A Time to Love

by Beryl Kingston

  It was a lovely house, with its own neat front garden, like all the others, and a fine front door inset behind its own porch, and three white-framed windows, two upstairs and one down. ‘It’s a country cottage,’ she said to her daughter, as the agent eased the key into the lock. ‘Whatcher think a’ that?’

  ‘Gracie like a tunty cottage,’ the child lisped, and followed her mother happily through the front door.

  It was even better inside. The front room was light and airy, looking out over the front garden the way it did, and it had a lovely fireplace, with a mantelpiece and an overmantel and everything. We could get really snug in ’ere of a winter’s evening, she thought.

  Between the front room and the back there was a flight of steep stairs leading to the upper floor. They toiled up to inspect the main bedroom which stretched across the front of the house and the back bedroom which had its own window overlooking, wonder of wonders, a real back garden. ‘Look at that, Gracie. Wouldn’tcher like ter play out there? Oh, we shan’t know ourselves in a place like this.’

  She already knew that the house was the refuge she wanted, but she decided to look at the kitchen anyway. ‘Might as well, eh Gracie?’ And the kitchen was perfect, a fine modern room, painted a nice brown, and so clean! The wooden table that took pride of place in the centre of the room was scrubbed almost white. She went into the walk-in larder, and admired the Welsh Dresser, and the coal hole and the iron range, which was the most up-to-date model she’d ever seen, with an oven and four hobs. Plenty of room for kettles and irons, she thought. How much easier washday would be in a place like this. Leading out of the kitchen was a narrow scullery with a quarry-tiled floor and its own yellow sink with its own tap, and boxed into a little closet in the corner its own W.C. What luxury! No more emptying chamber pots of a morning or lugging heavy pails of water up and down stairs all day long. I can have all the water I want and boil it up lovely. It’ll be like living in a palace, and even at twelve and six a week, well worth it.

  ‘Keep it for us!’ she told the agent imperiously. ‘Mr Cheifitz’ll be round first thing in the morning to pay the rent. We could move in termorrer, couldn’t we?’

  So it was agreed.

  ‘Won’t your Pa be surprised!’ she said to Gracie as the tram rattled them back to Shoreditch High Street and the smell of the breweries.

  But he wasn’t. He was relieved.

  When he came home to an empty flat and her terrifying note, he’d been seized by a panic every bit as strong as hers had been, and had instantly come to the same conclusion. They must put a distance between their children and the infection, and the sooner the better. If she hadn’t found a suitable place, he’d go out himself as soon as the kids were settled for the night, and between them they’d keep on looking till they found somewhere. He kept an anxious vigil beside the bedroom window, worrying and scheming, working out how much rent they could afford, which he estimated would be somewhere between ten and eleven shillings, and trying to remember the sort of places where they could live in safety for such a sum.

  It seemed a very long time before he saw his dusty family trailing along the road. He rushed down the stairs two at a time, to carry little Gracie the rest of the way and hear their news. And when Ellen told him about the country cottage, he agreed to it at once, taking twelve and six in his long stride as though it were no more than the weight of his drowsy toddler.

  ‘The rent’s a bit steep,’ Ellen said, feeling she ought to criticize, as he hadn’t.

  ‘We’ll manage,’ he said, as they climbed the stairs. ‘I might get a rise. You never know. I’ll ask Mr Palfreyman. No harm in asking, nu? Or we could take lodgers, maybe.’

  ‘Not till there’s no more cholera, though,’ she said, her eyes fearful again.

  ‘Nu-nu, bubeleh,’ he reassured. ‘We’ll stay in our own house all by ourselves till there ain’t a trace a’ … that.’ It was too terrible to name.

  ‘I done the right thing, ain’t I, Davey?’ she asked as they closed their front door behind them and were alone at last in the privacy of their flat. Fatigue had brought a sudden uncertainty with it.

  ‘I’d a’ done the same if it’ud been me,’ he said. ‘I think you’re a giddy marvel the way you look after us, an’ that’s a fact. I’ve never known anyone so quick off the mark.’

  It was the same fiery protective instinct that had made her oppose the brit so passionately. But that was forgotten. For this time he agreed with her.

