Scattered Seed

by Maisie Mosco

  “Who can argue with Fate?” Ralph shrugged in the Jewish way he had acquired from her. Her moodiness never ruffled him.

  Marianne transferred herself restlessly from her chair to the window seat, which was also a storage chest for her towels and linens. “That’s what Hannah said when I told her. She blames Fate for everything. I don’t, it’s too easy. So we crossed each other’s path three times, what of it? The second time was entirely due to my carelessness. If I hadn’t left Birdie’s civvies in your vehicle that day—”

  “How is Birdie?” Ralph interrupted. “When’s her baby due?”

  Marianne smiled. “Any minute. She was knitting bootees the last time I phoned her, waiting for Bert to come home for his tea. I can’t imagine Birdie living such a staid existence, but perhaps it was the war that made her behave as she did.”

  “It changed a lot of people,” Ralph said pensively.

  “Me, for instance. I’d probably have a nice Jewish husband and be living in the next avenue to my parents, just like my cousin Shirley, if being away in the Forces hadn’t unsettled me.”

  “I was thinking of my ex-wife,” Ralph said. “A sweeter girl than the one I married would be hard to find. But she got a job at the Stage Door Canteen, the attention showered on her there went to her head. And now she’s a GI bride.”

  Marianne scanned his face. “Does it still hurt when you think about her?”

  Ralph laughed abruptly. “Only my pride. That was all that was hurting by the time I met you, sweetheart. The night I returned Birdie’s holdall, I wanted to ask if I could see you again, but I wasn’t divorced then. And I had scruples.”

  “Where are they now?”

  Ralph reached for his tobacco pouch, which was on the floor beside his chair. “That was a bit below the belt, wasn’t it?” he said, stuffing some of the dark shag into his pipe and applying a match to it.

  “I didn’t mean to say it,” Marianne replied after a silence. She fanned away the cloud of aromatic smoke that had drifted towards her. “It’s my fault we’re living in sin, not yours.”

  Ralph’s expression, which had momentarily tightened, relaxed into a grin. “What’ve you been reading? Peg’s Paper?”

  “Not since I was a kid and my Auntie Bessie’s maid, Lizzie, used to bring it with her to my grandmother’s on a Saturday. I remember asking her what living in sin meant, but she wouldn’t tell me.”

  “Officially, we’re not even doing that. I’m paying rent for a place I hardly use.”

  “All I need is for my Auntie Rebecca to drop in when she’s in London visiting her sister and find your socks hanging up to dry over my sink!”

  “That’s what I meant about your family pulling strings across the miles, sweetheart. Not just your parents, but all those aunts, uncles and cousins who keep cropping up in your conversation, with your sainted grandmother. To me, they’re like those offstage characters who influence the action of a drama more than the ones you see. Like Edward in that play we saw a few weeks ago.”

  Marianne smiled reminiscently. Seeing Edward My Son had been a catalytic occasion for her. Halfway through the evening, she had known she wanted to try writing for the theatre, that the dramatic impact had triggered something off in her creative mind. It had made her set aside the novel on which she had been working and give her attention to learning, through trial and error, the playwright’s craft.

  But it wasn’t easy, she thought now as her eye fell on her mother’s letter. How could her imagination be given full rein when she was always being brought down to earth with a bump? And how Ralph put up with the things she sometimes said to relieve her feelings was nothing short of a miracle.

  “You’ll have to forgive me, love,” she said to him impulsively. “When I hear from home, everything comes flooding over me and I start thinking I had no right to get involved with you. That I should have got another job instead of staying where I’d see you every day, then it wouldn’t have happened. Instead of which – well, here we are.”

  Ralph balanced on his lap a rough layout he had brought home from the ad-agency studio and Marianne glanced at his big, capable hands. When she had seen them on the steering wheel the day he drove her to camp from Andover, she wouldn’t have thought he was an artist.

  “There was something between us at our first encounter, sweetheart,” he said as though he had been reading her mind.

