What Was Promised

by Tobias Hill

  But the wise bird hasn’t been fair. An oath made is a debt unpaid is all that Flossie’s says, and what’s that supposed to mean? It must be Mr Izzard’s fault, he must know what the birds will pick, he must like Iris better. It’s rubbish, Floss doesn’t want it. She humps her bag along, as if four cauliflowers and a proverb are the burdens of martyrdom.

  They haven’t far to go, but the girls run out of puff at the bottom of Columbia Road, and Mary has to leave them there with half the bags, bickering. She’s got the first lot into the square, is catching her own breath again, when she sees that there are people gathered under the balconies.

  Death, she thinks: it looks like a death. There are men in the knot, drawn out from their work, and their voices are lowered. Mary recognises one of the spindlemakers, and the Jew, the watchmaker who took in the troublesome boy. He’s peering at the eastern block. That’s his building. Mary’s too.

  It can’t be Michael. Michael will be out at the Roman Road all day. He never comes home before dark. Michael won’t slacken for anything.

  Mary prepares herself. She goes up to the watchmaker. He’s wringing his hands. He stares at her with his goggle eyes.

  ‘Mrs Lockhart –’ he starts, but Mary cuts him off.

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘It’s Mrs Platt,’ says the spindlemaker, and Mary thinks, Oh, thank Christ. Thank Christ it’s her, and none of mine. But the spindlemaker is still talking.

  ‘They put the bailiffs on her. Rent unpaid, that’s what Dick Wise says. He went up to talk to them, but it’s all in order he reckons. They’ve got their papers alright.’

  ‘She oughtn’t have opened up to them,’ a woman says. ‘It’s too late once you open up. You ought to lock your windows, even. You would have thought she might know better. What are they doing now? Can you see them?’

  ‘Just sitting,’ the watchmaker says. ‘All morning they are just sitting. What are they waiting for?’

  ‘That’s what’s they do,’ the spindlemaker says. ‘First they take inventory, then they get comfortable. You’ve five days before they clean you out. Bastards don’t want you running off with the goods, see. Like bloody great vultures, aren’t they? Bloody great bruisers in their bloody great boots.’

  ‘They’re all piss and wind and that’s all they is,’ the woman says, but Mary has already turned to go. Her relief is ebbing away, leaving behind a residue of unease. Mrs Platt is her own neighbour. By rights that should mean something, and if it hasn’t – if Mary has never cared for Annie Platt – well, then it should matter now. In Birmingham, Mary was brought up to know what neighbours are for.

  She takes up her shopping and climbs the stairs. Outside her door she leaves the bags: the next door down is Annie Platt’s.

  There are two men sitting on the step. Both of them are smoking. They don’t look like bruisers. One is stocky, with little shoes, and the other is hardly more than a boy. They look up at Mary quietly, steadily.

  ‘Can I go in?’ she asks.

  ‘Ma’am,’ the stocky man says, and he takes off his hat and stands aside, courteous as an undertaker.

  Mary steps past them. The flat is dim. She can make out Annie in the lounge, standing by the mantlepiece. The old woman picks up a china thing – a little shepherdess – looks at it in the gloom, and puts it back in its place.

  ‘Mrs Platt?’ Mary says, and Annie raises her head.

  ‘Oh, hallo dear,’ she says, cheerily. She’s in a duster coat and slippers. She has no stockings on. Her legs are white as talc. She looks around the room.

  Mary asks, ‘Are you alright?’

  ‘Oh yes, I’m alright,’ Annie says, and smiles. ‘I was just looking for something, whatever it was. I don’t suppose it matters.’

  The girls, Mary thinks. I need to get them home. But she’s here, her unease has brought her in, and she can’t just leave like that.

  ‘Why don’t we sit down,’ she says, and notices for the first time that the dim room is crowded with chairs, as if Annie is hoarding them against rationing: a stack of churchy straight-backs, two pink wing-chairs with matching antimacassars, a stool, a pouffe, and a settee with an ancient knitted cover, faded as old heather. There’s hardly room for company.

  ‘Yes, why don’t we?’ Annie asks. ‘And we could have a cup of tea. I bought a pennyworth yesterday. I offered those men a pot but they wouldn’t even have it standing. The caddy’s in the pantry. Only they might have taken it already. Do you think they have?’

