The Running Years

by Claire Rayner

  When Hannah came home for those painful yet so yearned for weekends, she would sit and listen to her mother’s silence and weave complex dreams in her head, about how one day she would change everything for them all, not only for Bloomah and Nathan but for Jake and Solly too. One day, when she was old enough, she’d find a way to make it better for all of them, just as it was better for her now. One day. Meanwhile, there was Mary Lammeck and the peace and luxury of life at Eaton Square to see her through the years of waiting.

  24

  Hannah was combing Mary’s hair, and Mary sat with her eyes half shut, enjoin the sensation, peaceful and comfortable.

  Now, Hannah wondered? If I ask her now will it be a good time? Or would it be too soon? If she has too much time to think about it, she'll get upset. If I leave it till just before, maybe it'll be easier. Or maybe she'll already have made a plan and be upset about changing it.

  ‘Mrs Mary,’ she said softly, turning the tortoiseshell comb with an expert glide of her wrist as she reached the end of a stroke. ‘My Uncle Alex has sent me a letter.’

  ‘A letter, Hannah? That’s nice,’ Mary said dreamily and then, a little more sharply, ’there’s nothing wrong, I hope? You said everyone was well when you came back this week.’

  ‘Oh, no, Mrs Mary, nothing at all. Everything was fine.’

  Everything was just the same as ever, Bloomah seeming a little white and thinner and a little more tired, and as silent as ever, Nathan still haranguing he corners of the room, and the boys bigger and noisier but just the same old boys,. Everything was fine.

  ‘He’s the one I told you about, you remember? The one who used to work in the theatre?’

  Mary smiled, tilting her chin back so that Hannah could more easily reach the crown of her head. ‘I remember. The one who’s done so well. The one your father doesn’t like.’

  ‘Not doesn’t like,' Hannah said, quickly to Nathan’s defence. ‘Everyone likes Uncle Alex. It’s just that he’s Poppa’s younger brother, you see, and he doesn’t think … it doesn’t seem right that - well, you know how it is! Poppa gets upset if Uncle Alex tries to help, and Momma gets upset when Poppa gets upset, and then the boys shout as well and … ’

  ‘And you're glad to get home to me, hmm, Hannah?’ Mary smiled gently at her in the mirror, but there was a watchfulness behind her eyes. Even after all this time, seven years of having Hannah with her from Sunday to Friday, there was a shred of anxiety in her. Would she just not come back one Sunday? Would the carriage return without her, and bring instead a peremptory message to say she was going to stay with her parents now? Each week Mary would stand at the drawing room window, watching through the curtains until the horses came spanking round the Square to deliver Hannah at the front steps and would breathe again as the small figure appeared in the carriage door, foreshortened but unmistakable. She had her Hannah back for another week, and her fragile happiness was secure. Till the next Friday came, and with it that nibble of jealousy and doubt that always came to fill the void left by the girl’s departure. Even after seven years of returns.

  ‘You know I'm always glad to see you, Mrs Mary,’ Hannah said carefully. Home was Antcliff Street, happy as she was here in Eaton Square. Eaton Square she thought of as work. Home was where Bloomah and Nathan were, miserable though it was. Poor Mrs Mary! she thought now. Poor Mrs Mary!

  ‘Uncle Alex’s letter,’ she said. ‘He sent it to me here. I got it this morning.’

  ‘That’s nice,’ Mary said, ad waited, carefully blankfaced.

  ‘It’s his business,’ Hannah said. I told you about his business?’

  ‘Which one, Hannah?’ Mary said, and her lips curved. After a moment Hannah smiled too.

  ‘He’s a busy person,’ she said, still a little defensive. ‘It’s good to be busy. You’ve said that yourself.’

  ‘But how busy can a man be?’ Mary smiled more widely than ever now feeling somehow that there was no threat to her peace of mind in Alex Lazar’s letter, and Hannah, swift as she always was at identifying Mary’s thoughts, struck quickly.

