Kate and Emma Read online

  Kate and Emma

  MONICA DICKENS

  Contents

  Part One

  Part Two

  Part Three

  Part Four

  Part One

  ‘She fell down.’

  ‘She seems to be bruised all over.’

  ‘She falls all the time. I never seen a child so clumsy.’

  ‘She ought to see a doctor.’

  ‘I’d have fetched her up to the hospital last week, but my leg played up.’

  ‘I can get the doctor to come and see her.’

  ‘Who told you to come here?’

  ‘That doesn’t matter.’

  ‘I can guess anyway. There’s some people born to make trouble. Whatever you’re thinking, it’s a lie. I’ve treated that child like my own.’

  ‘She’s not yours?’

  ‘My daughter’s. I bring her up as mine.’

  The child sat on the floor, wedged in a corner against the torn and greasy wallpaper, staring, passive, her chill little hands turned palms up, unoccupied.

  This is how they sit, the children. They sit and wait. They sit on chairs and beds and collapsed sofas and wait for it to be time to eat, or time to sleep, or time to move away from the fire, because at last it’s spring.

  Even the babies just sit there like dolls, solemn, unfocusing, wetting on the mattress or the newspaper, or the worn velour of the chair, wherever they have been planted.

  The older children don’t play or do anything. There is nothing for them to do, except rattle drawer-handles and pull on the mother’s clothes, and she slaps at them vaguely, like flies.

  Some of the small ones climb on to Mr Jordan’s lap when he sits down. He always does sit, if they ask him, although in some of the places he would probably rather stand. So I sit too, self-effacing in the background, and I was so happy when a small crusted girl who turned out to be a boy with long matted curls, climbed up on to me, that I didn’t mind the smell and dirt of him.

  I even loved him more for being like that. Or was it that I loved myself for my large heart? The sort of facile sentiment with which people exclaim over pictures of starving Asian babies, when they have no intention of doing anything about it.

  Most children soon stiffen and wriggle away, like cats that jump on your lap and then off, sneering if they think you like it. This boy just sat and leaned on me, and I felt such a surge of love for him that I bent my head in case Mr Jordan should think I was trying too hard.

  I am the daughter of a magistrate in the Children’s Court. My father thinks I am too irresponsible and unaware for eighteen, because, in an ungainly attempt to amuse or attract attention, I make jokes about things which are not supposed to be funny. When I said that some of the eleven- and twelve-year-olds who had been assaulted looked as if they had asked for it, he asked Mr Jordan, who is the local Cruelty Man, to show me some of the things that lie behind the children who come to court.

  Mr Jordan is a big, burly man, with a pugnacious face that breaks up into a sort of sweet innocent wonder when he smiles. In an unwieldy overcoat like a grey blanket, he looks extra large and healthy in the cramped and cluttered rooms where the cold squats like a spider. I was paralysed before the day was out, holding myself stiffly, so as not to collapse in a rattle of bones and teeth. It was a miracle that all the babies had not perished in that worst brutal month of winter. I think some of them had.

  Mr Jordan goes about in a little noseless car which he drives like the Italians, as if it were a toy.

  ‘Don’t be afraid,’ he said, as we went on two wheels into a grey yard between grey old tenement flats, scattering children like chickens.

  ‘I’m not.’ Since I was braced with terror, I didn’t go through the windscreen when he stopped.

  ‘It’s a bit rough here, but they won’t eat you.’

  We climbed the kind of stairs that should only lead down into a dungeon, not up to a place where people live, and he knocked on a door that said, pigs live here in pencil at the bottom where the paint had been kicked off. When it was cautiously opened by a boy in men’s trousers cut off at the bottom with a blunt saw, he went ahead, saying, ‘Can I come in?’ as he went, so that he was half-way down the passage before anyone could say, ‘No.’

  A man’s voice called out thickly from behind a closed door, and his wife said he was on the night shift and trying to get some sleep.

