Often I’ve thought I’d write to her, or go to the phone box on the corner and ring her flat. She gave me the number, that time I was there.
I didn’t want to go at first, because I was afraid of seeing her and me in the flat together. In the end she came for me in her father’s car, stuck my coat on me as if I was a child and made me go. I didn’t want to take Sammy. He was tiny then and a bloody nuisance most of the time because he’d get all this stuff in his throat and threaten to choke on you. I was going to leave him with Barbara, but Emma said he had to come and see the place he nearly lived in, which was really why I didn’t want to take him, because remembering any part of that time makes me start seeing and hearing things I don’t want to think about, ever again in my life.
There was a woman here not long ago from the Health, taking statistics. When she asked me: Father and mother living? I said No. My voice dropped it in like a stone. Dead.
Emma had her way, as she usually does in the end with me. We wrapped up old Sam in a blanket, and I’ll say this for him, he didn’t give any trouble all afternoon. The shock of going in a comfortable car instead of that hot-rod of Ron’s and Barbie’s must have stunned him.
Em’s flat is in one of those sad old squares where the bricks used to be red before London got at them, and the garden in the middle used to be green before the kids got at it. It didn’t look much, the house, when we stopped outside. The entrance to our flats is smarter, really, and of course Em doesn’t have a lift, although her place is on the top floor.
But if she did, it wouldn’t stink, that’s the thing. I saw the woman who has the ground-floor flat, and I saw another girl going in the house next door with a shopping-basket and a couple of kids in grey school uniform. I thought of the Nelsons on our ground floor, and some of the people you meet on the stairs when the kids have put the lift out of business, and I saw what I knew already.
This is all right. It’s shabby and old and a dreary bit of London with the power station breathing down your back, and everything could do with a lick of paint, but it’s all right because of the people who live here, and the rent Em has to pay proves it.
That’s why she has this other girl living with her, to share the cost. With me, it would have been from choice. With this Lisa, it’s from necessity.
Not that there’s anything wrong with her. She was rather nice really, and she was quite daft about the baby. Sat and held him all the time with her hair falling over her face and her long clean fingers stroking his cheek. Well, I said, when you get one of your own you’ll soon get sick of that.
She laughed. I thought I’d feel awkward with her. I was angry at first when she came home, and thought Em should have picked a time when she wouldn’t, but she was quite easy, and the two of them seem to get on all right, but not like Em and me. They don’t have the laughs we used to, I can see that, nor the excitement of letting your brain run away like a bolting horse. When Em and I started kidding about Mary Gold, along the balcony at our flats, the wreck of the Golden Mary, we call her, and how she grows hemp in the window-box and keeps all the coppers supplied with weed, she took it dead seriously and believed every word.
The flat is lovely. Oh my God, is it lovely. A lot of things in it are all the wrong shapes and seen a good bit of use, but they have got some pictures up with colours that make your toes curl, and in the kitchen they’ve made it like a French café, with all magazine pictures of beautiful food stuck higgledy on the red walls.
We’ve got a lot of things newer, Bob and I have, that will be paid off some time, never, and he’s painted the bedroom and the bath, but somehow it doesn’t look like this.
The first thing I did when I got back to our place was to take down the pictures Bob tacked up. I kicked all the junk laying about the kitchen in under the sink where the pipes and sour smells are and cut up that red and white tablecloth and tacked it across. It looked better. At least it did before the tablecloth got all splashed and stained, and the junk began to creep back on to the shelves and draining-board again.
I’ve seen Em on and off since then, but there has been many times when I’ve needed her, and I’ve wanted to write or phone. But there isn’t a stamp, or I haven’t the money for the phone box. Even when I’ve had the pennies, I’ve been afraid to butt in. All the time I was at the Fulham flat, Em never said: I wish it was you here with me, so of course I talked my marriage up, to show I’d got something better.
Suppose that girl answered the phone. She’s got one of those soft, superfine voices, like face tissues, not like Em who can bellow as loud as me when she likes. If Lisa answered, I might panic, and she’d say to Em with that peaceful smile: Your queer little friend rang up.
