Kate and Emma

by Monica Dickens

  ‘Thank you so very much, Mr Sullivan.’

  ‘Smiler, they call me. Everyone does.’

  ‘So long, Miler,’ Sammy said.

  GOOD OLD EM, she went down to the electric people and paid what was owing, so now at least we’ve got some light again, and can fry a bit of bacon.

  It won’t bring back my little baby, but at least he had a sending off fit for a prince. When Em gave me the cheque for fifty quid, I went straight back to that nice man at the funeral parlour and said, ‘All right, give me the thirty-pound funeral, with everything of the best.’

  I thought they might let Bob come, but he’s in bad favour it seems for not working. I wore a piece of black lace for a veil, like Italian women, and I was very brave. Very pale, but very brave. It was only when we got back and George wasn’t there that I had to howl.

  And somehow then, it didn’t help, the lovely funeral.

  Em said I was extravagant, getting the nice blazer suit for Sammy and then laying it away in paper, since it’s much too good for him to mess about in. We had a bit of a row then. What does she want? I dressed him up for the funeral to please her. She thinks I am too hard on the boy, although she won’t say anything more to me about it, because she wants to keep on coming here.

  For what? To spy? I have to be careful now, to keep my hands off the child, though it’s the only thing he understands. When I took hold of him to get him undressed, he screamed like a pig-killing and ran to Em. ‘What’s the matter with him, Kate?’ she said, upset, and I said, ‘Mind your own bloody business,’ because I have to say things that hurt her, to take away the hurt in myself.

  She would never tell anything against me though. I know she wouldn’t. That’s about the only thing I do know, these days. And that child cries and carries on, I don’t know how anyone is expected to stand it.

  ‘Why wasn’t it you that died?’ I ask him, ‘instead of poor little George that never had a chance?’ And he cries then and goes to hide in one of the rooms off the passage, where it’s dark.

  NANCY HAD STAYED late at school to rehearse a play, and I found Johnny Jordan in a white pullover like a gym instructor, making his own supper, very serious, very thorough, with mashed potatoes and gravy and the table meticulously laid for one, which people don’t usually bother with when they are alone.

  There were only two chops, and I have seen him eat four, so I said I had had my dinner early. I waited until he’d finished eating, because he is a man who thinks better when not engaged with a knife and fork, and then said, ‘Do you remember that woman who kept the nasty little shop in Butt Street?’

  ‘Mm-hm.’ He was eating cake now.

  ‘She wouldn’t let you do anything for her at first, and then, you said, she suddenly cracked, and let you help.’

  ‘I saw her not long ago, as a matter of fact, in the High Street. She’s much happier, and the two boys looked quite different. What happened to the daughter, your friend? You lost touch with her, didn’t you?’

  ‘I found her again. Don’t tell her mother. Kate would hate that.’

  ‘She’s different though. More stable.’

  ‘All the more reason. Kate isn’t. It’s happened to her too. The cracking. The letting go. Johnny, she’s been through - she’s only twenty-two, and she’s been through more than anyone should in a lifetime. Her husband is in prison now, and she’s just lost her baby. It died from cold. It died from cold, I tell you!’ I raised my voice to beat the horror of it against his imperturbable listening face. ‘How can any woman stand that?’

  ‘It wasn’t the only one, I’m afraid,’ he said, ‘this winter.’

  ‘For her it was.’ Usually I like him to talk about his work. Now I wasn’t interested in his cases. The hell with them. ‘She was on the edge before, ill, tired, she’d had about all she could take. Now she’s cracked. Something’s given way. I don’t even know if she’s entirely sane.’

  ‘You want a doctor then.’

  ‘Perhaps. But there’s something else. I hate this. I swore I’d never let her down, but I’ve got to tell you. I wouldn’t tell it to anyone else in the world, I don’t think. It sounds too bad. They’d condemn her, but you wouldn’t.’

  He is easy to talk to once you get going, because he sits and listens properly without interrupting. He’s the only person I’ve found who can do that, except Bess when she listened so patiently on the boat to my story about Rocky and the kidnapping.

