‘Nu-nu,’ David said vaguely, but as though he agreed. He was too overwhelmed with grief to argue about anything. If Hymie wanted to visit, then let him. Very little mattered now after the misery of the last few days.
They sat in the garden as the sky clouded red and orange and the long day cooled. The two men talked gently about the funeral, and Papa Cheifitz, and how movingly Rabbi Jaccoby had spoken about him. And Miriam sat silent, watching their faces.
And at last Hymie got around to the subject that had brought them to the house. ‘Um – Ellen says you was thinkin’ a’ takin’ lodgers,’ he said, head bowed, scowling a little, anxious not to give offence to his friend but eager to please his wife.
‘Ellen?’ David said, still vague.
‘When we first moved. You remember,’ she prompted. ‘We was thinkin’ a’ lettin’ the big bedroom.’
‘Yes, yes. I suppose we was.’
‘You wouldn’t like to take us on, would yer?’ Hymie asked. ‘We’re desperate fer a place of our own. Miriam don’t get on with Ma.’
And at that Miriam broke into wailing. ‘We’re having the most terrible time,’ she cried. ‘Oy oy! You’d never believe … We can’t stand it another day, I tell you.’ And she was off into her complaints again, shaking her head from side to side and crying with abandon.
The sound of her weeping was more than David could bear. He’d heard so many sounds of grief that day that he was lacerated with sorrow. ‘Don’t cry,’ he begged. ‘Hymie, make her stop. You can come ’ere if you like.’ Anything, only just make her stop that noise.
It was accomplished so easily, Ellen felt weak with relief. She’d been preparing herself for arguments or even a downright refusal. But one glance at her husband showed her that there was no fight left in him at all. And that made her feel ashamed of herself all over again. I shouldn’t’ve done it, she thought. Not now, when ’e’s ’ad more than ’e can stand. I’ll make it up to ‘im after, I swear ter God.
‘Oy! D’yer mean it?’ Miriam said, and she stopped crying at once and flung her arms round Ellen’s neck and kissed her moistly. ‘Oy, you’re so good to us. We ain’t never ’ad such friends.’
‘We didn’t ought to ’ave come,’ Hymie said, because his friend looked more ghastly than he’d done all day. ‘’Specially terday. I’m that grateful you can’t think, Davey. We’ll talk about it termorrer, nu?’
‘You can ’ave the one room,’ Ellen told him, feeling she ought to be businesslike about it. ‘Water when yer want. Tuesday washday. You can come up an’ see it now if yer like.’ And give poor Davey a bit ‘a’peace and quiet.
So they saw the big bedroom and told her privately how much they appreciated it and how kind she was. And Hymie fitted a gas ring in the grate the next morning and they moved in at the end of the afternoon. And even Ellen felt it had all happened too quickly.
But David didn’t complain. Not even when they went to bed in their new small bedroom downstairs and could hear their new lodgers clumping about above their heads. Not even when Gracie woke in the middle of the night and she had to go upstairs to attend to her. It was as though none of it was happening to him. He slept fitfully and ate what he could, and spoke when he was spoken too, his eyes gaunt and his face dirty with stubble. One day was much the same as the next. He drew the pictures required of him, knowing them worthless, and spent the evening at his mother’s because it was the duty of a son to comfort his mother during the shiva. And the terrible ache of his loss took a very long time to fade.
On Thursday, when the seven days were nearly over Rivke and Dumpling walked him off to Brick Lane to ‘make a decision’.
Rivke came straight to the point, brusque as ever, even in mourning. ‘So,’ she said. ‘You moder vill live vid you now, nu?’
He supposed so. He had always known that was how it would be. ‘I’ll tell Ellen,’ he said.
‘Sunday she should move,’ Rivke said. ‘The next rent’s due Monday.’
It came as a profound shock to him when he got back home that night and Ellen said it wasn’t possible. ‘We got six people in the ’ouse already,’ she said. ‘Where’d we put ’er?’
‘Hymie’ll ’ave to go, then.’ That was simple.
But she scowled and looked uncomfortable. ‘You can’t do that, Davey,’ she said. ‘That ain’t fair. We’ve give ’em our word. Can’t yer Ma find somewhere else?’
‘Somewhere else?’ he echoed stupidly. ‘She’s my mother, Ellen. She’s my responsibility.’
