Kate and Emma

by Monica Dickens

  All right lady. I know who you mean, but I stayed in the room.

  Molly laughed, with all her teeth on show. ‘The more you have of your own, the less trouble the extra ones are.’ She smiled at me, but I went on eating cornflakes.

  ‘It’s always people like you,’ the friend said, ‘who do more for others than anyone who has much less to do.’

  They were going together to visit some old duck in hospital, and I was going to baby-sit and start the tea when Mike and Ralph and Donna got back from school. For money of course.

  ‘I’m a baby farmer,’ Molly said, picking up Ziggy, who is half black and half white, and not too bright either.

  ‘Hardly,’ the friend said. ‘You can’t make money out of what they pay you.’

  ‘How much do they pay?’ I asked, flinging it out, prepared to add something rude if they said: None of your business.

  But Molly told me, just as if I had said: What’s the time? and honestly, it isn’t much. You couldn’t make a penny on it, not and feed us like she does. Don’t ask me why she does it, because I do not know.

  Mollyarthur, they say, and laugh. I’m not surprised.

  MY GRANDFATHER was a grocer, like his father before him, Don’t picture him with a long stiff apron and a mouthful of raisins. He had started like that, said my grandmother, but my cousins’ parents and mine neither remembered nor believed it. When his cautious father retired, he had swiftly become a tycoon, in his small way, with three Bernard Bullock shops in London, then six, and twelve when he died, not counting the one in Camden Town, which the Germans burned down in a redolent inferno of roast coffee and melting brown sugar.

  The small empire went to his boys. Uncle Mark had done his war in the Catering Corps, with crossed knives and forks on his cap badge, and was a true son of his father. David, my father, had gone back to the Law when the Army let him out, and since the grocery outlook was bleak, with the Food Ministry apparently a permanent fixture, he sold out his share to Uncle Mark, glad to be rid of it. His heart had never been in cheese and sausages. He says my grandfather always smelled of Stilton, but I think he has made that up to fit the general aura of grocery in which he was brought up.

  We felt sorry for Uncle Mark, stuck with the old-fashioned business with the name in black and gold glass over the stores, and the old clientele of particular ladies who cared how their coffee was ground fast dying out. We had been clever, taking the money and investing it in businesses which were someone else’s worry. Money is better than margarine. One of my father’s phrases from my childhood which has stuck.

  Things looked bad for Uncle Mark. Groceries were going modern. They were beginning to wash vegetables, freeze food, seal up meat in packets, dabble in self-service. The story was out that my uncle, with his lines of square biscuit tins aslant along the front of the counter, was tottering, was even going to take Derek away from Harrow, Derek told me excitedly, the Christmas after the summer when he and I had said the Black Mass for the English master.

  And then he did it. He went self-service, and in five years he had got rid of the shops in bad situations and turned all the good ones into supermarkets, and was building more.

  Other expanding grocery chains took foody-sounding names. He stuck to my grandfather’s. B.B., with the big red letters high over the roof, and Derek had to finish his time at Harrow and then go to Pitman’s to learn how to add before he went in to the firm.

  When I decided to leave school and not go to college, because I was at that stage when you think that the only education that matters begins after you stop being educated, my Uncle Mark offered to take me in.

  He put it that someone from our side should be in B.B. (they had planned it for Peter), but I felt that it was more grudging than that, as if I were a poor relation. We are not poor, but I am not my uncle’s type. He likes them quick and obvious, in sports cars. Serves him right to have a daughter who is even less like that that I am. He would never employ Nell in the business. She isn’t even very clean.

  I am taking this business course in a college with green walls and curved stone wainscots, like a hospital, and every Saturday morning I go to one of the B.B. supermarkets to do field work. I am a nuisance to everybody, because my stacks of soup tins totter and the paper bags I pack too full burst before the customer has got to the door, and she’s spread-legged there, trying to catch the rolling stock and hang on to what’s left. They chant that everyone has to learn, because I am M.B.’s niece and they are stuck with me, but I daresay each manager hopes on a Saturday that it’s not my turn for his store.

