She’s quite well known in the district. People say: Oh, you live in the same house as Ruth Sullivan. Isn’t she wonderful? but nobody seems to know Smiler.
His name is Ronnie, but she calls him Smiler, because he has a sad, rejected face, like a dog pressed against a locked door on a cold night. He is a big man, slow in his movements - he gets terribly in the way in their crowded flat - and with his shoulders hunched forward as if he was looking for something.
The first time I saw him, coming up the hill one evening while I was pushing the pram up from the other side, full of kids and firewood, my heart turned, because I thought it was Douglas.
I have never seen him since the day they separated us, like runaway lovers, in the coffee bar, but I have never forgotten him. A few steps nearer and I saw that Smiler wasn’t like him at all, because Doug’s face was stronger and more secret. It didn’t have his history written on it. But the stooping walk was the same, that’s what fooled me, and when Smiler saw the smile that had begun on my face, he smiled too, as if he had found what he was looking for.
I had stopped by the side path which leads round to my door, and he said, ‘Are you the little girl who moved into the downstairs? Hooray.’
I don’t know why anyone should hooray over me, with a shape like a sperm whale and three croupy kids, but Smiler and I have been friends from that time on. Ruth doesn’t mind. It gets him out of the way when he comes down to see me. He brings half a pint of milk that he’s lifted from the kitchen behind her back, and I make hot chocolate and we talk to each other. I haven’t had anyone to talk to for ages, not since Em. He can’t talk to his wife, because she’s never still or silent long enough. So it’s someone to talk to, for both of us.
I thought at first that I would be able to talk to their eldest girl, who is about sixteen, and in some ways puts me in mind of me at that age.
Some people are in love with the world. Linda is in hate with the world, like I was for a time, only she’s got no reason. Her mother spoils her and her father daren’t cross her, because of it. She stays out half the night, with a gang of girls who all do their hair alike and wear the kind of sham-leather clothes I used to think were the ultimate before I changed my ideas, and when she’s at home she either sulks, or yells that it’s suffocating her and she’s being cheated.
What of? She’s got nothing to offer that I can see. But she’s young, and I wanted to be friends with her because I’m young too. I’m only twenty-two, but I’m old, old, old, and I don’t want to forget what it felt like to be sixteen and not give a damn.
But Linda’s got no time for me. I’m grown up. I’ve been caught by marriage and kids, so I’m one of Them, who’s done something or other to stop her getting whatever it is she thinks the world owes her for taking up air space.
I CAME HOME from Canada in late December, and I hope my mother appreciated - No. If she knew it was a sacrifice to stay in London to have Christmas with her and Connie instead of going to Scotland to have it with Joel, it wouldn’t be worth making.
Why doesn’t he come down here? they asked, especially Connie, because she is a ravaged, sex-hungry woman with the scalp showing through her hair, although she’s only been a widow a few years.
I pretended that Joel couldn’t get leave. It was not fair to initiate him into the family gathering at Uncle Mark’s, with Nell breastfeeding her baby in the room where you put your coat (she’s gone from weirdo to peasant since marrying a scientist), and poor Gran not quite with it, and the stray relations who come out from under stones to have a feed at Uncle Mark’s expense.
It was my first Christmas in England since I went to America. In other years, my father had been there to make it human. This year, no one mentioned him. When Uncle Mark gave the toast to Absent Friends, my mother looked hopeful, because she is still rather dedicated, like a general’s relict, and Connie cleared her throat threateningly, but Uncle Mark shoved his glass into his beard, and that was that.
Derek and I got a little drunk and went for a walk on the Heath, and kissed each other with dispassionate passion, which did us both good, I thought, so it was just as well that Joel wasn’t there.
The next day, Connie told me that I would ruin my skin if I drank too much. I didn’t tell her that she had ruined Uncle Mark’s party by refusing to drink his beautiful wine and leaving selections of her food in a ring round the edge of her plate. It wasn’t true. The party was ruined by my father not being there.
