It stopped being a station platform and became a flower market. Roses. The scent of roses. ‘Roses roses all the way and myrtle dropped in their path like mad,’ she heard someone say and tried to turn her head to see who it was, but the pillows under her neck got in the way and she couldn’t move at all.
‘Hannah.’
The cold wet weight was worse now. She flexed the muscles of her thigh, trying to move her foot away to be free if it, but no matter how hard she tried she couldn’t do it and she was angry then and wanted to shout, but all that came out were little whimpers and she wanted to say loudly, ‘Be quiet! Such a stupid noise!’
‘Hannah, dolly, it’s all right. It’s all right. Keep still, dolly. The nurse says you got to keep still.’
Another voice, not a warm friendly familiar one with bubbles in it somewhere, but a cold voice with trickles of ice water in it. ‘Lady Lammeck, you must stop that! If you keep moving that way you'll pull the drip down and then where will we be? Do keep still!’
‘Hannah, dolly, open your eyes. Please Hannah’
She thought about that for a moment. Open her eyes? A strange request, for they were open, weren’t they? She was staring at the taxi on the train lines at the end the platform in the flower market …
She experimented, trying to open her eyes that were not closed, and discovered that she was wrong. They had been closed, quite tightly, and now she was opening them the light that came in was hurtful. She closed them again, looking for the reassuring familiarity of the train lines and the flowery platform, but all she could see now was light, Platforms and trains and taxis had disappeared.
‘Try again, Hannah,’ the familiar voice said, and obediently, she did and stared at the source. Uncle Alex, his face so blessedly familiar that she felt warm everywhere except where her foot was; that was still cold and wet and so heavy.
‘Uncle Alex,’ she said. Her voice sounded very odd, thick and croaking, just like the voice that had been so silly about the roses and the myrtle. ‘Uncle Alex.’
‘Gott se dank!’ She saw he was crying, the pouches under his eyes wet and gleaming in the lamp light. ‘I thought you’d never talk again, and that’s a fact, dolly. Gott se dank.’
She looked at him consideringly and then turned her head, carefully, almost surprised to find it obeyed her. A long white room with light, with patches of red in tidy patterns and flowers in a vase. She frowned, knowing that what she saw was familiar yet not able to identify it. She turned her head back to Uncle Alex, looking at him with hope. He would know. He always knew.
‘Uncle Alex?’ He took her hand in his and it felt so comfortable there that at once she where she was and said carefully,’ Hospital?’
‘Yes, dolly. Hospital.’
She lay and thought about that for a while, staring up at the ceiling high above her, watching a cobweb in a corner swaying in a faint breeze. ‘Hospital,’ she said again, still carefully.
‘In Letchworth,’ Uncle Alex said and she frowned at the cobweb which shook itself more vigorously in the breeze and told her nothing. There was haziness around the edges of the cobweb and she thought, ‘I'm tired,’ and closed her eyes but felt a wave of fear come with the drowsiness.
When she opened them again she knew somehow that she had been asleep for all she had been afraid to, and turned her head to look for Uncle Alex, to apologize for being so rude. He was sitting there, his head slumped to his chest and she wanted to laugh. He had fallen asleep to, was as rude as she was. She felt a wave of tenderness for him lift in her and wanted to touch him, but she could not reach, and let her hand fall back. Bu he seemed aware of her movement and lifted his hand with a jerk and stared at her, his face a little blank from his sleep.
‘Hello,’ she said, and managed to smile, though it hurt a little, for her face felt stiff. ’tell me what happened, Uncle Alex. I'm all - muddled.’
You can’t be that muddled, a small lucid part of her mind told her pompously. Not if you know you're muddled.
His face seemed to crease a little, and he looked at her hand on the counterpane and then reached for it, holding it tight in his fingers. She wanted to pull away because his grip was hurting her.
‘Factory got a direct hit, he said, and is voice seemed louder than it needed to be. ‘They found you in the street. Thrown out by the blast, you were. Fractured ankle, three ribs cracked, bruises. Bit of concussion.’
