The Running Years

by Claire Rayner

  ‘Poppa,’ she said after while. ‘Is he …' She left the sentence unfinished to hang in the air above the red plush table cloth and David’s books spread on it. No one said anything. ’the boys,’ Hannah said then, almost desperately. ‘Are the boys well?’

  Sarah’s face lifted, ‘Ah the boys! Always a laugh, always a joke - it’s a pleasure to see them. They eat with us every night, you know? Their breakfast they fix themselves with what I have ready, then they eat at night with us and I tidy a bit for them in the day, believe me, they're all looked after, Hannah.’

  She peered at Hannah over Mary Bee’s sleeping form and her small eyes were bright and appealing.

  ‘Believe me, you don’t have nothing to worry about. I watch them real careful. I know what it is for men on their own - helpless they are, like little babies. But you don’t need to worry. I take good care of them, and your Uncle Alex,’ She glanced at her husband, now sitting in his own chair opposite David, with his head bent over a book. ‘One way and another, you don’t have to worry.’

  ‘Thank you, Aunt Sara,’ Hannah said. She felt passionately grateful to her and went across the room to kiss the sweaty plump cheek and then take her baby back. ‘Thank you. If ever you need me, tell Solly - he knows where to find me. I can always come. Even if he doesn’t want me, I can always come.’ Neither of them needed to explain who was meant by ‘he'.

  On the far side of the door, shrouded by a large red curtain hanging from a polished wooden rail on large brass rings, there was a muffled thump. David lifted his head.

  ‘That’s Uncle Nathan,’ he said conversationally, and then returned to his work as though he had offered noting more momentous than a comment on the weather. Hannah stood very still, her baby crooked in her arm, and uncle Benjamin and Aunt Sarah lifted their heads, like dogs in a hunt pointing at their quarry.

  Footsteps came slapping closer. The curtain billowed and a puff of smoke came from the fire as the door opened. Then the currtain was pushed aside and he came in, his hat in one hand.

  He stood peering around the quiet room. ‘So, what’s happened here? Cat’s got your tongues?’ He sounded jovial, he way he used to sound when she was small and he had come home full of satisfaction because he had had several clients with important letters to be written.

  Then he saw her and the joviality disappeared and he stared at her, his face blank of expression. It was as though she had never seen him before. He looked older than she remembered, for his beard was longer and more straggled and his hair, in the rich gaslight, looked greyer than it had. His face was fuller though; clearly Aunt Sarah’s cooking agreed with him.

  ‘Hello, Poppa,’ she said, her voice husky. ‘I brought your granddaughter to see you.’ She held her out, like an offering. ‘Mary Bloomah, Poppa. Your granddaughter.’

  He stood staring at her, and then he said it as though it were a bad word, spitting it out. ‘Mary, Mary? A choleria on you and your Mary!’ He turned and went blindly through thee curtain and slammed the door on the other side behind him, leaving her standing in the warm and silent room.

  ‘It’s a pity, you know,’ Uncle Benjamin said after a while. ‘Pity you didn’t tell him her second name, you know? He feels bad about the way he gave you to that Mary Lammeck, and now …' He shook his head. ‘He’s a funny man, my brother. Difficult, you know? Sarah, make some tea. Tea and a bit of kugel …'

  ‘No, thank you,’ Hannah said, and the words only just came out, for her throat felt constricted. ‘I - it’s time to go. Please, take care of him, Aunt Sarah, Uncle Benjamin. Let me know if … Take care of him.’ She went out into the cold dark street, holding Mary Bee close to her, and ran to find her cab. She thought she was crying, but she wasn’t. Her face was quite tight and still.

