Kate and Emma

by Monica Dickens

  My mother met me at the station in the sheepskin coat she had already put away and camphored. ‘This will be the end of the primroses,’ she said. It wasn’t true, but since the snow could not hurt any of the alpines now flowering in her rock garden, it had to be the end of something.

  My father was by the door when we got to the house, looking out from the lighted hall through a curtain of gilded snow. He never waits for me like that. I always have to find him. When I kissed him, he puts his arms round me quickly, and I realized that he had been as nervous of me as I was of him. We had thought that we would look somehow different after our last meeting. The relief that we did not was very great.

  Since I have been in love, it is strange being at home. My room, the feel of the banister, the warm spots and the draughts, the familiar smell of dog and furniture polish and starch in the curtains are part of another self. How can they all be the same when I am so different?

  It is only when I am at home that I feel guilty. Escaped, emancipated, special; but a cheat too. In London, it doesn’t feel like cheating, except that time when I met Johnny Jordan after Tom and I had been at Kate’s flat.

  My grandmother was there for the week-end, which was why I had come, as much as to stop my mother moaning. She is quite rich, because of her B.B. shares, and she drives about in a fat black Austin with a chauffeur who used to be an alcoholic and looks as if he could do with a drink now, but otherwise she is the plain grocer’s widow she would have us think her, and still smells faintly of buns.

  She gets on all right with my mother, on a level of mutual misunderstanding, each trying to compensate for some lack they find in the other. My mother fusses round Gran in a smothering way that would give me claustrophobia if I were an old lady, and Gran listens dutifully to the trivialities of my mother’s days, faking interest.

  They both try too hard, and it makes a week-end rather exhausting. Why don’t they leave each other alone? They don’t even like each other any better for trying so hard. My father doesn’t try at all with either of them, and they both love him.

  When I took in Gran’s breakfast tray on Saturday morning, I drew the curtains and showed her that the snow was lying quite thickly on the garden.

  ‘Are you going out to play in it?’ Gran asked. I had on a pair of Bermudas and my hair in two pigtails fastened with paper clips, and she does occasionally have these lapses on first waking, when she forgets what decade we’re in.

  ‘There’s a big drift outside the garage. Daddy and I are going to shovel it, so we can get the car out.’

  ‘I don’t want your father to shovel.’ My mother came in with something I had left off the tray, which Gran didn’t want anyway. ‘Every year if it snows, men his age drop like ninepins from heart attacks. I’m always reading about it.’ Those are the kind of news items she never misses.

  ‘David is stronger than he looks,’ Gran said soothingly. ‘How pretty you look in that green, Laura.’ It was red, but Gran sees everything in shades of black and white, so she guesses.

  ‘Do I?’ My mother was surprised. It was an old jersey thing she’s had too long. She must have looked out of the window and seen the snow lying and more in the sky to come, and thought What does it matter? When I am her age, I shall dress more carefully, not less, especially at week-ends. When I am forty-eight, Tom will be sixty.

  ‘She is pretty,’ I said, because thinking of me and Tom at forty-eight and sixty mellowed me. I put my arm round her and felt her awkwardness. She can never relax into an embrace.

  ‘You’re getting thin, Emma.’ She always says that. It shows motherly concern for a daughter away from home. It never was true when she used to say it to Alice, but it is now, about me.

  My father and I couldn’t talk much while we were shovelling. The snow was wet and it was hard work. Our faces were red and my knees were mottled red and blue between my shorts and woollen socks, and his breath was like steam from a kettle, because he was panting. It was harder for him, because he can’t balance properly with his leg. I could have done the job by myself in the same time, but we used to do it together when Peter was too small and Alice too lazy, so we did it together now, and my mother only opened the window twice to call out: ‘Don’t overdo it!’

  ‘That’s the voice she used to call to us: Don’t go too far out,’ I said.

  ‘The day Peter was drowned,’ my father said, ‘she’d stayed in the hotel with you, do you remember?’

  I have never forgotten the exact discomfort of the wicker chairs we were sitting in when the ambulance man came in through the hotel porch.

