Scattered Seed

by Maisie Mosco

  Why had he changed? And when? It was not possible that she hadn’t known what was going on in his mind. He was the centre of her life, her very heartbeat. And yet it had happened, she could not deny it. She’d had to accept, that night in the cellar, that she knew nothing about him and it was still so. The dear warmth of his presence, when he came home on leave, the look and feel of him, was all he allowed her. The essence of him, the person he was and had always been without her knowing it, he kept locked within himself.

  “I can’t sleep at night for thinking of him,” she whispered breaking the heavy silence that had fallen.

  Sammy wanted to take her in his arms, give her his shoulder to weep on, which summed up his function in her life, he reflected bitterly, but steeled himself as he had never done before. Her obsession about David, the burning resentment of his regard for his brother, had festered for too long. What a fool he’d been to hope the open sore of the past would heal as if it had never been.

  “Worrying about our son is something we share,” he said roughly. “But Martin isn’t the only reason you’re unhappy.”

  “The other is I can’t bear to see the husband I respect dancing to someone else’s tune about everything!” Miriam flashed.

  Sammy sighed and withdrew into his shell again. He had said more than he’d intended already. It was fruitless to prolong the discussion; like walking round and round a revolving door that always returned you to the same place. His wife had two loves in her life, his brother and their son. The first she had lost, and God forbid that she should lose the other.

  “I’ll make you a nice cup of tea, chuck,” he said with his customary smile, that had once come naturally, but which he now wore like a mask to hide the ache in his heart.

  He went into the kitchenette to put the kettle on to boil and saw Miriam gaze at the big calendar she had pinned to the wall above the mantelpiece.

  “It’s April already,” she said dully. “Martin will be twenty in September. He was only seventeen when he joined up, he’s been away two-and-a-half years.” She picked up a thick, black crayon and obliterated Sunday from the calendar though it was not yet over, wanting to speed another day on its way so the time would come more quickly when her son would be home again.

  Esther was garbed in the long-sleeved blue and white overall she had taken from the shop because it matched her kitchenette decor, her hair swathed in a scarf to protect it from the pungent fumes drifting from the red-hot oil in which she was frying gefilte fish. One of her new silvery locks had escaped on to her forehead, she noticed when she stepped into the adjoining living-room to glance at her dozing husband and saw her reflection in the mirror. So let her hair get greasy and fishy, what did it matter? She had only covered her head from habit. How she looked and what she smelled of wasn’t important any more.

  Before the War Office telegram came, she’d gone to the hairdresser’s every week and had the ageing streaks coloured to match the rest. Now, there was more grey hair than ginger and was it any wonder? There were new lines on her face, too, but they weren’t important, either.

  Only Harry was important. The thought of him had shut out her fears for Arnold, and the apprehension of a different kind that had plagued her about Marianne. She hadn’t set foot in the beauty parlour since the day her world was turned upside down, or even bothered to look at herself properly in the mirror when she washed and dressed.

  Yesterday at the Shabbos gathering, her mother had told her she was losing weight and Bessie had said enviously that she wished she could, which had amused everyone because her mouth had been full of cake when she said it. It was the way people still laughed, even those who loved Harry, that made the waiting more unbearable. The way everyday life went on, with the rain still raining and the sun still shining as it would continue to do if Harry never came home again.

  The telegram had not included the phrase “presumed dead”, and everyone said that was hopeful. But how long could you go on hoping? And what would the enemy do to Harry if he was a prisoner of war? Albert Watson had also been captured in Italy but was now in a POW camp in Germany. Harry had “Jew” engraved on the identity-disc which servicemen and women wore in case the military had to bury them. He had showed it to her and joked about it when she turned pale after learning its purpose. But she wouldn’t let herself dwell upon what the Germans might inflict upon a live Jewish soldier.

  Ben awoke with a grunt and sniffed. “Something’s burning on the cooker, Esther.”

