When Bob gets a better job, we’ll be all right. Get out of this hole and get a decent flat again, and the school can find someone else to clean up their mess, for Bob will be in a chalk-stripe suit or a uniform, and we’ll give his overalls to the poor.
If we ever get another Council flat, which I doubt, if they’ve got a black list, like the Roman Church with their dirty books, I’ll put by the rent each week before I even buy cigarettes. I didn’t now how well off we were till I found out how much they were asking, other places.
Four quid we have to pay for this one room with the sink and that miserable gas fire, and lucky to get it, with two kids. Norma upstairs, she pays more for those three cupboards she calls a flat. Poor Mr Zaharian with those Salvation Army trousers he’s cut the bottoms off with the pinking shears I won at Bingo, that three-cornered cell where he cries with homesickness is not much bigger than my room at Moll’s.
This old house, which used to be a grand dwelling with servants in the days when this part of London was for those with money instead of those without, is like a picture I once saw of Hell, a big tall house all stuffed full of people wailing and wringing their hands out of the windows.
It’s all cut up into separate flats and rooms. There’s nine families living here, if you count the singles as families, Dino, Mr Zaharian, Dolly - when she’s single - and that poor old woman who creeps up and down the stairs in boots, and nobody knows her name or where she goes in the daytime. I think she’s a white slaver, and jabs young girls in the arm as they help her across the road, and bundles them into the back of a van.
When Em comes back, we’ll have a laugh talking about all the weirdos in this house. We used to tell things about the people in the flats, but most of it was guessing, because they were pretty stuffy, and whatever they did they did behind their front doors. But here the front doors are just the doors of rooms, and people share taps and bathrooms and toilets, and the downstairs people share a kitchen, and everybody knows everybody else’s business. What they don’t know they make up, and tell it on the half-landing where Dino has his room that used to be a little conservatory, which is where the women gather.
They all knew about Sammy and the iron pills, and I didn’t even have to ask anyone to take Emily while I was at the hospital. Both Marge and Dolly came right in and almost fought for the privilege. So there’s that to it, but there’s cruelty too, in the way they talk, and judge everybody.
Some of them thought it was my fault, and told Bob so. He repeats everything to me, like a child with a lesson, whether it’s going to hurt or not. He can’t always tell the difference.
When Sammy had that bruise on his face, I didn’t take him out for three days because of the women on the landing, and Mrs O’Hara who sits on that little balcony of hers, with a lap spread wide as a table, so she can see who goes in and out. When she sits, you can’t see the chair at all. She’ll fall into the area one day, balcony and all, on top of the milk bottles. I hope it’s when Em’s here.
Come back, Em, oh I wish you’d come back.
If I write to her, perhaps she will. I used to write letters, but Moll always had paper, or those shiny picture postcards she collected, and stamps. I can’t even find a pencil most days. Sammy eats them. Tina used to eat coal, and Molly said she’d started doing it when Ziggy came, and she had to stop being the baby. Sammy is jealous of little Em. I know that. He howls to get my attention, and if he can’t go or I go out and leave him, he does something bad. I remember when I was little and they used to sometimes make me feel I wasn’t there, I’d deliberately break something, or wet on the floor, because being hit was better than being ignored.
I HAD NOT meant to go home so soon, although there were times when I wished I had the money to flip back and forth like an executive.
There were many times when I missed my father, and wanted badly to see his tired, attractive face, and hear his voice, which is completely English without being upper class about it. In America, you get very conscious of the English voice. What sounds all right in Knightsbridge, the loud clear shopping voice that owns the world, can make you squirm in New York. American parodies of the British are not all that grotesque.
I wanted to talk to him. I was in slight danger of marrying Joel. Why danger? He is charming and just right in everything, like a man in a story, but if I could see him with my father, away from his own country and the service environment which invests him with some of the strength and importance of the planes he flies, it would be safer.
