Scattered Seed

by Maisie Mosco

  She gazed at it with the troubled feeling that had dogged her since she received his first one, superseding her confusion about Michael, who had been posted out of her life last week.

  The night after Michael’s departure, Birdie and Joyce had dragged her to a British airborne unit dance at Bulford. A change of scene would cheer her up, they’d said, and it had. But it had increased her confusion, too, and made her feel guilty that she could be cheered up so easily. She had found herself eyeing the stag-line of paratroopers quaffing beer, their red berets tucked into their epaulets, and thinking it wouldn’t be difficult to fall for one of them.

  This had set her musing about what being in love meant and added to her state of emotional flux. Was the feeling Michael Weiss had aroused in her as transient as his presence had been? Capable of being transferred to any number of suitable successors? The thought that it might have dismayed her. She had always thought of love as an emotion you attached to one special person. Romantic love, that is, which was different from the way you loved your family. From the way she loved Martin, she thought now, gazing through the window across the fields full of army vehicles without seeing them. And she couldn’t love him the other way, she accepted with sudden certainty. That was what her troubled feeling had been about; why she hadn’t written to him though he had rarely left her thoughts since he’d declared his new kind of love for her.

  Birdie was winding her damp locks around pipe-cleaners. “’Adn’t yer better go an’ see wot the office wants wiv yer, Marianne? The request fer yer company arrived ’alf-an-’our ago, before I went fer me shower. Yer said yer was only goin’ fer a lickle walk when yer went art this mornin’, where’ve yer bin all day?”

  “The bus to Salisbury pulled up when I got to the bottom of the hill, so I hopped on to it.”

  “Spent all that time on yer own? Pull the other one!”

  “Sometimes a person needs to be alone to think. I spent most of the day in the Cathedral.”

  Birdie laughed raucously. “What, on a Shabbos?”

  Marianne laughed, too. Birdie’s neighbours at her home in Stepney were called Horowitz and there wasn’t much she didn’t know about Jews and their ways.

  “I’ve been wanting to see inside it for a long time,” Marianne told her. “And it isn’t like going into a church to pray, is it? To me, the cathedral’s just a beautiful building steeped in history.”

  “Tell that ter yer Bubbah,” Birdie grinned.

  “The Jews up north call their grandmothers ‘Bobbie’,” she informed Birdie and brushed the intrusive thought of Sarah away.

  Browsing around in the cool serenity of the cathedral had had a calming effect upon her and afterwards she had stood for a while drinking in the beauty of the gracious greystone edifice towering against the sky. There were other people standing around on the broad green sward, too, but she had hardly been aware of them. It’d been like being alone in the quiet of the cathedral close, the first solitude she had experienced for a long time.

  In her quarters, someone or something was always intruding on your thoughts. Even when Birdie and Joyce were out, and Marianne had the room to herself there was the noise of other girls clattering up and down stairs. And the American Forces Network seemed to follow you wherever you went, you didn’t even have to go anywhere to hear it. Frank Sinatra’s voice was now drifting from the common room wireless down the corridor, singing “Long Ago And Far Away.”

  If it wasn’t Sinatra, it was Count Basie’s “The One O’Clock Jump”, or Lily Ann Carroll telling you “Saturday Night Is The Loneliest Night Of The Week”. Vera Lynn hadn’t made her presence felt in this neck of the woods and Marianne sometimes felt like an extra in a Hollywood musical. Especially when she walked down the main street in the barracks. Frankie’s dulcet tones were invariably issuing from the loudspeakers attached to every passing tree, urging you to “Come Out, Wherever You Are” and it would not have surprised her to see the gum-chewing GIs and WACs suddenly break into a jitterbug.

  “What yer bleedin’ daydreamin’ abart now?” Birdie asked her scathingly.

  Marianne smiled. “It’d take me too long to tell you.” She had not had time to record her impressions on paper lately. But perhaps it was best to let the whole experience soak into her mind, then after the war she could shut herself away with a typewriter and write a book about it.

