‘Don’t worry,’ Em said. ‘I’ll be there.’
‘I don’t want you there.’ She almost told lies in front of her father. I’d be afraid of her doing that with a stranger.
‘I’ve got to be.’
You don’t have to speak for me, if you don’t want.’
‘It isn’t that. It’s to—’
‘Speak against me?’
She nodded, watching me. ‘To confirm what Johnny says.’
That hurt, but she took hold of me and said, ‘You don’t think it was my idea?’
‘I don’t know. Let go of me.”
'I' said I wouldn’t go, but they can make me. I got a summons too.’
‘Show me.’
‘Oh God, Kate, it’s not the kind of thing you carry about in your handbag. What’s the matter with you? Don’t you believe me?’
‘Yeah.’ Em wouldn’t let me down. I know that now. The more I lose - what little there is to lose - the more I trust in her.
Everyone else is against me now. They all know. When I fetched the girls back from Ruth’s, I asked her if she’d take them again if I go with Mrs Evans to sec Bob, and she said, Td rather not have anything to do with it. There’s been too much talk already.’ Ruth Sullivan, she’s so wonderful, everybody’s friend. She’d not have said that if Smiler had been home, but she’s pushed him back to work, rattling chest and all. She’s after his pension. Em says when she went there, he had a cup of tea by his bed with all weedkiller scum on the top.
I decided not to go and see Bob anyway. If the sight of me makes him angry, it’s not fair to give it him when he’s where he can’t get at me. They’ve got enough frustrations in gaol already, without frustrated rage as well.
The man in the tobacconist’s asked me, ‘How’s your little boy?’ and laughed, and called over his shoulder, ‘Here she is,’ to his wife at the back of the shop. Filthy witch hunter. The milkman made his little girl stay in the van Saturday, instead of coming for the empties.
Everyone is against me. When I asked Em why she didn’t think I was a monster too, she said, ‘That’s what I ask myself. May as well look human though.’ She had come with scissors and rollers and a bottle of shampoo to fix my hair so I’ll be all right in court.
‘We’ll keep it in a long bob,’ she said, shaping away at the top layer, while I sat on the chair that hasn’t got a back, in front of the fire. ‘It always looked better like that.’
‘To hide the mark of Cain.’
‘Well, that too. One of these days, I’m going to take you by force to a plastic surgeon.’
‘I couldn’t stand the pain.’
‘You could. It would be worth it, like having a baby.’
‘That wasn’t.’
She was snipping and clicking away, standing behind me, and I was staring into the fire at nothing, liking the feel and friendliness of it. When I was a child my mother used to cut my hair once in a great while when it began to get into the food. Her hand was shaky, and I always thought she was going to cut my ear off.
‘Do you remember,’ Em said, ‘when I saved fifty pounds towards an operation for you, and you took the money? What was it for?’
‘Didn’t I tell you it was for a friend?’
‘I didn’t believe that.’
‘Oh. I thought you did. Why didn’t you ever ask for it back?’
‘It was for you anyway. Pity though.’ She put her hand for a moment on the dark red stain that disfigures the back of my neck. She’s never done that before. It was cold in the room, but her hand felt warm with life.
‘I’m not sure I’d want to be without it now,’ I said. ‘It’s one way to make sure I’ll never forget her.’
‘Who?’
‘My mother.’
‘I thought you hated her.’
‘I do. That’s what I must never forget.’
She had finished cutting now, and was running the comb through my hair, lifting strands of it and letting it fall through the comb softly against the side of my face.
‘She put it there, you know,’ I said. ‘The mark.’
‘That’s silly, Kate. Things like that happen before birth.’
‘That’s what I mean. She tried to get rid of me, because she didn’t want to marry him. Whatever she did, it didn’t work. Typical - she never did anything right. All she did was mark me.’
‘Oh no, Kate, that’s not possible.’
‘Yes it is. She told me.’
‘She told you she tried to get rid of you?’
