The Running Years

by Claire Rayner

  ‘It doesn’t matter, Florrie,’ Daniel said, puzzled and a bit impatient now. ‘Just take Mrs Lammeck’s coat now, will you? Mamma, will you need to tidy yourself before we go to the drawing room?’

  ‘No dear,’ Davida said sweetly. ‘Don’t discommode yourself.’ She unpinned her hat and veil and gave it to Florrie who bobbed awkwardly. ‘Such a sweet little house, to be sure! Perhaps you should tell your - Hannah to fix the mirrors here in the hallway. It would make it seem so much less poky, don’t you know.’

  A remarkable noise was coming down the stairs. Daniel looked towards the drawing room door with a faint frown on his face as voices pealed very loudly above a great clatter of dishes.

  ‘I can’t imagine who is there with Hannah,’ he said. The irritation that had crept into his voice was not lost on Davida. ‘She said she had some people coming, but – ’

  ‘Her friends, no doubt,’ Davida said sweeter than ever. ‘I shall be happy to meet them. Shall we go up?’ She began to climb the stairs, holding he skirts away from the sides with some ostentation, for the staircase was barely half as wide as the one in Park Lane. Daniel followed although he would have preferred, had it been possible, to send Florrie up to fetch her mistress down to greet her guest.

  Davida opened the drawing room door herself, not waiting for Daniel, and stood in the doorway looking in, with a faint smile of her face. And then her expression of well bred good manners froze in a chilly rictus.

  The room was bursting with people. Hannah was sitting nearest the fire which was piled high with sea coal and pouring tea from a large pot. All around her were chairs and sofas tightly crammed with bodies. Daniel had never seen so many people in such a small space and he looked over Davida’s shoulder and then pulled back at the heat that poured out at him. And at the smell.

  The scent of naphtha from the moth balls used to store very best clothes was heavy in the hot air, and so was the smell of food - vast edifices of chopped herring sandwiches and egg sandwiches and cheese sandwiches and rolls covered with herring pieces and anchovies. There were slabs of cheesecake and strudel and honey cakes and heaps of sugar biscuits. Everyone had laden plates on their laps.

  Hannah looked up, the jumped to her feet, almost sending a plate of herring flying. ‘Daniel! I thought you would have been home long ago. Oh! Mrs Lammeck!’

  The room slid to a silence as heads craned to stare at the newcomers, and then after a moment, returned to their conversations. A thin woman with a very tired face talked in a high shrill whine to a very fat one who had a voice even higher and shriller and two men boomed at each other at the same time. A tall handsome girl wearing a red dress heavily trimmed with green frills and carrying food-laden plates in each hand shouted at a small boy who was trying to take food from the table by the fire. ‘Leave orf, for Gawd’s sake!’ and then grinned at the newcomers.

  ‘Allo! We ‘avent' met, seein' I'm not family like the others, so I better interduce meself. I'm Cissie Weiss, used to work with Hannah in the factory. Nice to see you, you must be Daniel,eh? Lucky fella! She’s a girl and three quarters, your Hannah! Insisted I should come today and bring my Lenny and all, a real gutena shumah she is!’ That’s my Lenny over there - Lenny, will you lay off' She swooped at the child and, putting down one plate of food, cuffed him, and he broke into a loud wail.

  ‘Hannah!’ Daniel said and at the sight of his face she felt her belly tighten.

  She had realized as soon as she saw David standing there how silly she had been to keep her tea party a secret from him. Had there been only themselves, he would have welcomed all the family warmly, she knew that. Daniel had none of his mother snobbery. But in the presence of his mother, that was different.

