Kate and Emma

by Monica Dickens

  ‘I put her before the dance, that’s all. Whatever she’d done, if she’d done murder, I’d still go to see her. She’s alone. She’s got no one, and she’s got to go through this in court. Of course that’s more important than a party. With balloons and drunken colonels.’ I shouldn’t have said that. I wasn’t supposed to mind the squadron commander letting go at week-ends.

  ‘Everything I’ve ever wanted, everything I’ve ever planned for us, you wreck it.’ He began to rage like a spoiled child, kicking up the corner of the carpet and kicking it again when it rolled back at him. ‘Your father. Your job. Your uncle. Your God damn cheap little gaolbird girl friend—’

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘I hope they put her in gaol. I hope they lock her up and throw away the key and you can never see her again.’

  He was shaking with anger, and I was shaking too, and didn’t want to speak, so I began to finish my packing. ‘What the hell are you doing?’

  ‘I have to go, Joel. I told you. I’m getting the night train. Will you take me to the station?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then I’ll get a taxi. What will you do?’

  ‘I shall go to the Weidners’ and get drunk.’

  He can be so like a child that I sat down on the bed and laughed and held out my arms to him. But it wasn’t the childish Joel who turned away from me and said, ‘Go on then, but don’t bother ever coming back.’

  I WORE THE red coat that Em gave me when she came back from Canada. It’s about the only decent thing I’ve got left. I had to sell some of the other stuff when they came at me with the moment of truth about the rent.

  I was glad I wore it, when I saw her waiting on the bench as I came pushing in among the crowd, afraid I was late, for she said, ‘Oh good, you’re wearing the coat. It looks wonderful.’

  To tell the truth, I hadn’t expected to see her any more. I thought she was through with me, like everyone else. I am an outcast, a pariah dog kicked into the stinking gutter. The looks I get. No one has smiled at me for days. Except Mr Jordan, and I don’t count him. He’s a reincarnation of Saint Francis, come back a different shape.

  Em was sitting on the bench among all those terrible mothers and things they get in that court, and she got up and kissed me and said, ‘The coat looks wonderful,’ which was just what I wanted to hear, since everyone was going to be looking at me.

  Dear Em. She came. I never thought she would, but she came. She’s like a dog that doesn’t know when it’s licked. She’s like those burrs that used to get into my hair when we lived down the lane. You can’t shake her off. She came, with that long hank of hair over her shoulder like the first time I saw her in the market. It makes her look like a teenager, though her face really looked tired and white and much older.

  But she came. She and I together again, and I’m not afraid any more. She’ll stick up for me. Mr Jordan, he can say what he has to, but Em won’t let me down.

  I needn’t be afraid of her father. He was all right to me last time. And the woman in the fur hat - I swear it’s the same one she had five years ago, that kind of curled lamb is very durable - she’s not a bad old sow either, though they don’t let her say much. It was her suggested me going to Mollyarthur’s, so I’ve a lot to thank her for.

  I wish old Moll was here.

  It feels funny sitting in the chair, right where my dad sat that day, and they had to tell him to stand up when he answered Mr Bullock. Mr Jordan came in right behind me, carrying Sammy. Some funny clothes they put on him at the Home, I must say. Green was never his colour. I’d been told to sit, but Mr Jordan just stood there, looking too big, holding my child as if it was his own.

  A man who had been darting about having confidential words with people as if he owned the place, put some papers on what they call the bench, although it’s really only a table, with billiard cloth tacked over.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Emma’s father. ‘Application for a permanent Place of Safety Order. Yes, Mr Jordan?’ He has this lovely liquid sort of voice in his throat, like an actor. Not a bit like Em’s, which is rather deep, and loud - you can hear it a mile off. ‘That is the child?’

  Who else? Did they think he was carrying that great big boy for fun?

  Mr Jordan put his hand on the Bible to swear by Almighty God. Why didn’t they ask me to swear? I was going to get a chance to tell my side of it, wasn’t I? Then he looked round sort of helplessly, and a policewoman got up at the back of the court, rather a pretty one. I turned round to check, for they are sometimes iron maidens.

