Chocolate Girls

by Annie Murray

  With Janet gone, Edie was even more appalled by Ruby’s announcement – for herself, losing another friend overseas, as well as worrying for Ruby and what she was rushing into this time. But over and above all this, somewhere in her thoughts at almost all times, even when she was trying to concentrate on something else, was David.

  That afternoon when he had disappeared along the seafront at Aberystwyth, Edie was filled with the most terrible anguish. His anger and apparent rejection of her felt like the worst moment of her life, worse even than losing Jack or her first child. Davey had been hers now for fifteen years, and now he knew the truth he didn’t want her! She wept for a long time at the end of the prom, oblivious to everything around her. She was so frightened David would just keep walking and never come back. If he was really my child he would come, she thought wildly. He would be tied to me, the bond would draw him to me. But now, why should he come back?

  Of course Frances was much calmer, and reassured her. He won’t leave – he loves you. You’ve been his mother. Give him time for it to sink in. When he did come back, sullen, but calm, they ate their evening meal together, almost as if the conversation on the prom had never happened, except that Edie felt so churned up inside she barely touched her lamb chops. They avoided the subject. David even talked about where he’d walked to, about the beauty of the sun setting over the evening sea. But he seemed distant, over-polite, as if conversing with strangers. Edie couldn’t bear to go to bed without trying to speak further to him.

  When they had all gone up for the night, she tapped on his door, then cautiously opened it. He was leaning on the sill of the open window in his pale blue pyjamas, looking out at the sea. Laughter floated up from the street.

  ‘Davey – David?’ she corrected herself quickly.

  He turned and looked at her but did not move away from the window. She could not read his expression. It was not hostile, just neutral, waiting for her to speak.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ More tears came then. She wanted him to come close, wanted his forgiveness. ‘I’m sorry I’ve given you such a shock. I didn’t want to tell you really – I was worried . . .’ She couldn’t finish.

  He looked away out of the window and she felt rejected again, as if he couldn’t stand the sight of her and her emotion. But when he turned back to her after a moment she saw he was struggling to contain his own tears. She held herself back from running to comfort him, knew he would not want it, not tonight.

  ‘I do know a little bit more. When you want to know. We could find out . . .’

  ‘Her name,’ he said in a choked voice. ‘D’you know what I would have been called?’

  Softly, Edie said, ‘I don’t know what she called you, but her name was Gerda Mayer. She came from Berlin.’

  David nodded slowly, and turned back towards the window. ‘OK,’ he said.

  That week since they’d been back he had not spoken of it at all. Edie expected questions, outbursts, but he had been more or less his usual self, as if the weekend in Wales and what he had learned there was something separate from his normal life. He went out with his friends, built his models, read his books. She heard his wireless set playing in his room as usual. As the summer holidays passed and nothing more happened, Edie tried to talk to him about it several times and he brushed her off, though not aggressively. But she could not relax about it and several times Frances found her crying to release her constant tension and anxiety.

  ‘I can’t believe he’s just going to leave it at that,’ Edie sobbed one evening. ‘I feel so wound up because I don’t know what he’s feeling – he won’t say.’

  ‘He probably doesn’t even understand that himself,’ Frances counselled. ‘You know what he’s like – he finds it hard enough to say what he feels normally. I’m just so sorry to see you getting yourself in such a state over it. I’m sure that when he’s ready, he’ll want to know more.’

  David went back to school in September. He had excelled at his School Certificate and was now free to concentrate on his favourite subjects – mathematics and sciences. Two of his best friends were also studying the same subjects and he seemed very happy. But after a fortnight, when Edie came in from work, Frances said he had been quiet and withdrawn. Edie went up to David’s room. She found him doing his homework, frowning over a maths problem, and he looked round at her.

  ‘Have a nice day?’ She kept her tone light, as if not expecting anything.

  ‘Yes . . .’ he said vaguely. And after a pause, ‘Mom?’

  Edie waited.

  ‘I don’t want . . . I mean, I don’t want to upset you, that’s the thing . . .’

  She suppressed her immediate feeling of panic and let him finish.

