I had come home excited, crashing into the house in a rude sort of glow, and found her coming down into the front hall with that knock-kneed Alice waddle, and spilled it all out to her on the stair carpet.
‘They’ll hear you.’ She looked at the drawing-room door. Alice is a secret person, afraid of trouble. My father used to be rather brutal with her at times, because she was fat and unlucky, with a nervous compulsion to say the wrong thing. She is still plump now, but attractive, I think, because I admire women who don’t show their bones like I do. She is the wife of a Birmingham gynaecologist, ten years older, whose patients fall morbidly in love with him, to no avail. This has given her some poise, but she has never lost her fear of being caught out. If Gordon complains, she jumps to make excuses or to do something she has forgotten, nervously, as if she were afraid of him. He is not frightening. He is large and golden like a well-washed retriever, with a voice that is balm to women in their hour of need.
‘Don’t talk so loud.’ The finger to the lip was a familiar gesture.
‘I’m going to tell them anyway.’
‘Not tonight. Don’t spoil the evening. There’s lobster, and everyone is happy. Don’t upset them.’
I knew who she meant. Nobody bothers much about upsetting my mother, because her outlook is so defeated already that one more disillusionment won’t hurt. I have given up trying to hoist her into life on my shoulders. She has always slipped back, missing the fun, the new experiences, the stunts. Alice has never been afraid of her, but she has always tried too hard to placate my father, and it doesn’t work with him as it does with Gordon, who absorbs it blandly, like a sponge. If my father shouts, it’s better to shout back.
I got him out of the drawing-room on a pretext, and told him alone, in the little room across the hall. It isn’t fair to lump him as an audience with my mother, because he can understand, and she has to have it spelled out. What do you mean? is her first reaction to startling news, and it slows things up.
‘You remember that girl in court when I was there, the one who ran away from home?’
‘I remember a thousand girls in court who’ve run away from home.’
‘The one who screamed out at her father, and he stood there like a brutal ox, as if he didn’t care.’
He remembered. ‘Rather an appealing child, under the dirt and fury. I sent her to that insatiable woman with all the children. I wonder what happened to her. I never know unless it’s the worst, and they come back to court.’
‘She’s changed,’ I said. ‘It’s wonderful. There was so much in her that had been crushed and smothered by that ghastly home. If you had sent her back there, she’d have killed someone, or herself. Now she’s my friend. I’ve been going to Mollyarthur’s, and we have become best friends.’
I sounded like my past self telling him about some schoolgirl crush. She’s my best friend. She’s moved her desk next to mine. I could almost feel the serge of my gym tunic.
‘Why haven’t you told me about her?’ He was leaning on the mantelpiece in his charmer pose, his head slightly tilted and the foot of his bad leg on the fender. He wasn’t trying to charm me. He just looked charming.
‘I thought you’d disapprove. Or laugh.’
‘Have I ever?’
I wanted to say Yes, but I said: ‘No.’
‘I’d like to meet her. Why don’t you bring her home?’
He should know why. ‘I had been going to ask you if you’d come to Molly’s house. I wanted to show them to you and you to them. But then I thought that it might come between Kate and me, because you’re not like anybody she’s ever known. No, it wasn’t really that. It was - oh hell, Daddy, I’m such a coward. I’m afraid to risk an idea in case it doesn’t work, and I will have lost even the idea.’
‘You usually jump in with both feet, all the same.’
‘I’m going to now. You’ll meet her now. I’ve had this superb idea, and I’m going through with it whatever anybody says, because it’s what I want and it’s what she wants.’
Too belligerently, expecting him to protest at any moment, I told him about the flat, and getting Kate a job, and that when her probation was over next year he must free her to go where she liked. Then I stopped and looked at him because his face was giving nothing away, and I didn’t know how he was taking it.
‘Go on, please,’ he said, as if I were a hesitant witness.
My throat was tight, but I got it out. ‘She’s going to have a baby. She can’t marry the boy. He’s not very bright, and she - she’s really intelligent, in spite of her family, like a swan in a cuckoo’s nest. She and I are going to bring the baby up between us. It will be ours. Mine if people want to think that. I shan’t care what anyone thinks, and you mustn’t either, because this is the one thing I want more than anything in a whole lifetime of wanting.’
He didn’t say anything for a little while, just stood and looked down at me where I was sitting on the stool with my hands round my knees, clutching them white. He is so damn attractive. Not only to me. I see the way other women look at him, with speculation. The lines are deepening in his face, but his eyes will never fade and grow dull, even if he becomes a helpless old man, bullied by some matron like Kate’s dog woman. If the iridescent grey of his hair flattens to white, his eyes will still be deeply, dramatically blue.
‘You’ve made up your mind,’ he said at last, not as a question.
I nodded, rocking backwards with my feet off the floor, hanging on to my knobbly knees.
‘You can’t expect me to like it.’
‘You will, when you know Kate, when you see how well it works out.’
‘Suppose I don’t give you a chance to let it work out?’
‘You can’t stop me. I’ll be earning. I’ll be independent. You can’t make me a ward of court for wanting to share a flat with a girl friend.’
