All This by Chance

by Vincent O'Sullivan

  The first glass would become a second but never more, as Sam talked on, slipping away from English, coming back to it, and even there Stephen losing much of what he was being told, until at times it was as though Sam spoke not to him so much as aloud to himself, finding the words to make clear to himself what needed to be told. ‘Livandowski,’ he would say, when he guessed he may have been drifting towards darker things, talking now of the music at the synagogue in Belsize Park, his palms coming together as though he were about to sing. ‘What a voice can do to you.’ And Stephen would again lose the drift of what he said, how much good it would do his friend David to come with him, It is not your English go there, Sam said. But no, David could not be cheerful without being sad, the boy must know what he meant? Sam saying how he was not the first man, David, not the last man either, not to have the wife he deserved, that there are women who leave the kindest of husbands for a man not worth that, not worth so much as that, snapping his fingers. ‘For a man with dogs out Walthamstow.’ His disgust was intense. ‘It is when the war is on and people do crazy things. David will tell you the shop goes wrong when that lady who works for him dies in the air-raid. That is not the whole story, Stephen. Not the only story.’ Then Sam stands and takes the glasses, and says as he leaves the room, ‘Not that you say a word. You know nothing, Stephen.’

  ‘Nothing,’ Stephen assured him.

  Most Wednesdays he waited until Sam finished in the kitchen, washing the glasses, moving plates that have something to do with what they will eat tomorrow, quietly singing snatches of song in a voice that has little tune to it, and that at times may be broken into by a laugh, and as he said one evening, pausing at the door before taking to the stairs, ‘I think we must get a cat one day, eh? A cat from Vienna. I have a name for her but I keep that to myself. Until we get the cat.’ He taps the side of his nose. ‘She will never know unless we tell her.’ Sam thinking it a better joke than did his young friend, his laughter keeping on as he makes his way up to his bedroom. And so much later Stephen saying to his children, who at times will think only how often have we heard him tell us this, ‘I owe everything to them, the man whose house I boarded in, the one I worked for in the shop. Everything. Like the name you have now, David.’ And once this button was pressed, as the children said behind his back, they waited for the other sentences to follow, and might almost have mouthed with him, ‘So little I even understood. I had no idea what to say to almost everything, or why things happened as they did.’

  There were fragments he still failed to understand. One week when Sam Abrams ceases to speak of Mrs Einhorn, any more than Mr Golson mentioned his own wife so much as once, who left him but that did not matter, and Mrs Garnett who died, and took his heart with her, in one of Sam’s phrases. ‘And you never got the cat,’ young Lisa will say. While thirty years on again, in the bach on the coast, and with only the boy left to tell, ‘All of us were ghosts,’ Stephen says, ‘only they were real ones and I was still waiting my turn.’

  ‘That’s bullshit,’ David will tell his father. ‘No one can have so little to say about back then.’

  His father contradicting him. ‘I must be one of those who can.’

  ‘Your rambling on about old men. My mother wasn’t even there. That has still to come. Even you can’t make her a ghost that early?’ He clattered the tumbler he drank from on the low glass-topped table between them, in the bright room with the hard breaking of the surf coming up to them as it did on those afternoons when the westerly picked up. At other times the old man seldom hears it, although the younger people do. The girl who was married to a road worker further down the beach, who came in two mornings a week and cooked for him when he was alone, told him she could not imagine not having it there, that sound. It has been there all her life, she told him, except when she was in town, and hated it there at night, the other sounds, but not that, not being able to hear the sea.

  He wished as always there was more he might tell his son, as he had been able to write about to Lisa, a little of it anyway, years back, when she too had begun to ask him questions. But there was nothing new to be said, no dredged incidents, no anecdotes, any more for Lisa then than David now, nothing they had not heard in pieces from him before, or from their mother, and she too had come back to half a dozen things, so much of what they had wanted her to tell them not there to tell.

  Six months had passed since Stephen arrived, and then almost a year, and it was December when he sent his one card home, but never knew if it had arrived, or if his father had read it or as likely burned it unread. ‘A farm,’ he would say, when Mr Golson asked him more about his home, about where he had grown up. ‘Cows and mud and half a day by bus from anywhere. That’s enough to remember. My father who was in the other war was mad.’ And as a joke to make his boss who was now his friend smile quietly at him, and shake his head as if his way of saying, Now I know you are having me on, you are making fun of me, Stephen, he said, ‘It was less like Finchley Road than you might think.’ Then they would talk of other things that mattered more than the past. Mr Golson said it was too late now for people like himself and Sam Abrams and most of their friends ever to be free of, but you are the lucky ones. The young. The ones from so far away you don’t need to know what we mean. He began to give Stephen papers and pamphlets to read, the kind of thing he said that the English, good people that they are, are always afraid of, a world that starts again. He explained what the important words meant. Proletariat and capital and commodity exchange, and not so much the need for another world but the certainty that it would arrive. One must believe that.

