by Annie Bullen
Kattie was not normally an introspective woman. From earliest childhood her easy charm, her dimpled smile, her intense interest in other people, had been enough to win her friends and a devoted band of hangers-on. Those people who did not respond, or who reacted with suspicion to her open offers of friendship, she discounted. Billy had been one of those who found it impossible, perhaps with some justification, to believe that so much was being offered for so little return. So Kattie had focused her warmth upon Angela (who naturally responded), dismissing Billy as one who diminished and was therefore worthless. But rarely had those who nestled inside the fold deserted it.
Kattie looked down at the baby, now waking in her arms, and then at her carelessly reclining daughter. She frowned as if she recognized neither of them as she pulled her red skirt down over her knees where it was rucked up by the weight of the baby. The child sighed and pushed up to Kattie’s soft breast, nuzzling into what she recognized as warmth, security, food. Kattie glanced again, absently, at the questing child and back to Dorelia.
‘Is he, do you think, taking drugs again? Has he said anything to you? Is that why he hit Hugh?’
‘Oh no. I mean that’s not why he hit Hugh. No I don’t know if he’s taking anything, anything hard I mean. I’m sure he’s well, you know, smoking and he’s always jolly keen to talk about drugs and all that.’
‘Well what on earth made him do it?’
‘Do what?’ Dorelia smirked infuriatingly.
‘Hit Hugh like that.’
‘Oh THAT. Didn’t you realize? It was because of me.’
‘You?’
‘Yes. You see he thought Hugh was trying to kiss me –which he was – and he got all sort of jealous. Or disgusted. I’m not sure.’ Dorelia tapped her toe against the bed-post and smiled innocently at her mother.
‘Hugh trying to kiss you. Hugh?’
‘Oh yes. Well, he was. But I think he was sort of dazed. He didn’t really know what he was doing. He was just sort of clinging on if you know what I mean. That’s all.’
‘And Fergus hit him to, to PROTECT you?’
‘Yes. Yes, I suppose so. I suppose that’s why.’
‘Oh God!’ Kattie slumped over the grizzling baby. Hugh’s batty charm was turning into something sinister. She knew about the messy scandal of the ending of his first marriage, and about his stormy relationship with Anna. But she had only looked at him as her Hugh, a talent to be nurtured, and she had never considered him in a sexual light. Fergus could be imagined as possessing all sorts of unpleasant private habits, but Hugh had seemed to be above fleshly urges, a brilliant mind weaving strange melodies. Kattie’s pretty pink cheeks flushed dark red as she pictured Fergus and Hugh in sexual competition over her daughter.
‘Dorelia,’ she began, but the baby, now thoroughly disillusioned in her search for milk, began to howl with such total concentration that nothing else could compete with her urgency.
Dorelia, who had acknowledged her mother’s difficulty in framing a question by holding her body very straight and still, a perfect diagonal across the rumpled bed, now scooped herself upright and gently took the yelling child out of Kattie’s arms. Kattie did not protest, but yielded control to Dorelia, an abstracted frown creasing her face.
‘Look, I’m telling you. Straight up. This old geezer’s evil, right? He’s dishing the stuff out. I swear it. You can tell what he’s on just by looking at him. I mean, I do know about all that, don’t I?’
Fergus was on top again. Plump arms bulging out of sweat-stained short-sleeved T-shirt, elbows on the plastic-topped table, he leaned forward to gaze carefully at the impassive bulk of Tim Tyson. The detective inspector did not acknowledge the information by so much as a twitch of a muscle, but Fergus knew that he had the policeman’s attention. He leaned back and relaxed. Sighing a little, he sniffed, flexed his arms and turned his head to one side, to grin secretly.
Tim Tyson was the copper who’d nicked him, both times. The first wasn’t so bad, a short stretch in an open prison, but the second, a stay in Dartmoor, had been infinitely more unpleasant. Uncle Tim, Fergus called him behind his back, a figure who stayed solidly in the mind, playing a role between that of father and uncle. He and the detective inspector maintained a relationship which stopped short of intimacy but which had become necessary in an emotional way to himself and useful at times to the policeman.
