‘Yes,’ she said, and put her hand out towards him and touched him. The peace that had filled her when they were together in the bedroom began to return. Doubts that had been jostling in her mind subsided, burying themselves deeply under her gratitude to Max, and she smiled. ‘We’re getting married, Bessie,’ she said, and laughed a little shakily as her sister stared at her. There was a blank little silence, and then Bessie began to cry and laugh and clap her hands all at the same time.
24
The doubts that had come to her that morning stayed buried, or at least Lexie was able to control them. She could certainly push them away if they did come bubbling up, as the next few weeks became a hubbub of planning and excitement from Bessie who wanted to organize the biggest wedding there had ever been and had to be firmly persuaded that this was not what either of them wanted.
‘Just a quiet affair, Bessie, please,’ Max said. ‘It’s not my style to splash — all I want is the family. No one else, no one at all but ourselves.’
‘After all the fuss there’s been, how can we even have all the family?’ Lexie said. ‘We hardly want Monty and Dave, and I don’t suppose Benny wants to strut around too much either. He can’t be finding it easy, still living with Dave — and Joe’s in America, so you can forget him.’
‘Yes,’ Bessie said, sobered. ‘Yes, I suppose you’re right,’ and spoke no more about a big wedding. But there was still planning to be enjoyed, and she threw herself into it with great gusto. Alex Lazar had suggested, with an unusual diffidence for a person of his ebullient nature, that they have the reception at his tea shop, and Max had greeted that idea with real pleasure. So Bessie was in a blur of happiness as she set about drawing up the modest invitation list, devising menus and fussing over deciding which of the waitresses should have the honour of being pressed into service for the big day, which was set for the beginning of November, as soon as the formalities could be completed. It was as though none of the nastiness that had followed Fanny’s death, the court case, the press hounding of Lexie, the fuss and the excitement, had actually happened. She certainly seemed not to think about it at all.
But Lexie did. She tried not to, tried very hard indeed, but it wasn’t possible. As she set about packing her possessions at Mulberry Walk — for it had been decided they would live at Max’s flat in Hanover Gate Mansions, near Regent’s Park — and shopped with Max in Tottenham Court Road for new curtains and carpets that would make their shared new home really theirs, rather than the somewhat stern bachelor establishment it presently was, she found her mind filling with it. She kept seeing the headlines and the pictures, kept hearing the voices of the counsel who had questioned her, and, above all, kept hearing Mr Welch’s plump tones, deep inside her mind.
She certainly meant no disloyalty to Max in doing what she did then. She had promised him she would turn her back on all of it; that she wouldn’t go back to work ever again, would concentrate on their shared future, on being his wife and being happy, but she hadn’t been able to help it. There had been the letter one morning lying on the mat at Mulberry Walk, and after she had read it she had put it in her handbag and said nothing to Max about it. She should have done, but she couldn’t. It doesn’t matter, she told herself defensively as the letter lay there for the next few days. It’s not important. I’m not going to do anything about it, so why feel bad about it?
Then why keep the letter? asked the wicked little voice inside, although she ignored it. There were some questions that couldn’t be answered.
But early in October, when the plane trees began to shed their leaves and the streets danced with them and the nip in the air bit her cheeks to a brighter red and filled her with energy, she gave up the battle, took the letter out of her bag, and went to see Mr Welch.
It was Max himself who chose the way she would tell him. He had changed a good deal during those past weeks. Although he was still blessedly himself he had become more relaxed and less puritanical about his work. Whereas when she had first known him there had been no doubt in her mind that, had his job demanded it, he would have broken any engagement he had with her, now he let his clerk deal with matters he would once have thought imperative to handle himself, and frequently took off half days in order to be with her. So when, on that particularly golden Wednesday morning, he telephoned and said, ‘Let’s pretend we’ve nothing more important to do than talk to each other. Let’s drive out to the country and sit on a patch of grass and be frivolous —’ she had caught her breath and said at once, ‘Oh, yes. Yes please.’ She had been worrying dreadfully about how to tell him, and when and where, and now he had unwittingly arranged it. Her conscience bit sharply as she felt a great wave of gratitude rise in her. He was able to make her feel that so often and so easily; he seemed to have tapped a bottomless well of appreciation for him. She loved him, of course she did, but above all she was grateful to him. And now — but she’d worry about that when she had told him what she had to say.