  ‘There are rich and clever people who think as we do,’ he said, and sometimes they would read a weekly newspaper together, and a man called Mr Laski at times came into the shop, and said, ‘You must come along with David. There are so many young people at the meetings you would feel at home.’ But the thought of being with those his own age who spoke of things he found vague, even when explained, intimidated him. He found excuses until Mr Golson understood his reticence, and although they continued to speak of such things he no longer pressed him. ‘We find our own time,’ he said. ‘I was forty before I read a page of any of this.’ Yet even so Stephen came to understand more clearly the lies that history made up about itself, and the nets that were spread for working people, and at another and distant time enraged his son by saying he would have joined, almost certainly he would have gone to meetings as Mr Golson so waited for him to do, had he not met their mother, and life became so immediate and demanding, so vivid it was as though until then he had only heard of colour but never seen it. Anything other than her seemed not to matter. And his son’s anger not simply at the politics, which he detested, but that even when speaking of back then, his father did not say ‘love’ when he spoke about their mother but found a dozen others ways. ‘When we met’, he would say, or ‘when we became close’, or ‘once we had decided’, or, ‘There is so much in that saying, swept off your feet.’ His son even shouting at him, ‘You never bloody say “love” ever, you must know that!’

  ‘It’s not a word, David, just to be used in chatting about things.’ But ‘Sam Abrams,’ he will say, ‘I owe him everything for that. For seeing the advertisement outside the church, and forcing me to go. Otherwise I might still be there.’ Sam had told him he was too young to be a hermit, to sit and read, to not realise women withered without attention, it was his duty to attend. He saw the advertisement for the dance. He insisted the boy attend. ‘David will never tell you these things. You must listen to me. Sam knows these things.’

  The young woman was taller than Stephen by several inches, pale and tall and shining, the way the dark green satin of her blouse took the light and gave it back. The parish hall they stood in, each so obviously alone, was too large for the number of young people attending. With the coloured paper decorations along the walls, the smiling older woman who played the upright piano on the low stage at the hall’s end, the kindly young cleric in his collar and grey su
it, not much older than the fifty or so young people who watched him from the floor or from the benches that ran along the walls as he assured them, ‘You are all so welcome here.’ But there was the chill of space and social stiffness, as the parish determined to ‘get things back to normal’, as indeed it almost was, for only one of the young men wore a military uniform, a cadet of some sort. A year or two ago, as the woman at the piano could have told you, the crowded hall seethed like a parade ground, and the girls the prettier for it, she would tell that too, the edge always of uncertainty at that time that made the dances poignant, as now they were likely only to be dull. This was the first of its kind in months. The young vicar smiled as he spoke to them and opened his clasped hands as though he released something none of them would have expected, the quiet unruffled fun of peacetime. That is what he would like them to think. Each fortnight from now on, and numbers would surely swell when the word got round. The fun is back. After his few words he nodded to the woman at the piano who began to play the Lancers, which perhaps half of the young people knew the steps for. The one older man who had stood with the rest and listened, who must have been thirty, and held a cigarette in his hand although a notice at the entrance requested that you smoke only outside the hall, turned and left. He had seemed an adult come to the wrong event. But then the vicar himself, who had asked everyone to call him Robin, broke the ice and was the first to enter the spirit of things, by mock-bowing to a girl who in fact was his fiancée. How strange all this seems, Stephen thought, close and strange together, the sudden sense of so many girls in colourful dresses, their bright slashes of lipstick and that English way of laughing. And yet how distant too, in that way so much about living here still seemed to him, that feeling so often with him in the shop, his own smiling and nodding in the talk of ration books and rebuilding and the shame, what else was it, of kicking Mr Churchill out, after all that he had done. And yet not really being here, that feeling too almost always with him. He wondered if there was anywhere he would not feel that. He supposed now that this was what ‘parish’ meant, people who liked to be together, who sounded the same as those they talked with, so much shared between them they might take for granted. It was hard to imagine what these people were like when they were not here, within a few yards of him. It was hard to say that about anyone, really. Although he guessed that the tall girl in the green blouse, the dark pleated skirt, was no more parish than he himself. She was the only one he noticed who was dressed like that, as if she had come from an office, and not especially for this, the church’s ‘Let’s Get Back to Peacetime’ special dance. The other girls were in frocks, two of them even in sort of gowns as if they too had not quite understood.

  He had found a space on one of the benches far enough from anyone else that he would not be obliged to talk. When he put his head back for a moment against the wall it crinkled against a big rosette of blue and red and white paper, and he again leaned forward. He watched across the hall, through the hopping of the dancers, as the vicar nodded to a boy in a suit, who went up to the girl in green and leaned to speak to her, and her quick firm shaking of her head. As though this was the last thing she expected, to be asked to dance, here of all places! Stephen smiled across at her, knowing how they must be in the same boat, exactly, but if she noticed him she did not acknowledge it. The light across the shininess of her blouse now on the fall of her fair hair as well, as she lowered her head and her face was obscured, and she looked down on her hands as they lay on her lap. He wondered if maybe she was afraid, her stillness that of an animal whose defence was not to move. But his attention suddenly interrupted by the young woman who broke off her dancing with the vicar and came across to him, laughing as she drew close, demanding—she used that word, demand—that he dance with her, they were all friends here. ‘No piking,’ she teased him, taking his hand, drawing him towards her.

