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 Victorias 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 oft” 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 Staveney 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 out.
This kind of frantic telephoning and arranging being so common, because of working mothers, the deputy secretary thought no more of it: Victoria would be all right.
When Victoria woke from a short anxious sleep, into this unfamiliar place, Edward was seated at a very big table, and a tall woman, with her blonde hair down all around her face, sat opposite, leaning her arms on the table. Victoria had seen her in the playground coming to pick up Thomas.
Victoria kept quiet for a little, afraid to make her existence known, but then Edward, who had been keeping an eye on her, cried out, ‘Oh, Victoria, you’re awake, come and have some supper. This is Victoria,’ he told his mother, who said, ‘Hello, Victoria,’ and finished some remark she had been making to her son. That a little girl she didn’t know was asleep in her kitchen was nothing that needed comment. Edward s friends, and Thomas’s, washed in and out of her house on social or school tides, and she welcomed them all. Thomas’s social life, in particular, since he was after all only seven and could not come and go like twelve-year-old Edward, was a bit of a trial, being such a complicated network of visits to this or that attraction, planetarium, museums, river boats, friends, sleep-overs, sleepins, cat-overs. Making events match with kids and times was a feat of organisation. She was pleased, rather than not, that the little girl was black because, as she never stopped complaining to Edward, his friends were all much too white, now that we lived in a multicultural society.
Why was Thomas at a very inferior school? Ideology. Mostly his father’s, Lionel, who was an old-fashioned socialist. While Thomas would certainly be lifted out and up into one of the good schools, at the right time, he was taking his chances in the lowest depths now. The phrase was Jessy’s, when engaged in altercation with her ex-husband, ‘Here is news from the lower depths,’ she would cry, announcing measles or some contretemps with a bill she could not pay. Hut she made the most of a situation she deplored, because she was able to look her less principled friends in the eye and say, ‘I’m sorry, but he has to know how the other half lives. Lionel insists.’
Victoria was lifted, put into a chair where her chin barely appeared over the edge of the table, and Edward adjusted the situation with big fat cushions. ‘And now, what do you feel like eating, Victoria?’
Victoria was not used to being asked and since nothing she saw on the table seemed familiar, looked helpless, and even ready to cry again. Edward understood and simply piled a plate with what he was eating, which happened to be Thai takeaway that Jessy had brought home, stuffed tomatoes from last night’s supper, and leftover savoury rice. Victoria was hungry, and she did try, but only the rice seemed to meet with the approval of her stomach. Edward, who watched her - well, like an elder brother, as he would Thomas - found her some cake. That was better and she ate it all.
Jessy silently observed, her plate untouched, the cup of tea between her long hands held below her mouth, so steam went up past her face. Her eyes were large and green and Victoria thought they were witches’ eyes. Her mother talked often about witches, and while her aunt never did, it was her mother’s sing-song incantory voice that stayed in the child’s mind, explaining the bad things that happened. And they so often did.
‘Well, what are we going to do with you, Victoria?’ at last said Jessy Staveney, carelessly enough, as she might have done with any of the small children who appeared and had to be dealt with.
At this, tears sprang into Victoria’s eyes and she wailed. Even worse than the witchy eyes, ever since she could remember, even before her mother died, What shall I, what are we, what should I do with Victoria, was the refrain of her days and nights. She bad been so often in the way, with her mother’s uncles. She was in the way when her mother had wanted to go to work, but did not know what to do with her, her child Victoria. And she knew her aunt Marion had not really wanted her, though she was always kind.
‘Poor little girl, she’s tired,’ said Jessy. ‘Well, I’ve got to get off. I’ve got a client’s first play at the Comedy and I must be there. Perhaps Victoria should just stay the night?’ she said to Edward, whose own eyes were full of tears too, so terribly, so unforgivably guilty, did he feel about everything.
Victoria was sitting straight up, her fists down by her sides, her face turned up to the ceiling from where struck a clear and truthful light illuminating the hopelessness of her despair. She sobbed, eyes tight shut.
‘Poor child,’ Jessy summed up, and departed.
Edward, who had not yet taken in that this child was not perhaps six, or seven, now came around to her, picked her up, put her on his lap, and sat clutching her tight. Her tears wetted his shoulder and the beat and fret of the taut little body made him feel not much better than a murderer.
‘Victoria,’ he said, in the intervals of her sobs, ‘shouldn’t I telephone somebody to say you are here?’
‘My auntie’s in hospital.’
‘Who else do you go to?’ - thinking of the networks of people used by hint and by Thomas.
‘My auntie’s friend.’
At last necessity stopped Victoria’s sobs. She said her aunties friend was Mrs Chadwick, yes, there was a telephone.