by Marie Joseph
This was what being a man meant. He thought he had known. Oh, God, he thought he had known. This girl, this beautiful lovely girl was so completely his that when it was over he still lay on top of her, whispering words formed not by his tongue but from some inner source of ecstasy.
Then, when he stroked her little swollen face he felt her tears on his fingers, and even then her tears did nothing to shake him back to reality.
It was only after he had driven her home and watched her let herself into the house, identical to the last grain of pebble-dash with its neighbours, that the truth struck him with more than remorse, more than shame. It was a blinding revelation of his own stupidity.
He went into the bedroom and stared down at the rumpled sheets. Never, never once, even in his wild teenage years had be behaved with such a total irresponsibility. And the girls he had loved had known what it was all about; that in itself had been some sop to his conscience. But, oh, dear God, for Emma Sparrow it had been the first time. The very first time!
He picked up Emma’s torn tights from the bathroom floor, took them through into the kitchen and dropped them inside the pedal bin. He stared at the pail for a long time, then he picked it up and took it down the stairs, crossed the courtyard at the back of the block of flats and emptied it into the communal dustbin.
Then he went back into the flat, spread his papers out on the coffee table and pulled it in front of the hideous orange vinyl armchair.
And asked himself, for what was to be the first time in at least a hundred how, for God’s sake, how he could have been such a fool?
Eight
CHLOE RANG THAT evening.
‘Hi, honey! Missing me?’
Simon ran a finger round his collar, just as if his tie were still in place. He had worked, or tried to work, in the flat all afternoon with the memory of Emma Sparrow’s tormented face coming between him and the neatly penned rows of figures.
‘How?’ he asked himself a dozen times. And ‘Why?’ he had asked twelve times more.
Now with Chloe’s clear voice in his ears, with the sense that she could have been there in the room with him, his normal self-assurance slipped, leaving him feeling ridiculously like a naughty schoolboy caught out in some misdemeanour.
‘Work’s piling up,’ he said, in what he hoped was a matter-of-fact voice. ‘The Bolton thing isn’t going straight forward, but I am sure I can sort it out.’
‘I’m sure you can, honey. But I am not ringing to ask about the factories, am I? I wanted you to tell me you can’t exist without me, and to ask me to hurry back.’ She paused. ‘As a matter of fact, I am thinking of coming back next week. That’s if you’re not too busy to drive out to the airport to pick me up.’
Simon automatically reached for his work diary and flipped over the tightly packed entries. ‘Just tell me when, and I’ll be there.’
‘Sure it won’t interfere with your timetable?’
He couldn’t tell whether she was being teasingly sarcastic, or just plain disagreeable. Without seeing her face he felt at a loss.
‘Give me a day and I’ll be there.’ Simon found he was gripping his ball-point pen between his fingers, willing her to co-operate just this once instead of turning even a transatlantic conversation into a form of mild bickering. A part of him was screaming at her to stay where she was for a while longer to give him time to come to terms with the extraordinary happenings of the day.
‘What have you been doing with yourself?’ Chloe asked after a day had been fixed. ‘You sound harassed, honey. Is there any more news of the house?’
‘Nothing.’ Now they were on safer ground and he could stop acting like a law-breaker on the defensive. ‘But all things being equal we should be able to move in about mid-June.’
‘Momma says it’s time we got married.’
Again he cursed the fact that he could not see her face. He gripped the receiver even tighter. For all he knew Mrs Day could be standing right behind her daughter, smiling and nodding her neatly coiffed hair, looking like an elder sister, and cheering Chloe on from the sidelines.
‘We’ll certainly discuss that.’ It was meant to sound jokey, but now Chloe was having problems with only his voice to go by.
‘Sure you can fit me on the agenda, honey?’
They said goodbye, with the thinly veiled animosity lingering like trailing ectoplasm between the north of England and New York. Simon went back to his papers and worked for a while, then dropped his face into his hands. He sat there without moving, whilst the silence of the room grew and lengthened.