Fergus, with his feet unsteadily on both sides of the line, thought he knew just how far he could go with his criminal contacts and with his ‘friends’ in the CID. He knew that for all the useful information he passed over to Tim and his colleagues in the way of sly hints, nods and innuendo, they would have no hesitation in nicking him again and putting him away (for a long one this time). In the course of his considerable experience outside the law (although it must be admitted that Fergus thought he moved in a far grander league than he really did), he had found himself increasingly intrigued and entranced by the wheeling and dealing that went on inside, the machinery for gathering information and arresting suspects, the deals made to secure a conviction. Fergus, who knew, or thought he knew, all the villains in the area, only passed on snippets that could not be traced back to him, but his need to talk about what he had gleaned increased with his own sense of complicity, of real usefulness, as he dropped hints about who was to be burgled, defrauded or set fire to.
The pair were sitting in the plastic surroundings of the Co-op coffee lounge. Tim Tyson often met his contacts here where almost any encounter went unremarked among the bulging carrier bags of tired shoppers waiting for their bus home. He pushed at an overflowing ashtray with a disdainful finger and sighed. Dispassionately he looked across the tea-stained table at young Fergus, whose head lolled slightly to one side as he grinned inanely at the attention he felt he was commanding. The detective inspector had never been known to address Fergus by any name. Fergus was not aware of this but he did long for a contact with Tim that did not depend merely on his usefulness to the policeman. As that could not be achieved, the next best thing was to feed him with information which with a bit of luck would bring Fergus fully into his compass.
‘Can you make this one stand up?’ If Tyson spoke more sharply than he intended it was in the knowledge that he had, in the past, spent many hours listening to interminable hints and innuendoes from Fergus which, when probed, proved maddeningly insoluble.
‘Oh yeah. Yeah. First of all there’s the way he is and I know all about that, don’t I. Then there’s this.’ He triumphantly pulled a piece of writing paper from his pocket and flourished it at Tim. The policeman raised an eyebrow but said nothing as he took it. The address at the top of the letter was in Chelsea and the paper was thick and expensive.
‘Hugh, my dear,’ it began. ‘What fun. I’m thrilled that you have something for me at last. We shall have to keep it under wraps, as they say, for now, but perhaps I could collect, under cover as it were, on the night of your little recital. Many thanks by the way to you and the charming Kattie for the invitation. Do let’s be discreet though, Hugo – much better that way.’ The signature was a thick illegible scrawl.
‘Where did you find this?’
Fergus shrugged and sniffed.
‘Around – look, it’s all there. See the date. This week. It’s proof isn’t it?’
‘Not really. He could be referring to anything. What makes you think we’re talking about drugs?’
Fergus twisted his lips into a righteous shark-like grin as he pulled a brown envelope out of his pocket. ‘Try this.’
Tim Tyson looked suspiciously around at the gossiping shoppers and then peered into the envelope, which contained a screw of white paper. Without extracting the little packet he fumbled it open and peered at the white powder it contained. He sniffed and tasted and pulled his lips into a thin line.
‘Where was this?’
‘In his jacket pocket. Straight up. I tell you, he’s evil.’ Fergus relaxed happily giggling to himself as he slopped more sugar into his coffee.
‘I’d better have a large plastic bucket – one with a lid. No, I’m not making wine, it’s for nappies.’ Angela accepted the blue bucket from the elderly shopkeeper and consulted the list drawn up by Kattie that morning.
‘Milton?’ The query was lost on the store woman, who pushed at her neatly pinned grey bun of hair and reached under the counter to produce the sterilizing fluid. Angela wanted to laugh, but she pulled herself together and between them they assembled a respectable store of supplies to keep young Juanita going for a few days at least.
