by Maisie Mosco
“Did you go to Chanukah parties at shul when you were a kid, Kinsky?”
Kinsky gazed pensively at the wintry sunbeam that was lending an illusory warmth to the green walls and white-counterpaned beds. “Who didn’t, sir?”
“You’ll be back with your family soon,” Nathan said to comfort him and saw his lips tighten to a grimace in his thin face.
“Being fed like a baby by my mother, because I’ve got no hands.”
Bitterness was as strong in the air here as the stench of blood and the lads’ depression more difficult to treat than their postoperative conditions. Nathan patted Kinsky’s shoulder wordlessly. He had considered himself something of a psychiatrist in civvy street, but it would take more than the simple methods he had employed to heal the psychological wounds of war.
His next patient was minus a leg. All the soldiers on this ward were maimed. Some were casualties of Arnhem, not yet fit enough to be shipped home. The newer cases had been brought in from the battle now raging in the Ardennes. Nathan had heard the Americans were bearing the brunt of it and shuddered to think how heavy their casualties must be.
“When’s me stitches comin’ hout, sir?” the pudgy lad, whose stump he had just exposed to view, inquired with forced perkiness.
“Not yet, Barton.”
“I fought as ’ow it might be terday, when Nurse nicked me, barrel of oats.”
Barrel of oats? Barton’s conversation took some working out.
“Hit’s me fer the theatre, I fought, sir. Hup the happles’n pears. Look sir, they’ve gone from the hend of me bed.”
He was referring to his case notes. “Are those Barton’s?” Nathan called to the grey-clad figure just entering with a sheaf of papers in her hand.
“I’m just returning them. There was something I wanted to check with Dispensary,” she replied. “I wasn’t expecting the ward round to begin until ten, or I’d have been here when you arrived,” she added as she drew nearer.
Nathan stared uncertainly at her composed, fair-skinned face framed by the big, starched-white kerchief Queen Alexandra’s Nursing Sisters wore on their heads. It couldn’t be her. But it was and why not? She was a nurse and he a doctor and there was a war on. “I’m a little early this morning,” he said stiffly.
Mary remained at this side whilst he scanned the notes and finished examining Barton, then accompanied him on the rest of his round. Apart from the necessary medical exchanges, they did not speak a word to each other.
“Why haven’t I seen you around before?” Nathan asked, halting in the flagstoned corridor when they left the ward together.
“I’ve just been transferred here.”
Nathan had heard in the Mess last night that the Sister in charge of this ward had been relieved of her duties and had not been surprised. The atmosphere was enough to make anyone crack up and she had seemed on the verge of a breakdown for some time. He had expected a replacement. But not Mary! “Do you wish you hadn’t been?”
“Do you?” Mary countered.
Her expression told Nathan nothing. What did he feel for her all these years later? Something was churning inside him, but was it anything more than regret?
Mary turned away and went into the office. She was already seated at the desk writing when Nathan followed her.
“I have a lot to do,” she said without glancing up.
The sound of the nib scratching on the paper was like a blunt knife scraping his nerves. “Does seeing me again mean nothing to you?”
Mary put down her pen. “We were young and foolish together, how could it not?”
“Is that how you think of it?”
“When I allow myself to think of it at all. Which isn’t often. You were a fool to think what you felt for me could be stronger than your family. And I was one for hoping it would be. How’s your wife, by the way?”
Nathan did not reply. The question wasn’t a polite inquiry about Rebecca’s health, it was a deliberate reminder of her existence. But he needed no reminding. All his adult life he had been torn between these two women.
Mary cut into his thoughts. “The child she was expecting when I saw her must be about eight now.”
“She’s nearly nine.”
“And no doubt has brothers and sisters.”
“She hasn’t, as a matter of fact.”
“I thought Jews always had big families.”
“Did you?”
“To keep watch on each other, like your brother did with you. I remember you accused him of spying on you, when he found us together in Whitworth Park.”
“Why are you raking that up?”