Connie is not so bad as she ought to be, considering her habits. She makes rugs all the time, which is peaceful, and she and my mother enjoy quite a lot of rapport, decrying this and that. They talk of moving to the country and buying a loom.
When Joel came to London, he got on beautifully with both of them, as he always does, because people are meat and drink to his vitality, so never bores. He gave my mother the jollying treatment, and she said afterwards, ‘He’s not a bit what I expected.’
‘What did you expect?’
‘Well, an American - I thought I wouldn’t know how to talk to him,’ she said, and I realized that she had been afraid.
When we are married, she will come to visit us - Connie can stay behind with the loom - and I shall be much nicer to her. It will be easier, with Joel. His tolerance is natural, rather than an attempt to understand. To be what he thinks I am, I have to hide my cruel devil.
He wants me to give up my job. I shall have to in the end, but not yet. I am at the London office, planning the layout of the first of the new B.B. markets in Leeds. I must just see this one through, I tell him. But then there will be another, in Sheffield, and then another. Not much of a marriage, and what happens when Joel gets sent back to the States?
Then I shall be an Air Force wife, planning nothing more challenging than Wives’ Club teas, with the bread dyed blue to match the napkins, and high-chested women in hats or hair spray in charge of the ornate teapots from the Chancery Lane silver vaults, whose owners have sat up half the night poking toothpicks into the scrolls and crevices.
I shall be one of the healthily pregnant women disparaging the marvellous cheap clothes and china in the PX, and pushing a cart with a small rude child in it round the commissary. But the drugged look on my face will not be the normal supermarket coma. It will be nostalgia for the days when I was not a customer, but a power behind the scenes who could design you a far better commissary, right from the day the first bulldozers moved on to the empty land.
Before Joel went back to Scotland, I took him to see my father. He and Benita live near Ham Common. They have a little old brick house in a narrow lane with high garden walls and no proper street lights. My mother, who has driven past it in dark glasses and a hat pulled down like a pre-war spy, says that it doesn’t compare to our tiled and timbered house with the view; but it does. It is very small, but it belongs there. Our house never properly belonged on the side of that gentle Kentish hill. It sat on the chalky earth like a townee at a picnic, and the earth resented it.
At the green gate in the walled lane, I hung back, and Joel took my hand and said, ‘Don’t be afraid. I’m with you.’
‘I’m not afraid.’ I pulled my hand away to open the gate. How could he not see it? It was because he was with me that I didn’t want to go in. It would hurt that I had never come here on my own; only when I had the trophy of Joel to show him.
All right, I had wanted to hurt him. Now I didn’t. There was no point.
I like Benita. I knew I would. That is one reason why I haven’t been before. She’s supposed to be the enemy. I had thought she might daunt me with sophistication, but my youthful memory of her was exaggerated. She looks and smells and sounds good, but not in a way that makes you feel you look and smell and sound terrible yourself.
Joel was very happy and casual, but with his father and mother both divorced and married again, this kind of situation is standard. I was tense. I tried not to try too hard, but I knocked things over, first some books on a little one-legged table, then my drink.
My father said, ‘Thank God for that, anyway. I was afraid you wouldn’t be like my daughter any more.’
Benita frowned, and he said, ‘She told me not to get sentimental.’
‘I should have told you not to have three martinis,’ she said, with the smile that really knows him, not the tight, tentative smile with which my mother used sometimes to approach him, unsure of her reception.
Connie, and my mother too, secretly, for all her public loyalty, might like to hear that he had gone to seed, drinking too much, ruined by adultery. But he looked very healthy, younger even, and less tired. He had had three drinks because he was afraid of me.
My mother had been afraid of Joel. My father was afraid of me. Joel, with his sociable face that no one would hate and no one would paint, and his animal eagerness to like, Joel was a relief. I could see that. My father was glad for me. Very glad, as if he felt absolved for helping me to break my heart over Tom.
Why can’t I be glad for him? He isn’t the same man, that’s all. Or is it not he who has changed, but my vision of him?
