“But you’ve been seeing him all these years?”
“Off and on. He wasnae a bad sort at first. Until he became wan of these big shots in the Royal Air Force, what with him flying in the war and everything. A test pilot, he is now. Always off testing something or other. Never time for his wee sweetheart at the Laird’s castle. Keeping me hanging like forgotten washing on the line. So I let him do what I said I’d never let anyone do before I had a ring on my finger. I thought it might make a difference.” She patted her belly. “Aye, it’s made a fine difference, all right.”
“So where is he now?”
“Once he had his way with me, he was off. Gone for good. I’ve no seen the bloody Sassenach since. And as for this baby – I cannae have it.” She was close to tears now. Chewing at her lip to hold them back, her fingers in a nervous pick at the hem of her shawl. Just like her mother’s on the clasp of a handbag. “Father would kill me if he found out. He’d kill Charlie too, if he could get his hands on him. So would Jamie. I’m going to … to someone. One of the Laird’s maids had it done. A woman in Glasgow. She says it’s no so bad if it’s caught early.”
The heat rose in his cheeks. He turned away from her in a walk to the window. He knew nothing of these matters. Women’s talk.
“Avram. Listen to me. I know it’s no right to ask ye after what I done. But I’ve no choice.”
“Ask me what?”
“I need some money.”
Outside, the pin flags struggled to life in a snatch of breeze then died again. He sucked slow on his cigarette, feeling the burn of the flake flood his lungs, then exhaled into a mist on the pane. “What about Jean?”
“Avram.” He sensed a harshness in her voice now. “Does that mean ye won’t help me?”
“I didn’t say that. I was only wondering why bother with me when your best friend can help you.”
“That lass disnae have twa sticks of her ain to rub together. All this is Donald’s. She came here with nothing after the fire. And every ha’penny and farthing she spends has to be accounted for. She cannae buy a needle or a grain of sugar without Donald wanting to see the receipt. How is she going to find me the money to pay for an abortion? And the fare to Glasgow? And a place to stay in the city till it’s all over?”
“I’d still think she’d be smart enough to squirrel away a few bob from that drunk of a husband.”
“All right, then. If ye must know. She also disnae approve. She says it’s too dangerous.”
“And is it?”
“There’s a chance of infection. Or I could bleed tae death.”
“These seem good reasons not to go ahead.”
She shook her head, bit down hard on her lip, pulling away the surface skin until just the hint of bleeding showed. “I dinnae want any fatherless bairns running around the place. And anyway, what other choice have I got? It’s either that … or I can throw myself down the stairs. I know I dinnae have the right to ask. But can ye please help me? I dinnae know where else to turn.”
He continued his stare out of the window. The sun made it so that partly he could see just his reflection, partly he could see beyond the glass. The sea was so calm, throwing out just the faintest shrug of a wave to the shore. Almost as if it was resting, waiting for something to happen, caught between tides perhaps. He turned back to Megan. “I’ll give you whatever you want. But on one small condition.” He paused, heard the crackle of Papa Kahn’s voice among his thoughts. “I’m coming with you.”
Forty-seven
THE TRAIN WAS WELL PAST STIRLING, and the urban blight of the Glasgow outskirts began to creep into view. Megan sat opposite, asleep, her face returned to the flush of a motherhood soon to be cut painfully short. Only one hour previously she had sat milk-white and drained after vomiting in the water-closet on the Stirling station platform. She told him the sickness was normal. Avram reckoned it must have been the fear of what was to come, making her ill.
He thought about his return to Glasgow. Does everyone return? Returning was in his blood, for the Jews were in a constant state of returning. Returning from their exile. The children of Israel returning to the land of Canaan from Egypt. Only to be expelled again. And now, two thousand years later, Uncle Mendel telling him about Theodore Herzl and his Zionist descendants wanting to return to that very same land. Does everyone return to the source? Would he return, not only to Glasgow, but some time later retrace his steps back to Russia? Mother Russia. The Russia of his mother. The Russia of revolutions.