I nodded. ‘That’s why I never went back there.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ She was standing sort of paralysed, with the comb in one hand and the scissors in the other, looking at me as if I had two heads.
‘And tell you that she said to me: I wish to God I had killed you? No thanks. Although there’s been times all the same…. You ever wish you’d never been born? There’s been times when I wished she hadn’t bungled it.’
IT MADE QUITE a nice little story for the newspapers. There was a picture of Kate in some of them, leaving the court with me, and one paper had a picture of Sammy, taken at Molly’s when she was out and one of the Care and Prot. girls who had seen no man for weeks, except Jim, let the photographer in.
My mother and Connie were very distressed. They knew the story, of course. I had told them the substance of it straight through, and then gone quickly out of the room and left them to react on each other. They knew about my part in it, but they thought it could be kept a muffled family secret, like a werewolf in the attic. They didn’t even think that Uncle Mark knew, although I had told them about Kate when I asked him if I could go on working for him, since I wasn’t going to be married. They knew that I had to go to the magistrates’ court, and Connie made me a special breakfast, with potato cakes fried in gammon fat, for strength, and they thought that would be the end of it.
But when they saw my picture in the evening paper, walking along with Kate in the pouring rain, both looking grim and at least forty, it was too much. I knew it would be. That was one reason why I didn’t go home right away. I stayed with Kate. I was stiff for days after two nights on that chair bed, but she’d slept on it for weeks.
I took the dog to the RSPCA, and I went with Johnny to take Emily and Susannah to the Home, and then I took Kate to the hospital, and stayed with her until she went to sleep, small and lost in the spotless anonymity of the bare room with the window high up, like a cell.
No, not like a cell. Don’t be melodramatic, Emma. This is where she belongs, for a while.
When Johnny told me they were going to prosecute, I was angry at first. All for the children and nothing for the parents, and what good will it do Sammy to have his mother in prison as well as his father?
‘She’s sick, not wicked. I know it was wicked, what she did, but she didn’t realize. She was in a queer sort of fantasy state. She didn’t now what she was doing half the time. This is cruel, Johnny. They used to put schizophrenics in the stocks and throw rotten pumpkins at them. We’re supposed to have come a long way since then.’
He let me storm for a bit. That’s one of the maddening things about him. He lets you go on throwing things at the impenetrable wall of his calm, and only tells you at the end that your aim is wrong.
He was taking Kate to court not to punish her, but to make sure that she got the treatment she needs. ‘She’d not agree otherwise. We need the court’s authority.’
‘Suppose they don’t give it?’
‘They will. She’s seeing two doctors, though she doesn’t know why. I’ll have either them or their written evidence to speak for her.’
‘Very subtle. Running the prosecution and the defence at the same time.’
‘Well, it’s nice,’ he said mildly, ‘if you can help someone without them knowing it.’
They told me at the hospital that Kate would have no visitors for three weeks, to free her from associations. It felt like abandoning her to the lions.
I still didn
’t feel equal to facing my mother and Connie. It had been bad enough on the telephone. They had gone out for the other evening paper and then bought all the morning papers and burned the pictures in the fireplace, like a Boston bishop symbolically burning one pornographic book that had already sold a million copies.
I went to two more agents to ask about flats, and then, for some reason, I went out to Ham Common to see my father. I don’t know why. Perhaps it was because I didn’t want to see my mother.
‘He’s not back yet,’ Benita said. ‘Take off your coat and I’ll light the fire. I’ve been making a dress upstairs all day.’ She brought it down to show me, a cocktail dress in the kind of brocade you would expect to see on sofas, very gorgeous.
‘I wish I could do that,’ I said.
‘I could teach you.’
I let it go. I don’t think she was trying to seduce me, but I have to be careful. ‘My father never used to stay at the office as late as this.’
‘He had that train journey home. And they’re very busy just now. Some kind of merger with a Belgian firm. They’re working out the percentage of stock transfer.’ Benita knew exactly what went on both in the juvenile court and the firm. My mother never had. But then she hadn’t often been told.
