The Fortune Men

by Nadifa Mohamed

  Ben. London. August 1940. There’s still sand in his hair from the Sahara. He has become nocturnal from the night sorties and after they make love he reads by candlelight until dawn. They’re in a cheap bed and breakfast in Earl’s Court, on a terrace of once-grand white villas that are now flaking and sooty. The French hostess charges too much for her terrible petit déjeuner so they walk to a caff in High Street Ken where they eat a good fry-up and listen to the one record the proprietor owns. ‘We Three’ by the Ink Spots, played over and over until they hear it even when the place is silent. Ben could impersonate the lead singer, Bill Kenny, beautifully, batting his eyelashes and puckering his mouth for the hammy falsetto notes. She would take the spoken parts, putting on the deep southern drawl of Hoppy Jones, ‘Now, I walk wi’ my shadow, I talk wi’ my echo, but where is the gal that I love?’ Such childish, irreplaceable joy.

  A couple of years earlier, a few days after the bonfires and fireworks of Guy Fawkes Night, they had woken up to the news that would shape the rest of their short married life. Kristallnacht. Ninety dead, one thousand and four hundred synagogues burned to the ground, broken glass and jeering crowds. Days and days of it. German Jews incarcerated, forbidden to work or to go to university, or to hold property, yet forced to pay compensation for the very violence that had destroyed their homes and livelihoods. Ben and Diana listened, waited for the British government to react to this barbarism, but only the Americans recalled their ambassador. The British wrung out their ornate condemnations and wagged a half-hearted finger at Herr Hitler. She doesn’t remember the exact moment the notion of enlisting came up, who brought it up or where. They both had the foresight to see that, despite Chamberlain’s hesitation, war was inevitable. They might as well have told their parents that they were setting off on a polar expedition, for all the sense it made to them. It was only when they saw the uniforms – brand new and neatly pressed – that they believed it was real. One night, her father arrived at her front door, convinced that he could persuade her to stay behind, even if Ben wanted to give up everything for the sake of strangers. Parked at the kitchen table with mugs of tea, she let him deliver his spiel; describing the charity sales she could organize for Kindertransport children, the petitions she could draft and send to the local parliamentarian, the plans the Board of Deputies had in place to persuade the government to accept more refugees. She pushed across that morning’s copy of the Daily Mail, its headline screeching ‘ALIEN JEWS FLOODING IN!’ and let him read the article that decried Jewish refugees taking British jobs while the native population languished on the dole.

  ‘We either fight this fight now or later, which is better, Father?’ she remembers saying.

  ‘They have been saying this all the time I live here, it’s no bother,’ he replied, pushing the paper away with disgust.

  ‘It’s different now, Daddy, I can’t prove it but I feel it down to my bones. Soon it won’t be just Russia we can’t set a foot in but the whole of Europe. We’ll be marooned on this little island and surrounded by sharks. You left Russia to save your life but still tried to help those left behind, and this is how I want to help.’

  His hands already had a little tremor then, which he tried to hide by drumming on the table.

  She pushed on, wanting to finish this conversation before Ben returned home. ‘Remember the riots in 1919, when you put on your silver war medal and paced the barricaded shop with a club, me and the girls upstairs, squashed under the iron bed, as Mummy kept watch at the window. You know we fell asleep at our normal bedtime? Didn’t matter that we were little ’uns and could hear glass smashing, fires burning, women screaming, men baying for blood, none of it mattered because we had our hero. So now there are little girls hiding under their beds in Germany, men just like you beaten and killed for nothing, a fire lit under their beds, what should I do?’

  He had nodded then, defeated, and patted her head with some kind of benediction. ‘You go, child, I have raised you to have too much courage, now I can only blame myself.’

