But she had, and finally after nearly an hour searching the same walks and corners over and over again, he had to admit it.
Hymie tried to comfort him. ‘Don’t yer want ter get ’ome and tell yer Ma about the commission?’ he asked. ‘I know I would.’
But David hadn’t the slightest interest in the commission. ‘All my life,’ he said, with the dramatic extravagance of seventeen years, ‘all my life I been waiting to meet a girl like that. And now this! Why oh why did that silly woman have ter come up with her commission then? Of all times! She ’ad the rest of the evening. The rest of the fortnight even. Why then? It’s too bad, Hymie.’ He looked as though he was going to cry.
‘Plenty more fish in the sea,’ Hymie said helpfully, nodding his shaggy head to encourage his friend. Who’d have thought old Cheify would get smitten like this?
‘Girls ain’t fish!’ David shouted. ‘How’m I gonna find her, Hymie? Where d’you think she’s gone?’
‘Off ’ome I’spect,’ Hymie said. ‘Same as we should.’
Everybody had gone home. The place was almost empty and so quiet their voices echoed. There was only one old gentleman left in the gardens, quietly examining the paintings and looking tetchily at the two boys whenever they raised their voices.
‘I find ’er,’ David said. ‘I come back ’ere every Saturday, till I find ’er. I vow it. I find ’er somehow or other.’
‘’Course,’ Hymie said comfortingly. ‘Only we go home now, nu?’
Emmanuel was thrilled to hear of the commission. ‘Our son a portrait painter,’ he said. ‘Vhat you think a’ that, Rachel?’
Rachel was more interested in Mrs Fulmington. ‘Vhat she look like, Davey? She dress good, nu?’
‘I don’t know. I suppose so, Mama. She was fat.’
‘Fat? Oy-oy, Davey. Vhere’s your manners? You don’t call a lady fat. So tell your Mama all about her.’
‘Later, Mama,’ David said, kissing her vaguely. ‘Now I got ter do a sketch.’ His brain was swollen with images of his beautiful girl and he wanted to commit them to paper before the memory began to fade.
Rachel sighed her resignation as she cleared the table to make way for him. ‘So he’s an artist. Nebbish! He ain’t got time for his Mama.’
There was truth in her complaint that night, and he knew it, but couldn’t respond to it. The vision was too imperative.
It was an excellent drawing, one of the best he’d ever done, although it didn’t satisfy him. He’d caught the delicate curves of her cheek and her chin and the fullness of her parted lips, and he’d managed the gleam of those blue eyes, and the texture of that heavy hair. Other details were lost. He remembered that the neck of her blouse was unbuttoned, and that her arms were slim and her waist delectably slender, but he couldn’t recall the colour of her costume nor what flowers decorated the brim of that enormous hat. Never mind, he thought When I find her again I’ll get her to pose for me in exactly the same clothes. And the thought was both comforting and upsetting, for it brought his sense of loss into the keenest focus.
From then on he drew at least three pencil sketches every day, mostly head and shoulders, because her face was so clearly printed on his memory and he still couldn’t draw hands. And in his Tuesday class he started a full-length portrait, with her lovely eyes gazing dreamily out at him from above the Pre-Raphaelite draperies he liked so much and drew so well. By now he’d drawn her so often he felt they were already acquainted. He tied three of the best sketches to the foot of his bed, so that her face was the first thing he would see when he woke in the morning and the last thing to occupy his thoughts before he drifted off to sleep at night. Oh he must find her. He must.
That Saturday, the minute Shabbas was over, he dragged poor Hymie off to the People’s Palace to search. They were there every week for the next month, regardless of what was on, but there was never any sign of the beautiful girl. And then it was July and the first of the sketches was beginning to curl. The sight of it made him morose. ‘I don’t reckon I shall ever find ’er, Hymie,’ he sighed. ‘She’s the one girl in all the world fer me. I shall never love no one else. Never.’
Hymie thought that was carrying things a bit too far, but he had too much concern for his friend to say so. ‘We go on looking, nu?’ he said. ‘Maybe she came fer the opera. We’ll come ’ere fer the next opera. Whatcher think?’
But David only sighed profoundly and looked more miserable than ever.
It’s just as well he’s got ter go an’ draw that portrait termorrer, Hymie thought. Sommink ter take ’is mind off it. An’ not before time!
