Scattered Seed

by Maisie Mosco

  “Like you do,” Arnold said teasingly.

  “Leave the kid alone,” Harry instructed him with big-brotherly authority. “You know she hates being reminded of her size.”

  “I don’t appreciate being called the kid, either,” Marianne said in a dignified voice. “And kindly don’t consume all the scones before I arrive home, you two.”

  “How can you have room for scones when you’ve just swallowed a dictionary?” Arnold quipped.

  Marianne opened the exercise book she was clutching in her hand and pretended to read, but she was listening to her brothers’ chortling as they strode away. Martin didn’t make fun of her because she liked big words. He didn’t make fun of her about anything. If only he was her brother and Harry and Arnold her cousins! But her life was full of if-onlys and she sometimes wondered if anyone else’s was.

  Martin seemed perfectly happy with his, but Auntie Miriam was his mother and she wasn’t strict, like Mam. Anyone would be satisfied if they were allowed to read in bed and stay up late to hear grown-up programmes on the wireless, instead of nothing but Children’s Hour.

  She gazed pensively into the chemist’s window at the brightly coloured liquids in fat-bellied flasks labelled “poison”, then averted her eyes with a shiver. How could something that looked so pretty be deadly, too? A figure was looming towards her out of the evening mist that had fallen patchily on the main road and she hoped it wasn’t Mam, coming to fetch her. Usually she went straight home, but she wanted to talk to Martin on his own, which she was hardly ever able to do now he went to a different school. Whenever she popped across the back-entry to see him after tea, Auntie Miriam and Uncle Sammy were there. And Martin was always doing homework or practising his Bar Mitzvah portion though he wouldn’t have to say it in shul until he was thirteen.

  Thank goodness she was a girl and didn’t need to have that on her mind as well as her other worries. Like not being good at arithmetic, even though her English made up for it. And having that awful period-thing to look forward to; and the terrible agony of having babies, which, Lizzie had told her and Shirley, was a woman’s lot.

  The figure emerged from the mist into the pool of lamplight near the tram-stop and Marianne sighed with relief; it wasn’t Mam after all. Then a tram trundled into sight and clanked to a halt.

  “Martin!” she shouted as he leaped off the step.

  “There’s nothing wrong, is there?” he called, hurrying towards her.

  “Trust you to ask that!”

  Martin tugged the peak of his cap sheepishly. Why was he always expecting something bad to happen?

  “If there were, d’you think I’d be the one the family’d send to tell you? Honestly, Martin! I just fancied walking home with you, like we used to.”

  He flashed her a smile which animated his pale face and hitched his leather satchel higher on his shoulder. “So, come on then.”

  They trudged along in companionable silence until they had turned off Cheetham Hill Road into a street of terraced, lace-curtained houses.

  “I’ve got something to tell you,” Martin said. “About my grandfather.”

  “What’s Zaidie Sigmund been up to now?” He was not Marianne’s grandfather, but she and her brothers had always looked on him as one and she smiled, thinking of how he was always in hot water with Martin’s Auntie Helga who kept house for him.

  “He’s courting a lady.”

  Marianne gaped. “Who is?”

  “Grandpa.”

  “Why’re you calling him that, when we’ve always called our grandparents Zaidie and Bobbie?”

  “I’m trying to stop using Yiddish words.”

  Marianne thought of their mutual Sandberg grandparents who used Yiddish words more often than Sigmund Moritz did. Zaidie Abraham had never learned to read English and enjoyed reading the Yiddish Gazette every week.

  “Bobbie Sarah and Zaidie Abraham won’t like it,” she declared emphatically.

  “They’ll just have to lump it,” Martin replied.

  Marianne gave him a shocked glance. “I don’t know what’s come over you, Martin.”

  “You would if you were in my form,” he said moodily. “They’re nearly all Christian and I feel a right idiot when I forget and call someone a shlemiel or something. It’s not like Temple School, Marianne, half-and-half. Where there aren’t any stuck-up devils who say things that make you feel like something in a glass case,” he added heatedly.

