She was dreaming more than ever now, but these dreams were quite unlike her old ones. Never did she think of Eaton Square or the people there if she could help it, though sometimes a vagrant memory would creep past her guard and explode into her mind. But that was not often; mostly she had managed to lock that seven years of her life into a box, to be buried deep inside her.
Instead she dreamed of remote coral islands, surrounded by azure seas, where she lived alone. She would furnish her islands, exotic creations all her own, with meticulous detail, seeing every plant and ever animal on them. She would watch herself through each tranquil day, seeing herself wake in a tent made of branches to run and swim in her perfect seas, and then catch fish and cook them over fires she had built of drift wood, and then to catch butterflies so that she cold set them free, or to pick flowers to arrange in her tent. On and on she went, weaving a remote and totally impossible world into which she could escape.
She grew thinner and thinner. Bloomah looked at her at the end of each day as she sat at the family table playing with her supper (for the less she ate the less she seemed to want to eat) and worried over her. But she said nothing. She knew better than to do that.
For life at Antcliff Street had been misery, that first few weeks. The first flush of delight at having Hannah back dissolved into petulance. If the girl was quiet, Bloomah suspected her yearning for the other woman, for her lost Mary, and she would snap and complain, so that Hannah became even more withdrawn. And then, sometimes, she would start to nag at her, going on and on about how much Hannah must despise her home, after the way she used to live, and wasn’t she ashamed of her parents, and how was she going to get on with her fancy ideas now?
Bloomah knew she was wrong to do it, knew it was unkind, knew above all that it estranged her daughter even more, but she couldn’t stop herself. And Hannah on her part felt the sting of her mother’s words because there was truth in them. She did loathe the narrow pinched poverty of Antcliff Street. She did hate the shabbiness and the dirt and the smells and the way her brothers and father seemed to take it all for granted and to have no ambition to better their lives. And she hated the way Bloomah had been defeated by her years of struggle in this cramped little place. At first Hannah had tried to help. She had suggested different ways of arranging the furniture, better ways of draping the windows, offered to clean and scrub, but Bloomah had flared up at that, and accused her of criticizing. So she had stopped trying. They settled for a sullen politeness that left both of them feeling cold and lonely. Life at Antcliff Street was undoubtedly misery.
October died in a splutter of yellow leaves in Victoria Park, and Hannah began to hope again. Soon, surely soon Uncle Alex would be back? Then she could go and tell him she wanted that job, wanted to find a better place to live, wanted to get away from Bloomah and Nathan and the boys, to be her own woman again. Soon surely, she would be free?
*
Her freedom came in a splutter of blood on the worn linoleum in front of the cooker on the landing.
It was a raw night in the middle of December, when the smell of sulphur was thick in the air. Hannah had walked back from Spitalfields with her head down and a scarf pulled over her nose, thinking of how much she would enjoy a hot bath, a real hot bath in a bathroom with hot towels and good soap and the smell of scent, the way it had been at Eaton Square. She had been too tired to stop herself remembering, letting her mind wander through the carpeted corridors and the warm firelit rooms; anything to take the chill of this winter darkness out of her bones.
She stopped at the corner shop to buy a loaf of fresh brown bread and some Dutch cheese, for today was pay day, and she had three gleaming half-crowns in her pocket. The week had been murderously busy, and she had worked at a rate which surprised even her, turning out fifteen felled coats a day, a considerable feat. Had she known it, Isaac was complementing himself on his newest felling hand; she was not only fast but neat, and she kept at it. Paying her seven shillings and sixpence for her week’s work had been a pleasure, because she had earned more than three times that for him, and he knew it. Of course he had more sense than to let her know it.
The shop was warm and welcoming, the women standing about chattering as usual; whatever time of day it was, there was always someone at Black Sophie’s. For once they didn’t stop as she came in to stand staring at her, but nodded affably enough and went on with their gossip.
