Kate and Emma (36 page)

I wrapped him in the cleanest of the blankets and Johnny and the doctor went off to the nearest magistrate to get a Place of Safety Order which would give them the right to put Sammy into the hospital.

I stayed behind to tell Kate what we had done. Waiting for her, alone in the tomb of the flat with the sleeping babies, I knew that it was going to take more courage than I have ever needed.

If I had stayed with Molly, instead of coming back to London, I would have been in Scotland on Sunday. When I telephoned Joel on Saturday night to tell him not to meet the train, I told him briefly what had happened, and he was suitably shocked. Well, I was shocked too. Sick with shock. So why should his reaction sound wrong? Why shouldn’t he say, If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s cruelty to a kid’? Everybody says it.

That’s what was wrong.

‘I’ll have to stay here for a bit, Joel.’

‘But the dance is on Friday. Our dance.’

‘I’ll be there.’

‘I want you now.’

‘I can’t leave Kate just now.’

‘Does she need you?’

‘She needs someone.’ No reason to tell him that she had thrown a milk bottle at me and called me a double-crossing bitch.

‘I’ve got to stay. I must go to the hospital too.’

‘I said come tomorrow.’

‘All right.’

Johnny said, ‘Of course you must, Emma. After last night, you’re better away. It won’t do her any good to see you till she calms down. Was she drunk, do you think?’

‘I thought so, a little. I don’t know where she’d been. I don’t know - she wasn’t like Kate at all. She screamed at me as if I was someone else. I’ve never heard her like that. Yes … Yes, I have though. Once years ago at Mollyarthur’s, when something set her off about her mother and she shouted and raved with her eyes shut and fell down.’

‘I was round this morning,’ Johnny said, ‘to tell her where the boy was, and see what I should do about the other children. She’s all right. And the little girls seemed quite happy. She was making them a breakfast of eggs cooked in butter. And there was cream for the cornflakes. Plenty of cream. But no milk. No bread. No chairs round the table.’

‘That’s Kate.’ I looked at him. His face doesn’t often give away what he thinks. ‘Don’t be disgusted with her, Johnny. I’m trying not to be. But what she did - I’ll never forget it, when I opened the door and you shone the torch. When I think of it and see it and smell it, I want to kill her, trample her out like a filthy crawling thing.’

‘You’re about all she’s got,’ Johnny said. ‘If you give her up now, it’s the end of her.’

‘I know.’

With Joel, I could forget a little. It is a very gay Base, with parties somewhere almost every night, and the grey stone villages in the valley transformed, a little nostalgically for me, by the Air Force families who live there.

Bright ski pants in the tiny store, where the post-mistress guards her stamps and postal orders behind a fire screen stapled to the counter. Absurd powerful cars crawling in the lanes behind Mrs McKenzie’s little green van with the bread and the evening papers. A yellow school bus, shipped from the States, flashing red lights as the girls in thick white socks and saddle shoes jump
down with their arms showily full of books they have no intention of opening. The Base cinema, where airmen in parkas with big fur collars throw popcorn undiscriminatingly at the officers while they wait for the first show to let out. Joel in his uniform and his short furry haircut, looking like Joel on Cape Cod. Proud of me. Sure of me. Talking about our children.

When I marry him, it will be escape. I shall start again, in America or wherever they send him, and there will be no more tormented loves or loyalties to tear me apart.

On Thursday, I was in the little hotel by the water, dressing to go with Joel to a cocktail party, when the girl from the bar, who is everything else besides, put her head round the door and asked me to take a call from London.

I went down with my hair loose, and heard Johnny’s voice.

‘What’s happened?’ Instantly it was all a dream, the parties, the yellow school bus, the escape. I was caught in the painful pincers of reality. ‘What’s wrong?’ He wouldn’t call me unless something had gone wrong. He was always frugally surprised by the nonchalance with which Joel and I made telephone calls up and down the length of the British Isles.

‘Nothing. I just thought you’d like to know. Sammy came out of the hospital today.’

‘How is he?’ I should have been there. Walking down the shining corridor with a parcel of new clothes for him. Through the swing doors and into the ward of railed cots and nursery-rhyme screen to where he waited, avidly, to see a face he knew.

