Emma Sparrow

by Marie Joseph

  In that instant she saw herself lying naked in his arms, and heard again the hoarse murmurings of his voice as he took her, gently at first, then with rising passion.

  And in that moment she knew that he was remembering it too, and knew that in the park with the sound of children playing and the muted ping of tennis balls on rackets, with old couples strolling slowly along the winding paths, and the shimmer of the sea across the wide grass-fronted promenade – she knew that he wanted to kiss her so badly that his desire was there in his dark eyes, plain for her to see.

  ‘Emma ….’ his voice was low. ‘Emma Sparrow.’

  Like a slamming of a door in her face the happiness was gone. The worry and the fear were back, the humiliation and the despair. And she had been so wrong in thinking she could forget, even for the space of a sunlit afternoon.

  ‘Where are you going? Stop!’ His voice spiralled after her as she ran, stumbling over the grass, not knowing or caring where the path was leading, only wanting to get away from him and the longing on his face that she knew was mirrored on her own.

  He caught up with her on the stony path with benches set back into high privet hedges, each one in a small secluded alcove of its own.

  ‘Now,’ he said, pulling her to sit beside him, ‘now what’s wrong? Come on now, love. You know me well enough to tell me, so let’s have it.’

  Then, when she drooped her head, but not before he had seen the tears glistening on her long eyelashes, he went on, ‘Listen, Emma. I wouldn’t hurt you either mentally or physically, you must know that?’ He sighed. ‘What we did was not a sin, Emma. You mustn’t even think that.’ He patted his pocket as if searching for cigarettes. ‘It happens all the time.’

  ‘But not to me! Not to me!’ Emma jerked her head upwards, her brown eyes blazing in the sudden pallor of her face.

  ‘Oh, I see.’ Simon dropped the two clubs on to the path in front of the bench, and tried to take her hands, only to have them snatched away from his grasp. He sighed again. ‘You must stop fretting and blaming yourself, Emma. It was my fault. I should have known better, but I am a man, and men… well…. They might regret but they don’t torture themselves.’ He pulled at his upper lip as if searching for the right words. ‘What happened between us was beautiful and I will never forget it, and I am not asking you to forget it, just to keep it safe in your heart.’

  For a moment the hate she felt for him brought the blood rushing to her face so that she wanted to hit out at him, to rake her nails down his face and shake him out of his complacency. Then the feeling went as quickly as it had arisen, and she clenched her hands together to stop their trembling and drooped her head again.

  ‘I think we’d better go now,’ she said in a flat, dull voice. ‘You take the clubs back and I will wait by the car. I don’t want to play now. I just want to go back.’

  ‘But we haven’t settled anything, Emma.’ He was genuinely concerned as he walked along by her side, genuinely caring. ‘You haven’t told me that you understand.’ He shook his head from side to side. ‘I don’t want to imagine you fretting. I couldn’t stand that. You make me feel like a … you make me feel terrible.’

  Emma quickened her steps. ‘What you mean is you want me to say it was nothing. What you mean is you think I am just a stupid girl, a factory girl who got what she asked for. Is that it?’

  ‘Emma!’ He pulled her round to face him, heedless of the stares from three women in crimplene dresses sunning their fat red arms on a bench by the tennis courts. ‘I care for you. In my own way I care for you. I’m not a philanderer – oh, God, what an expression, but it fits. I was as overwhelmed as you by what happened. Can’t you see?’

  ‘Take the clubs back.’ Her voice was weary and now, for her, the gay bright day was over. The sounds of summer faded, and as she retraced her steps to the car she walked like an old woman of the roads, trailing one foot after another.

  She expected him to unlock the car when he came back, but instead he took her by the arm. ‘We’re not going back yet. We’ll go over to the sea front and talk some more, and we are not going back until I see you smile again. And that’s definite. Okay?’

  She knew it was no use arguing. She was perceptive enough to realize it was his own conscience he was setting to rights in a way, and there she could not help him. It wasn’t him having a baby, was it? It wasn’t him lying awake at nights wondering what to do, knowing there was only one thing to do, and dreading the doing of it.

