It wouldn’t have mattered if she had, since it was incomprehensible to all but initiates. There were bluebirds on the front, carrying eggs in one of those things that are all handle and no basket. The message on the back said: ‘What do? Need talk. All miss.’
I went to Grove Lodge the next evening. Kate wasn’t home from work, but Molly and the children gave me such a welcome that I wondered how I could have stayed away so long. Molly was painting one of the upstairs rooms, with a table on its side across the doorway to keep the younger children from the paint pot. I sat on the upturned table edge and nursed the coloured baby, and Molly said: ‘Tell me about it.’
She was the kind of woman who would never say: Where have you been? or: We thought you’d forgotten all about us, stressing your absence rather than your presence, so that you wished you never had come back.
‘About what?’ Ziggy rubbed his astrakhan head under my chin, sensuous as a cat. She went on painting, slapping on the wall colour like a craftsman, sure of me.
‘Exams,’ I said. ‘I’ve had to work.’
‘Not that hard. Not my Emma.’
‘I’ve been in love, Moll. That’s why I haven’t come.’
‘Tell me.’
‘Well, there’s this place they call the Banjo Room—’ I started to tell her, sounding like one of the children recounting the story of a film. Kate came up the stairs, pale and dragging her feet, her eyes shadowed, but not with make-up, still wearing the red and white striped dress from the nursing home, and I related to them both the tale of Gerhart. Kate sat on the table edge with me and looked at her grubby little hands with the nails worn down square, and I was disappointed to find her monosyllabic, less interested than I wanted.
To spark her, I elaborated, made it more romantic than the doorway and cinema and coffee-bar stuff it had been; but even when I had Gerhart betrothed to an heiress in the Fatherland and our renunciation a tragedy instead of a quiet fizzle, she only said: Is that right?’ although Molly was enthralled.
I thought that Kate was annoyed because I had stayed away so long, and that made me angry too. If she was going to be stupid and cheap like that, why should I bother? I’d stay away longer next time. She might need me, but I didn’t need her.
I thought all this resentfully, as I was putting Ziggy and Madeleine to bed in drawers in the linen cupboard because it was their room that was being painted, but I knew it wasn’t true. I did need Kate in a way that was just as unexplainable and inescapable as our being so alike when all the outward circumstances of our lives was so different.
But I could need her and hate her at the same time, and love her and hate her too. We had a fight at supper because I said I liked her hair that length, and she said it looked awful and she supposed I thought she was growing it to be like me.
‘Aren’t you?’ I asked, and she retorted that she was only growing it to spite the matron at the nursing home, who wanted her to cut it off, so not to flatter myself.
‘Girls, girls,’ said Mr Arthur mildly, putting chunks of cheese on his bread like a French roadmender. Kate told him to mind his own bloody business, so Molly sent her out of the room, and I stayed behind, uncomfortable, as if I had won some worthless battle by cheating.
‘I like it when she punishes Kate,’ George said, helping me to take out plates. ‘She’s too soft on her, because she’s had a worse time than what we done, but she don’t know the half of it, Mum don’t.’
All Mollyarthur’s foster-children call her Mum, except the temporaries, who call her Auntiemoll in one word like animal, and Kate who calls her Moll.
‘The half of what, Georgie?’ He is a bright child, with red hair flopping over the scars of the car crash that robbed him of his parents.
‘Nothing much,’ he said, fixing me with his eye to see how much he should tell. ‘She hits the littleuns though. You should see.’
‘You’re making it up.’ George had once said he was on the bottom of the sea for three days with an octopus, to cap one of our inventions.
‘Am I then? Ask Maddy how she got them bruises then, only she can’t talk. Mum thinks she fell out of bed.’
‘Why don’t you tell her?’
‘Kate said she’d do us too if we told.’
‘Told what? But he burst suddenly into song and ran from me.
