by Maureen Lee
It didn’t take long for Ruth to establish her father’s financial situation. It had been failing sight that caused him to sell the tailor’s business just before she went away, and the pass book showed the 150 pounds he received for the goodwill. But almost immediately more than half had been withdrawn. Her fare to Austria, she realised with a shock, her spending money, the new clothes. The trip had been her twenty-first birthday present - “I want to show you off to my brother and his wife.”
Thereafter, his capital had been taken out in tiny dribs and drabs until five years ago, when there was nothing left at all. Fortunately, he’d had the good sense to retain the lease of the shop. The receipts showed he received fifteen shillings a week rent. On the other hand, he paid nine and sixpence for the house, which meant he was left with a few shillings a week to live on! Yet he’d never said anything in his letters. She’d always assumed him to be relatively well off.
The key sounded in the door and Ruth hastily put the books back, just as Jacob came bustling in with his shopping bag, looking a trifle self-important she thought.
“I’ve got some nice steak and kidney,” he said breathlessly, “though the queue was a mile long, and they’d just got Brussels sprouts in the greengrocer’s, so we can have a Sew with some potatoes, I even managed to find coffee.” He smiled happily. “We can have a feast today. Put the kettle on, love, and we’ll have a cup of coffee straight away.”
Ruth wordlessly fetched water from the back kitchen, wondering where the money had come from to buy all this stuff. As she leaned over the range to stand the kettle on the hob, she noticed the musical box was no longer on the mantelpiece.
She went out into the other room where he was putting the groceries away and humming a tune, The Blue Danube.
“Where is it, Dad?”
He stopped humming immediately and his face fell. For the first time since she’d come home, Ruth saw her father properly. What a dear face he had! As dear and as kind as a face could be, so gentle, with those silly half-moon glasses on the middle of his nose, quite useless to see through. He was the sort of man who wouldn’t hurt a fly. She thought of all he’d done for her in the past, the piano lessons, the pretty clothes - not just for Austria. She remembered him sitting under the gaslight in his tailor’s shop, his eyes screwed up as he stitched. “You’ll damage your eyes, Dad,” she used to say, and she’d been right.
Most of all, Ruth recalled the devotion, the love which had no boundaries; there was nothing, absolutely nothing she could do wrong. The stories he told came to mind; stories of old Russia and of Liverpool when he first arrived. He’d brought her unknown mother to life, turned Rebecca into a real flesh and blood person.
He was staring at her strangely, as if aware she was going through some sort of inner turmoil.
One part of Ruth, a small part, wanted to burst into tears, to cry on his shoulder that she was sorry, sorry she’d been so frigid since she returned, sorry that he was poor and she hadn’t sent money when she had it, and that she’d thought him a miser, when in fact he was the most generous man in the world. He’d sold the musical box, her mother’s dearest possession, in order to buy his daughter food.
But to another part of Ruth, the very thought of an embrace or a kind word was repellent.
“Where’s the musical box, Dad?” she asked again.
He let out a long, slow breath. “I pawned it. I never knew it was worth anything until you said.” As if expecting her to protest, he spread out his arms and shrugged expressively. It was a gesture she remembered clearly from the past. “Possessions aren’t important.
Memories are what matter, and you can’t pawn them.”
“How much did you get?”
“More than expected, nine pounds.”
“It was probably worth five times that.”
He smiled. “Not in Bootle.”
“I’ll look for a job tomorrow,” Ruth said firmly.
“No, no!” he protested. “We can’t have you working.”
“Then what else will you pawn?” Ruth shrugged and flung out her arms, unaware the gesture was exactly the same as his own. “The waxed lily in my bedroom? You might get half a crown for that. Or your old sewing machine? What’s that worth, five shillings, ten? I don’t know about these things. And when everything is pawned there is to pawn, what do we live on then?”
He hung his head. “I don’t know.”
“I have nothing but the clothes I stand up in and a few spare things in my suitcase.”