‘Not no more, she ain’t!’ she insisted. ‘I’m your responsibility now. Me and the kids.’
‘We got duties to the older generation too.’
‘Oh come on!’ she mocked. ‘What’s she ever done fer us?’
‘She brought me up, Ellen.’ Surely she wasn’t expecting him to deny that.
‘Well, she never brought me up.’ Her face was set and stubborn. ‘She don’t like me, Davey. She don’t like me and she don’t like the kids. She’d be miserable being with us.’
That might be true. The thought made him falter. ‘I dunno,’ he said wearily. If only his father were still alive. He’d have known what they ought to do.
‘Well, she can’t come here!’ Ellen said, massively stubborn now. ‘We got a house full.’
And you filled it, he thought miserably, but he didn’t have the energy to fight over it.
‘I dunno,’ he said again, and he remembered the only person who could help him. ‘I’ll ask Dumpling.’
‘You ain’t!’ Dumpling shrieked when he confessed he’d got lodgers. ‘Oy oy, Davey bubeleh, vhat you thinkin’ of, vid your moder the vay she is?’
‘They was in a state,’ he explained. ‘Miriam said she couldn’t go on. I dunno. It seemed the only thing ter do at the time. I dunno, Aunty Dumpling, I don’t seem to be able ter think straight these days.’ He looked so woebegone, she kissed him at once.
‘Never you mind, bubeleh,’ she said. ‘You’re an edel boy. Ve couldn’t vish for a better. You done all you could. You leave this to your Aunty Dumpling, nu?’
‘Are you sure?’ he said anxiously.
She gave him a little shake. ‘Don’t I tell you?’
It was as if she’d taken a great burden from his back. He felt an overpowering need to lie down and sleep. But first he had to show her how grateful he was. ‘A woman of valour, who can find?’ he said. ‘For her price is far above rubies.’
The woman of valour was even more valiant than he knew. On Sunday she relinquished her dream that Fred Morrison would marry her, and decided to take her widowed sister-in-law into her home.
For once she and Fred Morrison stayed indoors and spent the evening talking things over. They both found it very distressing.
‘So it’s the vay ve are,’ Dumpling tried to explain, having fed him with prune cake and lemon tea as the very least she could do to soften the blow. ‘A vidow voman ve don’t leave alone. The same vid me. Vhen Mr Esterman died, my dear Rivke she takes me in the self same day. Such a good voman! I stay vid them years, till she marry.’
‘Of course,’ Mr Morrison agreed, stroking his narrow moustache anxiously. ‘It has to be done. I quite understand. Only … I hope I may come to visit you now and again, after …’
‘Nu nu, Mr Morrison, von’t make no difference,’ Dumpling promised. ‘Sunday ve go out, same as alvays.’
He was comforted, but only marginally. ‘I wouldn’t want to butt in or nothing. Not being Jewish, if you see what I mean.’ He was so upset, he couldn’t raise his eyes to look at her.
‘So you’re a good man, Fred Morrison,’ she said trenchantly. ‘Jew or no Jew, a good man, don’t I tell you. You visit vhenever you vant.’
But of course he didn’t, even though their Sunday outings continued. How could he? It would have been intruding.
Rachel was unhappy about the arrangement too. ‘I should a’ gone vid Davey,’ she complained. ‘If it hadn’t a’ been for that shiksa, may she be forgiven, I’d a’ gone
vid my Davey.’
‘Nu,’ Dumpling agreed sympathetically. ‘So you better here vid me, maybe.’
‘I should have gone vid Davey. We could’ve settled in good. I could’ve help her vid the children.’
‘But you don’t like her!’ Dumpling said surprised.
‘Nu nu, I like her vell enough.’
Dumpling decided it would be prudent to ignore this. ‘We get along good,’ she tried to encourage. ‘Two old vidow vomen, ve got a lot in common, don’t I tell you.’
But Rachel wept and wouldn’t be comforted for a very long time. A month went by and she was still aggrieved, even when she was sitting in Dumpling’s comfortable chairs eating Dumpling’s delicious cooking. ‘It ain’t right, Dumpling,’ she said over and over again. ‘I should a’ gone vid Davey.’
