Riptide

§ 49

Vera cooked as well as her mother. Cal had no idea what it was, but there was plenty of it. A dash of meat somewhere, he thought it might be mutton, but healthy portions of carrot and lentil. All the same it was a spartan meal, in that neither Stilton nor his wife nor the lodgers came down to eat, and the awkward recriminating and self-recriminating gathering around the kitchen table consisted of Cal, Kitty, Vera, Rose, her husband Tom, the roundly pregnant Reenie, and the boy Tel.

Cal aimed for neutrality, as heads bent over plates in what he could only think of as an angry silence.

‘Is Pilot Officer Micklewhite on duty?’ he asked of Reenie.

Reenie and Rose were the tearful ones, always on the verge of grabbing a handkerchief and dashing from the room. Reenie looked up at him, eyes red-rimmed.

‘Beg pardon?’

‘Maurice-I meant, I guess Maurice is on call?’

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘He can’t get away, you see. They could scramble any time.’

And in saying this the implication of her own words came home to her. She sniffled and dug around in a pocket for her hanky.

Vera’s voice cut through the sniffles.

‘You’ll have to move back now. You know that, don’t you?’ Cal wondered to whom she was speaking, but Kitty answered all the same.

‘Wot? Wot do you mean?’

‘I mean you, fancy pants. You’ll have to move back. I can’t manage this house on me own. It’s time you recognised that you can’t shirk your responsibilities no more.’

‘Wot? Me? Why me? Why not Rose or Reen?’

‘Why you, ‘cos you’re the eldest, that’s why. Besides, they’re married. They got blokes and kids of their own to look after. I can’t look after me mum as well as Dad and Tel.’

Tel chipped in, ‘You won’t ‘ave to look after me. I don’t need no looking after. I’ll be in the Navy next year.’

Then both the sisters turned on him.

‘Not bloody likely!’

‘Wot?’

‘You’re going nowhere,’ said Kitty, aiming at him with her fork. ‘Hasn’t this family lost enough already? You can just wait till you’re called up, and even then you won’t have to go. Not after this. It’d be cruel to take you as well as Kev and Trev. If you join the Navy now it’ll break your mother’s heart.’

‘That’s not fair!’-the cry of younger siblings everywhere. ‘You’re making me stay at home just so you can go on swanning around up West.’

‘That’s got nothing to do with it. I work up West. Bow Street ain’t exactly the Mile End Road, you know. I can’t roll out of bed and be at work ten minutes later! Will you lay off. Will you all just lay off! I am not moving back, and that’s final.’

Vera gathered up plates, an oversized show of bustle, as much noise as she could make. And when she’d dumped everything in the sink, she faced Kitty across the width of the kitchen and uttered the single word, ‘Bitch.’

Kitty pushed back her chair and yanked open the kitchen door. Cal sat nonplussed. He’d never seen anything like this. In his family it simply didn’t happen. His sisters would never call each other a bitch, they’d simply point out that one was being boring-the greatest sin the family knew of, to be boring.

‘Calvin!’ Kitty said from the doorway.

Out in the street it was already dark.

‘Will you take me home?’ she said.

‘To Covent Garden? Sure. I’ll get us a cab at the end of the street.’

‘No. I meant to your place. To Claridge’s.’

‘To Claridge’s?’

‘I can’t stay here. Not with that lot. And I don’t want to be on my own. So just take me home with you, will you.’

‘Am I ever going to see where you live?’

‘You wouldn’t want to, really you wouldn’t.’