  ‘“If I’d been there,” she said afterwards, “I would have told him not to go too far out.”’

  ‘He wouldn’t have taken any notice. None of us did.’

  ‘But the thing was, she had to say that. It was my fault. We all knew that. I was with him. I should have known about the current. She didn’t say it for about a month, and I thought she wasn’t going to. Perhaps she hoped she wouldn’t. In the end she had to.’

  ‘I love you.’ He won’t let me rage and storm against my mother, so it is all I can say to make up for these ghastly things in his life.

  ‘I’m afraid you may have a father complex. Perhaps that’s why - ‘ He stopped and looked at me. The last time my mother came to the window, we had stopped work to foil her before she called and we were in the earthy little toolshed, putting the shovels away. It was warm in there and we had lingered, stamping and banging our hands, while he lit a cigarette.

  I sat down on the table where my mother pots things, to shake snow out of my boot.

  ‘I have to ask you again, Emmie,’ he said. ‘Have you thought about what you’re going to do?’

  I shook my head. I could feel my face growing stubborn, but I was afraid of letting go. ‘We tried not seeing each other. It didn’t work.’

  ‘How do you mean, it didn’t work?’ He had on a thick brown sweater and a torn tweed jacket and baggy old trousers he’d dredged up from what looked like the twenties. The hat that used to collect rain like a gutter when we went fishing was pushed to the back of his head, and the circulation was coming back in claret patches to his bony forehead and nose. My mother would have screamed Heart! but he was just cold, and nervous about having to talk to me like this.

  ‘We can’t, that’s all. We just can’t.’

  ‘That’s absurd. You can’t. If you know what’s the right thing to do, you should have the strength to do it.’

  My eyes stung, and I blinked and looked down. It hadn’t expected him to be quite so obtuse. ‘Damn Eric,’ I said. ‘I wish you didn’t know.’

  ‘I’ve known for some time,’ he said more gently. ‘Not what it was, but I knew there was something. How could I not know? You don’t crash about so much any more.’

  ‘I’ve grown up.’

  ‘Not very. But you’ve stopped falling over things.’

  ‘You should be glad. It used to annoy you.’

  ‘I know. Funny, when you came into the drawing-room last night with the tray of drinks, with your hair piled up and the black dress, I found myself wishing you’d trip over the rug.’

  ‘You haven’t said anything to Mother?’ I knew he hadn’t. She could not have avoided at least looking at me wretchedly, even if she had not known what to say.

  He shook his head. ‘No need for her ever to know anything about it.’

  ‘She’ll have to know in the end.’ We stared at each other mulishly, antagonists. I wished I hadn’t come. I wished that I had stayed in London and waited about, watching the dirty snow, on the chance of seeing Tom. But Tom and Sheila had gone to stay with friends. That was the third reason why I had come home. I hoped it had snowed in Buckinghamshire, and spoiled Sheila’s golf.

  The toolshed had only been warm compared to the snow-heavy air outside. It was cold and damp now, and I wanted to go back to the house, but my father said, ‘Wait a minute. Something has got to be said.’

  I was standing by the door, lookin
g at the humped bushes and the sheet of lawn my mother’s silly dog had spoiled, going mad in circles on the virgin snow. ‘There’s nothing to say. I’m sorry, Daddy. I’m sorry as hell to hurt you. I don’t expect you to quite understand, but I wish you’d try.’

  He grimaced as if he were in physical pain. ‘You’ll think I’m lying if I say I do understand. I’ve got to tell you something, Emma. You’re the last person I thought I’d tell, because - ‘ He groaned. ‘I always wanted you to think I was perfect.’

  ‘I do,’ I said, because I do, even with everything I know about him.

  ‘Come in again and shut the door.’

  He took off the fishing hat and flung it on to a shelf of flowerpots, running his mittened hands automatically up the sides of his head, where the hair grows in pigeon wings. ‘Listen, Emmie.’ We were like children playing secrets, hiding from the grown-ups. It was absurd. We didn’t look at each other. I was ashamed and embarrassed for us both, especially as he didn’t tell it well. My father with his relaxed command of words, never garrulous, timing replies just right, apt and easy with the customers in court - he told me this as if I were a headmaster and he a naughty schoolboy, stumbling over his story and stammering, choking on his cigarette, grinding it out underfoot and coughing again as he lit another.