  The tide was out, and they went down the stone steps to the beach where sunbathers lay spreadeagled, faces upturned to the sun in determined stillness; hot sun was a commodity too rare to waste, and getting brown was an important part of a holiday.

  ‘How is Chloe?’ Emma stopped and taking off a sandal shook the sand from it before putting it back on again. ‘I thought she would have been with you today.’

  ‘She is back in London. Her job came vacant again and she took it.’ He stopped walking to watch a young man dangling his baby in the shallows, trailing the baby’s feet in the water, then lifting him high as the child screamed with delight. The boy, for that was all he was, was totally engrossed in his task of introducing his little son to the sea for the first time, and without warning, the bitter taste of anger rose in Simon’s throat. Suddenly, watching the young father, he was conscious of his own age, deeply aware of his failed marriage and the souring of his relationship with Chloe.

  ‘I envy that man.’ He was speaking half to himself. ‘At this moment I envy him with all my heart.’

  Emma was watching the baby too, perhaps for the first time realizing what she was going to do. Without thinking, she placed a hand on her stomach, and as the young mother ran past them holding out a towel and chiding her husband for keeping the baby in the sun too long, the dam of her emotions broke down.

  ‘An’ I envy them too, both of them. All three of them,’ she shouted, and as Simon pulled her round to face him she told him about the baby.

  ‘But it’s all right. I’m going to see the doctor next week and have an abortion. I wasn’t going to tell you. I don’t know why I am telling you now.’ She tried to break free from his grasp, but he held her tight.

  His face had darkened. They might have been quite alone there at the edge of the sea, with the sun turning the dark-green rolling waves into a sparkling blue, with their feet sinking into the soft sand, and the wind lifting her hair.

  His eyes were as dark as night, as the implication of what she had just said slowly dawned. He was seeing Chloe, lying on a bed in some nursing home, having his child dragged from between her legs, bloody and mangled. Not an embryo only one step from a sprouting bean, but a child, like that child being carried now wrapped in a towel in the loving arms of his father. He was seeing Emma, small and white, having her baby scraped from her body. His baby! His second son or daughter, discarded like bloody flotsam and dropped into some surgical pail.

  ‘Not twice!’ he shouted the two words as Emma drew back from him, bewildered by his unexpected reaction. ‘No! You will not have an abortion, love. I won’t allow it.’ Pulling her into his arms he held her tight, rocking her backwards and forwards. ‘I might have made a mess of my life up to now, but this time I do it right! I am going to do it right, I tell you!’

  Emma wriggled free so that she could see into his face. Now she was the one to speak calmly, now that She had told him it was as though the way was clear. ‘There is nothing for you to worry about.’ She spoke softly. ‘You know I have no choice. I am almost totally responsible for my family. For Alan and Joe, and my father when he comes out. There is no room for a baby in that set-up, and the doctor will know that. He will arrange it, and when it’s over I can begin all over again.’ She put up a hand and touched his ravaged face. ‘I can go through with it, honest. There’s no other way.’

  He was holding on to her like a man drowning. ‘You will not. I will not allow it. Never! Never!’

  ‘But it’s the only way.’ Emma swayed in his arms,
and when he spoke she would have fallen but for their fierce grasp.

  ‘You can marry me,’ he said clearly. ‘I will marry you before I will let you do that. Understand? I will marry you, Emma Sparrow. Tomorrow or next week, I will marry you, and you will have my baby. Do you understand?’

  Eleven

  ‘IT’S LIKE FLAMIN’ Cinderella! Cinderella coming home and telling her ugly sister that she’s going to marry a prince! Flaminenry, but you’re a dark horse, our Emma. Fancy it being your boss all the time! No wonder you were keeping your mouth tight shut!’

  Sharon was tired, and Sharon tired kept little rein on her tongue, Emma knew that. Saturday was a long day standing behind the sweets counter and weighing out bags of mixed sweets chosen by jostling shoppers. She had had to miss her Saturday night disco dancing with Ricky – the boys had insisted on staying up late to watch television, and Ricky had gone home in one of his huffs – and now this.

  ‘So you’ll be getting married before me?’ Her small, exhausted face seemed to have shrunk to the size of a teacup, and her blue eyeshadow accentuated the strain round her eyes. ‘Well, one thing’s certain, you won’t be able to borrow my dress. Your bosoms are sprouting already. Did you know that?’

