Emma Sparrow

by Marie Joseph

  Then, before she could stop him, he pulled Emma up into his arms and, holding her pressed tightly against him, kissed her hard, forcing her lips apart, and grinding his tongue into her mouth.

  ‘So now you know, Emma Sparrow!’

  He let her go so abruptly that she had to grab the chair arms to steady herself, and before she recovered her balance he had gone, slamming the front door with such violence that it seemed the little house shook to its very foundations.

  * * *

  Three weeks later Simon Martin, bored with the loneliness of his hotel room, and seeing columns of figures dancing before his eyes, decided to take a midnight walk before going to bed.

  The countryside stretching beyond the rear of the hotel was flat, bisected by wooded banks massed with wild flowers. And that night their scent hung in the air as if sprayed from an aerosol.

  Simon was discovering to his delight, as many southerners had done before him, that Lancashire was more than a vista of mill chimneys; that there were green valleys, wide stretches of moorland and shimmering rivers. It was a night of stars, with hedges glowing greenly in the gentle darkness, and he knew, he needed to know, that when Chloe came up and saw the house now under negotiation, she would share his content.

  He was turning to go back to the hotel when he heard the car pull up. When he was seized from behind the blow to the side of his head sent him sprawling. And when the kicks came fast and furious he held his arms over his head in an instinctive attempt to shield his face. There were no words, no grunts, no smothered oaths, just a deliberate series of well-aimed kicks, to his groin, his body, and when he tried to get to his feet he felt the blood spurt from his nose as a fist slammed relentlessly into his face.

  Frantic now with pain, he gripped a trouser leg, his numbed senses telling him that there were three, or at least two attackers. His heart thumped against his ribs as with every ounce of strength in him he tried to twist the leg, to bring his assailant down to ground level, but a kick in the region of his stomach made him gasp and lose his grip, and as the car roared away he was kneeling down in the road being violently sick.

  When he managed at last to stagger up the drive and into the foyer of the hotel, the night porter reached for the telephone even as Simon slid unconscious to the floor. By the time Simon opened his eyes to feel a wet cloth on his forehead, the ambulance was on its way.

  Six

  THE NEWS THAT Mr Simon had been mugged was all over the factory before the girls had taken the covers off their machines the next morning.

  Mrs Arkwright was in the office discussing it with Mrs Kelly. The assembled pieces of material were neglected as rumours flew thick and wide, gathering strength as they were repeated.

  ‘Left for dead,’ the copper-haired machinist said in a hushed voice. ‘In the infirmary with the sight of one eye nearly gone.’ She paused. ‘Mrs Kelly told me. An’ Mr Gordon is by his bedside.’ She sighed deeply. ‘Strange Mr Simon coming up here from London where folks get mugged all the time, then having it happen to him here.’

  ‘It’s a terrible world and no mistake.’ A middle-aged woman in a tweed skirt and a yellow tee-shirt stretched across massive breasts broke in. ‘It was kids did it, I reckon. Just for laughs. I nearly said just for kicks,’ she went on, then withdrew the smile from her face as no one saw the joke.

  Emma stood quietly listening, her brown eyes wide in the sudden pallor of her face. Then without a word she left her machine and walked into the office, going straight in without knocking, leaving the girls exchanging meaning glances with each other.

  ‘Is it true about Mr Simon?’ Emma ignored Mrs Arkwright and spoke directly to Mrs Kelly, relying on the little Irishwoman’s kindness to tell her the truth with no embellishments.

  ‘Aye, love, it’s true.’ Mrs Kelly was ignoring Mrs Arkwright too. ‘He went for a walk late on apparently, and got set on by a gang.’

  ‘Is he badly hurt?’ The question was no more than a whisper.

  ‘Bad enough. They’ve kept him in the infirmary anyroad, and they don’t do that unless it’s serious, not these days they don’t. Not with folks queueing up for beds and not getting one till they’re at death’s door.’

  ‘Did they get who did it?’

