Family Chorus

by Claire Rayner

  FAMILY CHORUS

  Here was excitement and new sights and smells and she loved every bit of it.

  ‘Isn’t it romantic, Ambrose?’ she’d said, hugging his arm close to her. ‘Isn’t it all wonderful? I hate the East End. One day we’ll both be stars in a show over there —’ and she had jerked her head in the direction of Shaftesbury Avenue and its great glossy theatres, ‘— and we’ll never have to go to the horrible East End again —’

  He looked down at her and made a face. ‘It’s not that different here to the East End, ducky, and never you think it. They’re all robbers and thieves wherever you go.’

  ‘Not everywhere!’ she had said, and sounded genuinely shocked. ‘Not here in the West End! People here have real class — I’m going to be here one day, you see if I don’t.’

  Also by Claire Rayner

  THE FINAL YEAR

  COTTAGE HOSPITAL

  GOWER STREET

  THE HAYMARKET

  PADDINGTON GREEN

  SOHO SQUARE

  Family Chorus

  CLAIRE RAYNER

  ebook ISBN: 978-1-84982-036-3

  M P Publishing Limited

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  © Claire Rayner 1984, 2010

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  e-ISBN 9781-84982-036-3

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  For Maggy,

  who reads all my words twice over.

  With gratitude.

  Prologue

  Everyone was more concerned with death than with life the night that she was born. First the remote departure of the old queen, launching herself into oblivion from the marble and velvet splendours of the palace of Osborne in the Isle of Wight, and then the much more important death of Milly, sliding away wearily from her short existence in a stuffy back room of the dark little house in Sidney Street in the East End where she had lived with the clutter of children and neighbours who now surrounded her. They fussed over her or sat about uneasily getting in the way, depending on their genders, and paid no attention at all to the scrawny infant lying in the kitchen drawer where they had thrust her as Milly began to bleed so furiously. She was irrelevant as she lay there blinking at the hissing gaslight and opening and closing her minute bloodstained fists, and scowling at the world she had inherited; it was Milly who mattered, not the direct cause of her death.

  And even after it was clear that nothing could be done for Milly, who lay dreadfully pallid and silent in a heap of feather bedding and pillows, they sat about and stared at each other and wondered what to do next; and no one thought about the baby, until she opened her small cavern of a mouth and shrieked her fury at her situation.

  ‘Oh, Gawd,’ Bessie said distractedly and stared at Fanny, who as the mother of a two-year-old must surely know what to do, but Fanny stared back at her, with handsome dark eyes opaque as pebbles, and said and did nothing. Busha too paid no attention, sitting with her arm placed with ostentatious protectiveness across Shmuel’s shoulders. Bessie said again, ‘Oh, Gawd,’ as the baby wailed even more loudly, and went over to the kitchen drawer and stared down at her.

  ‘Milk,’ Fanny said contemptuously, as the noise increased and Shmuel looked up, peering through red-rimmed eyes at Bessie, who stared back at him helplessly and then at Fanny and said, ‘Milk?’

  ‘Oh, really, Bessie, don’t be so stupid!’ Fanny snapped, and at last got to her feet and went to rummage in the corner cupboard. There was a bottle half full of milk there, and she took it out and then looked round at her husband on the far side of the small kitchen. ‘Give me a bit of rag, Dave,’ she commanded, ‘an’ a bit of thread. You can get some from the workshop — white rag —’ she shouted after him as, obediently, he went clattering down the stairs. ‘Clean white rag —’

  Later they all sat and watched as she tied to the neck of the bottle the scrap of fabric that Dave had found and then pushed the makeshift teat into the infant’s mouth, listening to the gulping and whimpering sounds she produced as she sucked the bulky rag and filled her small belly.

  ‘Is that the right sort of milk for it?’ Bessie said uneasily. ‘Ain’t it s’posed to be boiled and that?’

  Fanny lifted one eyebrow and went back to sit beside Dave again. ‘Won’t make much difference either way,’ she said. ‘It’s not goin’ to do, is it? I mean, look at it — can’t be as big as a plucked five-pound fowl and don’t look much healthier —’

  ‘Don’t you be so sure.’ Mother Charnick came into the kitchen from the bedroom, at last closing the door behind her on the sight of Milly dead in the big bed, the sight from which they had all been carefully averting their eyes. ‘I’ve seen worse’n that one. It’ll do, poor motherless nebbish — I wish you long life, Shmuel, Fanny, Benny, Joe, Bessie —’ She went round meticulously shaking the hands of the chief mourners, carefully avoiding the stepchildren (for who knew better than Mother Charnick the right way to do things?) and at once, as though someone had fired a starting gun, the wailing began. Busha first, producing a wild sound that still somehow managed to sound controlled, and Mrs Feldman from the flat upstairs, and old Sophie from next door, tears streaking down their leathery cheeks as they rocked back and forth in the time-honoured fashion of mourners. Shmuel started then, his shoulders heaving painfully, and behind him the boys Benny and Joe looked at each other sideways, ashamed and embarrassed, not knowing what to do or say, and in the shadows in the corner the stepbrothers, Moishe and Issy, stood in matching embarrassment. Only Bessie sat silently, staring at the baby in the drawer, her face expressionless.

