Emma Sparrow

by Marie Joseph

  Telling his parents was easier than Simon had expected. He could have told them afterwards; after all, he had more or less gone his own way since he left school. But what struck him forcibly was the likeness between Emma and his mother. Mary Martin had the same soft quietness about her, the same brown stillness, the tilt of the head which showed she was not as passive as her gentle appearance might suggest.

  ‘One of the factory girls?’ Bernard Martin glanced across at his wife. ‘History does repeat itself sometimes, then, lovey.’ He leaned across and pressed her hand. ‘First time I met your ma,’ he told Simon, ‘she was coming out of the biscuit factory gates with her head tied up in a turban thing. I was riding a bicycle and if I hadn’t jammed my brakes on fast I would have knocked her for six. And instead of that she knocked me for six, didn’t you love?’

  ‘But there was the war coming, and you were only a glorified errand boy yourself,’ his wife reminded him. ‘Simon has his qualifications. We started off even-pegging, whereas Simon’s already got on.’ Her smooth forehead was furrowed with anxiety. ‘And what about Chloe? Did it not work out, you living together?’ She looked honestly bewildered. ‘How do you know this will work out any better than your first marriage did? You can’t keep chopping and changing, you’re not exactly a young boy now.’

  ‘Then it’s high time he settled down.’ Bernard winked at his son. ‘When are you bringing her down to meet us, son? I don’t blame you for wanting a quiet wedding, but we would like to see her some time. Your mother will be pestering the life out of me if you don’t.’

  Simon automatically reached for his diary. ‘There’s the annual general meeting of the shareholders in late August. I could take a week off then and kill two birds with one stone. Will that give you enough time to make new curtains for the guestroom and fill the freezer, Mum?’

  Mary Martin relaxed with a smile. ‘Oh, go on with you. We just want to make the girl feel at home. We want her to see you come from a nice home.’ She was already making plans – Simon and his father could see the arrangements taking shape in her mind. ‘She’s only young, and I expect her parents are just as concerned.’

  Ah, Emma’s parents…. Simon’s face was grave as he filled them in with the details of Emma’s background, and when he had finished his mother nodded her head slowly.

  ‘Well then, we’ll just have to try to make up for what she has missed, won’t we, Dad?’

  ‘New curtains and fourteen quiches in the freezer definitely,’ Bernard Martin said, and winked at his son once again.

  Twelve

  EMMA HAD BEEN at home for three weeks when Ben Bamford came to see her. She had left Delta Dresses without telling even Mrs Kelly the reason, and though Simon had assured her that this was the best way, the only way, she still felt strangely diminished.

  Normally when any of the factory girls got married there were cream cakes all round, and crude slogans pinned on the wall behind her machine, as well as a ride round the factory floor in one of the big basket skips, with pound notes being pinned on to the bride-to-be’s overall as she was dragged on her triumphal way.

  Not that Emma had wanted that, she persuaded herself. Not that she didn’t realize that in marrying the London boss’s son she had stepped over the boundary of what was expected. Dignity was the thing, and Simon had said he would tell Mr Gordon in his own good time.

  ‘Why the bloody secrecy?’ Ben Bamford came straight to the point. ‘And why the bloody hurry? I couldn’t believe it when our Patty told me, and she only got to know because working behind a bar means she gets to know most things.’ He reached out and gripped Emma’s wrists hard. ‘And it surely can’t be a shotgun wedding because your old man couldn’t point a bent banana at an Eccles cake.’ He pushed her away roughly and looked her up and down deliberately, his vivid blue eyes blazing.

  Then, as Emma’s face gave the truth away, he stepped back a pace as his mouth dropped open in amazement. ‘Well, bugger me! You have got one in the oven, haven’t you? You could cold-fish me and then let the likes of him do what I’ve been aching to do for ages? You dirty little whore!’

  Emma bit her lips in a childish gesture of distress. ‘It wasn’t like that, Ben. You know me well enough to know it wasn’t. I was half out of my mind when I found I was going to have a baby, and I was going to … to get rid of it, but he, Simon, he asked me to marry him.’

