Kate and Emma

by Monica Dickens

  We played that we were married. We used to be able to do that long ago by the river, but soon the people began to come back. Bernie’s parents. The film people in the converted dairy. Tom’s wife. There were people about all summer in the river cottages, and in the autumn when they left, Sheila let theirs to a friend who was writing a book.

  ‘A boy friend?’

  ‘No, this gruesome woman with the moles and metal earrings.’

  She never has a boy friend. She has no children. She has nothing but Tom, and she doesn’t even know she hasn’t got him. Sometimes when Tom or I get desperate, we say: We’ve got to do something, but we never do. We don’t know what to do, so we let it go on like this.

  He left before the time that Kate and Bob might come home, and they came soon after, having found nothing up West but a liver and bacon supper and a glass of lager.

  I stood at the bus stop with my red coat wrapped round me like a soldier’s shroud, smiling secretly to myself to show the couple waiting with me that I didn’t need to envy them for having someone to hold them close against the funnel of wind between the flats.

  A little blue car streaked down the road, stopped with a rocking squeal beyond the bus stop, and shot back like a clockwork train thrown suddenly in reverse.

  Johnny Jordan leaned across and stuck out his head. ‘What are you doing on my beat?’

  ‘I’ve been to see Kate. That girl I told you about. Remember when we went to Butt Street?’

  He nodded solemnly. Of course. I had cried. Although so long ago, he would have to remember it solemnly.

  ‘She lives in those flats.’

  ‘Married then. I’m still seeing the mother off and on. She’s never told me.’

  ‘She wouldn’t.’

  He opened the car door and I got in, feeling the envy of the hugging couple, because I had been rescued. ‘You can wait all night for the buses here. I’ll run you to the station.’

  ‘I don’t live at home any more. I have my own flat now, in Fulham.’ I should say something which would show that I had not been thrown out or walked out, in case he might think my father had failed as a father, but I let it go.

  ‘Come home then and have a cup of coffee,’ he said. ‘Jean will be so pleased. We’ve often talked about the time you came. Then I’ll run you home.’

  ‘It’s too late. Your wife—’

  ‘She always waits up if I’m called out, in case I come back with a child.’

  ‘Do you often?’ I was still living in my secret smile, still half with Tom, but talking easily, very relaxed, like being woken from sleep without having to get up.

  ‘Once in a while. Sometimes she feeds them before I take them to the Home. It was a false alarm tonight. The neighbours were edgy. This woman had reported them a year ago because their baby kept crying, so they turned round and reported her. Her husband had given the boy a hiding, nothing much, but they’d waited a year next door to catch the sound of blows. The woman, she caught me on the way out and played war with me for not taking the kid away. I’m not a kidnapper, ma’am. No, you’re a bloody fake, she said. They think you can just walk in and take anyone’s child away in the middle of the night, like the Gestapo.

  ‘Well, dear, I brought you one back!’ he called out, as we went into the house, smelling so delightful after the dubious air of Kate’s flat. Jean came down the stairs in a dressing-gown wearing a face of welcoming concern for a miserable child, which broke into a broad smile when she saw me.

  We sat by the kitchen fire in the inglenook where the old range used to be. We had mugs of coffee with foam on the top, and the last of Jean’s Christmas cake. They were nice. Jean, who is still an enthusiastic patron of my Uncle Mark, wanted to hear what went on behind the scenes at B.B., so I told them a few of the funny bits to make them laugh. She laughs out loud, easily. He keeps his mouth shut and laughs inside the smile.

  I didn’t talk much. I was sleepy, and he wanted to tell her what the mother tonight had said and done when she guessed who had telephoned him, which was much more fascinating. When it was time to go, and Johnny went to get our coats, Jean said: ‘I am so glad you came. Do come and see us again. We’re very fond of you.’

  ‘Wasn’t it lucky I saw her?’ Johnny came back with my red coat and held it for me. When Tom does that, he keeps his hands there after it’s on and slides them round me, just touching my breasts for a second if we are in a place where there are people. But they aren’t likely to be people we know. We have to go to other kinds of places.

