The Credit Draper

by J David Simons

  “Megan Kennedy.”

  “I dinnae ken names.”

  “We’re friends,” Celia said.

  “How do I ken that?”

  “You’ll have to trust us.”

  The clunking of a key in the lock. The door opened slightly, the light of a candle washed out into the lane. The woman came up no higher than Avram’s chest. The candle glow showed a square face, the top of a head sparsely covered with clumps of reddish hair. He recognised the smell about her. Ether.

  “Is that her?” she said tilting the candle towards Celia.

  “Who?” Avram asked.

  “The Oban lass.”

  “That’s who we’re looking for.”

  The woman peered up at them both. She had no eyebrows, her thin lips drooped at the corners in a terrible sadness.

  “She’s no been,” she sighed and quickly withdrew the candle. “She should be here by now. But she’s no been.” The door closed in their faces.

  “Thank God,” he said. A feeling of nausea passed over him. He leaned forward until his brow touched the dampness of the stone wall. The slimy coolness slightly soothed his aching head.

  “I’ll let the lady up,” the man at the reception desk of the Great Northern Hotel said. “But not you.”

  “I’m the one paying the bill,” Avram insisted.

  “Changes nothing. Rules is rules.”

  “It’s probably better I go alone,” Celia said.

  “I’ll wait here.”

  Avram settled down into an old leather sofa in the foyer. The concierge had stayed at his desk, flicking from page to page of his vast ledger, running a yellow-stained finger fast down the columns. Avram wanted to ask him for a cigarette but Celia was back at the top of the stairs.

  “The door’s locked,” she shouted. “She’s not answering.”

  The concierge looked up from his books. “I’ll bring a key.”

  “I’m coming with you,” Avram said.

  The concierge looked at him, sniffed hard. “Aye. All right then.”

  Celia rattled the handle while Avram pounded the door.

  “Let me,” the concierge said, catching up, breathless, finding the master key.

  The door opened. The room was empty. Celia rushing to the open window.

  “Nothing,” she said. “Just the yard.”

  “Must be out,” the concierge said. “Although I didnae see her pass. And I’ve been sat there all day, what with my books to do and everything.”

  “Bathroom,” Avram shouted. “Where is it?”

  “On yer left. Last door along the corridor.”

  It was locked too. Avram knocked hard, grazing his knuckles but still no answer. “Do you have a key for this one?”

  “Aye. Just let me find it.”

  The concierge opened up. Megan lay slumped in the bath. Still in her slip, skin bluish, wrinkled. A half-empty bottle of gin on the floor. Celia was there first. Head close in.

  “She’s still breathing. Help me get her out.”

  The water was tepid. Avram took her under the shoulders, Celia took the feet. She lifted out nice and easy, laid on to a towel, cotton fabric clinging to her skin, cold nipples poking through.

  “What’s all this about?” The concierge pushed in, getting a good look. “She’s no dead, is she?”

  “It’s nothing to worry about,” Avram told him, fearing the lie in his words. “She’ll be fine.”

  “She disnae look fine to me.”

  “She’s drunk that’s all. Fell asleep in the bath. Help me take her back.”

  “I’m no touching her.”

  Avram fished out his wallet, handed over a note. “Take this.”

  “I don’t know. I might need to alert the polis.”

  He pressed another ten shillings note into the concierge’s hand. “We can handle this ourselves. If there’s a problem, I’ll let you know.”

  Celia, on the floor now, rubbing Megan hard with the towel. “Old wives’ tales,” she said. “Soak in a boiling hot tub. Flush it out with gin.”

  “Will she be all right?”

  “Let’s carry her through. Get her warm first.”

  “What about the baby?”

  “We won’t know for sure till the morning.”

  Celia helped him carry her into the bedroom, bundled her up tight under the blankets. “I’ll see if I can fetch a hot bottle,” she said. “You watch her.”