I had agreed to stay in America for two years, so when my mother wrote that she was ‘bitterly disappointed’, first about Christmas, and then that I wasn’t coming back this summer, it was something she had invented to make herself, or me, feel worse. She offered to pay half my fare. When I have children, I shall never make half-gestures. They shall get all or nothing.
In the spring, however, I came home from work and found Mrs Patterson shuffling through the letters on the collapsible shelf in the hall that collapses if you put a parcel on it.
Brenda says she steams open all the letters, but I don’t think she does theirs, only mine, because she is an agent for the F.B.I, and checks me for security since that day she caught me watching deadpan at the far end of the housewares aisle in her local market to see whether shoppers turned left or right after the instant starch.
When I came in, she held out the blue airmail letter upside down, because she had been trying to decipher the return address on the back, and whispered, ‘A letter from England’, with her eyebrows stretched like rubber bands, as if it were a novelty, ‘From your folks?’
‘From my sister.’ It was hard not to whisper when you answered her. Talking normally sounded like a shout.
‘My sister is in Denver. Everything all right at home, I hope?’ she asked anxiously, for, in her world, people wrote letters only for disasters. Other news went on the appropriate kind of greeting card. Birth, Thank You (for the present, the flowers, the party), Secret Pal, Sympathy, Congratulations (on your wedding, your graduation, your recovery, your promotion), Get Well Quick, Enjoy Your Retirement, Bon Voyage, Sorry I Forgot Your Birthday, Let’s Hear From You - she spent hours at the revolving racks in the drugstore searching for the exact message. When I was at Cape Cod for a week last summer, she had sent me a card with a picture of a sad fisherman’s wife saying, ‘Miss you, that’s for shore. Hurry home from sea.’
I had started to read the letter, for if I didn’t, she would think I had something to hide, so I didn’t answer for a moment.
‘Everything all right at home?’ she whispered again, and I looked at her blankly and said, ‘Yes - oh, yes thanks, everything’s fine,’ and made myself walk upstairs, for her feelings would be hurt if I ran.
‘Darling Emma,
I have got to tell you this right away, although I know how it will hurt you. Daddy has left mother. They are going to get a divorce. I think you’d better come home. I will ask Uncle Mark to clear it with the New York people. We’ll pay your fare. I feel as if it was the end of the world, though I don’t see why. It happens to a lot of people. Theirs is the generation that discovered divorce.
Please come home,
Alice.’
When I said goodbye to Joel, he said, ‘I have a feeling you’ll never come back,’ but I knew that I would. I had nothing left in England now. Even Kate was slipping away from me through her awful marriage that was dragging her slowly back to what she had been dragged away from. She was getting my letters and presents, because they didn’t come back, but she never wrote. She had called her baby after me, but she didn’t need me.
I flew home, since Uncle Mark was not paying for paper hats and streamers and laughter on the boat deck, and Alice met me at the airport in a new car and a new green suit and a new hair colour, which made me realize how long I had been away. Her round face was not troubled, because it can’t be, but she hugged me with all that soft awkward weight of hers, and said, ‘Oh God, I’m glad you came,’ so fervent
ly that I felt like a rat and a coward for letting her take the crisis alone.
Alice is twenty-eight. I am nearly twenty-two, and already we felt the sickening reversal of relationship. Our parents had blundered like children. From now on we would have to be the grownups who sorted things out.
My mother was waiting for us with a dog on the lap of an old brown dress, being brave. I really was glad to see her after so long, and I was touched that she cried with pleasure when I came, but the critical demon in me, which has to hold her always remorselessly in judgment, wished that she would be brave in something more inspiring than the tube of seated cinnamon wool that should have gone long ago to worsen the burden of the poor. Her lovely thick black hair, which is her best feature, was oily and lank. She looked, Alice told me disloyally in the kitchen, less like a virtuously wronged wife than a woman you could hardly blame a man for leaving.
‘I blame him utterly,’ I said, and nearly cut my finger off.