  “Yer’ve still got yer forage cap on,” Birdie said when she was leaving the room to go to the office. “I fought I was habsent-minded till I met yer!”

  Marianne changed into her flat cap, which was the correct uniform for official occasions.

  “Hif yer wasn’t so bleedin’ straight-laced, yer’d never remember where yer’d left yer knickers!” Birdie called after her as she departed.

  The office was situated beside a small parade ground, with the cookhouse and sick-bay, a short walk from the girls’ quarters, and Marianne wondered why she had been summoned there, whilst she strode along the path. Had they found out that she always put her room-mates’ kitbags under their blankets when they didn’t return before lights-out, so their beds would look occupied if the duty NCO came around flashing her torch? But in that case, why hadn’t Birdie and Joyce been summoned, too? Perhaps she was to be posted to another unit and they wanted to give her her orders immediately?

  Junior Commander Platt wasted no time in ending her conjecture. “I received a telephone call from a Mr. David Sandberg,” she said when Marianne had given her the obligatory salute.

  “He’s my uncle, ma’am.”

  “So he said.”

  He was the one who always took charge in a family crisis and Marianne’s heart had begun to thud.

  “I have some good news for you, Klein,” the officer smiled. “Your brother is alive. A prisoner of war.”

  Marianne sagged with relief and gazed down at her shoes, so the CO would not see the tears that had sprung to her eyes. When she raised her head, Miss Platt’s smile had gone, and she was toying with her propelling pencil.

  “Some bad news, too, I’m afraid, Klein. Your uncle asked me to break it to you gently, but there’s no way, is there? He said you and the young man were extremely close.”

  Uncle David didn’t use words like “extremely”. Which young man? She knew, but she didn’t want to open her mind to it. What was the CO saying? Something about a motor-bike. The picture of an aeroplane falling from the sky that had just risen before Marianne’s eyes disintegrated. Martin had been killed in a road accident. This afternoon. It must have happened after he came to visit her.

  “Sit down, Klein,” Miss Platt said.

  Marianne gave her a dazed glance and she rose from her desk and shepherded her to a chair.

  “Thank you, ma’am.” If he hadn’t fallen in love with her, he’d be out with a WAAF, or one of the civilian girls he knew in Lincoln. Alive and well. Instead, he was lying in a mortuary, because of her.

  Miss Platt poured some water from a flask and made her drink a little. “I wish I had something stronger to offer you, Klein. You look as if you need it.”

  There’s a human being inside that impersonal shell, Marianne thought remotely. The girls wouldn’t believe it when she told them.

  The officer was eyeing her sympathetically. “Your uncle asked if I would let you have compassionate leave. But you know the regulations by now, don’t you, Klein? I had to tell him a cousin’s funeral isn’t a reason.”

  Not go to Martin’s funeral? She, who’d been closer to him than anyone else in the world? “Yes, ma’am.” Marianne rose from the chair, set the glass of water on the desk, saluted with machine-like precision and left the office.

  Half-an-hour later, she was in Joyce’s current GI’s jeep, being driven by him to Andover, with the bag of civilian clothing Birdie kept handy for her periodic absent-without-leave jaunts on her lap.

  “What’ll they do to you, hon, when you get back?” the snub-nosed private asked when he dropped her at the railway station.

  “I d
on’t care.”

  “Me, I’d end up in the stockade if I went over the hill.”

  “I’ll probably get the ATS equivalent. Birdie only got confined to barracks for a week, last time she went AWL. But that was before the twenty-five-mile limit was put on our travelling. They’ll take going off without a pass more seriously now.”

  “You’re darn tootin’, sugar! Things’re hottin’ up for the invasion as of now, a guy can feel it in the air. Everyone’s waitin’ to go. Are you sure you oughta do what you’re doin’, hon?” Joyce’s boy-friend asked with concern.

