Kate and Emma

by Monica Dickens

  ‘YOU MUST GO by boat,’ Uncle Mark said. ‘Cut loose and have a dizzy time.’

  In spite of having Nell and Derek for children, he still hopes that our generation can reproduce the simple pre-war giddiness of his. An ocean liner to him is a fairyland of romance. He flies everywhere now, so he has not seen the Irish priests in sports jackets, the crew-cut Mormon missionaries, the service families whose children stay up later than the grown-ups.

  ‘You don’t meet enough people, Emma. Parties and fun, young men - that’s what you need.’

  Young men. I must have met some in this last year. I haven’t noticed. Parties and fun. If I couldn’t go with Tom, I didn’t go, and there was almost nobody who could invite us together. Lisa. Derek. Tom’s friend Alistair who met us in Edinburgh.

  I was still numb with loss, sleepwalking blankly from one day to the next, so I did not make the effort to insist that I would rather fly to New York. Uncle Mark was paying the fare, so I went by boat.

  Tom and I had both kept our promise. We had not telephoned or written. We had stayed away from any of the places we might meet. Once Bernie asked me to a party at the river house, but I refused. I was not going to let my father down.

  He and I had been a little nervous of each other since the blood-stained pact. At first we occasionally asked each other how it was going, until we were hit by the absurdity. Father and daughter each renouncing illicit love - Feel all right, Em? I’ll live, how about you? - like people trying to give up smoking.

  If he had said: I know how you feel, Fm going through hell, I would have crawled into his arms. But he didn’t. He couldn’t know. How could he compare my devouring relationship with Tom to his little circus with Benita and her matching luggage? There were times when I felt that he had cheated me. Then I went home and saw how little he had there, and I knew that he had given up a lot, perhaps even more than me, for I had nothing now, but he still had the dull defeatism of my mother.

  At least I was free, with the freedom of emptiness. The flatness of nothing stretched before me like a desert, featureless, with no signposts.

  Physically, I was going to New York, to work for Uncle Mark’s old lend-lease friend, now chairman of a big grocery chain, but myself was going nowhere. I was huddled up inside, tight and uncommunicative like a cold hibernating squirrel.

  The first day on the boat, when the cranes and cabbages of Southampton had disappeared behind the curtain of rain, and I was gone for a year, with no hope now, I sat in the lounge and held on to myself. My face felt like Stonehenge, and I had to cross my arms, because there was an actual ache in my chest. I thought I might be going to have a heart attack, and how disappointing for my mother that she had been so busy predicting it for my father that she had passed up the luxury of anticipating it for me.

  I sat there while the unseasoned passengers came and went through the lounge, exploring their floating trap, and composed the cable that would be sent from the ship. The carpenter would knock up a rude coffin. Where would they bury me? Since we had not yet reached Ireland, they might turn round, and people in a hurry would be angry, but have to pretend not to mind, and get up a collection for my family.

  After I got to know Martin and Bess, she said: ‘When I came into the lounge looking for Martin and saw you hunched into that chair like a hermit in a barrel, I thought you were holding on to your heart to stop it breaking.’

  ‘I was.’

  I told her about Tom, and she passed it on to Martin, and he began to stop treating me like a child, and let me have martinis. I told her many things in those five days, even some things I had not been able to tell Tom. It came flooding out of me like tears. I must have been a hideous bore. I even knew I was at the time, but God, the relief. I had to go on with it, like having to be sick when someone is watching.

  Bess is very good at listening because she can sit with her hands in her lap, relaxed, and not make redundant comments to prove she is paying attention. She is very good to look at too, which helps when you are vomiting up your soul. Poised and fragrant, with smoky-blue eyes and the delicate bones and features I wish I had in those bad moments when the desires think darkly of plastic surgery.

  I even found myself telling her about the time when I was kidnapped. I have told very few people about that, and my parents know only the bare facts. They know what happened, because I had to tell it in court, but they never knew how I felt about it.

