Kate and Emma (16 page)

It was not quite dark when we got there, with a warm strong wind that carried the rank sweetness excitingly into my face when I jumped out of the car on to the squelching grass. The wind was in the high trees, making more noise than movement. The air was full of a sighing roar, and it was not until we went through the house and straight out the other side to the garden that I realized that it was the river, not the wind.

Beyond the white fence at the bottom of the garden, the water from the weir came rushing, a swirling brown flood of rainwater charging off to London and the sea. It was high up the banks, tumbling over its own shoulders, eddying in slack pockets, streaked smooth in swatches as if a hand was drawing it flat from underneath,
turning back on itself in a brief curl where the huge poplar had a root out to catch the scum and twigs and bits of paper that were trying to get away on the flood.

The noise of the weir filled your head completely, muffling thought, leaving only sensation. I stood transfixed by the low fence, watching the river surge past me, my hair whipping across my face to go with it, as if the wind were driving the water.

‘We are going to stay, aren’t we?’ I asked Bernie. We had to shout, as if we were at sea. But he had gone. They had all gone in, and I realized that I was hanging tightly on to the fence, so as not to be swept away.

I let go and went back to the house. They were pouring drinks and I asked if we could sit outside in the shelter of the porch, but Lisa and Derek said they couldn’t stand the noise, and Bernie said in a knowledgeable Mr Toad voice: ‘The river’s high. It’s not usually as bad as this.’

Bad. I didn’t say what I had felt like, hanging on to the fence out there with my hair blowing like vinegar into my mouth and the water galloping through my head. Bernie would think I was trying to make an impression. Derek is different. If he and I had been alone, I could have made him stay outside, and he would have been able to lose himself in the excitement of the shouting river. But the other two found it tiresome, so he chose to side with them, since his relationship with me, in all its fluxes, has never encompassed blind loyalty.

Lisa and I were cooking in the little kitchen and drinking wine out of empty meat-paste jars which were all we could find, since, Bernie’s mother had most of the cupboards locked. It was quite dark by now, and we had found the main switch and turned on the lights, and the damp of the stone cottage, unused all winter, was pushed back into the night. Derek and Bernie were droning comfortably away in the other room, and we were getting that feeling of being in a shell, a world complete within a world, when there was a violent bang on the back door.

‘Bernie’s parents!’ Lisa whispered, although, from Bernie’s description of them, they would not knock, but would come storming in to catch us in some beastliness.

Because of the river, which filled the house, muffled but insistent,
I had not heard a car, or feet approaching. It was a disembodied knock, like the night asking to come in, and I was the aghast old woman in
The Monkey’s Paw,
knowing the Thing that clawed and gibbered outside.

‘Open it,’ Lisa and I said to each other. She was afraid too, with some private horror of her own out there. The door opened on a gust of wind, and a man in a torn shirt put his head in cautiously. Then he laughed, relaxed, and came in. Tm sorry,’ he said, talking to me, not to Lisa. ‘I saw the lights and I thought someone had got in. Kids have been breaking into houses round here all winter.’

‘Tom?’ Bernie came through from the other room. “Ullo, me old cock.’ That is the way Bernie talks a lot of the time. It’s very trying. ‘What are you up to down here?’

‘
I’m
making bookcases. I’ve been coming down by myself every night all week. I didn’t expect to find you here.’

‘I’ll buy you a drink if you’ll swear not to tell the old folk.’

‘Aren’t you allowed to come down without them?’ The man was about thirty, perhaps more. He didn’t look like anyone I had ever imagined falling in love with, which made the shock worse.

‘Not with girls.’

‘Oh, I see.’

I was still staring at him and he was still looking at me, and had been ever since he came in, even when he was talking to Bernie. It was like a scene in one of those shallowly directed plays where two characters suddenly stand in profile and stare at each other, with distended eyeballs if that is all they know about acting, and nobody else on stage notices - only a few hundred people out in the audience.

