Scattered Seed

by Maisie Mosco

  Lucky by comparison with something worse, Marianne reflected poignantly. Lizzie’s work-roughened hands and ageing appearance had not been acquired on her own account, but by dedication to others. The same applied to Bridie, and Marianne experienced a pang of shame. They were human beings, not just pillars of the family; but she hadn’t seen them in that light, had always taken them for granted. Uncle Nat was right; she has a lot to learn before she was equipped to write a book about why people became what they were.

  Leona was seated at the table, watching the twins play chess, their three heads bent over the board. None of them had uttered a word since Marianne entered the room. As if they had mentally obliterated everything outside themselves in order to concentrate on their game. That’s how I used to be, she mused. But kids always are. Isolated by choice in the world of childhood. And privately contemptuous of the adults who didn’t understand them.

  The three youngsters at the table would soon enter their teens and time would begin to fly more quickly, carrying them with it. Through the painful confusion of adolescence, when nobody’s anxieties were the equal of your own, Marianne recalled wryly. Until dawning maturity began to open your eyes and mind, ending your total self-absorption. Of how total her own had been, she had only a moment ago become aware. It was as though she had been asleep and had suddenly realized on wakening that there was more to the familiar figures of her childhood than their relation to herself. That they existed in their own right.

  The re-alignment that had begun with Lizzie and Bridie continued to function when she returned to the parlour. Her parents weren’t just the stumbling blocks between herself and Ralph, motivated by nothing more than Jewish orthodoxy, she thought, looking at them. They were a disappointed middle-aged couple, who’d once been young and hopeful; who’d lived for their children and been let down.

  The way to avoid disappointment from your kids is not to have expectations, she reflected, eyeing her father’s bowed shoulders and the downward curve of her mother’s mouth. But perhaps it wasn’t possible to be a parent and avoid that pitfall? To reconcile yourself to your children’s ideas being poles apart from your own. And for Jewish parents, religious expectations came into it, as well as personal ones.

  She was still musing about this when they saw her off at the railway station that night. And found that her eyes had misted over when the time came to say goodbye to them. “I love you both very dearly,” she told them.

  Her mother gave her a searching glance. “What’s brought this on?”

  Marianne smiled away her tears. “Nothing special,” she answered though it was not the truth. A few hours ago, she would have resented her mother’s suspicious tone. Now, all it aroused in her was tolerant amusement.

  “Me, I didn’t mind hearing it,” her father declared, hugging her.

  Her mother sighed. “Dad means we’re not sure you do.”

  “Because I’ve left home?”

  They nodded.

  “Hundreds of girls do it. I could introduce you to at least half a dozen at my office.”

  “They’re Jewish?” her mother inquired.

  “No, as it happens.”

  “So there you are, then,” her father declaimed.

  They measured everything by that yardstick, Marianne thought wryly as the train departed and she stood at the window waving goodbye. It was the length and breadth of their vision. And a reason for pity rather than contempt, because it was the only one they had.

  Ralph was waiting for her on the platform at Euston.

  “I asked you not to come,” she said as he kissed her. “Supposing someone who knows me travelled on this train?” she added, glancing nervously at the passengers still alighting. She did not relax until they had entered the underground. Visiting Mancunians wouldn’t be likely to risk getting lost travelling by tube; they’d make for the taxi rank.

  “I can’t bear it when you go home,” Ralph said on the train to Kensington. “I’m always terrified they’ll chain you to the bedpost to keep you there. Are you happy to be back?”

  “Of course,” Marianne replied unhesitatingly, her fingers answering the pressure of his. But the minute I get here, I’m back to the old two-and-nine, all of a jitter because I’m scared of being found out, she added mentally. And the knowledge that this would always be so was depressing; like standing at the beginning of a long road down which two Marianne Kleins would tread the path of their double life. Not until she was in her coffin would she have any peace, be relieved of the burden of her deceit. And if she died before Ralph, he would probably give the game away by turning up at her funeral and the deception would all have been for nothing!

