Kate and Emma (12 page)

‘Nothing wrong I hope?’ A relation of one of the patients? A back-room girl from the Children’s Department?

‘Merely that I cannot employ her any longer.’

‘Oh, you’re the Matron.’ It figured. Kate had described her
as being without any recognizable human feature, either of body or soul. ‘I’m sorry you’re not satisfied. Katherine has worked so hard to please you.’ I bared my teeth in what she could take as a smile if she chose.

‘If so, which I doubt, then she has failed. It’s no business of yours, but I cannot have that kind of girl in my Rest Home.’

Some rest. The way Kate described it, the old people incarcerated therein would get no rest until the final one.

‘There’s nothing wrong with Kate,’ I said angrily. ‘What’s wrong with her?’

‘If you don’t know,’ said the Matron, ‘which is unlikely, since you seem to be very familiar in this house, then I shall tell you.’ She glanced at the barefoot, open-mouthed children, saw that they were too young to understand, and said: ‘The girl is pregnant.’

‘That’s a lie. How dare you say that? It’s libellous.’ I wouldn’t have been so angry, I suppose, if I hadn’t known at the back of my heart, ever since Molly suggested it, that it was true. The truer it was, the less I wanted to hear it, especially from this woman.

‘Don’t shout at me!’ Matron shouted in a nurse-lashing tone which must once have woken all the sleepers in the ward. ‘If you’re trying to tell me I don’t know pregnancy when I see it, you’ve come to the wrong shop.’

‘What’s going on?’ Molly appeared at the top of the stairs in her blue woollen dressing-gown with her hair on end. ‘What’s the matter, Emma? Oh, it’s you, Matron. Is there something I can do for you?’

‘You can explain to the Council why I can’t employ Katherine any more.’

‘Yes, I see. Well, she couldn’t have stayed much longer anyway.’

A lot of the wind went out of Matron’s sails when she found that she couldn’t shock Molly as she had shocked me. ‘What are you going to do about it?’ she asked. ‘The girl is in your care.’

Molly weaved a little on the top step, but put her hand on the banister post and answered with dignity: ‘It’s perfectly all right. Kate is going to be married.’

Matron yapped a bit more about social duty and ingratitude and learning her lesson, and when she had gone, Molly sat down on the top step and laid her head against the wall.

‘If you send me there when I am old,’ she said, as I went up to her, Til hang myself with the sheets.’

I WAS KNITTING something. I’ll never finish it, but Moll had cast it on for me, and she likes to see me knit. I’d nicked some toy soldiers from my mother’s shop while I was there, and Bob was on the floor with them, making them drill round the leg of a stool.

‘Molly thinks we ought to get married, Bob,’ I said.

He smiled up at me, his soft black hair over his eye, game for anything, then went back to his soldiers, pushing out his lips in little band sounds as he marched them.

‘I couldn’t marry you, Bob. It would be like marrying a child.’

‘Yes, that’s right,’ he agreed.

SHE CAN’T MARRY Bob. She can’t. Molly says that she should, but Molly, though liberal in many ways, is surprisingly stuffy about this. Not angry with Kate, just stuffy. She’ll help her, but on her own terms, and her terms don’t include fatherless babies. She has had enough of them as fosters, Lord knows, but perhaps that’s why.

Things like this set up barriers between generations. It’s like talking about the war to someone who is old enough to have been grown up then. It has never quite left them, and it shuts you out.

Molly is thirty-four. I am nineteen. We are the same age in outlook, until something like this comes up. She is rigid. A baby means marriage.

But marriage is the purpose, not the expedient. I argue with
her all over the house. ‘To chuck away your life for an unborn baby who will never thank you anyway. Who ever thanks their mother for giving birth to them, let alone making a sacrifice of it? Suppose you make her marry Bob, and the baby is born dead. What then?’

She was cleaning windows, standing on a stool to reach the top panes in one of the high Victorian rooms. I did not offer to help, because I was angry with her. ‘She’ll still have Bob.’

‘That’s the trouble.’

‘Bob’s all right. He’s not as simple as he looks. He earns a good enough wage and he’s reliable.’

‘So is a chair leg.’

‘He’s worse with Kate because she orders him about and makes him more childish.’

‘She doesn’t want to marry him.’