‘A bit weak, of course, and nervous. But there’s nothing really wrong with him that feeding and care won’t put right. He’s in the Home out by the reservoir. I took him there. They like him.’

‘They’d better.’

‘Yes. Well—’ Johnny was never any good at the telephone, and worse at this distance. ‘Got much snow up there’? I was reminded of Tom calling me across the Atlantic, when we talked about the weather.

‘I just thought I’d tell you. I have to get him into Care, you know. His case is coming up in the juvenile court tomorrow.’

‘I thought it would be next week.’

‘Not now he’s out of hospital. Tomorrow.’

‘Friday,’ I said. ‘My father’s court.’

‘Yes. Your father’s court.’ There was a pause. ‘Perhaps,’ Johnny said, ‘it’s as well you can’t be there.’

We said our goodbyes, and I went back to my room and plaited my hair listlessly, not yet knowing how I was going to wear it. I felt left out. Useless. Superfluous. It was all going on without me, the important things. There was nothing I could do, but God knows I hated the idea of Kate in court again, and this time not the victim.

The faces would condemn her. They shouldn’t be surprised. They’d seen everything, and worse than this, but still the faces would condemn, and my father would be too hard.

So often, the cases are on the border - parent, child, whose fault is it? - so that when he gets a clear-cut case with facts like this, he tries to make an example. I’ve seen him do it: This kind of thing absolutely will not be tolerated. People have got to learn that they can’t, etc., etc.

Pointless. There are no public seats. The people connected with the other cases are outside. His audience in the small room are only afficionados who are already on the side of the law.

Sammy would be all right. He would be brought in and looked at with a sympathy not shocked enough to be unprofessional, and the students at the back would make notes.

But Kate would be there alone on the hard chair in the middle of the room, defiant and graceless and probably rude, and no one would be on her side.

She would sit on one side of the benches outside in the draughty tiled hall, with the mothers’ work-swollen hands turning red-purple on the way to blue, if the list moved slowly, and some of them would know each other, and so would the string of unrepentant boys who had defrauded London Transport of ninepence and the red-haired girls who truanted, coming back and back. But Kate would not know anybody.

They would know about her, because they know everything, the women to whom my father’s court is no more intimidating than the headmaster’s room at the secondary school. They would know that she was the reason why the Cruelty Man was there. They had seen him. Hullo, Mr Jordan, how’s business? And they would
treat her like prisoners treat a man convicted of raping a child - with a righteous unloading of guilt on to someone whose guilt is so much greater.

When Joel came up to my room, I was packing. He didn’t notice that at first. He said, ‘You can’t go to the Weidners’ like that. You look like an ad for the Shawmut Bank’. He pulled the thick braid tight round my neck like a rope, and kissed me.

‘I’m not going,’ I said.

I don’t often see Joel angry. He is the kind of man to whom enraging things don’t usually happen. Cars run constantly for him, and tyres keep their air. His parents give no trouble. His senior officers don’t oppress him, and the men in his crew don’t make ghastly mistakes. I have never infuriated him. But when I told him why I had to go to London, he was white with fury, and his relaxed and happy mouth was tight and brutal.

‘If you go,’ he said, ‘you can’t get back for the dance.’

‘I know.’

‘I planned this for ages. Our big moment.’

‘I know you did. I’m so sorry. I know how you wanted it to be. But it doesn’t make any difference in the end. To us, I mean.’

‘The hell it doesn’t. You’re running out on me. That’s what it comes to.’

‘But I can’t run out on Kate. You must see that.’

‘I see one thing. You put that vicious little tramp before me.’

‘I put her before the dance, that’s all. Whatever she’d done, if she’d done murder, I’d still go to see her. She’s alone. She’s got no one, and she’s got to go through this in court. Of course that’s more important than a party. With balloons and drunken colonels.’ I shouldn’t have said that. I wasn’t supposed to mind the squadron commander letting go at week-ends.

‘Everything I’ve ever wanted, everything I’ve ever planned for us, you wreck it.’ He began to rage like a spoiled child, kicking up the corner of the carpet and kicking it again when it rolled back at him. ‘Your father. Your job. Your uncle. Your God damn cheap little gaolbird girl friend—’

‘Shut up.’

‘I hope they put her in gaol. I hope they lock her up and throw away the key and you can never see her again.’