  Marianne watched him accentuate a corset-clad lady’s billowing curves with a swirl of his pencil. “Your enormous boot, which I tripped over,” she smiled.

  “I mean when I lifted you from the doormat. And even before that, when you were lying there, gazing up at me like an injured sparrow. I was scared you’d break if I touched you.”

  “But you’re not anymore.”

  They shared an intimate glance.

  “Let’s go for a walk, you look a bit peaky today,” Ralph said. “You don’t get enough fresh air.”

  “I’d like to. But I must make myself work or I’ll never get anything written,” Marianne answered resolutely, inserting more paper into her typewriter.

  Ralph was still eyeing her with concern. ’You don’t eat enough, either. It’s no wonder you’re thin.”

  “Stop worrying about me, love.”

  “If I don’t, who will?”

  She watched him resume work and tried to concentrate on her own. But the inspiration she sought would not come and she allowed her mind to dwell upon the wonderful thing that had happened to her, which even Ralph’s being Gentile could not mar. How lucky she was to have him care for her. Hannah had prophesied that when the right man came along, Marianne would not give him up for any reason. And she’d known Ralph was that man at their third meeting.

  Her heart had leapt at the sight of him. It had been in a corridor at the agency and they’d both stopped in their tracks. Even across the few yards that separated them, Marianne had been unable to fight the magnetism of his eyes. Then they’d walked towards each other and the feeling his nearness aroused in her had been like a physical ache sapping her strength.

  The gruffness of his voice when he greeted her had told her the feeling was a two-way thing and it had not taken long for the first, tentative stage of their relationship to become the sure and comfortable bond of love and friendship that was theirs now. They had been lovers for three months, yet there were still times when Marianne awoke in the morning and was assailed by unreality when she saw him lying beside her. Times when the whole of her life in London assumed the quality of a dream.

  There’d been snow on the ground when her father, against his better judgement, drove her here. With a trunk full of the new clothes her mother had insisted on buying her when she was demobbed, and the curtains, cushions and other paraphernalia from home that brightened this shabby room and made her feel it was hers. Now, spring sunshine was mellowing the seedy frontages of the Edwardian houses across the street; transforming their brass letterboxes into a string of dazzling gold nuggets that stretched from one end of the long terrace to the other.

  Like the house in which Marianne lived, most had been converted into furnished flatlets. This wasn’t the best part of Kensington; her Aunt Rebecca had told her. Nor was it a Jewish district, she’d added when Marianne turned down the offer to live with a widowed relative of hers in Golders Green. Marianne had felt like telling her there was no such thing as a Jewish bedsitter-land. But they were at a Shabbos gathering and it would have reopened the family inquest about her leaving home.

  Only Hannah and Carl had taken her side. Uncle Nat had remained neutral, but Marianne had felt he sympathized with her. She had not expected the others to understand. Their horizon began and ended within walking distance of a shul; they eschewed the world outside that embraced all peoples. Centuries of oppression had bred in them the need to cling together; but it wasn’t necessary any more, Marianne thought, running her fingers absently over the keys of her battered Remington.

  The last time she went home for a weekend, she’d spoken
her mind about this. And antagonized the family, she recalled ruefully. Her cousins especially. “How can we be any other way? Look how we’ve been let down in Palestine,” Shirley, who saw everything through Zionist eyes, had said angrily. “But we’re English, too,” Marianne had answered. “As English as they’ll let us be,” Ronald had declared with feeling.

  Marianne had been surprised to hear him say this. He was more intelligent than his sister and not given to making emotional statements. Perhaps it wasn’t possible for any Jew to divorce emotion from intellect regarding Jewish matters, she’d admitted to herself later. She had never become actively embroiled in the Zionist cause, but she had the same feeling for the Promised Land all her brethren had. “Next year in Jerusalem” was the age-old hope read from the Haggadah every Passover, when you were seated at the Seder table, with the bitter herbs before your eyes recalling your people’s history. Lest your secure British citizenship made you forget it. In some ways, being Jewish was like being a split personality. Your nationality was that of the country in which your forebears had found refuge, but you were lumbered with congenital racial loyalties that confused you about where you belonged.

