The Running Years

by Claire Rayner

  She raised her chin a little. ‘I know. Marie told me.’

  ‘She told you?’ For the first time he lost some of his air of relaxation. His brows came down to form a straight line over his dark eyes. ‘You know and you don’t care?’

  ‘I didn’t say that,’ she retorted. I said I knew. But I fail to see what affair it is of yours whether I know anything, or what interest my daughter’s behaviour is to you.’

  ‘She looks a nice child, at bottom, he said reflectively, almost as though he were talking about the qualities of a new car. ‘Basically nice manners, but a little spoiled, I suspect. It worries me to see her with a hard drinking set like my sister’s. I’ve told her, of course, but Daphne is quite impossible since she married. If she’d done the sensible thing and settled down with the Goldsmid chap who fancied her, it would have been much better all round, and I told the family so at the time, but they were so dazzled by that damned earl business. So, she lost what little sense she had, as I said, and I'm concerned to see a girl as young as yours hanging around with her lot. Very raffish, they are Mrs Lammeck, very raffish. You ought to keep a closer eye on her.’

  Hannah felt the muscles in her cheeks knot against her jaws, she was clenching her teeth so hard. To have this interesting, looking man lecturing her made all her own anxieties about Marie even worse.

  ‘I fail to see what concern it is of yours,’ she said, her voice high and hard. ‘I am well aware of my daughter’s … activities, and I don’t need you or anyone else to come and tell me.’

  ‘There! I said I loathed meddling in others' affairs.’ he smiled again, friendly and relaxed. ‘It does put people’s backs up. But there are times when you must do what you must. And times when you have to take the risk of upsetting people. Take last night. There I was at the Manhattan, it’s a most reprehensible place - Mrs Meyrick opened it last month after they let her out of prison, you know - and I wasn’t too pleased to find myself there anyway. But a customer from Amsterdam wanted to go there, and what can we business people do? And almost the first person I recognized is your daughter. She looks very much as you did when I first saw you, you know. And I just had to do something. I walked up to the child, told her it’s time she went home and put her in my own car. Daphne was past caring, frankly, and I dare say the party was getting a shade boring anyway, but really, the child shouldn’t have agreed to go in a strange man’s car so easily. I told her I was Daphne’s brother, but there was no proof? She let me derive her home to your house, and swept out for all the world like a countess herself. She could teach Daphne a thing or two about aristocratic behaviour, I suspect, but then I'm genuinely concerned about what Daphne might teach her. Do remember, wont' you?

  He got to his feet. ‘I'm fond of my sister, but I'm not stupid about her, and she’s bad news for a girl as young as yours. So, there you are! I came to do my family duty, and now I’ve done it. I'm sure you'll keep a close watch on her in future and - ’

  ‘And you can get out!’ Hannah said luxuriating in lost temper. She felt the colour rising in her cheeks. ‘How dare you come here and lecture me! Who do you think you are? The mere fact that I married your cousin and you run your family’s business and lives doesn’t give you any jurisdiction over me. Marie is my affair, and stays that way! I'll thank you to keep out of what doesn’t concern you.’

  ‘Oh, damn it,’ he said quietly, so quietly that it stopped her in full flood. ‘And I hoped I’d done it tactfully. Well, I suppose there’s no way to be tactful in such a matter. I'm sorry, Mrs Lammeck. I’d hoped we could become friends over this, but there it is. Good morning.’ he turned and went quietly, closing the door behind him.

  She spent the rest of the day in a blur, working smoothly but automatically, without giving her full mind to what she as doing. When the time came to go home she took a taxi instead of making her usual frugal journey by underground. It was not that she could not afford taxis; indeed she could, but there was a long memory of past penury in her and she hated to waste money unnecessarily.

  This evening she sat at the back of the cab watching the traffic rush by and stared out unseeingly. That damned man! As if she didn’t know Marie was a problem! Did he have to come and lecture her so? But he didn’t, her secret voice whispered. He was really very charming about it, and it was a caring thing to do. Suppose it had been you in his position. Would you have gone to so much trouble for someone else’s errant child. And instead of thanking him she’d chewed his head off. Oh damn damn, Marie ought to be spanked.