  41

  She had now way of knowing exactly when Daniel would be home. Albert, who might have been able to give her news, had become more remote since Mary Bee’s birth and Uncle Alex’s attack on him. He never came to the house now but always sent Young Levy with her money. Nor could Levy tell her anymore than she already knew, that Daniel had sailed from Shanghai in January and was therefore due in Liverpool sometime in February. No, he didn’t know the name of the ship, all arrangement had been made from the Shanghai office - and no, he had not heard directly from Daniel. They would expect him in the office when they saw him, and clearly, as a Lammeck wife Young Levy expected her to be equally phlegmatic. She stared at his face, as wrinkled as a winter apple, and his sparse white hair and sighed; no point on getting angry with him. He was as much at the beck and call of the lords of Lammeck Alley as she was, as Daniel was. She would just have to wait.

  He arrived one evening just after her early dinner. She had settled Mary Bee for the night in her small basket and was sitting up in her bedroom beside the fire there. I seemed unnecessary to light the drawing room fire just for her, she had told Florrie, and they needed the bedroom warm for the baby. She was sewing a dress of white lawn for Mary Bee, wearing a comfortable but not particularly handsome wrapper, and with her hair un-pinned, when she heard the rattle of horses' hooves outside and the bang of a cab door.

  She lifted her head to listened and then, as no more happened, returning to her sewing. Whoever it was clearly was not coming to the house, for although there was still a certain amount of street noise, there had been no knock at the door.

  She sat quietly sewing and when he bedroom door opened did not raise her head, but said only, ‘Just a moment, Florrie. Let me finish this row.’

  ‘Well, there’s a welcome!’ His voice sounded very loud in the quiet room and her chin jerked up.

  ‘Daniel? Daniel?’ She jumped to her feet and stood there clutching her sewing in one hand and staring at him.

  He looks dreadful, she thought immediately. What’s happened to him? He had lost weight and had and unattractive boniness about him. His skin seem to have thickened and changed colour. He looked faintly yellowish and his eyes were bloodshot.

  He came into the room and dropped his coat on the chair against the wall. ‘My luggage can come up in the morning,’ he said. ‘I thought you’d have come to Euston at least to meet the boat train, if you didn’t feel coming up to Liverpool.’

  ‘But I didn’t know when you were coming!’ She shook her head in puzzlement. ‘Why didn’t you let me know which ship you were on?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he said curtly. ‘You only had to check at Lammeck Alley. Or was it too much trouble?’

  She felt as though she had been slapped and stared at him in even greater puzzlement. He sounded so angry, so cold and so very far away. ‘Of course it wasn’t me! I mean. I tried and they said - ’

  ‘It really doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘You weren’t there and that’s all there is to it. At least Florrie was at the front door letting the cat out when I got here, so I didn’t have to ring like a stranger. How are you Hannah?’

  ‘I'm … ‘ Again she shook her head and turned to put down her sewing, carefully smoothing it for something to do.

  ‘I'm very well,’ she said then and turned to look at him. ‘Mary Bee, she’s over there.’

  ‘Who?’ he said. he had approached the fire now, standing close to it, obviously cold, an she said quietly, ‘You daughter, Daniel. Mary Bloomah Lammeck. I’ve taken to calling her Mary Bee. She’s over there.’

  ‘Yes.’ He looked across the room to the moses basket in its warm dim corner, but he made no move. She felt fear rise in her. Surely something dreadful had happened?

  ‘Daniel,’ she said then. ‘Daniel - I’ve missed you so much.’ She put out a hand and set it on his sleeve, almost timidly. He pulled her arm away and turned to the fire to hold out his hands to the glow and rub them together, Not looking at her. Something had gone dreadfully wrong.

  ‘Daniel, what is it? What’s the matter?’

  ‘What do you mean, what’s the matter? Dammit, I'm cold and I'm tired. I’ve had a hell of a journey, I’ve been on the move for the best part of seve
n weeks, and you ask me what’s the matter? Have you no imagination at all?’

  It was as though he were trying to work himself up into a righteous anger, for he went on and on, about how cold he was, how tired, and how difficult the journey had been. She said nothing, just standing and staring at him and that seemed to make him even angrier.

  ‘For God' sake, don’t stand there gawping at me like that! What did you expect me to do? Fall on your neck full of the joys of spring?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said quietly. ‘Yes, I think I did. I’ve missed you. I thought you’d have missed me.’

