Kate and Emma (31 page)

‘What?’ My eyes were closing, and I blinked across to where he sat in his own blue chair on the other side of the fireplace. My mother made him take the chair, forcing it on him although he said that he wanted nothing from the house, and at least Benita has had the taste not to fall on it with a new loose cover devoid of associations.

‘That chap Jordan - remember him?’

I nodded.

‘You’ve met him in court. That’s right, you went out with him once or twice, didn’t you?’

‘What about him?’ I was going to telephone Jean tomorrow to ask if I could take Joel to see them.

‘His wife was killed. A petrol tanker went out of control on a hill. She was crushed against a shop front. About six months ago, it was. Perhaps more. Dreadful business. I meant to write and tell you, but I forgot.’

Forgot! I left Joel with Benita - she wanted to keep him for dinner and he wanted to stay - and drove dry-mouthed and staring through unfamiliar streets that were somehow in the right direction, to Johnny Jordan’s house.

The brass plate was still on the door, for the house belonged to his organization, not to him. I thought perhaps he would be gone, but when I rang the bell, Nancy opened the door.

She has grown a lot since I last saw her, and filled out into a junior version of her mother’s shape. She was in her school uniform, but it looked like fancy dress on a grown-up.

She used to call me Miss Bullock politely, but when she opened the door with her mother’s instinctive smile for anyone outside before she saw who it was, she said, ‘Emma,’ and I was able to put my arms round her.

Her father found us standing in the hall like that when he came through from the back of the house to see who it was.

We went into the kitchen. I have never sat in the front room in his house. I don’t think they ever do. The kitchen was warm, but empty. Nancy doesn’t fill it. The yellow walls looked farther away, and the emptiness sat like a presence on the top of the dresser and the curtains and the chimney shelf, waiting.

‘I wish you had written to me,’ I said. Thank God I hadn’t called him blithely on the telephone and spilled out my news about Joel. Some people are saved by luck from the unspeakable mistakes.

‘It’s not your sorrow.’

‘It is.’ But it would sound presumptuous to claim any rights to Jean.

Nancy is fifteen and is taking care of the house, but they want to transfer her father to another town where there is enough work
for two people, and they could live with the other man and his wife.

Nancy said, T won’t go.’

‘You’ll have to, if they send us.’

‘They won’t move you about like a pawn, you know that. What about Mrs Allison? What about the Bokers? What about those people squatting in the Army hut? If you want to stay here, you’ll stay.’

‘Then we’ll have to get a housekeeper.’

‘I won’t let her in.’

‘Be reasonable, you—’

‘I am. I just don’t want to be treated like a
child
any more.’ Standing up, she leaned on the table with her sleeves rolled up and her mother’s apron on and appealed to me. ‘Did you have to fight to grow up, Emma? Did you?’

‘I refused to stay at school.’

‘You see? He wants me to stay for ever. In this outfit.’ She banged the rounded front of her gym tunic. ‘But I’ve got to start training for a decent job.’

Her father patted the hand that was tensed flat on the table, the nails still bitten and childish, unlike the long silver talons of her contemporaries. ‘We’ll see.’

‘She still gets worked up,’ he said later, when she had gone out to a friend’s house. ‘I have to go easy with her. Jean and I didn’t want her to grow up too fast, like these others I see all the time. Poor silly kids trying to pretend they’re women. Now I can’t stop her. She mustn’t think I’m taking care of her. She has to be taking care of me. The other day, she came into the bedroom when I was looking at Jean’s picture.’ He was talking slowly, dropping the words on to the tablecloth, with his shoulders hunched and his jaw set in wretchedness. ‘She rushed at me and sort of - sort of beat on me, and said, “Don’t cry. I forbid you to cry.” I’ve got to be careful, you see, not to let her think she’s not enough, so I can’t let go with her.’

‘You could with me,’ I said, ‘if you want to.’

‘No thanks,’ he said politely, as if I had offered him a sandwich.

He was silent for a minute and then he said, ‘I wish you’d been here though.’

‘So do I.’ I didn’t know what to say. His grief and loss are so massive. The disaster that has happened to him is so crushing that I don’t see how he can crawl back into life again, and yet I know that day after day he is still walking imperturbably into the homes of dirt and stench and ignorance to try and sort out other people’s disasters of their own making.

