Kate and Emma (26 page)

‘None of your business, ducky,’ she said, suddenly flippant. She leaned forward to the baby and, as her frail neck came out of the scarf, the dark red stain was like a punishing hand laid on her.

I didn’t know what to do. There was only one thing I wanted to do, so I did it. Outside a public house, I went into a telephone box that smelled of every bad thing the human race purveys, and dialled the number of Tom’s office.

‘Who wants him, please?’ A new voice. Sheila’s private eye must have been fired when I left the scene.

‘Miss Weir.’

I’m sorry, he’s not in this afternoon.’ Why the
hell
can’t they tell you that right away instead of building you up with Who wants him? ‘Can I take a message?’

‘No thank you. No message. Don’t bother to tell him I called. It’s not important.’

Time was, when I was in a bad way, that I used to go to my father. Sometimes he understood and sometimes he didn’t. Sometimes he would give the time to listen properly and sometimes he wouldn’t. But he was there. He was someone I could go to.

When you have no one to go to, where do you go? When children have no one who wants them, they turn up on Johnny Jordan’s doorstep. I turned up there that evening, just as supper was coming to the table, and was absorbed easily into the meal with no fuss or surprise.

No one asked me why I had come. They were glad that I had. I was home from America, and so I had come to see them. They were having roast beef, and Nancy had made her first apple turnovers, so it was a good day for me to be there.

The girl has two long brown pigtails like I had at her age. They come forward into the food, and she keeps flipping them to the back of her shoulders, as I remember doing. Sometimes when she is thinking, she puts the end of one of them into her mouth. I used to do that, and my father used to cry out sometimes that if I didn’t stop eating my hair, he would cut it off. Once, when I forgot
just after he had shouted, and he thought I did it on purpose, he came at me with the huge pair of scissors from his desk. Not in fun. I believe he would have chopped the pigtails off then, if I hadn’t run away.

Nancy’s father doesn’t shout. He says patiently: Don’t suck your hair, and she says: I didn’t know I was.

I know just how it tastes at that age. I still suck the ends of mine occasionally, but it doesn’t taste as good when you are grown up.

Nancy and her mother both have round country faces with high colouring, and big easy laughs. When they laugh, they look at each other, like a duet. Johnny is much quieter.

‘He’s shy,’ Jean says. ‘You wouldn’t believe this man was so shy, some of the places he goes to. Remember those people, Johnny, who lived in that old bus behind the railway yards, and no one ever knew she had a child? Like a little savage, it was, when you brought it home. It bit me.

‘No one but this stupid idiot would have gone in there,’ she told me, with her affectionate mixture of pride and abuse. ‘The man had a knife out, but never mind that, our boy goes right in, like a Jap.’

‘Doesn’t sound very shy,’ I said, for it is all right in this house to talk about and around Johnny. He sits with the sweet smile softening his square boxer’s jaw, turning his eyes thoughtfully from one to the other, as you speak.

‘Just as long as the customers don’t find it out,’ Jean said. ‘They’re scared of him.’

‘They’re not,’ Nancy said, bringing cups of coffee from the stove. ‘When I took that box of shoes to Mrs Richardson, and told her I thought the boys had ringworm, she said: “You send your father next time, miss. He don’t notice these little details.” ‘

When Jean went upstairs to wash Nancy’s hair, I knew that I should go, and not burden the contented household with the things that had gone wrong for me. But my legs would not push me out of the chair, and my voice would not say the words of leaving. I sat on at the table in the yellow and white kitchen, and Johnny made me another cup of coffee and sat down again to consider me.

‘You’ve changed,’ he said. ‘A bit.’

People say that when you come back from America. They say it without admiration, to stop you telling of transatlantic joys and marvels they don’t want to hear. They tell you that you have an American accent, helpfully, as if it were a smut on your nose.

Johnny was not thinking about America, however. He said, ‘Last time we saw you, that night I found you at the bus stop with your hair blowing round your face in that cold wind, you were - how shall I say it? - restless. Keyed up. Nervous, I thought. As if you—’ he laughed without opening his mouth— ‘had been up to something.’

He is more perceptive than you would think, Johnny Jordan. That’s why he has this job.

