Kate and Emma (7 page)

Happy birthday, dear Katie, they sang. Happy birthday to you, and my heart came right up through my chest as if I was going to cough blood.

THE BIRTHDAY PARTY was the beginning of the real friendship between Kate and me. After Molly had broken her down with the cunning staging of the cake and those heartbreaking children in the candlelight, she dropped the shield and dagger she’d been carrying round like a Roman Legionary, and risked enjoyment.

She had to wash her face after the emotion of the singing. When she came out of the kitchen scrubbing at her face with a dish-towel, Sonia said, ‘You’ll have to do up your eyes again,’ but Kate said, ‘Who for?’ and stood on her head up the wall beside one of the small boys who was relaxing there, with his pyjama jacket fallen over his face.

Mollyarthur’s husband is the hale, shock-headed kind, like a man in an advertisement for pipe tobacco. He has a loud slow voice with a few West Country vowels, and a laugh out of all proportion to the joke. Ha, ha, ha, he goes, ho, ho, at almost anything I say, and makes me feel I have a rare wit. Kate walks wide round him as if he were going to rape her, but he is as mild as bread, and accepts all the extra children stoically, as if it were a disease that Molly had.

There was a cottage piano in the corner shadows, with panels of
painted swains and ladies, and its hammers and wires exposed. After the food, he played, nodding rhythmically over his square pelted hands, and we sang old easy songs with the children. Sonia and Kevin told each other it was corny, and soon roared away on the cow-punching motorbike, and when the children had straggled off to bed like the Lost Boys going up the tree-trunks, we sat on the floor and told ghost stories.

I was afraid to go home after the one Kate told about the Claw - she has seen every horror film ever made - so Bob walked me to the station, for what that was worth. He is like a great amiable child, with his shambling walk and his gullible grin, and if he really ran away with Kate, as I seem to remember someone saying in court, they must have been like Hansel and Gretel.

‘Well, how did it go?’ my mother asked me next morning, and I forgot where I was supposed to have been, so I said I liked it, which was the truth, and that I had made a new friend, which was also the truth.

‘Let’s hope this one lasts longer than Hugh.’ Docketing her ideas as she does, my mother expects girls of my age to be exclusively concerned with the opposite sex.

‘She’s training to be a nurse,’ I said, although I knew by now, because Kate and Joan had let go profanely about the nursing home, that they were only unwilling drudges who washed and scrubbed and swabbed and soaked and rinsed all day long in the unending battle against senile incontinence.

I go to Mollyarthur’s quite often after work. I am not in love just now, and the girls I know are away at college with utterly liberated morals, or married to television actors, or engrossed in some much more interesting job than mine. No one is training for retail grocery, and they have never been very real friends anyway.

At Grove Lodge, which looks better as the winter begins to loose its hold, Donna left when her mother came out of prison, but the twins have come to take her place, sad balding three-year-olds who have never had enough of anything, food or sleep or fresh air or love. If Kate and I will put the children to bed, Molly will give us kippers or chops for supper. If not, it is all the left-overs thrown in a frying-pan with eggs broken in the middle, which isn’t bad either.

I am her sixth foster-child, since Kate refuses the title, and Mr Arthur, whose name is Jim, groaned and said it was getting worse than a Remand Home.

‘Don’t hurt Emma’s feelings,’ Molly said. ‘If you had been taught to shoplift by a stepmother who chained you to the bed at night, you’d be delinquent too.’

He laughed ho, ho, because it is his nature, but he only plays card games with us, not this game. One of the things we do is inventing gruesome backgrounds for this sixth foster-child. It doesn’t bother Kate; in fact it was she who started it, and she who keeps throwing in macabre details like burnings and starvings and babies abandoned in sewers, which have a faint smell of truth under the Gothic exaggeration.

One of Molly’s friends who heard us at it, told Molly that it was in bad taste, in view of … and made a mouth.

‘You mean me?’ Kate called from the kitchen, where she and I were doing Michael’s arithmetic for him while we discussed my youth under the white slavers.