  Marianne glanced at her wristwatch. The train to London was due in twelve minutes and a pulse in her throat was fluttering nervously. But her resolve had not faltered. “I only intend being away for a couple of days and the girls are going to try to cover for me,” she answered. “But if I’m found out, so be it. However they punish me it won’t last forever. But if I don’t go I’ll regret it for the rest of my life.”

  She entered the station with the crowd arriving to catch the train to town and darted into the ladies’ waiting room whilst the military policewomen patrolling near the platform barriers were looking the other way, emerging a few minutes later as a civilian, over whom the red-capped Amazons had no jurisdiction, her uniform secreted in Birdie’s holdall.

  Don’t march, walk, she instructed herself when she had bought her ticket and had to pass by them. All she needed was the rigid gait that had been drilled into her to give her away! This must be how criminals felt when they were committing their crimes; as if the eye of the law was burning into the back of their neck, but afraid to turn and look. Only they didn’t have her additional problems. Birdie’s court shoes were too big for her and the paper she’d packed into the toes wasn’t stopping her from stepping out of them every so often. And she was afraid the skirt of her borrowed suit would slip to her ankles any second; it was inches too wide and the safety-pin with which she had anchored it to her ATS corset didn’t make it feel secure.

  Her anxiety lessened on the train when a grim-looking ATS sergeant-major seated opposite did not so much as glance at her. And after she had walked through the barrier at Paddington without drawing the attention of the MPs, she ceased worrying about anything other than whether she would get lost in the labyrinth of underground passages through which she had to find her way in order to reach Euston by tube.

  She had only travelled home on leave from her present unit once before. It had been early afternoon when she arrived in London and the same on her return journey. The underground had not looked the way it did now, crammed with people for whom it was a nightly air-raid shelter.

  The sight of them sprawled on their improvised beds jolted Marianne back to the grim reality of the war and heightened the feeling she had had lately that the life she was living in Wiltshire, surrounded by Yanks and jeeps, was not real, that she would awaken one morning and find it had just been a dream.

  Some of the people she passed were dozing beneath grubby-looking blankets. Others were eating and drinking and a girl of about her own age was suckling a baby and chatting perkily to her nocturnal neighbours, as if there were nothing untoward about baring your breast in the underground. But it was probably routine to her by now, as this nightly, molelike existence was for everyone down here. Some were no doubt homeless already and others might find the homes they had left intact no longer there tomorrow morning.

  Yet looking at them, Marianne mused, nobody would guess they had anything on their minds. There was an air of good cheer about the whole exercise. Perhaps it was the togetherness she could feel all around her that helped them maintain it, she reflected and had to smile at the sight of two very fat ladies dancing the Lambeth Walk. An old man with a concertina was providing the music. They even had their entertainment.

  The ambience remained with her when she left the underground behind, like a gauze curtain dimming her thoughts about Martin without having taken them away. But speeding northward on the night-train to Manchester, the terrible thing that was taking her there shut everything else out.

  All the compartments were full when she boarded, and she passed the long journey seated on Birdie’s holdall in the unlit corridor, staring through the window into the darkness, only dimly aware of the ghostly shapes of the trees being replaced by factory chimneys, with the train wheels clanking: “When shall we twain join hands again?” on and on, until she thought the sound would explode inside her head.

  She had telephoned her father from Euston to ask him to meet the train, but it was her Uncle David whom she found waiting for her at London Road Station. To her surprise, Shirley was with him. Looking as if she’d just stepped out of a bandbox, as usual.

  “Wherever did you get that dreadful outfit, Marianne?”

  And as obsessed by clothes as ever.

  Shirley was eyeing Birdie’s strident red costume. Her appalled gaze took in the matching, Spanish-heel shoes and sheer, black stockings, and the saucy beret, also black, which with Marianne’s thick fringe gave her a gamine appearance. “Fancy coming home for a funeral dressed like a French tart!”

  “Can’t you think about anything else, even at six o’clock in the morning?” Marianne retorted. The warm, family feeling that Shirley’s coming to meet her had evoked fled away. Even though we don’t like each other, she’s here, because we’re cousins and one of our own is dead, Marianne had thought. But now Shirley’s presence at the station seemed the empty duty it was.

