Because inevitably Davida had appeared. Wherever Daniel was, Davida was likely to be nearby. And where Davida was, was Leontine.
Davida had lost her temper quite spectacularly, allowing her voice to rise shrilly even forgetting her redundant R as she spat the words out, horrible words that had made Hannah feel as though someone had kicked her in the belly and robbed her of breath. She had made it clear that Hannah was a cheap servant girl, a jumped up self-seeking salacous slattern with designs on her betters, who had abused Mary’s trust and care by setting her cap at the rich young nephew who came to visit, a man who was virtually engaged to be married, at that. She was little better than a tart, a street girl, a guttersnipe who polluted her benefactor’s home. It made no difference that Daniel turned on his mother and tried to stop the flow of vituperation. It made no difference that Emmanuel appeared, and Leontine’s brother Willem, and then even the King and a large number of the guests. She went on and on, as Hannah stood there, white and silent, letting it flow over her. She saw the faces around her, amused and avid and contemptuous, and it seemed that nowhere was there a friendly expression, any hint of concern for her. Daniel seemed overwhelmed more by embarrassment than anything else.
And then Mary was there, her eyes wide and frightened, quite stripped of her armour of expressionless calm, just as Emmanuel was saying in a tight, icy voice that she was to go; that Hannah was to go now. She was to take herself out of the house instanter, no time to be lost, now, now, now. Hannah saw it all again, saw herself staring at Mary trying to argue with him, pulling on his arm, and he turned on her, painfully aware of the King standing there near him, and saying in that same tight smell voice that there was to be no argument, the girl was going now.
Even the King, laughing genially and bidding Emmanuel not to make such a fuss, had no effect on him. Emmanuel was implacable and Mary’s stricken face showed she knew no performance on her part, no inveigling would overcome this decision. For one mad brief moment Hannah had looked at the King and caught his glance and thought ‘I'll tell them, I'll say that I was frightened by the King and Daniel was only trying to help.’ But the idea slipped away as fast as it had come. Who would believe her? And if they did, wouldn’t it make it worse? Setting your cap at the nephew of your benefactor was bad enough; doing the same at a King - they’d chop her head off, she told herself wildly. I can’t. I can’t …
She felt herself fill with panic, yet she showed none of it. The footman who opened the front door to let her out after Emmanuel had shepherded his guests away from the fuss, leading the King to his smoking room for a ‘little special brandy I have for you,’ pushed her coat at her, and she looked up at him gratefully. It was the spotty one who had fumbled at her on the back stairs, and she wanted to laugh, but she didn’t. She was just grateful for the look of pity on his face.
‘Never mind, ducks,’ he murmured as she pulled the coat across her shoulders. ‘You'll get another place, certain sure. Madam'll see to it you gets a good character, even if ‘e carries on ever so. Good luck to you, ducks.’
She looked over her shoulder for one brief moment, at the few people standing in the hallway and on the stairs, and then saw her. Mary was standing with both hands gripping the banister rail, staring down with her face quite still and expressionless again. Hannah lifted her hand in a small gesture and then, as the door swung wider to let in the cold air of the early September morning, shivered. The door closed behind her with a snap that pounded in her ears like a violent thud. It was over. Quite, quite over.
And now she had to make them understand, Nathan and Bloomah, sitting there staring at her across the table, their faces creased with confusion and bewilderment and, just a little, fear. For Hannah’s money had been the prop and stay of their lives; Jake’s contribution was little enough, and no one talked any more about what Nathan could provide. There had been, for seven years Hannah’s envelope, and Hannah’s baskets of food and clothes and Hannah’s gifts. And now there was just Hannah, sitting in a white ball gown under a sensible coat looking as though she had been whipped.
‘Your clothes,’ Bloomah said. ‘What are you going to do about clothes?’
Hannah looked down at herself, and then almost against her will smiled, a twisted little grin. ‘I'll have to manage with this, I suppose!’
‘Sell it,’ Nathan said. ‘Jake can take it down the Lane. Sell it. You'll get a good price.’
The door opened and Jake was standing there with Solly behind him, peering past him into the room, blinking in the light.