  ‘You’re my mom – you’ll always will be.’ He raised his lovely dark eyes to her, full of need for reassurance. ‘I just want to know where I came from.’

  ‘Oh Davey—’ She put her hands on his shoulders and kissed the top of his head. ‘Of course you do. I know that, my lovely. And I’ll help you do that any way I can.’

  It was Frances who started them off, helping as she had done on so many occasions.

  ‘So far as I remember there was a Committee for Refugees based at one of the synagogues,’ she said as the three of them sat round the tea table the next day. Frances frowned into her teacup as she tried to recall the details. ‘My memory just isn’t what it was. The thing to do would be to ask some of the Friends. They’ll know. ’

  Edie and David accompanied her to the Meeting House that Sunday. When the meeting was over Edie felt calmer, somehow more solid in herself after sitting still, listening in the silence, and sure, despite her fears of what it might cost her, that David had to do what he was doing. Frances talked discreetly to a Miss Jenkins, who had been a particular friend of Serena Bowles, the woman who took in David’s mother.

  ‘She doesn’t know much about the refugee committee itself or who was on it,’ Frances said as they walked home. Edie and David measured their pace to fit Frances’s. One of her hip joints was causing her pain and she had taken to walking with a stick. ‘But it seems our first step might be to get in touch with a Mr and Mrs Leishmann. Miss Jenkins seems to know them personally. They own a tailoring business near Five Ways.’

  David was listening intently and Edie felt a strong impulse to try to silence Frances and ask her to repeat what she had learned when he was not about. It was as if she needed to hear the information first and allow herself to come to terms with it before allowing him to hear anything. Once again she felt panic – no, more than that, she realized, as she identified the unpleasant emotion that was stabbing inside her. How could she be jealous of a dead woman? But she was, and she tried to push the feeling away. David must be allowed to hear. He was almost grown up now, not a child.

  ‘They attend Singers Hill Synagogue and of course they know all sorts of people. But she said they also used to help out at the club that was run there during the war to help refugees feel more at home. They’d be very good people to start with at least.’

  ‘So when should we go and see them?’ David asked earnestly.

  ‘Maybe Saturday?’ Edie tried to sound encouraging.

  Frances paused for a moment, leaning on her stick to get her breath back. ‘I can’t imagine Saturday would be the best day for an Orthodox Jewish couple. I’ll find out their telephone number and enquire.’

  ‘D’you think they might have known . . .?’ David began, then stopped himself from saying ‘my mother’ in front of Edie.

  Frances eased herself into walking again. ‘Oh,’ she said gently. ‘I expect they knew all sorts of people.’

  Thirty-Eight

  Leishmann’s Bespoke Tailors was a fusty looking establishment, which announced its trade in gold scrolled lettering on the black paintwork above its dark windows. When Frances had spoken to him on the telephone, Mr Leishmann had been most kind and welcoming. The three of them were invited to tea on Sunday afternoon, but Mr Leishmann had asked if they would first meet hi
m at the shop, where he had some work to finish, and they would walk together to his house nearby.

  ‘Miss Jenkins told me the shop is deceptive,’ Frances said as they stepped out of the station at Five Ways. ‘It looks small and quite unassuming, but apparently the Leishmanns do some of the very finest work.’

  When they pushed the door open there was a mellow-sounding ‘ting’. It was gloomy inside, but as Mr Leishmann appeared from the back he clicked a switch, filling the room with light. The floor was covered with ancient brown linoleum. A yard from the back wall stretched a long counter with a brass tape measure screwed to the top, on which were lying a large pair of scissors and several reels of cotton. On a shelf to one side were stacked a number of bolts of cloth, and a huge dresser was arranged to one side of the room with a great many small drawers in it. There was a tailor’s dummy in one corner.

  ‘Good afternoon – hello, hello! Pleased to meet you. I am Joe Leishmann!’