Tomorrow he would have to go into the factory and face Emma. He knew that he was coward enough to dread it, and man enough to realize that what had happened could never be explained but had to be dealt with.
‘Dealt with?’ He said the words aloud. Oh, what in heaven’s name had possessed him? And possessed was the right word. He dropped his hands and his eyes were bleak. They had come together like deprived children, seeking comfort. They had touched and rubbed flesh against flesh, and even to a man with an ex-wife and a mistress, not to mention roughly half a dozen other encounters, it had been a revelation. It had been as if they had been taken over by some primeval force stronger than he had known existed. She had needed that hour. Craved it. And so, God dammit, had he. Never, ever, had he experience anything remotely like that before. Not even when he was a young boy lusting after girls, wanting to explore their bodies and prove his masculinity.
Emma Sparrow…. Taking Emma and loving her was the sort of memory that would linger in his mind till the day he died. He was not promiscuous. He had been faithful to Chloe for a long time now, even without the binding legality of a marriage certificate, but that small defeated little girl had shattered his thought process. Through her he had lost his sense of legitimacy and for that, in a strange perhaps even cruel way, he could never forgive her.
He saw her the next morning, crouched on her stool over that infernal buttonhole machine, with her hair hanging loose and not pulled back into the childish pony-tail. To hide her nose, he thought, and was touched.
From his desk he could see her through the glass-fronted wall of the office, but she worked without looking up, steadily and methodically, reaching for one blouse after another, pressing the foot pedals, guiding the material into position as if all that mattered was achieving her quota for the day.
She knew he was there. After a long and almost sleepless night she had accepted that he would be there, and there was nothing she could do but wait, just wait to see what, if anything, he would do.
She was all emotion, but she was as still as a mouse inside her. He might never know it, but now her mind, her heart and all her being belonged to him. Now she knew how it could be, and the practical down-to-earth side of her was already accepting that it might never be that way again. She would never be a worry to him; not even the smallest anxiety. And if he apologized to her, she would want to die.
She looked up suddenly and in that unguarded moment their eyes met. As he looked hastily away she felt a coldness seep into her bones and was surprised to find that she was not shivering.
In the canteen at lunchtime she deliberately chose to sit at a table with three of the machinists and when, out of the corner of her eye, she saw him come in, she turned her head. She went back to her machine as soon as she could, and when Simon did not reappear she knew that he would not be coming back into the office that day.
She knew and felt as if she had been granted a reprieve, because there was nothing he could say.
Emma was alone in the living-room of the house in Litchfield Avenue that evening when the knock came at the door, and her hand crept to her throat as her eyes widened in dismay.
He had come to say he was sorry, to explain that he could not think what had come over him. He had come to beg her silence, to ensure that when his Chloe came back from America there would be no repercussions from what he would say had been a moment of unprepared folly. Emma felt the beginnings of hysteria
rise thick as she told herself that never, ever, would Mr Simon say a sentence like that. She made herself take a step towards the door, then another.
It was … it had been, all her fault. Again and again she had gone over what she had done. She had gone straight to him and wound her arms round his neck, and she had let the towel drop, so that when he had put his own arms round her it had been her naked body pressing up against him.
Emma walked slowly into the square box of a hall and hesitated. He had come at a time when what defences she had were swept away by the wild force of her weeping, and any man would have responded in exactly the same way.
But if he apologized, if he tried to even begin to apologize, then she would die.
She opened the door and saw Ben Bamford standing there.
‘Okay, okay. It’s me, not me ghost. Come on then. Are you not going to ask me in?’ He was grinning, jiggling his car keys up and down in the pockets of his brown leather jacket. His fair hair was shorter and more curly than she remembered it. His face seemed to be rounder, but his vivid blue eyes were the same laughing eyes, dancing with mischief as he stared at her.
‘What’s up, Em?’ He stretched out a hand as she leaned against the door jamb, then drew it back as she flinched away from the supportive gesture. ‘Eh? What’s up?’ he asked again. ‘I’ve not got mange, chuck.’