‘God bless St Luke,’ he said as he manoeuvred his dark green Bentley through the clotted morning traffic of Chis-wick, on their way to the Great West Road, ‘letting us have the roof off.’
‘St Luke?’ she said, trying to pay attention. She had been gazing out at the shopfronts they were passing, not really seeing them, buried in her own thoughts. ‘That’s an odd prayer from a good Jew.’
He laughed. ‘Dear heart, I show no nasty bigotry in these matters. If this sort of weather had been labelled by Rabbi Mendel Slotnik, then I’d cheerfully say, “God bless Rabbi Slotnik.” As it is, hot weather in October is St Luke’s and I appreciate it. It’ll be lovely by the river. What would you rather do? Have a splendid lunch at Skindles and then walk through the fields by the water, or take the walk first and have a picnic and finish up with tea at Skindles?’
‘Picnic,’ she said at once, and he flicked his glance sideways at her and grinned, his eyes crinkling.
‘I expected you’d say that,’ he said. ‘So I ordered a hamper. We can pick it up at the hotel. Lobster patties and little roast chickens and all sorts of goodies like that. We’ll have a lovely day —’
‘Why is it you always get everything so right?’ she asked, turning to sit sideways in her seat so that she could look directly at him. The scarf she had tied round her head flapped in the breeze, and she pulled it off so that the wind could whip through her hair. It felt very good, and she felt again that stab of sheer joy she so often felt when she was with him. But it was immediately followed by the wave of gratitude that seemed to accompany every aspect of their relationship, and she couldn’t help a frown, which she was glad he didn’t see. He was concentrating on the traffic as the big car edged its way through the vans and cabs and pedestrians who persisted in darting across the streets almost under his wheels.
‘I don’t,’ he said then. ‘There’s a great deal I get wrong. But I do my best to make the least of those things and the best of the ones that do work. It’s something I learned a long time ago. I had to —’
‘Tell me about it,’ she said, as the car at last moved into the first stretches of the Great West Road and the traffic speeded up. ‘What were you like when you weren’t the best solicitor in London, the prop and stay of Bedford Row, the scourge of all evildoers?’
He laughed and leaned back in his seat, using only one hand to steer the car and resting the other across the back of her seat. ‘I was your average runny-nosed street urchin. Like all the other Jewish kids down our street. And down yours and every other East End street, come to that.’
‘Never!’ She laughed. ‘I bet you were always tidy and had your shoes polished and never stole cherries from Mrs Berglass’s stall in Jubilee Street market. That’s what my friends Sammy and Barney used to do. They really were runny-nosed urchins — Awful. But you, you stayed at home and read good books. Tell the truth.’
He made a face. ‘I suppose I might have been a bit of a swot at times. But not all the time. Not to start with. But after my father died — well, there w
asn’t any other way out.’
‘Out?’
‘Out of the street,’ he said. ‘I go back there now, and I’m happy to do it. It’s good to see my brother Phil and his wife and the children — but when I lived there, it was different. I had to get out, any way I could. It was the most important thing in my life.’ He stared at the road ahead, his face quite expressionless, and Lexie looked at his profile and tried to imagine the solemn child he had once been.
‘Why?’ The wind snatched the word from her mouth and he didn’t hear her, so she repeated it loudly. It sounded more demanding and peremptory than she had meant it to and he glanced at her, his brows a little raised.
