Orphan of Angel Street (44 page)

He reached round for her lolling breasts, sculpting them into peaks while she squirmed. He let out a groan of relief and pleasure. Kissing her hair he slid up into her, feeling her, moist, taut, enclosing him. In a fraction of a moment, before thought ceased his mind said: at last, something proper, something right.

The next morning Mercy was sitting restlessly with Helga, Stevie and young Andreas Kesler in the nursery when the doorbell rang. Helga, oblivious to the effect this was having on Mercy, continued to chatter on.

Mercy found she was holding her breath and wishing Helga would do the same. She strained to hear the voices downstairs. Her heart was racing. Surely – she just caught the sound of it – that was Paul? A moment later she heard footsteps in the passage and Gerder Kesler appeared smiling at the door, her spectacles catching the light from the window.

‘Your friend is here, Mercy dear.’

‘Oh – thank you!’ Mercy scrambled to her feet in confusion. Gerder Kesler was even more informal than Margaret and barely treated her like a servant at all. ‘You shouldn’t have had to come . . .’

‘Not at all.’ She smiled at the obvious elation on Mercy’s face. ‘I’m only sorry the weather’s so inclement for you.’

‘Oh . . . well,’ Mercy said. Weather? What did weather matter! ‘Never mind.’ She hesitated, awaiting permission of some sort.

‘It’s all right, dear, you may go. Helga is perfectly fine looking after little Steven.’

Mercy kissed Stevie’s cheek hurriedly with a ‘Be a good boy now, won’t you?’ smiled gratefully at Helga and dashed for her hat and coat.

He was waiting for her in the hall and the sight of him, slightly dishevelled-looking as ever, filled her with immense tenderness and joy. He was real! He had come for her!

‘Hello,’ he said, with a shyness that suggested he, too, might be afraid she’d changed her mind.

‘They’re letting me off – the days you’re here. Isn’t it marvellous?’ she whispered.

Paul’s face fell a fraction as he picked up his sodden umbrella from the stand behind the door. They went out into the rain and he opened it and held it over her. ‘The thing is – I’m afraid I’ve only got two days.’ He sounded apologetic. ‘They want me back on board the day after tomorrow.’

Mercy took his arm and squeezed it. ‘Two whole days though!’

He looked down at her fondly, relieved. ‘Yes! Let’s make the most of it.’

‘How about saying hello properly then?’

‘What – here?’ He looked round the respectable Upper West Side street.

‘No one knows who we are, do they? And anyway, I thought you didn’t care about what people think.’ She felt euphoric in the rain in this great, exciting city.

Laughing, he scooped her closer to him and their lips met, finding each other hungrily.

Paul rested his forehead against hers for a moment and gave a loud sigh of happiness. ‘Everything feels right again as soon as I see you. I can somehow make sense of things. See a point to it all.’

Mercy took his face in her hands. ‘I’ve missed you’ – kiss – ‘missed you’ – kiss – ‘missed you!’

They set off with more purpose, arms linked, elated at simply being together, and further intoxicated at the thought of this place to explore freely.

The rain fell steadily, the sound of it all round them. They walked the distance of a few blocks through Riverside Park, smelling the pungent scent of wet spring flowers and hearing the doleful blast from the hooters of steam boats chugging along the brown water of the Hudson. Then they turned east again. Paul had a plan of the city which he opened while Mercy held the umbrella.

‘Let’s come back through Central Park later, shall we? It’ll be interesting to look at more of the streets.’ He glanced down at her. ‘Are you all right? We’re going to get soaking wet.’

Her pigeon grey eyes beamed back at him from under her blue hat. ‘I don’t care!’

They walked on, stopping to admire grand buildings, talking, exclaiming, swerving round the puddles which were forming everywhere.

‘I tell you what though.’ He stopped abruptly as they made their way towards Fifth Avenue. ‘I think I can remember the address – shall we go and see if we can find the Petrowskis?’