  ‘Knowing you was my girl? Knowing that, he still did that?’ The blue eyes raked her body in an insulting way. ‘I wish it had been me that dark night kicking his teeth in. I’d have done for him proper if I’d known his game.’

  Emma moved impatiently over to the settee, sitting down on the arm, her own eyes bright with indignation. ‘Your girl? Your girl, Ben Bamford? I hadn’t set eyes on you for weeks, and you went away and never wrote once, and now you have the nerve to say….’

  ‘What did you want? Bloody bunches of flowers? Letters with SWALK on the back of the envelope? You knew you was my girl, Em. I can’t say no fancy words like what he can but why did you think I kept on going out with you even though I was getting nothing?’ Suddenly Ben slumped down in a chair and buried his face in his hands. ‘You think I’ve got no feelings, don’t you? I feel like I’ve just been punched in the guts right now. I hit our Patty when she told me, I was that mad. But even then I never thought you was up the spout.’ He raised his head, and to Emma’s surprise and distress she saw the sparkle of tears in his eyes. ‘Why did you go and let him when you’d never let me, Em? Why?’

  The milk cart stopped in the avenue outside and there was the clatter of bottles on the step. The small room was stifling hot, and Emma pulled at the neck of her thin blouse as if it choked her. ‘I can’t explain, Ben. It was only the once, and if I could explain it to myself I would try to explain it to you.’ She twisted the duster she was holding into a thin rope. ‘But it happened, and the baby happened, and when I marry him next week I will try to make him happy. He’s not a happy man, Ben. You think he has so much more than you, but money isn’t everything.’

  ‘An’ I suppose him having pots of it doesn’t make no difference to you?’ Ben’s tone was sulky. ‘What will you do when you meet his posh friends, Em? Will you go all lah-de-dah like them, or will he keep you hid like you are hiding now? Will you remember to take your pinny off when you sit down at the table? An’ sit at the top table at the works do’s, pretending to be friendly with the workers an’ asking about their kids in a posh voice?’ He turned the last screw. ‘An’ when the baby comes will you sit alone with it in a big house with fitted carpets while he stops down in London for what he says are meetings? Will you know for sure that he’s not seeing that bird who looks like something out of a magazine?’ He put up a hand. ‘Oh, I saw her. I saw her and him down at the station, an’ it wasn’t all that long ago, either. I saw the way he was all over her when they said goodbye. What’s he done with her, then? Paid her off like what he’ll be paying you off one fine day?’

  ‘Why are you trying to hurt me so much, Ben?’ Emma stared sadly at him with all the brightness gone from her face. ‘Why can’t you wish me luck and go away? We never seem to meet without quarrelling. Every single time we’ve been together we’ve argued.’

  ‘But can’t you see? That’s because we belong! If I wasn’t on your side then I wouldn’t be sitting here, would I? I would never have come round this morning, and if you was really certain then you would have told me to push off.’

  Calmer now, he reached for a cigarette and lit it, throwing the spent match into the tiled hearth as if the electric fire were ablaze with coal. He inhaled deeply.

  ‘Look, Em. You can’t marry that bloke an’ you know it.’

  She gave up twisting the duster and threw it down behind her on the settee cushions. ‘Then what would you have me do, Ben Bamford? Have the baby here, then have to take it out to be minded every morning on my way to work? Bring it up with Alan and Joe, and Dad sitting coughing in that chair? And you arguing with me when I couldn�
��t come out with you every night? Is that what you wish for me?’

  ‘I am asking you to marry me,’ Ben said. ‘I am asking you to marry me and come to live with me at Patty’s home, and stop at home and bring up your kid along of Patty’s poor little kid, with me working and Patty going out full-time.’ He stared at the cigarette held loosely between fingers and thumb. ‘Patty would like that. I know, because she likes you and even after I had laid into her she still told me off for letting you slip through me fingers. She said it was me own rotten fault.’

  Choked with sudden emotion, Emma could only shake her head slowly from side to side.

  ‘You mean you would marry me, knowing the baby belonged to another man?’

  ‘It would be yours, wouldn’t it?’ Ben’s tone was fierce. ‘I like kids, an’ it would be just another kid, wouldn’t it?’