  He watched her all night. Paid for another room on the same floor to keep the concierge off his back. Celia went home. When he wasn’t in a guard by her bed, he was up by the window. It was a clear night and he could see the familiar glow from the foundry chimneys smeared against the starless sky. It was as if, many years ago, the City of Glasgow had lit a cigarette that had never gone out. A groan from Megan brought him back to her bedside. She had stopped shivering, there was even a smidgen of colour to her cheeks. Her breathing came easier and there was no fever. He took her hand, kneaded some warmth into her skin, watched the thick wrinkles disappear from her fingertips.

  Fifty-two

  AVRAM HELPED NATHAN bring out the card-table, folded out the legs until they locked, then placed it square in the centre of the room. Celia came in for the game. She strode around the room barefoot, her grey silk blouse hanging loose from the waistband of her skirt. Outside, a cut of lightning sliced through the hot heaviness of the evening. A thunder-boom and the rain streamed down. As if the confessions of the Jews had been too much for God to take, and now He was weeping at the failings of His people. Better God than Nathan, Avram thought as he prised open the window.

  ‘Thank goodness,” Celia said, fanning her face with her free hand, flicking ash on to the carpet with the other. “It’s as hot as a bloody foundry in here.”

  She took up her place at the table. Avram sat opposite, set an ashtray by her hand. A thin film of sweat had formed on her upper lip. Nathan dealt.

  “I thought they accepted your situation quite calmly,” she said, snatching up her cards from the baize. The green cloth was rubbed raw in places by impatient fingers, a couple of cigarette burns brown-spotted the surface close to where she sat. “Considering your belle is not Jewish.”

  “If almost complete silence means accepting the situation calmly,” Avram said, “then they were very considerate.”

  He had waited until the Fast was over before returning to the Kahn household. Apologised immediately for walking out of the Kol Nidre service, explained to Papa and Madame Kahn what had happened with Megan, what was going to happen with her. He wasn’t sure why he had told them, letting them preside over his actions in their after-the-Fast bloatedness like some rabbinical court. But what could they do? Even in their disapproval, they had no power over him. He was not their son. He did not need their money. He wasn’t even sure if he needed their blessing.

  “At least she’s British,” Madame Kahn had said before retiring to her bedroom. Papa Kahn had remained for a while, sitting silently in the tension, scraping patterns of loose sugar on the tablecloth with the edge of a butter-knife. Avram thought perhaps he hadn’t heard or fully understood what he had told him. Then the man had risen wearily from the table and disappeared into his study.

  “It is all right for the both of you,” Nathan said. “You go off and abandon them to me. I’m the one who gets all the complaints.”

  “I can’t help it if you never leave the house,” Celia snapped as she plucked and placed her cards within their fan. “You see, Avram. That’s why the poor boy’s hair turned white.” She leaned over and ruffled Nathan’s hair. They never saw the light of day, did they, these poor curls. They just drained of colour.”

  Avram began to pick up his cards, one by one, sorting them into potential runs and trebles. “Do you have any beau in your life?” he asked her. “Or do you just sit in your own dark rooms plotting revolutions?”

  “I will never marry,” she declared. “I might love a man. But I will never be his property. Anyway, I’m thinking of emigra
ting to Palestine.”

  “Palestine? Why would you do that?”

  “Jews from Russia are building communities there,” she said. “Socialist communes. Kibbutzim. There they have equality between men and women.”

  “She wants to work on the land,” Nathan interjected, dealing out the last of the cards. “This urbane miss intends to become a Zionist spinster.”

  “I am going to build a Jewish homeland from the toil of these fair hands,” she said, scrubbing out her cigarette in the ashtray. Her nails were buffed and painted rosy red in the modern style.

  Avram tried to imagine her milking cows or tying up the stooks or bent over stiff from the planting. He picked up the last of his cards. He couldn’t believe what he had been dealt. No clubs or spades. Just hearts and diamonds. Love and money. A blood-red hand.

  “And Avram is leaving us also,” Nathan said. “The Jews of the Gorbals are not good enough for this young clothing tycoon.”

  “I left the Gorbals a long time ago, my little lamed vav. And I left my Judaism behind too. The only difference now is I’m finally making a commitment to somewhere else. To someone else.”