  ‘She’s all right with the girls, and she was mad about the baby, but the oldest child - a boy - she’s ill-treating him. She did before, when she was ill and lost her temper, but I thought I’d managed to change her so she would be better with him. But she’s started again, I’m certain of it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know. She had to marry because of him. Could that have anything to do with it?’

  ‘Perhaps. I’ll have to go and see her, won’t I?’

  ‘Oh no, you can’t. Did you think I came to - to report her? It’s not that. I came for advice. Tell me what to do.’

  ‘I want to see her.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I must, don’t you see? You haven’t got to worry, Emma. I won’t go tramping in shouting Where’s this child Emma says you’re cruel to? I want to help her, not punish her. It’s not only for the child. I can help her too. ‘

  ‘She’ll know I told.’

  ‘She needn’t. Go and suggest I could help. Don’t say anything about the way she treats the child. Then you and I could go in like a friendly visit, and I could see what can be done.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I knew you’d have an answer. You always do.’

  ‘It was Jean used to have most of them,’ he said, ‘but I’ve learned there’s a way round everything.’

  ‘Did that come with this job, or did you learn that in the Army?’

  ‘I only learned one thing in the Army,’ he said, ‘that was any use to me outside, and it took me twenty years to learn that.’

  He stopped and smiled, and I asked him what.

  ‘That I was in the wrong job.’ He laughed, the quiet snort with which he used to punctuate Jean’s easy, noisy laugh, always a little behind her on a joke. ‘AH they that take the sword, Christ said, shall perish with the sword. The service, they call it, but who are you serving? For twenty years, I was trained to destroy people. I thought it was about time I trained myself to try and save them.’

  I WAS LYING down when Em came, on the divan bed she got me. I’ve had my lot of sleeping in the same room as the kids. Smiler helped me move the bed into the dark front room. It’s colder, but it’s quieter there. You can’t hear anything.

  The door was ajar because the milkman hadn’t been yet and I wanted to call out to him for eggs, and so Em walked in and went on through to the big room, and then came in to me and said, ‘What’s the matter, Kate - are you ill again?’

  ‘The doctor said to get more rest, didn’t he? I’m resting.’

  ‘The place looks like hell.’

  ‘That’s why I’m resting.’

  ‘I’ll clean up for you, if you like,’ Em said wearily. She never give up, doesn’t that girl. It’s amazing.

  ‘I’m going to get up in a bit,’ I said, ‘and get some dinner started for me and the girls.’

  ‘Where’s Sammy? Is he out in this rain?’

  ‘Oh no,’ I said. ‘He’s gone.’

  For a moment, she thought I meant that he was dead too, like my little George, and her face was a study. ‘Gone where?’

  ‘Away for a visit. To Molly’s. She came to see me, didn’t you know? And took him back with her for a holiday.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Where she lives.’ I’d forgotten for a moment, but luckily Em said, ‘York?’ and I said, ‘Yes, that’s right. In York.’

  She got her sleeves rolled up then, and got to work. Emily can’t really talk much yet, big though she is for two and a half, and all she could say to Em was: Sammy gone, and Em carried on that k
ind of Sammy-back-soon-to-see-Emily conversation like she can do by the hour, having more stamina than me, and went off quite happy.

  I couldn’t tell her about Sammy, because she’d make a fuss, but it’s the best think all round to stop his crying and his tricks. We’ve got a bit of peace round here now.

  WITH SAMMY AWAY, there was no hurry about taking Johnny to see Kate. She seemed calmer, and I thought I would wait and see how she was when the child came back.

  I was in Leeds about two weeks, and then I went on to York to stay with Molly and see what she thought about keeping Sammy. It might be a good thing to get him away from Kate for a while.

  Joel has asked permission to marry over here, so I shall be in Scotland soon. I had to drop the fight about giving up the job, because he said, If marriage isn’t worth that, it’s worth nothing,’ and I saw his point.