  Mrs Kelly shook her neat black head, with the hair so laquered into place that not a strand moved. ‘No, they made off. But whoever did it wants locking up and flogging. Talk about short sharp sentences. It’s short sharp leatherings what’s needed in my opinion.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Emma walked, straight-backed, out of the office and back to her machine where she switched on, picked up a piece of grey satin-look material and slid the button trim underneath the foot.

  Mrs Arkwright watched her with eyebrows raised. ‘What was all that about, then? Something going on I ought to know about?’

  ‘Nothing.’ Mrs Kelly’s tone of voice forbade any further discussion. ‘You know our Emma. She won’t tittle tattle. My guess, for what it’s worth, is that little Miss Sparrow would walk straight into your job if you ever decided to go.’

  ‘Would she indeed?’ Mrs Arkwright flounced from the office to speak sharply to the girls, and Mrs Kelly nodded, satisfied.

  At lunchtime Emma did not appear in the canteen. Instead she caught a bus outside the tall red-brick building and jumped off as it stopped for the lights outside Woolworth’s. Sharon was weighing a quarter of peppermint chews for a stout woman who wore a headscarf with dogs’ heads printed all over it. Sharon winked at Emma before passing the bag over and dropping the money into the till.

  ‘I can’t stop.’ Emma leaned over the display of cellophane-wrapped sweets and spoke softly. ‘But I had to make sure you would be going straight home after work.’ She hesitated. ‘I have to go somewhere, and I don’t want the boys wondering what’s happened.’

  ‘Go where?’ Sharon tucked a strand of fair hair underneath the wisp of blue chiffon wound round her head turban-wise. ‘It must be important for you to come down here in your lunch break. Go where, our Emma?’

  ‘I’ll tell you when I get back.’ Emma turned to go. ‘Give the boys their tea, will you, love? There’s a tin of baked beans in the cupboard.’

  ‘When you’ve finished chatting to your friend….’ An elderly man in a cloth cap and a shabby raincoat edged close to the counter. ‘A quarter of winter mixtures, if it’s not too much trouble!’

  Sharon gave him a radiant smile and scooped up a handful of the sweets, and when she turned round from weighing them Emma was gone.

  ‘Now I wonder what all that was about?’ she said aloud, and handed over the change with the practised smile dimmed a little round the edges.

  Emma had tried to prepare herself for the worst before she went to visit Simon in the infirmary after work that evening, but what she saw was worse than anything she could have imagined. He was lying so still that at first he appeared to have stopped breathing. Grey of face, with a pad covering his left eye, a bandage holding it in place, and with the bedclothes held away from his legs by a cage the size of an upturned barrel, the sight of him numbed her senses for a moment. She could only stand by the side of the high narrow bed and gaze down at his still face in silent dismay.

  A young Indian doctor beckoned to Emma and spoke softly.

  ‘He is quite comfortable, really.’ He smiled at Emma’s stricken expression. ‘He has not slept since being brought in at one o’clock this morning. He has insisted on talking on the telephone, and because he is badly shocked and will not realize, we have given him a sleeping draught an hour ago. You are his friend?’

  Emma nodded.

  ‘Then if you speak his name quietly he will perhaps hear and know you have been to see him, then when you come again he will be wide awake. It is best just to leave him. Really.’ The dark liquid eyes were full of compassion. ‘We will know tomorrow whether there is any danger to his eye. There is no internal bleeding, and no broken bones.’ he smiled. ‘Your friend is very strong and fit, it would take more than a bea
ting to kill him.’

  He walked away, the white coat flying, and Emma went to take her place by the bed again. There was such a shame in her that her whole body burned with it. The curious numbness had passed to her mind, and after five minutes had gone by without any movement from the still figure on the bed, she pulled up a little hard chair and sat down on it.

  Ben had done this terrible thing, she was sure of it. Aided and abetted by his friends, who would follow him to the edge of a cliff and jump over if he led the way; he had taken his revenge. Emma slipped the strap of her shoulder-bag from her arm and held it on her knee, unclasping and clasping the catch in nervous agitation. The worry in her mind niggled away at the numbness so that she saw what had happened, understood what had happened as if she herself had been the instigator.

