‘Why did you rush out like that, Emma?’
‘I had to meet someone for lunch. It was late.’
‘I thought you weren’t going to have lunch.’
‘I didn’t. We had coffee.’
‘Oh. I thought you were upset by that girl screaming. Poor child. They don’t have much of a chance.’
I had thought I would tell him, but, with my mother there, I couldn’t. I couldn’t say that I was torn with pain for Kate, and that when she cried and bent her head, and I saw the strawberry birthmark staining the back of her vulnerable neck, it was suddenly too much.
Perhaps I would tell him later. Perhaps not. Confidences saved up can misfire. It might sound like hysteria. Actually, it had been more like being hit.
‘You saw the boy you were interested in, didn’t you? Attractive little devil, he was trying to fool me.’
‘Why were you cruel to him?’
‘I wasn’t.’
‘You were. You teased him along, and then lashed out. It was deliberately cruel.’
My mother passed her sherry glass from the table to her lips without looking up from her book. She knows that he and I can fight on the same level, without hurting each other. Alice tells me: Don’t speak to him like that! But he can take things from me that he never would from her, because she is afraid, and he knows it.
‘Listen, Emma.’ My father has hair the colour of a pigeon’s wing which he wears conceitedly, brushed back long at the sides. He is not very tall, so he often stands up when other people are sitting. He puts an arm on the mantelpiece and the foot of his bad leg on the fender and looks down at you with that lifting smile, and I sometimes want to yell at my mother: Look - look at him. Look properly at him!
She is still in love with him, but she doesn’t let it show. She has a childish, rather anxious face, and beautiful thick black hair which she wears in a square doll cut. It swings and bounces prettily, and he sometimes plunges his hand in it, but not often. He is kind to her, but too polite. That must be galling, when you’re over forty, because he can’t have been, when they were young and passionate.
He demands things of her, but they are not, alas, the things that love demands. Meals must be on time. His friends must come before hers. She must never keep him waiting. Anything that goes wrong with the cars, the drains, the dogs is her fault, since the garage, the plumber, the vet are her affair.
She demands almost nothing of him. Too little, much too little. I don’t know whose idea the twin beds were, but if it was hers, she’s an even bigger fool than he thinks.
‘Listen, Emma. I wouldn’t keep my job long if I were a sadist. All right, I lost my temper with that boy. Why him, when there are so many more repulsive? He was enjoying himself too much. I saw him coming back and back to court, something a little worse each time. Not caring. Mum would pay the fine. Stupid woman, you can tell by looking at them they aren’t going to take it out of the pocket money.’
‘I don’t think he has any. You didn’t see the place where he lives. I did.’
‘I hope you washed your hair,’ my mother said.
‘I wash it every night.’ It’s a temporary obsession, but for the moment I am like the boy’s mother with all that compulsive laundry. ‘It was disgusting with dirt and smells. The other children look like maggots. If a boy can come out of a place like that still thinking life is fun, you shouldn’t crush him. You should give him the earth.’
‘Whose earth? The taxpayers’? He’ll take it anyway, what little bits he can knock off,’ my father said. ‘He’s headed for delinquency. I’ve learned to spot it.’
‘The parents should be put in gaol,’ my mother said automatically. This is one of her things, like taking away the vote from anyone who can’t pass an intelligence test, and sterilizing them.
‘The father is there already, and I’d hate to tell you what for. Delinquency is a defeatist word,’ I told my father. ‘That’s not what Mr Jordan said about that little boy.’
‘Jordan is an optimist. You have to be, in his job, or shoot yourself.’
‘He is a realist.’
‘It’s possible to be both.’ He smiled. Someone else might have added: Though not at eighteen, pretending they know what we are like.
We had dinner then, something I loved, red, juicy meat like tigers’ food, but I ate too quickly, hardly noticing, because I had hedged and sparred with him and put off asking about Kate. She’d die at home, and die in an institution. What can happen to her?