  If he stayed with her that long, she thought, eyeing their side-by-side reflections in the train window. Would they still be together when they were her grandparents’ age? With nothing more binding to tie them than shared memory of a long-ago passion?”

  “What’re you thinking about, sweetheart?” Ralph asked, sensing her pensive mood.

  “The children we’ll never have,” she said, carrying her last thought to its logical conclusion. “Not that I think I’m the maternal type,” she smiled. “Heaven help any kid who had me for its mother!”

  “Not if it had me for its father. But what’re we talking about this for?”

  “It just came into my head.”

  A week later, Marianne wondered if God had put it there to pave the way. Her menstrual periods had always been regular, but the one due the day after her return to London had not appeared. Ralph had once told her there was no such thing as a static situation. When she couldn’t find a way to get the action of her play moving. And what was a play but a mirror of life? But a dramatist had to search for the catalysts life provided naturally. And what a catalyst this was; the major-disaster kind. Why wasn’t she panicking? Instead of floating downstream on what felt like a river of inevitability? she asked herself as a fortnight slipped by.

  It did not so much as occur to her to ring up Birdie, now a nursing-mother herself, and obtain the recipe for the gin-and-vinegar brew guaranteed to bring on her period. Or to leap down the stairs as one of her erstwhile comrades had. She thought about these things but had no desire to try them herself. Desperation was not part of how she felt, and she allowed another week to pass before opening her mind to the question of what she would do. A further week elapsed before she told Ralph.

  He eyed her diminutive figure anxiously. “The first thing to do is see a doctor. You don’t look big enough to have a baby.”

  “I’m the same size as my grandmother and she had four. Before there was such a thing as modern medicine,” Marianne assured him.

  Their conversation continued on these lines for several minutes, centring on the unborn child’s welfare, before they got around to the crucial fact that its parents were not married.

  To Ralph, only one course was possible, and he seemed to think Marianne’s family would agree.

  “You’re wrong,” she informed him.

  “Are you telling me they’d rather your child was born the wrong side of the blanket?” he said incredulously. “That they’d prefer that to it having its father’s name, just because I’m not Jewish?”

  Marianne nodded.

  “I thought I’d learnt all there was to know about the Jewish mentality,” he declared, sitting down beside her on the divan bed. “But it seems there’re still some surprises that make a person wonder what kind of people Jews are.”

  “This is a fine time for you to start being anti-Semitic!”

  “I’m not anti-anything, sweetheart. It’s your people who are bigoted, not me.”

  “It only seems that way to you because you’re an outsider!” Marianne flashed. “And even if they are as you say, they didn’t get like that by accident. It’s a pity those who pass judgement, like you’ve just done, don’t stop to think there must be a reason for it.”

  “All right, so I said something off the top of my scone,” he placated her. “You’re too bloo
dy thin-skinned, sweetheart.”

  “There’s a reason for that, too, that you wouldn’t understand, because you’ve never needed to be.”

  “Don’t get your blood pressure up. It’s bad for the baby.” Ralph straightened her fringe, which always went awry when her temper asserted itself. “How often d’you reckon I’ll have to say that in the next nine months?”

  “Eight,” Marianne corrected him. “Possibly less.”

  “Which returns us to square one. Tomorrow you’ll see a doctor.”

  Marianne rested her head against the pile of cushions that converted her bed into a daytime sofa, beset by a sudden weariness. “And what’s square two?”

  “You know what it is so far as I’m concerned, sweetheart. You can lie there and make your mind up while I get us a bit of supper.”

  They had been home from the agency for an hour, but neither of them had done anything about preparing a meal. Marianne watched Ralph take some eggs from the bag of groceries they had bought in their lunch hour and prepare to whip up an omelette. Make her mind up about what? Facing up to telling the family they were going to be married? That she had let a Gentile make her pregnant, and had no intention of abandoning her child to an orphanage? Like Hannah’s mother had been coerced into doing under the same circumstances.