  Ben had refused to believe her when she had told him she had had no part in his dismissal. He had often teased her and told her to stop acting God and interfering in other people’s lives. Emma’s brown eyes stared unblinking at the pale face on the white pillow. Was she like that? Sharon had hinted as much when she had lectured her about sleeping with Ricky. Her father had said she drove him mad with her nagging, and the boys often exchanged glances of disgust when she tried to make them behave. Was she … had circumstances made her into the kind of woman she never wanted to be?

  Was that why Ben had been so sure she had hinted that the pilfering, no, the stealing from the factory was his doing?

  Suddenly she remembered the way Ben had lost control at the disco and hammered the strange boy’s head into the floor. Her chin came up. A sermonizer she might be, but someone else, something else in Ben’s life had made him the way he was. Emma shifted slightly on the hard chair. She leaned forward as Simon’s eyelids fluttered.

  She held her breath as the dark eyes opened briefly, then as they closed again she spoke in a whisper.

  ‘Sir? Mr Simon? It’s me. Emma Sparrow.’

  The long mouth curved into the semblance of a smile and the hand lying on the turned-down sheet moved slightly before the sleeping draught took over again.

  The colour suddenly flooding Emma’s face made her beautiful. The pounding of her heart and the emotion tearing through her whole body took her by shattering surprise. Tears misted her eyes as she stared at the still face on the pillow. In that very moment, with a man coughing in the next bed and with the sound of a nurse’s feet tapping along the polished floor, Emma stepped over the line marking what had been no more than a strange sensation of affinity, into the wider realms of unselfish love.

  He did not know that she was there; on waking he would not remember she had been, but still she sat there. The visitors at the other beds in the small square ward said their goodbyes and went away. A junior nurse helped the coughing man into his dressing-gown and led him to the bathroom, but Emma heard and saw nothing.

  Lost in her dreams, she failed to see the tall girl with dark shining hair come into the ward; failed to see the way she hesitated for a moment before coming swiftly over to Simon’s bed.

  When Emma looked up at last she saw this girl, with her cream suede jacket open over a green, silky polo-necked sweater, standing at the opposite side of the bed watching her. Not smiling, not frowning, just watching. There was a green silk scarf threaded through the leather strap of the girl’s brown handbag, and large gold hoop ear-rings shone in her ears. She was dressed exactly as Emma would have liked to be dressed, given the money.

  Chloe, in that same moment of assessment, saw a small girl clutching a black plastic bag, wearing a shortie raincoat over a dark-blue sweater. No jewellery of any kind, and hardly any make-up, but then who needed make-up with a skin like that? The eyelashes could have been false, but she thought not. Probably came with those enormous amber-flecked eyes, and what a face! This girl was a beauty, make no mistake about that.

  All that in a swift exchange of glances, lasting no longer than three seconds, before Chloe nodded.

  ‘Hi! I’m Chloe Day. I saw the doctor on the way in and she told me he was sleeping.’ She touched Simon’s cheek gently. ‘Looks pretty rough, doesn’t he? Does anyone know yet what happened exactly?’ She went on, not waiting for an answer from the girl sitting mute by the side of the bed. ‘He actually rang me this morning before I left for work, just so I wouldn’t worry if I rang the hotel this evening and got the news that way. He’s going to get one big surprise when he wakes to find me here. I’ve told him before about going out running late at night, but you know Simon.’ She looked up with disconcerting suddenness. ‘Do you know him at all well?’

  And she wasn’t being bitchy or snobbish, or patronizing, not even critical. Chloe was just being Chloe. Frank, friendly, mistress of her own emotions. Or at least she had thought so. On the long drive up from London she had imagined how Simon would look when he saw her, and how he would react when she told him she had given up a Paris trip and let her assistant go instead, just to be with him. Even as she imagined the scene she had heard her mother’s voice:

  ‘You’re so like me, honey. Whatever the circumstances, somehow you will always cast yourself in the role of the heroine. When your daddy was so ill last fall I was picturing myself being the brave little woman if he died. You know, coping with everything so that people marvelled and said how brave I was. And let me tell you, honey, whatever happens to you there will always be a part of yourself out there in the wings, cheering you on.’

