The mother was indifferent. She did not know what was going on, or what the little girl suffered. For it was a 'game' and the squeals and protests were from her own childhood and therefore in order, healthy, licensed. From her came a blankness, the indifference of ignorance. She cooed and talked to her stolid open-mouthed infant while the father went on with his task, from time to time looking at his wife with a wonderfully complex expression — guilt, but he was unaware of that; appeal, because he felt this was wrong and ought to be stopped; astonishment that it was allowable and by her, who not only did not protest, but actively encouraged him in the 'game'; and, mingled with all these, a look that was never far from his face at any time, of sheer incredulity at the impossibility of everything. He let his knees go slack, and pretended to release the child, who nearly fell, reached for a knee to steady herself, but before she could run away, was caught again as the knees clapped together on either side of her. The exquisite torture began again. 'There, there, there, Emily,' muttered the great man, flooding her in an odour of tobacco and unwashed clothes. 'Now then, that's it, there you are you see,' he went on, as the fingers thicker than any of her ribs dug into her sides and she screamed and pleaded.
This scene faded like a spark or like a nightmare, and the same man was sitting in the same room but in a chair near the bed. He wore a heavy brown dressing gown of some very thick rough wool, a soldier's garment, and he smoked and sat watching his wife. The large healthy woman was discarding her clothes in a rapid efficient way on her side of the bed near the fire: only now it was summer, and the fireplace had red flowers standing in it. The curtains hung limp and still, very white, but drawn back to show areas of black glass which reflected the man, the room, the movements of the woman. She was unaware of her husband, who sat there watching her nakedness emerge. She was talking, she was creating her day for him, for herself: 'And by four o'clock I was quite exhausted, the girl had her half day, and Baby was awake all morning, he did not have his sleep, and Emily was very trying and demanding today… and… and…The plaint went on, while she stood naked, looking about her for pyjamas. She was a fine solid woman with clear white flesh, her breasts small and round. The nipples were virginal for a woman who had had two children: small and with narrow pink aureoles. Her plentiful brown hair fell down her back, and she scratched first her scalp, then under one arm, lifting it to expose wisps of long brown hair. On to her face came a look of intense satisfaction which would have appalled her if she could have seen it. She scratched the other armpit, then allowed herself to scratch, voluptuously, with both hands, her ribs, her hips, her stomach. Her hands did not stray lower. She stood there scratching vigorously for a long time, a couple of minutes, while red marks appeared on the solid white flesh behind the energetic fingers, and from time to time she gave a great shudder of pleasure, masked as cold. Her husband sat quiet and watched. On his face was a small smile. He lifted his cigarette to his mouth and took a deep lungful, and slowly let it out, allowing it to trickle from half-open mouth and nostrils.
His wife had finished with her scratching, and was bundling herself into pink-spotted cotton pyjamas, in which she looked like a jolly schoolgirl. Her face was unconsciously greedy — for sleep. She was already in imagination drifting to oblivion. She got efficiently into bed, as if her husband did not exist, and in one movement lay down and turned her back to him. She yawned. Then she remembered him: there was something she ought to do before allowing herself this supreme pleasure. She turned over and said 'Good night old thing,' and was at once sucked down and lay asleep, facing him. He sat on, smoking, now openly examining her at his leisure. The amusement was there, incredulity, and, at the same time, an austerity that had begun, from the look of it, as a variety of moral exhaustion, even a lack of vitality, and had long ago become a judgement on himself and on others.
He now put his cigarette out, and got up from the chair, gently, as if afraid of waking a child. He went into the next room, which was the nursery with its red velvet curtains, its white, white, white everywhere. Two cots, one small one, one large. He walked delicately, a large man among a thousand tiny items of nursery use, past the small cot, to the large one. He stood at the foot of it and looked at the little girl, now asleep. Her cheeks flamed scarlet. Beads of sweat stood on her forehead. She was only lightly asleep. She kicked off the bedclothes as he watched, turned herself and lay, her nightgown around her waist, showing small buttocks and the backs of pretty legs. The man bent lower and gazed, and gazed… a noise from the bedroom, his wife turning over and perhaps saying something in her sleep, made him stand straight and look — guilty, but defiant, and above all, angry. Angry at what? At everything, that is the answer. There was silence again. Lower down in this tall house a clocked chimed: it was only eleven. The little girl tossed herself over again and lay on her back, naked, stomach thrust up, vulva prominent. The man's face added another emotion to those already written there. Suddenly, but in spite of everything not roughly, he pulled a cover over the child and tucked it in tight. At once she began to squirm and whimper. The room was much too hot. The windows were closed. He was about to open one, but remembered a prohibition. He turned himself about and walked out of the nursery without looking again at the two cots, where the little boy lay silent, his mouth open, but where the girl was tossing and struggling to get out, to get out, to get out.
