by Marie Joseph
Emma’s mouth curved upwards slightly into a stiff semblance of a smile.
‘It’s funny how everybody puts the kettle on at times like this, isn’t it?’
Patty sat down and waited. Any minute now and she’d be out with it. It wasn’t about the baby, she could stake her life on that. Maybe, just maybe, a nudge in the right direction wouldn’t come amiss.
‘Having trouble with your fella, love? They are all shits, so you can tell me.’
But suddenly, sipping the hot strong tea, Emma knew she could not talk about Simon to Patty Bamford. It must be her natural reticence or something. Her eyes softened with the threat of tears. Some women could sit opposite a marriage guidance counsellor and stumble through the debris of their relationship with their husband. And maybe it acted as a catharsis. Some women could criticize their husbands, comparing notes, describing their man’s filthy habits, or lack of feeling, then agreeing that all men were the same, with not a good one among them. She had often heard women in the avenue doing just that.
But it wasn’t for her.
Simon wasn’t a monster. It wasn’t his fault that he could not feel the same way as she did about him. Simon was so special that just remembering how special he was made her weak with love. She liked and admired Patty, but discussing her marriage with her would be as disloyal as being unfaithful. Because, oh, dear God, what she felt for Simon was precious. His indifference was her problem – just one more problem Emma had to work out for herself. An’ if she did not feel so ill, so diminished, she was sure she could think it through. Maybe it would have helped if she had been forced to sit at the buttonhole machine hour by hour with her mind transcending the mechanical movements of her fingers. She wasn’t sure. She wasn’t really sure of anything any more.
Patty was waiting. The weather was closing in so that soon darkness would fall. It was time she was getting back, but the effort of making a move was at the moment beyond her. Two nights almost entirely without sleep had left her dazed with a longing to close her eyes that was overwhelming. Emma reached out and put the cup on the table before it slipped from her nerveless fingers.
Why was she here? She could hardly remember getting here. All she had known was that she had to get away, out of the house where Chloe, dressed always in green to match the cushions and the curtains, laughed at her from every corner.
Green, the colour of jealousy. But whose jealousy? Her own?
‘That’s right, love.’ Patty’s voice seemed to be coming from a long, long way away. ‘Just you lie back and put your feet up and have a bit of a sleep. C’mon, shift over and I’ll put this cushion behind your head.’
She stood looking down at the girl with a face as white as bleached linen. So it was fella trouble! An’ if Emma didn’t want to say, then she didn’t want to say. But one thing was sure. She would have to get herself sorted out somehow, or she would end up where Patty’s own mother had ended up, an’ that was tearing out her hair in handfuls in a loony bin.
Tenderly Patty covered Emma’s legs with the ironing blanket, the nearest thing to hand. She shook her head from side to side and sighed.
Men! She could shoot the lot of them. But just now there was something more practical she had to do. Emma was not, in Patty’s forthright opinion, fit to go back home on two buses. An’ if the telephone box at the corner of the street hadn’t been vandalized, she would ring that husband up and ask – no, tell him to come and fetch her. Patty tightened her mouth as she remembered the tall dark man chatting her up over the bar counter at the pub. He had seemed nice enough, but then with bloody men, who could tell? Posh he might be, but he wasn’t good enough for Emma, an’ that was telling him!
Boy, could she write a book about men!
An’ now she was going to go over the street and ask the fella who worked a taxi round if he was free to run Emma home when she woke up. The cab was outside the house – she had seen it when she let Emma in.
Caring nothing that she was wearing down-trodden bedroom slippers and her pinny, Patty let herself out of the house, leaving the door wide open and, cursing the rain wetting her elaborate hairdo, ran flat-footed across the street.
Simon Martin, after an uncharacteristically long period of indecision, had rung directory enquiries, only to be told that the Birmingham address was not on their list of subscribers. He had picked up the glass of whisky, looked at it, then put it down again. That was no way round a problem.
He was used to acting quickly, making snap decisions. He could act or talk his way out of any dilemma, but now, faced with Emma’s disappearance, he quite literally did not know what to do. For once in his life he was at the mercy of his own emotions, and they were swirling round his blood-stream so that his heart thumped against his ribs and his legs buckled beneath him as he ran upstairs.
It was quite dark outside the house, and now the rain was sweeping down. Simon stood irresolute in the middle of the bedroom, a fist clenched against his forehead.
‘Emma!’ Had he cried her name aloud, or was it a moan coming from somewhere inside him? He tried to remember how she had been when he left the house that morning, and all he could see was her little white face and her soft brown eyes gazing mutely at him, as if she were pleading with him.
Hardly knowing what he was doing, he opened a drawer and threw a shirt into an overnight bag, then went into the bathroom to collect his shaving things. If Emma had gone to find her mother, then he was going to find her, and when he found her… if he found her… oh, God, he had to find her.
He clicked the locks of the bag shut, and took a last look round the bedroom. He stopped and rubbed his hand in a circular motion round his chin. Would she have gone off just like that, without telling him? Because if she had, then she had needed love so desperately that she had been driven to find a woman, a stranger, who just happened to be her mother, in her search for it.
Stumbling downstairs he stood once more by the telephone. Ought he to call the police? He picked up the receiver, then put it down again, biting his lips. Single-handed almost, he had, over the past weeks, steered the business into what seemed to be calmer waters, and yet now he was as indecisive, as jittery as an adolescent schoolboy.
He was standing there, the case on the floor by his side, tears of frustration stinging behind his eyes, when the front door opened.
And Emma was there… pale and bedraggled in her short jacket and still damp skirt, her brown hair wisping round her face. For a moment neither of them spoke, then almost without volition he stretched out his arms to hold her close, straining her to him.
