Kate and Emma (3 page)

This has never happened to me before, with women or men. I have fallen in love in a flash, committing myself utterly to devotion. I have liked girls instantly, if they looked at me with pleasure instead of appraisal. With Kate, it was different. She looked at me without moving her head while her father was telling mine what a bad girl she was. Her eyes were pale blue, unsuited to the Cleopatra make-up. She looked at me for a second as if I were the only familiar thing in that courtroom, then slid her eyes back and shut them, the lashes flickering.

She stood with her head up and her hands clenched white as her father told a one-sided story which sounded good to him, but to no one else. She would not speak, even to my father, and I wondered if he realized that the tilt of her head was not aggressiveness - favourite Remand Home word - but plain hydrology, to keep the tears from spilling over.

Why didn’t they leave her alone? She had set her mind on silence. If she spoke, she would cry, and she had set her mind against the defeat of tears.

‘Why did you run away?’ my father asked her again, and Miss Draper’s stomach rumbled sharply, like a school lunch bell. ‘Don’t you like it at home?’

Leave her alone!
She pressed her pale lips together, and the tears glistened along the absurdly blackened lashes.

‘Never
comes
home.’ Her father began to whine through the battered nose, seeing his last chance to get a hearing. ‘We can’t do nothing with her. She never comes home, and that’s the truth. Eleven, twelve at night—’

And she suddenly cried out, as if it was being wrung from her by torture, ‘What is there to come home for!’

I WON’T CRY. I won’t. They’re not going to win that way and think I’m sorry.

I’m not sorry. I’ll do it again, if they make me go home. It was all right with Bob, though two nights in that cellar was enough. With Douglas, it was the first time I felt grown up, when he talked to me about the sheep, and the pavement burning your feet.

All the time I had to stand there - and the Spanish Inquisition had nothing on it, believe me - they thought I was listening to what was being said, and the report from Stinkney and that. But all I was thinking of was holding on and not crying. They would have loved me to cry, don’t doubt it, sobbing all over the court like a sinner at a Billy Graham rally, so I wasn’t going to give them that pleasure, with their eyes looking pity at me, and the careful kindness, and that woman bogey with her jolly manner. It’s no wonder she chose the Force. What else could you do with those legs?

All but one girl. I didn’t know who she was, and I wasn’t that interested, but she didn’t seem to belong there in that yellow coat, and her hair was coming down in a heavy brown loop at the back and she didn’t want me to cry.

I could see her not wanting it. She was on my side. Well, the others were too, of course, in their way, but it’s a different way from hers and mine. Theirs is organizing people. Ours is just wanting to be let alone and see what comes next.

Why ours? I knew as soon as I came into that room, among the solemn, kindly stares, that she was my sort. She isn’t as pretty as me, unless you like that big-boned squaw type. But she looked at me, not with that case-worker look they all get - understanding, but watch your step - but truthfully, as if she was showing me herself.

I’ll never see her again, I daresay, but it helped, her being there. It helped me not to let go and give them a reformed delinquent. It helped me not to cry, and so I stood there and held on to that while Dad bellyached on, and the beak tried to be fatherly, and my mind floated off away like it does if you concentrate on something physical, like beating your hand with a hairbrush and whirling it round till little points of blood start up all over it. Bob and I do it sometimes to see who can bleed most.

I should have held on longer though, and not broken out like that and yelled at them. I didn’t mean to. I wasn’t going to say a word, just let them do whatever they wanted with me and not
give them the satisfaction of knowing whether or not I minded, though if they had sent me back to Stinkney, I’d have gone in with Lynn and her lot and really showed them. But while I was standing there holding the damn tears and floating off down that road that curves away round a corner I never get to, I could hear Dad steaming up to that self-righteous bit about all they’ve done for me, and I suddenly came back to it all in a rush. The hopeless ugliness and the way we all fight round and round like animals in a cage and the voices and the shop door buzzing and the mouse droppings and the milk sour and the damn baby wetting in my bed, and I had to yell.

