Scattered Seed

by Maisie Mosco

  For an “At” to return up the hill alone at night was asking for trouble. Drunken soldiers could be waiting to waylay her and one girl who had braved it had had to hit one on the head with the bottle of Coke she was carrying, to escape being raped.

  “We won’t leave yer on yer hown, Marianne,” Joyce echoed. “’We’re yer mates.”

  “An’ we can manage wivout our slap’n tickle fer one night,” Birdie smiled. “If we ’ave ter.”

  They were both painstakingly arrayed for their outing and had no doubt intended to find a couple of replacements for the boy-friends who had been shipped out. Marianne knew their offer was a real sacrifice, but she didn’t want to go with them. She surveyed Birdie’s bloodshot, blue eyes, the lashes caked with mascara, and the tiny, gin-swiller’s broken veins on her small, florid face above which a towering bird’s-nest of peroxide-blonde hair was crowned by an ATS forage cap.

  Joyce was tapping her foot impatiently, her hour-glass figure encased in a uniform she had altered to fit her like a second skin.

  “’Ow abart it, Marianne?” she demanded, licking off some of the purple lipstick that was too strident for her mousey colouring and made her look as if she suffered from heart disease. “Standin’ abart like this is a waste of good Joycie’n Birdie if yer haint comin’.”

  “’Course she’s comin’,” Birdie insisted. “But she’d better do ’erself up, or we’re not takin’ ’er.”

  Marianne rose from her bed reluctantly and gave them each a slice of strudel to eat whilst they waited for her to dress. What would Esther Klein say if she knew her precious daughter was about to go out on the tiles with these girls? Her experiences of nights-out with Joyce and Birdie could not be described any other way. But there was no point in her having left home if she was going to let the family control her by proxy; it was time she got them out of her system. And maybe she would meet a nice American Jewish boy at the dance, whose morals had remained as intact as hers had, war or no war.

  Chapter 7

  “It isn’t fair of you to deprive Shirley of a big wedding,” Bessie said, clicking away with her knitting needles to add another pair of khaki mittens to the pile she was sending to the Red Cross. “And now you’ve made me drop a stitch.” she added, glaring at David.

  When she was not knitting, she was out helping at a Services canteen in the city centre and David wished today was one of her duty stints. She had been nagging him about their daughter’s wedding reception since he arrived home from the factory half-an-hour ago. And also about why it was necessary for him to work on Sunday afternoons when his employees didn’t. But if it wasn’t this, it would be something else; she had to have something to nag about! “Ostentation in wartime is unseemly,” he said irritably.

  “You didn’t think that when you wanted our Ronald to have a big Bar Mitzvah,’ Shirley put in from the sofa, where she was sitting sketching.

  “The war hadn’t begun yet,” he reminded her. “You’re getting like me, love. Feeling as if it’s been going on for ever.” He lit a cigarette and rested his head on the back of his armchair, wearily. “Apart from anything else, how can we have a great big celebration when we still don’t know if Harry’s alive or dead?”

  The reference to Harry evoked a gloomy silence. Several weeks had passed since the War Office telegram arrived and the family were by now steeling themselves for the worst.

  “Why did you have to remind us, Dad?” Shirley shuddered.

  “You shouldn’t have needed reminding.” David got up and went to look out of the French window at his large rectangle of lawn, picking his way through the over-furnished room. He had wanted to discard the furniture and ornaments from their parlour in Bellott Street when they moved to Prestwich, but Bessie would not hear of it. A few elegant pieces with a Persian rug to set off the parquet floor would make this big room look cold and empty, she’d said when David had suggested it. And only paupers didn’t put down a wall-to-wall carpet, she’d added.

  But one day, when they moved to Cheshire, he would have his way. What was the good of moving up in the world if your possessions didn’t illustrate you’d acquired the good taste to go with it? His detached house was situated in a prestigious road and everyone knew you had to have money in order to live there. Nobody could say David Sandberg hadn’t done well.