The Scots. They never seemed to return. They went to far-flung places like Canada and New Zealand and India and there they stayed. They colonised, they set down roots, they established their church, they taught people their proud ways, they sang their songs that seemed to long for the return they would never make. They lived life in straight lines, seeds in a furrow ready to seize the soil with a fervour and send up shoots from wherever they scattered. The Jews were different. They trod lightly on the land. Their suitcases were always packed. Their return tickets were forever hidden under the mattresses. They kept their songs to themselves. The Jews were forever moving in circles.
But there was a tangent yet, where linear Scot met circular Jew. He only had to look to Uncle Mendel as living proof. Not just with the common love for the herring, the betting, the fiddle and the schnapps. But a thirst for education and social justice. The Scots and the Jews. Karl Marx and John MacLean. A Scottish Jew. A Jewish Scot. With his tallith and his kilt. His yarmulke and his sporran. His vursht and black sausage.
He watched Megan sleep. Her mouth slightly open, a bubble of saliva escaping her lips to dampen the cushion she had put between her cheek and the glass. He thought of the baby inside her. The baby that would never return. He only prayed she would.
“If it was yours, I wouldnae do this,” she had told him at the start of the journey.
The words had moved him terribly.
“You don’t think I’d have left you like Sinclair?”
“You’re here now,” she had said.
He flicked a loose thread off the sleeve of his new suit. A blue three-piece, with a fob watch to set it off nicely. His collar was freshly starched, his hair oiled and slicked back in the current style, his shoes polished to a shine. The credit draper was returning as a West Highland businessman with his own store and his own product. You cannae be surer – Than when yer wearing Glenkura. He had brought gifts for the Kahns. Pebble jewellery, a bottle of malt, linen handkerchiefs. He looked forward to the look on their faces when he gave them.
The train drew close to Glasgow’s Buchanan Street station. He noticed the sky darken, the trees hanging weary, the birds flying sluggish. Warehouses and tenement buildings crowded closer to the track. Some of the passengers, restless now, stood up to unload their luggage from the overhead racks, only to sit back down with a load on their laps as the train wheezed to a halt in an approach tunnel. He could feel the excitement of the city waiting for him, this Second City of a Great British Empire stretching pink on a school map of his memory from New Zealand to Canada. Here, there were tramcars and dance halls and picture houses and theatres. Here, there were broad avenues and bridges, foundries and shipyards, a university and an art gallery. Here was the home of Rangers and Clyde and Third Lanark and Partick Thistle. And Celtic.
He gently shook Megan awake.
“We’re almost there,” he said.
“I know.”
The man behind the reception desk of the Great Northern Hotel scratched his jaundiced cheek hard as he looked them up and down.
“You want a single room? Just for the lady?”
“That’s what I said.”
“Well, no gentleman callers. It is a rule of the establishment.”
“I will have to visit Miss Kennedy during her stay.”
“I meant staying the night.”
Avram helped Megan to her room. It was on the third floor at the rear of the building. The view was not pleasant – a window onto a back court full of ash can
s, empty bottles and the hotel’s refuse. But at least the room was high enough up for the smell not to reach them. She checked the bed linen, fluffed up the pillows, adjusted the coverlet.
“It’s clean enough,” she pronounced, sitting down on the bed.
“What will you do now?”
“I might have a nap. Then a wee walk around the shops. Just have to wait till the evening, that’s all.”
He pulled out his wallet, picked out a note, crisp from the bank yesterday morning. “Get yourself something nice.”
“Ye’ve done enough,” she said. But she took the money anyway.
“Do you want me to leave?” he asked.
“In a while.”
He sat down on the bed beside her. She gave him her hand, but continued to stare ahead. The wardrobe door was half-open and he could see their reflections in the mirror. He might as well have been a doctor taking her pulse. Her skin was rough and cold under the stroke of his fingertips. Behind the cupboard door, empty coathangers, shelves covered with newspapers, the smell of camphor.
“Come to bed with me,” she said. “Will ye?”
