Kate and Emma (30 page)

‘What will you do when your husband comes home?’ asks Mrs Martin, who lives in part of the upstairs, very pushing, and is going to have to be told soon to keep her fat red nose out of my business.

She has a great gift for asking the wrong kind of question, a gift which she exercises at every chance, to keep her hand in.

‘If he’s got such a good job up north, why didn’t you go with him?’

‘Oh, you poor thing,’ she said, the first time she saw me from the back. ‘Did you burn yourself?’

‘I was born with it,’ I said, and turned my collar all the way down, so she could see better, and she said, ‘How shocking.’

How shocking. So I don’t wear scarves round the house now, so that she’ll have to see.

‘I heard the boy shrieking. Has he hurt himself?’ She stands at the top of the back stairs and yells down at me with her teeth out and legs like cider bottles and the toes of her dirty angora slippers over the edge of the top step.

I don’t really like her at all. Her husband, who is a postman I wouldn’t trust with a Christmas card, let alone valuables in the mail, is for ever hammering and drilling. They are wiring the insides of the walls so that when Bob comes back, they can listen in to what we say.

But everything will be all right when Bob comes home. He’ll get a good job, though he’s sunk himself with the Army now, I fear, and we’ll have some money again and get another bed, king size, if we want it, with a headboard done up in all brocade. Red.

Because the house is on a hill, part of the flat is half underground. That’s the sunny side, needless to say, and it’s underneath the front steps that rise up over what used to be the coal cellars, only they’re nailed up now, with bodies inside of people who’ve died of pneumonia down here.

Ours is called the garden flat. Where do you live? Oh - at the top of the hill. The garden flat, you know. And you can see me out there with one of those big flowered umbrellas, serving Earl Grey tea to the vicar.

He came, incidentally, looking for Ruth Sullivan - waste of time, with a name like that, I told him - a great starved man
with a face full of horror at what he’d found in the church, and scared the life out of me, asking me if I wouldn’t come and find it too.

The garden outside our flat is a junk heap, which was paradise for the kids at first, but it’s too cold now to play out there, and everything is covered with snow and frost. I picked up an old cast-iron frying-pan to see if I could use it, and it nearly burned my fingers off. Even the dog barks to come back in as soon as I put him out.

At the bottom of the garden, lopsided a little from the hill, is an old chicken shed where Sammy goes to play some of the time. I’d just as soon he was out of the house. He whines all the time, and cries for his dad. It’s sickening.

If it wasn’t for you, I tell him, your dad wouldn’t be locked up. Coughing, complaining of the cold. He did it for you, I tell him, and the least you can do is shut up grizzling.

He doesn’t grizzle when he’s up with the Sullivans. He’s sly, that’s where it is. He knows how to get round them for treats. And he knows how to drive me even farther round the bend than I am already, with the three of them, and the dread of the next.

BABY GIRL FOUND! ON CONVENT DOORSTEP
When Sister Mary of the Angels opened the back door to take in the milk, she thought she heard a kitten mewing. Then she saw a baby girl, apparently only a few days old, wrapped in newspaper in a canvas toolbag.

The Sullivans live in the big top flat, and like all women with a lot of children of her own, Ruth never minds a few more. She is going to take mine when I have to go to the hospital. Sam and Emily are up there half the time as it is, thank God. She gives them jelly squares and biscuits, and she has given me a few baby clothes because she says she’s finished, but I don’t think she is. She’s the kind of woman who suddenly produces another at forty-eight and gets photographed with it in the maternity ward, looking surprised.

Ruth Sullivan is not like Molly, with thousands of kids, but still managing to let her husband feel there’s room for him.

As if I didn’t have enough on my hands, she tells him, without you coming home demanding, though all the poor thing has done is come home from the lumber yard in a perfectly normal way and ask what’s for supper.

I like Ruth, because she’s kind, in a domineering way, and when you’re as tired as I am, you don’t mind so much being ordered about, but he’s the better of the two, though doomed to go through life unnoticed, because she makes so much noise being a wonderful mother and everybody’s friend.

She’s quite well known in the district. People say: Oh, you live in the same house as Ruth Sullivan. Isn’t she wonderful? but nobody seems to know Smiler.