‘Oh,’ she said. Her ankle that was the cold wet weight, of course. She tried to squint down at her foot, but all she could see was a hump in the bedding.
‘A cast,’ he said following her gaze. ‘Plaster, you know? Like a great big boot. Looks silly, really, but it'll cure your break.’
‘That’s good,’ she said drowsily, and yawned, and felt her eyes closing gently as sleep stole over her. It was a good feeling, not alarming at all, as it had been before, and she was just letting it slide over her head when she realized what it was that she hadn’t said to him.
‘Marcus,’ she murmured, and hardly opening her eyes as she spoke. ‘When will he be here?’
There was no answer and the sleep began to roll back from her eyes. Slowly she opened them and looked at Uncle Alex, there in the chair beside her. She said again, 'Marcus. He'll be here soon, won’t he?’
He lifted his chin and looked at her and now the tears were there again on his pouched and lined cheeks and he stared at her for a moment and then shook his head, very definitely, from side to side like a clockwork doll. He looked so absurd she laughed, had to laugh.
‘Dear Uncle Alex, don’t be silly! When is he coming?’
‘I … he won’t be coming,’ Alex said aloud again. ‘You might as well know now. I told 'em I’d be the one to tell you, and I got to. He was on the stairs, dolly, when the factory got hit. On the bloody stairs. They reckon he never knew what happened.’
65
For a long time she did not think about Marcus. She thought instead of unimportant things like her ankle, which refused to heal and which eventually needed operations to repair the damage that had been done, and about the fact that the doctors told her, regretfully, that she would never regain normal use of it, that it would always be stiff. That gave her something to sit and brood about, there in the small day room at the end the long hospital ward, something she could encompass in her mind.
She thought, too, about her workers, worrying herself about them so that she needed sleeping pills night after night. Where would they go now? Millie, who had been a finisher for her twenty-five years, ever since the VAD uniform days, and Moishe the presser who had come to her as a club-footed boy of seventeen and was no working to keep his senile parents as well as a wife and a couple of children, and old Mrs Schneider whose efforts as a felling hand were of small value to production but who had been part of the place, the best tea maker, the one all the young girls relied on when they were worried about their boyfriends; who would employ her now, a woman of almost seventy?’
And Florrie, what about Florrie, treking out from London to see her day after day, making the tiresome journey into Hertfordshire on slow erratic trains, standing around for hours on windy station platforms uncomplaining and eternally patient, what about her?
She would tease and worry at her thoughts, obsessively, and knew it was all she could do, for how could she allow other thoughts of the greatest hurt of all to come into her mind? If she once allowed herself to think of Marcus, she would be lost forever. She knew that. Only by resolutely turning her back on the abyss of pain and despair that Marcus now was could she go on living at all.
And, extraordinarily, that mattered. In later years when she could allow herself to look back on the autumn and winter of 1940 and the early spring of 1941 she would marvel at how she had never once contemplated the possibility of just dying, as she should have done that Friday afternoon in Artillery Lane.
She had listened to what Uncle Alex had to tell her, his voice angry and loud with the misery of it, about how Marcus had told the peopl
e at the War Office that he was taking his wife for a night out, and they were to let him go early, how the driver of the official car he always used had tried to persuade him to take shelter as the sirens went just as they reached Artillery Lane, how he had gone tearing headlong do the street to the factory as soon as he had realized how close the raid was, and how the bomb - a comparatively small one, as it turned out - hit the roof dead centre just after he had gone rushing in. The driver had tried to hold him back, had himself been blasted into a hole on the far side of the street because he had not gone to take shelter himself, but he had not been able to save Marcus.
