‘Hannah,’ Daniel began but his father leaned forwards and said carefully, ‘Will of course go with you. Man needs his wife with him! Of course you must go together.’
Hannah’s first reaction to Daniel’s news was blank amazement. She who had never in her life been outside London, to travel so far? To spend so many weeks on a steamship crossing those myriad miles of water? She could not imagine it. She stared at him over the dinner table with her mouth half open in surprise.
‘Shanghai,’ she said. ‘Shanghai? Where is it?’
He laughed at that, the indulgent man of the world. Biggest city In China, and China’s huge! It’s a port of course, that’s why we’ve got an office there. And we do a lot of trade, a lot of very good trade with the hinterland - the Yangtse valley, you understand. The city stands on the Hwang Pu river on the Soochow Creek side but only fourteen miles or so from where it meets the Yangtse … ‘ He had spent the remainder of his afternoon at Lammeck Alley eagerly gleaning all he could about the place from Young Levy. ‘It’s a very exciting place. There’s a big International Settlement, with lots of Europeans. You'll like it, Hannah. You'll meet new people and make friends. You'll be very busy, I'm sure.’
They sat there staring at each other in the evening sunlight of their red walled dining room in Paultons Square in Chelsea, trying each in their own way to visualize life in remote Shanghai. Hannah thought of the crowded streets of the East End and tried to imagine them as Chinese streets decorated with shop signs like those she had seen occasionally in Limehouse, where the few Chinese people who lived in London clustered, but couldn’t. Daniel tried to envisage the sort of life he would have as manager of the Lammeck office, in total command, making decisions, catered to and respected …
It was a heady vision. In Lammeck Alley he was just Albert’s boy. He was well aware of the partners' opinion of him, and he could not blame them for it. He had never found what he had to do there exciting enough to make an effort over it. But as Office Manager in Shanghai, that would be different. There he would work hard, and enjoy it.
‘You want to go?’ Hannah said after a while, and picked up her spoon and began to eat her pudding. ‘Please, Daniel, do finish. Bet will be mortified if she thinks you didn’t like it. She’s very proud of this recipe.
Daniel began to eat, shovelling the food in without interest in what he was tasting. ‘Yes, I think I do. It would be … I think it would suit us both, don’t you? Do us good.’
He looked at her carefully, wanting to say it but not knowing how. Good to get away for a while, just us. Good not to have to worry about relations, yours or mine. Then we can be comfortable again.
He didn’t have to say it for she was thinking it too. It would be good to be far away from all the anxiety and the confusion. But not so good to be far away from Uncle Alex and Poppa and the boys. While she was in London there was always the chance, just a small chance, that Poppa would relent and see her again. She shook her head, confused. Then, as she sat his anxious gaze fixed on her, she smiled.
‘Yes, I think perhaps it will,’ she said in a composed voice and bent her head to finish her pudding. Daniel grinned widely and held out his plate for a second helping.
But once again, events overtook her. Accompanying Young Levy around the house making an inventory, for it had been agreed that Paultons Square would be rented fully furnished and staffed against the day when the young couple should return she suddenly felt odd. They had climbed the stairs slowly, for it was hot and the air hung moist and heavy everywhere. Suddenly her vision seemed to brighten and dazzle; the stairs in front of her bounced and tilted and she felt her gorge rise. Fortunately she fell backwards, against Young Levy who braced his elderly but wiry frame and caught her.
The excitement in the house was intense. Bet threw up her hand in horror and wept, while Florrie, more practical, ran down to the King’s Road to fetch the doctor. Young Levy, alarmed by Mrs Lammeck’s pallor, telephone the office to tell Daniel to come home. He arrived, pale with anxiety and accompanied by Albert, only a short time after the doctor had finished his examination and was packing his bags in the dressing room adjacent to the bedroom where Hannah lay.
‘No need to look like that, young man!’ the doctor said, as Daniel and Albert close behind him came rushing up the stairs. ‘Nothing to get all upset about. Put it down to the weather. No young woman in her state can expect to feel otherwise, while it’s so deucedly hot.’