Hannah didn’t linger with them. There was always the remote possibility that a message had come from Uncle Alex. And if not she would wrap herself up again in her heavy coat (the one memento of her Eaton Square days that she valued greatly, especially now that the weather had become so bitingly raw), and go to the public library in Watney Street. It was usually warm there, and they stayed open until nine o'clock on these winter nights. The library was free and sparsely occupied, and above all quiet, a comforting place, away from the miseries of Bloomah’s silence and Nathan’s armchair snores.
She pushed open the front door, stepping out of the wraiths of fog gratefully, and began to climb, wishing she could persuade her parents to invest in a small lamp for the dark turns. One of these days someone would fall and kill themselves in the dark over the broken treads.
The landing was dark too, and she stopped, aware suddenly of something wrong. There was a bulkiness somewhere in front of her. She put out her hand, but felt nothing. After a moment she said, ‘Momma?’ in a small voice. There was no answer, and she said 'Momma?’ again and tilted her chin, but it was clear that she was alone in the house. She reached for the wall, and inched her way round the edge of the landing, somehow not daring to walk across the middle of it, though she knew it as well as she knew her own hand. The door to the living room was ajar and she pushed her way in and fumbled across to the fireplace to reach for the mantelshelf and the box of Vesta in the vase on the right hand side.
The match flared as she lit the gas. She looked round, puzzled. Usually when she got home the fire was burning and the table laid for supper, and there was some smell of cooking, but tonight the place felt empty and still, as though no one had been here for some time.
‘Momma?’ she said again, standing beside the table with the Vesta box in her hand as the gas overhead hissed down at her. She shook her head in irritation at her own timidity and went to the door. Bloomah must be in the other room, lying, maybe on the boy’s bed, having fallen asleep and slept longer than she meant.
She was lying huddled in front of the cooker, a saucepan in one outflung hand and potatoes and water splattered around her head. She looked very small and very crumpled and yet somehow curiously comfortable.
She was still breathing. When Hannah squatted beside he and reached out one terrified hand, she had thought at first she was not, but now she cold see her chest just rising and could hear a faint sound of air moving through her parted lips. She was very white; even in the poor light thrown from the gas mantle in the living room Hannah could see that. She could also see that she was lying in a pool of blood. Her legs were splattered with it, and it had formed a cold clot beneath her apron, on the worn linoleum.
She had to run to the corner shop to get help. There was no one downstairs, in Mrs Arbeiter’s part of the house, no one anywhere about in the street but at the corner shop there would be women and warmth and commonplace talk. Normality. So she ran, and burst in through the door breathlessly, her face white and her legs shaking beneath her.
Black Sophie was tidying up, yawning, waiting for the last of her customers to make their unwilling way out into the fog. Hannah looked at her worn old face and felt, suddenly, huge guilt. It wasn’t right to upset her at the end of her day. She’d have to go somewhere else.
She pushed that silly notion away, and managed to catch her breath enough to tell them, to explain that Momma was lying on the linoleum in a clot of blood and please, please would someone do something…
One of the women ran home to haul out her son and send him running as fast as he could to the hospita
l for an ambulance. Sophie herself, who reacted to every emergency with thoughts of food and drink, scrabbled under her untidy counter to find a small bottle of brandy, which she forced at Hannah so that she had to swallow some of the fiery stuff. it made her cough, which at least brought some colour back into her face, and made her legs feel less jellied. And then all of them came with her, back to the silent house at number nine.
Somewhere along the way, in all the excitement (for the women’s exclaiming and shouting brought any number of neighbours to their windows), someone sent for Mother Charnik, the midwife from Christian Street. She arrived, panting, to drag her vast bulk in its rusty black overcoat up the stairs to the landing.
The cluster of women made way for her respectfully, for she was not one to argue with, not Mother Charnik. She had delivered their babies, and sorted out their aches and pains for as long as they could remember. Hannah looked up at her, from her place at Bloomah’s head where she was kneeling stroking the pallid forehead, and shuddered a little. Mother Charnik in that horrible overcoat had scarred her childhood with her ominous visits; when she had come to see Momma in meant that Momma was ill and small Hannah had to creep about and Be Good. She remembered it all too painfully now, as though all the episodes of Bloomah’s myriad illnesses had been woven into one huge one, the present one.
