Scattered Seed

by Maisie Mosco

  He glanced at his watch and saw that it was nine o’clock. He was later than usual because Lou had been called to a confinement whilst seeing his patients and Nathan had had to see them as well as his own. Most evenings, they chatted about their cases before they went home. About personal things, too. That’s when Lou keeps my feet on the ground, Nathan reflected wryly. As he’d promised to do when they were students. Only all Lou’s dreams had come true for him and Nathan’s had not.

  “Dreams shmeams, life is what you make it!” he heard Lou say in his mind’s ear. It was a sound philosophy, but you had to be Lou’s kind of person to adopt it.

  He got up and put on his coat and let himself out of the terraced house, his eye falling on the brass plate bearing his name and qualifications, as he shut the door. As usual, looking at it evoked a sense of unreality – enhanced the feeling that he was watching himself play a part. The feeling remained with him whilst he drove home. Even the word “home” seemed unreal when applied to the house where he now lived.

  “Home is where the heart is,” David’s maid Lizzie had embroidered on the framed sampler she gave to him and Rebecca for a wedding gift, Nathan recalled with irony, heading towards the place where his heart was not. Was it talking about David with Sammy that had set his mind on this track? Most of the time he avoided it, aware of its futility. He had chosen his path, if chosen meant allowing something to happen to you. And reflections like those he’d just indulged in were links in the chain that bound him to the past. From which he was still trying to unshackle himself.

  He drove along Bury New Road, past the darkened shops on Market Place, and stopped the car near the corner where Broughton High School for Girls stood secluded discreetly behind a clump of trees. Hunger pangs were attacking his stomach, he had not eaten since noon, yet he was reluctant to go home.

  “If we have daughters, maybe they’ll be pupils there,” Rebecca had said when they bought the house not far from the school. Their first child was due in February, but the prospect of fatherhood seemed unreal to Nathan, too. It was as though he had been plucked from one life and replanted in another which included career, marriage and children. Commitments which caused most of his peers to flourish with pride, but to which he seemed unable to relate.

  On his left was a short stretch of road known as The Cliff, which people said was liable to subside and crumble one day. He sat hunched over the steering wheel, gazing at the vast, industrial panorama below, its distant streetlights twinkling like an illusory fairyland, the tall factory chimneys poised against a sky rendered crimson along the horizon line by the hot glow from the furnaces in Trafford Park.

  By day, the view was bleak and unwelcoming, as much of Manchester and Salford was, and David had not wanted Nathan to set up practice in a working-class district. “Why spend your life in seedy surroundings?” he had argued. But Nathan and Lou wanted to help alleviate the suffering of people still existing in the penurious conditions from which they and their own families had escaped and had bought and refurbished the surgery of an elderly overworked doctor who wished to retire.

  Everything’s relative, Nathan mused, gazing down at the lights which lit the path of weary men returning each night to their smoke-grimed little houses, after toiling in the factories. Some of them were his patients and did not even have hot-water taps or own a towel worthy of the name to offer him when he washed his hands. His daily round sickened him with its ever-present squalor, but at least he was able to go home to Salford’s pleasant residential suburb of Broughton Park; he didn’t have to live that way.

  It’s time you stopped kicking and screaming about your lot, Nat! he told himself as he started the engine and drove to the tree-lined avenue where his house was situated. But it was easier said than done.

  A chink of light between the front-room curtains meant Rebecca was at home. Some evenings, she went with Lou’s wife, Cora, to a meeting of young women who were raising funds for German Jewish refugees and left Bridie, their maid, to serve Nathan’s meal. He let himself in and hung up his coat in the cloakroom which led off the hall, pausing to scan his fatigue-lined face in the mirror above the washbasin. When he emerged, Bridie was rubbing a thumbmark off the half-moon table with a corner of her starched white apron.

  “Good evenin’, Doctor-surr,” she smiled.