The telephone rang several times while I was there. A mother who had forgotten the day of her son’s court hearing. A father reporting a new address. A mother who was worried about her baby. Why don’t they call a doctor? A woman who wanted to know how to get to Birkenhead.

‘Are they running a new service?’

‘It’s always been like this. They get to know you, and then they’re after you for everything, long after you’ve put Case Closed on their folder.’

It was time for me to go. I didn’t know whether to tell him about Joel. One has this stupid egotism that one’s own happiness might sharpen the loss. But when I lost Tom, I didn’t mind other people having love affairs or getting married. Their puny lusts and plans had no relation to me.

It would be the same for him. So I told him about Joel, and I was right: it didn’t make him feel any better or worse. Why should it? The women with boys in trouble and sick babies and journeys to make to Birkenhead could help make him more than I could by needing him.

GEORGE, BOB SAID. If it’s a boy, you’ve to call him George, God knows why, but I did. You can call a child anything, like naming a dog or a canary, and change it the next week if it doesn’t seem to look like that.

Poor little George doesn’t look like anything much except those maggots that get into the garbage. He’s very pale. I never had a baby so pale, but it’s the cold, I expect. We’re all pale, those of us that aren’t blue, and the kids’ legs are mottled all colours, like bruises.

If Susannah goes out, her cheeks get red and sore, like the meat we had to scrape in the nursing home for that old gammer who had to have beef tea, so I keep her indoors, though some days it seems as cold in as out. Her poor nose is raw, where she keeps picking at the crusts that come from it running all the time. I got some cream for her, but Sammy took it and put it all over his face to play shaving. Sometimes you can’t help laughing at him.

Soon after I got back here with Georgie, the pipes burst. They have burst all down one corner of the house and it has frozen there like stalactites. Like a picture I saw of Niagara frozen up. Why travel when you can see the marvels of nature right on your doorstep?

The Martins had already moved out because their windows didn’t fit. Some people want jam on it. The Sullivans got out too, after the pipes, because that is it for water, and the plumbers have all dropped down dead from overwork. Ruth and Smiler have gone to her sister’s a few streets away, and the Martins have gone to a flat the Post Office helped them to find. The people next door, who had the fire when the kid knocked over the paraffin heater, they’ve gone too, so we are all alone here at the top of the hill, because we have nowhere else to go.

I wouldn’t have the energy to move out anyway. I felt bad enough after Emily and Susannah, but this time with George, I feel I have been put through a mangle. Perhaps they did, while I was under the anaesthetic, having that dream again about finding the reason for it all, that explodes as soon as you try to grab it. There’a a jigaboo doctor there who’d do anything. Trained in secret Mau Mau tortures.

My chest hurts off and on, so sometimes I just lay down on the mattress and pile all the coats and blankets on top of me, and let the kids take care of each other. I have to lock up the food, because Sammy takes it. He is a thief, on top of everything else. When Ruth came to see me, she said, ‘What’s that child done to his leg?’

‘He fell down,’ I said. ‘He’s always falling down.’ Which was the truth. Mrs Martin used to say he had rickets, which was a
lie. But Ruth was busy clucking round, cleaning up, swearing at me religiously in the way she does for letting things go.

For the love of sweet Jesus, she’ll say. In the name of all the blessed martyrs of Holy Mother Church, and make it sound like filthy language.

She came two or three times. In a way, I’d rather she didn’t, for it means I have to pick up a bit before she comes, to escape her tongue, but now two of her lot are ill, and they’ve got a bit of a water crisis at her sister’s house too, so she hasn’t come again.

Everybody’s got their problems this winter, though I daresay the Queen gets a bath every now and again, and a bit of a warm. Till they get the pipes fixed, I’ve just got to carry water, like a lot of other people. I fetched some coal in the pram, because they wouldn’t deliver although I was entitled to extra, with the baby. He’s all right. Never makes a fuss. Just lays there and looks at the ceiling with his empty blue eyes going back and forth as if there was a book written up there. The grate’s too small for this big room, but when she left, Ruth gave me an electric heater like a mushroom that blows hot air, and I stand it by his cot. That meter outside eats money, but I have a funny feeling I’m going to like George better than any of the others. Why? Because he’s little and white? Because Bob’s not here to make an ass of himself and the baby both by hanging over it with that big loose grin and going azoo, azoo?