  At the same time she felt her own pride struggling within her. These were her people, her family, her roots, and she had as much right to have them here, surely, as Daniel had a right to bring his mother. She lifted her chin and said,’ As you see, Daniel, everyone has arrived! Except Uncle Alex, I'm afraid, who had to remain in Hackney because of some problem to do with a concert he has organized for tonight. But everyone else is here, Aunt Minnie and Uncle Reuben and my mother’s brother, Uncle Isaac, and there is my Uncle Benjamin. I don’t think you ever met him, did you? And next to him his son David and - ’

  Doggedly she introduced them one by one. Charlotte, looking very pleased with herself as she sat beside a scrawny young man, some three inches shorter than she was, who was introduced her fiancé, Monty Guz; her sister Bella, a quiet girl in unfortunate purple satin, who looked equally pleased with herself when Hannah presented her new young husband, Harry, a sad faced young man with a prematurely bald head; and serious young David the Talmudic scholar, sitting with his yarmulka carefully placed at the very back of his head; and the seven noisiest and most lavishly dressed of them all, her Uncle Reuben’s children Leon and Rachel and Ann and Rivka and Hyman and Jack and Bertha and their assorted young companions to whom some of them were betrothed, and some of whom were only hoping (at which Minnie beamed for a moment and looked positively animated) and finally her brothers, Jake and Solly, who were standing behind her chair.

  ‘I'm sure you'll be pleased as I am to see my brothers and the rest of my family here in our house at last, Daniel,’ she said, and her chin was up even higher, but the anxiety showed in her face, which looked a little tight.

  ‘Of course,’ he said, and managed a smile. ‘Mamma, I am sure you too will be happy to know my new …relations.’ He looked at her, prepared to weather another of her storms and struggling to contain his fury with Hannha. Of all days to have invited such a ghastly creww; of all days!

  To his amazement, Davida did nothing but smile, a thin smile, accompanied by the smallest of nods at the whole room, but a smile none the less. He was so relieved that he became almost noisy, drawing her into the room, and urging her forwards Hannah’s chair which was the only one vacant. ‘Well, isn’t this splendid! Some tea, Mamma? Hannah, some tea, please, my love. And something to eat, perhaps.’

  Cissie at once marched forwards with her plates at the ready, as the room burst into noise again. The children and grandchildren of Lazar and Rivka talked interminably when they were together because they were together so much. The seven cousins shouted and squabbled and contradicted each other and interrupted each other precisely as they did at home. A fugue of voices and shrill monologues filled the room again.

  ‘I think, no, thank you, my dear,’ Davida said weakly and drew back from Cissie. ‘No, I think - if you don’t mind, Daniel, I will be on my way. I just wanted to call in for a few moments, you know, that is all. No, really, Mrs … Weiss, I think you said, I really can’t. Daniel dear, perhaps we can talk during the week, but I must go on now. Martha Damont is At Home this afternoon , with the Amsterdam cousins - the Willem Damonts you know – and she did so want me to call. I'll be on my way …’

  She smile at the room in general, her eyes glazed so that she did not actually have to exchange glances with anyone, nodded and then after a moment extended one limp hand to Hannah. ‘Hannah,’ she murmured, not looking at her, and then turned and went. Daniel following her after one last look over his shoulder at Hannah, who stood there as the chatter ricocheted around her head, and watched him go.

  35

  ‘You have absolutely no right to be angry!’ she flared a him. None at all. Did you expect me to abandon my family just because I married you?’

  ‘They abandoned you, didn’t they? When it suited them,’ Daniel said, and then as Hannah went a little white shook his head in irritation at himself. ‘Dammit, I didn’t mean that the way it did. I know it was only your father who did, and I know that worries you. I'm sorry.’ He came across the bedroom to put his hands on her shoulders, but she got up from the dressing table where she had been sitting brushing her hair and moved away to stand beside her washstand. She began to scrub at her hands, although she had already complete her preparations for bed.

  ‘I'll say it again,’ she said after
a moment. ‘And then no more. My relations are what they are. I'm sorry if they don’t meet with your mother’s approval, but I'm not going to apologize for that, do you understand me? I regret it because it makes things difficult for you. But its no fault in m or in them that she feels that way. it’s just that they're … different.’

  He laughed. ‘Different? Oh, God, I'll say they're different! Did you see her face then she saw them all? His grin invited her to share the joke, but she refused to look at him, and his face hardened again.

