‘But when you’re pregnant, the doctor—’
‘That’s different. It’s the baby he’s after, not me. Shut up now, will you?’ I couldn’t stand this indecent prying into my life. ‘What business is it of yours?’
‘Can I give Emily a bath?’ Emma said, having looked carefully at me and seen that there was no more to be said.
‘Help yourself.’
‘Where—?’
‘In the sink, where did you expect?’
I scooped the potato peelings and tea leaves out of it while Em boiled up a kettle, and we talked about the times at Moll’s when we bathed the kids and Moll would give us chops for supper if we did them all. We’d once done eight in fifteen minutes, our record, but of course there was a bathtub and lots of hot water, the way Jim used to stoke that boiler. All of a sudden, I could smell those babies. I’d forgotten children could smell like that.
While she had the baby in the sink, with Sammy sitting on the draining-board, watching her with his round dark eyes that are like Bob’s but more secret, not spilling over like a spaniel, she said, with her back to me, ‘Would you like some money?’
‘No,’ I said. Just like that. No. I could have shot myself, but having said it, I couldn’t go back on it, and I was so angry with myself that I had to try and make her feel she’d insulted me by offering.
I felt I was red in the face, and went and bent over the bed and started straightening it out, feeling my legs trembling and tense. I get stiff with anger sometimes, and wonder what’s happening to me. But it’s nothing new. It’s just that I’ve got more to be angry about now. I remember when I had to stand up in that courtroom, the first day I ever met Em, and she was in that yellow coat, and my dad was stood there telling lies about me and I still thought my mother would come, though I knew she wouldn’t, I was stiff then. Rigid with fury. That’s why I yelled out at them, and Em’s father frowned as if he was in pain. I yell now, sometimes. Bob puts his fingers in his ears and so does Sammy, copying him. It’s rather sweet.
‘Where are your books?’ Em asked me.
‘I sold them.’
‘I’ll get you some more. You can’t live here without anything to read.’
‘I’d sell them.’
‘You wouldn’t.’
‘If I didn’t, Bob would.’
‘He used to be so proud of what you read. When he made you the bookcase at the flat, he said, “Katie’s going to show me how to read them.”’
‘He can read all right.’ I didn’t want to think of cosier days when I used to read to Bob sometimes, and he’d sit with his eyes on my face like a child, marvelling at the story. ‘Books are a luxury.’
‘They’re not.’
‘You wouldn’t understand.’
I’d never said that to Em, but if it hurt, she didn’t show it. She got the baby dressed and washed off Sammy’s face, and then she wanted me to get dressed and she’d take us all out for a meal.
‘Emily can’t eat a meal,’ I said.
‘Don’t be stupid. Give her a bottle first, or whatever she has.’
She’s getting very bossy, is Em. I don’t know who she thinks she is, coming into my flat and ordering me about as if I was a case history and she was one of those hens Marge Collins has in her place all the time, shoving her around and telling her how-to budget. Just because she’s got everything and I’ve got nothing, she wants to patronize. There’s no difference between her and me except my rotten bad luck. You wait, Emmaline Bullock. It could happen to you. Then you’ll know why they call it getting caught.
IT IS QUITE awful. Worse than I expected. Much worse. It was bad enough when she was at the Council flat and had started to let go of all the things that had begun to mean something to her. But this - a house of hell, she said, and though I hadn’t expected to find her in Belgravia, I hadn’t expected it to be as bad as this.
I remember, ages ago, the first time I went out with Johnny Jordan, after we had been to see that scoured-out woman with all the children, and the little boy who had leaned his scabby head on my chest. He said then that poverty was a disease. They keep slipping back, he said, like malaria, and I thought he was wrong, but now I am not so sure. There is something about that dreadful room where Kate and Bob and the two children try to live, something that reminds me, most sickeningly, of Butt Street.
It is in a different part of town from her old haunts, but no better. Somewhat worse, if anything, for this is a neighbourhood where immigrants of all nations have come precariously to roost, bringing with them their less savoury habits from home.
