‘Smiler has the upstairs flat,’ I said. ‘Kate told me they were coming back when it’s warmer, so they must have the key to the front door. Let’s go and get it.’
I had started away, but he said, ‘I’ll stay here in case Kate comes home.’ He never gets excited. He never dashes off somewhere without thinking. It slows down the tempo, but it avoids mistakes.
Murray Road, Smiler had said. My wife’s sister has a big house with two rooms over the garage, so we’ve been lucky. I found it without difficulty. The other garages were single story, with pointed roofs. There was plenty of light here and everyone was awake, including all the children. They were scuttling about in droves, like clockwork toys, and there were enough grown-ups stamping about to man a regiment. But no Smiler.
‘He’s not well,’ I was told by a young man in a vest and very tight black trousers.
‘Bronchitis,’ said an older man, stepping over and round the children to look at me, and hacked out a cough or two to illustrate.
‘What is it, Ned? What’s all the noise?’ A woman in a dressing-gown and green quilted slippers, large but firm, as if she still had her corsets on, came into the hall with her eyebrows at the ready, although there had been plenty of noise before I came in, and I wasn’t making any.
‘Wants to see Smiler? Well, she can’t.’ She gave an akimbo impression without actually having her hands on her hips.
‘I’m a friend of Kate’s,’ I said, and her face relaxed as if that had been corseted too, and was now unhooked.
‘Poor Kate. Really let herself go, that girl has. It’s tragic,’ she said.
‘We’ve been out together, and Kate’s locked out. She’s lost her key. Could I borrow yours and go in from upstairs?’
‘Why didn’t she come herself?’ The corset began to go on again.
‘She’s waiting with the children.’ Lying is easy, to self-important women who are listening to themselves.
‘I daresay.’
‘Take her up to Smiler,’ said the young man in the desperately tight trousers. ‘Check her out.’
I was taken upstairs, with an escort of children on all fours, to where Smiler lay wheezing in a vast bed that filled a small room.
‘Hullo, Miss Emma,’ he said, to everyone’s relief. They didn’t want to be suspicious. It was their duty. They wanted to help. They wanted to be nice to me.
Too nice. Mrs Sullivan said she would get dressed and come with me. It’s a tricky lock.’
‘No, please. I couldn’t bother you.’
‘But I insist.’
‘I’ll manage.’ I rush from York in torment, letting nothing stand in my way, and then this, in a flowered rayon dressing-gown and quilted slippers.
A girl with a lot of hanging hair and a hanging lower lip to match had come to a doorway with a television set roaring applause behind her to watch me, treading over the sides of her shoes.
‘I’m good with keys,’ I said desperately.
‘I’ll bet.’ It didn’t mean anything, but the girl made it sound as if it did.
‘I’m going to get dressed.’
‘I can’t wait. It’s too cold for Kate and the children.’
‘As you wish then.’ She was a woman who took defeat ill. I was turning to go, when she said, ‘Linda can go with you.’
Ruin. But the girl in the turned-over shoes said, ‘Me go out in that cold? What do you think I am?’ So I got away alone with the key.
When I ran down the back stairs of Kate’s house and let Johnny in, his face was bright red from cold, and his ears on fire. He stood in the big room, stamping his feet and beating his gloved hands. From the filthy, hair-smothered chair in the corner, the sleek dog matched eyes with him, and decided to thump its tail.
Susannah was lying in the baby’s cot, and Emily was staggering about rather drunkenly in a pair of Sammy’s shorts and a jersey like a sieve, with the sleeves flapping down over her hands. I picked her up and found her smelly. The room smelled worse than the last time I was there.
‘This is where Kate lives,’ I said. ‘Isn’t it awful?’
I thought he would be professionally shocked, but he was professionally unshocked. ‘I’ve seen worse,’ he said.
Susannah was sleeping heavily, and she didn’t wake when Johnny turned her over to see her face. Emily did not seem properly awake. She yawned continually, and when I was holding her, she put her tangled yellow curls against my shoulder and dozed off, even while I was walking about. I found a large aspirin bottle on the mantelpiece, half-full.
