flossed head bore an ever-changing patchwork of angry red bruises; Carlos got these by falling over a lot, especially in the bathroom, where he fell over most. You could hear him moving about in there, chirruping or gurgling interestedly: then there would be a sudden thump or crash, a shocked silence as Carlos marshalled his grief and outrage, and finally his forceful, hacking wail that sent Lily running in, hoping he hadn’t broken anything. Carlos cried about other things too. He always cried to good effect: it always got him what he wanted. When you thought about it, Carlos was really pretty popular, had won quite a few admirers, for somebody who was only one year old. Just think how many friends and followers he would have when he was fifty—or seventy-five!
‘What exactly’s the schedule on Carlos?’ Jamie asked Lily. Jamie spent quite a lot of time playing with Carlos, or just watching him play. ‘He thinks you’re God until he’s three. Then he thinks he wants to climb into the sack with you until he’s twelve. Then he thinks you’re a scumbag until he’s twenty. Then he goes queer or whatever and feels guilty about you until he’s sixty and as old and fucked up as you are. That’s the schedule, isn’t it?’
‘Don’t talk like that,’ said Lily, and gathered Carlos in her arms.
Something in Lily’s eyes reminded Mary of the Hostel and its ruined girls. Lily had once been in trouble, but now she was out of it, out of trouble. She had tangled, wispy, weightless fair hair, sad lips, and no challenge in her presence. She also had a man called Bartholomé who worked in the North Sea. Lily thought about Carlos all the time, even when Carlos was asleep or jabbering contentedly in the next room. Lily didn’t do anything, but this was all right. Carlos was what she did.
Jo didn’t do anything but Jo did lots of things. Mary had never met or heard of anyone who did as many things as Jo did. She had ‘money of her own’, which perhaps explained it (everyone else there, including Mary, had money of Jamie’s). She also had shoulders like the back of a sofa, short bobbing brown hair, and a kind of war-hero’s jaw-line, with ferociously good teeth. She was always doing things, tennis, squash, riding, golf, and driving off to remote, virtually unreachable places at the wheel of her fat and powerful car. In the early evening she roared out hymns under the scalding shower, then marched through in chunky sweater and chunky jeans to superintend dinner with Lily. Later she watched television, knitting at the same time, or threading fish-hooks, or re-stringing tennis rackets, or oiling guns. Then at eleven-thirty sharp she stood up, stretched, said ‘Well!’ and strode off to bed. Occasionally she went out with her man. Very occasionally her man came round there. Her man was unbelievable, like someone on television. It was Jamie’s often-expressed belief that Jo was really a man herself.
‘She’s a fucking man, that girl,’ he said. ‘Don’t let her fool you—she’s fucked up too. All that scuba-diving and mountaineering and pot-holing and hang-gliding—she just wants to fill the days and not think about anything. Do you think she likes going out with that fucking robot?’
One Sunday night the fuses went. While Mary and Lily held candles, Jamie peered fearfully at the fuse box, which glinted in triumphant recalcitrance from its cave. Jamie kept extending his trembling fingers and snatching them back again at the last moment. Jo marched into the flat with a gun and three dead pheasants swinging from her belt. She shouldered Jamie out of the way and restored light with a single swipe of her hand. Jamie fell over. Lily helped him up. Blinking, and dusting himself down, Jamie said petulantly, ‘Christ, you’re not a girl at all, are you. You’re a bloke! Christ… Why don’t you put an e on the end of your name and go the whole hog.’
But Jo just laughed and tramped off to her room. Soon after that she went out again. She had other things to do.
Augusta didn’t do anything either, anything at all, but her life remained a throbbing epic of victories, reverses, strategies, set-backs, affronts, betrayals, campaigns and conspiracies. A social life was the kind of life Augusta had. And a sex life too. She had spiky black hair but her face was dramatically pale, paler even than her teeth, which were themselves very white. Mary saw her naked quite a lot, since she often sat with Augusta in her opulent brothel of a bedroom. Augusta was the same height and weight as Mary; yet she was not only slimmer than Mary but fuller too. Her body had an extraordinary jouncy, gymnastic look, with the narrow muscular back and voluptuous behind, and those conical breasts riding high on the frail ribcage. Augusta also had lots of men.
She rose late, later even than Jamie. By her bed she always had an enormous mug of water with a picture of the Queen of England on its webbed enamel surface. Before doing anything else Augusta drained her mug in one go. Then she got up and made herself coffee, quietly, with forbidding calm. She was always quiet and forbidding then, haughty too, almost regal—despite her startling pallor and her quivering hands. She looked especially quiet and forbidding if a man had stayed the night with her, and even more especially if the man hadn’t stayed the night with her before. Augusta’s men … Mary heard her clattering in late with them, and often saw them sneaking out in the morning—or sprinting out half-dressed, with Augusta appearing naked to shout them on their way. On such days she looked especially high-minded and dignified. She looked as if she were reassembling the bits of her that the previous day had dispersed—that disappointing and unworthy day, which just hadn’t been good enough for Augusta. Bad day, to fall so short like that.