‘Baby-sitting for my friend Kate, that’s all,’ I said lightly. He is the sort of man it’s hard to lie to. Not because he is righteous. He might lie like a demon to get himself out of a jam, or avoid a scene. You can’t be in the Army as long as he has and not learn that. But because he makes you feel you do it badly.

So I dropped that, and asked what I had been wanting to all evening, only Kate was something between him and me and I didn’t want to bring Jean into it. ‘Are you still seeing Kate’s mother, the woman who keeps that shop in Butt Street?’

‘Not any more. I had rather good luck with her, as a matter of fact.’

He never says that he was successful, or has got people to do what he wants. When he achieves marvels with the lost and the hopeless, it’s always a fluke, a bit of luck that just happened to come his way.

‘The man got a job with a moving company. I happened to know someone in the firm I could send him to, and I got the little girl into the special school in the end. It was stubbornness really that the mother wouldn’t see she needed help. She wouldn’t admit to herself there was anything wrong. So I had to be a bit brutal. I forced her to see it and, in the end, she was glad to have the decision made for her. It’s often like that. They’re at the end of their rope, some of these women. They’ve had too much, and they’re in a state that they can’t let go. They won’t let you help, and then suddenly they break, and they let you have it all. The thing is to know when to give it back to them. She’ll be all right
now, I think. She has some strength. She made her mistake years ago, marrying that chap. She could have been a different kind of woman, I thought.’

‘What did she do to Kate?’

‘I don’t know. She never talked about her.’

‘Kate hates her. And him. Did you know he deliberately burned her? That was the final thing that made her run away.’

‘I knew there had been some ill-treatment. That was in the case notes. But the girl hadn’t said much, and it was vague. It was the other kids I was checking on anyway, and she seems to be quite decent to them. It’s often just the one, like that. Sometimes it goes back to the same kind of treatment in the mother’s childhood. Almost as if they tried to get their own back in some unreasonable, useless way.’

I did not say anything. Kate is not on his beat now, and even if she were, I would not tell him. She had been persecuted enough. I would have to get up the nerve myself to talk to her about Sammy. Our Miss Bullock, so conscientious in her field work. But our Miss Bullock can’t forget that she saw terror flash into a child’s eyes.

I got up to go, and Johnny said that he would call Jean down to say goodbye. For something to say, he asked me what I was going to do, and when I said I thought I was going back to America, he said, ‘Was this a holiday for you then, coming back now?’

I hesitated, standing in the narrow hall with the red and blue patterned carpet and the bright infested wallpaper. I hung on to the flat swirl of polished ginger wood where the banister ended, and tried to stop myself telling him about my father.

It was a stale squib of news. It shattered no one. Joel had said, ‘He would do it just when I’m hoping to get leave.’ Kate had shrugged and hardly heard, and started to talk about herself.

Jean came down the stairs in an apron, smiling, and I looked up at her, and then I looked back at Johnny Jordan, too big and muscular for his little over-decorated hall, frowning at me because I had opened my mouth to say something and no words came out.

‘What is it, Emma?’

I told them. Suddenly they break, he had said, and let you have
it all. I broke. I let them have it, weeping as hysterically as any of his unbalanced women, living too near the edge.

He put his arm round me, not like my father, because he is much taller and more secure, and I yelled stupidly into his shirt, ‘He cheated me, he let me down!’

Jean put me to bed, telephoned my mother, and said that the car had broken down and I was staying with friends. I slept until the next midday. When I woke and dressed, Johnny and Jean were both out. Nancy was home from school, getting her own lunch, and I realized that I had spent the night in her bed.

‘Where did you sleep?’

‘On the sofa, I often have. We had two pairs of twins once in my bed, the night the Buildings burned.’

I knew that I should stay with my mother, if I was the right kind of daughter, but I was the wrong kind, and I couldn’t stay with her.

My father was letting her have the house. ‘You can’t say he’s not been generous, Emma,’ she said, because her sickening line now is to try to change my attitude towards him.

She is always dropping in a good word, in the special soft voice she uses for talking about him. If she goes on talking about him like this, as if he were dead, what will she have left to say when he really does die? Perhaps she will die first, of boredom and lack of purpose, and he will live on into his nineties, the old goat, in the health and bloom of sin.

