Jubilee (Book 1 of The Poppy Chronicles)

by Claire Rayner

  ‘Not fancy, but a real good place for a nosh up, and you don’t ’arf look in need of it! But how can I take you there, when I don’t know where you’re goin’ after that? I took it for granted you’d be staying with your folks until such time as we could get our plans made, but now you’ve gone and ruined it all –’

  ‘I’ve ruined nothing,’ she said, sitting with her head bent and watching herself stir her tea. ‘I knew nothing of any plans you had made, did I? I knew only of what I had decided to do. And do it I shall. I shall find a room in a respectable hotel, since you say it is not possible to go to your sister tonight and –’

  ‘I didn’t say it wasn’t possible to go to Jessie’s tonight!’ he said irritably. ‘I never said any such thing. What I said was that it wasn’t right to go there at all –’

  ‘Why not? She invited me. I think she meant it. I didn’t consider her the sort of person who says things on impulse and later regrets them.’

  ‘She isn’t. She – if she said it, she meant it. But it won’t do, Millie, it really won’t do!’

  ‘Why not? You have not said why not. Only that you would prefer I did not. That is not enough of a reason.’ He called me Millie, she thought then, and felt a little trickle of cold across her shoulders. He called me Millie.

  ‘Because – oh, damn it, why do you have to be so pig-headed?’ he snapped and threw himself back in his chair. ‘It’s one thing for me to tell them I’m to marry a shicksah from the West End, ain’t it? It’s another to say, “oh, yes, she’s left her family, lives down here with Jessie” – can’t you just see it? She’ll go meshuggah, my mother, meshuggah!’

  She looked at him now enquiringly, and he shook his head irritably. ‘She won’t put up with it,’ he said flatly. ‘She’ll go mad, she will. I can talk her round in time, I swear to you. If you go on living at that house, if she knows you’re rich and respectable. But let her get the notion that you’re –’

  ‘I am not rich nor ever have been,’ she said and again bent her head to look at her tea cup. ‘I told her that, as I recall, when we met.’

  He waved that away. ‘Not rich? Listen, she knows what rich is! It ain’t so much havin’ cash of your own to spend, like you think it is. It’s living in a decent house, having servants, all that. And you’re chucking all that away when it’s the best card I got in my hand. Can’t you see that?’

  ‘Is it so essential to you that your mother agrees to our getting married?’ She still did not lift her head.

  ‘Important? Well, of course it is! How can’t it be important? She’s my mother, for Gawd’s sake!’

  ‘I do not care what my father says. I have not spoken to him on the matter, nor do I intend to. But if I did and he objected, it would make no difference. Not if I had decided for myself that it was what I wanted to do.’ Now she did lift her eyes and looked at him very directly, her thick dark brows raised to sharp circumflexes and he looked at her uneasily and then dropped his own gaze.

  ‘You don’t understand,’ he mumbled. ‘How can you understand? Do your lot go and carry on like you was dead if you marries out o’ your faith? Eh?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘But the way they would behave would add up to the same thing. I have left my father’s house and that means my reputation is destroyed and I shall never be able to return there, even if I want to. Which is very unlikely.’ She allowed herself a thin smile. ‘From now on, I might as well be dead to Papa for all the care he will have of me.’

  ‘It’s not the same thing,’ he said again, and now he sounded sulky. ‘All of ’em, my mother, my father, my sisters – they’d turn their backs on me. You got to see what that’d mean –’

  ‘Your sister Jessie wouldn’t,’ she said softly.

  ‘Jessie?’ He looked up then. ‘I’ll bet she would. It’s one thing to tell you to come and stop by her, though why the silly bitch said it I’ll never understand, but it’s another altogether to think o’ me marryin’ you. She wouldn’t go for that. No Jewish family ever does –’

  ‘But she did,’ Mildred said. ‘She sat there with me in the London Hospital and told me I would be good for you. She said she wanted me to marry you –’

  He gaped at her, and then his own brows snapped down, hard. ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘I have never lied to you yet,’ she said as calmly as she could. The cold trickle between her shoulder blades had thickened and spread.