‘Could be for Kate,’ Johnny said.
‘Or to keep the children sleeping while she goes out. Mum give you these?’ I rattled the bottle in front of Emily’s closed eyes and she grunted and nestled into me like a nursing puppy.
‘Where’s Sammy?’ I asked her loudly.
‘Where’s Sammy?’ I shook her, and then put her on the floor so that she had to stay awake or fall over. I crouched in front of her, and she put her hand on my knee to steady herself.
‘Where’s Sammy?’
‘Gone.’ She rocked backwards, and I clutched her.
‘Yes. He’s gone away. Where did he go?’
‘Ow air.’
‘Where?’
‘Ow air.’ She jabbed a fat finger towards the window, squaring her bottom lip to yell with exasperation at the same stupid question. ‘In a garn.’
‘We’d better get the police,’ Johnny said quietly.
‘Let’s look by ourselves first.’
I put Emily on the bed and Johnny and I went into the garden. We didn’t need the torch. The moon was clear of the clouds now, making deep shadows. The piles of refuse and old iron were etched in black and white. Here and there a tin-can, not yet rusted, shone like a cat’s eye. For weeks the ground had been too hard for digging. We began to look among the frozen junk, picking it over with aching fingers, turning over a rusted water tank, shining the torch into a scrambled pile of old bicycle wheels with spokes sticking out like broken umbrellas.
I knew what I was looking for, and yet I didn’t know. I am nearly twenty-four and I have never seen a dead body. Imagination terrified me and held me back behind Johnny as he calmly searched, a large, slow, matter-of-fact figure in the moonlight. If he saw it first, the pile of rags, rotting flesh, bones - whatever it would look like, I wouldn’t be so afraid of it.
Sammy dead…. Johnny was working methodically down the slope missing nothing. I made myself think of Sammy alive, with the round black eyes and pointed shaggy head, and suddenly I could step in front of Johnny over a little cracked concrete basin full of sodden filth, where someone had once made an ornamental pool, down to where the chicken house sagged against the iron fence. The door was bolted, dropped on the hinges. I pulled back the bolt, lifted, and tugged it open. I didn’t call to Johnny, but as I went inside, he was behind me with the torch.
I didn’t think Sammy was dead, not even at first when I saw him lying on the floor, with the piece of grey blanket over his legs, stiff as canvas.
He was asleep, curled up on the stinking mattress of old chicken dirt and his own filth, one hand under the sharp bone of his cheek, his hair a caked and sticky mass, his delicate eyebrows raised in sleep as if his dreams surprised him.
A rope was tied round his waist with a knot too tight for his fingers to undo. It was fastened to the wall, long enough to give him a few yards of movement, not to reach the door. There was no window. On the floor were a dented pan, and an empty jam-jar and a darkened lump of bread so hard that he had been sucking on it before he dropped it in the dirt.
Johnny stood very still, bent over under the sloping roof, with his torch shining on the sleeping boy. ‘Bear witness to this,’ he said to me. ‘Bear witness to what you see.’
He had to use his knife to get the rope loose. When he cut it, and pulled it free from underneath the child, Sammy woke and cried, and I saw as he turned him over that a small stain had spread through the many layers of clothes from a sore wh
ere the rope had rubbed him.
His gnome face was like a skull, the eyes sunk into the shadows of the sockets, his lips drawn back in a death’s-head grin when he tried to smile.
‘Ullo Emmy,’ he said, as I picked him up.
‘Why isn’t he dead?’
Johnny didn’t tell me about the other children he had known who had lived for more than three weeks tied up in a chicken shed. He didn’t tell me anything.
I wouldn’t let him carry Sammy back to the house. He was so light, only a bundle of clothes. I clutched him tightly to me. I would never get the stink and filth of him off my coat, my hair, my skin, and I didn’t want to.
