Free Bad Girls Good Women by Rosie Thomas Page B

himself, towering over Jessie. But the colour of his skin was only a dim reflection of his father’s blackness.
    What would I be? Felix wondered. An angel the colour of cold English coffee? He also wondered if it was his half and half-ness, the awareness of being neither one person nor the other, that gave him his sense of separation.
    Desmond and Jessie had met when they were both working in a club off Shaftesbury Avenue. Within a few months Jessie was pregnant, and a few months after that her musician obligingly married her. He had also insisted on the boy’s Christian name, although Jessie had preferred Brian.
    ‘It means the lucky one, girl,’ he told Jessie. ‘We all need a bit of luck, don’t we?’ He disappeared for good about a year after Felix was born.
    ‘He went on tour, with a new band, up north somewhere,’ Jessie said. ‘Going to be his big break, it was. He never came back.’
    ‘Why not?’ Felix would demand. When he was small boy his father’s absence made him silently, unnervingly angry.
    Jessie would only shrug. ‘Liked his drink, Des did. And pretty faces, especially if they were white ones. Plenty of those in Manchester, or wherever he was. Fell for someone else, I expect. He’s got two or three wives to his name by now, I should think.’
    At sixteen, Felix had calculated, he could move away from Jessie and begin to live his own life. He dreamed of going to Rome, or Florence, to find some kind of menial job that would still give him time to paint.
    Then, in the same week as the King died, Jessie fell ill.
    She had double pneumonia, and for five days Felix was sure that she was going to die. He sat by her bed, waiting again, and all the waiting he had done all through the years of his childhood, seemingly for nothing, welled up out of the past and crushed the hope out of him. Later, he remembered the stillness of that week. All the music had been silenced for the King, and the faces in the street outside the hospital were sombre.
    He didn’t believe the doctors when they told him that his mother would live. She seemed so fragile, with all the energy and liveliness that he had taken for granted drained out of her.
    Jessie did recover, very slowly, but it was as if her illness had quenched some hope of her own. She struggled back to the current club as soon as she could, but the work exhausted her. The customers noticed and commented on her low spirits. They were allowed, even expected, to have their problems, but Jessie had to be cheerful for them. Not long afterwards she was ill again, and missed more days off work. At last the boss, the latest in a long line of owners to whom Jessie had devoted her energy, took her aside. She would have to be more like her old self, he warned her, his special girl, our Jessie, or he couldn’t promise to keep her on.
    Felix was incandescent with anger when Jessie told him. He wanted to burst into the club and hit the man square in his puffy face.
    ‘Don’t upset yourself, love,’ Julia advised him wearily. ‘It isn’t worth it.’
    Two months later Jessie was fired. A salvo of bouquets and fulsome good wishes followed her into exile from the only world she knew.
    ‘There are other places. Other jobs,’ Felix said savagely, but Jessie only shrugged.
    ‘It isn’t worth it,’ she repeated.
    Already she was drinking heavily, and her bulky body seemed more of a burden for her to propel to and fro. But Jessie had dozens of friends and they rallied round her now, almost against her will. One of them, a man like Mr Mogridge but even shadier, owned a block of property to the north of Oxford Street. It was out of their old territory, but Jessie and Felix gratefully accepted his offer of a short tenancy, at a tiny rent, of the flat overlooking Manchester Square.
    ‘It won’t be for ever,’ Mr Bull said crisply. ‘It’s due for development, all that. But you can have it for now, if it’s any help to you.’
    They moved into the flat, and Felix