‘Wassa matter?’ Jake said. ‘Heard all the talking. Wassa matter?’
‘Nothing,’ Hannah said, and stood up. ‘Not a thing. I just came home, that’s all. Go back to bed. We'll talk in the morning - later in the morning. Momma, Poppa, go to bed. Please. I'll sit here in the chair for a while. I don’t need the couch outside. We'll talk later.’
‘I'll ask Mrs Arbeiter, can I have her small back room. It’s the smallest there is, so maybe she won’t want too much for it.’
‘Tomorrow, Momma,’ Hannah said. ‘Please, not now. Please, go to bed.’ Bloomah recognized the appeal in her voice and nodded and stood up. ‘Nathan,’ she said, and went across the room to the curtain which was pulled across their bed, to give what semblance they had of privacy. ‘Boys, go already. You heard your sister. Tomorrow we talk. Go’
They all went, Nathan still uncharacteristically silent, and at last she was alone. The gas light was blown out, and she was left to sit in the big armchair in the darkness to try to think of tomorrow, listening to Nathan’s snores and watching the sky lighten behind the uncurtained window. Tomorrow. It was a Thursday tomorrow. It would be the first Thursday she had spent in her own home for seven years. It was a strange thought.
*
Behind the problems of getting together a new pattern of life was a much bigger one, too big to think about properly. She talked to Mrs Arbeiter, and persuaded her to rent the small back room downstairs so that she could have somewhere to sleep, promising her she’d pay the extra money as soon as she had a job. She sat at the table upstairs in her chemise and sewed furiously on one of Bloomah’s old dressed, so that she’d have something to wear, while Jake took the ball gown to the second-hand clothes-sellers in the Lane. She sent Solly to Uncle Alex’s to ask him if he could come over to see her, so that she could tell him she would take his job after all, though she did not tell Solly that, and she talked a lot to Bloomah, trying to persuade her that she had been thrown out of the Eaton Square house not because of some venality on her own part, but because Emmanuel’s capriciousness.
‘I didn’t go anything, Momma, believe me,’ she said, lying staunchly. ‘Not a thing, truly. It was just he was in a mood and he gets jealous. Mrs Mary is… I mean, she liked me, and he got jealous.’
It sounded believable and Bloomah believed it. And if I work at it, Hannah told herself, biting off the thread and tugging on the new seam she had made to test it, if I really try, I'll believe it too. Because anything is better than thinking they really imagined I was trying to catch Daniel. As if I would dream of such a thing.
As if you ever dreamed of anything else, her secret voice whispered at her jeeringly, maliciously. You sent yourself to sleep with that one very night.
No, she argued, no. She needed that argument to stop herself from thinking about what was really distressing her, the biggest problem of all, Mary’s silence.
The weekend came and went, and they counted the money Jake had managed to get for the gown - a munificent five pounds, for it was a very remarkable garment - and paid the next month’s rent out of it, and put the rest into Bloomah’s purse to buy food for as long as it would last. But there was no word from Mary. Hannah had thought that she would send some sort of message, some comfort for what happened, but nothing came. No note, no parcel of her clothes, no money, nothing. It was though the Eaton Square yeas had never been, as though Hannah had never lived there, and never been loved by Mary. She could not underst
and it. Hadn’t she been frightened of the passion that Mary had had for her? Hadn’t she always had to do her best to hold back that need, that longing the older woman displayed? Could it all have died overnight on one September night at a ball, just because her sister-in-law Davida had accused Hannah of flirting with her son?
The silence stretched into Monday. Hannah sat and stared out of the window at the street and tried to make a plan for her future, and her family’s future. Because to add to all her other sources of distress, Uncle Alex was away.
‘Away?’ she said to Solly, staring at him as he stood in the doorway, his round face agog with the weight of his message. ‘How do you mean, away?’
‘He’s gone to America!’ Solly said, his voice thick with awe. ‘On a ship, to America. Ain’t that something?’