  But when she got home he forgot her rage because Marie was in such a state of anxiety.

  ‘It’s Charles, Mama!’ Mare came rushing down the stairs to greet her a soon as she put h key in the lock. ‘He’s been gone all day, and I'm so worried!’ She stood there with her eyes filled with ready tears and Hannah put one arm out and hugged her, almost automatically.

  ‘Florrie!’ she called, and Florrie came toiling up the stairs from the basement, wiping her hands on her apron.

  ‘I’ve told her not to take on so, mum, but you know our Miss Marie, always works herself up, like she did when she was a baby. I told her, there'll be tears before bed if she don’t stop it. No, don’t you make faces at me, madam! No harm done, mum, I told him what you said, and he was to take it easy today, but he said he was right as a trivet and he had some business to see to and he was going out. He put some flour over his eye - he’s a caution that one, but he was right, it did hide it real good! And off he went about eleven o'clock.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Back to that hateful East End,’ Marie burst out and clutched at Hannah’s dress rather dramatically. ‘I told you it was an awful place, Mamma, and if we’d never gone to that horrible wedding, none of this would have happened.’

  ‘Be quiet,’ Hannah ordered. ‘Florrie?’

  ‘He said he had to see someone, and I asked who and he laughed and said not to worry, it wasn’t no one as’d do any harm. Your cousin he said, but here, you’ve got a lot o the cousins, ain’t you mum? And I couldn’t say which it was, and with Mr Jake and Mr Solly not here there was no way I could work it out. But I wouldn’t worry, mum, really, I wouldn’t and so I’ve been telling madam here all day. The way she’s been goin' on! He’s a good sensible boy not like some I could mention as isn’t a million miles away, and he'll come home safe and sound. He promised to be here for supper at seven and it’s all Lombard Street to a China orange he will. So you go and take your bath mum, and settle into your comfortables and I'll deal with you, Miss Marie. You can come and make the custard for dinner. Keep you occupied that will, and let Bet take the weight off her feet.’

  At ten to seven Hannah heard his key in the door and came out of the drawing room to meet him. He was standing in the hall, unwinding his scarf from his neck. At first she couldn’t see him properly, for he was standing with his back to the light that was coming through the glass panels of the front door. But then he turned to greet her and her chest seemed to lurch, for he looked so strange, so very unlike the Charles she had know and loved for so long. His usually neat hair was rumpled and his eyes, those sleepy smiling friendly eyes, were wide and seemed to have had a torch lit behind them. He looked as though he had been quite, quite changed, and she wasn’t sure it was a change she liked.

  52

  ‘Charles, of all people,’ Hannah said. ‘How can such a thing happen to Charles? He’s an intelligent boy, educated.’ She shook her head. ‘You're not helping, Uncle Alex,’ she said with an edge to her voice. I asked you because you always know what’s best, I’ve leaned on you for years and now you're telling me there’s nothing I can do? There’s got to be.’

  ‘For an intelligent woman you're being stupid,’ Alex said, and leaned forwards across the vast expanse of his office desk. ‘I'm telling you, the boy’s been converted. Never mind that it’s politics as much as religion - whatever it is, there ain’t no way you can change the situation. Be glad it’s no worse, is all.’

  ‘No worse! He
says he’s leaving school! He wants to spend all his time in the East End with my cousin David, and when I get my hands on him, I'll - ‘

  ‘You'll what?’ Ale leaned back an shook his head at her. ‘What can you do? The boy went to see him because he recognized the man’s got spirit in him. And so he has, one of he best Talmudic scholars of Omsk, got the respect of more rabbis than I’ve had hot dinners.’

  ‘And a bolshevik.’

  ‘Listen, dolly, I don’t know what he is, bolshevik, menshevik, all I know he’s interested in the Russian ideas. And why shouldn’t he be? What does a Talmudic scholar have to lose preaching revolution? Gornisht! So he can enjoy himself dreaming crazy dreams about how everyone can have what everyone else gets. When you're a businessman like me, you can’t afford such notions. Bu I don’t grudge David his dreams - they don’t do him no harm.’

