Kate and Emma (19 page)

Tom thinks it is exciting. We ran across the dark little garden with the white wrought-iron chairs and the empty urns that Sheila brought back from Italy and into the unlit kitchen, and he flung his arms round me exultantly.

‘I had to have you here. You should be here all the time. I’ve wanted you so much all day. You were so far away last night.’

‘You were miles away from me.’

‘The telephone is useless. Have you ever made a transatlantic call? They sound as if they were in the next room. It costs a pound a minute and then you can’t think of anything to say.’

We drew the curtains all over the house before we turned on any lights.

‘Won’t people think that odd?’ If Lisa and I pulled all the curtains, the neighbours would think we were going to gas ourselves.

‘No, she always - oh well, it’s all right,’ He never wants to talk about her, will hardly mention her name, as if that lessened the disloyalty. In the house, he ignores the many signs of her and behaves as if it were just for him and me, but as far as I’m concerned, everything is hers. The house shrieks of her. Her colour schemes. Her carpets. Her cupboards and drawers, all neatly closed, but the clothes and shoes inside are clamouring like the tell-tale heart.

We sat in the narrow room on the first floor which is her drawing-room, and Tom put on Benjamin Britten, whom he has rediscovered through discovering him to me, and expected me to listen quietly, but how could I? Her candlesticks. Her flower pictures. Her cigarettes. Her Mexican brush to sweep the grate. Her photograph on the walnut table by the window, beautiful, assured in columnar-necked black, a face that would surely never betray itself with anything so vulnerable as unhappiness. Eric’s sister. Had she sobbed to him? Had
she
asked Eric to tackle my
father in the bar of his club? If so, she was a coward. Why didn’t she tackle me?

I sat on her white curly rug and, when the record was finished and Tom got up to turn it, I said so abruptly that it sounded childish: ‘Why didn’t you tell me that Sheila knew?’

‘She doesn’t.’ He had his back to me, bending over the machine. I didn’t think he would ever lie to me. Now I knew that he could. Why not? Almost everyone lies instinctively if they are suddenly caught out, like hackles going up. Honesty takes a little more time, a moment or two to let the flash defence of the adrenals strengthen into self-respecting courage.

I told him about my father. He turned round and, for the first time, I saw him falter. For the first time, I felt stronger than him, the leader, not always the one who followed.

‘Why didn’t you tell me? If only you’d told me. Why have we needed to be so frantically careful if she knew anyway, and you knew she knew?’

‘She wanted me to say I’d stop seeing you,’ he said wretchedly. ‘She was so unhappy. What else could I do?’

I remembered when we were at Brighton, which was one of the places we went to last summer, to be safe in a crowd. We had been together all day, freely in the open air, holding hands and doing what everyone else did. The pier, the ghoulish waxworks, the boat, the slog up with the slogging families to the station.

‘It could always be like this,’ I had said, ‘if only we had the courage.’

‘I can’t tell her. I can’t do that to her.’

‘You’re dodging it,’ I said. ‘You want to have her and me both, because you’re afraid of enemies. We can’t go on like this.’

‘All right, I am afraid. Can’t I be a coward? Do I have to be superhuman because you love me?’

But he is more of a coward than I knew then. He sat on the floor and held me. It was better that way, not having to look at each other.

‘My father wants to know what we are going to do,’ I said, pulling at the rug as if it were a thick-haired dog who liked to be roughly handled. ‘He’s trying to give me a chance to do what he wants me to do without being told.’

‘Now that you know I lied to you, it should make it easier.’

‘Why? If you’re a coward, wouldn’t it be pretty cowardly of me to love you less? I love you more. There is a fatal weakness in all the Bullock women. They have never loved heroes. My great-grandmother—’

I could feel him relaxing just slightly, wanting me to joke, to make things easy and provisional again, with no grim tomorrows, but I couldn’t manage it. I pulled away from him and stood up, and went to lean my forehead against Sheila’s blue wall, rolling it from side to side on the cool paint.

‘You want to stop,’ he said. ‘Is that it?’

‘I can’t.’

‘Turn round.’

‘I can’t.’ I was crying now. ‘What are we going to do?’

Always before when we have started these agonizing conversations, we have killed them quickly, before we could force each other to face the truth. But that was before my father knew. Or if he guessed at anything, before he laid it down between us.