  Ralph brought the omelette to the divan and made Marianne eat some of it. “Well?” he asked when she had done so.

  “Nothing else could have made me do what I’m going to do to my parents,” she said decisively. “But the baby has to come first. And I don’t see how they can expect it not to,” she added without conviction. “When their children have always come first with them.”

  In her heart she did not have the slightest hope that her parents would understand, and that night her sleep was troubled by dreams of the terrible things they and the rest of the family would say to her. All except Hannah and Carl. And Uncle Nat. She awoke to the sound of Ralph’s voice telling someone to stop screaming. Who was he saying it to?

  “For God’s sake, sweetheart,” she heard him implore, and became aware that the screams she could hear were her own.

  Her lips clamped shut and the screams stopped. But she could not control the violent tremors that were rippling through her.

  Ralph got out of bed and brewed some strong tea. He said nothing until Marianne had drunk it and her trembling had subsided.

  “Tell me something, will you, sweetheart? What exactly is it you’re so bloody petrified of?”

  Marianne avoided his eye. “Petrified’s the wrong word. I just don’t want to hurt anyone. And I’m going to have to.”

  “I don’t think you’ve really thought about this,” he replied after a silence. “By which I mean, Marianne, you haven’t seen this emotion that’s tearing you to bits for what it is. Nor had I until it came to a head, tonight.”

  “It’s guilt, Ralph, that’s all. With a capital G.”

  “Guilt doesn’t give a person the screaming meemies.” Ralph sat down beside her and stroked her hand. “I’ve never witnessed anything so – well, primeval’s the only way I can describe it. The way you were while you were screaming – and those rigors – the bloody bed was shaking from them. As if you were literally being consumed by fear.’

  Marianne tried to smile. “So would you be, if you had to face what I’ve got to.”

  “I’ll be facing it with you.”

  “Oh no, Ralph.”

  “Oh yes.”

  Marianne removed her hand from his. “Just because I had an attack of the shakes, it doesn’t mean I’m a coward. I’ve never been one. I’ll go to Manchester today and get it over with,” she said resolutely. “But I’m going alone.”

  Ralph eyed her anxiously. “You’re not fit to travel. You look like a ghost.”

  “Do I?”

  He passed her a hand mirror and watched her study her wan countenance.

  “Well, I never look what you’d call rosy, do I?’ she said with false nonchalance. Was that chalky face really hers? It looked as if someone had coated her olive skin, that usually had a sheen to it, with whitewash; and daubed purple paint beneath her eyes to make them look bruised. “If this is what pregnancy does to me, I’ll have to wear a mask,” she said to Ralph in the same jocular tone.

  He took the mirror from her. “It isn’t the pregnancy,” he declared vehemently. “It’s that bloody battle you were having in your sleep. And I’d like to throttle whoever, or whatever, you were having it with.”

  Marianne smiled wearily. “Nobody’s ever succeeded in doing that to the Jewish religion, Ralph, though plenty have tried. And I wouldn’t want them to.”

  “I said it was like watching something primeval, didn’t I?” he said after a silence. “It isn’t just your family you’re scared of. It’s God.”

  “Aren’t we all?”

  “Not like the Jews are, sweetheart. Still subjugating their reason to laws that don’t make sense in the twentieth century.”

  “You sound like my Uncle Nat. But things can make sense if you believe in them, my grandmother says.”

  “And who am I to argue with your grandmother?”

  An alarm clock ringing in the flat next door interrupted their conversation.

  Ralph glanced at his watch. “It’s seven o’clock.”

  “On a Shabbos morning,” Marianne said wryly. “I’ll be able to announce my forthcoming marriage and motherhood to everyone at one fell swoop, this afternoon. At the weekly gathering of the clan.”