  When I told Uncle Mark, he said, ‘That’s why I never employ women in jobs that matter,’ and I said, ‘You did me,’ and he said, ‘I had to. You’re my niece.’

  I know I have done well for him, so I asked him if it would kill him to say I had been useful, and he admitted, Yes, that was why he was angry with me for getting married.

  Once I am with Joel, I won’t be able to keep dashing back to London to see how Kate is, which was one reason why I wanted Molly to keep Sammy for a while, at least until Bob gets home again and gets a job and we see how things are.

  There is to be a big squadron party at the Base next week, so after Molly’s I was going on up to Scotland. At the party, Joel is going to tell everybody that we are going to be married. That is the way he likes to do things, with a splash, so I have bought a gold dress like a skin, very sensational, because everyone will look at me.

  Molly is still on the fostering bit. I can’t imagine her ever living with just her own children, and her eldest is now thirteen and the youngest seven, so she says she needs to have a few babies about the place. She now has children who can’t get themselves adopted, half-caste, or crippled or retarded, and she has bought herself an old van converted into a kind of bus, because she is always taking them to clinics and special schools.

  I got a taxi from the station to their house on the outskirts of the town, a kind of north-country Grove Lodge, a Victorian encumbrance that families can never unload except on to people like Molly who don’t care what it looks like as long as there is plenty of room.

  Molly arrived in the bus just as I did, rocketing round the curved drive and stopping just short of the rhododendrons to disgorge a babel of children of all colours, one spastic boy in a small wheelchair, and a stray goat she had found in the road.

  She has two young girls to help her, Care and Prots like Kate was. One of them came out in a pair of black tights and a long angora sweater to bump the wheelchair backwards up the steps, and the other herded the children inside from the chilly afternoon. It is colder up here than it is in London, with eternal snows stilt in deep solidified drifts, and sugaring the gables and inconsistent planes of the roof. Molly looks wonderful, radiating health like a toothpaste advertisement. When I kissed her as she got out of the draughty old bus, her cheek was cold, but she felt warm from inside, like a stove.

  ‘Where’s Sammy?’ I asked.

  ‘Sammy?’ She frowned. ‘You mean Kate’s Sammy?’

  ‘Yes. I was so glad when she told me he was with you.’

  ‘But he isn’t.’

  We stood stock-still on the iron-hard gravel of the drive and stared at each other, with the Yorkshire wind blowing our hair and skirts.

  ‘Didn’t you go to London and get him?’

  ‘I haven’t been down for months.’

  ‘Oh God. Take me back to the station, Moll. I’ve got to get, back.’

  ‘Come in and have something to eat first.’

  ‘I can get the fast train if we go now.’

  Molly never argues or asks for explanations until you have time to give them. She climbed back into the bus and was off before I had got the door shut on my side, but I hung on and pulled it in as we turned left on to the road. On the way to the station, I told her about Kate and Sammy, not everything, but enough, and she bit her lip and pounded on the wheel with her big fur glove, railing at Bob and me and herself and life for our part in the tragedy of Kate.

  ‘What did we do wrong?’ I asked miserably, hunched with my collar up on the springless, rattling seat.

  ‘I don’t know, Emma. That’s the rotten, shaming thing. Even the best we knew to do was a wretched failure.’

  On the train going down to London, I tried to read, suspended in a maddening vacuum of time between knowing what I had to do and being able to do it, but the shadowy chamber behind my eyes, where pictures only materialize clearly when you are not looking for them, was full of shapes and nightmare visions. Cold watery afternoon deepened into dusk and then to darkness on the frozen mud and blackthorn of the midland fields, and by the time I got to London, I knew with a kind of sick despair that I was too late.

  Too late for what? Whatever Kate had done, she had done weeks ago, before I last saw her. It had been too late for too long.

  It was after nine when I got to Johnny’s house. Nancy opened the door in a dressing-gown, and her usual doorstep smile dropped when she saw me.

  ‘What’s the matter, Emma?’

  ‘Where’s your father?’

  ‘In bed. He’s tired.’

  ‘Please get him down.’