  ‘I spotted her by her hair,’ Johnny said. ‘She’s the only girl I know who’d dare to wear it all loose down her back like that.’

  ‘It doesn’t take much courage,’ I said bleakly, because I would kill myself if he knew that my hair had been pinned up when Tom came and we were eating ham and eggs. It was the first time I had felt guilty about Tom, or seen it as a furtive, cheap and dirty thing.

  I had a week off. Horrible time to have it, but I was the most junior in our department, so if anyone was going to have a holiday in March, it was me.

  Tom and I had made fantasy plans of how he would take some days off and we would go to Scotland, but of course he couldn’t and we didn’t. We never can. He has a business and a wife. I am an extra. I recognize that. I don’t make demands on him. I did it once, early on, and I learned a lot from that mistake. I shall be twenty-one this summer. I shall tell my grandchildren: I learned everything about men before I was twenty-one.

  I went to see Molly, but she had taken all the children to her mother’s, with a note on the door for someone called Red, presumably an older Care and Prot. out at work: Gone S ‘gate. Back 8. Key under u no wot. Start pots heat pie feed all an’ls.

  I took Kate some books which I had promised her. Bob has made her a bookshelf, the height of gracious living, wider at one end than the other. Very practical. You put the taller books at one end and the paperbacks at the other.

  I had nothing to do. I wasted the days, waiting for the end of the week when Sheila might be going to Paris to see Collections. Please, Sheila. Oh come on, Paris in March is entrancing. I am as dependent on her movements as if it were her I was in love with.

  My father telephoned me one evening in the middle of the week. ‘Lisa? Oh good, it’s you, Emmie. I thought you might be out.’

  ‘I don’t go out much.’ I didn’t, if I couldn’t be with Tom, and there were many, many hundreds of evenings when I couldn’t be with Tom. But I kept most of them free, in case. I had lost a lot of friends in the last year, along with a lot of my egotism. If you are still in love with yourself, you aren’t in love. That’s one of the things Tom taught me.

  ‘This is your week off, isn’t it?’ my father said, and I thought: Oh God, don’t let him be wistful. ‘Are you coming home?’

  Of course, he wouldn’t be wistful. He said it casually, so that I could say: ‘I wish I could, but I’ve got so much to do. I’m spring-cleaning the flat.’ Well, I was in a way. I was washing the curtains. ‘I’ll try to get down for the week-end, but don’t count on it. I may have to go to a football match.’ Well, I might. Tom and I can go where there are shouting, amorphous crowds.

  ‘How about lunch with me tomorrow? There’s a fairly short list at court. We should ger through it in the morning.’

  ‘Where will you take me?’

  He hesitated, and then said: ‘Why don’t you give me lunch for a change? Let’s have it at the flat.’

  Tom telephoned later, from a call box where he was supposed to be posting a letter. It was a frustrating conversation, full of pauses. He had a contract problem with an American firm, which wasn’t interesting, but he had fought with it all day and couldn’t think of much else. I had done nothing. I had nothing to tell him except the things I couldn’t say with Lisa in the room. She knows about Tom, of course. She is not very interested any more - anything that lasts over three months is as dull as a marriage - but whoever I am talking to, she always stops what she’s doing and listens. It
’s a bad habit of hers. I’m going to tell her one day. God, I’m getting crabby. The next thing, Lisa and I will be into a neurotic battle, and the magistrate will say jauntily, hoping to be quoted in the evening paper, when we are up for assault: It’s the age-old problem of two women and one cook-stove. Magistrates never know the current names for anything. They talk about motorcars and wireless sets. Even my father has been known to ask juvenile-court clients: Are you good at your studies?

  Frustrated with Tom, and feeling separated from him by vast expanses, although his house is only a mile away across the slate roofs and chimneys from my bedroom window, I welcomed the thought of my father coming tomorrow. I wanted to see him, and I was glad he wanted to see me. The next morning, I went out into a dark drizzle and bought cold roast beef, left it ready with the kind of salad he likes, and went back to the drab district I know so well because Molly is there and Kate is there and the juvenile court is there.