But this was life and not a play, so everyone noticed. I didn’t care. I didn’t care what Derek or Bernie or Lisa thought, nor what they did. I suppose they sort of shared Lisa. I don’t know. I can’t remember anything about the supper, or what happened when we were in the house. I only know about the shuddering poplar and the dark urgent water, and how my love galloped away rejoicing with the untiring river that filled the night.

EM IS GOING with a married man. It’s a funny thing, but when she told me about it, I was shocked. I’d not have thought I would be, but that’s what marriage does for you.

Not that I didn’t want to hear about it. I did, although I couldn’t help thinking she was on the wrong bus. She told it all to me, as if she really needed to let it out. That’s what she came for, I suppose. I’ve not seen very much of her since Bob and I got married, especially after that macaroni evening at old Marbles’.

I have missed her. In the old days she was round all the time, at Moll’s. We both knew everything the other was doing and thinking. It was like being sisters, almost like living together. That’s almost two years ago, but I still miss it. I miss Em. I want someone to talk to.

Often I’ve thought I’d write to her, or go to the phone box on the corner and ring her flat. She gave me the number, that time I was there.

I didn’t want to go at first, because I was afraid of seeing her and me in the flat together. In the end she came for me in her father’s car, stuck my coat on me as if I was a child and made me go. I didn’t want to take Sammy. He was tiny then and a bloody nuisance most of the time because he’d get all this stuff in his throat and threaten to choke on you. I was going to leave him with Barbara, but Emma said he had to come and see the place he nearly lived in, which was really why I didn’t want to take him, because remembering any part of that time makes me start seeing and hearing things I don’t want to think about, ever again in my life.

There was a woman here not long ago from the Health, taking statistics. When she asked me: Father and mother living? I said No. My voice dropped it in like a stone. Dead.

Emma had her way, as she usually does in the end with me. We wrapped up old Sam in a blanket, and I’ll say this for him, he didn’t give any trouble all afternoon. The shock of going in a comfortable car instead of that hot-rod of Ron’s and Barbie’s must have stunned him.

Em’s flat is in one of those sad old squares where the bricks used to be red before London got at them, and the garden in the middle used to be green before the kids got at it. It didn’t look
much, the house, when we stopped outside. The entrance to our flats is smarter, really, and of course Em doesn’t have a lift, although her place is on the top floor.

But if she did, it wouldn’t stink, that’s the thing. I saw the woman who has the ground-floor flat, and I saw another girl going in the house next door with a shopping-basket and a couple of kids in grey school uniform. I thought of the Nelsons on our ground floor, and some of the people you meet on the stairs when the kids have put the lift out of business, and I saw what I knew already.

This is all right. It’s shabby and old and a dreary bit of London with the power station breathing down your back, and everything could do with a lick of paint, but it’s all right because of the people who live here, and the rent Em has to pay proves it.

That’s why she has this other girl living with her, to share the cost. With me, it would have been from choice. With this Lisa, it’s from necessity.

Not that there’s anything wrong with her. She was rather nice really, and she was quite daft about the baby. Sat and held him all the time with her hair falling over her face and her long clean fingers stroking his cheek. Well, I said, when you get one of your own you’ll soon get sick of that.

She laughed. I thought I’d feel awkward with her. I was angry at first when she came home, and thought Em should have picked a time when she wouldn’t, but she was quite easy, and the two of them seem to get on all right, but not like Em and me. They don’t have the laughs we used to, I can see that, nor the excitement of letting your brain run away like a bolting horse. When Em and I started kidding about Mary Gold, along the balcony at our flats, the wreck of the Golden Mary, we call her, and how she grows hemp in the window-box and keeps all the coppers supplied with weed, she took it dead seriously and believed every word.

The flat is lovely. Oh my God, is it lovely. A lot of things in it are all the wrong shapes and seen a good bit of use, but they have got some pictures up with colours that make your toes curl, and in the kitchen they’ve made it like a French café, with all magazine pictures of beautiful food stuck higgledy on the red walls.

We’ve got a lot of things newer, Bob and I have, that will be paid off some time, never, and he’s painted the bedroom and the bath, but somehow it doesn’t look like this.