  He said nothing, just standing there staring at her. The glow from the fire and the lamp beside her chair shadowed his face and she could not see him clearly. For a moment it seemed to her that he was going to step forward and put is arms around her, that the last few minutes had been just a nightmare born of his fatigue, but then the hope shrivelled as he pushed past her and went to pick up his coat.

  ‘I’d better go and see mother, he said harshly. ‘She'll have been expecting me today, I know that!’

  ‘And she didn’t meet you at Liverpool, or even Euston?’ she flashed, stung, but he said nothing, shrugging into is coat.

  ‘I'll be back later,’ he said. ‘Don’t wait up,’ and was gone, leaving her standing there in her wrapper and staring at the door he had left swinging open behind him. She was almost in a state of shock, she was so bewildered.

  *

  God knew he had tried. In the first revulsion of feeling he had when that cable had arrived, he had flung himself out of bed and had written a dozen pages to Hannah, pouring out his contrition, his misery, his self loathing. But just before he had finished it Yü Soo had awakened and come to stand naked behind him, weaving her hands sinuously through his hair. He lost his temper at himself, and directed it all at her, hitting out at her as though she were no more than a pet dog that had misbehaved, shouting his rage, and telling her to go, to get out of his house and his life. At first she just cowered away from him amazed, and then, as she realized at last that she was being thrown out she hurled herself at him, her fingers clawing with great precision, and scratched his face and his back cruelly. She kicked at his belly and pulled his hair until they were both rolling on the floor spitting and swearing, each as naked as the other for she had pulled his dressing gown from his back. His houseboy pulled them apart, his face split with a huge grin of sheer enjoyment that had inflamed Daniel’s rage even more. He flung the houseboy out too.

  He had gone back to bed then, shaking and feeling sick and curled up there, trying to collect himself and regain his self control. It was time he went to the office. Friday was settling day, and he had to be there, for he was still struggling to understand the complex system of payments and discounts to customers and buyers. He had to be there. But the morning had gone on and he had been unable to move, feeling throroughly ill.

  Perhaps he had been incubating the fever, anyway; perhaps it was his own misery and the horrible scene with Yü Soo that lowered his resistance and allowed the germ to take hold. Whatever it was, by mid afternoon he was raving with fever, shouting for help which did not come. Wen he dragged himself to the kitchen to fetch water for his raging thirst, he found that every pot and pan had gone, and when he went to his desk to see what had happened he found sheets of his letters to Hannah ripped and strewn about the floor, and his cash box shattered and empty. But he had been past caring the, too ill to want anything but immediate death.

  They sent no one from the office to see why he was absent. Ling Ho, he later realized, had been delighted with such further evidence of the foreigner’s laxity. There he had lain, feverish, often delirious, his head and limbs aching ferociously all thought Friday and Saturday, becoming ever more dehydrated and ill. By the time Jimmy had arrived to collect him for a pre-arranged game of golf on Sunday afternoon, he was lying in his own excrement, nearly comatose.

  He had recovered reasonably fast, once the horrified Jimmy had sent for a doctor, and found a couple of new servants to take care of him. By the end of the week thinner, sallow of complexion and feeling weaker than a sick dog, he had gone creeping back to the Bund as miserable as he had ever been in his life. Those weeks of exhilaration when he had sailed on the Priam and contemplated the world of responsibility and success awaiting him in Shanghai seemed an eternity ago. Now he was defeated and miserable and almost past caring about anything or anyone.

  Even Hannah. Had the letter he had written that January afternoon remained intact, he might have sent it to her and if he had his return home could have been tolerable. Painful, but tolerable. They would have had some sort of structure on which to recreate, however painfully, their lost past.