  In the outer hall, the usual dispirited bunches of grown-ups and children were waiting on the benches, making little puddles on the stone floor with umbrellas and rubber boots. It is always cold out here. When the mothers come into the courtroom, their hands are always red, from cleaning everybody up before they come, and then sitting waiting in the cold.

  A few older boys were leaning against the walls trying to look as if they didn’t care. Some of them didn’t. I saw a wild-haired boy I had seen twice in court last year. He had a black eye and a plaster on his cheek, and his father, small and tubercular, looked as if he were afraid of him.

  There were still about a dozen cases, by the look of the hall, so I asked the policeman at the door of the court to let me in, and sat at the end of the room opposite the bench, with the policewomen and the students. My father was reading the report on a dejected boy who stood before him, trying to wipe his nose on his sleeve without raising his arm. He looked up when I came in and gave me a smile which should put fresh heart into the dejected boy, if he was afraid of the merciless beak.

  Usually when I come to court, I sit at the side of the Bench with the Clerk of the Court and the probation officers. My father sometimes makes jokes for my benefit, but he can only see me out of the corner of his eye. Now that I was sitting behind the parents and the children, his eyes kept straying beyond them to me, and I wore my inscrutable face so as not to distract him.

  It is not easy to stay inscrutable in my father’s court, and today was no exception. A desperate boy who couldn’t get a job had taken a scooter and fallen off it at the first traffic lights, right under a policeman’s nose. A girl had taken her father’s savings and no one could make her say what she had spent them on. A fifteen-year-old girl, sullenly bold, admitted that she had tried to get pregnant so the boy would have to marry her. Her mother, swollen with her eleventh child (Get the lady a chair, the cry goes up, as soon as the shape is seen), lodged a long keening complaint with my father, not for what the girl had done, but for what she hadn’t, which was to stay at home and look after the younger children.

  A girl of twelve had been taken to the Child Care centre because she had been assaulted by the lodger, who was ‘just like one of the family’. A mother at the end of her rope stood tight-lipped and trembling before the Bench, and asked for her boy to be taken into Care to stop him roaming. The boy seemed not unwilling, but when my father agreed, he shrieked like a mandrake and the mother weaved about like a reed in the wind, collapsed moaning and ^legless and was dragged out with her heels thumping the floor.

  Children’s courts are more emotionally crippling than adult courts, where people are under better control, and what has happened is usually their fault. On the Bench, it is not apparent that my father is a little bruised by the conflicts and the suffering and the blunders that rage under his nose once or twice a week, but when he comes out he often looks drained, and he doesn’t bother to try not to limp.

  I drove his car to the flat and poured him a large gin right away and sat him in the only comfortable chair. It had no cover on, because I am washing that too, and the strange old tapestried upholstery is the colour of the fungus on jam.

  I sat opposite him on the stool whose colour is explained when you see the original chair, desiccating my shins in front of the gas fire, and we talked about the court and the woman who had been dragged out, and then he said, out of the blue, ‘What’s this I hear about you being mixed up with a married man?’

  He knew. I sat perfectly still on the tapestry stool with my shoes off, still looking down. My hands hadn’t tensed, but under my shirt I could see my heart battering like an organism separate from my body. He knew. We had been so careful, so agonizingly discreet, but he knew. Who else did?

  ‘How do you know?’ I said. There was no sense saying anything else.

  ‘A man at the club, youngish chap, I don’t know him very well, cornered me in the bar and said: Do you know that your daughter is having an affair with my sister’s husband? It seemed rather a crude thing to say, but people are like that these days.’

  ‘How does he know?’ This must be Eric, who Tom plays golf with. Eric, whose car I was once in when Tom’s was at the garage. Eric, who is supposed to think the sun rises and sets on Tom, and gets his whisky for him wholesale. ‘How does he know, Daddy?’ His face was twisted up, as if he would have liked to try and smile, but could only get to it with one side of his mouth.

  ‘It seems quite a few people do. Including his sister.’