  She was going to take Sammy, but Em’s father said, ‘Give him to the mother. You take him, Mother,’ he said to me, in a voice that had nothing in it, not kindness, but not hate either. Mother. It makes you laugh. Last time I was in here, he called me Katherine and asked me if I was happy at home.

  Well, of course when I held out my arms for Sam, he cried, the little bastard, and clung on to Mr Jordan. People nodded oh ho, I could see them doing it, and the woman in the Cossack hat leaned over to say something to Mr Bullock which he ignored, as if it was too obvious.

  ‘All right, Officer. Thank you,’ he said to the pretty policewoman, and she took Sammy and he sat with her at the back of the room and beat on the table with a ruler. So Emma’s father said, ‘Perhaps you had better take him outside. He’s a bit too old anyway.’

  Too old to hear what was going to be said? Listen, that kid knew it all the day he was born.

  Things settled down, and Mr Bullock told Mr Jordan to go ahead, and I crossed my legs the other way, and hitched a bit to pull the edges of my coat over them. I am Mother. Very honest and respectable. Working hard to keep the family going while my man is in stir. I felt terribly alone, sitting out there. I wished I could have held Sammy on my knee. Little bugger. He would go and screw everything up.

  Mr Jordan had been talking for about two minutes before I began to extract words from the sound of his voice, and realized I should be listening.

  It was about Bob, and the flat and everything, and Mr Bullock listened for a little bit, tapping a pen on the table with his long clean fingers, before he said, a bit too sharply for Mr Jordan, who was doing his best, ‘My colleague and I have copies of your case notes here. There’s no need to repeat all the background details.’

  ‘Very well, sir.’ You could see he was a bit scared, though I don’t know why. He must have stood up in this court often enough to tell about people mistreating their kids.

  But I didn’t mistreat Sammy. I just did what I thought was best, and that’s what I’ll say, if they do me the courtesy to ask me. If you’d had my lot, I’ll say, you’d know that there’s just so much a person can take. All right, what I did was wrong, I see that now, but at the time there was nothing else I could do. You can’t condemn a person for doing their best.

  ‘We’ll take it from the night you came on the scene then, shall we?’ and Mr Jordan got his feet planted firmly on the floor and started off again, talking right past the front of me, as if I wasn’t there at all, and they were all in a play someone had made up.

  It would make a play too. The big man talking, slow and steady, and the people all round the walls of the square room listening and looking at me. The small lonely figure sat alone in the spodight, in the red coat with the collar so bravely turned up, and the courageous tilt to her head. If only I didn’t have this cold heavy feeling inside me as if something awful was going to happen, I might be able to enjoy the drama of it.

  ‘It was on the twenty-second of this month, sir, last Friday. A lady came to my house to tell me that she was anxious about a four-year-old boy.’

  ‘To make a complaint against Mrs—’ he looked down— ‘Mrs Thomas?’

  ‘Oh no. This lady is the mother’s friend. A very good friend. She has known her a long time, and understands the problems, but it wasn’t until this day—’

  ‘Just a minute. You know this lady, is that right?’

  ‘I know her, sir, yes.’

  ‘Did she
tell you anything about the child at any other time before last Friday?’

  No. I could have answered that one. Not Emma. She’s nagged at me. Kept on to me about Sammy, although it was easy for her to talk. But it was between us. She’s never told about the poker, and she never will.

  Mr Jordan looked carefully at the magistrates, and then said, ‘Yes. She had spoken of it.’

  The poker. Oh my God, he knows about the poker. She’s sold me, Emma has. Now I know there’s no one in the whole world you can trust. Now he’s going to tell them I took the poker to the boy, and how am I going to get out of that?

  ‘She came to me one day to ask my advice. About a month ago, that would be.’

  ‘Is it in the notes?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It didn’t seem relevant to the case.’

  ‘It does to me, if it was about this particular child. Was it?’

  ‘Yes, it was. She told me that she was afraid her friend wasn’t treating the boy properly, and asked for my help.’

