What Was Promised

by Tobias Hill

  ‘It wasn’t.’

  Mary cleans her child. She had the water warm, but already it’s cold in her hands. ‘Of course not,’ she says, ‘there’s no such thing.’

  ‘There is,’ Floss says, ‘she saw it in Long Debris! You did, Iris, didn’t you?’

  But Iris won’t say. Only later, when they’re both in bed, when Mary is kissing them in the dark, does Iris lean into her neck to whisper muzzily.

  ‘It wasn’t.’

  ‘What, love?’

  ‘It wasn’t the ghost,’ Iris says. ‘It was smaller than him.’

  2. Summer

  On the first it is dry. A watercart goes laying the dust.

  On the second, third and fourth, it’s wet. The costers are crestfallen hawks, the tarps fat ponds of rain.

  On the fifth, the Jew watchmaker plays chess with the Banana King.

  Just as they do most Saturdays, weather and families permitting, Solly Lazarus and Clarence Malcolm climb up to the fifth floor laundry (where no one much goes anymore – the cant of the Columbia Buildings is appreciable up here), and set up the table and chairs, the board and pieces and the ash-tray, out on the old drying balcony. Clarence has brought apples. Across the bombstruck wasteland that runs a zigzag east of them, Solly can see his wife. She’s tramping through the rubbishy grass, her basket – hooked over one arm – full of a froth of elderflower.

  Clarence whistles, Solly waves, and Dora waves back up at them. Clarence is glad to see her there. He’s hoping she’ll give him an edge.

  When Clarence takes a piece, he slams his own on top of it – ‘Ha!’ – so that the board and table shake, and sometimes (the floor being what it is) the whole thing goes teetering over, both men wailing and catching at it, and all the pieces sliding south, so that they have to start again.

  When Solly thinks he has a clincher, he grips his pipestem in his teeth, smiles around it – ‘Aha!’ – and moves his piece extra slow, his goggle eyes darting up to make sure Clarence is watching, so that they’ll both remember his genius for posterity.

  Now it’s Solly’s turn. Clarence blows a Gold Flake smoke ring. He says, ‘Bernie was talking.’

  ‘You’re trying to distract me, Clarence. Don’t think I don’t know.’

  ‘It’s true, though. Someone knows a council man, says they’re going to turf us out.’

  ‘Just talk,’ Solly says, ‘those council men, they like the sound of their own voices.’

  ‘Let’s hope.’

  ‘They must have better things to do.’

  ‘Let’s hope that too.’

  Solly’s hand wavers. It was with his help that Clarence got a place in the Columbia Buildings. And if the Buildings are condemned? Solly will find rooms somehow – he’ll be more Jew or less Jew, as landlords and circumstances require – but what will Clarence do? There are coloured fellows in Notting Hill, and some in Stepney, but they live bachelor lives, and if Solly knows Bernadette she’ll have nothing to do with them.

  Another thing: if what Dora says is true, it’s no time for the Malcolms to be without a roof over their heads. Solly scratches the birthmark on his scalp. ‘It’s too hot today,’ he says.

  ‘Hot! This isn’t hot, this is nice. Jamaica, now, that’s hot. Melt a man down like chocolate.’

  ‘Have it your way. This someone, did she say when?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well,’ Solly says, and moves a knight with some reluctance. Silence rules on the balcony.

  ‘So!’ Solly says, too loudly, as Clarence ponders, ‘Bernadette looks well.’

  ‘Plenty well.’

  ‘Dora says so too. Dora says she glows.’

  ‘Bernie always glows.’

  ‘I am making an implication.’

  ‘I know what you’re making,’ Clarence says. ‘Gossiping like an old woman.’ ?Then, with a kind of shyness, ‘It’s true.’

  Solly claps his shoulder. They shake hands over the board. Downstairs a wireless is talking up the Olympics.

  ‘My sunshine woman,’ Clarence says. Then, ‘Ha!’ he crows, and the board shakes like an earthquake.

  When they’re done Solly goes down and pours himself a drink. He doesn’t like to drink in company. He is excited by others, invigorated by them, and often fearful of them. With others he likes to keep his wits about him. Six days a week, in the Lane, he wears his wits like best clothes. Now there is no one to see him.