The old woman peered at her through narrow short sighted eyes, then flopped down on her knees beside Bloomah and without a word dragged her skirt up. Hannah wanted to reach out and hit her for handling her mother so; Bloomah who whatever else happened was always so modest, who would never let anyone see her when she took her dress off, not even her own daughter.
‘Tsst,’ the old woman said after a moment of fumbling. ‘Tsst - give me a towel, one of you. Come on, you ain’t made of schmaltz on a cold day, are you? Move already!’
‘In the boys’ room,’ Hannah said, jerking her head, and one of the women ran and fetched a towel. Mother Charnik with swift and surprisingly delicate movements wadded it between Bloomah’s legs, and held it there fast. They could all see the blood now, a slow purplish stain spreading sluggishly across the fabric. The women took a hissing breath and shook their heads and muttered. Hannah felt the coldness that was inside her start to rise, like a tide.
‘Not good, dolly,’ Mother Charnik said, and peered at her in the dim light. She was sweating and her forehead sent an oily gleam back at Hannah.’ Where’s your poppa? Where’s the boys?’
‘I don’t know,’ Hannah said. ‘They usually eat before I get home. Gone out maybe. I don’t know.’
‘Jake’s at the gym in Leman Street and Nathan’s playing solo down at Curly’s, one of the women said. ‘My Sam’s there with him. He told me he was going with Nathan.’
‘Someone go fetch,’ Mother Charnik ordered. ‘There’s a time a man plays solo, there’s a time a man sits beside his wife God forbid it should be necessary,’
The ambulance arrived after what seemed to Hannah an eternity, its bell ringing importantly in the narrow street, and then everyone was out, the uncorseted women with their hair pinned up, wigless at this time of night, the children tousle headed from their beds, the men whispering and muttering at each other, shaking their heads with downturned mouths. They hardly ever noticed Bloomah from one day’s end to the next but tonight they appeared to watch her being carried out on a red blanketed stretcher to the high wheeled white ambulance with its two impatient high stepping horses misting the heavy air to an even thicker fog with their breath.
Bloomah died at the London Hospital fifteen minutes before Nathan and Jake got there, and just after Solly arrived wide eyed and guilty from the public house in the Mile End Road where he had no right to be at his age, and out of which one of the busy know-all neighbours had flushed him. They found Hannah sitting very still and straight on one of the wooden benches in the front hall, staring down at the tiled floor. The place reeked of lysol and hard carbolic soap and the high ceiling was misted with the fog that had come drifting in through the big door. All Hannah could think of was the fact that in two days time it was her birthday. She would be eighteen.
30
The days went by in a mist even thicker than the all pervading fog. People came and went and murmured at her, ‘I wish you long life,’ the timeless ritual words of comfort. Hannah hated them for that. It implied that all she cared about when faced with the awesome fact of her mother’s death was her own chance of life. As if that mattered. As if any of it mattered. Bloomah was dead, and she’d never been able to tell her how important she was, never been able to apologize or explain how much she really loved her and needed her. And now she never would. The chance to pay her debt to that thin tired woman was gone for ever, and Hannah felt, with all the intensity of which she was capable, that she would bear the burden of that failure all her life. She had to bite her lips to prevent herself shouting as much at the repeated mumbles of ‘I wish you long life,’ ‘I wish you long life.’
Nathan was at first stunned, not seeming to believe it had happened. He seemed to Hannah to shrink before her eyes that first night, sitting in the front room at Antcliff Street in his armchair and staring at the dead fireplace and saying absolutely nothing. Jake and Solly were silent too, but theirs was more the silence of uncertainty. Hannah realized that what was distressing and frightening them was not Bloomah’s death, which they had not yet fully comprehended, but Nathan’s silence and staring-eyed blankness.
The next day he began to change. The rabbi came and talked to him, and then his brother Reuben, and sister-in-law Minnie, and then Isaac and Thin Sarah, and the neighbours, all bending respectfully over him. He seemed to blossom under the warmth of their regard and became more himself again. He began to talk of the funeral arrangements and harry Hannah about the way everything should be done.
