Kate and Emma (22 page)

At first he looked surprised, and apologized, as if he had really made a mistake. He took a step backwards and then changed his mind and came on towards the bed. He had a sharp nose and a small petulant mouth with a cleft chin, too pretty, but his eyes were ugly, jaundiced. I managed to say, ‘Please go away,’ and he smiled, and just then the waiter came in and the man turned and went out, giving me a brisk little wave from the door as if he had been paying a social call.

I don’t know what the waiter thought. I was stiff with horror. If the man had touched me, it would have been like a tortoise with its shell off. I thought of my father, as I often did, and wondered whether he was less foolish than I, and could stop remembering.

I had my twenty-first birthday in America. I had made some friends by now, as well as Brenda and Dodie, and they wanted to give me a party, but Bess telephoned because she had remembered the date, and I was to come to Cape Cod.

‘They won’t let me. I’m doing a survey.’

‘What of?’

‘Traffic flow.’

‘Have you switched jobs?’

‘Traffic flow. Which way they push the carts round, and why. Mr Vinson will never let me go in the middle of the week.’

‘Ask him.’

I did, and was surprised when he said Yes. He is a very formal fat man with a blue jaw which he constantly polishes with an electric razor in his desk, and a liking for words like connotation and eventuality, which are not in the more casual commerce of speech. I had not realized he was human, but he suddenly relaxed and pulled out from among his credit cards a picture of his family: two toothy teenagers and a wife all looking about the same age.

He gave me a cheque for fifty dollars for my birthday, and I bought a white swim suit with it and paid my plane fare to Hyannis, where Bess met me in an English car with three sun-bleached daughters with brown bare feet.

While I was in their house getting ready for the party, there was a telephone call for me. Long distance from England, the middle daughter said, panting up into my room.

I grabbed for my dressing-gown, but she said: ‘Come down like that, everyone does,’ so I ran down in my slip, and heard the voice of the English operator, a man, because it was almost midnight over there. Another male voice was coming in in the background, and I said, ‘Daddy!’ more excitedly than I had thought I would, and then I heard Tom laugh.

I was standing on the marble floor of a little lobby off the front room, and my bare feet were like ice, although my hands were sweating, gripping the receiver as if it could hold me up.

‘It isn’t only your father who thinks of you on your birthday,’ Tom said, and the whole damn thing came flooding back, just when I had thought it was beginning to leave me, just when it was beginning to be a conscious effort to remember his face and voice.

It was, as he had once said, like talking to someone in the next room. It was like talking to him across the mile of London rooftops, from my flat to the telephone box where he had written among the obscenities and scrawled numbers: T loves E for ever.

It costs thirty bob a minute, he had said, and then you can’t
think of anything to say. All I could say was, ‘How did you know where I was?’

‘I rang your mother, and said I had a bill to send you. She sounded panicky, as if I was a bookie or a blackmailer, so I changed it to a receipt, and she gave me the address.’

‘I didn’t want you to know where I was.’

‘I do now. I may have to come over later this year.’

‘Don’t.’

‘Emma, I—’

If he had said: I want you, come back, I swear I would have gone. With the last remnants of sanity, I interrupted jerkily: ‘How did you know I was here?’

‘Someone at your New York number told me. Where are you?’

‘On Cape Cod.’

‘Oh God, darling. Martha’s Vineyard was one of the places I was going to take you.’

‘Don’t, Tom, please don’t. I can’t stand it.’ I stood there bowed over and shivering in my slip, pleading with him from three thousand miles to leave me alone, just as I had once pleaded with him never to leave me.

His voice changed and he said rather stiffly: ‘How is everything, all right?’

‘Yes, all right. What about you?’

‘Pretty good, Been very busy. Usual thing. It’s rained all summer.’

‘The sun shines here all the time.’

The seconds slipped prodigally past while we discussed the weather back and forth across the Atlantic, and soon the operator would cut in and he would say goodbye and it would be over, and I would have failed him.

‘Emma’s shivering!’ the child called out to Bess when I put down the receiver. ‘Get her a drink, quick.’