Mary rose from the desk and went to gaze through the window at some ambulances that had just pulled up in the courtyard. “Why the hell do you suppose?”
“I ruined your life, didn’t I?” Nathan said after a silence.
“Let’s not be melodramatic,” she replied, turning to face him, “It isn’t your fault I happen to be a one-guy gal, as our US Allies would put it. Not that I haven’t tried not to be, Nathan.”
“You never did call me Nat, like everyone else does, did you?”
Mary shook her head mutely.
A moment later they were in each other’s arms.
“Mind my cumbersome headgear doesn’t hit you in the eye!” Mary warned with a tremulous laugh. “That little cap I used to wear was more convenient!”
The allusion to her cap, and the fragrance of lavender rising from her skin as it always had, transported Nathan back to a linen room at Manchester Royal Infirmary, into which they had sometimes crept for a few precious minutes alone. Remembrance was so strong, he could even smell the freshly laundered sheets that had surrounded them on the shelves.
“I’ll never forget the time we heard Sister Reilly talking to someone outside the door and thought she might open it and catch us,” he said reminiscently. “Oh, Mary!”
He rested his cheek on hers, as he had then; she still aroused tenderness in him. Affectionate friendship had deepened their young desire. Desire that had never been consummated, he thought, feeling her firm breasts against his chest and her heart beating with his. How ironic it was that life had given him Rebecca to assuage his sexual hunger but had denied him fulfilment with the only woman he had ever loved.
“That’s enough of that,” Mary said, breaking away from him.
Nathan averted his gaze, conscious of the hardening in his loins as she had no doubt been, too.
“Nothing like a bit of slap and tickle to take your mind off the war, is there?” she said coarsely.
He watched her adjust her headgear. “Was that what it was?”
“What else could it be?” she answered. “We might all be dead tomorrow. A nice little armful’s what every soldier wants.”
“I’m not a soldier, Mary. I’m just a doctor in uniform.”
“Away from home like all the rest.”
“Why are you saying this to me?”
“So you won’t get the idea what happened just now was important to me.”
“You mean you’re not going to let it be?”
“Not likely! Where would it end? Remember my friend Ann Barker? You wouldn’t recognize her if you saw her now. That affair she started with a married man when we were students is still going on and a right wreck it’s made of her. Personally, I’d rather live like a nun. Not that I do.”
Mary sat down at the desk and smiled at Nathan’s shocked reaction. “You taught me I’d got hot blood in my veins. And I’ve since discovered you don’t have to be in love to enjoy sex.”
“I’ve never been in love with my wife,” Nathan said stiffly.
Mary borrowed another American expression. A barrack-room one. “Well, that’s tough shit, isn’t it? For all three of us.” She returned her attention to the notes she had been writing and did not raise her head when Nathan left the office.
That night, she was surrounded by officers in the Mess, as newly arrived nurses always were. Nathan stood with a noisy group on
the other side of the smoky room, feeling limp and drained. He needed some sleep, a night never passed without his being roused to deal with emergencies. It was the same for his colleagues, but most seemed able to burn the candle at both ends, he reflected, surveying the throng around the bar. But it was an ambience of false merriment, as if everyone were determined to forget where they were and why and suddenly Nathan wanted to escape from it. Instead he leaned on the piano listening to Pettifer, the radiologist, tinkling a tune, unable to tear himself away from Mary’s presence.
Each time he glanced in her direction she was glancing at him and he wondered which of them would get a stiff neck first, from hastily jerking their heads the other way. A beefy, orthopaedic surgeon had his arm around her, damn him! And Mary kept smiling up into the fellow’s bleary eyes, but the smile was like a mask glued to her face.
“I shay, Shandberg ol’ chap, get me a refill, there’sh a good bod,” the radiologist requested whoozily.
When Nathan returned from the bar with Pettifer’s drink Mary had gone. But the orthopod was still here, he noted with relief. Perhaps she’d just gone to powder her nose, but if the surgeon had disappeared, too – Nathan tried to curb his jealousy. The knowledge that she slept around was like a thorn in his side, but he had no strings on her, he told himself firmly and left the Mess.