  But the letter had been irretrievably lost, and he could not write another. He could not even send a cable, for he found waiting for him at the office when he returned a cable to himself, giving him by the ever courteous Ling Ho with one of his polite bows, recalling him to London. His reaction to that had made him hate himself ever more, for his eyes had filled with tears compounded both of his fever-induced weakness and his bitter disappointment, and not a little shame that Ling Ho, the author of so much pain, should see them. Once again, he turned his self hate and anger away, in the wrong direction, aiming it at Hannah, far away and oh-so-innocent at home in London. Let her find out for herself that I'm coming back, he had thought, as he contemplated the wreck of his high hopes, and felt the weakness deep in his bones. Let her find out and come and meet me, and sort it all out. If she loves me, she will. It was unreasonable, ridiculous, childish, but he could not help that. It was how he felt, and he was in no condition to do anything but act on his feelings, as a child does.

  He had left the office and taken the first available steamer home, not even telling them in Lammeck Alley which ship it was, leaving that sort of detail to Ling Ho. He was too tired and unhappy to care.

  His unhappiness had grown all through this journey home. He looked back over his behavior of the past few months and felt as though he had fallen into a great chasm of misery. He had written Hannah such meagre letters, because of that damned whore; how could he write lovingly to the wife of his heart who just borne him his first child when he had been sharing with the olive skinned and oh-so-knowing body experiences that belonged to Hannah alone? How could he even face her when he got home? He paced the decks night after night as the ship heaved through rocking winter seas, hating himself and wallowing even more in his own self disgust.

  From Liverpool onwards, as the train fled through the darkening Midlands towards the warmth and lights of London, a change came over him, once again taking his shame and guilt and turning it outwards. The dock there had been awash with people greeting passengers; on all sides couples were hugging, woman were weeping with delight, children leaping about with excitement, while he stood waiting to see his luggage through the customs shed, alone and lonely. She should have come to Liverpool, he told himself absurdly. She should have somehow known he was coming, and been there to hold him.

  As the train wet on its way he formed words in his head to match the rattle of the wheels over the lines: ‘She should have been there, she should have been there, she should have been there… ’

  At Euston there were more tearful greetings on the platform for other passengers, and eager shouting for porters and rushing away to comfort and happiness through the tendrils of steam that filled the echoing station. He had deliberately topped up his fury, converting the last of his guilt into her fault. How could he have cared what had happened when she cared so little that she couldn’t be bothered to come from Chelsea to Euton?

  By the time his cab reached his front door, his rage had ben monumental. The sight of her there beneath the lamp, her bent head lit to a rich bronze beneath the lamplight and her figure voluptuous in its maternity under that thin wrapper had nearly ruined it all. He had wanted to go and throw himself at her feet and confess all and be shriven. He had to hold on to his hard won rage and punish her for
his own behaviour. There was no other way he could cope with his distress. So, he turned and ran from her, clattering down the stairs, slamming the door behind him, refusing to look at her stricken face another moment.

  Now, as another cab sped through the busy lamplit London streets, he felt his rage diminishing. He was tired, quite desperately tired, He needed comfort more than any man ever had. He thought of his mother and her dark knowing eyes and the way she could chatter on and on without saying a word about Hannah, yet managing to imply that he was in some sort of thrall to her. That could not be borne. It would be unfair to Hannah, he thought ridiculously, and shook his head at his own confusion and almost without thinking tapped on the roof of the hansom. When the driver looked down through the open flap Daniel gave him another address, instead of the Park Lane one. The man said equably, ‘Righto, Guv,’ and the flap snapped shut again and he leaned back in the cab and thought. ‘Why did I do that?’ and shut his eyes with fatigue. He didn’t know why but never mind. He’d feel better later probably. Surely he’d feel better later?

  It was not often that Leontine Damont was at home on a winter evening. She worked hard at holding her place in society and at enhancing it, and felt herself a failure if she did not have at least three competing invitations for the same evening. She needed her frequent trips to Baden Baden and Nice to recover, for she lived a punishing schedule of balls and dinners and crushes and opera visits for most of the year. But tonight she stayed at home, because she had visited the dentist that afternoon and had suffered some pain at his hands. So when the butler came quietly to announce Mr Daniel Lammeck she was sitting beside her drawing room fire in a crimson peignoir and thinking only of going to bed early with one of those splendid new cachets that Aunt Davida had brought home from Paris on her last visit, to help her sleep.