We put him on Kate’s sour, tumbled bed and covered him with all the blankets we could find, and I stayed with him, feeding him warm milk with a spoon while Johnny went to get a doctor. There was no time to think about Kate and what I would say to her if she came home now. When Johnny came back with the doctor, there was no time to think what we would say if she came blinking in from the dark passage and said: What’s going on? We would probably push her out of the way and get on with what had to be done.
The doctor did not spend long looking at Sammy. He stood up and nodded at Johnny. ‘Get him out of here.’
I wrapped him in the cleanest of the blankets and Johnny and the doctor went off to the nearest magistrate to get a Place of Safety Order which would give them the right to put Sammy into the hospital.
I stayed behind to tell Kate what we had done. Waiting for her, alone in the tomb of the flat with the sleeping babies, I knew that it was going to take more courage than I have ever needed.
If I had stayed with Molly, instead of coming back to London, I would have been in Scotland on Sunday. When I telephoned Joel on Saturday night to tell him not to meet the train, I told him briefly what had happened, and he was suitably shocked. Well, I was shocked too. Sick with shock. So why should his reaction sound wrong? Why shouldn’t he say, If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s cruelty to a kid’? Everybody says it.
That’s what was wrong.
‘I’ll have to stay here for a bit, Joel.’
‘But the dance is on Friday. Our dance.’
‘I’ll be there.’
‘I want you now.’
‘I can’t leave Kate just now.’
‘Does she need you?’
‘She needs someone.’ No reason to tell him that she had thrown a milk bottle at me and called me a double-crossing bitch.
‘I’ve got to stay. I must go to the hospital too.’
‘I said come tomorrow.’
‘All right.’
Johnny said, ‘Of course you must, Emma. After last night, you’re better away. It won’t do her any good to see you till she calms down. Was she drunk, do you think?’
‘I thought so, a little. I don’t know where she’d been. I don’t know - she wasn’t like Kate at all. She screamed at me as if I was someone else. I’ve never heard her like that. Yes … Yes, I have though. Once years ago at Mollyarthur’s, when something set her off about her mother and she shouted and raved with her eyes shut and fell down.’
‘I was round this morning,’ Johnny said, ‘to tell her where the boy was, and see what I should do about the other children. She’s all right. And the little girls seemed quite happy. She was making them a breakfast of eggs cooked in butter. And there was cream for the cornflakes. Plenty of cream. But no milk. No bread. No chairs round the table.’
‘That’s Kate.’ I looked at him. His face doesn’t often give away what he thinks. ‘Don’t be disgusted with her, Johnny. I’m trying not to be. But what she did - I’ll never forget it, when I opened the door and you shone the torch. When I think of it and see it and smell it, I want to kill her, trample her out like a filthy crawling thing.’
‘You’re about all she’s got,’ Johnny said. ‘If you give her up now, it’s the end of her.’
‘I know.’
With Joel, I could forget a little. It is a very gay Base, with parties somewhere almost every night, and the grey stone villages in the valley transformed, a little nostalgically for me, by the Air Force families who live there.
Bright ski pants in the tiny store, where the post-mistress guards her stamps and postal orders behind a fire screen stapled to the counter. Absurd powerful cars crawling in the lanes behind Mrs McKenzie’s little green van with the bread and the evening papers. A yellow school bus, shipped from the States, flashing red lights as the girls in thick white socks and saddle shoes jump down with their arms showily full of books they have no intention of opening. The Base cinema, where airmen in parkas with big fur collars throw popcorn undiscriminatingly at the officers while they wait for the first show to let out. Joel in his uniform and his short furry haircut, looking like Joel on Cape Cod. Proud of me. Sure of me. Talking about our children.
When I marry him, it will be escape. I shall start again, in America or wherever they send him, and there will be no more tormented loves or loyalties to tear me apart.
On Thursday, I was in the little hotel by the water, dressing to go with Joel to a cocktail party, when the girl from the bar, who is everything else besides, put her head round the door and asked me to take a call from London.
I went down with my hair loose, and heard Johnny’s voice.
‘What’s happened?’ Instantly it was all a dream, the parties, the yellow school bus, the escape. I was caught in the painful pincers of reality. ‘What’s wrong?’ He wouldn’t call me unless something had gone wrong. He was always frugally surprised by the nonchalance with which Joel and I made telephone calls up and down the length of the British Isles.
