The long car journey to the East End with Charles driving rather proudly - this was a new skill for him - had been the best part, with the children chattering about his school affairs, for Marie was avid for Eton gossip.
Hannah had hesitated about sending her much loved Charles away to school, wanting to keep him near her, but her guilt about the way his family had rejected him because he was her ward had overcome her. If his surviving grandparents and his dead parents' cousins wanted to pretend he was not a Lammeck, that was up to them; but she knew he was, and he was to be reared as his own parents would have wished. Which meant Eton for all Lammeck and Damont sons went there. So, she had driven him to Windsor one September morning and settled him in his new school, a diminutive, forlorn figure in his high collared shirt and scrappy trousers under the classic jacket and top hat. She wept all the way home again, but it had been the making of him in many ways, training him up to be what he was now, easy going, relaxed and charming.
Listening to Charles and Mary Bee chatter as they drove through the deserted City of London towards Aldgate and Commercial Street she smiled at the back of their heads and felt a great wave of over for them both wash over her. The years had not been easy since the war had ended, what with the struggle to get the business back on its feet once the factory took over the dress mass production, but the children had been there to help her feel there was a point in all her labours. She had no one else but them to love so uncomplicatedly, for her brothers' laziness filled her with exasperation and she felt guilt, still, about Nathan. Having the children had helped soothe the long lonely nights when she would lie awake trying not to remember Peter and behind him, in the shadows of her memory, Daniel. She had made up her mind to it that that sort of love was over for her. She had brought nothing to her men but cold death, and she was never going to take the risk of loving again. So thanks God for the children.
Until Marie had stopped being just a willful spoiled child and had become the willful spoiled young woman she now was. A naughty ten-year-old can be scolded and put to bed early. A naughty fifteen-year-old, Hannah was finding, was quite another story. She refused flatly to go away to a stuffy old girls' school, and demanded the right to stay at home and have governesses, if she must have an education (for which she frankly saw no use at all) and insisted on going out and about unchaperoned, a demand to which Hannah had not yet acceded and which caused most of the fights between them.
The one thing they did not fight about was Marie’s decision to seek out her Lammeck relations. She knew, for Hannah had told her so, that there had been a split in the family long ago, though not really why, and that her father’s relations chose not to acknowledge her mother. In her young years she had been content to accept that. But when she was thirteen she had slipped out of the house one afternoon and with all the aplomb of a person twice her age had taken a taxi to the house of Albert Lammeck, having found his address in the telephone book, and there introduced herself as his granddaughter.
Old Albert, long alone now, forgot the hatred his poor dear Davida had felt for the child’s mother and her refusal to have any contact with the child she had borne, and fell instantly in love with Marie. He refused to see her mother, which suited Marie well enough for she enjoyed having the old man to herself, and began to bestow outrageously lavish gifts on the child. And Hannah said nothing, at all, bitterly hurtful thought Marie’s behaviour was. She felt she had no right to stand between her own child and her other relatives however much she mistrusted them. Only once did she intervene, and that was when the presents became too lavish altogether. She insisted that Marie return Albert’s gift of a diamond ring and wrote a stiff letter to him demanding that the practice stop, pointing out that the child was under twenty-one she, her mother and legal guardian, had every right to exert such control. The old man muttered and complained and told Marie how cruel her mother was, and gave her presents of money secretly, a fact which Hannah well knew and could do nothing about. Marie, of course, was in her glory. When she had trouble with her mother she could always run to her Gramps. Indeed, being a good mother to Marie was a very difficulty thing to be, Hannah told herself, even when Charles was home, for Marie, like everyone else, loved Charles and wanted to please him.