  That night they slept apart for the first time in the four months they had been married. It was as though there was a chasm in the middle of the big brass-framed double bed that neither would approach for fear of falling in.

  Had Davida been able to see them she would have been well pleased with the effect of her visit to Paultons Square, a visit that had underlined her conviction that the Jews of the East End were of a different species from herself and should never have been allowed into England in the first place. It had also convinced her even more that it was her duty as a mother to separate her son from his so-called wife. If he didn’t know what was good for him, she certainly did.

  So, she started a new tack altogether with Daniel. She would be charing and friendly and quite uncritical, and show him by means of underlining the contrast between his past and his present how misguided he was. He must be coaxed back into the family fold, not harried. So she telephoned him each morning just before ten o'clock as soon as she had awakened and just before he left the house to go to Lammeck Alley, to chatter cheerfully and with every sign of warm affection. She talked of her friends, of other members of the family of the busy doings of Willem Damonts who were setting up an English office of their diamond business and therefore spending as much time in London as an Amsterdam, and of the assorted minutiae of her day. And he talked of office matters, and the people he me at lunch time and the gossip he picked up about mutual acquaintances, none of whom were known to Hannah, and he never talked at all about him home life. Hannah would sit in her small morning room finishing her breakfast, able to hear every word he said. She ached to stop him, but never in any way would she interfere between Daniel and his mother. That was a problem that only he could sort out, and she bit her tongue and said not a word on the subject. And the silence grew between them.

  Not that they argued. That first Sunday evening had been painful, their first real quarrel, but Hannah was too accustomed to behaving as other people wanted her to to persist in displaying anger at her much loved Daniel, and he for his part was much too sexually active to be able to maintain a fight with her for longer than a day or two. But a wound had been inflicted in the body of their love and it left a clumsy scar. The house in Paultons Square lost some of its comfort.

  The weeks moved on into a blazing June when the tarred streets softened in the sunshine and horses stood with drooping heads at the kerb sides and people became irritable with each other. And Hannah often found herself chafing at the pattern of her life. The house was finished now, and there was little for her to do in the running of it. The days yawned empty ahead of her though she sewed a good deal, making herself gowns and blouses and chemises, but her wardrobe was as full as she wanted it, and a puritan streak born of her penurious childhood forbade her to have more than she required. She did not even need all she had, for unlike most young brides she had no friends with whom to fill her indolent hours and so no one other than Daniel for whom to dress. Cissie, the only of her erstwhile workmates with whom she still felt any rapport, was much too busy earning her own and Lenny’s keep in Uncle Isaac’s factory to spend any time with Hannah, and anyway the idea was ridicuous. The journey between Paultons Square and the East End was an arduous one, that took at least an hour even behind a fairly brisk cab horse. Hannah could not look to Cissie for companionship, nor, she felt, could she look at her neighbours. Questions would be asked about her antecedents, and about her life before her marraige, and she shrank from that. She was not ashamed of her past, nor of her family, but Davida’s expression that afternoon in Hannah’s drawing room had told her all she needed to know about the way her neighbours would react. Better not to become involved with them at all than to tolerate their snubs.

  Her discontentment was not lost on Daniel. He watched her and listened to her and know she was distressed, but didn’t know how to help. That wretched Sunday tea party still hung between them like a shadow, but there a nothing he felt he could do to dispel it. And because he was anxious, Davida blossomed. Even though he was punctilious about not discussing Hannah or his home life when they had their telephone conversations, or when they lunched together every Wednesday, a habit into which they had drifted, she could see Daniel’s marriage crumbling before her eyes. And in her triumph became incautious.