‘Oh, by the way,’ he said, after we had been in the house for a while, and I was beginning dangerously to relax and let him woo me, ‘I forget to tell you.’
‘What?’ I was comfortable and warm. I have only been in England a few weeks, but I know already that this winter, if you are warm somewhere, it’s all you ask. This winter, some of the subtleties of living have gone overboard in the struggle against the vicious cold that grips this helpless country in an iron hand.
‘What?’ My eyes were closing, and I blinked across to where he sat in his own blue chair on the other side of the fireplace. My mother made him take the chair, forcing it on him although he said that he wanted nothing from the house, and at least Benita has had the taste not to fall on it with a new loose cover devoid of associations.
‘That chap Jordan - remember him?’
I nodded.
‘You’ve met him in court. That’s right, you went out with him once or twice, didn’t you?’
‘What about him?’ I was going to telephone Jean tomorrow to ask if I could take Joel to see them.
‘His wife was killed. A petrol tanker went out of control on a hill. She was crushed against a shop front. About six months ago, it was. Perhaps more. Dreadful business. I meant to write and tell you, but I forgot.’
Forgot! I left Joel with Benita - she wanted to keep him for dinner and he wanted to stay - and drove dry-mouthed and staring through unfamiliar streets that were somehow in the right direction, to Johnny Jordan’s house.
The brass plate was still on the door, for the house belonged to his organization, not to him. I thought perhaps he would be gone, but when I rang the bell, Nancy opened the door.
She has grown a lot since I last saw her, and filled out into a junior version of her mother’s shape. She was in her school uniform, but it looked like fancy dress on a grown-up.
She used to call me Miss Bullock politely, but when she opened the door with her mother’s instinctive smile for anyone outside before she saw who it was, she said, ‘Emma,’ and I was able to put my arms round her.
Her father found us standing in the hall like that when he came through from the back of the house to see who it was.
We went into the kitchen. I have never sat in the front room in his house. I don’t think they ever do. The kitchen was warm, but empty. Nancy doesn’t fill it. The yellow walls looked farther away, and the emptiness sat like a presence on the top of the dresser and the curtains and the chimney shelf, waiting.
‘I wish you had written to me,’ I said. Thank God I hadn’t called him blithely on the telephone and spilled out my news about Joel. Some people are saved by luck from the unspeakable mistakes.
‘It’s not your sorrow.’
‘It is.’ But it would sound presumptuous to claim any rights to Jean.
Nancy is fifteen and is taking care of the house, but they want to transfer her father to another town where there is enough work for two people, and they could live with the other man and his wife.
Nancy said, T won’t go.’
‘You’ll have to, if they send us.’
‘They won’t move you about like a pawn, you know that. What about Mrs Allison? What about the Bokers? What about those people squatting in the Army hut? If you want to stay here, you’ll stay.’
‘Then we’ll have to get a housekeeper.’
‘I won’t let her in.’
‘Be reasonable, you—’
‘I am. I just don’t want to be treated like a child any more.’ Standing up, she leaned on the table with her sleeves rolled up and her mother’s apron on and appealed to me. ‘Did you have to fight to grow up, Emma? Did you?’
‘I refused to stay at school.’
‘You see? He wants me to stay for ever. In this outfit.’ She banged the rounded front of her gym tunic. ‘But I’ve got to start training for a decent job.’
Her father patted the hand that was tensed flat on the table, the nails still bitten and childish, unlike the long silver talons of her contemporaries. ‘We’ll see.’
‘She still gets worked up,’ he said later, when she had gone out to a friend’s house. ‘I have to go easy with her. Jean and I didn’t want her to grow up too fast, like these others I see all the time. Poor silly kids trying to pretend they’re women. Now I can’t stop her. She mustn’t think I’m taking care of her. She has to be taking care of me. The other day, she came into the bedroom when I was looking at Jean’s picture.’ He was talking slowly, dropping the words on to the tablecloth, with his shoulders hunched and his jaw set in wretchedness. ‘She rushed at me and sort of - sort of beat on me, and said, “Don’t cry. I forbid you to cry.” I’ve got to be careful, you see, not to let her think she’s not enough, so I can’t let go with her.’
