‘Listen, Bloomah, it isn’t like it sounds!’ Nathan said, and shook his head in some asperity. ‘Eat some more, shut up and eat, and I’ll tell you again.’
‘You’ve told me already,’ Bloomah said fretfully, but she reached for the plate and took one of the onion rolls from it and spread it thick with cream cheese. Watching her, Hannah could feel her delight. How often was it they had a full half pound at one time? How often was it they didn’t have to spread it thin an oil slick in the gutter?
‘I’ll tell you again. This woman – she says our Hannah could be a companion to her. Not all the time, but during the week. She’ll collect her every Sunday morning, take her to her house in the West End, bring her back in time for shabbas, Friday night. That’s all. A companion. For all her money, she’s got no children, not one! What sort of woman is it got no children? Naturally she feels it, feels it bad. And this morning, she talked to our Hannah and that was how it happened. She wants a child she can look after a little bit, teach a little bit, have as a companion. She’ll pay good money, Bloomah, and take care of our Hannah. Believe me, it’s a great opportunity for her. I saw her house, I know what I’m talking about.
Hannah knew too. She sat there on the old piece of rug by the fire, now piled high with coal Poppa had bought with the money the lady had given him and thought a about the morning. Already it didn’t seem real. She stared inside her head at all that had happened and all that she had seen and she couldn’t tell whether it had been of her private stories or an actual here-and-now event. It must have been real for Poppa kept talking about it as though it had all happened. And yet it felt like one of her dreams, just like one of the stories she lived on the roof outside the landing window.
The lady had carried her away somewhere and she had hung on, her eyes tight shut, feeling the crisp fabric of the lady’s gown against her cheek and smelling the rich soft smell of her, and shaking inside as her tide of rage slowly subsided. She had taken her away from the big room where the people were lining up, away from the smell of steaming clothes and unwashed bodies to a smaller warmer room upstairs where there was a fire burning, and she had sat down on a wide chair, making a lap that was comfortable and safe.
There they had sat for what seemed a long time, Hannah huddled against the lady’s serge bosom, her face buried in her neck as her shaking feelings slackened and at last died away. Finally she had sat up and looked at the lady’s face, so near her own, and uncertain what to say had managed, in a very small voice, only ‘Hello.’
‘Hello,’ the lady said gravely, and the smiled. She had a friendly smile, Hannah decided, though she wasn’t pretty. Her hair was a faded colour, like the curtains in Mrs Arbeiter’s room downstairs that had once been brown but which had hung at the window so long that most of the colour had been bleached out of them by the summer sun. Her eyes were faded too, though they might once have been a brighter green, and her face had a sort of melted look, as though the soft bits if it around her jaw were sliding off the bones underneath. But it was a friendly face, though it had a worried look on it, and suddenly Hannah felt the need to be nice to her, the way she was extra nice to Momma when Bloomah had her worried look. So she smiled, a wide and cheerful smile and nodded her head.
Mary looked at the child on her lap, and felt her chest tighten. She had red hair, a frizz of curls that stuck damply to her forehead, a hideous black straw hat which had fallen off the back of her head and was held against her neck by a frayed elastic. She had a pointed chin and a wide gap-toothed smile, with her two front teeth very white and large in her small face. Her eyes were blue, a clear translucent blueness that made Mary feel she was looking right inside the child’s head when she looked into them. It was exactly the sort of face that Mary envisaged on those long sleepless nights that still overcame her, when she thought of her red-haired daughter.
For as the years had gone on, she had allowed her dead baby to grow in her memory. With each passing year she had added to her vision of the child and would think of her and grieve for her not as a helpless scrap of newborn humanity but as growing one-year-old, and two-year-old ad five-year old, and six-year old …
Somehow she had not been able to let her grow much beyond the age of ten. To imagine her dead baby as a gawky girl, with budding breasts and curving hips, a woman like herself, was too much even for her creative mourning. So she had, for the past decade, remembered her dead child as a ten year old, merry and intelligent, with red hair and blue eyes, and the roundness of childhood still about her.