It shocked them. The noise suddenly in the small room. Not what I said. That was no news. A women in a suit she’d knitted herself got up later and told how she had been to our home and what it was like. It was a bit much, hearing her say words like filth and slovenly - after all, it was our home - but Dad said never a word, and the old piece who is one of the magistrates but not allowed to talk kept sneaking looks at the clock. It was getting on for one. That’s the time they go for their dinner, you’ve got to consider that. So they wrapped the thing up.

After I’d yelled out like that and shocked the plaster off the walls, I did cry, but only for a moment. Tears came gushing out like when the kids get the fire hydrant open, but I knew that if I just let them fall without putting up a hand to rub at them, they’d stop. They did, and I felt better, like letting a bit of gas out of your stomach to relieve the pressure.

I’d given them their answer, and I had stopped being afraid of crying, so I could take some interest in things, and look at the girl in the yellow coat again, but she was leaving. She was going out a door at the back and I thought well, you ruddy sod, deserting me, though I was nothing to her, nor she to me.

But it just shows you. So I felt dead rotten then, and I let myself listen to what they said, and answered Yes, which surprised them, since I’d been labelled unco-operative, and we all parted friends, and Dad went out the door we came in.

I’d never looked at that door, not once the whole time, although I still thought, even at the end, that my mother would come. She didn’t. Why should she? Miss Reid took me out the other door,
which didn’t lead into the hall, but it didn’t matter. I knew she wasn’t out there.

I SPENT THE afternoon in a cinema, and found that my father had gone home on an earlier train, because the car was not at the station. Our house is not far from the railway - it’s not far from anywhere, for that matter: you can hear the neighbours breathing on a quiet night - so I would just as soon walk, although it is mostly on a main road, between two Medway towns.

As soon as you step up on our black drive, you can see the view dropping away beyond the hedge. The fields and the little common where the gorse is blocked in like a schoolroom print in the spring cannot be built over. Only the Ministry could despoil the wood beyond and the single, perfectly shaped chestnut-tree in the middle of the empty meadow.

It is absolutely pretty and I dislike it absolutely. A pose? All right, but when the hundredth visitor has stood on the terrace, dutifully exclaiming and wondering where the drinks are, the view begins to purr and simper. The Green Belt, for God’s sake. A narrow green girdle of Socialist niceties, a feeble attempt to disguise what they have let London do to the Weald and the Thames Valley and the spurs of the Chilterns.

Only twenty miles from London, the visitors exclaim, and all this country! A cheat. If you rode a horse into the valley and up the meadow on the other side, you would be into the washing lines of the Estate before you were really galloping.

My parents were lucky. They bought this house long ago, when people were more relaxed about the Green Belt, and this was not exclusively the best view twenty miles, etc., etc. Prices all along our road are very high now, and my father could get twice what he gave, and he might have, five or six years ago, and escaped. But he is losing initiative. He is losing the dream with which he beguiled me. Or perhaps he never truly had it.

Our neighbours are mostly richer than we are. It is quite social, with the same people ait all the parties, and a proportion of
adultery, like a pale imitation of O’Hara suburbia, because the gin is weaker.

The teenage parties are as dull as the grown-up ones, for different reasons. The host parents are conscientious about Being There, which means they go upstairs and hang over the banisters trying to hear something lewd, like the mother in
Peyton Place.

When I went into the house and draped my yellow coat over the acorn end of the banister, my mother was in the little room off the hall, drinking sherry out of a glass she couldn’t get her nose into and reading a novel by the fire.

The drawing-room is hard to heat, so we sit in the little room when we are alone. Not that we sit together very much. After dinner, my father, who often brings work home, goes to his room upstairs whether he has work or not, and my mother reads with her dark sculpted eyebrows up, making little noises like a sleeping pony. I sometimes try to watch television, and when she begins to ask: How can you bear to watch that trash? I go up and read in the bath with my hair draped over my breasts like wet seaweed.

When I have finished training and have a proper job with Uncle Mark, I shall have a flat in London. She doesn’t know yet, and we’ll let that battle keep. Often I think I can’t wait so long, but until I’m earning, the only alternative is marriage. Who with? None of the people I have loved so far have loved me. Some of them didn’t even know me.

