Kate and Emma

by Monica Dickens

  The kids were in bed, and I thought they were asleep, but Sammy started to cry, and then he called out, Tm cold, Mumma.’

  ‘I’ll give you cold.’ For he had two jerseys on, and his socks.

  ‘Go in to him, Kate.’

  ‘Go in yourself.’ But it would take more than a crying child to move him out of a chair. I went in, and Emily had got most of the blanket wrapped round her, so I pulled some away and tucked it round Sammy, and dared him not to go to sleep.

  ‘I’m cold, Mumma.’ That’s what he calls me, though a boy his age should say Mum. Even Emily does. But with Sammy it’s Mumma, like a baby.

  All of a sudden, Bob jumped up and shouted, scaring all the kids awake and the dog barking round his feet in a frenzy, pulling at his laces.

  I swore at him, but he said, ‘Shut it, Katie. I’ve got an idea.’

  That in itself was rare enough, so me and the kids watched him without interfering, to see what he would do.

  He’s always been clever with his hands, has Bob, the one thing really you must give him credit for, no matter what you think about the inside of his head. We had been behind with the gas bill for some time, and they were threatening to cut us off, though I don’t really think they would do that, they never have yet. They had been saying again on the wireless what a bad winter it was going to be, the worst within living memory, unless you were older than you ought to be. They keep on about it, nagging away about coal shortages and power cuts and what about the old folk - as if old people were the only ones who had to live in the kind of igloos they call houses in this rotten sunless town - and so Bob bought me a huge pair of fur gloves, like a bear’s paw. They cost five pounds, which was one reason why we hadn’t paid the gas bill, but much more fun.

  I didn’t know he’d been worrying about the gas - Bob sometimes goes for weeks without saying much that makes sense - but it seems he had, for when they started croaking about the winter again, he jumped up and went into the kids’ room where the meter is and fiddled about a bit, and then went back and hunted in the shed among the tools and stuff he’s brought home from time to time according to what job he was in, until he found what he wanted.

  The meter man with the foxy eyes, who used to look at me very speculative before I had to struggle back into Moll’s old Hawaiian smock again, wasn’t due for another two months, and before that Bob would fix all back to normal so that there would be enough registered to fool him.

  ‘To allay suspicion.’ Bob likes a good round phrase when he’s serious about something. ‘Being one jump ahead, that’s what does it, Kate girl. If it’s going to come down like ice, like they say, I shall be the man who saved my family’s lives.’

  He was as pleased with himself as if he’d invented the Bomb, but he was bloody nearly the man who lost his family’s lives, for all that.

  Bob and I had gone out that night. It was Bingo at the Moderne, and they were offering double cash prizes, so we had to go, although I look like a beer barrel, Bob says, in that brown coat.

  ‘Get me another then.’

  ‘Have the baby first. Then I will.’

  After Sammy was born, he bought me a fur for my neck. He promised me a present before Emily and Susannah, but then when they were girls, he forgot.

  I wore the fur gloves. They make a strong hollow sound when you smack your hands together, and you’d think that dog would go out of his mind. Take care of the kids, Bruce, Bob always says when we go out, very solemn as if the dog could understand him, but if anyone did get in, he’d do no more than lift his leg on them, if that.

  It was cold already, not half-way into November, and we had stuffed up the grating in the back room with newspaper and rags. Susannah had a cold, which wasn’t unusual, her nose is like a tap, and Sammy was still coughing, but he’ll not lose that until the spring. Smoking too much, I tell him, and he barks away like a sea-lion.

  So Bob wanted to leave the gas on in their room, but there had been a little girl burned alive in the next street when her nightdress caught fire, and so being a good careful mother, I made him turn it off.

  If I hadn’t, there’d have been no house left, I daresay, let alone no kids.

  When we come back from the Bingo, a pound the poorer since the game was rigged and the woman who won most of the cash was related to the manager by marriage, there were no kids, it’s true, but it could have been worse.