  “The state you’re in, you might feel ill on the train,” Ralph said, watching her stagger to the window to revive herself with some fresh air.

  “I’m stronger than you think,” she answered, then found that her legs would not carry her back across the room.

  Ralph caught her as they buckled. “That settles it, sweetheart. You’re staying in bed until I say you can get up,” he said, carrying her there.

  “You’re not my lord and master yet,” she protested weakly.

  “But I soon will be.”

  “On paper,” Marianne countered. “But in reality, that’ll be the day!”

  Ralph tucked the bedclothes around her, then knelt down and cupped her face in his hands. “Why did I have to fall madly in love with a bloody-minded little creature like you?”

  “Because I’m so beautiful,” she said self-deprecatingly.

  He kissed her dry lips. “You’re the loveliest thing that ever happened to me. I’d go through fire and water for you.”

  “You might have to after I’ve told the family. Especially when my Uncle David gets at you.”

  “I can’t wait to make his acquaintance,” Ralph said grimly. “He’s the head of the clan, isn’t he?”

  “How did you know? I mean I suppose he is. But I hadn’t realized it until you said it.”

  “I knew from the way you talk about him.”

  Marianne felt constrained to say something complimentary about her uncle. “He’s very nice under ordinary circumstances,” she declared. It was true.

  “It’s how folk behave under extraordinary ones that matters, sweetheart,” Ralph said, putting on his dressing gown.

  “Everyone has his own code, love.”

  “But they don’t have the right to apply it to others.”

  “Uncle David doesn’t just apply it,” Marianne said pensively. “He forces it down your throat. If I’d listened to him, I’d still be in Manchester. And our Arnold wouldn’t have married Lyn. There’d have been no Matthew.”

  Ralph picked up his toilet bag and towel to go to the bathroom. “What you’re saying is he changes the course of people’s lives.”

  “If they let him. He did it to my Uncle Nat.”

  “How?”

  “He made him be a doctor when he didn’t want to be one. And stopped him from marrying a Christian girl.”

  “Your Uncle Nat sounds like a weakling.”

  “You didn’t have to be one in those days to succumb to the pressure put on you.
Knowing you had to was a state of mind.”

  “And the last bit hasn’t changed,” Ralph declared. “All that has, it strikes me, is that some of your generation have begun putting up a fight.”

  Marianne fell asleep whilst he was taking his bath. When she awoke, he had been shopping and was unpacking a carrier bag.

  “I hope your Uncle Nat likes salad,” he said, putting a lettuce some tomatoes on the table. “I forgot to inquire when I rang him up. He’ll be here for supper, sweetheart.”

  Marianne eyed him speechlessly.

  “I got his phone number from your address book.”

  “You’ve been rifling my handbag, have you?” was all she could manage to say. She watched Ralph take the lettuce to the window and shake some soil off it, before dumping it in the sink. “Why did you choose him to ring up?”

  Ralph ran some cold water on to the lettuce. “For one thing, he’s a doctor and your state of health is causing me concern. For another, we could use an ally in your family and he seemed the likely one.’

  Marianne stared up at a crack in the ceiling. “You’ve set the ball rolling, haven’t you?” she said resignedly. But oh what a relief it was just to lie back and let things happen. To know it was out of her hands.

  Chapter 5

  Nathan was stunned by Ralph’s telephone call. But who wouldn’t be? he thought after he had replaced the receiver. To learn their young niece had a private life of the kind respectable people wouldn’t expect to encounter outside the pages of a novel? Girls in trouble were routine in Nathan’s work. But they weren’t Jewish girls and came from the kind of background where pregnant brides were nothing unusual and families took it in their stride. Marianne’s plight would have constituted a disgrace to the family even if her young man was a Jew. As things were, it was a right kettle of fish!

  Leona came into the hall from the breakfast room, munching a bit of toast. “Your boiled egg’s going cold, Daddy.”