So Mary Bee Couturiere had been born, and thrived. The business made enough money to pay the cost of running the house (at least she owed that, her only inheritance from her brief marriage) and to pay Florrie and Bet and later the girls who came to sit and sew beside her. To pay for the sewing machine and pressing table and materials which she put in the red walled dining room and that first year, she had made enough to pay back Uncle Alex and his initial investment.
He stood and looked at her holding out the cheque to him, her chin up a little, and for one dreadful moment, she was afraid he was going to refuse it. If he had, the whole edifice would have crumbled, for she knew now the truth of what he had told her that April evening. That the full ownership of her own business had to be hers, that any feeling that he still had a share in it would somehow have diminished her achievement. She had fought back and won, and he had to take his money back to prove that she had. He understood. He took the cheque and solemnly gave her a receipt, and then took her out to dinner at Keppner’s restaurant, and fed her on quantities of salt beef and apple strudel, and made her laugh a lot.
Now Mary Bee Couturiere operated smoothly and was still keeping busy in spite of the shortage of silks and satins and feathers and beads and sequins, and in spite of the guilty consciences of the fashionable women which kept them away from their dressmakers. And there was also Artillery Lane.
She stopped on the front step and looked up at the blank faced building and took a deep breath. The war was hateful. The fact they had to make uniforms for girls who would spend their time in them dealing with men who had been shot at and bayonetted or gassed by other men was sickening. But the hard fact could not be denied: Hannah Lammeck now owned her own factory, and employed fifty people in it and had a thickening bank balance to cushion the future for Mary Bee, safe at home now with Bet and Florrie to look after her. It was a warming thought.
‘You're early, Hannah!’ Cissie Weiss came thumping up the stairs behind her, panting a little. She’d put on weight since she’d agreed with joy to come and work for Hannah instead of Isaac Levson, but it suited her. She looked regal in her handsome green suit and with her mass of black hair pinned up. ‘Bleedin' kid - you think I could get him out of bed this morning? Not Lennie Weiss! He reckons he’s old enough to do what the hell he likes, and going to school ain’t what he likes. I said to Joe Cohen at the paper shop this morning, I told him, that kid'll be enough to make me take him at his word one of these days and marry him. Maybe with a father to beat the tochus off him, we’d get somewhere. See the paper?’
‘No Thanks, Cissie,’ Hannah said. They went together into the cluttered little office at the back of the factory, Hannah switching on the lights as she went. ‘I’ve got enough to worry about. The more I read the papers, the worse I feel. Look, at that girl - what’s her name, Jessie Cantor - if she’s late again she'll have to go. I know it’s hard to get people who're any good, but she’s a bad influence.’
Cissie hung up her coat and pinned on her supervisor’s overall. ‘Glad to give that one the push,’ she said with relish. "She’s a trouble maker. And l’ve got a couple of girls from down my street might do as fellin' hands, if I give ‘em a bit of training. Listen, last night there was seventeen bolts of serge came in - I checked ‘em and three of ‘em’s faulty. Bad dye errors. So, what do I do? Try and run ‘em in on the cut and hope they don’t show too much, or send ‘em back? Thing is, if we do that, we'll run out of work for the third bench of machines, and they're on piece work and won’t take it kindly.’
‘Damn,’ Hannah said. ‘I knew i shouldn’t have left early. If I’d have been here I could have sent them back right away. Look, I'll call the dyers. See what they can do to replace them. Three pieces, you say? It’s a lot, and the next delivery not due till - ‘ She shuffled through the papers on her cluttered desk. ‘Next Wednesday. Not good. I might have to send one of the men over - ’
‘Be better if you call Mr Lammeck, wouldn’t it? Cissie said. ‘He gets them moving faster'n any of ‘em. Or shall I?’
Hannah kept her head down, staring at the delivery note in her hand. Call peter. She could say thank you again for the last night as well as ask his help to sort out the bad delivery. Calling Peter would be a very agreeable thing to do, which was a very good reason why she should not do it.
