by Norman Lewis
It was a car to cause pained eyebrows to be raised anywhere in the neighbourhood of St James’s, but was received with astonished admiration in the outer suburbs, and seen by such as Alexander it was a human version of gaudy attraction hung by the bower bird in its lair to entice the female of the species within range.
Alexander’s involvement with the dangerous Russians of Woodberry Down had been prolonged by the fact that he had fallen in love with one of them and was therefore concerned at this time with the need to show himself off to the best advantage. She was a Jewess, pretty and amazingly fair, the daughter of the Grand Rabbi of Astrakhan. Making a shallow dive into the history of his own people, Alexander had learned of the existence of an originally non-Jewish people, the Khazars, who had been converted to Judaism in the Middle Ages — hence the Rabbi’s daughter’s Grecian rather than Semitic features. The Rabbi, her father, had remained behind in Astrakhan, but the rest of the family had been in England for some years and Zahra had been sent to school in Highgate. She showed neither surprise nor emotion of any kind when Hagen told her he loved her, merely saying that she would have to speak to her mother and her brother about it.
A family conference took place, after which Alexander was invited for an interview, not only by the mother and brother but also by a local rabbi whose advice they had taken and who questioned him searchingly on his family background, his prospects, but above all on his religious beliefs. In all three areas Alexander was on dangerous ground. He had never been inside a synagogue, and little remained about him that was Jewish but the faint and slowly disappearing accent. The rabbi watched him with troubled eyes as Alexander tried to explain and excuse the religious liberalism of the community to which he belonged.
Zahra’s family asked for time to consider the matter. In the meanwhile further meetings with the girl were not ruled out, but the stipulation was made that one of her friends must be present.
The picnic party in the Bugatti was inevitable, and the car was useful in its way, too, as it turned out, because the minor shared hardship generated by such excursions helped wonderfully to break the ice, and spice the encounter with mild uncertainties and adventure.
It was Sunday, the first of May, a steely and near-arctic day, with a black tapestry of cloud over London under which the buildings of the city were as white as old bones. Zahra had been spending the weekend in Bloomsbury with a friend who was of Sicilian origin with whom she had been on a course in English life and culture designed by London University for the benefit of visiting foreigners. Having removed the erotic ivory plaque from the dashboard, we arrived at the meeting place, the old Euston arch, just as a few small snowflakes began to fall. This involved us, as soon as the girls arrived, with the predicament of erecting the hood which, when not in use, was stowed away in the boot. This the girls, working with us and their hands like ours blue with cold, entered into in the spirit of fun.
Both girls were exceedingly vivacious. Zahra was more beautiful than her friend, but Ernestina, who reminded me of Carmen Miranda and sported a good deal of jewellery unsuited to the climate, had more to say. Our intention had been to drive out for lunch to a little place on the river near Richmond, but a small difficulty arose over Zahra and kosher food, and she had come provided with sandwiches. The girls had heard exciting reports about Epping Forest, and were eager to see it, so we went there instead.
More sandwiches were bought at the Robin Hood pub near Chingford, after which we parked just off the road by the side of a small, slatternly mere. Both girls, neither of whom had left London during the time they had lived in England, were enchanted by their surroundings. Ducks copulated with noisy and incessant ardour in the shallow water among the half-submerged oil drums and the bicycle wheels. The wind had snatched the snowflakes away, but now the landscape was fleeced with rain. Once in a while, as we munched our sandwiches and shook the water from our sleeves, a little derelict sunshine burst through a rent in the clouds to produce a sombre and fleeting illumination among the trees which Ernestina found ‘Turneresque’. Although she knew nothing of England beyond what she had read in books, she had formed an attachment for the country and its people based largely on Dickens and fallacy, and was ready to excuse anything. We discussed the class system which she saw as evidence of the dynamic democracy of our institutions. In Spain, where she had been educated, there was no democracy, and only two classes, the rich and the poor. Surely we were better off? The English could do no wrong. I dressed badly and knew it, but what I realized as a personal shortcoming, an incurable untidiness, she almost certainly saw as commendable humility.
The matter of love came up, although treated in a somewhat academic fashion. The fair Zahra, who had ceased to nibble her last sandwich, turned her soft, trusting eyes upon us and spoke of Jewish idealism and the five-year betrothal preceding marriage in Astrakhan, where such idealism was practised in its purest form. Ernestina shocked her by assuring her that all married men in Sicily who could afford to do so, kept mistresses.
‘What happens if they’re found out?’ someone asked. Ernestina lifted a hand, clasping an invisible pistol to her forehead, crooked her forefinger as if pressing a trigger, clicked her tongue and giggled (she had a most infectious laugh).
‘They get shot,’ she said.
‘You don’t mean that.’
‘I do,’ she said. ‘If they are so foolish as to be caught, what good are they to anyone? Far better out of the way.’
‘And do the wives go to prison?’
‘Of course not. These are family affairs. They’re hushed up.’
‘Would you shoot your husband?’ I asked.
‘No,’ she said, ‘but I won’t marry a Sicilian. Just to be on the safe side.’
