The Running Years

by Claire Rayner

  ‘You seem to understand her better than I do.’

  He smiled then and the mobile mouth curled and the parallel clefts appeared in his cheeks. She thought again, nice face. Nice.

  ‘That’s because I don’t love her too much,’ he said. ‘Which is why its easy for me to see what she needs. You'll let me do it?’

  ‘Yes please.’ She managed a smile.’ And - ‘ She stopped and then shook her head. ‘Yes?’ He quirked his head at her, waiting.

  ‘Nothing - I mean, would you care for some coffee, or a drink perhaps?’ He shook his head. ‘You weren’t going to say that, were you?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘Try again.’

  She made a little face. ‘No, I wasn’t. I was going to say I'm sorry. And thank you. And I hope you can forget how rude I was last time we met.’

  He put his hat down very carefully on a small table, and threw his coat over the back of the chair beside the dead fire and sat down with a sigh of relief, stretching his legs out throwing back his head against the chair back.

  ‘Thank heaven for that,’ he said. ‘Now you can come and sit down, and we'll start from the beginning. It’s the only place to start. And I'll have that drink you weren’t going to offer. Whiskey if you have it. You have something too. You need it.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, a little blankly and then, with a spurt of irritation, ‘Help yourself. The table in the corner.’ She sat down in the other armchair, kicking off her shoes and throwing her own head back to rest as he had.

  ‘Better and better,’ he said, and went to fetch drinks. He brought her the same as his own, whiskey with a splash of soda, and though she rarely drank anything so powerful, she took it gratefully.

  ‘Now, he said, coming back to his chair. Where shall we begin?

  ‘Where shall we - don’t talk riddles, please I'm too tired.’

  ‘We’ve a lot to learn about each other,’ he said. ‘Friends need to know a lot about each other, and if we're to be friends, then the sooner we fill in all the gaps the better. Shall I start by telling you about me, or would you rather start by telling me abut you? I know a lo already, of course - ’

  ‘Like what?’ She had taken very little of the whiskey but already it was warming her, making her feel easier.

  ‘Like you married my cousin and he left a widow with a baby. Very stupid of him.’

  ‘Stupid! That’s harsh word.’

  ‘No, it isn’t I knew David better than you might think. A charming chap, but not the most sensible of people. I hope you haven’t gone on mourning him all these years?’

  She looked at him over the rim of her glass, but said nothing. She should have been offended but somehow she wasn’t. The whiskey she thought a little confusedly. Or tiredenss?

  ‘I’ve wondered why you haven’t married again, you see,’ he went on. ‘I’ve kept an eye on you, as much as I could. When Judith left Charles to you, and everyone was in such an uproar, I told them it would be all right, that I’d see no harm came to him, so i’ve had to watch out for you.’

  She opened her eyes wider and stared at him then her relaxation disappearing. ‘You’ve been spying on me? Because of Charles?’

  He laughed.’ Such a dramatic word! Not spying, just watching. Not that it was necessary. I told them very early on that there as no need to worry over Charles. He’s been better with you than he would have been with anyone else in the family. He’s a lucky boy to have you for a mother.’

  ‘I’d rather he’d had his own parents,’ she said, and her voice was flat.

  ‘I know,’ he said gravely. ‘They were special people. And Peter told me… ‘ There was a little silence.

  ‘Peter told you what?’ She sat very still, feeling a warmth growing deep inside her that she knew was not the whiskey.

  ‘That you were special,’ Marcus said simply. That’s all. That you were special. I knew anyway, of course.’

  ‘That I'm special?’ Her voice was a little unsteady, but she could do nothing about it.

  ‘No. That I look forward to finding out for myself. I mean that he loved you, and you him.’

  She felt the warmth rise higher and higher, filling her belly and then her chest, and then to her own fury felt it spill over into tears. She stared at him, holding her face as still as she could, and keeping her eyes wide open to prevent the tears from spilling out, and he looked back at her with the same grave look and said quietly, ‘It’s all right you know There’s no need to feel bad about it. It helped him, I think. He loved Judith but he needed to love you too. It was inevitable. Just as his dying was. Those were bad times and you made them better for him. Hannah, will you believe me? It’s all right. Don’t look so … like that. Please. I need you to look happy. I really do.’

