‘So what’s the news?’ Hymie said, welcoming him affably. ‘I thought you was dead.’
‘I’m in love!’ David said.
‘Oy oy! So what happened to the Lady of Shalott?’
‘It’s her. I found her!’
‘Some fellers have all the luck!’ Hymie said when the tale was done.
‘Yes,’ David agreed seriously. ‘It is luck! I never thought I’d find her again, an’ that’s a fact.’
‘What’s yer Dad think about it?’ Hymie asked.
‘I ain’t told him yet.’
Hymie gave him a quizzical look and took out his packet of cigarettes. ‘Why not?’ he said offering one.
‘Ta,’ David said, glad of the pause while they both lit up. ‘Well …’ he said finally. ‘She ain’t Jewish.’ It was a painful fact to be forced to face. He’d been avoiding it all summer. But there it was. Spoken and admitted. She wasn’t Jewish. She ate bacon and thought the Sabbath was comical and hadn’t even heard of the Commandments. And because she wasn’t Jewish he hadn’t said a word about her to either of his parents. And he ought to have done.
‘My life!’ Hymie said understanding at once. ‘They won’t like that. What yer gonna do?’
‘Not much I can do,’ David admitted. ‘I love her, Hymie. I want ter marry her.’
‘If that’s the case,’ Hymie said, ‘you’ll have to tell ’em sometime.’
‘At Yom Kippur,’ David said, making his mind up at last. ‘I should’ve told them at the start, Hymie, so for that I got to attone. Then I tell them – I think.’
‘My life!’ Hymie said again. But he agreed to come to the theatre on Thursday to be introduced. ‘Trust you ter fall fer the wrong girl, Cheify!’ he said as they parted.
‘She ain’t,’ David said earnestly. ‘She’s the only girl I’ll ever love. Ever. I told you when I first saw her, nu?’
‘Your Ma’ll have a fit,’ Hymie warned.
David didn’t doubt it, and the thought of what she’d say when Yom Kippur began and he finally plucked up enough courage to tell her made him scowl all the way back to Shoreditch. But then he saw Ellen sitting astride her bicycle in her delicious bloomer suit and he forgot everything except the joy of being with her again.
September came, and a new term at evening school and Yom Kippur. But David still didn’t confess to his parents. Several opportunities presented themselves during the fast but he dodged them all. For what if they forbade him to see her again? It would have been well within their rights as Jewish parents, and the more he thought about it, the more likely it seemed. He stood beside his father in the crowded synagogue brooding and doubting and feeling horribly ashamed of his cowardice. Because that was what it was, and he knew it. But he couldn’t run the risk of being forbidden to see her. He loved her too much now. She was part of his life, and more important to him than either of his parents, dearly though he loved them. She occupied his every dream and he thought about her all day long, continually and obsessively, so that her laugh rang above the scuffle of the workshop, and her face shone at him from every page, and her dark hair eclipsed the stitches. The hours they spent together were too swift and too precious and too blissfully happy to be curtailed or altered in any way. So although it troubled his conscience he decided to say nothing for just a little longer. It wasn’t really deception, he tried to persuade himself, just delay. It would give him time to think of the right way to break the news, an acceptable way that wouldn’t outrage them.
He didn’t enrol for any more Art classes either, although he did go down to the People’s Palace on enrolment evening to see Mr Smith and explain why.
‘I thought I’d take a year off, maybe,’ he said, recognizing the lame excuse even as it left his mouth. ‘I’m getting stale. Don’t you think so, sir?’
‘The siren’s song!’ Mr Smith said mildly if enigmatically. ‘You cut off into the world, Cheify. Enjoy it while you can. Life is short and art is long, eh?’
‘I’ll come back an’ see you, sir, I promise.’
Mr Smith crossed David’s name from the list on the table between them. Then he pushed his pencil into the thicket of hair above his right ear and grinned. ‘I hope she’s a beauty,’ he said.
David felt his cheeks burn, but he looked his teacher in the eye and admitted, ‘She is.’