‘Oh no,’ the friend said quickly, and Molly said: ‘We weren’t talking to you anyway. You run your life, I’ll run mine,’ which always makes us shriek with laughter, very childish. But we are childish, romancing and dramatizing and making up exotic things which might have happened at the supermarkets or the nursing home, and crimes the nurses have committed (Kate detests them all), and marvellous things that are going to happen to us when we are famous and adored, and impossibly marvellous men who are going to come charging into our lives: always older, lean, sardonic yet tender, the kind who don’t exist.

The only thing that comes charging is Bob, who wanders across the Park from time to time and sits in a chair and eats raisins until he is told to go home. He seldom talks, unless you get him on to soldiers, which are his dream. He still thinks that one day he will be in the Army. He has been rejected already, but he does not understand why. He thinks it was because of his feet, and he wears supports inside the cumbersome rubber-tyred shoes and does pushups on his toes when he is standing, which is only when there is nowhere to sit down.

When Kate and I are off on a saga, he will sit and listen
peacefully, throwing raisins into his smile and occasionally asking a question about people who don’t exist, as if they were real. Kate treats him like a child, and calls him Molly’s seventh baby, since there are enough fosters, but I never see her touch him or look at him as if there were anything between them or has ever been.

We are getting so that we can say anything to each other. We talk about everything that is in our heads, without pausing to think if it’s safe, as you do with people who are friends of circumstance, or friends of convenience, not friends of choice. The only things we cannot talk about are the purplish-red mark she carries like a yoke on her neck, and we never talk about her home, and the misery that drove her away and that keeps her from going back.

‘Moll is stuck with me,’ she says, and Molly says Good, and starts to plan how we’ll arrange the furniture for the wedding and whether Jim shall take Kate to church in a hired car or the old brown Ford with ribbon streamers.

I think that may be why Kate started to concoct all the horrors about me, to foil discovery of any of her own, like a child babbling about dragons in the shrubbery so that no one will look at the trampled flowerbed.

I am leading a somewhat secret life, almost like a furtive love affair, because I cannot describe Grove Lodge at home without my mother thinking that I am slumming, although she would make an effort to be pleased at what she called bravely my ‘unusual choice of friends’ when I brought the Nigerian home from the college.

And my father? I am going to take him to Molly’s soon and show them to him, and show him off to them.

I find myself wanting to include him more in myself. Although I have this secret life, which is making me happy and is exciting, because Kate and I discover things about each other all the time, and I am watching her grow towards what she might have been if her life had been different, I want him too. I want to do things with him, grab him, keep him. He slipped away from my mother years ago, but I am not going to let him slip away from me.

When I was a child, our closest times together were out of doors. I wore out one shoulder carrying his golf clubs, and later he
taught me to use them. He taught me to ride, and tennis he taught me, although I was always too slow. I was a lumbering child. People called to me: ‘Straighten your knees!’ but it didn’t help. He was not expert at anything, but he could do everything fairly well. He taught us all, including himself, to sail, and he taught Alice and Peter and me to swim, and we soon swam much better than he did, which was why he hadn’t been able to get to Peter when he was going out in the Poldhu current.

My mother, with her lack of grace, which she has passed on to me, was hopeless at anything athletic, except fishing, which she was brought up to. Apart from those two times when we went to Raglan and she was the expert, she was always the one who had to watch and applaud, and come in the car with blankets when the sailing dinghy capsized, and sit knitting on a backless bench outside the riding ring while we went endlessly round and round.

My father and I used to ride together. Once when Alice was ill, we selfishly went to the New Forest for a long week-end and rode ponies all day along the spongy cathedral aisles. I have never forgotten the magic of that. We rode all day among the great greenwood trees, and he read
Wuthering Heights
to me at night, and brushed my hair carefully before I went to bed. It was so good that I think I may have imagined it, but he says that it did happen, although he remembers it raining all the time, which I don’t, and his riding-boot splitting, and a raconteur who used to spoil his times in the bar after he had put me to bed.

Golf and tennis are out for him now because of his leg, and so are the walks we used to take, with one of the succession of hysterical terriers my mother has always had. There is no reason, however, why he shouldn’t ride, except that he hasn’t for years, and my mother is always telling him that he is just the age for a lightning heart attack.

