The little girl lay back and then reached for the glass and drank eagerly. The moment the glass was empty the mother got up and said: 'I'll make you another one.'
'Oh stay with me, stay with me.'
'I can't Emily. You are being difficult again.'
'Can Daddy come?'
'But he's busy.'
'Can't he read to me?'
'You can read to yourself now, you're a big girl.'
The woman went out with the empty glass. The girl took a half-eaten biscuit from under the pillow and picked up a book and read and ate, ate and read, her limbs always on the move, tossing and rearranging themselves, her unoccupied hand touching her cheek, her hair, her shoulders, feeling her flesh everywhere, lower and lower down, near to her cunt, her 'private parts' — but from there the hand was quickly withdrawn, as if that area had barbed wire around it. Then she stroked her thighs, crossed and uncrossed them, moved and twisted and read and ate and ate and read.
There lay Emily now on my living-room floor.
'Dear Hugo… dear, dear Hugo — you are my Hugo, you are my love, Hugo…'
And I was filled with that ridiculous impatience, the helplessness, of the adult who watches a young thing growing. There she was enclosed in her age, but in a continuum with those scenes behind the wall, a hinterland which had formed her — yet she could not see them or know about them, and it would be of no use my telling her: if I did she would hear words, no more. From that shadowy region behind her came the dictate: You are this, and this and this — this is what you have to be, and not that; and the biological demands of her age took a precise and predictable and clocklike stake on her life, making her exactly like this and that. And so it would go on, it had to go on, and I must watch; and in due time she would fill like a container with substances and experiences; she would be delivered by these midwives, some recognisable, understood, and common to everyone, some to be deduced only from their methods of operation — she would become mature, that ideal condition envisaged as the justification of all previous experience, an apex of achievement, inevitable and peculiar to her. This apex is how we see things, it is a biological summit we see: growth, the achievement on the top of the curve of her existence as an animal, then a falling away towards death. Nonsense of course, absurd; but it was hard to subdue in myself this view of her, shut off impatience as I watched her rolling and snuggling be side her purring yellow beast, to make myself acknowledge that this stage of her life was every bit as valid as the one ahead of her — perhaps to be summed up or encapsulated in the image of a capable but serene smile — and that what I was really waiting for (just as, somewhere inside herself she must be) was the moment she would step off this merry-go-round, this escalator carrying her from the dark into the dark. Step off in entirely… And then?
***
There was a new development in the life on the pavement. It was bound up with Gerald; with, precisely, his need to protect the weak, his identification with them, that quality which could not be included in the little balance sheets of survival. There were suddenly children out there, nine, ten, eleven years old, not attached to families, but by themselves. Some had parents they had run away from, or whom they did see, but only occasionally. Some had no parents at all. What had happened to them? It was hard to say. Officially of course children still had parents and homes and that kind of thing, and if not, they had to be in care or custody; officially children even went to school regularly. But nothing like this was the practice. Sometimes children attached themselves to other families, their own parents being unable to cope with the pressures, not knowing where to find food and supplies, or simply losing interest and throwing them out to fend for themselves as people had once done with dogs and cats that no longer gave pleasure. Some parents were dead, because of violence, or epidemics. Others had gone away out of the city and left their children behind. These waifs tended to be ignored by the authorities unless attention was specifically drawn to them, but people might feed them or take them into their own homes. They were still part of society, wished to be part, and hung around where people lived. They were quite unlike those children whom I will have to describe quite soon, who had put themselves outside society altogether, were our enemies.
Gerald noticed that a dozen or so children were literally living on the pavement, and began to look after them in an organised way. Emily of course adored him for this, and defended him against the inevitable criticism. It was mostly of old people that it was said they should be allowed to die — I can tell you that this added a new dimension of terror to the lives of the elderly, already tenuous — that the weaker had to go to the walclass="underline" this was already happening, and was not a process that should be checked by sickly sentiment. But Gerald took his stand. He began by defending them when people tried to chase them away. They were sleeping on the waste lot behind the pavement, and complaints started about the smell and the litter. Soon would happen what we all feared more than anything at alclass="underline" the authorities would have to intervene.
There were empty houses and flats all around; about half a mile off was a large empty house, in good condition. There Gerald took the children. It had long ago lost its electricity supply, but by then hardly anyone paid for electricity. The water was still connected. The windows had been broken, but shutters were made for the ground floor and they used old bits of polythene for the upper floor windows.
Gerald had become a father or elder brother to the children. He got food for them. Partly, he begged from shops. People were so generous. That was an odd thing: mutual aid and self-sacrifice went side by side with the callousness. And he took expeditions off to the country to get what supplies could still be bought or purloined. And, best of all, there was a large garden at the back of the house, and he taught them how to cultivate it. This was guarded day and night by the older children armed with guns or sticks, or bows and arrows or catapults.
There it was: warmth, caring, a family.
Emily believed herself to have acquired a ready-made family.
Now began a new, queer time. She was living with me, 'in my care' — a joke, that, but it was still the reason for our being together. She was certainly living with her Hugo, whom she could not bear to leave. But every evening, after an early supper (and I even arranged for this meal to be at a time which would more easily accommodate her new life) she would say: 'I think I'll be off now, if you don't mind.' And without waiting for an answer, but giving me a small guilty, even amused smile, she went, having kissed Hugo in a little private ceremony that was like a pact or promise. She came back, usually, at mid-morning.
I was worried, of course, about pregnancy; but the conventions of our association made it impossible to ask questions, and in any case I suspected that what I regarded as an impossible burden that could drag her down, destroy her, would be greeted by her with: 'Well, what of it? Other people have had babies and managed, haven't they?' I was worried, too, that her attachment to this new family would become so strong that she would simply wander off, away from us, from Hugo and me. There we were, the two of us, waiting. Waiting was our occupation. We kept each other company. But he was not mine, not my animal, most definitely he was not that. He waited, listening, for Emily: his green eyes steady and watchful. He was always ready to get up and meet her at the door — I knew she was coming minutes before she appeared, for he smelled or heard or intuited her presence when she was still streets away. At the door the two pairs of eyes, the green, the brown, engaged in a dazzling beam of emotion. Then she embraced him, fed him, and bathed. There were no baths or showers in Gerald's community yet. She dressed herself and at once went out to the pavement.