He found the words would not come. His throat had closed; he could only keep her there, safe in his arms, his heartbeats jerking painfully.
‘I thought you had left me,’ he managed to whisper at last. ‘I thought you had gone away. I didn’t know what to do.’ He raised his head and she saw the anguish etched deep on his thin face.
Then he showed her the Birmingham address written on the slip of paper, and saw the emotion drift across her expression like a shadow creeping into sunlight and back again.
She was so small that her head came only to his chin, but as she reached up and held his face between her hands he grew calm and still. And now for the first time in their turbulent relationship she was master. When she took him by the hand and led him upstairs, he followed her like a child.
On the landing she turned to him. ‘I’ve been to Patty Bamford’s house, and I didn’t get wet coming back because she sent me home in a taxi. I got wet going there.’
She took him into the bedroom, shrugged off her jacket and began to unzip her skirt. But he would not let her. He wanted to do everything for her, to show her that his caring went so deep it was a physical ache inside him.
So she stood quietly and allowed him to undress her, and his hands were the gentle hands of both lover and friend as he took her nightdress from beneath her pillow and lowered it over her head.
He brought her housecoat and tied the ribbons clumsily
, but she made no move to help him, knowing that this was what he needed to do, although her hands ached to touch his thick hair and pull him close to her.
Then he led her downstairs, past the cold and cheerless sitting-room into the warmth of the kitchen.
‘You must sit there,’ he told her, pulling a chair out. Then he broke four eggs into a bowl and took the hand-whisk down from its rack on the wall.
‘I am a wizard with omelettes,’ he told her gravely. ‘Which shall it be? Cheese or herbs?’
‘Herbs, please.’
Emma watched him with love, aching with love as he stood by the cooker in his dark business suit, tipping the pan so that the beaten eggs ran evenly. And still she made no move to help, knowing that this was the way it had to be.
‘There!’ he said at last, cutting the omelette carefully into two pieces. He set a plate in front of her and placed a fork in her hand. ‘Now we must eat. You must eat it all up, love, and then we can talk.’
She smiled. ‘It’s lovely, Simon.’ Then she put her fork down. ‘I wasn’t going to Birmingham. I am just not made like that.’ She tried to eat again, but the food stuck in her throat. ‘Oh, yes, my mother does live there. You found that out?’
He nodded, his own meal untouched.
‘I realized that she is only my mother because she gave birth to me. I am too… too sensible, too much a product of Mam’s upbringing to make a dramatic gesture like that. Anyway, she would probably have had a pink fit if her long-lost daughter had turned up on the doorstep without warning. It would have been an embarrassment for both of us, don’t you see?’
Simon pushed his plate away. There was so much that he did see, so much he should have seen long ago, and it was important that he said the right words. Far more important than giving in to the overwhelming urge to take this small girl in his arms.
‘But you needed her. You needed the thought of her. Your mother symbolized all that need, didn’t she?’ He ran his fingers through his hair and his eyebrows drew together in a puzzled frown. ‘Then why Patty Bamford, Emma? Why on earth, out of all the world, Patty Bamford?’
What he desperately wanted to say was ‘Why not me?’, but he knew he was afraid of what the answer might have been.
Emma pushed her own plate away and clasped her hands together. She too realized the enormity of what she was going to say, but being the way she was could only tell the honest unvarnished truth.
‘Patty Bamford knows what it feels like to be lonely. Oh, she has had men, lots of them I should imagine, but she is still about the loneliest person I know. So I thought if I went there she might say something, something I could identify with that would help.’
‘And did she?’
Emma shook her head. ‘When I tried to tell her how I felt the words weren’t there.’ She stared straight into his troubled face. ‘I just wanted to come home. To you,’ she added softly.
Simon took a deep breath. ‘And I had failed you. No, don’t say anything. Let me finish. Whenever you needed me I wasn’t there. I was so wrapped up in the business, so engrossed in making it tick over that I couldn’t see that I was neglecting you, shutting you out.’
Emma sighed. He was trying so hard, and still he hadn’t said the words she wanted to hear.
‘But every woman married to a man like you has that to put up with.’ She was achingly serious. ‘I understood, Simon. No, maybe it’s been, as Mam would have said, six of one and half a dozen of the other.’ Then her brown eyes widened with indignation. ‘But remember one thing, Simon Martin! I am not another Chloe, nor am I another Ellen. You mustn’t use either one of them as a yardstick when you’re measuring me up!’
Suddenly, without warning, Simon banged his fist down so that Emma blinked in surprise.
‘Don’t say that! Don’t ever think that! No, you are not Chloe, little sweetheart. Nor are you Ellen.’ His whole expression softened. ‘You are, and always will be, the love of my life. The love I have wanted and been waiting for…. You are beautiful and kind, and sweet, and unselfish, and I wish I could change into the kind of man you deserve.’ He held out his hand, and she saw the sparkle of tears in his eyes. ‘And I can’t promise to change all that much. I will always be dashing off to some meeting; often doing sums in my mind when I should be listening to you.’ His voice broke so that what he said next came out in a hoarse whisper. ‘But I will always love you, Emma. Always. And I will cherish you to the best of my cherishing. So now you know.’
It was Emma who moved first. She moved quickly and put her arms round this proud, clever, often thoughtless man she loved with all her being.
‘Oh, dear God, how I love you,’ he whispered into the satin ribbons of her housecoat.
And he could not see the blinding joy on her face as she pressed his head close, tangling her fingers in his hair.
‘Keep on doing just that,’ she said softly. The joy was there in her voice and, hearing it, he sighed, and was at peace.
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First published by Hutchinson 1981
Arrow edition 1982
Reprinted 1982 (twice) and 1983
© Marie Joesph 1981
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