A Time to Love

by Beryl Kingston

  ‘Fred Morrison,’ Dumpling said, doing the honours. ‘He has the flat across the road. Mrs Renshaw’s, you remember. Such a nice woman. Oy yoi! Vhat a life ve lead!’ Mrs Renshaw had suffered a heart attack last summer and died before anyone could get to her. ‘Vhat a life! Ve eat now, eh Davey?’

  David sat opposite the infamous Mr Morrison all through the meal, and by the end of it he really rather liked him. He was such a very correct man, calling Aunty Dumpling Mrs Esterman all the time, and passing the dishes most politely, and talking so seriously. He said he worked as a despatch clerk for the East London Weekly Pictorial, and was gratifyingly interested in Mr Woolnoth and his bookbinding. ‘It being all part an’ parcel a’ the same trade, so to speak.’

  David started his first sketch of the man as soon as he got home that evening, but although his clothes were easy enough, the suit so dark and uncreased and the shirt so white with its high wing collar and its fat neat de, the face was impossible because he couldn’t remember any of its expressions. The pencil-line moustache, the thin nose, the sleek hair, yes, but not how Mr Morrison looked. It took four more meetings and six more sketches before David came anywhere near a likeness.

  And then one afternoon in January he suddenly realized what it was he’d missed. Aunty Dumpling had just turned down the gaslight and they were settling round the fire to read the latest copy of the Weekly Pictorial when Mr Morrison glanced up sideways at her. His face was lit by the firelight and it wore such an odd expression that David found himself staring, much longer and harder than was polite or proper. Nervousness, he thought, observing the taut lines etched into the man’s cheeks. He wants to please. And then he noticed the dog-like anxiety in the man’s eyes, and understood something else. He thinks he’s inferior. Inferior to us. How very odd, when he’s so well-dressed and proper. The idea that a grown man could feel inferior to a woman and a sixteen-year-old was new and extraordinary. Absorbing it, David felt that he liked Mr Morrison even more.

  That night’s sketch was much better, for he’d caught the tilt of the head and the taut cheeks and the lustrous anxiety of the eyes. This one was good enough to cover with tissue paper and put away in his folder, ready to be shown to Mr Eswyn Smith. For in twelve days’ time his long exile would be over. In twelve days’ time he would be back at the People’s Palace. And I have earned it, he thought, looking at all the sketches he’d amassed.

  In the grand emporium of Hopkins and Peggs the staff were preparing for the January sales, and Ellen was being observed. Miss Morton needed a new assistant, and she and Miss Elphinstone were thinking of promoting Miss White.

  ‘She’s been with us three years now,’ Miss Morton said. ‘She’s nearly sixteen. A dependable young woman. Good head for figures. Quick.’

  But promotion couldn’t be rushed. ‘I will keep an eye on her,’ Miss Elphinstone decided. ‘See how she does.’

  Ellen knew nothing of this, for just at the moment she was fully occupied keeping her eye on somebody else, a quiet, undersized, scruffy little girl who was walking very slowly past the counter, deliberately not looking at the off-cuts of ribbon and lace trimming that were piled so temptingly in the sales baskets. She was watching a thief.

  It was a disquieting experience, for the child reminded her of her earlier self, and it was a self she thought she had forgotten. She knew so exactly what that girl was thinking, and what she would do next. And sure enough, almost to the predicted second, a small rough hand reached out to tweak a length of velvet ribbon out of the nearest basket. But Ellen White was quicker than she was.

  ‘That’ll be sixpence,’ she said, holding hand and ribbon in a equally sudden grip.

  ‘I was only looking, miss,’ the girl said, bold with fear.

  ‘You wasn’t thinking a’ nicking nothink?’

  ‘’Course not!’ The lie was easy and wide-eyed.

  ‘You wasn’t thinking a’ buying nothink neither, was yer?’ Ellen said pleasantly. And when the child stared back and didn’t answer, ‘Tell yer what, I’ll walk you to the door, shall I. See you safely on yer way.’

  They walked together, Ellen’s hand lightly on the girl’s shoulder. ‘I’d stick ter the Lanes if I was you,’ Ellen advised as they parted.