  ‘I’ve never,’ his telling her, ‘I don’t know. Really.’

  ‘Where we all begin, then,’ she said. ‘Where else can we?’ She held him firmly and accepted his shuffle and he scarcely took in what she said as she prattled to put him at his ease, telling him her name was Lorna, ‘Robin’s Lorna’, floating her hand in front of him, the ring with its glinty stone for him to see. And stupidly he asked, ‘Are there other Lornas?’, which she thought a droll thing to say, and steering him, directing him, not noticing that he bumped her, confiding that the beat, the beat was the thing to follow, the rhythm and the beat were everything, kind and firm and welcoming as she told him how Robin so wanted to get the parish up and running at the youth level especially, youth and a little older, it was so much harder here mind than it was in Surrey. ‘But you go where you’re put,’ she said, ‘do what you can. You marry into where they send you.’

  He felt a rush of relief as Lorna thanked him when the piano paused. This, it seemed, was when the dancers clapped for a moment, and found other partners, before the elderly lady with her big smiling teeth launched into a foxtrot. Lorna said, spotting another man sitting by himself, ‘Thought he could get away!’, and left Stephen as he most wanted to be, alone again, no one trying to be kind to him. He went back to the bench against the wall. He wondered how long he must stay before he might leave without it looking rude to walk out on so much kindness. He saw another older woman, so thin and a little hunched that he supposed she might be related to the pianist, who fussed about at a long table at the far corner of the hall, arranging plates, setting out tall jugs of coloured drinks. But the dancing had barely started, they would not be expected to eat and talk together so soon as that? The new fear that he must dredge for things to say, that the words would not be there for him. No, he must go before then. He must make a break for it.

  There was a new buzz in the room as couples laughed together when again the dancing stopped, and Robin called out to the pianist, who showed her teeth and smiled back, and someone whooped as the notes banged out for a reel. Stephen felt a kind of panic as a girl came close to him, and he shook his head. Why was time stretching out like this—was it ten minutes or half an hour since Lorna had told him, ‘There, I’ll be keeping an eye on you, Stephen, making sure you join in.’ He could tell the dark girl disliked his saying no to her like that, his not so much as thanking her for asking. He closed his eyes and once more leaned his head against the soft crush of paper. Then the decision made for him, the rescue, he would joke with her about it, remembering the day each year from now on as exactly that, the rescue. The tall girl’s voice, clear and precise and urgent, ‘We must leave here now.’

  Seconds later they stood in the porch to the hall, a darkly varnished space that smelled of wax and damp coats, and with a tiny Gothic red-paned window that the lights from a passing car smeared into a quick flare. The piano still pelted out its reel, there was the fun of changing partners and stooping beneath the raised meeting hands, but all that already part of another life they had dipped into briefly and were free from. The girl took a coat from one of the hooks and draped it across her arm, while Stephen sought out his, and the scarf Mr Golson had insisted he borrow, this time of year you only had to listen to all that hawking in the shop. Then only outside, past the wall at the end of the church grounds, they stopped to help each other with their coats, their breathing as though forced to make a run for it, their laughing before they even spoke, the camaraderie of those who get away.

  ‘Your scarf,’ she said, quickly taking it up from where it had fallen from his arm. Her first real words to him. And his own, a joke that he did not intend but that amused her, ‘It doesn’t belong to me. You had better wear it.’ He raised it and put it over her head because, as he was saying now, the night was so bitter and the coat she wore so thin. Then ‘Eva,’ she said, as they walked back towards the main road that glittered in patches through the naked branches of the trees on the rise leading up to it. No more than that, and she already knew his name was Stephen, she must have heard the vicar’s fiancée call him that, for she thanked him with his name when he gifted h
er the scarf that belonged to Mr Golson.

  Tall and quiet and calm, the words first occurring to him as he walked beside her, the words others would most often say of her as well, at the beginning, at the end, although the last becoming that touch more insistent, as one life changed to another, and then another again. All this by chance, as they kept saying to each other in those first months together, and never ceased to wonder at even in the other times, the sheer chance of a church social both had felt so awkward at as to run away from. ‘An Anglican dance you were sent to by a Jew who thought you a loner, that I was urged into going to by Quakers.’ It amused Eva always to speak of it like that.

  ‘I don’t get the joke,’ David would say to her in his teens, already angry, already humourless, that so much seemed so deliberately concealed from him.

  ‘If you don’t then it’s not a joke,’ his sister telling him. ‘I wouldn’t lose sleep over it.’

  1948

  ‘Now?’ he said. ‘You mean here?’

  ‘Yes. Now. Yes.’

  Her hands at his belt. The stretch of the sea, the colour of a pewter plate, across her shoulder. The grass slope from the stone walls behind him falling away from where they stood, towards a road beneath them. People with a spread rug perhaps a hundred yards away, a woman in a big hat calling to a dog that ran and then returned, excited, leaping, from here it was hard to say at what. A couple who had passed a few minutes back were now out of sight, beyond the huge corner of the castle that rode above the town.