Emma Sparrow

by Marie Joseph

  That first afternoon they took a car rug out into the back garden and lay on it, side by side, with the blue sky above and the distant hum of traffic muted in their ears. With their fingers entwined they slipped in and out of sleep together.

  ‘I love you,’ she whispered, and he smiled.

  ‘You keep right on doing just that,’ he said, and if it wasn’t quite the reply she wanted, for today it was enough, more than enough.

  When she made tea in the kitchen and took it outside Simon was sitting up with a folder open on his knees, checking the closely typed figures. He motioned to her to put the cup of tea down on the grass, adjusted his spectacles and went on with his calculations, leaving the tea to grow cold.

  And it never occurred to Emma, not even fleetingly, that it was a strange thing for a man to be doing on his wedding day.

  ‘You are sure you won’t mind being alone?’

  He held her close before he left to drive down to London the following Monday morning. ‘You won’t do anything silly like climbing ladders, or fainting in the bath?’ He ran a hand in an already familiar gesture down the soft slight swell of her stomach. ‘Take care of him for me. Okay?’.

  And when he had gone she stood in the doorway of the big room with its picture windows at either side, and silently gloried in its beauty.

  The day before, whilst Simon prepared his notes for the trip down south and wrote the first draft of a memo to be xeroxed and sent out to every worker in the group of factories, she had rung Sharon and asked her to bring the boys over when she finished work.

  ‘For supper,’ she’d said innocently, and Sharon’s loud explosive hoot of laughter had crackled in her ears.

  ‘Last week it was tea! Oh, flaminenry, our Emma. Is it formal dress, then?’ Cos if it is I’d better be getting me tiara out of its box and giving it a polish. It hasn’t taken you long to cotton on to posh ways, has it? Are we having “horses doovres” to start off with?’

  Emma had leaped at once to the defensive. ‘It is supper for me and Simon. He doesn’t come home till seven at the very earliest. You’ve no idea how hard he works.’

  But Sharon never had known when to let be.

  ‘An’ tea is cucumber butties cut so thin you can see the plate through them?’ She giggled, and as she went on chattering Emma realized it was the first time they had spoken to each other on the telephone.

  ‘The maid’s having her day off. Hope you don’t mind. You know what it’s like with staff these days.’

  Sharon answered through an invisible plum. ‘Oh, my dear. I have the same problem. Only last week the parlour maid trumped as she was bringing in the fillet steaks, and of course I had to tell her to go. No refinement at all. So I do understand, my dear.’

  ‘Come as soon as you can,’ Emma said, and replaced the receiver carefully on its cradle.

  At five o’clock there was a chicken casserole simmering in the new oven, four potatoes baking in their jackets underneath, and ice-cream in the small freezer. It was all a million light years away from standing at Mam’s old cooker, often still wearing her coat as she grilled fish fingers or hamburgers straight from the packet.

  And when Emma saw them coming up the road from the bus stop she ran to the door with arms outstretched in an excited welcome.

  Because it was raining and the path was muddy, she made the boys remove their shoes, then smiled as they made a beeline for the velvet sofa facing the television – two inanimate objects, eyes fixed, transferred merely from one setting to another, oblivious of everything but the figures on the screen.

  ‘Why is everybody so pale on your telly.’ Alan wanted to know.

  ‘Mrs Collins gave us cottage pie for tea,’ Joe said.

  ‘Shepherd’s pie,’ Alan contradicted.

  ‘Cottage!’

  ‘Shepherd’s.’

  ‘Cottage.’

  ‘Oh, shurrup, both of you!’ Sharon followed Emma through into the kitchen, arms folded, thin legs looking even thinner beneath the straight skirt she had shortened to meet the current fashion.

  ‘You are all right, all of you? Aren’t you?’ Emma opened the oven door to peer anxiously inside and prod the potatoes with a fork.

  Sharon stared down at her shoes, determined not to show rapture at anything in the house. ‘A fat lot you care, anyroad.’

  Emma whipped round. ‘Of course I care!’ Her face was flushed. ‘I wouldn’t have moved out if Mrs Collins hadn’t stepped in and been glad of the money. And anyway, Dad will be home soon. It’s only a matter of weeks now, then you’ll be getting married and…!’