All the same, as soon as the big clock on the far wall showed nine o'clock and she could count on him being there in his office, she closed her office door against the roar of the machines and the workers' chattering voices, and asked the operator to put her through to the Ministry of Supply.
43
‘Dearest Hannah,’ Judith said. ‘I am utterly and totally exhausted. I can’t tell you how it’s been this past week - I’ve had every morning at Aunt Susan’s, rolling bandaged. You should just see them all the old ones, solemnly dressed up in vast white aprons and the nurses' white veils, every inch the ladies with the lamp, sitting there with the maids bringing tea and cakes every five minutes to restore their strength, and moaning all the time about how frightful it is with all the butlers and footmen gone off to the army! I can’t tell you how difficult it is to keep a straight face, but for all that it is hard work. They make me do all the really difficult bits like cutting the gauze and then humping the boxes of finished bandages away. Then in the afternoons if it isn’t slipper-making at my revered Mama-in-law, it’s sewing pillow cases at the Goldsmiths' or packing chocolates and cigarettes into parcels for the Front at the Willem Damonts. And then I’ve been out three evenings this week at fund-raising balls. Truly darling. I am positively wrung out!’
She didn’t look it. She sat opposite Hannah at the corner table at Uncle Alex’s Bishopsgate tea shop eating her poached eggs on toast with very evidence of enjoyment, and looking very beautiful indeed. Even thought she had done all she could to look 'ordinary', regarding it is immoral to look expensively dressed in wartime, removing every piece of trimming from her blue hand tailored suit, it still looked what it was, superbly cut and made of the most costly fabrics Paris could provide. Her hair was as luxuriant as ever and her skin as unblemished and warmly coloured. It was small wonder that so many of the tired workers eating their frugal lunches watched her covertly over the rims of their tea cups.
‘So, darling,’ Judith finished her poached eggs and reached with gusto for her currant bun, I can’t tell you how grateful I am that you have time to take care of my poor Peter. The poor angel works so hard all day he’s entitled to a little relaxation in the evening and with me so busy on war work and organizing the fund-raising balls and all, I'm no pleasure to be with for he so loathes the social scene. And the darling does so enjoy his stuffy old music! It’s so sweet of you to go with him and sit through it.’
‘But I like Elgar,’ Hannah bent her head over her own tea cup. This was awful. Her weekly visit with Peter to the Queen’s Hall in Langham Place were a rainbow of colour in a world that was grey. To be thanked by Peter’s wife for doing the thing she most wanted to do, which was to be alone with him, was beyond bearing.
'Really, Judith,’ she said now, almost desperately. ‘I love the music. It’s no hardship.
But I won’t be able to any more.’
‘Oh, darling, why not?’ Judith opened her eyes wide. He'll be quite desole! He told me, you're much nicer to go to concerts with than I am. I chatter so much I spoil his enjoyment, and you, he said, are positively tranquil. You mustn’t stop going, you mustn’t. If you’d said you loathed the music of course it would be different, though even then I’d beg you to do on, as though it were war work, don’t you know!’ She laughed with great merriment. ‘Indeed, I insist that you do. It is you war work. Well, I know the factory is too, of course, but - well, you need the rest, and so does Peter, and you both enjoy it, so that is that!’
She gathered up her gloves and pushed back her chair. ‘Dear heart, I must go! I promised Charles that I would take him to the Zoo this afternoon. I'll tell you what! I'll go along and collect Mary Bee,
and take her. I'm sure she will adore it, little wretch that she is, and then we can go to tea at Gunter’s and I shall give them masses of cakes an ices and make them thoroughly sick and we shall all have a blissful time! Then you need not fret about rushing home to Mary Bee, you can go straight to meet Peter in Whitehall and have some dinner before you go to the concert! There, it’s all arranged, and I must go. Thank you for lunch, sweet one. Too, too delicious.’
Hannah watched her go, and gave up fighting her conscience. Perhaps she was being foolish after all. Peter seemed to see no threat in their evenings spent without Judith, so why should she? Clearly he did not recognize the electricity in her that she felt in him, so all she had to do was control her own reactions, and just go on being the Peter Lammeck’s dear cousin Hannah their good old friend, and not make any unnecessary problems.