  About a month after I last went to court with my father, I had to go to the B.B. market which is in the neighbourhood of the turreted old grey school which is now the courthouse. The manager there is one of the classless young men my uncle so cleverly picks, with a flat grammar-school accent and a sharp, conversant mind.

  His name is Mr Burdick, and it will be just my luck to start off in his office before I pass on to headquarters. He is brisk with everybody, as if the world was due to end in half an hour, and he spins briskly on the ball of his foot when he turns. He is especially brisk with me, to show that he doesn’t give a fish finger for the Bullock family. He rushed me down, still in my fur boots, to the jam section, and threw me at a solid man in a white coat with the red B.B. on the pocket, who was stamping prices on the jar lids.

  ‘See how you get on with that! said Mr Bullock challengingly, as if it were a formidable task, and left us.

  The solid man’s name was William Fender. It is B.B.’s latest conceit to have the assistants labelled. It’s supposed to make the shoppers feel at home, but actually it may daunt them, because anyone with his name pinned over his heart in a plastic case might be too grand to be asked where the soapflakes are.

  ‘You haven’t a coat,’ said William Fender, and looked down at my black boots with the white fur cuffs.

  ‘He didn’t give me time to change.’

  ‘I know.’ He smiled, and we were colleagues, bonded indissolubly against the boss. He showed me where to go, and I weaved through the Saturday morning crowds of women and husbands and children shouting: ‘Get that!’ at cereal packets with spaceship models on the back, went through the butchery, where grim women in hairnets were wrapping uniform shapes of meat, and found a shelf of coats at the back of the storeroom. The one that was the right size said Marjorie Beale on the pocket so I turned the card round and wrote Gladys Heifer on it and pinned it back on.

  ‘I thought you were Miss Bullock,’ William Fender said, stamping Bee Bee brand blackberry jelly with practised speed and grace. ‘Excuse me, madam,’ as a woman with her head swivelled backwards ran her cart into him.

  She pulled the cart back, rounded his bulk and moved on in the coma that falls on women in places like this. In ordinary shops, they spy and peer and pick things over, sharp-eyed. Here among the aisles of abundance that would feed half Asia, they wander like zombies, hypnotically taking things from the shelves, which is why my uncle is rich.

  ‘When your cousin was here,’ Mr Fender went on, ‘we had quite a time. Found him smoking back of some cauliflower crates in the storeroom in the end. His dad was wild.’

  ‘How did he know?’ As if it wouldn’t be just like Burdick to tell.

  ‘He was here that day, and spotting through the one-way in the office, and missed him on the floor.’

  The manager’s office in the gallery above the cash registers in each market has a window you can see out of, but not into. It is supposed to be for catching shoplifters, but is more often used for spying on the staff.

  After we had done the jam, and cleaned up a jar of honey which a woman swept from the shelf with a Superman cape, we moved on, our heavy rubber stamps weighing down the pockets of our coats, and attacked a monstrous tower of condensed milk cartons, waiting to be shelved and priced. Mr Fender showed me how to alter the set of the stamp without getting ink on my fingers, which was the only useful thing I learned that morning, opened one of the
cases for me and went away.

  It was very boring. The milk was our own brand, Bee Bee. Quality Is Our Busyness, and a picture of two excited bees about to fight, or worse.

  The huge clock hands on the wall above the freezer that jerked round the letters B E E B E E B E E B E E (it would be the end of all if you forgot what store you were in) moved grudgingly for me, but I was quite pleased to find myself clock-watching already. It made me feel I belonged.

  I imagined that I was a woman doomed all her working life to wear a white coat that said Gladys Heifer (she never married because of her mother), and to stamp prices on tins and stack them on shelves for other people to take down.

  ‘Leave them alone!’ I yelled silently, as time and again people took down cans of milk and made gaps in my phalanx. It was clear that before G.H. had been at this game very long, she would have lost all sense of the purpose of the job.

  I liked it best when customers asked me things. ‘Could I exchange this tin of meat for a tin of salmon?’ Even if the salmon had not cost more, the meat had not come from one of our shops. What did she take us for? ‘We can exchange, but not substitute,’ I told her hard-eyed.