  Nathan had asked her not to address him that way, but her habit of doling out a double dose of respect each time she spoke to him seemed unbreakable.

  Bridie straightened her cap, which was on at a lop-sided angle as usual, and put a thick forefinger to her lips as Nathan was about to reply. “Herself’s asleep on the sofa, Doctor-surr,” she whispered glancing at the front room door. “Lookin’ ivery bit of it like that picture o’ the blessed Madonna me mother sent me at Christmas,” she added reverently. “’Twud be a pity t’disturb her. ’Tis cold cuts y’re gettin’ t’night, Doctor-surr. Oi’ve laid ’em out f’ ye.”

  “Thank you, Bridie.”

  Nathan went into the parlour, which his wife called the lounge, and stood with his back to the fire looking down at her. The smooth, oval face and heavy eyelids fitted Bridie’s description of her. But the rest did not. Madonnas didn’t have sensuous lips darkened to an inviting mulberry-red, nor long-legged voluptuous bodies like Rebecca’s which fired him with desire when she lay in his arms. A crude remark David had once made drifted into his mind. A man can enjoy a woman without loving her, his brother had brutally implied and Nathan had been shocked, had thought this could never apply to himself. But now he knew differently, and the knowledge had diminished him in his own eyes.

  Rebecca stirred drowsily, brushing away a lock of ebony hair that had strayed from her chignon to her cheek, then rested her hand upon the swell of her belly and Nathan felt ashamed of the hardening in his treacherous groin as he watched the gentle rise and fall of her full breasts.

  The photograph provided by the matchmaker had not prepared him for her breath-taking loveliness in the flesh. Nor for the sweetness of her nature. Why did he feel no love for her, though she had shared his life and his bed for more than a year? But the chemistry that people called love could not be analysed like the contents of the bottles in his dispensary, nor was there any antidote for its painful effects. Living with Rebecca had not made him forget Mary.

  Rebecca opened her eyes and gave him a welcoming smile. And then a quizzical look from their tawny depths. “What’re you standing there thinking about, darling?”

  “You.”

  She laughed with pleasure. “What’re you thinking about me?”

  “How beautiful you are,” he said telling her half of the truth.

  “I don’t feel beautiful, with a stomach the size of a football and all done up in maternity clothes!”

  “You always wear shades of brown,” he remarked, eyeing her chocolate-coloured skirt and the beige Shantung blouse which would make most women look drab, but somehow enhanced her dusky complexion.

  “Don’t you like brown?”

  Nathan smiled at her anxious expression. But his amusement was tinged with guilt because she was always so eager to please him. There’s never a strident note about her, he thought, or about anything she does. The way she had furnished their home was the essence of subtlety. The curtains and upholstery in this room were sage green and the carpet a dull gold which complemented the oak-panelled walls. A silver candelabra stood graciously alone on the mantelpiece and the only other ornament was a big Chinese vase, at present filled with bronze chrysanthemums, on a pedestal by the window. David’s house had just been refurnished and Bessie had been lavish with the money she inherited after father’s death last year. But you can’t buy good taste, Nathan reflected, comparing his brother’s over-adorned parlour with his own.

  “I like everything about you,” he told his wife sincerely. But liking, even coupled with admiration, was not love.

  Rebecca held out her hand to him and he went to sit beside her on the sofa, breathing in the fresh soapy fragrance which
always surrounded her.

  “I felt the baby move today,” she said in the husky voice with a London accent that still sounded foreign to him.

  “Well, you’re five months on, aren’t you?” he replied clinically, wishing he could react like a prospective father instead of a doctor.

  “At first, I thought a fly’d got under my clothes and was crawling about on my tummy. It felt as if something was fluttering its wings against me, Nat, and I even got undressed to have a look,” Rebecca went on excitedly. “Then I phoned Cora and she said the first time hers moved it felt like that. So, faint you couldn’t tell whether the movement was on your inside or your outside.”