  “Well, you are always welcome here if you should choose to return. As Papa says, this is your community.”

  Somewhere in the house a bell rang. Avram thought it must be the telephone but Celia looked up worried from her cards. “I’ll go and see what he wants.”

  “It’s Papa,” Nathan explained when she had left. “It’s Papa’s bell.”

  “He wants to see you,” Celia said to Avram on her return. “Try not to keep him long.”

  So many of the important events of Avram’s life had taken place in this study. It had witnessed his arrival in this country, the night before his bar mitzvah, the banning of the football. It was as if from their high position on the shelves all these Talmudic tracts inscribed with their laws and their ethics had stood forever in judgement of him. Papa Kahn now sat in the midst of all this inherited wisdom, his face glowing ghostly behind the solitary desk lamp, his fingers playing with the shiny ivory beads of the abacus. Click. Click. Click. It was a soothing sound. Regular. Predictable. Counting. Numbers.

  “Lock the door.”

  The request surprised Avram but he did what he was told. He then moved some bolts of waterproof cloth off the only other chair in the room, sat down. He watched Papa Kahn follow the path of the beads, his yellowish eyes hypnotised by the movement. Click. Click. Click. Eventually the man spoke, talking as if he were continuing a conversation he had been having with himself for a very long time.

  “… how they came for us these Cossacks. Like pigs sniffing out truffles. And each time, the Jewish elders had to hand over another few males to the army. Like a tithe. Or a sack of wheat. I escaped the first few visits but I knew it would soon be my turn. And it wasn’t just the young men they were after. It was the young women, too. Not just like pigs now. But like hungry wolves. Do you remember your mother, Avram? How beautiful she was.”

  Avram tried to remember, tried to form the features of her face from the haziness of his memory. The exact shape and colour of her eyes, the breadth of her forehead, the tone of her skin, the length of her hair. But there was no longer an image of Rachel Escovitz to be salvaged. All that remained was the smell of the skin on her neck.

  The door handle shook. Madame Kahn’s voice.

  “Who locks a door in this house? What is going on in there? He is not to get excited. Do you hear, Avram? Herschel? Who locks a door in a house?”

  “Everything is all right, Martha. Isn’t it, Avram?”

  “Everything is all right.”

  “Now, leave us.”

  The handle shook one last time.

  Papa Kahn shifted in his chair and continued.

  “You see, Avram, I loved your mother. I loved Rachel very much. But not enough.” Papa Kahn closed his eyes, hooded them from the desk-light with the cup of his hand. The fingers were almost without flesh. “For they were coming after me too, these Cossacks. Closing in with their quotas. Quotas, quotas and more damned quotas. Quotas to stop me from studying. More quotas for the army. And what did I do? What did I do?”

  Papa Kahn let the question hang, as if he was testing himself again, perhaps hoping this time for the answer to be different. Avram waited too, listening to the rain battering against the window, the click, click, click of the abacus beads marking out the passage of time. Papa Kahn cleared his throat.

  “I ran away, Avram. Nothing more than a coward. I abandoned her, even though I loved her. The curse of a fearful man.” A long sigh. The tired escape of breath from withered lungs. “I had heard the stories, of course. A man from a nearby village who had made his fortune in America. How that word sounded to me then. America. America. Like Paradise itself. Like a pot of gold. America.” He slumped back in his chair. “I came here first, as you know. And while I was waiting for a ship to take me to this Paradise across the ocean, I started to like it here. This Glasgow with its little community of Jews. The kosher food. The Yiddish. The Scots with their tolerance for our ways. Our shared respect for education. For social justice. Of course, I wrote to your mother for a while. For a year perhaps we corresponded. And then nothing. Time passed, things changed. Until you and your letter.” Papa Kahn took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand. “And then we never hear from her again.”

  “But what about the thimble?” Avram asked. “The thimble. She sent you the thimble for my bar mitzvah.”

  “Forgive me, Avram. But I lied to you. Your mother gave the thimble to me when I left. A small token of her affection. Dmitry never came that time of your bar mitzvah. He never came. I just wanted you to have something from your mother.”