  They know that my bicycle skidded on wet leaves and buckled its wheel against a tree. They know that instead of walking three miles home in the rain - what kind of a fool did they think I was? - I had thumbed a car, against all my mother’s panic-stricken orders, and got into it with the middle-aged man who was driving.

  They know that, instead of letting me out at the turning for home, he had driven on with me for miles and miles, until it was dark and I had no idea where I was. They know that I jumped out once, as he slowed at a corner, and tried to run, and that he caught me and tied my hands and put a scarf round my mouth to stop me yelling, though who was to hear me on the lonely marshes of Romney?

  They knew that he took me to a little shuttered house near the sea and kept me locked up there for three days, and bungled the business about the ransom, and walked right into the police trap with his long ungainly legs and his sad reflective eyes. They know that he killed himself in prison a few months later, because it was in the papers, and the story about me told over again.

  They do not know that I loved Rocky, and I shall never tell them. They could not possibly understand. Even Tom did not perfectly understand. He made a rather crude joke about thirteen-year-old girls and I wished I had not tried to explain to him.

  Kate knew. When she told me about the Australian she was only with for a few hours, I told her about Rocky, and how lonely he was, the loneliest man I had ever seen.

  ‘So was Douglas, I think,’ Kate said. ‘He didn’t have anyone to talk to.’

  ‘He was the first person in my life who needed me more than I needed him.’

  ‘He made me feel I mattered,’ Kate said, and I remember saying, ‘Don’t tell Molly,’ and her saying, ‘She’d be shocked.’

  A woman of thirty can fall in love with a man of sixty and no one is shocked. When you are thirteen, forty-three looks like a dirty old man and people won’t believe that it was only caring and companionship, because that is the kind of minds they have. Even people like Molly. My mother had me examined after Rocky. I shall never forgive her for that.

  Bess and Martin live in an ugly industrial town in Massachusetts, because that is where he makes window frames, but they have a summer house on Cape Cod, and when we talked about me staying there and the beach and sailing and their daughters who would make me stand in the sunset shallows and dig for clams, I realized that I looked forward to it. I felt my cheekbones rising up and out, and I pulled them down.

  ‘You’ve remembered you’re not supposed to smile so widely,’ Bess said.

  ‘It seems disloyal. If we - well, coming to America was one of the things we were going to do together.’

  ‘Stop acting,’ Martin said, suddenly rough, and I saw him, in fright, as a burly stranger made of nothing but jaw and muscle and ruthless common sense.

  At first in New York I was still only half myself. I went about alone a lot, as you can in this city, and be anyone you want to be. It is like being in a film. You can sit in the Automat and eat pie and read a paperback and just be a girl in the Automat, feeling the part without living it. When you leave, you are a girl in a black linen dress and new shoes with a big tortoiseshell buckle holding her hair, waiting for the traffic lights to change. When you cross, your legs criss-crossing with fifty others in front of the panting bus, you are an extra in a crowd scene, existing only in that moment on the screen.

  I roomed with two girls from the office, but once in a while 1 would take a hotel room, and stay there for a night or two with the television and the air conditioning and be a girl alone in a hotel, enigmatic in
the lobby, mysterious in the elevator, where the men held their thin straw hats to their chests and stared.

  If Brenda and Dodie thought I was with a man, they did not say anything. We were friends on the surface, but we let each other alone. Once when I had rung for breakfast and left the door open so the waiter could get in, a man came into my room in the hotel.

  At first he looked surprised, and apologized, as if he had really made a mistake. He took a step backwards and then changed his mind and came on towards the bed. He had a sharp nose and a small petulant mouth with a cleft chin, too pretty, but his eyes were ugly, jaundiced. I managed to say, ‘Please go away,’ and he smiled, and just then the waiter came in and the man turned and went out, giving me a brisk little wave from the door as if he had been paying a social call.

  I don’t know what the waiter thought. I was stiff with horror. If the man had touched me, it would have been like a tortoise with its shell off. I thought of my father, as I often did, and wondered whether he was less foolish than I, and could stop remembering.

  I had my twenty-first birthday in America. I had made some friends by now, as well as Brenda and Dodie, and they wanted to give me a party, but Bess telephoned because she had remembered the date, and I was to come to Cape Cod.