‘But I don’t understand! He never said … ‘ Nathan sat upright, pretending he hadn’t been half asleep in the big armchair. ‘I ask you, what sort of family is it a brother goes to America, never says goodbye, nothing? What sort of man is it takes no time to tell no one what’s he’s doing? Here’s Reuben, I see him in the street only yesterday, he don’t say nothing about Alex going to America, so maybe he knows and don’t choose to tell me? What sort of family is it, for God’s sake, to treat a man this way?’
‘He’s coming back,’ Solly said portentously. It wasn’t often he had as interesting piece of news as this, and he intended to make the most of it. ‘He’s gone on business, see? Just for a little while.’
‘Business? What sort of business takes a man to America he don’t even tell his family? Dirty business, I'll tell you what, dirty business. No time to say goodbye to his brothers, to his nieces and nephews, no time to remember he’s got relations that care about him?’ Nathan was rapidly converting Alex into the adored young brother with whom he spent the greater part of his waking hours. ‘How come he don’t even send a note round?’
‘If you listen, I'll tell you!’ Solly said. ‘It’s boxing, see? There was this big fight planned in a place near New York.’ He took a piece of paper from his pocket. ‘Yeah, Atlantic City, see? Only they sent Uncle Alex a cable, they got let down, and it’s a big fight, and he got Kid Zimmerman signed up, ain’t he. He’s the big one. Kid Zimmermann got the best chance at the heavyweight title since Daniel Mendoza, they reckon at Leman Street. Anyway, they send this cable they got to have the Kid. Uncle Alex got just an hour to get to Tilbury, get the ship. So they goes and the fight’s three days after they gets there, and then they're having other fights if the Kid wins, which Bernie down the gym, he says he reckon'll happen. He says maybe Uncle Alex gets back November, December, maybe not till after the New Year, even!’
‘And no message!’ Nathan said. ‘No message, for his own family.’
‘Bernie says he’s sorry. He was supposed to tell everyone, but he’s been too busy, you know how it is.’ Solly turned to Hannah who was standing very straight and quiet by the window. ‘So there you are, Hannah. No Uncle Alex for a while. What did you want him for?’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Hannah said. ‘It really doesn’t matter.’
29
Her Uncle Isaac gave her a job grudgingly, because he couldn’t imagine what use he could get out of a girl of seventeen who had never worked in a factory. Still, she was his sister’s child.
‘At your age, you ought to have three four years good experience behind you,’ he said fretfully. ‘How can I treat you like an improver when you ain’t even a beginner? Sit you with the new ones and they won’t understand how come it is you're so old, sit you with the people you belong with, they gets upset you ain’t pulling your weight. But what can I do? For Bloomah, I got to do what’s necessary.’
She swallowed her pride, and with it her nausea and started work. She walked from home for twenty minutes each morning to Isaac’s new Spitalfields workshop, arriving at eight sharp, climbing the stairs with the other beshawled cold yawning girls.
That was when the nausea began; the smell was so thick she could taste it, a mixture of wool fat and machine oil and dirt and cat and mildew which combined to make a repellent stench. Not that the others seemed to notice; they had worked here for so long it was part of the ambience they carried around with them. They would seize the enamel mugs of tea that Isaac’s wife Thin Sarah had ready for them (she was called Thin Sarah to distinguish her from her brother-in-law’s wife Fat Sarah) and drinking it with every evidence of enjoyment. Hannah couldn’t. I wasn’t just that she was used to using fine china which was clean as well as delicate; it was the cloying taste of it, so heavily sweet, laced with thick sugary condensed milk, poured from a battered tin. She would stand and hold the mug between her cold fingers and pretend to drink it, finding a chance to empty it into the slop bucket beneath the rickety table used for brewing tea, when no one was looking.
Then she would push back her rising gorge and settle at her bench and start to sew. Uncle Isaac had told her she had better be a felling hand since she had never used a machine - which cheered him a little since felling hands, paid on piece work rates usually earned less than machinists. Set in front of her each morning was a great pile of heavy men’s overcoats, all with their seams and hems to be oversewn with thick thread. Felling hands had to find their own thread, and wax for strengthening it, and needles too, but Isaac, with a great show of magnanimity, told her he would see her right for the first month. ‘After that, though, you buy our own like everyone else. It’s worth it to you, believe me. The more you buy, the more you use, the more you earn.’