  ‘Sounds drunk to me.’

  The woman did not seem to think this insolent, although she neither confirmed nor denied it.

  Mr Jordan, looking very large and reliable in the tiny defeated room where the family were clustered round a small electric fire standing on an upturned bucket in the fireplace, asked her if he had hit any of the children again and she said, ‘Not since last Saturday,’ as if she were telling harmless symptoms to a doctor.

  She was a shell of a woman, bloodless, lustreless, husked empty by childbearing, yet somehow pregnant again, the swelling grotesque on her scant frame. On her hip was a furious red toddler almost half as big as her. A baby with no hair wheezed on the dresser in a cardboard box and the other children waited numbly, while layers of wet grey napkins on the fireguard raised acrid steam between them and the bar of warmth.

  Next door was a larger room, but it was full of bicycles, boxes, rag piles, broken furniture and things unrelated to domestic living, like a car door and a big drum of what looked like telephone wire. I had glimpsed the bathroom and the kitchen on the way in. The bath was full of empty paint tins and the kitchen was little more than a slot, with old soup cans and broken crocks washing-up against the stove. They had silted themselves into the small room, which was not much bigger than a railway carriage.

  Mr Jordan sat down, and one of the barefoot children, who was wandering about with a plastic feeding bottle stuck in its mouth like a lollipop, climbed on to his knee. The mother was pretending to look for the rent book, although I got the impression that she knew where it was, so I sat down too in a corner behind the table, and that was when the little boy crawled up on me and leaned his head on my chest with a sigh, like a dog.

  The top of his head was scabby under the tangled hair, and his mouth and nose were surrounded by such painful-looking sores that you could feel them tight on your own face. I loved him more than my sister’s children, who have everything and don’t need me. This child, who had nothing on but a bigger boy’s shirt over torn grey pants and was mottled like a marble Christ-child in that chill, malodorous room, accepted me as his own.

  The boy with the sawn-off trousers found the rent book, which showed arrears of almost thirty pounds.

  Mr Jordan was angry, since money had been given last week to help the debt, and the woman, whose large weary eyes were still beautiful, admitted that her husband would not mind going to prison to clear it.

  ‘You and the children could be turned out. Where would you go?’

  ‘I don’t know. My sister has a farm in Kilkenny, you know. I’ve always thought…’

  ‘Would your sister take you in?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve not heard from her for years, but I’ve always thought …’ A dream to keep her going through the hopelessness and the disasters. Somehow they had muddled on, but if all failed, there was still My Sister, although the farm was perhaps only a bungalow and a chicken-run, and the sister long gone away.

  Mr Jordan put down his child, who was wearing the tatters of a flimsy party dress given away by someone too mean to throw out anything useful, and stood up briskly. Listening time was over. Now it was telling. He told her that he would try to get another grant, and that he would be back tomorrow to talk to her husband, when he was sober.

  ‘Is he working?’

  She pretended not to hear. The boy said that Dad
had left the tannery because it turned him. Mr Jordan looked very stern, but I think it was because he had run out of things to say.

  I was depressed when we left. My boy cried when I put him down among the breadcrusts, and I wanted to pick him up again with his poor sore face against my black sweater and take him home and hear my mother talk about people who should be sterilized.

  ‘What if one offered to take a child away and give it the things she can’t?’ I didn’t mean patronizing things like clothes and food and school and a new accent. I meant love, and being noticed, and having your ideas listened to, which I couldn’t imagine happening in that railway room with the wet grey smell. ‘What would she say?’ I asked, as we sped desperately for the narrowing gap between a bus and a petrol tanker. ‘Would she be glad?’

  ‘I doubt it.’ We just made it through the gap and shot out across the lights like toothpaste from a tube.

  ‘How can she stand it? I can imagine her as a girl, pale-haired and delicate, with those big eyes, dreaming of some marvellous man she’d marry.’

