Emma Sparrow

by Marie Joseph

  Sharon was very dignified in her rollers and the faded quilted dressing-gown that had been too small for her for three years now. She stared at Emma with shock. It was like seeing the Pope tear his hair and shout swear-words from the balcony in Rome, as she told Ricky later. Emma never shouted. Sometimes she raised her voice a bit, or her mouth went tight, but she never yelled like somebody common. Sometimes her eyes were longing eyes, as if she was imagining herself in another place, and there was a time, before Mam had been killed, when Emma had teased her and called her a butterhead. Now Emma’s own brown hair was scragged back from her face like one of the toffee-nosed models in magazines, just scragged back showing her rounded shiny forehead, and her eyes all glittery as if she was going to cry.

  ‘You’ve changed, our Emma.’ Sharon said this with sadness tinged with regret. ‘It’s not my fault the tea’s burnt. Anyway, I’m going to Ricky’s mother’s for my tea, so you don’t have to bother about me.’

  She was watching Emma’s face wrench itself out of shape when the door-bell rang. Two piercing rings, followed by two knocks, rapidly, one after the other.

  Sharon’s eyes and mouth flew wide. ‘Oh, flaminenry, it’s him! It’s Ricky! Oh, no, he can’t come in and see me like this!’ She tore at the rollers, rasping strands of hair with them, clattering them down on the table. ‘Emma … oh, you let him in. I’ll run upstairs, then….’ She turned briefly. ‘You won’t tell him where Dad’s gone, our Emma? Please?’

  When Emma let the boy in the white crash helmet into the house, Sharon’s flight upstairs must have been quite visible to him through the round glass inset in the door, but he just nodded as if to himself and followed Emma through into the living-room.

  ‘You’re Ricky.’ She motioned to her father’s chair. ‘Sit down. Sharon won’t be long.’ She tried to smile, but her face felt stiff, and the same stiffness seemed to be affecting her whole body. The face beneath the crash helmet was foxy sharp, and the dark eyes shifted restlessly without settling on anything particular.

  Emma nodded towards the silent viewing figures on the settee. ‘Sorry about them. I’d switch it off but it won’t make any difference. They’ll just sit there waiting for it to come on again.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Emma backed towards the kitchen door. ‘She’ll not be long,’ she said again, and closed the door. Then she crossed her arms and rocked herself backwards and forwards. Oh, that boy! That little boy with the spots, and the almost nothing of a chin! That thin, undersized, paralysed with shyness kid. Keeping Sharon out late night after night, and wanting to be engaged to her! Kissing her with those thin red lips – and had that been a suspicion of a moustache? He couldn’t be more than seventeen … he couldn’t. Emma felt the hysteria rise thick in her throat, then she crossed to the pedal bin and shook the burned fish straight into it from the grill pan. She clenched her hands and fought so hard for control that she felt sick.

  There were the boys to feed and chivvy into the bath, and there was her father to wait for. And when he came back it would be all right. He would be up in court like the last time, and they would give him another fine, with time to pay, and he would go out and get another job, and life would go on just the same.

  But even as she tried to convince herself, she knew it wasn’t true.

  By Monday morning she was back on her stool in the factory, a fresh pile of blouses in front of her, her hands busy and her mind wandering into dark places, her usual optimism gone completely.

  ‘Are there any other offences you would like us to take into consideration?’

  They had asked John Sparrow that down at the station, and he had said there were. Shrunk into his chair he had told her that he would have to report at the local court, maybe in two to three weeks’ time. And this time he accepted the fact that it might mean prison.

  The boys would come home from school to an empty house, but they were used to that. Sharon would go out nightly with her fiancé; and she, Emma, would carry on with running the house.

  And how would it be for her father in prison? Emma, with only television documentaries to fall back on, saw him emerging from a cell, slop bucket in his hands, clad in loose-fitting prison jacket and trousers, coughing, always coughing.

  She turned the slippery material too quickly, pressed the switch, and the needle went straight through her finger.