David hadn’t given his first commission a single thought. It was a job, that was all. Like binding books. He would do it because he’d given his word, but it meant nothing to him. It didn’t even make him feel excited.
His eyes acknowledged that Finsbury Square was an impressive place, with its high town houses set well back from the genteel luxury of the well-trimmed park at its centre. But that was all. In normal circumstances Mrs Fulmington’s house would have made him feel gauche and out of place, but now, with his head full of dreams and despair, he climbed the steps to the front door as easily as though he were climbing the staircase in the Buildings, and when a supercilious butler admitted him, he announced himself as ‘Mr Cheifitz, portrait painter’ boldly, as though he was a Royal Academician.
Mrs Fulmington was fatter than ever in heliotrope satin, and her daughter Fifi turned out to be a tubby three-year-old with thin mouse-brown curls and a fat pasty face. Being an only child and very spoilt she had no intention of sitting still to be painted. She squirmed and wriggled and whined and complained, ‘I’s bored! I’s hungry!’ and even though her mother tried to bribe her with lemonade and chocolate biscuits, it was almost impossible to draw her. Nevertheless he did what he could and made several quick sketches while she smeared chocolate on the cream brocade. Then he promised to return for a second session in a week’s time, and made his escape.
Mr Eswyn Smith was highly entertained by his account of the sitting and laughed immoderately.
‘It’s all very well you laughing,’ David said ruefully. ‘I tell you, sir, I wish I’d never took this on.’
‘Let’s have a look at your sketches then,’ Mr Smith said deciding to be helpful. But when he saw them he laughed even louder. ‘You’ve made her look like a pig,’ he said.
‘She is like a pig.’
‘Oh dear me!’ The Art Master said, still laughing. ‘Her mother won’t think much of that. I suppose her hair is scraggy? Yes, of course. Trust you to be accurate.’
‘That’s what she’s like,’ David said stubbornly, ‘and it was hard enough doing these. I told yer, sir. She wouldn’t keep still. Ai-yi! I don’t think I’ll ever be able to draw her.’
‘Then draw someone else,’ Mr Smith advised. There’s plenty of kids round here would sit still for tuppence.’
‘That’ud be cheating,’ David protested.
‘Not a bit of it, you dreadful young Puritan. That’s good artistic practice. All the best portrait painters do it. As long as you get the face right nobody notices the rest of the figure, you mark my words.’
So as it was good artistic practice David asked his cousin’s little girl Naomi to sit for him. She was four years old and a good deal skinnier than Mrs Fulmington’s awful Fifi, and very much better behaved, so after three busy half-hours he had produced several commendable sketches, most with blank faces but one with an approximation of the original sitter. The next week he took them all back to Finsbury Square so that proud Mama could make her choice.
She was quite charmed. ‘Why that’s my little Fifi to the life,’ she said. ‘How very clever of you, Mr Cheifitz! Just look at those dear little feet. She’s always had such delicate feet, Mr Cheifitz. She takes after my side of the family when it comes to the matter of feet, you know.’
And David looked from Naomi’s narrow bones to the podgy appendages scrambling over the sofa in front of him, and decide
d to keep quiet. Mr Smith had been quite right.
So the portrait was finished, and a flat uninteresting untruthful thing it was. Mrs Fulmington was delighted with it. ‘I shall recommend you to all my friends,’ she gushed, handing across the promised two guineas. ‘I think you are so very clever, Mr Cheifitz.’
But her friends didn’t appear to share her opinion and no further commissions were forthcoming. By now David was so cast down by the loss of his beautiful girl he hardly noticed this lesser disappointment. Evening classes had stopped for the summer and now there was nothing in his life but work and useless dreams. It was very hot and the streets of Whitechapel smelt worse every day, pungent with the sweat of labouring men and animals, of stale piss and hot horse dung and the decomposing accumulations of the outdoor privies. And to make matters worse, there was no breeze to carry away the smell of its industries, the sour fumes from the breweries or the fleshy stink from the tanneries or the prickling scent of rotting oranges from Spitalfields Market. Flies and bluebottles worried the horses and crawled over every stall, and at night the bugs bit so often and so furiously that sleep was impossible. David took to sitting out on the gallery during the worst part of the night, and when morning came he was pale and lethargic in consequence.
‘Vhat ve do vid him?’ Rachel worried. ‘He don’t sleep. He don’t eat nothink. You think he’s sickening maybe?’
