The Lemon Tree (6 page)

In the store, Helena was in her element. She watched with care how her father set about establishing his new business, learned how to set up the bookkeeping, how to find suppliers and, most important of all, how to find
customers. She would sit unobtrusively in the background while he bargained for bankrupt stock from other businesses or cajoled a lady who wanted the price of a dress length reduced, and when his English failed him, she quietly translated – though her own grasp of the language was not very good. When they had a quiet hour, he would reminisce about the family business in Beirut, and, when he found she was interested, would go into detail about its organization, its employees, and its links with distant countries. He was astonished that she knew and understood much of its detailed running already. She laughed at his astonishment and reminded him how he used to take her down to the warehouses to give her a change. ‘I used to listen to you talking to people – and when I grew bigger, I used to ask Bachiro to show me the papers that seemed to be like oil flowing to facilitate the movement of everything coming in and going out.’

Her father laughed. ‘You did? You nosy little person!’

‘I wasn’t nosy,’ she replied indignantly. ‘I was really interested in what you and Uncle James and Grandpa were doing. I kept thinking that if I had been a boy, you would have begun to keep me by your side and teach me everything.’

‘Well, you’re a great help to me now, little flower. I don’t know how I would manage without you.’

Her big eyes shone at the compliment, and he thought that he should get her married as soon as he could, before the harshness of their life in Chicago toughened her too much. Men liked gentle amenable women; a ruthless trader would not appeal to them.

But, without realizing that he was doing it, he had already inculcated in her the basic principles of organization, enterprise, forethought and quick decision-making which were to be her strength in times to come.

The two rooms above Charles Al-Khoury’s shop in Chicago were occupied by Polish immigrants. When they moved out, he again bargained with his Greek landlord and succeeded in renting the rooms for little more than he was already paying for the shop. Triumphantly, he got Sally to clean the rooms and then he installed his wife and daughter in them.

The tiny store and the flat above it became Helena’s world.

She carried samples of materials to the houses of well-to-do ladies, when requested; and in the shop she made tea for women who began to discover the fine quality of Charles’s stock. They sat by his counter and talked haughtily to him, under the impression that they were bargaining successfully for a better price than others obtained; dressmakers, who also came, always got materials at a better price, but they always received a lower grade silk. As her father warned her, ‘Dressmakers are always poor; you can’t get more money out of them than they have. Remember that!’

Helena was allowed to handle swatches from the fat bales on the shelves, and she soon learned what constituted a good dress length. Her English rapidly became better than his, so he encouraged her to write his business letters for him and then to keep the accounts. Though she did not write her father’s letters in Arabic to Uncle James, she sometimes saw them. It was apparent that her father
felt that Uncle James was quite mad; he was boiling soap in his landlady’s wash boiler and was selling it door-to-door in Liverpool.

The bales of material were heavy, and Charles lifted them himself. Helena watched with anxiety the sweat pour down his face, as he moved the cotton-swathed rolls from shelf to counter to show them to customers, and, later, lifted them back onto the shelf.

One day, when he had gone with swatches of material to see a particularly high-class dressmaker and Helena was watching the shop for him, Sally remarked to her, ‘Your pa’s doing too much.’ She was polishing the old wooden counter to a fine sheen, as she spoke, and did not appear to expect a reply.

Helena’s heart seemed to miss a beat, as the implied threat of illness sank in. From then on, she insisted that she be allowed to help with the tidying-up of the shop, but she was a skinny youngster without much power in her arms; and he would laugh and take the bundles from her to lay them on the shelves.

Apart from his stock, American women found the Lebanese shopkeeper charming and they recommended the store to their friends. The tiny business began to prosper. The Al-Khourys hoarded every cent they could.

At the end of six months, Charles insisted that his wife give up her job with the tailor and stay at home. ‘If we are very, very careful, we can manage,’ he assured her. ‘I don’t like you doing menial work.’

Helena took her mother for granted; she did not realize that she possessed unusual beauty, and that, as she learned to dress in Western clothes, her father felt jealous when other men looked at her. He wanted her at home, not veiled like a Muslim woman but decently bundled up like a good Maronite.

Leila Al-Khoury was thankful to be released from the
tailor’s stuffy attic, but she refused to wear her native dress or veil her hair. She had fallen in love with hats and bought herself a plain black straw which she trimmed with shreds of silk from her husband’s shop.

