by Louisa Young
Mabel and Nadine went Christmas shopping together. As they came out of a glove shop (soft green leather, for Iris, and pale blue for Kitty), Nadine said: ‘Is it always like that?’ to which Mabel responded: ‘That depends how you think it was …’
‘Self-conscious, and slightly panicky,’ Nadine said. ‘Them not you. With an undertone of disrespect.’
‘… because, you see, I don’t know what it’s like when I’m not there,’ Mabel said.
Nadine, who had never in her life been the only white woman in a room of negroes, thought about that.
‘You know what’s tiring,’ Mabel said suddenly. ‘Being the beginners’ course for everybody. Always being talked to about your skin colour. Or being looked at, knowing they’re thinking about your skin colour, and specifically not talking about it. Or not being looked at, because your skin colour is too confusing for them even to see you.’
Nadine wanted to say sorry, but it didn’t seem right. ‘Let’s have a cup of tea,’ she said, and steered Mabel towards her preferred tearoom. Yes, the waitress gave them a doubtful look; yes, Mabel – and Nadine too – stared her down.
‘The other day,’ Nadine said, ‘I was at dinner, and someone said to me, no Jew is safe in Europe – and then she stopped, as she realised what she had said, and apologised to me. I couldn’t think why for a moment. I thought, Oh, does she know I have Jewish relatives, in Italy? – and then I realised she meant me. You know, I didn’t used to be “a Jew”. Nobody was in the least bit interested. But now apparently I was a Jew all along. I’m starting to think, all right, I’ll go to a synagogue and see what it’s all about – but that’s absurd for me, really – I’m not going to start to be religious now. But the anti-Semitism – would I even have noticed, if I didn’t have my Italian cousins? I mean, Mabel, imagine if I read in The Times one morning that I wasn’t English, that my marriage was invalid, that my parents’ marriage was invalid, that I and my children are impure, that I can’t have a Christian servant, or work …’
Mabel looked at her.
‘No Jew is safe in Europe,’ she said.
‘But apparently nor are inverts or gypsies, or – would you be safe in Europe?’
Mabel looked at her coolly. ‘Under the Italians,’ she said, ‘You and I would not be allowed on the same bus. And Peter would have five years in jail for being with me.’
Nadine was flummoxed by this. ‘Are you sure?’ she said.
‘Well, maybe that’s only in Ethiopia,’ Mabel said. ‘Maybe they have one set of laws at home and one in the countries they have invaded. Like they have one for the ruling class and one for everybody else.’
‘How do you know about this?’ Nadine asked.
‘London is a place that people come to,’ Mabel said. ‘And when they’re here, they talk to each other.’
Nadine said, ‘Are you safe in London?’ She was feeling an abyss opening up around her: so much that I don’t know, that I have not seen.
‘Safe is something you can feel sometimes,’ Mabel said. ‘Not something you ever are.’
Nadine looked at her, and one of her waves of tearfulness surged up inside her.
‘This sort of thing could be against anybody, couldn’t it?’ she said. ‘There’s no logic. How long before it’s old people, or one-legged people? So it has to be fought, and then if there is war … and then we’re back to that, fearing, for everybody, all the time … and the only comfort for that is the idea that nobody is actually safe anywhere anyway, in wartime or in peace, because we can all fall sick, be knocked down by a motor car, and that’s so dispiriting and you know it only upsets other people if you indulge it, so you have to cheer up and be brave and put the damned kettle on …’
‘Yes,’ said Mabel, mildly.
Nadine looked up at her and grinned.
‘Sorry,’ she said.
Mabel raised her hand, in a tiny movement which conveyed everything of understanding, affection, forgiveness, and humour. It reminded Nadine of Rose.
They each took a sip: the sip of the moment passing, the sip of relief. The sip of punctuation.
‘If there is war,’ Nadine said, then stopped herself and asked: ‘Where were you, in the last one?’
‘I was a child,’ Mabel said. ‘In London, and touring the country with my mama.’
They talked about that for a while, and about Nadine’s war, and each began to see what an exceptional woman the other was, and they ordered more tea.