It’s probably all own fault, she told herself as she paid the bill and walked back to the factory. I’ve been alone too long and I see things that aren’t there and want things I shouldn’t.
And the concerts were a delight. Haze of delight. He’d been so matter of fact about it that first evening, as indeed he was on every other succeeding one. ‘I have tickets for the eight o'clock performance, and Judith as usual is gadding about on one of her things, so you shall come and hear it with me,’ as though it were the most natural thing in the world.
She had let the music swap her in its comfort and sing its shapes into her tired brain and been totally content in a way she could never remember being, even when Daniel had been alive. There was a placidity in Peter, a still centre that sent waves of peace out to her, and quelled the anxiety that was so much part of her now that she did not event realize it was there, until Peter dispelled it with his presence.
He had sent her home in a cab before going home himself that evening and he said, almost as an afterthought as he closed the door on her, ‘Next Monday. I'll meet you here, at half past seven. Then we'll have time for a glass of sherry before they start. It’s rather light and pleasant next week. Pomp and Circumstances, inter alia. Very patriotic of course. Never mind. We'll still enjoy it. Goodnight.’
She enjoyed it as he’d said she would, and gone the next Monday and the Monday after that too, as they drifted into a pattern, a drink before the concert at the Langham Hotel, watching the khaki clad figures of young officers on leave being feted by the usual cluster of eager girls, and then the music, and afterwards back to the hotel for a little late supper. They ate little for usually both of them were too tired to bother much about food by the end of the day, and both had busy days to face on the morrow. The long social evenings and self indulgence that led to fuddled weary mornings were long since lost, though the roistering officers and their friends did their best to carry on the old traditions. Peter would watch them somberly and then catch her eye and smile a little wryly, and say nothing.
Perhaps tonight he would be a little more cheerful than he had been last week? He had shown his usual calm face to her, but she had been aware of tension, of uncertainty of some kind inside him and fretted all week about it. Tonight, perhaps, he would feel better, be himself again?
They listened to the music as usual and when went on to the Langham, not talking much at all until they ordered their meal. Then, one soldier in particular caught their eye, a tall young man who laughed a lot with a great deal of exuberance and was particularly noisy, and seemed, too, be more than a little drunk. Certainly he was exceptionally clumsy and knocked things from the table and laughed uproariously when his companions fielded them for him. They seemed less elated that he was, and after a while Hannah said quietly, ‘I think he’s blind, you know.’
They watched for a little longer and then Peter bent his head sharply, not wanting to watch any more.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘He’s blind. That’s quite a performance he’s putting on.’ ’they're really incredible, these boys. That’s all they are, most of them, children. I feel sick sometimes. I dare not think about what’s happening, it’s so ugly. I keep saying to myself, just finish today. That’s all. Tomorrow can take care of itself. Just finish today.’ 'But it can’t take care of itself,’ he said. It’s got to be looked after. That boy’s looked after some of the tomorrows. That’s why he’s here now, blind as a mole and fumbling in the dark and laughing his head off so that we can sit here and think that he’s drunk.’ His voice sounded harsher than it usually did. She looked at him and tried to see what lay behind his words, but his face was, as usual, unreadable.
‘There’s nothing more we can do than we're doing,’ she said, almost defensively. ‘I'm working as hard as I ever have, and so are you. Though it worries me that I make so much money out of it.
He made a little gesture, almost literally brushing that aside. ‘That’s not important. It’s only money. Not important. There’s more to be done than we're doing.’
He looked at her, and she could see for the first time some tension in the muscles round his eyes. ‘I sit at a desk with a telephone growing out of the end of my hand and I move thousands of yards of cloth and buttons and thread and tape and needles and tailor’s chalk and out of the other end of the machine which I am comes uniforms and uniforms and uniforms. But it’s not good enough.’
‘Not good enough? What more can you do, for heavens sake?’ She let her voice rise a little. ‘You're already doing an enormous job.’