Who does she think she is? I could have been her. My hair is almost the same colour. I could have worn it like that, Lady of the Lake stuff, if that’s what you have to do. Barbie is on at me now to cut it, and I may do. The grease is darkening it like it did with Sammy, and it’s too much bother to keep washing it, and the colder it gets this winter, the colder the hot water gets.
Modern flats with all utilities. I could tell some tales about peeling plaster and the woman next door’s sink water coming up the plughole of my bath. Some of the girls get on to me to go to the tenants’ association meetings and speak up, but the wreck of the Golden Mary goes, which makes it bad news.
I had just thrown up that day, in the afternoon it was, a funny time, and I was washing my face when Em rang the bell and hooted through the letter-box, and I went to the door with the towel in my hands, no make-up on nor nothing. I was so glad to see her.
‘What’s the matter?’ Em never says Hullo or the ordinary things that people greet you with, just whatever comes on to her tongue. ‘You don’t look well.’
‘I was washing my face,’ I said. ‘Come in the bedroom while I do it up, and then you’ll know me.’
The dressing-table is one of the things that may have to go back, so I make the most of it while it’s here. It is polished wood with an oval mirror, very low, and you sit on the low stool that comes with it and have all your stuff in the little drawers with painted metal bows on them for the handles. I need a tiny pearl-handled revolver in there among the musk-scented handkerchiefs and the oblivion pills in case of capture.
It’s new since Em was last here, and she was impressed, but she forgot about it almost at once, and when I sat down low to do my face, she fell flat on the bed with her shoes on my good spread and gave an ecstatic groan and told me about being in love.
I have never known her talk quite like this. He is twelve years older than her, she says, and it’s made her a lot older, I mean that. When we’ve talked about men before, it was fun, but it wasn’t like this.
‘I want you to be pleased about it, Kate,’ she said, and I was, but it still nagged me like a tooth that something had happened to her that I could never have.
When you’re married it’s all over. You can’t pretend about the white charger any more. We went to pick up Sammy to feed him and he was all in a stinking mess, and this is what marriage is, so I said, to bring her down to earth, ‘Why don’t you marry this Tom then?’
That was when she told me he was married, and I was shocked.
He is in business of some kind, it seems, and his wife has her own hat shop, one of those tiny places you daren’t go in because there’s only a few hats displayed and you can’t say No after they bring out a dozen others, each one farther out than the last. That’s what Em says, but she doesn’t wear hats anyway.
She went in the shop once just to get a look at the wife, and asked for something they wouldn’t have, like a sou’wester, so she could get out quick.
‘She’s ugly as sin,’ I said, staring at Em’s new face, the one she’s in love in, more vivid, the expressions changing faster. I was beginning to get over the shock, and to enjoy the tale in our old way. I wanted this Tom to be chained to some beast not fit to breathe the air with Emma, but Em made a face and said: ‘That’s the hell of it
. She’s beautiful.’
‘Beautiful, but cruel.’
‘No. She’s very kind. He rather likes her as a matter of fact.’
I was shocked again. ‘You’re trying to have your cake and eat it, Tom boy,’ I warned him.
‘It’s not that. It’s just that he won’t hurt anyone. But he was never in love with her. She was in love with his friend, and the friend married someone else, so Tom married her because he was sorry for her.’
‘That’s what they all say.’ I wagged my head, very wise, very married.
‘It’s true. He tells me the truth about everything. He’s the first man who has. He was in prison once for knocking someone down when he was drunk. He had his twenty-first birthday in Wormwood Scrubs and one of the warders’ wives made him a cake. He told me.’
Sammy was sending back bubbles of apple sauce, which meant he’d had enough, so I took and held him over the sink to wash him off. ‘What are you going to do about it?’ I said.
‘I don’t know. We have to be together, that’s all. I don’t care what happens to her. He doesn’t talk about her, not unless I make him, but he never says anything against her. He’s still sorry for her, because she’s barren. She would be. Anything to get his pity. I can’t go back in the shop again, so I walk past sometimes and look in to remind myself who my enemy is.’