With this imaginative concoction on her head, she pressed herself lovingly against her husband and assured him that he had nothing to worry about. He was partially mollified, though the flowerlike face framed by the hat’s brim was, he felt uneasily, very attractive.

Helena had not inherited her mother’s beauty. Though she was not ugly, she had her father’s strong nose and wide mouth. She was sallower than Leila and there was no hint of pink in her cheeks; and her long oriental eyes with their secretive, sidelong glances were too foreign for Western taste. The tumbling black mass of her hair was restrained in a bun at the back of her head and gave little hint of its richness. Amid the babble of thousands of immigrants, as a skinny young girl she passed unremarked. Until she met Joe Black.

Curled up alone in a feather bed in Liverpool, her dream passed from the nightmares of the Lebanon and Chicago, to Joe.

She smiled in her sleep, as she seemed to hear herself saying to him cryptically, ‘You never gave me toffee apples.’ And his laughing back at her and saying, ‘I never thought of them. Want one?’

Joe had his own ideas of gifts. In her dream, she saw him lounge into their living-room, the original log cabin in which her stepfather had first lived in Canada. Peeking out of his jacket was a tame grey fox, a birthday gift.

One Christmas, he had brought her a muff made from a marten fur he had trapped; his mother had cleaned and tanned the skin and he had then given it to another Cree woman who had fashioned it for him. Sometimes, when he had been south to see his grandfather, he brought her a
little opium to smoke, bargained from a lonely Russian farmer who had established his own patch of poppies, or, at other times, a small packet of tobacco from Virginia, passed from hand to hand across a continent, in trade.

The rising sun began to push long fingers between the heavy velvet curtains of her bedroom in Liverpool, and she sleepily stretched out to touch him. But he was six thousand miles away, harvesting a hay crop.

Leila Al-Khoury lamented bitterly that it was Mr and Mrs Ghanem who had brought the typhoid into their Chicago home. The infection had, in fact, sneaked through the tumble-down, crowded neighbourhood like a smouldering fire; but Mr Ghanem was the first person to die from it.

The local inhabitants were used to illnesses which ran their course, and the patients were nursed at home. Though guesses were made, no name was put to the sickness. Immigrants had little money, so doctors were rarely called.

Charles Al-Khoury, worked to a shadow of his former self, was in no state to withstand such a virulent infection. The Al-Khourys knew that Mr Ghanem was also ill. His wife told Leila that it was ‘Something he’s eaten.’ It was assumed that in both cases the fever would go away and the diarrhoea would ease, if the patients were kept on a liquid diet. Meanwhile, Helena served in their tiny shop and Leila nursed her husband.

When Mr Ghanem died, leaving a widow with five sons to feed, Leila realized, in a panic, that this was no ordinary illness. She sent for a doctor, only to be scolded by him in English she barely understood for not calling him earlier. Charles died in her arms.

Once more, Leila tore her clothes, and the household rang to shrieks of mourning. Both she and a terrified Helena were devastated, as was Mrs Ghanem in her tiny home. Other neighbours, afraid of being infected themselves,
left small gifts of food at the shop door, but refused to come in.

Only Sally walked briskly up the stairs to the Al-Khoury flat, to bring some common sense into their lives. Hiding her own sorrow for a man she secretly adored, she instructed a grief-stricken Helena to get back to the store and mind it. ‘I’ll look after your ma.’

Helena had obeyed, but she quickly found herself in difficulties. Men delivering cotton and silk her father had ordered through middlemen refused to leave the goods without her father’s signature. ‘You’re too young to sign for it. You can pay cash, if you like,’ she was told.

‘Could Mother sign for it?’ she asked, afraid of parting with the small sum in the secret drawer of the old till.

A man delivering a roll of silk had hesitated at this suggestion, but finally said uneasily that he did not think his company would accept a woman’s signature, and went away with the roll still on his shoulder.

Beating down her increasing terror, she served customers from the existing stock with her sweetest smile, as she struggled with the heavy rolls. She knew that, unless she could buy replacement materials, the business was doomed.

Oblivious of the impending end to their sole source of income, Leila sat cross-legged on her bed, allowing Sally and Helena to minister to her. Occasionally, she would fling herself down on the pillows in a fresh burst of weeping.