  The WAAFs nicknamed the balloons ‘sausages’ but to her they looked like whales, with bulbous silken bodies and three flashing silver fins, floating in the sky as waves of clouds rushed by. Chained to a network of steel cables, the hydrogen-filled balloons were to be winched up to keep bombers from diving or dropping their explosives with any accuracy over London. The instructors warned them of the dangers they would face: lightning could set the gas alight or travel down the steel cables into the winch, while heavy winds could topple the balloons or wrest them away. It took eleven weeks of training to become a balloon operator. Diana remembers standing barefoot and in overalls, painting over interior tears in the nylon balloon fabric with a noxious glue, only thirty minutes allowed inside and then twenty minutes of fresh air. When her time was up she would be hauled out by the arms like a modern-day Jonah. Yet another day, Diana knee-deep in mud as she tussled with a deflated balloon in the middle of Wembley Common; untangling the sharp, slick steel cables with stinging, blue fingers. Diana in a classroom, jotting down how to load a splice wire or calculate a balloon’s elevation. Diana having a go as ‘the bird in the gilded cage’, manipulating the winch’s gears while simultaneously watching the cables unfurl, calling out ‘blue line, thirty feet’, ‘tension, four hundredweight’, ‘no slack on drum’, ‘start up winch’ or ‘haul in winch’ to the irascible instructor. She had done and survived it all.

  Diana lifts the needle from the record and places it back in its sleeve, her reverie over. She stands and brushes the dust off her skirt. She must go downstairs and look through the post to see if Howell’s have sent the exam results for Grace. She’ll have to get her something nice to celebrate if she’s won the scholarship. Try to put all of this out of her mind long enough to buy a nice little jewellery set or a taffeta dress.

  She’d had to take Grace along to the identification parade. Mother and child trooping into the central police station. They both thought they had seen a glimpse of the man in the doorway but they couldn’t agree on what they had seen: hat or no hat? Coat or no coat? Somali or West African? It would’ve been funny if it weren’t so terrible. Diana thought there would be a line-up of different men but instead they had asked them to stand in a dim corridor while they led the chief suspect towards them. Placed under a large light that made him blink unseeingly in their direction, the suspect’s gaunt face looked eerie, glowing as it did under the merciless yellow light. Grace rubbed her face against Diana’s hand as she looked and looked. It was not him, they agreed on that, this was not the face in the doorway.

  Detective Powell seemed disappointed in them and led them back out to the street with a request they think hard about what they actually remembered.

  It had come to her one night, a week or so after everything happened, that maybe it was true that their family was cursed. Her mother had said it intermittently throughout the years but Diana had shot the idea down impatiently. There wasn’t a place for curses or lucky heather in the modern world, or so she had thought. Now, there was a strange comfort to the idea that all of this pain was beyond their control, beyond the realms of prayers or intellect or justice. Curses were in the Bible, weren’t they? God cursed, the prophets cursed, the angels cursed. Such a multitude of misfortunes: her mother’s orphan childhood, the two divorces, their father’s bad lungs, Violet’s twisted spine, Ben dead before he ever saw his child, Violet killed steps away from where her family ate dinner. A curse with an origin and cause so obscure it could never be lifted, that made more sense than anything else. The men thought that they had God – that they were the special ones who could hear him, plead with him, sing for him, wield power in his name – and where had it got them? They’re scrabbling around trying to explain the inexplicable, the newsreels hiding nothing, not even the tumble and crack of Europe’s last Jews as bulldozers drove them into mass graves. A curse, the women knew. The mark invisible yet indelible, Diana knows now too. The face of an acquaintance as she announces her pregnancy, the
crowds on the steps of a church as the bride and groom emerge, the young romantics canoodling on a park bench – she has no way of sharing that joy any more. She finds herself wishing harm on them – a miscarriage, an affair, a terrible revelation – and then looking away in shame. She can march those cruel thoughts away but she cannot face a lifetime of nodding and smiling as other people’s lives glide past hers, everything good falling and staying in their laps.