Just as well. If he was lying, I shouldn’t encourage him. If it was true, I didn’t want to know. It could be true and yet not true. A slap isn’t cruelty. Madeleine might be an easier bruiser, as well as a mewling child, born to annoy. Who in this world could swear that they never laid a finger on any child, ever? I once struck out in exasperation at my sister’s boy, and went in terror that I had made him a idiot. I’ve seen even Molly smack a child a bit too hard for trying to drive her up the wall. She’s not a saint. Well, she is, but the earthy kind, with all the natural instincts.
Molly came into the kitchen and shut the door in case Kate was going to come back.
‘I’ve got to tell you what I think,’ Molly said. It isn’t often her face falls out of its smile, but this was one of the times.
She told me, and I said quickly: ‘She’s put on weight with your cooking, that’s all.’
‘But you see how she is. She was so happy. She isn’t any more.’
‘I thought she was upset because I stayed away too long.’
‘Kate’s not that dependent,’ Molly said. ‘She’s had too many things taken away from her in her life to show she minds. If you died, she’d be destroyed, but she’d not let it show.’
‘Why don’t you ask her?’
‘I can’t, if she doesn’t tell me.’
‘You want me to ask her. Is that why you sent the postcard?’
‘Oh no, Emma.’ Molly put her hand on my arm, shocked. ‘I just wanted to talk to you, because I don’t know what to do.’ I had never heard her say that. ‘I’m supposed to report it to the Council, anything like this, but she’d have to be examined. Perhaps forcibly. That’s what happened at the Remand Home. They had to tie her down. Not good.’
I went up to Kate’s room at the top of the house. It is just a little slit of space wide enough for the bed, and I leaned over the knobbed brass rail at the foot and looked at Kate lying there pretending to read her magazine. She didn’t look like any of the girls have looked who have come to work for my mother, but then they don’t look like anything special except themselves, dark or fair or black or white, and a bit bulkier.
I thought Molly was imagining, seeing pregnancy everywhere, like my mother since she took up her good work among the fallen. Anyway, you don’t go into your friend’s room and ask her if she’s going to have a baby. You wait for her to tell you.
‘Please come downstairs, Kate,’ I said. ‘I’ve brought you a record.’ She grunted, moving her eyes moronically back and forth along the lines of the moronic movie magazine.
‘Georgie told me you hit Madeleine,’ I said, to make her look up.
‘Georgie’s a dirty little liar.’ She sat upright and pressed the magazine down on her knees so fiercely that it tore. ‘He tries to get me in trouble. He’s jealous because Molly likes me the best.’
‘He hasn’t told Molly.’
Her tight little face relaxed. ‘She wouldn’t believe it anyway. Only people like you would believe it.’
I would have hit her if the high end of the bed hadn’t been in the way. I took my chest off it and tried to calm down. ‘Why are you so vile?’
‘I don’t feel well. I’m tired.’ She began to whine, sticking out her lip. ‘The work’s too hard, and Matron is a bloody slavedriver. The nurses make me sick, starching around and leaving all the dirty work to me. Joan too, that lazy sow. All she does is tells tales on me.’
‘If you’re going to be miserable,’ I said, ‘I’m off. I wish I hadn’t come.’
Kate suddenly plunged on her knees to the foot of the bed and grabbed my hand. ‘I’m glad you came,’ she said. ‘I missed you, Em. Don’t leave me.’
‘Never,’ I said. It was all over, the trouble, whatever it had been.
‘Get my hairbrush.’
It was a hard one, with plastic bristles set in rubber. Kate banged it on the back of my hand and then on hers and we both had to whirl our hands round and round until the blood started in tiny points where the bristles had hit. Taking my hand, she pressed the back of it against the back of hers and mingled our slippery blood.
‘Blood comrades,’ she said, and her eyes were flat and staring, like a sleepwalker.
I felt a bit dizzy and the back of my hand was like a nutmeg grater, but Kate was content. She came downstairs with me then and we played the new record, and Jim Arthur gave us each a glass of warm beer and we sat on the floor in the room while he and Molly played draughts, and started to kid each other along over the beer until we were back into one of our old games again.
I was once more Mollyarthur’s foster-child, a baby abandoned under a church pew in a cricket bag - that was from Jim, who joined in with a great Ho ho, from relief at Kate’s change of mood.
