Kate and Emma (21 page)

‘Help me,’ I said. ‘What am I going to do?’

‘Help you - when I can’t even help myself. We’ll have to help each other.’ He grimaced again, jerking the face muscles on one side, as if someone had run a needle into him. ‘It’s going to be hell for both of us. Do you want to make a pact that we’ll stick to it?’

When Kate and I made a pact, we hit the backs of our hands with a hairbrush, whirled them round to make the blood start out, then pressed the backs of our hands together, joining the blood.

I took a stiff brush that my mother uses for scrubbing flowerpots, and we took off our gloves and I showed him how to do it. The blood sprang up out of my hand in tiny jewelled bubbles. The veins of his were nearer the surface, and one of them broke when the bristles hit it. When he began to circle his arm, I saw that the hand was already covered with blood, so I pulled his arm down quickly, and we joined his dark flowing blood with my bright drops.

‘Blood comrades,’ I said, sealing my disloyalty to Tom. ‘I swear.’

‘I swear.’

So em is off to America. Her uncle is sending her to study sales techniques, she says, but I know it is really to get her away from this Tom.

She’s broken with him. I asked her flat out. If I don’t talk about it, she said, it’s all right. Just don’t make me talk about it.

I hated to see her go. I wanted her to be here when I have the baby. I wanted her to come to the hospitaal and see me sitting up in bed with a ribbon in my hair and that sort of purified look, like they get in the movies after they take the pillow out and pretend they’ve had it.

It’s odd, I’ve always minded so much about how she sees me.

She’s seen me every worst way, from the beginning on, when I’d been two weeks in Stinkney without a change of clothes, and all that talcum in my hair to get rid of the filthy oil they hit you with. But I still, when I’m looking sweet, like people do when they’ve just had a baby, whether they want it or not, I still want Em to see me.

I rolled my hair the other day the way the models do, all over to one side with the ends flicked out, and my first thought was: I must show Em. But Em is three thousand miles away. I may as well cut the whole lot off and go back to polo necks. Or just let my neck show, who cares? Who cares what I look like? If I ask Bob to admire something new about me, his first reaction is to paw. That’s men, as my aunt used to say, the only one of my mother’s family who still came to see us. Can’t hardly wait till one gets out to stuff the next one in.

If I could have Em as a visitor in the hospital, that Sister would give me more than the fag end of her manners. She’s still there, because I asked in Out Patients. If Em came to my bedside with her hair swept round her head like a polished bronze turban and that yellow dress she bought to travel in, there’d be no Get up and make your bed, Mrs - er. You young girls are all born lazy.

Only another month to go. With Sammy, I couldn’t wait to be
rid of him. Little did I know, though that was another thing my aunt used to say. It won’t come out as easy as it went in. I am afraid, and I want Em here to tell it to afterwards and lie about how brave I was. It’s one thing I’ve experienced that she hasn’t.

If I didn’t look so awful, I’d have gone to the station to see her off, I mean that. Why should I care about her family being there? I’m not afraid of them. They almost had me practically one of them, and Em said at the time that they were pleased about her and me and the flat, though I think she made that up.

It’s hell being pregnant in the summer, because you can’t cover it with a big coat. If Moll hadn’t given me that Hawaiian flowered smock, I’d not have been able to go to the party she gave for Em. I took old Sam to Moll’s, because Barbie and Ron had gone to the races, and Barbie’s getting sick of minding him for me anyway, now that I can’t pay her hardly anything. Some friend.

He’s really quite all right in the cot alone, but Molly and Em wouldn’t think so, so we took him along and I was quite proud of him, the fuss everyone made. Em gave him the little red suit as a going-away present. All the things she’s given me. Lisa must be mad with jealousy because she didn’t get the saddle-stitched jacket. I can’t wear it yet, but my day will come.

At Moll’s we sang Should Auld Acquaintance. It choked my throat. All the kids were singing, even the new ones who hardly know Em, and I thought of my birthday that evening centuries ago, and how far we had all come since then.

