Kate and Emma (17 page)

‘That’s what they all say.’ I wagged my head, very wise, very married.

‘It’s true. He tells me the truth about everything. He’s the first man who has. He was in prison once for knocking someone down when he was drunk. He had his twenty-first birthday in Wormwood Scrubs and one of the warders’ wives made him a cake. He told me.’

Sammy was sending back bubbles of apple sauce, which meant he’d had enough, so I took and held him over the sink to wash him off. ‘What are you going to do about it?’ I said.

‘I don’t know. We have to be together, that’s all. I don’t care what happens to her. He doesn’t talk about her, not unless I make him, but he never says anything against her. He’s still sorry for her, because she’s barren. She would be. Anything to get his pity. I can’t go back in the shop again, so I walk past sometimes and look in to remind myself who my enemy is.’

People in love are boring as hell. Did I go on like this about Douglas? He’s the nearest I’ve been to it, though it didn’t amount to much. But kid though I was, and a mess - well, two nights in that cellar - it might have come to something if they hadn’t caught me. I remember talking about him to Em for quite some time afterwards, and wondering why she wasn’t more interested.

Just as she was wondering now why I didn’t want to talk about Tom all afternoon. She was obsessed, possessed, her dark Minnehaha eyes looking inwards. But she made an effort to talk about
me, so I thought I might as well give her something to make it worth her while.

‘I’ve chucked the job,’ I said.

‘Oh Kate. I thought you like it at the shop.’

‘It didn’t like me.’ That’s an expression she hates, I know. You shouldn’t use stale phrases, she says, if you’re bright enough to invent your own. But you try living with Bob and Sammy, and see how bright the conversation is.

‘They sacked you?’

‘I sacked myself. I got too tired. Well, all right, Em, why not? Other people have babies when they’re married. Why not me?’

‘You’re only eighteen.’

‘I’ll be nineteen when I have it. There’s a girl my age two floors down going to have her third, and her husband’s been off work for three months with his back.’

‘How does she look?’

‘Terrible.’

We burst out laughing. We still have that. It isn’t funny, if you know Doreen, but Em and I have always had to shriek and sob at all the wrong things. No harm. It’s nothing to do with Doreen, or anyone. Just laughing.

Sammy laughed too, crowing like a chicken the way he does, and Em picked him up and hugged him, and crowed with him, then put him down again to crawl. He crawls everywhere, not on all fours, but hitching himself along with one leg tucked under him. If he doesn’t stand up and walk soon, I’ll go out of my mind.

Bob came in, with a big grin for Emma. He likes her. She doesn’t understand that’s why he went for her that evening. It’s about the only way he knows to show he likes you. That and butting his head against you like a cat to make you stroke the sides of his hair.

Em has got over it. She can joke and tease with Bob again, like she used, but when I went out to the kitchen to put on the potatoes, she came with me, I noticed.

‘Is my dinner ready? What time are we going out?’ Bob asked. He was on the floor with Sammy, rolling over and over with him,
one way to get the dust picked up, it was all over the back of Bob’s jacket.

‘Not till seven.’ We were going to play Bingo at the big place that used to be a cinema. We go there at least once a week. It’s keen. I won a ham once, and Bob won that set of queer-shaped dishes we’ve never used. I meant to ask Em what they’re for, but I forgot. Once I won five quid. Five quid! The cards are a shilling each. What can you lose?

‘Who takes care of Sammy when you go out? Em asked. She had picked him up and was saying goodbye to him, telling him she’d be back soon. She credits him with understanding more than he does, like she did with Moll’s cats.

‘Barbie Johnson. She’s a friend of mine across the yard. She’ll always take him.’

‘Have a good time,’ she said, when we were in the narrow passage that goes to the door. They didn’t waste any space when they made these flats. Golden Mary will get stuck in her front hall one day and walk out in the street wearing the building.

‘We will. It’s special prize night, and after we’re going up West, the four of us, and see what’s doing.’

‘Who are you going with?’

‘Barbie and Ron. They’re fun.’

‘I thought she was going to look after Sammy.’

‘Oh Em, don’t fuss at me. He’ll be all right. I give him two aspirin to get him to sleep and he’ll never know we’ve gone.’

‘Kate, you can’t!’ You’d think I’d said give him rat poison.