  Bessie was still smarting because her daughter’s wedding reception was not going to be the talk of the town. “Lizzie got a splinter in her finger this morning, dusting your damn orange-box,” she lashed out at David.

  “Why don’t you set fire to it, Mam?” Shirley smiled.

  The orange-box bookcase David had kept from his childhood was a joke to his children, but not to his wife. “She once threatened to,” he told his daughter. “Then you started crying, you were in your cot at the foot of our bed and we were so busy trying to quieten you we forgot what the argument was about.”

  “I wouldn’t let Peter keep an eyesore like that in the corner of our bedroom.”

  “He wouldn’t want to,” Bessie said. “But at least your dad’s stopped wanting mirrors all over the house and I suppose I must be thankful for that.”

  “If I were Dad, I’d want to forget I’d once earned an orange box sweeping the greengrocer’s floor,” Shirley answered.

  David smiled. But the stink of rotting cabbage leaves and over-ripe fruit had drifted from the past to his nostrils and he saw himself as a scraggy little lad, clutching Mr. Radinsky’s broom in the Strangeways store. “My parents couldn’t afford to buy me a bookcase,” he said gruffly.

  “But now you’ve got three, Dad, haven’t you? Two in here and another upstairs. So why do you need to keep that horrible old box?”

  David lit a cigarette and turned back to the window. How did you tell your child, who had never known privation, how precious something is to you when you acquire it by your own labours? But the orange box was more to him than just that. The Sandbergs had only had one looking-glass in Strangeways, everyone had had to queue up in the kitchen to use it and when he married Bessie he had insisted on a mirror in every room to prove he was on his way up. Now, his rise from the ghetto was self-evident and mirrors had lost their significance for him, but the orange box he would always keep. Everyone needed a reminder of from whence they came.

  The first shadows of evening had begun to fall in the garden and he watched a bird swoop down on to a laburnum tree and disappear into the foliage where Lizzie had told him there was a nest. One day, he’d remember to go and look at it. If other matters ever stopped pushing such simple pleasures from his mind! When he looked back, it seemed as if he’d never had time to enjoy anything. When had he last spent a day in the country, or by the sea? He hadn’t had a break since before the war and it was now 1944. Even then, he had not taken real holidays; just odd weekends at old Mrs. Litvak’s boarding house in Blackpool, where he and Bessie had spent their honeymoon. Bessie had taken the children there for a fortnight every August before they grew up, but the factory had always held him chained.

  “Come and look at Peter’s portrait, Dad,” Shirley commanded.

  David drew the blackout curtains and went to admire the sketch she had made of her beloved. “Another one?” he teased her. “We soon won’t be able to see your bedroom wallpaper for pictures of Peter.”

  “She’s romantic,” Bessie declared. “She takes after me.”

  “After you, love?” David said dryly. “When she was satisfied with that weeny little diamond on her finger?”

  Shirley glanced at her ring, for which Peter had saved up all his army pay. “It’s all he can afford at present.”

  “But you don’t mind, do you?” David smiled.

  “I know he’ll buy me a great big diamond one day, when he gets rich from coming in the business.”

  His daughter’s materialistic reply was a shock to David. She was like Bessie. Calculating and acquisitive. Why hadn’t he realized it before? Maybe he hadn’t wanted to. He, too, had those characteristics, but a ma
n had to have them, or where would he be? And they had never impinged on his personal relationships. In some ways Shirley had a man’s mind. She’d inherited his drive and efficiency, as well as being artistic, and she was invaluable in the business. So she wasn’t the sweet little thing he’d kidded himself she was. You couldn’t have it both ways.

  It had been Shirley who had organized their improvised workroom after they were bombed out and dealt with the Jewish employees’ qualms about entering a church, even a disused one with the pews removed so it could be rented out as temporary premises. How she had managed this, he did not know – and hadn’t had time to care, with all the tasks he’d had to undertake himself. But his daughter had soon had everything running smoothly and later had helped him install the factory in the highly suitable building they occupied now.