The request took him off guard. He thought to refuse, just to spite her, just to show her where the power lay now. “Yes,” he said, hearing the excitement in his voice.
She began to undress and he stood up to do the same. She didn’t look at him as she folded her skirt and blouse in a professional neatness over the chair. He hung up his suit in the wardrobe, placed his shoes under the bed. She pulled back the bedclothes, lay down on the sheet in her shift and he moved in beside her. The linen felt slightly damp. He kept a distance, refraining from touching her.
“Ye can do it,” she whispered.
“Are you sure?”
“Go inside me.” She searched out his hand, clenched it. “I want you to.”
He realised he wanted her too. He wanted her badly. She turned on her side towards him, stroked the hair off his forehead, ran her fingers lightly across his cheek, her eyes full of questions. He put a hand on her hip, felt the cold beneath the coarse cloth, heard the moan on her breath to his touch. A hand on her buttock now, pressing her into his hardness, kissing her neck. She was grasping him tightly, her shift riding high on her thighs, his fingers pushing the cloth up further. He smelled the familiar odour of her sweat, the dampness underarm, but he missed entwining his fingers in the thick winding of her long hair. Her arms were around him now, nails digging deep into the back of him, legs kicking against his calves. Grasping and pushing away at the same time. He eased open her thighs. His own confidence surprised him. There was no nervousness, no fumbling, no hard push against her membrane of resistance. No blood. Instead, he slipped in warm and easy in a liquid flow, moving slowly and gently in a rhythm. She relaxed now, her hands caressing his, massaging desperate affection into his skin. He felt himself tighten, ready to explode. She tensed underneath him in an arch of her body upwards, grinding herself closer to him. Her teeth bit into his shoulder. He heard a scream of release and realised it came from his own mouth. His body shuddered and he collapsed on top of her. He could hear her heartbeat against his chest. He looked at her, saw she was crying.
“What’s wrong?”
She rubbed one eye, then the other with the back of her hand. “It’s nothing,” she said.
He eased himself off her. She turned away from him and he lay down beside her, drawing his arms around her belly, thinking for the first time about the unborn child that had lain silently between their lovemaking.
Forty-eight
HE HAD ALWAYS CHERISHED AN IMAGE of how it would be. Drawing up front in a hansom, or even at the wheel of his own shiny motor car. He saw children in a scamper after his vehicle, rewarding their chase with scattered handfuls of sweets and farthings. Tenement windows thrown open for housewives to gape at the parked automobile outside the close at number thirty-two. And wasn’t that Rabbi Lieberman stepping out of the synagogue to admire the passing procession? And Mrs Carnovsky gawking behind a tobacco cloud? Papa and Madame Kahn, Celia and Nathan, standing outside the close, lined-up spit and polished as if for a photograph.
But showing up and showing off like that was no longer in his mood. Shanks’s pony was how he set himself across the city. It felt better to walk, even in the thick hot city air, his feet pounding out the memory of his journey from the docks so many years before. The banks, the hotels, the fancy stores and posh tea-rooms, all less intimidating to him now, but nevertheless still grand and imposing in their watch of his progress from the Saltmarket, along Argyll Street to the Adelphi Hotel, then south to the Gorbals. Halfway across Glasgow Bridge he stopped, set down his case, stood up on his toes and looked over the parapet at the sluggish swirl of the Clyde beneath. The water ran the colour of milky tea.
He thought of Megan curled up under the blankets in her dull hotel room, listening to the cats scrabbling for scraps down among the rubbish in the courtyard. The stain of their lovemaking remaining on the sheet as the birthmark of their consummation. He thought of the Kahn family waiting nervously for his return. He saw the table set with linen cloth in the front room, laid out for the early dinner before the Fast. A bottle of sweet red wine and glasses glistening ready for the blessings, the oily smell of the silver-polished candlesticks still lingering, Madame Kahn fussing with the table arrangements, Papa Kahn keeping to himself in his study, one eye on the Talmudic tract in front of him, the other on the clock. And Nathan? How had that sickly, bed-ridden child grown to be a young man? And Celia? How would he feel when he saw her again?