Jacob wondered what had happened to the fine jewellery she used to own, but said nothing. He’d already noticed she didn’t wear a wedding ring.
“I’ll go upstairs and take a look in the wardrobe,” she said, “and see if any of the clothes I left behind are fit to wear.”
The wardrobe reeked of mothballs. Ruth took the frocks out one by one. They were well preserved, but much too old-fashioned to wear now. Not only that, they were childish, with puffed sleeves and sashes and too many frills. Still, the material was good. It might be less expensive to have them altered than buy new. She was hopeless with a needle, always had been—perhaps herfather knew of a dressmaker she could use. Indeed, Mrs Waterman, who’d made the frocks in the first place, might still be in business.
Ruth closed the door on the wardrobe and pulled out the drawer underneath. It was full of underwear, neatly folded. She’d taken little baggage to Austria, as the plan had been to stay only three months. There were morel things in the tallboy, a pretty shawl she’d worn when she went to concerts with her father and several cream flannel nightdresses. She took one out. Incredibly, it was as good as new, with its high lace-trimmed neck and long gathered sleeves. It meant she would be warm in bed that night; the one she’d brought with her was as thin as the tablecloth her father still used.
In the top drawer, she found a heart-shaped chocolate box containing her old jewellery, and drew out a long colourful string of beads. It was all cheap, mostly bought from Woolworth’s, and some pieces had tarnished, but somehow it felt more precious than all the expensive stuff she’d acquired since. She inserted a pair of drop earrings that matched the beads and looked at her reflection in the spotted wardrobe mirror.
It was incredible, truly incredible, but it was as if the old Ruth Singerman were staring back - no, she corrected herself, the young. She undid the plaits coiled on her neck and let them hang loose. She felt that if she tried really hard, she could erase the last twenty years from her mind and become the young Ruth again.
Did she want to? She leaned forward and asked her reflection quite distinctly, “Do I want to?” But the I reflection provided no answer. One of their friends in Graz, a psychiatrist, had used hypnotism to treat his patients. She wondered if she could be hypnotised to forget she’d ever had a husband and two children.
She closed her eyes and had an immediate vision of Benjy hanging from the stairwell. She quickly opened her eyes again. It was guilt she felt more than anything when she thought about Benjy, because she hadn’t loved him for a long time. She found his middle-aged paunch and the ridiculous mutton-chop whiskers he’d affected quite repugnant.
Even in death, it was easy to feel guilt, but hard to feel sympathy for a man who’d taken his own life rather than stand up to the German monsters.
By then, the house had been stripped bare. The hated Huns had taken everything of value: the pictures, the Steinway, the furniture, even her furs. The children had gone the same day as Benjy. That’s what had tipped him Over the abyss into despair. Ruth arrived home to find she no longer had a family. Benjy was dead and the children had disappeared.
“Where?” she asked faintly. Jews seemed to be vanishing daily off the face of the earth. There would soon be not a angle one left in Graz. It could only be the barbarians who’d taken, her children. They’d left the most precious things till last. But no, to her relief it wasn’t as calamitous as she’d first thought, not quite.
Gertrude Bruening, wonderful, loyal Gertrude, m
ore like an angel than a cook, who had hidden her in her own home for the next two dazed and wretched years, was sitting on the bottom stair, rocking to and fro and wailing like an animal which had returned to its lair and found someone had stolen all its young.
“A group of Simon’s friends came from the University,”
Gertrude said breathlessly when Ruth calmed her down.
Both ignored the body swinging overhead. “Oh, you should have seen them, Frau Hildesheimer, their eyes were fever bright and they were bursting with excitement.: They were planning to escape to America. But Simon and Leah had to make their minds up there and then if they wanted to go with them. There was no time to wait for you to come home. Mr Hildesheimer, poor man, he tried to stop them. Me, I insisted they go, I knew it’s what you “, would have wanted.” She burst into tears. “At least I hope so. If not, you’ll just have to give me the sack.”