  ‘Do you?’ she said, and the tears that had hovered withdrew, leaving only the warmth behind. ‘Why?’

  He smiled then, that wide and easy smile that made him look so young. ‘You'll find out,’ he said. ‘You'll find out. Now go to bed. You're exhausted. You look as though you need sleep more than anything else in the world. I'll see you tomorrow, after I’ve spoken to Uncle Albert. Tomorrow evening, over dinner. I'll call for you at Buckingham Palace Gate. Goodnight, Hannah.’ And he was gone, leaving her sitting in her armchair and staring at the opposite one and trying to collect her thoughts into some of coherence.

  53

  In years to come Hannah was to look back on that summer of 1925 as though it had been preserved in golden amber. Though there were the children to worry about, especially Charles, it was a glorious time in every other way. The business was thriving; the first collection from the new showroom caused a furor, and she found herself in demand in a way she had never been before. Women who regularly dressed in Paris, with Coco Chanel or Poiret, Lanvin or Worth demanded Mary Bee clothes and wore them everywhere. She was photographed wherever she went and bombarded with requests from the newspapers to write articles on What the Modern Girl Should Think, and What the Modern Woman Needs to Know and a great many other things which had nothing whatsoever to do with her skill as dressmaker. Of course, she refused all such offers, having far too much to do to be interested in becoming any sort of journalist, but she was flattered and amused all the same, and found herself basking in her new found fame.

  For the first time since she had moved into the house more than fifteen yeas before, Hannah agreed to make it over, and decorators and builders descended. The kitchens were equipped with the newest electrical equipment, including a refrigerator which made Bet’s eyes open wide, and central heating was installed with radiators in every room, much to Florrie’s gratification after fifteen years of hauling coal scuttles. The drawing room was stripped of its old fashioned art nouveau decor, somewhat to Hannah’s regret, for she had always been particularly fond of it, and replaced with the newest rage in furnishings, which was cubist. There was square furniture upholstered in vividly coloured geometric patterns, piles of jazzy cushions, curtains which bedazzled the eye. Florrie was enchanted with it all, and no less enchanted with the dining room, which Hannah made as snowy as her showrooms, all in white and gleaming chrome and glass. Even her bedroom was done over in shimmering mauves and lilacs, and a new bathroom added in which she had a special shower built, all very daring and American. Jake’s and Solly’s rooms, too, were totally redecorated, since they had seized on an offer by Uncle Alex to spend some time in New York ‘keeping an eye on his interests'. Hannah knew that Uncle Alex had created the job for them; and although she felt a certain amount of guilt about how relieved she was to have her house less crowded, she did not feel as badly about their departure as she might. She spent a great deal of money and enjoyed herself hugely, looking forward with glee to Jake’s and Solly’s exclamations when they returned from New York and Marie’s response to it all when she came home from Lausanne.

  For Marcus had manipulated Albert exactly as he said he would. Marie, offered the chance of finishing school in Switzerland, was entranced with th
e idea. The word school on her mother’s lips, she said, made her think of hockey sticks and long hikes in the country that gave you hideous muscles, but a Swiss finishing school, where she’d meet the most divine people and really learn about life and what the world was something else. Hannah, suitably coached by Marcus, primmed her lips and looked doubtful, and allowed Marie to coax her into giving her consent.

  Seeing her off had been misery, a hectic farewell at Victoria Station where Marie caught the boat train.

  Hannah had been controlling her anxiety and distress at parting with her beloved daughter so well that she had given no thought to where their final farewells must take pace. When they actually arrived at the station in Uncle Alex’s Hispano Suiza she felt her belly lurch in that all too familiar painful fashion. The station swarmed with fashionable people rushing to catch the boat trains or the Flèche d'Or through to Paris, but as she looked at it the scene seemed to float out of focus and a picture came over it of the way it had looked the first time and she had seen a traveller off here, eight years before. Then it had been khaki, everywhere, under clouds of steam and children with crying faces and women with dry eyes and apples rolling on the ground …

  She jerked her thoughts away and helped Marie, who was flushed with the excitement of it all, to count her luggage, and soothed he when she announced dramatically that she had lost her dressing case and found if for her, and would not let herself remember.

