Kate and Emma

by Monica Dickens

  My mother, with her lack of grace, which she has passed on to me, was hopeless at anything athletic, except fishing, which she was brought up to. Apart from those two times when we went to Raglan and she was the expert, she was always the one who had to watch and applaud, and come in the car with blankets when the sailing dinghy capsized, and sit knitting on a backless bench outside the riding ring while we went endlessly round and round.

  My father and I used to ride together. Once when Alice was ill, we selfishly went to the New Forest for a long week-end and rode ponies all day along the spongy cathedral aisles. I have never forgotten the magic of that. We rode all day among the great greenwood trees, and he read Wuthering Heights to me at night, and brushed my hair carefully before I went to bed. It was so good that I think I may have imagined it, but he says that it did happen, although he remembers it raining all the time, which I don’t, and his riding-boot splitting, and a raconteur who used to spoil his times in the bar after he had put me to bed.

  Golf and tennis are out for him now because of his leg, and so are the walks we used to take, with one of the succession of hysterical terriers my mother has always had. There is no reason, however, why he shouldn’t ride, except that he hasn’t for years, and my mother is always telling him that he is just the age for a lightning heart attack.

  I know a boy called Alan, who comes from Shropshire and can’t go long without a horse. He says it like that, as another man would say it about a woman. He is a laboratory student and he lives in a nasty room in Fulham and he has no money, so I take him to the stables near us sometimes when I can afford it. When they started to let us take the horses out on our own, instead of in jostling groups of rumpy blue jeans and grimly expert infants on white ponies, it was so lovely that I made my father come too.

  He didn’t want to, but I forced him. This one thing he was going to do with me, this last relic of the childhood things we had shared.

  His boot hurt his leg. When I went to his room to see if he was ready, I found him sitting on the fat leather stool with his leg stuck out in front of him as if it was wooden.

  ‘I’m not coming.’

  Ignoring his strained face and the little twitch of his mouth, I pulled him up and handed him his stick. Once he was on the horse, he would be all right. Alan, who was a bit sceptical about the whole project, for he is one of these Peter Pan fools who discount everybody over thirty, would be amazed when he saw how well he could ride.

  The first trauma was that he couldn’t get on. I tried to give him a leg up, but the trashy horse the stable had given him would not stand still. Alan, who is the kind of boy who orders first for himself in restaurants, even when you’re paying, and will go off anywhere without looking to see who’s following, was already up and half-way to the yard gate.

  When I called him, he dismounted with a visible sigh and got my father on the horse, then rode ahead all the way and never looked back to see how well my father handled the horrid poky horse. If he had been looking back when my father fell off, he would have seen that the horse shuffled its foot into a hole and stumbled. I explained this, but I could see he didn’t believe it. My father sat on the ground rubbing his leg and lighting a cigarette, and Alan kept circling round on his tall restless horse saying, ‘Are you all right, sir?’ and I said, ‘He won’t be if you step on him.’

  Alan had to get off and help my father up again. Jumbled up together in the narrow path between the trees, the horses began to kick and bite, and Alan had the nerve to tell me, ‘Better not bring him next time.’

  ‘There won’t be a next time,’ I said, and pulled my horse back and rode with my father, who smoked cigarettes all the way home and rode with his bad leg stuck straight out like a cow-hand.

  A few days later, when we were all at a cocktail party in London, he introduced me to a woman of about thirty-five with coppery hair and marvellous amused eyes. He told her, ‘This is the girl who’s trying unsuccessfully to keep me young,’ and she said, ‘You keep on doing that, whatever, he says.’ But he refuses to come riding again.

  He will come to Grove Lodge though. He is getting lazy, but I shall tell him that it’s part of his job.

  If he remembers Kate, and to him, after all, she is only one in a procession of rebellious waifs, he will be amazed at the change in her. It is not just that she is growing her pale hair and has caught the shampooing mania from me, but she is happy, and in court it seemed she never could be.