‘I saw your picture,’ Benita said, sitting with the shimmering dress in her lap, picking out threads. ‘Not very flattering, was it?’
‘Did you mind?’
‘Mind - why? I was proud that you had stuck with that wretched girl.’
‘Did my father—’
‘He was upset. Not because of the publicity. He wanted to go to court, but I thought you’d rather he didn’t. He told me you fought him in the children’s court.’
‘He put me in a spot.’
‘You put him in a spot, you know, suddenly appearing like Dracula’s ghost.’
‘I didn’t know they’d call me. It wasn’t so bad at the other court. I’d rehearsed what I was going to say. And the magistrate didn’t try to make me tell him other things about Kate. Those two bitches who used to live in her house had already done enough of that.’
‘The woman who said, “I used to hear screams like the torture chamber”? The papers loved that.’
‘Mrs Martin. She looks like a drunk parrot. I could kill her. And the other one, Mrs Sullivan, with her armoured hat. They lived in the flats above Kate before the pipes burst. They were supposed to be her friends. But when they heard about the case, they went and asked if they could give evidence. Can you imagine that? As if it wasn’t bad enough, they actually wanted to make it worse. Did you know people could be so vindictive?’
Benita nodded. ‘You can’t get to my age without finding that out.’
‘I’ll bet they were furious when they didn’t get their pictures in the papers too.’ Smiler’s wife had frankly been there to show off. She let off so much high-powered logorrhoea about all the things she had done for Kate that the magistrate shook his head like a dog trying to get water out of its ears.
When Mrs Martin told about the screams, and he asked her why she had done nothing about it, she held the top of her handbag like a perch and said, ‘It wasn’t my business.’
‘It seems to me we’ve heard that before in this court,’ he said to no one in particular, and Mrs Matrin nodded, with folded lips, taking it to mean that she had said the right thing.
They had brought Bob from the prison. He looked well, a bit fatter, with his hair cut so that it didn’t fall into his eyes. He sat with his big limp hands between his knees, looking at Kate in a sort of agony. I don’t think he understood much, except that everything had gone wrong, and that when he came home in a few weeks’ time, there would be nothing to come home to.
Kate looked at him as if she hardly knew him, scornfully when he was standing up to be questioned. I don’t see how that marriage can ever get going again. Johnny says it will in time. I don’t even think it should, but that’s because Miss Bullock, social worker, is dead.
At first Bob said that Kate had always been a good mother, and treated all the children well. ‘Never did no wrong. No, sir. I can vouch for that.’ But when he was asked, ‘Isn’t it true that the little boy was afraid of her because she was too rough with him?’ he hung his wet lip and said, ‘Yes, that’s right. He was.’ Poor Bob. You could make him admit he’d shot the Queen if you asked him the right way.
When my father came home, I had to go through the details of the hearing again for him.
‘Jack was right to suspend the sentence,’ he said. ‘The girl is obviously slightly off her rocker. I saw that when she was before me.’
‘Why wouldn’t you help her?’
‘I told you. The children are my job. Whether the parents are sick or sadistic - that’s someone else’s job to find out.’
He got up suddenly. ‘I’m glad you came.’ He bent and kissed me. ‘I wanted to do that as soon as I saw the car and knew you were here. I stood on the step outside pretending I couldn’t find my key, trying to get up the nerve to kiss you. Then I didn’t dare, because you looked cool and beautiful.’
‘Would you rather I looked the way I did in your court? I’d sat up all night on the train from Scotland.’
‘How is Joel?’
‘I don’t know. It’s off.’
He glanced at Benita, but she didn’t indicate that I had already told her. ‘I’m sorry, Emma.’
‘That’s why I looked such a wreck that day. You were ashamed of me.’
‘No.’
‘Why did you look at me like that when I came in? What had I done wrong? You looked as if you were terribly hurt.’