  At last Marie was ensconced in her first class compartment and the guard had been heavily tipped to take full care of the transfer of her luggage and her own safe conduct to the boat. As Hannah stood watching the train curve away down the line she could control the memories no longer. She stood there, bereft, feeling the same sense of despair filling her as had filled her that last time, standing in the same station, with Judith at her side.

  When she had turned to go, almost blinded by her own pain, he was standing there in what was a familiar pose of his, his hands clasped together in front of him, his overcoat hanging over his arm and his hat in one hand.

  ‘I thought you might be feeling it a bit,’ he said. ‘So I played hookey from Lammeck Alley. They can manage without me for a while, don’t you think? Yes. So do I. Come on. We'll go and have a great big piggy tea at Gunter’s and talk nonsense.’

  And so they had, eating crumpets and jam and milles feuilles and licking their sticky fingers and laughing, so that she had gone home to Paultons Square calm and relaxed, genuinely happy that Marie was safely on her way.

  Once Marie had gone, life with Charles became easier. He continued to be passionate about his new found beliefs, especially the political ones; he sat opposite her at meals, his elbows on the table, talking lucidly and with great excitement about his dreams of a new world, and she sat and listened and watched his eager face, and began, slowly to understand.

  All her life she had known about poverty and hunger and misery. She had been born into it, and grown through it and out of it. Now she was comfortably off by means of her own talent and the pain of her deprived childhood had long since left her. Indeed, if the thought about it at all, it was to be glad that she had been so toughened in her early years. If she had not been so, would she have had the strength, the energy, the sheer application to have reached the point she now stood upon? Listening to Charles, she realized how different it was for him. Protected from his birth by the comfort of money and love, his world had been a good and caring place, marred only by the blind inevitability of war that had stolen his parents from him. Meeting for the first time in his eighteenth year, as he now had, the sight and smell of poverty, it had felled him. It had not been only his beating at the hands of those street boys which had affected his conversion; it had been his own later observations in those narrow mean streets that swarmed around Whitechapel Road and Commercial Road. And, now, talking to Hannah, he managed to communicate to her his anger and his passion and his solid determination to change it all.

  ‘If I persuade just one man that he owns his own soul and the work of his hands, Aunt Hannah, it will be worth it. If I can fight and destroy just one of the men who steal their hearts from them as they steal their labour, then I shall have been born for something.’ The high flown words were robbed of any banality by his sheer passion, his total conviction that he was right, and she listened and thought, and slowly stopped worrying about him. The way of life he had chosen might not be one she would have chosen for him, but it was his, and it filled him with satisfaction and striving. In his anger and distress and hunger for justice he was a very happy young man. What more could she want for a child she had always loved? And all through that golden summer, while Charles learned and argued and listened to David and ranted at his meetings, and Marie danced and chattered with other girls in her Swiss school and Florrie and Bet purred happily about the house in Paultons Square, Hannah fell more and more deeply in love.

  She had never meant to. She was a woman who had made up her mind. She was the woman who was never going to live again. She was going to be celibate for the rest of her life, she had told herself; devoted to her work and her children. No man with a curling mouth and clefts in his cheeks was ever going to change that.

  Was he?

  But he made arrangements for her that were so irresistible that she could not demur, though she did try, often. But what was she to do when he announced he had such treasures as opening night tickets for the newest Noel Coward revue, ‘On With The Dance!’ Or when he arrived at Buckingham Palace Gate just as she was leaving at the end of the day, and drove her off to summer-warm Maidenhead to eat supper at Skindles, and then punt along the dark river while a gramophone played ‘Poor Little Rich Girl' in the bow? Such treatment was irresistible and at last she gave up trying to resist. When she caught sight of his familiar figure standing in the hall waiting for her, his hands clasped in front of him, she let her stomach turn over and made no effort to control the excitement. When the telephone rang and she knew it was he, she hurried to answer it. He had slotted himself into her life as though a place had been carved out for him, long ago, and had just been waiting to be filled.

