The Two Hearts of Eliza Bloom

by Beth Miller

  ‘Well,’ and Dov looked at me, witnessing my failure to stop the tears, ‘Maybe not right at this moment. But yes. I think she has a better chance with you than with someone else.’

  ‘Thanks, man,’ Alex said, and if that was him wiping away a tear of his own, well, Dov and I were too polite to mention it.

  Dov was now a big part of our lives, and he got on really well with Kim too – not surprisingly as they were quite similar in many ways, not least in the beard department. Dov was astonished by Vicky, and stared at her open-mouthed for most of the time, which she thankfully interpreted as admiration, and referred to him when he wasn’t around as ‘my young Jewish boyfriend’. At the house-warming party Vicky got rather drunk, and Dov told me she’d followed him round, backing him into a corner at one point while Alex and I were showing Sheila and Kim round the new place. She announced that she’d kissed every man in the house except him and what was he going to do about it. As the only men in the house were Kim and Alex, Dov cunningly sidestepped her main question by asking about the circumstances around her kissing Alex. She apparently became somewhat maudlin and said, ‘I kissed him in Brighton but he said he didn’t want to and pushed me away – not very gentlemanly, was it?’

  I don’t know how Dov managed to extricate himself from this scene without being ungentlemanly himself, though he assured me his honour was intact, but I realised that this put an end to the last traces of worry about Alex and Vicky that I had been carrying around. For this, and for so many other things, I was grateful to Dov.

  Dov reckoned that Mum would be willing to see Alex after the baby came. My other siblings could meet him then too. I was happy to wait for that. But there were two people I didn’t want to wait for.

  I hadn’t been to Hatton Garden for years, not since I was a child, and the sprawling streets were confusing to navigate. We found Dad’s shop eventually; you had to buzz the door to be let in. I suppose the men behind the counter thought we were a couple in the market for an engagement ring, and quickly, given the size of the lady’s tummy, as we were greeted with warmth and huge smiles. When I explained that we wanted to speak to Kap Bloom, the smiles switched off. I caught one of the men staring with horror at the Accessorise crystal ring on my finger and I put the offending hand in my pocket.

  Dad came out from the back office, his expression as black as night. Before we had a chance to speak, the manager, a tall thin man with a goatee, followed him out and snapped, ‘We can’t have your family turning up whenever you like, Bloom.’

  I expected Dad to explode at him – no one dared be that rude to Dad – but to my amazement he merely nodded and said, ‘I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.’

  ‘It’s not his fault,’ Alex said. ‘He didn’t know we were coming.’

  Dad frowned furiously at me, and shook his head. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said again.

  Goatee said, ‘Ten minutes, Bloom, take it off your lunch break.’

  Dad stormed out without looking to see if we were coming, and marched up the street. We followed him, glancing at each other, wondering what he was going to do. He stopped on the pavement outside a café and turned on me.

  ‘What in Ha-Shem’s name are you playing at?’

  ‘Sir,’ Alex said, ‘I’m sorry if we’ve caused you problems at work.’

  ‘You’ve got some balls, boy, you know that?’ Dad said, raising his voice. He looked at Alex for the first time. ‘Some great big balls. First her.’ He cocked his thumb at me. ‘Then coming here. This isn’t your territory, boy. There better be a good reason for this.’

  Seeing these two men next to each other for the first time, I realised how small Dad was, how frail he was beginning to look, a tired old man. His thick black hair was receding at the hairline, his beard was speckled with silver. He still spoke like a dictator, but he didn’t look like he could follow it through. I’d never seen him as vulnerable before.

  I expected Alex to continue speaking for both of us. But he turned to me, and said, ‘I think we do have a good reason, sir. My wife wants to tell you something important.’

  Calling me ‘my wife’ to my father’s face was a good way of showing Dad exactly how big Alex’s balls were. I was never more proud of him.

  ‘Well?’ Dad folded his arms and frowned at me.

  ‘You know we’re having a baby, Dad.’

  ‘That’s nothing to do with me.’ He said the words quickly, automatically, almost before I’d finished speaking. But there was something in his eyes that made me continue as if he hadn’t said anything.