  Which was more than all his relations did. Dumpling was impressed, of course, especially by how quick she’d been, and Emmanuel said she was a woman of sense, and he wasn’t a bit surprised, and he’d be round on Sunday to fix up a little gate across the stairs and to see if the windows needed bars. But Rivke and Rachel were annoyed.

  ‘Rushing off vidout a vord!’ Rivke snorted. ‘Davey, she don’t tell even.’

  ‘He should a’ married a nice Jewish vife,’ Rachel said. ‘A nice Jewish vife vould a’ know’d better. For vhy she got to go rushing off all that long vay? Vhen ve was young ve stayed vhere ve vas. Spending good money, rushing off!’

  ‘She got money to vaste, maybe?’ Rivke said. ‘Vonce a shiksa, alvays a shiksa!’

  ‘A house!’ Rachel said. ‘Ay-yi! She get above herself that shiksa. So vhat’s wrong vid rooms, I ask you!’

  ‘A house!’ her sister-in-law agreed. ‘They should be so lucky!’

  David and Ellen knew very well how lucky they were. Even if they did have to pay twelve and six a week for their good fortune. As May blazed into June and infant cholera continued to rage in the tenements they’d left behind, Jack and Gracie bloomed. Soon their cheeks were as pink as the roses in their front garden and Ellen was relieved to notice that the baby’s legs were growing fatter by the minute. Even David’s initial disquiet over the rent was eased, for Mr Palfreyman gave him a rise, at the first time of asking and without consulting a single matchstick. The terrible apprehension that had precipitated them into their new life gradually eased a little.

  They made friends with their next door neighbours, a family called Streete on one side and a nice quiet lady called Mrs Brunewald who lived with her bachelor son on the other. And they were pleased to think that they weren’t ‘all living on top of each other’ and that their landlord was somewhere on the other side of London and wouldn’t be watching them every minute of the day the way Mrs Undine had been just a little too fond of doing. But the most rewarding privacy of all was a separate bedroom for the kids.

  Dumpling came to see them two or three times every week, to check that they were all still healthy and to play with her ‘chickens’ while Ellen nipped down to the shops. They would have their dinner out in the garden under the shade of a sprawling bush laden with sweet-scented white flowers. Mrs Streete, who was knowledgeable about such things, told them it was called a syringa, and offered to show them how to prune it when the time came, and Mr Streete, who ‘took the air’ in his own back garden every evening, told them they’d got a nice little plot of earth down the end there and gave David a box full of seedlings to grow in it.

  ‘Ol’ farmer Giles at work in his vegetable garden,’ David said happily striking a pose, trowel in hand. It was the first time he’d clowned about like that since Rivke brought her awful news. Things were getting back to normal.

  ‘What are they?’ Ellen asked, looking at the little green shoots.

  ‘I dunno,’ he had to admit. ‘I didn’t like to ask. Never mind. If they’re edible we’ll eat ’em.’

  ‘An’ if they ain’t?’

  ‘We’ll stick ’em in a vase and put ‘em on the table.’

  ‘We ain’t got a vase.’

  ‘A jam jar then.’

  ‘Oh Davey!’ she said, throwing her arms round his neck. ‘Aintcher glad we come ’ere?’

  They were so happy they almost forgot about the cholera, and the brit, and the fact that she wasn’t Jewish, and that he didn’t like English food and she couldn’t cook kosher, an
d that his mother didn’t approve of them.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Emmanuel Cheifitz was always anxious these days.

  ‘You vorry too much, dolly,’ Dumpling rebuked him lovingly. ‘So you get old before your time, I tell you.’

  But he only smiled his tolerant smile and patted her plump shoulder and went on worrying. ‘I am old, Raizel,’ he said, ‘and life ain’t easy.’

  There were so many reasons for anxiety. The dread of cholera was a perpetual heaviness dragging his mind, even though the number of cases were said to be dropping, and Gracie and the baby seemed safe enough for the time being. And then there was Rachel who was making herself so unhappy because she wouldn’t accept David’s marriage; to say nothing of the usual alarming fluctuations in the rag trade. Nu-nu, life was not easy and it got more difficult year by year.

  He went stooping off towards Mr Goldman’s workshop in Wentworth Street, his spine bowed, plucking at his tatty grey beard, muttering to himself, ‘If only she would visit a bit more, see the childer, say something good about the house. Ai-yi! Who would have thought my Rachel could be so stubborn. A mule, has vesholem.’