‘I was. I was expecting to see a stranger involved in this nightmare thing. When I saw you, it hit me hard that you’d been going through all that, perhaps the worst experience of your life. And I didn’t know.’
‘You thought I should have come and told you?’
My father shook his head. ‘I had lost the right to that. That’s what hurt.’
So Miss E. Bullock, case worker, wasn’t quite dead after all. There was something I knew I had to do.
Kate hated her mother. The mother had rejected her utterly, from the moment of conception right up to the final moment when she drove Kate away for ever with the truth.
And the wicked fallacy about the birthmark. Part of her treatment will be plastic surgery, I think. If she ever tells the doctors what she told me, that would be the first thing they would do for her. That’s what I’d do, anyway. Dr Bullock, psychiatric counsellor.
They might cut out the ugly dark red stain from the back of Kate’s neck, but how could they cut out the dark hatred from her heart? Only one person could do that.
I went to Butt Street one dingy afternoon, when the wind was playing cyclones with waste paper and old drifts of grit, and the dustcart was whining and clanking down the middle of the street, exhaling a sharply active smell in the street of old quiescent odours.
When I went into the shop, Kate’s mother was talking to a pinched woman who had soapflakes and scouring powder and ammonia and bleach ranged on the counter as if she were going to fight all the dirt of London. They were only discussing prices when I went in, but they both stopped and looked at me as if they had been plotting against the Government.
I waited by the scarred ice-cream freezer until the customer had paid and gone out.
‘Yes?’ Kate’s mother said. ‘Is there something you want?’
‘Can I talk to you?’ I had not rehearsed what I would say. I knew that wouldn’t work, because what I said would depend on what she said, and there was no way of guessing that, even though Johnny had told me she was better and happier. He had also told me that I was wasting my time, trying to get her interested in Kate, but he doesn’t always have to be right.
She did look slightly better. Well, slightly different. She had cut off the sad, inadequate swatch of faded hair in favour of a basic bob and bangs, too young for her. The overall she wore was pink instead of blue, but equally shapeless
and badly laundered. There was no new vanity in what she had done to her face, because she had done nothing. Her thick, slack skin was an airless indoor casualty, and her pale eyes so lacked expectancy that it was almost worth crying out: I’ll give you five thousand pounds for the whole shop! to see if you could spark them.
Johnny’s improvement must be in the soul, or else she has slipped back.
‘Can I talk to you?’
‘You’re talking, aren’t you? You selling something?’
Sal-va-shun! I should have brought my horn.
‘I’ve seen you before, haven’t I?’
‘I don’t think so.’ With my hair in a good thick doughnut, and the tent of my blanket coat, I didn’t think she could recognize the raw young Emma who had tagged in here with the Cruelty Man, almost five years ago.
‘I’m a good friend of Kate’s,’ I began, and instantly her face shut up. As if I had said: I’m a homicidal maniac, she moved sideways to the door at the back of the shop, opened it a crack and called, ‘Dick!’ still keeping her eyes on me.
He came out, Kate’s father, short and greasy and belligerent, with that punched-up nose spread half over his face. You can see Kate in her mother, not in her father.
‘It’s about Kate,’ his wife said grimly.
‘What about her?’ He kept his hand on the knob of the curtained glass door, to show that his attendance at this conversation was ephemeral.
‘She’s had a very bad time,’ I began. ‘She—’
But her mother cut in with, ‘You think we don’t see the papers? I’ve been ill ever since last week, just thinking about it.’
‘That’s right,’ Kate’s father said, nodding his battered head— he has what looks like ringworm scars on his greying scalp. ‘Very ill, she’s been, with her nerves.’
‘If the people round here ever got to know that was her,’ his wife said, ‘I’d kill myself.’
What I had come to say was getting more hopeless every minute, but I blundered ahead and said it. ‘I thought perhaps you would see Kate, after she comes out of the hospital.’
Kate and Emma Page 31