  She left him fumbling in his cardigan pocket for his cigarettes and went to rescue their supper. Once, he would have been there ahead of her, but it would take more than a panful of singed fishballs to rouse him from the despondency he’d sunk into, Esther thought as she removed them from the oil and laid them to drain on brown paper.

  “When do you want to eat?” she asked Ben through the doorway.

  “Never.”

  “So you’ll live on cigarettes instead! A lot of good it’ll do you.”

  “Only one thing will do me any good.”

  “You’re going to stop living if our Harry doesn’t come back?” she asked flatly and watched his face crumple with pain. “We’ve still got two other children, remember.”

  “Oy,” Ben groaned and avoided her eye as she returned to the living-room and stood beside his chair.

  “I was saying it to myself as well as to you,” Esther told him. “Because so far we haven’t said it to each other, have we?” She sat down in the other armchair and listened to the clock ticking away in the silence, waiting for her husband to speak. “And maybe we should’ve done,” she added when he did not.

  Ben stared down at the scaly red patches on his hands, which Lou Benjamin had said was eczema when he went to the surgery for some ointment to relieve the itching. “Twice before I’ve had this rash,” he said pensively. “The first time, I was only a kid of fourteen. It was after my parents died in the flu epidemic. I woke up with my hands like this the morning of their funeral. And I got it again, years later, when my brother married a shiksah.”

  “So other people sit down and cry when they’ve got tsorus and you break out in a rash instead.”

  “The kind of man who can weep I’ve never been.”

  “I know.”

  “Even when I was a lad I couldn’t.” Ben scratched his left hand which troubled him most. “But the way I feel, it’s a miracle I haven’t got this itch all over my body.”

  Esther looked at his sagging shoulders and straightened her own. If she had to be the strong one just now, she’d be it. In the past, she had always leaned on him.

  “Why not nip across the road and invite Miriam and Sammy to come and eat our burnt supper with us?” she suggested to take his mind off himself. “The way Miriam looks these days, I don’t think she ever eats and to have company would do us all good. I miss how it was in the old days, when we used to pop into each other’s houses across the back entry. Round here, where you’ve got to ring the doorbell because everyone keeps their side door locked, it isn’t the same.”

  “It’s a different life we live now, Esther. For one thing, everyone’s got their own troubles. I don’t mean the family’s stopped being close, that could never happen. Maybe it’s the war. Or perhaps it’s being in a snobbier district. But there’s a separateness nowadays that there never used to be,” Ben reflected.

  “Even so, go across and invite them.”

  “Miriam’s company I can do without! She knows her son’s alive and well and stationed in Lincolnshire, but nobody would think so from the way she goes on.”

  “You’re forgetting how we worried night and day about Arnold being on a minesweeper, before the telegram about Harry came,” Esther said in fairness to her sister-in-law.

  “But we didn’t go around depressing everyone else, the way she does.”

  “Miriam only has one child, Ben. Which brings us back to what started this conversation.” Esther had to force her next words out of her mouth. “If Harry’s dead –
”

  “Don’t say that!” Ben cut in. “I don’t want to hear it.”

  “I’ve already said it. Because it’s something we have to face up to and we may as well prepare ourselves now, instead of pretending it’s impossible. But if he is, we’ll still have our other son and our daughter, won’t we?”

  For a moment Ben could not speak and when he found his voice it sounded hoarse and cracked. “In some ways you’re as strong as your mother, Esther. Only I never knew it until now. However black things seem, she always finds something to hang on to. But I’m not like that, I never have been. I’m a fighter, yes, or I’d never have dragged myself up from nothing with no family to help and encourage me until I became part of yours. But what we’re going through now – you and me – it isn’t a fight, and that’s why I can’t cope with it. There’s nothing to do but wait and I can’t bear the waiting, Esther.”

  “You’ll have to,” she replied.

  Ben gave her a dazed glance, then averted his eyes and stared into the fire, over which he had sat huddled for most of the day. “It’s always worse on Sundays, when I’m at home with nothing to keep me busy.”