‘Why not? It doesn’t hurt them. I used to give it to that Chink baby of Moll’s when he was teething. He knew no more till morning. What’s wrong? You talk about me being young, and that. Well, I am. We’ve got to have some fun.’

‘I’ll stay with Sammy.’

‘Don’t be daft.’

‘I’d like to. Please.’

‘Your funeral. If it makes you happy—’

‘I’ve got some things to do. I’ll be back at seven.’

She kissed me and went off quickly, forgetting to make the sign against the evil eye as she passed Mary’s window, like I’ve told her to do. I shrugged and went back in to put on the dress I got when
I started to know about Sammy, but no one else did. I’m into that already. It’s disgusting.

I RANG TOM’s office and found him still there. ‘I can’t meet you, darling.’ He had answered the telephone himself. The switchboard girl had gone home. She’s a private eye for Sheila and the League of Moral Decency. If I ring during the day, I am the woman in the barber’s shop of the hotel where he gets his hair cut. ‘Please understand. It’s something I can’t help.’ I told him about Sammy. ‘He was once almost half mine, don’t forget. It’s the least I can do.’

‘Sheila’s going to the theatre. I’ll come and be with you there,’ Tom said.

It is more than eight months since we met by the river, but we still grab every chance to be together. Ten minutes at lunch-time in a drab little bar near the restaurant where he usually takes his clients. Three minutes at the station if I have to catch a train home, Tom running through the crowd at the last moment with his face afraid he’s missed me, as if I were going away for ever. Someone is going to see him looking like that one day. Someone who knows Sheila.

‘No, you can’t,’ I said.

‘Why not?’

‘You can’t.’ Why did I have to think of Kate sneaking Bob in to Grove Lodge when she was baby-sitting for Molly?

‘No risk. I’m hardly likely to see anyone there I know. Give me the address again. I’ll get there after they’ve gone.’

I hurried to get back to the flat before Kate and Bob left. I was afraid they might go off without waiting, and I wouldn’t be able to get in. A drop in the ocean, what I was doing, if she was often leaving the baby alone, but my insistence on staying might make her see that it mattered. Mr Jordan would be proud of me. Our own Miss Bullock, one of our most conscientious case workers.

‘I still think you’re daft,’ Kate said, and her friend Barbara, who is very glamorous, with fantastic and iridescent eye-shadow, said,
‘No, Katie, some people are like that. They devote their lives to the little ones,’ as if I were a sublimating spinster.

‘She’s right though,’ Ron put in from behind his teeth, which are too big for his mouth, so that he has difficulty closing his lips round them. ‘Kate shouldn’t leave the kid alone. I knew a family once, had a paraffin heater—’

‘Oh, lay off,’ Kate said.

Bob was standing behind her with his big gentle hands on her shoulders, as he often does, as if touching her gave him confidence. ‘If Katie says it’s all right, it is. She knows what’s best for my baby,’ he said in a sort of drilled monotone.

From the balcony I watched them away in Ron’s car, a souped-up old saloon with a skull and crossbones on it and the orange undercoat showing in patches. No Tom yet, thank God. What would he wear? If he came straight from the office with the black suit and hat and briefcase which disguised him as just another man, Golden Mary would think he was the tax collector.

I gave Sammy a bath in the plastic bowl in the kitchen because the bath was dirty and I didn’t see why I should clean that for Kate as well. The things she learned at Molly’s seem to be coming unstuck. While I was waiting for Tom, I poked round the flat a bit and put out a dozen souring milk bottles from behind the stained curtain under the sink, and found things in drawers and cupboards that made me shut them again quickly. Other people’s mess is their own affair.

If she and the baby had lived with me at the flat, it would have been different. She would have been different, proud of what she had, proud of herself and what she could be. When she came to the flat that day and Lisa was so condescending, although Kate didn’t notice it, I wanted to say to her: I wish it was you and me and the baby here. But Kate talked as if she was quite satisfied with what she’d got, so I didn’t say it.

I don’t wish it now anyway. It wouldn’t have worked with Tom in my life.

Sammy was still awake when he came, sneaking past Mary Gold’s as I’d told him, in his ski-ing sweater and a pair of tennis shoes, as if he were running messages for the Secret Service. I fed the baby and I cooked ham and eggs that I had brought for us,
and we played house in Kate’s Council flat which was built in austerity just after the war, so you have to keep your voices low unless you have nothing to hide from the neighbours.