But not today. However well it had started, it soon decayed into another of Marie’s squalls. They arrived at the house of cousin Leon, in a neat terrace at the Hackney end of Shoreditch High Street (for Leon had come up in the world and was doing well with a factory of his own) to find it in an uproar. The living room had been rearranged so that there were chairs all round the walls, under the many heavy pictures of which Leon’s wife Rae was so proud, and a large sofa under the window had been covered with a white damask tablecloth. The bride, a large girl with a somewhat bewildered expression on her face, was sitting in the middle of it, her white lace dress with its uneven handkerchief hem mid-calf length (to show her thick legs in white silk stockings and white kid ankle strap shoes) carefully arranged to display the richness of the design which was fussy to the extreme. Hannah, whose own taste and therefore designs tended towards severe simplicity of line, could not help glancing at Marie and saw the faint sneer on her face and felt a little coldness form in her chest. Today was going to be bad, whatever Charles did to keep the peace. The rest of the bride’s outfit was fussy too, with a headdress plentifully sprinkled with large satin lilies of the valley and twinkling sequins and a veil spotted with more sequins, and a massive heavily beribboned bouquet of already wilting gardenias and camellias and arum lilies, and she could feel Marie’s rising contempt as clearly as if she had given words to it.
The centre of the room was filled with the inevitable food-laden table, round which neighbours and friends and family milled and grabbed and grasped and chewed at the tops of their voices. The room smelled powerfully of gefillte fish and brandy and sweet cakes and moth balls and cigars and perfume, and already a hint of sweat, for it was a warm day although it was still early spring.
By the time they reached the synagogue and had been bombarded with the usual oohs and aahs over how much Marie had grown, and the service under the canopy had been chanted and wept through. Marie was in a towering sulk. Charles was as he always was quiet and amused and interested in all that went on around him and unfailingly polite to everyone, but for once this seemed to make Marie worse.
After the ceremony they went on to the wedding breakfast at two o'clock, a vast meal. Marie picked ostentatiously at her plate and ate nothing, while Charles ploughed his way happily through a heaped plate, and even took second helpings, much to the approval of Aunt Sarah and Uncle Benjamin on each side of him, while Marie grew crosser and crosser.
At home, afterwards, where they had gone to change into evening clothes or the rest of the day’s celebration, the Dinner and Ball, she had thrown a tantrum and sworn she would not go back, but somehow Charles had managed to mollify her. Back they trundled, now in evening dress, to the same hired hall with its trimmings of balloons and trailing smilax and flowers and the false sweep of staircase at the far side where the wedding group were photograph in half a hundred poses.
Now, the second colossal meal having been served and eaten, as though none of the guests had been fed for a week, the dancing had taken over. Another half hour, Hannah promised herself, and I'll tell Marie we can go. Thank God tomorrow is Monday, and I can lose myself at the factory, and the plans for Buckingham Palace Gate. Se sank herself for a while in a little reverie and about how she would arrange her splendid newly leased showrooms, and began to feel better.
The music pounded on and on, and she nodded and smiled at the aunts and uncles and cousins as they whirled past, glad no one had come to sit beside her and gossip. She was almost hoarse with a day of talking to them all, for they were clearly proud of her and her success and everyone in the family and the family’s families by marriage had gone out of his way to come and say, ‘Please God by your lovely daughter and your boy,’ and ‘God willing we should always meet
on such simchas.’
The music stopped and the sound of voices rose to fill the gap. Somewhere across the big ballroom someone started shouting for a horah, and the band good naturedly followed the rhythm of their clapping hands and burst into one of the old tunes. For a moment Hannah felt as though she was five years old again, sitting beside her parents at a neighbour’s house and listening to the singing voices and the thumping stomping feet of the dancers in a circle, heads bobbing and knees bending as they went through the ancient rhythm. Ha va nagilah, ha va nagilah …
She was watching indulgently as one after another they all joined in until the place was bursting with the noise of singing and stamping, and enjoying it in a slightly dazed way, when Charles came pushing through the hubbub looking a little crumpled but happy enough.
‘Hello!’ Hannah grinned at him. I thought you’d be trying this one!’
‘No such luck, I'm afraid, he said, and not for the first time she was startled by the deep note of his voice. Would she ever get used to that baritone sound? Surely she should have by now; he was seventeen after all. ‘I'm just not clever enough to learn it. Where’s Marie?’
She jerked her chin up at him.’ Marie? She was with you!’
‘Oh, blast her!’ Charles said softly and then shook his head, irritated. ‘I told her not to be so silly and to come and sit with you. She was in one of her tempers over someone accidentally kicking her. I'll go and find her. She really is getting tiresome, Aunt Hannah. You'll have to do something - send her way to school, I reckon. It does me all the good in the world, you know.’ And he went ploughing into the still stamping shouting dancers to look for Marie.
