Kate and Emma (20 page)

I went to the phone box on the corner and dialled the number of the flat.

‘Hullo?’ Lisa sounded as if she were in bed, talking through the curtains of hair, like a four-poster.

‘This is Kate Thomas, Emma’s friend, if you remember. Is Emma there?’

‘Oh,
hullo.
Of course I remember. How are you, Kate? Emma’s gone home for the week-end. Shall I give her a message from you?’

She sounded so nice, I almost asked if I could come and see her instead. If I had lived with Em, people like Lisa would have been my friends too. I would have invited her to our flat if she wanted, so why couldn’t she invite me?

Barbie came round after that and we went to see a film. When I got back, Sammy had fallen off our bed where I’d left him with the bottle propped. No harm. He’d gone to sleep on the floor. Bob had gone off to see old Marbles, when the library closed, and had his tea there (cold baked hearts), and when he came in, I told him the bruise on the baby’s arm was what he’d done taking hold of him to throw him to the ceiling.

‘You’re too rough,’ I said.

‘I wouldn’t hurt a hair of his head.’

But he hasn’t got much hair, hasn’t Sammy. He pulls a lot of it out, like one of the twins used, I can’t remember which. A sign of insecurity, Molly used to say, but Mollyarthur says a lot of things she makes up as she goes along. I remember her saying one day at Marbles, when I was bitching about all the shoving and kicking keeping me awake: You’ll love the baby once you have him, she said. You’ve no idea what’s in store.

I HAD NOT been home for over a month. I had to go eventually, because my mother was getting that moan into her telephone voice with which she can usually exasperate me into doing what she wants. I had not seen my father since he left the flat on that dark Day of Judgement afternoon. I had no answer to his question. If he asked: What are you going to do about it? I would have to say: Nothing.

From a warm and windy week, it dropped suddenly cold and still on Friday and by evening, as the crowded train made its short dashes south between stations, big wads of snow began to drop on it, laughing silently because people had been thinking the winter was over.

My mother met me at the station in the sheepskin coat she had already put away and camphored. ‘This will be the end of the primroses,’ she said. It wasn’t true, but since the snow could not hurt any of the alpines now flowering in her rock garden, it had to be the end of something.

My father was by the door when we got to the house, looking out from the lighted hall through a curtain of gilded snow. He never waits for me like that. I always have to find him. When I kissed him, he puts his arms round me quickly, and I realized that he had been as nervous of me as I was of him. We had thought that we would look somehow different after our last meeting. The relief that we did not was very great.

Since I have been in love, it is strange being at home. My room, the feel of the banister, the warm spots and the draughts, the familiar smell of dog and furniture polish and starch in the curtains are part of another self. How can they all be the same when I am so different?

It is only when I am at home that I feel guilty. Escaped, emancipated, special; but a cheat too. In London, it doesn’t feel like cheating, except that time when I met Johnny Jordan after Tom and I had been at Kate’s flat.

My grandmother was there for the week-end, which was why I had come, as much as to stop my mother moaning. She is quite rich, because of her B.B. shares, and she drives about in a fat black Austin with a chauffeur who used to be an alcoholic and looks as if he could do with a drink now, but otherwise she is the plain
grocer’s widow she would have us think her, and still smells faintly of buns.

She gets on all right with my mother, on a level of mutual misunderstanding, each trying to compensate for some lack they find in the other. My mother fusses round Gran in a smothering way that would give me claustrophobia if I were an old lady, and Gran listens dutifully to the trivialities of my mother’s days, faking interest.

They both try too hard, and it makes a week-end rather exhausting. Why don’t they leave each other alone? They don’t even like each other any better for trying so hard. My father doesn’t try at all with either of them, and they both love him.

When I took in Gran’s breakfast tray on Saturday morning, I drew the curtains and showed her that the snow was lying quite thickly on the garden.

‘Are you going out to play in it?’ Gran asked. I had on a pair of Bermudas and my hair in two pigtails fastened with paper clips, and she does occasionally have these lapses on first waking, when she forgets what decade we’re in.

‘There’s a big drift outside the garage. Daddy and I are going to shovel it, so we can get the car out.’

‘I don’t want your father to shovel.’ My mother came in with something I had left off the tray, which Gran didn’t want anyway. ‘Every year if it snows, men his age drop like ninepins from heart attacks. I’m always reading about it.’ Those are the kind of news items she never misses.