  The escalating trouble in Palestine had caused her to think about this a good deal, lately. The children being born there now would be a new breed of Jew, unburdened by Marianne’s handicap. But she had been born and raised in England and the knowledge that British soldiers and Jewish guerrillas were presently spilling each other’s blood made her feel that she personally was being torn apart. The Union Jack was her flag, but Judaism was her heritage.

  Six million had died in the holocaust because it was theirs, Zaidie Sigmund had reminded her before she left home; as if he thought removing herself from the family ethos meant she needed reminding. To the family, Marianne had turned her back on her upbringing. They could not comprehend that it was possible to be Jewish without the Star of David being the sole illumination in your sky.

  And here she was, letting them come between her and the play she was trying to write! A line of dialogue entered her mind and she began typing. The next line followed, and her fingers flew feverishly on the keys, keeping pace with her racing brain.

  When she looked up it was twilight and she sat in a daze, mental and physical energy spent, utterly drained as she always was after a lengthy creative stint. But with an inner satisfaction, too. She had stared at blank paper for most of the day, but in the end her work had gone well.

  Ralph switched on a lamp, suffusing the room with an amber glow that softened the harsh lines of the cheap furniture and his own craggy profile. “Ready for a cuppa?” he inquired.

  Marianne nodded limply and watched him pull back the curtain that hid the miniature kitchen and put the kettle on the gas ring to boil. “Don’t you have enough of doing layouts at the studio?” she said, glancing at his work.

  Ralph unhooked two yellow beakers from above the sink and took the teapot out of a cupboard. “I may as well earn myself some overtime while you’re busy writing.”

  “Why not get cracking on a painting, instead?”

  Ralph puffed his pipe, pensively. “I’m not like you, sweetheart.”

  Marianne surveyed him silently. What did he mean? There were depths to him she had not yet fathomed, despite their closeness. Her mind began groping to comprehend. Because he spent all his free time at her place, he had brought his easel and paints here. They had remained in a corner, untouched, with some blank canvases eyeing him accusingly beside them. Until one memorable afternoon.

  Her gaze travelled to the still-life hanging, unframed, above the hearth. It was then that he’d begun painting that. The sequence of events that led to him doing so flashed before her eyes like a series of slides beamed from an epidiascope. Ralph returning from the barber’s with a handful of oranges he’d bought from a barrow. Herself at the sink, drying the teapot-lid with a crumpled pot-towel and laughing at his shorn-lamb appearance. Him swinging her off her feet to carry her to the bed. And the oranges landing on the table where she had dropped the things in her hands.

  After they had made love, he had moved the table to the window, set up his easel and begun painting. He had not rearranged the composition of his subject, as though he wanted to record a treasured memory on canvas. Marianne had sat watching him and every stroke of his brush had seemed to her like a lover’s caress.

  She rose from her chair and went to study the picture more closely. It was real, as a still-life should be. But with an extra something that wasn’t just the way Ralph had captured the dewy sweat of oranges brought from the cold street into a warm room; or her own greasy thumbmark on the pot-towel upon which they lay; or the few grains of tea she hadn’t rinsed off the teapot lid. He had seen them with a tender eye and when that eye was also an artist’s, something magic happened.

  “You were happy when you painted this, weren’t you?” she said to him.

  The kettle began whistling and Ralph removed it from the gas ring without replying.

  Marianne went to stand beside him.

  “Let’s have coffee for a change,” he said.

  “What the hell does it matter?” she answered impatiently. All that mattered was the realization that had just hit her. He wasn’t happy now.

  Ralph took a tin of Nescafé from the shelf on which she kept her frugal supply of groceries, opened it and found it was empty. “It’s a good thing I got another when I went shopping this morning. If I left it to you, you’d bloody starve.”

  “Stop digressing. Why don’t you paint anymore?”