  It is partly due to him (we’ll forget that it was Miss Draper’s idea), partly due to Mollyarthur, and partly to Kate, who has turned her stubbornness into survival. When he has seen her, and understood that I love her, then I will ask him for a loan which I’ll repay when I am earning. A birthmark can be removed by plastic surgery, but it costs money.

  I was surprised when Mr Jordan, the Cruelty Man, telephoned me one evening and asked me if I had time to go out with him again.

  ‘I thought I was a nuisance.’

  ‘No, you were a help.’

  ‘How could I be? I was just there.’

  ‘It helps, discussing things in the car between visits. Trying to explain to you what’s going wrong with someone, it helps me to get my own thoughts straight about them.’

  ‘I’d like to go.’ Not from curiosity, not because I could help, but because I have to see. In my life, I may never be selfless enough to lessen by one grain the world’s misery, but it’s worse not even to know it’s there.

  ‘I’d like you to come.’

  He could say that over the telephone. When we met, he was once more rather shy and formal, although he rocked the little snub car just as recklessly round the streets and countryside, hazarding infants and slow grandfathers.

  When I thanked him for asking me again, he said: ‘Your father thinks that you should see more of his work, since it’s really part of his,’ which wasn’t at all what he had said on the telephone.

  I like him, though, and admire him. He has the physique of a man who tears telephone books in two and keeps a punch-ball in the cellar, but he has no conceit or violence. He used to be a sergeant-major, but I can’t imagine his voice ever terrorizing anyone into step. Perhaps he broke it, there on the barrack square, and that’s why it murmurs now, unmilitary. His hair grows like a boy’s from a point on the back of his head, and his smile makes nonsense of his soldierly jaw. He is often silent, not necessarily in thought, but because he has nothing to say, and he is absolutely marvellous with the people he takes care of.

  Although he is the Cruelty Man, and some people think he goes round in a paddy wagon carting sadistic parents off to gaol, Taking Care is the right description for what he does.

  We took some shoes to brothers who had been going to school on alternate days because they only had one pair between them, and we went to the Assistance Office to try to get more money for a widow with a mongol baby, and we went to see about a father’s debt, and a holiday for a child with asthma. Although I had done little more than play with the children and listen to the bailiff’s sinister Dickensian jokes, I felt that I had done more good in one morning than in my whole life.

  As we drive round this ugly, grey and teeming neighbourhood where Mr Jordan has worked for five years, grown-ups call out and wave to him, and urchins bang on the little tin car at red lights and cry: ‘Gis a ride, Mr Jordin!’ He is not the avenging angel, but a familiar and welcome figure, like the ice-cream man.

  We slowed down in a back street beside a monstrous beery woman shoving a child in a rickety pram, and her violent face split like a dropped tomato with pleasure at seeing him. She chatted like an old friend, droning easily away about the discomforts of her new flat and the low class of people who surrounded her.

  When we drove away, he laughed: ‘You should have seen the place I got her out of,’ and wrinkled his nose. ‘And she’s doing her best to make the new one as bad. She and her husband have both been up for neglect. She’s got two kids in Care and I’m watching the others, but she’s always glad t
o see me.’

  When he said that his wife had told him to bring me home for lunch, ‘if you care to, Miss Bullock,’ I said: ‘Oh yes, but please call me Emma.’

  His neck got a bit red, and after that he didn’t call me anything, not even Miss Bullock.

  His wife called me Emma though, right away, and said that she had seen me in the B.B. supermarket, and that I shouldn’t let them sell sardine tins without an opener.

  She is a lovely woman, just right for him, soft-haired and squashy in front, with pink cheeks and strong arms. The go-anywhere, do-any thing kind, who would look right fraternizing with the neighbours in Army married quarters or feeding chickens at a farmhouse door, or living on a lighthouse or answering the telephone and typing out his case notes.