‘How do you know? She hasn’t said she won’t.’

‘She hasn’t said she will.’

Kate won’t make any decisions. She sits about looking slightly bloated, eating chocolate and reading in a pair of glasses with plain lenses because she wants to look intellectual. If you try to make her plan, she says: Plenty of time, as if the baby wasn’t coming for twenty-four months, instead of six.

I could kill her for letting this happen, just for the sake of a few minutes’ dubious fun in that ridiculous high iron bed wedged so tightly into her room under the roof that you have to climb in over the end of it. She told me where, although she hasn’t told Molly, because she was supposed to be baby-sitting.

She has messed up everything, just when she had the chance of a life with something better in it than the poverty and dirt and fighting squalor she ran away from. I even find myself wishing she had the sense to get rid of the thing. She won’t, I know, and I feel guilty when the wish passes through my mind unbidden. But thoughts are not crimes, I suppose, unless you grab at them as they go by.

Now I have an idea. It is the idea to end all ideas, and I shall carry it through in the gnashing teeth of all opposition. Here at last is something I can do for somebody. I am selfish. I am an inflated egotist. I feel no urge to help the whole of suffering
humanity, but I could help just this one small unit, since it would be for myself too.

Don’t leave me, Kate said, and I said: Never. I could show her now that I meant it. Jt could be our baby. Mine too. We could bring it up together. I could get her a job in one of the B.B. markets, if Uncle Mark doesn’t fire me. We could share the flat I am going to have next year. People could think it was my baby if they liked. I wouldn’t care. No harm in being thought an unmarried mother if you’re not. We could call it Kathaline, from both our names. Paint its room yellow. Get a kitten for it. A rocking-horse. A tricycle. Take it to the sea.

Kate caught fire on the details. She said at first: ‘Oh, can it,’ then gradually woke from lethargy to enthusiasm, until we were throwing ideas back and forth like ping-pong balls.

‘We’ll do the cot up in roses, have one of those rugs with all pictures, wheel out a pram and have everyone turn and stare after us because we are so young and pretty.’

‘On Sundays. It will have to go in a nursery while we’re at work and we can take turns fetching it and baffle everyone.’

‘Should we have our hair down or up? We’d want to make a good impression.’

‘Mature, mysterious, enriched by motherhood. Let’s do the flat all white, with blood-coloured curtains.’

‘Oh, Em. We could have steak and hot chocolate every night and never go to bed. We could have real parties, with men in coloured waistcoats and give them spaghetti and wine, like they do. Oh, Em—’ She looked at me with a strange shining simplicity, all her defences down. ‘I could be like you.’

I am terribly happy. Life has suddenly a huge and brilliant purpose, which makes me see that before there were only negative purposes: things I didn’t want to do, people I didn’t want to get mixed up with, the kind of person I didn’t want to be. How could I, even fleetingly, have wished the baby dead? Now that it is partly mine, I begin to feel the same ache for it as for that wretched scabrous child I nursed in the cold railway-carriage room I went to with Mr Jordan, where they threw the tin-cans into the empty grate.

Frustrated motherhood? Why not? I am nineteen. Some of my friends are married, none of them to anyone I’d be seen dead with, let alone conceive by. Now I can have the baby without a husband.

‘You’re mad,’ Alice said. ‘People will say you’re queer. The next thing we know, you’ll be breeding cairns and live in Essex.’

She had come for the week-end with her husband and children. It was like dropping into a warm bath of the past. Marriage has matured her outwardly, but she can still shriek with laughter like we used to, scattering small rugs all over the house. She lives too far away. I always forget how much I like her until I see her again.

I had come home excited, crashing into the house in a rude sort of glow, and found her coming down into the front hall with that knock-kneed Alice waddle, and spilled it all out to her on the stair carpet.

‘They’ll hear you.’ She looked at the drawing-room door. Alice is a secret person, afraid of trouble. My father used to be rather brutal with her at times, because she was fat and unlucky, with a nervous compulsion to say the wrong thing. She is still plump now, but attractive, I think, because I admire women who don’t show their bones like I do. She is the wife of a Birmingham gynaecologist, ten years older, whose patients fall morbidly in love with him, to no avail. This has given her some poise, but she has never lost her fear of being caught out. If Gordon complains, she jumps to make excuses or to do something she has forgotten, nervously, as if she were afraid of him. He is not frightening. He is large and golden like a well-washed retriever, with a voice that is balm to women in their hour of need.