But Hannah knew he wouldn’t find her. The wretched child had made up her mind to leave, and leave she had. Her peach silk coat with its chinchilla fur collar had vanished from the cloakroom, and the tired part-time commissionaire at the door of the all thought, though he wouldn’t like to swear to it mind, that he’d seen the young lady goin' off down the Commercial Road. Looked very nice she did, he thought, when she put her coat on, and he’d said as much and had his head bitten off for his pains, so he didn’t exactly look to see where she’d gone when she’d went off, I mean, what man would? But he thought she’d gone off down the Commercial Road, all the same …
50
‘I will find her,’ Charles said soothingly. ‘Don’t worry, Aunt Hannah, I'll find her. She’s probably gone to the Bag o’ Nails or somewhere like that.’
‘Bag o’ Nails?’ Hannah stared at him. She felt sick with fright; it was silly for he to be so alarmed, for Mary Bee - Marie - wasn’t a baby after all; she’d be all right, surely? But she is a baby, a secret voice somewhere deep inside her whispered. Only fifteen. A baby. ‘What’s that?
‘A night club,’ Charles said briefly, shrugging into his coat. ‘She’s developed a passion for the wretched place. A dead bore, if you ask me, but there, our Marie never really asks anyone, does she? ‘I'll find her, I promise. Don’t worry. Go home, darling, and leave it to me.’
It was Uncle Alex who took her home. He had a gift for appearing at just the right moment, and now he came out into the little lobby, his thumbs hooked into the pocket of his white waistcoat and his head wreathed in smoke from the cigar clamped between his teeth, and grinned at her.
‘Having fun, dolly? Where’s that little girl of yours? Not a dance have I had with her, and I’ve got to do that before the night’s over.’
As Charles explained, Alex’s face lengthened. he shook his head at Hannah. ‘I’ve told you, dolly, that little puss wants her tochus smacked. You spoil her, you always have. Listen, Charles, go look. Make sure she ain’t out in the streets, on account it’s not a good time. There' been some trouble.’
‘Trouble?’ Hannah said sharply.
‘Ah, nothin' new! The local shaygetzes got nothin' better to do, they roam around, pick on nice Yiddish boys, beat ‘em up. I’ve got an arrangement with the gym, they're gettin' a few of our boys together to keep an eye out, you know? But they're not out tonight and I'm told there was a bit of trouble over towards Arbour Square. So watch out for yourself, Charles, you dressed like that, they'll get funny if they see you. Take one of the others with you.’
‘Oh, really Uncle Alex, no need!’ Charles was at the door, his hands on the knob. ‘She’s probably picked up a taxi and gone to a night club. That’s her latest craze.’
‘Look in the streets first,’ Alex said. ‘Taxis there ain’t a lot of around these parts.’ Charles went, smiling reassuringly at Hannah over his shoulder ‘Come on, dolly. I'll take you home,’ Alex said. ‘I got the car round the corner.’
‘Ours is here too,’ Hannah said distractedly. ‘I can’t leave it here.’
‘I'll deal with it,’ Alex said soothingly. ‘Relax. One of the boys'll drive it home for you. Don’t worry, Charles'll find her, you'll give her a spanking, it’s finished! You're tired, dolly that’s why you're worrying.’
But when they had been at home in Paultons Square more than an hour and there was still no sign of either Marie or Charles, he stopped being so soothing. Hannah sat hunched in the armchair beside the long dead fire and Alex stood at the window staring out and smoking steadily so that the room greyed with wreaths of tobacco mist.
‘I'm going to all the police,’ Hannah said at last, unable to bear it any longer. ‘Something awful must have happened. We can’t wait any longer.’
‘Not police,’ Alex said. ‘That makes dramas, and please God, there ain’t no need for dramas. Listen, where’s this place he said she might have gone? I'll phone, see if anyone’s seen her.’
‘It’s one in the morning!’ Hannah said. ‘You can’t phone now.’
‘Night clubs I can phone,’ Alex said grimly. ‘I don’t go to them much, but that for them one o'clock in the morning ain’t no time to worry about, that I know.’