  ‘Why should she say that? She knows how Ma is – and Poppa – he’d be as bad – and –’

  ‘She said what your mother wanted, your father did. Or something of that sort.’

  He made a face. ‘She’s right there. But I just don’t –’ He shook his head. ‘Well, all right. If she’s on my side, that helps.’ He began to brighten. ‘Listen, Millie –’ and he reached for her hand but she took it from the table and set it on her lap beneath the marble top. ‘Listen, doll, maybe it’s not so bad as that. Maybe we can fix things. As long as my mother don’t know you’re with Jessie –’

  Her temper, which had been simmering just below the surface, finally erupted. ‘Is it not enough that you have already accused me of lying to you without now suggesting I should tell lies? I am to move in with your sister as long as I keep the fact a secret? Why should I? So I choose to leave my father’s house for reasons of my own, and that makes me an – an unacceptable person in your family’s eyes? I must put on a show of riches before they can be convinced that I am a suitable person to marry you? If that is how they think, then I must tell you I despise them. If their faith in God means so much that they grieve over a child who leaves it to marry, as you say they do, how can their grief be assuaged by the appearance of riches? Every word you say makes me –’

  ‘Hey, hey!’ He was staring at her, amazed. ‘What are you goin’ on about? Don’t you understand nothing? It ain’t to do with the faith as such. I mean, it ain’t to do with religion! At least, not properly – oh, how do I explain to someone who ain’t a luntsman what it’s all about –’

  ‘It would help if you did not use words I do not comprehend,’ she said icily.

  ‘That’s all part of it!’ he said. ‘Can’t you see that? Listen, a luntsman – it means someone from the same land as you, someone of your own kind. You don’t have no understanding of what it is to be one of us, do you? You and your sort, you’ve lived in this country for ever – but my lot – we’ve been on the run for ever. We’ve been spat on for being Jews, we’ve been murdered and robbed and raped and always we’ve run to somewhere new, somewhere we can try again. And every time it gets bad again – the people get jealous if we do well, they hate us if we don’t, we can’t do nothing right. Strangers never can. So we run. My parents ran here when times started to be bad in Poland and Russia for Jews. It’s worse now, and people are coming in their thousands, thousands and thousands – but my parents, they saw the trouble brewing and they got out among the first. So, they come here, they don’t speak a word of English, but they learn. They learn fast. They got nothing, but they got each other and the people who came from the same village they did. Their luntsmen. And they leaned on each other, right? They needed each other to lean on, strangers in a strange land and all that! My father – he don’t care about God, for Gawd’s sake! I’ve heard him curse God – and anyway, I don’t think he believes he exists. But he goes to the synagogue all the same and he sticks with his own kind and he says his prayers. But it’s not because of what he believes! It’s because of what we was. Strangers. And if we stop caring about each other, and sticking close together, we’re in dead trouble. That’s the thing of it. That’s why it matters people stay inside the faith. It ain’t the faith itself, you understand. It’s the staying inside that’s important.’

  She sat and watched him as much as she listened to him. His whole body was animated and excited, not just his face, as he lifted his hands and used them to punctuate his speech, and his face was alight with the drama of what he was telling her and for the first time since she
had been with him this evening she felt again the wave of warmth and affection he could create in her, and of which she had been so very aware last night.

  He stopped at last and looked at her appealingly and she nodded. ‘I see,’ she said. ‘Yes, I see. I’m sorry if I – I did not wilfully misunderstand.’

  ‘I know you didn’t,’ and again he reached for her hand, and this time she let him take it. ‘It isn’t that I don’t love you, Mildred. I do love you, very very much. You know that, don’t you? It’s just that it’s all so complicated –’ And now his voice drifted away and he looked at her and his eyes glistened with emotion and she felt an odd sensation and then realized it was embarrassment. ‘Mildred, do you love me?’