  They could hear him before he appeared, bustling in through a door at the back, and shook Frances heartily by the hand. He was tiny, round-faced man wearing thick, black-framed spectacles. His greying hair, despite his attempts to slick it back over his head as he greeted them, kept springing back up again in dense tufts. Edie guessed he must be in his mid-fifties, and his German accent was very strong. For a second she felt an instinctive inner recoil. In her life she had only ever heard German spoken in the newsreels of Hitler’s hectoring voice at his Nazi rallies. But Mr Leishmann was quite different. He was smiling broadly and she felt immediate liking for him.

  ‘So this is young David!’ He hurried over and seized David’s hand as well. David said a shy hello. Mr Leishmann peered at him for a moment, suddenly serious, and said, ‘Oh yes . . . Yes, yes,’ then recollected himself and turned to meet Edie. Shaking his hand, she smiled into his twinkling eyes.

  ‘Now, in a moment we will go to my home and drink coffee – or tea – and have some nice cakes.’ Mr Leish-mann’s enthusiasm and his rounded tummy both testified to the fact that he was rather fond of cakes. ‘But there is first one thing I have to do. Come—’ He beckoned them like a traffic policeman. ‘Through here – I will show you.’

  At the back was a workroom with several sewing-machines. Bent over one of the long tables, a woman was working in the light from the window.

  ‘This is . . .’ Mr Leishmann started to say, then, making all of them jump, he broke into an anguished cry. ‘No! Not like that! Mein Gott, how many times must I say it?’

  He leapt over and started to adjust something she was doing to a garment being created out of a rich, sea-blue satin.

  The woman pushed her chair back and got to her feet. Edie saw a strong-jawed, sullen face, black hair pulled back into a stylish bun, and full, plum-coloured lips. She was wearing a green dress which was nipped in at the waist and hugged her curvaceous figure.

  ‘OK!’ she roared back at him. It took Edie only a couple of seconds to discover she was Italian. ‘You want to do it that way, you do it yourself! That is not right. How can I work with you when you know nothing about how to make it properly!’ She slammed the fabric down. ‘I fed up. I go home. You want a slave to work for you, a stupid person who know nothing, you find her somewhere else.’ She turned to the three of them as if they were advocates brought in specially to defend her. ‘Look, you see? He tell me one thing. Is no right. I do it the right way – the way I always done it. I am a woman – I know the way I making clothes for the woman. But no – is always wrong . . . He is impossible . . .’

  ‘Nadia . . .’ Mr Leishmann tried to interrupt the flow with little success. ‘She is my assistant,’ he told Edie and the others. ‘She thinks she knows everything . . . Nadia, will you STOP zis shouting! Whose shop is this? Whose business, eh? This is Joe Leishmann to whom you are shouting!’

  Nadia was silenced for a second and stood pouting, hand on hips. ‘I do it my way. The right way,’ she said with a smouldering expression. She gestured towards the door. ‘Or I leave. I go now . . .’

  There then followed a long technical altercation at high volume and with much arm-waving about the way the dress was supposed to be tailored, during which Frances took the opportunity to lower herself on to the chair closest to the door. Each demonstrated to the other why their own way was the only possible method by which a sane person could fashion a garment of this quality and pattern. Mr Leishmann mopped his brow with his handkerchief. For a moment Edie thought he was showing signs of surrendering. But suddenly, in a quiet, steely tone, he said, ‘Nadia, if you can’t do what I ask you to do, I will give the dress to Esther to be finished.’

  Nadia looked up at him, abruptly silenced. Pouting still more and giving an abrupt shrug, she said, ‘OK, you win – this time. I do it your way. Don’t blame me if she look like a bloody horse in it.’

  ‘Good,’ Mr Leishmann said cheerfully. ‘My God, you make everything such hard work. Nadia – these are some friends of mine.’

  Nadia looked round at them and, almost as if the last minutes of bickering had not taken place, gave a broad smile and nod. ‘Nice to meet you.’

  ‘Now – we are going home to take tea with Esther, but—’ Mr Leishmann wagged his finger at her. ‘I will be back later to see what you have done.’

  Nadia scowled, subsiding back on to her chair. ‘Jews,’ she grumbled. ‘You no working Saturday . . . Now you go have tea and cakes. I’m a bloody Catholic, ain’t I? I ain’t s’posed to work Sundays!’

