What Was Promised (5 page)

‘Yes,’ Mary says, ‘I heard.’

‘Cuts all over. Bacon Street. Not far,’ Mrs Platt says, and she gets to her feet. ‘I’ve just got to go in the corner. Where is it? Oh, don’t worry yourself. Same as ours, isn’t it?’

With her neighbour gone Mary leans on the board. She pictures Mrs Platt, in the dark, taking a wrong turn, hitching up her skirts and pissing over Michael’s bed. Well, then she’d get what she deserves. She’s like the horse she talks about. Hungry for disaster.

He had the smell of blood, you see, he had a taste for it.

She pours herself more tea and sits. She’s calm. She’s not frightened, whatever Annie Platt would like. Worried? Yes. She heard about the man with the cuts – found by the dustmen in Bacon Street, half dead and too drunk to know it – but the gossip is that the man might have been living rough. That would be less worrying. The troubles of beggars are not those of other people.

In any case, her girls won’t have gone as far as Bacon Street. They’ll stay in sight of home, Mary’s sure. The adventure will be Flossie’s idea, and Floss might find trouble, but Iris is sensible.

Iris is Mary’s girl. Floss is her father, to the bone.

Mary looks up and sees there’s a new crack in the ceiling. It makes her stomach turn. In the pantry, yesterday, she caught weeds growing in. She pulled them through by their green hair and found they had even put on flowers. Little strings of violet stars, trailing out into the sun. Pretty things, doing their best; but Mary doesn’t lack for flowers, and she felt sick at the sight of those.

The Columbia Buildings are falling down. Mary wonders if they’ll have to leave. It’s one bomb did the grave damage, a big one, early in the war. It came right down the air shaft of the shelter, the official one that lay under the old market square. There were forty died down there, though others were pulled out alive. Mrs Platt was one of them.

Of course she was, Mary thinks. Mrs Platt would find a way out of an atom bomb.

A blessing
, Michael calls it. Mary wishes he wouldn’t say it so plain, but it’s true for them. Where would they be, if not for that bomb? Michael saw their chance and got them in quick. They’re the lucky ones to have a roof at all. Where would they live, if not here? They might be as wretched as that man in Bacon Street. They might still live apart, Michael in his Old Street lodgings, her and the girls still cheek by jowl with her Aunt Kate in Birmingham, living off sour charity. Waiting for Michael to make their fortunes, to find the gold in London’s streets . . . though gold’s only in stories: Mary’s streets are Michael’s, and those are only paved with flowers.

Or silver. Mary has seen the silver, and other things. But she doesn’t ask.

The latch clicks and she jumps up. She’s quick into the hall, but Mrs Platt is there before her, wiping her hands on her skirts.

‘
There
you are! Your mother’s been so worried. I don’t know what you two were thinking of!’

‘Thank you, Mrs Platt,’ Mary says, and the girls troop past in general silence, Floss head up, Iris head down.

Mary has them all back in the kitchen, is doing her best to be stern while the girls clean their hands and faces, when she sees that Iris has been crying.

‘Dirty as a coal miner,’ Mrs Platt says, and Floss looks up, wet and feral.

‘I’m not!’

‘Mrs Platt,’ Mary says, ‘you’ve been a help.’

‘I’ll be going then,’ the old woman says, grudgingly; but she does. Alone with her children, Mary touches Iris’s blotched face.

‘What’s this for?’

‘She saw a ghost!’ Floss says, but Iris shakes her head.

‘It wasn’t.’

Mary cleans her child. She had the water warm, but already it’s cold in her hands. ‘Of course not,’ she says, ‘there’s no such thing.’

‘There is,’ Floss says, ‘she saw it in Long Debris! You did, Iris, didn’t you?’

But Iris won’t say. Only later, when they’re both in bed, when Mary is kissing them in the dark, does Iris lean into her neck to whisper muzzily.

‘It wasn’t.’

‘What, love?’

‘It wasn’t the ghost,’ Iris says. ‘It was smaller than him.’

