The lab was a wonderland. Hand-welded instruments blew up in the middle of the room. Men in white coats crawled around on all fours searching for a dropped crystal the size of a crumb. Her supervisor was none other than Herbert Littlewood, whom everyone called the Wizard. He taught her that to be a scientist meant to be fearless, to love surprises, accidents and explosions, because that way lay discovery. And all of them, the Wizard and his fellow sorcerers, all of them predicted a bright future for young Esther Adler.
‘And then what happened?’ Miriam would ask (innocently when she was small, more provocatively as she got older).
‘Then I married your father and we moved into this big house and had you. Isn’t that wonderful?’ She ruffled Miriam’s hair. ‘It’s important to appreciate the present.’
Once, when Miriam was small, she cried: ‘Like my birthday present!’
‘Just like that,’ her mother said, and added silently: just like a birthday present; one that is not exactly what one had wished for.
*
Esther was the youngest of eight, and the only one of the siblings to display an extraordinary mathematical talent. As a child, she had loved the story of Joseph, who dreamed that his older brothers bowed down to him as slaves. She thought Joseph a fool, though, for telling his brothers about it; no wonder they sold him to a passing Ishmaelite.
To her teachers, it was obvious that she had inherited her brilliance from her father, a diamond cutter, especially since she had early on displayed a passion for geometry. The wonder girl alone knew that her gift had nothing to do with her father, despite their shared interest in crystals. He was an able cutter, but he did not have the inquisitive mind of a scientist, nor a sense of how things fit together.
She remembered very clearly the first time she beheld the beauty of smaller shapes arranged within a larger shape. She had been about five years old, and had watched trapezes and triangles being fitted into a larger rectangle by a person with a most extraordinary sense of space and geometry: her mother, who was expertly laying out a dress pattern on a stretch of fabric.
Esther never shared this memory with anyone. She would have been mocked by her colleagues had she cited her mother’s dressmaking as an influence. Her mother would have been embarrassed. But Esther continued to watch her mother lay out dress patterns, and imagined that she was quietly aware of her talent, or at least proud that she ended up with less scrap material than any other woman in Hatton Garden.
Old Mr Adler showed Esther around like a particularly well-cut gem whose perfection reflected his own skill. Her success was his reward for all he had sacrificed, for his tenacity in teaching his children the craft, even the girls, even though his friends and neighbours thought this eccentric.
‘It’ll make it hard to find a match,’ they warned him. ‘Who wants a wife who coughs like an old cutter?’
In the evenings, he would gather his children in his workshop. Two high wooden tables pressed into a hot, dark, dirty attic, a nightmarish doll’s house that had followed them from Antwerp to London. Three cutters hunched over their spinning scaifes on one side, their calloused hands gripping wooden tangs that held the stone against the disc. Esther’s three gangly brothers crammed into the narrow aisle behind the cutters’ backs, kindling braziers and softening lead balls over hissing gas flames: Nathan and Simon, and Solly, whom they called the rabbi when their parents were out of earshot. Sticky, greasy black dust crept up their noses and stuck to their fingertips. Esther would wipe her face and then that was blackened too. The white bows around her sisters’ braids had long turned grey. Her thick brown wool stockings and the patched flannel dress tied high under her chin itched with trapped heat and dust.
Then one of the cutters would stop his wheel, smear a slick of oil across it, sprinkle it with diamond dust and lower his stone again. Fifty-seven times. Fifty-seven facets for a sparkling full cut, eight facets for a cheap splinter.
The men sang over the hissing gas flames, folk songs in strange tongues when it was a good day, a fifty-seven-facet day. When it was an eight-facet day, you could hear only the hissing gas flames and the clanging metal and another, deeper hiss, the hiss of diamond grinding diamond.
Esther and her sisters kneeled in a corner in their thick flannel dresses, folding paper into rectangles that would later be labelled with dates and names.
The door opened and her father hurried in. He untied the big leather wallet with the stock, carefully placed it on his desk and gathered his children around him to show them a large cut stone he had just brought in. It was tucked away in a folded piece of paper like a humble splinter, but he unwrapped it with reverence. ‘Look, if the cut is perfect every ray of light will follow the best path. It goes into the stone and bounces round and round, then shoots straight back into your eye. It’s not that hard to understand, is it?’
But they all found it very hard to understand. All of them, except Esther.
He was speaking to them now in the formal German and French he used to flatter clients. When he scolded the children or gave them orders, he mixed Yiddish with Flemish. English hardly ever made it up the steep staircase and into the dirty workshop. It usually waited on the street like a patient English gentleman, and when the children went home at night they picked it up and spoke it among themselves.
‘Just look. Take this loupe – Nathan, give your sister your loupe – and look. This one’s perfectly clear. Now think about the light. First there’s the light reflected off the surface, what we call the adamantine lustre. Then there’s the light that enters the stone, and which we mustn’t let out the back. And finally we have what we call the fire of the diamond, which I won’t bother explaining to you, since Esther appears to be the only one here who is following me. Esther, do you happen to have any brains to spare for your brothers?’
