‘See her!’ the father said. ‘I’d better not.’
‘I mean, perhaps you could help her. Perhaps you could—’ Had I expected them to sob gratefully and beg to be taken to Kate?
‘I thought you might want to take the little girls for a bit,’ I went on and the mother leaned forward on the old lozenge linoleum of the counter and said, ‘Leave us alone, do you hear? We’re all right. We’ve got our own kids. We’ve got our business and my husband is in work. If she told you to come here, you can go right back and tell her I wouldn’t stoop to help her if she raised her hand from the stinking pit of hell.’
‘A devil,’ her father said. ‘A devil, that’s what she is. We read about it.’
‘To think of her doing that to that poor innocent little child,’ her mother droned. ‘Can you wonder we don’t want nothing more to do with her?’
‘No,’ I said dismally, and I went back to Johnny’s to tell him that he was right again, rot and blast him, and E. Bullock was wrong.
It is almost a year since Jean was killed, but he and Nancy still aren’t able to fill the emptiness of the house. It even looks empty from die outside. The same curtains are there, and the green window-boxes waiting for spring, but it’s not the same. Jean’s bicycle always used to lean in the side passage. Nancy’s generation doesn’t bicycle in London.
I had been to see Kate, and when I went to tell Johnny about her, he was still out, although it was late enough for him to be home.
‘He works too hard,’ Nancy said, more like a wife or a mother than a daughter. ‘Since Mum died, he’s been driving himself. He makes calls till all hours. He’s hardly ever at home.’
‘Do you mind?’
‘Well, I do. It’s rather lonely.’ She is enough like her mother to make it very painful to see her bright-skinned face not rounded with secure pleasure, but getting a little heavy and serious.
‘You’re a good girl, Nancy.’
‘I’m not. I’m bitter and horrible. When I hear about these kids my age rejecting their mothers - they talk about it at school, “I saw through her when I was thirteen” - I could do murder. That’s one reason I have to get out. They’re so babyish. They pile up their hair and stuff their bosoms, but they’re still kicking and screaming like two-year-olds in a playpen. I’m not going back after the exams, whether we move or not.’
‘Are you going to move?’
‘I suppose. The man who will take over here is recovering from an operation. I hope he has a relapse. I don’t want to go and live with the Grants.’
‘It won’t be so lonely for you.’
‘I’d rather be lonely here. I don’t think Mrs Grant and I are going to like each other. She’ll be big and domineering and try to teach me how to do things I already know.’
When I asked her if she had seen Mrs Grant, she said No rather miserably, and didn’t want to talk about it any more, so we played cards until Johnny came home.
He was tired and depressed. One of the schools had reported bruises on a kindergarten child, but the family had skipped yesterday, owing rent, and Johnny had been following up false leads, trying to find them for hours.
We talked about Kate. Bob is out and working, and Mrs Evans is getting them a flat, but that’s not the end of it. That’s just the beginning. Kate is one of the reasons why Johnny doesn’t want to leave. Kate and her children and all the other bedraggled families who have become a part of his life. It won’t be easy for the new man to go into house after house, flat after foetid flat, and hear, ‘Where’s Mr Jordan then?’ and see the faces drop.
‘But Kate will have you,’ Johnny said, ‘unless you change your mind about your American.’
‘No.’ I have not told him the whole reason about that. I have not told anyone, and I haven’t yet seen Tom again since we rode in the taxi, hanging on like desperate rock climbers. I can’t. I’m afraid of what he’s going to say.
‘I think it - it’s pretty good, how you’ve stuck by her,’ Johnny said diffidently. He has almost as hard a time throwing out a compliment as an insult.
‘We took a blood oath,’ I said, and Nancy asked, ‘What’s that?’ coming in with soapy wet arms from the room at the back. ‘Is it cutting wrists? A girl did that at school to someone and then wouldn’t do it to herself. There was blood all over the cloakroom.’
I told her about the hairbrush ritual that Kate had taught me. ‘You do it with people you make a promise to. People you’ll always stick by.’
‘Let’s do it now. You promise that you’ll always stick with us, even if we get swallowed up by big domineering Mrs Grant. Here, I’m washing brushes with the socks.’ She brought in a stiff hairbrush and gave it to me. ‘Not me, my hands are wet. Do it with Daddy. I want to see you do it’
Johnny and I looked at each other, then smiled and shrugged, because we were only doing it to please Nancy. We stood up, and I banged on my hand and started whirling my arm, and then he banged on his, very hard, so that the beads of blood began to spring out at once, even before he whirled it. When we put the backs of our hands together, he suddenly grabbed my hand with his other one, and pressed it very hard against his as the blood mingled.
‘Blood comrades.’
‘Blood comrades,’ he said, and neither of us was smiling.
‘Once,’ I said, ‘when I was in London, I telephoned you. It was a time when nothing seemed to matter very much, and I didn’t care what happened. You were out.’
‘Once when I was in America,’ Tom said, ‘I telephoned you. Twice. There was no answer. I was going to try again, after the week-end, but I had a cable from London. Sheila was in the hospital and I had to come back.’
‘Is she all right now?’
‘Yes, thank you,’ he said, as if I were an acquaintance inquiring politely about his wife. ‘She was very ill. She’s - well, she’ll never be as strong as she was.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I began, but he said, ‘For God’s sake, Emma, drop this. I’m offering you everything. I should have said this long ago. I should have married you long ago. I was too afraid of hurting her. So I hurt you instead. But I know now that nothing matters except you.’
‘It’s too late.’
‘It’s not.’
‘She’ll still be hurt. More so, if she’s not well.’
‘I don’t care. I’ve had my purgatory. If I die tomorrow, they’ll have to let me straight into heaven. Why have you stayed away so long?’
‘We promised.’
‘You did. A promise to your father - what does that mean? He broke his promise to you, didn’t he? And got away with it. Why can’t you?’
Why can’t I? Oh God, why can’t I?
THERE IS ONE of the nurses here, name of Diller, a great huge woman like a Russian discus thrower, and she’s one of those men who get themselves turned into women. I’m sure of that. When they chopped her, they forgot to chop off the moustache.
She is cruel to me, because she is a sadist. That’s why she took this job. But everyone else is all right. So is the food and having time to sleep, so I may pretend I’m not cured of whatever it was I’m supposed to have. I’ve forgotten now exactly what it was.
There’s this doctor, he gives me cigarettes and we talk for hours. He doesn’t seem to have much to do, so we talk about my mother and the old days, which he says is all right to do, although I’ve always thought those dark things were better left to rot in secret.
Emma was in yesterday, and I sent her down the corridor with a made-up question to have a look at the faggot. She agrees. It is a man, but we shall say nothing. Some of the poor old girls they’ve got in here haven’t seen a man for years except the doctors, who are all black or eunuchs, so even just the moustache is better than nothing.
Emma told me about a little girl of five whose mother beat her with a strap. They had been looking for the mother for days. She’d gone to ground. But the kid turned up on Mr Jordan’s doorstep one evening. All by herself, no one knows who took her or told her to go there, and Emma says her
back was all up in welts, and bleeding. She had to cut the vest away when the doctor came, and he found she had two ribs broken as well, and some teeth knocked out.
Can you imagine a woman doing that to a kid? She’s a sadist. So is Nurse Diller. She makes lampshades out of human skin.
This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader
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Copyright © Monica Dickens
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Kate and Emma Page 32