‘I suppose we could try it.’ I turned round and looked at him, our eyes aghast as we saw the terrifying nullity, the
dullness
of not having this.

That was it. We were looking at something so dull. The grand drama of renunciation, on which I should have lived proudly for the rest of a stunted life, resolved itself into me standing with my back to the wall, leaning against it because I could not stand upright, not even sobbing properly but snivelling, and Tom saying, as he came to pull me away from the wall because I looked so derelict: ‘Let’s not be too wholesale. Let’s try it for a month. Three weeks. At least we can say we tried.’

I cheated. On the ninth day, I went to Tottenham Court Road station. I really did want to go somewhere on a train, but I let myself walk from the studio in the Strand where the labels for B.B. products were designed, so that I could use this station.

I crossed two roads and passed two entrances to get to the right one. No matter where I was coming from or going to, I have always used these gents-scented steps, even when I wasn’t meeting Tom. I imagine I always shall.

He came up the steps quickly, seething behind two women with bundles who were tackling the ascent abreast. He didn’t seem to be looking for me, but when he saw me, he didn’t look any more surprised than I felt. There was a dreadful inevitability about the meeting, which made a mockery of all the times during my eight days of struggle when I had passed a telephone and resisted physically the desire to lift it.

Tom was on his way to the office after lunch, and I was on my way to Ealing Broadway to discuss Spring Cleaning Sales with a market manager, but we went down the steps together and took shilling tickets and sat side by side in the first train that came along, and watched our dim, mysteriously attractive reflections in the other window. When we slid into a station, we disappeared. Back in the tunnel, our lovers’ faces hung once more on the dark wall.

‘This is no good,’ Tom said. ‘I’ve been in hell.’

My joy that he had suffered as much as me flooded through the emptiness of the last eight days. I sat and stared in silence at the image of my enraptured self and, when an oatmeal woman on her way from somewhere dull to somewhere duller sat down in front of it, I stared at her.

Afternoon people in the Tube are not obviously going to or from work, so they enjoy the independence of nobody knowing what they’re up to. They read the early editions of the evening papers and leave long-distance suitcases by the doors and balance briefcases and midwife-sized bags comfortably on their knees because they are able to get a seat.

The ones who are not reading stare like ruminants. The woman opposite had a piece of her lunch embedded somewhere in her back teeth, but she never found it. She stared at me and I stared at her until we got to Tufnell Park, which was as far as we could go for a shilling. Tom and I got out and waited with his arm round me on the corner of an anonymous street of khaki-stucco houses, warted with bow windows, for a bus to take us back to London.

‘What happens now?’ I said, somewhere in Camden Town, where it was early-closing day, and newspapers blowing against the cigarette machines chaianed up in doorways. ‘Are we supposed to start another three weeks?’

‘What’s the use? It didn’t make me not love you.’

‘That wasn’t the point. It was supposed to make us find out if we could do without each other.’

‘Well, I found out.’

‘So did I.’

BOB HAS BEEN laid off. Half the men have, in his lot, and if you’ll tell me how we’re supposed to live on almost half what he was getting with overtime, and keep up all our payments, I’ll thank you very much.

There’s talk of a strike, but there’s always been that, ever since Bob’s been at the coach works. They bang on the tables in the cafeteria and talk very threatening, but nothing comes of it.

‘It’s your own bloody fault you got laid off,’ I told Bob. ‘You could have seen this coming months ago, you and those braying idiots who do all the talking.’

‘We were told it was spite,’ Bob said, ‘when they cut down on the stores men, with Christmas coming. We didn’t foresee this. It’s a steel shortage, see, up in the north. It’s the politicians, they say, causing trouble between our side and this country where they get the raw materials. Raw materials, that’s it.’ You’d think he’d said something clever.

‘What country?’

He didn’t know. He repeats what he’s told, that’s all.

‘It’s a chain reaction, like,’ he said, fond of the phrase. ‘A chain reaction.’ He sits there smiling over something like that which tickles his fancy, as if it solved everything. ‘A chain reaction, they call it.’

‘And you’re out of work, that’s what I call it. The sack.’ I sounded like my mother. I could hear her saying it at Dad that time he lost the job with the Council. Only man ever found drunk in charge of a dustcart, that’s my Dad.