I know a boy called Alan, who comes from Shropshire and can’t go long without a horse. He says it like that, as another man would say it about a woman. He is a laboratory student and he lives in a nasty room in Fulham and he has no money, so I take him to the stables near us sometimes when I can afford it. When they started to let us take the horses out on our own, instead
of in jostling groups of rumpy blue jeans and grimly expert infants on white ponies, it was so lovely that I made my father come too.

He didn’t want to, but I forced him. This one thing he was going to do with me, this last relic of the childhood things we had shared.

His boot hurt his leg. When I went to his room to see if he was ready, I found him sitting on the fat leather stool with his leg stuck out in front of him as if it was wooden.

‘I’m not coming.’

Ignoring his strained face and the little twitch of his mouth, I pulled him up and handed him his stick. Once he was on the horse, he would be all right. Alan, who was a bit sceptical about the whole project, for he is one of these Peter Pan fools who discount everybody over thirty, would be amazed when he saw how well he could ride.

The first trauma was that he couldn’t get on. I tried to give him a leg up, but the trashy horse the stable had given him would not stand still. Alan, who is the kind of boy who orders first for himself in restaurants, even when you’re paying, and will go off anywhere without looking to see who’s following, was already up and half-way to the yard gate.

When I called him, he dismounted with a visible sigh and got my father on the horse, then rode ahead all the way and never looked back to see how well my father handled the horrid poky horse. If he had been looking back when my father fell off, he would have seen that the horse shuffled its foot into a hole and stumbled. I explained this, but I could see he didn’t believe it. My father sat on the ground rubbing his leg and lighting a cigarette, and Alan kept circling round on his tall restless horse saying, ‘Are you all right, sir?’ and I said, ‘He won’t be if you step on him.’

Alan had to get off and help my father up again. Jumbled up together in the narrow path between the trees, the horses began to kick and bite, and Alan had the nerve to tell me, ‘Better not bring him next time.’

‘There won’t be a next time,’ I said, and pulled my horse back and rode with my father, who smoked cigarettes all the way home and rode with his bad leg stuck straight out like a cow-hand.

A few days later, when we were all at a cocktail party in London, he introduced me to a woman of about thirty-five with coppery hair and marvellous amused eyes. He told her, ‘This is the girl who’s trying unsuccessfully to keep me young,’ and she said, ‘You keep on doing that, whatever, he says.’ But he refuses to come riding again.

He will come to Grove Lodge though. He is getting lazy, but I shall tell him that it’s part of his job.

If he remembers Kate, and to him, after all, she is only one in a procession of rebellious waifs, he will be amazed at the change in her. It is not just that she is growing her pale hair and has caught the shampooing mania from me, but she is happy, and in court it seemed she never could be.

It is partly due to him (we’ll forget that it was Miss Draper’s idea), partly due to Mollyarthur, and partly to Kate, who has turned her stubbornness into survival. When he has seen her, and understood that I love her, then I will ask him for a loan which I’ll repay when I am earning. A birthmark can be removed by plastic surgery, but it costs money.

I was surprised when Mr Jordan, the Cruelty Man, telephoned me one evening and asked me if I had time to go out with him again.

‘I thought I was a nuisance.’

‘No, you were a help.’

‘How could I be? I was just there.’

‘It helps, discussing things in the car between visits. Trying to explain to you what’s going wrong with someone, it helps me to get my own thoughts straight about them.’

‘I’d like to go.’ Not from curiosity, not because I could help, but because I have to see. In my life, I may never be selfless enough to lessen by one grain the world’s misery, but it’s worse not even to know it’s there.

‘I’d like you to come.’

He could say that over the telephone. When we met, he was once more rather shy and formal, although he rocked the little snub car just as recklessly round the streets and countryside, hazarding infants and slow grandfathers.

When I thanked him for asking me again, he said: ‘Your father
thinks that you should see more of his work, since it’s really part of his,’ which wasn’t at all what he had said on the telephone.