  Even as Sharon spoke Emma felt the pricking twinge in her breasts. It was strange, but coming back on the coach she had felt the same sensation. It was as though for the first time she could accept the fact that there was a baby growing inside her. In some inexplicable way her body was at last responding to signs suppressed when it seemed there would never be a baby at all.

  ‘It won’t be that kind of wedding.’ She drew her eyebrows together in a small anxious frown. ‘We didn’t get much of a chance to talk. Mr Simon … Simon wants it all to be a secret for a while. He has to go down to London on business next week, and when he comes back he says we’ll start making plans.’

  ‘Did he fetch you home tonight?’ Sharon produced a plastic bag from behind a cushion and began to roll her hair up.

  ‘No. The coach dropped me off at the bottom of the avenue. It would have looked strange if I’d travelled back with him. You know how people talk.’

  Sharon speared a roller with a hairpin. ‘Charming! An’ I suppose they won’t talk when they find out? Flaminenry, our Emma, they’ll talk their bloody heads off!’

  ‘I’ll have left the factory before it gets out. Simon has his position to think about.’ The frown between Emma’s eyes deepened. ‘I’m to stop at home till he can arrange a quiet register office wedding, then we’ll move into a house he is buying.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Out on the old Preston Road side.’

  ‘A posh house?’

  ‘I don’t know. I haven’t seen it.’

  Sharon’s smile was sarcastic. ‘An’ who is to take over here then? Have you forgotten you have a family already, our Emma? What are me and Alan and Joe supposed to do when you’re dusting the posh furniture in the posh house? Or don’t you care?’

  ‘Of course I care!’ Emma twisted her hands in her lap, a sure sign of her agitation. ‘Mr Simon … Simon says he will arrange for a woman to come in every day when the boys come in from school. To give them their tea and clean up a bit. He says when Dad comes out it will do him good to have to face up to his responsibilities anyway.’

  ‘He what?’ Sharon leaped to her feet, her face flushed beneath the crown of jumbo-sized rollers. ‘The cheeky sod! So he knows what our dad is like, does he? Did you not tell him that our dad hasn’t the strength even to blow the skin off his rice pudding? Does he think he’s marrying into the aristocracy, or something?’

  ‘No.’ Emma’s voice was so quiet it was almost a whisper. ‘He knows exactly the kind of background I come from. He’s been here, hasn’t he? He’s seen. But it makes no difference. He’s not a snob.’

  ‘He’s so madly in love with you he can’t see the wood for the trees. Is that it, then?’

  Emma’s face seemed to crumple. ‘He just wants to do the right thing by me, Sharon. He wants the baby. He wants it bad. You should have seen his face when I told him I was going to have an abortion. I thought he was going to hit me.’

  ‘An’ you love him?’ Sharon clenched her hands by her sides, rigid with indignation. ‘First I knew of it if you do.’

  Emma lifted her head. ‘I think I love him so much that if I were to admit it, even to myself, I would be frightened to death. I think I loved him from the first moment I saw him. Just to be near him makes me so happy, even when I hate him I feel so happy inside. I didn’t know. Nobody told me it could be like this. It’s as though nobody but him exists. I can’t stop looking at him, and when I am with him I am different. Words come into my mouth and he makes me feel lovely.’ She held out a hand. ‘You know, Sharon. You’ve got Ricky, so you must know.’

  ‘I flamin’ don’t!’ Sharon backed away. ‘That’s the soppiest thing I’ve ever heard. Me an’ Ricky don’t carry on like that.’ She sat down again. ‘You’ve got carried away, our Emma. You can’t get married feeling like that. He’s flattered, that’s what he is. Older men get like that sometimes when a young girl fancies them, but it doesn’t last. He’s an old fella compared to Ben Bamford.’ She leaned forward. ‘Why don’t you tell Ben about the baby? He would marry you if you still want to have it. He’d knock your block off first, but he would marry you; he’s only biding his time, Ben is.’