  ‘We just wanted to tell you that, when the baby comes, we’re going to name it after your father, Levi. Of course, I never knew him, but I wish I had, and the baby will carry his name: Lev if it’s a boy, Leah if a girl.’

  There was a long silence. I couldn’t tell what Dad was thinking – for once, his expression was unreadable.

  ‘Well, that’s all we wanted to say,’ I said. ‘We’ll let you get back to work.’

  Alex and I started to move away, and we had taken a few steps when I heard my father murmur something. It sounded like, ‘Thank you.’

  I turned back, but he was already walking – scuttling, really – back towards the shop. Alex and I looked at each other.

  ‘Did you hear that?’ I said.

  ‘I think so,’ he said.

  ‘We must have imagined it. I never heard my dad say “thank you” in my life.’

  ‘Well, he definitely said, “something you”,’ Alex said, and smiled.

  ‘I want to think it was “thank you”.’

  ‘Me too. I’m pretty sure that’s what it was,’ Alex said, and he reached for my hand. We both let out a breath.

  Now there was only one person left who needed to meet Alex.

  Zaida was going downhill rapidly, so time was pressing. One Sunday, a few weeks before we moved house, Alex and I visited him at Beis Israel. Alex held back as I went forward to Zaida’s chair and gently woke him – he seemed to spend most of his time asleep now. He came to slowly, taking a few moments to focus on my face. Then he broke into his beautiful Zaida smile. ‘My darling! My dear one!’ It was some time now since he had been able to access my name.

  I kissed him, and Alex and I sat on either side of him.

  ‘Zaida,’ I said, ‘I want you to meet my lovely young fellow.’

  Zaida turned to look at Alex. ‘Hello,’ he said.

  ‘Hello, Moshe,’ Alex replied.

  Zaida turned back to me. ‘A nice-looking fellow you found for yourself.’

  ‘He is, isn’t he? In fact, Zaida, I need to tell you something important. This man, Alex. Well, he’s my husband.’

  ‘Ah! Your husband! Mazeltov! I remember the wedding.’

  He gently took Alex’s hand, and mine, and joined them together across his chair. Alex and I sat, our hands clasped, Zaida’s hand on top of ours. We were all linked.

  I took a breath. ‘Zaida, Alex has been my husband all along. Not that other fellow.’

  Zaida looked at me, puzzled. He raised our hands to his lips, and kissed them.

  ‘What other fellow?’ he said.

  Thirty-Four

  May 2016

  The carpet is new: a rich dark red, whereas the one I remember was beige and flecked with blue and pink spots. I spent a lot of time staring at that carpet when I was a child. But they certainly haven’t replaced the chairs – they’re the same uncomfortable hard-backed wooden chairs from my youth. I stretch out my legs so vigorously that I almost feel the muscles in my calves twang.

  On one side of me, a woman in a mahogany-coloured sheitel wig is gossiping in a noisy whisper to the woman on her other side. ‘You wouldn’t believe it, would you? No discussion, no nothing, she says, “That’s what I’m going to do”, and who even cares if he doesn’t like it.’

  ‘What did he do?’ the woman whisper-shouts back.

  ‘What could he do?’

  ‘Oy, I don’t know what is going on these days, sometimes.’
<
br />   ‘Then she has the cheek to come to me. “Mum,” she says, “Mum, I know you’re not going to like it but…”’

  Troublesome daughters are everywhere. I really want to know what it was that the mum wasn’t going to like, but Leah, who is slumped on my other side, puts her hand on my shoulder and whispers, ‘How much longer?’

  I sit forward and crane my neck to see the men praying below. ‘I’m not sure, darling. Forty minutes? An hour?’

  With a humpf, Leah flops back into her seat in a more or less horizontal position.

  Alex just smiled when I told him that Leah and I would attend shul together.

  ‘It’s the right thing to do,’ he said.

  ‘I know. But it feels so hard, going there. Right back where I started.’

  ‘But by choice, this time. For Leah’s sake.’

  ‘Do I hear my name?’ Leah came in, wearing one of her long skirts. She must have grown a little recently because it wasn’t quite as ankle-skimming as previously.