  I could see her with a tiny waist, leaning on a rustic bridge over an Irish stream with the other soft-haired girls. I saw them in muslin, like a Rodgers and Hammerstein chorus, which made the vision less real, but more poignant.

  ‘Don’t fret, Miss Bullock.’

  I hate my name. I wish he wouldn’t use it, but he would not call me Emma if I asked him, because my father is a magistrate, and this Jordan is scared stiff of the court. Literally stiff. He stands there like his old Army days, with his jaw square and his feet at forty-five degrees, but I have seen the papers in his hand trembling as he tries to give evidence the way my father likes it.

  My father is irritated by policemen and any type of official when they use that kind of courtroom language like: I then proceeded to instruct, instead of: I told. He will make a dry little joke which nobody laughs at except Miss Draper, the sycophant, and so he frightens people like Mr Jordan, which isn’t fair, because that is the way they have been taught to speak in front of him.

  My father is supposed to be one of the best magistrates in the juvenile courts, and no doubt he is. He is very painstaking, and fair, too, but sometimes when I watch his elaborate patience with some surly teenager who hasn’t really tried, I laugh mirthlessly to think how hard it can be to get his attention at home when it is a day when there is too much of me and my hair and my voice and my energy on the stairs. I should have married first and left Alice at home. She keeps out of his way, and would let him grow middle-aged in peace.

  ‘It used to fret me terribly,’ Mr Jordan said. ‘I used to take it all home with me and rail to my wife against the unfairness of people having to live like that. Then it began to fall into a pattern. I saw some people who’d been through the worst things and fought their way out. But the others - I began to see that half the mess they make themselves. You can help them up to a point, but you can’t cure them of the disease.’

  ‘What disease?’

  ‘Poverty. They keep slipping back, like malaria.’

  I said nothing, because I didn’t agree, and I didn’t want to start an argument since it was his day and his job, and he might be shy of arguing, even though he knew more about it than me. I haven’t seen much squalor, in spite of my father’s work, because he is remote from the real stink of it. But people don’t do this to their own lives. Life does things to them, as it has done to that scoured woman with the unseen beast in the bedroom and all those children who happened to her probably without joy, when he was drunk.

  I spent the whole day with Mr Jordan. He went imperturbably in and out of one-room flats and basements and the odd little broken-down cottages that still hide in London corners. I tagged along behind him, stumbling with cold, and gave sweets to the sitting children and tried not to look like a social worker.

  Why not? I want to help, but I don’t want to be labelled. Yet I am labelled already. Emma Bullock. What else could she be but a social worker? I will now call for a few words from our secretary, Miss Emmaline Bullock, whose wonderful work among the unemployed weavers of the Meon Valley is such an inspiration to us all.

  Why should I mind? This is probably the only country in the world where the name do-gooder is risible, like vicar. I don’t want to do good to people. I want to feel things about them, like my heavy-headed boy. If you start doing, you might have to stop feeling.

  One of the places we went to that day, that numbing day, when I cried afterwards at Charing Cross, with my hands turning from yellow to blue to red in a basin of warm water, was a house with the top floor shut off and a piece of old tent over the hole in the roof, and miles of unworn clean clothes on strings across the kitchen ceiling. Heels sank a good half-inch into the filth on the floor, and it was a marvel that the crawling baby had not died of septicaemia.

  One of the boys had stolen some coppers from a wishing-well at an exhibition. How had he got in? By waiting near the ticket office until a simple customer arrived, then asking the price of entrance and looking so crestfallen at the answer that the simpleton paid for him.

  ‘That’s how he gets in to the cartoons and newsreels,’ his mother said quite proudly.

  Three and ninepence he had got, in pennies and halfpennies, and he was due in my father’s court next week.

  He was such a lovely little liar, all fanned-out lashes and gritty dimples, that I took the day off from the business college where I am taking a course forced on me by my Uncle Mark, who runs the family firm, and went to court with my father.