Kate’s street is a long, tall terrace, marked out for slum clearance if there is any sanity in the Ministry of Housing, but still inhabited to the hilt. It was a sodden, sunless day, standard for London, but the Africans and West Indians looked as if they could never get used to it. They looked miserable, the women did, their strong faces already as pinched and shrewish as cockneys’. Besides the shrill swarms of children, most of the houses had overflows of people on the steps or leaning against the railings. Kate’s house on the corner had a monstrous jelly-fish woman squatting on the ground-floor balcony, like a doll over a telephone. She turned to say something disparaging to someone inside, and I went up the steps under her eye, giving her my enigmatic profile, the jaw slightly out.
There had been bells once, but now only rusted sockets. No buttons, and the cards alongside washed anonymous by the weather. One of the peeling double doors, tall and narrow as a coffin lid, was ajar, so I went inside and stood uncertain in the sour, turnip-greens hall. Molly had only given me the house number. She had said it was a flat, but it looked as if it was going to be even less of a flat than that honeymoon eyrie on the top floor of Marbles’.
I knocked at the first door off the hall, which still had an embossed brass hand-plate and had probably led to the dining-room in the good old days. A child with what looked like chicken-pox opened the door, and a voice came from over the back of a large leather sofa, If that’s the Prisoners’ Wives’ Aid, come on in.’
‘I’m looking for Mrs Thomas.’
‘Why look here? Upstairs,’ said the prisoner’s wife. ‘First door on the left.’
At the bend of the staircase was a small alcove, where two women were talking outside a frosted-glass door, with someone whistling behind it. The women stopped talking to watch me come up, and moved their heads round and upwards as I passed and climbed on, like chickens mesmerized in front of a white wall.
First door on the left. A passage led away on either side of the staircase. It would depend which side you were coming from. A door at one end was open on a roomful of steam. I thought it must be the bathroom, but when I got closer, it was a three-cornered bedroom, with a kettle boiling away like mad on a gas ring on the floor. In the doorway of this Turkish bath appeared a short dark man with very wide trousers, raggedly cut off, a shirt without a collar, not the same thing as a collarless shirt, and huge brown melancholy eyes the shape of teardrops, drawn in close to a beaked nose.
‘I’m making tea,’ he said. ‘You want some?’
‘No thank you.’ Our Miss Bullock, field worker, should not be afraid to go anywhere, but he looked desperate enough to dismember me and steam me like salt beef. ‘Mrs Thomas?’
‘Katie.’ He smiled widely, and of course he was not a slaughterer, but Kate’s good neighbour, who gave her cups of tea when she was low. He took me to her door, knocked for me, bowed and slipped away in his grey gym shoes before she opened the door.
The last time I saw Kate, her pale hair had hung to her shoulders, brushed and cared for, for she had always been vain, even in the worst times. With her hair cut, and tousled as if she had just got out of bed, she looked unnervingly like the Kate I had first seen, the hapless urchin of my father’s court. She wore boy’s striped pyjamas, stained at the cuffs and ankles and gone at some of the seams, with a crumpled mauve chiffon scarf tucked into the neck.
I had forgotten how small she is. When I put my arms r
ound her, it was like holding a child. She is bonier, and her face is thinner and drained of colour, like a ghost of Kate.
The baby is as plump and healthy as if it had stolen her strength and blood. The little boy, Sammy, used to be square, but he has elongated, and his legs are like props for a bird. When she took off the preposterous nightdress and I saw his ribs and swollen stomach, I asked her if he had been ill. She said casually that he was always ill, on and off, and the doctor said he was the type who never put on weight.
He has big black round eyes that stare at you without blinking, and his hair, which is downy, like a new growth, is all on the top of his broad skull, which makes him look like a dwarf tribal Indian. He is naughty. Even at two and a half, you can see him being naughty on purpose, watching her to see how much she’ll stand. When I took him on the bed and he upset the ashtray, he ducked, even before she swung her arm at him. The duck came with the mishap, instinctively, and I am trying not to think about what I saw in his eyes.
