There was a little silence. Alex put his hand on Charles' head for one brief moment , then took it away. ‘You're a Jew, my boy. A yid, a sheenie, a Jew. That’s what you did. That’s the insult.’
‘Insult? How can it be an insult just to be? I know I was better dressed than they were, and that’s a bit insulting, I suppose, if you can’t dress up yourself. But it was a wedding, wasn’t it? A wedding, people always dress up for weddings.’
‘Especially Jews,’ Alex said heavily, and got to his feet. ‘Especially Jews. Whatever we do, we do bigger than other people and they don’t always like it. And we're foreigners, remember,? Lousy foreigners.’
Charles stared at him, and then grinned, a lopsided grin that made his eye twitch with pain as his grazed skin stretched. ‘Me, a foreigner? How can I be a foreigner? Dammit, I can’t even learn a foreign language! You must have heard what old Barnsley said about my French, and my Latin isn’t much better. Me a foreigner? I'm English.’
Alex shook his head. ‘You're a Jew, my boy. And they'll never forget it, even if you do.’
The front door opened again, making a muffled sound beyond the drawing room. All three of them lifted their heads at the same moment like birds in a field, startled and alert.
Marie came in and stood just inside the drawing room door, her head down as she watched herself peel of her gloves.
‘Really, this is too absurd!’ she laughed in a high drawling voice, very artificial and controlled. ‘Waiting around for me like this. I just decided to go on, that was all! Too absurd.’
She lifted her head and stared at them all, and they stared back silently and then she saw Charles and her face blanked. She moved to peer more closely at his bruised eye.
‘Charles? What’s the matter, What is it?’
He looked a he and then at Hannah, and lifted is eyebrows in a mocking little grimace. ‘What happened? I went looking for you, fish face, and got my own face pushed in for my pains.
‘You, looking for me? But I don’t - ’
‘You heard what he said, Mary Bee.’ Hannah stood behind Charles' chair, her hands on his shoulders. ‘He went to look for you when you ran off that way and frightened me, and some hooligans set on him and did this. Because he was looking for you.’
Marie was on her knees now in front of Charles, staring up at him. Her face crumpled and she began to cry, looking as she always did when she was distressed, more like a five-year-old than her almost grownup self, but this time Hannah was not beguiled. For years Mary Bee had only had to cry to reduce Hannah to total compliance. It had always seemed to her that the child was uniquely disadvantaged in having no father, and she would not anything to protect her from unhappiness. But not this time.
‘Take a good look, young lady,’ she said now. ‘Take a good look. You did this.’ Marie shook her head and wept even more bitterly, putting her face down on Charles’s knees.
‘Oh Lord!’ Charles said lightly, and pushed her head away, grinning at her lopsidedly because of his sore face. What a carry on! Do stop, ducky. You'll have all the crease out of my trousers. No need to make such a fuss. I'm all right. Bit shattered is all. And I'm not sorry it happened.’
‘Not sorry?’ Hannah said, an bent her head and set her cheek against his undamaged one. ‘That’s taking good heartedness too far.’
‘No, it’s not - oh, Marie, shut up for the love of Mike!’ Mary Bee sniffed and wiped her face with the back of her hand, looking very woebegone. ‘I mean - it was interesting.’ Charles said.
‘Interesting!’ Alex gave a little snort of laughter. ‘Interesting, the shlemeil says!
Charles stared up at the ceiling, speaking in a rather flat voice, almost to himself. ‘It’s this sheenie business. I’ve never had it, you see. No one ever said anything like that to me. It makes you think, doesn’t it? It’s interesting … ’
‘No one at that school of yours never made no cracks about you, Charles? You amaze me,’ Alex said dryly. ‘You really do. I get around, my boy, and the places I go to, I find the same sort of people as your coffee stall heroes. Only they don’t always act so honest and direct. It’s a bit more on the side when you get to some of the high places. Like, they make arrangements for entertainments that don’t include you, by goin' to the sort of clubs that don’t admit Jews, or they organize things that you ought to be part of on Friday evenings or the High Holy Days, so that you got to be left out. And they stop talking when you come by and look at you sideways and grin and nod and borrow your money and sneer at you. Oh, I tell you, Charles, sometimes I’d rather have the coffee stall shaygetzes and their fists. With them you know where you are. With the polite mumserim, you can’t get hold of nothing. And you never noticed that at your school?’