  ‘He said not to—’

  ‘Get him down, Nancy!’

  My hair was still untidy from Yorkshire, strands of it hanging down by my ear like a demented vagrant’s. She took two quick steps backwards and then turned and ran up the stairs.

  Johnny in a dressing-gown. Heavy wool, tied low with a cord where men think their waists are, a thick brown pillar looking down at me from the top of the stairs.

  ‘It’s Kate,’ I said. ‘Please help me. I have to go to her. I think something terrible has happened.’

  ‘I thought you were in Yorkshire.’ He came down the stairs with animal feet in huge warm slippers.

  ‘I should be. I had to come back. Sammy isn’t up there with Molly. I don’t know where he is. Johnny, I—I—’ He came down the last step and put his hands on my arms, and gripped them when he felt that I was shaking.

  ‘I have a terrible feeling she’s killed the child.’

  Driving to Kate’s house in the little blunt blue car, we hardly spoke. Johnny had his jaw set square as if he were riding in a steeplechase. I sat in a ball, holding myself with my arms, for the tension of the journey had left me all bones, freezing cold. I wasn’t shivering any more. Johnny had given me a shot of brandy and told me, quite harshly, to get a grip on myself and pin up my hair, or he would go to Kate’s without me.

  ‘What shall we say?’ I asked him, as we came up the hill from the housing estate and saw the humped silhouette of the lightless house, racing with the moon away from the shredded clouds.

  ‘We’ll ask her where the child is. See what she says. Don’t rush it, Emma. We may have to talk to her all night before we find the truth.’

  ‘What about Nancy?’

  ‘She’s all right. I often get called out at night.’

  ‘Here.’ We stopped by the rotted hedge. Most of the snow was gone from the trampled waste of garden, but it was white with frost, like concrete. The house was dark, but we must wake Kate. We couldn’t wait till morning. I beat on the door with my usual three flat-handed bangs. ‘Kate!’ I shouted. ‘It’s Emma-let me in!’ It was like beating on a tomb.

  ‘They’ve gone,’ Johnny said. ‘We’ll look for her in the morning.’

  Almost I went with him, but I had to say, ‘Let’s try a window.’

  The window of the big room was too high to reach because of the slope of the ground, but we went round to the stone trench under the wide front steps where the electric meter was, and knocked on the window of the underground room where Kate sleeps.

  There were no curtains. J
ohnny shone his torch into the room, and I thought she would wake in a panic at the beam of light. The bed was empty. Unmade, filthy, the pillow on the floor without a cover, clothes and wads of paper thrown about, a grotesque long-legged doll hanging from a hook in the wall like a suicide, but the room was empty.

  ‘She’s gone.’

  ‘Where to? She had nowhere to go. No one to go to. Smiler perhaps - he might know. Her friend, Mr Sullivan. He told me where he lived.’ As we went back round the side of the house, we heard a scratching and whimpering like an animal on the other side of the back door, which was Kate’s front door.

  ‘The dog,’ I said, ‘she’s left the dog behind.’ With visions of a starving skeleton hurling itself on me, all rabid fangs, I called, ‘Bruce? Here, Bruce boy!’

  The voice of Emily answered me, an incoherent babble of words with only a few consonants shared between them.

  ‘Where’s Mum?’

  ‘Gaw a picya.’

  ‘Pictures?’

  ‘Yiss.’ She can say that all right.

  ‘Open the door, Emily. We’ll have to go in and wait for her,’ I said to Johnny, who stood quietly behind me, letting me take over. ‘How could she leave those tiny girls alone? Oh, how could she?’

  ‘You’d be surprised how many—’ he began, but I told him not to be so damned imperturbable, and he shut up.

  There were some scuffling sounds from the other side of the door, as if Emily was jumping up and down. ‘Can’t you reach the handle?’

  ‘Naoo,’ she whined. She can say that too.

  ‘Get a chair,’ I said. ‘Get a box. Get something to stand on.’

  She began to babble again in vowels, and the babble went away down the passage and didn’t come back, although I beat on the door and called again and again.