Chocolate Girls

by Annie Murray

  Unexpectedly, and to his enormous embarrassment, David burst into tears.

  Forty

  Ruby was to leave the country at the end of January. All through the months before, she was full of nothing else, as were the girls. Marleen though, having nearly given up on getting David to take any notice of her, was indignant at his complete lack of interest in the new life ahead of them.

  Edie, whose mind was also elsewhere, preoccupied with David, found Ruby’s one-track obsession rather trying, especially as she was the one being left behind – by everyone, it seemed.

  ‘You can come out and visit us,’ Ruby told her, during one of the dinner breaks at work. Some of the other girls in the factory were all agog to hear Ruby was moving to America. But then they weren’t going to miss her as much as Edie. Especially as they were working together for the time being, putting Milk Tray chocolates in with the Easter eggs. Ruby’s job was to slip the eggs into their bright display cartons. ‘You’ve got to come. I want you to meet Carl and you’ll love America!’

  ‘Oh I don’t know about that . . .’ To Edie, the thought of flying across the Atlantic was almost beyond her imagination.

  ‘Go on with yer! You can save up the fare and come and see me and the girls. Course—’ Ruby stood up, brushing down her overall, ‘Carl’s paying for me and the girls. He might be able to pay for you as well, later on.’

  Edie went back to work, heavy-hearted. She couldn’t help resenting this Carl Christie whom Ruby thought so much of, for taking her friend away from her, however much Ruby seemed happy.

  What’s up with me? she thought. I don’t like the way I’m carrying on at the moment. I can’t seem to find a good word for anyone. She could barely admit to herself how jealous she was of the Leishmanns and all the time David was spending with them, especially that dressed-up mannequin Esther Leishmann. She knew perfectly well Esther Leishmann was a kind-hearted person. And they had been so good to Davey. But they had started taking him off to the synagogue on Saturdays as well as his visits to their house every week. And he seemed so excited, so full of life these days. He talked very little about it though, she couldn’t draw him out on the subject, and she felt excluded and angry. What was it the Leishmanns could give David that she never could? And now here was Ruby full of her new start. Edie was feeling insecure and jealous. And now these emotions even extended to Frances!

  A few days ago, a letter had come from Janet from Ibabongo. They had been intending to come home ‘“for a furlough” as the missionaries call it’, Janet wrote. ‘But Martin is so busy, and there is so much to be done that we still can’t see how we can get away for a break of more than a few days.’ Both of them were working flat out, with the maternity wing, the leprosy hospital, the school. Would Frances perhaps consider coming out to visit them in the Congo instead?

  Edie’s first reaction was to think this a preposterous idea. From Janet’s descriptions of the journeys she and Martin had made to reach the village, how did she think Frances could possibly manage at her age? But Frances seemed quite taken with the idea.

  ‘I think I could cope,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t want to have to walk for hours at a time, but I don’t imagine I should have to. It would be marvellous to see them and the work they’re doing, and it doesn’t sound as if they’re going to manage a trip here.’

  So even Frances was making plans for a future which didn’t include her! Oh, I’m so silly, Edie thought, hating the bitter feelings which rose up in her. A few days before, she had met one of the volunteers from the WVS whom she ran into from time to time.

  ‘Still here, are you?’ she’d said. ‘Still in the same place?’ The words seemed to taunt her.

  The night before Ruby’s departure with Marleen and Greta, they all gathered at her house in Glover Road. Her suitcases were already packed and lined up in the back room and the house looked bare and rather sad. Ethel and Lionel were there and they all drank Ruby’s health and wished her luck.

  ‘You get yerself settled in, bab, and I’ll be over!’ Tearfully Ethel grinned round the room. ‘We’re not letting a chance like that slip by us, are we, Lionel?’

  As they left that night, Edie and Ruby hugged each other tight.

  ‘I wish you weren’t going,’ Edie said miserably. ‘I really do. I wish everything could stay as it was.’