  ‘She doesn’t.’

  ‘Yes, Emmie, she does. Didn’t this - what’s his name?’

  ‘Tom.’

  ‘Didn’t this Tom tell you that she knows?’

  ‘He doesn’t know it either.’

  ‘Oh yes he does. They’ve had it all out. She doesn’t want to divorce him. She is very unhappy.’

  ‘You seem to know more about it than I do.’

  ‘Yes.’ He looked at his hands, stroking the loose skin over the knuckles, trying to pull it tight. ‘It seems awfully irrelevant, but do you suppose we could have some lunch?’

  ‘Oh yes. I’m sorry. It’s all ready.’

  I brought the tray and he sat at the table by the window. I didn’t want anything. I stood up at first while he was eating, but he said: ‘Sit down, you’re not a waitress.’

  ‘Here at the table?’

  ‘Why not? I can talk better if I look at you.’

  ‘There’s nothing to say.’

  ‘Yes there is. I want to know what you are going to do.’ He put down his knife and fork and leaned back with his hands on the table and his chin down a little, studying me patiently, as he does when he is waiting for an unwilling delinquent to speak.

  ‘Nothing. There’s nothing to be done. Tom and I are in love. I’m going on with it and so will he. I can’t help how Sheila feels. She’s lost him anyway.’

  ‘You haven’t done much thinking, have you? You’ve just gone ahead. You didn’t know what to do, so you let it go on?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Start thinking, Emmie,’ he said, ‘before it’s too late.’ He got up. ‘I’d better go. I thought I would want to sit here all afternoon and battle it out with you, but I find I don’t. I don’t want to talk about it any more.’

  We didn’t kiss or touch each other when we said goodbye, and I didn’t go down with him to the car. It was dark outside at half past two. The end of the world that London springs a few times during the winter to justify the bearded old men in Regent Street with their sandwich-boards that announce the Day of Judgement.

  After he had gone, I turned out the lights, and instead of thinking, I fell asleep on the red convex sofa. The telephone woke me at a quarter to five.

  ‘Miss Weir?’ We had chosen this name for the woman at the barber shop, because of the background music of our first meeting. ‘I’m going to leave the office a little early. Can you fit me in at five thirty?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Very well.’ Was it Tom’s breathing I could hear, or the switchboard girl? Was she the one who had told the
world? ‘We’ll be waiting for you then.’

  If I said: We’ll see you here, it meant Come to the flat. We’ll be waiting for you meant that I would meet him at our particular entrance of the Tottenham Court Road tube station, opposite the Lyons, where all the perverts in the world go up and down the stairs.

  He never gives me much time to get anywhere, but I usually manage it. He asks me to be there, so I am. I waited underground at the exit to the stairs, and he came hurrying, as he always does, to meet me. He always thinks one day I won’t be there, but I always am, and the little shock of pleasure when I see his face anxious and searching, then suddenly alight because he has seen me, never gets less. We come together without speaking, and move off without touching to be part of the crowd.

  He went to the ticket machines.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘The house. Don’t you remember?’

  Of course. He had said last night that Sheila might leave for Paris today. I had known it this morning. I had forgotten it some time while I was with my father.

  ‘I don’t want to go to your house,’ I said, but he was off down the escalator and didn’t hear. Partly because we can’t be seen together, and partly because he moves so quickly, he is always slightly ahead, with me tailing behind like a short-legged child. One day he will look back and I shan’t be there. Yes I will. I dare not lose him.

  Tom’s house is narrow, in a white terrace with empty window-boxes and skeletons of almond trees along the pavement and all the front doors painted a different colour. The colour of Tom’s front door is lilac. That’s Sheila. Everyone else has a primary colour, so hers has to be lilac.

  I hate going to her house. I have only been there twice before. Once when Tom stopped to fetch something, and I sat in the car with my head down, pretending to read a magazine and thinking each tap of heels along the pavement was hers. The second time she was in Ireland, and I was in the house, using her stove, her sink, her salt and pepper, discovering that she didn’t clean the saucepans properly.