  ‘Let’s go to bed.’ Emma stood up and bent down to switch off the electric fire. ‘It’s all such a mix-up.’ She turned impulsively and put a hand on Sharon’s bare arm. ‘We’ll talk about it tomorrow, eh?’

  ‘We flamin’ won’t.’ Sharon shrugged the hand away. ‘Strikes me you’ve met a right one. Fancy him going down to London just now. He should be here, sorting things out. Strikes me he’s got his priorities all wrong, your Mr Simon. Best thing you can do would be to have that abortion before he comes back. Have it done private and charge it to him. I’ll stop off work to look after you. Okay?’

  ‘Would you have one, Sharon? An abortion?’

  At the tone of Emma’s voice Sharon whipped round. ‘Like a flamin’ shot if I was in your position. But then I’m not daft enough to get caught, am I?’

  Seventeen next week, Emma thought as she followed the slight figure bristling with rollers and indignation upstairs. Oh, flaminenry! Only seventeen!

  ‘You’re doing this to pay me back, aren’t you, Simon?’

  Chloe’s face was white with shock as she stood in front of the home-made brick fireplace in her friend’s London flat. When he first told her she had thought she was going to faint. She had gone icy cold, especially her face, and the dark-brown carpet had seemed to come up as if it were going to hit her smack between the eyes. ‘You tell me you are going to marry this girl because she is pregnant, because you got her pregnant quite sober one day when I was away. She means nothing to you, but you will marry her. Oh, God, Simon, don’t play the knight on a white charger because it doesn’t become you.’ She put a foot up on the brick hearth and leaned her forehead against the mantelshelf with its hand-made pottery mugs and its bamboo-framed photographs of her friends’ two children.

  ‘You’ve been taken in by that heart-shaped face and those wistful brown eyes, haven’t you?’

  ‘But I never said….’ he looked bewildered.

  ‘You didn’t need to, honey. I always knew it was the girl called Emma Sparrow. I think I knew when I saw her sitting by your bed in the hospital. All smouldering passion behind that calm face and in that drooping sullen mouth. Her type have been leading men on since Eve passed Adam that rosy apple. She wanted you to make her pregnant, can’t you see? And now, because integrity’s your middle name, she’s got you home and dry. Oh, Simon….’

  All at once she began to sob. Huge tearing sobs that made Simon glance round at the closed door.

  ‘It’s okay.’ Chloe raised a ravaged face. ‘They’ve gone to Hampstead to fly a kite on the Heath. And I don’t know why I am crying like this. Heaven
knows there hasn’t been much going for us lately.’ She fought for control. ‘It’s just the surprise, the waste. Jealousy, maybe, because she is going to share your life, and not me. Because I had an abortion and she had more sense. Because now I am sure I love you, when before I wasn’t sure.’

  ‘Chloe.’ He took a step forward and she came into his arms. ‘You’re making this very hard for me, love.’ He stroked her hair. ‘I want us to go on being friends.’ His voice deepened. ‘You don’t mean what you just said. You never wanted to live up there. You never wanted to marry me, not really. Before I told you, I was thinking how happy you looked. When you told me about your trip to Copenhagen next week I saw the pleasure in your eyes.’ He shook her gently. ‘Sometimes I think you will never marry.’ He tried to make her smile. ‘I don’t think there’s a man around who could tie you down to a home.’

  ‘Tie me down to a home?’ Chloe moved away, and covering her face with her hands began to laugh, gently at first, then with rising hysteria. ‘Oh, God, Simon! I never looked on your feelings for me as a fortress I could creep into to shield me from the wicked world. We were equals! You were never the sort of man who would lose his cool because we ran out of your favourite cheese. I didn’t have to hand you your vitamins at breakfast, and pick your socks up off the bedroom floor. Is that what you want? Is that what you have wanted all the time?’

  When he left her she was calm again. He promised to keep in touch, and she promised to be his friend.

  But when the door had closed behind him she ran into her room with its shower and the small portable television set at the foot of her bed. With pounding heart she lay down on the coverlet and drummed with her heels like a child in a tantrum.

  ‘Blast you, Simon Martin!’ she yelled. ‘You stupid bastard! You stupid godamned bastard!’

  She sobbed for ten minutes, then slowly calmed.