Free The Men and the Girls by Joanna Trollope

didn’t think it would be so soon.’
    â€˜What for?’
    â€˜Explain yourself.’
    â€˜Why d’we have to meet?’
    â€˜We don’t have to. But I thought we might like it if we did. I knew I should like it and I imagined you could put up with it. I have a cat, and even if you don’t like me you will like my cat.’
    They turned the corner into Cardigan Street. A sharp wind met them and Miss Bachelor stooped into it. ‘I detest the winter.’
    â€˜Yeah,’ Joss said. She planned to dump the carrier bag, say hi to this cat, and run. Miss Bachelor said, ‘I will turn on my gas fire, and we will make toast.’
    â€˜I got homework,’ Joss said.
    â€˜You will do it better after toast,’ Miss Bachelor said. ‘And another time, we might do it together.’
    â€˜I don’t need that,’ Joss said rudely. ‘I’ve got Uncle Leonard for that.’
    Miss Bachelor stopped in front of a narrow door, and fumbled inside her coat for a key on a string round her neck.
    â€˜I shall keep you fifteen minutes, Josephine, and then you may go, and if you dislike it that much you need never come again.’
    Joss was late for supper. She was not only late, she had clean forgotten it was going to be something of a celebration, because it was Kate’s birthday. It was only when she burst into the kitchen and saw the three of them sitting there, with candles and a bottle of wine, that she remembered. They all looked up when she came in.
    â€˜Where’ve you been?’ James said.
    â€˜Doesn’t matter,’ said Kate quickly.
    â€˜Where’ve you been?’ Uncle Leonard demanded as if James hadn’t uttered.
    â€˜Miss Bachelor’s,’ Joss said. She drooped. ‘I forgot.’
    She had forgotten, completely. She had spent the first ten minutes of her allotted fifteen minutes looking steadily and pointedly at Miss Bachelor’s clock, and then she hadn’t remembered to look at it again until Miss Bachelor had remarked that it was half-past seven.
    Kate pulled out the chair beside her. ‘Come and sit down. James has done a chicken, roasted a chicken.’
    There was a lump in Joss’s throat. She said, ‘I’m not hungry.’ She wasn’t, she was full of toast, packed with it, slice after slice toasted on an old-fashioned fork, like a devil’s fork, in front of Miss Bachelor’s gas fire. Miss Bachelor let her spread the butter straight from the packet.
    Kate said in a slightly tight voice, ‘Did you have a nice time?’
    Joss nodded. It was weird, but she’d liked it, she’d liked it from the moment Miss Bachelor had said, ‘We have something in common, you and I. We are both regrettable to look at, but you are going to improve. Indeed, you are going, in the end, to be lovely, and believe me,’ Miss Bachelor said, waving her hand at her postcards and pictures, ‘I am a judge of loveliness.’ Joss had knelt on her bed and looked at the Marys pinned above it, Mary after Mary in blue robes, and golden robes and rose-coloured robes, each one holding her Jesus. Joss didn’t like some of the Jesuses. She thought Jesuses ought to look like George and Edward Hunter, with soft round baby faces and fair hair, and some of these Jesuses looked middle aged, heavy and knowing. But the Marys were beautiful. Joss supposed Miss Bachelor was churchy; old women like her were always churchy.
    â€˜I am an atheist,’ Miss Bachelor said to Joss, ‘but I am thankful to the Christian religion for the inspiration it proved to be to the masters of the Italian Renaissance.’
    â€˜What’s an atheist?’
    â€˜Look it up,’ Miss Bachelor said, pointing to a dictionary in her shelves. Joss did, with difficulty, not being adept with dictionaries, and then she was amazed.
    â€˜You don’t believe in God!’
    â€˜In any god. Once I was that most Victorian of