  I didn’t want to hear. I didn’t care what he had done. Just don’t tell me I I cried inside myself. Why do I have to know?

  It was the woman with the eyes and hair whom I had met two years ago at the cocktail party. Benita was her name.

  ‘I saw her at the airport when you went to France. Was she going with you?’

  ‘You don’t have to know the details,’ my father said. ‘You shouldn’t know any of it. It’s only that I -1 have to tell you now to stop you making this hideous mistake.’

  ‘Why is it a mistake to be in love?’

  ‘It isn’t, if you’re free.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘He’s not.’

  ‘He doesn’t love her.’

  ‘That makes no difference.’ Now that he had got his initial confession out, choking on it like a lump of unmasticated steak, he could talk to me more easily. We were looking at each other again. The earthy smell was damp and pungent in my nostrils. I have never liked this log cabin toolshed since the spiders when we were children. I didn’t like it now.

  ‘It’s classically simple, dearest,’ he said. ‘You must see that. It’s between right and wrong. Someone like you can’t possibly make a life out of the wrong.’

  ‘Why can you?’

  ‘I can’t. Benita and I are - chucking it. Putting an end to it, Letting go. There isn’t an expression that doesn’t sound like a musical comedy.’

  ‘Would you have married her?’

  ‘You can’t base a life together on someone’s else’s misery.’

  ‘I know.’ I did know. I had known all along, I suppose, even when the flooded river swept by, encouraging me: Love him, love him.

  My father never said: He’s too old for you.

  He never said: He should have told you that his wife knew.

  He never said: He’s a coward. He’s thought of himself all along more than of you.

  If he had said any of these things, I would have broken from him and gone out, back to my life. I knew them all. I didn’t need to hear them from him or anyone else. They made no difference to my love.

  But he didn’t say them. He said quietly, with his hands in the pockets of his sagging old jacket, which my mother had tried, ineffectually, to patch with leather, ‘You have two choices then, if you won’t give up. To wreck his marriage, or to wreck your own life.’

  ‘I don’t care about conventions. It’s been—’

  ‘Do you like this hole-and-corner thing you’ve got yourself into?’ he burst out violently. ‘Don’t tell me it’s exciting. It’s not. It’s terrible. Exhausting. Wretched. Destroying. A few friends who know - and leer a bit. The rest can’t be your friends. Ail the places you can’t go together. All the contriving, the lies, the - the ghastly effort involved just to meet for a drink - Oh God, Emmaline Bullock! I’m fifty-two. Who cares what a mess I make? But you - you’re twenty, and the world is throbbing with men for you, and you should be shot for your insanity - your sheer bloody-minded, depraved perversity that makes you steal and cheat and lie, at twenty. Twenty. You should be shot.’

  ‘Help me,’ I said. ‘What am I going to do?’

  ‘Help you - when I can’t even help myself. We’ll have to help each other.’ He grimaced again, jerking the face muscles on one side, as if someone had run a needle into him. ‘It’s going to be hell for both of us. Do you want to make a pact that we’ll stick to it?’

  When Kate and I made a pact, we hit the backs of our hands with a hairbrush, whirled them round to make the blood start out, then pressed the backs of our hands together, joining the blood.

  I took a stiff brush that my mother uses for scrubbing flowerpots, and we took off our gloves and I showed him how to do it. The blood sprang up out of my hand in tiny jewelled bubbles. The veins of his were nearer the surface, and one of them broke when the bristles hit it. When he began to circle his arm, I saw that the hand was already covered with blood, so I pulled his arm down quickly, and we joined his dark flowing blood with my bright drops.

  ‘Blood comrades,’ I said, sealing my disloyalty to Tom. ‘I swear.’

  ‘I swear.’

  Part Three

  So em is off to America. Her uncle is sending her to study sales techniques, she says, but I know it is really to get her away from this Tom.