  ‘An’ Dad will take over?’ Sharon’s mouth dropped into a sulky curve. ‘Oh, yes. I can just see Dad taking over. I can just see him in the kitchen wearing a pinny. He can burn a pot of tea an’ you know it, our Emma.’ She kicked out furiously at nothing. ‘You never stopped to think, did you? Not when you did what you did, or about what’s going to happen now.’

  She lifted her head and stared straight at Emma. ‘Anyroad, there were a knock at the door yesterday, and when I went it were a woman I’d never seen before.’

  She hesitated as Emma took four plates from the oven rack and laid them out in a row on the breakfast bar. ‘Well, go on.’

  ‘It was your mother,’ Sharon said.

  Emma stood quite still, the meal forgotten.

  ‘My mother? You mean my own mother came and just knocked at the door? Oh, my God, I don’t believe it!’

  ‘You’d best sit down for a minute.’ Sharon pulled a tall stool forward. ‘She said she had come on the train to see a friend she used to know years ago, and on her way back to the station she called on the spur. Her friend had told her about Mam dying, but not about Dad being in prison and you getting married. She was quite took aback.’

  Emma could feel her heart thudding, even as she told herself not to be stupid. ‘What was she like?’ Her lips quivered. ‘Was she like me? I mean, am I like her? Was she nice? What did she say?’

  ‘You’ve gone ever so white.’ Sharon’s voice was concerned. ‘She wasn’t … you’re not a bit like her. She was little and fat with her hair done in a reddish colour. She said she was a widow now, and when I told her you was married she couldn’t believe it. She lives somewhere outside Birmingham, and I’ve got her address if you want it.’ Sharon looked round for her shoulder bag. ‘But I didn’t give her your address. I was going to, then I thought better of it.’

  ‘Did she ask for it?’

  ‘No, she didn’t. She was only in a minute with having to catch her train and everything.’ Sharon put a hand on one of the plates. ‘I’m starving hungry, our Emma. Mrs Collins gave the boys jam on toast, but I’ve had nothing.’ She gave Emma’s arm a little shake. ‘Look. You can’t be that upset about it. You’re just being dramatic. Mam was your mother, an’ you know it. Not that woman with dyed red hair. She went off and left you and never even wrote nor nothing. You want to forget she ever came.’

  Emma nodded, and getting down from the stool began to dish up the meal. They were carrying it through into the far end of the big room used as a dining-room, when she suddenly stopped and said, ‘What colour were her eyes, Sharon? Was she a kind sort of person? Did you like her? Would I like her?’

  ‘She was just a woman,’ Sharon said impatiently. ‘Oh, flaminenry, our Emma, forget her. I wish I hadn’t told you now.’

  They were half-way through the meal when Sharon asked where Simon had gone.

  ‘London. He has four interviews and three meetings to get through in two days,’ Emma told her.

  ‘Stopping in a hotel, I suppose?’ By the tone of her voice Sharon managed to make it sound as if what she really meant was a brothel. ‘Why couldn’t you have gone with him? You could have gone round the shops in Oxford Street. Catch me missing a chance like that.’

  She passed her plate for a second helping. ‘Won’t you be scared sleeping alone in this house with no neighbours to knock on the wall to? I’ve had Joe in bed with me since you went, an
’ even though he kicks me to death it’s better than being on me own.’

  ‘I’m not in the least worried.’ Emma went through for the ice-cream, and wondered if her mother had really been as fat and red of hair as Sharon had tried to make out. It was no good, she just couldn’t put it out of her mind.

  In the middle of the night, with the house dark and silent, she sat up in the middle of the big bed and tried to work things out in her head.

  It was true that Mam had brought her up, and with as much loving care as if she had been her own daughter. And it was also true that if her real mother had been dead she would never even have thought about her.

  Emma hugged her knees and switched on the beside lamp. She couldn’t love a woman who was a complete stranger, even if that person had given birth to her. Could she? She could be curious about her, and even terrified at the thought of meeting her. She could wonder what deep unhappiness had caused a mother to walk away from her husband and child; and knowing her father, in spite of loving him, she could ask herself had all the faults been on one side?