Her plants needed watering. Her voice was flat and drear. She wouldn’t have a drink. She didn’t want her dinner. She wouldn’t take a book to bed, as she has done every night since I can remember.
When I went into her room later, she lay propped there like a corpse at an American funeral, with her arms outside the neat covers and her head in the middle of the smooth pillow, looking through the opposite wallpaper at nothing.
The white candlewick counterpane was squared neatly on the other twin bed, pleated in under the pillow with Mrs Baker’s nicety, but the ashtray I had made for him at school was beside it, and the second part of Henry IV, and a pencil and pad he used to make notes with. They had sold their double bed some time ago after my father’s operation, thank God, or I had a feeling she might have lain rigidly on her side of it with the sheet on his side turned down, like the empty chair and filled wineglass at the dead man’s table.
‘She accepts too much,’ I said in Alice’s room.
‘She has always accepted the way he treated her.’
‘But she behaves as if she were mourning him, when she should be sick with anger. Do you suppose she knew?’
‘I don’t know.’ Alice turned round in her nightdress on the dressing-table stool, and I saw that she was pregnant. ‘I didn’t, but then I never know anything that goes on. If Gordon was involved with one of the gynies, I’d be the last to find out. He never said anything to you?’
I shook my head. I would never talk about the toolshed. I would never think about it. I had decided that, going up Mrs Patterson’s stairs in Brooklyn, as soon as I had read Alice’s letter. My father was dead for me, and all that had gone between us.
‘Why didn’t you tell me about that?’ I nodded at her stomach.
‘I was just going to when this happened. In fact, I’d started a letter to you. Then I threw it away and wrote the other and forgot to put in about the baby. That’s how agitated I was. Gordon gave me sedatives,’ Alice said with interest, because she is not the type who gets dope prescribed for her.
‘How did you hear?’ How could he tell her without telling me? That hurt almost as much as what he had done.
‘Mother telephoned. He should have told us himself. It was cowardly. What do you suppose she’s like, this trull? He’s going to marry her, you know.’
‘I saw her at the airport, that time he went to France.’
‘You should have told me.’
‘Not after what you’d said. I didn’t want you thinking that about him.’
‘What’s she like?’ Alice asked, her eyes quick with unavoidable interest.
I told her about Benita and her slow, amused voice, and the blaze of excitement that went about with her.
Alice groaned. ‘Poor mother. What is she on her own? She doesn’t seem to have any position, any slot in life without him. Count her friends. Most of them were more his than hers. She’s going to be awfully lonely.’
‘Perhaps I’ll stay at home with her,’ I said drearily. Gladys Heifer among the condensed milk, who never married because of her mother.
Alice had to go back to Birmingham after two days, two days in which my mother tried to make us behave like a bereaved family without enough strength or honesty to mention the departed. If Alice or I spoke about my father, or the practicalities of the divorce, she skated sadly away from it, saying, ‘I wish you girls wouldn’t dwell.’
‘What else is there to talk about?’ Alice said.
‘Oh - the garden, the birds coming back,’ she said stupidly. I wouldn’t be her solicitor for anything.
It was only when Alice had driven off, as guilty at going as I had felt at not being here (my mother engenders guilt feelings in people very easily), that she relaxed a little.
‘I didn’t want to upset Alice just now,’ she said. ‘The early months are so important. Millicent lost a child that way, you know, before Derek, because Mark was missing after an air raid.’
‘You told me.’ She had, many times, with reflections on the doctor. ‘But you’ve upset Alice far more by being so defeatist. Why do you take it so - so humbly?’ I was missing Alice already, more than I had expected. Alone with my mother in this over-polished, overrated house, I felt claustrophobia beginning to set in. ‘Why can’t you be angry? Why don’t you burn his notebooks, smash up his pictures, melt down his golf cups? I would. It’s an unbearable thing to happen to a woman, especially someone like you, who - well, you never stopped loving him, did you?’