  They live in a small terrace house with a gable and a bay window and a sign on the door, so that people can come and complain about their neighbours, or leave unwanted children on the step. He has just painted the wood of the house, and repapered the hall with violent bouquets that clash with the carpet. In the kitchen where we had lunch, he has painted all the doors and cupboards yellow, with Austrian stencilling, and converted the old coal-range alcove into a cottagy fireplace with carved inglenook seats.

  ‘He works all the time,’ his wife said, ‘but it’s always for other people. It took me six months to get him to do any of this for me.’

  She is very proud of him, her pride no less affectionate for being expressed in terms of complaint. He is comfortable with her, stowing away great forkfuls of meat and potato in proportion to his build, the peace of his home strengthening the tolerance he shows outside. We had been to two places this morning where I had been with him before, and I felt the defeat of it, because the women had made no progress, hadn’t taken his advice, hadn’t kept the rent money safe, had still not cleaned out the back room or taken the child to the dentist.

  It’s so disheartening, but he doesn’t give up. ‘Just have to keep going back and back,’ he said. ‘Takes half a dozen trips sometimes to get the floor scrubbed or a mattress burned, but you have to keep on.’

  ‘Or burn the mattress yourself,’ his wife said. ‘He’s been known to do that too. And get in there after the dirt. Remember the time we cleaned out those two top rooms in Ely Street? Fifteen bathfuls of it, the Council took away, and the neighbours all went out because of the smell.’

  She laughed, as if she might add: Those were the days. ‘He gets all the gravy, running round in that little car and everyone knowing him and waving, but it’s me he gets to do his dirty work.’

  ‘Half the time,’ he said, ‘when I come home, there’s a child in my bed or a baby being changed on the kitchen table. Comes a bang on the front door and there’s a kid crying or a bundle in a kitbag, sometimes just while they go off for a visit, sometimes for ever. If I’m not here, Jean will take them in. They know that.’

  They have one child, a girl of about ten, who came home from school before we left. She is soft and capable, like her mother, and unflurried, like her father. His name is John. Johnny, his wife calls him. Johnny Jordan. ‘I’ve only one more family to see,’ he said, ‘and it’s a bit of a distance. Would you rather I leave you at the station now?’

  I almost said Yes, because I was full of food, and tea was swilling in me. Although it was not nearly so cold as the last time when I all but perished, it had been raining for days, and I was afraid to surrender the warmth of Jean’s kitchen to the chilly damp of the homes of Mr Jordan’s customers.

  Courage. What is this? I thought you wanted to see and know. One doesn’t crusade so well on a full stomach, but when I said I’d come, Johnny Jordan, who had eaten twice what I had, drove off with me as eagerly as a fasting monk.

  ‘It’s one of those cases,’ he told me in the car, ‘you find them quite often, where only one child is abused. You’d think that if parents were capable of ill-treating one child, they’d do the same with the others.’

  ‘But with dogs,’ I said, ‘there’s sometimes one puppy which gets pushed away from the milk, or the mother rolls on it.’

  ‘Yes, or the father picks it up and takes it away. We had a collie once did that, in our camp, I mean, where I was stationed in Germany. He put it under a hut, that dog did. We reared it with milk on our thumbs, but it was wasted time. When it was grown, we gave it to the Colonel’s wife, and it tore the heart out of a sofa and bit one of her children.’

  ‘Perhaps the father was right.’

  ‘Perhaps. With kids, Miss Bullock—’

  ‘Emma.’

  ‘Yes. With kids, when they pick on just one, as if there was something about that child they couldn’t stand. I was called out once in the middle of the night to a woman who had beaten her child to death. She provokes me, was all she said, both then and in court. She gets on my box. She kept talking about her as if she was alive and she’d do it all over again. Her other kids were fine though.’

  Most people are less talkative after food. He was more so, or perhaps it was because I had been to his house, and his wife and I had liked each other. He wasn’t so shy with me.

  ‘Perhaps you thought you were going to see horrors like that, coming out with me?’