  ‘She gave you details?’

  ‘Just a general impression of the mother’s behaviour to the child.’

  She hadn’t told. I let my breath out again.

  ‘And so you made a call, of course.’

  ‘Perhaps I should have, but at the time, because of the state the mother was in, it seemed better for her friend to go back first and ask if she would like me to help her, since she had been through such a bad time, with her husband in prison, and she had been ill, and her baby dying.’

  ‘If you had gone to see her then, this appalling thing that was done to this child would not have happened.’

  ‘I’m afraid that’s so, but at the time I did what I thought was right. We can all be wise after the event, sir.’

  Good for you, Jordan. I almost got up and cheered. Then the cold lead hit me again, as if the middle part of me had died, and just my legs and shoulders working, and I remembered that they were talking about me.

  The woman magistrate didn’t smile. I don’t think she can. The Nazis cut the muscles when they experimented on her in the concentration camp. But Mr Bullock did, and everybody relaxed a bit.

  He tightens wires in the court, more like a prosecutor than a magistrate, and then he snaps them with a smile or a joke, to show he’s really just one of the boys. Or is it to show his power?

  One up to Jordan though. Why do they seem as if they were on opposite sides? They are supposed to be working for the same thing. To take children away from their mothers. They should try having a baby some time. I reckon if you can go through that for a kid, you’ve a right to keep it.

  ‘The mother was then seen again by this lady—’

  ‘This lady. The friend. It would be easier if we had her name.’

  Like hell it would. That would make you sit up. But no one said anything, so he let Mr Jordan go on. ‘And she found that the boy had gone. He had gone to visit a mutual friend of theirs in York, the mother said. Everything seemed satisfactory, so of course there was no reason for me to visit the mother, with the child not there. I would have had to see the child. The friend went away herself about that time and, while she was up north, she went to York to see the child, where she had been told he was visiting. The boy was not there. He had never been there/

  Bloody liar, Kate. But Em had believed it, hadn’t she? It would have been a good lie, if only she’d not taken the fancy to go to Moll’s, and there’d have been no trouble. I was going to bring Sammy back in again, everyone knows that. I just had to get some rest, and then I was going to bring him back in quite soon, before Bob came home.

  ‘She came straight back to London, and to see me.’

  ‘And this was—’ Mr Bullock put on glasses to look at the notes, and then took them off again to talk. They all do that. ‘This was on the twenty-second. The same day you found the boy?’

  ‘We went straight round there. The mother was out, but we got a key to get in through the house upstairs from a neighbour.’

  So that’s how they got in. Anyone who could milk a key out of Ruth Sullivan - good luck to them.

  ‘I found the two little girls in the basement flat. They had apparently been given some aspirin to keep them quiet.’

  ‘They were quite alone?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Mr Bullock looked at me thoughtfully for a long moment, and I kept my face inscrutable. The squaw mask. Emma taught me how. I wonder if he recognized it from home.

  ‘We then went out into the garden to look for the boy. We thought she might … something might have happened to him.’

  Go on. Come right out and say you thought I killed him while you’re at it. Then I’ll sue you.

  ‘And after about ten minutes, we found the little boy, Sammy, in the old chicken shed at the bottom of the garden.’

  You could feel the room stiffening. People who hadn’t heard about me before were glad they came.

  ‘Describe what you saw/

  They were all looking at me while Mr Jordan talked. Under the coat collar, my neck burned like a thousand fires. I felt as if all the eyes in the world were on me. I thought I was sitting naked on the chair, exposed in the middle of the room. I squirmed, and hung on to the sides of the seat. I felt that sickening, restless feeling you get when you’re going to faint. I couldn’t. Not now, and let them think I couldn’t take it. I dropped my head down to my knees and let the blood sing back.

  ‘Are you all right, Mrs Thomas?’ I wasn’t Mother now.

  ‘In a moment.’ I looked up, and shook my head to clear the ringing. ‘Yes, I’m all right.’ I should have told them I was pregnant and made them feel bad, but they knew how long Bob had been in prison. That wouldn’t do.