I had not failed my father. If he did telephone me on my twenty-first birthday, I could speak to him without guilt. I swear, we had said, and I had stuck to it.

He didn’t telephone. I knew it was too late, because my mother goes to bed at ten. I even told Bess the call was from him, and the listening child had opened her mouth, but shut it at my
look, and shrugged her shoulders on a mystery not worth pursuing.

At the week-end, Martin took me to the Air Force Base to see President Kennedy arrive from Washington in his plane and take off for Hyannisport in his helicopter. We went to the officers’ club for a drink because Martin used to be in the Air Force, and that was when I met Joel.

After that, I went up to Cape Cod often at week-ends, and when Bess closed up the summer house in September and the children went back to school, Joel would hop on planes going to the Base at Poughkeepsie, and borrow a car and suddenly arrive at the house in Brooklyn, where Brenda and Dodie and I lived with secret Mrs Patterson who could not talk above a whisper.

I have never told Joel about Tom. He has forced me back into life by not knowing that I was out of it.

I MUST WRITE to Em. I’ve been saying that for weeks. It’s awful, I haven’t written since the baby was born, and she wrote back to say it had been on her birthday, so we dropped the name Linda and called her Emily.

Bob is fond of Em, in his way, because she doesn’t laugh at him, and she was always nice with him after she got over the fright he gave her that time at Marbles.

‘Stinking idiot,’ I told him afterwards, ‘doing a thing like that to a girl like her.’

‘She’s a girl, isn’t she?’ he said, with that innocent look he gives you under his hair, his eyes all round and wet. T thought she’d like it.’

But he doesn’t hold it against her that she called him a filthy beast. Emmaline he wouldn’t have, because he can’t spell it, but Emily he likes, so one of these days we are going to have her christened. Perhaps we’ll wait until Em gets back, and she can be godmother.

Sammy was christened in the second week, but I didn’t feel so bad after him as I have since Emily. Anaemic they say, and I
should be living with old Marbles, because I’m supposed to eat liver, but we can’t afford it, not in the quantities she used to dish out. No wonder Bob rang the bell first try.

So I have these iron pills that taste of dust, and I left the top off one day and Sammy got at them. He’s into everything now that he can walk, if you can call it walking, that beery stagger from one piece of furniture to the next, like my dad coming home in the dark. Nothing is safe. He was bad enough when he was a baby, but it gets worse as they get older and you can’t stick them down somewhere and leave them. I’d only gone down the passage to see Mr Zaharian, but five minutes is all they need, when they’re crafty like this one.

He had to go to hospital and have the stomach pump. He might die, they told me, if it’s got into the bloodstream, for I’d no idea how many were in the bottle, so we didn’t know if he’d had two or twenty.

He might die. That was a queer feeling. I had to sit there on that metal chair in the corridor outside the ward and think about how much I’d mind. I couldn’t see it, not beyond the funeral, with the tiny coffin and Bob and me so serious, and talking in hushed voices. I would be holding Emily, and it would be a symbol, like, of the continuity of life unvanquished by death. Make a nice picture, though I’d have nothing to wear.

He might die, they said, and it came into my mind that it might be better for him. Why should I think that? He’ll get by, like I have. I’ve had some fun in life, with all the rest of it, and I’ll have some more when we get out of this mess. Bob says when he’s in the Army, we shall have married quarters made of red brick, somewhere in Surrey where the earth is sand and it’s all yellow gorse and little fir-trees.

Emma wants to know all about the baby, and she sent Emily that all-over suit with feet, thank God she did, for it’s about the only decent thing she’s got to wear, with the state things were in when Sammy was through with them.

Marge Collins who lives downstairs, and has three kids in Care by different fathers and has milked every government agency and charitable institution, says I can get baby clothes just for the asking, but no thanks. Marge has never been in a Remand
Home or on probation. I have. They don’t stop at baby clothes. They want to rehabilitate you. My life is mine now. I don’t want no case workers ferreting out my business.

