Emma Sparrow

by Marie Joseph

  ‘I’m not going,’ Emma told Sharon. ‘I can’t go. I don’t want to talk to anybody and the thought of traipsing round Blackpool and riding there and back in a coach makes me feel sick just thinking about it. They will think it’s funny if I give backword now, so you’ll have to send a message first thing Saturday morning. Alan is big enough to go with a note on the bus. I’ll say I’ve gone down with ’flu or something, anything, but I’m not going, and that is definite!’

  ‘Then I will take a day off from work and we’ll go to the doctor’s.’ Sharon’s small chin was set firm. ‘He has a surgery Saturdays. An’ we will practise what you are going to say, so that when we get home it will all be fixed. The abortion,’ she added, raising her eyebrows at the stricken dazed expression on Emma’s face. She sighed, a deep noisy sigh. ‘Oh, flaminenry, our Emma, you’re not going to decide to have it, are you? You wouldn’t be that daft, would you? It’s nothing but a little tadpole at the moment, a thing, not a person! You’re not going to spoil your whole life, not while I am here to stop you. Look, you can go in to wherever they go, have it done, and nobody will know. I’ll ring the office and say you’re off with a stomach upset, an’ that will be true enough, then when you go back to work it will all be over. Okay?’

  ‘Just like that?’ Emma shook her head slowly from side to side. ‘As easy as that?’

  ‘Yes.’ Sharon looked very wise. ‘Doctors don’t pass no judgement. They have to take an oath when they have passed their exams to say that they promise to get people well, not try to judge them for their morals. Ricky says so.’

  ‘You haven’t gone and told Ricky?’ Emma’s voice rose almost to a shriek. ‘You promised on God’s honour.’

  ‘We was talking about something else,’ Sharon said comfortably. ‘Right then. Are we going to the doctor’s on Saturday morning, or aren’t we?’

  Emma’s brown eyes were the eyes of a small trapped animal. That was exactly how she felt. Trapped. Betrayed by her own body into a situation so unbelievable, so mind-bending, she was not ready to come to terms with it yet.

  Soon, but not yet. Dear God in His heaven, not yet.

  ‘I will go on the outing,’ she said dully, ‘then the week after I will go to the doctor’s, but alone. Quite alone. What I have done I’ve done an’ I will get out of it in my own way. Okay?’

  Sharon bit her lip, then turned away so that Emma would not see the tears that had sprung unbidden to her eyes. When she spoke the familiar flippant tone was back in her voice again.

  ‘Then sit on the seat over the wheel,’ she advised. ‘That way you’ll get shook up, and who knows, it might just do the trick.’

  And she ran upstairs before the tears could spill out and run down the blusher stroked in a triangular shape to hollow her cheeks like the fashion models in her weekly magazines.

  Ten

  THE TWO COACHES were there, parked in the street outside Delta Dresses when Emma turned the corner. She had purposely left it to the last minute, and was relieved to find that all the seats were taken apart from one near the back. It was immediately behind Mrs Kelly and her husband, a big man with grizzled sideboards, the collar of his blue sports shirt turned down over his jacket.

  Emma sat by the window, laying her shoulder-bag across the seat as if defying anyone to sit by her side. There was no way she could make conversation, no way, and when Mrs Kelly’s black head appeared between the two tall headrests Emma actually shrank back against the dark red upholstery.

  ‘Did you see Mr Gordon sitting up front with his wife, love? She looks a nice woman, but seventy if she’s a day. I’m sure that’s an invisible net on her hair. It’s the first time I’ve set eyes on her as a matter of fact. He says she’s not a mixer, and never has been.’

  The driver switched on the engine, and Mrs Kelly raised her voice accordingly. ‘Bet she’s only come today because Mr Simon’s coming. Most likely old Harry convinced her it was the done thing.’

  With a sharp intake of breath Emma glanced involuntarily at the empty seat beside her.

  As if reading her thoughts Mrs Kelly went on. ‘Of course Mr Simon is following on in his car. He’s meeting us at the restaurant at dinner time.’ She winked. ‘I can’t exactly see him sitting on the back seat with the lasses and singing “I’ll take you home again, Kathleen”, can you?’

