Kate and Emma

by Monica Dickens

  The meter was outside in a shed under the front steps of the house, so that if you froze half to death when your electricity went off, you could freeze the whole way going out in the middle of the night to recharge it.

  The wine was a great help. When the chicken was cooking, we drank it while Kate bathed the baby in a plastic bowl and I washed the two little girls in the sink and dressed them in the new pyjamas. They capered, clowning with delight, and Sammy joined in, mimicking their bows and the stamping turns and strange stiff pointing gestures which were their dancing.

  Although Kate says he is always looking for trouble, he doesn’t seem to lead, he follows, taking his cue from the girls for what to do. While they were prancing round the table, he pulled a cord and sent a lamp crashing, breaking the bulb, and sat on the floor and yelled because the lamp had hit his bad leg.

  Kate came to the doorless doorway of the kitchen holding the baby and its bottle, and yelled back at him. The dog jumped down from the chair barking, and made a pass at Emily, who shrieked like a train whistle. Kate stopped shouting when she began to cough, and Sammy went under the table.

  ‘Who’s your doctor?’ I asked, letting Emily into the bulging pocket of my slacks where the sweets were, and putting my fur boot into the dog to get it back to its chair - I was, as Kate said, learning fast how to keep order round here. ‘I’m going to call him.’

  ‘He won’t come. They’re so busy now, they’ll only come to sign your death certificate.’

  ‘Then I’ll take you to see him.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with me. It’s over, what I had. It doesn’t hurt now. Just a cigarette cough.’

  She still smokes all the time, leaving cigarettes casually burning in saucers and tin lids, lighting another, putting that down and taking a drag on the first one as she passes it.

  When I say, ‘You’ll start a fire one day,’ Kate says, ‘The people next door who had the fire from the paraffin heater, they got rehoused in a Council flat.’

  ‘I’m taking you to the doctor. He can see the baby too. And Sammy’s leg.’ The boy crawled out from under the table when I said his name, and pulled himself upright by the edge of the thick sweater I was wearing today so as not to insult Kate by keeping my coat on.

  ‘No, Em.’

  Kate had drunk two plastic mugs of wine. She was a little flushed, much prettier. Her hair was longer now, and she had washed it before I came, and brushed it neatly, soft and flaxen. Straightening up from the baby’s cot, looking me in the face with her lip stuck out, for a moment she was almost the old Kate, headed for an argument.

  ‘No, Em.’

  ‘It should be seen. It’s not healing. Even I can see it’s not a new burn. When did he do it?’

  ‘Oh—’ She looked away. ‘I forget. Some time ago.’ ‘It’s infected. You must take him.’

  Kate looked at me again, dead in the eye, and said, ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I can’t trust him not to tell the doctor.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘All right. I can’t lie to you, Em. Why should I? It doesn’t matter now. You’ve been here. If you don’t come back, it’s all one to me.’

  I said nothing, waiting for her to stop acting.

  ‘I burned him with the poker.’ She looked down at the baby, and then flicked her eyes up at me, but I kept my face still. ‘It was when we last had the power cuts. The stove was right off, and I’d got the poker in the fire to heat a pan of water. He’d been a devil all day. It was when I was sick, I should have been in bed. I felt awful, but there was the baby, and Susannah was bilious, throwing up everywhere, and I was dragging about, and I couldn’t stand no more. He messed his trousers - a child of four - and before I knew what I was doing, I’d caught him one across the back of the leg. All right. Now you know.’

  ‘The doctor needn’t.’ I was surprised how calm I felt now that I actually knew. I had been afraid before, when I wasn’t sure. Now I wasn’t afraid. I was filled with hopeless love for the child standing by me, his thin shoulders under my arm, listening unconcernedly to what we said, as if it had happened to someone else. My poor Sammy. But it wasn’t that alone. Poor Kate, I was thinking. Oh my poor, poor Kate.

  ‘He’ll know. The kid will tell him.’

  ‘He didn’t tell me.’