The first thing I did when I got back to our place was to take down the pictures Bob tacked up. I kicked all the junk laying about the kitchen in under the sink where the pipes and sour smells are and cut up that red and white tablecloth and tacked it across. It looked better. At least it did before the tablecloth got all splashed and stained, and the junk began to creep back on to the shelves and draining-board again.

I’ve seen Em on and off since then, but there has been many times when I’ve needed her, and I’ve wanted to write or phone. But there isn’t a stamp, or I haven’t the money for the phone box. Even when I’ve had the pennies, I’ve been afraid to butt in. All the time I was at the Fulham flat, Em never said: I wish it was you here with me, so of course I talked my marriage up, to show I’d got something better.

Suppose that girl answered the phone. She’s got one of those soft, superfine voices, like face tissues, not like Em who can bellow as loud as me when she likes. If Lisa answered, I might panic, and she’d say to Em with that peaceful smile: Your queer little friend rang up.

Who does she think she is? I could have been her. My hair is almost the same colour. I could have worn it like that, Lady of the Lake stuff, if that’s what you have to do. Barbie is on at me now to cut it, and I may do. The grease is darkening it like it did with Sammy, and it’s too much bother to keep washing it, and the colder it gets this winter, the colder the hot water gets.

Modern flats with all utilities. I could tell some tales about peeling plaster and the woman next door’s sink water coming up the plughole of my bath. Some of the girls get on to me to go to the tenants’ association meetings and speak up, but the wreck of the Golden Mary goes, which makes it bad news.

I had just thrown up that day, in the afternoon it was, a funny time, and I was washing my face when Em rang the bell and hooted through the letter-box, and I went to the door with the towel in my hands, no make-up on nor nothing. I was so glad to see her.

‘What’s the matter?’ Em never says Hullo or the ordinary things that people greet you with, just whatever comes on to her tongue. ‘You don’t look well.’

‘I was washing my face,’ I said. ‘Come in the bedroom while I do it up, and then you’ll know me.’

The dressing-table is one of the things that may have to go back, so I make the most of it while it’s here. It is polished wood with an oval mirror, very low, and you sit on the low stool that comes with it and have all your stuff in the little drawers with painted metal bows on them for the handles. I need a tiny pearl-handled revolver in there among the musk-scented handkerchiefs and the oblivion pills in case of capture.

It’s new since Em was last here, and she was impressed, but she forgot about it almost at once, and when I sat down low to do my face, she fell flat on the bed with her shoes on my good spread and gave an ecstatic groan and told me about being in love.

I have never known her talk quite like this. He is twelve years older than her, she says, and it’s made her a lot older, I mean that. When we’ve talked about men before, it was fun, but it wasn’t like this.

‘I want you to be pleased about it, Kate,’ she said, and I was, but it still nagged me like a tooth that something had happened to her that I could never have.

When you’re married it’s all over. You can’t pretend about the white charger any more. We went to pick up Sammy to feed him and he was all in a stinking mess, and this is what marriage is, so I said, to bring her down to earth, ‘Why don’t you marry this Tom then?’

That was when she told me he was married, and I was shocked.

He is in business of some kind, it seems, and his wife has her own hat shop, one of those tiny places you daren’t go in because there’s only a few hats displayed and you can’t say No after they bring out a dozen others, each one farther out than the last. That’s what Em says, but she doesn’t wear hats anyway.

She went in the shop once just to get a look at the wife, and asked for something they wouldn’t have, like a sou’wester, so she could get out quick.

‘She’s ugly as sin,’ I said, staring at Em’s new face, the one she’s
in love in, more vivid, the expressions changing faster. I was beginning to get over the shock, and to enjoy the tale in our old way. I wanted this Tom to be chained to some beast not fit to breathe the air with Emma, but Em made a face and said: ‘That’s the hell of it. She’s beautiful.’

‘Beautiful, but cruel.’

‘No. She’s very kind. He rather likes her as a matter of fact.’

I was shocked again. ‘You’re trying to have your cake and eat it, Tom boy,’ I warned him.

‘It’s not that. It’s just that he won’t hurt anyone. But he was never in love with her. She was in love with his friend, and the friend married someone else, so Tom married her because he was sorry for her.’