  He surveyed her sleek new hairstyle and the sumptuous figure her childish curves had promised and for once could not find in her the little girl she had been. Your children sped away and suddenly you were confronted with unfamiliar adults, he thought with misty eyes. Ronald was on the way to being a doctor and Shirley a comely young woman who would soon be Peter Kohn’s wife. But still my daughter, he told himself with a surge of possessiveness. That, she would always be.

  As for his son. He hoped the boy would be stronger willed than Nathan had been, let loose among all those Gentile nurses. “I’m surprised our Nat hasn’t asked Rebecca to join him in Scotland,” he remarked to Bessie.

  “I’m not,” she replied. “And I don’t think she would if he asked her to.”

  David prickled with apprehension. That his brother’s married life was, to put it mildly, traumatic, was no secret to the family. So was his own, but Nat wasn’t the kind to come to terms with it as David had done.

  “What would Rebecca want to be stuck in some out-of-the-way army camp for? Without even a decent school for Leona to go to?” Bessie said.

  But David could tell she had deliberately made her tone light because Shirley was present.

  “Go and make a cup of tea, love,” she instructed their daughter. “We forgot to have any, like we always do on Lizzie’s half-day.” She waited until Shirley had left the room before continuing the conversation. “Nat had no right to join up,” she pronounced censoriously.

  “A man has to do what his conscience dictates,” David answered.

  “What conscience? He just couldn’t wait to get away from his wife.”

  Bessie was still Rebecca’s confidante and most of the things David learned about his brother were gleaned from her. “That little minx, Leona, makes a lot of trouble in that household,” he said in Nathan’s defence. “Haven’t you noticed how she plays one of them off against the other?” He ground out his cigarette thoughtfully. “You and I have rowed about a lot of things, but we’ve never quarrelled about our kids, have we?”

  Bessie stopped knitting. “But the real cause of their trouble is that woman.”

  “What woman?” David asked avoiding her eye.

  “You don’t have to pretend with me, David. Rebecca told me all about her.”

  “And who told Rebecca?”

  “She didn’t need telling, she’s got eyes. And a wife’s intuition. It wasn’t just Nat’s face that gave the game away that night at the Infirmary when Sister whoever-she-is walked into the room. It was yours, as well.” Bessie busied herself with her knitting again. “But I think Rebecca’s a fool for letting it eat her up. She’s the one who’s got Nat, not that nurse.”

  David could barely conceal his astonishment. Had his wife forgotten she’d once behaved exactly the same way with him about Miriam?

  Her next words told him she had not. “I didn’t always use my head myself when I was younger. But I wasn’t daft enough to do what Rebecca has. She doesn’t sleep with Nat anymore.”

  “What?”

  “I think that must be why he joined up.”

  “So would I, if you did that to me.”

  “You’re too old,” Bessie said comfortably. “And I’m not going to.”

  David was stunned by what she had imparted to him. How could Rebecca treat Nat that way? To the best of his knowledge, his brother had forgotten Mary and been a good and faithful husband. But there was no telling what went on in the female imagination.

  He surveyed his own wife placidly knitting, plump and silver-haired with two large diamonds sparkling on her red-nailed fingers. This woman had made his life a hell in their early years together, but time had taught her not to go too far with him and he had learned how to humour her. She still lashed out at him when some inner ire sought release, but these outbursts had become part of the fabric of their marriage and these days his home life was far from intolerable. If she suddenly stopped nagging him he would probably miss it!

  “What’re you smiling about?” she inquired.

  “You and me.” How had they progressed from constant strife to this? Sitting companionably by the fire together, like Darby and Joan.

  “Children can bring a couple closer together if you let them, like they’ve done with us,” Bessie said, with her thoughts still on Rebecca and Nathan. “You probably wouldn’t still be with me if they hadn’t,” she added with unprecedented honesty.

  David got up and kissed her cheek. She was right. He had his children to thank for everything.