  There is a buyer interested in the property, a hardware merchant from Newport who is trying to drive down the price by a quarter. Diana will probably agree but feels no obligation to be quick about it. He keeps calling Daniel, telling him to make her see sense, which makes her delay even more. He thinks that because there was a murder in the shop he should get a discount. That he’s doing her a favour by purchasing it at all. To him it’s just property but all of her history is tied up in its bricks and mortar. Her father had bought the building in 1909, first number 203 then, later, number 204, knocking them through to create one large shop. He had enough money left in the bank to hire a maid and to commission a large oil painting, of the girls dressed like Tsarinas, to hang above the dining table. Diana’s earliest memories are of exploring the maze of nine rooms upstairs and looking down at the carnival life of Bute Street from the sash windows. A parade of hulking great Vikings with blond beards and ripped shirts bloodied from brawls, of Salvation Army bands looking for drunks to save, of robed Yemenis and Somalis marching to celebrate Eid, of elaborate funeral cortèges for the last of the rich captains of Loudon Square, of Catholic children clad in white on Corpus Christi, led by a staff-twirling drum major, of makeshift calypso bands busking to raise enough money to tour the country, of street dice games descending into happy laughter or nasty threats, of birdlike whores preening their feathers to catch a passing punter. What an education for a young girl it had been. Safe too, safe enough for Violet or their mother to stroll alone to the bank every week, with hundreds of pounds in takings stuffed into a handbag. Old maligned Tiger Bay, as tame as a circus lion. But she has decided to leave it all behind, to leave the Bay and never return.

  Grace has won the scholarship to Howell’s. The thin envelope stamped with the school crest was lost in a pile of post Diana had stacked up on the counter a few days ago. She said she would do it for Aunt Violet, and she did. L’chaim. Diana hopes she won’t struggle there, being one of the scholarship girls and Jewish on top of that, but it’s what her father had left Russia for, a chance to become someone through hard work and talent. Maybe life would be different for her. All three sisters had left school at sixteen to start work in trades they expected to remain in until old age. If only she could tell Violet that Howell’s had accepted their little chicken, how proud she would be. Maybe Grace would be the first to go to university, to travel, and enjoy an easier life. Diana has never been abroad in her life, even though she has cousins in New York who have told her to visit countless times. She could take Grace. They could even emigrate there, why not? The ground beneath their feet is liquid now. They could become Americans or Canadians or Ten Pound Poms. Live the wandering Jew life. Try to outrun the curse if nothing else. But first, a good education for Grace amongst the daughters of Cardiff’s gilded class: barristers, surgeons, shipping barons.

  Diana looks up from the letter, thinks she’s heard footsteps in the back room and takes a few steps towards it. No sound, so she approaches closer. Looks into the empty alcove where the police think Violet was attacked before she crawled into the open, bleeding heavily, to pursue her murderer. Diana marches around, examining every corner to dispel her fear. Violet is suddenly very present in the shop, her humming and brisk little steps easy to sense. Returning to the counter, Diana rushes to put her coat on, stuffs the letters into her handbag and slings it over her shoulder, then slams the door on the eerie place. Out into the daylight and the ordinary chit-chat of street life, the tram sending sparks into the air, she looks back at the dark melancholy shop front and hopes to never set foot inside it again.

  The GP surgery. A yellowed plastic skeleton grins at Diana from a corner of the waiting room while a black child wails in his mother’s arms. The place has changed, the old doctor, Something-Lewis, had left the practice in theatrical protest at his loss of income under the National Health Service, and she is glad of it. He was a shameless snob with strange ideas about who should be ‘encouraged’ to breed, which he enjoyed expounding at every visit. He’d usually manage to squeeze a quick, placatory ‘not that I have any issues with the noble Hebrew race, of course’ into his lectures, and Diana would reply ‘of course’, a doubtful smile tickling her lips.

  The replacement, Dr Woodruff, looks to be in her early thirties, and has a boyish cropped hairstyle. Large green eyes and plump red cheeks give colour to her otherwise plain, milk-white face. The brogue as she welcomes Diana into the cosy room is a soft, Edinburgh purr. Yes, she’s much better, Diana thinks, as she takes a seat opposite her. She had been hoping to avoid talking about any of this, but now it has started to take a physical toll; no more than a couple of hours’ sleep at night, headaches, her monthlies gone, heart racing and jumping all over the place, a constant sense of dread. She gives the doctor all of the symptoms and waits for her to stop jotting them down.