  The sudden ringing of the door bell brought them both to their feet, the moment of closeness shattered and gone. Emma walked over to the window and lifted the curtain. ‘It’s the telephone engineer. Simon is having a telephone put in here so I can keep in touch with Sharon and the boys.’ She stared down at the carpet. ‘And the car just drawn up at the gate is the driving instructor to give me a lesson. I’ve had two already.’

  Ben exploded into immediate and terrifying anger, his face flushing red and his blue eyes blazing. He dropped the cigarette on to the floor and ground it into the carpet with his shoe. ‘Forget it, Em! Forget every bloody word I said. I wouldn’t marry you, not if you crawled on your hands and knees to ask me! Forget the bloody lot!’

  He wrenched the front door open and ran down the short path. The telephone engineer stepped hastily backwards to avoid being knocked over.

  Sharon and Ricky went back to their respective jobs after Emma’s wedding, and Simon drove his bride through the town, up the Preston Road and straight to the house set back from the main road.

  ‘When we’ve changed we’ll go out for a pub lunch,’ he told her. ‘I still think we should have taken your sister and her fiancé out for a meal. It’s not much of a wedding day for you, is it, Emma?’

  ‘It’s the way I wanted, it. The way we both wanted it.’ Emma fingered the orchid pinned to the collar of her blue suit. ‘All things being equal.’

  She was very calm, very dignified, and there was nothing about her to suggest that inside she was a mess of teeming emotion. Here she was, she told herself, married to a man she loved but did not know. How could that be? And that awful short ceremony, with the registrar ticking Sharon off for giggling … and oh, God, when he reminded Sharon that what was happening was a serious matter, Emma had wanted to drop through the floor.

  She stole a glance at the man sitting beside her, hands steady on the wheel, doing automatically all the things her driving instructor told her to do, doing them without thinking, his face serious, with only a pulse beating at the side of his neck giving his own feelings away.

  Tomorrow he was going back to work, and at the beginning of the next week he was going down to London for two days, and she would be left alone in a house for the first time in her life.

  There would be no Sharon sleeping in the bed beside her, head held rigidly on the pillow so as not to disturb the crown of soft rollers. No frenzied rush in the mornings to get the boys off to school. Instead of that Mrs Collins from over the road would be coming into the house in Litchfield Avenue for an hour, then letting herself in for another hour when Alan and Joe came home from school. All arranged by this man, and paid for by this man, with a simplicity that had left her breathless.

  ‘Given the money, anybody can arrange anything,’ Sharon had said. ‘Besides, he is used to arranging things. He’s a boss, isnt he? With a few pound notes in your pocket you can make anything work for you. I bet in a few months you won’t want to know us, our Emma. He has taken you over, just like you was a firm he was merging with. You’re like a flamin’ zombie. Do you realize that? You’ve been going around in a dream like it was somebody else it was all happening to. Do you want to marry him? Do you want to be with a man like that for the rest of your life?’

  Emma shivered, and immediately Simon’s hand left the wheel and closed over her knee. ‘I am sorry it had to be like this, love. I’ve done you out of being married in white with the bells ringing, and the choir singing “O perfect Love”.’ He squeezed her knee, then took the wheel again. ‘But I am going to make it up to you. I am going to watch you grow rosy and fat as the weeks go by, and you’re going to eat all the right things so that when the baby comes it will be healthy and strong. And you are going to take care of yourself. For me, and for our son.’

  ‘It could be a girl.’

  Simon shook his head. ‘The Martins always have boys. I order you to have a boy! Okay?’

  He was obsessed about the baby. It was as though this coming child of his signified all his dreams, all his hopes, as though Emma herself was merely the necessary appendage to make it all possible. She knew that, and the knowledge scared her. It was as though once he had lost a child and was still mourning. He had told her about his first marriage, and she knew about Chloe; at least she thought she knew about Chloe, but sometimes she thought Simon Martin was like a chairman at a board meeting, keeping to the salient points and ruthlessly skimming over what he did not consider to be worth discussing.

  She was standing in the bedroom in her bra and pants, wondering whether to wear her new jeans and a top, or whether a dress would be more in keeping for a wedding lunch, when he came upstairs.