‘Nu-nu,’ Emmanuel said. ‘He veil enough, bubeleh. It the heat. Ve all suffer.’
‘So maybe he’s in love,’ Dumpling suggested cheerfully, setting down her teacup and wiping the sweat from her forehead with a large handkerchief.
‘Never on my life!’ Rachel said. ‘Such a thought vouldn’t enter his head.’
‘So vhy not? You ask me he’s just the age.’
‘So ve don’t ask you, Raizel. The idea. He’s a good Jewish boy, I tell you. He don’t think such thoughts.’ She was very annoyed, her hands trembling among the teacups.
’The heat, bubeleh,’ Emmanuel said, trying to calm them, because they were both pink in the face and alert with anger.
‘So ve ain’t all like some people,’ Rachel said, looking at her sister-in-law sharply.
‘Ai-yi-yi!’ Dumpling wailed covering her head with her protective apron. ‘Me she means, Emmanuel. Your own sister!’
‘Some people,’ Rachel continued regardless of the wails and her husband’s anxiously placating hand, ‘vhat don’t behave like good Jewish vomen. Some people vhat ain’t got no modesty vorth the name.’
‘I should live to hear such things!’ Dumpling’s high-pitched voice mourned through the shroud of her apron.
‘Love, she says, Emmanuel! You hear her. Love! The shame of it! Courting vid a goy and she calls it love!’ Tears fell down Rachel’s cheeks like rain on a window.
‘Rachel! Raizel! Please!’ Emmanuel begged. ‘Ve don’t say these things!’ He turned from one to the other in such agitation he looked like a spinning top. ‘Please!’
Dumpling pulled her apron down beneath her chin, smearing her tears as it descended. ‘Goy he may be,’ she said. ‘Lover he ain’t. So you got a dirty mind, Rachel Cheifitz!’
Now it was Rachel’s turn to howl her outrage. ‘I should live to hear such vords!’
It took Emmanuel the rest of the evening to restore them to an approximation of reasonable behaviour, and even then they could only bear the sight of one another if he sat between them and held a hand from each. When David came home from his chess game with Hymie they were both so extravagantly affectionate towards him that he knew there’d been a row. And when his father wouldn’t tell him what had upset them, he knew it must be something serious.
‘Was it to do with Mr Morrison, maybe?’ he asked tentatively.
Emmanuel sighed profoundly. ‘Ai-yi, David! Vhat a vorld ve live in! Too much vork, I tell you. Too liddle play. And so hot! Is no vonder ve kvetch.’
And he was right. The heat was intolerable. Perhaps his mother and Aunty Dumpling wouldn’t be so prickly with one another once it got cooler. But in the meantime everybody in East London seemed to be fatigued and short-tempered. Mr Woolnoth snapped at the apprentices and the apprentices quarrelled witih one another. His father and Uncle Ben spent more and more of their time gambling, and weren’t comforted. And out in Brick Lane the gangs were beginning to spar.
The two most formidable of the local gangs, who used to live in the Nichol before it was demolished, were spoiling for a fight, insulting one another and putting the boot in at every opportunity. So no one was surprised when the knives came out and the street was loud with shrieks and screams. This time the whole thing started with a bottle fight between two women, but within minutes the street was full of running figures waving knives and bottles and chair legs and lengths of piping. Less than an hour later three people were in hospital with stab wounds and the police had arrived and made ten arrests, with considerable difficulty and despite vociferous opposition.
David, watching from the door-locked safety of Aunty Dumpling’s upper room, was excited and appalled. The fighting figures made excellent models, but the mindless violence of it all was more puzzling than ever this year.
‘Why they fight?’ he asked his father as they walked home from the synagogue that Friday evening. ‘Why they don’t talk, argue it out maybe, like we do, instead a’ just thumping? Don’t make no sense ter me, none of it.’
Emmanuel couldn’t say. ‘Ve live in a violent vorld, nu.’
‘Someone ought ter stop it.’