A train pulled out in a slow steamy churn from Glasgow Central along the bridge opposite. He could feel the agitation in his limbs, his legs wanting to go this way and that, anywhere and everywhere but back to the Gorbals. He had a desire to pick up his case, return to the hotel, lie down by Megan’s side, wrap his arms fiercely around the unborn child in her belly.
“Avram? Avram Escovitz? For God’s sake, Patsy, is that you?”
He turned round. Solly standing there in front of him in a felt hat, filling out a fine double-breasted pinstripe, leather gloves despite the warm weather, a smile as broad as the Clyde splitting his fleshy jowls.
“It is you, isn’t it, ye daft bampot? I hardly recognised you.”
Avram grabbed at Solly’s outstretched hand, eagerly shook the leather-clad fingers. “It’s so good to see you, Solly.”
“It’s grand to see you too. You’re looking the right little businessman.”
“You’re looking prosperous yourself.”
“You mean I’ve got fat.”
“You never were a skinny one.”
“The betting business has been good to me.” Solly adopted a boxer’s crouch, sent a slow hooked delivery to pad at his shoulder. “You’ve filled out a bit yourself.”
“No longer Begg’s little runt.”
“That’s for sure.” A tram swung on to the bridge in a clatter of metal, swinging pantograph, and a scatter of sparks. Like an elephant on the rampage.
“I heard you were coming to visit for Yom Kippur,” Solly shouted over the noise.
“Who told you?”
“Celia.”
“How is she?”
“Who knows with Celia? She’s one of these suffragettes now. When she’s not chaining herself to one thing or another, she’s burning down the stands at the races. She is definitely not good for my business.”
“Do you have time for a drink?”
Solly laughed. “Aye, a wee dram or two before the Fast would be a grand idea.” Then an arm round his shoulder. “See how we’ve grown. It used to be a game of fitba’ on the streets. Now, it’s off to the pub.”
The Rabbie Burns was next to the railway bridge. Frosted windows to above eye-level, then topped with stained-glass panels boasting various coats of arms. The Rabbi Burns, he and Solly used to call it, the joke doing nothing to diminish their fear of the place on their rush past after school. Frightened they were to bump into the occasional pallid customer e
merging bleary-eyed, staggering and impatient from an establishment always reeking of beer, unemployment and serious drinking. Especially on schoolday afternoons when there was no darkness to disguise the air of sin about the place. Avram used to think a boy could get drunk just from the stench, waiting outside for a drinking father.
Yet, here he was entering the pub as a working adult with money in his pocket and Solly leading the way, of course. For that was Solly. Even today, when Megan had made him feel more of a man than any bar mitzvah ceremony, Solly was in charge, ordering the drinks, half of heavy and a wee dram for them both, paying with a flourish, choosing a table. Solly holding court, full of the quick patter, offering him a cigarette from a case, silver-plated, nothing flash. Wouldn’t want the punters to think he was doing too well. Still the same Solomon Green. Like father, like son. Morris Green & Son, Bookmakers. That would be the name above a permanent shop if his business were ever allowed to go legal. Although the betting shop did somehow exist inside Solly’s head and in the heads of the punters slipping him a bet on the day’s dogs and horses. Despite the work being “not strictly kosher”, Solly telling him how he had moved the business forward, setting up a network of agents in the shipyards, running a sideline in coupon betting.
“And do you know what?” Solly said, pinching his waistcoat pockets between thumb and forefinger, the first time his hands resting since he had sat down. Solly looking much older than his years, hair receding fast towards his father’s bald dome. “Dog racing is really taking off. They’ve just put in electronic traps at Glenburn. Next year, they’re introducing electric hares at Carntyne. Should bring in the punters in droves.” He paused to gulp out two perfect smoke rings. “And another thing you should know. I’m getting married.”
“Mazeltov. That Molly you used to winch?”
“Not Molly. Someone of the faith.”
“Anyone I know?”
“Aye.”
“So, you’re not telling me then?”
The Credit Draper Page 30