  ‘Bye-bye Nadia,’ Mr Leishmann said, ushering the three of them out into the front of the shop.

  ‘You would never believe how much I pay her,’ Mr Leishmann remarked, with a resigned air. Edie glanced round at Davey, who had been watching the proceedings with wide eyes. To her surprise she saw a broad grin spreading across his face.

  The distance to the Leishmanns’ house did not take many minutes. Mr Leishmann walked beside Frances, offering her his arm which she politely declined, and they made their way talking quietly togther.

  ‘You all right?’ Edie whispered to David. She reached out and squeezed his arm.

  He nodded and gave her a nervous smile. But she could see the anticipation in him. And she found herself feeling excited too. For all her vulnerable feelings about David’s origins, she too wanted to know, and now they were getting closer to finding out more.

  The Leishmanns lived on the upper floor of a house in Frederick Road, a broad street of stylish Edgbaston houses, all set back from the road with well-tended front gardens. Edie felt rather intimidated when they turned in at the gate of the imposing Georgian house, newly painted white, its windows shining in the hard October light.

  ‘Of course, it would be nice to occupy the whole of such a house,’ Mr Leishmann said with a wry expression, as he let them in through a side door. ‘But there is quite enough for Esther and myself to do already, and living up here we do not have to concern ourselves with the garden. If it was for us to do, it would soon be like the jungles of Africa.’

  They climbed up a back staircase and along a short corridor which led them to the upper landing, from which the main staircase had been blocked off. Edie found herself walking on a thick, crimson carpet.

  ‘Esther? I have brought our visitors!’

  Like her husband, Esther Leishmann could be heard talking before she appeared.

  ‘Ah, hello, good afternoon, come in, you are very welcome.’

  She came out of one of the side rooms, very petite, dark hair fastened back in a neat chignon, and dressed in a beautifully tailored suit in a woollen bouclé material of soft browns. She shook each of them by the hand, greeting Frances warmly. She was an attractive woman, with fine, black brows, face softly powdered, her features accentuated by lipstick and a hint of rouge. As they shook hands Edie felt gold rings pressing against her palm. She realized Esther Leishmann was even smaller than she was.

  ‘So you are Mrs Weale,’ she said. She did not rush to release Edie’s hand.

  ‘Pleased to meet
you,’ Edie said. She felt the woman candidly scrutinizing her, but she saw sympathy in her eyes.

  ‘And this must be David.’ She took his hand, seeming to do so with a special carefulness, and her eyes lingered on his face, but she said no more then.

  ‘Now – please come in. Everything is ready. I have been waiting for you.’ She led them into their sitting-room, a rather grand parlour with a marble fireplace and long windows overlooking the garden. Once again the floor was covered by a luxurious carpet, mossy green this time, and the mirror over the mantlepiece, the tables and glass front of the china cabinet all gave off the shine of loving elbow grease. She settled them on brocade chairs. ‘What took you such a long time, Joe?’

  Mr Leishmann shrugged. ‘Nadia.’

  Esther Leishmann looked fondly at him over the teacups and made a scornful sound. ‘You will never learn how to handle that woman. You know—’ She turned to Edie and the others. ‘He is really like a child when it comes to business.’

  ‘But you make very beautiful clothes,’ Frances said. ‘Your suit – did you make that yourself? It’s very fine.’

  ‘You like it?’ Esther Leishmann stood up and turned round to show her. ‘It’s very easy when you know how.’ She gave a conspiratorial smile. ‘From one of the new Dior patterns. I can make one for you if you like.’

  ‘Oh, I think I’m a bit old to keep up with fashion,’ Frances laughed.

  ‘No—’ Esther Leishmann looked appraisingly at her. ‘You have style. You know how to dress. I can see that.’

  Frances raised her eyebrows at this directness. ‘It’s nice of you to say so. I have always rather enjoyed clothes,’ she admitted.

  ‘Of course – why not? Now – let us take tea.’ Esther buzzed around energetically, pouring tea into bone china cups on the low table in front of them. There were platters loaded with pastries and cakes, and little plates and cake forks.