  Marianne was eyeing him with dismay.

  “They’re not all like that,” he admitted, simmering down. “But how many does it take?”

  “Why don’t you punch them on the nose?”

  Martin kicked a tin can which was lying on the pavement into the gutter, then slowed his pace, thoughtfully. “Remember what we used to sing to Shirley when we were all little and she was always saying horrid things to us?”

  “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never harm me,” Marianne chanted softly.

  “Well that’s my philosophy,” he told her, quickening his step again.

  “What’s philosophy?” she asked, skipping to keep up with his long-legged stride.

  “It’s time you began reading books like the ones in my grandfather’s library, instead of stuff like What Katy Did, then you’d know. Look it up in the dictionary when you get home.”

  “I can’t,” she giggled. “Our Arnold said I’ve swallowed it.”

  Why must she start giggling in the middle of a serious conversation? Martin thought exasperatedly.

  “Made up any poems lately?” she inquired out of the blue.

  Her mind jumped about like a grasshopper, too. From one subject to another. But she was his favourite cousin all the same. “Poems don’t get made up. They get written,” he corrected her.

  They had reached the cobblestoned passage where the back doors of their homes faced each other and halted prior to parting. Martin stood stirring some mud with the toe of his boot. Marianne watched his long fingers playing with the buckle on his navy gabardine, then scanned his face uncertainly; the thick eyebrows, a shade or two darker than his light brown hair, drawn together in a thoughtful frown above the small nose; the thinnish lips and the tapering chin. He looked the same, yet somehow he wasn’t. She could feel something different about him, as if he was suddenly a lot older than her. But if she worked hard, next year she’d be at a high school and catch up with him, learn all the new things he was learning.

  She had yet to discover that catching up with Martin intellectually would not be easy. They had been reared from birth in the same close family ethos and an extraordinary rapport had always existed between them, but Martin was Sigmund Moritz’s only grandchild and Sigmund had implanted in him a love of learning and literature, as he had with David and Nathan Sandberg when they were boys. Paradoxically, Martin’s father, Sammy, was the only one of the three Sandberg brothers who had had no taste for scholarship and he had never read a book in his life.

  “All right, Martin,” Marianne conceded with something akin to respect in her voice. “I won’t say ‘made up’ any more. So, have you written any poems lately?”

  Martin surveyed the thin little figure leaning against the wall and smiled amusedly. One of her fawn bicycle socks had slipped down to her ankle, the top buttonhole of her blazer was fastened to the second button and there was a smudge of ink on her olive cheek.

  “I wrote one this morning, on the tram, as it happens,” he said fishing a scrap of paper out of his pocket and slipping it into hers. “Have you written any more stories?”

  Marianne nodded and handed him her dog-eared exercise book. “You can read them in bed tonight. What’s your mam got to say about Zaidie Sigmund courting a lady?” she inquired irrelevantly.

  “I don’t think she’s very pleased.”

  “Your Bobbie Rachel won’t let him marry the lady unless she’s nice, Martin. She’ll fly down from Heaven when he’s asleep and whisper in his ear that he mustn’t.”

  “The
re’s no such place as Heaven.”

  Marianne felt as if a cold hand had touched her heart. What was the matter with him? “How can you say such a dreadful thing? It’d mean there’s nowhere for all the dead people to go to, wouldn’t it? And if there’s no Heaven, why would the grown-ups tell us there is?” Something was prodding her memory. She was sitting on the grass under a tree, watching Martin chew a blade he’d just plucked from beside her. “The day of Bobbie Rachel’s funeral, we went to Bellott Street park and you told me you’d dreamed about Heaven!” she accused him. “You even described the angels and now you’re saying there’s no such place.”

  “That was ages ago,” he said dismissively. “In some ways you’re still very childish, Marianne.”

  Marianne watched him stride across the entry and disappear through his back doorway, then turned and entered her own yard. When she walked into the kitchen, her mother was turning over some clothes which were drying on the fireguard.

  “Is it true there’s no Heaven, Mam?” she demanded taking off her blazer and tossing it on to the sofa.