‘Need some history, do you, so that you know what it is you’ve committed yourself to marrying?’ he said lightly. ‘Well, I dare say you’re entitled to know. So, where do I begin? When my father died, I suppose —’
The road unwound beneath the big wheels, and the sun glinted off the chrome of the bonnet as they sped westwards. He talked and she listened and didn’t see the glossy new factories they were passing or the tidy little suburban villas with their privet-hedged gardens full of dahlias and scrubby chrysanthemums. She saw only the small boy in the poky little flat in Myrdle Street, so like the place in Sidney Street where she had grown up, but much less comfortably furnished, for there was no rich Aunt Fanny to supply the hand-me-down furniture. She saw him with his head bent over his schoolbooks, night after night, while his brother ran and played in the streets below and his mother spent all her time wearily washing and ironing, for, now she was a widow, that was how she kept her sons alive. Lexie could almost smell the reek of heavy yellow soap and bleach, and heard the hiss and thump of the heavy flat irons his mother lifted from the constantly burning kitchen range, felt the sweat that trickled down the small boy’s back as he worked in the overheated room on hot days, and knew too the hunger that filled him. Not all of it was a hunger for food (though that was not unheard of in the small flat, for his mother, despite the long hours with her laundry tub, earned precious little with which to feed her family, often needing to collect baskets of charity food from the Board of Guardians or the ‘Schnorrer’s shop’ as the better-off neighbours scornfully labelled it, the rich women’s settlement in Spitalfields) but a different kind of hunger, for a better life he could not have described but which he dimly perceived must be possible.
She saw him as he grew bigger and tougher, finding a series of evening jobs in the markets of the East End, humping bags of potatoes, onions and carrots for hours on end for a couple of coppers and a bag of half-rotten food, saw him getting up in the mornings long before his brother and mother to study hard so that he could get first a scholarship to the Raine’s Foundation School in Arbour Square and then, eventually, to University, to read law. She watched him as he made his steady way onwards, through articles to an old-established City firm and then a junior partnership in an East End office, until now at last he had his own place in the splendours of Bedford Row. There was much he didn’t tell her, being spare both of self-pity and self-aggrandizement, but she could see it clearly for all that, the long lonely years that gave time only for work, with none for fun or friendship, and she thought suddenly — it’s all right. I’m worrying for nothing. We’re the same. I’m worrying for nothing, he’ll understand, he will — and her spirits lifted. She leaned forwards and kissed his cheek and he protested, laughing, warning her she’d make him swerve and kill them both. But she didn’t care and kissed him again and he hugged her briefly with his free arm, as he steered the sleek car expertly to the side road that was the last stage of the run down to Maidenhead and the river.
They sat in a patch of long grass high above the river bank, with a clear view of the slow-moving water and the tired sunburnt reeds drooping their heads into it, steeped in the dusty gold of the afternoon sunshine. They had eaten the lobster patties and the little roast chickens greedily; the air, for all its lazy autumnal warmth, had enough crispness in it to hone their appetites. They had also drunk a whole bottle of hock and now were feeling replete and at peace.
She moved after a while, pulling the rug he had spread for her back from the check cloth the hotel had so thoughtfully packed in the hamper, and stretched herself out on it. He watched her, smiling, sitting there with his arms around his knees, a stem of long grass held between his teeth. He had taken off his jacket and tie and opened the neck of his shirt. Lexie could see the dark hair growing at the top of his chest and was amused by that, for the hair on his arms, clearly to be seen now for he had rolled up his shirt sleeves, glinted gold in the sunshine.
‘Your arms look like hot buttered toast,’ she said lazily. ‘How did you get such a tan?’
‘I spoiled myself back in April.’ He got to his feet and came over to sit beside her, looking down at where she lay with her arms behind her head as a pillow. ‘I went to the South of France and sunbathed and swam — it was glorious. We’ll go there together soon. Will you like that?’
‘It sounds dreadfully expensive.’
‘It is. But I only have you to spend money on, and I want to.’
‘But your family? Don’t you —’ She stopped, embarrassed for a moment, feeling she was prying, but he laughed comfortably and lay down beside her, stretching out and staring up at the sky like her, squinting a little against its soft brightness.