  Though not much. There were two cars outside our house and three policemen sitting in the passage as if they were waiting to see the dentist, and they jumped on Bob as if he was a wildcat and took him away in handcuffs. Handcuffs for Bob, I ask you. He was crying when he left, poor soul, and trying to get his wrist up to wipe his nose. I hope he wiped it on the copper’s cuff instead.

  The third policeman, who was a plain-clothes man, much more respectable, took me up to the hospital, and I stayed there the rest of the night in a bed in a side room, and they let me bring the little ones home next morning, though they kept Sammy in a bit longer, because they weren’t sure of his chest. When I went later to fetch him home, the Sister, who didn’t look old enough to be telling anybody anything and would never get a man and children of her own with that boss eye, told me that he was undernourished, so I said he was under a doctor, thank you, for chronic diarrhoea, which was being taken care of.

  She said, and you couldn’t tell which eye was looking at you, that it was funny there had been no diarrhoea in the hospital, and I said, well, wasn’t she clever, she must have cured him, and took him away. He didn’t want to come with me at first. He’s like that sometimes in public, very embarrassing, so I carry some toffees in my pocket. He’ll come for them.

  It was Violetta who had found them, and I wish it had been anyone else, because her fat pink tongue is hung as loose in her mouth as a rotting tooth, and there was enough people knew about it anyway, without her filling in all the overblown details to all comers. Not that I care. I’m getting out. I’ve had it.

  She means to be kind, Violetta. It was her overdeveloped sense of kindness that took her to the Tunnel that night in the first place. When Bob and I were on our way out, we met her in the street coming back from the off licence with a few bottles concealed under the tent that is neither a coat nor a jacket, but comes halfway between, where her hips should be.

  ‘Going out, children?’ she asked, as we came up the stone steps from the underworld. ‘I look in on the babies for you, if you like.’

  ‘It’s locked up,’ I said, for I’m not such a fool as to tell even Violetta, who wouldn’t steal a threepenny bus ride if the conductor was on top, that Bob had not got round to fixing the lock yet.

  She went anyway, to see if she could get in, for her husband has a ringful of keys the size of a grapefruit. It was as well she did, for as soon as she opened the door, she smelled the gas, and if she hadn’t pulled all three of them outside, that would have been it.

  She saved their lives really, although you couldn’t thank her. ‘No trouble, my dear, no trouble,’ she said. ‘Glad to help.’ As if she had done no more than iron a couple of shirts for me, and when I tried to give her a present, she gave the money back and said, ‘You need it more.’

  Too true.

  When Bob had his flash of inspiration, he had disconnected the gaspipe and fitted a rubber tube on in some way so that it went round the meter without registering.

  Very simple, like all works of pure genius. What wasn’t so pure was that one end of the old rubber tube slipped half-way off while we were out, so there I was that night with my kids in the hospital and my husband in goal.

  He got six months, which was hard, I thought, but he was scared dumb in the court, and the magistrate thought he was being obstinate. He won’t see his child until it’s about three months old, but if it’s a boy, I shall take it up and show it him, and the warder who stays there with you will look tenderly on the affecting scene and reflect on the courage of the Women who Wait.

  The prison welfare officer, they call her,
and she was very nice, I must say it, although normally I can’t stand her type of woman.

  Mollyarthur now, she was different. She took other people into her own crowded life, but these women with folders and little cars, their own lives aren’t up and down enough, so they get this craving to go out and live in someone else’s.

  Look at all the help they give, Marge Collins used to say, as she counted out the loot she’d milked out of one more Council committee, yet another charity outfit, all mad to outdo the others, fighting like jackals over the bodies of the poor.

  ‘Most of them get paid for it,’ I said. ‘It’s just a job, like any other.’

  But there was something about the woman from the prison, something bold and honest, with an undercover laugh twitching at her lips to get out, that made me think of what Em might be like when she hit forty, still not caring what she said. When I told this woman that I didn’t want her coming bothering me, which I didn’t, because the place was in the worst state it’s ever been and I didn’t want any of the germ maniacs after me to clean up, she said, ‘Don’t worry, I didn’t want to come either,’ and we laughed, recognizing something crude in each other.