  ‘You’re sure you feel okay?’

  Simon Martin’s face hovered above her, seen as through a veil. There was a drumming in her head, and when she tried to stand up her knees buckled beneath her.

  There was no sick bay in the factory, just a first aid box in the office, with Mrs Kelly pulling the needle out and dabbing the place with antiseptic, and handing her a glass of water laced with soluble aspirin.

  ‘I’m taking her home.’ Simon held her firmly by the elbow and guided her out of the office. Someone brought Emma’s coat, helped her on with it and draped the long woollen scarf round her throat.

  This was more, he told himself as he almost pushed her into the passenger seat of his car before going round and getting behind the wheel, this was more than the shock of getting a needle through a finger. Emma Sparrow was so white that her skin appeared to be almost transparent. And what made it worse was that she was trying to smile, assuring him over and over that it wasn’t necessary, that she would be quite all right.

  ‘You’ll have to tell me which way to go.’ He followed her instructions, given in a voice so low he had to turn his head to catch what she was saying. ‘You mean to tell me you ran all this way the day you missed the bus?’

  ‘Yes,’ she told him. No, her finger didn’t hurt all that much, it was just that her father had been ill the day before, stopping in bed and frightening the life out of her when she had thought he was going to stop breathing. Bit by bit, as they drove through the centre of town towards to the newly-built houses fringing the outskirts, Emma answered his questions, very conscious of the fact that she was sitting beside the boss’s son, being driven home in one of the works’ cars on a Monday morning when she ought to have been busy at her machine.

  ‘There’s no need for you to come in.’ She fumbled with her bandaged hand for her key, and when she found it at last in the depths of her brown shoulder-bag, Simon took it from her and opened the door.

  ‘There’s no need for you to come in, sir,’ she said again, but even as she said it he was already in, standing by the settee in his dark suit, fingering his striped tie, staring round with open curiosity.

  ‘I’ll just nip upstairs and tell my father. He’ll be wondering who it is coming in in the middle of the morning.’ Emma left him abruptly, seeing through his eyes the shabby room with Sharon’s magazines slipping in an untidy heap from the low table, the moquette covers on the settee cushions with their springs bulging like molehills, and the television screen, blank now the boys were at school, filmy with a layer of dust.

  When she came back downstairs he was in the kitchen with the kettle going on top of the cooker. ‘I found the tea bags,’ he announced cheerfully, dropping two into the brown teapot, ‘but I can’t find the cups and saucers. Or do you use mugs most of the time, like us?’

  ‘The cups and saucers are in the top cupboard, but they might need washing.’ Emma felt shame spread over her like a warm wave. ‘We only use them when we have company, and we haven’t had much of that lately.’

  He turned and smiled at her. ‘It’s okay, Emma. You go and sit down. I’m used to this. I’ve had long periods of living alone, so I don’t stand on ceremony.’ He grinned. ‘I remember when I was young my mother would have died rather than serve a visitor without a lace-edged cloth on a tray and the silver teapot and the sugar tongs at the ready.’ He took a bottle of milk from the fridge. ‘At least, when I say-silver I mean silver-plate – we didn’t rise to such heights as solid.’

  Emma went to sit down as she was told, but first she bent down and switched on one bar of the electric fire. Her finger throbbed and ached, and there
was an alum-tasting bitterness in her mouth.

  Why couldn’t he leave her alone? Talking about his mother and her flamin’ silver teapot, then trying to make amends by saying it wasn’t real. Patronizing her. Playing at being kind, and oh, dear God, surely he wasn’t washing-up? Emma sat on the edge of her chair, nursing her injured finger, cursing herself for her stupidity in letting it happen. Even the new girls on the sewing machines hardly ever got the needle through.

  ‘Here we are, then.’ He came into the room carrying two mugs of steaming tea, handed one over, then sat down facing her. Emma narrowed her eyes. He was so sure of himself, this son of the boss down in London. So confident, she wouldn’t have put it past him to run upstairs with a mug for her father. All without a by-your-leave.