  And the girl gave her a cheeky grin, agreed and fled.

  ‘Most diplomatic,’ Miss Elphinstone approved, having watched the entire incident. ‘Yes. I think she will do, Miss Morton. I will recommend her promotion after the sales.’

  David’s return to the Tech was quite a pleasurable occasion, although most of his friends had left by now, like Hymie. But the teachers were the same, and Mr Eswyn Smith hadn’t changed at all. He was standing in his favourite corner of the room, busily cleaning the brushes on a multicoloured rag, and the walls around him were covered with designs and drawings and examples of handwriting. His bald head was spattered with white paint and there were pencil shavings in his tatty beard, just the same as always. When he saw who’d arrived he threw the rag onto the table and strode forward to welcome him back.

  ‘David Cheifitz, my dear boy, they said you’d enrolled. Just at the right time too. We’re off to the Tate next month to study the masters. Did you bring your sketches? Good! Good! Well, let me see them.’

  It was a lovely moment. Like coming home after a long journey. He signed up for both Art classes, on two evenings a week, and after the first week he felt as though he’d never been away, and on the fourth Thursday evening they went to the Tate Gallery to study the masters.

  It was an overwhelming experience. There was so much to look at that David forgot how to look. He drifted from canvas to canvas in a stupor, saturated by the painted beauty all around him and overawed by the terrifying competence of all those artists. He would never be able to paint like that. Never. Not if he studied for a hundred years. Such hands, white and relaxed, their elegant nails as pink as pearl; such eyes, gleaming with the most intelligent light as though they were set in flesh and blood. He was lifted and demoralized by the power of it all.

  Mr Smith was bubbling with cheerfulness. ‘This way for the Pre-Raphaelites!’ he said. And they all trooped after him.

  The Pre-Raphaelite paintings were in another imposing saloon, only this one was empty and silence hung in the air to press them all into good behaviour. Girls with pale dreaming faces gazed to right and left from every canvas or looked soulfully at the viewer, and these were not the grubby faces of Whitechapel nor the corseted bodies of the West End. These angelic creatures wore flowing draperies that clung to their bodies, and their bodies were as perfect as their faces. They stopped David in his tracks. He had never seen anything he liked so much or thought so beautiful.

  That is, until he saw the Lady of Shalott, glowing towards him from the far end of the gallery. It was a painting of a calm blue-green river bordered by spiky reeds and willows and luxuriant trees, and in the centre of the picture was a dark boat with an unlit lantern at the prow, a drifting, silent, ominous boat. And sitting in the boat was another beautiful dreaming girl. She was dressed in white and had long, straight, red-gold hair that framed her face and fell in unbrushed profusion almost to her waist. Her face, or rather the expression on her face, made his heart contract with a sudden and entirely new emotion as if somebody were nipping at it, squeezing and pinching, but in an odd pleasurable way. Her chin was raised, so that her head was tilted back and her long slender neck was in shadow. All the light in the picture fell on the beautiful oval of her face, on the fine curve of her cheek and the straight nose ever so slightly tip-tilted, the full red lips ever so slightly parted and the huge eyes anguished, lids drooping. Even at this distance he knew that her eyes would be blue, but he had to walk right down the gallery before he could be sure, and as he walked, and the beautiful girl grew closer and closer, he forgot all about paint and painting, all about shape and colour, all about his need to acquire a better technique. This was the face of a damsel in distress, and if he could have done it he would have jumped straight into the c
anvas to help her. He had fallen in love with a picture.

  From then on he visited the Tate Gallery whenever he had the time, walking there if he couldn’t afford the fare, to stand happily alone before the lovely vision. Mr Smith found him a copy of Tennyson’s poem so that he could read the story of the Lady of Shalott, and now he knew that she had died for a glimpse of love, which was romantic and beautiful and terrible. And when the lady of the poem, forced to view the world through that awful mirror, caught a glimpse of those ‘two young lovers lately wed’ and cried that she was ‘half sick of shadows’ he knew so exactly what she was feeling it was as if she were in the room and speaking to him.

  From time to time as the spring eased into summer he tried to draw his vision, but the finished picture was always flat and unrealistic. ‘You draw better from life,’ Mr Smith observed.