‘And a baby.’
‘The baby’s incidental. It goes with the girl friend.’
‘If the father is not very bright, the child might not be either. Have you thought of that?’
‘I’ve thought. All the more reason to help.’
‘I like you, Emma,’ he said. ‘I like the way you set your heart on things. Your mother has never wanted anything really badly in her life.’
‘Except you.’
‘That was easy. She didn’t have to fight for it. Her family liked me in their grudging, noncommittal way.’
‘If I was asking you to let me marry someone horrible, what would you say?’
‘The same, I suppose.’
‘The same as what? You haven’t said anything.’
‘It’s your life, Emma, that’s all. It’s your life, not mine. God knows what people are going to think, but if you don’t care, I’ll try not to either. The older I get, the less I care what people say, and I wish I hadn’t wasted so much time caring in the past. I’m glad you don’t. I like you, girl.’
‘I like you, Bullock.’ I got up and kissed him. ‘Will you back me with -’ I jerked my head towards the hall, where I heard my mother’s voice, and her terrier’s nails headed for the kitchen on the polished floor.
‘She won’t like it.’
‘I don’t care. Is that cruel? I’m just telling you. I don’t care.’
‘At least pretend. To me as well, if you want me on your side.’
‘Tell her for me.’
‘Tell her yourself.’
‘I can’t. She’ll offer to take Kate into the kitchen. It’s the only way she knows to deal with pregnancy.’
He laughed. I can always make him laugh, and I stretched my arms high up above my head and felt absolutely wonderful and he saw it, and I said: ‘This will be the first good thing I have ever done in my life.’
‘You’re always doing good things.’
‘Name one.’
He couldn’t, so I asked him then about the money, and if he would lend me enough later on to add to the sixty pounds I had already saved for plastic surgery for Kate.
‘Don’t you mind him going without you?’ one of us asked my mother when she came into my bedroom to tell Alice that one of her children looked flushed.
‘What do you mean, mind?’ she asked, a little flushed herself.
‘Whose idea was it - his or yours?’
Alice was in my bed, bosomy in an expensive nightgown, and I was sitting on the side, pounding my hair with a brush, letting it fall sideways in a spread curtain through which I saw my mother fiddling with things on the dressing-table, talking to her own face, not to us.
‘I didn’t want to go, Emma. I’ve told you that.’ She stared at the mirror, her face dramatically lit from below, full of strange glows and shadows because she was standing higher than the lamp. ‘They’re his friends. I’ve hardly even met them, and it was obvious they only asked me because it would have looked odd otherwise.’
Alice gave an impatient exclamation. ‘Don’t fish.’
‘They’re too rich, I couldn’t have stood it. And they’re intellectual. They play clever games after dinner. I got into that once. Your father was in his element, of course, but I felt an idiot.’
I could imagine her suffering glumly, unable to go home because he would not take pity on her for not trying.
‘In any case,’ she said firmly to the mirror, ‘it does us good to get away from each other now and again. People must lead their own lives, you know, even when they’ve been married for more than twenty-five years. My hair has kept its colour well though, I’ll say that,’ she added, as if marriage were a greying ordeal.
She stayed talking with us for a while about past things, indulging herself in the illusion of the three of us together at bed-time, as we used to be before Alice married, before I grew up. She said no more about the south of France holiday, and nor did we, because Alice and I were both aware of her futile pretence of thinking that by not bothering him, she could preserve a relationship already disintegrated.
When she had gone to her room with its familiar smell of dog on the bed and her innocuous scent, Alice said abruptly: ‘Do you think he’s got a woman?’
‘Oh my God, no. He’d never’ I thought she was pretty filthy even to think of it, but she has never known him as well as I do. He has always liked me best, and she knows it. But that gives her even less right to lie in my bed with her round chin on her nightdress ribbons and say that. If anything is going to be said, I’ll say it.
He had told me that he would find out the name of a surgeon who might do the operation on Kate’s neck, but then he went away without remembering.
‘Oh Lord, I forgot,’ he said at the airport. I said it didn’t matter, because it could not be done until after the baby, but I had wanted to tell Kate that it was all fixed.
At the last moment, I said to him: ‘Let me come with you!’
Did I really think he would say: Come on? He said, ‘You haven’t got any luggage.’ He is getting very staid and middle-aged.
His flight was called, and I kissed him and left. As I went out through the main hall, a woman was coming through the doors from a car with all the bustle of an attractive woman arriving late, breathless, getting attention without demanding it.
I looked at her, because she was what I would never be at that or any age, colourful, exciting, none of her ripeness lost, and saw that I knew her. It was the woman at the cocktail party who had told me to keep my father young after he had fallen off the horse.
As she went by me in her own little dramatic bustle of porters and airline officials and expensive luggage, she saw that she knew me, and said: ‘Oh, hullo, how are you?’ without knowing who I was.