  ‘Nobody sings that nowadays anyroad,’ came the disembodied voice of Mr Kelly from his seat. ‘More like “I’ll sleep with thee tonight, Kathleen”. Oh, turn round, Eileen, do. Tha’re as jumpy as a fart in a bottle this morning.’

  Simon Martin drove down the M6 motorway at a steady seventy. To his own surprise he was almost looking forward to the outing. It should have been a duty chore, a mere showing of his face to illustrate the good feeling between management and staff, but as he drove along Simon felt his spirits rise.

  True, his relationship with Chloe seemed to be at a watershed, despite the fact that when he telephoned her their conversation was punctuated with easy laughter. The clash of two strong personalities was, he told himself, smiling, obviously not so apparent when they were apart. It was clear that Chloe was revelling in her job, relieved to be back in London again.

  Simon had visited Blackpool with his parents as a small boy and still remembered the Golden Mile along the promenade, with its shouting shabby fascination. The smell was the thing he recalled most vividly, a heady mixture of fish and chips, candy-floss and frying onions. He had made himself sick by stuffing himself with toffee apples and vinegar-soaked cockles, and had then listened entranced to the barkers in their setback stalls selling pots at knock-down prices. Even now he could still remember staring up in amazement at a booth holder running a dozen dinner plates up his arm without dropping a single one.

  After briefing Simon as to the exact location of the fish restaurant where they were to eat midday, Harry Gordon had lamented that all was changed.

  ‘Bloody discos everywhere!’ He had moved his head from side to side in disgust. ‘Not to mention bingo round every corner. They’ve even mucked up the piers so they don’t look the same at all. All the character’s gone.’

  But as Simon drove down the tree-lined avenues, with their gracious houses of Accrington brick mellowed by the morning sunshine, then on to the wide sweep of road flanking the promenade, he decided that as far as he was concerned the magic was still there.

  The crowds on the front were still the same warm-hearted northerners out for a good time; the men in open-necked shirts and the women in their white cardigans with angry triangles of sunburn in the V-necks of their flowered summer frocks. And always the wind. Brash and breezy Blackpool, even on the hottest day, with sunbathers cowering behind striped windbreaks down on the golden pebbleless sands, and the Tower standing sentinel over all.

  Simon remembered how his father had tried to turn a fortnight at the sea into a general knowledge exercise. ‘Five million bricks, two thousand five hundred tons of steel, and ninety-three tons of cast-iron in that structure, laddy. And on a clear day it can be seen for fifty miles around. How about that, then?’

  ‘How about that?’ Simon asked himself as he drove past the enormous structure, smiling with quiet pleasure at the milling crowds with the youngsters in their stetson hats and tight jeans. As he passed a huge arcade an old Elvis Presley song wafted tinnily through the open window. Simon shook his head. Harry Gordon had been wrong. Blackpool was just the same. Different in some respects maybe, but fundamentally just the same.

  He parked the car in a multi-storey car park, then walked for four or five hundred yards back to the fish restaurant, its presence heralded by the strong smell of potatoes frying in pans of boiling oil.

  He joined Harry Gordon and his wife at a table by the window and, turning round, stared straight into the brown eyes of Emma Sparrow.

  Emma had already planned what she was going to do. All morning she had walked along the promenade with Eileen Kelly and her ebullient husband, but as soon as the meal was over she was going to e
scape and wander off somewhere by herself, meeting up with the rest at five o’clock for the high-tea at a café pointed out to her on the morning stroll.

  The wind had loosened her hair and brought a glow to her pale cheeks, and in spite of the terrible gnawing anxiety she was hungry. She watched as the girls at her table oozed tomato sauce over their fish and chips. She shared their uninhibited laughter, but when asked to join them down on the sands she said she had some shopping to do.

  ‘Rock for my brothers,’ she explained. ‘They’ll never forgive me if I don’t go home laden with sticks of Blackpool rock.’

  And because every girl on the long table had her boyfriend or husband in tow, they stopped asking her to stick with them and let her go, a lonely determined little figure in her white slacks and pale-pink overblouse, the inevitable bag swinging from her shoulder.

  Simon saw her go, and refusing the cup of strong tea being poured from a thick white teapot by Harry Gordon’s subdued wife, got up and followed her out on to the wide crowded pavement outside.