‘My love, I can assure you you are not marrying into a family of indigents. My brother makes his own living — he’d be mortally offended at the idea that I pay him. He still lives in the East End because he likes it. He feels right there. He’s not as ambitious as I am — never was. He’s a trouser presser and he’s happy that way, and so is his wife — and he makes a good living for them all. He costs me nothing. And my mother died two years ago.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said automatically, and turned her head to look at him. His profile was sharply etched against the blue-gold sky. ‘Is it good to be ambitious, Max?’
‘Good? I don’t know,’ he said and rolled on his side, propping his head up on one hand so that he could look down at her. ‘I just am. I always have been. I knew there had to be something better for me than Myrdle Street and there was. Just as I knew one day I’d meet you. I was always ambitious for you.’
‘But how could you be? You can’t be ambitious for someone you don’t know.’ She caught her breath, wanting to talk about what it was that was pushing more and more urgently against the barrier of her tongue, knowing she would soon have to say it, but wanting to hear what he had to say, too.
‘I knew.’ His voice was a little husky. ‘I just had to wait until you arrived. But I knew you would —’
He bent and kissed her, gently at first and then more urgently. Lexie let her arms go round his neck, enjoying the contact but wanting to talk to him, needing to tell him. She opened her mouth to speak and that made his kiss more urgent, and then they were clinging together, their mouths hot and desperate, and she stopped caring about talking. She wanted only to touch him, to feel his skin under her fingers, and suddenly she was stroking that dark-haired chest and this time he didn’t pull away, as he had that dreadful day at Bedford Row. Instead he rolled back a little, so that she could reach him more easily, and his own hands were caressing her body as hungrily as she was caressing his. It was as though they were one mind inhabiting both bodies, as though each knew what the other wanted without having to explain or show.
The sun was cooling now as the afternoon drifted away, and Lexie shivered a little as the chill wind touched the bare skin of her thighs, for her dress was now crumpled under her as she twined her legs about his and that little movement seemed to make him even more urgent in his caressing. Almost before she knew it was happening they were locked together in the closest of embraces and her body was moving in rhythm with his. It was not at all as it had been that first time, when it had hurt so much and she had hated it all so dreadfully, when her body had screamed its loathing of what was happening and she had felt as though she
were not there at all — just her body was. Now it hurt but in a totally different way, a marvellous way, a way she enjoyed and wanted, and she pushed herself against him, feeling the pain and glorying in it, trying to increase it, to make it climb a hill of sensation that would, she knew, explode into a shower of splinters of excitement. She threw back her head and felt her mouth widen into a rictus of a grin that showed her clenched teeth, felt her face and then the rest of her body get hot and hotter and hotter still, and then at last she was there, riding out the waves of sensation and hearing high thin cries that were good in her ears, marvelling at them and yet knowing that they were coming from her own throat. Then, and only then, did she become more aware of Max, of his face hot and wet against hers, of his breath thick in her ears as he too lifted his head and showed his face, a sweating face with eyes shut and a look as ecstatic and intense as it was possible for a man’s face to be. And then he collapsed, panting, against her. She could feel his heart pounding against her ribs, matching the speed of her own.
They lay together under the slowly darkening sky, aware only of their own bodies, feeling the world drifting beneath them and time passing them by, not caring about anything. It was enough just to be there, as they were, together.
25
Max’s solicitousness for her comfort, his concern that she had been as satisfied by him as he had been by her, was so touching that she felt tears sharp against her eyelids, and she said gently, ‘My dear, I’m not made of sugar! I won’t break up and disappear. You didn’t hurt me — or not in a way I didn’t want, at any rate. Please — don’t worry —’ She touched his check as he knelt beside her, looking down at her in the soft light of the early evening, and she smiled up at him. ‘Only now I’d like to tidy myself.’ He nodded and scrambled to his feet, turning his back on her, and with almost ostentatious politeness began to pack the hamper.
Family Chorus Page 27