‘You’d best come in.’ Her voice was low, and she glanced quickly up and down the avenue before stepping back. As he followed her into the living-room, she put up a hand to her face to hide the red of her nose.
‘It’s not as bad as it looks.’ She sat down on the chair with its back to the window. ‘I got in the way of a speed merchant on a bike on the way to work yesterday, that’s all.’ Then, for the first time, she smiled. ‘Oh, Ben. It is good to see you. I never thought to see you again.’ She pleated the folds of her skirt with nervous fingers. ‘You’re taking a chance coming back, aren’t you?’
He threw her a look of disgust. ‘You an’ all, Em? You are as bad as our Patty. She whipped me into the house so quick you would have thought old Kojak was hot on me tail. I think she would have hid me under the settee given half a chance.’
Emma’s chin, lifted. ‘Are you trying to say you didn’t do what I … what Patty and me suspected you did?’ She shook her head slowly from side to side so that her hair fell forward. ‘But then if you had done it, you wouldn’t be here now. You couldn’t just walk in as if nothing had happened. Could you, Ben?’
‘Could you, Ben?’ His tone mimicked her seriousness, but his eyes still twinkled. He pretended to tuck a strand of hair behind an ear, and spoke in a falsetto voice. ‘Oh, Ben. How could you possibly come back after you had knocked old smarmy pants Simon Martin for a six? Left him senseless so that even his old dad down in London could not recognize him? Oh, Ben. I have a good mind to fetch the police and have you put away with my daddy for doing a wicked thing like that.’
‘Stop it.’ Emma gripped the wooden arms of the fireside chair. ‘It’s not funny. Mr Simon might have lost the sight of an eye. He might have been killed!’ She dropped her voice to a whisper. ‘Was it you, Ben? Because if it was, I would rather you went. If it was, then I would advise you to leave the town again. The police will be asking you questions about where you were that night, and why you went away so suddenly. They found out that you had got the sack, and they’re not daft. It was good of Mr Simon not to report you, anyway.’
For a moment she saw the temper flare in his eyes, then with an unexpected movement Ben dropped to his knees by her chair, assuming an expression of mock pleading.
‘Do you think I would do a wicked thing like that, Em?’
Again she shook her head. ‘I don’t know, Ben. If you didn’t do it, then who did? You had a reason for wanting to get even. An’ if you didn’t do it, then why did you go away at exactly the same time?’
‘I went away,’ he said softly, ‘because I bloody well wanted to go away. I’d had it up to here with having no job and with living in the same house as that drunken sod who was always yelling at Patty. I woke up one morning – the morning in question as it so happens – and heard them fighting. Aye, fighting in bed, if you must know, an’ so I just got up, packed a shirt and skedaddled. Okay?’
‘And you had no part in beating up Mr Simon?’ Emma shrank back in the chair as if dreading the fact that he might try to touch her again, but Ben was enjoying himself too much to cloud the issue with any of that kind of larking about. It was as if, knowing that for once he was in the right, he was determined to make the most of the situation.
He put out a finger to touch the end of Emma’s nose, only to see her jerk her head back. He grinned. ‘For your benefit, I didn’t even know the gaffer had stopped a pair of hobnailed boots till our Patty told me.’ He put both hands together in an attitude of pious devotion, and raised blue eyes ceilingwards. ‘But no way can I say as how I am sorry.’ He rocked back on his heels. ‘An’ while I am in the confession box, dear Sister Sparrow, I have to admit that our Patty told me something else that made me say a rude word. She told me you had been to see her, straight after you had been to see him in the infirmary. Is that right? Now, why should you do a thing like that?’
‘I went to see how he was, that was all.’ Emma heard a car door slam outside in the avenue, and tension knotted tight low down in her stomach. If Mr Simon should knock at the door now when Ben was here…. If Ben thought … if he thought…. She closed her eyes briefly.
‘Oh, please God, please, please God, don’t let him take it into his head that he ought to try to see me tonight … not with Ben here.’ She opened her eyes to see Ben staring at her closely.