  “I should be so lucky.”

  He turned to look at her. “You’re a wonderful wife. And me, I should be ashamed of myself.”

  Esther managed to smile and got up to lay the table. “What for? Loving your son too much?”

  Ben watched her take the cruet set out of the sideboard cupboard and rub the silver-plated tops of the salt and pepper pots with a corner of her overall. “For loving him more than I love his brother. Does that shock you?”

  “I’ve always known it,” Esther replied. “And it used to bother me until I mentioned it to my mother.”

  “Ma you had to mention it to?” Ben said nervously. “What must she think of me?”

  Esther set the cutlery in place and brought a bowl of apples to the table. Bananas had disappeared from the English diet since the war and the few precious oranges, which she obtained from her fruiterer in Salford in exchange for under-the-counter pure silk stockings for his wife, she always took to the Shabbos tea party to be shared between Leona and the twins.

  “Mother once told me you were another David,” she informed her husband. “And coming from her, there couldn’t be a higher compliment, so set your mind at rest.”

  “But what did she say about me and the boys?” There had been mutual respect between Ben and his mother-in-law since Sarah took him as a lodger when he was a young man. Her opinion mattered.

  “That you don’t love one more than the other, you feel different things for each of them, like she does for me and my brothers.”

  “Perhaps it’s true,” Ben mused. “Harry gets on my nerves sometimes, but him I can talk to and I can read him like a book. Arnold, I’ve never understood. But I admire him. That lad knows his own mind and it’s sharp as a razor. He could end up a judge one day.”

  Esther smiled dryly. “And according to Hannah, our Marianne who gets on my nerves, though you make allowances for her, could end up an author.”

  “Oh God,” Ben said passionately. “I’d die for all three of them. Let them only come back to us soon, Esther, then we can start living again.”

  Esther went to put the fish balls on her big blue platter. Why was she filled with disquiet? Something Rabbi Lensky had said in a sermon years ago was filtering back into her mind. Nobody could live their life through their children.

  Chapter 8

  Martin awoke in the seedy room and lay staring at the red-fringed lampshade suspended from the ceiling. His head felt as if it was weighted down with stones and his mouth parched and sour. Hangovers were not unfamiliar to him. But usually he knew the details of how he had acquired one. All he could recall about last night was going for a drink with a couple of the crew.

  “Good morning, sweetie,” an upper-class voice cooed from beside him.

  He managed to turn his head and saw a silky, naked shoulder. Then the girl raised herself on one elbow and he caught a glimpse of round, creamy breasts before his eyes travelled to her face.

  “How did you sleep, pet?” she inquired.

  “Like the dead.”

  He got out of bed and moved groggily to the washbasin crammed into a corner beside a wardrobe. The room was so small, there must have been nowhere else to put it.

  “We certainly had ourselves a time, didn’t we, Martin?”

  Martin was sure they must have done but could not remember and put his head under the cold water tap which usually helped to clear it. She knew his name, but he didn’t know hers. Who was she? Her sharp-featured, blue-eyed face had struck no chord in his memory.

  When he reached for a towel and turned around, she was sitting up with her back resting against the dark oak bedhead, combing her fluffy, fair hair, her lush, pink-tipped orbs now fully revealed in the morning sunlight filtering through the fly-blown window. She must have awakened before he had and drawn back the blackout curtains he thought hazily and wrapped the towel around himself self-consciously when she glanced at his floppy penis and laughed.

  He had never seen this room before. How had he got here? He’d intended to drive home last night. Tomorrow was Shirley and Peter’s wedding day and he’d promised to be there in time to attend the Shabbos service in shul this morning, when Peter would be called up before the holy Ark as Jewish bridegrooms always were on the Sabbath preceding their marriage. But now Martin wouldn’t be there. He had let the family down.