All day she sewed doggedly, seam after seam, until her fingers felt like raw meat from the pressure of the heavy needle and her shoulders ached with the effort of pushing her arms through the same set of motions hour after hour. They stopped for ‘a piece' at eleven, when she would unwrap and eat the breakfast Bloomah had prepared for her - a slice of bread, sometimes spread with margarine, sometimes with chicken fat, depending on the state of the family’s finances, and she would drink strong tea without any milk in it, pretending that it was chicken fat on the bread, even when it wasn’t, so that she wouldn’t have to take the sickening condensed milk. This Sarah took it as a personal affront if anyone refused any of her offerings, and it wasn’t worth antagonizing her; better to pretend to a religious objection to mixing milk and meat, an excuse her aunt would understand.
And then it was the seams again, with the heap of coats seeming not to diminish at all, as Isaac added more and more and more to her pile of work. At one o'clock there was a fifteen minute dinner break; she ate the rest of Bloomahs' offerings then if she had had the appetite. Often she did not. Often she would sit over her packet of food staring at the wall with its blackened spots where flies had been swatted to flattened death, and think of the lunches she’d shared with Mary - bowls of creamy mushroom soup and souffles and puddings and eggs poached on beds of buttered spinach. She would shake her head and pulled herself back to reality and gladly give her meal to any of the other girls who asked her for it.
The other girls were her only source of pleasure in each day. There were six of them at her bench, mostly of her own age, though one was older, a round faced cheerful creature of almost thirty who had been married once, but who had been widowed very early. She seemed unconcerned about her bereavement, or about the fact that she had to leave the only fruit of that short marriage, a little boy, with her mother while she earned their living.
‘I much care,’ she would say when one of the others sympathized with her because she had to come to work before her little boy had woken up. ‘So I miss him this morning, he’s that much happier to see me tonight. You win a few, you lose a few.’ And she would start to sing in a rough little voice, always the same whining song, a lullaby. Schalft mein kindele, schlaft, mein kindele, schlaft, mein kindele, schlaft.
‘Shut up already, Cissie,’ the others would cry. ‘You'll send us all to sleep and then where do we go for next week’s rent?’ Cissie would laugh and go on with her hoarse little croon, un
til eight o'clock came. Time to go home, if they were lucky.
They talked a lot, of men, of course, but of other things too. There was Lena, a thin, very dark eyed girl of nineteen who was newly in love with one of the local lobbuses - or so Isaac labelled him, for he was a man of thirty with a taste for politics who was busily trying to start a trade union in his cabinet-making workshop. She had caught his fire and talked about the need for a union here in Isaac’s workshop.
‘We need proper breaks, three times a day with half an hour for dinner and piece work rates what he doesn’t change every time he feels like it, and a proper lavatory that’s kept clean for us, and one of us to talk to him when things ain’t done right.’
‘I should cocoa!’ said Cassie. ‘I should bleedin' well cocoa! An' who’s goin' to tell him that, eh? Who’s going to stock that bell on the cat? Not bloody me, and not bloody you, either.’ Jessie, the fat girl at the end of the table would shake her head in disapproval at Cissie’s rough language and start to talk about clothes, and how you could get really lovely nets down at Barney the Schmutterer’s place for less than a penny three farthings a remnant, if you went early on Sunday morning. The other would join in. They knew better than anyone that there was no chance ever of the workers in Isaac Levson’s shop telling their guv'nor what to do. Tell him he had no right to change piece work rates when it suited him? Tell him he couldn’t lay them off when he was short of work, couldn’t make them work long overtime at the ordinary rates when the rush was on and he needed them, however late into the night it kept them there? The sky would rain sovereigns every day after dinner before that would happen. It made more sense to talk about penny farthing bargains. That was a realizable hope.
Hannah sewed and listened and smiled when they spoke to her, and said little. She became a part of the furniture of the place, as much as the row of roaring sewing machines and the great goose irons steaming and stinking on the presser’s bench. The others chattered on, leaving her in peace to think her own thoughts and dream her own dreams.
The Running Years Page 31