  ‘They’ve done Charles harm!’ Hannah flashed, and got up restlessly and moved over to the window to stare down into Pall Mall. Alex had bought one of the handsomest buildings London could produce for his offices, and worked as he lived, in luxury. But all she could see when she looked down was Charles’s pale face and wide bright eyes and the air of suppressed excitement that had been so much a part of him since the evening he had come back for his day spent with David Lazar in Sidney Street.

  ‘What harm?’ Alex said reasonably. ‘Just tell me what harm! So the boy wants to leave Eton? Is that so terrible? Place costs a fortune, and as far as I can see ain’t doing him a ha'porth of good. If he’d ever said he wanted some special sort of career that he had to have Eton education for, it’d be different. But I’ve talked to him and he always said he had no special ideas about what he wanted to do. Said he’d probably finish up in Lammeck Alley like all the others.’

  Hannah turned and stared at him. ‘He said that?’

  ‘He said that. And looked content enough to say it. It fretted me, I'll tell you. It sounds so defeated, you know? No spirit in it. A nice boy, your Charles. Good hearted and - nice, you know? But he had no guts in him., Lazy, easy, nice boy. But now - ‘ He shook his head. ‘I saw him, you know? Last night over at David’s. And he was … I don’t know. It made me feel good.’

  ‘It made you feel - Oh, Uncle Alex, you're as bad as he is! I can’t talk sense to him, and now I can’t talk sense to you - ’

  ‘Listen to yourself, Hannah! Just listen! You're not talking sense! You're just displaying your own prejudices! What does it all add up to? The boy says he reckons he’s been a parasite all these years. That the Eton people are parasites and he’s had enough of ‘em' He wants to learn about his own roots, his own people, and he’s going to go do David every day to learn Hebrew an a bit of Jewish history. Is that so terrible for a Jewish boy? Your David, he says he wants to be a Jew, a real Jew, not a parlour one. He says he got beaten up for the way he was, so he wants to have the game as well as the name. Be a real Jew. And you know something? That makes me feel good.’

  ‘Why? Because it salves your conscience abut your own behaviour?’

  He grinned. ‘Now you're using your kopf! Sure,I'm lazy mumser. Never go to shul unless I you must, and I forget the last time I prayed of a morning. So, it does me good to see someone else doing it for me.’

  ‘It’s not the religion I mind, Uncle Alex. I might not be a devout person myself - if anything I suppose I'm not really sure I believe in God. Why should I? But that’s my business, just as Charles’s beliefs are his. It’s the rest of it that frightens me, He talks so wildly, how he’s going to change the world, get rid of the poverty and the landlords and share all the money. It’s such nonsense. He told me I'm as risk of being a capitalist, you know that? Because of the factory. I told him that without me a lot of people wouldn’t have jobs at all, and people without jobs are people without food. And he said that would all change one day, that the time would come when the workers would own everything that it was a future worth fighting for. On and on he went. It scared me.’

  ‘No need to be scared dolly,’ Uncle Alex said comfortably. ‘Believe me, no need to be scared. At his age he’s entitled to change the world. Leave him alone, and thank God you don’t need any of his earnings like parents did in the old days. You can indulge him while he gets it out of his system. And when the time comes and he’s got to earn his living, I'll find a place for him. So don’t be scared.’

  She tried not to be, but the change in Charles was so dramatic that it affected all of them. The old laziness that had been so charming was gone. He was up before any of them each morning ('Praying,’ Florrie told her in a low voice. ‘With them leather straps and all that on his head and on his hands, real peculiar, he looks, I never meant see him but he left his bedroom door open,’) and refused to eat the sort of food they provided. Hannah had never bothered with kashrus; her mother had, of course, for all the East End people did, but Mary, in common with many of the richer West End Jews, had bee very lax about the biblical dietary laws, and Daniel had cared even less. Now, Charles demanded his own special china, and ate only vegetables and fruit and bread and cheese. He would eat no meat or fish for fear it was not kosher, and that ruffled Bet dreadfully. It ruffled Florrie too, and also, inevitably, Marie.