  ‘Do you have any idea what might have brought all this on, Mrs Tanay?’

  Has she not heard? Everyone has heard. ‘It’s my sister, Dr Woodruff …’

  ‘Mmm, what about her?’

  ‘My sister was murdered.’

  Dr Woodruff leans back into the vast leather chair she’s inherited from Dr Something-Lewis. ‘I’m ever so sorry, Mrs Tanay. I had no clue.’

  ‘You must be the only one left.’

  ‘I’m afraid I’m not one for reading the newspapers.’

  ‘That’s probably a medicine of its own.’

  Dr Woodruff meets Diana’s gaze, holds it with a forceful, maternal insistence. ‘Do you have any support at home? I understand from your records that you are a war widow with a small child.’

  A war widow with a small child sounds little better than Tiny Tim, thinks Diana bitterly, but she answers, ‘Yes, my other sister, my brother-in-law too.’

  ‘Well, that is good to know. Let’s tackle the insomnia as a start, shall we? Find something that “knits up the ravell’d sleeve of care”, as Shakespeare puts it in Macbeth.’

  Diana looks down at her hands, doesn’t know anything of Macbeth.

  ‘I’ll write you a prescription for Medinal, take one tablet an hour before bed. You’ll have a touch of grogginess in the mornings but it will be worth it.’

  Diana takes the prescription gratefully. ‘And the other … issues?’

  ‘Time. Your body has taken quite a shock, just as much as your mind has, and it needs time to find its equilibrium again.’

  ‘I should just wait?’

  ‘I believe so, but come see me again, in a month or so.’

  ‘Yes, Doctor.’

  Diana sits on the bed of her rented room and places the sleeping tablet on her tongue, washes it down with a glassful of water. She has spread photographs of Ben, Violet and Grace all over the floor and she looks down at them, her eyes skipping from one to the next. The crisp black and white images begin to blur through her tears and she pads a hankie quickly against her cheeks. One of them in particular is painful to see again: a small snap of the three sisters in white smocks and pigtails, as they wait for the ferry to take them to Ilfracombe’s sandy beaches, buckets and spades dangling from their hands. Their parents stand awkwardly together to the side. Diana must be no older than ten in the photo, her wide smile full of new misshapen teeth, gloriously innocent of what life has in store for her. What a thing life is, she thinks. Chaos upon chaos. She wants to warn that little girl, ‘Don’t grow up, whatever you do.’

  The sleeping tablet acts more dramatically than she had anticipated and Diana slides drowsily under the sheets with her eyes already sealed. The world pulls away from her, even the dee
p sadness she had felt looking at the photos melts away, and she passes out in one … two … three …

  The only thing to wait for now is the trial, but the wait itself is a trial. Diana mulls it all over. She doesn’t want to sit in the witness box, but she must. She doesn’t want to explain how she heard nothing of the murder, but she’ll have to. She doesn’t want photos of Violet’s body paraded before the jury, but they’ll see them.

  It’s an exercise in impotence, like pregnancy, a period of waiting, waiting, waiting, with no control over the outcome. When she was heavily pregnant with Grace and the Luftwaffe attacked Cardiff, there was that same sense of suspended animation; you could look up to the sky all you liked but the minute you looked away death might come. Ben sent letter after letter, all of them arriving in a packet, full of fear and worry and then incredulity that no one was replying to him. Railways down. Telegraph wires cut. Roads blocked by rubble. It had been such an expedition for her, with only two months left before the baby arrived, to scramble to a working Post Office and send a telegram. The stress of it all was playing on his nerves, she could tell by the ever-increasing Xs scrawled across the bottom of the letters and the ‘I LOVE YOU’s written in large letters, as if giving a farewell shout.