  ‘I’m glad he’s gone,’ Madge Gordon told her husband. ‘He’s nice enough, I know, but I wouldn’t have known what to say to him all afternoon. Londoners always affect me like that. They seem toffee-nosed when they are not being really, if you know what I mean.’ She added hot water to the teapot for a second cup. ‘I think it’s the way they talk.’

  ‘He means well,’ her husband told her, draining his own cup and passing it over. ‘I must admit I’m at a bit of a loss meself when we’re not talking about the factory. These do’s can be a bit tricky, I admit.’

  ‘And we can have a nice look round the shops,’ his wife said complacently, spooning sugar into the two cups of steaming tea.

  ‘All alone, Emma?’ Simon caught up with her flying figure and then stopped in embarrassment as Emma’s face blushed a fiery red which faded quickly, leaving her as white as her trendy summer slacks.

  For a moment they stood facing each other, jostled by holiday-makers walking three and four abreast, then Simon took her arm and, shortening his steps to match her own, walked her down the side street leading to the car park.

  ‘It’s time we had a talk, Emma.’ He was in complete command of the situation, she could see that. And instead of telling him that she was in a tearing hurry, that she was on the last minute for a vital appointment, she could only stand there like a deaf mute, staring wide-eyed into his face.

  His hand was firm on her arm as he smiled down at her. ‘I saw you walk out of the restaurant. Good meal, wasn’t it? There’s nobody makes fish and chips like northerners, and that’s a compliment coming from someone like me who was born south of the Wash. You weren’t on your way to meet someone? Ben on duty today?’

  She turned her face away from his penetrating gaze. ‘I don’t know, sir. Sorry, Mr Simon. I don’t know what Ben is doing today.’ Emotion was in fast flow through her blood-stream. She wanted to back away, to run and put as much distance as she could between them, but the nearness of him, the feel of his fingers through the thin cotton blouse, the unexpectedness of it all had left her weak. So befuddled that she scarcely knew what she was saying or why.

  ‘I don’t see Ben these days,’ she told him as he turned her round and guided her along the busy pavement thronged with children sucking ice-lollies, and harassed mothers carrying loaded plastic carrier-bags. ‘We’re still friends, but there’s nothing between us. Not now.’

  Simon shot her a quick glance, then talked about the weather and the bracing air, and how glad he was to have spotted her leaving the restaurant, until they reached the car park.

  ‘Here we are,’ he said as they took the lift to the top floor, just as if everything had been pre-arranged, and when they were in the car he raised a hand and wound back the sliding roof.

  ‘We’ll get away from the crowds, eh?’ He turned the car away from the town’s centre. ‘Something tells me you’re not a girl who minds her hair getting mussed.’ He grinned. ‘Do you know something? Every time I walk past your machine I have an urge to tweak that ribbon tying it back, but I have to be circumspect. You know that, don’t you, Emma?’

  She nodded, fighting to get a hold on herself.

  ‘Ever been to Lytham St Annes, Emma?’ he was driving with one hand on the wheel and the other resting lightly on his knee. ‘We might find things a bit quieter there.’

  She sensed the holiday mood he was in and suddenly, loving him so much, relaxing now a little, she wanted to identify.

  Let tomorrow come with its return to anguish and terror. Let next weekend come with its visit to the doctor for the interview she was dreading with every fibre of her being. It was all right for Sharon to talk, but how was she going to sit facing that kindly man she had known all her life and tell him she wasn’t prepared to say who was responsible? It was all right for Sharon to say that doctors didn’t query morals, but they had feelings, didn’t they?

  No, she would put all that to the back of her mind if it killed her. She would take this moment and cherish every second – the sunshine, the glittering sea, the green and the gold, being with this man – and she would remember it for ever.

  ‘We never had a proper week’s holiday,’ she said. ‘But Mam, my stepmother, used to take us on the train sometimes on a day trip.’

  Her hair blew in sweet disorder round her face and she put up a hand to keep it away from her eyes. ‘We would go down on the sands and Mam would get a deckchair, then we would eat sandwiches, the potted meat in them gritty with sand, and drink strong tea from a flask. Then I would go for a paddle with my dress tucked in my knickers and scream as the ripples in the sand hurt the soles of my feet.’