Anna’s whirlwind departure and Hugh’s dazed condition had forced the rest of the household into a state of concern for the child, which had become a kind of talisman between the three women who passed it between them, marvelling as they did so at its easy acceptance of any pair of arms or warm lap. Kattie, forced back into her usual caring role by the baby, was beginning to revel in her own experience as a mother, smiling as she took Juanita from Dorelia and initiating Angela into the mysteries of holding and rocking the child into the rhythms of rest and sleep. She had tucked away her hurt at the defection of Hugh – which she partly understood and believed now to be temporary – and of Fergus, whom she treated since his return to the house with a polite distance.
Angela had had very little to do with babies; she treated the new arrival with its creased up animal face and soft milky snufflings as yet another distraction from the decision about sorting out the necessary mechanics of her life. She saw, and noted with a pleasant cynicism, Kattie’s transference of caring from the difficult sulks of Hugh and Fergus to the uncomplicated child. She minded for the wounding of her friend’s pride, but unconsciously she was beginning to be wary of being trapped by the sense of obligation that their particular allegiance had to engender, however tenderly. She had been happy to walk down to the village stores with the long list, something that Dorelia, who treated the baby as a jolly little toy to be lugged around and exclaimed over, had said she was too busy to do.
As she paid the unsmiling shop lady she heard the jingle of the bell and the click of the opening door. She held out her hand for her change and turned as the woman who now entered brushed past her to stand straight-backed at the marble-slabbed counter which ran at right angles to the main serving area.
Angela stood stock-still, for how long she could not tell. The bony-faced shopkeeper, the packets and tins on the wooden shelves, the full-blown pink roses in a jam jar on the counter all became hard objects, intensified in clarity and colour, frozen in the shock of time which would not pass. The blue plastic bucket, filled up with the things she had bought, was heavy, but she did not notice that the metal handle was digging a red mark into the flesh of her forearm. Everything to do with her senses tingled and she felt cold. Evidently the woman behind the counter had moved round to serve her new customer, so time must have passed as she heard the woman ordering slices of ham and pieces of cheese.
She did not remember leaving the shop, opening the door with its irritating jangle and walking down the three worn stone steps to the narrow pavement, but found herself following the line of the pavement, automatically walking up the hill in the opposite direction from Puttnam. It was only then that she realized that her arm was hurting as the bucket handle dragged at her skin. Absentmindedly she unhooked it and put the heavy load on the ground in a recess made by the stone wall which ran the length of the village street. On she trudged, up the steep hill, panting a little as her steps took her more and more briskly away from the village shop to the famous view over the chalk downs where, Kattie had told her, a cluster of Iron Age Britons had staked out and defended their claim to the land.
She felt fatalistic. The drama of the sweeping landscape, the sudden immense view emerging from the claustrophobia of the cramped village street, the knowledge that little things were happening to her and around her, had happened here before and been blotted out by armies and trade and weather, that patterns assembled themselves and reassembled themselves, made her dizzy. She grasped the rough top of the drystone wall, the only security against the drop to the valley below that ran as a footnote to the galloping hills beyond. The hard stone scratched her hands and the little pain pulled her back from the far view to her place, at the top of the village hill, a mile away from Puttnam.
‘Here it all is! Gosh, Angela, you must be going bonkers to leave it there! Do you know, when I got to it the whole thing had been knocked over and there was a hedgehog scavenging around inside it. A dear little snuffling hedgehog!’ crooned Dorelia. Kattie looked suspiciously at her daughter, who was swinging the bucket and its contents at the end of her long white arm. But Dorelia started to empty out the bucket, exclaiming at the things inside, stacking the tins of baby food, the powder and creams and lotions in neat piles among the jumble on the kitchen table. She moved with dragonfly darts and Angela’s head whirled as she tried to follow every action.
Dorelia was rarely seen in repose. On the occasions she chose to sit, staring into middle distance, she was never still. A leg would be swinging, a foot tapping, her long fingers poking and probing as she wrapped her fantasies around her. Never questioning her own place in the world or the exact nature of her relation with others or of theirs to her, Dorelia was nevertheless a restless dreamer. She was in transition now, suspended; she accepted this, content to let things happen, pretend things, and to wait for the signal that would usher her in to the next stage of her life. It was instinct that had showed her that she should come home now, making it her chrysalis, wrapping herself in the cocoon of her family until things became ripe. She was content to wait.
