The Bells of Bournville Green

by Annie Murray

  Greta answered the door to Anatoli’s daughter when she arrived at midday on Saturday, having travelled up from Brighton.

  ‘I don’t know if I want to see her,’ Edie said. ‘The way I feel at the moment I’m just as likely to speak out of turn.’

  ‘What’s she done?’ Greta asked, puzzled.

  Edie sighed. ‘Ignored him for years on end. Seems to have some grudge against him about her mother.’

  All Greta knew about Anatoli’s daughter, Caroline Brewer, was that she was thirty years old, married and a music teacher. But she had built her up in her mind into an imperious little madam who would put on airs with them all. How could anyone reject someone as lovely as Anatoli? she wondered. Feeling fiercely protective of him, she was prepared thoroughly to dislike his daughter.

  When she opened the door she found herself looking at a slender young woman with her dark brown hair taken back in a ponytail and a thin face with a serious expression. She was wearing a brown tweed coat with the collar turned up against the cold, and she looked nervous.

  ‘Hello—’ Her voice was posh and clipped. ‘Have I come to the right house? I’m Caroline Brewer. I believe my father lives here.’

  ‘Yes,’ Greta said. ‘This is it. Come in.’

  She stood back for Caroline to pass.

  ‘And you are?’ she enquired.

  ‘Greta Sorenson – I lodge with Edie and Anatoli.’

  Just then Edie appeared from upstairs. Greta saw her force a smile on to her face as she came and shook hands, not hiding away after all.

  ‘You must be Caroline. I’m Edie. It’s good to meet you at last. Would you like a cup of tea or coffee?’

  Caroline looked very uncomfortable in this new situation. ‘I think I’d better just go and see my father, if you don’t mind. Perhaps we could have some coffee . . .’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Edie said. ‘Let’s take your coat and I’ll show you up to him.’

  ‘You take the tray up,’ Edie said to Greta when she’d come down again. ‘I don’t think I can stand it.’

  Greta carried up a tray with coffee and biscuits on it and tapped on the door of Anatoli’s room. His daughter opened it, then retired to her chair by the bed.

  ‘Ah, come in, my dear,’ Anatoli said. His voice was so weak and reedy that it wrung Greta’s heart to hear it. ‘Greta, have you met my daughter Caroline? Caroline, Greta is part of our household here – very much one of the family.’

  ‘Yes, we’ve met,’ Caroline said. Greta nodded in agreement as she put the tray down.

  ‘Is there anything else you need?’ she asked.

  ‘No I don’t think so. But I expect Caroline will stay and have some lunch with us, won’t you?’ Anatoli saw her hesitate. ‘Perhaps we could have it up here?’

  ‘All right,’ Greta said. ‘We’ll bring you up some.’

  The two of them were shut away together for two and a half hours, had coffee and lunch, while Edie and Greta got on with the day-to-day routine, both quietly in an agony to know what was passing between Anatoli and his long-lost daughter. Just after half past two they heard the door open and Caroline Brewer’s voice as she came down, reclaiming her coat from the end of the banisters.

  ‘I shall need to be on my way now,’ she said. ‘It’s a long journey.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Edie said.

  The young woman softened for a moment, and gave a brief smile. She was attractive, very intelligent-looking, Greta saw. ‘Thank you for letting me come. I can’t keep visiting, but I shall telephone him.’

  ‘You’re ever so welcome,’ Edie said, rather gushingly, obviously relieved that things seemed to have gone well. ‘Do come again . . .’

  ‘No – I don’t think I shall do that. But thank you.’

  There was an awkward silence.

  ‘Goodbye then.’

  And they showed her out and went to the living-room window to watch her walk to the gate. Her hair was caught inside her upturned collar, her head down and she seemed lost in thought. She didn’t look back.

  Chapter Sixty-One

  David had gone to Aberystwyth to try to clear his head.

  ‘Give yourself a change of scene,’ Martin had suggested. ‘Get out in the countryside, climb some hills. That always helps.’