Like the child now sitting on her lap and smiling at her. Almost like. The dead child in her mind was round and soft and dressed in pretty clothes. This child was sticklike, with wrists as thin as a bird’s claws and a face that was shadowed by hunger. Her clothes, the ugliest Mary had ever seen, were much too large for her, and she had one bare foot and one adorned with a large very worn boy’s boot. Yet behind her sat a shadow of the child she could be, if the were properly fed, and properly dressed and properly cared for.
Hannah was eventually to know of what happened to Mary that morning, with the March rain pelting down the window and the coal fire spitting cheerfully in the grate, but it was to be a long time before the knowledge came to her. All she knew that day was that the lady who smelled good talked to her, and asked her questions and fed her soft sweet biscuits and gave her a glass of milk to drink.
It was possibly the questions as much as the food that filled her with pleasure. In Mary’s company, for Hannah was at heart a chatterer. Her need to talk had long since been flattened, since Bloomah was often too exhausted with all health to respond to her child’s eagerness, and Nathan almost always buried too deep in his anxieties. As for her brothers, being boys they took their own superiority for granted and their own right to be heard first as obvious, and gave her little chance to express her needs to them. So, she had learned to be silent when it was necessary, talking to herself inside her own head instead. Still she could talk easily when someone allowed her to do so.
And this morning Mary allowed her to do so. The questions she asked were about herself, about what she liked and what she did and how she felt and how she lived. And she listened to the answers. So often, Hannah had found, people questioned you but weren’t interested in what you had to say; Mrs Arbeiter was like that. ‘What’re you doing? Where’re you going?’ but she never waited to hear what Hannah might want to tell her. ‘Don’t get into trouble. Don’t talk to strangers. Come straight home.’ Boring busybody Mrs Arbeiter was one of the people the child hated most, because she was one of the people who listened to her least. This lady, she thought as she chattered on, telling her more than she knew of the bleakness of her life in Antcliff Street, this lady was not a bit like Mrs Arbeiter. She really wants to know about me.
‘So you like dresses?’ Mary said. ‘Would you like to learn how to sew, so that you can make them?’
‘I’ll have to one day,’ Hannah said. ‘Poppa says I‘ll have to go, because I’ll have to work in a factory like the others. I don’t want to do that. I want to be like Uncle Alex, he’s rich.’ Prudently she said nothing about her plans to act in a theatre. Even this warm and listening lady might not understand something as outrageous as that.
‘I don’t mean that sort of sewing,’ Mary said, knowing exactly the sort of sweatshop that awaited Hannah. ‘I mean real sewing – by hand, to make pretty things that you’ve chosen for yourself. Would you like that?’
‘Sew dresses for myself?’ Hannah’s brow furrowed. Where do I get stuff from?’
‘Well, I have an idea,’ Mary said, and suddenly put her arms around the child and hugged her. After a startled moment Hannah hugged her back.
Still holding her hand, the lady took her back downstairs, and told her to sit with Poppa, and gave Poppa a cup of coffee and some biscuits too, which surprised and pleased Nathan so much that he was almost speechless. Then she crossed the room to talk to the hard faced lady with the black hair, still sitting at her table.
/>
Hannah wouldn’t look at her. She couldn’t. The sight of that smooth pale face with its sweep of elegant black hair made the anger tremble in her again and she didn’t want that. It was much nicer to feel warm and full of biscuits than cold with anger.
So, she turned away and felt her face go pink as she caught the eye of the tall young man leaning against the wall. He winked at her, a slow knowing wink, and she looked down, deeply embarrassed, and then, unable to resist, peeped back art him. He winked again, and this time smiled too, and almost against her will she found herself smiling back. It had really been very awful to shout and kick at him as she had done, and it was very nice of him not be angry about it. She could tell he wasn’t angry, and that comforted her, and she decided he must be there because of her lady; he looked nice enough and rich enough to belong to her.