  Fanny gave them five minutes after Mother Charnick had gone, breathlessly heaving her huge bulk and her bag of unmentionable bits and pieces through the door (for as the local midwife she felt the need to carry many extraordinary instruments she would never dream of using, but which gave her a deal of authority and wisdom in her clients’ eyes), and then nudged Dave sharply and stood up.

  ‘Someone make a cup of tea for Poppa,’ she said loudly. ‘And a bissel somethin’ to eat. You got to look after the living in such times. Bessie, make tea. Dave, go down the corner, get some platsels, she’ll still be there, Mrs Cohen, and if she ain’t, knock on the window, she should come down. In sad times people got to put themselves out. Benny, Joe, go round the shul, tell the rabbi we got to organize a lavoyah. When you got a death, you got to have a funeral. Moishe and Issy, you go too. Mrs Feldman and Sophie, thank you already for being such good neighbours —’

  As usual everyone obeyed and noisily the room emptied, as the neighbours accepted their congé and went sniffing away. The boys also escaped gratefully, clattering down the lino-covered stairs to the street below as their older stepbrothers followed them with alacrity, though more sedately, leaving only Shmuel and the women to share the stuffy overheated flat with dead Milly.

  And the baby in the kitchen drawer.

  On the day of Milly’s funeral, all of Sidney Street turned out, and a good deal of Jubilee Street and Christian Street besides, as well as all the neighbouring tiny alleys and roads. It wasn’t so much that Milly had been so popular, though she had fitted comfortably enough into this world of overworked women and their too numerous children and demanding men, as that
people had an eye to the main chance and Dave Fox, Fanny’s husband, was becoming a name to conjure with in this part of the East End. As new in his attitudes as the century, as pushy and hungry and determined as tomorrow was Dave, and Fanny was twice the man he was, as the neighbours well knew; so they turned out in strength for Fanny’s mother’s funeral and shivah, the ritual seven days of mourning.

  Quite apart from anything else, it was a nice social occasion, though of course you shouldn’t know of such things, the death of a mother giving birth, nebbish, a terrible thing, but all the same — a break in the dull days, somewhere to go, a chance to gossip over a nice cup of tea after the prayers had been said, and a chance to see the Foxes’ home. Dave and Fanny had a whole house to themselves in Arbour Square; none of your rubbish, Dave and his handsome Fanny, and their beautiful son Monty, c’naina horah, a lovely little boy two years old and walking everywhere already, and a lovely home. Nice to have the chance to peer about at the heavy mahogany furniture brought special from Shoolbred’s in the Tottenham Court Road (who shopped in such posh goyisha places as that? For everyone else, Wickham’s in the Mile End Road was good enough) and the two kinds of curtains at all the windows, Nottingham lace and velvet yet, and a kitchen with so many pots and pans it must take all day to clean them. Wonderful.

  The funeral went well, as such things go, with everyone coming back to Fanny’s house through the misty gloom of the late January afternoon to wipe their feet on the coconut matting at the doorway under Fanny’s eagle eye, and then shuffle into her red-velvet-trimmed parlour to shake Shmuel’s hand respectfully and then make the rounds of all the children. It caused a little gossip that the stepchildren didn’t sit as mourners as well as Milly’s own blood children, but Shmuel was a stickler for these things and had said firmly they shouldn’t.

  ‘Bad enough my Busha and Moishe and Issy lost their own mother, God rest her sweet soul, and had to say prayers for her — I don’t want they should have to do it again, not even for Milly.’

  He had managed to convince himself somehow that his older children had been of an age to pray when their mother had died, but of course they hadn’t. Everyone knew the truth of it, everyone knew exactly how it had been, for Milly herself had told the story often enough; how she had been such a happy carefree girl in her parents’ home in a village in Russia so tiny everyone had forgotten its name; how she had been a person of consequence then, the farrier’s daughter, living a good life, spoiled by her parents and spending her days in her father’s horse-scented stables and her mother’s friend-filled kitchen. Until her only sister had died in the influenza epidemic, leaving behind Shmuel and four babies, none of them even five years old yet.

  ‘Fourteen years old she was,’ Mrs Feldman reminded Sophie as they sat at Milly’s funeral in London in 1901. ‘Fourteen years old, nebbish, and had to marry and be a mother. Terrible, terrible the way it used to be in the stetl, the way they made the poor girl suffer so — but what could they do? Who better to be a mother to her dead sister’s children but their own flesh and blood? It had to be — it was b’schert —’ They nodded comfortably at each other and took another cup of tea from the ever full pot on the kitchen table.

  And, indeed, suffer Milly had. She had learned to cook and sew and scrub for Shmuel and take care of his four clamorous children, and scrape a living for them all from the meagre earnings of his pedlar’s tray and what her parents slipped her on the side, though heaven knew it had been little enough as times got so hard that they barely made their own living, and she had learned to cope with Shmuel’s appetite for her body.