“It’s what I wanted, Gertie,” Ruth whispered. “Let’s” hope they’ll be safe.”
Perhaps they were, perhaps they weren’t. That was two years ago and Ruth had received no word from her children.
There was a noise from the yard and she got up and went to see what was happening. Her father was dragging a sack of coke into the yard. He must have bought it from the coalyard across the street. He looked happy again, as if the money from the musical box had changed the course of their lives forever. At least, Ruth thought dispassionately, she could make sure he lived comfortably from now on.
But she could never love him as she used to. He was old.
One day he -would be taken from her, and losing another loved one would be too much to bear. She would keep him at a distance, keep the whole world at a distance. From now on, Ruth Singerman would have a heart of stone.
She went back to the mirror, and for some reason she was never able to explain, she picked up a pair of nail scissors which had been in the box with the jewellery and began to hack away at her plaits. She’d had them for as long as she could remember, and it took ages to cut through the thick browny-red hair.
It looked terrible when she’d finished, as if her head had been attacked with a pair of garden shears. Tomorrow, before she went to look for a job, she’d go to the hairdresser’s and have a perm.
The plaits themselves looked pathetic now they were no longer part of her. Shivering, Ruth put them out of sight in a drawer. They made her think of dismembered limbs.
“The kettle’s boiling,” her father called, “and I’ve no idea how to make coffee.”
“Coming!”
Ruth took a final glance at herself in the mirror. She could never be the old Ruth Singerman again, and Ruth Hildesheimer no longer existed. From now on, she would be an entirely new person altogether.
She squared her shoulders and went downstairs.
Chapter 5
Tony Costello had found a kitten, pure white with a black patch over one eye and three black paws. It came crawling out of the wreckage of a bombed house one Saturday morning when Tony was out searching for shrapnel—the jagged metal remnants of bombs. His mam complained bitterly about having such horrible reminders of the war on the sideboard as if they were ornaments, but Tony was proud of his collection and the bigger the pieces the better as far as he was concerned. One day, he might have enough to build a bomb of his own.
The kitten came tripping purposefully over the rubble towards Tony, mewing loudly as if it recognised a friend.
“Can I keep him, please, Mam?” he pleaded when he took it home. He’d die if she said no.
“Oh, I suppose so,” she said reluctantly. “But you’ll have to see to it yourself. I’ve enough to do without having a cat to look after on top of everything else.”
“It’s not a cat, it’s only a kitten.”
“In case you haven’t noticed, kittens turn into cats, just like little boys turn into men.” She poured milk into an old saucer and as they watched the kitten lap up the drink greedily, Eileen ruffled her son’s fine blond hair. She found it hard to refuse him anything nowadays. Although he appeared quite happy, she felt she’d let him down as badly as she had Nick. “What are you going to call him?”
“Snowy?” he suggested after an earnest think.
“That’s nice. There’s an old shoebox in the washhouse along with the waste paper. If you crumple a bit of newspaper inside, it’ll do for a bed.”
“Ta, Mam,” Tony said blissfully. “I suppose I’d better make him a gas mask.”
Eileen grinned. “Aren’t you the clever clogs! Anything to keep you busy. Now, get from under me feet, else I’ll never get this pie done before your dad’s home for his dinner.”
Tony trotted away contentedly clutching the kitten and Eileen rolled a circle of pastry out and placed it carefully on a plate which contained a mixture of stewing steak and potatoes, fluting the edges with a knife. She marked off the section containing most of the meat for Tony.
After putting the pie in the oven, she collected the remaining pieces of pastry for a jam turnover. It would do for tomorrow’s pudding with custard. In previous days, the turnover would have been eaten for supper or cut in slices for anyone who might drop in for a cup of tea, but nowadays you couldn’t be as generous with your food as you used to be, tea in particular. Two ounces a week for each person wasn’t nearly enough, though it was more than anyone’s life was worth to let Sheila hear you complain, not with so many merchant seamen losing their lives in the effort to keep the country’s belly full - well, half full!