Alice would have said that she was travelling with my father. It’s surprising the mind she has under the nervous respectability. But that was impossible, since he had supposed that my mother would go with him, until last week when she said she wouldn’t. I thought how middle-aged he had been when I said goodbye, and how short and British he had looked limping away down the passage to the passport desk with his stick and his raincoat, and I thought perhaps I ought to wish it possible, for his sake. But I will never allow him that.
I got through my examinations at the college and am going to be at the head office in the autumn, in something called Merchandising, where my cousin Derek works.
Derek and I either take or leave each other according to circumstance and the changing state of our glands. When we were small, we fought. When I was about twelve and he fourteen, we were in love, experimentally. Then we lost interest, then came together again in an unpassionate liaison because we both had spots and could not attract no other intimates, but veered away again as the surplus grease cleared from our skins and scalps and new worlds opened. Now we go out together from choice, not necessity, and use each other for confidences or boastful sublimations of adventures that are not quite so gaudy as the telling. We fight at times because we know each other too well, then suddenly come together in a moment’s passion in a lull when no other is on tap.
Uncle Mark is afraid that we might eventually marry, which is perhaps why we are to be in the same department, because Derek at work is forgetful and cynical and at his worst. My mother knows that cousins who marry never have normal children. Query: Would she want to have Derek and me sterilized?
Until I go to the head office, I am sojourning, with pay, thank God, in the several B.B. supermarkets in various parts of London to see how the layout of the store affects the buying habits of the customers. It is very interesting. The traffic pattern varies, with the floor plan, from store to store, and even from district to district. In Edgware, for instance, the housewives head for the meat like jungle beasts, while south of Putney Bridge they must get their hands on a loaf of bread before they can look at anything else.
In Fulham, my Uncle Mark came to the store while I was there, and took a turn round the aisles as he often does, padding with his knees slightly bent and his hands behind his back, like a bearded undertaker. He wears the beard to cover a rifle wound, a brindle, crew-cut beard, which, although he has had it as long as I can remember, still looks as if it were hooked on behind his ears.
I don’t often see him, since our two families don’t mix very much, so I plucked up my courage to ask him about a job for Kate next winter. He is short-sighted, and at first he didn’t recognize me in the white jacket with my hair braided round my head like an Austrian lieder singer. I have my own plastic label now that I am on the pay roll. Emmaline Bullock. Behind the meat counter, I look like part of the display.
He asked me what I was doing, and I told him that I was observing the effect on the customer of scaling dog-food prices from left to right in relation to the direction of their approach. Thank God I knew. He said: ‘Good girl, Emma,’ and I stepped in front of him as he was about to pad on, and asked him about Kate.
He said something about it probably being all right, but not to bother him now, and I saw it through his eyes. So unimportant as to be almost non-existent. One more girl among hundreds to stamp prices on tins, to weigh grapes and wrap them in cellophane, to erect Today’s Bargain, tottering in an irresistible pyramid. Faceless to him they came and went. One left, there was always another to take her place.
SHE HAS ASKED her uncle about a job for me later, and he has as good as said Yes. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to tell her. I couldn’t find the words. I can laugh and joke and make up silly stories, but I don’t have the words to say the truth, not when it’s too good, or too bad.
We have fun playing the game, planning all about the baby, and how we’ll do up the flat, and the people we’ll know and the parties we’ll have and the fine new life that will come pouring into our laps day after day.
I could be like her. Different. I could be a girl who had never known Butt Street, never known that room in the attic, nights when there was no moon, nor
no one else. I could do it too, I know I could. I talk different now, and I look better. With my hair in a long bell like this, and clean all the time, I look like anybody.
Em is so excited, like a child. She knows a lot of things I never will - there wouldn’t be time in a while life to learn all the things I don’t know - but sometimes she’s childish and I am years older. You need to live, cock, I tell her. But I’m glad she hasn’t. Not my way.
She’s like a bull when she gets an idea. I haven’t the heart to say I can’t go through with it. Or can I? I am at what they call a crossroads of my life. This is a crossroads of your life, one of the cows at Stinkney said. What are you going to choose?
As if there was any choice. Back to the court and they’ll label you and send you off like a parcel. Thank God Em’s father had the sense to ship me to Moll.
I stand at the crossroads and look at all the roads. When I’ve been with Em, I believe that it really can happen, and forget that it can’t. She’s steamed up to the lid on this one. The baby will be ours, and the hell with the rest of the world. But she can’t say the hell with the world. I’ve got nothing to lose, but she … How can I do this to her?
I met Sonia at the library. Funny place to meet her, but she was waiting for the fellow she goes with now she’s broken with Kev. They sit and talk there where it’s nice and quiet, and die librarian, who is a real crackpot, thinks it’s better than getting up to something on the streets.
She saw at once. Trust her. She didn’t say anything about it, just asked if I wanted an address.
‘Who?’ I asked. We were by the fiction, del to harm.
‘One of the Indians. They’ll fix you up if you’ve got the money.’
I gave her a pencil and she wrote the address on a corner torn off a newspaper and I put it in my pocket. This is it then. This will be the first good thing I have ever done in my life.
Kate and Emma Page 10
