Kate and Emma (2 page)

I spent the whole day with Mr Jordan. He went imperturbably in and out of one-room flats and basements and the odd little broken-down cottages that still hide in London corners. I tagged along behind him, stumbling with cold, and gave sweets to the sitting children and tried not to look like a social worker.

Why not? I want to help, but I don’t want to be labelled. Yet I am labelled already. Emma Bullock. What else could she be but a social worker? I will now call for a few words from our secretary, Miss Emmaline Bullock, whose wonderful work among the unemployed weavers of the Meon Valley is such an inspiration to us all.

Why should I mind? This is probably the only country in the world where the name do-gooder is risible, like vicar. I don’t want to do good to people. I want to feel things about them, like my heavy-headed boy. If you start doing, you might have to stop feeling.

One of the places we went to that day, that numbing day, when I cried afterwards at Charing Cross, with my hands turning from yellow to blue to red in a basin of warm water, was a house with the top floor shut off and a piece of old tent over the hole in the roof, and miles of unworn clean clothes on strings across the kitchen ceiling. Heels sank a good half-inch into the filth on the floor, and it was a marvel that the crawling baby had not died of septicaemia.

One of the boys had stolen some coppers from a wishing-well at an exhibition. How had he got in? By waiting near the ticket office until a simple customer arrived, then asking the price of entrance
and looking so crestfallen at the answer that the simpleton paid for him.

‘That’s how he gets in to the cartoons and newsreels,’ his mother said quite proudly.

Three and ninepence he had got, in pennies and halfpennies, and he was due in my father’s court next week.

He was such a lovely little liar, all fanned-out lashes and gritty dimples, that I took the day off from the business college where I am taking a course forced on me by my Uncle Mark, who runs the family firm, and went to court with my father.

He was pleased. He wants me to be interested, and he likes me for an audience. He never had my mother, even when he was a rather theatrical junior counsel, because the courts are full of the kind of people she resents, both in the dock and out of it.

In the magistrates’ room we waited for Miss Draper, who was on the bench with him today. Miss Draper used to be headmistress of a girls’ school, and she is in love with my father, which doesn’t stop her being late for his courts. She has been late for everything all her life, including all the fearful joys.

She came crashing into the room in a hat like a Russian delegate’s and a coat like buffalo hide.

‘Don’t tell me I’m late again!’

‘I don’t have to,’ my father said rudely. ‘You can read the clock.’

She would have blushed if her skin had been thin enough to transmit colour, and I shook hands with her to make her feel better. My father put on his juvenile-court face, judicial but humane, and started off for the courtroom without asking Miss Draper if she was ready. She struggled out of the heavy coat and followed him, and I followed her. Everyone stood up when we went in, including a nervous couple sitting with a fat baby in the middle of the room, and a vital hairpin fell out of my head and down inside my collar.

I sat beside the Magistrates’ Clerk, at right angles to the long table where my father and Miss Draper sit, and the Honourable R. F. D. Goghill too, when his presence graces the court.

A juvenile court is not like a proper courtroom, apart from managing to be airless and cold at the same time. It is quite a small room with ordinary tables and chairs where the policemen and probation officers and people from the Council sit, and the children
stand in front of the Bench which isn’t a bench, with their parents sitting behind them. It is supposed to be not frightening for them, but mostly they are terrified, except the hardened cases, who behave as if this were merely a rehearsal for the real thing later on at the Old Bailey.

It transpired that the nervous couple were there to adopt the baby, and would have been taken to the magistrates’ room if my father had not hurried in before the Clerk called him because he wanted to make Miss Draper feel that she had been holding him up.

So they both had to go back again. He turned to take his stick off the back of the chair, and I could see that he was annoyed, although he pretended to be forbearing, which was great of him, considering it was his fault.

He looked tired. Now that the skin is loosening into little folds under his eyes, he sometimes looks sad. In other years, when he was a barrister, busy and mobile, making a production out of even his dullest clients, his face did not look as if it could ever slip into sadness. The only time I caught him crying, after my brother was drowned at Poldhu, his face was red and tortured as if tears were too difficult. But now it is folding into a slight melancholy, although, as far as I know, he is content.

