The blank eyes, a fraction above her own, were reflecting light, the pupils dilating, gathering in upon themselves, the brown irises softening and shifting. And she knew that he was looking at her at last. And then he was kissing her, his mouth urgent, and his hands caressing the small of her back, just as she remembered so well, oh so very well. ‘Ellen, Ellen bubeleh,’ he said, lifting his head. ‘Oy, I never thought I’d live to see you again.’ And then his face crumpled into anguished weeping, and his entire body began to shake and he sank to his knees, clinging to her skirt, frantically, as though he were drowning. And she sank with him, cradling his head in her arms, crooning maternal comfort without being aware of what she was saying. ‘Hush, my lovey, it’s all right now. Hush. Hush. You’re with me.’
He wept for a very long time, terrible gulping sobs, on and on and on, clinging to her skirt with both hands and with his head burrowing into her lap. And the soldiers on their way up and down the stairs walked delicately round them, touching their heads in unspoken sympathy with their rough gentle hands.
Afterwards there was a doctor to see them both and questions to be answered and forms that were filled in by somebody or other, but it was all a hazy business and a long way away. They had found one another again, and that was all that mattered. When the questions were over they were allowed to walk in the grounds among the beech trees, where they talked disjointed nonsense and laughed a great deal and kissed one another in every clearing. And when the bell sounded for supper they kissed goodbye almost cheerfully and she promised to come back next day and bring the kids. And he said he remembered the kids although privately he wasn’t quite sure.
‘They’ll let you ’ome on leave soon,’ she told him as they walked back towards the new porch. ‘Bound to. Wouldn’tcher think?’
But after she’d left him and as she was walking through the hall towards the fine front door, which was now labelled ‘Exit’, she was waylaid by the elderly gentleman, who explained that he’d been on the telephone to Bexhill and Bexhill thought it advisable for Rifleman Cheifitz to return to them for further treatment.
Her face fell visibly. ‘How long for?’ she said. ‘We thought ’e’d get a bit a’ leave. ’E’s earned it, surely ter goodness.’
‘Two or three days;’ the gentleman said. ‘A week maybe. He will need careful treatment as his memory returns you see, my dear. I’m sure you appreciate that. Bexhill is an excellent place.’
She stood before him, her eyes very blue in the spring sunshine. ‘’E ought to ’ave leave,’ she said stubbornly.
‘As soon as I can arrange it,’ he promised. ‘I give you my word. We shall send him down by ambulance tomorrow morning.’ And as her face fell again, he hastened to reassure, ‘The sooner he goes, the sooner he will come back.’
And at that she cheered up. Just wait till I tell the kids, she thought, an’ Mama Cheifitz and dear old Aunty Dumpling.
They were waiting at the gate as she came through the archway into Mile End Place, Aunty Dumpling looking anxious, with little Ben holding on to her skirt, Mama Cheifitz stooped and grey, holding her solemn Jack by the hand, and Gracie standing between them in her blue pinafore, her dark hair just like David’s.
She ran towards them shouting her news, so that they wouldn’t waste another second thinking him dead. ‘He’s alive! I found ’im. He’s coming ’ome!’
All the way down to Bexhill David was remembering things. Not in any discernible sequence, but at least without effort. For the first time since the explosion his brain was functioning again, throwing images onto his inner eye, and feeding his memory with smells and shapes and textures and colours. Ellen’s dark hair, bristling under his fingers, and her lovely breasts lifting with pleasure and those long legs threshing under the coverlet. Why had they spent such a long time away from each other? The war, was it? He had a vague sense that he was slipping in deep mud somewhere, but then Aunty Dumpling’s plump hands filled his mind, sewing ruffles, and he could taste her prune cake. And there was his daughter sitting on his knee, lisping her first words, and giving him goose pimples by stroking his moustache. And it surprised him to remember that he’d had a moustache. He must grow it again. Then a series of paintings and drawings, all enjoyable but making little sense; a child’s painting of a procession; a tenement at night, dark blue and with golden candles in all the windows; a beautiful anguished girl drifting downstream in a boat hung with tapestries; sunlight dappling a girl in a blue cycling suit. And then he was standing on the steps of a town hall somewhere as confetti tossed in the air before his eyes and he gave himself over to the sheer happiness of knowing that he had married his Ellen and that soon, in a few short days, they would be together again. Anything was possible now that he knew that.