  “Now, now, girls!” her uncle interceded.

  But he, too, had looked askance at Marianne’s attire. “These aren’t my things. I couldn’t get a pass, so I came without one and I’d never have got here if I’d been in uniform,” she told him whilst they were walking to his car.

  “I see.”

  “I suppose you think I’ve done the wrong thing, Uncle?”

  He did not reply until they had driven down Market Street and were turning right, en route for Prestwich. “I’ve been asking myself if I’d have done what you have, Marianne,” he said thoughtfully. “It was a big decision for you to have to make. But the answer is yes and I’m glad you did it, love. Shall I tell you why? Because nothing is more important than family; it’s what we’ve tried to instil into all you kids and you’ve proved we’ve done a good job.”

  “With one exception,” Shirley declared. “You haven’t heard about your Arnold yet, have you, Marianne?”

  David glanced at Marianne’s stunned expression after he had told her. “Your dad’s a bit under the weather, what with one thing and another. He didn’t feel up to meeting the train.”

  Marianne was not surprised. But the news about Arnold seemed insignificant beside the tragedy of Martin’s death. How could the two simultaneous events have failed to make her parents see things in their true perspective?

  They were sitting in the living-room when she walked into the house. Her uncle had dropped her at the garden gate and had said he would not bother coming in. Perhaps he hadn’t wanted to get involved in what he knew awaited her. She approached it with apprehension herself, but this changed to pity when she saw the two middle-aged figures hunched over the table sipping tea, and the overflowing ashtray at her father’s elbow.

  Where had his springy step gone to? she thought after he had risen to kiss her and slouched silently back to his chair. She noted him scratching his hands and saw the eczema from which he had suffered after Harry was reported missing looked red raw. And what a mess her mother was, with her hair all over the place and her housecoat unbuttoned over her nightdress. She had always taken a pride in her appearance, like an older version of Shirley, and made sure she looked immaculate whatever the hour or circumstances. Marianne could understand why she looked the way she did, but it was a shock because it wasn’t like her.

  “I want you to promise you’ll never do to us what Arnold’s doing,” her mother said after a silence.

  Hadn’t it entered her parents’ heads what they were doing to him? Two pairs of pathetic eyes
were riveted to her face. No, and it never would.

  “Promise us, Marianne,” her father implored. “If you don’t want to finish us both off.”

  Marianne replaced her tea cup in the saucer and cast Michael Weiss and his kind permanently out of her life. “Of course I won’t do it, Dad.” How could she?

  The two days she spent in the midst of the family passed in a blur of sights and sounds, with the bleak greyness of sorrow shading everything around her and the women’s weeping rising to a terrible crescendo when Martin’s coffin was carried from her grandparents’ house.

  She was not clear as to why the cortège left from there, instead of from his parents’ home, but it seemed right and she supposed that was the reason; the elder Sandbergs’ home was the heart of the family and the week of mourning was to be held there, too.

  The funeral did not take place until Monday afternoon. The body, a term Marianne could not apply to Martin and shuddered when others did, had had to be brought north. She had wanted to look at him, then had changed her mind. It was better to remember him as he had looked before the spirit that was the real him had left his flesh, than have her last memory of him reduced to a lifeless shell shrouded in the tallith in which Jewish males were buried.

  Because she was female, she was not allowed to go to the cemetery and see him laid to rest, though he would have wanted her to be there, and when the men returned from the interment she raised the subject with a young rabbinical student who had been a schoolmate of Martin’s.

  “There’s no law against it, Marianne,” he replied.

  Had she heard him correctly?

  Harold Schneider sipped the whisky that was always provided after a funeral and surveyed Marianne’s astonished expression. “You only think there is because in Manchester the women don’t attend burials. But it’s just a tradition that’s grown up because men think it best for them not to witness such a harrowing thing. In some communities, Sheffield for instance, the women please themselves and some do go to the cemetery.”