  She’s broken with him. I asked her flat out. If I don’t talk about it, she said, it’s all right. Just don’t make me talk about it.

  I hated to see her go. I wanted her to be here when I have the baby. I wanted her to come to the hospitaal and see me sitting up in bed with a ribbon in my hair and that sort of purified look, like they get in the movies after they take the pillow out and pretend they’ve had it.

  It’s odd, I’ve always minded so much about how she sees me.

  She’s seen me every worst way, from the beginning on, when I’d been two weeks in Stinkney without a change of clothes, and all that talcum in my hair to get rid of the filthy oil they hit you with. But I still, when I’m looking sweet, like people do when they’ve just had a baby, whether they want it or not, I still want Em to see me.

  I rolled my hair the other day the way the models do, all over to one side with the ends flicked out, and my first thought was: I must show Em. But Em is three thousand miles away. I may as well cut the whole lot off and go back to polo necks. Or just let my neck show, who cares? Who cares what I look like? If I ask Bob to admire something new about me, his first reaction is to paw. That’s men, as my aunt used to say, the only one of my mother’s family who still came to see us. Can’t hardly wait till one gets out to stuff the next one in.

  If I could have Em as a visitor in the hospital, that Sister would give me more than the fag end of her manners. She’s still there, because I asked in Out Patients. If Em came to my bedside with her hair swept round her head like a polished bronze turban and that yellow dress she bought to travel in, there’d be no Get up and make your bed, Mrs - er. You young girls are all born lazy.

  Only another month to go. With Sammy, I couldn’t wait to be rid of him. Little did I know, though that was another thing my aunt used to say. It won’t come out as easy as it went in. I am afraid, and I want Em here to tell it to afterwards and lie about how brave I was. It’s one thing I’ve experienced that she hasn’t.

  If I didn’t look so awful, I’d have gone to the station to see her off, I mean that. Why should I care about her family being there? I’m not afraid of them. They almost had me practically one of them, and Em said at the time that they were pleased about her and me and the flat, though I think she made that up.

  It’s hell being pregnant in the summer, because you can’t cover it with a big coat. If Moll hadn’t given me that Hawaiian
flowered smock, I’d not have been able to go to the party she gave for Em. I took old Sam to Moll’s, because Barbie and Ron had gone to the races, and Barbie’s getting sick of minding him for me anyway, now that I can’t pay her hardly anything. Some friend.

  He’s really quite all right in the cot alone, but Molly and Em wouldn’t think so, so we took him along and I was quite proud of him, the fuss everyone made. Em gave him the little red suit as a going-away present. All the things she’s given me. Lisa must be mad with jealousy because she didn’t get the saddle-stitched jacket. I can’t wear it yet, but my day will come.

  At Moll’s we sang Should Auld Acquaintance. It choked my throat. All the kids were singing, even the new ones who hardly know Em, and I thought of my birthday that evening centuries ago, and how far we had all come since then.

  When I was seventeen, and beginning to find so much in life, through Molly, I couldn’t wait to go ahead, to get on with the next thing. Now I was wishing I could have stayed right there where I was in the red polo neck with my waist twenty-four and my hips nothing, and all the kids only cherubs in the candle-light, and other people’s at that.

  They have taken back some of the men at the coach works, but not Bob, although he’s been down there twice and seen a man who always said he would look out for him. That’s how they are, It’s only people like Molly and Em you can rely on. The rest arc with you when you’re up, and kick you into the gutter when you’re down.

  I’ve heard my mother say that when we didn’t have much to eat that winter when the baker’s man stopped keeping the stale bread and buns for us. When Dad was in work, and before we had to move to that shack in the mud down the end of the lane, he’d been kind. The lower you get, she said, the harder they kick.

  But Molly says she is going to get work for Bob. She knows everyone at the Town Hall, and she thinks she can get him something. He still believes he is going in the Army, in spite of what the recruiting sergeant said last time he rolled in there. He went to the clinic again to have his feet seen, and they said: Splendid! Keep on with the exercises. So he does, it drives you frantic, but they are just as flat. Any fool can see that.