We played that we were married. We used to be able to do that long ago by the river, but soon the people began to come back. Bernie’s parents. The film people in the converted dairy. Tom’s wife. There were people about all summer in the river cottages, and in the autumn when they left, Sheila let theirs to a friend who was writing a book.

‘A boy friend?’

‘No, this gruesome woman with the moles and metal earrings.’

She never has a boy friend. She has no children. She has nothing but Tom, and she doesn’t even know she hasn’t got him. Sometimes when Tom or I get desperate, we say: We’ve got to do something, but we never do. We don’t know what to do, so we let it go on like this.

He left before the time that Kate and Bob might come home, and they came soon after, having found nothing up West but a liver and bacon supper and a glass of lager.

I stood at the bus stop with my red coat wrapped round me like a soldier’s shroud, smiling secretly to myself to show the couple waiting with me that I didn’t need to envy them for having someone to hold them close against the funnel of wind between the flats.

A little blue car streaked down the road, stopped with a rocking squeal beyond the bus stop, and shot back like a clockwork train thrown suddenly in reverse.

Johnny Jordan leaned across and stuck out his head. ‘What are you doing on my beat?’

‘I’ve been to see Kate. That girl I told you about. Remember when we went to Butt Street?’

He nodded solemnly. Of course. I had cried. Although so long ago, he would have to remember it solemnly.

‘She lives in those flats.’

‘Married then. I’m still seeing the mother off and on. She’s never told me.’

‘She wouldn’t.’

He opened the car door and I got in, feeling the envy of the
hugging couple, because I had been rescued. ‘You can wait all night for the buses here. I’ll run you to the station.’

‘I don’t live at home any more. I have my own flat now, in Fulham.’ I should say something which would show that I had not been thrown out or walked out, in case he might think my father had failed as a father, but I let it go.

‘Come home then and have a cup of coffee,’ he said. ‘Jean will be so pleased. We’ve often talked about the time you came. Then I’ll run you home.’

‘It’s too late. Your wife—’

‘She always waits up if I’m called out, in case I come back with a child.’

‘Do you often?’ I was still living in my secret smile, still half with Tom, but talking easily, very relaxed, like being woken from sleep without having to get up.

‘Once in a while. Sometimes she feeds them before I take them to the Home. It was a false alarm tonight. The neighbours were edgy. This woman had reported them a year ago because their baby kept crying, so they turned round and reported her. Her husband had given the boy a hiding, nothing much, but they’d waited a year next door to catch the sound of blows. The woman, she caught me on the way out and played war with me for not taking the kid away. I’m not a kidnapper, ma’am. No, you’re a bloody fake, she said. They think you can just walk in and take anyone’s child away in the middle of the night, like the Gestapo.

‘Well, dear, I brought you one back!’ he called out, as we went into the house, smelling so delightful after the dubious air of Kate’s flat. Jean came down the stairs in a dressing-gown wearing a face of welcoming concern for a miserable child, which broke into a broad smile when she saw me.

We sat by the kitchen fire in the inglenook where the old range used to be. We had mugs of coffee with foam on the top, and the last of Jean’s Christmas cake. They were nice. Jean, who is still an enthusiastic patron of my Uncle Mark, wanted to hear what went on behind the scenes at B.B., so I told them a few of the funny bits to make them laugh. She laughs out loud, easily. He keeps his mouth shut and laughs inside the smile.

I didn’t talk much. I was sleepy, and he wanted to tell her what
the mother tonight had said and done when she guessed who had telephoned him, which was much more fascinating. When it was time to go, and Johnny went to get our coats, Jean said: ‘I
am
so glad you came. Do come and see us again. We’re very fond of you.’

‘Wasn’t it lucky I saw her?’ Johnny came back with my red coat and held it for me. When Tom does that, he keeps his hands there after it’s on and slides them round me, just touching my breasts for a second if we are in a place where there are people. But they aren’t likely to be people we know. We have to go to other kinds of places.

‘I spotted her by her hair,’ Johnny said. ‘She’s the only girl I know who’d dare to wear it all loose down her back like that.’