But when Bob gets home, everything will be all right. I don’t really mean that, and I don’t know why I say it. There are times when I wish he would never come back, when I wish they would put him inside for life. They should have put him inside before I ever met him. Don’t you dare go off, my mother said. I’m going out, and you’ve got to take care of the little ones. So I met Sonia and those girls she went with at the bus stop, as planned, and we walked up and down near the cinema and these boys did too, like a dance, it was, and we finally came together, and no one wanted Bob, but no one wanted me either, so there it was.

Smiler comes round to see me quite a bit. The last time he came, he said he would make a meal for all of us, but there
wasn’t much to make it of, because I hadn’t felt like going to the shops. Going down the hill is all right. It’s coming up with the pram that makes you wonder why you ever embarked on it. I could go the other way, but Grove Lodge is there and it’s haunted. One of Em’s uncle’s shops is at the bottom of the steeper hill, and it makes me remember the day I found her there with that great brown plait hanging over her shoulder like a rope, and she’d pinned on a name she’d made up, just like I would have done. Their sausages are good too.

Smiler said he would go out and get some bread and tinned stuff. I had the chair bed pulled out and was lying in it with Georgie, so I told him to take the money out of my purse.

He laughed. ‘That’s more than Ruth would let me do.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Go to her bag. It’s sacred.’

‘What the hell does she keep in it?’

While he was getting the purse out of my old pigskin that Em passed on to me when she went away, the piece of paper with the address of her mother’s flat fell out.

‘You want this?’ Smiler picked it up. It was dirty and crumpled from being in the bottom of the bag so long.

‘I don’t know. Em was my best friend once. Now I’ve got too far away from her. I don’t suppose I’ll ever see her again.’

Smiler got out the money and went off to get us something to eat. I didn’t see whether he put the paper back into the bag or chucked it away. I didn’t care really.

I AM STILL staying with my mother when I’m in London. Although Connie is beginning to get on my nerves, padding about like a starved wolf in a pair of loose fur slippers, it doesn’t seem worth getting a place of my own, since I am in Yorkshire a lot of the time and Joel still doesn’t know how long he’ll stay, or whether he’ll get permission to marry over here.

I have the small back room because Connie has my bedroom. My mother gave it to her in pique when I said I wouldn’t be
living at home, and old Con moved in with her knit-and-crochet bedspread and her woven mats that shoot your legs from under you if you hurry in heels. That’s why she pads. She’s always lived with slippery rugs. Her husband died of pneumonia and other complications of a fractured femur, and we now see why.

Husbandless and childless, Connie has begun to mother me a bit, in an eager staring way. When I tumble into the kitchen for coffee, I often find her already up with a breakfast made for me which I have to eat, whether I’m late or not.

She picks up the letters and sorts through them, but there is seldom anything for her except catalogues from shops in Caernarvon and the occasional blue airmail from her cousin in Johannesburg in that kind of stultified handwriting which infects everybody in South Africa.

There is usually a letter from Joel, because he writes every day when he’s not on long flights, and Connie watches me read that before she gives me the rest of mine, although I would rather skim through them first and keep Joel’s letter for the bus. But then she wouldn’t be able to say: Everything all right? and hear me say: Just wonderful, in my American accent which makes her smile and shake her threadbare head, because it is supposed to remind her of Joel.

So it was that I didn’t read the letter from Yours faithfully Ronald E. Sullivan until I got to the office, because there were no seats on the bus, and I sat at my desk in a sort of daze of Kate, suddenly insulated from the dragging activity of the place trying to get into gear all round me.

I had not seen her for almost two years, and I had stopped writing because I had given up hope of ever finding her again. We have always been able to come together like quicksilver after being apart. Even reading about her in the short, apologetic letter from this man who had befriended her brought her suddenly close, and I saw her in that horrible room, rank with sour milk and sour baby, leaning forward with the poor punishing birthmark showing above the twist of chiffon scarf.