He was shaking with anger, and I was shaking too, and didn’t want to speak, so I began to finish my packing. ‘What the hell are you doing?’

‘I have to go, Joel. I told you. I’m getting the night train. Will you take me to the station?’

‘No.’

‘Then I’ll get a taxi. What will you do?’

‘I shall go to the Weidners’ and get drunk.’

He can be so like a child that I sat down on the bed and laughed and held out my arms to him. But it wasn’t the childish Joel who turned away from me and said, ‘Go on then, but don’t bother ever coming back.’

I WORE THE red coat that Em gave me when she came back from Canada. It’s about the only decent thing I’ve got left. I had to sell some of the other stuff when they came at me with the moment of truth about the rent.

I was glad I wore it, when I saw her waiting on the bench as I came pushing in among the crowd, afraid I was late, for she said, ‘Oh good, you’re wearing the coat. It looks wonderful.’

To tell the truth, I hadn’t expected to see her any more. I thought she was through with me, like everyone else. I am an outcast, a pariah dog kicked into the stinking gutter. The looks I get. No one has smiled at me for days. Except Mr Jordan, and I don’t count him. He’s a reincarnation of Saint Francis, come back a different shape.

Em was sitting on the bench among all those terrible mothers and things they get in that court, and she got up and kissed me and said, ‘The coat looks wonderful,’ which was just what I wanted to hear, since everyone was going to be looking at me.

Dear Em. She came. I never thought she would, but she came. She’s like a dog that doesn’t know when it’s licked. She’s like those burrs that used to get into my hair when we lived down the lane. You can’t shake her off. She came, with that long hank of hair over her shoulder like the first time I saw her in the market. It
makes her look like a teenager, though her face really looked tired and white and much older.

But she came. She and I together again, and I’m not afraid any more. She’ll stick up for me. Mr Jordan, he can say what he has to, but Em won’t let me down.

I needn’t be afraid of her father. He was all right to me last time. And the woman in the fur hat - I swear it’s the same one she had five years ago, that kind of curled lamb is very durable - she’s not a bad old sow either, though they don’t let her say much. It was her suggested me going to Mollyarthur’s, so I’ve a lot to thank her for.

I wish old Moll was here.

It feels funny sitting in the chair, right where my dad sat that day, and they had to tell him to stand up when he answered Mr Bullock. Mr Jordan came in right behind me, carrying Sammy. Some funny clothes they put on him at the Home, I must say. Green was never his colour. I’d been told to sit, but Mr Jordan just stood there, looking too big, holding my child as if it was his own.

A man who had been darting about having confidential words with people as if he owned the place, put some papers on what they call the bench, although it’s really only a table, with billiard cloth tacked over.

‘Oh yes,’ said Emma’s father. ‘Application for a permanent Place of Safety Order. Yes, Mr Jordan?’ He has this lovely liquid sort of voice in his throat, like an actor. Not a bit like Em’s, which is rather deep, and loud - you can hear it a mile off. ‘That is the child?’

Who else? Did they think he was carrying that great big boy for fun?

Mr Jordan put his hand on the Bible to swear by Almighty God. Why didn’t they ask me to swear? I was going to get a chance to tell my side of it, wasn’t I? Then he looked round sort of helplessly, and a policewoman got up at the back of the court, rather a pretty one. I turned round to check, for they are sometimes iron maidens.

She was going to take Sammy, but Em’s father said, ‘Give him to the mother. You take him, Mother,’ he said to me, in a voice that had nothing in it, not kindness, but not hate either. Mother.
It makes you laugh. Last time I was in here, he called me Katherine and asked me if I was happy at home.

Well, of course when I held out my arms for Sam, he cried, the little bastard, and clung on to Mr Jordan. People nodded oh ho, I could see them doing it, and the woman in the Cossack hat leaned over to say something to Mr Bullock which he ignored, as if it was too obvious.

‘All right, Officer. Thank you,’ he said to the pretty policewoman, and she took Sammy and he sat with her at the back of the room and beat on the table with a ruler. So Emma’s father said, ‘Perhaps you had better take him outside. He’s a bit too old anyway.’

Too old to hear what was going to be said? Listen, that kid knew it all the day he was born.