He nodded twice. ‘Aye, that was it. You went to see him because you was sure I had bashed his head in. You was bloody sure. Without giving me a chance you was bloody sure. You went to ask him not to give me away, then you went round to our house and when Patty said I had gone away, you put two and two together and made bloody five. You were playing bloody Samaritans again, weren’t you, Em?’
Her brown eyes were moist as she gazed at him, and because he had never seen her cry Ben reached for her, only to have her twist from his grasp as if his touch sickened her. Immediately he got up and went to sit on the settee opposite to her.
‘Okay, okay.’ His good humour remained unruffled. ‘So you’ve gone off me?’ He made a face of rueful resignation. ‘Aye, well, it ’appens. But I will tell you something, Emma Sparrow. You are the only bird what has ever gone off me. Maybe that is why I keep on coming round when other fellas would have told you to get stuffed long ago.’ Then, with a sudden mercurial change of mood, he was intense and serious. ‘Our Patty is on her own again. That bruiser she was living with left her flat. Just buggered off, taking even the kid’s money-box pennies with him.’ His face darkened. ‘An’ you want to know what our Patty has been doing? Well, I will tell you for nothing. She’s been going to work at the pub nights and leaving that poor little kiddo on her own. You saw her, didn’t you?’
Emma nodded. ‘She sat on my knee.’
‘Aye, well, she would. She takes to everybody, that one does. She is a grand little kid, an’ how our Patty could leave her like that I can’t reckon. Just think if she had woke up to find she was on her own? It’s not on, and I’ve told our Patty it’s not on. So … so I’m stopping here, an’ no, I didn’t have nowt to do with what happened. I just picked the wrong day to go, that was all. So I’ve got me a job as a porter down at the station.’ He stood up and saluted. ‘Wait till you see me in me uniform! Robert Redford will be dead bothered if he sees me! An’ I’ve fixed it up with the woman next door to pay her a bit of summat to have Tracy in her house at nights while Patty works.’ He laughed. ‘I’m not such a bloody hero as to promise to be the bloody baby-sitter as well as earning the bloody-bread.’ He lifted his head. ‘What’s that?’
‘It’s Joe.’ Emma stood up. ‘He’s taken to coming downstairs about this time every night since our dad went away. He
has nightmares. Listen to him. He must have had one now.’
When Joe came into the room, Emma went down on her knees gathering the small sobbing boy into her arms, trying to still the plaintive wailing that showed he was more asleep than awake.
‘It’s all right, love. It’s all right. Emma’s here. Hush now and we’ll have a drink of cocoa, shall we? Just you and me, eh?’
Ben jiggled the coins in his pocket. ‘I’ll be off then, Em.’ He patted the top of Joe’s tousled head. ‘Come on, now, lad. You’re not frightened of no bogies, are you? Not a big lad like you. You just tell your Uncle Ben about where they hang out and he will have their guts for garters. Okay?’ He walked to the door and turned. ‘If you want me for owt, Emma Sparrow, you know where to find me. Right?’ He twiddled his fingers in an airy goodbye. ‘I’m not saying I’ll be waiting, but you can give it a try.’
Then he closed the door behind him and walked with his jaunty step over to where his car was parked, whistling as if without a care in the world.
The car was there when Emma banged the front door behind her and ran down the avenue to catch the bus early the next morning. As usual she was on the last minute, yelling to Sharon to get up, retrieving a lost shoe from beneath Alan’s bed, and checking the food cupboard to see what was needed from the supermarket on her way home.
‘Get in, Emma.’ Simon reached across and opened the car door. ‘Come on. We can talk as I drive. Okay?’
He had cut himself shaving and his face was pale, but his hands on the wheel were steady and he drove the car expertly, almost as if it were an extension of himself. ‘We have to talk,’ he said, and Emma knew that the moment she had dreaded had come. He was going to apologize, to try to explain, perhaps even to ask her to keep what had happened a secret. Humiliation and shame made her sink down in her seat and turn her head so that she stared fixedly out of the window.