  For days she crept about the house lackadaisically, doing all that her mother or Florrie and Bet asked of her. The only time Marie was so complaisant was when she was ill, and they watched her fearfully. But then, one evening, she burst into tears when Charles came home from the East End, where he now spent every day, and begged him to be as he had used to be because she couldn’t bear it.

  ‘And it’s all my fault,’ she wept. ‘If you hadn’t had to go looking for me you wouldn’t have had your head beaten by those horrible men and you wouldn’t be acting so crazily now.’

  Then it was Charles’s turn to lose his temper. He told her she was an arrogant spoiled baby to take to herself the credit for what had happened to him. That she would do better to stop beating her breasts and carrying on as though she were God himself, changing other people’s lives, and set about changing her own by doing as he did, and learning something of her Jewish heritage.

  ‘You're ignorant and stupid,’ he said scathingly, and she went white at the scorn in his voice. ‘When the revolution comes people like you will - well, there'll be no place for you. You’ve got to change now before it’s too late. And if you’ve got an atom of sense in that empty head of yours you will.’

  Hannah lost her temper than, for Marie looked so stricken. She launched into him with his selfishness, and he went white too, and said in a clipped cold voice that he would leave the house and go and live where he belonged, among real people of the East End.

  They made it up, of course for Hannah cooled as fast as she had boiled over, and managed to talk both the children down to calmness. In the end it was agreed that Charles would go on as he had chosen, attending David’s East End Yeshivah each day, and going to his political meetings in the evenings, and that no one would criticize him for it; at home, however, he would stop criticizing Marie, or Hannah herself.

  So an uneasy peace descended on Paultons Square. Marie spent her days with her governess, and her evening drooping about the house or going to bed early with a book, while Hannah worked longer hours than ever getting everything ready for the first mannequin display of her new collection at Buckingham Palace Gate.

  The night before the showing at Buckingham Palace Gate, she worked until almost midnight to make sure all was ready. She had known she would have that sort of day, and had asked Marie to come with her. ‘I’d love you to see the dress rehearsal, darling,’ she' said. ‘I’d value your opinion.’ But Marie had pleaded a headache, and Hannah had gone without her.

  She came home to find Florrie in a state of great confusion, standing in the hallway in her flannel wrapper and curling papers, and Marcus Lammeck in her drawing room, with Marie in her room refusing to talk to anyone.

  ‘I’ve done it again,’ Marcus Lammeck said, standing in the middle of the room with his
overcoat slung over one arm and his top had gleaming in his hand. ‘I had to.’ He was wearing evening dress, and looked tired. She wanted to put her hand out to him, but she didn’t. She stood by the door and said only, ‘Marie?’

  ‘Marie,’ he said, then shook his head. ‘I had no intention of ever meddling again, but damn it, the child was behaving appallingly. At my sister’s house, I'm afraid. Half drunk carrying one like a - well, you would have meddled yourself. So, I brought her home. Only this time she argued.’

  He touched his cheek and for the first time Hannah saw that there was a scratch there. She closed her eyes for a moment.

  ‘Oh, what am I to do?’ She looked at him miserably. She was too tired to be angry, too distressed to be anything but honest. ‘She’s so unhappy and so am I, and since Charles … I just don’t know what to do.’

  ‘Will you let me advise you?’

  She stood very quietly there looking at him. He had not moved, still standing with his overcoat thrown over one arm and his hat dangling from the other hand, and the thought confusedly, such a nice face. So comfortable. A nice face.

  Wearily she said, ‘I'm no coping well on my own, am I? I thought I could, but she’s almost defeated me. Advice would be welcome.’

  ‘Let me talk to her grandfather. He’s a difficult man, I know, and he’s behaved badly to you, but he’s got some influence over Marie. I’ve found out that much. I think if he suggests to her that she should go away to school, somewhere exciting, like Paris, or Switzerland, she might go. She’s at an age when she'll want to do things to upset you, you see, so if you suggest a school, she'll fuss. If my Uncle Albert does, however, she'll want it.

  She stared at him and then rubbed her face with one hand. It felt numb, and she was so tired.