‘David is stronger than he looks,’ Gran said soothingly. ‘How pretty you look in that green, Laura.’ It was red, but Gran sees everything in shades of black and white, so she guesses.

‘Do I?’ My mother was surprised. It was an old jersey thing she’s had too long. She must have looked out of the window and seen the snow lying and more in the sky to come, and thought What does it matter? When I am her age, I shall dress more carefully, not less, especially at week-ends. When I am forty-eight, Tom will be sixty.

‘She is pretty,’ I said, because thinking of me and Tom at forty-eight and sixty mellowed me. I put my arm round her and felt her awkwardness. She can never relax into an embrace.

‘You’re getting thin, Emma.’ She always says that. It shows motherly concern for a daughter away from home. It never was true when she used to say it to Alice, but it is now, about me.

My father and I couldn’t talk much while we were shovelling. The snow was wet and it was hard work. Our faces were red and my knees were mottled red and blue between my shorts and woollen socks, and his breath was like steam from a kettle, because he was panting. It was harder for him, because he can’t balance properly with his leg. I could have done the job by myself in the same time, but we used to do it together when Peter was too small and Alice too lazy, so we did it together now, and my mother only opened the window twice to call out: ‘Don’t overdo it!’

‘That’s the voice she used to call to us: Don’t go too far out,’ I said.

‘The day Peter was drowned,’ my father said, ‘she’d stayed in the hotel with you, do you remember?’

I have never forgotten the exact discomfort of the wicker chairs we were sitting in when the ambulance man came in through the hotel porch.

‘“If I’d been there,” she said afterwards, “I would have told him not to go too far out.”’

‘He wouldn’t have taken any notice. None of us did.’

‘But the thing was, she had to say that. It was my fault. We all knew that. I was with him. I should have known about the current. She didn’t say it for about a month, and I thought she wasn’t going to. Perhaps she hoped she wouldn’t. In the end she had to.’

‘I love you.’ He won’t let me rage and storm against my mother, so it is all I can say to make up for these ghastly things in his life.

‘I’m afraid you may have a father complex. Perhaps that’s why - ‘ He stopped and looked at me. The last time my mother came to the window, we had stopped work to foil her before she called and we were in the earthy little toolshed, putting the shovels away. It was warm in there and we had lingered, stamping and banging our hands, while he lit a cigarette.

I sat down on the table where my mother pots things, to shake snow out of my boot.

‘I have to ask you again, Emmie,’ he said. ‘Have you thought about what you’re going to do?’

I shook my head. I could feel my face growing stubborn, but I was afraid of letting go. ‘We tried not seeing each other. It didn’t work.’

‘How do you mean, it didn’t work?’ He had on a thick brown sweater and a torn tweed jacket and baggy old trousers he’d dredged up from what looked like the twenties. The hat that used to collect rain like a gutter when we went fishing was pushed to the back of his head, and the circulation was coming back in claret patches to his bony forehead and nose. My mother would have screamed Heart! but he was just cold, and nervous about having to talk to me like this.

‘We can’t, that’s all. We just can’t.’

‘That’s absurd. You can’t. If you know what’s the right thing to do, you should have the strength to do it.’

My eyes stung, and I blinked and looked down. It hadn’t expected him to be quite so obtuse. ‘Damn Eric,’ I said. ‘I wish you didn’t know.’

‘I’ve known for some time,’ he said more gently. ‘Not what it was, but I knew there was something. How could I not know? You don’t crash about so much any more.’

‘I’ve grown up.’

‘Not very. But you’ve stopped falling over things.’

‘You should be glad. It used to annoy you.’

‘I know. Funny, when you came into the drawing-room last night with the tray of drinks, with your hair piled up and the black dress, I found myself wishing you’d trip over the rug.’

‘You haven’t said anything to Mother?’ I knew he hadn’t. She could not have avoided at least looking at me wretchedly, even if she had not known what to say.

He shook his head. ‘No need for her ever to know anything about it.’

‘She’ll have to know in the end.’ We stared at each other mulishly, antagonists. I wished I hadn’t come. I wished that I had stayed in London and waited about, watching the dirty snow, on the chance of seeing Tom. But Tom and Sheila had gone to stay with friends. That was the third reason why I had come home. I hoped it had snowed in Buckinghamshire, and spoiled Sheila’s golf.