‘Your Davey got enough to cope vid vid that Miriam,’ Dumpling said one evening, giving her the conspiratorial smile of the gossip. ‘You should hear vhat I hear about that one this morning. The vorst voman in the vorld, so Mrs Levy says. A monkey ain’t such trouble.’
‘Oy, oy!’ Rachel said, interested out of her grievance at last. ‘So tell me, Dumpling?’
Miriam Levy certainly was a very disagreeable young woman, as Ellen and David were discovering to their considerable discomfort. It was almost impossible to please her, for she seemed to have made up her mind that everyone in the world was out to make her unhappy. She was always complaining about something. Even the weather was deliberately against her. ‘It ain’t fair giving me Tuesday washday,’ she grumbled to Ellen. ‘It always rains of a Tuesday. You get the best a’ the weather every time.’
‘It rains on Mondays too,’ Ellen said reasonably. ‘Six a’ one, ’alf a dozen a’ the other.’
But reason was something Miriam was congenitally unable to recognize. ‘It was a lovely day this Monday,’ she wailed. ‘You got all your washing lovely an’ dry. Me, I still got it drippin’ on me ’ead terday. It ain’t fair!’
Hymie couldn’t do anything right either. If he came home late for his supper, she said he’d gone out of his way to ruin it; if he was early it was because he was spying on her. And as she decreed that the difference between early and late was a matter of a mere five minutes or so, he had a very hard time of it. As the months passed and her complaints grew shriller and more persistent he spent less and less of his time in the house, preferring the company of his gambling friends, who smoked a lot but spoke very little.
David was upset at the change in his old friend. ‘All the life’s gone out of him,’ he said to Ellen.
‘Can yer wonder?’ she said. ‘She don’t give ’im a chance, poor beggar.’ The longer they all lived together the more she regretted her decision. But she couldn’t admit it. Not even to David. Not when she’d manoeuvred it the way she had. It’s a punishment, she told herself, an’ serve yer right.
But at last, after nearly a year, nature provided her with an excuse to get rid of her uncomfortable tenant.
‘We got another baby on the way,’ she told David, when two months had passed and she was quite sure. ‘They’ll ’ave ter go, won’t they? We shall need the room.’
He was doubly pleased by her news this time. ‘I’ll tell old Hymie ternight,’ he said.
But Hymie had news of his own. ‘Oy oy!’ he crowed. ‘We got a baby coming an’ all. Whatcher think a’ that? Beginnin’ a’ January she reckons.’
She also reckoned there was no possibility of moving until long after the birth. ‘You vant I should lose the baby?’ she asked shrilly. ‘You know I don’t ’ave good health in that respect.’ Which was true enough, for she’d had two miscarriages already. ‘Ai-yi-yi! Vhat’s the rush? Ve got plenty room. It ain’t no vay to treat a voman in my condition, I tell you.’
So they had to let her stay, and very difficult and unpleasant it was for all of them.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
David and Ellen were eating their breakfast early one January morning when Mr Quinton came knocking at their door.
‘Hello, Quin. Come in quick,’ David told him, shutting the door on the chill air in Mile End Place. ‘Whatcher doin’ down this way?’
‘Just had a telephone call from old Palfrey,’ Quin said. He was proud of his ownership of one of these new devices and especially now that it had earned its keep. ‘Apparently we’re workin’ down this way today. Sidney Street. D’yer know it?’
‘Just across the road,’ David said, finishing his bread quickly. ‘What’s up?’
‘Bunch of anarchists,’ Quin said laconically. ‘Been shootin’ policemen, by all accounts. Anyway, they’ve barricaded ’emselves inside some house in Sidney Street, an’ old Palfrey reckons we ought ter go an’ have a look-see.’
Ellen was sitting on her heels in front of the hearth, trying to coax the fire to light properly. She was very near the end of her pregnancy now and she and the baby were very uncomfortable. David kissed the top of her head. ‘Mind how you go,’ he said. ‘I shan’t be late back.’
‘This coal don’t catch like the last lot,’ she said, and she addressed the fire sternly. ‘Come on! Burn will yer!’
It was a grey morning and the Mile End Road was swirling with mist that obscured their feet and trailed dampness into their lungs. ‘Oy! It’s perishing,’ David said, blowing on his fingers to warm them. ‘Let’s go down the Underground and draw the trains.’ They’d done a lovely piece on the Metropolitan District Railway just before Christmas. He’d been as warm as toast for three blissful days.