There was a knock on the door and her father slipped the stone into his pocket. He whistled once to send the boys back to their braziers. The girls followed, except for Esther, who pretended to tie her shoelaces so she could stay and watch. A heavy-set man came blundering in, steadying himself on the doorframe to catch his breath. He held a parcel under his arm: a roll of newspaper tied with string. It smelled of fish and she already disliked this man for bringing a fish with him that would spread its smell in the workshop.
The men moved to the desk by the door. Her father pulled an envelope from a drawer and unfolded it. He held the loupe in his right hand and his left sorted through the tiny splinters on the paper, pushing some to the left, some to the right.
‘Forget this one, and this one. Four or five are worth the trouble,’ her father said in Flemish. ‘Take the rest back to Café Flora. Tell your client they’re not worth my time.’
The man murmured something.
‘You could have saved yourself the climb,’ Esther’s father said.
The man reached for his own leather pouch but her father shook his head. His voice grew angry and he used a word Esther had never heard before.
After the visitor left, her father stayed at his desk and rolled the loupe between his fingers, as if he regretted having sent him away. He had forgotten all about the lesson, and with that look on his face none of the children dared remind him.
Esther quietly repeated the words that had enchanted her: ‘Adamantine lustre.’ She picked up a piece of chalk and drew the shape of a diamond on the table, gave it different facets the way a cutter would before getting to work. Then she wiped it away with the ball of her hand.
‘If the diamond is so clear,’ Esther asked Shimon, who had stopped his wheel to apply a new coat of dust, ‘then why are we all covered in soot?’
‘Because diamond is coal,’ he said without looking up from his loupe. ‘You know how a diamond is made, don’t you? By a great weight pressing down on coal.’
He ran his finger over the scaife and dabbed a black dot on Esther’s nose.
She turned her smudged hands. It was true. They looked as if she had been playing in the coal cellar. H
er brother Nathan tugged at one of her braids and told her to stop pestering the cutters.
‘Help me with this if you’re bored.’
He passed her a metal cylinder containing diamond splinters and debris swept off the worktop, and a metal pestle and a hammer. ‘Just clobber it until it’s really fine, all right?’
And she clobbered. And clobbered. And clobbered.
It was dark outside, night-dark, when the diamonds had finally turned into dust. She did not mind because it was dark outside even during the day, fog-dark. Nathan called the country Fogland. Every day English people stood in the street and agreed that it was awfully foggy, gosh yes, terribly foggy, as if it was an astonishing novelty. Esther’s mother never mentioned the fog, though sometimes when they hung up the laundry she told the girls about the gardens of Antwerp, where lines and lines of washing flashed white like teeth in the sun.
That evening the fog was so thick that Esther let her fingertips trail along the walls to make sure she was still on the pavement. With the other hand she grabbed Nathan’s sleeve and asked him what that man had tried to sell their father.
‘An emerald.’
‘And why didn’t we want it?’
Nathan stopped and waited until the others were out of earshot. He gave her a minty humbug, which she clicked against her teeth with her tongue. Then he explained to her that a lot of emeralds were cracked but he’d learned to uncrack them. All you needed was a tub full of oil and a pipe with a vacuum. Take a pile of cracked stones and make them flawless. No one would ever know the difference, until some lady wore her big green ring to a ball and, eek, it leaked oil all over her silk dress. But by then the emerald would long be sold and Nathan would have made a packet. What was one soiled dress compared to a lifetime in an attic?
If he had his own way, he said, he wouldn’t mind experimenting. Mix a bit of lead and water, make a nice crystal. With a proper cut it’s as pretty as a brilliant. Mount it on a fine ring, sell it to the lady who just threw away her emerald because it spoiled her dearest dress. Give a cut to the jeweller and pocket the rest. That was his idea, but it was secret, did she understand? Their father was strict about that sort of thing, and if Esther breathed a single word, Nathan would hang her up by her braids.
She knew he did not really mean that.
‘What’s a shlemiel?’ she asked.
‘Someone who’s not as stupid as our father thinks he is.’
That night, her mother came into the kitchen and screeched.
‘Esther Louisa Jeannette Adler, what on earth do you think you are doing in the middle of my kitchen, filthy as a scrapheap, and . . .’ she looked at Esther’s feet, ‘. . . standing on a lump of coal!’
‘Making diamonds.’
And her mother sat down on the big carved trunk in the corner, put her head in her hands and laughed and laughed.
‘Adler,’ she called, ‘come and see what your daughter has come up with now.’
Esther put down the metal weight she had been holding with both hands and stepped off the lump of coal. Her face was hot with tears and anger.
‘But if we make diamonds we’ll never have to go to the workshop again!’ she cried. ‘We’ll never cough again, and we’ll never have to clobber diamonds again, ever.’
She thought: and Nathan won’t make filthy forgeries.
Her mother stopped calling for Adler to come and watch the spectacle. Instead, she took a soapy cloth and wiped Esther’s face. Esther had expected to be slapped for cursing the workshop. But her mother merely continued cleaning her face.
