Authors: Monica Dickens
But where was Bob? There was nothing about him, but no sign that Sullivan had moved in.
I think she could do with some help,
he said,
if you are able.
Kate.
I left work early and took the old familiar line to the joyless, echoing station, half Underground, half main line, where I used to get off for Molly’s house. Londoners tend to drift back to their old neighbourhoods, however ungenial. I had always thought Kate might, and if only Mollyarthur were still here, she would have drifted back to Grove Lodge eventually.
The Common was swept by the same polar wind as on that evening when I first crossed it, going apprehensively to Kate’s birthday party, and now there is the snow as well, piled alongside the paths in primeval glacier chunks that will never melt in our day. The path was like stone. When a child running ahead of me fell down, I could feel the agony of the graze to skin already on fire from cold. The mother, bundled up like a Russian collective farmer, dabbed once at his face with her glove, then beat her hands together and hurried him crossly on, because she could care about nothing but her aching fingers.
If Molly were at Grove Lodge, there would be fires in the downstairs rooms and plenty of light to challenge the creeping February dusk. But Grove Lodge was cold and dark and empty. A board by the gate told that it had been taken over by one of the Council departments, and the clerks and typists and reliable women in sheepskin boots had all gone home.
I walked up along the edge of the housing estate to the top of the hill where a road of big dying houses drops down on the other side to a street of lights and shops and traffic. The house at the top was Kate’s, a square grey lump that someone had once been proud of, a sick elephant squatting in the dirty snow behind the remains of a hedge worn down to stumps like rotting teeth.
The top part of the house was dark, but there was some light below. I went round to the side door, half basement, half ground floor because of the slope. There was no knocker or bell, so I banged on it with the flat of my hand since my knuckles were too cold to use a fist.
The drain spout beside me had a wide skirt of ice at the bottom between the end of the pipe and the drain. Next to it was a low boarded-up window, scribbled over with chalk as a reminder of the days when children were able to play out of doors.
I didn’t hear Sammy coming to the door because he wasn’t wearing shoes. There was some scratching and fumbling and raiding of the handle on the other side, and when he finally got it open I pushed it to help him, and he sprang back as if I were the winter storming in.
He stood with his back to the patchy plaster wall and looked at me, and I went down on my knees, because his spindle small-ness made me feel a giant. He is four, I know, but he looks a year younger, although he still has that ancient gnome face with the dark unblinking eyes.
His long hair was spikily on end, as if he had run his fingers through it when it was wet and it had frozen that way. He wore a big boy’s grey jersey with the shoulders half-way down his arms and the slack ribbing almost to his knees. On his feet were an old pair of slippers poked into holes by his growing toles, no socks, and a handkerchief tied round a bad leg.
Staring at me, he let me take his hands. They were warm, with an odd dryness to them, but it was when I noticed that the unbandaged leg looked like a tomb effigy that I realized that I felt almost as cold in here as I had outside.
‘Where’s Mummy?’ I took his hand to go along the dark stone passage past shut doors which must once have been larders and pantries and little boot holes where disgrunded maids cleaned knives with pink powder, and I heard Kate’s voice call out, ‘Who’s that? Who is it, Sammy?’ Her voice was rough, as if it hurt, and then she coughed, single hard coughs, like a horse.
‘It’s me!’
Sammy had begun to cry, but I left him and ran over the last uneven flagstones and into the big vault of a room where Kate sat by a smoking fire holding a child with a tangle of filthy blond curls, naked below the waist.
‘Hullo, Em,’ Kate said, as if I’d just been away for the weekend. ‘I like your coat.’
She looks awful. She looked wretched enough two years ago, a slovenly child defeated by being a woman, but now she looks drained, used up, exhausted. She looks, I thought of it at once, like that Irish mother I saw years ago with Johnny Jordan, whose child I crazily wanted to take away. That shell of a woman who
had once been pretty, before life got at her. Kate looks, I suppose, like a lot of Johnny’s mothers look. I’ve seen a few of them. He has seen too many to be shocked by it.
When she smiles and laughs, it is my same Kate, and we picked up instantly on the old illusions and esoteric jokes, but her childish eyes, that glance quickly sideways when she is unsure, or wants to tease, are dull, and her skin is waxen, like the children’s.