Between bouts, Helena asked her urgently, ‘Couldn’t you run the business, Mama? I believe if you took it in hand, the suppliers would accept you – or perhaps we could import some silk direct from China?’ She sighed, and got up to pull back the closed curtains to let in the evening sun.

Leila put down the coffee her daughter had brought
her, turned her blotched face away from the light, and began to cry again.

Helena went back to her, to sit beside her and put her arms round her. ‘Mama, dear, listen to me, please. If you can’t help me, we’ll have to close the shop – we don’t make anything like enough to employ a manager, even supposing we could find an honest one.’

Leila wept on.

As she patted her mother’s back in an effort to comfort her, Helena said savagely, ‘I know what to do – but nobody will trust me. The salesman from Smithson’s chucked me under the chin this morning, as if I were a baby. He actually said, “Pity you’re not a boy!”’

‘Mama, could we sell something to get money, so that I can pay cash for stock?’

‘I don’t know anything about business,’ her mother sobbed, and continued to moan into the pillows.

In despair, Helena held a big sale and then shut the shop. She made just sufficient to pay their debts, except for one.

‘Sally, dear. I don’t have any money left to pay you. Instead, I saved these for you.’ She proffered a package containing several pretty ends of rolls that she had been unable to sell.

Sally bent and hugged her. She sniffed, and then said, ‘You don’t have to worry about me, hon. There was many a time when your pa couldn’t pay me. You and your ma are welcome to anything I can do.’

Before letting her out of the door, Helena clung to her. ‘Thank you, Sally. Thank you.’

Left alone, she searched the little shop to retrieve the remaining bits of jewellery hidden there. ‘I’d better take a good look upstairs, as well,’ she thought, as she wrapped the pieces up in a scrap of cotton. ‘If we don’t pay the rent we’ll be thrown out fast.’

As she tucked the little parcel well down into her skirt
pocket, she cried helplessly. She was nearly fourteen years old, tall for her age and very thin, with eyes that were sadly old for one so young and feet that seemed too big for her stature.

Since her mother was in no state to do it, Helena sat down at their rickety table in their tiny apartment and wrote to her only surviving blood relative, Uncle James in Liverpool, to tell him of his brother’s death and the penury of his widow. Tears blotted her shaky unformed Arabic script

By the time they received a reply six weeks later, the landlord, a kindly man, had grown tired of a tenant who was not paying him rent, even though she was a pretty widow, and told them they had another week in which to start paying again, plus something towards the arrears.

If it had not been for a large bag of rice, which her father had obtained shortly before his death, and the kindness of their neighbours, Helena and her mother would have starved.

In his reply, Uncle James wrote that, if they could manage to pay their fares to England, he would be happy to give both mother and daughter a home. Unfortunately, he was not yet earning enough to send them their fares; he had just leased a small factory building and installed his first soap boiler, and this had drained his reserve and his credit.

He did not know how to express his own grief at the loss of a well-loved brother, so contented himself with the usual polite phrases. Leila’s troubles were great enough without his adding to them.

He did not mention that the home he offered would actually be in a house owned by his English mistress, Eleanor. As he wrote, she was sitting on a chair opposite him, nursing their year-old son, Benjamin.

It had taken a great deal of coaxing on his part to persuade this downright little Liverpudlian that he owed
shelter to his sister-in-law, Leila, and her daughter, Helena. It was a duty he could not evade, he assured her, and he would have to find another place to live if Eleanor could not help him.

‘She’s foreign,’ Eleanor had protested.

James had looked up from his letter and responded dryly, though with a twinkle in his eye, ‘So am I.’

‘You’re different, luv,’ she told him, and smiled at him.

James’s eyes were bloodshot from private weeping on top of long hours of work. He looked so drained that she impulsively got up from her chair and leaned over the baby to kiss his cheek. ‘Well, never mind. Don’t you fret,’ she said kindly. ‘I suppose I could give ’em the second-floor back room to theirselves. I’d have to give Mr Tomlinson notice, though, so as he can find somewhere else.’ Mr Tomlinson was one of her three gentlemen lodgers, other than James Al-Khoury himself. She sighed heavily, as she sat down and rearranged Benjamin on her lap. ‘I’d have to ask you for a bit more housekeeping to help out, like, ’cos I’ll have two more mouths to feed – and I won’t have Mr T’s rent.’