  It wasn’t an appetite for her at all, she had soon learned that; to Shmuel a woman was a woman, one was as good as another, and that this wife was Milly, the little sister of his dead Rivka, had mattered little to him. He had grieved only a short time for Rivka, and cleaved so joyously to Milly that by the time she was twenty-six she had not only her four stepchildren to worry over but four of her own — four who had lived, that is. There had been many more who had died at birth or soon after, and Milly had taught herself never to think about them. Just about the ones who lived. She had learned, too, not to think of the stepdaughter who had died, the one who had been the youngest when Rivka had left Milly the inheritance of a ready-made family. Only eight months old, and therefore the one Milly had loved best, that baby had followed her mother and her infant stepsisters and stepbrothers in the awful winter of 1890, leaving Milly, pregnant as usual, to harden her lips to a tight line and never think of her again, little Leah whom she had loved best.

  It had got worse, if that were possible. The Cossacks had started their shouting and riding through the village square, and the peasants from the other side of the village near the church had jeered and set fire to the houses of the Jews, and the powers-that-were had turned their heads and seen nothing and done nothing to protect them, and Milly had been very, very frightened. So, indeed, had been everyone; many were the people who were to sit at Milly’s funeral in London who had themselves fled from the drumming hooves and burning houses and the wild shrieking people who had been their countrymen. Milly’s experience hadn’t been an unusual one. She, like thousands more, had stayed fearfully in the stetl while her man went off to seek a better place for them all, somewhere he could bring them where there would be gold lying in the streets for them to pick up, a place where they could sleep safe in their beds, free of the threat of death and disaster at every corner.

  It hadn’t worked out like that, of course. She had watched him go, comparing her fearfulness with his jauntiness, aware that she was pregnant yet again and sick with the fear of the death that could be to come rather than with hope for the life that she carried; she had soothed the seven children round her skirts and gone to work in the fields to earn enough to feed them till Shmuel should send for them, if he ever did.

  But he had, and, hope stirring sluggishly in her, Milly had clutched the precious tickets in her hand and set off, her belly huge with baby and her head solid with terror. The baby had been born — and died — on the ship on the way, but she had coped with that, and with the strangeness of the new home in London, two crowded sour rooms above the sweat shop where Shmuel had a job as a presser, and tried to start a new life where there was no gold to be picked up in the streets but where they could indeed sleep safely in their beds.

  So it had all started again, the eternal round of trying to get enough to feed them all, and tolerating Shmuel’s constant demands for the comforts of her body and the inevitable pregnancies that followed. One after another they came, those babies, and one after the other they had died, and Milly had grown thinner and quieter, and more and more exhausted, clinging to the old ways and the old language in the middle of this alien city that was now her home. She had never learned to speak English, relying on the children to deal with everything that needed a grasp of the ugly speech — for she always hated the sound of it — and limped wearily from day to day until at last she had managed to produce one live child, an English baby, one baby who breathed and cried and went on breathing instead of quietly dying, and died herself in doing so.

  ‘Terrible thing, terrible,’ Mrs Feldman sighed to Sophie. ‘To leave such a baby as that. Terrible, you shouldn’t ever know of such things. And who’s to look after it, the poor little thing? Eh? Who’s to look after it? Fanny?’

  They both looked at Fanny, busily organizing the other women in her kitchen to make tea for all the visitors who had come to pay their respects to the grieving family, and then let their eyes slide sideways at each other, more eloquent in their silence than they could ever have been in words.

  Fanny too was asking herself the same question. The baby, to her surprise — and perhaps, though she would have denied that hotly, a little to her chagrin — was still very much alive and making a great deal of noise. It cried often and fed voraciously, still sucking from the rag teat on the bottle full of raw cow’s milk and seeming to be content on it — for an hour or so at a time, at any ra
te.

  Obviously the question of the baby and who was to care for it was not going to be settled as easily as she had first thought. Someone was going to have to take on the responsibility, and, excellent manager though she was, and ideal person for the task though she might seem to be to onlookers — for hadn’t she a splendid home of her own and a child of her own to prove her ability as a baby carer? — she had no intention of saddling herself with such a burden, even if that burden was her own sister. For one thing, there was something ridiculous about having a sister of that age; the last thing Fanny wanted was to be reminded of her own age at every turn, as surely she must be if she took the child into her home. A twenty-five-year age gap between them — ridiculous.

  Anyway, Fanny had had enough of babies and feeds and nappies. She’d got Monty out of them at last, by dint of considerable effort, and she had no intention of getting involved in all that again. There would be no more children of her own to fret over — Fanny had quite made up her mind to that and was clever enough to know how to ensure that her decision was implemented — so why should she fret over Milly’s? Milly had been a far from satisfactory mother for a woman as ambitious, as energetic, as Fanny felt herself to be; to take on her baby now would be to saddle herself with a burden she didn’t deserve.

  But someone would have to take over the child, and the sooner she, Fanny, gave thought to who that should be, the better. Because if she didn’t plan it properly, it would all go wrong, and somehow they’d try to dump the infant on her and then she’d have the trouble of regaining her good name. Whatever happened, she wasn’t going to take on the child permanently, but she wanted to be free of her in a way that left her still earning the respect of her neighbours.