  Commercial Street was so crowded that summer it was impossible to move more than five yards at a time without halting to make way for somebody else. Only the trams made unimpeded progress and that was by dint of such a clangour of bells that even the donkeys stepped clear of them. Even though he was accustomed to the grinding noise and the incessant pressure of too many people in too little space, by the time Friday evening arrived Emmanuel felt enfeebled by it all. The pavements were so hot they were making his feet ache and what little air was left in the chasm between the tenements was frantic with flies and bluebottles. They flicked against his face as he walked along, and everywhere he looked they were crawling and buzzing, on fresh meat and rotting fruit, horse dung and vegetables, or gathered in obscene black clusters round the eyes of the horses waiting patiently beside the stalls, so that the poor creatures stamped and snorted and tossed their heads in a useless, repetitive effort to shake themselves free of torment.

  We live like flies in this place, Emmanuel thought. We breed, we swarm, we die. Only the Lord God is dependable. Stable and eternal and incorruptible. And the thought cheered him a little, as it always did. ‘The Lord reigneth: the Lord hath reigned: the Lord shall reign for ever and ever.’

  Just ahead of him a furious row had begun with a roar of exasperation, ‘You take me for a schlemiel!’ The arguers stood toe to toe, red in the face and glaring with anger at each other, their arms flailing like windmills.

  When life is hard, we should try to tolerate each other, maybe, Emmanuel thought, and he stepped into the road to avoid their anger.

  The noise behind him suddenly grew louder, with an alerting hysterical edge to it; screams, raucous shouts, ‘Be’ind yer! Mind yer backs! Clear out the way!’ and above it all the unmistakable pounding of hooves. He turned to see the crowd parting in panic, reeling away to right and left, and charging through the gap a huge chestnut horse, galloping at full tilt, foam-flecked and white of eye, its tilted cart ricketing behind it, two wheels in the air and two stuck in the tramlines. A bolting horse! Gottenyu! he thought, paralyzed at the sight and sound of it.

  He knew he ought to run, but everything was happening too quickly and anyway it was all too late. The horse was directly above him, up on its hind legs, forelegs flailing, with the carter’s grey face shifting and mouthing behind it. And then the hooves chopped down towards his chest and foam flecked his upturned cheeks and he was down in the road, with the breath knocked out of his body and a suffocating weight on his chest. Horse flesh swelled against his eyes, and the acrid smell of its sweat blocked his nostrils, and somewhere a long way away there was a stinging pain in his right hand.

  Time and reality detached themselves from him. Nothing was really happening. It was all confusion. And his mind slid away from it into a rocking unconsciousness, and he let it go, placidly.

  The horse was being dragged to its feet. He could feel its flanks quivering as it rose and hear its pathetic snorting. ‘Don’t be angry vid the poor creature,’ he begged, but his voice wasn’t working properly and the words stuck in his throat. I must get to work, he thought. It is the morning, nu? I shall lose pay if I stay here and there’s the rent to pay on Friday. And he struggled to his feet, surprised and a little annoyed to find that his legs wouldn’t support him properly.

  ‘Where d’yer think you’re goin’?’ a rough face said, and the voice and the expression were so kind and concerned he wanted to weep.

  He staggered on down the road, pushing at his own weakness. ‘To vork,’ he managed. ‘Got to get to vork.’ And then his knees buckled and he fell for the second time.

  A wall of dark legs obscured his view, dirty moleskins, tailors’ black trousers, thick skirts with dusty hems. He had his head in somebody’s lap and somebody else was asking questions. ‘Where d’yer live, mate?’

  He tried to tell them, but the words became groans and he was ashamed to be groaning and tried to stop himself. There was a dull ache in his chest and an odd roaring in his ears like the sea. He wondered where the horse was. He wondered how long he would go on lying in the road. Voices buzzed around him like flies. He drifted.

  As his mind swam back to consciousness for the second time, he heard a voice he recognized. ‘Mr Levy!’ he said, and the words were quite clear.

  ‘Ve get you home, nu?’ Mr Levy said, bending down so that their eyes were inches apart. ‘Ve bring a door for you.’

  ‘So?’ he said, not understanding. And something snapped in his chest like a piece of elastic. And he was struggling for air, and every breath a pain like the stabbing of knives.