‘So do you feel Jewish?’ Mabel asked.
‘No. I hardly even knew I was. I wonder if my mother did that on purpose.’
Mabel smiled low. ‘Not a choice I have for Iris.’
‘But would you?’ Nadine asked. ‘If you could?’
‘No,’ Mabel said. ‘That would be a lie. There’s no problem in being what we are. The problem is in how we are treated. And, you know, the world may improve.’
‘I’ve never had that,’ Nadine said. ‘Because it’s invisible, I suppose. Nobody ever knew I was Jewish. I slightly feel I’m letting the side down …’
‘Depends which side you’re on,’ Mabel said. ‘And what you think the sides are. And whose geometry you accept.’
‘Moral and social geometry?’
‘I’m on the side of the kind,’ said Mabel.
‘And the honest,’ said Nadine.
‘And the hardworking.’
‘And the peace lovers—’
‘Yeah, we’re getting kind of biblical here,’ said Mabel.
‘I am on the side of the peace lovers,’ said Nadine, and Mabel cried out ‘Nadine – why do people fall for it? For those Big Boys’ Gangs?’
‘A need to belong, I think. It’s easier to feel you belong if you can point to someone else and say “They don’t belong.”’
‘In the States,’ Mabel said, ‘the poor whites need the poor blacks – someone to feel better than.’
‘Hm,’ said Nadine. ‘I honestly don’t think I need to feel better than anyone else.’
‘That is a lucky position to be in,’ Mabel said. ‘It’s because you’re all right.’
‘I am,’ said Nadine. ‘I am.’ And then the tearfulness roared up again, and she started crying, and the next thing was she was telling Mabel about Aldo and Nenna and the others, about Tom’s campaign and how they had tried to help, about how since Kristallnacht politics had become suddenly very personal.
‘Sweetheart,’ Mabel said, and the word made Nadine cry the more, because despite Mabel being younger than her it was motherly. ‘I know. And people say they’re not interested in politics, as if that means politics won’t be interested in them.’
‘They’re Fascist and Jews,’ Nadine said. ‘They’ll be everybody’s enemy … we’ve invited them, I’m proud of what you said – London being a place people can come to. Riley’s said he can give Aldo work; they can stay with us—’
‘Not unless you turn the house into an internment camp—’ Mabel said.
‘You see! You see? Mussolini declares that they’re not Italian because they’re Jewish, but the British government won’t go along with that, they’ll say they’re Italian therefore Fascist – and they are Fascist.’
And that surprised Mabel. Nadine attempted to explain.
‘It’s all the same nonsense, in the end,’ she said. ‘Surreal nonsense. By Fascist law, I’m not allowed to exist. Mabel, if there is war, would you go back to America?’
‘No!’ Mabel said. ‘You know what US laws forbid me to do? Be married to my husband, number one.’
Nadine fiddled with her teaspoon and asked: ‘Do you ever feel you should be over there, campaigning, and so forth?’
Mabel yelped.
‘What, are you going to go campaigning for the Jews in Nazi-land?’
Nadine said: ‘Perhaps I—’
‘Stop that right there,’ Mabel said. ‘When the fight comes, we join in. It ain’t so likely a couple of middle-aged ladies can start the fight. We carry on fighting our little fights, sprea
din’ the word. Anyway, I don’t feel American any more. And my blood is from everywhere, insofar as I know. In America, I’d be the most uppity kind of negro – one who not only left, but succeeded. I ain’t going back till I play Carnegie Hall. And I ain’t never gonna play Carnegie Hall.’
‘Your voice has gone more American,’ Nadine said.
‘Does that when I get relaxed,’ Mabel said. ‘Or excited.’
*
They all went to church on Christmas morning, crunching up the frosty path. They all sang out, side by side, and Nadine smiled to see Peter, Mabel, Kitty and Iris’s eyes all fill with tears at the same glorious crunching chord in the penultimate line of the chorus of ‘Hark, the Herald Angels Sing’.