Though she was by no means as expert on men’s clothes as she was on ladies’, Hannah knew nice things when she saw them. Hannah knew all about balls and gowns made of lace and people who rode in carriages. The illustrated papers were full of accounts of their doings, and she had taught herself, with Uncle Alex’s occasional aid, to read them avidly, and believed implicitly every word in them, including the fiction. They had to be true, because why else would they be in the papers if they weren’t? Now she had evidence they were true, for the young man who had caught her at the door and at whom she aimed her kicks was clearly the hero of every story she had ever read. Even though he winked, which the men in the stories never did.
Mary came back to them, and Hannah looked up into her face, trying to see what she was thinking. The worried look had gone, and there was a blankness there that puzzled her. When they had been talking before the lady’s face had told Hannah a great deal; that she was friendly, that she liked to listen, that she often worried. Now it told her nothing.
Mary’s face was composed, but she was tense with excitement. Over the years, ever since she had connived in Fay’s escape to her happy marriage, she had learned to dissimulate. What she most wanted must always be treated casually, for as sure as God had made Lammeck Alley the most important business thoroughfare in the whole of the City of London, she would lose it if anyone knew she really wanted something. Of that she was certain. And now she wanted something so desperately that she almost frightened herself with the strength of her desire.
She took Nathan away, bidding Hannah quietly to sit and wait. Obediently, Hannah waited, finishing the last biscuit that had been left on Nathan’s plate, enjoying its soft crumbly sweetness against her tongue and relishing the warmth that now filled her. The room had largely emptied now, and the bustle would not start again till the afternoon when new applicants for charity came. Hannah swung her legs contentedly, glad there was no one there to stare at her and mutter about her bad behaviour. That she had behaved very badly she was well aware, but somehow it didn’t matter. She was a little sleepy now, as the aftermath of her attack of rage moved into her, and she leaned back against the wall behind the bench and stared t the ceiling, not thinking very much at all.
When Nathan and her Lady came back she was wearing a mantle over her serge gown, and had a hat on, and Nathan was looking, well, Hannah wasn’t quite sure how he was looking. Rather, she though after a moment, like the stuffed bird in a cage that Uncle Alex kept in his window at the house facing Victoria Park; glassy eyed and not quite there.
What followed made her feel glassy eyed too. They went out of the Settlement into Hanbury Street and with a nonchalance that left Hannah breathless Nathan held open the door of a carriage that was waiting outside so that Hannah’s Lady could climb in, and then picked up Hannah, and put her inside too. She sat there with her eyes round with amazement as Nathan climbed in after them and the door closed behind him and the carriage went rattling away, so that she swayed and had to lean back against the leather padding. She, Hannah, in a carriage? Her Poppa in a carriage?
The street through which they passed were a blur of traffic with carriages just as fine as the one in which she was riding thronging on very side, and here and there, amid the horse drawn traffic, motor cars with men in goggles moving majestically through the press. The shops they passed were breathtaking in their size and beauty, and she could not altogether believe they were real. The morning was getting more and more like the pages of the illustrated papers at every moment.
And then the house, a huge and unbelievable house in Eaton Square, with tall windows and the most imposing front door Hannah had ever seen, and people, people, people. Men in sober suits holding doors open. Girls in dark stuff dressed and lacy aprons and caps with frills taking her coat from her, leading her to the largest, prettiest room she had ever thought to see, and sitting her down before the fire and giving her a bowl of bread and milk. She looked at it with the yellow spread of melting butter on top and the memory of the biscuits disappearing at once. She seized the spoon and wolfed the plateful of hot sweet stuff raster than she knew she ought. Somehow it didn’t matter, for the girls in lacy aprons just smiled and shook their heads at her in mock reproof and brought her more when she had finished.
She slept after that, curled up in the chair in front of the fire, and it was not until Nathan came and touched her shoulder to wake her that she gave any thought to what was happening. Only then did she ask for the first time, ‘Poppa, when are we going home?’
‘Soon,’ he said and looked over his shoulder. ‘D'you like it here, bobbalah?’
‘It’s nice,’ she said. ‘When are we going home to Momma?’