The girl who works for us at the moment is from Yorkshire, and everything she cooks tastes meaty, even cakes. My mother gets pregnant girls through a society, like getting paper bags for vacuum cleaners. When they get too big, they plod off somewhere and she gets another. It is her social work. We used to have Spanish or French or Italian girls, but this is less responsibility, since they are pregnant already.
The one we have now is called Dorothy and she is quite unhappy. Why wouldn’t she be? Bad enough to have her luck without having to cook and clean for someone else as well. Her mother is dead and her stepmother kicked her out, glad of the excuse, Dotty says. She and I play cards at night, and drink flagon burgundy, which I buy to keep her healthy, and we make up fantastic stories about the unlikely people who will adopt her baby.
My parents and I have dinner in the dining-room, quite formally. Dotty, or whoever happens to be bumping round in the kitchen, pushes the food and plates through the little window over the sideboard, and I pass things round, and we have candles and good china and sit too far away from each other.
The dining-room is cheerless, like a Wimpole Street dining-room used for waiting patients. Do the specialists and their thin discreet wives eat breakfast and dinner there? It never smells of bacon or gravy.
Our oblong table has been taken good care of, no painting or cutting out ever, and the mean-seated chairs have always looked repelling, even as long as I have known them. The leaves of the plants are sprayed to make them shiny, and they look like plastic. Golf and tennis cups and a small trophy I won at dancing school and Alice’s last school photograph when she was head girl, in the middle with her hair up, are spaced exactly over the fireplace, which has an electric log fire that we all despise, but need. There is nothing of Peter’s on the mantelpiece. Everything is put away.
We should knock down the wall to the drawing-room and make it one huge sunny room with two window-seats and a fireplace at each end. Then we could get rid of the Dorothys and buy some scarred oak furniture and redesign the kitchen and have our meals in there, with the stove and mess out in the pantry with the sink.
I don’t press for change any more. It’s their house. They are only forty-five and fifty, not paupers, and healthy. The T.B. germ that lamed my father’s leg is not likely to recur. They could go and live almost anywhere in the world, but they stay with the dining-room and the cheating view and the aubrietia and the pregnant girls.
Once, the year before Poldhu, when we were at that fishing inn at Raglan, wet all the time from the river or the rain, and we all suddenly got to know each other very well, and wanted the same things, my father said, ‘Why can’t we always live like this, Emmie?’
‘We could,’ I said, but he never did anything about it.
I ate my dinner quickly, and asked if I could go. They were going to stay and drink brandy and make a little talk. When I am married, my husband and I will read at meals if we want to.
As I pushed back my chair, Dorothy broke something in the kitchen into a thousand pieces. No one looks up any more or exclaims, because dropping things goes with it. Dorothy slid open the window and looked in, with that one wild tooth on her lip. ‘Somebody say something?’
‘It’s all right, dear.’ My mother did not even give her the satisfaction of asking what was broken, and Dorothy slid back the window like a disgruntled booking clerk, and I went to the door.
Hanging on both knobs, with my feet against the edge, I asked casually: ‘What happened to that girl - you know, the
one with the pock-marked father, just before I left?’
‘The girl who shouted? A lot came out after you’d gone. A probation officer had visited the home. A little back-street shop, two up, two down behind for the family, all very squalid, and neither the father nor the mother seemed to want the girl back except to help with the shop and the children.’
‘You took her away.’ I swung on the door, and my mother told me not to, gently. She reads articles about teenagers which tell her not to nag at them.
‘You can’t take them away unless they’re in danger. They don’t belong to the State. You can ask them if they want to leave and if they say Yes, the parents usually agree. Half shame, half pride. If that’s the way she feels, the hell with her, sort of thing.’
‘If I yelled in court that I didn’t want to go home, would you let me go?’
‘If it was as bad as that, I’d have let you go long before. We’d let you go,’ he corrected, smiling at my mother, for she is allowed to think she makes some of the big decisions, as a sop to having to make the small irritating ones. ‘There’s some possibility of a job for the girl, if I remember. I didn’t want to send her to a hostel. There was some more from the Remand Home I didn’t read out because it would have pleased her to know she’d made such an impression. We thought better a foster-home, and old Draper came up with a good idea, her first all morning. Mrs Arthur. That mad woman who’s always clamouring for more foster-children, though she’s got about six of her own already.’