  ‘That’s because I’m here. They’d get him in a room alone, and he’d tell. My mumma done that! Charming. They’d report me. That’s what they do, you know. I heard Mrs Elia say that to my mother once when I’d been shut out in the yard all day. I’ll report you, she said, but she didn’t dare, with my dad the way he was. Don’t tell anyone, Em, please. You treat the burn. Get the proper stuff, you know what to do. It’ll be all right if it’s taken care of. I’ve just been feeling so rotten, I’ve let everything go. Now that you’ve come, it’s going to be different. Don’t spoil it, Em. Don’t let me down. You swore, remember?’

  ‘I won’t tell anyone,’ I said, God help me. ‘I’ll get some burn dressing tomorrow, but if it gets worse—’

  ‘Oh yes, of course, of course, if it gets worse.’ Kate began to gabble in relief. She was very flushed, and her shadowed eyes glistened with approaching tears. ‘I didn’t mean it, Em. I’m not cruel, you know me. I did it in temper. I didn’t know what I was doing.’

  ‘You’ll have to watch yourself, Kate.’ If anything else happens, it will be my fault now. ‘You’ll have to be more careful.’

  ‘Don’t preach at me. You don’t know what it’s like.’

  ‘It isn’t the end of the world to have four children. Lots of women do. On purpose.’

  ‘I don’t care. It’s different when you’re poor all the time, and having no one to talk to - even when Bob’s home. I can’t help it if that kid gets on my nerves.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with him. He’s a darling boy.’

  ‘He’s got a devil in him.’

  ‘Don’t talk like that. He’s only a little child.’

  ‘No one ever said I was only a little child when they—’

  ‘When what?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘If you were unhappy, all the more reason to see your children aren’t.’

  She was looking at me very intensely, leaning on the side of the cot over the sleeping, snuffling baby, and I thought that she really understood. But she said to me, ‘You don’t understand. You only have to be with kids once in a while - mine or anyone else’s. You don’t have to have them all the time. Every day. Every night. You feel lousy and you want to stay in bed, and the baby cries and you get up to him half-drugged with sleep, and then you sneak back for another half-hour because you’re so tired, so bloody tired. And just as you’re going away into the only place where no one can get at you - Waa-aa! It’s another one starting up, and you’ve to begin all over again, and he hits her and she bites him, and they’re all wet or hungry or sick or miserable and they all need you, so you may as well get up, and there’s another day started.’

  ‘But if you lose your temper,’ said our good Miss Bullock, ‘they get worse, so what’s it do?’

  ‘Look, you don’t plan to lose your temper. You just - you just - well, it’s just being so tired and fed up and there being no end to it. You’ve seen a fretsaw snap. Michael, Molly’s oldest, he used to have one for his models, remember, with the pedals and that. One minute buzzing along, eating the wood, spitting out the sawdust in a little cone on the rug. The next - ping! Up it flies in the air like a jack-knife - and I - and I can’t help it, Em. It’s just I’m so bloody tired.’

  She began to cry, and then suddenly changed it to a laugh, with a grimace that was like a convulsion. ‘Welcome back, Em dear,’ she said bitterly. ‘I’ll bet you’re glad you came.’

  She is very near the breaking-point. When I took her to the doctor a few days later, he said that she had obviously had some pleurisy on one lung, which was clearing up now. She would be all right with rest, he said, smiling wearily as if he knew that was a
joke word, and he wished that he could send her away.

  ‘But what can you do? I’ve got a dozen patients waiting for a bed in a convalescent home. By the time I got Mrs Thomas in, she’d be better.’

  ‘Or dead.’

  ‘And the baby—’ he pretended not to hear Kate - ‘nothing really wrong. He’s a little feeble. Try the new feeding I’ve given you. Keep him warm. He’ll pick up.’

  ‘He’d better,’ Kate said. ‘He’s my pet, you know. The best I’ve got.’

  I hoped the doctor would tell her not to say that in front of the other children, but he just nodded for us to go and said, ‘Try and get more rest.’

  He was immensely tired too. I felt sorry for him. There was a power cut on, and he wore boots and a woollen scarf in his consulting-room, and the waiting-room was lined all round with miserable, hollow-eyed women and bronchial old men.

  I tackled the plumber next, and after trying three, one rude, one amused and one tottering, I got one to come and fix the pipes and turn the water on again - for a sum.

  Darling Joel,

  I cant come up next weekend after all. I’m sorry, but I cant help it. Such an amazing thing has happened. I found Kate, and things are pretty bad for her. There’s a lot I must do. She needs me. Please do understand.