  He stands and sips in the sun-thinned gloom and thinks of Clarence Malcolm. He has never known a coloured man before, not to call a friend. He has never needed many friends, but one is a good thing to have – and Dora gets on with Bernadette, so that’s two. Better still.

  Neither he nor Dora has ever moved in wide circles: small ones in Danzig, smaller here. House mice, his father used to call them. If they lived in Whitechapel it might be a different story, but Whitechapel has too many godly Jews for Solly’s taste. Solly has no truck with gods. No, they fit in better here.

  After the war – before he got a proper license in the Lane – Solly traded on the hoof, roundabout Club Row. He knew the other costers, he was on first-name terms with some, but it was never more than that. And then, one day, Clarence arrived. Solly got down there late – Dora had needed him to queue – and there was Clarence, looking to Solly like his own self multiplied: twice as tall, twice as foreign and twice the looks as well, he doesn’t mind admitting it. Clarence Malcolm, fresh from Jamaica, astride a crate in the rain, knees up to his armpits, playing chess with poor Ben Weir, the cascara salesman with the stutter.

  Solly watched him beat Ben hollow. His game was unconventional: Clarence played like a boxer, waiting for the overreach, the lazy guard, the opening. Solly plays a different chess – all guns blazing, is his way – but there were lessons to be learned, he saw, in Clarence’s idling aggression, his velvet-gloved ambushes. A cute game, that was what it was. When Clarence won he grinned and stretched in unconcealed delight, slapped the drops off his fedora, turned to Solly and boomed, You got legs like a Coldstream Guard, standing there all this time! Sit down, man, come, come. Tell the truth, now; are you partial to the sport of kings?

  That chess should have thrown them together, two such different fellows. That they should share, not a love for music, or some other worthwhile thing, but this boyish passion; really, it is ridiculous. It is remarkable.

  Still, it’s hot, whatever Clarence says. Solly takes off his tie. He opens the window. He wonders where Dora is.

  All around the kitchen stand the paraphernalia of her craft: the buckets, the fraying sieve, muslin, a small jar of tartaric acid, and a big one of precious sugar; the rations she’s saved all spring, plus the extra meant for summer jam.

  Dora makes cordials. The elderflower is the best. It’s Solly’s favourite, and for Dora it entails tier on tier of happiness. Happiness in the picking, in the making and the drinking.

  He looks forward to the smell of it. The smell is alchemy. At first Dora’s cordial will be nothing but muck and water. It will smell of the pharmacist’s acid and the anodyne sweetness of sugar. Then one day they’ll wake up, one or the other or both. They’ll cough and sigh, and there! Instead of the smell of themselves – instead of Solly and Dora – there will be the elderflower. Its heady scent will fill their rooms. It will be the smell of summer itself. The English summer, that begins with the elderflower, and ends with the berry.

  Solly frowns. He thinks, But what’s wrong with the smell of us? Why wish for anything more than Solly and Dora? Aren’t we lucky to be alive? Aren’t we young, and in love?

  Not so young any more, whispers the imp inside his head, which (he hardly knows it) speaks with the voice of his mother. Not so much of the genius. You smell of beer and no money. You smell like a refugee, Solomon. You smell of childlessness.

  Solly clicks his tongue. The drink is souring his thoughts. He likes the way it loosens him, but he’s never had the head for it.

  What he needs is some music. He takes the drink into the lo
unge, turns on the wireless, grumbles over the dial until he finds a vein of jazz. Then he dances – little hops – around the room, past the one-bar electric fire, the bookcase full of paperbacks and Dora’s photograph albums, the workshop table with its watches and orphaned parts – all the way to the easy chair, where he collapses gratefully.

  There are letters on his table, but they don’t look new to Solly. They’ll be old news, Dora’s hoardings, brought out to be read again. He swipes a postcard off the top.

  NOTHING is to be written on this side except the date, signature and address of the sender. Erase words not required. IF ANYTHING ELSE IS ADDED THE POSTCARD WILL BE DESTROYED.

  I am (not) well.

  I have been admitted into Hospital {} and am going on well.

  I am going to be transferred to another camp.

  I have received your card dated 19th September, 1944

  Signature

  Solomon Lazarus

  Camp Address

  Onchan,

  Isle of Man

  Internment Camp.

