Her voice dwindled away a little and Alex shot her a sharp knowing glance.
‘But what do I do about Judith?’ Hannah said. ‘It worries me - I mean suppose she gets ill? Or… ’
She stopped, unable to give voice to her deeper fears, but as usual, Uncle Alex knew.
‘That’s a lot of nonsense,’ he said sharply. ‘I don’t know the girl like I know you, but you treat her like she’s a real friend, more than a relation, you know? That extra bit, which means she’s a sensible girl like you. You didn’t do anything stupid after Daniel died, and neither will she. Believe me.’
She did, grateful to that his strength on which to hold, but she still felt it was necessary to do something about the fracture that had seemed to appear between Judith and her inlaws. Eventually, Uncle Alex agreed with her.
‘They don’t deserve no-one should go to so much trouble for them, the shprauncy mumserim they are, but you're right, I suppose. Listen, dolly, you got enough on your plate. I'll go see this Alfred myself, all right? I'll tell him you're worried, see what he’s going to do.’
‘Bless you,’ she said and took a deep breath of relief. Having Uncle Alex there always on the edge of your life ready to be turned to in such moment of anxiety as this made all the difference to her. It was not that she called on him all that often, perhaps because he was there and available; it was just knowing that she could.
Alex came back two weeks later with his face thunderous with anger, and a sort of shame, and stomped into the dining room where she was sitting sewing a dress for Mary Bee with Judith sitting on the other side of the table sorting buttons. It was one of those monotonous and therefore comforting jobs that Hannah had learned to give to Judith, and sitting there in the dull heaviness of a March Sunday afternoon there was satisfaction for her too in listening to the click of the buttons a Judith dropped the into their boxes.
‘Uncle Alex!’ Hannah said, and looked at Judith. ‘How nice to see you! Shall we go upstairs?’ she indicated Judith’s bent head with a glance but he seemed too angry to be aware of her concern.
‘I tell you, Hannah, those ferstinkeneh Lammeck relations of yours! May the good God bring down on their stinkin' lousy heads the sort of tsorus they been askin' for, the selfish, stupid - ’
‘Uncle Alex, please!’ Hannah said. ‘We'll talk upstairs.’ But to her amazement Judith looked up and said dully, ‘It doesn’t matter, Hannah. Let him tell you.’
‘Tell me what?’ She looked at Judith and then shook her head. ‘No need, Judith, is there?’
Judith managed a smile. ‘Dear Hannah. Always expecting the best of people aren’t you? I never did. Still don’t. I know my in-laws better than you do, and I expected nothing from them.’ She looked at Alex. ‘Why did you go to see them?’
He hesitated, for the first time aware of having blundered. ‘I'm a shlemeil, Mrs Lammeck, you know that? I wasn’t thinking. You should forgive me. I went to see your inlaws on account of Hannah here thought it would be good idea.’
Judith turned her dull gaze on Hannah, and Hannah shook her head irritably. ‘Darling, I had to! There’s the future to think about, yours and Charles’s. You can’t just ignore your family. Charles is their grandson.’
Judith bent her head to her buttons again, her fingers moving slowly among the mother-of-pearl and bone and glass. ‘They know that. They'll have made sure his money is all right. You don’t need to worry about that.’
Hannah reddened. ‘I wasn’t even thinking about money!’ she said sharply. ‘I was thinking about him. I know how you feel Judith, but since Peter died, it’s been as though Charles was forgotten. His father’s dead and you, well, you might as well be in some ways, you’ve been so lost. I know I can’t help it … But he needs his family, his grandparents.’
Judith didn’t raise her head. ‘He’s got you, Hannah. That’s why I indulge myself the way I have these past six weeks.’
Almost sick with contrition Hannah ran round the table to kneel beside her. ‘Oh, dear, dear Judith, I didn’t mean that the way it must have sounded I truly didn’t. I just - you're so stricken, darling, and Charles is so small and helpless and there’s only me, and I can’t … Peter asked me to look after you and I will, all my life I will, but I thought that looking after you meant making sure you had others, not only me. Charles’s grandparents.’