‘I should be wearing one,’ he said, and bent his head again to contemplate the untouched food on his plate. ‘I should be there at Hill 60 listening to that barrage and up to my knees in mud. I should be falling asleep not knowing if I'll ever wake up again. I should be taking the same chances they are.’
‘Why?’ She wanted to reach out and hold on to him physically. The war had alarmed her from the day it had started and she had spoken no more than the truth when she said that it made her sick to think about it. But so far it had not touched her personally. No one who was close to her had put on khaki and gone to be killed at Ypres. No one she cared about was facing German bombs and torpedoes at sea She had to deal with nothing worse than shortage of familiar goods, and hard work, and making money. But now she was frightened, filled with plain cold terror that made her shoulders ache and the back of her neck feel as though great weight had been put on it.
‘Why, Peter? I can understand the boys getting excited and needing to go. They’ve sat in schoolrooms waiting to grow up and for them it’s a marvellous adventure. And the people who never do anything worth doing, who have no real use at home except for ordinary things, they're the ones the recruiting posters are after. Not you! You're doing an important job, Peter. If you left the Ministry who else could run the department the way you do? It’s like oiled silk, the way things work. I know you're doing a vital job, and so do you if you think about it. Don’t be infected by war fever, please. You're needed here.’
'There are any number of people who could do my job,’ he said, still with his head down, staring at his hands on the table cloth in front of him. He was kneading small pieces of bread into grey bomb-shaped pellets. ‘Old people. People who’d be no use at the Front, in the way I would be. Established people. Not Jews.’
She leaned back, chilled suddenly by the edge on his voice. ‘Jews? What has that got to do with anything?’
Now he did look at her. ‘You have to ask that? You? Don’t you know what people who came here before you put up with? Your parents, all their relations, all their friends, they came here like locusts, and they moved in, and they stayed. And my people, not my parents, I know, but a little further back, though not that much further back, it was the same with them. Old Bartholomew Lammeck came here from India, a funny little man wearing a proper suit of clothe for the first time in his life, more used to a turban than a top hat, he came here, and they let him come and stay, and now London’s full of us. My people and your people. Hordes of us.’
‘Well?’ she said,’ What of it?’
‘We have to do something about it. Now.' He shook his hea
d and managed to smile a little. ‘I suppose I do sound like a story out of the "Boys' Own Paper", but there it is. I'm grateful, you see. I feel I owe this country more than I can repay. That’s one bit of it. And there’s the selfish bit, too, of course. They don’t like us really, you know, the English - not yet. They're a funny lot, you see. They let us come and stay and looked at us sideways and didn’t say much, but they didn’t really take to us, and though we’ve been here long enough to look like them - well, not all that different - and to talk like them and live like them, we're still that bit different and they don’t really like or trust us. We make them uneasy. But if enough of us stand up and fight with them in this war, well, maybe they'll like us better. I’ve got roots here Hannah. They don’t go as deep yet as I’d like them to. Not deep enough to be really safe. I want to push them further in, and the only way I ca do that is by putting on one of my own damned uniforms and going to that mess in France.’
She felt her eyes get hot as she watched his fingers, long flexible fingers, go on kneading the bread, making bomb after bomb, piling them neatly beside his plate. She didn’t know what to say. She knew what he meant of course; she was as aware as he was of how unstable their hold was in the city of her birth. She had heard the gibes of
‘Jewgirl!’ shouted after her in the street. She had heard Judith making her light mocking jokes about the times she had been snubbed by fashionable parties because she was ‘one of the Chosen, my dear, these Hebrews get in everywhere … ‘ Had bitten her tongue when even Florrie who she knew was devoted to her personally made unthinking references to ‘That there grocer, e’s' a right villian, always jewin' you down.’ Only last month, there had been that fuss about Sir Edward Speyer. He’d been running the London underground train system for years, had made a superb job of it, but a whispering campaign had started, accusing him of being a spy, just because he was a Jew, and he’d had to resign. Peter was right. They did have to justify their presence in this country, had to prove themselves entitled to be here. Born here, but not belonging.
The Running Years Page 45