  And if he did that, if he saw her father propped up on his pillows, unshaven, wearing his vest underneath his pyjamas, smelling of whisky, coughing through a cigarette butt, then Mr Simon Martin would have a fine tale to tell his wife when he got back to London.

  ‘Why don’t you tell me what’s wrong, Emma?’

  She was drinking when he said that, and the question surprised her so much that she blinked at him over the rim of the thick pottery mug.

  ‘How do you mean, what’s wrong, sir?’

  Simon gave up. For days the white face of this girl had come between him and his ordered thinking. He had watched her, shoulders hunched over that devilish buttonhole machine, stopping now and again to push her hair back behind her ears, then reaching out for another blouse. Like an extension of the machine herself.

  He had asked himself why. Why should the sight of this one girl doing what she was paid to do affect him so? It wasn’t as if he hadn’t seen it all before. The factory in North London was three, almost four times the size of this one, and he had walked daily up and down past the long tables without giving the machinists more than a passing glance. He had even mentioned to Chloe at the weekend that he had a niggling worry about one of the girls in the Lancashire place.

  ‘If I used the expression “a soul in torment”, then I would say she’s got one,’ he had said, and Chloe had stopped chopping onions for a risotto and shot him a glance from streaming eyes.

  ‘Probably pregnant,’ she had said without thinking, then blushed and, as Simon turned away, called after him, ‘Oh, ‘Oh, don’t be a hypocrite, honey. Do you really think it was the time to start a family with the world the way it is? You know I was right, but you’re just too scared to admit it. You’ve got cosmic ideas, did you know that? You try to equate realism with emotion, and you can’t. They don’t add up, not even in your book.’

  ‘That’s too profound for me,’ Simon had answered untruthfully, and walked away.

  ‘Your mother, Emma?’ Simon persisted, knowing he had no right to persist, almost feeling his father standing behind him telling him not to be such a bloody fool. ‘Does she go out to work?’

  Emma tilted her chin, showing the long line of her throat and reminding him of a young Audrey Hepburn. ‘My own mother left me with my father when I was very young and got a divorce so that she could marry another man.’

  ‘And you see her sometimes?’

  ‘Never! She lives down near Birmingham somewhere and he, my father, won’t hear her name mentioned.’

  The man sitting quietly opposite to her sipped his drink thoughtfully. ‘And your father married again?’

  Emma wondered what would happen if she asked him to go, then as quickly reminded herself that she couldn’t afford pride, not with her job at stake. She spoke so softly that Simon had to lean forward to concentrate on her reply.

  ‘Yes, he married again and had three children. I have two stepbrothers and a stepsister. My stepmother was killed two years ago.’

  ‘Killed?’

  ‘Crossing the street. She was a good mam to us.’

  ‘So you do everything?’

  ‘The best way I can.’

  He ignored the dignified resentment in her voice. ‘Things can’t be easy for you, Emma’

  ‘We manage.’

  ‘And your father? Is he out of work at the moment?’

  The pain in Emma’s finger was spreading up her arm. It had been chaos getting the boys off to school that morning after being away so long. Alan had lost his dinner money, even after she had handed it to him personally; Joe had broken a shoelace; and Sharon was still in bed when Emma had left the house, running for the bus, not missing her breakfast because she had forgotten she had not had any. And now this man was quizzing her as if she were a candidate on Mastermind, snapping out the questions and expecting her to give with the immediate answers. One more question and she’d say ‘Pass’. She would. As Sharon would say, ‘Flaminenry, who did he think he was?’

  ‘Yes, he’s out of work at the moment.’ Well, that was true, anyway. She waited, the tension mounting in her, for the next question.

  But instead Simon Martin stood up and looked down at her. He seemed to be struggling with his thoughts, fighting a private battle in his mind; then he came and sat down on the settee beside her.

  ‘Emma. Emma Sparrow. If we … if I found your father a job, say in the packing department, a light job, do you think he would take it?’