  “You’ll know when it lands you a hefty kick!”

  Nathan got up and went to a small mahogany table where some thick slices of salt beef and a leg of roast chicken awaited him. Rebecca’s excitement and his own inability to share in it had heightened his feeling of playing a role. The Crown Derby dinner service and monogrammed cutlery did, too.

  How did an ordinary chap like him, the son of poor immigrants, come to all this? The elegance that he admired but felt strange with. The tasteful trappings of wealth. He began eating, but a great surge of resentment had welled up inside him and he could hardly swallow the food. He’d succumbed to his brother’s emotional blackmail, that was how he’d come to it! Sacrificed himself on the twin altar of religion and family, abandoned his Gentile sweetheart and allowed himself to be sold in the marketplace. To a Jewess whose family had the wherewithal to buy him for her, he thought, casting a smouldering glance at Rebecca and suddenly not liking her at all.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked.

  Nathan stared down at the table. The cutlery and china were wedding presents from her relatives, whose affluent lifestyle made him feel like a pauper in their midst when he visited them in London. “I was just thinking that your background lived up to the matchmaker’s information about you,” he said, wanting to wound her.

  Rebecca looked as if he had slapped her face.

  Chapter 6

  “Tell your father we’re not going to the Shabbos tea party tomorrow,” Bessie said to Shirley.

  Shirley looked disappointed. “Why not, Mam?” Her grandmother’s Sabbath gathering was the high spot of the week, when the children heard exciting bits of grown-up gossip and were allowed to play hide-and-seek all over the house.

  “Harry and Arnold and me were going to look through all the old things in the attic,” Ronald put in.

  “How can I go amongst people looking like this?” their mother demanded, fingering the black scarf enveloping her head, which she had worn all week as if to emphasize her plight.

  “If you want to be a prisoner in the house till your hair’s grown again, please yourself,” David said from behind his Manchester Evening News. “The kids and I’ll go to my mother’s without you.”

  “Tell him I don’t care what he does,” Bessie commanded the children, though her tone implied otherwise. “And if he doesn’t sue that Ruby Cohen for damages, I’ll never speak to him again.”

  “You’re not speaking to me anyway,” David retorted.

  “Tell him he doesn’t deserve me to.”

  Shirley and Ronald exchanged a long-suffering glance. Their mother’s temperament was nothing new to them, but her latest method of punishing their father for they-knew-not-what had brought them into the thick of it. She had not addressed a word directly to him in their presence since Monday night, when she retired to bed after returning from the hairdresser’s.

  “Why don’t you tell him yourself, Mam?” Ronald asked bravely.

  “Because she’s playing silly beggars,” David declared lighting a cigarette.

  “You can tell him it’s a sin to smoke on Shabbos, too, as he seems to have forgotten,” Bessie said sharply.

  David glanced at the flickering candles on the table. Lizzie had just cleared away the dishes after the evening meal, which was eaten in the dining room on Fridays, instead of in the kitchen. The goblet from which he and his family had sipped wine after he recited the Kiddush prayer was still standing beside the silver candlesticks and he experienced a pang of nostalgia for the Friday nights of his youth.

  His mother’s candlesticks were brass and there had been times when tsimmes and gravy had been all she could afford to give them to eat. But the simple carrot stew had somehow sustained them in devoutness more than the large portions of roast chicken seemed to now, when the menu had assumed more importance than the religious ritual. Once you take one step, it’s easier to take the next, his mother had warned him the first time he broke a Sabbath law, and it was true.

  He had slipped into the habit of going to the factory on Saturday mornings, instead of to shul, without its troubling his conscience. All he observed nowadays were the dietary laws and the High Holy Days. But he had never smoked in the same room with the Shabbos candles before. He averted his eyes from them but did not put out the cigarette.

  “I wonder if Mam writes Dad a note when we’re not there to tell him things for her?” Ronald whispered snidely to his sister whilst shaking the dice for their game of snakes and ladders.