‘Of course I’ll give you more,’ he assured her, without any idea of where he was going to get the extra money from. He put down his pen and got up to embrace both mother and child; Eleanor was a wonderful comfort to a lonely man, a real help – and she had given him a son. He prayed to God that his new venture with George Tasker, the Soap Master, would prosper.

Eleanor told herself she would do anything she could for him; she’d never again meet a man like him. Mr T must go; she could not imagine her despair if James left her. She wasn’t getting any younger; and now there was little Benji to think about.

In Chicago, a surprised Leila read his kind letter. Puzzled,
she looked up from her meagre lunch of boiled rice and weak coffee, and asked Helena, ‘Did you write to Uncle James?’

Having seen the English stamp on the letter, Helena was tense with anxiety, as she said eagerly, ‘Yes.’

Leila sighed. ‘I should have done it.’

‘I did ask you, Mama. But you didn’t listen.’

In the seven weeks since her husband had died, Leila had grown quieter. Though she did not cry so much, she was very listless. Nothing that Helena could do or say seemed to rouse her to the realization that, unless they did something quickly, they would die of starvation.

Now, seeing the letter, a wild hope surged in Helena. ‘May I read Uncle’s letter, Mama?’ she asked eagerly.

Leila handed it to her without comment.

As the girl read, a tremendous relief made her want to shout with joy, the first sense of wellbeing since her father had died. ‘Isn’t he good, Mama? And his wife, too. We’ll have to sell your jewellery – or some of it, Mama?’ A hint of doubt had crept into her voice. Despite their desperate position, Leila had sullenly refused to part with the last of her chains and brooches. Her husband’s declaration that he would only sell them
in extremis
had meant, to her, only in the case of death. A Lebanese, longer established than the Al-Khourys, had accepted a gold chain from her and had arranged Charles’s funeral. That to her had constituted a time to sell.

Leila did not immediately reply to her daughter; she sat fretfully toying with her coffee cup.

‘To get the fares to go to England, Mama – we have to get the fares from somewhere.’

Leila felt morosely that fate had dealt her an unbearable blow in the loss of her husband. In these last seven weeks of prostration, she had been waiting for that same fate to
compensate her in some way. Her brother-in-law’s kindly letter did not appear to do that, and she said capriciously, ‘I don’t want to go.’

‘But, Mama, what else can we do? Uncle James is a dear – you know that.’

‘He’s kind,’ Leila admitted reluctantly. She was quiet for a moment, and then, as if to justify her refusal she added, ‘I simply can’t change countries again. It would be too much; I couldn’t bear it.’ She buried her face in her hands.

Helena swallowed, and replied carefully, ‘It wouldn’t be much different from America, would it, Mama? I liked Liverpool when we passed through it’

‘It would be quite different,’ her mother replied shortly. She rose from the table and, dragging her bare feet on the planks of the floor, she went to Helena’s small bed at the back of the room. She lay down on it, her face towards the wall, as if to shut out a life which was a burden to her.

Helena went to sit at the foot of the bed and continue the argument.

Without looking at her, Leila protested, ‘Helena, you can’t imagine what it would be like to be penniless in Uncle James’s house. No matter how kind he is, we would be dependent upon the whims of his – er – wife. She’s bound to resent us – or she’d make use of us as servants. It would be insupportable.’

Helena took another tack. ‘I always imagined that Uncle James wasn’t married?’ she queried.

Leila bit her lower lip. She was not sure how to explain Uncle James’s domestic affairs. She said cautiously, ‘Some men have a woman friend who lives with them. Uncle James’s situation could make it harder for us.’ She turned slightly, to look at the frightened girl. ‘In the West, it’s not quite honourable, though I’m sure your uncle has his reasons for not marrying her …’

‘If she’s not his wife, couldn’t he send her away? Then we could look after him.’

‘I doubt he wants to be rid of her. They’ve been together a long time.’

‘I see,’ Helena muttered. But all she really understood was that her mother seemed totally incapable of doing anything. It was to be a number of years before she became aware of the profound effect her uncle’s lack of a marriage certificate was to have on her own life.