  He never said anything about their relationship, even though they became closer and closer. They would talk about everything and anything - world news, the art shows, the newest ballets and plays and music and food and wine and books. They shared silly jokes and puns. They chattered about their acquaintances. Yet close as they became in friendship, still there remained a barrier between them, and that puzzled Hannah. She knew he cared about her, and found her exciting. She would see his eyes on her across a room and feel her skin redden at the unmistakable message that was in his glance; she would feel his hands on her arm as he led her to a theatre seat, and she knew the electricity that leapt in her at his touch communicated itself back to him. Yet he said nothing.

  Until one night in late October. She was feeling depressed, for the summer holidays had been a disappointment to her. Hannah had been looking forward to Marie’s return home with enormous excitement, and then, out of the blue, there had been a laconic telegram from Lausanne announcing that Marie had been invited to spend the holidays at the Riviera villa of Comte Hugo de Marechal, the father of her dearest friend at school, so she could not come to London after all. Hannah had managed with considerable difficulty to telephone her, waiting hours to get a line, and Marie had been cheerful and friendly, but clearly amazed that her mother could possibly expect her to come home to London when she had the chance to go to Cap Ferrat with such madly fashionable people.

  ‘Ma chère maman,’ she had carolled in the thin crackling little whine that the telephone made of her voice. ‘You said I could come here to be properly finished, and if you fuss over letting me take up the opportunities that come my way, how can I possibly benefit? Tu comprends, Maman? C'est necessaire!"

  Hannah had comprehended and said no more. The child was happy, and that was what mattered, but Hannah had been disconsolate, and Charles had been of little help, absorbed as he was
in his own doings. Hannah had tried talking to cousin David about him to see if he could persuade the boy to spend more time at home and with his old friends. It worried her that he was so intent on his new learning that he had no fun at all. ‘A boy of eighteen,’ she told David, ‘ought to enjoy himself some of the time, surely. Tell him to come to the h theatre with me sometimes, David, or to a party. He’s looking so pale and so - oh, so anxious it worries me.’ But she got little satisfaction from him as she had from Marie.

  ‘Listen, Hannah,’ David had said, sitting at his kitchen table with his elbows on it, and the inevitable book between them. ‘You’ve got your life to live and your boy Charles has got his. He came to me to be taught, and it’s a mitzvah to teach such a boy. You wanted that I should refuse? Tell him he’d be better off dancing the Charleston? How could I? Sure I knew it would worry you, that his ideas and attitudes wouldn’t be comfortable for you, but Hanna, that’s your problem, not his. If you try to change him, all you'll do is drive him away. And I'll tell you this much, that boy is someone so special that I regard him as my brother. If he told me he wanted to come and live here with me, then the door would be open to him.’

  And Hannah looked round the small crowded kitchen with its line of washing drying on the racks overhead, and the toys littered the corners and the shabby furniture and knew there was no more she could do. David and his young wife Sonia had enough to cope with, what with their two small babies and the struggle to live on the few shillings David earned as a Talmudic teacher, she could not allow them to burden themselves with her Charles. And she knew that if she leaned too hard on Charles that he would come here, unaware, as only a rich boy could be unaware of the responsibility and expense he would be.

  By that evening in late October, she was restless and aware of a dragging discontent somewhere deep inside her. Her friendship with Marcus mattered enormously to her, but it was not enough. The old needs were stirring in her, the old hungers she had so rigorously repressed all these years Se would stand sometimes in her bathroom after her shower and stare at her own naked body, still beautiful, even though she was far past her thirtieth birthday; she saw enough of the bodies of her clients when the were being fitted to know that her own shape was good. Her breasts were as firm as they had ever been, rich and full and smooth, and her waist had not thickened nor had her hips and buttocks sagged. Yet it was a beauty that was wasted, and that, for the first time since Peter’s death, depressed her. She began to be angry with Marcus for awakening her hunger while doing nothing to satisfy it.