  ‘Your mother is in philosophical mood,’ Alex said, winking at me. ‘I was telling her that going backwards is OK. We have both done plenty of going back.’

  He was right, of course. I was a master of going back. I went back to my family after being married. Then I went back to Alex. Then I went back to my old life again just recently, staying with Deborah.

  And then, finally, back again, to Alex, with Leah. A golden return I would often think of. Dov dropping Leah and me off, Alex opening the door and running outside to greet us, flinging his arms round both of us. I had come back, and he had taken me back.

  ‘Sometimes you have to go back to go forwards,’ Alex intoned solemnly.

  ‘Isn’t that complete bullshit, Dad?’

  ‘No, it’s a Buddhist thing.’

  ‘We’re doing Buddhism at school, actually. Ethan reckons he’s a Buddhist now.’

  So I take Leah to shul, and afterwards we go to Dov’s for lunch, and she doesn’t spend much time with Gidon, but instead hangs out with Chanah and Devora, the younger girls. And when we get home, she rings Macy and arranges to go into town to meet Ethan, and it’s like old times.

  Alex and I sit at our usual places at the kitchen table.

  ‘Too early for wine?’ he says.

  ‘It’s three thirty.’

  ‘Wine it is, then.’ He passes me our fancy new corkscrew, a ‘glad you’re back together’ present from Dov. Alex knows I like using it.

  ‘So,’ he says, ‘who’s going first?’

  ‘You better had. You’re the one who threw me out,’ I say levelly.

  ‘Liza, I’m sorry.’

  I slide the corkscrew over the bottle. ‘Go on.’

  He says, ‘I saw my counsellor while you were staying at Deborah’s.’

  ‘Was she helpful?’

  ‘She was really tough on me.’

  The cork comes out with a satisfying pop. ‘I thought she wasn’t supposed to express an opinion.’

  ‘She didn’t at first. She was interested in why I was so angry.’

  ‘Well, thank you for saying sorry. And I’m sorry too. Sorry that I didn’t tell you what happened between Nathan and me.’ It still feels awkward saying Nathan’s name to Alex. Though it’s starting to feel less awkward than it once did. I pour two glasses, and push one in front of him. ‘But back then I didn’t feel it was worth turning our new start upside down, with something that seemed so irrelevant. And I wasn’t always great at speaking about my feelings. I was just thrilled we were back together, thrilled to be having a baby with you.’

  ‘Can you believe how grown-up our baby is?’

  ‘It feels like a few days ago that she was tiny,’ I say, and we smile at each other. Ah, Alex’s smile. We clink our glasses together.

  ‘Well… I need to say some more.’

  ‘Oh, sorry! Carry on.’

  He shifts in his seat. ‘The counsellor kept asking why I was so angry. I said it was because you had lied about Nathan. But she dug around, and it turns out that wasn’t the only reason.’

  I sip my wine. ‘Because I committed adultery?’

  ‘I love it when you go all biblical on my arse, Moses. Yes, of course, the breaking of the seventh commandment, that was a big part of it, too. But turns out there was more to it. I was jealous.’

  ‘Of what?’

  In a rush, he says, ‘I was completely, irrationally jealous that you’d slept with Nathan.’

  ‘But that’s, I’m sorry Alex, that’s… what?! I thought you were angry because I lied. Not because you were jealous. It was years ago! One time.’

  Alex stares down into his glass. ‘First I found out you’d slept with him all those years ago. Then I realised that the reason Leah found the pretend wedding photo was because you’d been looking at it recently. I couldn’t think why you’d have kept it.’ He looks up at me. ‘Unless you still felt something for him.’

  It was time – high time – to straighten this out. ‘Al, I hadn’t got the photo out to look at it. It was just in the box of things I was going through. I was actually trying to find something else.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The Re-education book.’

  His face softens. ‘You still have that?’

  ‘Of course I do! Every now and then I look through it and remember the things we did, the things we talked about, when I was newly arrived in the Real World.’

  He leans across, his hands braced on the table, and kisses my lips. Him doing that hasn’t made me physically jump for a long time.

  But it still makes me jump inside.

  ‘Oh god.’ He sits back and says, ‘My name is Alex Symons and I’m an idiot. It’s been a few weeks since I was last a complete idiot.’

