She said nothing but he knew, and held out his hands to her and said, ‘It will be all right, Hannah. We'll be married. It will be all right I promise you.’
She shook her head, unable to believe him. Davida was outside the bubble too, her animosity pushing against it as much as the December light did, and she could not see Daniel pressuring her back. That she was passionately involved with him she knew; the shape of his head, the way the firelight reflected the planes of his face, the faint scent of him as he came and stood very close to her, all this was becoming part of her with every minute that passed. But for all her bedazzlement she was still able to see reality, and the reality behind Daniel’s enormous sexual excitement was not strength, not safety, not the security she so ached for. It was only excitement. The core was not in him.
She clung to him all the same, putting up her face to be kissed, needed the reassurance of physical contact. And he, exultant, gave it to her, and found in her need enough encouragement to fuel his resolve. He would marry her, he would, no matter what Davida and his father and the whole damned tribe of Lammecks said or did.
In the moments when she was able to be detached, Hannah could understand that it was an absurd situation to be in, something out of a shilling shocker written for kitchen maids. Spurned by her father, alone a rich hotel room with a handsome man who was about to challenge his rich parents in order to marry a penniless waif. It was enough to make you laugh, Hannah told herself a little wildly, if it didn’t make you cry.
It was agreed that Hannah should stay in the room until Daniel could arrange their wedding, and both Rosa and Daniel waved away her protests about the cost.
‘Don’t you fuss, ducks,’ Rosa said. ‘Just be glad you got a real fella ‘ere to care for you. There ain’t that many walks in ‘ere a miss and gets the chance to walk out to be made a missus. She'll need some clothes, young Lammeck, won’t she? Can’t ‘eve ‘er walking around he Cavendish lookin' worse dressed than the bleedin' maids. I'll fix somethin'.
Hannah stopped arguing. There seemed little point, for Daniel was afire with his own resolve. It was as though something had entered into him to light his face and square his shoulders to a new swagger. She watched him and listened to him, a little overawed, for she had never in her best dreams ever imagined him as powerful as this. Or as loving. For there could be no doubt in her ind that he loved her. He missed no opportunity to sit close to her, to look at her, above all to touch her.
She stayed there for the next month, while Daniel bustled about their affairs, busy and important. He had to arrange for a wedding licence. She was under age and needed her father’s consent but he told the registrar that like some many East End people his bride-to-be had no birth certificate, and was aged twenty-one. And it suited the registrar to believe him.
While all this was going on Hannah stayed in Jermyn Street unaware of what Daniel was doing on her behalf. She wanted, very much, to be part of the mourning days for Mary, but had to accept Daniels' insistence she should go nowhere near Eaton Square.
‘It’s asking for trouble, darling,’ he said. ‘I know how you feel, but my Uncle Emmanuel … you must see it’s impossible. The place is seething with people, and he’d have no compunction at all about making a scene if he sets eyes on you. You know that. And we're to be married, remember. I don’t want to have any fights with him, or any of them, till it’s a fait accompli.’
Because that was how it was to be. He had given her elaborate explanations about why it was best to keep quiet, and just go their own way, why forcing his family to agree that he should abandon Leontine in favour of Hannah would not be a wise move. Her spirits had sunk a little, for she had imagined him facing up to Davida. It would have been more dignified, more pleasing to her own sense of the fitness of things to do it that way, above all, more demonstrative of his strength. But it was, she had to agree, more discreet to go about it in this somewhat furtive fashion, and so had acquiesced.
The days slid by her in a soft blur. Indeed, she needed the time to recover her strength, for the months of hard work and penury and the great emotional upheaval of the last weeks had left her weak, almost ill. Rosa, shrewdly recognized that, set her tasks to pattern her day.
She found sewing for her, and asked her to help arrange the flowers for the hotel and took her into the kitchens. ‘Wives ought to know about cookin'.’ Hannah was grateful to her. She had a rough tongue, a cruel malicious wit when she chose to display it, and a great deal of warmth, and she enveloped Hannah in it all and gave her time to recover.
