He spread his hands.
‘But why? Nuclear weapons are our best defence.’
‘They’re no defence at all,’ I said. ‘Bombs that poison the planet you live on can’t defend you. You can’t use them. It would just be suicide.’
Now he was leaning forward and beaming at me. You could tell he was really getting into the discussion.
‘But you won’t ever have to use them,’ he argued. ‘Just having them around has kept the peace in Europe for forty years.’
There’s no point in trying to win someone round once they’ve made up their mind to think something different. All that happens is that you get frustrated and annoyed, and they get to practise their cruddy old arguments. And it’s a cosmic waste of time. I’ve spent hours arguing with stubborn old geezers in the street, while dozens of potential sympathizers strolled past and never even got to see the collecting can I might have been rattling under their noses. But I get so exasperated I can’t keep my mouth shut.
‘Some people have smoked high tar cigarettes for forty years too, and not got lung cancer,’ I said. ‘But they might get it next week. Or the week after. Something’s bound to go wrong some day, isn’t it? What sort of peace do you call that?’
‘Good enough for someone like me,’ he said shortly. And he turned to Jude, safely sunk in her beanbag stuffing chocolate mints, as if to say: This conversation is over.
I should have left it there, I know I should. But I was annoyed. I hate it when people insist on wrangling with you about something, then try to stop as soon as they see the arguments are no longer going all their way.
‘Good enough for someone like you?’ I repeated. ‘Maybe you mean someone as old as you? But it’s a bit selfish not to be bothered about what might happen to the planet just because you won’t be on it much longer.’
Two spots of pink were rising on his cheeks. I could tell I was really getting to him now.
‘You probably forget,’ he said coldly. ‘Someone as old as me remembers another time. A time when bombs weren’t so terrible as they are now, so countries didn’t have to be so careful not to start huge international wars. A time when in almost every city in Europe, orphans were picking their way through piles of stinking, smoking rubbish!’
Jude lifted her head and stared. Gerald Faulkner went scarlet. I think it suddenly occurred to him he’d got in pretty murky waters for what was supposed to be just a friendly first meeting.
I said:
‘Don’t look so worried, Jude. Mr Faulkner probably didn’t have too bad a time in the war. He probably spent it safe in some air-raid shelter.’
‘I lost my father in it. Will that do?’ he snapped.
I should have felt awful, I know I should. I should have been truly ashamed and embarrassed. But somehow I wasn’t. I felt angry and cheated, as if he’d somehow conjured a rabbit out of a hat to end the argument unfairly on his side. I couldn’t speak to him. I couldn’t say sorry. I just stared down at my feet and started to trace some complicated pattern with my shoe on the carpet. And it was Jude who whispered,
‘How old were you?’
‘About your age,’ he said.
Her eyes widened, but she didn’t speak. He didn’t seem to have anything more to say, either. So we just waited in silence, avoiding one another’s eyes, till Mum came clattering down the stairs.
She threw the door open.
‘Ta-ra!’
I expect she assumed the silence that greeted her was caused by her dramatic entrance. She certainly didn’t appear to sense anything was wrong. She stepped in, swirled round twice in front of us, then made straight for the mirror, muttering,
‘I think I’ve done up all these little toggles wrong.’
She looked terrific, honestly she did. I never would have thought that if she put together all the things he’d suggested, she’d end up looking as good as she did. And she was clearly pretty impressed as well.
‘You’re a genius, Gerald,’ she told him, leaning forward to see where she’d gone wrong fastening the toggles. ‘You ought to close down that printing business of yours, and take up dress designing instead.’
‘You’re looking lovely, Rosalind,’ he told her.
Rosalind! Nobody calls her Rosalind. I haven’t heard my mum called Rosalind since Granny stayed here on election night and caught her swearing at some man on the telly. Rosalind! I hate it when perfect strangers stroll in, quite uninvited, and don’t even bother to find out what other people call themselves.
‘Mum’s called Rosie,’ I told Gerald Faulkner. ‘And Judith is Jude.’
It was the first time I’d spoken since our spat about bombs. I said it pleasantly enough, since Mum was in the room to hear. And I thought he’d at least be grateful for the information. But, guess what.
‘Oh, I can’t possibly call your mother Rosie,’ he said. ‘She’s already Rosalind to me.’ Then he leaned towards the beanbag Jude was nesting in, and, without even asking, used a fingertip to flip a peppermint cream out of its hole. It spun high in the air, and he caught it between two fingers like a party trick, making Jude giggle. ‘And I can’t call your sister “Jude” either. Judith is such a lovely name. I couldn’t bring myself to shorten it.’
He smiled. Mum, if she saw the reflection of his expression in the mirror, might have believed that he was just being pleasant. But I was pretty sure that I could hear a message underneath: And if you had any fine feelings, you couldn’t either.
I turned my face away. Mum was up on her toes now, practically climbing in the mirror in her attempt to see the toggles more clearly. Her skirt rose up, revealing a couple more inches of black diamond stockings. I looked back hastily.
And, sure enough, there he was goggling at her. When Granny catches anyone staring, she says to them tartly: ‘Had your eyeful yet?’ But Mum’s forbidden Jude and me to say that any more, and I’d already been warned about being polite. So I just scowled at him so hard you’d think his eyeballs might have shrivelled up and dropped right out of his face.
But he just kept on goggling, while Mum stepped back, satisfied with the toggles at last, and took one more look at the rest of herself in the mirror.
Her face fell. She’s like me – no good at convincing herself for more than a couple of minutes that she looks all right. She plucked at the blue suit where it clung to her hips.
‘Oh, dear,’ she sighed. ‘I tell you, I’m dead fed up with my body.’
‘Give it to me, then.’
That’s what he said. I heard him. Mum said – no, Mum insisted afterwards that it was just a silly joke, it meant nothing, and I should never have made that dreadful fuss, or yelled ‘Goggle-eyes!’ at him like that, and slammed out of the door to rush off to the meeting. She said it absolutely ruined their evening. She said the restaurant he’d booked cost the earth, and everything they ate ended up tasting like carpet. He kept on blaming himself, and she was absolutely miserable. She said if I ever, ever behaved as badly as that again, I’d be more sorry than I could imagine.
I said that I was sorry anyway. I told her I hadn’t really meant any of the terrible things I said, but I was just a bit upset about her going out so much that week, and not helping with Jude’s amphitheatre like she promised, and missing the meeting. I said I wouldn’t ever call him Goggle-eyes again, or lose my temper, and I wasn’t sure why I’d been so cross with him anyway. He was quite nice really, I said. I didn’t mind him. In fact, when the row was finally over, and she’d put her arms around me, and I was blowing my nose over and over, and trying to stop crying, I even told her that I quite liked him really.