Emily and Susannah are plump, in an unhealthy mottled way, although they both have sore faces from colds, and I’ve got a full day’s work washing them and getting their hair clean (bossy Miss Bullock with her sleeves rolled up), but George, who is only a few weeks old, looks like a baby’s ghost, although Kate assures me that they are all fine and will be as good as new when the spring comes and Bob gets home.
‘Where is Bob?’
When she told me, I was really staggered. I had thought all kinds of things about Bob in my time, but not prison. I wouldn’t have credited him with the enterprise to try to outwit the Gas. Board.
I hated to think of poor tired Kate having to go through this alone. ‘Why didn’t you tell me? I would have come from anywhere. It must have been a nightmare.’
Kate said, ‘Yeah.’ Then she said, ‘I don’t know. I sometimes think I’m better off without him.’
‘He’s like another child to take care of.’
‘I didn’t mind that. I could make him do what I wanted then, when he was babyish and silly. He still is, in a way, but in a different way. He’s got violent, you know. He used to be such a gentle boy, but that’s how getting to be a man has taken him/
‘You mean he - he hits you?’
‘Oh sure.’ She laughed. ‘The things we used to think about marriage, they’re not true, you know. Ask Sammy about his dad.’
‘My dad’s comin ome.’ Sammy hardly speaks, just sits and watches, but when he does, his voice is the husky garble of the streets.
‘He keeps on like that,’ Kate complained, ‘like a broken record. It drives you up the wall. I don’t know why he should
care. He used to go under the bed when the yelling started. Remember that time, Sam, when your dad picked up that piece of wood and swung it at me?’
‘Bloody cowl’
I said, ‘Sammy, no!’ but Kate only laughed and said, ‘That’s what he heard Bob call me. He don’t forget. Not this one.’
Kate has to pay three pounds ten a week for this tomb where she is living with the four children. They stay in the one big room, which used to be the kitchen, because there is only enough coal for one fireplace. But the room is so big and high and damp that the small fire and the electric heater can’t warm it. I kept my coat on while I was there, but I was still cold. I don’t know how the children survive, unless it is because they never have the contrast of being warm, like Eskimo sled dogs sleeping out through a blizzard.
They haven’t got enough clothes. When Kate put something on the bottom half of Susannah, it was a pair of ragged pants and a flannel skirt worn to the texture of cotton, a pair of sandals and no socks. The baby is not dressed, but bundled. That’s all you can say for him.
Kate’s kitchen, which used to be the scullery, has a stone sink like a horse trough and a small evil stove that would electrocute you if it got the chance. The table in the big room is covered with broken toys and newspapers and old magazines and piles of jumbled clothes which Kate has either washed or is going to wash, there’s not much difference. There is a table in the kitchen, but only two chairs, and you can see the marks on the old khaki paint where the cupboards and counters were ripped out. Now there is only a kind of meat-safe high up, which Kate keeps locked because she says Sammy steals food, and a few shelves with china on them and plastic mugs, and some tinned food, some of it incongruously expensive, like tongue and asparagus and chicken breasts, and much of it with the new Bee Bee label that I helped to design, with the bees at the hollyhocks instead of at each other.
‘Never go anywhere else,’ Kate said, and for some reason, she blushed. The flush spread round from the back of her neck and crept upwards, fiercer because she was so pale.
‘Because of me?’ I took a chance. I wasn’t sure if she hated me for having gone up on the seesaw while she went down.
‘Yeah,’ she said (Molly used to force her to say Yes), and there is nothing I wouldn’t do now to help her. Joel is going to wonder what has happened to my bank balance. It can’t be helped. Thank God I’ve got something.
There isn’t even a proper bed. Emily and Susannah sleep on a mattress on the floor, and it is one of those that Jean would have taken out into the frozen junk heap that is the garden and burned, if she had got her hands on it. Our Miss B. will too, when she gets a bed in. Can’t do everything at once. Kate sleeps on a chair that pulls out at the bottom. Sammy sleeps on a violated red sofa, sagging and sprung and blackened with dirt and grease.