  ‘Try the coronation,’ Hymie said. ‘You’ll see all sorts then. Do a great big picture like yer did a’ the old Queen’s Jubilee, d’you remember?’

  But the coronation didn’t inspire him either. He and Hymie went to see the procession, and he took his sketch pad and filled several pages with rapid sketches, horses, guardsmen, fashionable ladies in their huge hats, people in the crowd eating and cheering, even the new fat King, smiling benignly, but none of them pleased him. They were good enough, that was all. But there was something more to be found. He was sure of it. If only he knew where to look.

  All through that long hot summer and the mild autumn that followed, he prowled and brooded and dreamed, restless and dissatisfied, as though he was waiting for some great event.

  But nothing much happened. Aunty Dumpling and Mr Morrison still went out to the theatre once a week, but there was no sign of a romance, and his mother seemed to have forgotten she ever thought it likely. Hymie fell in love every Thursday, and Rivke’s son Joe got married. Three flats in the Buildings fell vacant and were filled by new arrivals from Russia, who couldn’t speak a word of English. But life was just the same. The tailors were all kept very busy making gowns for coronation parties and there was plenty of trade for Mr Woolnoth too, as London schools awarded special editions of Edward Our Sovereign and King Edward’s Realm to the most subservient of his subjects. Winter cracked a few more paving stones, January gave them all chesty colds, and on David’s seventeenth birthday rain fell from the sky all day as though the gods were emptying buckets. But nothing changed.

  Then it was June again, and Mr Eswyn Smith was organizing another exhibition of his pupils’ work in the Winter Garden. ‘Pull out all the stops this time, lads,’ he urged. ‘We’ve got a good audience, particularly over the weekends, two symphony concerts and an opera. We might just hook a few buyers or a nice fat commission or two. The principal seems hopeful. You never know.’

  So they gathered their work together, from pencil sketches to full-sized portraits, pictures of every kind in every medium, charcoal, Indian ink, pastels, watercolours, even oils. David took pains with his choice, because he could understand how important it was, even though his feelings weren’t engaged. And when the display was mounted on tall screens all around the Winter Garden among the potted plants and the elegant fretwork of the galleries, he was pleased with his drawings and felt he’d arranged them to advantage.

  The centrepiece was a large painting of the Building on a dark Shabbas evening, with the brickwork indigo blue, shadowed black, and every living room lit by the fuzzy golden bloom of candles, one above the other in seven-storey columns, and the grey courtyard below them full of vague blue figures, bent forward, hurrying home. He’d liked it very much when he’d first painted it, and his pleasure in it hadn’t diminished because it reminded him of the quiet and peace of the Shabbas, and the gentle moment when the family were gathered together and the meal began. Around it he’d grouped a collection of sketches and portraits, of stall holders in the Lane, of Mr Woolnoth and the apprentice, of Aunty Dumpling and Mr Morrison, of Hymie playing chess, and the King in his carriage and cousin joe standing under the chuppah with his bride.

  Yes, he thought, standing back to get a good view, it was a creditable collection. It looked professional. If he did feel just a little pride it was justified. This was his best work.

  He wanted to know what other people thought ot it and took to visiting the gardens every evening, loitering in the galleries while the visitors were promenading, so that he could watch their reactions. One or two stood before his pictures for quite a long time, which was really quite exciting, and one lady actually said they were ‘well executed’, but nobody offered to buy any, despite Mr Smith’s optimism. By the final evening of the exhibition he’d resigned himself to artistic obscurity.

  But he and Hymie went to the Winter Garden for the last time anyway. And it was the best evening of the lot, crowded with well-to-do people who all seemed genuinely interested in the display and stood around among the screens drinking champagne and talking to one another in their easy drawling voices.

  ‘Wherever ’ave they all come from?’ David wondered.

  ‘It ain’t from,’ Hymie said knowledgeably, ‘it’s for. They’ve come fer the opera, whatcher bet. Be all right if one of ’em wanted ter buy one a’ your paintings, nu.’

  ‘It ’ud be more than all right,’ David said. ‘It ’ud be a miracle. That’s what.’