‘Grandparents!’ Alex, sat down on the other side of the table. ‘They ain’t like other people, those Lammecks. Some grandparents.’
‘What happened, then?’ Hannah said, and looked at him, her hand still on Judith’s arm, and then, even as the words came out, she shook her head at Alex and turned back to Judith. ‘Please, Judith, can you understand why I asked Uncle Alex to talk to them? It was for you, really, to … to give you someone safe to look after you. Mary Bee and I - we’ve got Uncle Alex and I don’t think we could have survived without him. I know we couldn’t have. That was why. Not because of money. I can always make a living for us. I know that now. It was Uncle Alex who shoed me how. And Peter. But there’s more to surviving than money.’
‘It goes a long way to keeping body and soul together,’ Uncle Alex said dryly and, incredibly, Judith laughed.
‘Of course it does. And it matters a lot, but darling Hannah, you needn’t give it a thought. I’ve a little of my own that my father left me. It’s in trust for Charles, of course, and all Peter’s money is mine while I live, and then Charles’s, and I dare say that my parents-in-law have made sure Charles get his fair share of the family trust. They always look after things like that because money’s so easy Charles is probably very rich, you see. One day I'll find out and let you know so that you needn’t worry … ‘ She stopped fiddling with buttons then and turned her head to look at Hannah. ‘Dear Hannah, you needn’t have sent your uncle to find someone for me to lean on. There’s no one I need more than you. You’ve got enough strength for yourself and me and a hundred others besides. Don’t you know that? You don’t even need him. Does she?’ She looked across at Uncle Alex.
‘D'you have to tell her that?’ he said gruffly. ‘You think I don’t know? She don’t, but while she thinks she needs me, it makes me feel good.’ He grinned crookedly at Hannah and suddenly she found herself crying. Then Judith was crying too, her arms hot around Hannah’s neck. It was as though someone had opened the flood gates to let the held-back emotion out. And the two of them clung to each other with their faces wet and for the first time since the telegram had come allowed themselves the luxury of shared tears.
When at last Hannah lifted her head and dried her eyes she saw that Alex too was crying, sitting there with his hands set on each knee. She managed a watery smile and said, ’she said you were the strong one.’
‘So I am,’ he said and sniffed lusciously. ‘Believe me, it takes a strong man to cry, and you two are enough to break anyone’s heart. Such people, these Lammecks, that they deny themselves not to see such lovely girls as you two.’ He wiped his eyes on a large white handkerchief.
‘What did happen?’ Judith asked then and Uncle Alex settled down to one of his long dissertations, his delight in talking never more apparent, even though the subject matter clearly angered him.
‘I'll tell you,’ he said. ‘I got there, right to their fancy house in Belgrave Square. There’s three men working there, you know that? A butler, two footmen. I saw ‘em and I thought, why ain’t they in the army like my nebbish Solly who’s so scrawny you could tie a knot on each leg? And then I see the butler’s limping, so I feel bad on account the man’s a cripple and I been thinking rotten things, and you know how that makes a man irritable, so I suppose - ‘ He looked like a child who had been caught stealing. ‘ - so I suppose I come on a bit strong, you know? There’s him sitting there, that Alfred, at his desk looking busy, and I just land into him. I know I shouldn’t, I know I made it bad, but I don’t know, there was such an atmosphere there, you know what I mean? Cold and, English. He said it as though it was a bad word and Hannah said,’ But what e
lse should there be? The family isn’t like ours - it’s been here a very long time.’
‘I know, I know, but at the time I was, well, I was angry. I have a go at him, he tells me to mind my own business, gets me shown out. Says he'll deal in his own way with his grandson and that’s that.’ He stopped and then said, ‘I can’t blame him.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Judith said. ‘Honestly, it doesn’t matter. He'll come round when he’s ready. Once I’ve gone home to my own house.’
Hannah looked at her sharply. ‘Is it because you're here that he’s kept away?’ she said, her voice edged with anger.