‘Her state?’ Albert said sharply, pushing past Daniel.
The doctor grinned. ‘You a member of the family? This young man’s father, is it? Well, congratulations, sir. The young lady plans to make a grandfather of you. They will do if, you know, they will do it! I’ve left a prescription, Mr Lammeck, for a tonic for your wife, and for the rest, just make sure you get Miss Bishop booked. Best midwife in the district.’ He turned to go.
‘But they're sailing for Shanghai in a fortnight’s time, doctor! They'll be there at least two years, you know, and –’
‘Shanghai? The doctor looked over his shoulder. ‘Oh, dear me, no! No question of that! That girl takes a long voyage like that, and I won’t answer for the consequences. No, she'll have to follow you, I'm afraid, if you must go, Mr Lammeck.’ He looked at Daniel and grinned is his sharp grin again. ‘To tell you the truth m'boy, I almost envy you. It ain’t easy going through your wife’s first pregnancy, you know, or any pregnancy come to that, all that fuss and the drama and dealing with her mother and her sisters and all. You go to your Shanghai and let her follow up once the babe is safely born and established in its health. Much the best plan, I do assure you. Good afternoon!’
36
Albert tried hard enough, heaven knew, to discover a way to persuade his brothers to change their plans, but he was hamstrung by his own previous deviousness. He had know perfectly well that if his brothers suspected that he had pressed for Daniel’s appointment to the important Shanghai branch simply in order to protect his marriage from Davida’s meddling, they would have had no part of it.
Instead he had used all his eloquence to convince them that his boy was eager for advancement, that he had settled well and was more than ready for this step forwards. To try and pull him out now simply because his wife was not fit to travel would make them exceedingly suspicious, and as the junior of the four senior partners, he was in no position to upset them. Anyway, he did not wish to. Albert had expensive tastes, and a disagreement with his brothers that might, just possibly, result in his losing his seat on the Senior Partners' Board was not to be contemplated. After all, they all knew that Lammeck and Damont wives understood the exigencies of the business. Why should Daniel’s wife be treated any differently from, say, the wife of cousin Philip Damont, a nephew of their mother Augusta? He had been appointed to the Bombay office the year before. When his wife Violet had been stricken with jaundice as soon as they arrived, they had simply arranged for her to be brought home again, leaving Philip alone in India for another two years, never contemplating the possibility that this was not the way to arrange matters. As far as the Lammeck brothers were concerned, business came first, second and last in every calculation; what the business needed the members of the firm needed and when they needed something, the wives accepted. So ran the creed at Lammeck Alley. Albert could do nothing.
The only comfort he had was that Davida at least recovered her spirits. Her fury when she heard that Daniel and Hannah were to be swept out of her reach for two years had been monumental. Now that Hannah was to remain in London, her mood lifted.
‘I take it you intend to look after the girl then?’ Albert said a little waspishly, unable to resist the barb, for she had given him some uncomfortable hours this past fortnight. ‘After all, she' going to give you a grandchild. Imagine that, Davida. You a grandmother!’
She swept over that magnificently. ‘Oh, that should not be necessary. I am sure her own people will see she if fit enough. And I imagine you will be your usual foolish self and load her with mone
y. Really, the way you let that girl bambozzle you is little short of –’
‘I give what I give from my own choice,’ he said shortly. ‘She never asks and never has. And for my part, I'm glad there’s to be a grandchild. I’ve only the one son, after all.’ Another barb, for Daniel’s lack of brothers or sisters was due entirely to Davida’s refusal after his birth ‘ever to go through that again', a matter which had caused Albert not a little distress. Again, she ignored him.
‘I'm sure it will be the making of him,’ She nodded in great satisfaction. ‘He’s had a bad time lately - yes, the making of him,’ Prudently she forbore to say what she had intended to about Hannah, because Albert was looking thunderous now and Hannah was not worth having an argument over. "I must see to it that I order some goods for him from the Army and Navy Stores. They'll know what I should pack.