‘I known vorse violence vhen I vas your age. Ai yi! In Varsaw they kill us, systematic, house by house, street by street. Thank the good Lord they don’t do that at least’
‘An’ dishonest too,’ David went on, head down, brow furrowed, watching the tips of his own boots as he walked. ‘I seen Alfie Miller in the Lane yesterday, floggin’ cheap trays, makin’ a killin’. Gold rings on his fingers an’ all, an’ all the poor old things flockin’ ter buy.’ He could see Alfie’s well-fed tomcat face so clearly, and hear the chink of the coins as he dropped them into his pocket ‘He used ter be my hero, Alfie Miller, an’ he’s a crook.’ It was demoralizing. Oh, London was a horrible place, furnace hot and stinking and full of thieves and thugs. Was it any wonder he couldn’t find his beautiful girl here?
‘Alfie Miller ain’t your affair no more,’ Emmanuel said solemnly. ‘In any case it ain’t for us to judge. God vill judge.’ And he quoted the Yom Kippur prayer. ‘“Verily it is Thou alone who art judge and arbiter, who knowest and art witness; Thou writest down and settest the seal; Thou rememberest things forgotten.” All ve got to do is fear the Lord and obey the Commandments.’
He spoke with such quiet pride that David was comforted, for his words implied that Jews were different, and that was reassuringly true. They didn’t run riot in the streets and attack one another with knives. They were quiet and peaceable and Godfearing, a cultured civilized people who could be trusted to uphold the law and be kind to one another. And gladness made his heart swell so that warmth spread from the centre of his body to his skin, because he was Jewish, and belonged irrevocably to such a people.
And that night his last conscious thought was not a dream of his beautiful woman, but a prayer of thanksgiving to his God.
Nevertheless the heat and bad temper went on.
Hymie and his family were going to Southend on Bank Holiday Monday. Now that all three of them were earning and all his brothers and sisters had married and were living away from home, there was money to spare for outings. ‘Be some sport there,’ he said happily to David. ‘Southend. Imagine the sort a’ girls there’ll be! Why dontcher come with us?’
David wished his old friend luck, but the thought of girls, at Southend or anywhere else, didn’t entice him.
‘Sickening, don’t I tell you,’ Rachel said, when she heard he’d refused such an offer. ‘Vhat ve do vid him?’
It wasn’t in Emmanuel’s nature to think of doing anything to anybody, and he could only shake his he
ad and sigh and pluck his beard tatty.
In the end it was Rivke and her husband Ben who found a solution for her. Ben and his son Josh were both porters in a big department store in Shoreditch, and every year the store ran a staff outing for the workers and their families. This year charabancs had been hired to take them all to Wanstead Flats for the day and according to Ben there was a seat vacant on his particular charabanc, because one of the other porters had fallen ill. ‘So come vid us vhy don’t you?’ he asked. ‘Day in the country. Do you good. Plenty to eat, plenty to see, plenty to draw. Vhy not?’
For most of the year the Wanstead Flats were nothing but a windswept common, a flat unkempt heath, spiked with gorse and inhabited by rabbits and the occasional wagons of wandering Gypsies. But on Bank Holiday Monday it became a huge open-air theatre, with a fairground, a freak show, donkey rides and fortune tellers, wrestlers and travelling players, and stalls and barrows from all over North London, gathered for the best day’s trading in the entire year. There would certainly be plenty to see and sketch.
‘Well …’ he hesitated.
Rivke and Josh both added their voices and so did Josh’s two little girls, Naomi the model and her three-year-old sister, Ruthie. ‘They got donkeys, Uncle David,’ Naomi said. ‘It’s ever so good.’
So to his mother’s intense relief, David agreed to join them.
They had a fine day for it, for overnight rain had broken the hold of the long hot spell and cooled tempers and freshened the air. The charabancs arrived in good time and even though they picked up their passengers from all over Shoreditch and Whitechapel, they were in Wanstead Flats long before half past nine.
‘Vhat a day ve got!’ Rivke said as the driver opened the door. ‘Put yer bonnet on, Ruthie.’
‘Can I ’ave a go on the swings?’ Naomi said, following the others down the gangway.
‘’Course,’ David said. ‘Soon as we get out I promise.’ He was immediately behind her, guiding her by the shoulders to make sure she didn’t trip, and as they reached the step he looked up to check that their way was dear. And found himself gazing straight at the Lady of Shalott. His surprise and pleasure were so intense he was frozen to the spot. She was climbing down from the second charabanc, wearing the same lilac-coloured costume and a smart straw boater, and talking to a short plump girl with fuzzy fair hair. And she was even more beautiful than he remembered her.
A Time to Love Page 19