‘You could with me,’ I said, ‘if you want to.’
‘No thanks,’ he said politely, as if I had offered him a sandwich.
He was silent for a minute and then he said, ‘I wish you’d been here though.’
‘So do I.’ I didn’t know what to say. His grief and loss are so massive. The disaster that has happened to him is so crushing that I don’t see how he can crawl back into life again, and yet I know that day after day he is still walking imperturbably into the homes of dirt and stench and ignorance to try and sort out other people’s disasters of their own making.
The telephone rang several times while I was there. A mother who had forgotten the day of her son’s court hearing. A father reporting a new address. A mother who was worried about her baby. Why don’t they call a doctor? A woman who wanted to know how to get to Birkenhead.
‘Are they running a new service?’
‘It’s always been like this. They get to know you, and then they’re after you for everything, long after you’ve put Case Closed on their folder.’
It was time for me to go. I didn’t know whether to tell him about Joel. One has this stupid egotism that one’s own happiness might sharpen the loss. But when I lost Tom, I didn’t mind other people having love affairs or getting married. Their puny lusts and plans had no relation to me.
It would be the same for him. So I told him about Joel, and I was right: it didn’t make him feel any better or worse. Why should it? The women with boys in trouble and sick babies and journeys to make to Birkenhead could help make him more than I could by needing him.
GEORGE, BOB SAID. If it’s a boy, you’ve to call him George, God knows why, but I did. You can call a child anything, like naming a dog or a canary, and change it the next week if it doesn’t seem to look like that.
Poor little George doesn’t look like anything much except those maggots that get into the garbage. He’s very pale. I never had a baby so pale, but it’s the cold, I expect. We’re all pale, those of us that aren’t blue, and the kids’ legs are mottled all colours, like bruises.
If Susannah goes out, her cheeks get red and sore, like the meat we had to scrape in the
nursing home for that old gammer who had to have beef tea, so I keep her indoors, though some days it seems as cold in as out. Her poor nose is raw, where she keeps picking at the crusts that come from it running all the time. I got some cream for her, but Sammy took it and put it all over his face to play shaving. Sometimes you can’t help laughing at him.
Soon after I got back here with Georgie, the pipes burst. They have burst all down one corner of the house and it has frozen there like stalactites. Like a picture I saw of Niagara frozen up. Why travel when you can see the marvels of nature right on your doorstep?
The Martins had already moved out because their windows didn’t fit. Some people want jam on it. The Sullivans got out too, after the pipes, because that is it for water, and the plumbers have all dropped down dead from overwork. Ruth and Smiler have gone to her sister’s a few streets away, and the Martins have gone to a flat the Post Office helped them to find. The people next door, who had the fire when the kid knocked over the paraffin heater, they’ve gone too, so we are all alone here at the top of the hill, because we have nowhere else to go.
I wouldn’t have the energy to move out anyway. I felt bad enough after Emily and Susannah, but this time with George, I feel I have been put through a mangle. Perhaps they did, while I was under the anaesthetic, having that dream again about finding the reason for it all, that explodes as soon as you try to grab it. There’a a jigaboo doctor there who’d do anything. Trained in secret Mau Mau tortures.
My chest hurts off and on, so sometimes I just lay down on the mattress and pile all the coats and blankets on top of me, and let the kids take care of each other. I have to lock up the food, because Sammy takes it. He is a thief, on top of everything else. When Ruth came to see me, she said, ‘What’s that child done to his leg?’
‘He fell down,’ I said. ‘He’s always falling down.’ Which was the truth. Mrs Martin used to say he had rickets, which was a lie. But Ruth was busy clucking round, cleaning up, swearing at me religiously in the way she does for letting things go.
Kate and Emma Page 24