  ‘It’s his tea shops,’ she said, and pt the comb down and began to braid Mary’s hair. ‘He’s opening one in the West End now. It’s his third one, and it’s to be in Tottenham Court Road, and he’s having a special party to launch it, with a gypsy band an all the family there, and he says he wants me to come. It’s on Sunday afternoon. I thought you wouldn’t mind, seeing all the family will be there. Can I tell him? He’s got a telephone now, and he said I could ring him on it.’

  The telephone was commonplace in Eaton Square and unsurprising to Hannah in that setting, but in East London, even in Hackney, they were a rarity. Hannah was quite sure her uncle was the only Jew in the whole district who had one, and was deeply impressed by it; just for once, she needed to impress Mary too. It wasn’t easy to have anything with which to impress a Lammeck, not when you were a Lazar.

  ‘Sunday afternoon?’ Mary said blankly and looked at Hannah through the mirror, letting the appeal show in her face, but Hannah went on industriously braiding her hair, avoiding looking at her. ‘This Sunday afternoon?’

  ‘I would be back here about seven o'clock, I expect. Uncle Alex'll see to it that I get back all right. He’s very careful.’

  ‘I'm sure he is,’ Mary said. ‘Very careful. Sunday until seven?’

  ‘About seven, Hannah said, pinned the braid carefully. ‘There, does that feel right? It looks nice.’

  ‘Very nice,’ Mary said. ‘In Tottenham Court Road, you say? I could come in the carriage.’

  ‘It’s the family,’ Hannah said and this time lifted her eyes to look directly at Mary. ‘Momma will be there. She doesn’t often go anywhere now, but Uncle Alex insists this time. He’s sending a carriage for everyone all the way to Antcliff Street. It’s very important, he says.’

  Mary nodded, her face still. ‘Yes, of course. I do see that. His third tea shop, you ay? That’s very good, isn’t it?’

  ‘He had just a stall once, outside the Yiddish Theatre, you know? Just a stall, and now he’s got a proper shop in Whitechapel Road and one in Mare Street, in Hackney. It’s got marble topped tables, that one, and waitresses. They wear frilled aprons and caps just like your maids. It’s very nice. And now this one in Tottenham Court Road. It’s really very important.’

  ‘Of course it is,’ Mary said, and now she smiled. ‘I'm sure you'll enjoy it very much. I'll send the carriage on Sunday morning though, with a few things. I’ve got a dress for your mother.’

  ‘Yes,’ Hannah said. Thank you. That will be nice.’ After a momentary pause, she bent and kissed Mary’s cheek. It was not something she did very often, and Mary went pink with delight. ‘Momma will be pleased, I know.’

  If only I could share wit her, the way they do. Mary told herself bleakly, as she sat later that evening watching Hannah’s fingers flickering in and out of the sewing in her lap. They share her with me, why can’t I share her with them? She’s theirs, not mine, I’ve had her for seven years, but she’s still theirs.

  The seven years had dealt generously with Hannah. Her hair had lost some of its carroty look and had settled to a deeper copper gloss that shone rich and clean from good food and careful washing, and her once pinched narrow face had filled out. She had a small pointed chin that looked unexpected under those round cheeks, but endearingly so, and her eyes remained as rich a blue as ever. Some blue eyed children settled to a slaty grey in adolescence, Mary knew; she had seen many who had lost their childhood richness for a less exciting maturity. But not her Hannah. Their Hannah. She looked exactly as Mary’s dead child, grown up, had been meant to look. She knew that now. For seven years she had been free to live, no longer trammelled by the memory of her dead baby, for she had a real child now, one who could move from awkward bony immaturity to young womanhood without damaging herself or Mary. She had breasts now, this replacement child of Mary’s, surprisingly full ones for a girl of seventeen, and a rounded bottom that gave her back a hollowness
that made the men who came to the house look and then look again. Mary had seen their eyes move across that rich shape, and felt her own lips curve with pleasure at the sight of them. Men should be bewitched by her Hannah, just as she had been herself, just as she still was. That was the way it ought to be. Mary did not feel at all perturbed at the idea of sharing Hannah with outsiders like that. Only with her own people. The thought of next Sunday deadened her spirits.