  She blinked at the directness of the question. ‘I – that’s an odd thing to ask, considering – I mean, last night –’

  He waved a dismissive hand. ‘Never mind last night. I mean, it was great and all that, but it was only sex, wasn’t it? It’s love I’m talking about. I’ve told you I love you but you’ve never said it to me, have you?’

  She sat and thought, looking at him, scanning his face as though she were taking an inventory. Love him? She wasn’t sure what he meant. She had been obsessed with him, that was for certain. For weeks she had thought of no one else. But was that love? And she had been excited by him. Last night’s experience had been extraordinary, not so much because of how he had behaved as because of how she had been. She had caught fire and been as eager as he was. Was that love? And now she had finally left her home to come to him. Was that love?

  ‘It’s not that –’ she heard herself say and saw his face harden and added hastily, ‘I was trying to think – Was it because I loved you that I left my home? But it wasn’t that. I had to do it. Even if you hadn’t been there I would have had to go, maybe not so soon, but it would have happened. So it isn’t that –’

  ‘You haven’t said yet whether you do love me or not.’

  ‘I don’t know!’ she said. ‘What do I know about love? I said I’d marry you, didn’t I? Isn’t that enough?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘It isn’t. Because getting married won’t be so easy. I’ve tried to make you see that. It’s going to be even harder, now you’ve walked out. I suppose you couldn’t just sort of sneak back so that no one knew you’d gone?’

  ‘I’ve left my key behind,’ she said flatly. ‘And I do not wish to return. Whether I marry you or not, I’ve left.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have said that,’ he said after a moment. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘No, you shouldn’t.’ She looked down at the table again, at the half-cold cup of tea and pushed her chair back. ‘I must leave now if I’m to find a respectable hotel tonight. If I leave it too late I shall be turned away as being of dubious character.’ She stopped then. ‘That is something I shall have to get used to, no doubt, but I need not make it more difficult for myself than I must. So I must leave now –’

  ‘Oh, don’t be so daft!’ he said and leaned over and held on to her arm so that she could not stand up. ‘I’ll pay this bill and we’ll be on our way East. I’ll take you to Jessie’s if you insist. We’ll sort out when we get there what you’re goin’ to do, and how I shall look after you and –’

  ‘I do not need you to look after me. I shall take care of myself.’

  ‘Oh, be your age, Millie! You’ll be living in the East End now! You don’t think you can walk around the streets there as comfortable as you was here, up West, do you? It’s rough and tough in our parts. You’ve never had no trouble there on account of I’ve always been with you, but believe me, if you went out on your own you’d soon see what it was all about. So we have to work out when I can see you and take you around. Otherwise you’ll have to stay indoors with Jessie – and –’

  ‘She said I could work with her. As a – a finisher, I think she said.’

  He stared at her and then burst into laughter so loud that people at adjoining tables turned to look at him. ‘A finisher? You? In Joe Vinosky’s sweatshop? I should cocoa! Jessie’s got to be crazy even to think it. Ten, eleven hours a day over the bench, five of ’em working in a space no bigger’n a couple of graves, and no air and no chance to catch your breath – or she’s crazy! She’s forgotten how it used to be when she started. It’s all right for her, she’s hardened to it, but you wouldn’t last five minutes. And anyway, I won’t have you working for Joe Vinosky, and as for my sister Rae – she’d murder you and have you on toast for breakfast without no butter, believe me. She’s a real slave-driver, that one. Jessie can handle her, but you – you’d be mincemeat to her.’

  ‘Then I’ll find other employment,’ she said as sturdily as she could, but it was not easy to be as brave as she sounded. To work ten or eleven hours a day in a sweatshop did sound more than she could deal with and a long way from her flower shop idea. ‘Perhaps I can come back here during the day to work, in a shop perhaps or –’

  ‘No!’ he said. ‘No girl o’ mine has to work. I’ll see to it you’re all right. You stay at Jessie’s all day, and in the evenings, when I can get away, I’ll take you out. It’ll be boring, I dare say, but you’ll be all right that way. As long as you’ve got me to look after you, you’ll come to no harm.’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘I don’t want it that way. I want to find employment.’