  He was pleased. He wants me to be interested, and he likes me for an audience. He never had my mother, even when he was a rather theatrical junior counsel, because the courts are full of the kind of people she resents, both in the dock and out of it.

  In the magistrates’ room we waited for Miss Draper, who was on the bench with him today. Miss Draper used to be headmistress of a girls’ school, and she is in love with my father, which doesn’t stop her being late for his courts. She has been late for everything all her life, including all the fearful joys.

  She came crashing into the room in a hat like a Russian delegate’s and a coat like buffalo hide.

  ‘Don’t tell me I’m late again!’

  ‘I don’t have to,’ my father said rudely. ‘You can read the clock.’

  She would have blushed if her skin had been thin enough to transmit colour, and I shook hands with her to make her feel better. My father put on his juvenile-court face, judicial but humane, and started off for the courtroom without asking Miss Draper if she was ready. She struggled out of the heavy coat and followed him, and I followed her. Everyone stood up when we went in, including a nervous couple sitting with a fat baby in the middle of the room, and a vital hairpin fell out of my head and down inside my collar.

  I sat beside the Magistrates’ Clerk, at right angles to the long table where my father and Miss Draper sit, and the Honourable R. F. D. Goghill too, when his presence graces the court.

  A juvenile court is not like a proper courtroom, apart from managing to be airless and cold at the same time. It is quite a small room with ordinary tables and chairs where the policemen and probation officers and people from the Council sit, and the children stand in front of the Bench which isn’t a bench, with their parents sitting behind them. It is supposed to be not frightening for them, but mostly they are terrified, except the hardened cases, who behave as if this were merely a rehearsal for the real thing later on at the Old Bailey.

  It transpired that the nervous couple were there to adopt the baby, and would have been taken to the magistrates’ room if my father had not hurried in before the Clerk called him because he wanted to make Miss Draper feel that she had been holding him up.

  So they both had to go back again. He turned to take his stick off the back of the chair, and I could see that he was annoyed, although he pretended to be forbearing, which was great of him, considering it was his fault.

  He looked tired. Now that the skin is loosening into l
ittle folds under his eyes, he sometimes looks sad. In other years, when he was a barrister, busy and mobile, making a production out of even his dullest clients, his face did not look as if it could ever slip into sadness. The only time I caught him crying, after my brother was drowned at Poldhu, his face was red and tortured as if tears were too difficult. But now it is folding into a slight melancholy, although, as far as I know, he is content.

  He has enough money and enough work in the legal department of a chemical firm to bring him to town most days of the week, and his house and terraced garden have the finest view there is only twenty miles from London. He has come to terms with his leg, and he has come to terms with his marriage, which is to say that what he can’t alter he accepts. His elder daughter is married to a man without an accent, and her children have their thumbs growing in the right places. Even I, who nearly killed everyone by getting kidnapped at thirteen, am growing into the semblance of a woman, and I am neither pregnant nor a drug addict nor in love with a married African revolutionary, like some of the girls we know.

  The Clerk of the Court, whose wife sends him out smelling of camphor, gave me a case list. The little liar of the wishing-well was about half-way down.

  At the top were three or four girls of fifteen and sixteen, listed as Care or Prot., which usually means that they have been found in a coffee bar, or a transport café, or penniless in a railway station.

  My father and Miss Draper came back, and the Warrant Officer brought in the first girl. ‘Mother is present.’

  ‘Where is the father?’ asked mine.

  The mother said shrilly, prepared to air all the grievances of her married life, that he had left her two years ago, and my father grunted and nodded, as if he would have done the same. His nod put the woman into a chair, where she sat clutching her handbag like a bomb, challenging the Bench to make one move and she’d throw it, and the girl stood out in front of her, exposed all round and looking sullen. There was plenty to expose. She had been found fifty miles from home with some soldiers, but the experience had taken no weight off her.