Francis often brought home little treats which she suspected were black market. Last week, for instance, he’d turned up with a lovely piece of ham for Sunday dinner which had lasted through to Tuesday sliced cold. Eileen felt uneasy about getting more than her fair share of rations. She would far sooner live on the same amount of food as the rest of the street - not counting the Kellys, next door, who ran a thriving black market business - but it was awfully difficult to turn down half a dozen eggs or a couple of pork chops when they were put in front of you.
She never mentioned the gifts to her dad. Jack Doy would do his nut if he thought any of his family were eating food that hadn’t been acquired completely above board. Eileen salved her conscience a little by giving a lot of stuff to Sheila; five of the eggs had gone her sister’s way, and Tony had the sixth.
She wondered, it being Saturday and Francis’s day, what sort of present he would bring? After home for nearly two months and back at work for the best part of that time, it had become a sort of ritual; he always turned up with sherry or a box of chocolates.
Once, he’d brought a pair of silk stockings, though the intimacy of the gift made her feel uncomfortable and she’d given them away.
Sheila was becoming increasingly impatient, accusing her of being too nice to Francis. “Before you know it, everything will be back to normal and Nick might never have existed.”
“But what else can I do?” Eileen asked helplessly. “We’re living under the same roof together. If he’s nice to me, it’s awful hard not to be nice back.”
It was relentless, the charm, the presents, the way he offered to do things around the house when she was at work - the other day he’d distempered the back kitchen a lovely duck-egg blue. Now he was talking about using his accumulated wages to have a bath put in the washhouse, which would save fetching the tin tub indoors and bathing in front of the fire.
“What do you think, princess? Let me know when you’ve made up your mind and I’ll get someone in to do I it.”
What else could she say, but, “Yes, please, Francis?” A proper bath seemed the very ultimate of luxury to Eileen imagine not having to hump in pail after pail of water from the back kitchen!
Mind you, he’d always liked the house to be smart so he could show off when people came round on Corporation business. Number 16 was one of the few houses in the street to have electricity, and Eileen had a proper stove in the back kitchen to cook on - there was a green tiled fireplace in the living room where the old range used t
o be. Francis could always work miracles. Even in wartime, she marvelled, he was able to find a plumber and a new bath, though it would probably be one of the Corpy workmen doing the job as a foreigner.
She sighed and cursed herself for being so weak-willed and easily influenced. It was ironic to think that Sheila Mid her dad were able to resist her husband’s charm offensive, and even Tony seemed wary of his dad, yet die, the chief victim, was gradually being drawn back under his spell.
“The other day a letter had come from the solicitor dealing with the divorce, wondering why he hadn’t heard from her. She took the letter into work and showed it to Miss Thomas.
“I’ve no idea what to do,” she confessed.
Miss Thomas didn’t answer for a while. Eventually, she shook her head. “I don’t know how to advise you, Eileen. Is it definitely all over with Nick?”
Eileen winced. “It seems like it,” she muttered.
“But you still love him? I can tell by your face.”
“I’ll love Nick all my life, but it’s nowt to do with him in a way,” Eileen said. “I’d made up me mind about the divorce long before things got serious between me and Nick, but Francis is all sweetness and light. He can’t do enough for me. He even sends his white shirts to the laundry to save on the washing. Once or twice, I’ve found meself calling him ‘luv’. I’d feel dead mean Walking out. Anyroad, where would I go?”
“Oh, Eileen! You’re in a right old mess.”
“I am that,” Eileen said ruefully. “Y’know, when I’m on the afternoon shift, it’s nice to go home and find the cocoa made. He asks how the day went, all concerned like, and we end up having quite a pleasant little chat.”
Miss Thomas leaned forward, her chin cupped in her hands. “You know, I’d very much like to meet Francis Costello. He sounds a remarkable man.”