  But it lifted Hannah’s. She sat and sewed, setting tucks in a grey silk bodice for Mary and though her head was bent and she seemed totally absorbed in her work, she was uncomfortably aware of Mary’s thoughts as if the woman had spoken them aloud. Hannah cared for her, indeed she did; how could she do otherwise? Her whole life had been changed by her. It had of course been Daniel who had been the real instrument of her good fortune, she still felt that, but she knew it was Mary’s love for her that kept it so buoyant and she was genuinely grateful. Still, she couldn’t give back the unstinting love that Mary so much wanted and pleaded for so wordlessly. That sort of love belonged to Bloomah. It was Bloomah Hannah worried about, Bloomah whose needs she fretted over. And Bloomah from whom she felt most parted between Sundays and Fridays.

  Hannah often thought of her mother as she days went smoothly past on their elegantly oiled wheels. When she sat beside Mary’s bed each morning with he own breakfast on a small table, as Mary took hers from a tray, and read letters aloud to her, she saw Bloomah at home in the crowded room in Antcliff Street, moving awkwardly between the huddled furniture, making her own breakfast of a slice of bread with caraway seeds and a scrape of cream cheese, alone because the boys had gone, Jake to his uncle’s factory and Solly to his school, or the streets, and Nathan to wherever it was Nathan went each morning. It had been a long time, Hannah knew, since he had earned anything from his pen. The number of people who needed letters written in Russian and Polish had steadily dwindled, and anyway, more and more children were educated now. Parents who spoke Yiddish had children who had learned good plain English at their Board schools, and they dealt with their families' legal forms, if any, and such letters as they needed. No one had use for Nathan any more.

  Bloomah sat alone in her room in Antcliff Street, staring out of the window at the cobbled and passers by, eating bread and cheese, while her daughter sat beside a bed furnished with satin sheets and ate curled toast and rich farm butter and strawberry jam from the finest china, and thought about her, guiltily and miserably, and with an aching need that she knew she could never express.

  For each Friday when she climbed the stairs to the family’s two rooms and landing, and Mary’s carriage went clattering away, Hannah pulled the shutter down. She and Bloomah spent most of their time together in silence. There might be the odd conversation that never did more than skim the surface of either mind. They would avoid each other’s eyes and show none of their hunger for each other, for even after seven years neither Bloomah nor Hannah could forgive themselves for their defection of each other. And neither could they speak of their pain. The longer the silence between them went on, the harder it became to break it. Thank God, Hannah would think every Friday, for the men. Thank God for the way they niggled at each other, as Jake teased Solly about his cluster of girlfriends, and Solly jeered at Jake about his lack of any, and Nathan roared at all of them indiscriminately.

  Now, sewing Mary’s new gown, she deliberately closed her mind to the waves of anxiety Mary was directing at her, and thought about Uncle Alex and next Sunday. She saw him far too rarely, she thought now, not nearly as much as she could have liked. I wonder what it would be like to see him as often as I see Mrs Mary, she thought. I wonder what would happen if Daniel happened to walk by the new tea shop next Sunday, and happened to see me there, and happened to come in? She let her mind slide away into a lovely fantasy, one of the nicest she’d invented for a long time. Mary’s clamouring silence at last receded from her mind, and she was comfortable again, as comfortable as she could be only when she had shut out all the real things there were, and was left with the pretences that she could control for herself. That was the best sort of living there was, for Hannah.