Alexander was giving his set display of the worldly wisdom of the man about town, but I felt that it failed to impress, largely because it was not understood. Whenever the opportunity arose, Zahra fixed him with her soft eyes and plied him with a question. Soon I began to realize that Alexander was being subjected to a renewal of the rabbi’s interrogation, a subtle affair of small, artless queries through which all the facets of his character were under test. He was encouraged to talk on, and he did and Zahra watched him, probing and sounding. Despite the swagger of the Russian group as a whole, I saw her as cautious and calculating. In all probability we all wore disguises for this occasion, but Alexander, so carefully dressed for the part, was least convincing. There was little indication of the hard centre almost certainly concealed beneath Zahra’s confiding personality. I caught at her thoughts:
Handsome, yes, but penniless. An adventurer who will receive no inheritances. My father has a sense of humour, but never where I am concerned. How would he take this? Is it possible to imagine this man awaiting me as I am led in procession to the chappah? If he has no money, how can he offer the mishrim of gold coins, and the sharab in silver drinking vessels? Could he, even for this one occasion, play a single note on the r’beg or the toba? Oi, what complications! Could he take the traditional kobeiba of mince meat and cracked rice from its salver, shape it skilfully, using forefinger and thumb alone, into perfectly round kefta to feed both me and himself before our assembled friends, without covering us all with shame? Assuredly not. Would he respect the mikvah and learn in reasonable time to chant the prayers for the saba’a? It is improbable. As an Ashkenazi, spoiled with the fat living of the degenerate West, could he be persuaded to live on unleavened bread and dates during the fasts? No.
Chapter Seven
UNLIKE ZAHRA ERNESTINA WAS clearly not a walker in the old ways. She was full of what probably sounded to her revolutionary utterances, one being that in no circumstances would she marry an Italian, and on second thoughts she would do her best not to marry at all, although this did not rule out the possibility of living with a suitable male — above all one who was not her parents’ choice. She also said that she despised religion, and more than religion itself the educated Latins of her acquaintance who paid lip-service
to a faith they regarded as intellectually inadmissible. Sicilians, she said, were the worst of the lot, the insincere tag-end of a society in decay. She contrasted them with the English of the books she had read and the lectures she had attended, by comparison so devoid of deviousness, so upright in all their dealings, so bound by their word.
One of her theories — and it was one held by so many continentals — was that the weather had made them what they were. Ernestina had lived in hot climates and studied their enervating effect upon those who had to support them. Here the cold and the rain protected you from the siesta and kept you on your toes. Now the picnic over, she turned down a suggestion from Alexander that we should give up and go home, and urged further exploration of the sodden landscapes of Essex.
Another meeting was arranged for the next Saturday evening, but my instinct warned me that Zahra would not appear, and she did not. Instead Ernestina was there on time outside Euston Station, bearing a brief note from her to say that she had a cold. Reading through its sparse lines Alexander was inclined to the belief that he had seen the last of her. Meanwhile it was clear that Ernestina expected to be taken out, and the awkward prospect of a threesome was settled by his withdrawal.
Ernestina and I then walked down Tottenham Court Road and settled for dinner at the Corner House. St Giles’ Circus might have been Xanadu as far as either of us was concerned, and little did we know that the audience played to by Lionel Falkman and his Apaches was composed in the main of intelligent au pair girls, and that such Lyons establishments were beneath the notice of native Saturday night pleasure-seekers from Finchley and Golders Green. Lionel in his embroidered Balkan blouse made the routine round with his fiddle and we were pleased and a little surprised when he halted to play a few bars at our table. Ernestina had nothing but enthusiasm for her surroundings, for the elegance and restraint of the decor, the immaculate table linen, the sheen of the cutlery, the decorum of the clientèle, the democratic consideration with which customers summoned a waiter with an unobtrusive gesture instead of hissing or clapping their hands, the dignity with which he took the order, the wholesome simplicity of the food he brought and the noble indifference with which he collected a tip without so much as a glance at it. A suspicion grew that this was the first time she had been alone with a male escort, although there was grudging reference to an admirer who called at her house from time to time to hold her hand in a deferential fashion and recite Spanish lyrical poetry, which she thought was pretty poor stuff.
There was something she found distinctly Parisian about the atmosphere and style of the Corner House, although it lacked the familiar grubbiness of an equivalent establishment in Paris. She had seen something of the great cities of Europe, and described and compared them with vivacity. Here was cosmopolitanism indeed. After Santander in North Spain she had been sent to be educated at Beauvais, then back to the University of Madrid. She was fluent in five languages and prepared to quote and discuss Proust, Dante and Cervantes in the originals. All I could offer by way of linguistic accomplishment was a half-dozen sentences in Welsh, drilled into me in the infants’ school of the Pentrepoeth, and in the sphere of literature a nodding and uncritical acquaintance with Arnold Bennett and H. G. Wells. In spite of these cultural shortcomings and the fact that my travels had carried me no further than the soggy villages of South Wales, we found a good deal to say to each other.
