Kate and Emma

by Monica Dickens

‘If I answered every meddlesome question put to me,’ Mrs Marbles said, sighting down her thin red nose as if I were a rabbit, Td have time for nothing else. There was a girl here only yesterday with a whole impertinent list. Why should I tell her what brand of washing powder I use? If you’re one of those, you’re wasting your time, for I’ll not disclose the secrets of my sink.’

  ‘Oh, I’m not. I’m a friend of Bob’s.’

  ‘A good friend?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well then, you should know where he is,’ said Mrs Marbles triumphantly and shut the door.

  It was clear that Bob had gone, and she was covering, not for him, but because she wasn’t going to be caught not knowing. Or had she been bought off with the bag of coal to foil pursuers? If Kate was with Bob, she wasn’t at Butt Street, but I had told Molly that I would go there, so I must. I would ask loudly for something in the little shop, and if Kate was there, by some freak, she would hear my voice and come out.

  I was striking off again down the hill into the western sun that was pinkening the villas and the faces of the children in the street, when a voice hooted, ‘Em!’ at me, and there was Bob.

  He hurried across from the other side of the road without looking at the traffic, and grinned and waved at a car which squealed to a stop.

  ‘Hullo, dear,’ Bob said, standing in front of me with his hands hanging and his head on one side. ‘Fancy meeting you here. This is my street.’

  Bob always uses the possessive adjective, like a child. My street, instead of Where I live. I read it in my paper. What’s for my supper?

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘I’ve been to the house. She told me you weren’t there, and I was afraid - I thought—’

  ‘Meeting at my works,’ Bob said, in his bustling, trade union voice. ‘Very important. You come to get me? Are we going to the pictures then?’ He and Kate and I have been to the cinema a few times, which he adores, sitting between us, with his eyes bulging at the screen and his mouth full of nuts and chocolate. ‘Where’s Katie then? Didn’t she come with you?’

  Thank God. He wasn’t capable of having her hidden away somewhere without giving it away.

  ‘Bob, where can we talk?’ The pavement was full of running children and home-going men pressing up from the station, and the street was full of old cars and puny vans struggling up the hill in low gear.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Bob almost never talked. He listened.

  ‘Can we go up to your room?’ At the idea of trying to sneak past Mrs Marbles, watchdog at the secret sink, we both laughed. So we walked for a bit and I told him Kate was gone, breaking it with a gentle tact, which was quite wasted since he didn’t even show distress.

  I tried to find out if he knew anything, but all I could get from him were a few irrelevant things about Kate, and something vague about the Australian, which I could not get him to remember. In the end we got on a bus and rode to a place behind a tiled public house where the buses end by running into different concrete slots for each route number. I told him that if I didn’t find Kate, she would fetch up in court again and so would he if he knew anything about it.

  I thought he was listening to me, but he was watching the buses come in to the terminus, and when I said: ‘Tell me the truth, Bob,’ he said: ‘Isn’t it a marvel how each bus knows which hole to go into?’

  He had taken a little tin soldier from his pocket as we sat in the empty bus, and his hands were never still, turning the toy over and over, stroking it, tapping it with a black nail, following its outline with the tip of a wondering finger as if it were a lover’s face. He was tired of me because we were not going to the pictures after all. He either did not take it in about Kate, or else in the world he has always known to be missing is not a crisis.

  When I left him, I said: ‘I’ll let you know,’ and he said: ‘About what?’

  Big dreaming idiot. Why couldn’t he have known where Kate was? Now I had to go on. The walk with Bob, the ride on one of the homing-pigeon buses, the frustrating conversation had all been to put off having to do what I had known all along was inevitable.

  It was getting dark. It was getting late. Now I would have to go back to Butt Street.

  THE DAMN BUZZER went like a bluebottle just as we were having supper. Dad swore and Tony copied him and my mother said: ‘Shut up that, you little bastard,’ so I said something worse and he and she both turned on me.

  It was just like old times, and I wondered how long I could stand it this trip. I’d thought it would all be different. Shows what stupid ideas you get, from a distance. I’d thought I’d come back and say: ‘I’m going to have a baby,’ and she’d take me in and say: Don’t worry, and understand why I had to come home.

