The Running Years

by Claire Rayner

‘Oh, Uncle Alex can hear anything we have to talk about!’ she said in a louder voice than usual, stung by Albert Lammeck’s casual rudeness. How dare he try to hustle her own relations away? It was like that awful Sunday last year all over again, when Davida had been so clearly offended by the sight of Hannah’s cluster of cousins and aunts and uncles.

  ‘That’s it!’ Uncle Alex said, an sat down with a little thump, flicking an understanding look at Hannah. ‘Take a seat, Mr Lammeck! Take a seat! And mazeltov on your lovely granddaughter!’

  ‘No, I won’t stay,’ Albert said, and moved back to the door. ‘Just thought I’d call in you know, and … I'll come back another time, since you're busy. Jut a few family matters.’

  He was feeling wretched. He had felt all though Hannah’s pregnancy an increasing guilt at her distress; had seen clearly how much she needed her husband with her, and was angry with himself for being the one who had engineered matters so that they were parted. He had become quite fond of the girl, dammit, and it was no pleasure to know that he’d treated her damned nearly as badly as Davida had.

  This afternoon had been the last straw. Ezra had told him flatly that his son had turned out to be worse than useless in the Shanghai Office, and was to be brought back.

  ‘Look, Albert, family is family, but the firm can’t be played about with! And you had no right to tell us he could manage it there when Ling Ho has told us its plain as the nose on his face that the boy just doesn’t have it in him. There’s been nothing but muckups and lost money since he got there. He’s got to come back. I’ve talked to Alfred and he agrees. We'll send Margaret’s nephew, you know the chap I mean, Joseph Gubbay. He'll make a much better job of it. Your Daniel’s got to come back.

  Davida’s triumph when he had heard the news was galling. She let a smile spread across her face until she looked like a cat that had got the cream and he snapped, ‘Well, there’s no need to think you can make any more trouble for the boy! They’ve got a baby now, and if you meddle … ’

  ‘Oh, baby, pooh!’ she said, ‘If all the bastard babies this family has dropped around were added up it would no doubt provide enough clerks to fill Lammeck Alley twice over. I'm a practical woman, Albert, there’s the difference between us. You're so sentimental it really is embarrassing. Once the boy is home then we'll see to it that things change. it’s quite absurd to have him tied as he is, quite absurd.’

  Now he had come to tell Hannah that after all, the lonely misery of the past months had been to no point. She was not going to follow her husband to the glories of Shanghai and his respected job in the firm. She was to face a future with a husband who would never be more than a junior member of the family firm, however old he became in the service of Lammeck Alley. Her sacrifice had been totally wasted. He was to come back to her with his tail between his legs, branded as useless by his own family. ‘Damned family,’ he thought uncharacteristically for a short moment, sitting in his car on the way to Paultons Square. ‘Damned family!’ As if it mattered that the boy just doesn’t care for business.’

  But he could not convince himself. The firm had been the heart of his life for as long as he could remember, and at bottom he was disgusted with his only son for letting him down so badly in the eyes of his brothers.

  By the time he reached Hannah with the news, he was in no good humour, and the sight of her vulgar self-satisfied uncle had done nothing to improve his temper. Nor did what the wretched man had to say help matters.

  For Alex, in his usual blunt way, launched himself into a clear account of his views on the way his niece had been treated by her in-laws. Left alone to have her baby without any female companionship, what sort of family was that, he asked. She had no mother, surely her mother-in-law could have come to see the girl occasionally, help her, advise her?

  ‘Uncle ALex, please! Hannah said, aghast at both his sudden attacked on her father-in-law and at the mere thought of Davida coming to advise and help her. ‘Do stop, please!’ But it was too late, Albert Lammeck went white with fury, then turned and stomped out of the house, slamming the door behind him with very uncharacteristic ill manners.

  40

  It was early February, a blustery day that sent rubbish swirling in the gutters around the square and made passersby hurry along with their heads down and their shoulders hunched against the wind, when Hannah suddenly decided that the time had come to do something more positive about her father.