  ‘They haven’t taken anything. They won’t. You’ve time to find the money, and then they’ll leave you be. Didn’t they explain it to you?’

  Annie goes to the window. She stands in the light that comes through the nets. ‘Are they out there now, are they?’ she whispers.

  ‘Mrs Platt –’

  ‘Where anyone can see them.’

  ‘Annie, listen to me. You’ve five days. Can you get the money together? Is it much?’ Mary asks, but the old woman isn’t listening. Her hand grips the nets.

  ‘They’re scoundrels. With Christmas coming. After everything I’ve done for my country. They’re brutes, oh they are. I can’t bear it. It’s shameful. I won’t stay. I been here since I married, and now everyone’s dead, they don’t know who I am. Well, I won’t stand for it. I’ll be gone tomorrow if they lay a finger. How dare they! How dare they?’

  But Mary doesn’t know how, and she has to go for the girls. She finds them halfway up the road, dragging the bags between them, and by the time she gets them in and warm, Annie’s door is locked shut.

  The bailiffs stand aside again. They flank her while she knocks and calls. Like hounds, she thinks. Big silent hounds, the kind that are the most dangerous.

  When she gives up – as she steps back – her glance falls on the older man. He’s not looking at her. He’s standing with his pipe in his mouth and his hands deep in his pockets, smiling up at the blue sky, as if he finds it beautiful. For a moment Mary hates him, and then he nods – feeling her eyes – and the men sit down again, and she sees that they’ve been playing cards, and that she’s trodden all over them.

  *

  Dora, Bernadette and the boys are eating potato crisp sandwiches, the boys sandwiched between their mums, the four of them on wooden seats, in a blue tobacco smog, watching the stars converse in a distant firmament.

  ‘You sent for me, sir?’ says a shooting star. It twinkles as it speaks.

  ‘Yes, Clarence. A man down on earth needs our help.’

  ‘Splendid! Is he sick?’

  ‘No, worse,’ says the brighter star. ‘He’s discouraged. At exactly ten-forty-five PM tonight, Earth time, that man will be thinking seriously of throwing away God’s greatest gift.’

  ‘I don’t think they’re really stars, I think they’re angels in disguise,’ Jem tells Pond, who nods in grave agreement.

  ‘Oh dear, dear! His life! Then I’ve only got an hour to dress. What are they wearing now?’

  Jem beams at his mum. The pictures light him up. He’s a star himself, or a firefly, like Donna Reed when she’s around James Stewart. The pictures are Jem’s own heaven.

  ‘Mum! That one’s called Clarence!’

  ‘Hush up now,’ Bernadette murmurs, but the woman in the row behind grabs her chance, leaning in between them to hiss, ‘Do you mind?’

  They settle down. Dora takes mouse-bites of her sandwich, so that the crisps won’t crunch. Jem wolfs his down and looks at Pond’s, which Pond has held untasted since the film began. Pond’s eyes are on the silver screen. In spirit he’s inside its world, where the star-angels are now gone, and in their place a boy is falling through a sheet of river ice.

  The film was Dora’s choice. She’s sure she loved it the first time, when Solly took her out, and she’s told Bernadette so; but now it worries her. She doesn’t remember it being so fierce as all this . . . she hopes it’s the film she thought it was.

  She glances down at Pond. He gets nervous, just like her, but he hides it better;
a stranger would never notice it. Still, he looks all right. She’s worrying too much again. She should enjoy herself. It’s nice to be out with Bernadette, and to be able to treat her – it’s such a late thank-you, this, for the meeting with the sailor, Thomas – though Dora did give her a jar of cordial, but there’s no harm saying thank-you twice – not that she ever heard from Thomas . . . anyway: her boy looks happy. His face is purely peaceful, as if he’s sleeping with his eyes open.

  Bernadette is thinking of Neville, and God’s greatest gift.

  It’s a sinful thought. She’s had it before. She thinks of going to Camden and finding Neville passed away. They break in and the gas is on. The evil of the thought is that it comes on her like an idle daydream. It’s a sorrowful dream – in it Bernadette is sorry – but there’s something in her, even so, which blossoms with relief to think of the pipe’s covert hiss, to picture Neville at rest. There is that hard part of her which is glad to find him proved right: dead at last.