‘Yes,’ Judith said. ‘They're all like that about you. They went on and on at me because I was your friend. I told them it was none of their concern. But … ‘ he shrugged. ‘They'll come to see me once I go back to my own house. Don’t worry, Hannah.’ She looked at Hannah’s face then and closed her eyes distress for a moment. ‘Oh, darling, I didn’t mean that! I didn’t want you ever to know. I did what I wanted, you see, and told them to jump in the Serpentine, but I’d have bitten my tongue off before I told you. Oh, I'm so sorry!’
Hannah shook her head. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘I’ve always known they hated me. It’s just - it’s being told, I suppose.
‘It’s Davida. She’s been like this about you ever since Daniel, you see. They all are, now. I mean they don’t know you, do they? So they believe Davida and blame you for what happened to Daniel because it makes them feel better. They wouldn’t if they knew you the way I do, of course. But they don’t, so … ‘ She put her hand out to touch Hannah. ’they aren’t worth fretting over, darling. And don’t fret over Charles either. Once I go home to my own house, they'll soon be coming to see him. I know that. They'll start agitating about what school they'll want to send him to, how he should be reared to go into the business as soon as he’s old enough.’
Hannah sat back, contemplating her hands in her lap. She saw not her hands but Daniel, bored and spoiled, his face reflecting his discontent, going each day to Lammeck Alley. She saw how he had looked the night he came back from Shanghai. She saw the desiccated face of Young Levy who had given his whole life to serving Lammecks, and her own father-in-law’s lined and yet unexpressive face, a face born to dissimulate in the business world bounded by Lammeck Alley. And she thought of Charles, small and thin, his socks crumpled about his ankles and his eyes dark and watchful under that lock of hair that so stubbornly refused to behave itself, Charles with the curving nape to his neck that made her eyes melt with love when she looked at it. She thought of the way he would sit on her lap with his thumb in his mouth listening when she read stories to him and to her own Mary Bee, and how the two children played together and squabbled together and grew together.
She lifted her head and said very deliberately to Judith, ‘Don’t go back to your house, Judith. Sell it. Come and live here with me and Mary Bee and Charles and Florrie and Bet. Never go back to the Lammecks again. We'll be the new Lammecks, you and I and the babies. Will you?’
Judith looked at her and then at Uncle Alex and without a moment’s hesitation said calmly,’ Of course. I was so afraid you wouldn’t ask me.’
48
It was remarkable how happy they were. The small house was filled to bursting with them all. The dining room continued to be the home of Mary Bee Couturiere, small business though it was doing these days as the demands the factory made on Hannah increased steadily, and the drawing room on the floor above, which had once been so cool and pretty became cluttered, for Judith brought some of her own furniture with her when she sold her house. But none of the clutter mattered to Hannah, because somehow it all felt so right.
She tried to work out what it was about the new arrangement that comforted her so and came to the rather surprising conclusion that it was because it was like the East End. Antcliff’s Street had been mean and narrow where Paultons Square was wide and pretty; the flat that Nathan and Bloomah and she and her brothers had lived in had been shabby and ill furnished and dreadfully cramped, whereas Number 22 Paultons Square was solid and spacious, but it had been home in a very special way. She remembered her distant childhood now it was an amalgam of smells of food and drying laundry and carbolic soap but particularly human bustle and purpose that she recalled, and it was that same feeling that now filled Paultons Square. They did not feel their neighbours on each side and in the street outside pressing in on them in the same way they had in Antcliff Street; but still it felt the same. Warm and human and reassuring.
It was decided that the children should go to school together, now that Mary Bee was gone six and Charles was nine. Each day they went, accompanied by Florrie, along the King’s Road to a small private school. Each afternoon Florrie went to fetch them home again and then each evening all of them, the two mothers and the children and Florrie and Bet, would sit down together at the big scrubbed table in the basement kitchen to eat the main meal of the day. Hannah had been adamant about that; the days were long since gone, she told Florrie and Bet firmly, when they could lead separate lives.
Having servants rushing around and waiting on people who can do things for themselves doesn’t make sense in wartime,’ she said. We’ll eat the same meals at the same time. We're a partnership, now.’ This startled Judith at first, for she had always inhabited a world where servants were ever present but never considered as people like herself. But she was now so completely dependent on Hannah that she did not demur.