  His eye fell on a notice pinned on the door, requesting guests to vacate the room before noon. The place was a cheap, bed-and-breakfast dive, not the girl’s digs as he’d thought it might be. What had he done in his drunken stupor? Brought her here and registered as Mr. and Mrs?

  A sunbeam settled on her left hand and he caught the flash of gold on her wedding finger. He might even have married her, for all he remembered! But a special licence couldn’t be obtained that quickly, he reassured himself.

  “My husband was killed at Crete,” she said, seeing him staring at the ring. “But I told you that, didn’t I, sweetie? After you said you never fool around with married women.”

  She didn’t seem to be suffering from amnesia, the way he was. Obviously she’d had less to drink, but girls generally did. You gave them a gin and lime and they were yours for the asking. Like bitches on heat. The distaste that always followed his amorous exploits had begun to set in. Disgust for himself, too; for the desperate dissipation that loneliness, and the feeling of living on borrowed time, had driven him to.

  He had been plagued from childhood by an inexplicable sense of insecurity, but now there was a reason for it. A bomber crew’s tour of duty was thirty operations. He had just completed his fifteenth and according to statistics you only had a one-in-three chance of surviving the whole tour.

  When an aircraft in the squadron got pranged and chaps you’d attended the briefing with just a few hours ago were suddenly no more, relief that you were still alive took precedence over your grief for them and made you feel ashamed. But how long would it be before you bought it yourself? was always at the back of your mind and you filled yourself with liquor to forget…

  “Come back to bed, sweetie,” the girl said invitingly.

  … And you tried to cram a lifespan’s screwing into the time you had left. There were plenty of willing popsies, eager like this one to aid and abet you; anonymous faces and bodies even when you knew their names; their function purely erotic. Were they really the mindless creatures they seemed? The fleeting encounters you had with them didn’t allow time to find out and you were usually smashed out of your mind yourself, the liquor oiling your still-creaking civilian inhibitions into quiescence, or how would a respectable Jewish boy bring himself to behave this way?

  But he had never been as drunk as he must have got last night. What would his mother say if she saw him now? She’d probably be upset most by her son sleeping with a shiksah. They’re the only kind of girl available. Mother dear, he said to
Miriam mentally, and experienced a stab of pleasure that his private life would shock her. Her disapproval was the most persistent of his inhibitions and the one that for some reason, even when sober, he wanted to defy.

  The thought of his cousin Marianne got in the way, too. She’d looked up to him since they were kids and occasionally, when he had his hand up a popsie’s skirt, he had to blot out a sudden vision of Marianne’s quizzical dark eyes.

  He glanced out of the window at the narrow street. There was a pub he did not recognize opposite and an unfamiliar block of shops not yet open for the day’s trade. This wasn’t Lincoln. He knew the cathedral city, with its ancient, cobbled by-ways and mellowed old buildings, as well as he knew Manchester.

  “Where are we?” he asked the girl.

  “Andover, pet.”

  “What the hell are we doing in Andover?” He’d intended to drive north, not south!

  The girl turned to look at an empty Vat 69 bottle on the bed table, which Martin had not noticed, and giggled. “I’m not surprised you’ve forgotten.”

  He didn’t usually travel with a personal supply of booze. But he hadn’t got it for himself, he recalled eyeing it. He had paid a GI a fiver for it and had been taking it home because his grandmother had written that Uncle David couldn’t get hold of enough whisky for Shirley’s wedding.

  “I could do with a cup of tea,” he muttered confusedly.

  “The landlady’ll be bringing our breakfast soon, sweetie. It’s included in the price and we get it at eight o’clock.”

  Martin shuddered at the thought of the probably greasy repast and crawled back between the sheets, his temples throbbing.

  “Want me to fill in the blanks for you, pet?” the girl smiled.

  “I wish you would.”

  “You offered to drive me home.”

  “Where’s home?”

  “Bournemouth.”

  “Good God.”

  “But we didn’t make it all the way.”