As the ambulance drew in at the hospital gate he had a moment of apprehension and bewilderment, fearing that he wouldn’t know where he was. But the grey walls were familiar, and so was the ward where a young nurse led him. He’d sat in that chair by the window and cried for hours when the doctor asked him who he was and he couldn’t remember. He could feel the hot tears on his cheeks even now, and hear the doctor’s voice. A tall man, with a long saturnine face. Now what was his name?
And there he was, standing in the doorway, walking towards him, holding out his hand in greeting, his long face smiling.
‘Norris!’ David said, remembering at once.
‘Well, that’s a good start!’ the doctor said.
The next few days were full of questions, probing, encouraging and, too often, still baffling. But the first one was a pleasant surprise.
‘What do you think of that?’ Dr Norris said as they sat on either side of his desk in the dark consulting room that David remembered quite well. And he picked up a magazine from the desk and handed it across to his patient.
The Essex Magazine! How that cover brought memories! Old Quin in the litter of his office, the presses rolling, Mr Palfreyman consulting his matchsticks. ‘I used ter work there,’ he said. ‘I was a graphic artist.’
‘You still are,’ the doctor told him. ‘Look at page nine. You’re quite a celebrity these days.’
He couldn’t remember the drawings at all, but he knew they were his. ‘I must’ve sent them,’ he said. And he read the captions, hoping they would enlighten him. ‘Four more portraits of the war from Rifleman Cheifitz, our own absent hero. By popular demand.’
‘Well!’ he said, bashful with pleasure.
And the doctor told him about his fame and encouraged him to remember his work.
On the second day the questions were domestic. ‘You remembered your wife, I’m told.’
‘Oh yes!’
‘Tell me about her.’
‘We was at school together. She pinched my cake …’
On the third day Dr Norris turned to military matters. ‘Can you remember the war at all?’ he asked, very casually.
‘Not much. I can remember the mud. An’ the noise. Nothink particular.’ But even as he spoke a very particular image came into sharp focus in his mind.
A headland stretched before him, a wind-buffeted expanse of springy turf, bracken and brambles and squat spiky bushes, and he was afraid. He’d been walking for days, and all on his own. The Jerries could be anywhere, with all them trees fer cover. Terrible stunted trees, survivors, armoured and belligerent, tough hollies with leather leaves curled into spiteful claws, hawthorns, grey and threatening and bristling with spikes, brambles trailing barbed wire, blackthorns like bayonets. And a dark figure running towards him.
‘Sounds like the place where you were found,’ the doctor told him. ‘A farmer brought you in apparently. No marks of identification, barely any clothes, and no idea who you were. You’ve been quite a problem to the authorities.’
‘Why was I on me own?’ he asked.
‘Oh, we’ll get to that by degrees,’ Dr Norris said. Horrors had to be absorbed slowly. ‘Now we’ve started, it’ll get easier. You have my word for it.’
They
returned to the topic next day, and this time it did seem easier. He remembered the dixies and Maconochie’s dreadful soup. And the rats squealing when the barrage died down.
‘You can remember being under fire?’ the doctor asked.
He didn’t want to. But he could. ‘Evans always used to say …’ he began. And Evans’ mangled face roared soundlessly before him, filling his vision, and those terrifying, living hands were still clawing the air. Fear closed his throat and the blood was beating in his ears. He grabbed at the desk as he passed out.
‘Do you feel able to talk about it?’ Dr Norris said calmly when they’d brought him round. ‘It would be better for you if you could.’
It was a long painful confession and by the end of it he was drained and drawn and defeated. ‘I left my mate ter die in the mud,’ he said. ‘He could a’ been alive an’ I run off an’ left ’im.