‘I’m glad to hear it,’ Mr Smith said as they shook hands to mark their farewell. ‘A beautiful model is the most necessary adjunct to an artist. Perhaps you’ll bring her to see me some day.’
As he walked back to Whitechapel past the pavement stalls of the Mile End Road, David was deliberately storing their conversation in his memory, resavouring it like the precious exchange it was. If only he could talk to his father like that, easily and openly, admitting his love and being approved of simply because she was a beautiful girl. But in his father’s eyes she would be unsuitable, however beautiful, and the longer he loved her, the more surely he knew it. It was against his nature to be secretive. But that was what he had become. Oh why couldn’t she have been born Jewish?
It was a bad winter that year, a cold secretive season, obscured by fogs from November till February, chill and dank and dirty, coughing diseases into all the crowded tenements of Shoreditch and Whitechapel. There was an epidemic of measles in October, followed almost immediately by two even worse, diphtheria and scarlet fever. Soon, white coffins were an all too familar sight in the Buildings, and there was a general air of frozen sorrow about the place. Trade was bad and getting worse and work was hard to find and difficult to keep.
But despite bad weather and guilty consciences and the sickness and unemployment all around them, David and Ellen led charmed lives, contained and sustained in the little world of their love for each other. They didn’t even catch cold, which was little short of a miracle when they spent so much of the season walking about in the raw night air or sitting in stuffy theatres and crowded music halls being coughed over by their less healthy neighbours.
Now and then, when the fog lifted and it wasn’t raining, they put on their overcoats and took out their bicycles and rode to Epping Forest where the hedges were a damp black tangle of dead leaves, brambles and winter-revealed litter, and the overhanging boughs dripped on their passing heads. But they didn’t notice any of it, they were so wrapped up in each other, talking and teasing and playing their own private version of kiss-chase, for four scampering feet and two ardent mouths.
And that was how they found the white house.
They’d cycled deep into Epping Forest that Sunday morning, following the path north towards Great Monk Wood and Wake Valley Pond, riding side by side and at a leisurely pace because they were deep in conversation. It was a chill afternoon and the sky they glimpsed between the sodden branches was a sombre grey, so when they reached the Riggs Retreat at High Beach and saw that it was open, David was tempted to stop and buy hot drinks to warm them both up.
But Ellen was restless. ‘We’ll ’ave sommink on our way back,’ she said. ‘Let’s leave the bikes here an’ go off exploring. I got itchy feet’
‘Fleas, I ’spect.’
‘Sauce!’ she said, propping her bike against the veranda. ‘You coming or aintcher?’
‘Two intrepid explorers a’ the wild wood set off on their dangerous mission,’ David said, posing in front of the veranda as though he were having his photograph taken. Then he grinned at her and settled his own machine against the wooden railings. ‘After you, Miss Livingstone!’
The ground behind the Riggs Retreat fell away steeply in a series of terraced rose gardens, but now the roses were cut right back and the earth was black and bare. Ellen paid no attention to any of it but went skipping down the stone steps, her cape billowing behind her like a train, and David followed, admiring the rhythm of her quick feet and the easy grace of her movements and wishing he could catch them on paper. Several sketches, he thought, one after the other, to show a sequence, set side by side. And then she was gone, plunging between the trees
like a fawn, her cape licking the branches.
‘Wait fer me,’ he yelled, crashing after her.
Her voice came echoing back from the thicket in front of him. ‘Catch me if yer ca-an!’ He could hear beech leaves scuffling and twigs cracking and her feet running further and further away, and he followed the sounds happily, ducking to avoid branches and kicking the dead leaves into the air as he ran. Just ahead of him the trees were thinning and he could see the grey sky and a patch of smeared whiteness. He shouted her name and she called back at once. ‘Come an’ see what I’ve found!’
It was a wide clearing and she was standing in the middle of it, gazing up at a huge old-fashioned white house. It had evidently been empty for a very long time, for the windows were curtained with dust and grass was growing from the cracks in the front steps and the stucco was stained and chipped. But it had been a splendid place in its day, two storeys high, with a line of attic windows under the eaves for the servants, and flanked by outhouses and stables.
