“Come and see the rest of the house while we wait for the kettle to boil,” Nat said, leading May and Sam next door.
A schoolroom table, covered with a dark green velvet cloth with thick fringed edges, was laid for tea at one end while neatly arranged at the other were the tools of Sarah’s trade. Several pairs of polished scissors, a collection of pink hedgehog-spiked rollers, a variety of different size hairbrushes, a silvery tin marked “bleach” in handwritten letters and a couple of razors were all laid out in precise lines. Along the back of one shelf was a display of beautifully coiffured wigs, waiting for their owners to come and reclaim them from their wooden stands. A small mirror fixed at eye level to the wall opposite a comfortable-looking chair with armrests completed Sarah’s salon. The whole effect smacked of efficiency. The source of Rachel’s elegant hairstyle was obvious.
Nat took May and Sam through the tiny passageway to the back of the house where an unplumbed bath sitting on decorated metal feet had been squeezed into one corner. A cake of pink Lifebuoy soap in a saucer balanced on the edge. Outside they were shown a tiny yard with a meat safe, the shed that housed the privy, and an earth-filled wooden box in which some bedraggled sprouts clung to life. Ducking under the line of washing May could just make out a door leading into the back alley.
There were two bedrooms upstairs, one for Nat and Sarah, light and sunny and dominated by a pretty bed piled with cushions and brightly coloured shawls from beneath which something lacy and feminine peeped. Nat paused at the second door.
“This is Rachel’s boudoir,” he said, laughing at his use of the fancy word for the only room in which clutter had got the better of orderliness. A large dresser took up most of the opposite wall, its shelves crammed with Russian icons and gilt candlesticks, the wax of the half-melted candles arrested mid-drip. Beside the dresser was a full-length mirror with faded photographs and postcards stuck all around the frame. A small bookcase hung just inside the door, supporting, instead of books, a row of flower and coronet embellished mugs, each one bearing the portrait of a British king or queen. There was Edward VII and his queen, Alexandra, on their coronation day, his son George V and Queen Mary on theirs, and the same regal couple again on the occasion of their silver jubilee only last year.
“Only one more room to show you,” Nat said as he moved a ladder into position and began to climb.
Stacked along one side of the attic from ceiling to floor were dozens of bolts of material, the overflow from Simon’s workshop, Nat explained. But on the other side was a child’s brass bed with gleaming copper knobs at each corner. A coal fire was already lit in the corner grate but May’s attention went at once to the skylight. By standing on the bed and craning her neck a little she had a terrific view right up the adjoining Cyprus Street towards the war memorial.
“Auntie Edith always said you were trim,” Nat said, clearly delighted by May’s pleasure at the room. “So we hoped you would be able to squeeze in here. At least you will have it to yourself. I am afraid that Sam will have to stretch out on the sofa downstairs.”
A room of her own, whatever size, with a ladder leading nowhere except to a door of her own was something May had always longed for. At home in Barbados, despite the comfortable size of the house, she had always slept in her old childhood room, which led through a connecting door to her parents’ bedroom on one side and down to the stairway on the other. She had never liked the sense of being within earshot of her parents and their ineffectively muffled arguments, but out of habit, she had never thought of asking to move.
The house in Barbados had once been a splendid dwelling with its elegant Jacobean proportions, curved staircase, British-designed cornices and beautifully carved wooden doors. But the West Indian sugar export business was no longer thriving as it had in her grandparents’ day. Financial strain following the Great Depression in Britain and competition from other sugar-growing countries had eroded the demand and May had been conscious of the necessary economies her parents had been forced to make. In the past few years the number of household staff had dwindled from a dozen servants down to a couple of maids who came in to clean and dust and to help Bertha, the rotund and cheerful cook. Bertha prepared all the meals for the family as well as lunch for the plantation workers. Her pillow of a shoulder was famously available for any member of the community to lean on or weep on whenever they wished. Bertha’s husband, Tom, completed the complement of staff, a man whose strength lay in his head for figures as he organised the weekly accounts with impressive precision. The ancient plantation chauffeur had died two years ago and it had been Duncan’s idea to replace him with his own, unpaid daughter. Even the Rolls-Royce, for so long the pride and joy of May’s grandfather and father, had begun to show irreversible signs of age, no matter how much time May gave to the polishing of its green paintwork.