Hannah, at home in the heat of Paultons Square, was wretched. She had, absurdly, not considered the possibility that she might become pregnant. It was not that she was ignorant of the facts of parenthood; far from it. But she and Daniel had reached a tacit agreement that they would not wish for children too soon, and he had, in his lovemaking, taken care to protect her. And she had finally trusted him. So the realization that his care had failed and a child had been conceived had come as a most disagreeable surprise. And the fact that it had come at juts this time did not help to make her any happier about it. All of which contributed not a little to the fact that she was now feeling far from well, and spent a large part of her day white faced and miserable sitting in her wrapper by her open window and trying not to vomit. Florrie and Bet hovered over her with tempting dishes, but she grew thinner before their eyes. The enormous relief they had felt when they realized that their much loved mistress was not, after all, going to disappear into some heathen wilderness gave way to grave concern for her.
It was not entirely her pregnancy and the hot weather which made he feel so low; it was Daniel too. Somewhere deep inside herself she had taken it for granted that once Daniel realized that there was no possibility of her accompanying him he would refuse to go. He had only to say to his uncles that he was sorry, but his place was by his wife’s side, and that of his son or daughter.
But he didn’t. He talked about it, of course, sitting beside her in the evening when he returned from the Alley, and holding her hand but he did nothing He said he would tell them he could not go, but not yet.
‘Let’s see how you are by the end of the week,’ he said optimistically. ‘Maybe you'll feel better. Maybe we can find a different doctor who'll see that what you need is a long sea voyage to set you up.’
Another doctor came and said the same, that travel to a country like China would undoubtedly kill the baby and would do a great deal of harm to Hannah’s own health too. Still Daniel did not tell his uncles he would not go. At last she had to accept the situation for what it was.
‘Please, Daniel,’ she said, needing to give him permission to do as he chose, and knowing that the best way was to make him believe he was acting to please her. ‘Please, it won’t be for long. As soon a the baby’s born, and big enough to travel, I'll book a place on the next steamer, truly I will. It won’t be long. The doctor said it will be born in January, and by spring, just a few months really, I'll be there. And you'll be busy, too busy to miss me.’
Daniel looked at her and frowned and then shook his head and frowned again, but in the end said he agreed.
‘It’s not that I want to leave you, my love,’ he said. ‘You know that, don’t you? It’s just that, oh, at Lammeck Alley I'm nothing. But a couple of years in Shanghai and who knows? They'll give me a proper partnership as soon as I come back, I'm sure of that, and then we'll be sitting pretty. I mean, if I'm to be a family man, I’ve got to think of the future.’
‘Yes.’ She leaned back in her chair as another wave of nausea overcame her. The truth was, she knew, that Daniel had become enormously excited at the prospect of travelling so far. In the last few weeks he had thought of little else. She had seen him sitting with a blank expression on his face, and had known he was imagining himself there in exotic China, giving his lordly orders, making vast sums of money to send back to the coffers in Lammeck Alley to impress his uncles. She recognized what was happening to him. She who had depended so heavily on fantasy all through her young years, knew the dream world into which her husband had retreated.
But unlike her, he could not relinquish his dream when circumstances made it unrealizable, and she could not, for all the sense of impending doom that filled her when she contemplated his departure, spoil it for him by making demands of her own. She knew that she could make him refuse to go. They were still very young and very much in love and he needed her in many ways, not least as a lover, and she could very easily make him realize that leaving her would make him unhappy. But she did not.
Because her pregnancy was making her feel so ill, they stopped lovemaking, and that added to his willingness to go. It was not that she did not want him; indeed she did. They would lie side by side on those hot summer nights, not touching. She knew he wanted her, but feared to harm her, and waited for her to make the first move. But she, feeling that ever present nausea, could not, and so they lay there and eventually slept, uneasily alone together and unfulfilled.