  Instead she spoke first, before I could get a word in. ‘Why have you come back?’

  I said: ‘I got fed up,’ because I knew then I couldn’t say: I’m going to have a baby and if Molly finds out she’ll have me put away.

  I’ve heard about those places they send girls. No thanks.

  Loretta was the only one who was really pleased to see me. The boys don’t care, and Dad and Mother - well, they didn’t exactly throw me out, but they made it clear this was no place for me. They wanted to send me right back, but I said: ‘Let me stay a couple of days and get my breath.’

  They’re afraid they’ll get into trouble, since I’m on probation. Ever since the court, she said, there’s been people snooping, bothering, fussing about Loretta. She’s afraid the Cruelty Man will come back, although she fed his ear for good last time, him and some girl who was with him. She had a long hank of hair, my mother said (that stuck in her throat because although she wears hers down, which she shouldn’t at her age, it never grows past her shoulder blades). A bloody great long hank of hair, she said, and it made me think of Em. I’d die before I’d let her see any of this. I felt queer because I don’t know where I belong any more.

  It’s stupid to keep the shop open so late, but it’s the time for cigarettes, after the men get home and find the old woman’s smoked the lot, so they send one of the kids out for that, or for something she’s forgotten, and they have to come to us because everywhere else is closed. Nice way to do business. You only get the customers when they’re desperate.

  We were having supper, so in the end, because I was nearest the door, it was me got up to go into the shop when the buzzer rang.

  As soon as I saw her, I knew. It had been her came with the man. She knows him. I should have guessed when my mother said that about the hair, only I was seeing her too clearly at Molly’s then. Not here. Spying on me, sneaking in. How dare she?

  ‘Hullo, Kate,’ she said.

  ‘Hullo yourself.’

  SHE WAS GOING to turn back into the room behind, but I grabbed her. ‘No, Kate. Talk to me a minute.’

  She looked over her shoulder, then shut the door on the grumbling hubbub within and stepped behind the counter, just like her mother had done.

  ‘I’ll talk to you,’ she said, leaning forward on her fingertips. ‘I’ll talk to you about spying here behind my back.’

  ‘I didn’t know we were coming here,’ I said, my mouth dry and my stomach contracted in the alarm of being found out. ‘I mean, when we came, I didn’t know it was your family. Don’t you believe me?’

  ‘No.’ Kate was too practised with lies not to recognize mine. ‘Well, you saw, didn’t you? You saw what you wanted. What did you have to come back for?’

  ‘To find you.’

  ‘What made you think I’d be here?’

  ‘It’s your home.’

  She made a face. ‘I haven’t got a home.’

  ‘Molly’s worried,’ I said, ‘and I was too. Come back with me, Kate. There’ll be trouble with the court if you don’t.’

  She didn’t say anything. She leaned on the counter and stared at me, but she was still Kate, still my friend, so I went forward and put my hand over hers, the child’s hand with the bitten finger-nails, and asked her if she was going to have a bab
y.

  I have never seen Kate spit. She spat then, and it hit my hand. Then she called me a bloody social worker and went into the back room.

  Kate had to go back to Molly’s of course, since the court had placed her there. Her parents didn’t want her anyway. She had to go back to work too, and I wished, as I had many times before, that I could get her out of that unlovely dead-end job and into something worthwhile.

  Mollyarthur was ill. ‘I’m never ill, I haven’t time.’ She fought it for long enough to make herself worse, and finally collapsed on the bed and into a sleep which had been owing to her for years.

  I went every afternoon to help. I’d do anything for Molly. Anyone would. I was there one day, mopping the kitchen floor, with three of the children sloshing about barefoot in the soapy water. The knocker on the front door thudded like doomsday and I paddled down the hall in my bare feet, the children trailing after me like a brood of ducklings.

  The woman on the doorstep had a pug nose and a bulldog jaw and a yapping terrier voice, dog all over. She asked for Molly and when I said she was ill, she stepped into the hall without being asked and said: ‘Then you can give her a message for me. Are you the maid?’