2. Summer

On the first it is dry. A watercart goes laying the dust.

On the second, third and fourth, it’s wet. The costers are crestfallen hawks, the tarps fat ponds of rain.

On the fifth, the Jew watchmaker plays chess with the Banana King.

Just as they do most Saturdays, weather and families permitting, Solly Lazarus and Clarence Malcolm climb up to the fifth floor laundry (where no one much goes anymore – the cant of the Columbia Buildings is appreciable up here), and set up the table and chairs, the board and pieces and the ash-tray, out on the old drying balcony. Clarence has brought apples. Across the bombstruck wasteland that runs a zigzag east of them, Solly can see his wife. She’s tramping through the rubbishy grass, her basket – hooked over one arm – full of a froth of elderflower.

Clarence whistles, Solly waves, and Dora waves back up at them. Clarence is glad to see her there. He’s hoping she’ll give him an edge.

When Clarence takes a piece, he slams his own on top of it – ‘Ha!’ – so that the board and table shake, and sometimes (the floor being what it is) the whole thing goes teetering over, both men wailing and catching at it, and all the pieces sliding south, so that they have to start again.

When Solly thinks he has a clincher, he grips his pipestem in his teeth, smiles around it – ‘Aha!’ – and moves his piece extra slow, his goggle eyes darting up to make sure Clarence is watching, so that they’ll both remember his genius for posterity.

Now it’s Solly’s turn. Clarence blows a Gold Flake smoke ring. He says, ‘Bernie was talking.’

‘You’re trying to distract me, Clarence. Don’t think I don’t know.’

‘It’s true, though. Someone knows a council man, says they’re going to turf us out.’

‘Just talk,’ Solly says, ‘those council men, they like the sound of their own voices.’

‘Let’s hope.’

‘They must have better things to do.’

‘Let’s hope that too.’

Solly’s hand wavers. It was with his help that Clarence got a place in the Columbia Buildings. And if the Buildings are condemned? Solly will find rooms somehow – he’ll be more Jew or less Jew, as landlords and circumstances require – but what will Clarence do? There are coloured fellows in Notting Hill, and some in Stepney, but they live bachelor lives, and if Solly knows Bernadette she’ll have nothing to do with them.

Another thing: if what Dora says is true, it’s no time for the Malcolms to be without a roof over their heads. Solly scratches the birthmark on his scalp. ‘It’s too hot today,’ he says.

‘Hot! This isn’t hot, this is nice. Jamaica, now, that’s hot. Melt a man down like chocolate.’

‘Have it your way. This someone, did she say when?’

‘No.’

‘Well,’ Solly says, and moves a knight with some reluctance. Silence rules on the balcony.

‘So!’ Solly says, too loudly, as Clarence ponders, ‘Bernadette looks well.’

‘Plenty well.’

‘Dora says so too. Dora says she glows.’

‘Bernie always glows.’

‘I am making an implication.’

‘I know what you’re making,’ Clarence says. ‘Gossiping like an old woman.’ ?Then, with a kind of shyness, ‘It’s true.’

Solly claps his shoulder. They shake hands over the board. Downstairs a wireless is talking up the Olympics.

‘My sunshine woman,’ Clarence says. Then, ‘
Ha
!’ he crows, and the board shakes like an earthquake.

When they’re done Solly goes down and pours himself a drink. He doesn’t like to drink in company. He is excited by others, invigorated by them, and often fearful of them. With others he likes to keep his wits about him. Six days a week, in the Lane, he wears his wits like best clothes. Now there is no one to see him.

He stands and sips in the sun-thinned gloom and thinks of Clarence Malcolm. He has never known a coloured man before, not to call a friend. He has never needed many friends, but one is a good thing to have – and Dora gets on with Bernadette, so that’s two. Better still.

Neither he nor Dora has ever moved in wide circles: small ones in Danzig, smaller here.
House mice
, his father used to call them. If they lived in Whitechapel it might be a different story, but Whitechapel has too many godly Jews for Solly’s taste. Solly has no truck with gods. No, they fit in better here.