  ‘I used to be made to wear rubber shoes, and have cream rubbed on my shoulder blades. I remember feeling a right fairy,’ Simon said, and Emma laughed.

  ‘Oh, yes. Mam never seemed to think about sunburn till it happened. Then when we got home she would put camomile lotion on my back and arms, and when the skin peeled the next week Sharon would have a lovely time picking it off. But I never fancied doing the same for her, somehow.’

  ‘Mean,’ Simon said, and for a moment their eyes met and held.

  ‘Yes, I do remember Lytham St Annes,’ Emma said quickly. ‘When I was about seventeen I went on a youth club picnic, and a boy took me snogging on a striped towel in the sand-dunes, out of the wind. But he was only fifteen and it was nothing really. He kissed me with his mouth clamped tight, like this.’

  She tightened her mouth into a thin line and, delighted, Simon threw back his head and laughed out loud.

  ‘My father loves this coastline; always has,’ he said. ‘He told me once that when he was very young, before the war, his parents used to bring him here for holidays. They stayed at a boarding house back Cleveleys way, and kept themselves. You know. Bought their own food. Tomatoes in the dining-room cupboard, he said, and the landlady charging a shilling a week for the cruet.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘Cruet. A shilling a week for the use of, and if I know my grandma aright, she would be dousing everything with salt and vinegar, just to get her money’s worth.’

  ‘Mam said that people born Lancaster way used to put sugar on their tomatoes,’ Emma told him, then she nodded. ‘Oh, yes, I remember Mam said there used to be a pierrot troupe there with a man who used to come to the front of the stage at intervals and shout, ‘Are you there, children?’ An’ the children would shout back, “Yes, Tommy’! We’re here!” Mam said she once won a talent competition singing a song which went, “So you met someone who set you back on your heels? Goody-goody”, with her hair in ringlets set with sugar melted in warm water and a bow on the top.’

  ‘Lovely Mam.’

  Emma nodded. ‘She was that. She would give you a backhander as soon as look at you, but you always knew where you stood with her, and if she was on your side then heaven help anyone who tried to hurt you.’

  To her dismay, tears filled her eyes and she blinked them angrily away.

/>   ‘No wicked stepmother syndrome, then?’

  ‘Oh, no. I sometimes think she made more of me just because I wasn’t her own daughter. An’ yet, I never remember her hugging me, or praising me when I did well at school, but it was there all right, the solid affection.’

  ‘And your own mother?’

  They were back on the coast road again, driving past wide-fronted hotels, some of them set back behind green lawns and well-kept flower beds. Now the whole atmosphere was more leisurely, and Simon laughed again as Emma said, ‘Posher this end, isn’t it?’

  They were so much in tune, so much at one with each other. He was, he told himself, so enchanted by this small girl sitting by his side that even though he knew he was treading dangerously, he found himself wishing the afternoon would last for ever.

  She obviously did not want to talk about her own mother, and he was certainly not going to press her. Today was meant for joy. She was made for joy, and for a moment his heart ached as he thought about her life and the way it was.

  ‘Here we are,’ he said, and drove into the forecourt of a park with a pavilion flanked by green lawns, with putting greens and tennis courts and round flower beds abloom with bright vivid colour. ‘Fancy a game of putting?’

  The man handing out the clubs and the balls was as Lancashire as hot-pot and black puddings, with his creased kindly face and noble Jesus profile.

  ‘Nay, that’s a bit heavy for you, lass.’ He took the club Emma was holding and handed her a smaller one. ‘This isn’t Gleneagles, tha’ knows. Just keep your eye on the ball, love, and up with women’s liberties.’

  ‘He fancied you.’ Simon walked by her side across the smooth lawn to where the putting green lay cool and smooth behind privet hedges and flower beds sloping up to a winding path. ‘I could see him envying me.’

  ‘I probably remind him of his niece who teaches in Sunday school,’ Emma said with demure solemnity. ‘It’s Sharon who gets the wolf-whistles, not me.’

  ‘I can’t think why.’ Simon stopped by the first putt, and as he handed Emma a ball, closed her fingers over it. ‘You are very beautiful, and the nicest part is that you don’t know it.’