  ‘It says two for two-and-nine. How much is that each?’

  ‘Have you seen a little boy in a pink-woollen hat?’

  ‘Where are the toiletries?’

  Where is/are the tea, the matches, the baby pants, the lemon squash, the soup, the soap, the drying powder - what the hell was that?

  Labelled or not, no one was in awe of Heifer, with her rope of brown hair over one shoulder secured by a rubber band. She knew the answers - had not she spent two Saturday mornings learning the geography before Mr Burdick allowed her within smelling distance of a price stamp? - and was glad to oblige, even if the question was: ‘Where is the condensed milk?’ when it was staring them in the face.

  Roll on my one o’clock. I bent to prise open (death to the nails) what should have been the last carton if there were mercy, straightened up for the stamp, and there was Kate.

  Pushing a cart with a half-caste baby in it, another child hanging on her skirt, her yellow hair cleaner, though still back-combed like a thorn bush, a red polo-necked sweater doing good things for her shape, mascara not so glue-pot - smiling! Having a joke with a small boy who had stolen a packet of jelly and opened it to chew on the squares.

  ‘Katherine?’ I could not help myself. If you think about doing something like this, you don’t do it.

  She blinked and screwed up her eyes as if she were short-sighted, although her eyes did not have the soft lustre that goes with that.

  ‘Hullo,’ she said uncertainly.

  ‘I’m sorry. I was in the court when you - well, I was there. I remembered you.’

  ‘I remember you, I suppose,’ she said rather slowly. Her accent was not as thick as her father’s, the moderation of the cockney natural not refined. T didn’t recognize you with your hair like that. What are you doing here?’

  ‘You may well ask,’ I said. ‘Or you can ask what I was doing in court.’

  She shrugged to show me that she’d ask if she wanted to, so I said: ‘My father is the magistrate and my uncle owns the B.B. supermarket.’

  It was an ungainly thing to have to say, but for some reason it embarrassed neither of us. I didn’t feel I had to make a rotten joke to cover the fact that she had been given too little and I too much.

  She stood and stared at me for a moment with her foot in a cracked sloppy shoe on the rail of the cart, like a mother gossiping over the prams. When a tall woman with short curly hair and a pleased round face came round the custard corner carrying an oriental baby, she said, ‘Look, Moll. This girl was in court when I was there. She’s the beak’s daughter, and her uncle owns this thieving crib.’

  ‘Never.’ Moll was Mrs Arthur, the mad woman with six children, unaware victim of my mother’s plan for forced contraception. Mollyarthur, Kate introduced her, all in one word, like Moriarty. ‘It’s very exciting. I’ve seen your father. Not spoken to him, of course, but sometimes one of my children is there for a Fit Person order or something, so I go to court. I admire him very much.’

  ‘So do I.’ I felt bad about the Gladys Heifer label, and wondered if I could palm it away without her noticing.

  ‘I’ve seen worse,’ Kate conceded.

  The change in her was remarkable. In court, she had been a defiant little tramp, grubby, buffeted, alone. Here in the market, like any Saturday shopper, cleaned up, fed, the mob of assorted children bumping round her, she could almost have been Molly-arthur’s daughter.

  She was on the way up, away from whatever hell or haunting had brought her before my father. It had been much more than pity I had felt. Now there was no need for pity, and the rest remained.

  She liked me too, God knows why, for I must have been hard to place, labouring among the condensed milk and talking familiarly of magistrates. Whose side was I on? Perhaps, instead of the plastic Heifer label, she saw my heart pinned on the white coat, for she jerked out suddenly: ‘I like your hair,’ with such unintentional sincerity that she had to qualify it quickly with: ‘You’ve got a nerve to wear it like that.’

  Mrs Arthur did most of the talking. She talks all the time like a hilarious budgerigar, and Kate and I stood and smiled at each other like idiots, while the children kept running back from forays and throwing things into the cart, until the negroid baby was half-submerged in tins and bottles.

  Just as I remembered the one-way window and started stamping prices again like a demented passport officer, Kate said, rather belligerently: ‘Why can’t we ask her to my party?’