  “Because I wasn’t born with your tenacity, sweetheart. Your dogged dedication. Things have to be right with my life before I’m stirred by the creative urge.”

  “And what was especially right the day you began the still-life?”

  Ralph fished in a carrier bag that was dumped on the floor and brought out the bar of chocolate he always got for her with his sweet-ration coupons. “Are you kidding?” He found the instant coffee at the bottom of the bag underneath some carrots and onions and prised off the lid. “Do you really need to be told what was special about that day, Marianne?”

  “I doubt if any girl ever forgets the day she lost her virginity,” Marianne said after a silence. “But I’d never associated our lovemaking with your brief resurgence of artistic fervour. I mean we didn’t stop making love after you finished that picture, did we? But you haven’t painted anything since then.”

  Ralph made the coffee, then discovered Marianne had forgotten to order her usual gill of milk and yesterday’s dregs had turned sour. “When we’re married, the first thing I’ll do is give the milkman, the butcher and the grocer weekly orders. And I’ll buy us a refrigerator, so the food you forget is there will last longer,” he said wryly.

  He carried his beaker to the armchair and sat down.

  Marianne plonked hers on the draining board. “Returning to the subject, what you implied doesn’t make sense. If us making love’s all it takes to get you to your easel, you should be painting masterpieces one after the other.”

  “It takes peace of mind, too,” Ralph said quietly.

  She went to sit on the arm of his chair, her impatience replaced by a sense of her own inadequacy. She had given him her love, but it wasn’t enough. She rested her hand on his shoulder and thought how tiny it looked there. But he was a big man and she a very small woman. Just like her grandparents, she mused irrelevantly. Why did she always end up thinking of the family? Because she was keeping Ralph a secret from them. She didn’t like doing so and Ralph liked it still less. He wasn’t happy in the circumstances in which she had placed him; aiding and abetting the duplicity she herself had settled for.

  “You didn’t go to bed with me without thinking about it, did you?” he said, looking up at her. “It was a considered decision that wouldn’t hurt your folks. You said so when I came for breakfast that morning.”

  Marianne smiled reminiscently. “Over the pork sausage and bacon you brought. I’d been thinking
it over for some time, but that clinched it. I thought, if I’m eating this without a qualm, I might as well have Ralph. The only way I can.”

  “It’s as well you didn’t communicate that unflattering logic to me.”

  She played with a lock of his shaggy, dark hair which had not been reshorn since that day. “Would it have made any difference?”

  “No.”

  “You’re damn right it wouldn’t! If I hadn’t insisted on taking a bath and showering myself with talc first, like brides do on their wedding night, you wouldn’t have gone out for a haircut. I’d have been deflowered there and then,” she said bawdily.

  Ralph laughed and pulled her on to his lap.

  Once, sex had seemed a serious matter to her and perhaps it was with other people, Marianne reflected. But with herself and Ralph it was light-hearted as well as thrilling. Not at all the darkly mysterious business she’d imagined it to be; just part of their loving relationship.

  They sat in contemplative silence, their arms around each other, gazing into the hissing blue flames of the gas fire, which Ralph had lit whilst Marianne worked on her play. The sunshine never entered this north-facing room and even on a warm evening it soon grew chilly.

  “To you, what we’ve got now is an alternative to us being husband and wife,” Ralph said against her cheek. “But I’ll never be content with it.” He straightened her fringe tenderly. “Everything looked so rosy to me that day. I felt like shouting from the rooftops.”

  “What did you feel like shouting?”

  “We belong to each other now and that means she’ll marry me. It seemed a great leap towards it, I thought.”

  Marianne sprang off his lap. “Well, you were wrong, weren’t you?”

  Ralph regarded her across the space she had put between them. “Why must you be so brutal about it? As if you enjoy taking the last shreds of hope away from me?”

  “Enjoy it? It’s as painful for me as it is for you. What you call brutality, love, I call facing the facts. I made a sacred promise to my parents and I intend to honour it.”