When I was seventeen, and beginning to find so much in life, through Molly, I couldn’t wait to go ahead, to get on with the next thing. Now I was wishing I could have stayed right there where I was in the red polo neck with my waist twenty-four and my hips nothing, and all the kids only cherubs in the candle-light, and other people’s at that.

They have taken back some of the men at the coach works, but not Bob, although he’s been down there twice and seen a man who always said he would look out for him. That’s how they are, It’s only people like Molly and Em you can rely on. The rest arc with you when you’re up, and kick you into the gutter when you’re down.

I’ve heard my mother say that when we didn’t have much to eat
that winter when the baker’s man stopped keeping the stale bread and buns for us. When Dad was in work, and before we had to move to that shack in the mud down the end of the lane, he’d been kind. The lower you get, she said, the harder they kick.

But Molly says she is going to get work for Bob. She knows everyone at the Town Hall, and she thinks she can get him something. He still believes he is going in the Army, in spite of what the recruiting sergeant said last time he rolled in there. He went to the clinic again to have his feet seen, and they said: Splendid! Keep on with the exercises. So he does, it drives you frantic, but they are just as flat. Any fool can see that.

‘YOU MUST GO by boat,’ Uncle Mark said. ‘Cut loose and have a dizzy time.’

In spite of having Nell and Derek for children, he still hopes that our generation can reproduce the simple pre-war giddiness of his. An ocean liner to him is a fairyland of romance. He flies everywhere now, so he has not seen the Irish priests in sports jackets, the crew-cut Mormon missionaries, the service families whose children stay up later than the grown-ups.

‘You don’t meet enough people, Emma. Parties and fun, young men - that’s what you need.’

Young men. I must have met some in this last year. I haven’t noticed. Parties and fun. If I couldn’t go with Tom, I didn’t go, and there was almost nobody who could invite us together. Lisa. Derek. Tom’s friend Alistair who met us in Edinburgh.

I was still numb with loss, sleepwalking blankly from one day to the next, so I did not make the effort to insist that I would rather fly to New York. Uncle Mark was paying the fare, so I went by boat.

Tom and I had both kept our promise. We had not telephoned or written. We had stayed away from any of the places we might meet. Once Bernie asked me to a party at the river house, but I refused. I was not going to let my father down.

He and I had been a little nervous of each other since the blood-stained
pact. At first we occasionally asked each other how it was going, until we were hit by the absurdity. Father and daughter each renouncing illicit love - Feel all right, Em? I’ll live, how about you? - like people trying to give up smoking.

If he had said: I know how you feel, Fm going through hell, I would have crawled into his arms. But he didn’t. He couldn’t know. How could he compare my devouring relationship with Tom to his little circus with Benita and her matching luggage? There were times when I felt that he had cheated me. Then I went home and saw how little he had there, and I knew that he had given up a lot, perhaps even more than me, for I had nothing now, but he still had the dull defeatism of my mother.

At least I was free, with the freedom of emptiness. The flatness of nothing stretched before me like a desert, featureless, with no signposts.

Physically, I was going to New York, to work for Uncle Mark’s old lend-lease friend, now chairman of a big grocery chain, but myself was going nowhere. I was huddled up inside, tight and uncommunicative like a cold hibernating squirrel.

The first day on the boat, when the cranes and cabbages of Southampton had disappeared behind the curtain of rain, and I was gone for a year, with no hope now, I sat in the lounge and held on to myself. My face felt like Stonehenge, and I had to cross my arms, because there was an actual ache in my chest. I thought I might be going to have a heart attack, and how disappointing for my mother that she had been so busy predicting it for my father that she had passed up the luxury of anticipating it for me.

I sat there while the unseasoned passengers came and went through the lounge, exploring their floating trap, and composed the cable that would be sent from the ship. The carpenter would knock up a rude coffin. Where would they bury me? Since we had not yet reached Ireland, they might turn round, and people in a hurry would be angry, but have to pretend not to mind, and get up a collection for my family.

After I got to know Martin and Bess, she said: ‘When I came into the lounge looking for Martin and saw you hunched into that chair like a hermit in a barrel, I thought you were holding on to your heart to stop it breaking.’

‘I was.’