Em’s letters get sent on from the flats, so she doesn’t know we’ve had to move. I must write and tell her. I’ll write to her tomorrow. It’s so far away. They’ve taken her away from me, and we’ll never be close again, more than sisters, like we were once. When she writes about New York and that place she goes to by the sea, and this pilot she’s got now with his boat and his Thunderbird car, it’s because she wants me to share it, but all it does is make me see the gap widening. Her world is growing and spreading. Mine is narrowing, even from what it was. It cramps and smothers me, and I want to bust my way out. That’s why I threw that shoe. Bob laughed, because he thought it was at him, and missed, but it was at everything really. He’ll have to get that window pane fixed before the cold sets in. Newspaper doesn’t keep out draughts, as I should know.

When Bob gets a better job, we’ll be all right. Get out of this hole and get a decent flat again, and the school can find someone else to clean up their mess, for Bob will be in a chalk-stripe suit or a uniform, and we’ll give his overalls to the poor.

If we ever get another Council flat, which I doubt, if they’ve got a black list, like the Roman Church with their dirty books, I’ll put by the rent each week before I even buy cigarettes. I didn’t now how well off we were till I found out how much they were asking, other places.

Four quid we have to pay for this one room with the sink and that miserable gas fire, and lucky to get it, with two kids. Norma upstairs, she pays more for those three cupboards she calls a flat. Poor Mr Zaharian with those Salvation Army trousers he’s cut the bottoms off with the pinking shears I won at Bingo, that three-cornered cell where he cries with homesickness is not much bigger than my room at Moll’s.

This old house, which used to be a grand dwelling with servants in the days when this part of London was for those with money instead of those without, is like a picture I once saw of Hell, a big tall house all stuffed full of people wailing and wringing their hands out of the windows.

It’s all cut up into separate flats and rooms. There’s nine families living here, if you count the singles as families, Dino, Mr Zaharian, Dolly - when she’s single - and that poor old woman who creeps up and down the stairs in boots, and nobody knows her name or where she goes in the daytime. I think she’s a white slaver, and jabs young girls in the arm as they help her across the road, and bundles them into the back of a van.

When Em comes back, we’ll have a laugh talking about all the weirdos in this house. We used to tell things about the people in the flats, but most of it was guessing, because they were pretty stuffy, and whatever they did they did behind their front doors. But here the front doors are just the doors of rooms, and people share taps and bathrooms and toilets, and the downstairs people share a kitchen, and everybody knows everybody else’s business. What they don’t know they make up, and tell it on the half-landing where Dino has his room that used to be a little conservatory, which is where the women gather.

They all knew about Sammy and the iron pills, and I didn’t even have to ask anyone to take Emily while I was at the hospital. Both Marge and Dolly came right in and almost fought for the privilege. So there’s that to it, but there’s cruelty too, in the way they talk, and judge everybody.

Some of them thought it was my fault, and told Bob so. He repeats everything to me, like a child with a lesson, whether it’s going to hurt or not. He can’t always tell the difference.

When Sammy had that bruise on his face, I didn’t take him out for three days because of the women on the landing, and Mrs O’Hara who sits on that little balcony of hers, with a lap spread wide as a table, so she can see who goes in and out. When she sits, you can’t see the chair at all. She’ll fall into the area one day, balcony and all, on top of the milk bottles. I hope it’s when Em’s here.

Come back, Em, oh I wish you’d come back.

If I write to her, perhaps she will. I used to write letters, but Moll always had paper, or those shiny picture postcards she collected, and stamps. I can’t even find a pencil most days. Sammy eats them. Tina used to eat coal, and Molly said she’d started doing it when Ziggy came, and she had to stop being the baby.
Sammy is jealous of little Em. I know that. He howls to get my attention, and if he can’t go or I go out and leave him, he does something bad. I remember when I was little and they used to sometimes make me feel I wasn’t there, I’d deliberately break something, or wet on the floor, because being hit was better than being ignored.

I HAD NOT meant to go home so soon, although there were times when I wished I had the money to flip back and forth like an executive.

There were many times when I missed my father, and wanted badly to see his tired, attractive face, and hear his voice, which is completely English without being upper class about it. In America, you get very conscious of the English voice. What sounds all right in Knightsbridge, the loud clear shopping voice that owns the world, can make you squirm in New York. American parodies of the British are not all that grotesque.