Some of them keep slipping back, Johnny Jordan said. You can only help them so far. She has slipped back. She is still my Kate. She always will be, till death, but she is slipping back, like someone sinking in a bog, and I can’t pull her out. She won’t even hold out her hand for me to try. She wouldn’t take money, or even a meal. I tried to talk to her about the babies, but she made me feel like a prying spinster, looking for a vicarious thrill out of someone else’s sex life, so I shut up.
For a while we were close, almost like we used to be, but then we were miles apart, and she tried to make it seem as if I were the one who was aloof, when it was really her shoving me away.
When she asked me, just before I left, why I had come home now when I had said I would be gone two years, I didn’t feel like telling her. I had thought I would. One of the things I had thought about, riding here on a bus filling up as it approached with increasingly squalid people, was that I would be able to tell her about my father and that she would understand what he had done to me.
I had only had Alice for those few days, and Derek briefly on the terrace before Aunt Millicent fussed him inside to provide a forgotten date for Gran. I had no one to talk to, no one to say they were sorry for me, because they were too busy being sorry for my mother. I was sorry for her too, and I tried to show it, although she kills demonstrativeness stone dead in its tracks; but at the bottom truth of my soul, I was sorrier for myself.
‘What’s the matter?’ Kate asked, when I made an evasive answer, because she knows me too well.
So I told her. If I was looking for sympathy, she had none to give. She hardly seemed to listen, and then she shrugged her shoulders and said: ‘Been a good thing if my dad had done that years ago. We was always better off when he wasn’t home. Safer too. The day I run off with Bob, you know, he burned me with his cigarette. Deliberate.’
‘God, Kate, you never told me.’
‘I’ve never told anyone. I’ll never tell anyone what she did to me either. Never anyone but God the day I die, so they’ll be sure and chuck her into hell if she’s sneaked into heaven past the guards.’
‘What did she do?’ Kate has never talked about her black childhood. It is the only thing we have not shared.
‘None of your business, ducky,’ she said, suddenly flippant. She leaned forward to the baby and, as her frail neck came out of the scarf, the dark red stain was like a punishing hand laid on her.
I didn’t know what to do. There was only one thing I wanted to do, so I did it. Outside a public house, I went into a telephone box that smelled of every bad thing the human race purveys, and dialled the number of Tom’s office.
‘Who wants him, please?’ A new voice. Sheila’s private eye must have been fired when I left the scene.
‘Miss Weir.’
I’m sorry, he’s not in this afternoon.’ Why the hell can’t they tell you that right away instead of building you up with Who wants him? ‘Can I take a message?’
‘No thank you. No message. Don’t bother to tell him I called. It’s not important.’
Time was, when I was in a bad way, that I used to go to my father. Sometimes he understood and sometimes he didn’t. Sometimes he would give the time to listen properly and sometimes he wouldn’t. But he was there. He was someone I could go to.
When you have no one to go to, where do you go? When children have no one who wants them, they turn up on Johnny Jordan’s doorstep. I turned up there that evening, just as supper was coming to the table, and was absorbed easily into the meal with no fuss or surprise.
No one asked me why I had come. They were glad that I had. I was home from America, and so I had come to see them. They were having roast beef, and Nancy had made her first apple turnovers, so it was a good day for me to be there.
The girl has two long brown pigtails like I had at her age. They come forward into the food, and she keeps flipping them to the back of her shoulders, as I remember doing. Sometimes when she is thinking, she puts the end of one of them into her mouth. I used to do that, and my father used to cry out sometimes that if I didn’t stop eating my hair, he would cut it off. Once, when I forgot just after he had shouted, and he thought I did it on purpose, he came at me with the huge pair of scissors from his desk. Not in fun. I believe he would have chopped the pigtails off then, if I hadn’t run away.
Nancy’s father doesn’t shout. He says patiently: Don’t suck your hair, and she says: I didn’t know I was.
I know just how it tastes at that age. I still suck the ends of mine occasionally, but it doesn’t taste as good when you are grown up.