  ‘They won’t let me. I’m doing a survey.’

  ‘What of?’

  ‘Traffic flow.’

  ‘Have you switched jobs?’

  ‘Traffic flow. Which way they push the carts round, and why. Mr Vinson will never let me go in the middle of the week.’

  ‘Ask him.’

  I did, and was surprised when he said Yes. He is a very formal fat man with a blue jaw which he constantly polishes with an electric razor in his desk, and a liking for words like connotation and eventuality, which are not in the more casual commerce of speech. I had not realized he was human, but he suddenly relaxed and pulled out from among his credit cards a picture of his family: two toothy teenagers and a wife all looking about the same age.

  He gave me a cheque for fifty dollars for my birthday, and I bought a white swim suit with it and paid my plane fare to Hyannis, where Bess met me in an English car with three sun-bleached daughters with brown bare feet.

  While I was in their house getting ready for the party, there was a telephone call for me. Long distance from England, the middle daughter said, panting up into my room.

  I grabbed for my dressing-gown, but she said: ‘Come down like that, everyone does,’ so I ran down in my slip, and heard the voice of the English operator, a man, because it was almost midnight over there. Another male voice was coming in in the background, and I said, ‘Daddy!’ more excitedly than I had thought I would, and then I heard Tom laugh.

  I was standing on the marble floor of a little lobby off the front room, and my bare feet were like ice, although my hands were sweating, gripping the receiver as if it could hold me up.

  ‘It isn’t only your father who thinks of you on your birthday,’ Tom said, and the whole damn thing came flooding back, just when I had thought it was beginning to leave me, just when it was beginning to be a conscious effort to remember his face and voice.

  It was, as he had once said, like talking to someone in the next room. It was like talking to him across the mile of London rooftops, from my flat to the telephone box where he had written among the obscenities and scrawled numbers: T loves E for ever.

  It costs thirty bob a minute, he had said, and then you can’t think of anything to say. All I could say was, ‘How did you know where I was?’

  ‘I rang your mother, and said I had a bill to send you. She sounded panicky, as if I was a bookie or a blackmailer, so I changed it to a receipt, and she gave me the address.’

  ‘I didn’t want you to know where I was.’

  ‘I do now. I may have to come over later this year.’

  ‘Don’t.’

  ‘Emma, I—’

  If he had said: I want you, come back, I swear I would have gone. With the last remnants of sanity, I interrupted jerkily: ‘How did you know I was here?’

  ‘Someone at your New York number told me. Where are you?’

  ‘On Cape Cod.’

  ‘Oh God, darling. Martha’s Vineyard was one of the places I was going to take you.’

  ‘Don’t, Tom, please don’t. I can’t stand it.’ I stood there bowed over and shivering in my slip, pleading with him from three thousand miles to leave me alone, just as I had once pleaded with him never to leave me.

  His voice changed and he said rather stiffly: ‘How is everything, all right?’

  ‘Yes, all right. What about you?’

  ‘Pretty good, Been very busy. Usual thing. It’s rained all summer.’

  ‘The sun shines here all the time.’

  The seconds slipped prodigally past while we discussed the weather back and forth across the Atlantic, and soon the operator would cut in and he would say goodbye and it would be over, and I would have failed him.

  ‘Emma’s shivering!’ the child called out to Bess when I put down the receiver. ‘Get her a drink, quick.’

  I had not failed my father. If he did telephone me on my twenty-first birthday, I could speak to him without guilt. I swear, we had said, and I had stuck to it.

  He didn’t telephone. I knew it was too late, because my mother goes to bed at ten. I even told Bess the call was from him, and the listening child had opened her mouth, but shut it at my look, and shrugged her shoulders on a mystery not worth pursuing.

  At the week-end, Martin took me to the Air Force Base to see President Kennedy arrive from Washington in his plane and take off for Hyannisport in his helicopter. We went to the officers’ club for a drink because Martin used to be in the Air Force, and that was when I met Joel.