‘Nothing. I just thought you’d like to know. Sammy came out of the hospital today.’
‘How is he?’ I should have been there. Walking down the shining corridor with a parcel of new clothes for him. Through the swing doors and into the ward of railed cots and nursery-rhyme screen to where he waited, avidly, to see a face he knew.
‘A bit weak, of course, and nervous. But there’s nothing really wrong with him that feeding and care won’t put right. He’s in the Home out by the reservoir. I took him there. They like him.’
‘They’d better.’
‘Yes. Well—’ Johnny was never any good at the telephone, and worse at this distance. ‘Got much snow up there’? I was reminded of Tom calling me across the Atlantic, when we talked about the weather.
‘I just thought I’d tell you. I have to get him into Care, you know. His case is coming up in the juvenile court tomorrow.’
‘I thought it would be next week.’
‘Not now he’s out of hospital. Tomorrow.’
‘Friday,’ I said. ‘My father’s court.’
‘Yes. Your father’s court.’ There was a pause. ‘Perhaps,’ Johnny said, ‘it’s as well you can’t be there.’
We said our goodbyes, and I went back to my room and plaited my hair listlessly, not yet knowing how I was going to wear it. I felt left out. Useless. Superfluous. It was all going on without me, the important things. There was nothing I could do, but God knows I hated the idea of Kate in court again, and this time not the victim.
The faces would condemn her. They shouldn’t be surprised. They’d seen everything, and worse than this, but still the faces would condemn, and my father would be too hard.
So often, the cases are on the border - parent, child, whose fault is it? - so that when he gets a clear-cut case with facts like this, he tries to make an example. I’ve seen him do it: This kind of thing absolutely will not be tolerated. People have got to learn that they can’t, etc., etc.
Pointless. There are no public seats. The people connected with the other cases are outside. His audience in the small room are only afficionados who are already on the side of the law.
Sammy would be all right. He would be brought in and looked at with a sympathy not shocked enough to be unprofessional, and the students at the back would make notes.
But Kate would be there alone on t
he hard chair in the middle of the room, defiant and graceless and probably rude, and no one would be on her side.
She would sit on one side of the benches outside in the draughty tiled hall, with the mothers’ work-swollen hands turning red-purple on the way to blue, if the list moved slowly, and some of them would know each other, and so would the string of unrepentant boys who had defrauded London Transport of ninepence and the red-haired girls who truanted, coming back and back. But Kate would not know anybody.
They would know about her, because they know everything, the women to whom my father’s court is no more intimidating than the headmaster’s room at the secondary school. They would know that she was the reason why the Cruelty Man was there. They had seen him. Hullo, Mr Jordan, how’s business? And they would treat her like prisoners treat a man convicted of raping a child - with a righteous unloading of guilt on to someone whose guilt is so much greater.
When Joel came up to my room, I was packing. He didn’t notice that at first. He said, ‘You can’t go to the Weidners’ like that. You look like an ad for the Shawmut Bank’. He pulled the thick braid tight round my neck like a rope, and kissed me.
‘I’m not going,’ I said.
I don’t often see Joel angry. He is the kind of man to whom enraging things don’t usually happen. Cars run constantly for him, and tyres keep their air. His parents give no trouble. His senior officers don’t oppress him, and the men in his crew don’t make ghastly mistakes. I have never infuriated him. But when I told him why I had to go to London, he was white with fury, and his relaxed and happy mouth was tight and brutal.
‘If you go,’ he said, ‘you can’t get back for the dance.’
‘I know.’
‘I planned this for ages. Our big moment.’
‘I know you did. I’m so sorry. I know how you wanted it to be. But it doesn’t make any difference in the end. To us, I mean.’
‘The hell it doesn’t. You’re running out on me. That’s what it comes to.’
‘But I can’t run out on Kate. You must see that.’
‘I see one thing. You put that vicious little tramp before me.’
Kate and Emma Page 28