His name is Ronnie, but she calls him Smiler, because he has a sad, rejected face, like a dog pressed against a locked door on a cold night. He is a big man, slow in his movements - he gets terribly in the way in their crowded flat - and with his shoulders hunched forward as if he was looking for something.

The first time I saw him, coming up the hill one evening while I was pushing the pram up from the other side, full of kids and firewood, my heart turned, because I thought it was Douglas.

I have never seen him since the day they separated us, like runaway lovers, in the coffee bar, but I have never forgotten him. A few steps nearer and I saw that Smiler wasn’t like him at all, because Doug’s face was stronger and more secret. It didn’t have his history written on it. But the stooping walk was the same, that’s what fooled me, and when Smiler saw the smile that had begun on my face, he smiled too, as if he had found what he was looking for.

I had stopped by the side path which leads round to my door, and he said, ‘Are you the little girl who moved into the downstairs? Hooray.’

I don’t know why anyone should hooray over me, with a shape like a sperm whale and three croupy kids, but Smiler and I have been friends from that time on. Ruth doesn’t mind. It gets him out of the way when he comes down to see me. He brings half a pint of milk that he’s lifted from the kitchen behind her back, and I make hot chocolate and we talk to each other. I haven’t had anyone to talk to for ages, not since Em. He can’t talk to his wife,
because she’s never still or silent long enough. So it’s someone to talk to, for both of us.

I thought at first that I would be able to talk to their eldest girl, who is about sixteen, and in some ways puts me in mind of me at that age.

Some people are in love with the world. Linda is in hate with the world, like I was for a time, only she’s got no reason. Her mother spoils her and her father daren’t cross her, because of it. She stays out half the night, with a gang of girls who all do their hair alike and wear the kind of sham-leather clothes I used to think were the ultimate before I changed my ideas, and when she’s at home she either sulks, or yells that it’s suffocating her and she’s being cheated.

What of? She’s got nothing to offer that I can see. But she’s young, and I wanted to be friends with her because I’m young too. I’m only twenty-two, but I’m old, old, old, and I don’t want to forget what it felt like to be sixteen and not give a damn.

But Linda’s got no time for me. I’m grown up. I’ve been caught by marriage and kids, so I’m one of Them, who’s done something or other to stop her getting whatever it is she thinks the world owes her for taking up air space.

I CAME HOME from Canada in late December, and I hope my mother appreciated - No. If she knew it was a sacrifice to stay in London to have Christmas with her and Connie instead of going to Scotland to have it with Joel, it wouldn’t be worth making.

Why doesn’t he come down here? they asked, especially Connie, because she is a ravaged, sex-hungry woman with the scalp showing through her hair, although she’s only been a widow a few years.

I pretended that Joel couldn’t get leave. It was not fair to initiate him into the family gathering at Uncle Mark’s, with Nell breastfeeding her baby in the room where you put your coat (she’s gone from weirdo to peasant since marrying a scientist), and poor Gran not quite with it, and the stray relations who come out from under stones to have a feed at Uncle Mark’s expense.

It was my first Christmas in England since I went to America. In other years, my father had been there to make it human. This year, no one mentioned him. When Uncle Mark gave the toast to Absent Friends, my mother looked hopeful, because she is still rather dedicated, like a general’s relict, and Connie cleared her throat threateningly, but Uncle Mark shoved his glass into his beard, and that was that.

Derek and I got a little drunk and went for a walk on the Heath, and kissed each other with dispassionate passion, which did us both good, I thought, so it was just as well that Joel wasn’t there.

The next day, Connie told me that I would ruin my skin if I drank too much. I didn’t tell her that she had ruined Uncle Mark’s party by refusing to drink his beautiful wine and leaving selections of her food in a ring round the edge of her plate. It wasn’t true. The party was ruined by my father not being there.

Connie is not so bad as she ought to be, considering her habits. She makes rugs all the time, which is peaceful, and she and my mother enjoy quite a lot of rapport, decrying this and that. They talk of moving to the country and buying a loom.