I was a gipsies’ child, brought up to beg and steal. I was the bastard of one of the royal family, a Cinderella drilling through my fingernails with a sweatshop sewing-machine, unable to read or write. I was a drudge, a slave, my parents had sold me to a wicked step-uncle whoo ran a supermarket with cheap labour and at night I bedded down in a dark cellar among the rabbit corpses with their heads in the bloody buckets. We were working each other up wildly, as if we’d had six beers instead of one, and suddenly Kate’s voice went up hysterically on a laugh that turned into a sob and she screamed: ‘No!’
She stood up, tense, her hands in quivering fists. Molly and Jim sat with their heads turned, Jim’s hands frozen half-way across the board, and I sat staring on the floor unable to move, as a torrent of shouted, incomprehensible words began to pour from her like a haemorrhage.
NO! NO! IT wasn’t like that. Where I slept in the cellar, it wasn’t dark because the street lamp shone in all night through the railing in the pavement and I could see the bottom of the people’s filthy shoes going over it so I couldn’t sleep, and I laid there sweating, because of Miss Fern and wanting to be clever.
It’s never dark in town. It’s in that mucky country where the village kids thought my mother was a witch because of where we lived, and the attic was black, and the Hood used to come down at the end by the trapdoor. Nights when there was moon, it was all right. Nights when they stayed home, I could hear them banging about downstairs. Mostly it was him yelling. Once one of them fell down so hard the whole house shook, and my bed moved. They were in the dark downstairs too because there weren’t any more candles. I bathed myself in the moon. I sung to it. But it always got little again.
That time they went to the seaside, I stayed awake all night with the moon, but they never come back. No, it was the street lamp. Lord’s Lane, that must have been, because I sat by that window all the time behind the curtain so no one would see. None of their bloody business. Mrs Elia, she used to give me biscuits on the street. I buried them in the backyard in case they went off again, and then they did, and I couldn’t find Mrs Elia’s biscuits.
I used to bury sweets too, and ha’pennies, things people give me. They’ll find it all one day, like history. I had threepence, but the door was locked and I couldn’t get out. It was always nighttime. Once I jumped out of bed and ran in to her to wake her up, and she held me. He wasn’t there. Once after he hit her, she come and woke me up, crying, with her hair all over and her dress torn, and laid down with me and we told stories and I was her mother and made her feel better.
Lay down, I said the next night, lay down with me, but she flicked me on the face and called me a dirty name.
Cold. Coming home from school, it was always cold, empty. Last one to go, Miss Fern said. If you like school so much, why don’t you come more often? She give me a book about King Arthur, mystic, wonderful. You can sell books for tuppence down the Lane. He took the other ones too she give me. Where’s your mum? the truant man said. At work. The nursery won’t take the baby no more, because of his head. He was all wool, lovely little bootees she’d made, with bows. At school, we had hot dinners. The lady give me some shoes because mine were too small. Where’d you get them? I wasn’t afraid of him. I used to spit, to show that. Get your hands off her. She’d have six pair like that if it wasn’t for you. She was standing up in the middle of the room, holding the baby. She’d washed her hair in Lux and it was soft with the light all round it, saintly.
When I was a kid, she told him, I wanted for nothing, and she was so beautiful, remembering, I put my arms round her legs, but she was staring out of the window at the flats and didn’t notice.
All right - she was beautiful! I told her. That was when we were in the shop and she was crying because all the money had gone buying it and it was all broken stuff where the boys had got in while it was empty, and none but me and her to clear up. The little kids were crying from the journey and we gave them cornflakes from the shelves and a can of milk and there was still some chocolate the boys hadn’t taken. She was crying after, when we went into the shop and started to kick the boxes and rubbish into a corner. Let’s take the kids and go before he comes back, somewhere he’ll never find us.
You don’t understand, you don’t understand. She was still crying and she looked so ugly and awful I had to tell her, You’re beautiful. I ran out then into the street, because I - because I -1—
MOLLY AND JIM and I all moved together. I got to her first and put my arms round her. She was sobbing dryly as if she had been running.