Nancy and her mother both have round country faces with high colouring, and big easy laughs. When they laugh, they look at each other, like a duet. Johnny is much quieter.
‘He’s shy,’ Jean says. ‘You wouldn’t believe this man was so shy, some of the places he goes to. Remember those people, Johnny, who lived in that old bus behind the railway yards, and no one ever knew she had a child? Like a little savage, it was, when you brought it home. It bit me.
‘No one but this stupid idiot would have gone in there,’ she told me, with her affectionate mixture of pride and abuse. ‘The man had a knife out, but never mind that, our boy goes right in, like a Jap.’
‘Doesn’t sound very shy,’ I said, for it is all right in this house to talk about and around Johnny. He sits with the sweet smile softening his square boxer’s jaw, turning his eyes thoughtfully from one to the other, as you speak.
‘Just as long as the customers don’t find it out,’ Jean said. ‘They’re scared of him.’
‘They’re not,’ Nancy said, bringing cups of coffee from the stove. ‘When I took that box of shoes to Mrs Richardson, and told her I thought the boys had ringworm, she said: “You send your father next time, miss. He don’t notice these little details.” ‘
When Jean went upstairs to wash Nancy’s hair, I knew that I should go, and not burden the contented household with the things that had gone wrong for me. But my legs would not push me out of the chair, and my voice would not say the words of leaving. I sat on at the table in the yellow and white kitchen, and Johnny made me another cup of coffee and sat down again to consider me.
‘You’ve changed,’ he said. ‘A bit.’
People say that when you come back from America. They say it without admiration, to stop you telling of transatlantic joys and marvels they don’t want to hear. They tell you that you have an American accent, helpfully, as if it were a smut on your nose.
Johnny was not thinking about America, however. He said, ‘Last time we saw you, that night I found you at the bus stop with your hair blowing round your face in that cold wind, you were - how shall I say it? - restless. Keyed up. Nervous, I thought. As if you—’ he laughed without opening his mouth— ‘had been up to something.’
He is more perceptive than you would think, Johnny Jordan. That’s why he has this job.
‘Baby-sitting for my friend Kate, that’s all,’ I said lightly. He is the sort of man it’s hard t
o lie to. Not because he is righteous. He might lie like a demon to get himself out of a jam, or avoid a scene. You can’t be in the Army as long as he has and not learn that. But because he makes you feel you do it badly.
So I dropped that, and asked what I had been wanting to all evening, only Kate was something between him and me and I didn’t want to bring Jean into it. ‘Are you still seeing Kate’s mother, the woman who keeps that shop in Butt Street?’
‘Not any more. I had rather good luck with her, as a matter of fact.’
He never says that he was successful, or has got people to do what he wants. When he achieves marvels with the lost and the hopeless, it’s always a fluke, a bit of luck that just happened to come his way.
‘The man got a job with a moving company. I happened to know someone in the firm I could send him to, and I got the little girl into the special school in the end. It was stubbornness really that the mother wouldn’t see she needed help. She wouldn’t admit to herself there was anything wrong. So I had to be a bit brutal. I forced her to see it and, in the end, she was glad to have the decision made for her. It’s often like that. They’re at the end of their rope, some of these women. They’ve had too much, and they’re in a state that they can’t let go. They won’t let you help, and then suddenly they break, and they let you have it all. The thing is to know when to give it back to them. She’ll be all right now, I think. She has some strength. She made her mistake years ago, marrying that chap. She could have been a different kind of woman, I thought.’
‘What did she do to Kate?’
‘I don’t know. She never talked about her.’
‘Kate hates her. And him. Did you know he deliberately burned her? That was the final thing that made her run away.’
‘I knew there had been some ill-treatment. That was in the case notes. But the girl hadn’t said much, and it was vague. It was the other kids I was checking on anyway, and she seems to be quite decent to them. It’s often just the one, like that. Sometimes it goes back to the same kind of treatment in the mother’s childhood. Almost as if they tried to get their own back in some unreasonable, useless way.’
Kate and Emma Page 20