  Rough gentle hands were lifting him. ‘’Old on, mate! You’re all right now! We got yer.’

  ‘Ve don’t say nothink to Rachel,’ he begged.

  Ellen and Gracie were down at the end of the garden watering their mysterious seedlings. Jack had been fed and settled for the night, and now they were enjoying the one time of the day when they could talk without interruption.

  And Mrs Brunewald put her head over the fence and interrupted them.

  ‘Pardon me for bothering you,’ she said apologetically, seeing Gracie’s frown, ‘but there’s someone at your door. I thought you ought to know.’

  It was Aunty Dumpling, ashen-faced, breathless but entirely dry-eyed. ‘Oh Ellen, bubeleh,’ she panted. ‘The vorst news. The vorst. Is our Davey home yet?’

  Her lack of tears was more alarming than any amount of weeping would have been.

  ‘What is it?’ Ellen said, opening the door to let her in.

  ‘My poor Manny?’ Dumpling gasped as she followed Ellen into the kitchen. ‘Ai-yi-yi! My poor Manny! Home on a door they bring him. Ai-yi! Knocked down by a horse he vas, his poor chest black and blue, and such pain you vouldn’t believe. And he von’t have the doctor. Ai-yi! Vhat ve gonna do, dolly? He could be hurt bad, has vesholem.’

  It ain’t possible, Ellen thought, stupid with fright. He was here only Sunday, helping us lay the lino in the front room. He was all right then. Grey, a bit slower than usual, tired probably, but not hurt bad. ‘David’ll get the doctor,’ she said as she filled the kettle. ‘’E’ll be all right, you’ll see.’

  But Dumpling only sighed.

  ‘Don’t c’y Aunty Dump’in’,’ Gracie said, cuddling the old lady’s ample knee. ‘Ma kiss it better, nu?’

  ‘I would if I could, lovey,’ Ellen said. But the sight of Dumpling’s terrible dry-eyed distress was making her more afraid by the minute.

  When David came home and heard the news he reacted quickly, a tightly controlled expression on his face.

  ‘We’ll go straight back,’ he said to Dumpling, putting on his hat again. ‘Don’t wait supper for me, Ellen.’ And they were gone.

  The nightmare had returned, with a different terror, but as merciless as ever. ‘Dear God,’ she thought, ‘don’t let it be too bad. ‘E�
��s a nice old man an’ ‘e’s been ever so good to us. ’e didn’t oughter be hurt bad.’ And all sorts of vague impressions crystallized into knowledge inside her busy brain. She knew that she was praying, and praying directly to God, even though she’d never given Him a thought until that moment. In fact, she hadn’t even considered whether she believed in Him or not. And she recognized that she had grown very fond of old Papa Cheifitz, and that David was very much like him, especially now when he was taking responsibility and worried sick and determined not to show it.

  And she had to take Gracie upstairs at once and wash her face and hands and get her ready for bed, or she would have been weeping.

  When David and Dumpling got back to the Buildings they found the flat crowded with family, Rivke and Ben and all their children and all their grandchildren huddled in a dark anxious group round the table, muttering and whispering together. Nobody had thought to light the gas and the far end of the room was already diminished by shadow, but a faint steel-blue haze was reflected through the half-open window. It burnished the planes of their faces with an eerie grey-blue sheen, and when David arrived and they all turned suddenly to look at him, their eyes glimmered like blue night-lights. And he thought of unearthly lamps, edging the dark road to death, and the thought made him shudder.

  ‘Vhat ve gonna do, David?’ Rivke said, from her seat in the midst of her family. ‘Vhat you think?’

  ‘You are the son,’ Ben said hovering beside her. ‘You must decide.’

  They’re putting me in charge, David thought. The son. In charge. And even in the middle of his anxiety and his eerie sense of unreality, the thought pleased him. ‘I see him first, nu? Then I decide,’ he said. And for the first time in his life he walked out of the room where he’d lived and slept and dreamed, and into the private world of his parents’ bedroom.

  His father was slumped in the bed, propped up by a mound of pillows, but half asleep and making a subdued groaning noise as he breathed. His face was blotched with mauve bruises, and his chest was concave under its thin nightshirt. Even at first glance and by gentle gaslight, David could see how ill he was. Rachel sat beside him, holding his hand, her shoulders drooping with fatigue and anxiety.