And as the days went by, and he strength came back, she also had time to think.
She was learning that she was stronger than she had realized. That she could sit silently beside Daniel when he came to see her each evening and report on his day’s doings and merely by being their, quiet and still, could rekindle his flagging energies and help extinguish his fears of his parents. No matter how set he was on having his own way, there was no doubt in her mind that he was afraid of them and dreaded the day when he would have to face them with what he had done. She had to give him the power to do so.
She was also learning that her own body was a source of vast delight, that there was a sweetness and excitement in reality that far outstripped the joys of her old dreams.
At first she had demurred at making love again. Surely, she said to Daniel, surely if we are to be married, we should wait. But he laughed, and after a while she had laughed too. It was nonsense, of course it was. Why deprive themselves of a satisfaction for which they both starved? Their nights - and often their early afternoons - when he could steal away from his desk a Lammeck Alley - became oases of pleasure for them, as they explored each other’s bodies and their own responses with ever increasing sublety and delight.
Hannah blossomed under such loving; she became sleek and handsome, her hair springing back into its old glory and her cheeks filling out and losing their translucent look.
But it was not all Hannah discovered about herself. She found she had the capacity of containing pain that she had not realized was part of her. She buried her feelings about Bloomah and Mary and about her father' rejection deep inside her, and looked only forwards, never backwards. She did it so well that when Daniel arrived triumphantly one afternoon with all her clothes from Eaton Square packed in a trunk by Mrs Sarson who he had coaxed to collect all these items for her, she calmly accepted them and sorted them out and made them over and never a thought of the days when they had been new and Mary had so delighted in providing them for her.
Yet there was another source of pain - the fact that Daniel was arranging for a wedding in a Register Office. She had never been deeply involved with religious life, for children learn from their parents, and Nathan had been a lax attender of the synagogue services. He went of course on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the High Holy Days, and very occasionally to ordinary services when a family member or a friend’s son was Barmitzvah but otherwise he had held himself aloof, and so inevitably did his wife and children. But that did not mean that Hannah did not care about the practices of her family’s faith or that she could shrug away easily the accepted attitudes of the people of the East End. Marriages in Register Offices were not, in the eyes of the people of the quarter, marriages at all, and children born of them were regarded as mumserim, bastards, the offspring of fornicators.
‘There is no other way,’ Daniel said flatly. ‘For my part, I don’t care. All this fuss about synagogues, it bores me. And it’s going to put one hell of a cat among the pigeons. For both of us. But what else can I do? There isn’t a rabbi anywhere in London who’d marry is without proof that you're Jewish - which means we have to show your parents' Hebrew marriage certificate. And not only would you father refuse to give it to you - it would come out, wouldn’t it, that you're under age? Believe me. It can’t be done. Later, maybe when they all come round - and they will, of course - ’
Hannah was not so sanguine about that, but she loved him and wanted him, and if h
e wanted to believe that his family would eventually be reconciled to their marriage, then she would help him by believing too. But she had lain awake for many nights and thought what it would be like to marry someone and yet not really be married in the eyes of the people she knew. And it hurt. She told herself that as long as she and Daniel regarded themselves as properly married that would be all that mattered. Later they would put the seal of the rabbis on their union and surely that would hep God to forgive them? You had to be practical in this life …
So she would argue with herself as Daniel slept serenely beside her, his head thrust into her shoulder and one hand carelessly thrown over her breast, cupping it possessively even in his sleep, and try to stop the hurt from spreading from deep inside her. She knew that if she didn’t control her distress, it would ruin everything, and she passionately wanted everything to be good and happy.