Ninety. That will make Benita about seventy-six, if she stays the course. Well preserved, she’ll be, like plums in brandy, and spend too much on clothes. I shall be a raw-boned and leathery colonel’s wife of fifty-seven, with Joel at the Pentagon, giving buffet suppers at my split-level in Arlington and pretending I have a maid.

My mother is going to sell the house. It was when she told me, that I realized absolutely that I can’t stay with her. I realized then how much the house inevitably means, reeking as it is with the lives of all of us. All the things I detest about it - the pathetically disguised suburbanness, the fake country view, the gloss and the tidiness and the things replaced or re-covered or re-painted as soon as they began to get shabby - even these are part of the
essence of the house, my home. They could even, if the house were to be loved, be loved along with it, as you can absorb a beloved person’s bow legs or taste in clothes.

With the house gone, and my mother’s unsubde taste in decorating transferred to a flat in Hampstead near Aunt Millicent, I knew I couldn’t make it. If it was claustrophobia in the house, it would be padded cells in a flat.

Uncle Mark took me out to the kind of lunch he has every day, which is why he has to stay late at the office and loses a secretary every few months, and asked me what I wanted to do.

I told him the truth. I can, these days. It is surprising how, as you grow up, your most impersonal relations become human. He said that he would get me off the hook, and ordered a heavy claret and talked business for the rest of lunch, since we had exhausted the subject of my mother over the prawn cocktails.

He has plans for me in the firm. He is going to spread out into Canada, with a B.B. supermarket in a Toronto suburb, as a guinea-pig to see how he can compete. The Canadians are very American in their shopping habits, although they would kill you if you said so, because they see the Great Lakes as a barrier wider than the Atlantic; so if Uncle Mark goes on getting good accounts of me from friend Ralph in New York, he may send me up there to work on the layout.

‘She can’t fiddle about, Laura,’ he told my mother. ‘I sent her to America for at least two years - at her request, incidentally, and David’s - and she’ll stay there as long as I want her to. She’s beginning to be useful to me at last.’

Words a mother should be proud to hear.

‘She’s all I’ve got now.’ If you put long felt ears on my mother, she could look like a bloodhound.

‘She’s working for me. Just because David chooses to make a fool of himself, she’s not going to mess about with her career - or my business.’

Although I had already told my mother that I would not be with her in the new flat, she pretended dismay. ‘Then I’ll have to reconsider all my plans,’ she said. ‘I had so much in mind for her room. Off-white rug - Emma’s much more careful these days. The dressing-table in sprigged muslin. I saw it at Peter Jones’.’

‘Buy it,’ Uncle Mark said, as crisply as he can say anything through his beard, which muffles and softens the edges of words a little, after they leave his hedged lips. ‘I’m not sending her to Siberia. She’ll need her room with you. I’ll see that she gets plenty of leave, and help with the fare too.’ He is trying to make up to her for his brother, but it is hard going. ‘Shell be home with you a lot. Everything will work out splendidly, don’t you think?’

‘I shall be very lonely,’ my mother said, in the flat voice that puts an end to all jollying. ‘I may have to buy a pekinese.’

EM CAME BACK to say goodbye, and Mr Zaharian, who keeps his door open to watch out for all comers, greeted her like an old friend. He is always pleased to see anyone coming up the stairs, even Norma, who laughs at him and won’t say anything, just laughs and keeps on walking, and Phyll Conroy who won’t let her boys go in his room for sweets, but they go anyway.

We heard the racket of him crying: ‘Aha! and how are you, lady?’ and Bob said: ‘Who the hell is that?’ He was blocking in a picture of hussars in a colouring book. I had bought him some new crayons that morning. He’s easy to keep amused, I’ll say that, but the kids are going to have it rough keeping him away from their toys as they get older. He bought Sam some tin paratroops, Christmas, but guess who plays with them.

Mr Zaharian knocked on our door with his bloodstone ring that Sammy likes to suck. I yelled, ‘Come on in!’ because I was doing the wash, and he flung open the door with a grin and cried: ‘Your girl friend!’ - when I’m rich I’ll have him in a turban and red sash, announcing guests at my receptions - and there was Em grinning too, with her arms full of parcels and flowers.