  I tried to picture his face reading the letter with an understanding smile. But I couldn’t.

  I went to the coal merchants. The man in the office was large and bland, like an American funeral director, with that fobbing-off note in his voice so well known to the British in times of shortage. Yes, she might be entitled to more coal than she had had so far. Stocks are chancy, mind you, with the talk of a strike, but we have some.

  ‘Well, no, we can’t promise delivery,’ he said, as if I’d asked for the moon. ‘People who really want it come and fetch it.’

  ‘But this girl’s been ill!’

  ‘So have a lot of people, madam,’ he said, ‘including yours truly. We’re all in the same boat, you know.’

  ‘We’re not.’ If I thought I was in his boat, I’d jump into the sea and take my chance on a life raft.

  I put some sacks in the car the next day, and got them filled at the coal yard, and took them round to Kate. When my mother and Connie went off to Buckingham to look at possible cottages, Connie put her new rawhide suitcase in the coal dust in the boot of the car, and they both said that I had become very selfish and inconsiderate since being abroad.

  ‘Like an American teenager,’ said Connie, who has never met one.

  Sammy has lost his original suspicion of me and, to my joy, comes running down the dank, doggy passage shrieking; Emmy, Emmy! and hurls himself into my laden arms. His leg is better, thank God. I found a chemist who knew what he was talking about, and the burn is beginning to heal. He says: Ullo Emmy, about sixteeen times a day, and sings for me, cracked and cockney, ‘A Gordon for Me,’ because it was the first thing that came into my head to teach him.

  I love that child. ‘You can have him,’ Kate says. ‘Take him home to your mum’s. She’d love that.’

  ‘So would Connie.’ I made a face, and the thought crossed my mind that Benita wouldn’t mind.

  I did take him home for one night, after I took him to see a children’s Christmas show which had made up its mind to run till Easter. Clean, and with his hair cut and a grey pullover and shorts like a hobgoblin masquerading as a schoolboy, he looked all right, and he behaved well, but my mother and Connie, glad to find something wrong, were horrified at the way he talked.

  ‘What do you expect - newsreel English?’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Emma,’ said my mother, who in some curious way is gaining a little stature and confidence from having Connie around to back her up in prejudices. ‘Just see that you have him in bed before the people come for bridge.’

  In the night, he woke in my bed and cried, and screamed to go home. I comforted him down into quiet sobbing and went to warm some milk, and met Connie in her shaggy camelhair, prowling in a purple hairnet.

  ‘He’s all right. Just homesick,’ I assured her. ‘It’s quite natural.’

  But it isn’t. People say they ‘understand children’, but you can’t. Sammy is rather afraid of Kate, and she nags him all the time and favours the others, so that he tries desperately to make her laugh, because that is when she likes him best. Take him away, and he cries frantically for her. In the morning, he refused to sing ‘A Gordon for Me’ to my mother, which she took as a personal insult, and when I offered him a treat, he said, ‘When we goin ome?’

  This is what children do. It’s very humiliating. This is the crushing blow to one’s pride. You work hard to make a big hit with them, and then they want to go to someone who hasn’t even been very nice to them.

  I went to Kate as often as I could, and I was happy at that time, because she was letting me help her at last. I was supposed to be Leeds but, in the excitement of being needed, I kept making excuses to put it off, because there was so much to do for Kate and the children. Finally, I had to go, and Kate grumbled a bit, and said, ‘I wish you wouldn’t.’

  ‘Everything will be all right now,’ I said, as much to reassure: myself as her. We had the place cleaned up a bit, and the children were cleaner, warmer, better fed. So was Kate, but she was still on edge, tipping easily over into hysteria, still without energy for anything except losing her temper.

  I begged her to be good to Sammy. If you ever do anything like that again—’

  ‘You said we wouldn’t talk about it.’

  ‘If I had told anyone about his leg, they might have taken him away.’

  ‘Why didn’t you?’

  ‘You know why. It won’t be me who gets you into trouble. But be careful. For God’s sake be careful.’

  ‘Oh I will, Em.’

  ‘Be kind to him. He loves you.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, and I said, ‘Don’t worry’ at the same time, and we laughed and hugged, and I thought she would be all right.