The toolshed had only been warm compared to the snow-heavy air outside. It was cold and damp now, and I wanted to go back to the house, but my father said, ‘Wait a minute. Something has got to be said.’

I was standing by the door, looking at the humped bushes and the sheet of lawn my mother’s silly dog had spoiled, going mad in circles on the virgin snow. ‘There’s nothing to say. I’m sorry, Daddy. I’m sorry as hell to hurt you. I don’t expect you to quite understand, but I wish you’d try.’

He grimaced as if he were in physical pain. ‘You’ll think I’m lying if I say I do understand. I’ve got to tell you something, Emma. You’re the last person I thought I’d tell, because - ‘ He groaned. ‘I always wanted you to think I was perfect.’

‘I do,’ I said, because I do, even with everything I know about him.

‘Come in again and shut the door.’

He took off the fishing hat and flung it on to a shelf of flowerpots, running his mittened hands automatically up the sides of his head, where the hair grows in pigeon wings. ‘Listen, Emmie.’ We were like children playing secrets, hiding from the grown-ups. It was absurd. We didn’t look at each other. I was ashamed and embarrassed for us both, especially as he didn’t tell it well. My father with his relaxed command of words, never garrulous, timing replies just right, apt and easy with the customers in court - he told me this as if I were a headmaster and he a naughty schoolboy, stumbling over his story and stammering, choking on his cigarette, grinding it out underfoot and coughing again as he lit another.

I didn’t want to hear. I didn’t care what he had done. Just don’t tell me I I cried inside myself. Why do I have to know?

It was the woman with the eyes and hair whom I had met two years ago at the cocktail party. Benita was her name.

‘I saw her at the airport when you went to France. Was she going with you?’

‘You don’t have to know the details,’ my father said. ‘You shouldn’t know any of it. It’s only that I -1 have to tell you now to stop you making this hideous mistake.’

‘Why is it a mistake to be in love?’

‘It isn’t, if you’re free.’

‘I am.’

‘He’s not.’

‘He doesn’t love her.’

‘That makes no difference.’ Now that he had got his initial confession out, choking on it like a lump of unmasticated steak, he could talk to me more easily. We were looking at each other again. The earthy smell was damp and pungent in my nostrils. I have never liked this log cabin toolshed since the spiders when we were children. I didn’t like it now.

‘It’s classically simple, dearest,’ he said. ‘You must see that. It’s between right and wrong. Someone like you can’t possibly make a life out of the wrong.’

‘Why can you?’

‘I can’t. Benita and I are - chucking it. Putting an end to it, Letting go. There isn’t an expression that doesn’t sound like a musical comedy.’

‘Would you have married her?’

‘You can’t base a life together on someone’s else’s misery.’

‘I know.’ I did know. I had known all along, I suppose, even when the flooded river swept by, encouraging me: Love him, love him.

My father never said: He’s too old for you.

He never said: He should have told you that his wife knew.

He never said: He’s a coward. He’s thought of himself all along more than of you.

If he had said any of these things, I would have broken from him and gone out, back to my life. I knew them all. I didn’t need to hear them from him or anyone else. They made no difference to my love.

But he didn’t say them. He said quietly, with his hands in the pockets of his sagging old jacket, which my mother had tried, ineffectually, to patch with leather, ‘You have two choices then, if you won’t give up. To wreck his marriage, or to wreck your own life.’

‘I don’t care about conventions. It’s been—’

‘Do you
like
this hole-and-corner thing you’ve got yourself into?’ he burst out violently. ‘Don’t tell me it’s exciting. It’s not. It’s terrible. Exhausting. Wretched. Destroying. A few friends who
know - and leer a bit. The rest can’t be your friends. Ail the places you can’t go together. All the contriving, the lies, the - the ghastly
effort
involved just to meet for a drink - Oh God, Emmaline Bullock! I’m fifty-two. Who cares what a mess I make? But you - you’re twenty, and the world is throbbing with men for you, and you should be shot for your insanity - your sheer bloody-minded, depraved perversity that makes you steal and cheat and lie, at twenty.
Twenty.
You should be shot.’