‘I never look for it,’ Charles said. ‘And I think that sort of thing you have to look for. But people with fists, thin people who look as though they’d break in a high wind because they're so scrawny, going for a chap like me with their fists, that’s important? Isn’t it?’
‘What’s important now is getting you to bed, darling,’ Hannah said. ‘You'll feel like death in the morning if you don’t get some sleep. Come on.’
‘Charles, Mama,’ Marie said in a husky voice. ‘Please. I'm sorry. I didn’t mean it. I'm truly sorry.’
Hannah looked down at her and then managed a small smile. ‘No, love, I don’t suppose you did. You never do, do you? Go to bed, too. It’s almost two in the morning. And tomorrow’s a working day for me, if not for you.’
‘Me too,’ Alex said, and stood up. I'll be on my way. Listen, Charles, my boy, keep out of trouble, you hear me? No more going alone in the East End if this meshuggenah madam here goes adrift again. Let her be beaten up next time. It'll be her turn.’ He shook his head at Mary Bee, but there was no real anger in it. No one was ever angry with her for long, and she looked very crestfallen indeed as she watched Charles get to his feet a little stiffly.
‘Of course I'm going back,’ Charles said. ‘I’ve got to.’
‘You’ve got to do nothing of the kind,’ Hannah said sharply. ‘You're not the sort to go in for revenge, Charles, for heavens sake.’
He stared at her, his forehead creased. ‘Revenge, Aunt Hannah? Of course not! I’ve done that. I mean, I gave them worse than they gave me. I told you, I broke that poor devils' nose! It’s not that. It’s just that I’ve got to find out. Uncle Alex said this sort of thing happens all the time. but I'm seventeen and it’s never happened to me, and I’ve got to find out why and - well, just why. So I’ve got to go back.’
‘Charles, don’t be a shlemeil!' Alex said. ‘You're one of the lucky ones, one of the golden ones. You never got spat at in the street? Great. You never got a cold shoulder? Better still. You don’t have to go looking. Just be grateful you're sitting where you sit and stay there. Only an idiot does looking for trouble.’
‘I'm not looking for trouble,’ Charles said. There was a stubborn note in his voice now. Just information. I have to know why.’
‘Bed,’ Hannah said authoritatively. ‘Bed for everyone, and especially you. You're worn out and you can’t think straight when you're worn out. Come on.’
As she was falling asleep at last, an hour later, after seeing both the young ones settled in bed, and having hugged a contrite Mary Bee back to peace of mind, she thought suddenly, ‘How did she get home again? She didn’t have enough money with her to pay for two taxies. How did she get home?’
51
Something would have to be done about Marie. Even as she thought about it, sitting alone at her early breakfast the next morning, Hannah made a wry little grimace. The child had won over her name, just as she won over everything. It wasn’t good for her. She was becoming more than willful; she was a danger to herself, and knowing it was largely her own fault that Marie was the way she was didn’t help Hannah feel any better.
She went first to the factory in Artillery Lane to spend an hour with Cissie, who was still managing that complex operation with ever in
creasing efficiency, and then went on to Buckingham Palace Place to check the new workshops and showrooms there. The ready-to-wear side of her business was thriving and was the source of the family’s security. As long as women wanted cheap and cheerful dressed Artillery Lane would make a comfortable living for Hannah and the children as well as Cissie and Forrie and Bet and all the workers who spent their days with their heads bent over the machines and pressing tables. But it was the couture side of her activities that most satisfied Hannah, and as always would. To design beautiful garments for rich and beautiful people was a source of real joy to her, and not because her clients were rich and beautiful. She found a complex pleasure taking handsome tweeds and luscious silks and frothy chiffons and converting them into new objects of clean shape and elegant line and harmonious colour. When she made her Mary Bee garments she was creating as any artists would, and she knew it. When she made her Artillery Lane garments, which didn’t even have a trade mark (the shops that bought them put on their own labels) she was simply making a living.