  Her normal instinct would have been to grab her blouse from the bed and hold it in front of her, but Emma knew no shyness with this tall dark-eyed man. From that first moment of total surrender she had given herself into his keeping for ever, and to be coy would have been hypocritical and embarrassing for both of them.

  Coming swiftly over to her he pulled her to him and ran a hand down over her gently swelling stomach. ‘It’s beginning to show.’ He was smiling, satisfied, proud, and when he unfastened her bra and cupped a rounded breast in his hand, Emma looked at his thick dark hair and felt her bones melt to jelly.

  ‘I’ll be careful, darling.’ He was whispering now as he lifted her up in his arms and laid her down on the bed. ‘I won’t be rough.’ He tore at his clothes, the way he had done that first time. Then, as he took her in his arms, he buried his face beneath her breasts and moaned softly. ‘Oh, dear God, I need you, little Emma. You have no idea what you do to me with your soft skin and the quietness of you. I won’t hurt you, or the baby. I promise.’

  And he didn’t.

  Even at the moment of climax his movements were unhurried, and the sweetness of his slow loving and the tender murmurings of his deep voice made the strangeness of the morning and the coldness of the brief ceremony recede and fade into nothing.

  Later, when they showered together, they were like two children splashing each other, smiling and soaping each other as the warm water cascaded down over their bodies.

  Then in the long lazy summer afternoon Emma unpacked her pitifully few belongings, storing her cheap underclothes away in the long drawers of the white fitted bedroom furniture. She put her blouses and dresses in the cupboard at her side of the double bed, hung her belts and chiffon scarves on the fitted rail, and placed her shoes, all three pairs, in a neat row at the bottom.

  She opened the door of Simon’s cupboard and gasped when she saw the line of shirts. Childishly she counted them, but when she got to fourteen she stopped and closed her eyes, remembering the days when her father had owned just three shirts. One on his back, one in the wash and one for emergency, as Mam had said.

  It was perfectly true. There were those who had and those who had not, and now, as from today, she, Emma Martin, who used to be Emma Sparrow, was one of those who had.

  Conditioned to long bouts of silent communication with herself, through the years of sitting at the buttonhole machine as her mind roved free, she tried honestly to assess her feelings.

  It would be h
ypocrisy not to admit that the sudden transition from near poverty to comparative affluence was bound to affect her. She had never seen a bedroom like this, let alone slept in one.

  She sat down on the edge of the bed and stared round the room, making herself see it as if she were an uninvolved stranger. At the long-haired white carpet, chosen by Chloe, at the turquoise heavy silk curtains with the matching duvet cover and pleated flounce round the bed. At the bedside lamps with their chiffon shades, and her dressing-table fitted into the corner by the window.

  With the honesty that came as naturally to her as breathing, she asked herself a question: If Simon had been an out-of-work labourer, with nothing to offer her but a single room at the top of a condemned Victorian building, would she have married him?

  Or would she have rehearsed her story for the doctor, told it with tears running down her cheeks, and be back at the factory now with nothing but a fading unpleasant memory to remind her of what had happened?

  Would she? It was a straight question deserving a straight answer.

  ‘That is what education gives you, Emma,’ her headmistress had said, despairing of her bright pupil’s intention of leaving school instead of going on to A levels. ‘Education gives a girl more than academic qualifications. It gives her the power, and it is power, my dear, to sit down and get things into perspective, to argue with herself and come up with the right answer. To evaluate and make a choice, not from blind unthinking prejudice, but from her own logically drawn conclusions.’

  Emma had never forgotten the mini-lecture delivered in her headmistress’s penetrating voice, so now deliberately she faced herself and spoke directly to her heart.

  And she knew, in that moment, that education had no part to play in the way she was feeling now. If Simon Martin had wanted her, no matter what his status in life, she would have married him.

  Love, she was discovering, was not the tender, dreamy emotion she had thought it would be. Love, her love for Simon, was a deep ache of longing, where family loyalties counted as nothing, where just the sight of his dark head filled her with a total contentment. And where cool, clear thinking had no part. No part at all….