I told her about Tom, and she passed it on to Martin, and he began to stop treating me like a child, and let me have martinis. I told her many things in those five days, even some things I had not been able to tell Tom. It came flooding out of me like tears. I must have been a hideous bore. I even knew I was at the time, but God, the relief. I had to go on with it, like having to be sick when someone is watching.

Bess is very good at listening because she can sit with her hands in her lap, relaxed, and not make redundant comments to prove she is paying attention. She is very good to look at too, which helps when you are vomiting up your soul. Poised and fragrant, with smoky-blue eyes and the delicate bones and features I wish I had in those bad moments when the desires think darkly of plastic surgery.

I even found myself telling her about the time when I was kidnapped. I have told very few people about that, and my parents know only the bare facts. They know what happened, because I had to tell it in court, but they never knew how I felt about it.

They know that my bicycle skidded on wet leaves and buckled its wheel against a tree. They know that instead of walking three miles home in the rain - what kind of a fool did they think I was? - I had thumbed a car, against all my mother’s panic-stricken orders, and got into it with the middle-aged man who was driving.

They know that, instead of letting me out at the turning for home, he had driven on with me for miles and miles, until it was dark and I had no idea where I was. They know that I jumped out once, as he slowed at a corner, and tried to run, and that he caught me and tied my hands and put a scarf round my mouth to stop me yelling, though who was to hear me on the lonely marshes of Romney?

They knew that he took me to a little shuttered house near the sea and kept me locked up there for three days, and bungled the business about the ransom, and walked right into the police trap with his long ungainly legs and his sad reflective eyes. They know that he killed himself in prison a few months later, because
it was in the papers, and the story about me told over again.

They do not know that I loved Rocky, and I shall never tell them. They could not possibly understand. Even Tom did not perfectly understand. He made a rather crude joke about thirteen-year-old girls and I wished I had not tried to explain to him.

Kate knew. When she told me about the Australian she was only with for a few hours, I told her about Rocky, and how lonely he was, the loneliest man I had ever seen.

‘So was Douglas, I think,’ Kate said. ‘He didn’t have anyone to talk to.’

‘He was the first person in my life who needed me more than I needed him.’

‘He made me feel I mattered,’ Kate said, and I remember saying, ‘Don’t tell Molly,’ and her saying, ‘She’d be shocked.’

A woman of thirty can fall in love with a man of sixty and no one is shocked. When you are thirteen, forty-three looks like a dirty old man and people won’t believe that it was only caring and companionship, because that is the kind of minds they have. Even people like Molly. My mother had me examined after Rocky. I shall never forgive her for that.

Bess and Martin live in an ugly industrial town in Massachusetts, because that is where he makes window frames, but they have a summer house on Cape Cod, and when we talked about me staying there and the beach and sailing and their daughters who would make me stand in the sunset shallows and dig for clams, I realized that I looked forward to it. I felt my cheekbones rising up and out, and I pulled them down.

‘You’ve remembered you’re not supposed to smile so widely,’ Bess said.

‘It seems disloyal. If we - well, coming to America was one of the things we were going to do together.’

‘Stop acting,’ Martin said, suddenly rough, and I saw him, in fright, as a burly stranger made of nothing but jaw and muscle and ruthless common sense.

At first in New York I was still only half myself. I went about alone a lot, as you can in this city, and be anyone you want to be. It is like being in a film. You can sit in the Automat and eat pie
and read a paperback and just be a girl in the Automat, feeling the part without living it. When you leave, you are a girl in a black linen dress and new shoes with a big tortoiseshell buckle holding her hair, waiting for the traffic lights to change. When you cross, your legs criss-crossing with fifty others in front of the panting bus, you are an extra in a crowd scene, existing only in that moment on the screen.

I roomed with two girls from the office, but once in a while 1 would take a hotel room, and stay there for a night or two with the television and the air conditioning and be a girl alone in a hotel, enigmatic in the lobby, mysterious in the elevator, where the men held their thin straw hats to their chests and stared.

If Brenda and Dodie thought I was with a man, they did not say anything. We were friends on the surface, but we let each other alone. Once when I had rung for breakfast and left the door open so the waiter could get in, a man came into my room in the hotel.