  “Twenty minutes late she comes home from school and right away she’s asking questions!” Esther Klein exclaimed. “Hang your blazer up, my lady!”

  Marianne took the blazer to the lobby and hung it on the low peg reserved for her garments.

  “Now she’s asking me about Heaven,” her mother snapped when she returned. She cast a harassed look around the disordered room, which she had not had time to tidy since she arrived home from her husband’s shop an hour ago. “Why doesn’t somebody ask me about Hell?”

  Marianne took the buttered scone her brothers had left on the plate for her and stood nibbling it. Arnold had gone to Hebrew-school, but Harry, who no longer went because he had been Bar Mitzvah a few months ago, was seated at the table doing his homework and shrugged when Marianne exchanged a glance with him.

  “Mam never used to be in a bad temper all the time, did she, Harry?” Marianne said voicing their thoughts.

  “I had no reason to be,” their mother retorted rolling up some garments that were dry enough for ironing.

  “Shall I do that for you?” Marianne offered.

  “It wouldn’t do any harm if you did.”

  Marianne fetched the clothes basket from the scullery. “Sit down and have a rest, Mam,” she said taking over Esther’s task.

  “Don’t be meshugah, love,” Esther replied with a weary smile. “How can I, with all I’ve still got to do? Your dad’s entitled to find his home nice and shipshape when he gets back after a hard day’s work, not looking like a rag-bag.” She began sorting out the jumble of odds and ends which had accumulate on the dresser, putting them away in the cupboards and drawers.

  “But you’ve been working at the shop all day, too,” Marianne reminded her.

  “I know I have. But I’m a woman and it’s a woman’s job to keep the house nice.”

  “Why should it be?” Marianne demanded.

  “Because it always has been!” Esther exclaimed impatiently, brushing some crumbs off the sofa. She fetched the carpet-sweeper and began running it over the rug. “Nobody seeing the state of this room would believe I’m really a neat and tidy person,” she told her son and daughter. “But I can’t be in two places at once and I’m not going to be for much longer.”

  “Are you going to stop helping Dad in the business?” Harry asked her. “I’ll be fourteen soon, then I can leave school and work for him,” he added, putting down his pen, which he wished he could do permanently.

  “The while you’re still thirteen,” Esther answered. “And there’s good living accommodation behind the shop.”

  Marianne stopped folding a shirt. “You don’t mean we’re going to live there?”

  “We shouldn’t have waited this long to do it,” Esther nodded. “Why should I tear myself in two like I’ve been doing? It’ll be easier for me when the house and the business are both in one place.”

  “Mam’s right,” Harry said.

  “But what about us?” Marianne blurted. “You and Arnold and me?” She knew she should be considering her mother, but a feeling that her world was turning topsy-turvy filled her with alarm. “We’ll have to leave all our friends and the shop’s miles away, near the docks where the people aren’t Jewish.”

  “They’re the people your dad makes his wages from,” Esther told her sharply. “And they’re nicer than some Jews. They’ve always got a smile for you, though most of them are much poorer than us. Dad was going to tell you about this when he comes home and Arnold’s back from Cheder, but now you know.”

  Marianne sat down on the padded lid of the coal scuttle, looking the picture of misery.

  “Buck up, our kid!” Harry jollied her. “We can come to Cheetham and see everyone at the weekends, can’t we, Mam? It won’t be that bad.”

  “There’s a sensible boy!” Esther applauded, patting his head approvingly on her way to stir the pan of split-pea soup she had put to simmer on the black leaded hob. “One of you kids’ll have to come after school once a week, as well, to fetch the chicken and meat. There’s no kosher butcher in that part of Salford. Our Marianne can do it if she likes and have her tea at Bobbie Sarah’s.”

  “I won’t need to come to Cheetham after school, Mam,” Marianne pointed out. “I’ll still be at Temple School until I pass the scholarship. I’ll be coming here every day.”

  Esther was tasting the soup. “Of course, you won’t, you silly girl,” she said distractedly, adding more salt to it from the jar she kept on the kitchen mantelpiece because the scullery was damp. “After we remove, you’ll be going to Stowell Memorial School, Marianne. Near the shop.”