May followed Nat back down the creaking Oak Street ladder thinking how happy her mother and Bertha would be to know of the extent of Nat’s welcome and of the excellent character of Gladys’s only boy. May had heard all Edith’s stories about her adored sister, a passionate campaigner for the vote for women who had been locked up in Holloway Prison before the war for hurling bricks through government office windows. Edith had stayed in touch by letter with their son Nathanial after Gladys’ death, and when the news of Nat’s marriage to a beautiful Jewish girl reached Edith she felt happier than she had for years.
To her knowledge, May had never met a Jewish person and she and Sam had been fascinated by the written accounts of Sarah and his new family that Nat sent out to Edith in Barbados. His great-grandparents-in-law had moved from Russia to live and work in London’s East End in the middle of the last century where they raised half a dozen children. Rachel’s grandfather had been a tailor and his five sons, including Rachel’s father, had all joined the same trade. A talent for needle and thread had evidently been ingested with their mother’s milk. Rachel, the only daughter of the family, had fallen in love with Simon Greenfeld, the son of her father’s partner, and that marriage had produced one child. Rachel had suffered horrible complications at Sarah’s birth, making her incapable of conceiving again, and while there had been some hand-wringing over cups of consoling tea at the news that there would never be a son, the disappointment was soon forgotten in Rachel and Simon’s devotion to their daughter.
Beneath her nagging outer shell, Rachel was committed to the care not only of her daughter but of her husband too; she fussed over Simon night and day. She was anxious to prevent him from developing an excessively fatty heart like their neighbour Mrs. Cohen’s husband. Mr. Cohen had reached such a size that his coffin would not fit through the front door. He had been carried out of the house, stiff as a poker, with the whole neighbourhood watching. It was an undignified scene, especially as Mrs. Cohen, in her distress, had failed to dress her husband in his best suit and Mr. Cohen attracted some comments as he left Oak Street for the last time wearing a pair of striped woollen pyjamas.
Food, whether too much or too little, was not Rachel’s only preoccupation. Rachel fussed and worried about everything. When her daughter began walking out with Nat Castor, a gentile apprentice in Simon’s workshop, both her parents were cautious. Marrying outside the faith was not to be encouraged. But the vigorous and charismatic young man won them over and by the time the young couple announced their engagement Simon showed as much pride in Nat as he would have done in a son of his own. Nat had written a funny letter to his aunt Edith describing the conversational convolutions that had led to his marriage.
“Of course there will have to be a conversion, Nat, and all the trimmings, if you will forgive me putting it that way,” Rachel had declared. “I am afraid it might be a bit painful, but God wants you to know in no uncertain terms, Nat, that you are promising to trust in Him. Isn’t that right, Simon?”
In the Jewish tradition Simon invariably gave way to his wife’s running of all matters relating to the house and the family. If the truth were known, he enjoyed spending ti
me in his own company at the workshop, or with his friends down in the Bethnal Green Road bookies where he could find some respite from Rachel’s incessant chatter. It was therefore a shock to Rachel when her deferential husband announced that the surgical knife would not be necessary prior to Sarah and Nat’s marriage and that no religious conversion would be taking place either. There would be none of the customary sitting shiva, the weeklong period of mourning observed when a Jewish girl marries a gentile. So long as any children, God willing, were brought up in the Jewish faith, Nat could hang on to his God-given genitals intact. Nat had proved himself to be a good Jewish boy in all but name and that was good enough for Simon.
Privately delighted by Simon’s rare display of assertiveness Rachel came out fighting, demolishing every bit of street gossip on the matter.
“Look here, Mrs. Cohen,” she said, her arms folded in defence across her flowery bosom, “Nat’s not Jewish but at least he’s a tailor and that’s a good profession. My daughter has a good husband who can provide for her. That’s all that matters.”
