The Men and the Girls by Joanna Trollope

Author:Joanna Trollope
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Transworld
Published: 1993-07-01T04:00:00+00:00

Ten

‘I don’t eat porridge,’ Joss said.

‘This morning,’ said Miss Bachelor, ‘you do.’

Joss sighed. She was, she knew perfectly well, in no moral position to object to anything of any kind, nor had she the energy, even over porridge. It lay in her cereal bowl in a grey-fawn pool; her punishment.

She had spent the night on the sofa in Miss Bachelor’s sister-in-law’s sitting-room, under Cat and a mound of crocheted blankets. Miss Bachelor had seemed unsurprised to see her, and remarkably equable about being disturbed at almost two in the morning. She had made Joss a mug of disgusting cocoa, full of powdery lumps.

‘I am distinctly short of maternal instincts,’ she had said to Joss, ‘but if you wanted those, you should have gone to Osney.’

Joss had slept heavily and woken to a hammering headache. Now there was this porridge. What she craved was glasses and glasses of cold blue water and a very dark place to drink them in. She jabbed at her porridge and made lakes and bays for the milk to run into.

‘When you have eaten that,’ said Miss Bachelor, spreading jelly marmalade on a triangle of toast, ‘we are going round to Richmond Villa together.’

‘Can’t,’ Joss muttered. She inserted a tiny spoonful of porridge into her reluctant mouth and held it there, in disgust.

‘Do you wish to continue living there?’

Joss swallowed. Tears surged into her eyes. From upstairs came the sound of ferocious plumbing, as Grace Bachelor performed her lengthy morning ablutions. ‘I do live there.’

‘Not necessarily,’ Miss Bachelor said.

Joss dug again at her porridge. ‘I do. James said I could.’

‘Only temporarily. If you misbehave and are selfish and troublesome, he will turn you out.’

‘He won’t.’

‘He will. You are being elaborately childish.’

Joss felt childish. She gulped another spoonful of porridge and seized her cup of tea to wash it down.

‘If you do not behave with more co-operation and generosity, you will be turned out, and quite right too. He has no obligation towards you. You are not his child nor even, as you insist upon telling me, his stepchild. He is not responsible for you.’

Joss raised her head and looked at Miss Bachelor.

‘If you want to stay in Richmond Villa,’ Beatrice said, ‘you will have to earn your right to stay. There is no relationship on this earth worth having that does not have, in some way, to be earned.’ She stood up. ‘I am going to telephone James and tell him that you are safe, and that I am escorting you home. And when I return, you will have eaten your porridge. If I find the porridge in the waste bin, I shall order you a taxi for Osney.’

Joss gazed at her. On her white exhausted face there was an unmistakable mixture of resentment and relief.

‘Thank God,’ James said.

‘I am sure you were worried.’

‘I didn’t sleep at all. How dare she? How dare she make me lose a night’s sleep? Is she at all sorry?’

‘I believe so. She does, of course, lack any grace of expression, but I sense fear and a mild repentance.

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