  When Sunday afternoon came it was almost as good as one of her private imaginings. Riding up to the West End in Uncle Alex’s carriage was somehow much more exciting than the ritual Sunday journey to Eaton Square. Her two brothers sat opposite her, resplendent in new celluloid collars and well oiled violet-scented hair. Her father gave them a running commentary on the passing scenery as though none of them had ever seen it before, and Bloomah sat beside her, silent as usual but looking remarkably handsome in her dark blue dress, the only one of many that Mary had sent for her that she had ever seemed to like wearing. Hannah looked at her sideways and smiled, and Bloomah, without thinking, smiled back. For a moment a fragile thread of understanding hung in the air between them. The Bloomah turned her head and looked out of the window and it was gone, blown away in the chill draught. But never mind, Hannah thought, never mind. It will get better, when Momma feels better. She’s looking better.

  Which was a lie, of course. She wasn’t. She was looking thinner every time Hannah saw her, a thinness which suited her, for her cheeks seemed translucent and young, the lines of her middle-age and fatigue stretched out to invisibility on the taut skin, and her hair, still as thick and curly as it had been in her girlhood, exuberant over that sharpened little face. She looked handsome, but she did not look healthy.

  They arrived at the same time as the carriage Uncle Alex had sent for Uncle Reuben’s family. Hannah stood beside Bloomah as the cousins surged around them, kissing cheeks and exclaiming, smiling and nodding as Rachel and Leon and Rivka and Bertha, Hyman and Jack and Ann, a noisy gaggle of adolescents, carried their parents, the large and self satisfied Reuben and the eternally weary Minnie, triumphantly into Uncle Alex’s new establishment.

  Hannah stood in the door staring around her, and her mouth curved with delight. It was a beautiful place, really beautiful. Two of the walls were lined with engraved glass, great sweeps of fern and flowers and incredibly feathered birds depicted on each panel, and there was at the far end a wall as lavishly furnished in carved mahogany. The floor was a clattering terrazzo of white and black squares, and there were marble topped tables, each equipped with four wrought iron chairs. A long table covered with heavy damask had been set down the middle of the shop, laden with plates of rolls and smoked salmon on them, and rolls with pickled herrings on them and rolls with cream cheese and fresh cucumber on them, and rolls with heaven knows what else on them. There were cakes of all sorts and bowls piled high with fresh fruit. There were mountains of sweet biscuits, and sweets in brilliant colours and chocolates and more bowls of fruit. There were two great shining samovars, steaming seductively, and the table was draped with so much smilax and trailing maidenhair fern that the cloth beneath could only just be seen.

  Uncle Reuben’s collection stood poised for a moment and then surged forward in a mass, with Hannah’s brothers very close behind them, and joined their Uncle Benjamin and Aunt Sarah who were all ready swooping around the table with plates at the ready, to chatter and exclaim over the riches they were offered, while several large men in very expensive looking dark suits and matching wives, friends of Uncle Alex, helped themselves equally avidly from the other side of the table.

  ‘So, Hannah, dolly? What do you say, hmm?’ Uncle Alex had appeared at her side, and she turned to him eagerly and lifted her cheek to be kissed. He smelled as always of bay rum and chypre combined, and his eyes glinted at her from beneath his prematurely white hair. His face, round and jovial, so much younger and healthier looking than any of his brothers, beamed at her as he took her by both shoulders and held her away from him to stare at her.

  ‘Such a girl!’ he said and shook his head in mock disbelief. ‘ow come such a misery as Nathan should produce such a beauty, hey? You look good enough to eat on dry toast without any butter, dolly. So tell me, what do you think?’

  ‘It’s
beautiful, Uncle Alex,’ Hannah said truthfully, and turned to look again at the tea shop and the marble tables around which the families had scattered to settle to the serious business of demolishing Alex’s heapings of provisions. Really beautiful.’

  ‘Got class, hey?’ Alex peered at her sharply, and his eyebrows quirked. She laughed and said, ‘It’s lovely… I said it was.

  ‘But dolly, had it got the right - you know what I mean! Who else do I have I can ask such a question, hey! Everyone else in this family, they think I'm the gunsa macher, the big one, the know all. Me, I'm the maven to them. No one knows better than Alex. But you don’t think that, on account you hang around with the real thing, the ones who got so much class it’s crawling out o' their tochusses you should forgive the expression.’