  Sitting there in the darkness, she could remember the anguish of the weeks after she discovered she was pregnant and how, half-ashamed, she had cried for her mother. Wanting and needing her with such intensity that once, in despair, she had even stretched out her arms to her. And if it was ridiculous, even if it was disloyal to those who had cared for her, the feeling was still there. A strong, deep love that wouldn’t go away.

  ‘I bet her hair wasn’t all that red, either,’ Emma told herself, as switching off the light she lay down again and tried to will a sleep that would not come.

  Thirteen

  IT WAS AFTER nine o’clock in the evening when Simon arrived back looking, in Emma’s private opinion, tired and ill.

  Quick at sensing his mood, she made the mistake of offering him something to eat straight away, remembering how Mam had always pushed a plate of food under John Sparrow’s nose as soon as he came in. ‘Feed a man the minute he comes in before you tell him owt,’ she always said, so Emma kissed her husband and smiled.

  ‘There’s a nice pork chop in the oven. It won’t take me a second to dish it up.’ Then she stepped back as if he had raised a hand to hit her as he hurled his brief-case into the far corner of the velvet sofa and slumped down in a chair.

  ‘Just give me a whisky and soda, there’s a good girl. I couldn’t eat a thing.’ He patted his flat stomach. ‘I am all blown up with eating business lunches for the past couple of days, and talking to illiterate morons who won’t even try to realize how desperate things are and what we’re up against.’

  He drained the glass and passed it over to her. ‘Get me another one, love, and go easy on the soda this time. It’s been hell down there. We’ve had to lay off seventy workers at the Acton factory. Seventy! And with the excuse that it was all due to production problems.’ He ran a hand through his thick hair. ‘What a fiasco! It’s a vicious circle with the mills up here laying off their workers in turn.’ Glancing at his watch he started to get up. ‘I must ring Harry Gordon up to ask him to arrange a management and supervisors’ meeting first thing tomorrow morning. He won’t like it, but there’s no choice. Somebody has to get the message across somehow.’

  His dark eyes were like chiselled holes in his face, and there were two spots of high colour on his cheekbones. He took the glass of whisky through with him into the hall, sipping from it as he went. ‘I should have rung him from down there, but I wanted to get back.’ He looked up briefly from dialling. ‘You’ve been all right on your own?’

  Emma nodded, opened her mouth to say something, thought better of it, then went through into the kitchen to switch off the oven and take out the casserole. There had never been any left-overs in Litchfield Avenue, and she stared at it, wondering if it would heat through the next day, reminding herself that Mam had always said that pork was tricky, when she heard Simon’s raised voice as he talked to Harry Gordon.

  ‘So, okay, it’s bloody short notice!’ His words were ragged with exhaustion, and sharp with irritation. ‘Well, you will just have to put him off. I know… I know.’

  Emma stood listening. So this was one of the boss men her father and Ben Bamford had complained about!

  ‘Sitting about on their fat arses,’ John Sparrow had said, ‘watching the men do all the work.’

  ‘Treating us like we was down the bloody salt mines,’ Ben had grumbled. ‘Taking three hours for their so-called business lunches then knocking off again at five.’

  Emma reached for a piece of foil and wrapped up some white crumbly Lancashire cheese, put it back in the fridge, then replaced some biscuits in a tin.

  It just went to show, she decided as Simon’s tone rose in frustration. She bit her lips. An’ the best thing she could do was to keep out of his way till he had got it off his chest. For the time being, anyway.

  So silently, like a small quiet mouse, she went about her task of tidying away the uneaten meal, knowing and accepting the fact that until Simon had relaxed, her very presence was superfluous. She wasn’t being subservient. Nothing like that. She was merely using her loaf, that was all.

  When she went back into the living-room at last he was asleep in his chair, the glass empty by his side, papers slipping from his knees. He looked grey, far older than his years, and touchingly vulnerable.

  When the telephone rang she went quickly into the hall to answer it, whispering a hello, and praying it wasn’t Harry Gordon ringing back.

