‘I’m thirsty,’ Victoria burst out, and Mr Patel handed across a glass of orange crush, with a gesture that indicated to Edward he shouldn’t dream of thinking of paying for it.
Edward held the glass for Victoria, who was indignant – she, a big girl, being treated like a baby, but she was grateful, for she did badly want to be a baby, just then.
Edward was saying, ‘I’m so sorry. I was supposed to pick you up, with my brother.’
‘Didn’t you see me?’ asked Victoria, accusing him.
And now Edward was scarlet, he positively writhed. This was the burning focus of his self-accusation. He had in fact seen a little black girl, but he had been told to collect a little girl, and for some reason had not thought this black child could be his charge. He could make all kinds of excuses for himself: the confusion as the other children were running off to the gate, the noise. Thomas’s bad behaviour, but the fact was, the absolute bottom line, he had not really seen her because Victoria was black. But he had seen her. All this would not have mattered to a good many people who came and went in and out of those big gates, but Edward was the child of a liberal house, and he was in fact in the throes of a passionate identification with all the sorrows of the Third World. At his school, much superior to the one here, though he had attended it, long ago, ‘projects’ of all kinds enlightened him and his fellow pupils. He collected money for the victims of AIDS and of famine, he wrote essays about these and many others of the world’s wrongs, his mother Jessy was ‘into’ every kind of good cause. There was no excuse for what he had done and he was sick with shame.
‘Will you come home with me now?’ he enquired, humbly, of the pathetic child, and without a word she stood and put up her hand for him to lead her.
‘Poor little kid,’ said one of the girls, apparently touched.
‘Oh, I don’t know, she’s doing all right,’ said the other.
‘It’s not that far,’ said Edward to the child, who was half his height. He bent down to make this communication. And she was stretching herself up, so sure was she that she ought to be behaving like a big girl, while she whimpered, like catches of her breath, staring up at his face which was contorted with concern for her.
‘Goodbye, Victoria,’ said Mr Patel, in a stern, admonitory way, that was directed at this white boy, who was reminding him of those summer insects, all flying legs and feelers, called Daddy-Long-Legs. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ he shouted after the couple, for he was remembering he knew nothing about this boy, who should be informed that Victoria was not without friends. But the couple were already in the street, where their feet made sturdy progress through clogs of wet leaves, and puddles.
‘Where? Where to?’ the child pleaded, but in such a little voice he had not heard: he was bending continually to send her smiles he had no idea were agonised.
Just as Victoria thought they would be trudging until her feet dropped off, they turned in at a gate and were walking up into the face of a house whose windows blazed light, in a cliff of such houses.
Here Edward inserted a key and they were in a big place that seemed to Victoria like a shop, of the sort she sometimes gaped at in the High Street. Colour, light and warmth: she was cold now, for the wind had cut through her, and in a great mirror on a stand where Edward was, all touzled by the wind, was herself, yes, that was her. Victoria, that frightened thing, with her mouth open, staring, and then Edward was bundling her jacket off her and throwing it over the arm of a red chair. He was going on ahead and she ran after him leaving herself behind in the surface of the mirror. And now they were in a room larger than any she had seen, except for the school hall. Edward reached out for a kettle, which he filled at a sink, and Victoria thought that this part of the room was like a kitchen. Toys lay about. It occurred to her that this was where Thomas lived, so where was he?
‘Where is he?’ she whispered, and Edward stood still in the midst of his fussing with cups and saucers to work out what she meant. ‘Oh, Thomas? He’s gone off to sleep over with a friend,’ said Edward. ‘Now, you just sit down.’ When she did not, he lifted her and deposited her in a chair that was like a cuddle, it held her so soft and warm. She looked about cautiously for fear of seeing more than she could take in. This was a room so big all of her aunt’s flat would fit into it. And then, as she gaped and wondered, she slumped down, asleep: it had all been too much.
Edward, who was used to a small child – he still thought Victoria was that, she was such a tiny thin little thing – did not do more than lay her back in the cushions, for comfort, and then began searching in a vast refrigerator for something to eat. He did not know where his mother was, but he wished she was here. He had arranged to go out and meet schoolfriends, and here he was stuck with this child, whom he had so shockingly mistreated … it had better be said now that he was on the verge of an adolescence so conscience-driven, agonised, accusatory of his own world, passionately admiring of anything not Britain, so devoted to every kind of good cause, so angry with his mother, who in some way he saw as embodying all the forces of reaction, so sick to death with his father, who represented frivolity and indifference to suffering – his good humour could mean nothing less – that, at the end of it, about eight years from this night, Jessy Staveney told him, and everybody else around at the time, ‘Your bloody adolescence, my God, my God, it’s shortened my life by twenty years.’
Edward sat, in his usual way, as if he didn’t really have time for this lazing about, and spooned in yoghurt – low-fat yoghurt, with added vitamin D, and frowned over his dilemma about Victoria. Victoria went on sleeping.
If she were dreaming – she was subject to nightmares and sleepwalking – her dead mother might have appeared, smiling away, but always out of reach, evading Victoria’s reaching arms. She had died five years before. Victoria had had uncles but no father, or none that her mother was prepared to identify. No ‘uncle’ came forward to claim her or acknowledge responsibility. Victoria’s aunt, her real aunt, her mother’s sister, had no children. She had only recently agreed with herself that she was lucky, kids were such a grind, when she was landed with a four-year-old orphan. She was a social worker. She lived in a council flat – bedroom, lounge, kitchen, shower – in Francis Drake Buildings on a council estate (the other three were Frobisher, Walter Raleigh and Nelson), whose children went to Victoria’s school. She had pared her life down to the outlines of her work, which she loved, but then she had to take on Victoria, and she did, showing no reluctance, only a little weariness.
This very morning she had been taken ill. In the ambulance she remembered Victoria, and told the ambulance man that Victoria would be standing waiting in the playground to be picked up after school. He was not unfamiliar with this kind of situation. He telephoned the school, no easy matter, since Victoria’s aunt kept passing out with the pain of her illness, which would kill her when she was still not fifty. The ambulance man got the number of the school from the operator, rang the school secretary, explained the crisis. She went to the classroom where Victoria was copying sentences off a blackboard, a good little girl, while apparently oblivious of the noise made by the other children, who had no aspirations to be good. The teacher said, or shouted, No problem, Victoria could go home with Dickie Nicholls and she supposed someone would fetch her. The secretary said, No problem, returned to her office, looked for the Nicholls number, rang, no reply. Working mother, diagnosed the secretary, being one herself. She tried the numbers of various mothers, and at last one said she couldn’t help, but how about trying Thomas Steevey in the register: that was how Staveney had been pronounced. The deputy secretary rang the Staveney number and got Jessy Staveney, who told her son to collect a little girl at the same time as he did Thomas. The deputy secretary had not said that Victoria was black, but why should she? There were more black or brown children at the school than white, and she herself was brown, since her parents had come from Uganda, when the Indians were thrown