‘He would have been dead,’ Dr Norris said. ‘Nobody could have survived injuries like that.’
‘Honest?’
‘You have my word for it. There’s no need for you to feel guilty about it. You did all that anybody humanly could.’
There was a long pause while David digested the information and the doctor wrote up his notes. Then he put down his pen and gave David a smile.
‘I think we’ve progressed about as far as we can for the moment,’ he said. ‘What would you say to a spot of home leave?’
‘When?’
‘Well, today’s Thursday. Would tomorrow suit? Start with a weekend.’
He sent Ellen a postcard as soon as he got back to the ward. ‘Coming home tomorrow evening. Will be on the 6.15, London Bridge.’ And with great joy he remembered the way he always used to sign his postcards to her. ‘I.L.Y. David.’
The train back to London Bridge was late and travelled slowly. But what did that matter when his mind was full of memories and the tracks were singing. ‘On the way home! On the way home!’
Chapter Thirty-Nine
He was bewildered by the crowds on London Bridge that evening. He hadn’t expected to see quite so many people, nor that they would all be walking towards him quite so quickly. Had London always been so crowded and so busy? They reminded him of the 17th Battalion going ‘over the bags’, all tramping along like that, and with such grim, set faces. And suddenly he remembered the sensations of going over the bags, the sweat running from his armpits, and his mouth dust-dry and the all pervasive smell of fear and shit and cordite and decaying flesh. The memory was so dreadful it suspended all action. He couldn’t walk, he could barely breathe and he couldn’t think of anything else.
The home-going workers on the bridge jostled around him, heedlessly, another wounded soldier getting in the way, and gradually the tussle of their passage pushed him back against the parapet. His hands touched the cool stone, and he turned, looking away from them, seeking some other, natural sight to comfort him away from nightmare.
And there was the Thames, rippling easily beneath him, its olive green water reflecting the darkening blue of the evening sky, the eternal, peaceful, dependable Thames. As he watched, two coal barges sailed effortlessly under the bridge and the long wash they left ribboning behind them glinted with red and gold. He glanced into the sky, idly seeking the source of the colour, and saw that the sunset was just beginning. A spring sunset in London, just like so many others he’d seen before the war. A peaceful sunset.
Below him cranes cast their stiff patterns against the cliff side of familiar warehouses, and empty barges lay at anchor side by side, nudging each other in the gentle tide. On the north bank an elegant green building gleamed in the sunlight, and he knew it was Billingsgate fish market, and there, straight in front of him, was Tower Bridge, standing firmly on its two supporting pillars, its bright blue risers swelling up towards those familiar white minarets. And he remembered walking towards that bridge with Ellen, and knew that there was a gold crown on top of each of the towers and that fantastic red griffins supported the City arms, and he was pleased to think he could recall such details, useless though they might be.
But then his mind pushed another remembered moment to the fore, and this one worried him. He knew he’d stood on London Bridge before, leaning on the parapet, just as he was doing now, feeling lost and unable to focus his thoughts, but he couldn’t remember when it had been, or what he’d lost. Something to do with Ellen, he knew that, but the more he pushed himself to remember, the more the memory flickered and faded. A quarrel? Yes, he was sure of that, for he remembered the sense of hurtful things said, and the knowledge that irreparable harm had been done. But what was it all about?
He was still struggling when Ellen walked across the bridge to meet him. She’d come straight from work and was still in uniform, her boots and gaiters gleamingly polished, and her cocked hat topping newly-washed hair. She’d been in a fever of impatience ever since the postcard arrived, but now she was trotting towards him at last, half walking, half running, because her bus had been late and she was afraid she might have missed him. But no, there he was, leaning on the parapet, in almost exactly the same place as he’d been that dreadful night, and looking so worried. Oh, you needn’t worry ever again, my dear, dear darling. I couldn’t bear to lie to you, ever again. Not now, after all this.
She was beside him, slipping her hand into the crook of his arm before he was aware of her. He turned towards her, still anguished, and the expression on his face reminded her of the lady in that painting he was so fond of, drifting downriver to die because she’d broken some silly mirror.
‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘I’m ’ere. Did yer think you’d missed me?’
‘We quarrelled,’ he said. It wasn’t quite a question but she could tell he wasn’t sure about it.
‘Yes, we did. But don’t you go botherin’ yer ’ead about all that. It’s over an’ done with.’
‘It was serious, nu.’ That wasn’t quite a question either.
‘We thought it was then, lovey. It ain’t now. Come on, let’s go ’ome.’
They caught a number 14 bus, where he was surprised and gratified to see that the driver and the conductress both knew her well and were obviously fond of her. This working life of hers was going to take a bit of getting used to. But it suited her, there was no denying that. She looked so fit and pretty in that uniform, with her eyes so blue and her cheeks pink and her dark hair bushing from underneath the constraints of that jaunty cap.
They remembered landmarks all the way home, ‘That’s Cannon Street down that way, an’ St Paul’s. D’you remember St Paul’s?’ Yes, he thought he did. And there was the Aldgate pump, and Petticoat Lane, where they both worked when they were young, and Commercial Street where they got married, and Brick Lane where Mama Cheifitz and Aunty Dumpling live (I’ll tell him about Dumpling later) and Whitechapel Road, and the London Hospital and Sidney Street (oh, he remembered Sidney Street), and finally they were in the Mile End Road where the stall holders were packing up their wares in a muddle of boxes and paper wrappings as the twilight gradually descended.
‘Nearly home,’ she said squeezing his arm. ‘Ta-ta, Poppy!’ And the conductress gave them a grin and they stepped down onto the pavement, almost opposite the narrow entrance to Mile End Place. He remembered it so clearly, sights and sounds and smells.
‘Wallflowers in the garden,’ he said. ‘An’ roses.’
‘Daffs,’ she told him. ‘It ain’t time fer roses yet. They’ll bloom later.’
They walked through the archway, past the Tyne Main Coal Company, and into their own little close. And there were the white cottages facing one another across their neat front gardens, and the trees down the end, fringing open sky, and Aunty Dumpling blundering through the gate, throwing her apron over her head in the most beautifully familiar way, and crying with happy abandon, ‘Davey! Davey! Bubeleh!’
He dropped his kitbag and ran to seize her in his arms and be kissed moistly over and over again and have his cheeks patted with those dear rough fingers. And
there was his mother behind the gate with his two boys standing very close behind her and a grown-up Gracie holding her hand. How stooped she was, he thought, and very grey, looking up at him shyly, the way she always used to, and crying without a sound, and he kissed her most tenderly and wiped away her tears and told her not to cry and cried himself. And then he had one arm round Gracie, and the other round little Jack, and Benny was hanging about his knees, and he was so happy he felt as though he was going to burst. ‘My family!’ he said. All my family!’
‘We kept yer studio just as you left it,’ Ellen said, and she signalled to Dumpling with her eyes, such a quick flickering signal that David missed it altogether. And Dumpling grinned hugely and disentangled little Benny from his father’s knees and led them all into the house.
The studio was just as he’d left it. He remembered every brush. And there was his easel standing in the window with a paper on it already stretched and ready, and the marmalade jar full of pencils, all neatly sharpened. ‘Oh Ellen!’ he said.
But it was his mother who answered. ‘Good, nu?’ she said. ‘You got a good vife in our Ellen, bubeleh.’
He was surprised that she was the only one to have followed him into the front room. Where were the others? Where was Ellen? But then another surprising memory edged into his mind to puzzle him. Surely, he struggled to remember, his mother hadn’t always been fond of Ellen. When they got married, she hadn’t liked her at all. Because she wasn’t Jewish. He could remember that quite dearly. Yet here she was, quite at home, smiling and nodding, ‘A good vife!’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘She is Mama, a wife in a million.’
‘So you coming to supper?’ Dumpling asked appearing in the doorway. ‘A liddle chicken ve got.’
A Time to Love Page 52