When Joel came to London, he got on beautifully with both of them, as he always does, because people are meat and drink to his vitality, so never bores. He gave my mother the jollying treatment, and she said afterwards, ‘He’s not a bit what I expected.’

‘What did you expect?’

‘Well, an American - I thought I wouldn’t know how to talk to him,’ she said, and I realized that she had been afraid.

When we are married, she will come to visit us - Connie can stay behind with the loom - and I shall be much nicer to her. It will be easier, with Joel. His tolerance is natural, rather than an attempt to understand. To be what he thinks I am, I have to hide my cruel devil.

He wants me to give up my job. I shall have to in the end, but not yet. I am at the London office, planning the layout of the first of the new B.B. markets in Leeds. I must just see this one through, I tell him. But then there will be another, in Sheffield, and then another. Not much of a marriage, and what happens when Joel gets sent back to the States?

Then I shall be an Air Force wife, planning nothing more challenging than Wives’ Club teas, with the bread dyed blue to match the napkins, and high-chested women in hats or hair spray in charge of the ornate teapots from the Chancery Lane silver vaults, whose owners have sat up half the night poking toothpicks into the scrolls and crevices.

I shall be one of the healthily pregnant women disparaging the marvellous cheap clothes and china in the PX, and pushing a cart with a small rude child in it round the commissary. But the drugged look on my face will not be the normal supermarket coma. It will be nostalgia for the days when I was not a customer, but a power behind the scenes who could design you a far better commissary, right from the day the first bulldozers moved on to the empty land.

Before Joel went back to Scotland, I took him to see my father. He and Benita live near Ham Common. They have a little old brick house in a narrow lane with high garden walls and no proper street lights. My mother, who has driven past it in dark glasses and a hat pulled down like a pre-war spy, says that it doesn’t compare to our tiled and timbered house with the view; but it does. It is very small, but it belongs there. Our house never properly belonged on the side of that gentle Kentish hill. It sat on the chalky earth like a townee at a picnic, and the earth resented it.

At the green gate in the walled lane, I hung back, and Joel took my hand and said, ‘Don’t be afraid. I’m with you.’

‘I’m not afraid.’ I pulled my hand away to open the gate. How could he not see it? It was because he was with me that I didn’t want to go in. It would hurt that I had never come here on my own; only when I had the trophy of Joel to show him.

All right, I had wanted to hurt him. Now I didn’t. There was no point.

I like Benita. I knew I would. That is one reason why I haven’t been before. She’s supposed to be the enemy. I had thought she might daunt me with sophistication, but my youthful memory of her was exaggerated. She looks and smells and sounds good, but not in a way that makes you feel you look and smell and sound terrible yourself.

Joel was very happy and casual, but with his father and mother
both divorced and married again, this kind of situation is standard. I was tense. I tried not to try too hard, but I knocked things over, first some books on a little one-legged table, then my drink.

My father said, ‘Thank God for that, anyway. I was afraid you wouldn’t be like my daughter any more.’

Benita frowned, and he said, ‘She told me not to get sentimental.’

‘I should have told you not to have three martinis,’ she said, with the smile that really knows him, not the tight, tentative smile with which my mother used sometimes to approach him, unsure of her reception.

Connie, and my mother too, secretly, for all her public loyalty, might like to hear that he had gone to seed, drinking too much, ruined by adultery. But he looked very healthy, younger even, and less tired. He had had three drinks because he was afraid of me.

My mother had been afraid of Joel. My father was afraid of me. Joel, with his sociable face that no one would hate and no one would paint, and his animal eagerness to like, Joel was a relief. I could see that. My father was glad for me. Very glad, as if he felt absolved for helping me to break my heart over Tom.

Why can’t I be glad for him? He isn’t the same man, that’s all. Or is it not he who has changed, but my vision of him?

‘Oh, by the way,’ he said, after we had been in the house for a while, and I was beginning dangerously to relax and let him woo me, ‘I forget to tell you.’

‘What?’ I was comfortable and warm. I have only been in England a few weeks, but I know already that this winter, if you are warm somewhere, it’s all you ask. This winter, some of the subtleties of living have gone overboard in the struggle against the vicious cold that grips this helpless country in an iron hand.