‘What a place!’ he said, standing beside her with his arm about her shoulders. ‘What say we explore?’
‘Be a lark if we could get inside,’ she said. ‘I’d love ter see the inside.’
‘Come on then. I dare yer!’
The front steps led to an inner balcony that stretched along three-quarters of the frontage, past the central front door which disappointingly, was locked, and four of the six high French windows, which were equally secure. The balcony was screened by elaborate wrought ironwork now weather-blackened and rusty, but the floor was almost in its original state, tiled in a geometrical pattern of blue, green, buff and white, which they both thought very pretty.
‘No way in here,’ David said. ‘Let’s try the back.’
There was a yard at the back of the house, much overgrown with moss and ferns and leading to a very dirty window and a grey door set askew under a warped lintel. ‘I don’t reckon that door’s on its hinges,’ David said as they approached. ‘You ask me it’s just propped up.’
It was.
‘What a bit a’ luck!’ Ellen said, her hands already tugging the handle.
It took considerable strain and strength to lift the door, because although it wasn’t shut it was wedged tight. But they were both full of determined energy and ardent with curiosity, so at last the job was done and they’d turned it far enough on its axis to make a gap big enough to squeeze through.
The kitchen was dark and cold and very dirty, with a greasy ceiling and brown walls and hard stone flags underfoot, but they explored it just the same. They poked their noses into the pantry and the wine cupboard, investigated the wash house with three deep sinks and a broken washboard, and a small square cosy room that was obviously the cook’s parlour. Then they found a flight of narrow stairs at the end of the corridor, beside the servants’ bells, and scrambled up, hand in hand in the darkness.
There was a door lined with green baize at the top of the stairs, and when they opened it they found themselves in the hall, and another world. It was a very grand place indeed, surprisingly warm, and spacious, and full of white light, with an elaborately carved ceiling high above their heads and the same pretty tiles under their feet. The staircase was made of oak with intricately carved balusters, and the panelled doors that led out of the hall to right and left were painted with leafy branches and spring blossom and perching birds.
‘’S like a palace!’ Ellen said, unbuttoning her cape in the warmth. ‘Bet they ’ad some sport ’ere in the old days.’
David took off his cap and stuffed it into his coat pocket. ‘Just look at them paintings,’ he said.
But she was already running up the stairs ahead of him. ‘Last one at the top’s a cissy!’
She allowed him to catch her at the top of the first flight where there was a landing lit by a Venetian window. And he was artist enough to spend two seconds thinking what a perfect setting it would be for a portrait of lovers kissing, even before their kiss began. He held her lovely face tenderly between his hands and kissed her mouth lingeringly and langorously, moving his own dreamily from side to side, as waves of delicious pleasure spread through both their bodies. ‘Ellen, bubeleh,’ he said softly when they paused for breath. She was smiling her love straight into his eyes and her lips were so full and so red with kissing he couldn’t resist kissing them again.
The house was silent all around them and as their lips touched in that second kiss he rejoiced that they were alone in this private place and had no need to rush or pull apart abruptly for fear of passers-by. But privacy and time were mixed blessings, for the longer they kissed and the more pleasurable their kisses grew, the more instinctive their love-making became. As they drew apart for the seventh time, or was it the eighth? he was holding her about the waist, his thumbs the merest fraction of an inch away from the lovely inviting curves of her breasts. The desire to touch her was so overwhelming his face was strained with it. She bit her lip, hesitating, wanting him to continue, but a little afraid of sensations so strong and so compelling. And the sight of her face, flushed and perplexed, halted him. They stood close together but very still, she hoping and fearing, he knowing, even with passion urging him on most powerfully, that he should only continue if she gave him permission. ‘May I? May I, Ellen?’
She lifted her head very very slowly, and closed her eyes. It was a movement so meltingly tender and yielding that no other permission was necessary. Breathless with gratitude and anticipated pleasure, he cupped her breasts in his hands for the very first time and began to stroke them, kissing her neck where her flesh smelled of salt and talcum and musk. ‘Oh Ellen! Bubeleh!’