‘There'll be food to prepare,’ he said importantly. ‘Bagels and salt herrings and hard boiled eggs for the mourners, when they come back from the burial grounds, and whiskey. And then afterwards when the people come to the shivah, coffee and cakes. And we'll need a cloth over the mirror and a memorial candle and low chairs.
‘Hannah mustn’t do it,’ Thin Sarah said. ‘She’s a mourner too - ‘ And Nathan had peered at her, puzzled for a moment and then said vaguely,’ Oh yes. Hannah’s a mourner too … ’
The funeral was held at eleven in the morning. The carriage came with its black horses and Hannah wondered briefly who had paid for it. Reuben? Isaac? Certainly not Nathan. If Alex had been here, he would have covered it all, of course. And then she stopped caring as the men in their dark suits clustered round and the women started to wail and throw their hand up, and she took hold of her awareness and pushed it deep inside her. Today was going to be hell and she could live through hell only by withdrawing from it.
They told her not to go to the burial grounds, that women never did. For a brief moment she almost rebelled, wanting to tell them that she too had the right to set her hand on the barrow that would hold the plain box in which Bloomah would be buried; she too had the right to push it to the grace and then throw in her handful of soul. But the flare of argument died as soon as it raised itself, and she stayed obediently with the women.
They bustled about importantly, setting plates with salt herring to symbolize tears, together with hard boiled eggs, symbols of the way the Jewish soul is toughened under stress, and round bagels to add their symbolism of life going on in its eternal circle, readying the hour for the mourners' return from the cemetery, far away at Plashet in East Ham, the other side of Plaistow. The gossipped and bustled, well pleased with themselves, giving each other instructions and countermanding them with efficiency.
‘Look at ‘em.’ Cissie said sourly, sitting beside Hannah. ‘Just look at them. It’s as good as a wedding or a Barmitzvah to them. Better. No presents to buy.’ Hannah actually smiled and reached out and touched her hand. To have given up a morning’s work to come to comfort her was friendship indeed and she was grateful for it. Even Uncl
e Isaac had made a face at the amount of time he was losing to go to his sister’s funeral. Only a small complaint, but a complaint nonetheless. And Hannah knew it was justified. The loss of a day’s money was a painful one. All the more reason to be grateful to Cissie.
The day wore on. The men returned and more and more people came pressing up the stairs to bring their offerings of freshly baked kugels and plavahs, food for the mourners, then to stay and gossip and drink tea and enjoy the unusua resiteofa social occasion. A shivah it might be, but after all, everyone has to die and Bloomah alovah shalom hadn’t had so bad a life. Three children almost full grown c'nainah hora, and thank God she didn’t suffer too much, she went fast, please God by me it should be the same God forbid you should even think of dying, but you got to be practical, don’t you?
The next day and the days after that were the same, punctuated by the sing song of prayers at morning, midday and evening. And all the time Nathan seemed to grow in stature, he developed an air of dignified mourning that made Hannah want to shout at him, to tell him Bloomah was dead, really dead, that he wasn’t playing a game pretending she was.
But she didn’t, of course. He needed his moment of glory, standing there praying flanked by his sons at the forefront of the mourners, as the rabbi swayed and chanted over the flickering candles. Who was she to rob him of that?
It was on the fifth morning he came. She was sitting on the special low mourner’s chair staring out of the window at the dirty grey sky. The fog had lifted at last. The boys had muttered something about needing to get some air, and after morning prayers were over had skipped out, promising to be back before midday. Nathan was dozing in his armchair, abandoning his own low chair with the excuse that his back was hurting him. She looked at his half open mouth and his unshaven cheeks (for mourners may not shave until the allotted time is past), and felt her anger at him bubble inside her again. It was as though she needed someone to blame for what had happened to Bloomah, someone apart from herself. Nathan with his air of self centred satisfaction made a good target. And then she hated herself for feeling so. He was suffering too, in his own way.
The Running Years Page 32