Many years later, Esther would think about what had been on her mother’s mind that night. Perhaps her mother had been recalling the delight of Esther’s teachers, her little girl’s curiosity, her facility with weights and numbers; perhaps she had thought, why not give this one a little more time away from the workshop, a little more time to sit at the kitchen table and learn her grammar and arithmetic? Perhaps she thought: we have four other girls who can help me scrub pots. We have three boys who can rub two diamonds against each other for hours until they are perfectly round and ready to be cut. Why not let this one, the smallest, spend more time with her neat exercise books?
The older girls were born in Antwerp, where the neighbours peered into your tureens and the community’s only matchmaker hurried from door to door with his black notebook. Esther was born after they moved to Hatton Garden: a spring child for a new beginning.
The next day, Esther was told that she did not have to come straight to the workshop after school. She would still have to help with some of the tasks, but she could sit in her mother’s clean kitchen where she would not be breathing black air. And she would never again be told to make diamond dust.
3
Esther won a scholarship to a women’s college at sixteen, an award for best master’s thesis at twenty-one, a research post in the Wizard’s lab at twenty-two. And then she was suddenly in a great rush to marry. The family could not understand why; unlike her sisters, she had not been under any pressure. Perhaps, they thought, it was only natural for a woman ultimately to prefer a warm home over a cold laboratory. With the help of friends and relations, a suitable young man was found. An architect. His leg was in a plaster cast and he walked with a strong limp. Something to do with steep crooked steps and a pail of soapy water.
Before the leg was healed, Esther became Mrs Morningstar. On their wedding day, she circled him seven times under the chuppah and thought: what an utterly primitive and superstitious thing to do; I might as well be poking a stick at the sky to make it rain.
After the ceremony, she muttered to him: ‘It’s all a lot of mumbo jumbo, isn’t it? Isn’t it?’ And he stared at her with an expression of astonished hurt.
They moved into a Victorian pile in Hampstead left to Esther by an aunt, a confirmed spinster, with the recommendation that she turn it into ‘an academy for scientifically-minded young ladies’. Esther ignored the recommendation. She prepared to pull the cloth cover over her spectrometer for good and fill the big empty house with children.
‘I didn’t marry you to turn you into a cook and a maid,’ her new husband said gruffly. ‘You might as well keep your work until we have a child for every room.’
‘And then you will turn me into a cook and a maid?’
No amount of ambition would make her return to the Wizard’s lab, but she found a modest, quiet teaching post at Bentham College, which she imagined would lead to greater things.
The leg never quite healed under the plaster cast. Some nerve had been squashed, some vein compressed for too long, some bone rejoined incorrectly. The calf withered and Mrs Morningstar grew used to her husband’s limping shuffle echoing through the many empty rooms of the house.
4
Down in the quad, students were unstringing the dead lanterns and stacking empty cups. The Bentham College show, Mrs Morningstar supposed, had been a success. She weighed the medal in her hand again, opened the drawer, but on an impulse slid it into her coat pocket instead of locking it away.
‘Gottfried von der Weide’ read the name on the medal. It was a name made for being engraved in gold, a name that evoked images of old-world aristocracy and stiff-backed gentlemen dancing in ballrooms. Neither the medal nor the name quite fit the awkward young foreigner who had always been lonely in the Wizard’s lab. She remembered how he had once fought desperately with his white coat until he realized someone had sewn up the sleeves. As pale and pudgy as a flour dumpling, he spoke with a stammer and wiped his sweaty palm on his coat before shaking hands. The chaps never asked him to the pub after work. They did not ask her, either. The two of them would work in the lab long after the others had left, but their enforced company was shy and awkward. Later, when the men decided that they liked and even admired her, Gottfried had already returned to Heidelberg. They wrote to each other once or twice; questions of recruitment, equipment. Yet two years ago he had sent her his Nobel medal, smuggled to London from Heidelb
erg in the double-walled suitcases and thickly lined jackets of men who knew well that the German government had imposed a ban on the export of gold. Why me? she had asked the man who knocked on her office door one day with the medal in a small blue case. Why not the Wizard? And it alarmed her that people should have such trust in her, that a persecuted scientist should send her his Nobel medal, while a cousin she barely knew had sent her her only son, whom she had taken in as a lodger. If she was considered the most trustworthy person these people knew, what did that say about the state of the world?
*
With her hand in the sagging coat pocket, she crossed the quad. Her daughter must have gone home. She took the train up to Hampstead, where the horrid old house awaited her, its empty rooms now gradually filling up: not with laughing children, but with relatives from the Continent waiting for a passage to America.
‘Is that you, Essie?’ her husband called from upstairs when she turned the key in the lock. She rummaged through the envelopes on the silver tray by the door before she replied. Bills, subscriptions, and then, a thin envelope stamped with an address she had not read since her marriage.
Glancing at the staircase to make sure no one was watching, she tore open the envelope with uncharacteristic nervousness.
It was a letter from the Wizard, or rather, a few formal lines typed out by his secretary. A tap on the shoulder, the call to a research mission of national importance. It would not be particularly glamorous: she would probably sit in a field and watch test persons fire projectiles into mattresses, or work on the theoretical side, calculating trajectories and scatter fields. But she would be working with the Wizard’s set again, with bright lights who illuminated each other’s work.
Of Love and Other Wars Page 4