The Running Years

by Claire Rayner

  She stood up to greet him, with her hands held out in a pose that she knew was inviting and which showed her long white arms t advantage. Daniel, responded to her clear invitation, and because he felt no real emotion for her, unlike the confused and very important feeling he had for Hannah, walked straight up to her and put his own arms around her and kissed her with all the hunger that he had been holding back for so long. He did not precisely pretend she was anyone other then Leontine, a good enough girl he had know most of his life, but it was Hannah he thought of as he held her with her head thrown back against his arm, almost devouring her.

  Nightmares again. It was like the time when Bloomah had died, and then Mary had too, only now it was worse, for now there was Mary Bee to thing of and she became restless and fretful, needing to be held close and fed often, though Hannah’s milk suffered badly. But she concentrated her whole mind on Mary Bee and her demands, willing her body to produce what the child needed, and refusing to thing at all about Daniel.

  They came in the early morning when the sky was still heavy with darkness, though there was a promise in the east of light to come, knocking on the door so loudly that Florrie was terrified and came to her room to call her before answering it. She had not gone to bed but had stayed in the armchair into which she had folded herself after Daniel had gone, trying to think of why he had been so strange, and cried. There she had fallen asleep at last, exhausted and frightened.

  And then there was Florrie, her flannel wrapper pulled around her and her face looking very childish under the hair in its curling rags, shaking her and saying, ‘Oh, mum, please mum, there’s such a bangin' at the door, and it’s only six o'clock, mum, and I'm scared to go. I got such a bad feelin' in me. Please, mum, should I answer it? It’s only six o'clock, mum, and no one comes till seven, not even the milkman.’

  She stood on the doorstep with Florrie close behind her peering over her shoulder, and looked at the tall man in his shining mackintosh cape, with the rain dripping of the hem of it, and holding his helmet in his hand. She knew at once.

  ‘Daniel, she said in a flat voice. ‘Daniel.’

  The policeman had been regretful, very. He tried as carefully as he could to make it easy for her, but how could it be easy? Daniel had come and gone so swiftly last night and in such a strange and unhappy way, and now there was this policemen telling her there had been an accident, that he had been found crumpled at the foot of the river steps by Chelsea Reach, his head bruised and his face in the water. He must have missed his footing in the dark and fallen. The blow on his head had done it, so far as they could tell, he told her earnestly as though that would comfort her, a blow that must have knocked him unconscious and that was why he’d not been able to pull his face out of the water as the tide lifted. She had swayed and he put one huge hand to steady her, but she pushed him away. She lifted her chin as the baby began to cry, and said, ‘I must go - my baby. Florrie, give him some tea. I'll come as soon as I can.’

  It had gone on all morning, the telephone calls from Lammeck Alley and then the people coming and going, Florrie red eyed and soggy with tears, and Bet silent and frightened, both trying to help as best they could. Albert, white with control and looking at best with such fury in his eyes that she felt sick, an Uncle Alex, appearing somehow from nowhere and being noisy and bustling and blessedly wonderfully normal, and Mary Bee crying and crying and seeming insatiable however often she fed her, and she knew that she was pushing nipple into the gaping little cavern of a mouth as much to comfort herself as to soothe her baby.

  More policemen, more questions. Had he been ill? Odd in any way? Oh, just returned from abroad, was it? Oh, that affected some gentlemen badly, of course. No, they meant nothing, madam, of course not. Unexplained death, you see, madam, out of our hands, but I'm sure we'll do all we can to make it easy for you, madam, deal mostly with his father, I think. He says he'll take care of things. Deepest sympathy, madam, from all the force, I'm sure, at Chelsea Reach Station… tragedy to happen, hope you feel better soon … and they talked themselves out of the house and out of her life, leaving her to cope with a fretful baby, and her own sick cold terror, and a blank future.

  She was eighteen years old and had a two-month-old baby, and she was a widow. It took a lot of getting used to, that.