Hannah continued to run the factory and the remnants of her couturiere business, while Judith, feeling quite freed from any involvement with her past interests, chose to start work at the munitions factory in Woolwich, travelling each day on crowded workmen’s trains and returning white faced with exhaustion to Chelsea each evening.
The change in Judith worried Hannah dreadfully at first. That she should grieve for the loss of Peter was inevitable, but that she should so totally reject her past self as well as her in-laws seemed strange, even mad, and that was very alarming. Then, dimly, Hannah realized what Judith was trying to do. She was trying to retain her hold on the future by killing the past. The Judith that Peter had known was to die as surely as Peter himself had died. The chattering, sparkling creature who had fluttered so gaily around the rich drawing rooms of the West End had to go, leaving behind a different person, just as the death of a caterpillar gave birth to a butterfly. But in Judith’s case, it was a reversal of that metamorphosis; the butterfly had given way to the dullest and most dogged of caterpillars.
Once she understood, Hannah stopped worrying. She had genuinely feared that Judith might, in her despair, destroy her own life, but now that she saw Judith had destroyed only part of it, Hannah felt they were safe. With Jake still safely busy in his Scottish training camp, and with Solly strutting triumphantly in his neat khaki uniform as a driver to a colonel at the War Office (the last favour Judith had ever asked of any of her Lammeck relations having been granted), they could relax. The worst had happened with Peter’s death. They had nothing more to dread.
Or so Hannah thought. But just as the war was coming to an end the next blow fell. Year later, when Hannah looked back, she would marvel at how casually it had started.
She had spent a busy afternoon at the factory joyously supervising a change-over of machinery to handle lighter peacetime goods, for she had decided that once the war was over she would expand Mary Bee Couturiere into a wholesale manufacturing house. Once the war was over, she told herself shrewdly, every woman in the country would be yearning for new feminine clothes, she had to be ready for a deluge of orders.
She had gone home by taxi, indulging herself a little, for she felt more tired that she usually did and had a mild headache. It surprised her to feel so low. That she, who had gone home with enough energy to spare for playing with Mary Bee and Charles after the hardest days at the height of the war and her grief, should feel tired now surprised her. What surprised her even more was how much worse she felt by the time she rea
ched Paultons Square. Her headache was thumping in her ears, her back and legs ached abominably, and she felt shivery though it was a sunny early October afternoon and she dragged herself up the front steps and put her key in the door feeling wretched.
Florrie took one look at her and bustled her off to bed. ‘Depend on it, mum, it’s this 'ere Spanish ‘flu,’ she said. I'm a'callin of the doctor, that I am. The things I’ve ‘eard said about it, it won’t do to neglect it. Turns into the consumption overnight it does, if you don’t watch it.’
‘Nonsense,’ Hannah said, dazed, and then, as she moved her head and a sharp pain shot through it, added weakly, ‘Well, maybe bed would be … Spanish ‘flu? What’s that?’
‘Ain’t you been reading the papers?’ Florrie had her upstairs now, and was busying back the bed, and setting a match to the paper and sticks laid ready in the fireplace. ‘They says that there’s ever such a lot of it about, started in Spain it did, been going all over the place, like anything. India’s terrible, really terrible, it said in my paper. People fallin' over in the streets.’ She shot a look at Hannah who was swaying a little as she tried to unbutton her dress and prudently said no more. To tell her that the papers had said that Indian peasants were dying in their hundreds and thousands would hardly make her employer feel any better.
The next few days were a blur for Hannah. her temperature shot up, and she became delirious, calling for Daniel, and even, once or twice, for Peter. She was to remember, afterwards, seeing Florrie’s worried face looming over her distorted and huge, and Judith’s too, and the doctor’s, and then slipping away into the hot red darkness of the aches that filled her. She would wake in the night and stare wildly about her at the lamp burning low on the table beside Judith, who was dozing in the armchair, and shout suddenly and Judith would hurry to her and bathe her forehead with cold water and murmur soothingly and she would fall asleep again to dream terrifying visions of great animals chasing her and huge towers built of glass bricks which changed colours horrifyingly and then collapsed about her in thundering roars of noise. And everywhere she hurt, her eyes, her ears, her very bones.
The Running Years Page 49