The difference was important to her even though the couturiere business had made her once again an unwilling part of the clan upon which she had turned her back. Her customers included many of the established English aristocracy, but the merely rich came to her too, and that included Lammecks and Damonts and Gubbays and Rothschilds and all the rest of the great Jewish houses; and her attitude to them could not help but be coloured by her past experiences at the hands of Davida and Albert Lammeck. When a new customer heard her surname and was surprised and started asking questions about her connections with the Lammecks, she was evasive; polite but unforthcoming, though she knew they soon found out from each other and gossiped. Se needed to remain remote.
But she had to admit they were a particular joy to dress, these connections of hers, with their lazy good looks and elegant bodies and the carriage that came from years of wealth and security and contentment. English beauties with their pallid fairness and their delicate skins and faintly flushed with rose were subtle and interesting, but these Jewish women with their splendid complexions and large dark eyes and lustrous skins, still carrying, many of them, the hint of rich colour that Bartholomew had brought to England from the East all those long years ago, looked magnificent in Mary Bee creations. She would stand back and watch the preening and know that they were special and be angry with herself for admiring them the way she did. She ought to be as cool with them as she was with the English roses, just a couturiere, a creator to whom they turned for self-adornment and no more than that. But because she tried so hard to be the same with her Jewish clients as she as with the others, she only succeeded in being ever more remote and abrupt. She did not know it, but she had a reputation among many of her clients for ’difficultness.’ Not that it mattered; it added to her distinction in their eyes. Having Hannah Lammeck ignore you showed you were being dressed in the most fashionable way possible.
Buckingham Palace Gate looked particularly satisfying this morning. The workmen she had set to rearranging and decorating the rooms had nearly finished. She stood in the marble entrance hall staring at the great curving staircase and feeling good, in spite of her fatigue. Her eyes were sandy with lack of sleep, for she had only dozed for a bare four hours or so, but still she felt good as she looked. The crimson carpet against the white marble of the stairs, the delicate curving iron balustrade, the little marble copies of Greek statutory in the staircase niches, it all looked exactly as she had visualized it. The great showroom, too, with its creamy wild silk covered walls and the massive crystal chandelier and the low white suede sofas and armchairs almost blended into the deep pile of the white carpet, all looked as muted and subtle and yet as exciting as she had planned. Her clothes would stand out magnificently against such a background and she felt a lift of sheer excitement as she imagined, for one brief moment, the first mannequin parade she would have, next month. The clothes were nearly ready, the invitations were out. It would be superb.
Then, even as she saw how the great showroom would look, another vision lifted itself against her eyes. Herself as a scrawny carrot-headed child crouching by a half dead fire in Antcliff Street drawing pictures of dresses on blue sugar bags. It was an odd experience, and she shook her head at herself, and went swiftly up the stairs to the workrooms and her office above.
By eleven o'clock her fatigue was forgotten. The workrooms were purring with activity, the women sitting at the big tables with their needles flashing busily as they made buttonholes and felled seams and set in hand-made shoulder pads. Hardly any machine work was done at all here, unlike Artillery Lane, and the noise and reek of machine oil that was so much part of that establishment was quite absent. There was just the scent of new linen and the hiss of modern gas fires and the breath of coffee from the corner where the most junior girl kept the pot bubbling to sustain busy fingers through the day. There were plenty of people working, for Hannah was now able to offer apprenticeships to selected girls, and there were several eager fourteen-year-olds being taught to sew fine seams as well as pick up pins and make coffee.