Paul was certain that Tomek’s scrap of paper had said Broome Street. When they reached the Lower East Side, they found themselves in streets edged by high, dingy tenements between which streetcars rattled and cars hooted. The buildings were astonishingly shabby with shutters hanging off and ancient, peeling paint. From the windows spilled hanks of bedding, and laundry festooned every possible spare hanging place. Racks of clothes for sale splayed across the sidewalks. And there were people everywhere, teeming through the streets, sitting on steps, standing in doorways, yelling from windows. Mercy looked round in fascination at the men in shabby black clothes like dishevelled crows with their hats and beards and ringlets, and the shawls and embroidered blouses, the stiff, old-fashioned dresses and assortments of garments and materials worn side by side that she’d never seen in her life before, on people of a kind she’d barely ever seen either, with their high cheekbones and raven hair. And a pandemonium of different languages, guttural sounds shouted along the milling streets where you had to shout simply to be heard at all.

Broome Street was as crowded with activity as anywhere else. Paul remembered that Tomek’s number had been forty-three. They walked slowly along the row of poor tenement houses, amid a curious gaggle of ragged children, and found a house with forty-three chalked on the door. They looked uncertainly at each other. A man sitting on the step of a house two doors away stared at them, then hawked and spat into the gutter.

‘I think this is right,’ Paul said. ‘Can you hold this a minute?’ They had bought bread and spiced meat in the Italian Quarter on their way, and Paul handed the bag of food to her.

Going to knock, he found that the door shifted a little and he nudged it with his shoulder. When it opened he turned and grimaced comically at Mercy.

‘Well, here goes.’ He led her inside.

When the door swung shut again they found themselves in almost total darkness. The air was thick with smoke and there was an overpowering stench of lavatories mixed with stale smells of cooking and a general frowstiness.

‘Ugh,’ Mercy said. She was afraid to move. But then she said, ‘Listen, Paul – that’s a babby crying upstairs! Could be little Peschka.’

‘It could.’ Paul went and opened the front door again to let in some light. It was then they noticed that the walls and ceiling of the hallway were also very dark and seemed to be covered with some sort of pattern.

‘Good Lord!’ Paul tapped his hand on the wall. ‘I do believe it’s lined with – tin, it feels like. Embossed tin! How strange. Bit wasted in here, isn’t it? It’s like the Black Hole of Calcutta. I tell you what – let’s see if there’s anyone in here.’

He went to an inner door off the hallway and knocked softly. After a moment it opened a crack and a woman’s face, very pale and gaunt, peered out at them. Mercy could just make out an arc of frizzy red hair round her forehead which was wrinkled with suspicion.

‘Er, Petrowski?’ Paul said to her. ‘Petrowski? Polska?’

Without altering her expression she opened the door a little wider, pulling the ends of her shawl round her. Mercy heard a clicking sound behind her, comfortingly familiar, and realized it was a sewing machine. The woman pointed silently up the stairs.

It was Tomek who opened the door. His face remained blank for a moment as he peered at them in the gloom. It was then transformed with joy as he recognized them and he pulled Paul into his arms, chattering madly.

Two young children also peeped out through the door at them.

‘Yola – Yola!’ Tomek shouted.

Yola came to them from what appeared to be a second room behind the first. As she walked across the bare boards of the dingy room and saw them, emotion immediately welled in her dark eyes. She clung to Mercy, weeping, kissing her and clutching her hands, as if she were a true sister who’d come all the way from Poland to find her.

The Petrowskis’ living quarters, which they shared with Tomek’s brother and his wife and children, consisted of two rooms, where they had to cook, wash, live and sleep, amid the smoke from the range. Yola showed Mercy the little back room in which a bed was curtained off from the small amount of space remaining. She indicated that she and Tomek slept on the floor in the other room.

Yola’s sister-in-law Zanya, who spoke some broken English, explained haltingly to Mercy that her husband was finding Tomek a job at the docks, that soon he and Yola might be able to find a place of their own. She was taller than Yola, with a lighter complexion and more pointed face, her hair fastened back in a green scarf. When Yola told her who Mercy was she smiled and kissed her.

Yola looked exhausted, Mercy thought, but did not seem downhearted. The four of them and Zanya’s children shared the food that Mercy and Paul had brought and Zanya brewed coffee on the stove. Tomek insisted that Mercy sit on one of the chairs and Yola, suckling Peschka, had the other, while the others sat round on the floor. The Poles exclaimed to each other over the Italian meat, which was as strange to them as to Mercy.