But although the pain was contained, it was still there. She knew that on her wedding day, a late December afternoon when the rain pelted down with a dreary insistence outside a green painted room in the despised Registry Office with Rosa and a couple of maids from the hotel standing witness for them, at a civil ceremony that would make her Daniel’s wife. She should have been elevated with joy, standing there in her tailor made honey-coloured skirt and coat, with one hand in a handsome squirrel muff, a gift from Rosa, and the other holding the bell shaped skirt clear of her buttoned boots and with Daniel’s gift of an elegant fur-trimmed bonnet on her head, but she wasn’t. She was filled with an ominous mixture of guilt and dread of the future. How in God’s name could she and Daniel ever be happy, when their marriage was based on such foundations?
33
But they were, in those early months, Daniel bought a house for them in a corner of Chelsea, not a very fashionable area but still very respectable. He took her there directly from the wedding, seen off in the hansom cab by a grinning Rosa who was spilling over with ribald jokes which Hannah tried not to hear.
From the moment she saw the house in Paultons Square at the western end of King’s Road, she knew it would be not just a place to live, but a haven in a very shaky world. It stood on the corner of the square, looking down Danvers Street to the occasional glimmer of the river at the far end, neat, white painted and trimmed with iron lace balconies on the upper floors. There was a small paved area at the foot of the kitchen steps and she peered down into it as they climbed to the front door and thought, ‘I'll put plants there. Make a garden,’ and felt suddenly very married.
Daniel had asked Mrs Sarson to find domestic staff for them, and in an obscure attempt to please dead mary, she had gone to great trouble. Hannah found herself the mistress of a cheerful cook who was only a few years older than she was herself, and a general maid who was two years younger than Hannah, but very mature and hard working and determined to be the best general maid in the whole of Chelsea. Daniel had thought to have a valet, but Florrie, the maid, took him firmly in hand, and dealt with his clothes and his boots and his shaving water and bath water as firmly as she took care of Hannah and her needs, and that was that. They managed perfectly with just Florrie to attend to the house and their personal needs and Bet in the kitchen.
Which was just as well, because they were far from rich. Daniel had never had any money of his own; Albert had never seen any need for it, giving him as he did a handsome allowance, and knowing perfectly well that his mother provided for him lavishly in other ways. She had paid his club subscriptions, his servants' wages (for he had had his own valet of course as well as a groom to take care of his carriage and horses), and on occasion, had sent him on costly holidays jaunts to Switzerland or Germany. But all that ceased when he married Hannah. Davida’s fury was monumental, and she retreated into a vast sulk at Park Lane from which she sent furious letter to all her sisters-in-law and friends about the evil that had befallen her beloved son.
She had tried, very hard, to use financial pressure to bring her Daniel to heel, but for once in her life was thwarted by her husband. Albert had always taken pride and pleasure in his Davida’s sleek appearance ad sparkling ways, but had learned to ignore her tiresome tantrums. Furthermore, he had a great affection for his only son. Daniel was very much like himself, dapper and charming and friendly, and not at all complicated to understand. And also Daniel had a faintly rakish way that his father secretly envied a little. Albert had a good life, wrapped in security, with his successful niche in his family’s business, his splendid home and his elevated aristocratic friends and his gambling and his parties, but he had always hankered for a something a little more exciting, somehow, and when Daniel defied his mother and chose to marry a little guttersnipe from the East End in a Registry Office, Albert was, just a little envious. Anyway, the girl was interesting. That red hair and those narrow blue eyes and that shapely body stirred him too, and he would look at his daughter-in-law who had character as well as her oddly interesting looks, and was learning fast how to behave as Daniel’s wife, with no hint of any East End vulgarity about her; and indeed, he would tell himself, riding home in his carriage along the king’s Road after visiting them, indeed why should she not be perfectly comme il faut? Wasn’t she raised as much by his own sister-in-law as by her own know-nothing nobody parents?
So, Albert ignored Davida’s rages and complaints and nagging, and kept as close as ever to Daniel, arranging for him to have a slightly better title for the small amount of work he did at Lammeck Alley, so that he could better paid for. Albert brother’s, however, flatly refused to settle shares in the business on their nephew. As Emmanuel said, the control of the firm had, from the beginning, been tightly in the hands of the senior partners only, ever since old Bartholomew’s day. They would not countenance so giddy a young man as Daniel having any real say in what happened in Lammeck Alley. He would simply have to wait until all the brothers were dead and the next generation had taken over.