  ‘Millie, don’t be so stubborn –’

  ‘If you are to be as tiresome as this about it, then I shall not go to your sister. I shall do as I said and seek a hotel and then a set of rooms somewhere and find myself work to pay my way. I –’ She swallowed hard. ‘I dare say you mean kindly, wishing to take care of me as you say, and I know it is how it should be for women. But I have been looked after all my life and it has been dreadful – quite dreadful. I have no wish ever to be looked after by a man again. Oh, don’t look like that! I want us to be – I mean, I do want to marry you. I don’t know what love is, or whatever it is that is in me that makes me want to marry you, but I will not be looked after by you. I must take care of myself.’

  He shook his head. ‘But you can’t say that. Not and be married, Millie!’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Being married to someone means you take care of ’em –’

  ‘Then why cannot I take care of you?’

  ‘Ah, but you will! You’ll keep house and cook and clean up and all that, the way women do, and when we have kids, you’ll have them to run after an’ all. But you got to have me to earn the money for it all, haven’t you?’

  ‘I don’t see why,’ she said, feeling her obstinacy rising in her. ‘I believe I can earn my own living. I intend to try. And anyway, you know yourself that we cannot be married so quickly. You have to persuade your mother and the rest of the family. Or are you willing to marry me without their consent, after all?’

  He was silent and she lifted her brows at him. ‘You see?’ she said and she made it as gentle as she could. ‘I will have to take care of myself, won’t I? And the sooner I begin, the better.’

  17

  Jessie’s house, Mildred decided, was delightful. It was small, very small, with the narrowest of passageways that led into a tiny kitchen and an even tinier scullery, and at one side of it a little parlour, and two bedrooms above. There was a tap in the scullery that brought water right into the house – no outside pump for Jessie – and there were gaslights in every room, even in the bedrooms, as Jessie pointed out with some pride.

  ‘Lots o’ the other houses down here, they got gas in the kitchen and the parlour, but that’s it. Upstairs it’s oil lamps and candles, and that means a lot o’ work. But I made this place real comfortable, didn’t I? You like it?’

  ‘I like it very much,’ Mildred said fervently and stood in the doorway of the room into which Jessie had shown her. It was the small back bedroom of the house and it contained a neat bed, with a red blanket as a counterpane and a very plump pillow at the head, a wash stand and a wardrobe, as well as a small table and a wicker armchair beside the small fireplace. Th
e floor was covered in cheerful red linoleum and there was a strip of bright blue and green carpet on the hearth and at the side of the bed. The cotton curtains at the little window were red too, and the whole room glowed with jollity.

  Mildred conjured up a memory of her room at Leinster Terrace, in all its pallor; the floor had been carpeted all over, it was true, but in a dismal shade of light brown, and the bed had been higher and clearly better sprung than this one, but shrouded in a dull cream damask, and the window had been curtained more lavishly, but in the most ugly of yellowish Nottingham lace. It had been much more costly and a great deal larger than this little box of a room, but here she saw peace and contentment and, above all, cheerfulness.

  ‘It’ll be a pleasure to see it used, to tell you the truth,’ Jessie said. ‘I fixed it up like a bedroom see, when we moved in, not wanting it to be empty like, but I had it in my mind that one day we’d use it for a kid. But there, it never happened –’ And she looked bleak for a moment and Mildred glanced at her and impulsively put out one hand and set it on the other woman’s arm.

  ‘Well, I dare say you’ll marry again,’ she said. ‘I mean –’ She reddened then, embarrassed at her own temerity. ‘You said to me that night at the hospital that you – ah – had – that someone was paying you some attention –’

  ‘Oh, him!’ Jessie said cheerfully. ‘Gave him the push weeks ago. Got too big for his boots, he did. Thought he was entitled to a bit more than what he was getting. It’s one thing to share a woman’s bed from time to time, quite another to think that gives him any rights in her purse. So he got his marching orders fast.’