After the war – before he got a proper license in the Lane – Solly traded on the hoof, roundabout Club Row. He knew the other costers, he was on first-name terms with some, but it was never more than that. And then, one day, Clarence arrived. Solly got down there late – Dora had needed him to queue – and there was Clarence, looking to Solly like his own self multiplied: twice as tall, twice as foreign and twice the looks as well, he doesn’t mind admitting it. Clarence Malcolm, fresh from Jamaica, astride a crate in the rain, knees up to his armpits, playing chess with poor Ben Weir, the cascara salesman with the stutter.

Solly watched him beat Ben hollow. His game was unconventional: Clarence played like a boxer, waiting for the overreach, the lazy guard, the opening. Solly plays a different chess – all guns blazing, is his way – but there were lessons to be learned, he saw, in Clarence’s idling aggression, his velvet-gloved ambushes. A cute game, that was what it was. When Clarence won he grinned and stretched in unconcealed delight, slapped the drops off his fedora, turned to Solly and boomed,
You got legs like a Coldstream Guard, standing there all this time! Sit down, man, come, come. Tell the truth, now; are you partial to the sport of kings?

That chess should have thrown them together, two such different fellows. That they should share, not a love for music, or some other worthwhile thing, but this boyish passion; really, it is ridiculous. It is remarkable.

Still, it’s hot, whatever Clarence says. Solly takes off his tie. He opens the window. He wonders where Dora is.

All around the kitchen stand the paraphernalia of her craft: the buckets, the fraying sieve, muslin, a small jar of tartaric acid, and a big one of precious sugar; the rations she’s saved all spring, plus the extra meant for summer jam.

Dora makes cordials. The elderflower is the best. It’s Solly’s favourite, and for Dora it entails tier on tier of happiness. Happiness in the picking, in the making and the drinking.

He looks forward to the smell of it. The smell is alchemy. At first Dora’s cordial will be nothing but muck and water. It will smell of the pharmacist’s acid and the anodyne sweetness of sugar. Then one day they’ll wake up, one or the other or both. They’ll cough and sigh, and there! Instead of the smell of themselves – instead of Solly and Dora – there will be the elderflower. Its heady scent will fill their rooms. It will be the smell of summer itself. The English summer, that begins with the elderflower, and ends with the berry.

Solly frowns. He thinks, But what’s wrong with the smell of us? Why wish for anything more than Solly and Dora? Aren’t we lucky to be alive? Aren’t we young, and in love?

Not so young any more
, whispers the imp inside his head, which (he hardly knows it) speaks with the voice of his mother.
Not so much of the genius. You smell of beer and no money. You smell like a refugee, Solomon. You smell of childlessness.

Solly clicks his tongue. The drink is souring his thoughts. He likes the way it loosens him, but he’s never had the head for it.

What he needs is some music. He takes the drink into the lounge, turns on the wireless, grumbles over the dial until he finds a vein of jazz. Then he dances – little hops – around the room, past the one-bar electric fire, the bookcase full of paperbacks and Dora’s photograph albums, the workshop table with its watches and orphaned parts – all the way to the easy chair, where he collapses gratefully.

There are letters on his table, but they don’t look new to Solly. They’ll be old news, Dora’s hoardings, brought out to be read again. He swipes a postcard off the top.

NOTHING is to be written on this side except the date, signature and address of the sender. Erase words not required. IF ANYTHING ELSE IS ADDED THE POSTCARD WILL BE DESTROYED.

I am (
not
) well.

I have been admitted into Hospital
{}
and am going on well
.

I am going to be transferred to another camp
.

I have received your card dated
19th September, 1944

Signature

Solomon Lazarus

Camp Address

Onchan,

Isle of Man

Internment Camp.

Date
12th October, 1944

‘Oh, this?’ Solly says to the room. ‘Yes, I remember this.’ And he nods; not happily, only backing up the words, as if some authority has asked him to confirm his statement.