  David had the utmost respect for Martin. He was a fellow medic and he had known the horrors of war. He was also prepared to help David in any way he could.

  ‘I’m sure we could arrange for you to finish your training here in Birmingham if that’s what you’d like. But give yourself some time to think. There’s no need for a snap decision.’

  David loved the calming effect of the sea, the way it offered a bigger perspective on things. He chose Aberystwyth because he had been there before in his teens with Edie and Frances Hatton at another time of deep confusion. He travelled there by train and booked himself into a guest house on the front, not far from where the three of them had stayed before. It had been summer that time, busy with swimmers and ice-cream sellers, the sky and sea meeting in a mauve haze as the sun sank in a late afternoon. Now the colours were all steel and ink, wet brown sand, mouse grey of the dryer rocks, plants forcing up through their crevices to be whipped by the wind.

  He didn’t take much notice of the boarding house. Anything would have done and it was simple and adequate. He ate, slept, went out. Above all, he walked, for hours and hours. For those five days he barely spoke to anyone. He welcomed the physical exhaustion of being on the move all day, feeling the muscles in his legs pull and strain, falling exhausted into bed at night. It reminded him of the army, except that here there were no orders, no drills, no burning heat – and this time he was entirely alone.

  The physical tiredness was a relief because his mind was so fragmented. Concentration on any one thing for long was impossible. It was shock, Martin Ferris had told him. Shock upon shock. It would get better, with time.

  ‘You may not be ready to study again yet,’ Martin advised.

  David had dismissed this at first. Of course he should study! It was his refuge, all he had left! But now he saw what Dr Ferris meant. When he tried to think about things his mind threw up a series of jagged, jumping images and he could not always fit them together. Past and present were a jumble.

  Israel seemed far away, like a dream. Sometimes he stopped and sat hunched up in his raincoat at some vantage point looking over the wind-roughed sea, moist air beating at his face, and tried to remember Jerusalem on a July morning, the sounds and smells. He could bring it to mind of course, very easily. It was only weeks since he had left. But already it felt impossible that he had lived there for so long. It seemed astonishing that he spoke Hebrew fluently, that he had had a son, a family . . .

  At first he would not think about Gila and Shimon. Each time his thoughts led him to them he forced them away again, locking them into a strong-box in his mind that he would not visit. Instead, he thought about the army, the war, the hospital where he had worked. Sometimes he thought about Annaliese. He knew he must write to her. She would be so distressed to know what had happened and that he was not coming back. And these thoughts led him back to his wife, his son, and once more he shied away.

  His mind was like a drunken butterfly, flitting and looping round to places where he didn’t want it to rest.

  He kept finding himself thinking about Greta Sorenson, the young woman sharing the Gruschovs’ house. Why did his mind keep turning to her? She was so kindly, and they had known one another as children. She was as different from Gila as it would be possible to be. There was the colouring of course, her blonde, pink-cheeked looks when Gila was dark, exotic, volatile. But there was also that measured calm about Greta, her rounded, curving form moving round the house, her sweet yet inscrutable face and wide blue eyes. There was something about her which was both wholesome and powerfully, mysteriously, feminine. He found himself just watching her sometimes as she moved round the kitchen. She soothed him somehow by the quiet, inevitable way she got o
n with things. And by the way she listened to him and took him seriously. Sometimes he found himself longing for her to be here, sitting beside him. He was shocked by the thought. But then all his thoughts jolted him like shocks.

  For those days in Aberystwyth he got up very early and walked before breakfast on the silent, colourless beach. In the evenings he went back to the guest house after dark, ate his meal and fell into bed early, hoping to lose himself in sleep. But his dreams were less controllable than his waking mind, and each night that passed he dreamed more and more vividly. The night before he was due to go home, his son came to him very clearly, alive and whole, playing in the old apartment in Jerusalem. He was sitting on the floor of the living room, his curly head bent over his favourite toy, a car that Edie had sent to him. ‘Broom, broom!’ he was saying. He saw David and stood up, dressed in his shorts and little leather sandals.