The operator took some time to answer. Hannah sat on the edge of her chair, watching Alex jiggle the earpiece rest, and wanted to shake him to hurry up and knowing she was unjust for feeling so. Fear was building in her so that she felt as though her skin was stretched tightly over the maelstrom of feeling within and would burst ay any moment and leave her a screaming wreck. She had to clench her fists to control herself. She was so intend on Alex’s struggles with the telephone that she did not hear the front door open and close. Not until the drawing room door opened did she realize the wait was over. Hannah whirled and stared and Alex stood open-mouthed and then very quickly cradled the earpiece on the telephone and started forwards.
‘My God, what happened? Bloody hell, the lousy mumserin. Hannah, call a doctor!’
‘No,’ Charles said, his voice husky. ‘No. it’s not as bad as it looks. Not as bad as it looks,’ He stared at Hannah and shook his head. ‘Believe me, Aunt Hannah not as bad as it looks.’
His coat was torn and thick with mud. His white tie had disappeared from his collar which had sprung open and his shirt was smeared with mud and blood, most of which seemed to have come from his nose. His right cheek had a graze that ran from the corner of his eye to his jaw line, and one eye was swollen and bruised. His hair ruffled and had sprung back into its childish curliness, and the combination of that and his attempt to smile reassuringly at her was too much for Hannah. She felt the tears spill over and the held her hands out to him and almost wailed his name.
They helped him out of his coat and settled him in a chair, and Hannah ran to fetch water and a towel and gently cleaned his face as he sat patiently, trying not to wince. As he had said, it looked worse than it was. When she had finished it was clear that apart from a black eye and the graze no damage was done. His nose bled ferociously, but was now staunched and had not been broken and the graze was superficial, like those on his knuckles.
‘I gave them as good as I got,’ he said, contemplating his own fists, and then looked up at Alex. ‘Uncle Alex, for God’s sake, why? I did nothing to them! I was just walking, looking or Marie.’
‘What happen
ed?’ Alex said and sat on the arm of Charles' chair.
‘I don’t know.’ Charles leaned back, tiredness in his voice now. ‘Five of ‘em - thin fellows, no brawn on them at all. Looked half starved, to tell the truth. But there were five of them. They just jumped me, you know? I wasn’t doing a thing. They were shouting first, standing at a coffee stall, and when I went by they shouted ‘’sheenie'' and ‘'yid'' to me and I took no notice. I just walked past but then they started again and I stared at ‘em. Dammit, who wouldn’t? And that seemed to do it, because they came all at once, the five of them. And that damned coffee stall man and the other people around, there were enough of ‘em, they watched an they cheered them on. It was the most sickening unfair thing you can imagine. They watched! And they shouted too - "Kill the bloody sheenie! Kill the bloody sheenie!".’
He closed his eyes and Hannah suddenly saw the small six year old Charles standing beside the nursery table with his paint brush in his hand and his thin legs sticking out beneath his blue holland overall. ‘Is Papa going to be killed?’ he had asked, and he had looked just like this; young and serious and remote.
‘Did you find Marie?’ Alex said after a moment. He turned his head and stared at Hannah and shook his head lightly at her. She took a deep breath and pushed down the new wave of fear that his question had created in her.
Charles shook his head. ‘I think she must have got her taxi. I’d been walking around for ages before this happened. In fact, I was sure she’d got away from the district and I was looking for a taxi myself, walking along Whitechapel Road, you know? I don’t know where she is, but I'm sure she’s not in the East End. At a nightclub probably safe and sound.’ Charles opened his eyes and stared at Alex. ‘Why, Uncle Alex? What did I do to make them do that to me? Or me to them? I beat them, you know. The five of them - they went off in the end, and one of them got a fair old pasting from me, I promise you. I’ve been boxing at school. And one of them, I think I broke his nose. I felt it go, and that was awful because it was only a fight - I mean, I didn’t want to do anything like that, but what could I do? There’s only me and those other people cheering them on, and no one shouted for me or helped, so what could I do? I just hit him as hard as I could, and felt his nose crunch. Why? ‘That’s what I can’t understand, I was just walking past … ’
The Running Years Page 51