‘This is a ghastly book,’ my mother said.

I used to say: Why read it? I don’t any more.

‘All the people are so worthless. Why must one read about worthless people?’ Since books nowadays aren’t written about the kind of people she considers worthwhile, it’s hard for her.

She said that I could have some sherry - if she knew what Derek and I put away when we go out - and I invented a few clean and poignant things about the morning, because the truth makes her talk about bringing back the birch, and then my father came in, which was what I’d been waiting for since I fumbled out of the courtroom with my hair coming down.

‘Why did you rush out like that, Emma?’

‘I had to meet someone for lunch. It was late.’

‘I thought you weren’t going to have lunch.’

‘I didn’t. We had coffee.’

‘Oh. I thought you were upset by that girl screaming. Poor child. They don’t have much of a chance.’

I had thought I would tell him, but, with my mother there, I couldn’t. I couldn’t say that I was torn with pain for Kate, and that when she cried and bent her head, and I saw the strawberry birthmark staining the back of her vulnerable neck, it was suddenly too much.

Perhaps I would tell him later. Perhaps not. Confidences saved up can misfire. It might sound like hysteria. Actually, it had been more like being hit.

‘You saw the boy you were interested in, didn’t you? Attractive little devil, he was trying to fool me.’

‘Why were you cruel to him?’

‘I wasn’t.’

‘You were. You teased him along, and then lashed out. It was deliberately cruel.’

My mother passed her sherry glass from the table to her lips without looking up from her book. She knows that he and I can fight on the same level, without hurting each other. Alice tells me: Don’t speak to him like that! But he can take things from me that he never would from her, because she is afraid, and he knows it.

‘Listen, Emma.’ My father has hair the colour of a pigeon’s wing which he wears conceitedly, brushed back long at the sides. He is not very tall, so he often stands up when other people are sitting. He puts an arm on the mantelpiece and the foot of his bad leg on the fender and looks down at you with that lifting smile, and I sometimes want to yell at my mother: Look - look at him. Look properly at him!

She is still in love with him, but she doesn’t let it show. She has a childish, rather anxious face, and beautiful thick black hair which she wears in a square doll cut. It swings and bounces prettily, and he sometimes plunges his hand in it, but not often. He is kind to her, but too polite. That must be galling, when you’re over forty, because he can’t have been, when they were young and passionate.

He demands things of her, but they are not, alas, the things that love demands. Meals must be on time. His friends must come
before hers. She must never keep him waiting. Anything that goes wrong with the cars, the drains, the dogs is her fault, since the garage, the plumber, the vet are her affair.

She demands almost nothing of him. Too little, much too little. I don’t know whose idea the twin beds were, but if it was hers, she’s an even bigger fool than he thinks.

‘Listen, Emma. I wouldn’t keep my job long if I were a sadist. All right, I lost my temper with that boy. Why him, when there are so many more repulsive? He was enjoying himself too much. I saw him coming back and back to court, something a little worse each time. Not caring. Mum would pay the fine. Stupid woman, you can tell by looking at them they aren’t going to take it out of the pocket money.’

‘I don’t think he has any. You didn’t see the place where he lives. I did.’

‘I hope you washed your hair,’ my mother said.

‘I wash it every night.’ It’s a temporary obsession, but for the moment I am like the boy’s mother with all that compulsive laundry. ‘It was disgusting with dirt and smells. The other children look like maggots. If a boy can come out of a place like that still thinking life is fun, you shouldn’t crush him. You should give him the earth.’

‘Whose earth? The taxpayers’? He’ll take it anyway, what little bits he can knock off,’ my father said. ‘He’s headed for delinquency. I’ve learned to spot it.’

‘The parents should be put in gaol,’ my mother said automatically. This is one of her things, like taking away the vote from anyone who can’t pass an intelligence test, and sterilizing them.

‘The father is there already, and I’d hate to tell you what for. Delinquency is a defeatist word,’ I told my father. ‘That’s not what Mr Jordan said about that little boy.’