  Date 12th October, 1944

  ‘Oh, this?’ Solly says to the room. ‘Yes, I remember this.’ And he nods; not happily, only backing up the words, as if some authority has asked him to confirm his statement.

  He remembers Onchan Camp. The boarding house room he shared with a procession of other men – Jews, Hungarians, Italians. The beauty of the view from their window across the island. Douglas town in the rain, or the castle in the sun, and always the green or gold of gorse – even, on clear days, a hint of Port Erin, where the women’s camps were, and where – the Italians said so – the Finns swam naked in the sea.

  He remembers leaving Dora. They’d been in England six months. Dora, pregnant, nineteen years old, weeping on the platform. The night train to Lancashire. The transit camp, two thousand men, with twenty buckets and no chairs. Then Liverpool, the crossing, the Steam Packet heading into a storm, all of them sick or sleeping, one or the other, taking turns. And when they came into Douglas he woke, and the first thing he saw was the flag of Man, the triskelion, its three legs so like a swastika that for a wild moment he thought he’d been betrayed. He thought he’d been given back into the hands of the enemy.

  It was morning, and the sky was white. The soldiers lined them up like soldiers, all along the wet quay, the whole crazy muddle of them – the London waiters, the Oxford professors, the buskers, tramps and vicars, and Ferracci, the opera singer, and the Germans and the Jews, and the man who had a Scotty dog, and the man who had brought a fishing rod – and with sixty others Solly was led up to Onchan, on the cliffs above the town. They kept him until Onchan closed, then sent him on to Mooragh.

  Dora, weeping on the platform. That stayed with him a long time: then it was lost to him for years. It was as if he’d worn away a snapshot kept in a wallet. That was harder. To not remember Dora weeping was worse than remembering.

  It won’t be long, he said to her. He didn’t know it was a lie. In the end it was five years. The war for him was nothing but the view from the cliffs of Onchan. It was all echoes and distances. The long draw of ships’ horns, the ha-ha-ing of gulls, the echo of a football struck by men wasting their years in play, the rumours of other men killing and killed far away. The dust-pocked newsreels of Hitler, the crowds rising to his gesture like flowers to the light. The disbelieving whispers of things still inconceivable.

  And Dora’s war? Well, he’ll never know. He knows what she has told him, which is only what can be fitted into words. He knows they lost the child, a boy, and that they’ll never have another. He knows how desperate her hungers have become for the things she lacks most – not food or clothes, or friends or neighbours, but parents and children; for family, above and below and around her. He knows he wasn’t there when it mattered most, and that, returning to vacancy, he is no longer enough to fill it. The Dora he left weeping isn’t the Dora he came back to. What else can he know?

  Solly puts the postcard back. He turns off the wireless.

  *

  Some said “no” and some said “yes”. Some said they could but go and see, and anything was better than little supper, less breakfast, and wet clothes all the night. Others said: “These parts are none too well known, and are too near the mountains. Travellers seldom come this way now. The old maps are no use: things have changed for the worse and the road is unguarded . . .”

  Someone is calling Jem Malcolm’s name. He’s so deep in his book that at first the voice seems miles away, and when his head comes up he blinks like a boy coming awake.

  ‘Jem,’ he hears, ‘Je-em,’ his name drawn out into a singsong.

  It’s Floss, and he smiles, listening: he knows exactly where she is. She’s in the depot yard – which used to be a market square – by the old market arcades, where the council keep concrete and timber and the spindlemakers is. If you stand just there and call just right the square works like a megaphone. Floss found it out with him. It’s wizard.

  ‘Jem, where are you? I know you’re there. Are you there, Jem, are you? Jem!’

  Soon some old lady will come out and ask what all the racket is. Floss Lockhart, she’ll say, I see you down there, yelling. We’ll have no more of that today. This is a nice neighbourhood. You go lark about somewhere else.

  Doesn’t he want to lark with Floss? Oh, he does, but the book won’t let him go. If he stops reading now something might happen to it. A thief might find his hiding place. A bomb might find Columbia Road, like the one that blew up Japan. The book and everything will burn with the power of the sun, and then he’ll never finish it.