  His eyes were kind, so filled with kindness that Emma was dismayed to feel her own eyes grow moist. For a full minute she stared at him, not knowing what to say. Kindness was a funny thing. Just a minute before she had been conscious of a growing anger. Now, faced with the obvious compassion in his expression she wanted to put her head down and weep. Instead she told him the truth.

  ‘My father has been charged with stealing from the firm he worked for as a driver. It isn’t the first time, and when he comes up at the … before the magistrates in two to three weeks’ time, they will most likely send him to prison.’

  Simon was very businesslike. There was no shock on his face, nothing but an earnest desire to help. Almost without volition his hand crept to his pocket. It was his way – had always been his way. If help was needed and it was in his power to do so, then he gave it. When Chloe needed more money she asked and it was immediately handed over. For an accountant, she often told him, he managed the domestic finances with the expertise of an inefficient housewife.

  But before he could open his wallet Emma was on her feet.

  ‘No! We don’t need that kind of help, sir! We’re hard pressed, but we’re not starving. I get me wages of a Friday, and that’s all I’m accepting.’ She wagged a bandaged finger at him. ‘An’ if you don’t mind, sir, I’ll go upstairs to see to my father, an’ I’ll come back to work tomorrow. This afternoon likely.’ The tears in her eyes were tears of humiliation and anger now. ‘I won’t be the first one going straight back to work when the needle’s been pulled out of a finger.’

  ‘Sit down, Emma.’ Simon replaced the wallet in his pocket and patted the seat beside him. It was all wrong. The whole situation was out of control. He was getting in too deep, and he knew it. It was breaking the unwritten code sitting down in this house with one of his girl machinists, even though her father was upstairs coughing his heart out by the sound of it. And another thing. This unusual girl, losing her temper, was talking to him as an equal. He shook his head, contradicting himself. She was his equal, blast it. In his father’s day the employees were expected to be subservient, but not now. And anyway, this Emma Sparrow seemed to have a knowledge, an awareness that even he, with his superior education, lacked. With this girl his rationality was reduced to emotion, and if his father found out he would be appalled.

  ‘Never get familiar with the workroom girls, son. Never! Not even if you fancy one like hell. Spit where you like, but never on the factory’s doorstep. Message taken?’

  But it wasn’t like that. How could it be? Chloe was his girl. He would marry her some day. She had been carrying his baby up to a short while ago. Would Emma Sparrow have done what Chloe did? Simon rubbed a hand over his forehead and was surprised to find that it came away dry. This girl with her gentl
e brown eyes and her soft creamy skin, with the trick she had of tilting her head when she was angry or upset – unusual wasn’t the word for her.

  ‘Look,’ he said gently. ‘Look, I’m sorry I was tactless, and Emma, try not to anticipate the worst about your father. It’s not certain that he’ll be sent to prison. They take a lot of things into consideration, you know, at the courts. When they go into it and find he is a widower with a young family…. His voice tailed off as he saw the expression in her eyes.

  ‘He was warned last time, but it made no difference.’ Emma lowered her head. ‘I think it’s ever since my mother left him. He’s not got a chip on his shoulder – what he’s got is a whole forest of trees.’ She raised her head and looked directly at him. ‘But he isn’t all bad. He’s the sort of man who would pinch your last penny, then make you a pot of tea and hold your hand till you felt better.’

  ‘You’re very fond of him.’

  ‘He’s my dad! I love him.’

  Simon swallowed hard and stood up abruptly. ‘I’ll be getting along. If that finger is still painful tomorrow I’d see the doctor, but don’t come in this afternoon.’ He smiled. ‘I dare say Mr Gordon can bring in fresh troops to man the buttonhole machine temporarily.’

  Had he really said that? He knew she had thanked him for bringing her home, remembered she had stood at the door, the bandaged hand laid across her chest like Nelson at the top of his column. Then he sat at the wheel of his car, combing his hair with his fingers in a new and nervous way before he drove away.