  She began to talk to Albert about her hopes. At first he let her prattle on, not bothering to try to sort out the meaning of her elliptical phrases, but after a while he did understand, and he disliked what he heard. The last thing Albert wanted was any further drama. He could imagine all too vividly the way his brothers would purse their lips and complain if Davida’s hopes for a divorce blossomed. He could also imagine the repercussions. The Lammeck brothers had always treasured their royal friendships, not because they benefited in any obvious financial way - indeed they did not need to, for their business thrived - but because of its social value. There were people in England who sneered at the Jews, they all knew that. The older families, those who measured their lineage in hundreds of years rather than in mere generations, were cool in the extreme; there were many houses in London where Lammecks and Damonts, even Rothschilds and Sassoons were regarded with contempt, and certainly never invited. Week after week the comical drawings in Punch, the journal of require reading for all with any pretensions to style, were littered with big-nosed caricatures. But the King’s friends were privileged. To lose cordiality would be a sad blow, and Albert had a shrewd idea that raffish though the King was, and fond of a night of gambling and womanizing, divorce in his circle would stick in his craw. There had been previous scandals, heaven knew, that had involved him, but that had been in the days when he was Prince of Wales. Now he was King and getting older too and far from well, and matters were different. Albert was quite sure that a divorce involving his son would cause the King to lose some of his affability, and that he was not to be thought of. He had to do something to block Davida.

  It took longer than than the thought. Indeed, by the time his ploys succeeded the King, his family friend, was dead and London was in mourning, and wondering how life would be under raffish Edward’s more prosaic son, George V. But that made no difference to Albert; he still had much to lose from a divorce sandal involving his son.

  So it was that one late July afternoon at Lammeck Alley, Daniel was shaken out of his lethargy in a most surprising manner. His father and uncles sent for him at the end of the Senior Partners' monthly meeting. He was to come to the Board Room, Young Levy said, and no, he didn’t know why.

  Daniel looked questionably at Young Levy (still called that, even after his thirty years with the firm) but he merely shook his head and went back to his tall desk. So Daniel went, trying to remember what he had done, or more likely not done, to merit so formal a summons. He was not, he knew, the most assiduous of the junior members of the firm. His cousin Peter, said to be a positive genius with figures, was much more industrious that he was, and Marcus, that square and rather silent youth who chose to spend his school holidays at Lammeck Alley, was said to know more about the diamond selling side of the business than anyone in the London branch of the family, almost as much as the Damonts who were the real diamond dealers of the City. The summons made his heart sink, but he entered the big panelled room with a jaunty step to show them how little he was concerned.

  He listened to what they had to say with his face rigid with surprise.

  ‘Shanghai?’ he said at length. ‘Shanghai?’

  ‘Why not, m'boy? Ezra said cheerfully.’
Why not?’ he was cooling himself with a fan fashioned out of a dried palm leaf, and looked particularly oriental this warm afternoon, with the sallow complexion and liquid eyes with a faintly yellow tinge to the whites that, more than fifty yeas ago, Bartholomew had brought with him when he came to open the London Office. Looking at him, Daniel thought, ‘I'm glad I look like Mamma’s family,’ and then wrenched his mind back to the present.

  ‘We need a member of the family to keep an eye on what goes on there,’ Ezra was saying. ‘We're handling more and more tea, you know, and a good deal of silk, and I'm told the possibilities for textile manufacture are increasing daily. Ling Ho, who is the manager of the office at the moment, is a man of wide experience in these matters, and we want him to get out and about and buy textile plants and set up some factories of our own. That means we need someone to take over from him and we think it can be you. You'll have a reliable interpreter of course, but we will expect you to learn some Chinese, nothing too fancy, understand, just enough to follow the contracts. Ling Ho will be there if you need him. You will do very well, my boy! We’ve arranged to settle you in a house near the new Futan University, a very respectable area, and cool in the warm months, they say. Later, if you choose, you can find yourself a bigger place.

  Daniel shook his head, trying to collect his thoughts. He had visited abroad, of course – the spas in Germany, the more fashionable Swiss and French resorts, but the thought of going to China filled him with astonishment.

  ‘You sail next month,’ Alfred was saying. ‘Stateroom will be booked by the firm, so all you need to worry about is getting your affairs here tidied up. Young Levy will see to selling your house, if that’s what you want, though I’d suggest you rent it. They tell me that part of London is gettin' positively desirable. Odd, but there it is. Hang on to it and use the rents, that’s what you ought to do.’