‘And,’ said Ezra with satisfaction privately to Emmanuel, ‘with my Marcus shaping up as he is, and Albert’s Peter being newly married and sensible with it, believe me, there’s no risk Albert’s Daniel will ever make trouble here. Anyway, we'll be around a long time yet, God willing.’
Daniel regarded himself as living in some penury, for he had been used to much less cramped quarters and his own vehicle and many luxuries which he had taken for granted. He had Given Up All For love, he would sometimes think, and find pleasure in so doing. His Hannah was worth it, and made it less miserable than it might have been to hanker after more lavish days.
But from Hannah’s point of view her life was one of great luxury indeed. It was not as new to her as it would have been to one of her brothers, of course; after seven years in Eaton Square she knew about luxury. But there, though she had eaten well, been dressed well, and slept on a soft bed, her role had been that of a pampered servant, no more. Here in Paultons Square she was the mistress, the queen of her domain, and how she relished it.
The first few month of her marriage, cold January and February and March she spent blissfully shopping for curtains and furniture and kitchen fitments and cushions. Albert had taken her aside and given her a sizeable cheque,’to make you comfortable, my dear. Get yourself a few new gowns.’ She smile had smiled and take it with appreciation. She was married now, and there was no reason why she should not accept a gift from her father-in-law. She would have accepted any gift at all from her own father, so way not Albert? And then she pushed away the thought of Nathan, as she was learning more and more easily to do, and settled to spending her riches on making home nicer for Daniel.
She did it well. In her drawing room were the curving lines of the Art Nouveau which was all the rage from Paris, the lily shapes, the green and yellow silk curtains and cushions, the Ambrose Heal furniture, but the walls were painted a cool white rather than hung with Mr Morris’s wallpaper, and there was less furniture than there was in more fashionable establishments. Her dining room she modelled entirely on Eaton Square, as a sort of memorial to Mary. It was red
walled and mahogany bedecked, heavy and a little stuffy in the old manner, but somehow it worked. The contrast between the two rooms delighted her, and met with Florrie’s total approval, for she liked, she told her mistress with young severity, ‘furniture as looks like furniture, none of that crinkle-crankle fall-down-as-soon-as-you-look-at-it - stuff you sees down at Schoolbred’s in Tottenham Court Road - ’
For Bet she provided the best that a modern kitchen could have, working her way through Harrod’s kitchen list carefully, from One Mould Tin, copper, jelly, 1¼ pint, price five shillings and sixpence, via Six Wrought Iron Saucepans All Capacities prices from two shillings and fivepence to nine shillings net, to One Kneeling Mat (Waterproof), price one shilling and threepence. She enjoyed poring over the list with Bet and Florrie and prudently crossing out all that they felt they coild do without, but then insisting that the best cooking stove, a Fletcher coal-gas range, should be provided to make Bet’s life easier, and a Bradford’s Model Washing Wringing and Mangling Machine the Best Brass Capped India Rubber Rollers to make washday less arduous for Florrie. By the end of their third month with her, both her servants adored her. Hannah had managed that most difficult task for ladies of a respectable class, that of Getting On Well With Staff, without even knowing it was difficult, or putting herself out in any way to do it. Daniel felt more and more certain that she had chosen wisely when he married her and began to talk to his father about the possibility of bringing Davida around to his way of thinking.
‘She can’t sulk for ever , can she?’ he said. "And I dare say once Leontine gets herself married off, as surely she will, for she’s a good enough girl and she’s got a handsome fortune for anyone who wants it, Mamma must see how absurd she’s being.’
‘Wait till you have children, my boy,’ Alfred advised. ‘That’s what will work the miracle. Don’t rush it.’ But Daniel persisted, sending his mother letters and flowers from time to time.
The Running Years Page 35