‘Never boil your cabbages twice, my son,’ Quin advised as they turned up their coat collars and prepared to face the chill.
‘I hope this’ll be a nice quick job, that’s all,’ David said.
But it was a rotten long one.
It was just five past seven and still dark when they reached Sidney Street, which was a poorly lit, insignificant place lined with flat three-storey tenements and baroque pubs, dirty, overcrowded and poverty-stricken, exactly the same as all the other alleys in the East End. Front doors stood ajar, as they always did in tenement houses, dim gaslights cast a yellow mist through some of the dirty curtains, early risers were shuffling off to work. There was nothing remarkable about the place at all.
As his eyes grew accustomed to the lack of light, David saw that there were several policemen standing about beside the ‘Rising Sun’, looking self-conscious and pretending not to be there, and that over on the other side of the road, gathered at the corner of Sidney Street and the Mile End Road, were three equally obvious newsmen, hunched in their overcoats, smoking and gossiping.
‘There’s old Tin Ribs,’ Quin said, lighting a fag as he took stock of the situation. ‘From the Express. ’E’ll know what’s what, if anyone does. Got a good nose fer news has old Tin Ribs.’
It was certainly a very red one, David thought, as they crossed the road towards the young man, almost the same colour as his muffler. But he was a friendly young man and greeted them affably, introducing his colleagues from the Mail and the Graphic.
‘Whatcher got?’ Quin asked.
‘Murderers, so they reckon,’ Tin Ribs said. ‘Gang that shot them coppers down Houndsditch way. You remember. Two, three weeks ago. Done a jewellers.’
‘Peter the Painter an’ his mob,’ the man from the Mail told them lugubriously. ‘Terrible villain, Peter the Painter. Won’t take him without a fight.’
‘They’re in No. 100, opposite the ‘Rising Sun’,’ Tin Ribs said. ‘Police sergeant says there’ll be a shoot-out.’ He was licking his lips happily at the thought.
‘Just in time, eh Cheify?’ Quin said.
‘Looks like it,’ Tin Ribs agreed, rubbing his red nose on a grey handkerchief. ‘Hope they look sharp. It’s brass monkey weather.’
A black shadow approached them ponderously and became a police sergeant, bulky in his thick cape. ‘Don’t suppose none a’ you gents could speak Yiddish by any chance, could yer?’ he said.
David admitted to the talent, wonderi
ng why he asked.
‘What a bit a’ luck,’ the sergeant said. ‘Do a little job fer us, would yer?’ He began to walk back down the road again, indicating by the tilt of his body that David should follow.
‘What sort a’ job?’ David asked, falling into step beside him.
‘Nip in to one ’undred,’ the sergeant said, ‘an’ tell all the others to make ’emselves scarce. They got six families in there beside the mob, you see, sir. Super wants ’em out of it before the sparks fly. Mob’s on the top floor. Don’t go beyond the first flight a’ stairs, an’ you should be safe enough. Not much sign a’ life so far. Most of ’em are asleep.’
It was better than standing around in the cold doing nothing. So he agreed.
No. 100 was a squalid, decrepit house, smelling of damp coal and burning bones and stale piss and shit. He’d spent such a long time now in Ellen’s well-scrubbed home he’d forgotten what it was like to live in dirt. The hall was full of cardboard boxes and smeared paper and bits of ancient rag, and the banisters were so badly broken he thought it prudent not to touch them as he made his way cautiously up the stairs. He could hear voices on the floor above him and when he reached the landing a bearded man wearing long side ringlets and a Polish peaked cap eased his head out of the nearest door and looked at him anxiously.
‘Shalom!’ David said. ‘I am David Cheifitz, a Jew like yourself.’
‘Ai yi!’ the man said. ‘Come in, my friend. You tell me what is happening, nu? Is it true the police surround the house?’
David stayed where he was on the landing. There was no time for visiting. ‘You must leave this house at once,’ he said. ‘The police may use guns.’
‘Gevalt!’
‘Do you have relations you could go to?’
‘In Poland.’
‘Friends?’
‘In this room, as you see.’ It was crowded with young men, sleeping on the floor, under sacking.
‘Then you must go to neighbours. Anywhere. Wake up!’ he said to the sleepers. ‘You are in danger. You must leave this house.’
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