  She had been sitting in her drawing room staring out at the street While Mary Bee lay sleeping in the small moses basket that Judist had given as her birth preset. Wherever she went about the house, she took the basket with her, wanting her baby always beside her; not for her the usual Lammeck practice of putting a baby in a special room all on its own. She hated the idea of a nursery as much a she hated the idea of a nurse, and faintly refused to have either, to Florrie’s and Bet’s delight, for it meant that they were allowed to help with the care of the child. It also protected them from that bane of every servant’s life, the presence of a self satisfied nurse. They complimented each other on Madam’s wisdom and made sure that Hannah had all the help she could possibly need.

  Which was why she often found that time hung heavily on her hands. Mary Bee was an easy baby, who slept a great deal ('because she had a long birth,’ Miss Bishop said knowledgeably.’ These babies need time to get over it,’) and took her feeds without fuss. However long Hannah stretched out the business of unbuttoning her blouse and providing her with her needs, and bathing her and changing her clothes, great tracts of the day remained unused. She yearned for the time when Mary Bee would be like Charles, large and active and in constant need of attention and play, and then felt guilty for wishing her baby’s life away.

  Guilt was very much a part of her feeling for Mary Bee. She would sit and stare down at the crumpled face on its lace trimmed pallet, at the way the soft fuzz of reddish hair misted the small skull - now more a natural shape - consumed by distress at the way she had felt about her during the long months of pregnancy. To have hated her so much - it had been wicked, wicked. Hannah would slip her little finger into Mary Bee’s minute fist and swear she would make it up to her. She would have all any child could ever need, to repay her for the loss of love while she was growing inside her wicked mother.

  She had been feeling particularly bad that February afternoon. It would still be four weeks before Daniel’s ship would reach Liveropool; an eternity of time, and though she was impatient to see him, she was nervous too. Albert had said nothing about why Daniel was coming back; had only told her curtly two weeks ago that he was, but she realized it was for no happy reason, and was apprehensive. It was no wonder then that depression had come down like a cloud to settle over her. Tears were very near the surface as she moved away to the window to look at the world outside. She found herself thinking of the street she had once looked out on when she was a child. Antcliff Street had been mean and narrow, with its twin rows of small flat fronted houses and tired inhabitants, and Paultons Square was pretty with its central trees fringed garden and obviously prosperous passersby; yet somehow there were similarities. The same grey stone and battered brick, the same sooty air, the same London ‘feel' about it. She wanted, suddenly and desperately, to see Antcliff Street again.

  Florrie showed no hint of surprise when she was told to call a four wheeler, and obediently whistled one up from the King’s Road and helped Hannah to settle in it, with Mary Bee warmly bundled in a shawl on one arm. Hannah sat in the corner of the cab, leaning back against the dusty leather squabs and staring dreamily out of the window as the horse made the long trot to the East End. The streets became first richer then meaner, and the short winter afternoon shrank into twilight as gaslights began to plop into life along the streets as the lamplighter went by, his long pole over his shoulder. She was going home and the thought made her feel good.

  She went first to Antcliff Street, leaving the cab waiting at the corner of Bromhead Road and paying the driver a handsome tip to go
and get himself drunk.

  ‘I'll want you to take me back in an hour or so,’ she told him. ‘And I'll pay you the rest of the fare when we get there, so wait for me.’ She knew she would never find another cab for hire in this part of London and needed to keep her escape route open. She might have told herself on the journey that she was going home, but she knew perfectly well that she was doing noting of the sort.

  She knocked on the door of number nine and stood on the pavement waiting, staring at the dark fanlight above the door with Mary Bee warm against her chest and thought in an almost detached way, ‘This is ridiculous. Quite ridiculous.’ She didn’t move though, and the fanlight sprang into life as someone inside brought a light.

  The door opened a crack, and Mrs Arbeiter’s face peered out, suspicious and ferocious at the same time, and stared at her for a moment. Then the door opened wide and a gust of the old familiar smell hit Hannah, food first, greben, and fried fish and garlic-scented cucumbers, and then the heavy reek of the carbolic soap used to scrub the stairs and a hint of cats and mildew too. At once Hannah was swept back into her childhood. She was ten years old, small and vulnerable to attack from this large and formidable woman.

  ‘Hello, Mrs Arbeiter,’ she said in a small voice.