‘Don’t talk so loud.’ The finger to the lip was a familiar gesture.

‘I’m going to tell them anyway.’

‘Not tonight. Don’t spoil the evening. There’s lobster, and everyone is happy. Don’t upset them.’

I knew who she meant. Nobody bothers much about upsetting my mother, because her outlook is so defeated already that one more disillusionment won’t hurt. I have given up trying to hoist her into life on my shoulders. She has always slipped back, missing the fun, the new experiences, the stunts. Alice has never been
afraid of her, but she has always tried too hard to placate my father, and it doesn’t work with him as it does with Gordon, who absorbs it blandly, like a sponge. If my father shouts, it’s better to shout back.

I got him out of the drawing-room on a pretext, and told him alone, in the little room across the hall. It isn’t fair to lump him as an audience with my mother, because he can understand, and she has to have it spelled out. What do you mean? is her first reaction to startling news, and it slows things up.

‘You remember that girl in court when I was there, the one who ran away from home?’

‘I remember a thousand girls in court who’ve run away from home.’

‘The one who screamed out at her father, and he stood there like a brutal ox, as if he didn’t care.’

He remembered. ‘Rather an appealing child, under the dirt and fury. I sent her to that insatiable woman with all the children. I wonder what happened to her. I never know unless it’s the worst, and they come back to court.’

‘She’s changed,’ I said. ‘It’s wonderful. There was so much in her that had been crushed and smothered by that ghastly home. If you had sent her back there, she’d have killed someone, or herself. Now she’s my friend. I’ve been going to Mollyarthur’s, and we have become best friends.’

I sounded like my past self telling him about some schoolgirl crush. She’s my best friend. She’s moved her desk next to mine. I could almost feel the serge of my gym tunic.

‘Why haven’t you told me about her?’ He was leaning on the mantelpiece in his charmer pose, his head slightly tilted and the foot of his bad leg on the fender. He wasn’t trying to charm me. He just looked charming.

‘I thought you’d disapprove. Or laugh.’

‘Have I ever?’

I wanted to say Yes, but I said: ‘No.’

‘I’d like to meet her. Why don’t you bring her home?’

He should know why. ‘I had been going to ask you if you’d come to Molly’s house. I wanted to show them to you and you to them. But then I thought that it might come between Kate and
me, because you’re not like anybody she’s ever known. No, it wasn’t really that. It was - oh hell, Daddy, I’m such a coward. I’m afraid to risk an idea in case it doesn’t work, and I will have lost even the idea.’

‘You usually jump in with both feet, all the same.’

‘I’m going to now. You’ll meet her now. I’ve had this superb idea, and I’m going through with it whatever anybody says, because it’s what I want and it’s what she wants.’

Too belligerently, expecting him to protest at any moment, I told him about the flat, and getting Kate a job, and that when her probation was over next year he must free her to go where she liked. Then I stopped and looked at him because his face was giving nothing away, and I didn’t know how he was taking it.

‘Go on, please,’ he said, as if I were a hesitant witness.

My throat was tight, but I got it out. ‘She’s going to have a baby. She can’t marry the boy. He’s not very bright, and she - she’s really intelligent, in spite of her family, like a swan in a cuckoo’s nest. She and I are going to bring the baby up between us. It will be ours. Mine if people want to think that. I shan’t care what anyone thinks, and you mustn’t either, because this is the one thing I want more than anything in a whole lifetime of wanting.’

He didn’t say anything for a little while, just stood and looked down at me where I was sitting on the stool with my hands round my knees, clutching them white. He is so damn attractive. Not only to me. I see the way other women look at him, with speculation. The lines are deepening in his face, but his eyes will never fade and grow dull, even if he becomes a helpless old man, bullied by some matron like Kate’s dog woman. If the iridescent grey of his hair flattens to white, his eyes will still be deeply, dramatically blue.

‘You’ve made up your mind,’ he said at last, not as a question.

I nodded, rocking backwards with my feet off the floor, hanging on to my knobbly knees.

‘You can’t expect me to like it.’

‘You will, when you know Kate, when you see how well it works out.’