  I said: Yes, although with a brief child’s apron that said Mother’s Little Helper and my hair screwed up on my head in a lopsided ball with two knitting-needles which Carol had thrust through it, I didn’t look like a maid anyone would ever employ.

  ‘You can tell her it’s about Katherine,’ the dog woman said, humping her large brown plastic bag higher under her arm, as if the children were pickpockets.

  ‘Nothing wrong I hope?’ A relation of one of the patients? A back-room girl from the Children’s Department?

  ‘Merely that I cannot employ her any longer.’

  ‘Oh, you’re the Matron.’ It figured. Kate had described her as being without any recognizable human feature, either of body or soul. ‘I’m sorry you’re not satisfied. Katherine has worked so hard to please you.’ I bared my teeth in what she could take as a smile if she chose.

  ‘If so, which I doubt, then she has failed. It’s no business of yours, but I cannot have that kind of girl in my Rest Home.’

  Some rest. The way Kate described it, the old people incarcerated therein would get no rest until the final one.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with Kate,’ I said angrily. ‘What’s wrong with her?’

  ‘If you don’t know,’ said the Matron, ‘which is unlikely, since you seem to be very familiar in this house, then I shall tell you.’ She glanced at the barefoot, open-mouthed children, saw that they were too young to understand, and said: ‘The girl is pregnant.’

  ‘That’s a lie. How dare you say that? It’s libellous.’ I wouldn’t have been so angry, I suppose, if I hadn’t known at the back of my heart, ever since Molly suggested it, that it was true. The truer it was, the less I wanted to hear it, especially from this woman.

  ‘Don’t shout at me!’ Matron shouted in a nurse-lashing tone which must once have woken all the sleepers in the ward. ‘If you’re trying to tell me I don’t know pregnancy when I see it, you’ve come to the wrong shop.’

  ‘What’s going on?’ Molly appeared at the top of the stairs in her blue woollen dressing-gown with her hair on end. ‘What’s the matter, Emma? Oh, it’s you, Matron. Is there something I can do for you?’

  ‘You can explain to the Council why I can’t employ Katherine any more.’

  ‘Yes, I see. Well, she couldn’t have stayed much longer anyway.’

  A lot of the wind went out of Matron’s sails when she found that she couldn’t shock Molly as she had shocked me. ‘What are you going to do about it?’ she asked. ‘The girl is in your care.’

  Molly weaved a little on the top step, but put her hand on the banister post and answered with dignity: ‘It’s perfectly all right. Kate is going to be married.’

  Matron yapped a bit more about social duty and ingratitude and learning her lesson, and when she had gone, Molly sat down on the top step and laid her head against the wall.

  ‘If you send me there when I am old,’ she said, as I went up to her, Til hang myself with the sheets.’

  I WAS KNITTING something. I’ll never finish it, but Moll had cast it on for me, and she likes to see me knit. I’d nicked some toy soldiers from my mother’s shop while I was there, and Bob was on the floor with them, making them drill round the leg of a stool.

  ‘Molly thinks we ought to get married, Bob,’ I said.

  He smiled up at me, his soft black hair over his eye, game for anything, then went back to his soldiers, pushing out his lips in little band sounds as he marched them.

  ‘I couldn’t marry you, Bob. It would be like marrying a child.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ he agreed.

  SHE CAN’T MARRY Bob. She can’t. Molly says that she should, but Molly, though liberal in many ways, is surprisingly stuffy about this. Not angry with Kate, just stuffy. She’ll help her, but on her own terms, and her terms don’t include fatherless babies. She has had enough of them as fosters, Lord knows, but perhaps that’s why.

  Things like this set up barriers between generations. It’s like talking about the war to someone who is old enough to have been grown up then. It has never quite left them, and it shuts you out.

  Molly is thirty-four. I am nineteen. We are the same age in outlook, until something like this comes up. She is rigid. A baby means marriage.

  But marriage is the purpose, not the expedient. I argue with her all over the house. ‘To chuck away your life for an unborn baby who will never thank you anyway. Who ever thanks their mother for giving birth to them, let alone making a sacrifice of it? Suppose you make her marry Bob, and the baby is born dead. What then?’