People in love are boring as hell. Did I go on like this about Douglas? He’s the nearest I’ve been to it, though it didn’t amount to much. But kid though I was, and a mess - well, two nights in that cellar - it might have come to something if they hadn’t caught me. I remember talking about him to Em for quite some time afterwards, and wondering why she wasn’t more interested.
Just as she was wondering now why I didn’t want to talk about Tom all afternoon. She was obsessed, possessed, her dark Minnehaha eyes looking inwards. But she made an effort to talk about me, so I thought I might as well give her something to make it worth her while.
‘I’ve chucked the job,’ I said.
‘Oh Kate. I thought you like it at the shop.’
‘It didn’t like me.’ That’s an expression she hates, I know. You shouldn’t use stale phrases, she says, if you’re bright enough to invent your own. But you try living with Bob and Sammy, and see how bright the conversation is.
‘They sacked you?’
‘I sacked myself. I got too tired. Well, all right, Em, why not? Other people have babies when they’re married. Why not me?’
‘You’re only eighteen.’
‘I’ll be nineteen when I have it. There’s a girl my age two floors down going to have her third, and her husband’s been off work for three months with his back.’
‘How does she look?’
‘Terrible.’
We burst out laughing. We still have that. It isn’t funny, if you know Doreen, but Em and I have always had to shriek and sob at all the wrong things. No harm. It’s nothing to do with Doreen, or anyone. Just laughing.
Sammy laughed too, crowing like a chicken the way he does, and Em picked him up and hugged him, and crowed with him, then put him down again to crawl. He crawls everywhere, not on all fours, but hitching himself along with one leg tucked under him. If he doesn’t stand up and walk soon, I’ll go out of my mind.
Bob came in, with a big grin for Emma. He likes her. She doesn’t understand that’s why he went for her that evening. It’s about the only way he knows to show he likes you. That and butting his head against you like a cat to make you stroke the sides of his hair.
Em has got over it. She can joke and tease with Bob again, like she used, but when I went out to the kitchen to put on the potatoes, she came with me, I noticed.
‘Is my dinner ready? What time are we going out?’ Bob asked. He was on the floor with Sammy, rolling over and over with him, one way to get the dust picked up, it was all over the back of Bob’s jacket.
‘Not till seven.’ We were going to play Bingo at the big place that used to be a cinema. We go there at least once a week. It’s keen. I won a ham once, and Bob won that set of queer-shaped dishes we’ve never used. I meant to ask Em what they’re for, but I forgot. Once I won five quid. Five quid! The cards are a shilling each. What can you lose?
‘Who takes care of Sammy when you go out? Em asked. She had picked him up and was saying goodbye to him, telling him she’d be back soon. She credits him with understanding more than he does, like she did with Moll’s cats.
‘Barbie Johnson. She’s a friend of mine across the yard. She’ll always take him.’
‘Have a good time,’ she said, when we were in the narrow passage that goes to the door. They didn’t waste any space when they made these flats. Golden Mary will get stuck in her front hall one day and walk out in the street wearing the building.
‘We will. It’s special prize night, and after we’re going up West, the four of us, and see what’s doing.’
‘Who are you going with?’
‘Barbie and Ron. They’re fun.’
‘I thought she was going to look after Sammy.’
‘Oh Em, don’t fuss at me. He’ll be all right. I give him two aspirin to get him to sleep and he’ll never know we’ve gone.’
‘Kate, you can’t!’ You’d think I’d said give him rat poison.
‘Why not? It doesn’t hurt them. I used to give it to that Chink baby of Moll’s when he was teething. He knew no more till morning. What’s wrong? You talk about me being young, and that. Well, I am. We’ve got to have some fun.’
‘I’ll stay with Sammy.’
‘Don’t be daft.’
‘I’d like to. Please.’
‘Your funeral. If it makes you happy—’
‘I’ve got some things to do. I’ll be back at seven.’