  ‘I don’t believe it! I don’t believe it!, believe me, I don’t! Hannah, it is, little Hannah come back all rich and beautiful? Such clothes, you look marvellous! And a baby, someone said you had a baby, heard it from Solly, they said, but I said who can know what goes on in the West End, how can you be sure? So how are you? What’s the baby' name? Is it a good baby? What is it? How come you're here when your Poppa don’t live here no more?’

  She still doesn’t wait for answers, Hannah thought, and giggled softly and held Mary Bee out towards her.

  ‘She’s a little girl, she said proudly. ‘I’ve called her …’

  Mrs Arbeiter was peering into the bundle. ‘Well, never mind, dolly, next time, please God, a bris.’ Hannah’s face reddened, but she bit her tongue. Stupid woman! Mrs Arbeiter went on, ‘You want I should make some supper for you? I got some lovely fried plaice, lovely, done it just this morning, believe me it’s as white as snow, with a bissel cucumber, maybe, you'll eat, be comfortable … ’

  Hannah should her head. ‘Thank you, Mrs Arbeiter, but it was just … ‘ She floundered and then tried again, and the words came out all wrong, It wasn’t what she meant to say at all.

  ‘I brought Mary Bee to show Momma.’

  There was a little silence and Mrs Arbeiter drew back into the shadows of the lamplit hallway. She looked perturbed. ‘You shouldn’t say such things. Let her rest easy in her grave, already. You shouldn’t say such things.’

  I'm sorry …I didn’t mean … it’s just that I wanted to come back to where I was born, you see, with my own baby. I … it’s hard to explain. I just wanted to show her …' She held Mary Bee closer again. The baby stirred and whimpered in her sleep and then settled.

  ‘Meshuggah, you ask me,’ the old woman said. ‘Meshuggah. You got a decent place to live now, Alex told me, real fancy place, and you want to bring a baby to show her a place like this? Meshuggah. Crazy.’ She went padding away along the passage way to her kitchen door, the broken carpet slippers slapping on the worn lino. ‘Go up already if you want. There ain’t no one up there. Your Uncle Alex he pays the rent for me. Uses the place to keep some of his stuff. Got no one living up there now since your Poppa and the boys went over to Sidney Street.

  Hannah climbed the stairs, feeling a little withdrawn and dreamy again, the way she had on the journey here. It was as though this was someone else, not her at all.

  The stairs were narrower than she remembered, and she marvelled at that a little. She had been full grown when she left, after all; it wasn’t that long ago. But it felt small all the same, as though she had not been here for a very long time, since she was small herself.

  The landing above was dark and she hesitated for a moment remembering suddenly the night she had come here and it had been dark, because Bloomah had been dying on the floor. She shook her head at herself and walked steadfastly across the space to the door.

  It wasn’t quite dark yet, and she could see fairly easily. It looked odd, with the furniture that she had know so well all gone and smaller, just as the stairs had been. There were piles of cardboard boxes and wooden crated scattered about. She stared at them and tried to see Bloomah sitting up against her pillows in the big bed while she, Hannah, sat curled beside the fire, but there was nothing there, only wooden boxes which stubbornly refused to give way to her imaginings. Once she had been able to see all she wanted to, just by switching on the special ability inside her own head, but now she couldn’t. She shivered a little in the dank mildewy air and hugged Mary Bee.

  The bay stirred on her arms and began to wail and Hannah thought with a small shock, ’she’s hungry. It’s getting late, she’s hungry.’

  She sat down on one of the crates, and there, in the silent twilit desolation of the empty room unbuttoned her coat and the her blouse and put Mary Bee to the breast. The sound of it filled the room, small slurping noises and smackings. Hannah enjoyed the sensation, as she always did, and felt, again as she always did, a small surge of guilt because feeding her baby felt so agreeable like lovemaking. She became relaxed and languorous, sitting staring over Mary Bee’s head at the greasy window panes and not thinking much of anything but the sensation of the busy mouth against her bare skin.