  ‘Back in two weeks,’ I said, but the architect we had hired got headstrong and I had to find another, and there was drainage-trouble, and difficulty in getting the freezer units we had planned’ for - the problems of building a supermarket in England are unsuperable compared with the States - and it was almost a month before I got back to London and hurried down to Kate’s with the presents I had brought.

  Sammy opened the door to me, childishly without surprise, as if I had only been gone since yesterday.

  ‘Miler’s ere,’ he said conversationally as he led me along the chill passage to present me, as he always did, in the doorway of the big room like an impresario - ‘Ere’s Emmy come!’

  Kate wasn’t there. Emily and Susannah, filthy as when I first found them, were sitting on their new bed, stewing gently in its acrid vapours. Leaning on the fireguard, trying to get warm, was a tall man of about fifty, with a long sad face like an abandoned Army mule.

  He pushed himself away from the guard and came forward uncertainly. ‘You’re Miss Bullock?’ He kept the high littered table between us, like a counter to keep civil service employees away from the suppliant mob.

  ‘It’s Emmy,’ Sammy said, holding my hand in his chicken’s claw. ‘I told yer.’

  ‘I’m Mr Sullivan,’ the man said, ‘that wrote you about Kate. I hope you didn’t think—’

  ‘Oh no, I was terribly pleased. Where’s Kate?’

  ‘I’m afraid I’ve got bad news for you,’ Mr Sullivan said. Why did they call him Miler? He couldn’t run a hundred yards with those feet. He looked down and twiddled his fingers on the table edge. ‘The baby’s dead.’

  ‘George?’

  He nodded. ‘She’s very upset,’ he added after a moment.

  I found to my surprise that I was angry. Not sad. Not shocked. Just angry. I started to rant at Mr Sullivan unreasonably, but he hung his long face down and accepted it as if he had it coming to him.

  ‘It’s impossible! The baby was better. He was beginning to gain w
eight. Didn’t she feed him what she was told? Why didn’t she take him back to the doctor? What happened? Oh - it’s unbearable!’

  ‘Yes, she couldn’t bear it,’ Miler said.

  ‘I mean, it’s unbearable that anyone could be so - so hopeless. You leave her alone for a minute, and—’

  ‘George is dead.’ Sammy’s bright, newsy voice, as if it were the first we’d heard of it, took the wind of canting rage out of my sails.

  ‘Yes, he’s gone away.’ That was what Alice would say to her children.

  ‘No, e’s dead. I saw im. E was laid there in a box on the table. We washed is face, me and the girls.’

  ‘She kept him here?’ I asked Mr Sullivan.

  ‘Two days, I think. I just chanced to look in today in my dinner hour to see how she was getting on, and that’s how it was. So I fetched the doctor to take him away and said I’d stay while she went to the undertaker. She didn’t want to, poor girl. She thought so much of that baby, you know, she didn’t really want to face up to him being dead.’

  ‘How did he die?’ I was almost afraid to ask it.

  ‘Pneumonia, the doctor said. Kate told me it was from the cold.’

  ‘What happened to the electric fires?’ I had been too angry to notice at first that there was no heat in the big damp room except the small coal fire.

  ‘Someone got into the meter out there and took the money,’ he said. ‘They cut her off.’

  ‘The baby died from cold.’

  ‘That’s about the sum of it.’

  ‘Where’s the electricity office?’ They would be people against whom you could not win, so I must go now in anger, like Kamikaze.

  ‘They’ll be shut now. It’s their half-day.’ When Mr Sullivan smiled, as he was moved to do at this type of grisly joke, a curious process took place among the deep folds and furrows of his face. From drooping, they all turned upwards, like one of those reversible pictures which is a sad man one way up and a happy man the other.

  ‘I’ll go tomorrow.’

  He was still smiling. ‘Don’t expect them to be sorry,’ he said. ‘All they’ve said so far about the power cuts is: It’s your own fault if you will be so selfish and use all that electricity. Cook a Sunday dinner these days, you feel like a traitor. You’d be too young to remember, but it’s like after the war when they used to lower the gas pressure to take us down a peg in case we thought we was somebody for winning. If you’re going to stay and see Kate, Miss Em, I’ll get back to the job then.’