  She remembers the day she arrived in England. Neville wasn’t there to meet them. They looked up and down the docks – Jem, seven years old, sat waiting on the trunks – but he hadn’t come for them and in the end it was the boy from the boat, sweet Thomas Cowlishaw, who was their Good Samaritan, who took them onto the boat train, saw them to Waterloo, and put them on the Underground that led to Camden Town.

  They should have known beforetime, that’s what Bernadette thinks now. The letters should have made it plain that something had gone awry. But they were younger then, younger than the three years it has been, and so caught up in themselves, busy with their hopes of life in England. Busy with Jem, busy with themselves. If they noticed Neville writing less, well then, letters went missing, didn’t they? There was a war on and Neville was fighting it. Flight Sergeant Malcolm was a busy man himself: Flight Sergeant Malcolm would get news to them when he could.

  It had been Neville’s idea first, England. After he went across himself – giving up his headmastership and paying his own way to fight – Neville told them to be ready. The war would soon be over, and then England would need plenty of hands on deck. London would be hungry for men. Have your bags packed, he wrote. You will do well here.

  And then for years his letters glowed with proof of how well a man could do. Neville had joined the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve: Neville had been promoted. Ground staff, flight staff, NCO. Neville Malcolm, of Glasgow, Jamaica, was flying his own Lancaster. Ten operations, twenty, and the home parishes all talking him up. Neville was their war hero.

  Later – when their bags were packed, their minds made up, their plans laid – later the letters changed. Neville’s worries crept into them. He’d been having headaches. He thought it was the cold at altitude. He didn’t want to write about his good fortune any more in case pride came before a fall. He didn’t want to jinx himself. And then there was an accident. Neville never wrote of that. The news reached them, oh, a long time after, from the family of a Montego Bay airman, injured himself and writing home. Neville’s bomber had come down in a wood near Lowestoft. Two of the crew had been killed, but Neville had made it out of the fire alive. The Montego man wrote that an angel must have watched over him. Neville had come through it with broken ribs, a strong concussion, and hardly a burn on him.

  That man knew nothing, Bernadette thinks. Not a thing. Nor did I.

  It was dark when they had got to Camden. They were all bone-tired. Jem was swaying on his feet. There were children playing out in the road like those of the poor folk back home. No one answered Neville’s bell but there were people on the steps, the door was open, and they went up. They found Neville’s door unlocked. A dog was howling outside. They opened the door and there he was, just sitting in the dark. He was rocking back and forth, and when he turned to look at them his face had an old man’s beard, and his eyes were white.

  Neville? Clarence said. Is that you?

  Don’t come in, Neville said. Don’t come in here. This is where the dead live.

  ‘It’s a good picture, Mum, isn’t it?’ Jem whispers.

  ‘Yes,’ says Bernadette. ‘A good picture.’

  ‘Well,’ James Stewart says, ‘You look about like the kind of an angel I’d get. Sort of a fallen angel, aren’t you? What happened to your wings?’

  ‘I haven’t won my wings yet. That’s why I’m an angel Second Class,’ Clarence says, and when Jem smiles up at her, Bernadette smiles with him, and the baby kicks inside her.

  *

  Solly works. Not that he wants to. It’s Saturday, his holiday. God has nothing to do with it – a man needs a holiday, that’s all.

  At least he isn’t missing anything. This picture Dora likes so much, It’s a Wonderful Life, well, Solly’s seen it. Nothing to write home about. Schmaltz. Too much religion, too much of angels and salvation.

  He might have talked to Bernadette, he might have liked that, it’s true, but Dora would have shushed him, then. And they took the boys along with them, and he’s had his game with Clarence, so there’s nothing to do now but work or twiddle his thumbs. If they come back soon they could all still make a day of it, but in the meantime Solly has a watch that won’t fix itself, and the owner is a busy man, the kind of gent who needs what Solly offers: the right time, all the time.

  Is Solly that kind of gent? An all-time-right-time man? Pull the other one. He might have been something once. In Danzig, before they left, he was training for the law. His father was a judge’s clerk. Solly might have gone one better if things had been different. He might have amounted to something by now.