  Ruby laughed through her tears, holding Edie tight. ‘You can’t ask the world to stop turning, Edie. You have to move with it. Now you get yourself a passport and get over to see us, eh?’

  With final kisses and good wishes they left for home. Walking up Oak Tree Lane with Frances and David, Edie went on ahead of them in the winter night, lit by a slice of moon. Even the night air felt suddenly different, as if she was breathing in the scent of change. She had thought things would just go on, year after year. She had clung to the security of Frances and the home she had offered them while she was bringing up David. She had thought the three of them would always work at Cadbury’s, always be there together. That she and Ruby would always be Ginger and Cocoa. And in months it had all changed. Her friends were scattering and she had watched her son fall in love in front of her eyes with something she could barely understand. He was moving ahead in his life. She was the one who had stayed still.

  She was full of poignant thoughts that evening. How many years would Frances live for? How long would David be at home? All this time she had lived in the comfortable certainty of other people, barely looking at her own life. Still here. Yes – still here. So what do I do now? she thought, as they reached the brow of the hill in the moonlight. What can I do with my life now?

  1957–9

  Forty-One

  ‘So – have you got everything, d’you think?’

  They stood in the front room of Frances’s house, David’s suitcase and shoulder-bag waiting by the door.

  ‘You’ll never manage with just that, will you? What about that jersey – did you put it in?’

  David tutted fondly, shrugging into his coat. ‘Yes I did – I know Israel’s cold in January. But I’m only going for a few months – not for ever!’

  That was not how it felt to Edie.

  ‘You will be all right, won’t you?’

  He came up and put his hands on her shoulders. Her long, thin boy, much taller than her now. How she loved him! They had eaten a farewell meal together last night, just the three of them, and it had felt so good-natured, so close at last, after all the turmoil they had passed through.

  ‘I will. Don’t fuss. And I’ll write very often. You know I like writing letters. I’ll miss you, but I’ll be back very soon.’ Seeing the tears welling in Edie’s eyes, he hugged her. ‘Look . . . Mom. It’ll be OK.’

  She could hear the emotion in his voice too and he pulled away. He has to do this, she told herself, forcing herself, as she had done so many times over the past months, to understand, to let him be.

  ‘Mr Abrahams will be here in a minute,’ he said, going to the window to hide his own moist eyes.

  Frances limped into the room on her stick and said her goodbyes with great affection, and there was a flurry of activity then, when Mr Abrahams’s car drew up outside. He was a friend of Mr and Mrs Leishmann from the synagogue, and had offered to drive David all the way down to London Airport. Edie had decided not to go. She wouldn’t have felt comfortable travelling with them, and preferred to say her goodbyes in the privacy of home.

  ‘So, you are ready, young David?’ Mr Abrahams boomed cheerfully as they opened the door.

  Edie held David in her arms for one more snatched embrace.

  ‘Goodbye, love,’ she said softly.

  ‘’Bye, Mom.’

  ‘Go safely,’ Frances said.

  Then he was waving through the shiny windows of Mr Abrahams’s car and a moment later was gone.

  Edie stared at the empty space where the car had been. He had been carried into her life, and now he had been carried out of it, that was how it felt.

  ‘He won’t come
back,’ she said, with flat certainty.

  ‘Don’t be silly, dear,’ Frances said, sharp in the face of this melodramatic gloominess. ‘Of course he will, in a few months – he’s got his place at university.’ She turned on the step, surreptitiously wiping a tear from her own eye.

  ‘Let’s get in out of this cold wind.’

  There had been times over the past two years when things had been so bad that Edie could not have imagined David would ever again give her the sort of fond hug with which he parted from her before his flight to Tel Aviv. For a long time it had felt that they were enemies.