Once Hannah had been told all that, she closed her mind on the information, wrapping it in silence, hiding it away. Alex, her most constant visitor, seemed to understand, for he said no more about Marcus at all. Once, one afternoon during that first month, he leaned forwards and held her hands together cradling them in both of his, and said quietly, ’dolly, I'm proud of you. You're a credit to yourself, to your family, to all Yidden. You're well named, boobalah, you know that? Lammeck, lameck, strong, in the old Hebrew. That’s you. Strong and quiet and good. I love you, dolly. Take care of yourself, and what you can’t take care of I will.’ He had kissed her on both cheeks had gone, walking down the ward with that slight swagger of his, his heavy checked coat swinging and leaving a tail of cigar smoke behind him. She almost cried that afternoon, sitting in a hospital ward full of yellow and bronze chrysanthemums, watching him go and feeling dreadfully alone. But she did not. Lameck, strong, I must be strong.
They let her go home in early November, limping heavily and holding onto a thick ebony stock that Uncle Alex had brought her, because she had become too restless to stay. The orthopaedic surgeon, an elderly man with finicky ways and a passion for complex joint surgery, had wanted her to stay, so that he could operate again. ‘Might be able to get more mobility back,’ he had said, but she had refused. As long as she could get about at all, that was good enough. She had no need for more. She needed home and peace and comfort now.
Home. Florrie had lit up when Hannah had told her she was going to open up Paultons Square again.
‘I don’t care of they do bomb us there,’ she had said. ‘Anyway, they haven’t so far, so maybe they won’t. It seems to be mostly the East End and the City and the docks. Anyway, I don’t care. But you should go away, Florrie. Go to Whitby with Bet. You know she’d love you to be with her.’
But Florrie of course had flatly refused and had a happy fortnight getting all the furniture out of storage and cleaning the house from top to bottom.
On the day Hannah came, home, the weather was the sort that she and Marcus had both loved, cold and crisp but very sunny, with the last of the leaves on the trees whispering in the sharp breeze. The air smelled clean, with none of that thick explosive smokiness that had been so much a part of the atmosphere at Artillery Lane. Uncle Alex helped her out of the car wordlessly, supporting her with one hand under her elbow, but she disengaged herself gently and stood there, leaning on her stick and staring up at the house. It was important to her that she walk in unaided, and he seemed to understand and stood back as she made her way slowly and painfully up the steps.
As she reached the top step, her control as tight as she could keep it, refusing to think of Marcus here, the front door of the house next door opened and someone came out. She stopped as she saw Hannah and smiled widely.
‘Hello, Lady Lammeck! I am glad you're back! Oh, have you been hurt? I am sorry! Fall, was it?’
Hannah stared at her, a tall buxom woman with iron grey hair, trying to remember. She had never been on particularly close terms with her neighbours, and this one had come to live at number twenty only a couple of months before the war started, all so long ago, so forgotten. She couldn’t even recall her name.
‘No, not exactly,’ she said now. ‘I - it’s nice to be home.’
‘Will you be starting up your dressmaking again, by any chance?’ the woman said brightly. ‘I was just going to start coming to you for some dresses and lo and behold you stopped for the war! But not for the duration, I hope! I’ve got some absolutely stunning silks my son brought home from Shanghai and I'm absolutely dying to have them made up! Do say you're going to start again!’
Hannah looked at her consideringly and after a moment nodded. ‘I might,’ she said. ‘Let me see the silks, I'll see what I can do.’
‘Marvellous! Couldn’t be more marvellous! I'll pop in tomorrow after, seven, if that’s all right? Must dash now, war work you know! Got a first aid detachment waiting to be taught bandaging. See you tomorrow!’ And she went rushing importantly down the Square as Hannah stood on her step and watched her go.
That was how it was that she began to live again. The factory was gone and had to be forgotten, and Marcus had gone and was not to be thought of, but Mary Bee Couturiere was still there, waiting to be part of her life again. When Cissie came out of the sanatorium she had had to go to at the end of 1941, after an alarming haemorrhage, to find that her Hackney house had been bombed and was uninhabitable she came to live in Paultons Square with Hannah, and together they picked up the threads of the old days. They made up the precious hoarded fabrics that women brought them and altered and refurbished old dresses from the halcyon days of the thirties, and later, when illicit supplies of parachute silk came on the black market found themselves sewing that extraordinary material too.