  The spring they left, 1938, anyone with eyes and ears was getting out however they could. The Eastern Jews went back to Poland or sailed for Palestine, and the German Jews – Solly’s Jews – they got on whatever ship would take them, the longer the passage the better. Everyone going their separate ways, to Sweden or Britain or further – Canada, America, Argentina; a dam-burst, the Old World emptying into the New. And Danzig soon falling to ruins behind them, all the bustling streets, the pretty gables and bright awnings, the crowded promenades and waterfronts, all of it left for dead.

  Eyes and ears and a bit put aside; that was all you needed. Only the poor and the fools would have stayed. But Dora’s father was neither, and where is he, now? Surely dead with all the rest.

  It’ll pass, Dr Rosen used to say, when Solly was trying to change his mind. These things come and go. Think of it like Baltic weather – one day one thing, the next another. These things people say against us, Solomon, these things they do . . . they are not sensible. Sooner or later, people always return to their senses, Dr Rosen used to say, over Goldwasser and cigars, in the parlour on Jopengasse.

  Solly misses him. He misses Danzig itself. He thinks of it especially when he takes the boy to the river. It’s the waterfronts that bring it back.

  At least they’re alive, Dora and him. At least they’ve got each other, and London . . . well, London will pick itself up. But the Law? Well, the laws are all different here. All that learning Solly did, it’s no more use here than his High German. The only learning worth a schilling is that which his grandfather gave him when he was just a boy: how to take a watch apart, tune it, and put it back together.

  It’s not forever. This thing he does, it’s not a life; it’s only work, and it could be worse. There’s still time – isn’t there? – for Solly to better himself again. If this is all in the meantime, well . . . it could be worse, it could be meaner. At least he has Dora. At least he does something he likes.

  What he likes best are the times like these, when you don’t even think. Your hands remember what to do. It’s as if they touch the watchwork and turn into clockwork themselves. When all you do is do, you don’t have time to dwell on things. Like their families, all far-flung or missing. Or like the bailiffs they put on Mrs Platt: since he sat down to work Solly hasn’t thought of them at all.

  It’s a nice watch, this one. A Lindbergh-Longines. It makes a change from the Ingersolls and suchlike
Solly usually sees. A man brought him the Lindbergh on Thursday: a Pole, but one of the good ones. Not a peasant. An educated man. Things must be looking up, when people like this come to him. To work on a piece like this, it’s a privilege.

  It’s a better watch than Solly will ever wear himself.

  He’s still at it when the postman comes. Solly pops the loupe out of his eye and bustles to the door, blinking. There’s nothing for him but one for Dora. Solly stands in the hall, squinting at the envelope. It has an Edinburgh mark, but he doesn’t know the hand. It isn’t an impressive one.

  Never mind. Dora likes getting post, it always perks her up, and a perk for Dora is a perk for Solly. He takes the letter through, pops it on the mantlepiece, and forgets all about it. It will stand there until Monday morning, when Dora will come across it while she’s dusting. She will sit down alone, in Solly’s chair, and her hands will shake as she reads.

  ‘Now some music for you,’ the wireless says. ‘This morning we have the great pleasure of welcoming back Mr Jack Simpson and his sextet.’

  ‘Morning, Mr Simpson!’ Solly says, in his best flamboyant market English, and turns Jack up a notch.

  *

  Evening. Mary waits for her old man.

  It’s late. There are few other lights still on in the Columbia Buildings’ Neo-Gothic blocks and towers: soon hers will be the last.

  The girls are fast asleep. On the wireless the Home Service has finished: all that’s left is the end of the Third Programme. Still, she doesn’t mind sitting up. There’s something soothing about it, a comfort to be kept to yourself, like the softness of a worn housecoat. Mary has always been waiting for Michael. She waited sixteen years for him to find her. She has done this before, other nights, and will do so again. So much of her life will be spent waiting.

  She doesn’t get enough of him. He works so hard for them, all day, and his nights, too, are often spent in the company of men. Tonight the lack of him is keen. The flat is hollow with his absence. The kitchen hems her in. Mary thinks, It’s worth any wait to have him mine, but I spend too much time in this dratted room. She almost wishes she was back out in the grey and the cold with the girls at her heels. She does wish that.