My mother started to talk about birth control then, and I left the room and went up to wash my hair.
Dorothy came up with the hot-water bottles and sat listlessly on the edge of the bath and dabbled her hand in the water as if she were boating. I had been thinking of Kate thawing out, softening in the mad woman’s home full of warmth and love and milky babies.
‘You were in a foster-home for a bit, weren’t you, after your mother died?’
‘Yeah.’ Dorothy patted her stomach, then got up and put out her tongue at the glass in the medicine cupboard before she opened it and started to hunt for the Alka-Seltzer.
‘What was it like?’
‘Bloody awful. They only do it for the money, everyone knows that.’
IT WAS TOUGH at first and there were times when I felt like taking off and heading for home, only I was afraid they wouldn’t take me in.
Of course I’ll not go back, I mean that, but you can be homesick even when you hate your home. I found that out at Stinkney House. All those bells and polished floors - and you know who polishes them. I had to dream I was somewhere else, and Butt Street was the only place there was.
Now there’s this place and is it something. I never knew people lived like this, but there’s a lot I didn’t know. I found that out with Douglas quick enough. I knew about living in a mess, because that’s the only way I did know, but I never knew you could live in a mess and yet it not be a mess, with everyone on top of each other but nobody hating each other.
When Molly asked me about the end of the first week how I liked it, I said it was like a lot of puppies in a box, able to be tumbling all over each other without fighting and cursing. ‘Didn’t you know that was possible?’ Molly asked. I didn’t answer. No one’s going to sermonize over me. Not that she would, but she’s not going to get the chance.
Molly let me alone the first two days, and I didn’t even have to eat or speak if I didn’t want to. I stayed in bed most of the time, because it was the first time I had ever had my own room. There’s only space in it for the bed really, but it’s mine and I wouldn’t let the kids in then, although now there is always someone climbing over the high iron rail at the bottom and taking a dive on to me.
I came down when I was hungry and took the food back to bed. Like a squirrel, I heard someone whisper, when they were pretending they didn’t know I was in the larder. No one minded. Mr Molly is up north on business, which sounds grander than it is, because he is only an insurance assessor, and I heard Michael, the oldest boy, asking loud and clear: ‘What will Dad say when he comes back and finds we’ve got another one and it’s a great girl?’
‘He’ll say Good,’ Molly said, raising her voice for me to hear that too.
About the third day, when it was either come down or grow into the mattress, I came down and sat by the fire in the room where everything was going on: piano, homework, fretsaw, doll’s-house, babies sleeping, eating, crawling, clockwork trains, dogs, ironing. There was a big basket of washing on the floor with the cats in it. Better nobody ask me to fold it, that’s all. They just better not ask. I wasn’t going to lift a finger. If they thought they’d got me here to work, they’d another think coming. I’d had that.
Mollyarthur, they call her, all one word, like Pollyanna. She was ironing away, lifting the baby away from the cord with her foot, and a cup of tea with a bun soaking in the saucer at easy reach.
She’s always eating: biscuits, bits of cake, strained baby food the little ones leave. But she’s thin because she works it off. She eats the peel from baked potatoes if someone’s fussy, and toast crusts, ends of the loaf, anything but the dog food. ‘I balk at that,’ she says.
She has very white, even teeth. Mine have little brown ridges on them, which the school dentist said came from measles, which I don’t remember having unless it was that time when my mother was in the hospital having Stewart and Dad sprayed me with flea powder. Molly’s teeth are like the people in the toothpaste pictures. ‘My one beauty,’ she’ll say, gnashing them at you. But really, she’s not bad-looking - if she knew anything about hair and make-up. Bright red lipstick and pin curls. I ask you. She’s going to let me make her over when she’s got time. She’s putting it off because I mean to pluck her eyebrows, and she is scared.