  She was standing in the stone passage with her collar turned up and all the litter of cans and newspaper round her feet and the string of wet grey washing slapping her in the face, since she’s much taller than me. Sammy had gone off somewhere with her bag, and I had a flash of insight as I saw her standing beleaguered there with that crooked smile, that although it was bad to be the property of all the do-gooders in the welfare state, it was worse for her to have the burden of people like me and Bob.

  But I didn’t give in. It might be her today, but next time it would be My Colleague, with a nose like a tapir and a plan for reorganizing my life, so I said that I was quite all right with what I was getting now from the National Assistance, and that the kids and I were moving into a better place.

  Both half-truths. The money’s enough to keep alive on, that’s about it, and the new place isn’t better than Thomas’s Tunnel, but it’s different.

  You can say that again.

  Violetta couldn’t understand why I had to move. ‘Six months,’ she said. ‘No trouble at all. He’ll be out before you can turn round.’

  ‘I’m not going to stay here with all the street knowing where he is.’

  ‘Why do you care, child? It happens to the best people.’

  But I do care. She thinks it is because I am ashamed of the neighbours knowing, but it isn’t that. It’s because I don’t want them to be sorry for me.

  The day poor Bob went to court and never come out again, Mrs Olson came over with a chocolate cake. That’s what they do. Any trouble, they bake away like mad, like people send flowers to a corpse to make themselves feel better for not having done anything for it when it was alive. When Pearl Richmond’s husband was in the crash with his petrol tanker, someone who’d never spoken to her before because she’s a Jap, baked her a fruit cake the size of a tombstone and she was still cutting at it when he came out of hospital two months later.

  The chocolate cake was all right though. The kids and I ate half and then Bruce got at the rest.

  For some time back, I’d been having nostalgia for my old haunts. This part of London is all right in some ways, but I much prefer the old familiar neighbourhood where Bob and I were for the first two years, and where Moll was at Grove Lodge, and I used to fight with Joan in the kitchen of that nursing home that backed on the Common.

  I took the kids over there one day and wandered about and passed the end of Butt Street and made a face down it, and found this flat on a card outside a tobacconist along with all the tarts, now heavily disguised as anything and everything, even Woman to do General Work. They are not allowed to call themselves Models any more, but you can always tell. Barbie showed me how.

  If you could pick up this flat and transfer it to Spain or somewhere warm, it wouldn’t be so bad. Even if you could just swivel it round on its base so that at least one of the windows got the sun when there was any. After the Tunnel, I don’t mind so much it being dark, but it’s those bloody great windows that let in nothing but the cold, and when the first snow came last week, it sat on the window-ledge outside the big room, blown half-way up the glass and frozen there like a hand trying to push its way in.

  What it is, it used to be the servants’ quarters of a big house on the side of a hill, in the days when what you saw down the hill wasn’t a million tiny houses with women telling terrible things about their husbands from one back door to another.

  When you have lived in this flat for a bit, you begin to see what they thought of servants. Or perhaps it wasn’t so damp in those days. Everything is running, the walls, and if you hang the wash outside on a nice day, it stops being dry after you bring it indoors. It probably looked better too, with furniture in, and when the big room was the kitchen, with a fine coal range under the chimney where my crabby little grate is now and a huge table in the middle, scrubbed white, with people kneading though and chopping onions and shaping sausage rolls on it.

  Most of our stuff has been sold, for one reason and another, or gone back where it came from, because of the payments, and the place looks like a barracks after the troops have moved out.

  I kept the mattress though, when I sold the kids’ bed. The bed that was Bob’s and mine, that we got at the auction, I got rid of that because the people who used to live here left behind one of those chairs that pull out to sleep.

  ‘What will you do when your husband comes home?’ asks Mrs Martin, who lives in part of the upstairs, very pushing, and is going to have to be told soon to keep her fat red nose out of my business.