  She said it as if Mollyarthur had already said she couldn’t, as if things were only of value if they were forbidden.

  ‘Why not?’ Mrs Arthur’s smile spread to a grin round her clean white teeth. ‘It’s Kate’s birthday. She’s asked some of her friends and the girl she works with at the nursing home. Will you come, Gl—’ She looked at the card on my front. ‘But your name is Bullock.’

  ‘I put this on.’

  ‘She’s ashamed of working here,’ Kate said.

  ‘Oh no,’ I said, too quickly. ‘Of my name.’

  That wasn’t what I meant. Not what I meant at all. I meant - oh hell, they should have known what I meant. I shuttered my face into redskin reticence and they collected the children and went away hating me. They wished they hadn’t asked me to their rotten party. I wouldn’t go anyway, even if they had told me where they lived.

  Molly sent the postcard to my father at the court, not knowing where I lived. Short, crimped writing, like the baby’s hair, not a pronoun in sight. ‘Forgot say where live. Grove Lodge edge park. Friday evening. Bring gram recs. M.A.’ On the other side was a glazed picture of two kittens in an upturned hat. ‘Anyone I know?’ He gave it to me when I came home. My mother, who is honest about all the wrong things, never reads other people’s postcards, but my father and I do.

  ‘It’s the – it’s a girl I know at the college. Shan’t go bring gram recs.’

  ‘Don’t blame,’ he said, taking the card back to look at the kittens again.

  Sometimes when I come home at night, he kisses and hugs me as if I were a small child again, galloping in with pigtails and a gym tunic. Sometimes he doesn’t and, if he doesn’t want it, you can’t start it, as my mother must have found out at cost, some time ago.

  Standing by his desk, looking down at the narrow grey head which at times you can see as a skull, I again almost told him about Kate, and again I couldn’t. Why not? He is not a snob. Perhaps I was afraid that he would think I had inherited her through him. Taking over where he left off. Trying to help.

  Good for you, he would say. Someone her own age can do more for her than anyone. Then it would get to my mother, and she would want to discuss it, picking it to pieces like a dandelion clock, until there was nothing left. She had done this with school friendships, ambitions I revealed, love affairs. I tell her now mostly surface things that sound like my
life, and keep quiet about what matters.

  There is only one park in that neighbourhood, a bleak stretch of bitter grass with chained swings, a shuttered kiosk humped against the winter, and a few men hurrying along the walks head down to get home.

  I walked half-way round it and found Grove Lodge, a monstrous brown brick villa with a motorbike with cowboy trappings in the garden and a lot of windows in unsymmetrical places. Music poured out of the ground floor, and smoke poured out of the fat chimneys, as if the house were half-way across the Atlantic, with the ship’s band swinging.

  The bell did not work and there was no knocker, so I thumped. After a while, some of the squeals and feet inside channelled into a clattering run to the front door, and I was in, with two small boys hurding past me down the chocolate-cake steps and into the bushes.

  ‘Come back in here!’ a woman’s voice called from somewhere, as if she had something in her mouth. They didn’t come, and she didn’t come to see why, so I shut the front door, put my coat on top of a pile of magazines on a chair, plugged in a hairpin and pretended that I wasn’t afraid of Kate’s motorcycle friends, and of Kate herself in this new environment.

  The doors off the hall were shut. The music came deafeningly from the room on the right. I opened the door and went in.

  A girl with a nose turned up square at the end like a pig’s was dancing on the linoleum with a boy like a knife blade, his lemon-coloured hair in sidewhiskers, one side longer than the other. Grimly apart, they were dancing in a manner slightly reminiscent of the parties along our road, but more respectable.

  A thick girl, the same shape all the way down, was sitting on the floor in front of the fire, her legs stretched out in front of her like deadwood. A pallid boy with a forelock of soft black hair sat smiling in a rocking-chair, legs crossed very high, one thick rubber sole pushing him gently back and forth.

  He and the thick girl looked at me. The couple went on dancing, both so concave that you wondered about their guts. Kate stood by the gramophone with her back to the door and pretended not to know that I had come in.