  BOOK FOUR

  Changing

  42

  The man sitting beside Hannah in the swaying crowded train was sucking his teeth mournfully as he read the newspaper. Hannah tried not to listen but even the rattle of the train could not drown the repulsive sound. She tried to read the headlines over his shoulder as a distraction, but that did not help because they were all about the gas attacks at Hill 60 and the Second Battle of Ypres. The War dominated everything as it was; to start reading casualty lists at eight in the morning was more than could be asked of even the most patriotic citizens.

  She turned her head to stare out of the grimy window at the black walls of the tunnel, at the way the cables swooped and cured as the train rocketed by them, and made herself think of more pleasant things. Mary Bee this morning, for example, crawling into bed with her and making a great tangle of bedclothes and lace trimmed nightdress and demanding biscuits from the tea tray that Florrie had brought at six o'clock, and kicking her heels with fury when she was told they would spoil her breakfast. Little monkey! Hannah thought fondly. She had of course got her biscuits. I suppose I do spoil her a little but who can blame me? She’s so very adorable, all red curls and wide blue eyes and a skin as firm as downy peach. And anyway, she only has me. No one but me.

  That was an ever recurring theme in her thoughts about Mary Bee, her debt to her. She had tried, heavens, how she had tried, not to feel guilty about her daughter’s fatherless state, tried to tell herself it was not a fault in her, Hannah that had left Mary Bee to grow through her baby years to her study almost five-year-old self without a father to care for her, but in a sense it was her fault.

  Again she wrenched her thoughts away and remembered the previous evening instead. That had been fun, even though it had been quite unlike the old days, before the War – was that only eighteen month ago? – when going to the theatre had been an event of high fashion. Last night they had groped their way there through the blackout, taking a bus to the Gaiety rather than the car, and had worn just ordinary frocks, she and Judith, while Peter had been in his office suit, all stuffy and grey and sober tie. But they had laughed a lot for the play was fun and the music delicious, with George Grossmith as handsome as ever and the comedian Leslie Henson with his odd croaking voice exceedingly funny. She hummed the tune she had liked so much under her breath; ‘ … they'll never believe me – they'll never believe me … that from this great big world you’ve chosen me … ’

  The train slowed, came into Mansion House Square and the crowded seats heaved like a field of corn in a wind as passengers, looking tired even before the day’s work had begun, got out and more came piling in. She relaxed. Not far now to Liverpool Street and the day’s work.

  Last night. Judith and Peter. Better not to think about last night with Peter sitting there between them. She and Judith had laughed and chatted during the intervals as they always did, yet she had been so aware of Peter’s physical presence beside her, of the warmth of his body as his arm touched hers, of the way he looked at her sometimes in the dimness and how his eyes glinted with shared delight in what was happening on the stage. Don’t think about that.

  Peter and Judith. What would she have done without them these past four years? It had been Judith who had got Mary Bee Couturiere off the ground. She had listened to Hannah’s tentative plans to make her living with the only real skill she had, her needle, and had sent so many of her fashionable friends trekking out to Paultons Square that for the first year of the business’s Hannah had not time for anything but measuring and cutting and sewing and fitting, and of course looking after her daughter. As Judith had said, the two Mary Bees would be too much for anyone but Hannah Lammeck, who, she to
ld everyone she met from Park Lane tea parties to East End suffragette meetings, was the hardest working woman she knew. In her loving generosity Judith filled her own wardrobe with Mary Bee frocks and cloaks and lingerie, and saw to it that everyone else she knew did the same.

  And Peter. It had been he who had opened up the other half of her business, the factory in Artillery Lane to which the train was now carrying her. As soon as the War had started on that sweltering August afternoon, he had said, ‘They'll need uniforms. Lots of uniforms. Find yourself premises, Hannah, get yourself some workers, I'll see to it you get the contracts.’ In the past fifteen months since the factory had first switched on the banks of lights over the sewing machines and set the great goose-irons over the hissing gas jets, they had turned out more than fifty thousand VAD uniforms for the government, making money at a rate she would never have though possible.