  ‘Get her a glass of water.’

  ‘No. No, thank you. I’m quite all right.’

  ‘Would you rather wait outside?’

  And not know what was said against me? ‘No, thank you. I’d rather stay,’ I said with simple dignity. I would have liked to draw myself up like Edith Cavell before the firing squad, but I had to sit bent over a bit, so I wouldn’t feel queer again.

  ‘The child was lying on the floor of the shed, on a pile of filth and excreta. He was warmly dressed, but emaciated and suffering from some degree of malnutrition. There was a tin dish near him and a stale piece of bread, and a jam-jar half-full of water, although the mother told me afterwards that she had been feeding him regularly. He was tied to the wall with a rope round his waist, and it was apparent from the stain on his clothing that it had made a sore. When we found him, the child was asleep and apparently also slightly under the effects of aspirin.’

  First thing a mother finds out, that it’s safe to give a kid aspirin, up to a point.

  Then there was a bit about getting the doctor and taking Sammy to the hospital. Bloody sauce. I’d said to him that morning: You all right, Sam? I said, and he said: Yes, Mumma.

  ‘You saw the mother that night after she came home?’

  ‘I saw her the following morning. Saturday the twenty-third. I told her where the boy was.’

  ‘No one stayed with the other children?’

  ‘The friend, sir. She stayed with them until the mother returned.’

  When I got back and saw the lights, I thought Emily had put them on. It gave me a terrible fright when I went into the room and saw Em standing there like the Statue of Liberty with that cold, accusing face. I think she thought I’d been drinking, but it was just that something flared up in my head at the sheer bloody nerve of it. To break into my house and take my kid away as if I was a common criminal. End of a beautiful friendship, I thought when she’d gone, but you don’t get rid of Em so easily, not just by heaving a milk bottle at her.

  Mr Jordan was finished. He’d said what he came to say and was ready to go home to his lunch. He shifted on his feet, and Mr Bullock said, ‘Thank you, Mr Jordan. Not a very pretty story, is it?’

  The woman in the lambskin bonnet said som
ething to him, muttering with her eyes sharp on me as if she thought I’d break and run for it, and Emma’s father nodded and said, ‘Just one thing we’d like to establish, and that is the exact time the child was shut up in the chicken shed.’

  Why don’t you ask me? I could tell you. But they don’t do things that way.

  ‘The mother’s friend last saw him on the day she came to me for advice. It was just before she went away that she saw the mother again and was told the child had gone away. So it would be about three weeks, I would say.’

  ‘About … about. This is a court of law, Mr Jordan,’ he said, rather unfairly, considering he hadn’t even thought of the question himself. He is getting a bit difficult. I remember Em telling me that he’d gone off with another woman younger than him. She doesn’t seem to have rejuvenated him too much. Sometimes they can’t take it so well, after fifty.

  ‘We should have had the mother’s friend here. The exact time of the child’s imprisonment should be in the record of the case.’

  No wonder the women waiting outside were saying: We’re here for the day. He’s the slowest beak they’ve got, they say, and I see why. Bit of an old woman really, on detail.

  ‘The friend is here today, sir. I wasn’t going to call her, since I didn’t think you—’

  ‘Of course I do. I am anxious to get the facts, Mr Jordan, not guesses, for the mother’s sake, as well as the child’s.’

  Thanks for nothing.

  ‘Yes, I appreciate that, sir.’ Poor man, he was sweating a bit, and I must say it was stuffy in the courtroom. I’m not used to so much heat after living in the catacombs. I opened my coat.

  The Warrant Officer had gone to call Emma. I got my smile ready so that everyone would know that she was on my side as soon as she came in. She hadn’t told about the poker, had she? She would tell them what a good mother I was, and how hard I’d tried, and how my head ached. Who did they think the aspirin bottle was for? Facts, Mr Jordan, not guesses.

  I HAVE ALWAYS gone in through the door behind the bench from the magistrates’ room. Now I went into the court by the door I had never used, and my father looked up from the notes and said, ‘Emma.’ And all the lines of his face were deep and sad.