  ‘Abba, why have you taken so long?’ Shimon asked impatiently. ‘It’s time for us to go!’

  Full of beans, he came running towards David. In the dream the room was very long, not like the real one at all. Shimon ran and ran towards him, his arms outstretched. Just before he reached David there was a bang and Shimon disappeared. Nothing was left but a thin column of smoke rising from the rug on the floor.

  David woke to the sound of his own groans and sobs. He could not shake the dream off. He was distraught, in an agony of loss and guilt. He could have stopped it, all of it. Surely he could if he had tried hard enough? He was racked by sobs.

  A sharp tapping at the door brought him to himself.

  ‘Are you all right in there? What’s going on?’

  ‘Nothing. I’m all right,’ David managed to say.

  He squeezed his eyes closed, mortified. For comfort he held the lumpy pillow in his arms and cried, more quietly, in the shadowy dawn.

  All that day the dream tormented him and he could no longer shut down his thoughts. As he walked in the cold and rain his whole body was full of pain. His arms ached to hold his son. Should he go to Israel, he asked himself over and over again, find Gila, beg her to start again with him? But he knew it was no good. Her heart was closed to him. It had begun already in small ways, but the moment that bomb went off, killing their boy, destroying their unborn child, it had stripped them of a future. The way forward was closed, and David knew it was as true for him now as for her. He simply could not bear it. Never in his life would he set foot in Israel again. He must make a new life elsewhere.

  That afternoon he sat on a bench at the end of the prom staring out at the sea. He had not eaten that day, had not thought about it, and the rain had come down and down. David had barely noticed, he was so taken up in the pain of his thoughts.

  ‘You all right, son?’

  An elderly man was standing in front of him under a black umbrella. His face was pink from the wind and he had kindly eyes. He had a dog, a terrier of some sort, on a lead.

  ‘I’m sorry, what did you say?’ David asked him.

  ‘I said are you all right? You’re soaked to the skin!’

  ‘So I am.’ David stood up, looking down at himself. He tried to speak sensibly to the man. He was being kind after all. ‘Yes, I am rather wet. I’ve been walking but I’m going back to change now.’

  ‘I should think so,’ the man said. ‘Catch your death . . .’

  He felt it his duty to go and see the Leishmanns again when he got back. Sooner or later he would have to face them, and they had not heard what had happened. This time there was going to be no pretending.

  Once more he was invited up to their sitting room and tea was served, this time by Esther Leishmann, who seemed more recovered than on his last visit. Some of her former vigour had returned. There were pastries and a chocolate gateau, which they ate with little silver forks.

  David still regarded the Leishmanns as having a parental sway over him, even though he had not always followed their ideas for him to the letter nor had he always been in close contact with them. But he still came to them in the spirit of a son seeking consolation.

  His news silenced them. Even the click of forks against bone china grew silent. Eventually Esther Leishmann said,

  ‘So, she has gone back to Israel? Of course she is upset, she is prostrate with grief. And you are her husband. You are not going after her?’

  ‘She doesn’t want me to. She says it is over: the marriage is finished.’

  ‘But no, how can that be?’ Esther cried. ‘She is mourning her son, she is overtaken by her suffering. But why end her marriage? You could see she was not well, the poor girl, so thin and shrunken like a little twig on a tree. But why leave her to grieve alone? You should be with her, Rudi! At her side as her husband!’

  David was silent. He looked down at his plate, feeling a surge of anger against Esther Leishmann, who always thought she knew best how other people should be living their lives.

  ‘What is your thinking, boy?’ Joe Leishmann asked, more gently.

  David looked up into his kindly face.

  ‘Our son is dead. Our marriage is dead. I cannot go there again.’

  ‘Not to Israel?’ Joe’s face wrinkled in pained confusion. ‘But you have made your life there, surely?’

  David had begun to shake his head but Esther Leishmann’s voice cut in shrilly.