Mary was leaning on the wall outside the door, huddled in her cape.
Nathan stopped short when he saw her there.
“I couldn’t bear the way you kept staring over at me,” she said.
“Why?”
“You know bloody well why!”
Nathan could see their breath steaming in the frigid air and a coating of frost forming on the roof of the sergeants’ mess, opposite. Of course he knew why; it had been a ridiculous question. Being in the same room with him was probably torture for her, without his making things worse.
“I’m going to bed,” she said, striding away from him.
“Let me come with you,” he answered, following her.
“Let go! You’re hurting me!”
He had gripped her shoulder and halted her, without realizing it. But he hadn’t meant to say what he’d just said, either. He could hear Pettifer’s aimless tinkling on the piano drifting from inside. Apart from that, there was no sound and no light except for the moon silvering Mary’s blonde curls.
“It might as well be me you go to bed with as anyone else,” Nathan said thickly, unable to prevent himself from doing so.
“That’s where you’re wrong. With you it would involve my emotions.”
“I think I still love you, Mary.”
She laughed abruptly. “You’re honest. You admit you’re not sure.”
“I’ve never been knowingly dishonest with you.”
“No. You kidded yourself, too. That we could have a future together. And there’s an added complication now. Two, to be precise.”
His wife and child.
“So why are we standing here discussing the impossible?”
Was it impossible? Nathan felt on the brink of a now-or-never decision. He could see Mary’s shadow elongated on the cobble-stones, as it had been beside him since they parted years ago. Now he could choose between the shadow and the substance. And the chance to be happy would not come again.
“To be happy, a person must first be at peace with the Almighty, or what should taste sweet will always taste bitter,” his mother’s voice counselled him inside his head.
When had she said it to him? He couldn’t recall the occasion, but her Jewish wisdom was always at the back of his mind. How could it not be when she had implanted it there? And a Jew who disgraced his family doubly, with a divorce and remarriage to a Gentile, would know no peace at all. It was this that was stopping him from taking Mary in his arms and saying he’d never give her up again. Keeping him chained and manacled, like he’d been since the day he was born a Sandberg.
“Poor Nathan,” Mary said, studying his beaten expression. “We don’t stand an earthly, do we? We never did and I’m as sorry for you as I am for me.”
Nathan felt her lips brush his fleetingly, like the wings of a passing butterfly, and was filled with an aching sadness because it epitomized what she had represented in his life. A transient glimpse of happiness that had coloured the greyness of his days.
“Let’s just wish each other well,” she said with tears in her eyes. “And stay friends.”
He watched her walk away from him across the courtyard. God had not destined him to be happy and there was nothing he could do about it.
Chapter 14
On VE Day, Sarah sat in the porch with Sigmund, watching Abraham weed the garden.
“Everyone is celebrating, people are dancing in the streets, but my husband has to make himself busy,” she said with a tolerant smile. She could hear his chest wheezing, though he was working a yard or two away from her and wanted to tell him to rest. But it would be contrary to her decision to allow him to do as he pleased. She had hidden her anxiety since then and must continue to do so.
“While a person’s busy, they don’t have time to brood,” Sigmund declared with a heavy sigh. “To have peace again in Europe is God’s blessing. But why did He let there be a war?”
Sarah knew he was thinking if there hadn’t been one, the family would not have lost Martin. But because of the war she was to be a great-grandmother. To a child who would not be Jewish. Arnold wouldn’t have met the girl who was now his wife if he hadn’t left home to join the Navy.
She took his letter from her skirt pocket to show it to Sigmund whilst her husband’s attention was occupied by some stubborn nettles beside the gate. Abraham had ordered her to burn it.
“You’ve told Esther?” Sigmund inquired after he had read it. Apart from a curt note to his father announcing his marriage, this was Arnold’s first communication with his elders since his defection.