  ‘Tell me something I don’t know.’

  ‘Believe me, I’ve not enjoyed hanging out with myself these last few weeks.’

  ‘Nathan was only that one time, Alex. You and I were separated, and I thought we were finished. I was in complete turmoil. And when it did happen between me and him, it was a disaster. Do you want me to tell you how disastrous it was?’

  ‘No, I’d be better off without the details. Here’s the thing. I eventually worked out – or to be truthful, the counsellor did – that I was jealous because I wanted you to be just mine.’

  ‘Oh sweetie, I am just yours.’

  ‘I mean that I didn’t want you to have been with anyone else, ever.’

  ‘Err…’

  ‘It’s pretty embarrassing to realise,’ and Alex coughs, stagily, ‘that though I have always considered myself a feminist, it turns out that my position on my wife is the classic virgin-whore thing. My counsellor was super-tough on this. She said, “Was one of the attractions of marrying Eliza the fact that she was a virgin?”’

  ‘And was it?’

  A pause. Then: ‘Yes.’

  ‘God, Alex!’ I gaze at him. Who is this person?

  ‘I didn’t realise it at the time, I swear.’ He coughs again, and takes a slug of wine, spilling a bit on his shirt. He really is embarrassed. ‘Basically, I always thought of you as pure.’

  ‘I’m a person, not a bar of fucking soap!’ These days, even that word trips off my tongue with ease.

  ‘I know. I know! I’m a male chauvinist bastard even my grandfather’s generation would be ashamed of.’

  I’m suddenly furious. ‘This is a bloody outrage, Alex!’

  ‘I’m just trying to explain why I was irrationally angry.’

  ‘You slept with tons of people before we met!’

  ‘Well, not tons.’

  ‘I’ve slept with two! And one of those was only once! Ask Vicky how many she’s slept with! Or Kim’s new girlfriend, what’s her name, Sarah? Or anyone, really, who lives out here.’

  ‘I know, Liza. God, I’m such an arse.’

  I thought about Nathan calling me wanton. I would never have dreamed that my own husband thought the same.

  ‘Jesus, Alex. Maybe it would have been better if you’d carrie
d on letting me think this was all about me lying.’

  He reaches across the table for my hand, which is clenched into a fist. He holds on to my lumpy, angry hand.

  ‘The counsellor said I had a version of us in my head. A narrative, she called it. I was the worldly one, the leader, the teacher. You were the innocent, the pupil. But my version only worked if I was the only man you’d ever been with. When I found that wasn’t true, maybe my whole world shifted on its axis. Everything I thought I knew was wrong.’

  ‘Is this your counsellor saying this? Or you?’

  ‘Me. Here’s the thing, Liza. You came from such a different world. All the rules and traditions, your attitude, you were so incredibly interesting. You made me feel interesting too. I was the guy who won the girl from the hidden world. We were Romeo and Juliet. You let me show you all the things I knew. Do you remember when we first watched Some Like It Hot together? You laughed so hard I thought you’d break.’

  ‘But I can’t believe that you’d have such an old-fashioned belief! I fell in love with you partly because you were a modern man!’

  ‘If you think you’re disappointed in me, imagine how I feel.’

  With my free hand, I take a gulp of wine. ‘Really,’ I say, ‘I should have gone and slept with loads of men before we met, and then seen if you’d still wanted to marry me.’ A thought occurs to me. ‘Is this why you said that thing about Kim, too? Are you jealous because of my friendship with him?’

  ‘No, honestly. I love that you are friends, I swear. But you know, he’s always had a soft spot for you…’

  ‘He has, I know. But he would never ever act on it, you know that. And neither would I.’

  ‘I know. I really do know that. Believe me, I spent most of the Easter weekend trying to convince him that I’d trust him with my life. It was just a stupid thing that came out when I was angry, but later I realised that I’ve always felt more possessive of you than I should have. Even Kim’s gentle interest in you unsettled me. I suppose it made me feel insecure.’

  ‘I love Kim like a brother,’ I say, my voice quiet, ‘and it was lousy of you to embarrass him like that in public, and horrible to make him ashamed of his feelings.’