After several more outings Ernestina peremptorily decided that the time had come for me to meet her parents. I was given no advance warning of this and therefore no time to prepare for the experience, which proved overwhelmingly strange. I was shown into a large room in the family house at 4 Gordon Street, Bloomsbury, which was lit as powerfully as if for a stage presentation. A strong overhead light in a chandelier was supported by a complex of lamps behind frosted panels at each corner of the ceiling. Pieces of period furniture had been placed here and there on a small prairie of magenta carpet, and my attention was captured by a gilded door, its panels incised with an abstract geometrical design. This was the setting for the surrealistic happenings of a Buñuel film to come. I became aware of my crumpled suit of inferior cloth, of trousers that were too short and sleeves too long, of untended fingernails and creaking shoes, of the untidy parcel of books I was carrying and the badly-folded evening paper stuck into my jacket pocket. ‘My father is very informal,’ Ernestina assured me. ‘He is easy to get on with, and you will like him. He will not understand your English, and you will not understand his Italian, but that doesn’t matter.’
A moment later the gilt door swung open and a short, corpulent man entered the room. He was dressed in a dark suit of conservative cut which he might have been wearing for the first time. His eyes were black and protruding, and his black hair was brushed close to his scalp and no expression showed in his face as he came towards us, taking short, shuffling steps. We shook hands, he gave me a quick, mechanical smile, and said something incomprehensible in a language which I presumed to be Italian in a cracked, grating voice that managed in some way to be pleasant. ‘Daddy is welcoming you to our house,’ Ernestina said. ‘He asks you to make yourself at home.’ I bowed and, stricken momentarily with my old speechlessness, produced a faint, inarticulate gargling, before seating myself, still gripping my frayed parcel, on the edge of a small golden throne. Thus begun my long acquaintance with Ernesto Giovanni Batista Corvaja, a singular man.
At this point my attention was distracted from his somewhat hypnotic stare by the entrance of his wife, Maria Corvaja, a short, smiling over-elaborately dressed woman who, to my enormous relief, turned out to speak excellent English. We sat facing each other and a maid brought wine in cut glasses that added their iota of scintillation to the sheen and the glitter of the surroundings. All the interiors of my life until this moment had possessed their nooks and their crannies, places where untidy parcels could be stuffed out of sight, the alcoves and the recesses of rustic architecture which promised concealment in emergency. Here we sat together transfixed by protocol in our cube of pitiless light, from which there was no escape.
Madame Corvaja poured out routine affabilities, criticized Stalin and praised the Marriage of Figaro being performed in London at that time. But it was clear that the real business of the moment was with Ernesto, from whom I was divided by a linguistic chaos. Sometimes, I judged by the rise in his tone of voice and his eyebrows that I was being questioned, and I was obliged to reply by mumbling almost anything that came into my head. I was irresistibly reminded of a waxwork grouping at Madame Tussaud’s, to which a miraculous animation had been added.
Eventually the presentation was at an end. Following instructions I bent over Madame Corvaja’s hand and brushed it with my lips, Ernesto gave me a limp hand, and renewed his perfunctory smile and the parents withdrew. I was told that in leaving the room Ernesto had said to his wife, ‘Machè? È un cenciauolo?’ (‘Has she brought a rag-picker home?’) for which, when his comment was repeated to his daughter, he received a severe reprimand.
A month or two later, to the huge surprise of those who knew us, we were married. It was to be a marriage with a difference, a bold experiment undertaken with open eyes, a step in a new direction. Society — in this case represented by Ernestina’s father and mother — would demand a signed legal paper, and they should have it. Thereafter concessions would stop. We agreed that a working partnership between a man and a woman could be a valuable arrangement, but there were to be no ties or sanctions. Ernestina would keep her own name, and we declared ourselves free to come and go as we pleased, and to part — if it ever came to that — without claim on each other. Needless to say, we were both earnest students of the doctrines of Bertrand Russell, and much as we agreed with his views on the subject of free love, we proposed to go a step further. This, we agreed, was not a love match. Romantic love was dismissed at best as an invention of Victorian novelists, at worst as a psychotic interlude. It was an arrangement inconceivable in any period outside the Thirties when revaluation of soci
al customs could take extreme forms, and it was destined not to work as well as we had hoped it would. Later, in retrospect, I was more and more inclined to see the union as a way designed by Ernestina of freeing herself from the claustrophobia of family relationships, and from a Latin tradition she was at that time set upon renouncing — perhaps at any cost.
Inevitably all the circumstances attendant upon the ceremony were perfunctory and austere. Vows were exchanged in a quick embarrassed mumble in the prosaic setting of the Henrietta Street register office, the witnesses being Alexander and a current Hindu mistress, said to be heiress to a Bombay garment-making fortune, who suffered from a streaming cold. Following the ceremony the Woolworth’s ring was thrown in the nearest dustbin, after which the ticklish problem presented itself of breaking the news to the Corvajas.
We found Ernesto and his wife under the blazing lights of the drawing room of Number 4, Gordon Street, neither of them having received the slightest warning of what was about to happen to them. Ernestina delivered a short take-it-or-leave-it speech, and as Ernesto listened, a grey patina seemed to spread across his cheeks. In silence he drew a hand across his face and the shadow was gone, and a defeated looseness of the jowls was drawn tight.