  She was cleaning windows, standing on a stool to reach the top panes in one of the high Victorian rooms. I did not offer to help, because I was angry with her. ‘She’ll still have Bob.’

  ‘That’s the trouble.’

  ‘Bob’s all right. He’s not as simple as he looks. He earns a good enough wage and he’s reliable.’

  ‘So is a chair leg.’

  ‘He’s worse with Kate because she orders him about and makes him more childish.’

  ‘She doesn’t want to marry him.’

  ‘How do you know? She hasn’t said she won’t.’

  ‘She hasn’t said she will.’

  Kate won’t make any decisions. She sits about looking slightly bloated, eating chocolate and reading in a pair of glasses with plain lenses because she wants to look intellectual. If you try to make her plan, she says: Plenty of time, as if the baby wasn’t coming for twenty-four months, instead of six.

  I could kill her for letting this happen, just for the sake of a few minutes’ dubious fun in that ridiculous high iron bed wedged so tightly into her room under the roof that you have to climb in over the end of it. She told me where, although she hasn’t told Molly, because she was supposed to be baby-sitting.

  She has messed up everything, just when she had the chance of a life with something better in it than the poverty and dirt and fighting squalor she ran away from. I even find myself wishing she had the sense to get rid of the thing. She won’t, I know, and I feel guilty when the wish passes through my mind unbidden. But thoughts are not crimes, I suppose, unless you grab at them as they go by.

  Now I have an idea. It is the idea to end all ideas, and I shall carry it through in the gnashing teeth of all opposition. Here at last is something I can do for somebody. I am selfish. I am an inflated egotist. I feel no urge to help the whole of suffering humanity, but I could help just this one small unit, since it would be for myself too.

  Don’t leave me, Kate said, and I said: Never. I could show her now that I meant it. Jt could be our baby. Mine too. We could bring it up together. I could get her a job in one of the B.B. markets, if Uncle Mark doesn’t fire me. We could share the flat I am going to have next year. People could think it was my baby if they liked. I wouldn’t care. No harm
in being thought an unmarried mother if you’re not. We could call it Kathaline, from both our names. Paint its room yellow. Get a kitten for it. A rocking-horse. A tricycle. Take it to the sea.

  Kate caught fire on the details. She said at first: ‘Oh, can it,’ then gradually woke from lethargy to enthusiasm, until we were throwing ideas back and forth like ping-pong balls.

  ‘We’ll do the cot up in roses, have one of those rugs with all pictures, wheel out a pram and have everyone turn and stare after us because we are so young and pretty.’

  ‘On Sundays. It will have to go in a nursery while we’re at work and we can take turns fetching it and baffle everyone.’

  ‘Should we have our hair down or up? We’d want to make a good impression.’

  ‘Mature, mysterious, enriched by motherhood. Let’s do the flat all white, with blood-coloured curtains.’

  ‘Oh, Em. We could have steak and hot chocolate every night and never go to bed. We could have real parties, with men in coloured waistcoats and give them spaghetti and wine, like they do. Oh, Em—’ She looked at me with a strange shining simplicity, all her defences down. ‘I could be like you.’

  I am terribly happy. Life has suddenly a huge and brilliant purpose, which makes me see that before there were only negative purposes: things I didn’t want to do, people I didn’t want to get mixed up with, the kind of person I didn’t want to be. How could I, even fleetingly, have wished the baby dead? Now that it is partly mine, I begin to feel the same ache for it as for that wretched scabrous child I nursed in the cold railway-carriage room I went to with Mr Jordan, where they threw the tin-cans into the empty grate.

  Frustrated motherhood? Why not? I am nineteen. Some of my friends are married, none of them to anyone I’d be seen dead with, let alone conceive by. Now I can have the baby without a husband.

  ‘You’re mad,’ Alice said. ‘People will say you’re queer. The next thing we know, you’ll be breeding cairns and live in Essex.’

  She had come for the week-end with her husband and children. It was like dropping into a warm bath of the past. Marriage has matured her outwardly, but she can still shriek with laughter like we used to, scattering small rugs all over the house. She lives too far away. I always forget how much I like her until I see her again.