  She has a great gift for asking the wrong kind of question, a gift which she exercises at every chance, to keep her hand in.

  ‘If he’s got such a good job up north, why didn’t you go with him?’

  ‘Oh, you poor thing,’ she said, the first time she saw me from the back. ‘Did you burn yourself?’

  ‘I was born with it,’ I said, and turned my collar all the way down, so she could see better, and she said, ‘How shocking.’

  How shocking. So I don’t wear scarves round the house now, so that she’ll have to see.

  ‘I heard the boy shrieking. Has he hurt himself?’ She stands at the top of the back stairs and yells down at me with her teeth out and legs like cider bottles and the toes of her dirty angora slippers over the edge of the top step.

  I don’t really like her at all. Her husband, who is a postman I wouldn’t trust with a Christmas card, let alone valuables in the mail, is for ever hammering and drilling. They are wiring the insides of the walls so that when Bob comes back, they can listen in to what we say.

  But everything will be all right when Bob comes home. He’ll get a good job, though he’s sunk himself with the Army now, I fear, and we’ll have some money again and get another bed, king size, if we want it, with a headboard done up in all brocade. Red.

  Because the house is on a hill, part of the flat is half underground. That’s the sunny side, needless to say, and it’s underneath the front steps that rise up over what used to be the coal cellars, only they’re nailed up now, with bodies inside of people who’ve died of pneumonia down here.

  Ours is called the garden flat. Where do you live? Oh - at the top of the hill. The garden flat, you know. And you can see me out there with one of those big flowered umbrellas, serving Earl Grey tea to the vicar.

  He came, incidentally, looking for Ruth Sullivan - waste of time, with a name like that, I told him - a great starved man with a face full of horror at what he’d found in the church, and scared the life out of me, asking me if I wouldn’t come and find it too.

  The garden outside our flat is a junk heap, which was paradise for the kids at first, but it’s too cold now to play out there, and everything is covered with snow and frost. I picked up an old cast-iron frying-pan to see if I could use it, and it nearly burned my fingers off. Even the dog bark
s to come back in as soon as I put him out.

  At the bottom of the garden, lopsided a little from the hill, is an old chicken shed where Sammy goes to play some of the time. I’d just as soon he was out of the house. He whines all the time, and cries for his dad. It’s sickening.

  If it wasn’t for you, I tell him, your dad wouldn’t be locked up. Coughing, complaining of the cold. He did it for you, I tell him, and the least you can do is shut up grizzling.

  He doesn’t grizzle when he’s up with the Sullivans. He’s sly, that’s where it is. He knows how to get round them for treats. And he knows how to drive me even farther round the bend than I am already, with the three of them, and the dread of the next.

  BABY GIRL FOUND! ON CONVENT DOORSTEP When Sister Mary of the Angels opened the back door to take in the milk, she thought she heard a kitten mewing. Then she saw a baby girl, apparently only a few days old, wrapped in newspaper in a canvas toolbag.

  The Sullivans live in the big top flat, and like all women with a lot of children of her own, Ruth never minds a few more. She is going to take mine when I have to go to the hospital. Sam and Emily are up there half the time as it is, thank God. She gives them jelly squares and biscuits, and she has given me a few baby clothes because she says she’s finished, but I don’t think she is. She’s the kind of woman who suddenly produces another at forty-eight and gets photographed with it in the maternity ward, looking surprised.

  Ruth Sullivan is not like Molly, with thousands of kids, but still managing to let her husband feel there’s room for him.

  As if I didn’t have enough on my hands, she tells him, without you coming home demanding, though all the poor thing has done is come home from the lumber yard in a perfectly normal way and ask what’s for supper.

  I like Ruth, because she’s kind, in a domineering way, and when you’re as tired as I am, you don’t mind so much being ordered about, but he’s the better of the two, though doomed to go through life unnoticed, because she makes so much noise being a wonderful mother and everybody’s friend.