“To her I daren’t even mention his name. Ben I told.” Hurt though he was, Ben did not pretend his younger son was dead, the way Esther did. “Maybe Arnold chose me to tell this news to because I’m only his grandmother, so he thinks I’ll be upset once removed,” Sarah conjectured. “And it’s right he should let us know,” she added. “We’re still his family.”
Sigmund was studying the snapshot Arnold had enclosed with his letter. “He wants us to know what a good-looking wife he’s got, also.”
Sarah glanced at the patrician features and long, dark hair. But she had already committed her Christian granddaughter-in-law’s face to memory. It had kept her awake the whole of last night.
“In a crowd, she could even pass for Jewish,” Sigmund said. “And even if she couldn’t, why not write and tell Arnold she should be megyah, before the child is born?”
“Conversion is just on the outside,” Sarah answered. “It doesn’t change the person’s blood. And there wouldn’t be time for her conversion between now and the baby’s birth. You’re forgetting how much a convert has to learn, Sigmund, and how long it takes to reach the standard required by the rabbis.” Sarah replaced the envelope in her pocket just in time to avoid Abraham seeing it. It was probably to work off his feelings about Arnold’s news that he had spent the day toiling in the garden.
“Even so, you should suggest the girl converts and the child also,” Sigmund declared. “Then afterwards Esther will have no excuse to keep Arnold cut off from the family.”
Sarah sighed. “You think I haven’t thought of that? But I wouldn’t dream of suggesting it, Sigmund. And for a very good reason. How would I like it if her grandmother asked Arnold to become a Christian?”
“With that I can’t argue.” Sigmund opened the copy of Proust’s Time Regained he had on his lap and left Sarah to her thoughts.
She knew he could not see the print in the fading light and was using the book as an excuse to lose himself in his own. We’re three old people already, Sigmund and Abraham and me, she mused, drawing her shawl closer around her. It had been a warm day, but in the evenin
gs she always felt cold. But what else could a woman of sixty-six expect? Even one who in some ways still felt young. Though her bones sometimes ached with weariness when she lay in bed, she had not lost her zest for life, or forgotten the painful longings that went with youth. The way being in love could cancel everything else out.
As her husband must have done, or how could he be so hard about Arnold? She didn’t expect Abraham to accept their grandson’s shiksah wife, nor could she do so herself. But to behave as if the boy had never existed? And to forbid Sarah to keep in touch with him, even? The great-grandchild would be the seed of their seed. Nothing could change that, whether they accepted it or not.
“We don’t have to draw the curtains anymore,” Abraham called, collecting his gardening tools together to return them to the shed at the back of the house.
Sarah emerged from her distressing cogitations. The blackout had been relaxed to a less stringent “dim-out” for some weeks, but now even that would not be necessary. “The Japs don’t travel this far,” she smiled. No matter what your worries were, there was always something to be thankful for. But those families whose boys were fighting the Japanese would not be rejoicing tonight, with the lives of their loved ones still in jeopardy. Nothing could prevent her own from coming back, now. Except for the two casualties the family had suffered, and Arnold was only a moral one, everything was as before.
Sigmund closed his book and gazed apprehensively at a pinpoint of light that was hurtling through the gathering dark, against the sky. “You think the Japs have maybe invented a long-distance, lit-up buzz-bomb? That doesn’t buzz?”
Sarah laughed. “You’ve forgotten what a shooting star looks like?” Her expression grew pensive. “What a world we’ve been living in these past few years, that even a beautiful thing like a star we can now mistake for an instrument of destruction. It will take some getting used to that for us the war is over.”
Part Three
Cords and Discords
Chapter 1
The family stood huddled together watching the Britannic sail away, oblivious to the cold March wind gusting around them. It was Sarah’s first visit to Liverpool Docks, but she would remember it for more than that reason. She could feel David and Nathan gripping her arms. Esther was holding on to Abraham. Did they think their elderly parents would capsize under the strain of this painful parting? She glanced at her husband’s set expression and knew her own was the same. The years had schooled them both to withstand anything.