  She had struggled from the start with his attachment to the Leishmanns, because she sensed that it was about so much more than his fondness for the couple. They were, as she saw it, stand-ins for his real parents. They had actually seen, touched, spoken to his real mother, Gerda Mayer. They were German and Jewish, the nearest he could get. And for a time, suddenly, she seemed to count for nothing. She had had great difficulty controlling her feelings. First of all it had got worse when David started attending the synagogue. Going to Shul, he started calling it. His language became peppered with Hebrew and Yiddish terms which she had never heard before. David was excited about learning them, about his new identity, and would have taught her if she had been willing to hear. But the sound of these guttural words made her feel immediately agitated, enraged even. The new language was going to turn David into someone who spoke differently, thought differently. Someone she didn’t know.

  It meant that she scarcely saw him at weekends. On Saturday – Shabbat as he insisted on calling it – he spent much of the day with them. Them, they had become in her mind. The enemy, tearing her son away. On Sundays, sometimes, he still came to the Friends’ Meeting House, but while she had been influenced by the Friends to be suspicious of ritual and set words, David bemoaned the lack of it. He said Quaker prayer was all very well, but he needed something more. He wanted words, gestures, music. After lunch he was off again, to his cosy afternoon tea with the Leishmanns. Many times Esther Leishmann, hearing from David of Edie’s difficulties in accepting what was happening, invited her to go as well, but she always refused. They didn’t really want her there, Edie thought bitterly, and she would have felt uncomfortable.

  ‘Can’t you stay in for once and have tea with us?’ she complained sometimes. ‘We hardly ever see you.’

  ‘But I promised I’d go,’ he’d protest. ‘You know what Mrs Leishmann’s like – she’ll have been baking.’

  Usually Edie had to accept that, but once or twice she had lost her temper and shouted at him. ‘Oh, go on – go then. You’ve always got summat better to do than spend any time at home, haven’t you? Go on – go and see your Jewish friends – they obviously mean more to you than we do.’

  And then she felt awful afterwards, ashamed of her bitterness, and sad because she knew, if she carried on, she would drive him further away. And she was aware that he was in turmoil too. Amid his excitement about the discoveries he was making was confusion, tension about who he was and how he should feel. Mostly it was locked up inside him. Now and then it poured out in explosive bursts of temper. She wanted him to talk to her about it, yet at the same time she didn’t want to hear. It seemed as if there was no way to make things go right again. When she was angry she accused him of being secretive. In a calmer state she realized that he didn’t know how to talk to her, and also that he was trying to protect her.

  Despite herself she found herself searching his room when he was out, but all she ever found were books. He spent hours reading. Some of the books were about the Jewish religion, some on Zionism. Names jumped out from pages at her, Jabotinsky, Herzl, Ben Gurion, fathers of Zionism, names she had never heard before and which seemed harsh and alien.

  The worst time had been the six weeks Frances was away visiting Janet. She had finally gone during the spring of 1957, as the first rainy season ended. The plan had been to go earlier, but Frances had not been in good health the summer before. Edie thought she was crazy to make the journey, but Frances was determined, and as it turned out, coped very well. She came home looking quite refreshed, despite the long journey, and full of Janet and Martin’s work in Ibabongo.

  But during that time Edie really touched bottom. Being alone in the house with no Frances to offer a consoling ear, she felt desperately alone and cut adrift. There was no Janet, Ruby’s first excited letters dwindled into complete silence, and David was either out or in a world of his own. Of course she knew plenty of people in the factory in a day-to-day sort of way, but she had never needed to try to make deeper friendships when she had Ruby, Janet and Frances. Now the silence of the house filled her with sadness. Her life seemed to be full of absences.

  David was studying hard. One evening she went up and tapped on his door. He was hunched over his desk, left hand raking through his dark hair, the other writing furiously. She ventured closer, awed by his intense concentration on things she could scarcely understand. He was working on maths problems, pages of his quick, sprawling figures. To her it was as comprehensible as a knitting pattern written in Chinese.

  ‘You busy?’ she said, though it was obvious he was.

  He finished writing something, then looked up at her. She sensed him suppressing his irritation at being interrupted. Edie sat on the bed next to him and he straightened up in his chair, accepting her presence. His face was solemn, tired-looking.