In a room that had windows open to a formal garden, a room that had a 'feel' to it of another country somewhere, different from the rooms in this house, was a small bed in which the girl lay. She was older, and she was sick and fretful. Paler, thinner than at any time I had seen her, her dark hair was damp and sticky, and there was the smell of stale sweat. All around her lay books, toys, comics. She was moving restlessly and continuously, rubbing her limbs together, tossing about, turning over, crooning to herself, muttering complaints and commands to someone. She was an earthquake of fevers, energies, desires, angers, need. In came the tall large woman, preoccupied with a glass she was carrying. At the sight of the glass the girl brightened: here at least was a diversion, and she half sat up. But already her mother had set down the glass and was turning away to another duty.
'Stay with me,' pleaded the girl.
'I can't, I have to see to Baby.'
'Why do you always call him Baby?'
'I don't know, really, of course it is time… he's quite old enough to… but I keep forgetting.'
'Please, please.'
'Oh very well, for a minute.'
The woman sat on the extreme edge of the bed, looked harried, looked as she always did, burdened and irritated. But she was also pleased.
'Drink your lemonade.'
'I don't want to. Mummy, cuddle me, cuddle me…'
'Oh, Emily!'
With a flattered laugh, the woman bent forward, offering herself. The little girl put her arms up around the woman's neck, and hung there. But she got no encouragement. 'Cuddle me, cuddle me,' she was crooning, as if to herself, and it might just as well have been to herself, since the woman was so puzzled by it all. She suffered the small hot arms for a little, but then she could not help herself — her dislike of flesh raised her own hands, to put the child's arms away from her. 'There, that's enough,' she said. But she stayed, a little. Duty made her stay. Duty to what? Sickness, very likely. 'A sick child needs its mother.' Something of that sort. Between the little girl's hot needful yearning body, which wanted to be quieted with a caress, with warmth, wanted to lie near a large strong wall of a body, a safe body which would not tickle and torment and squeeze; wanted safely and assurance — between her and the mother's regularly breathing, calm body, all self-sufficiency and duty, was a blankness, an unawareness; there was no contact, no mutual comfort.
The little girl lay back and then reached for the glass and drank eagerly. The moment the glass was empty the mother got up and said: 'I'll make you another one.'
'Oh stay with me, stay with me.'
'I can't Emily. You are being difficult again.'
'Can Daddy come?'
'But he's busy.'
'Can't he read to me?'
'You can read to yourself now, you're a big girl.'
The woman went out with the empty glass. The girl took a half-eaten biscuit from under the pillow and picked up a book and read and ate, ate and read, her limbs always on the move, tossing and rearranging themselves, her unoccupied hand touching her cheek, her hair, her shoulders, feeling her flesh everywhere, lower and lower down, near to her cunt, her 'private parts' — but from there the hand was quickly withdrawn, as if that area had barbed wire around it. Then she stroked her thighs, crossed and uncrossed them, moved and twisted and read and ate and ate and read.
There lay Emily now on my living-room floor.
'Dear Hugo… dear, dear Hugo — you are my Hugo, you are my love, Hugo…'
And I was filled with that ridiculous impatience, the helplessness, of the adult who watches a young thing growing. There she was enclosed in her age, but in a continuum with those scenes behind the wall, a hinterland which had formed her — yet she could not see them or know about them, and it would be of no use my telling her: if I did she would hear words, no more. From that shadowy region behind her came the dictate: You are this, and this and this — this is what you have to be, and not that; and the biological demands of her age took a precise and predictable and clocklike stake on her life, making her exactly like this and that. And so it would go on, it had to go on, and I must watch; and in due time she would fill like a container with substances and experiences; she would be delivered by these midwives, some recognisable, understood, and common to everyone, some to be deduced only from their methods of operation — she would become mature, that ideal condition envisaged as the justification of all previous experience, an apex of achievement, inevitable and peculiar to her. This apex is how we see things, it is a biological summit we see: growth, the achievement on the top of the curve of her existence as an animal, then a falling away towards death. Nonsense of course, absurd; but it was hard to subdue in myself this view of her, shut off impatience as I watched her rolling and snuggling be side her purring yellow beast, to make myself acknowledge that this stage of her life was every bit as valid as the one ahead of her — perhaps to be summed up or encapsulated in the image of a capable but serene smile — and that what I was really waiting for (just as, somewhere inside herself she must be) was the moment she would step off this merry-go-round, this escalator carrying her from the dark into the dark. Step off in entirely… And then?