She looked away, but I moved round and made her look at me. She smiled sadly, with that same infuriating meekness, and shook her head. ‘What’s the use of being angry?’ she said. ‘Millicent says I shouldn’t agree to a divorce, but what use would that be? It would only make a scandal. If it is all done sensibly and discreetly, the solicitor says, there will be no risk of jeopardizing his position.’
She was so bloody humble that I shouted at her. ‘What do you care about his position? He should lose it! Sitting there playing God and telling wretched, unhappy people they should patch up their marriage difficulties for the sake of the children - he shouldn’t be allowed to put a foot in court again. He’s a liar and a cheat and a phoney. I hate him, and you should too.’
She put a finger to her mouth and glanced towards the kitchen automatically, although pregnant girls are temporarily out of stock and there is no one there after Mrs Baker goes home. ‘He’s still your father, Emma. You mustn’t talk like that. He’s still the finest magistrate they have,’ she said, with a pitiful, inappropriate pride. ‘That doesn’t change.’
‘If my husband did this to me,’ I said, pouring myself a huge drink of my father’s whisky, ‘I’d get a gun and go after him. Or after the woman.’
She shook her head again in that same submissive way, gently stroking the smelly dog, which had a wart on its lip and disgusting dried blood in its torn ear.
‘I know how you feel,’ she said, although she couldn’t possibly, if she lived to be a thousand, even if she was reborn as me. ‘He was so close to you. In some ways, you had more of him than I did. I was always a little -’ she puffed through her nose in a brave little mirthless laugh - ‘a little shut out. This isn’t the first time I’ve been lonely, you know.’
I should have put my arms round her, but I missed my cue. I couldn’t bear her masochism. ‘It wasn’t my fault,’ I said gruffly. ‘There was no room for you too.’
‘You were too young, of course,’ she said, her eyes musing back, ‘to know about the others, and, later on, still too devoted to guess. A girl doesn’t want to believe that her own father is less than perfect. Funny how she does, with her mother,’ she added with surprising shrewdness.
‘Since how long?’ I said bluntly, standing with my legs apart, clutching the whisky, looking down at her.
Oh - years.’
‘I don’t believe it.’
‘Yes. In many ways, poor Emma, this final thing is worse for you than for me. I knew what he was like, you see. You didn’t.’
I did not want to see my father. M
y mother said that I must, but I refused. He telephoned, and I would not speak to him. When he telephoned again, I answered, and slammed down the receiver when I heard his voice. The bell began to ring again almost immediately.
‘Telephone, Emma!’ my mother called from the kitchen, as if I was deaf, and I let it ring, staring at it, then picked it up limply and listened, and when he said, ‘I want you to come and see me,’ I said, ‘All right.’
‘Who was that?’ My mother came out of the kitchen, putting her rings back on her wet hands. When she is at the sink, she still makes a great thing of taking off her engagement ring and the sapphire he gave her, laying them in the tiny dish he brought her back from France, and putting them carefully on again when she is done. If I was her, I’d flush the whole lot down the drain, Limoges dish and all.
‘Lisa. She wants me to see her tomorrow evening.’
‘For dinner? We were going to have the steak.’
That was the kind of thing that had driven my father mad. The people for the meals, instead of the meals for the people. ‘What time, dear? I shall have to—’
‘I’ll cook.’ I clenched my teeth. Good intentions or not, Gladys Heifer was never going to be able to stay the course.
My father had taken a service flat. Strange furniture, unlikely curtains, indifferent carpet stained with other people’s drinks. He was like a man in a hotel room, transient, unpossessed. The familar things, his typewriter, law books on the card table he was using as a desk, bits of clothing, his stick hooked over the back of an alien chair, only increased the strangeness.
Walking down the hall past the scarred red prison doors of so many lonely people was the hardest thing I had ever done. I was afraid of him.
Kate and Emma Page 18