He has enough money and enough work in the legal department of a chemical firm to bring him to town most days of the week, and his house and terraced garden have the finest view there is only twenty miles from London. He has come to terms with his leg, and he has come to terms with his marriage, which is to say that what he can’t alter he accepts. His elder daughter is married to a man without an accent, and her children have their thumbs growing in the right places. Even I, who nearly killed everyone by getting kidnapped at thirteen, am growing into the semblance of a woman, and I am neither pregnant nor a drug addict nor in love with a married African revolutionary, like some of the girls we know.

The Clerk of the Court, whose wife sends him out smelling of camphor, gave me a case list. The little liar of the wishing-well was about half-way down.

At the top were three or four girls of fifteen and sixteen, listed as Care or Prot., which usually means that they have been found in a coffee bar, or a transport café, or penniless in a railway station.

My father and Miss Draper came back, and the Warrant Officer brought in the first girl. ‘Mother is present.’

‘Where is the father?’ asked mine.

The mother said shrilly, prepared to air all the grievances of her married life, that he had left her two years ago, and my father grunted and nodded, as if he would have done the same. His nod put the woman into a chair, where she sat clutching her handbag like a bomb, challenging the Bench to make one move and she’d throw it, and the girl stood out in front of her, exposed all round and looking sullen. There was plenty to expose. She had been found fifty miles from home with some soldiers, but the experience had taken no weight off her.

She would not talk to my father. She bit her lip and hung her head and clenched her fat fists at the sides of her cracked leather skirt, which was as big from hip to hip as from waist to hem. She might have talked to Miss Draper, who has quite a reassuring way with her, like a slow farm animal, but Miss Draper does not often get a chance to ask questions. She writes things in a ledger, and nods or shakes her head, and pretends to compress a laugh if my father makes a joke, and from time to time he leans over and they consult without moving their lips or looking at each other, like television panellists.

‘Come forward, Mother,’ my father said. He calls the women Mother because he can’t remember their names, and he thinks it is insulting to stop and look for it on the case notes, although I think it is more insulting to call them all Mother, as if they were in a labour ward.

The mother talked, a dirge of complaints, and the girl did not look at her. Parents and children hardly ever look at each other in the juvenile court. It is as if each were equally ashamed of the other, although the parents usually do their best for the children, however much they may have threatened them with the Law beforehand. When it actually strikes, they are always ‘So surprised’ at the theft, or ‘Can’t understand’ why he cheated the railway, since he has always been a good boy and had only to ask at home if he was short.

When my father asked the fat girl whether she wanted to go home, she shook her shaggy head.

‘You’d rather live somewhere else, Arleena?’ He pronounced it carefully, as seriously as if it were Joan. A few years in the juvenile court, and you can tackle any name.

Although the mother had said nothing in favour of her daughter, she now took a step forward, as if she were going to lob the bomb into my father’s lap, and cried, ‘You can’t put her away!’

‘We’re not going to “put her away”,’ he said, putting irritable quotes round it, although he has heard the phrase so often that it should not bother him any more. ‘Holly Lodge is a hostel, not a prison.’ He explained the Order that he was going to make, talking to the girl, not the mother, which he always does, even with the morose ones, so they won’t feel that things are going on over their heads.

‘If her dad had stayed to his duty, this wouldn’t have happened,’ the mother said, chewing on her spite. ‘Ask me if I’ve had a penny from him since. Just ask me that, if you don’t mind!’

‘I do mind,’ my father said, with the kind of shocking urbanity he shouldn’t use here.

‘They don’t care,’ the woman said to no one, and followed her daughter out of the court, feeling worse than when she went in.

Children came and went, frightened, rebellious, unbalanced, shifty. Parents trooped in and out - gangs of them sometimes, if several boys were involved together. The women had bags like week-end luggage, and red hands from waiting in the cold hall. The fathers had belted overcoats like tubs, and were flawless patriarchs who had always upheld the difference between right and wrong.

A boy had stolen a motorbike because he was bored. A girl had stayed out all night because she was fed up. Another had been lodging with the Indian lodger. A ten-year-old in heels and stockings more ladders than nylon had been to school four times in seventy days. A whiskered Zen Buddhist had picked a pocket. A boy with acne like leprosy had broken probation for the sake of a packet of cigarettes. It was a normal morning.