  They oughtn’t to be playing the game on Shabbos, David thought. But what was the point of not allowing it? When he let them switch the lights on and off and ride instead of walking; spend money, too. His mother’s warning had really come home to roost!

  “That’s what you get for being a horrid boy, our Ronald!” Shirley sniggered as the red counter he was sliding along the board arrived at the head of a very long snake.

  “Don’t you believe it, love,” David said to her, watching his son reluctantly slide the counter down to the reptile’s tail. “You know in some ways life’s like a game of snakes and ladders, Shirley.”

  “Ask him what he means by that,” Bessie shrilled.

  David saw her claw at her triple-string pearl necklace, as if some emotion that she was struggling to contain were choking her, and the buttons on the bodice of her blue crêpe dress were wobbling about on her heaving bosom.

  She’s gone right back to how she was when we were first married, he thought. Building things up in her mind and thinking everything I say is some kind of criticism of her. His premonition that this would be the outcome of losing her hair had soon been followed by the reality. But it had not really been a premonition. More a logical conclusion based on the events of the past which his wife’s inherent insecurity would not allow her to bury forever beneath the present. The most she was capable of was brushing the past temporarily aside, like dust swept beneath a rug which would rise to confront her again whenever the rug slipped from under her feet.

  David lit another cigarette from the stub of the old one and watched the smoke disperse the way his hopes of domestic stability had done, aware of Bessie eyeing him anxiously and of his children watching both of them. Much more of this and his kids would end up as neurotic as their mother!

  “I’ve been up a few ladders and down a few snakes in my time, that’s all I meant,” he told them, though what he had really meant was that a person doesn’t necessarily get what they deserve. “The trouble is the snakes are easy to slide down, but the ladders are hard to climb,” he added and was relieved to hear them laugh.

  “The one he climbed when he married me wasn’t,” Bessie informed the children. But she was in effect reminding David, as the look she gave him illustrated. “One day he was just a worker and the next he was boss of poor Zaidie Salaman’s business,” she said nastily. “Because Zaidie was ill with a broken heart after my brother died in the war.”

  “That was our Uncle Saul that we never knew.” Shirley told Ronald, who had less interest in the family history than she had. “He was married to Auntie Helga.”

  “And if he hadn’t been killed, he’d have been running the factory now, instead of your dad lording it there on his own,” Bessie declaimed, continuing her vendetta against David.

  Shirley ignored the reference to the factory. Long-ago
love affairs were much more intriguing. “It’s a bit like a story I read in Lizzie’s Peg’s Paper,” she said with a dreamy smile. “The way Dad’s brother married Auntie Miriam and your brother married her sister, Mam. It’s very romantic.”

  “You shouldn’t be reading such drivel,” David rebuked her. “We’ve got lots of good books in the house.”

  Bessie had stiffened at the mention of her old enemy Miriam and he found this hard to relate to the way the two of them had sat chatting amicably at his mother’s, last Saturday. But his wife could change with the ease of a chameleon and needed nothing tangible to colour and recolour her attitudes. A convenient memory was another of her attributes; the idea of her dead brother running the business if he’d lived was ludicrous. Saul had been David’s closest friend and his nature had been the direct opposite of Bessie’s. But his business acumen was negative and his interest in the factory non-existent.

  “Watch out, Dad!” Ronald piped.

  A long cylinder of ash was teetering on the end of David’s cigarette. He felt the glowing tip sear his fingers and dropped it hastily. “I forgot I was smoking,” he muttered retrieving it and putting it into an ashtray.

  Bessie rushed to examine the carpet and succeeded in finding a minute singe on its brand new, raspberry-and-custard pile. “Tell your father he’ll set the house on fire one of these days with his carelessness!” she rasped to Shirley. Then her headscarf slipped off and they saw her for the first time without her hair.

  Shirley gasped and burst into tears, and Ronald had one of his fits of laughter.