  Avram looked around him. The bolts of cloth, the abacus, the crumpled figure in the chair opposite. The rows upon rows of books, stacked high, pressing down him. The airlessness of the room making him feel nauseous. “I must go,” he said.

  “No, no, wait. I just want to say one more thing. One more thing. Please listen.” With enormous effort, Papa Kahn raised himself from his slump. Avram noticed the loose fit of the suit, the wide gap between shirt collar and throat. A child in adult’s clothing. “About this matter at hand. About this girl.”

  “Megan.”

  “Yes, Megan. You are not running away like I did, Avram. Not running away. This is good. I want you to know this is what I think. It is something good that you do.”

  Avram rose from his seat, backed slowly away from the desk, unlocked the door. Closed it softly behind him. Madame Kahn stood across the hallway in her dressing gown. Her hair was down in a ragged mass of grey-white tresses. Her face ashen and greasy from the smear of some recently applied lotion. She held a hairbrush in her hand.

  “Now you know,” she snarled, brandishing the brush at him as if to ward off a curse. “Now you know all the trouble you brought. This memory of … of her. Of that woman. It was better when you were away. Much better. So, go now. Gie avek. Get out of here. Go back to the Highlands with that shiekse of yours.”

  He felt his legs heavy, powerless to move from the orbit of this woman’s venom. He saw Celia and Nathan come out from the living room, the two of them together, almost a blur, Celia’s dark hair merging with Nathan’s whiteness.

  “Gie avek,” Madame Kahn kept on saying. “Gie avek.”

  He was gulping for breath now as his lungs tried to shift this incredible weight from somewhere deep in his stomach. Faster, harder, this struggle for air. He managed a step forward. And it was Nathan who took him. Nathan who had always been there to give sanctuary to his pain. Nathan who held him in his arms. As the tears started to come. His body shuddering, spasms coarsing through him, ripping him apart. This tremendous release. As the various compartments he had carefully constructed began to collapse in on themselves. Freeing their prisoners to run riot inside of him, to dance over that open sore of a moment when his mother let go of him and disappeared into the mist.

  F
ifty-three

  “THEY’RE INTRODUCING ELECTRIC HARES AT CARNTYNE,” Solly tried to explain to Megan. “That should bring back the punters. Then I’ll have less to do with the horses and more to do with the dogs.” Solly sank back in the leather upholstery, flicked some cigar ash out of the cab’s open window. “I always liked dogs.”

  “When have you ever liked dogs?” Avram remarked. “I’ve never seen you with a dog in your life.”

  “I have a dog,” Megan said.

  “You see, Avram. A woman with my own pleasures at heart. Now, are you still coming to my wedding?”

  “Send me an invitation and I’ll come.”

  “You are first on my list. And bring this beautiful lassie with you.”

  But both he and Solly knew the truth. There would be an invitation, of course. Followed by a polite refusal and an expensive gift. Better to refuse than try to explain to Megan the fuss he would cause bringing a pregnant Highland girl to a grand Jewish wedding at the Grand Hotel.

  Solly dropped them off at Queen Street station where Megan complained of a slight nausea, some pain in her abdomen. Quite natural though, she said. Just needed to sleep it off. He worried about any damage caused, but she reassured him enough time had passed for her to know the baby was fine. Celia had told him the same, although how women knew these things was a mystery to him.

  He watched her as she slept, her head rolling this way and that with any strong movement of the train. This was his task now, to guard over her and this unborn child in her womb. Feeling all the better for making this commitment to her, crossing an invisible line to leave all that was unresolved, untidy and painful behind. A fresh start. With a wife and child and a good business to build on. But there would be no synagogue or kirk ceremony to mark this transition. Just a declaration before two witnesses. Jean Munro and Archie Campbell would do nicely.

  Megan slept right past Stirling and Callander. It was only when the train was climbing its route towards Crianlarich that she awoke, as if roused by the sense of her return to the Highlands. He could smell the freshness himself. The pine. The heather.