  The first bell was ringing for the return of the audience and sure enough the gardens began to clear. They had come for the opera. It was rather a disappointment. ‘Well, that’s that,’ he said. ‘Let’s cut off fer a cup a’ coffee.’

  ‘No, ’ang on a tick,’ Hymie said. ‘There’s a lot more people coming in the other end. Look.’

  And he was right. The gardens were filling again, and this time with working men and their wives and families, and groups of girls, and sweethearts arm in arm. They entered cautiously as though they’d been waiting for the nobs to leave and weren’t quite sure the coast was entirely clear. And a lot of them were looking at the pictures.

  ‘See what they think,’ Hymie said.

  So they stood and watched as the new crowd circled the stands, chattering and exclaiming and giggling, faces raised and hands pointing.

  And David suddenly saw the Lady of Shalott.

  She was standing right in front of his exhibition looking up at the picture of the Buildings, a small slender girl with a mass of dark curly hair caught up in a bun at the nape of her neck under the brim of an absolutely enormous hat. He had a vague impression that she was wearing some sort of costume in a pale colour, dove grey or lilac, but it was her face that caught his attention. Her head was turned so that he had a heart-stopping view of her lifted profile, wide brows and huge blue eyes, a short straight nose ever so slightly tip-tilted, full red lips ever so slightly parted, the slender stem of a white neck and an exquisite curve of cheek. The Lady of Shalott, beautiful and perfect and here, in the flesh.

  For a few seconds he stared at her in admiration and disbelief while his heart drummed against his ribs as though he’d been running, then she turned her head so that her lovely face was hidden by the brim of that ridiculous hat, and he remembered he had legs and began to walk towards her. He hadn’t got the faintest idea what he would say to her. He only knew that she was the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen in his life, and that he simply had to stand beside her and talk to her.

  A hand clutched his sleeve and pulled him to a halt. It belonged to Mr Smith, who was grinning so widely his mouth was like a slice of melon. Oh not now! Not now! What does he want?

  ‘Allow me to present our Mr Cheifitz,’ the Art master was saying, looking over his shoulder at the person beside him. ‘David, this lady is Mrs Fulmington of Finsbury Square. She would like to commission a portrait.’

  She was a huge fat woman in purple, and she was grinning too, displaying a row of hideous false teeth, all identical and unlikely. A commission, David thought, a real commission, and he knew he ought to be feeling excited, because it was a piece of extraordinary good luck. But the Lady
of Shalott was walking on to the next screen. Oh why now?

  Nevertheless he shook hands politely and listened while the fat lady told him how very good she thought his drawings were and what a very pretty girl her daughter was. ‘You’ll enjoy painting her, I’m sure,’ she gushed. ‘The prettiest curls, although I say so myself. An artist’s delight.’

  ‘I shall look forward to it, ma’am,’ he said politely, but craning his neck to see where the beautiful girl had gone. Hurry up or I shall lose her. No, there’s that hat, curving before John O’Connell’s pictures. Oh she’s all curves, and what lovely thick hair she has. Hurry up, do.

  But nothing could hurry Mrs Fulmington. She gushed and bridled, and held his arm with her fat gloved hand, and told him what a great lover of art she was, and wouldn’t get to the point, no matter how hard he and Mr Smith endeavoured to inch her there. It took nearly half an hour before she finally gave him her card and suggested a time for the first sitting. Nearly half an hour, as he knew with anguish, because he’d been watching the great clock all the time, when he wasn’t looking for the Lady of Shalott.

  Nearly half an hour, and when she’d finished the beautiful girl was gone.

  Chapter Fourteen

  David was frantic. He danced and dodged from one end of the Winter Garden to the other, narrowly missing the patrons and the potted plants, taut with eagerness and anxiety.

  Hymie trundled after him, puzzled and complaining. He could hardly believe his eyes. Could this really be David Cheifitz rushing about like a lunatic, jumping and panting and treading on people’s feet? Gentle David Cheifitz? David Cheifitz the artist? ‘Steady on, Cheify!’ he said. ‘What’s got in ter yer?’

  David couldn’t stop to explain. ‘She must be ’ere,’ he muttered. ‘Must be. She can’t be gone. Ai yi yi! She can’t be gone.’