He’d hit her that time. She was carrying Loretta, and he hit her in the belly, as if he’d take it out on the child as well. I went for him, and he took my arm and held it over the gas. She put butter
on it. No, margarine. I remember asking her: Why is it always me? Why don’t he go for the boys? Because they were filthy little devils, you couldn’t keep them clean, and her saying, with her mouth gone thin and hard, not soft with pity like it was when she first saw what he’d done: You were born to trouble, Kate. I didn’t know then what she meant.

Freddie Turner, one of the men who’s been laid off with Bob, says they may not take everybody back. Streamlining the operations, he said. He’s as bad as Bob for sucking on peppermint words to make the truth taste better. ‘Streamlining our department, and there’s those will be found redundant.’

‘Not our Bob,’ I said, for I never let gorillas like Fred see that I know what a baby I’ve got. ‘Bob will be the first to get his job back. They can’t run the place without him.’

Freddie made a vulgar sound, because his wife would never say anything like that about him, even for fun.

Emma and I often talk about Bob like that. He loves it. Last time she was here, when there was talk about the chance of a layoff, we were making all kinds of wonderful plans for him. How he was going to be acclaimed a genius because of the pictures he draws. All soldiers they are, and he colours them with crayons and pins them up round the walls. I took them down and burned them after I first saw Em’s flat, and what she had up for pictures, but Bob went ahead and did some more, so I let them be. At least they cover up the marks from the people before. They must have spent their spare time throwing lumps of bacon fat at the wallpaper.

He would have a one-man show, Bob would, and Em and I would wear little jewelled caps on the back of our heads and velvet dresses, the kind everyone looks pregnant in, so it wouldn’t matter about me.

He would be walking outside the Knightsbridge barracks one day and a Guards officer would come out and say: You’re just the type this country needs, my boy, and have him inside and into uniform without a second glance at his feet.

He would be taken on by a rival coachbuilding firm and push them so far ahead with his brilliance and industry that the man who sacked him would come in rags, on all fours, begging for a
job as cleaner, and Bob would let him sweep the floors with his moustache.

‘He hasn’t got one, Katie.’

‘His beard then.’

Emma and I had some laughs that night, like old times, and Bob was dear and chuckly, like I like him.

But now that it’s happened, and the dressing-table gone back - it was the first to go, I knew it would be, that Armenian is as hard as nails - it’s not so funny. I’m not going to let the T.V. go. They can kill me first. You try being cooped up here, I’ll say, with one baby out and one in and feeling sick all the time, and they’ll go Kchr-eechk with the knife and say: That will cure the sickness, madam. Bob likes the Westerns best. He sits in front of the set with a cap pistol and fires it off when they do. It drives Sammy frantic.

I didn’t pay the rent last week. Mrs P. was all right about it when I told her what had happened, but she gets a bit less all right every week, I’ve seen it. So when Bob sat there talking about chain reactions, smiling and nodding as if going down to the labour exchange twice a week was all he need do about getting a job, I had suddenly had it.

‘How do you know they’ll take you back?’ I said.

‘You said they would.’

‘Oh God, you hopeless idiot—’ But if he didn’t know when I was fooling, it was a waste of breath to tell him. ‘It may be weeks, months. Why don’t you
do
something? I’m fed up sick with having you sit about here all day eating caramels.’ Every time he puts one in his mouth, he looks in the bag to see how many are left. Every time. T can’t stand it any longer,’ I yelled at him. I’m almost six months gone now, so it’s natural to be hysterical.

‘What do you want me to do?’ He will never quarrel, not when he’s sober, and he is never drunk because he gets sick first.

‘Get out and do something. Go down to the library again and look at the job columns.’

‘All right, Katie.’ I watched him put on his raincoat and go out with the collar tucked in at one side, although I thought the public library was closed on a Saturday afternoon.

I wanted very badly to see Em. I would go and see Em and get
human again. She might have something for me. Not money. I’d never ask for money, in case she might mention that fifty pounds. I was afraid once it might come between us, but with someone like her, it wouldn’t. But she’ll give me a blouse sometimes, or a sweater, things she pretends she’s sick of. This old tatter, she’ll say. If I wear it to work any more, they’ll throw me out. It will do for me to mess about in, I say, and go off with that smashing red number that makes Barbie’s famous Dior copy look like the rubbish it is.