  His specs are slipping. He’ll have the National Health 524 Contours soon: these are just market hand-me-downs. He’s tried the 524 Contours. They hurt, but that was because they weren’t properly prescribed. His mum said they looked intelligent. She’s going to queue for them all hours.

  Jem pushes the hand-me-downs back up. He wrinkles his nose to keep them there. His gaze drifts to the pages.

  They asked him where he was making for, and he answered: “You are come to the very edge of the Wild, as some of you may know. Hidden somewhere ahead of us is the fair valley of Rivendell where Elrond lives in the Last Homely House. I sent a message by my friends, and we are expected.”

  Jem bows like a monk over scripture. His knees are capped with fine white dust; but he likes the smell up here, which is of ancient wood and stone, and soap suds and all clean things.

  This is his best hiding place. Once upon a time there was a laundry below him, but it was forsaken long ago. No one comes up this way any more – only sometimes, on days off, Dad and Mr Lazarus. But they don’t know the hiding place. All they notice is their game.

  Mr Lazarus has prescribed specs, but they’re not the 524 Contours.

  ‘Jem,’ Floss says one more time, but she’s losing steam, she’ll give up soon and look for someone else to play with.

  He gnaws his lip and reads faster. He’d really like to go with Floss, but he has to get to Rivendell. It’s dim in the hiding place, though, the sun gets tired creeping in the gaps where the slates have gone, and outside it’s so bright and warm . . . and if he goes with Floss he can make up his own stories. He could make up one like this. Not with a sissy hobbit – Floss won’t like that – Jem doesn’t like the hobbit either – but with dark trees and waterfalls, and the great heavy faces of trolls.

  Jem likes telling Floss stories. He makes them up ahead of time. She likes the frightening ones best, so he’s got good at frightening. Stories like the German airman. Floss was all for that. No one listens to Jem like Floss. He loves the look she gets when she believes in him.

  Floss will believe most anything.

  Sometimes she worries him. Jem worries about lots of things, but not all worries are the same. The worrying he does for Uncle Neville gets into him like a London winter, a bone-deep cold that makes him shiver; but the worry he has about the bombs is a heat so fierce it’s hard to breathe, and those he has for himself are m
ostly furtive things, little noiseless creatures that infest all his imaginings, his thoughts and stories and dreams.

  With Floss it’s like a tide. The worry for her comes and goes. Sometimes it swells up so high that fear is what it really is . . . she frightens him, then, like her father, Mr Lockhart, whose face is pulled down on one side, as if the wind changed on a game, and who looks at Jem so hard but never says a word to him. And then the worry for Floss will ebb away again. They’ll be having a lark and Jem will wonder what he ever worried for.

  Sometimes he doesn’t understand her. She’ll do something that makes no sense, and after Jem will ask her why, and Floss will say, Oh Jem, you don’t understand. But he knows he doesn’t understand – that’s why he asks her why. But Floss says he doesn’t understand, as if that is the answer. And then they just go round in circles.

  She’s pretty. Jem thinks so. Most of the time it doesn’t matter and then sometimes nothing else does. People will give her things just because she looks that way. Once a lady in Bacon Street bought her an ice – and one for Jem (She thinks you’re pretty too, Floss said) – and once a man in a Homburg offered her a ticket to the Electric Theatre. But Floss said, What about my friend? And the man shook his head at Jem, and Floss said, I don’t want to, then. And I think you’re rude. And I don’t talk to strangers.

  But Floss, Jem said, after, you did.

  Other times she just gets wild. Then their games go bad. It always comes up out of nothing. It doesn’t give Jem time to think. It’s only later that he stops and knows he’s gone astray.

  One time they made a girl give them her hat and money. It was only farthings. Floss told her that Jem was Dick Turpin, the famous boxer and highwayman. It was her money or her life. Floss wore the hat halfway home, then threw it in an alley. She said it had nits. Another time, in Kingsland Waste, she stole a rubberstamp. She nicked it from Mr Instance, the rubberstamp engraver with the wart. She hid it in her mouth. After they got away she spat it into Jem’s hand and her tongue was blue. The stamp said Henry Wiltshire, Esq., Farrier, 9b Lavender Walk – but backwards, like a secret message in a secret agent story.