They communicated in the usual way of nods and gestures, and with a little help this time from Zanya.

‘Is Yola happy to be here?’ Mercy asked her.

Zanya asked the question of Yola and the two women laughed.

‘She is happy,’ Zanya said. ‘She is . . .’ She struggled for the words. ‘We have help here – she not alone. Not to be hungry now . . .’

Mercy nodded, understanding.

‘She will be sewing,’ Zanya said.

Yola suddenly got up and went into the other room for a moment. She returned holding a brass candlestick which she unwrapped from a piece of soft cloth, and a photograph. The woman who stared back from it had a face as lined as bark on a tree. Mercy looked up and saw that Yola’s eyes were once again full of emotion.

‘Her mother,’ Zanya said.

She didn’t need to explain that they would never see each other again. The candlestick was evidently also one of the few precious possessions she had brought from Poland.

They sat for some time. Mercy held Peschka and fussed over her, and then they left, promising to visit again the next day.

Mercy’s two days with Paul passed with terrible speed. That first night she lay in bed across the room from Helga, praying that the woman would soon cease her continual chatter, fall asleep and leave her alone with her thoughts.

When Helga did eventually sleep, Mercy turned on her back, the bed creaking as she moved. It had been wonderful to see the Petrowskis had fared well on Ellis Island and now had hope of a new life. Their bravery, the risk they had taken, filled her with burning determination. She, like them, would leave her past behind and look forward. Whatever James Adair had done, she would leave it behind. She would not let it mar her future. Like the Petrowskis she was going to begin again.

When we get back to England, she thought, I’ll look round for something else. I’ll get away from him. She would be sad to leave Margaret after all her kindness, but her presence in the house could only mean trouble for Margaret. She would wait for the right time, for something suitable. Then she would go. She would wait for Paul.

The day she had just spent with him seemed the most perfect she had ever had. When they parted that night they had held each other for a long time in a shadowy spot round the corner from the Keslers’ house. They touched and kissed and he spoke such loving words to her. Her body filled with desire for him, seemed to have a will of its own. For a moment she couldn’t forget the revulsion she had felt with James Adair, but she forced him out of her mind again.

I loved Tom, she thought, I can love. I feel even more for Paul, love him with all my heart, mind, body . . . His words of affection, of passion, were still fresh in her mind and she was full of wonder.

‘I want to be with you always, Mercy. I want to spend my life with you. Life would be nothing without you now.’

She was almost too thrilled and excited to lie still.

I must be, she thought, the happiest person in the world.

The next evening they had to part. When they met in the morning this still seemed far off – they had a whole day in front of them! But it rushed past.

Once more they walked, talking and laughing all day. They watched the almost imperceptible movement of the East River from Manhattan Bridge, bent their heads back to look up at New York’s most soaring buildings, and once more visited the Petrowskis to say, for the time being, their goodbyes. Amid the hugs and blessings and tears, she and Paul promised that they would keep in touch, and they left them in their cramped little rooms which held so much hope for the future.

Late that afternoon, Mercy and Paul walked back, with painful reluctance, towards the Keslers’ house.

‘Now’s our chance to see more of the park,’ Paul said.

‘Slowly,’ Mercy added wretchedly. ‘Oh Paul, I wish we could just stay here. Forget about everything else and start a new life ourselves.’

‘I know. I wish too.’

The closer the time to part was approaching, the more difficult they both found it to speak. Mercy’s heart was weighed down by the thought of not seeing him. They were to be in New York another two and a half weeks and even when they got home Paul would be in London and there was no telling when they might meet.

‘You will write to me, won’t you?’ he said. ‘Letters from you would keep me going.’

‘I’ll try. Only I’ve hardly ever written letters before!’

‘Just write the way you talk to me. I’m not up to much at it either, but at least it’s something.’

They passed along the winding paths of Central Park, eyes full of green grass and spring leaves. Paul’s arm was round her shoulder, hers at his waist, now it was dusk and they were away from the streets, and few people were in the park.

They stopped at the lake and stood together, looking across the wrinkled water, at the black, spindly trees beyond.