She was absorbed in her costing sheets when one of the little apprentices came breathlessly to tell her there was a gentlemen please madam, and she’d told him as how madam was busy, but he said he wouldn’t take long and please could he come in?
Hannah made a face. There were always salesmen pestering her to buy cottons and needles and pins. She had opened her mouth to tell the child to send the man away when he appeared in the doorway behind the girl and nodded unsmilingly her.
‘Thank you, Rita.’ Hannah said composedly, and Rita looked over her shoulder and bobbed at the visitor and then at Hannah and went scuttling away, leaving the two of them staring at each other.
She knew at once who he was. They had not me directly for many years, in fact the last time she had actually seen him had been half her life ago, at an afternoon soiree Mary had given at Eaton Square, and then she had hardly noticed him. But he was so much like his sister, with a wide mouth that looked as though it would move very easily with none of the stiffness about the upper lip that was so common among the men who came to her showrooms with their wives, and with those deep clefts in his cheeks that he was unmistakable. On Daphne, the Countess, that look gave a raffish air, a sly horsiness that had always made Hannah uncomfortable when she came to choose clothes, and which had coloured her reaction when she head that Marie had met her. But in this man the look was quite different. It made him quite starling attractive and mature even though she knew he was five yeas younger than herself. He looked like a most interesting man, and one she would like to know better. No, she whispered deep inside herself. No, that’s the last thing you want. Lammecks are trouble and never forget it.
‘Mr Marcus Lammeck.’ Her tone was frosty. ‘What can I do or you?’
‘Mrs Hannah Lammeck,’ he said gravely and bent his head. ‘Good of you to remember me. It’s been a great many years since we actually saw each other. An At Home at my Uncle Emmanuel’s house as I recall. I hadn’t realized you’d noticed me at all. You, of course, were quite unmistakable.’
I'm right, she thought. His mouth does move easily, curling around words in a most interesting way.
‘I recognized you because you look like your family,’ she said, still chilly. ‘Your sister is a client of mine.’
‘Ah,’ he murmured. ‘The Countess - tiresome wench, isn’t she?’
‘I really couldn’t say.’ Hannah lifted one eyebrow a little. What can I do for you, Mr Lammeck?’
‘May I sit down?’
‘By all means.’ But she made no effort to indicate a chair. He fetched one from against the wall, and settled himself on the other side of her desk.
‘I feel as though I'm asking for a job, sitting here like this. Would I be any use as a dressmaker, do you think? They tell me lots of men are involved with fashion these days, Captain Molyneux, and so forth.’
‘I have a great deal to do this morning, Mr Lammeck,’ she said, gl
ancing at her watch pointedly and then at him. He stared back, and she became suddenly every aware of how she looked. She was wearing one of her favourite dresses, a soft green crêpe with pleats falling in panels from the low slung pockets and with long wide cuffed sleeves that showed her slender wrists and fingers. She had had her hair cut in the newest close shingle, and it shone with a particularly coppery glint in the sunshine pouring in through the high windows of her office, and despite her fatigue, she knew she was looking well. She needed little makeup and rarely used it, but this morning she had used some mascara to darken her lashes, as much to cheer herself as because she particularly wanted to impress anyone.
And now she was worrying about impressing this man! It was maddening. She tightened her lips again, ‘I really do have a great deal to do this morning.’
‘Then I’d better get to the point, an I don’t want to,’ he said, and unexpectedly smiled, a wide smile that deepened the clefts of his cheeks making him look, paradoxically, younger. ‘I’ve come to meddle in your affairs, Mrs Lammeck. I loathe doing it, but I think I must,’
‘Oh?’
‘It’s my sister’s fault, I suppose,’ he said, and leaned back in his chair. ‘She has no more sense that a flea, frankly, and since she married her wretched earl she’s lost what little she ever had. She’s taken up with your daughter, I'm afraid.’
The Running Years Page 52