Within minutes of May and Sam’s arrival on Oak Street, and even though it was a little late for tea, a shop-bought cake still in its box was brought to the velvet-covered table, an extravagance usually reserved for the birth of a new baby or the coronation of a new king. Covered in pale creamy brown icing, with a few flicked-up sugar peaks skipping across its otherwise smooth surface, the cake boasted a single halved walnut that had been placed smooth side down in the middle.
“You can always tell a Fuller’s coffee cake,” Nat whispered, shushing his chattering mother-in-law as he cut into the soft icing. A tiny sound, and the barest of visible agitations of the surface as the sharp knife made contact with the glazed sugar, caused those sitting around the table to moisten their lips in anticipation.
“Not a noise you get from any other cake,” promised Nat, as he gently pushed the knife on down until it made contact with the china beneath.
“What about a lemon bun?” Rachel said, handing a plate round.
“Have a drink, May. Help yourself, Sam,” Nat added, indicating six miniature, flower-patterned glasses, brimming with liquid.
May closed her hand around the delicate stem with care. The honey-coloured wine was sweet, but not sickly.
“L’Chaim!” Nat, Sarah, Rachel and Simon cried in unison as they raised their thimble glasses in welcome to the new arrivals.
The next day May and Sam’s cousins took them to the Trocadero at Piccadilly Circus, the most famous of all the white- and gold-painted Lyons Corner House teashops. A Jewish tobacconist had founded the company nearly forty years earlier, Nat explained, and some, the proud Greenfelds among them, considered the restaurants to be the height of luxury.
May watched, impressed, as one of the Lyons’s “nippies,” the black-and-white uniformed waitresses popularly named for their agility, nipped between the packed tables, balancing trays of teacups, teapots and plates of curranty scones and jam. Across the other side of the huge dining room was a “trippy” threading her way cautiously through the closely packed chairs, clumsily clearing away the dirty crockery onto her trolley, looking forward to the day when she stopped tripping up and became eligible for nippy status.
Rachel was already ordering a second round of chips, belching gently but unapologetically as she instructed the nippy to be sure the next serving was extra hot and generously salted. May traced the rim of her plate with a tepid chip but she could not actually bring herself to eat it. She had smelled the same smell on her coach journey from Liverpool, mingled with the stench of cigarette smoke inside the coach, and it had made her nauseous. Even so, May longed to have the money to pay for the tea. May had arrived in London with twenty pounds that her mother had given her. “I wish I could afford to give you more, my darling,” her mother had said. The sum had seemed to May like a lot at the time, but the cost of everything in London meant that the twenty pounds was fast running out.
Hanging on the walls of the restaurant were a series of framed posters from Lyons’s long-running advertising campaign featuring a fictional character called George. The gag was that George was never where he was expected to be. George was never at home, never in the office, never appeared on the railway platform to join his wife waiting to catch a train, never turned up to watch the Punch and Judy show with his children, and consistently failed to arrive on the golf course, his golfing plus-fours pictured hanging limply over the frame of a scarecrow instead.
“The trouble with George,” Nat explained, “is that he has always ‘gone to Lyonch.’”
Three days after May’s arrival in England she was sitting in one of the brown armchairs in the front room, looking through the small collection of books on the shelves and wondering what had happened to Sarah. Simon and Nat were in the tailor’s shop, and Sam had gone down to the headquarters of the Royal Navy to investigate how he might join its voluntary service. In a corner was a tailor’s dummy dressed in the half-finished wedding suit Nat was making as a favour for a best friend. After the excitement of arrival, May was at something of a loss to know what to do with herself. Everything, the cold weather, the food, the traffic, the clothes, all proclaimed how different life was back home. She felt as if she had been turned upside down. She had considered going up to her attic bed but as she had passed the ever-open door to Rachel and Simon’s room she had caught sight of Simon standing in front of the mirror, his back to the door. He was juggling his huge stomach from one hand to the other while chanting to himself loudly enough for May to hear “wobble wibble, wibble wobble.” He was stark naked. May did not want to attract his attention by climbing the squeaky ladder and instead silently retraced her steps downstairs.
