When they stopped laughing Rachel said: ‘You’ll take life seriously one day, I promise. I don’t know what we did to make you so foul-mouthed and wicked.’
‘You’re not responsible,’ Emma told her, ‘nor is father. I suppose I got into this mess because I didn’t know anything about myself. At the moment I’m nothing. When I go for a walk I feel I’m like everybody I pass on the street, and can’t wait to get back here so that I can be on my own, and feel like nothing and nobody, and then again like myself, whatever that is. Maybe I’ll know a bit more when this thing comes out. Did you know yourself any better, mother, after you’d had three children?’
Clara was disturbed, and only doubted that Emma spoke such rigmarole when her mother replied: ‘It was after you were grown-up that I began to know who I was.’
‘The last few months must have taught you something,’ Emma said. ‘It has me.’
‘I know,’ Rachel retorted. ‘It’s taught you how to quarrel. And how to insult your parents.’
By her silence Emma knew that she was pressing against all their wounds. ‘I’m sorry, mother.’
‘I think you should be.’
Clara felt pain for them both, and stood up, saying brightly to Emma: ‘Why don’t you start keeping your journal again? It might help you to sort things out in your mind. I write mine, as and when I can. It keeps me in touch with myself – or what’s left of me these days.’
‘I prefer to be on my own,’ Emma said. ‘When people are with me, I’m even more alone, so I don’t mind either of you being here. If I kept a journal I might get to think I was somebody else, and I should hate that, even though I don’t know who I am most of the time. Only this in here knows who I am, but by the time he’s old enough to tell me I won’t be anywhere where I can hear what he’s got to say. And he wouldn’t know by then, in any case. One minute I feel I’m going to live a hundred years, and the next it seems I’ll be lucky to get beyond this one. I don’t care, really. During the war the world was crowded with happy people who only wanted a good time. Now, it’s full of ghosts. Something happened, and I don’t suppose any of us knows what it was. Perhaps even having a baby won’t make much difference to me. If so I don’t know what will happen.’
Rachel went home after three days because, she said, she needed a rest. Clara, left behind, was swept with anguish as she looked at her sister, and heard her, in an ordinary enough voice, say things which filled her with either sorrow or horror. Emma’s lips were set firm when she stopped talking. The glow in her eyes, suggesting a far-seeing vision, was due only to short-sightedness.
9
Clara came back from the post office, took off her raincoat and galoshes in the hall, and coo-eed to let Emma know she had returned. With a fire burning, the parlour could not be cosier, but Emma was neither there nor in the kitchen. Clara shouted upstairs, and the maid told her she hadn’t seen Emma for an hour.
She put her galoshes back on, and took a dry coat from the hall stand, but did not know which way to go. Sleet blew into her face, so she walked with its main force behind, to open ground beyond Park Side. Someone was cycling, but there were no pedestrians. Protected by houses from the worst of the weather, she made her way to Christ’s Piece. They had often gone over Butts Green and Midsummer Common to the river, a pleasant stroll with the minimum of buildings hemming them in. But she kept as much towards houses as possible, and peered across spaces in case Emma was there.
It was muddy by the river and the boathouses. Her nose ran water and her neck was cold. Every step made her doubt that she was going in the right direction, but not to make for somewhere seemed too painful to be borne.
Her instinct was to get back into the warm house, but the knowledge that she must fight against it drove her on. You did what you had absolutely no wish to do far more easily than what you would quite enjoy doing – a reflection which made her momentarily stalwart against the elements, and would comfort her as long as the thought of Emma and her general predicament didn’t force itself too close to her powers of strength and decision – thought the dreadful situation could only be absent for a few precious seconds at a time during her surge through the rain.
The green river lapped at its banks. An old man on the other side pottered at some job on a boathouse roof, but then came down his ladder to take shelter, squeezing his hands together as if to get the wet out of them. She called, and asked if he had seen a woman walking alone.
He laughed. ‘No, I ain’t. Not even a dog, come to that.’
She felt an ache in her chest as if someone had punched her. Chimney smoke and mist hung over the houses. The wind had dropped and rain came directly down. Crossing Sun Street, she was nearly struck by a horse-and-cart, the driver too surprised to shout back when she called him a fool for not looking where he was going.
She went up and down every street, then crossed each at right angles, imagining Emma as quite close in front, but always turning a corner before she could be seen. She considered walking across Parkers Piece to the railway station, then stood by the kerb wondering whether she shouldn’t get into the comfort of the house and stop allowing Emma to make both their lives miserable. It was impossible to be still. From the edge of the space she saw someone a few hundred yards away, where the walks intersected at the middle.
The never-ending distance passed by putting one foot in front of the other, and keeping on with head down and eyes fixed at the soaking turf, as if afraid that should she look up the figure would vanish. The rain made no difference. If she had to live the rest of her life under water, so be it. To exist in such a way attached her to the earth and could only be good for her. Every step forward put on another year of life, but Emma had to be reached and taken home because each minute out there might take a year off her life.
She looked up every dozen paces to make sure there was still some object to aim for. She laughed at herself. There was no one to hear. Raindrops distorted what she saw. The figure was probably a poor old tramp with nowhere to go. She wanted to turn back, for fear he should jump on her. Girls had been raped on Parkers Piece at night. But it was Emma. There was no mistaking the way she hunched her shoulders. Clara called, and hurried breathlessly on. Emma stood with head bowed, unable to hear.
Clara held her arm. ‘Whatever are you doing? You’ll get pneumonia – at least!’
She looked. Her skin was like clay, glazed so that the rain poured off. ‘I’m trying to find out what it’s like to be alone.’
Clara drew her close. She smelled of rain and sweat. ‘I’ve been looking all over. You might at least have told me where you were going, then you could have been alone for as long as you liked. But just to go off like this for your own crackbrained reason is too much. You’ve no consideration for anybody except yourself. Don’t you think it’s time you pulled yourself together and behaved a bit more reasonably? Perhaps it doesn’t matter what happens to you, but you ought at least to think about the baby you’re going to have.’ She gripped her arm. ‘So let’s go back to the house before you really get ill. You’re going to need a hot bath and something to drink if you aren’t to get a bad cold. Now come on, and stop all this bloody stupid nonsense.’
She was putting it on, but the severe tone was right, under the circumstances, she thought. We are all Death’s prisoners, she had heard a preacher say from his pulpit on the edge of the market one morning. Life was a battlefield from which there could be no survivors. Once the fight begins, losses continually occur, even in the most favoured conditions, till you become one of them. She made her observations and, with so many dreadful events all of a sudden to endure, thought it her duty to record the fact that no family was free of tragic times.