There is no time to feel sad, or compare Kate with the girl she used to be. There is too much to do. The coalman, a doctor, a plumber, although Kate says that you can whistle for people like that this winter. She has to carry buckets of water from the corner of the road. I put on her dog-eared fur gloves and made enough journeys to fill the tub and everything else in the kitchen that would hold water, and I felt like a pioneer woman, rugged and heroic. But Kate and some of the neighbours have been doing it for two weeks, and they find it neither rugged nor heroic’ but just something you do. Something must be done about that dog with the complacent grin. No wonder it looks complacent. There is a stack of Bee Bee brand dog-food tins in the kitchen, and it lies in a chair by the fire on a blanket, and looks much sleeker and healthier than the children. There is a corner of the passage which it has obviously pegged out for lifting its leg.
‘What about getting rid of the dog?’ I suggested. ‘He must cost a lot to feed.’
‘Bob’s dog?’ Kate sounded shocked. ‘With him in gaol? He’d murder me if he came out and found him gone. Besides, he helps keep Sammy warm. They sleep together. Touching, it is.’
I asked her if I could change the bandage on the boy’s leg, because the handkerchief was dirty, with a moist sticky patch at the back.
Kate told me irritably to leave it alone, but when I came back
the next day after work, with my arms full of packages like some ghastly lady of the Manor bringing soup to the peasants, I brought some lint and bandages and antiseptic cream, and when I insisted, Kate shrugged and said, ‘O.K., if you can make him hold still.’
The handkerchief was stuck to the wound, and the child fought and screamed while I was trying to soak it off. Once he hit out at me, and I slapped him back without thinking, because he had hurt my eye and made me angry with pain. I was instantly ashamed, but it quieted him, and Kate said, ‘You’re learning fast.’
‘How did he do it?’ The wound was on the calf of the leg, raw and wet and red round the edges.
‘He fell. He’s always falling down.’
‘It looks like a burn.’
‘That’s what I said. He fell against the fire.’
‘Don’t you keep the guard on?’
‘Shut up lecturing,’ Kate said, ‘and open that bottle of wine.’
I had brought red wine, some chops and a chicken, fresh fruit, thick sweaters for everybody, and some diapers, for I had seen from the dump on the table that Kate was using rags.
I had brought another electric fire. ‘Take it back,’ said Kate, who was reacting bluntly to the presents, because I was clumsily trying to give too much at once. ‘They don’t give the stuff away, you know.’
‘I brought shillings for the meter.’
The last time I had offered her money, she had refused and I thought I’d hurt her in the stubborn knot of pride she has always held within herself whatever happened. But now she slid her eyes round to the pile of new shillings I had got at the bank, and said, ‘Good old Em. Now we can cook the chicken.’
The meter was outside in a shed under the front steps of the house, so that if you froze half to death when your electricity went off, you could freeze the whole way going out in the middle of the night to recharge it.
The wine was a great help. When the chicken was cooking, we drank it while Kate bathed the baby in a plastic bowl and I washed the two little girls in the sink and dressed them in the new pyjamas. They capered, clowning with delight, and Sammy
joined in, mimicking their bows and the stamping turns and strange stiff pointing gestures which were their dancing.
Although Kate says he is always looking for trouble, he doesn’t seem to lead, he follows, taking his cue from the girls for what to do. While they were prancing round the table, he pulled a cord and sent a lamp crashing, breaking the bulb, and sat on the floor and yelled because the lamp had hit his bad leg.
Kate came to the doorless doorway of the kitchen holding the baby and its bottle, and yelled back at him. The dog jumped down from the chair barking, and made a pass at Emily, who shrieked like a train whistle. Kate stopped shouting when she began to cough, and Sammy went under the table.
‘Who’s your doctor?’ I asked, letting Emily into the bulging pocket of my slacks where the sweets were, and putting my fur boot into the dog to get it back to its chair - I was, as Kate said, learning fast how to keep order round here. ‘I’m going to call him.’
‘He won’t come. They’re so busy now, they’ll only come to sign your death certificate.’
‘Then I’ll take you to see him.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with me. It’s over, what I had. It doesn’t hurt now. Just a cigarette cough.’
She still smokes all the time, leaving cigarettes casually burning in saucers and tin lids, lighting another, putting that down and taking a drag on the first one as she passes it.