Florrie went on as she always had looking after them, cleaning the house and cooking their meagre rations with as much skill as she could must and, when they needed her, joined in the sewing. Much of it was hand work, for sewing machines were hard to come by, and the only battered one they had frequently broke down, so there as ample work for all of them.
And, oddly, they were happy. The would sit, the three women, with the wireless playing ‘Music While You work' and ‘Workers Playtime,’ Cissie sometimes singing along with the familiar tunes in her gruff alto, and talk a little of unimportant things like weather and films and the books they were reading. The never discussed the war, never listened to the war news on the wireless together, tacitly agreeing to shut it out of their shared lives as much as they could. Hannah would read the papers at night, after she had gone to bed, and for all she knew the others did too, but whether she worried about setbacks in North Africa or found hope in news of successful RAF raids on Germany, she never said a word about it to them any more than they did to her. It was as though they had all agreed that they had fought their war, and lost it. Now they would struggle on, somehow, letting others carry their share of the rest of it.
Nor did Hannah ever speak to Cisse and Florrie of her other distress, the continuing silence from Holland and from America. Once she had asked Uncle Alex to do what he could, to see if he could find out anything about what was happening in Holland but he had come back after six weeks, miserable and angry because despite his many contacts in Government offices he had drawn a blank. There were some refugees trickling out, occasional escaped prisoners of war who managed to get away by sea to England, but none of them, it seemed, knew anything much about what was happening there, and certainly nothing about one young English Jew who had disappeared in Amsterdam.
As for Marie, all Hannah knew that she was still drew her regular income from the bank as arranged by the lawyers at Lammeck Alley. Peterson had come to see her shortly after she had come home from hospital, to tell her of her own financial situation, and of what was happening with Marie’s money.
‘Sir Marcus was a major shareholder in Lammeck and Sons, as you know, Lady Lammeck,’ he had told her. ‘Business at present is, of course, virtually at a standstill, except for those factories which have been turned over to munitions or other war production. All our overseas interests have been frozen for the duration, and quite what will happen there we are not in a position to know. But you need not be concerned about money. You have a handsome competence, very handsome indeed, and once this tiresome was is over, you will, I am sure, be better off
than you are now. However - ’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Hannah said flatly. ‘It really doesn’t matter. I’ve always earned my own living, and still can if I must.’
‘Your factory, of course, was insured, I’ve checked on the policies and enemy action was covered, so there will be money there, although it may be some time yet before we get it for you.’
‘I’ve told you, it doesn’t matter,’ Hannah said more sharply. ‘We’ve got enough, Florrie and Cissie and me. We’ve got the house and we get our rations. We're not likely to get involved in black market buying.’
‘I should hope not!’ Peterson said, his face a mask of horror, and Hannah wanted to laugh for a moment. His probity was such a comfort, so cosy a reminder of the long ago days when the world could afford luxuries like virtue and honour and polite behaviour.
‘I'm more concerned about my daughter,’ she said now. ‘Mrs Rupert Lammeck. I’ve heard nothing from her since - since a cable to say her baby was born. Nothing. Is she have you heard?’
He shook his head, not looking at her. ‘I am sorry, Lady Lammeck, but no. Not directly. I can only tell you that the arrangements for drawing money were changed from the USA side at her request. We were asked to allow for cash to be drawn on any branch of the British American Bank, and we did that. I can tell you that it had been drawn from, let me see … ‘ He consulted one of the mass of papers on his lap. ‘Ah yes. San Diego. Seattle. Las Vegas. Ah - Chicago. Then San Diego again. Then New York and the last time, hum., Detroit.’
She frowned puzzled, and he said gently,’ She seems to be moving about a good deal.’
‘Yes. A good deal. And Rupert? Have you heard from him?’
‘Nothing at all. We will have to make contact of course. His brother, your husband, has left him a small legacy. Carefully tied up, of course, but all the same … ’
The Running Years Page 65