The days shrivelled away. Two nights before departure they were sitting in the drawing room before the open window. There had been a few grumbles of thunder and Hannah was tense and nervous, waiting for the storm to blow itself into life and waiting, too, for him to go. She loved him, she didn’t want to loose him, but the delay in his departure, seemed intolerable. It would be easier if he went now, this second, the thought, resting her head on her chair back, and left me to get over this wretched business on my own.
He looked at her in the deepening twilight, at the way her hair, unpinned now, lay on her shoulders, and at the shadows under her eyes and wanted her very badly indeed. His body was tense with need. He had to lean back in his chair and stretch his shoulders very deliberately, concentrating his mind on the sensations his back muscles gave him, in order to keep his thoughts away from his genitals. When she stirred in her chair, opened her eyes and smiled at him, his body leaped again, and it took all the control he had to stop himself reaching out to seize her. She, less perceptive than she usually was, because she felt so low, said sleepily. ‘Dear one, you must be very stuffy sitting here with me. Go for a walk, love, do. I'll be all right on my own.
And because he was lonely and hungry for sexual reassurance he went to see Leontine. ‘After all,’ he told himself, walking through the hot still air of the busy streets toward her house in Knightsbridge, ‘After all, she’s an old friend. I’ve got to say goodbye.’
They said goodbye. Leontine behaved with sweet forbearing, as though he had never jilted her, for not only had she been reared to accept unacceptable male behaviour as always forgiveable, she till felt exceedingly attracted to him. He sat and talked to her for over an hour, never speaking of Hannah but about Shanghai, and how his life there would be. At last, he leaned forwards to touch her hand and said, ‘Write me, Leontine? I’d like to think we were still friends.’ She promised she would, and they parted with a chaste kiss on her cheek that still managed to leave Leontine almost breathless. She watched him from her drawing room window as he went swinging away through the midnight streets towards his wife. ‘Interesting,’ she thought. ‘Perhaps Aunt Davida was right. She said it would all work out, and maybe it will.’
Their parting, when it came, was almost perfunctory. Hannah was as felled by her sickness as ever when he got up very early in the morning of the day the Ocean Steamship company ship ‘Priam' was to sale for Shanghai, calling at Colombo and Hong Kong, a journey that would take him almost seven weeks, but all the could think about was the risk of missing the boat train to Liverpool, from Euston Station. He rushed about the bedroom in a great frenzy of activity and she managed to drag herself up and put on her wrapper and get Florrie to come and hel
p him with his last minute packing, in order to settle him.
They ate a brief breakfast, or rather he did, for she could manage only tea, and then, suddenly, the cab was at the door and they could hear the cabman complaining and panting as he carried the trunks and cases out to the four wheeler, supervised by Florrie. Daniel jumped to his feet wiped his mouth on his napkin and looked around anxiously for his hat, a new straw hat he had bought expressly to travel in.
‘Time to go, my love,’ he said, almost distractedly. ‘Can’t miss the boat train, the ship goes on the late afternoon tide and they said it might be early. Dammit, here did I put that … oh, there it is … ‘ He seized the carpet bag containing his immediate necessaries and came and stood beside her where she sat at the table.
‘Come and wave me off, then,’ he said. ‘No one will notice you aren’t dressed yet if you stand well back in the doorway.’ ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, I don’t think I will. I'll say goodbye here.’ She put her face to be kissed. After a moment he bent and brushed her cheek with his lips.
‘I'll write as soon as we touch port,’ he said huskily and turned and went. She sat listening for a long time after the rattle of the horse’s hooves and jingle of its harness had died away.
It was both easier and harder than she thought it would be. Easier to live without him, because she went on feeling ill for some weeks after he had left. Harder because hers was so disagreeable a pregnancy. It surprised her for she had seen enough of pregnant women in the East End to know that child-bearing was not an illness. The women of Antcliff Street had gone about their daily business as their bellies burgeoned and had shown no hint of the misery she was suffering. The women at Uncle Isaac’s factory, too, had gone on cheerfully working as their months passed, just pushing their stools further away from their work benches as the baby grew. They had not spent hour after hour battling with nausea.
The Running Years Page 38