  ‘Hi! Is that Emma?’ The voice at the other end was as loud and clear as if its owner were standing there right beside her. Emma saw her eyes grow wide in the reflection in the mirror over the small table.

  ‘This is Chloe. Chloe Day. Is Simon there? Would you mind if I had a word with him? I’ve a few things I would like him to send on. You don’t mind, honey?’

  Taken completely by surprise, Emma stammered something. By Simon’s chair she hesitated for a moment as she realized the sleep was a necessary shutting down of his overtaxed strength. She touched him gently on his arm, and immediately he opened his eyes and stared at her face as if wondering who she could be.

  ‘The telephone. For you.’ She tried not to sound apologetic. ‘It’s Chloe … Chloe,’ she repeated, then stood back as he almost knocked her away in his rush past her into the hall.

  ‘Chloe! How are you?’ His voice was quite different now. It sounded young again, filled with pleasure, eager and almost excited.

  Determined not to eavesdrop, Emma ran quickly upstairs and closed the bedroom door.

  And she wasn’t jealous. To show jealousy would be childish and make Simon angry and disappointed in her. He had explained that there was no animosity between him and Chloe; that he hoped that some day they would meet and be friends. Emma tucked a strand of hair behind an ear and went to examine her body profile in the long mirror. She was the one Simon had married, and this was his baby just beginning to show. Besides, men brought up like Simon Martin did not write off their mistresses, or even their ex-wives when they married someone else. They behaved in a civilized way.

  Just as she, Emma Martin, who used to be Emma Sparrow, must behave in a civilized way. Not carry on like Ben Bamford, rushing down the path in a frenzy of rage, or like her father refusing to talk about his first wife.

  Emma glanced at the drawer in her dressing-table where she had hidden the slip of paper with her mother’s address scribbled on it. She nodded her head up and down twice. Her decision not to mention it to Simon, now that was being civilized. It was bad enough him being lumbered with a father-in-law who would soon be coming out of prison to drink and cough what was left of his life away, and sponge on Simon if he got the chance. Emma was ready and prepared for that. But for Simon suddenly to find he had also acquired a fat mother-in-law with bright red hair, well, that would have been too much. Emma trailed through into the bathroom and turned on the taps to drown the sound of the animated conversation going on in the hall below.

  Simon’s
homecoming hadn’t been in the least like the rapturous, idyllic meeting she had planned. The honeymoon was over, as Mam would have said. Slowly she began to undress.

  But then, did anything turn out according to plan? Flaminenry, as Sharon would undoubtedly say, that was life. Wasn’t it?

  Simon got into bed just after eleven o’clock. Too tired to make love, too sleepy and whisky-sodden to do more than lay his hand on her stomach with a proprietary gesture. ‘Don’t let me miss the alarm in the morning, love. I want to be away before eight. I’ve got to chase some supplies up after the meeting with Harry Gordon. It’s a good job I’m not a union man. Being the boss’s son has its disadvantages at a time like this. There’s too much at stake, and I don’t mean just personally either…. God, but I’m tired.’

  Whenever Emma had thought about marriage to Simon, if she had really thought past the wedding and the relief from the anguished anxiety and indecision about what to do about the baby, it had been in terms of him going off to work, then coming home to a cooked meal.

  She would be a credit to him. That she was determined to be. She would meet his friends, and they would spend long weekends in the large neglected garden with Simon pushing the lawn mower whilst she weeded gently and went indoors for drinks and trays of snacks. She would learn to cut bread thin and spread it with butter, not grab thick slices from a cut loaf and smear it with margarine, and she would think in terms of chops instead of fish fingers and the interminable hamburgers.

  She wasn’t blaming Simon for the humdrum reality of her existence. He had rescued her from far worse, hadn’t he? And the fact that their being together had coincided with the partial closing-down of the London end of his father’s business meant that he had to work even longer hours to consolidate the northern side. This much she understood.

  What she had not prepared herself for was the loneliness. Long, long days in the house when there was nothing left to polish, when the evening meal so lovingly prepared dried and frizzled in the oven, and a telephone call told her he would be delayed once again and not to keep anything for him as he would be having a beer and a sandwich with a client before going back to the office to work on yet another return.