Angela, trained to observe, felt that physically Dorelia was the refinement of her parents. (She, Angela, with her keen visual sense was often confused when it came to Kattie; she could never picture her friend’s real shape. She found it impossible when Kattie was not in the same room to say if she was fat, plump, tall, perfectly proportioned or just a bit larger than life size. Angela, it must also be said, was not alone with this difficulty: many friends who had maintained constant contact with Kattie over the years always found themselves faced with a reality very different from their mental image of her. Which just shows, many of them thought, how full lips and a generous nature can deceive.) Dorelia was very tall, but not large. All sweeping angles and the clumsy grace of the unselfconscious, she whisked on past people, touching them lightly, very often unaware of others except in relationship to herself just in that moment of touching. The only person Dorelia had loved passionately was Kattie. The separation, the physical severing of that love-tie between mother and daughter had been painful for each of them in a way that at the time, six or seven years earlier, neither had appreciated as the agony it was.
Dorelia, already beautiful at thirteen, bypassing adolescence or already there, or perhaps never intending to grow up, a Peter Pan fairy with a cloud of Rossetti hair, led a life centred on Kattie and, to a lesser degree, on Clem. In a quite contented way she was also very happy with the ordinary things in her life. Girl Guides, the local youth orchestra where she played her violin, school drama groups, community works, Dorelia obediently and happily became moderately good at all these things, to Clem’s indulgent amusement. But Kattie, worried by the domestic contentment of her beloved daughter and remembering the dreams and shifting excitement of her own early adolescent years, decided that Dorelia must be moved to a different environment. Quite suddenly the decision was made to pack the girl off to a school in Switzerland.
Each suffered but neither told her pain. From Dorelia’s babyhood Kattie had felt a curious dependency on the child, as if her own development was linked to that of her baby. And so it was. Clem, at that time, away from home a lot, was at first amused and touched and sometimes irritated by the private language and games, the clothes they wore which Kattie had made in identical material, by the physical intimacies between mother and child, the kisses and cuddles, the strokings and hand-holdings. Clem did not suffer, in that Kattie always had plenty of love for him t
oo – that was her nature. But he fretted that Dorelia would grow up not knowing a proper childhood and that Kattie, with so much talent and energy for love, would cripple both herself and their child with it. So it was with a sense of deep relief that he watched his daughter, under the care of one of those resourceful and sadly independent escorts who undertake to deliver children safely halfway round the world, depart for her new Swiss boarding school.
Kattie carried on smiling, but there was a flatness, a thick wooden edge to the way she moved from enthusiasm to enthusiasm. Clem, unable to help, watched with some anxiety. There was a certain balance which Clem understood instinctively. Always shrewd in matters of business, he had used those instincts to choose the right paths in response to the decisions that were necessary. In the way he had always known that he and Kattie were right in their relation to each other, providing a steady balance, he knew that he must wait for the imbalance that had been created by Dorelia’s departure and the tearing of the bond between the two women to be righted and steadied. So he stood back and carefully watched as Kattie baked bread, filled freezers with mounds of food, stitched patchwork quilts and made needlepoint cushions. She redecorated rooms, cleared out old cupboards, found new evening classes, busied herself discovering and discarding. He understood that her nature was to respond, to act as a catalyst, to give what she could not use herself to others who needed an emotional shot in order to carry on with what they were making or dreaming of making.
Clem watched and he waited. One warm summer’s night as he sat at home and read, he heard the click of the front door and there were women’s voices, Kattie’s high and excited and another slow and deep. He looked up, through the pool of light cast by the lamp behind his chair, as the door into the sitting room opened. Kattie, cheeks pink with excitement, was holding the right hand of a thin dark girl. She led the girl up to Clem’s chair, the two women stopping at the edge of the shadow cast by the lamp.