  It worried her, the prosperity that this hateful war had brought with it. The three years of struggle with Mary Bee Couturier had been rewarded much less handsomely, in spite of demanding twice the effort, and still brought in a much smaller income though she still spend a good deal of time looking after it. But Peter had shaken his head at her in that dry way of his when she had said as much to him and told her shortly not to be so silly.

  ‘There’s no crime in being prosperous,’ he said. ‘If you did bad work, skimped on the contracts, I’d be as hard on you as anyone else. But you do good work. That’s why you're paid so well. Enjoy it ’

  Hard working Peter, growing more and more tired in his job in Whitehall, controlling so much of the government’s war effort, handling so many contracts for war production; Lammeck Alley must miss him badly They had only Marcus now to hold the fort, with the senior partners getting older and more inflexible with so many Lammeck and Damont nephews and cousins and in-laws in the army and navy. There were rumours that Marcus Lammeck too was getting restless and was talking of joining the Royal Flying Corps. Not that she cared about what happened at Lammeck Alley. Hannah Lemmeck she may be, but not one of them cared for her or ever gave her a thought, apart from Peter and Judith, so why should she care? Yet she was, she had to admit, a little interested.

  Liverpool Street, at last, and, relieved, she joined the river of humanity that poured out of the stuffy train. Walking with long easy strides for she was wearing one of her own 1914 creations but without the hobble underskirt that had been such a stylish feature then. She had ripped it out and now wore only the over-tunic which reached just below mid calf, and gave her legs ample room to move. Fashion was totally irrelevant in wartime, of course, but she had been pleased with the idea when it came to her, liking the look of the neat attenuated skirt with the pretty flare and been even pleased when more and more woman followed suit. Now she was surrounded by busy females wearing sensible tailormades and tunic dresses. Some of them were even hatless, here in the City, though most, like herself, still felt named without at least a small head hugger. No need for feathers now of course; that sort of frivolity belonged to the lost world of 1913 and before.

  She breathed more deeply now, looking up at the milky blue April sky, and the sparrows that swopped so busily. There were fewer easy pickings for them these days, with so many horses gone to the Front; the hordes of chattering small bird that used to feed so richly under the noses of great dray animals that sent clouds of grain flying from their nosebags. Now, the sparrows had to seek elsewhere for sustenance.

  She passed the tea shop on the corner of Bishopsgate, and glanced inside, smiling at the steamy walls and crowded marble-topped tables and the bustling waitresses. Uncle Alex had prospered too, for he had had the good sense to open his shops (now more than forty of them, exactly like this one, scattered about London) from six in the morning till midnight. That way people who worked the nightshifts in munitions factories could get their dinners, and the people who worked during the day, starting too early for landladies to bother to put them themselves out, got their breakfasts too. But he was doing his bit for the War effort as well. Each week he spent a large amount of time in Whitehall, sitting on committees that planned the victualling of the army at the Front and the feeding of vast number of solders in training at home. He had become an expert on mass catering, all because of a now vanished coffee stall outside the Yiddish theatre in Whitechapel. It was an amusing thought, and Hannah’s lips quirked as she crossed the road, dodging open topped buses and the hooting vans and cabs.

  Uncle Alex. He had saved her sanity in those dreadful days after Daniel’s death, seeing her through hell of the inquest, protecting her from Albert’s and Davida’s wrath when they had both turned on her on that awful day, accusing her of hounding their beloved only child to his early death. He sat beside her protectively as she sat shivah for Daniel for the full week, alone because Albert and Davida insisted on sitting their mourning days without her, at Park Lane, Albert’s rejection of her had hurt, for she had thought he had become fond of her, but she understood it, dimly. He had to consider Davida after all. Even at the cost of losing contact with his grandchild. So Uncle Alex had helped her through that dreadful week, and later it had been he who had finally pulled her out of her desperate misery hen she had come so close to despair that she had contemplated, quite seriously, following her Daniel into whatever oblivion he now inhabited.

  ‘Listen, dolly,’ Uncle Alex had said to her that evening, five years before. ‘You gotto stop all this, you hear me? It’s wicked, that’s what it is. Wicked.’