‘Davey!’ she whispered. ‘Davey, Davey, Davey!’ the words crooning in her throat, vibrating underneath his lips. The pleasure in her breasts was so intense she couldn’t bear it. but when he paused, just long enough to lift his head and find her mouth again, she couldn’t bear him to stop either. ‘Oh don’t stop! Don’t stop!’
And then, to her surprise, her legs began to tremble. And that made them both stop and filled him with remorse. ‘What is it? I ain’t hurt yer, ’ave I, Ellen? Sit down, nu?’ his eyes all tender concern.
They sat on the top step cuddled close together until the trembling stopped. ‘P’raps we shouldn’t ’ave,’ he said, anxious and contrite. ‘I’d never do nothink to hurt you, Ellen, you know that dontcher?’
‘Yes,’ she said. Of course she knew it. Wasn’t she here with him, trusting him?
This was the moment to ask her to marry him, he thought. But he couldn’t, could he? Not till he’d told his parents. ‘I do love yer,’ he said.
‘You won’t never leave me, will yer?’ she said, and it hurt him that she sounded so anxious about it.
‘Never ever,’ he promised. ‘Not now. Not after … We belong together now. Fer always.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘We do, don’t we? I’d never a’ let no one else do … that. You know that, dontcher?’
‘’Course!’ Oh he really ought to ask her. It was the proper thing to do, and cowardice not to.
‘I’m all right now,’ she said, soothing him because he looked so worried and loved her so much. ‘I dunno what came over me.’ But the trouble was, that uncontrollable trembling had made her remember Fenny Jago and her ugly jibe, ‘Down on yer back, same as all the rest.’ Perhaps you were bound to feel ashamed like that unless you were married. She gave her head a little shake to push her thoughts away and stood up, pulling him to his feet after her. ‘I’m off ter see the rest. Catch me if yer ca-an!’ And she ran before anything more could be said or done.
Sudden movement lightened their mood. They played kiss-chase all over the top floor of the house, through bedrooms and dressing rooms, in and out of cupboards, hiding mouse-still behind doors and kissing langorously in corners, until they were quite out of breath and their sudden, serious commitment to one another had been absorbed and accepted. Then they came downstairs again, arm in arm and still panting, and a pale sun broke through the
clouds to column through the Venetian window and lighten their way.
David looked back up the stairs to the little landing. ‘I’d like ter paint a picture a’ this place,’ he said. ‘Two lovers with the winder behind ’em, maybe.’
She understood at once. ‘You an’ me,’ she said. ‘Kissin’.’
‘We’ll have a look round downstairs,’ he said, ‘an’ then I’ll come back here an’ do a sketch. Whatcher think?’
The first door on the right led to a series of rooms, one leading out of the other and all quite empty and rather chill and dull, but the first door on the left led to an enormous room which stretched for the full length of the house. It had high windows filling three of its walls and a huge fireplace made of mottled marble in the centre of the fourth. The moulded ceiling was picked out in powder blue and white, there were elaborate carvings above both the doors, and enough blue and white striped wallpaper still left on the walls for them to see how beautiful it had once been. Even without furniture and curtains, and with the floor bare, there was a grandeur about this room that overawed them. The fireplace was so big there was room for them both to sit inside it. Which they did, with their backs against the side walls and their feet where the fire should have been.
‘It’s like a little house,’ Ellen said. ‘You an’ me on either side a’ the fire. All warm and cosy.’
He was more interested in her than the fireplace. She looked so very pretty with that white marble behind her dark curls and her eyes shining love at him from the shadows. Prettier than he’d ever seen her. And he knew he had to draw her. Now. Just as she was. He took his pencil from the top pocket of his jacket and tried to fish out his notebook too, but his cap was still stuffed in the way, and after a useless tussle, which was an aggravating waste of time, he gave up the effort and simply drew an outline sketch of her head and shoulders on the wall beside him. And found he was quite pleased with it
‘Whatcher think?’ he asked proudly.
‘Very life-like,’ she said laughing at him. ‘Takin’ it home, are yer?’
A Time to Love Page 23