  But here and now the reality was far different. In the scene she had envisaged, Simon had been sitting up in bed, holding out his arms and smiling at her, not lying drugged in a sleep that seemed almost deeper than death. She shuddered. And there had been no lovely elfin child staring at him with her soul shining clear for anyone to see.

  ‘I work in the factory, at Delta Dresses.’ The waif had a voice to match her fragile beauty, soft and husky, not loud like her own. Chloe held out a hand across the bed and found it held in a warm firm grasp.

  ‘My name is Emma Sparrow,’ the girl said. ‘An’ I’ll be going now. It’s been nice meeting you, Miss Day. Goodnight.’

  Chloe watched her go, a puzzled frown wrinkling her smooth forehead. Emma Sparrow. The girl with the soul in torment. The girl Simon had mentioned more than once.

  Moving round the bed she sat down in the chair Emma had pulled up to the bed and took Simon’s listless hand in her own. Momma had been right. If there were to be any heroines competing for an Oscar the winner was going to be Chloe Day. Okay?

  With dragging feet Emma walked down the long corridor, down one flight of steps, the length of another wide polished corridor and out through the swing doors into the warm spring evening. Emotions she hadn’t known she possessed were rampaging round and round in her bloodstream, and the foremost of them all was telling her that she had to find Ben and confront him with her suspicions. No, more than her suspicions, her certainty.

  She had seen the wild violence in his eyes the night he had come to the house, and he had hinted … but oh, dear God, never would she have believed that he could inflict such deliberate pain and suffering on another human being. Emma closed her eyes and behind the closed lids she saw Simon lying on the ground, and heard the dull thuds as the kicks found their target. She whimpered so that a passing cyclist turned his head to stare at her in curiosity.

  Mr Simon’s eyes, his steady dark eyes, cut and bruised…. She got on the bus, sat on the seat near to the platform, and got off before the terminus, deciding to walk the rest of the way.

  Sharon would have to manage. For once she would have to see the boys to bed and stay in with them, with Ricky there or without Ricky there; it made no difference. Her thoughts were hard and clipped now, and her steps quickened as she turned into the long main road leading to the street where Ben lived with his sister.

  She passed barren stretches of spare land where terraced houses had been demolished, land waiting for the money to be found for the builders to move in. She passed rows of shops, boarded up with crude graffiti chalked acro
ss the boards. She passed a public house, then another, with the tops of heads showing above half-glazed windows. And she saw nothing.

  For the time being all her concentration was set on getting to Ben’s house in the quickest possible time. The episode with Chloe at the hospital was obliterated from her mind as completely as if it had never happened.

  When she lifted the knocker and let it fall against the door of the end house in a street not yet scheduled for demolition by the town planners, she was shivering. And when Patty Bamford stood before her, the blonde hair wisping from its tortured swirls, she was so breathless she could hardly speak.

  ‘Is Ben in?’ This was no time for niceties, no asking if it were convenient. ‘I want to speak to him,’ Emma said, holding her hand against the stitch in her side, the sharp pain only now making itself felt.

  Patty’s blue eyes widened. ‘You’d best come in.’ She stood back and waited for Emma to precede her down the narrow passage leading to the back room.

  ‘I’m sorry things are in a bit of a mess, love.’ She was apologizing, stacking plates together on the table by the window, stubbing a cigarette out in a saucer, waving a hand to Emma to sit down. ‘That fella of mine insisted on going out, Ben’s cleared off, and I should be at work but I can’t leave her.’ She jerked her head towards the child sitting strapped into a high-chair by the side of the wide, chipped tiled fireplace.

  The child was way past the high-chair age, Emma saw that at a glance, but the little legs dangling down were spaghetti-thin, and the head seemed much too big for the frail body. The eyes were round and not set in hollows, and they shone, not with intelligence, but with a strange touching glow of happiness. Ben had said Patty’s girl was a bit backward, but nothing had prepared Emma for the shock. She walked over to the chair and smiled, and the child immediately held up her arms.