Afterwards Kitty put a handful of Christmas roses on Julia’s grave, mossy now, and settled, and Mabel held Peter’s hand tight.
*
Iris came back to her mother in the New Year, sheepish, lonely and forgiving, after the night at the Serpentine with Tom. The massive relief when she did so seemed energy enough to carry them into this new life, down here. They still had the flat in Belgravia. Lexington Street had gone, taking that life with it. They were no longer three generations of black women making music and going to church. They were the exotic (how they grew to hate that word) musical wife and daughter of an English gentleman, and eyebrows rose when they came into the room.
Iris had hoped to start lessons at the Royal College immediately, to go up on the train, stay at the flat, but that proved not possible. Mabel thought – if I had been open, earlier, could she have been studying all these years, at this higher level? But that made her think about Thornton, and the past, the great and full past … she couldn’t regret anything. After a false start or two they had found a piano teacher in Sidcup, an older woman, strong on technique. Sir Robert introduced her, and Mabel could not help realising that it was this connection which made the woman accept Iris. Mabel wondered if he knew it. She found that she could not ask him. So Iris worked, and worked: listened, learnt, played. Sir Robert took her to concerts, and sent her tickets. Once or twice Mabel and Peter found them heads down together over a score: Debussy, Rachmaninoff, the sweetness of shared obsession and concentration.
Mrs Bax, Julia’s old bridge partner, and two of her friends, came to call. They quite simply stared at Mabel and Iris as if they were creatures in the zoo, and asked if they could pat Iris’s hair. ‘They might as well be taking notes,’ Iris hissed, in the hall, as she and her mother both left the room pretending to be looking for Mrs Joyce. Mabel laughed. Mrs Joyce caught them giggling together, for a moment, but then Iris said she wasn’t going back in there to be peered at and reported on to the ladies of the neighbourhood, ‘half of whom probably wanted to marry Peter themselves’. At this, Mrs Joyce looked at her with new respect, so later Iris wandered into the kitchen and explained to her about how dull it is for negro people to have their negro-ness gone on about all the time.
‘Quite apart from the fact,’ she said, ‘that I’m as white as I am negro anyway. And I am a daughter of this house. Peter’s daughter.’
(Mrs Joyce said to Mr Joyce later that she was grateful for the conversation. She had been a little concerned, about how to behave, as it’s not what a person is used to, children from long ago suddenly popping up fully grown and being presented as if they’d always been there, and – you know – illegitimate – but then not illegitimate after all – but of course the girl – Miss Iris – was right. The parents were married now and Mr Peter had put everything right, even if the new Mrs Peter wasn’t, um, English.)
*
In the spring and summer the English countryside, it turned out, was beautiful, and the garden was lovely, and Nadine came down with Riley, and Kitty came a few times. But when Iris cycled back from her class in tears, because the teacher had said she could no longer teach her because other pupils’ parents had complained, on the same day that the girl in the haberdashers had again ignored Mabel, simply ignored her, said not a word, as she served customer after customer before her, and nobody – nobody – said, ‘Oh, I think this lady was before me’ – Mabel bit her patient lip, threw some cushions at Peter’s cello, still reclining there in the corner of the beautiful sitting room, and cried out that enough was enough.
‘Please, please can we go back to town,’ she said to Peter. ‘I’m not getting this English negro country lady thing right. Or it’s not getting me right. Please. Please.’
And he said, ‘Of course, my love, of course.’
Later, he said: ‘At this rate they’ll be needing the place as a military hospital before the year’s out anyway,’ but he had recognised their needs, and that was what mattered.
Chapter Twenty-One
Norfolk, September 1939
Riley watched the weeks slip away during that odd summer. He was reading the papers all the time, and taking everything in: Czechoslovakia in the spring, the end of the fighting in Spain, Mussolini and Hitler signing their ‘Pact of Steel’. Initially it had been going to be called a ‘Pact of Blood’. Dear God what is wrong with these people?
His mind of course turned to Aldo. Was blood and steel what Aldo had in mind? Of course not. Aldo, Nadine’s flesh and blood. Now flesh and blood was a pact Riley understood. Flesh and blood, or blood and steel … Hardly a difficult choice, you’d have thought.