My wishing-well boy, scrubbed up a bit and wearing some of the clean clothes so jealously hoarded on the ceiling strings, lied freely and sweetly, while his mother sat back and nodded and smiled, as if she believed him.

My father, who has a very beautiful smile, lifting like a bird’s wing, his eyes very deeply blue, played along with him, liking him for his sparkle and cheek. He and the boy threw charm at each othe for a while until my father suddenly tired of it, and rapped at the boy that he would send him away to be disciplined.

The boy backed away as if he had touched fire. My father has done this at home. As children, the excitement of a wild game with him was heightened by uncertainty, and I have seen him romp with a dog and then suddenly slap it hard on the jaw; but I didn’t think he would do it in court, and I was afraid of what would happen.

Nothing. Smoothly he had substituted Probation even before the Children’s Officer had finished clearing his throat for a polite protest, and I saw that the others in the room only thought he was acting, to teach the boy a lesson. I was the only one who knew it was a flash of cruelty. And the boy knew.

I didn’t want to stay any longer. I caught my father’s eye and tilted my head at the door, and he raised an eyebrow which meant would I lunch with him, and I put my hand on my waist which meant I wasn’t eating today, and I was just getting up to slide out of the door behind him when the girl came in.

The Warrant Officer had her by the arm, as if she had tried to run for it outside. She shook him off, with a quick sideways look of pride on her small blunt face, and went to stand in front of my father with the toes of her thin shoes exactly in line, as if she had been there before.

I was half out of my chair, but I sat down again. She was another Care or Prot., a little younger than me, short, with a childish figure, and not very clean. Her lips were almost as pale as her skin, her wary eyes were ludicrously pencilled, and her chopped saffron hair had been roughly back-combed into an attempt at a good shape. Her legs were bare, the light hair on them standing out with cold, and her clothes looked as if she had snatched them off a younger sister.

She stood staring through my father and biting her nails, although there was nothing left to bite.

‘I saw you two weeks ago, didn’t I?’ My father had his hands
clasped on the table and his head slightly tilted, trying to put her at her ease, because she was rigid with antagonism.

‘Yes.’

The children never call my father Sir, although most of the parents do, either from right or ingratiation.

‘And you’ve been at Pinkney House. Let’s see what they say about you. “Fairly cooperative as long as everything goes her way … poor attention to work, either daydreaming or sulking … slightly aggressive.” Yes, well.’ My father laid down the Remand Home report and looked at the girl over the top of his glasses before he took them off. ‘Not very good, is it?’

She shook her head, keeping the immature chin tilted up.

‘You were remanded to Pinkney because your parents weren’t here last time. Why weren’t you here, Father?’

The man had a stubble of greying hair like the top of a barrister’s wig, and flat, elliptical eyes too close together above a brutalized nose. He licked his lips and put his hands on his knees truculently, with the thumbs outside. ‘I couldn’t get off work.’

‘Stand up.’ The Warrant Officer nudged him, and he stood reluctantly, folding his short arms for comfort, which made him look more uncomfortable.

‘Did you ask?’

‘I’m on the vans, see.’

My father raised one eyebrow, and decided not to pursue it. ‘And the mother - where is she?’

‘She couldn’t come. Look, she’s got the kids, and the shop too. How could she come with Kate not there to see to it?’

‘If Katherine were at home, there would be no need for anyone to come here,’ my father said mildly, and the man’s belligerence bounced back at him unused, and reddened the folds of bristled skin above his shrunken collar.

Katherine. Kate. She attracted me. Why? She was undernourished and grubby and childish, and a policewoman had found her with a much older man in a place known as a Club, for want of any other label. It was not sudden attraction, not something jumping out excitedly from yourself like a flying-fish at the outspoken call of a stranger. It stayed within myself. There was no discovery. I seemed to know her quite well. When the other girls had stood
there, with the same kind of story, I could watch, listen, try to imagine what it was like to be them and to have had their kind of life. With her, it was oddly as if I knew.