She had hoped to find Sarah there, but then remembered how her cousin had packed up her rollers and hairbrushes before setting off to give a shampoo and set to one of her richer clients, one of several, bored, indulged wives who were only to happy to fill the vacant hours by having their hair curled and styled. May had learned quickly that hard work was the habit of the Oak Street household. Simon and Nat’s buoyant tailoring business brought relative affluence to number 52, and between them the family tried their best to ease a little of the poverty that surrounded them. The neighbourhood was a poor one, with unemployment and the resulting deprivation often leading to desperate behaviour. Petty thieving was rife, even within Oak Street itself. Only the other day, after a pair of prized racing pigeons disappeared from the back yard at number 73, a delicious smell had come seeping from under the Smith’s front door at number 54. There were ten children in the Smith family and the elder ones wore shoes with a hole punched into the side, a warning sign to pawnbrokers that these shoes were the property of the local school and only out on loan. The children tried to hide the hole from their friends by stuffing an extra sock in the side but no one else was fooled. Simon and Nat would pass on cast-off coats and waistcoats that came their way, Rachel was forever popping next door and into other houses in the street to see if they could do with a bit of leftover pie and Sarah cut the neighbours’ children’s hair and helped them with their letters and numbers, in exchange for the occasional bantam’s egg supplied from the backyard coops.
Apart from Simon wobbling away in his bedroom, the house was empty. Glad for the rare chance to be alone, May went into the parlour where a two-day-old newspaper was lying on the leather sofa. Nat was fascinated by politics and had heard long ago that The Times was the paper of the educated classes. His neighbours, if they were interested at all in reading the news, got their daily information from the Daily Worker. But Nat had become friendly with a butler, a customer from a big house in the West End, for whom Nat had made a smart black working jacket and matching pair of trousers. Each morning, the butler would collect the previous day’s copy of The Times from his employer’s smoking room, have a quick look at the sports pages and then pass the paper on to Nat. They would meet at the bus stop on Bethnal Green Road when the butler was on his way to work or at Goid
es, the Whitechapel café where Jewish intellectuals went to discuss politics and literature over small cups of thick Turkish coffee and glasses of lemon tea.
May turned the pages of Nat’s secondhand paper, looking for the names of the latest winners of the Littlewoods football pools. Sam had suggested the pools might make their fortune.
“Every day someone wakes up to a morning of good news,” he argued, “and to a means of escape from a hard life. Maybe one day it will be me. Then I will buy a yacht,” he promised, “and we can sail round the world like kings and queens.”
But May could find no reference in the dog-eared newspaper to anyone celebrating a windfall. The first few pages were covered with columns of boxed-in advertisements. The front page carried notices from financial advisors, personal advertisements from spiritualists promising to “restore confidence” for those living in uncertainty, and details of a sumptuous antique Persian tapestry for sale at a bargain price of two hundred pounds. The second page was devoted almost exclusively to educational positions in boys’ schools but on the third she came across the columns reserved for domestic situations. Most required skill in the kitchen and May’s culinary expertise was based on little more than watching Bertha preparing huge mounds of rice and peas for the plantation workers’ lunch back home.
May tucked the paper under her arm and went upstairs, passing Simon’s now closed door, climbing the complaining ladder to look through her skylight from where she gazed yet again at the memorial stone with its poignant message of sacrificing life for duty. She began to wonder what sort of occupations would have awaited those young men had they not lost their lives before life had barely begun. A man’s world had been on offer for those boys, but it had been replaced by one top-heavy with women.
A man’s world … snippets of a conversation with Nat the day before began to reform in her mind. Nat was proving quick to notice anything that interested her. On the morning after their arrival the Greenfelds, the Castors and the Thomases had gone for a brisk walk in nearby Victoria Park and as they crossed the road May had been conscious of Nat studying her face.
Abdication: A Novel Page 6