  ‘Don’t work too late, will you?’ she offered. ‘You’ll be falling asleep in the classroom.’

  He smiled faintly. ‘I’ve nearly finished.’

  ‘Is it hard? It looks it to me.’ She fiddled with the pleats of her skirt.

  ‘Quite,’ he said, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands. ‘But we did it in the lesson. I’ve got the hang of it.’

  ‘Got your big exams soon, haven’t you?’

  ‘They’re called A levels,’ he said, a touch impatient now.

  ‘OK.’ She got up. ‘You’d better get finished. ’Night, love.’

  ‘’Night.’ He was already leaning over his work again.

  It was a few days later, while Frances was still away, that he made his announcement. The day before, he had been to tea with the Leishmanns, and he’d stayed late. He went to school as usual, but when Edie came home, instead of finding him in his room, deep in homework, he was waiting for her. He’d even started heating up their shepherd’s pie. It made her so happy, that he was spending time with her of his own accord, and she laughed with him, telling him about her day.

  ‘I went to the staff shop,’ she told him, laying the table. ‘I got you some misshapes – fudge mostly. And some Milk Tray.’

  He smiled and thanked her. But when they were sitting over their meal, he put his knife and fork down and looked across at her, his long-fingered hands resting on the table.

  ‘I have made a decision.’ His voice was quiet, but sure and his eyes steadily held her gaze. ‘I am going to go to Israel. I want to work on a kibbutz.’

  Edie stared at him. What madness was he talking?

  ‘What d’you mean?’ she brought out, finally. It felt like hearing news of a death. ‘Israel? You can’t go to Israel! You want to go to the university! All your plans!’

  ‘I’ll put it off for a year,’ he tried to soothe her. ‘I just want to go for a few months, to experience the life there.’ He leaned forward. ‘I want to know how it feels to be part of Israel – to be part of building something. It’s a new state – not like any other there’s ever been, built on ideals! – and the kibbutz is like one of the foundation bricks. People have their possessions in common, they work the land together, build villages where everyone’s equal and their work counts equally. Not like here where everything is based on your class or how much money you’ve got. It’s something completely different and it’s the Jews who are building it!’ His eyes flashed at her. He was afire with intense enthusiasm.

  ‘I can’t bear the thought of never being part of it. I want to go and j
oin them. I can work for a few months to earn some of my fare and Mr Leishmann said they will give me the rest – that I should go and come back to tell them what it’s like. They’ve never been there.’

  Edie blazed with anger. ‘I might have known they’d have summat to do with it. Always taking over, controlling you – putting these ideas into your head. I don’t want you going. You’ve worked hard all these years because you wanted to be an engineer and go to university and now you’d let them just mess that up and have you . . . farming or whatever it is they do over there!’

  ‘But I’ll come back and go to university the year after!’ He stood up, wild with emotion. ‘I don’t understand why you’re so against me all the time, against everything I do. I can’t help being who I am! You talk as if all I should ever do is sit here with you year after year. Men younger than me were soldiers in both the wars and no one stopped them going, did they? You can’t own me, Mom. Sooner or later I have to go.’ He stopped and looked at her in silence for a moment. Then, quietly, with great intensity, he said, ‘I want to go and I want you to agree. But I shall go. You’re going to have to accept it.’

  He took his plate and went to finish eating in his room. Edie sat for a long time, her meal forgotten, staring at his empty chair. His words, those quiet, measured words sunk deep into her. But I shall go. And she knew then that she had to summon all her strength and courage. She had to fight her jealousy and resentment towards the Leishmanns, the synagogue, all the people who she felt were taking him away from her, and try to enter his new world. Because if she didn’t move with him, she was going to lose him.

  When spring came, he invited her to come to the synagogue for the annual Seder – the Passover celebration meal. He had invited her the year before but she had refused then, abruptly. What place did she have doing something like that?