  I didn’t answer, because naturally the beast in me had, but the non-beast had hoped not. So he went on, talking to the car ahead - he doesn’t, at least, turn his head from the road to look at you when he speaks - ‘It’s not anything remarkable, where we’re going. The girl all the trouble was about, she’s gone, but, after what came out in court, I was asked to keep an eye on the rest of the family for a while. Your father’s court, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘Why was she there?’

  ‘She ran away when she was about sixteen. Found with a man, the usual story.’

  ‘I know. My father says he sees them in a recurring pattern, like wallpaper.’

  ‘I wish I had your father’s tongue.’

  ‘He wishes he had your ideals.’ That wasn’t exactly what my father had meant when he called Johnny Jordan an optimist, but near enough, and it delighted him, although he pretended not to hear, for want of a reply.

  As we turned a corner into one of the nastiest streets in this peculiarly nasty district, he still had the pleased smile on his face. The sign on the dirty brick of the end house said Butt Street. The car stopped with a crunch of broken glass in the gutter half-way down the flat sick terrace outside a house whose front room had been converted badly, long ago, into a little shop. A sweet-shop, I suppose. Or not. Rat poison and firewood in the cluttered window. A cardboard ice-cream cornet. Steamed jars of peppermint and fruit balls.

  I got out and followed Johnny Jordan in, like his dog, sapped of initiative. Would I have asked him to leave me at the station if I had known? I should have known. When he talked, in the car, I should have known where we would end. I could stay in the car now, say I was tired, bored, anything. I was spying on Kate, ransacking the secret drawers of her life, but I could not stop myself. I had to know. I followed him into the shop.

  When he opened the door, a small buzzer sounded, sourly. There was no one in the tiny shop, and we could have stolen a bar of chocolate, or a plastic bucket and spade with the colour bleaching out, or a card of pins from the wall.

  There was an ice-cream freezer in one corner, the chipped enamel spotted with black fingermarks. When I opened the lid to look inside, the door beyond the counter opened instantly, as if the woman who came through had been watching us behind the curtained glass.

  ‘Oh hullo,’ she said to Mr Jordan. ‘It’s you,’ although she might have been watching us for a good two minutes as we waited there, he stamping his feet discreetly among the little wads of grey gum on the floor to attract attention, since he was in one of his silent spells where he couldn’t call out.

  ‘Just dropped in to see how everything is going.’

  ‘Not too bad.’ Either from habit, or for security, she had moved to stand behind the narrow counter while she talked to us, hands on the broken linoleum
top, flanked by the glass cases of toy soldiers and cigarettes and chocolate bars.

  I nodded when Johnny Jordan identified me, and stood against the sticky ice-cream freezer, wishing I was older, so that I could look properly at new people without myself getting in the way. I am like a mother with an awkward child, wondering what they will think. The woman stared at me while she talked listlessly to Mr Jordan. Who’s that girl leaning clumsily on my choc bars and lollies? Her ankles are too bony for tights. Why doesn’t she say something?

  I wished that I could see people whole and perceptively, not as a jumble of scattered impressions. Kate’s mother. I wasn’t seeing much except her slack shape, wrapped round in a faded blue overall with frying stains on the front. Not fat, but so far out of control that you couldn’t tell if she was pregnant or not.

  Kate’s mother. She had never talked about her, not once, and I had not asked. She had talked of her father a little, making a face and using some crude epithet, but of her mother nothing, so that I had once asked Mollyarthur whether I had missed something in court, and the mother was dead.

  Molly had said No, and then, ‘You saw the father. I think her mother must be worse.’

  So I had imagined a vulgar and violent woman, coarser even than the pock-marked van driver with the misbegotten nose. I had imagined a gross caricature of a woman, like the beerbarrel we had met that morning with the pram.

  Kate’s mother, standing with her tired hands on the counter, the wedding ring deep in the swollen flesh, was not a monster. She was just a woman in a back-street shop with her faded yellow hair tied back with a bow of frayed tape, the only girlish thing about her. A woman who might once have been nice-looking if anyone could remember.