  After that, I went up to Cape Cod often at week-ends, and when Bess closed up the summer house in September and the children went back to school, Joel would hop on planes going to the Base at Poughkeepsie, and borrow a car and suddenly arrive at the house in Brooklyn, where Brenda and Dodie and I lived with secret Mrs Patterson who could not talk above a whisper.

  I have never told Joel about Tom. He has forced me back into life by not knowing that I was out of it.

  I MUST WRITE to Em. I’ve been saying that for weeks. It’s awful, I haven’t written since the baby was born, and she wrote back to say it had been on her birthday, so we dropped the name Linda and called her Emily.

  Bob is fond of Em, in his way, because she doesn’t laugh at him, and she was always nice with him after she got over the fright he gave her that time at Marbles.

  ‘Stinking idiot,’ I told him afterwards, ‘doing a thing like that to a girl like her.’

  ‘She’s a girl, isn’t she?’ he said, with that innocent look he gives you under his hair, his eyes all round and wet. T thought she’d like it.’

  But he doesn’t hold it against her that she called him a filthy beast. Emmaline he wouldn’t have, because he can’t spell it, but Emily he likes, so one of these days we are going to have her christened. Perhaps we’ll wait until Em gets back, and she can be godmother.

  Sammy was christened in the second week, but I didn’t feel so bad after him as I have since Emily. Anaemic they say, and I should be living with old Marbles, because I’m supposed to eat liver, but we can’t afford it, not in the quantities she used to dish out. No wonder Bob rang the bell first try.

  So I have these iron pills that taste of dust, and I left the top off one day and Sammy got at them. He’s into everything now that he can walk, if you can call it walking, that beery stagger from one piece of furniture to the next, like my dad coming home in the dark. Nothing is safe. He was bad enough when he was a baby, but it gets worse as they get older and you can’t stick them down somewhere and leave them. I’d only gone down the passage to see Mr Zaharian, but five minutes is all they need, when they’re crafty like this one.

  He had to go to hospital and have the stomach pump. He might die, they told me, if it’s got into the blo
odstream, for I’d no idea how many were in the bottle, so we didn’t know if he’d had two or twenty.

  He might die. That was a queer feeling. I had to sit there on that metal chair in the corridor outside the ward and think about how much I’d mind. I couldn’t see it, not beyond the funeral, with the tiny coffin and Bob and me so serious, and talking in hushed voices. I would be holding Emily, and it would be a symbol, like, of the continuity of life unvanquished by death. Make a nice picture, though I’d have nothing to wear.

  He might die, they said, and it came into my mind that it might be better for him. Why should I think that? He’ll get by, like I have. I’ve had some fun in life, with all the rest of it, and I’ll have some more when we get out of this mess. Bob says when he’s in the Army, we shall have married quarters made of red brick, somewhere in Surrey where the earth is sand and it’s all yellow gorse and little fir-trees.

  Emma wants to know all about the baby, and she sent Emily that all-over suit with feet, thank God she did, for it’s about the only decent thing she’s got to wear, with the state things were in when Sammy was through with them.

  Marge Collins who lives downstairs, and has three kids in Care by different fathers and has milked every government agency and charitable institution, says I can get baby clothes just for the asking, but no thanks. Marge has never been in a Remand Home or on probation. I have. They don’t stop at baby clothes. They want to rehabilitate you. My life is mine now. I don’t want no case workers ferreting out my business.

  Em’s letters get sent on from the flats, so she doesn’t know we’ve had to move. I must write and tell her. I’ll write to her tomorrow. It’s so far away. They’ve taken her away from me, and we’ll never be close again, more than sisters, like we were once. When she writes about New York and that place she goes to by the sea, and this pilot she’s got now with his boat and his Thunderbird car, it’s because she wants me to share it, but all it does is make me see the gap widening. Her world is growing and spreading. Mine is narrowing, even from what it was. It cramps and smothers me, and I want to bust my way out. That’s why I threw that shoe. Bob laughed, because he thought it was at him, and missed, but it was at everything really. He’ll have to get that window pane fixed before the cold sets in. Newspaper doesn’t keep out draughts, as I should know.