‘We love you, Kate,’ I said. ‘Don’t cry, it’s all right. I love you.’
I LOVE YOU, Kate.
I love you, I said to her in the shop when she was crying and ugly. I was running. I waited behind that bit of wood fence, but she didn’t call me back.
Get your hands off me - let me go! I hate you! There was a black hole in her face and the words coming out of and beating on my hands over my ears where he put his cigarette on me to burn me. We don’t want you and my hand was on fire when I put it to my mouth. We don’t want you and he laughed and I was screaming rot in hell—
ABOUT A WEEK after that hellish night when Kate hit out at me and fell on the floor screaming and Jim dashed a glass of beer on her because it was the first thing to hand, I came out of the subterranean college cloakroom and found Molly waiting for me at the top of the steps. No babies in sight, and no smile either.
I was going to ride to the station on the back of Sean’s scooter, but when I saw Molly, childless, unsmiling, I took the scarf off my head and told him: ‘Don’t wait. I’m not coming.’
‘Why not?’
‘I want to talk to a friend.’
‘Oh.’ He assessed Molly rudely from under his hair, taking in the neat agreeable look of her: good legs, bright colours, no style, and walked away without responding to her friendly smile.
‘Have I spoiled something?’
‘He saves me bus fare. What’s up?’
She took my arm and walked me away from a crowd of people coming up the steps. ‘Have you seen Kate?’
‘Not since I came back to your house to see if she was all right, and she pretended not to remember what happened.’
‘She didn’t come home last night. She’s gone.’
‘Where?’
‘I don’t know.’ We are standing by the pillar-box, whispering for some reason, although no one was listening on the hurrying street. ‘Yes, I do though, Emma. I think she’s gone home.’
‘To her mother and father? After what she—?’
‘Listen.’ Molly stepped aside for a girl with a bundle of letters, and drew me close to her. ‘Quite a long time ago, she took some coal. She put it in a potato sack and hid it in the toolshed. Ralph told me. It was there for weeks and now it’s gone. I’m not going to tell the probation officer, but I wanted to see you before I went to her home.’
‘Let me go.’ Molly didn’t kno
w I’d been to Butt Street. No one did except Johnny Jordan.
‘No, I’ll go. I can stop in and see poor old Mr Bluett in the council flats over there.’ It was typical of Molly that even in a crisis, she could plan to kill two birds with one stone.
‘I’ll come with you.’
‘Not a deputation. We might scare them if she’s not there.’
‘Suppose she’s with Bob again?’
‘I thought of that. I could find him. I know where he lives.’
‘Let me. Let me do it all, Moll.’ I am shorter than her, and will never have her sense if I live to be a hundred, but for the moment I felt taller, wiser, in charge. ‘I’ll go to Bob and then I’ll go to her home.’ I was scared, but I would go.
Bob lived on the top floor of a house like Mr Jordan’s: bow-windowed, with a little Swiss porch over the door and a few laths laid into the stucco for timbering, the roof part of a gabled pattern all down the street. Here the pattern was in steps, each identical house a few yards above the other, parallel up the steep hill.
Most of the miles and miles of boarding-houses in London were never meant for more than one family, but the tall, pillared terraces seem to take it naturally. These decorated villas seem more violated by the occupying army of multicoloured lodgers. When I rang Bob’s bell, panting from the climb, it should have been his family home, and a warm round mother like a scone should have opened the door in a floury apron and asked me in.
But his mother was in Belfast and no one ever said anything about his father, so here he was, and the woman who opened the door with a jerk, as if she were at war with the stuck hinges, didn’t smell of baking, and she shut the door half-way when she saw me, to keep me outside.
This must be the famous Mrs Marbles with her passion for offal, who fed Bob on stewed heart and blood pudding. When I asked for him, she said: ‘He’s not here,’ and I thought Oh God, he and Kate have gone, and now there’ll be trouble.
‘Not home, you mean,’ I asked nervously, ‘or not living here any more?’
Kate and Emma Page 8