  ‘Rudi, you must go back to Israel! You have made your aliyah – Israel is your home. You have trained as a doctor there and it is your job to stay, to build up the state. You are a Jew! It is your duty! What are you even thinking of, saying that you will not go back there? You simply must!’

  David felt the rage break over him like a wave. He put his plate down and stood up.

  Why must I? The words screamed in his mind. Why must I go to Israel? Why should I stay there? It is your dream that I go, not mine! If you think Israel is so important then why don’t you go there yourselves instead of sitting here in safety and telling everyone else what to do while their husbands and wives and sons and daughters are killed defending the state of Israel? You are Jews as well, so why is it me who has to fulfil your dreams – why don’t you go instead of expecting me to do it for you?

  ‘I must be leaving,’ he said quietly.

  ‘David . . .’ Joe tried to stop him. He could sense the trembling emotion in the young man beside him.

  ‘You must rethink,’ Esther was instructing him even as he was going through the front door.

  ‘Goodbye,’ David said abruptly.

  And he left, storming away along the sedate Edgbaston street.

  Why, he raged in his head, do I have to spend my whole life worrying about whether I am living the right way as a Jew? Why can’t I just live my life?

  He stopped suddenly, outside the Edgbaston Friends’ Meeting House. Across the street stood an impressive dwelling which had belonged to George Cadbury, so there was a strong Quaker influence in the area. The Meeting House was a well-proportioned brick building. David felt its quiet peacefulness beckon him. He wished he could go inside and just sit, but it wasn’t open. And seeing it somehow increased his sense of conflict.

  He walked on, more slowly, sadly.

  I am always going to be neither one thing nor the other, he thought. Maybe I have to move on from here. Go somewhere where there are more Jews, but which is not Israel.

  It was then that he decided he would go to America. Surely he could fit in there? The New World felt like the answer to his old problems.

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  Anatoli was dying. There was no doubt about it now.

  Even though the normal routines of life had to go on, everything was dominated by what was happening upstairs in the Gruschovs’ house. Greta was glad to go to work, for the friendly faces on the line at Cadbury’s and the cheerful normality of it all. But even when she was there a part of her mind was always with Anatoli, wondering how he was, whether he would still be there when she got home.

  ‘I’m going to have to stay in nights at the moment,’ she told John.

&nb
sp; He tried to be understanding but was obviously put out.

  ‘He’s your landlord, isn’t he?’ he asked, puzzled.

  ‘Yes, he is, but . . .’ How could she explain how much more Anatoli had become for her? ‘I want to help look after him.’

  John’s disappointment was nothing to her, not compared with doing everything she could for Anatoli.

  He needed round-the-clock nursing now and they took turns to be with him, all desperate to keep him at home for as long as possible. But he was declining fast.

  ‘It’s almost as if he was waiting for Caroline to come before he could let go,’ Edie said a few days after the young woman’s visit. She and Greta were in the kitchen while David kept watch upstairs. She yawned, exhausted, sitting at the kitchen table. ‘He never said much, but it must have meant the world to him.’

  ‘They made their peace then?’ Greta asked. She had not felt she could ask Anatoli what had happened. It was such a private thing about his past.

  Edie sighed. ‘Yes, they did. Anatoli’s always said that the best part of his marriage was the last two or three years, after Margot became ill. He said he wasn’t a very good husband before – not at home enough, too busy trying to make a success of his business, involved in too many other things . . . Course, that’s what the children remembered – that he wasn’t there, that their mother was unhappy and lonely, and they blamed him.’ She smiled gently. ‘I think when he was younger he was much more uppity. Traditional man of the house, his word is law, that sort of thing. When things changed at the end I think they fell in love again, and it made him gentler. That’s what he said. But Richard and Caroline had left by then and were getting on with their own lives. They just thought he didn’t care about any of them.’

  ‘I can’t imagine him being like that,’ Greta said.

  ‘No, I know. But he was able to explain to Caroline. Richard’s kept in better touch anyway. He seemed to think she had forgiven him – he was happier afterwards.’