He noticed that babies were being given little gas masks of their own. Evacuation plans were drawn up. The country was hovering on a starting line, waiting for a starting gun which didn’t go. It was terribly hard for everyone to concentrate, as their fears and desires and opinions flickered about the place, bouncing off each other, ricocheting. War or not war. The Up-And-At-’Em school; the Never-Agains. The young people who knew nothing, the practically minded, and those who were still like Peter used to be. He assumed there were others who were still like Peter used to be – in their sheds, their pubs, their back parlours, their street corners, saying nothing, paralysed, still, twenty years later. Not everyone had been able to heal up in Peter’s symbolic ten years. And here we are, another ten years on. He did not want to see a baby in a gas mask.
He found that he was fiddling with his splint more, unscrewing it, screwing it up. It was uncomfortable. Nerves, he thought. Nadine came in one day when he had taken it out, and found him just staring at the gap, in the mirror. She took the splint from his hand, and put it down, and kissed him.
It really did make him nervous, and then the fact that it made him nervous made him nervous again, in a slightly different key.
*
Nadine had arranged the family holiday. It was to be two weeks of calm and rest in a hotel on the Norfolk coast from the end of August. There would be walking, and bathing or sailing if they wanted. Kitty had agreed to come for a few days – they hadn’t seen much of her for months. He and Nadine were glad that she was coming. He wanted very much to keep tabs on everybody, everything. He had held his wife closer, since Kristallnacht.
A couple of days before they were to go, the Nazis and the Soviets signed their non-aggression pact. Well, that’s it, Riley thought. Hitler’s got nothing to be scared of now. He’ll just carry on, barging around …
He spent his time in the hotel library, reading and asking himself questions which the newspapers didn’t answer. What will happen? What will happen to Tom? What will happen to Kitty? He thought about how quick they had all expected it to be, last time, and how quickly those who had expected it to be quick had died. The term ‘last time’ took on a life of its own in his mind. Last time, he thought, it was the war to end all wars. He thought he’d better concentrate on the particular. What does a publisher do during wartime? There’ll be rationing, of paper almost certainly – there’ll be messages to be put across, propaganda – I can do that.
When Nadine told him to go and get some air, he did. Sometimes he sat in a deckchair on the breezy beach wrestling with his newspaper. It’s all set in place like buoys at sea, a runway, a flare path. This is the rout
e; that’s all. Nothing to be done.
*
Kitty arrived a day later than the others, screeching into the hotel’s drive in a tiny car with the roof down. Johnny Carmichael was driving it. She looked utterly enchanted with herself as she burst on to the verandah where they were having tea: pink-cheeked, windblown despite her scarf, convinced of her own adulthood.
‘Darlings,’ she said. ‘I do hope you don’t mind, I’ve brought Johnny. Tom knows him and he’s quite adorable. He’s booked his room and everything, and will be perfectly happy to take people out in his simply fantastic car.’
Riley had to stop himself laughing at her – dear Kitty. He shook hands with Carmichael and wondered how he felt about this. A gentleman caller! Well, he looks like a gentleman, for what that’s worth. When Tom came in from striding the dunes, he was delighted to see Carmichael, and that sent the visitor up in Riley’s estimation.
The delight didn’t last long. Kitty had brought the post from Bayswater Road. ‘Here’s one from Nenna, I think!’ she said.
As Tom took the envelope from her his hand shook.
‘You haven’t heard from them for a long time,’ Nadine said. Tom was just staring at it.
‘Let me,’ she said, and he let her take it from him gently. She opened it, and handed him the flimsy sheet of paper.
Riley could see the tearstains. Oh, he thought, and Carmichael said, ‘Old man—’
Tom looked up at them, looked round. ‘I’ll read it to you,’ he said, and someone said ‘Oh Tom are you sure—’ and he shushed them, and said, ‘We’re all rather in this together now, aren’t we?’ so then everyone was quiet and he read.