  In her modest semi-detached villa on a narrow tree-lined avenue Miriam was seated by the fire alone. She had just come downstairs after one of her frequent visits to Martin’s empty bedroom and stared into the flames, restively.

  Sammy was busy at the table, carving a tray to give to Shirley and Peter for a wedding present. He had padded the table with an old blanket, to protect it, and kept raising it to make sure he was not making pressure marks on the polished oak surface.

  “I wish you’d stop doing that,” Miriam said. “I don’t give a damn if you mark the table, but like I’ve told you before, if you’re worried in case you do, go and do your carving somewhere else.” She gave Sammy an irritated glance and picked up a copy of John Bull, to browse through it.

  “The kitchenette’s too small, there’s no room for me to work in there,” Sammy answered. “And the shed’s got that big fanlight that you won’t let me paint to black it out.”

  “Why should I have to switch on the light during the day when I go in there to mangle the clothes?” Miriam bristled. “This house isn’t right for us, that’s the top and bottom of it! We were better off where we were, with a nice big kitchen to live in, instead of two entertaining rooms and that poky little scullery I haven’t yet learned to call a kitchenette.”

  Sammy remained silent. The conversation was more or less identical to the one they had most evenings. And as heated on Miriam’s side as usual. He knew what she would say next, though he hoped she wouldn’t.

  “It makes me sick the way you always do everything David tells you to!”

  That she wouldn’t bring her resentment of his brother into it was too much to hope for. “David wanted us all to live near each other,” he said giving his usual defensive reply and thinking she must be tired of hearing it.

  “But your parents’re still in their old house. They didn’t let David make their minds up for them.”

  “Nor did I,” Sammy said quietly. “I’m here because I want to be.”

  “Which is another way of saying you’re here because you want to please David,” Miriam retorted. “When are you going to be your own boss, Sammy? And I’m not talking about your job, I resigned myself to David being your boss in that respect years ago. I’m talking about your life.”

  Sammy chipped away at the delicate tracery he was carving on the handles of the tray, then he put down his knife and looked into his wife’s angry green eyes which these days were the only thing about her appearance that had retained the vitality of her youth. “When are you going to stop hating David because you couldn’t be what he wanted you to be, so he gave you up?”

  Miriam caught her breath and the magazine on he
r lap slid to the floor. Her old romance with his brother was something about which they never talked. This was the first time in twenty-one years of marriage that Sammy had mentioned it. Why had he done so now?

  “That’s what you’ve really got against him, isn’t it?” Sammy added.

  “No!”

  “Are you sure?”

  “How could I still be harping on that? I’m not a romantic girl any more, I’m forty-five.” She retrieved the magazine and flung it on the sofa. “And I’ve been your wife all these years, we’ve got a son we both adore. What’re you talking about?”

  “About how you’ve never loved me, but I haven’t let it matter,” Sammy said with a tightness in his throat. “All I wanted was to make you happy.”

  “You have.”

  He scanned her face and she got up to pace the room restlessly, as if what they were discussing was of no consequence and more pressing matters were on her mind.

  “You don’t seem happy now.”

  “Who could be happy when their son could get shot out of the sky any minute?” Miriam said tremulously, pausing by the sideboard to gaze at a photograph of Martin in his RAF uniform. She put out her hand and touched the thin, unsmiling face regarding her from behind the glass, then her eye fell on the bomb-aimer’s badge above his breast pocket and she turned away and shuddered. Every time she saw it she was reminded of the night in her mother-in-law’s cellar when the bombs had rained from the sky and Martin had recited his terrifyingly cynical poem about death.

  The realization that her son was a stranger to her had come as a shock. How could it be? When she had carried him in her womb, fed him at her breast, loved and nurtured him from childhood to manhood? Where had the timid little boy gone to, whom she had comforted on her lap when he shed tears of sorrow over a dying sparrow in the backyard? And who had once called her cruel when she put her foot on a cockroach.