  ‘Wicked?’ She had peered up at him through swollen eyelids. ‘Wicked? I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘Who do you think you are, dolly?’ he said earnestly, sitting facing her with his knees spread wide to accommodate his burgeoning belly. ‘Eh? Who do you think you are? Some fancy lady that don’t have to suffer on account she’s some sort of special creation God made to amuse himself? That you ain’t Dolly! I'll tell you who you are. You're Bloomah’s daughter. You're my mother Rivka’s granddaughter. They had troubles too, believe me, they had troubles. My Momma Rivka Aleva ha-shalom had to pick up everything she ever had to call her own to come and live in the stinkin' East End of a city that didn’t want her or hers with people whose language she couldn’t understand and who despised her and spat on her, and start again. Bloomah, God rest her soul, had to live in a lousy couple of rooms with a feckless husband who was as much use as a bloody sick headache to her, and worked her kishkas out for her children. What satisfaction did she ever have in her life? And the women before them had it bad, just as bad. Worse, some of them. They really new what tsorus was. There was one of the grandmothers, I don’t know who, but I was told when I was a boy, one of the old boobahs in the family, had to give her baby boy away to relations to stop the Tsar getting him for the army. There was others who got themselves burned out by lousy Cossacks on account they’d committed the terrible crime of being Jews. There was some that was raped and killed – why else did they run the way they did and bring us all here, hey? So that you could live and your baby Mary Bee could live and keep us all going, till next time and the time after. Because the times keep coming, the bad times. They always have, and me, I reckon they always will. Right now the goyim are treating us fair enough, not too much hating, just a bit of nagging on account of some meshugganeh anarchists. But they'll start again, you see if they don’t. They always have, and then there'll be work for you to do, and for Mary Bee and for all of us. Who are you now to fold up under your private trouble? Sure I know, you're suffering, oh God but you're suffering. But that’s what Jews is for, dolly. You got to suffer and try again, you hear me? And not only try again, but do better than anyone else. On account that’s the only way we’ve got to show them what we're about. Not just surviving but winning. Beating the lot of them.’

  He leaned even further forwards to pinch her thin cheek. ‘Like me, dolly, like me. You got to do the same. So cry a bissel, lie in your bed at night and cry a bissel, and then get up in the morning and get on with living.’

&n
bsp; Somehow she had. She looked at his broad face and gleaming eyes, almost hidden now in the folds of expensively fed flesh and felt thee strength and love for him and nodded and held onto him and cried bitterly for a long time. But it had been the last time that she cried during the day. She wept at night, night after night, crying for herself to her lonely sleep, but never again during the day did anyone see tears on her cheeks. They saw only concentration and seriousness and then, as the months grew into years, sometimes laughter. Even now, almost five years, she will wept at night occasionally, but it was less painful now, more a melancholy remembering of missed joys and the angry bitterness of the early years. She had filled her days with work, right from that evening when Uncle Alex had picked her up and dusted her off and set her on the road again.

  Not at the tea shops. She had suggested that, but he had shaken his head.

  ‘Dolly, would I ever like to have to you! I tell you, I could make you the best bloody tea shop manageress the business ever had, you should forgive the language. But that would be good for me, not for you. What you got to have is something of your own. And, love you as I do and care about you as I do, there ain’t no way anyone owns Alex Lazar’s business but Alex Lazar. Not even you dolly. Anyway, you need something of your own. I'm here to tell you that there ain’t no satisfaction in this world like your own business. You take your own hands and your own head and you use ‘em to build something that wasn’t never there before. Me, I got my tea shops, and my artist’s agency, and a couple o' this and few o' that besides, and I look at the offices and at the books and I say to myself, Alex Lazar, I says, that’s creation. God you ain’t, but you got that spark he gave you, and you’ve used it right. You got to go the same, dolly. You got to love Hannah Lammeck the way I love Alex Lazar, you understand me? Even if you don’t understand it don’t matter. You will one of these days.’