‘Yes,’ he said vaguely, and looked over his shoulder again, and this time her Lady answered, coming from the far side of the room where she had been standing against the door.
‘Hannah, my dear,’ she said softly. ‘Your father and I have been talking. About you.
‘I didn’t mean to be so rude,’ Hannah said, wary now. Sooner or later everything had to be paid for, she knew that. ‘I didn’t mean to be … I mean, it was all– ’
The lady shook her head. ‘That doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘That’s not what we’ve been talking about, Hannah. My name is Mary Lammeck. Mrs Lammeck.’
‘Yes,’Hannah said, not sure what was expected of her.
‘I have no children of my own. I did have a girl, like you, but not now. And I’ve asked your father if I can … well, I would like to share you with him and your mother. Just for a while. Would you like that?’
Hannah was sitting up very straight now, her hands rolled into tight fists. ‘I don’t know what you mean, share.’
‘I thought maybe you would like to come to my house and learn to sew, and perhaps some music and things like that, and keep my company, and go home to your parents at the end of each week. I would provide you with clothes, new clothes and stuff to make some, too, and we’d walk in the park and listen to the musicians there, you know, and go to the shops and out to tea at Gunter’s.
‘Gunter’s? said Hannah, blankly.
‘Well, never mind that. I’ll explain that afterwards. Just now, I want to know, will you stay with me this way, for a while it would be… ’ She looked uneasily at Nathan. ‘It would be a help to your mother and father.’
‘It’s not right, a girl of your age sharing a bedroom with your brother. Jake’s nearly sixteen already,’ Nathan said. He sounded wretched.
‘Shall I, Poppa?’ Hannah said and looked round the room. This is a very nice place and it’s a big room, big enough for a of people … ’
‘This room?’ Mary said. ‘Oh, my dear, you won’t sleep here. This is the housekeeper’s room. You’ll have bedroom all of your own. Come and see.’ She leaned over and picked Hannah up, perching her on her arm, and carried her away, into the rest of the house.
That was almost more than Hannah could bear. Room after room went by her uncomprehending eyes as Mary carried her through the lower floor, and then, after she had insisted on being set on her feet, and Mary had taken one hand to hold it warmly in hers, she went through the upper rooms, staring at th
e great double drawing room in blank amazement as its cast fireplace and brocaded chairs and silken curtains in the richest yellow Hannah had ever seen outside the sun itself, and so many settees and chairs with little gilt backs and tables laden with ornaments. It was all much too much.
So much that when Mary said again, ‘Would you like to visit me. Then, Hannah? Just for a while? From Sunday morning to Friday afternoon. The home to your parents, until Sunday again. Just to see how we get on? It would be … I would like it very much.’ And Hannah could say noting, only moving nearer to Nathan to stand close beside him and stare up at the face of the lady who was turning her entire world upside down.
All the way home to Momma, all the time while she sat inside the carriage as Poppa made the driver stop on the way so that he could buy things to take home – including a sack of coal, which made the carriage driver’s face look every peculiar indeed – she sat silent. It was like the things that happened in her long lonely hours on the roof, and she could not get hold of it properly. When it was all inside her own head she knew exactly what to do, exactly how it all ought to turn out. But this was a dream inside someone else’s head. Mrs Lammeck’s head.
‘Mrs Lammeck,’ she said aloud, practising it, rolling it round her tongue. ‘Mrs Lammeck.’
‘Do you like her, Hannah?’ Nathan asked. ‘Is she a nice lady?’
‘She’s a very nice lady,’ Hannah said. ‘She smells nice.’
‘Is that the best you can say? The woman offers you a future like one can ever imagine, and all you can talk about is the smells nice?’ Nathan suddenly seemed to have lost his temper. ‘What sort of a child is it, tell me, that talk of smells in such a situation? So answer me? How do you deal with a child you give a sensible question, she gives you a stupid answer? How do you … ’
All the rest of the way Poppa asked the interior of the carriage questions, and she sat against the corner of the window, staring out and feeling oddly better. Poppa asking question no one could answer, this was as it should be. This she could not understand.
The Running Years Page 23