  Harry looked shocked. “But that’s a church school, Mam. Dad told us when he took us to see how he’d dressed the shop windows all in white for Whitsun and we passed it. He said all the little girls who go there’d be buying their Whit Walk frocks from him. Don’t you remember, Marianne?”

  Marianne did not reply.

  “Our Marianne can miss the scripture classes when they’re reading the New Testament, nobody’ll mind,” Esther answered. “And it’s no use you sitting sulking, love,” she added briskly to Marianne. “We’re removing because it’s best for us and that’s that. I’ve always been a good saleswoman. Remember me telling you I worked in a gown shop when I was a girl? With me there all the time, the business will do a lot better and we’ll be able to afford a lot of things we haven’t got now.”

  “Will Arnold and I be able to have bikes?” Harry asked eagerly.

  Esther glanced around the shabby room, at the threadbare purple carpet which was not her taste, but that of her sister-in-law Bessie who’d passed it on to her, the darned upholstery of the sofa and the blue chenille curtains faded to grey from years of laundering. “After we’ve bought a few other things, Harry,” she told her eldest son whose ideas were as big as his Uncle David’s.

  “I’d rather stay here and not have any new things,” Marianne whispered.

  Esther surveyed her tense expression and the little clenched fists which meant she was trying not to cry. How do I come to a kid like this, who gets worked up over everything and nothing and doesn’t want to see reason? she asked herself with the surge of exasperation and love combined that her daughter so often aroused in her. Who did Marianne take after? It had to be something in her blood that made her as different from Harry and Arnold as chalk was from cheese, because all her children had received the same upbringing. Marianne had a will of iron, too, but she’d got that from her grandmother, who seemed to understand her better than anyone else did. The rest of her troublesome nature must come from those relatives of her father’s who’d been writers and artists in Austria. And here am I having to deal with it, Esther thought wryly.

  She went to kneel beside the coal scuttle on which Marianne was still hunched, and stroked her silky, black hair for a moment, enjoying the feel of it.

  Marianne looked up at her with surprise; her mother was not given to suc
h demonstrativeness. Harry seemed surprised too.

  “I don’t have much time for you kids these days, do I?” Esther said, aware of their reaction. “But it doesn’t mean I don’t love you. And things’ll be different after we move, you’ll see.”

  “I don’t want them to be different,” Marianne declared, deliberately missing the point. “And I don’t want to leave Temple School until I’ve sat for the scholarship, even if we are removing. They’re teaching us special things to make sure we pass.”

  The love and exasperation rose in Esther again, with the latter well to the fore. “You’ll do as you’re told, you’re only a little girl,” she snapped, going to give the soup an angry stir.

  Marianne got up and went to fetch her blazer.

  “It’s nearly teatime, your dad’ll be home soon. Where d’you think you’re going?” Esther demanded, watching her put it on.

  “To tell Bobbie Sarah what you’re doing to me!” Marianne said hotly as she fled into the scullery and out of the back door.

  Chapter 4

  Sarah was preparing pastry when the doorbell rang. She took off the old blue, wrap-around overall she wore to protect her clothes from flying flour and went to see who the caller was. At noon on a Thursday, her Jewish neighbours would be busy with their pre-Shabbos cooking as she herself was. There were so many different things to prepare, it took her two whole days. Her Christian neighbours would be getting their dinner ready or eating it; most of them made themselves something hot and thought it strange that she couldn’t be bothered to do this just for herself.

  “Sigmund!” she exclaimed with surprise when she opened the door. “You’ve got no customers for try-ons today?”

  Sigmund Moritz followed her into the kitchen and lowered his short, plump frame into Abraham’s rocking chair. “Let them wait,” he answered nonchalantly.

  “So, what brings you here, when my husband isn’t home?” Sara joked. Sigmund was like a brother to herself and Abraham and his wife had been like a dear, sweet sister. Rachel had been dead for four years, but a day never passed without Sarah thinking of her.