***
There was a new development in the life on the pavement. It was bound up with Gerald; with, precisely, his need to protect the weak, his identification with them, that quality which could not be included in the little balance sheets of survival. There were suddenly children out there, nine, ten, eleven years old, not attached to families, but by themselves. Some had parents they had run away from, or whom they did see, but only occasionally. Some had no parents at all. What had happened to them? It was hard to say. Officially of course children still had parents and homes and that kind of thing, and if not, they had to be in care or custody; officially children even went to school regularly. But nothing like this was the practice. Sometimes children attached themselves to other families, their own parents being unable to cope with the pressures, not knowing where to find food and supplies, or simply losing interest and throwing them out to fend for themselves as people had once done with dogs and cats that no longer gave pleasure. Some parents were dead, because of violence, or epidemics. Others had gone away out of the city and left their children behind. These waifs tended to be ignored by the authorities unless attention was specifically drawn to them, but people might feed them or take them into their own homes. They were still part of society, wished to be part, and hung around where people lived. They were quite unlike those children whom I will have to describe quite soon, who had put themselves outside society altogether, were our enemies.
Gerald noticed that a dozen or so children were literally living on the pavement, and began to look after them in an organised way. Emily of course adored him for this, and defended him against the inevitable criticism. It was mostly of old people that it was said they should be allowed to die — I can tell you that this added a new dimension of terror to the lives of the elderly, already tenuous — that the weaker had to go to the wall: this was already happening, and was not a process that should be checked by sickly sentiment. But Gerald took his stand. He began by defending them when people tried to chase them away. They were sleeping on the waste lot behind the pavement, and complaints started about the smell and the litter. Soon would happen what we all feared more than anything at all: the authorities would have to intervene.
There were empty houses and flats all around; about half a mile off was a large empty house, in good condition. There Gerald took the children. It had long ago lost its electricity supply, but by then hardly anyone paid for electricity. The water was still connected. The windows had been broken, but shutters were made for the ground floor and they used old bits of polythene for the upper floor windows.
Gerald had become a father or elder brother to the children. He got food for them. Partly, he begged from shops. People were so generous. That was an odd thing: mutual aid and self-sacrifice went side by side with the callousness. And he took expeditions off to the country to get what supplies could still be bought or purloined. And, best of all, there was a large garden at the back of the house, and he taught them how to cultivate it. This was guarded day and night by the older children armed with guns or sticks, or bows and arrows or catapults.
There it was: warmth, caring, a family.
Emily believed herself to have acquired a ready-made family.
Now began a new, queer time. She was living with me, 'in my care' — a joke, that, but it was still the reason for our being together. She was certainly living with her Hugo, whom she could not bear to leave. But every evening, after an early supper (and I even arranged for this meal to be at a time which would more easily accommodate her new life) she would say: 'I think I'll be off now, if you don't mind.' And without waiting for an answer, but giving me a small guilty, even amused smile, she went, having kissed Hugo in a little private ceremony that was like a pact or promise. She came back, usually, at mid-morning.
I was worried, of course, about pregnancy; but the conventions of our association made it impossible to ask questions, and in any case I suspected that what I regarded as an impossible burden that could drag her down, destroy her, would be greeted by her with: 'Well, what of it? Other people have had babies and managed, haven't they?' I was worried, too, that her attachment to this new family would become so strong that she would simply wander off, away from us, from Hugo and me. There we were, the two of us, waiting. Waiting was our occupation. We kept each other company. But he was not mine, not my animal, most definitely he was not that. He waited, listening, for Emily: his green eyes steady and watchful. He was always ready to get up and meet her at the door — I knew she was coming minutes before she appeared, for he smelled or heard or intuited her presence when she was still streets away. At the door the two pairs of eyes, the green, the brown, engaged in a dazzling beam of emotion. Then she embraced him, fed him, and bathed. There were no baths or showers in Gerald's community yet. She dressed herself and at once went out to the pavement.
This period, too, seemed to go on interminably. That summer was a long one, the weather the same day after day. It was hot, stuffy, noisy, dusty. Emily, like the other girls, had reverted with the hot weather to earlier styles of dress, shedding the thick garments that had to be worn for utility. She pulled out the old sewing machine again and made herself some bright fanciful dresses out of old clothes from the stalls, or she wore the old dresses themselves. Very strange those pavements looked, to someone my age, with decades of different fashions on display there all at the same time, obliterating that sequence of memory, which goes: 'That was the year when we wore…'
&
nbsp; Every day, from early afternoon onwards, Gerald, with the children from the community house, would be on the pave — ment, so Emily was separated from her 'family' only for a couple of hours each day when she paid her visit home to dress and bath, and for an hour or so each evening, when she took a meal with me. Or rather, with Hugo. I think, too, that coming home for this brief time was a necessity to her emotionally: she needed a respite from her emotions, her happiness. In that other house it was all a great crescendo of joy, of success, of fulfilment, of doing, of making, of being needed. She would return from it like someone running in laughing from a heavy storm, or from too-loud band music. She would alight on my sofa smiling, poised ready for flight, basking, friendly to the whole world. She could not prevent herself smiling all the time, wherever she was, so that people kept looking at her, then came to talk to her, touch her, share in the vitality that flowed off her, making a pool or reservoir of life. And in that radiant face we could still see the incredulous: But why me? This happening to me!
The Memoirs of a Survivor Page 9