  And than, at last, Bloomah was there. Not in the bed, not sitting against the white pillows and looking exhausted and pallid, not at all visible in the way the contents of Hannah’s dreams often were, but just there, a presence that was as natural to Hannah as the baby’s was. The room grew gradually darker as Mary Bee sucked greedily and her mother and her grandmother watched her and listened to the small burp and then the hiccup and at last to the slight snoring of her satiated sleep

  Hannah buttoned up he clothes and tucked the baby back in the crook of her arm and went downstairs to thank Mrs Arbetier gravely, and smile at her, no matter how the silly woman chattered with her eternity of unanswerable questions. She had found what she had come for.

  She almost went back at once to the cab. She stood for a moment, uncertain, on the kerb’s edge and then walked out to Bromehead Road. But instead of turning right to where the cab horse stood dispiritedly nosing in his straw bag of chaff and oats, she tuned left and went along the alley that led into Jubilee Street, and then on and around the corner into Sidney Street. She had come this far, and found Bloomah, and said her farewells to her. Surely to go back to Paultons Square without trying to see Nathan too would be foolish? And Hannah Lammeck was not foolish, she told herself. Never foolish. Leave that to others.

  But he wasn’t there. Her Aunt Sarah and Uncle Benjamin greeted her, drawing her into their flat, making her sit down in the best armchair, exclaiming delightedly over her baby, though her cousin David barely looked up from his place at the table.

  ‘You forget what little menschela they are,’ Aunt Sarah murmured, and slid her vast bulk into an armchair beside her fire and held out her arms. Hannah, uneasily, gave her the bundle. Mary Bee opened her eyes and looked at her great-aunt and then burped rather loudly, dribbling a little milky curd down her chin. Even Uncle Benjamin laughed, his black skull cap dancing on the back of his head.

  Their room was comfortable an cluttered, with a big highly polished brass samovar on a corner table, and a myriad of ornaments on the red plush-cover mantleshelf and on several tables with their fringe bobbled cloths. Sarah, the rabbis' daughter, had brought a decent dowry into her marriage, and it showed. The fire was bright and well fed with big pieces of coal, not the dust and slack that had been her own family’s fuel all through her childhood, and the gas light purred richly overhead. Uncle Alex looked after his scholarly brother well, it was clear. Hannah smiled affectionately at Uncle Benjamin. He was younger than her father and only a little older than Uncle Alex but someho
w looked much older than both of them, his white beard framing his face to give him a serious patriarchal look.

  ‘So, my dear, you go regularly to synagogue, you and your nice young husband? which one do you go to? I imagine he’s so rich, he must be Sephardi? tTey tell me the services they have at their Sephardi place - Bevis Marks, ain’t it? - I hear it’s very interesting. Not for me, of course, I got my own Bes Midrash and I’d never go nowhere else, but it’s interesting, very interesting, what these Spanish do.’

  She went a little pink. ‘I don’t go at all, Uncle Benjamin. It just isn’t … I’ve never been able to …' She shrugged and stopped. He looked at her a little sadly, then pushed his wire rimmed glasses more firmly back on his nose and shook his head. But he said nothing and Sarah, more perceptive than she looked, said. ‘So tell me, how does this little boychick behave. He eat well? He looks like he does.’

  ‘Her name if Mary Bloomah,’ Hannah said, the irritation rising in her again. Didn’t Solly tell you she’s a girl?’ If Sarah too commiserated over her child’s sex she’d lose her temper.

  ‘Solly never said nothing What a lovely little girl she is,’ Aunt Sarah said placidly and crooned at the baby’s face. ‘Such a lovely baby. My first was a girl, too. Such a lovely way to start your family, with girls such a help to you.’

  If you're lucky,’ David said sourly. ‘I ain’t noticed Bella and Charlotte coming round all that much these days.’

  His mother smiled and shook her head. ‘When you was little, believe me, David, they was helpful. Now they got their own husbands to look after, Gott de dank, and it’s not so terrible, a boy should help his mother a bissel shopping now and again. I don’t ask you should wash dishes, God forbid, do I? So stop your complaining already.’ She smiled fondly at him ‘Such a genius at the books as he is,’ she said to Hannah. ‘Every minute he has to spend away from them he grudges. Such a good boy,’ Hannah looked at David’s sulky face and remember herself helping her mother with dishes, while her brothers did nothing at all, and signed a little. Nothing ever changes, she thought. Nothing every changes.