It was very cold this first day when I came down and sat, and I needed the fire. It’s a tall old house, sort of a brown brick mansion gone to seed, which used to be part of an estate before the Park went municipal, with swings and benches and a frozen wading pool. Molly keeps the fire big. She got extra coal because of the children. My mother couldn’t get any extra. She couldn’t even get delivery, and we had to take the pram and get a bag.
It isn’t fair, but Moll is in with everyone, that’s what does it. Mollyarthur, they all say round here, and then laugh, but not in spite.
I am going to take Ralph’s red wagon and fetch some coal round to my home, but I haven’t done it yet. Perhaps the weather will let up.
There are fires in the downstairs rooms, but the bedrooms are as cold as bedrooms always are, only worse here, because you don’t sleep so many in a room and everyone has their own bed. We all go to bed in socks and jerseys. I was nervous when I first came because I don’t have hardly any clothes (Lynn or one of her lot nicked that good blouse I had), but Molly has whole piles of them in drawers, all sizes jumbled up and anyone’s who’s cold or naked can go and help themselves. She found me a red sweater with a high turtleneck. Why have I never had one before? It comes right up to my hair at the back and I think it is why I am happy.
I sat by the fire all that day, floating off a bit at times, with the curved road running away from my eyes. She brought me a sandwich and some tea, and in the afternoon, one of the little ones, Tina, that’s one of hers, came up on my lap and I didn’t push her off.
I had a little bit of a cry, because of Loretta at home saying: Where Katty? It was nice, the salt trickling into my mouth, and no one bothering me. In this house, if anyone wants to cry, he can and no one yells: Shut up that bloody row! If they make too much noise, or it’s temper, they have to go away or do it in another room.
But I cried quietly, and Molly gave me a banana when I’d done. So I bathed two of the kids because no one asked me, and because I’d never bathed kids in a real bath before, and it’s much more fun than in the sink with the dirty dishes.
So then I bathed everybody, the whole outfit, except the Chinese baby who was asleep. There’s ten of them all told, six of hers and four foste
rs. Michael, the eldest, is nine, and the Chink is five months and would have a better chance if he was a refugee, but since he was born here, nobody wants him.
Molly didn’t make a big thing about it. She said, ‘Thanks, Kate,’ and let it pass, so I may do it again.
I shall have to watch my step though. I am happy. I’ve been happy before and it’s always been taken away. I’m not going to let go. I’m not going to let them think they’ve got me - and then they’ll do me in. I once told my mother I loved her and look where it got me.
Look where it got poor Bob. If he hadn’t gone soft on me, I wouldn’t have left him like that, smack in the middle of Charing Cross Road. His face! I saw it from the top of the bus. He’ll have got home all right, simple as he is.
There’s books in this house. There’s two bookcases. Mr Molly-arthur made them and they have books in them and magazines and gramophone records. She says I need glasses, but I’m eating the book, that’s why I’m holding it close.
Six kids and four fosters, that’s what she’s got. When HE came home and tried to be nice, he said, prompted by her, no doubt, ‘Oh good, another foster-child,’ and I ran up to my room. It’s marvellous having somewhere to run to. At home there was only the street.
I am not a foster-child. Get that into your head, mister. I am not a child, and anyway, I have a mother and I can go home any time I please. I am staying here because I don’t choose to go home, and I have no money, and the State is obliged to support me. When I start the job at the nursing home next week, and save some money, I’ll be out of here and take a room, don’t kid yourself.
He had been told by Molly to say, ‘Oh good.’ I know that. I know him. I know that kind. Plaid socks, shirts clean, very proper. He shines his shoes every day. Every day Get alone with him in a dark corner and you’d soon see. I can’t lock my door at night, so I push the foot of the bed against it. In the morning the little ones come up and scratch like dogs, and I move the bed back and let them in, and the dogs as well sometimes.
A friend of Molly’s who was here the other day said it, but so would anyone, ‘Doesn’t Jim mind all these children, and another one every time he turns his back?’
Kate and Emma Page 3