She kissed me and went off quickly, forgetting to make the sign against the evil eye as she passed Mary’s window, like I’ve told her to do. I shrugged and went back in to put on the dress I got when I started to know about Sammy, but no one else did. I’m into that already. It’s disgusting.
I RANG TOM’s office and found him still there. ‘I can’t meet you, darling.’ He had answered the telephone himself. The switchboard girl had gone home. She’s a private eye for Sheila and the League of Moral Decency. If I ring during the day, I am the woman in the barber’s shop of the hotel where he gets his hair cut. ‘Please understand. It’s something I can’t help.’ I told him about Sammy. ‘He was once almost half mine, don’t forget. It’s the least I can do.’
‘Sheila’s going to the theatre. I’ll come and be with you there,’ Tom said.
It is more than eight months since we met by the river, but we still grab every chance to be together. Ten minutes at lunch-time in a drab little bar near the restaurant where he usually takes his clients. Three minutes at the station if I have to catch a train home, Tom running through the crowd at the last moment with his face afraid he’s missed me, as if I were going away for ever. Someone is going to see him looking like that one day. Someone who knows Sheila.
‘No, you can’t,’ I said.
‘Why not?’
‘You can’t.’ Why did I have to think of Kate sneaking Bob in to Grove Lodge when she was baby-sitting for Molly?
‘No risk. I’m hardly likely to see anyone there I know. Give me the address again. I’ll get there after they’ve gone.’
I hurried to get back to the flat before Kate and Bob left. I was afraid they might go off without waiting, and I wouldn’t be able to get in. A drop in the ocean, what I was doing, if she was often leaving the baby alone, but my insistence on staying might make her see that it mattered. Mr Jordan would be proud of me. Our own Miss Bullock, one of our most conscientious case workers.
‘I still think you’re daft,’ Kate said, and her friend Barbara, who is very glamorous, with fantastic and iridescent eye-shadow, said, ‘No, Katie, some people are like that. They devote their lives to the little ones,’ as if I were a sublimating spinster.
‘She’s right though,’ Ron pu
t in from behind his teeth, which are too big for his mouth, so that he has difficulty closing his lips round them. ‘Kate shouldn’t leave the kid alone. I knew a family once, had a paraffin heater—’
‘Oh, lay off,’ Kate said.
Bob was standing behind her with his big gentle hands on her shoulders, as he often does, as if touching her gave him confidence. ‘If Katie says it’s all right, it is. She knows what’s best for my baby,’ he said in a sort of drilled monotone.
From the balcony I watched them away in Ron’s car, a souped-up old saloon with a skull and crossbones on it and the orange undercoat showing in patches. No Tom yet, thank God. What would he wear? If he came straight from the office with the black suit and hat and briefcase which disguised him as just another man, Golden Mary would think he was the tax collector.
I gave Sammy a bath in the plastic bowl in the kitchen because the bath was dirty and I didn’t see why I should clean that for Kate as well. The things she learned at Molly’s seem to be coming unstuck. While I was waiting for Tom, I poked round the flat a bit and put out a dozen souring milk bottles from behind the stained curtain under the sink, and found things in drawers and cupboards that made me shut them again quickly. Other people’s mess is their own affair.
If she and the baby had lived with me at the flat, it would have been different. She would have been different, proud of what she had, proud of herself and what she could be. When she came to the flat that day and Lisa was so condescending, although Kate didn’t notice it, I wanted to say to her: I wish it was you and me and the baby here. But Kate talked as if she was quite satisfied with what she’d got, so I didn’t say it.
I don’t wish it now anyway. It wouldn’t have worked with Tom in my life.
Sammy was still awake when he came, sneaking past Mary Gold’s as I’d told him, in his ski-ing sweater and a pair of tennis shoes, as if he were running messages for the Secret Service. I fed the baby and I cooked ham and eggs that I had brought for us, and we played house in Kate’s Council flat which was built in austerity just after the war, so you have to keep your voices low unless you have nothing to hide from the neighbours.
Kate and Emma Page 13