The clash of personalities Carl foresaw did not take place the following day. Nor did Sarah’s Shabbos gathering. Martin was taken ill early in the morning and by the afternoon tea-parties were far from the family’s thoughts.
Miriam found him seated on the edge of his bed, clutching his stomach, when she went to waken him, and his ghastly colour told her the pain was no ordinary cramp. If only Esther was here, she panicked. But the Kleins had moved to Salford two weeks ago and she could no longer dash across the back entry to fetch her practical sister-in-law as she had often done in the past.
“Sammy!” she shouted. “Go next door and bring Mrs. Hardcastle, right away!”
“I don’t want Mrs. Hardcastle,” Martin groaned. “I feel sick.”
Miriam gathered him close. His face felt hot and dry to her touch, but his hands were cold and clammy. “Martin ate too many prunes last night,” she said trying to smile as Sammy came in from their bedroom, half-dressed. “Hurry up and go next door, will you?”
“I’ll go to the phone box and give our Nat a ring, as well.”
The way his wife went to pieces if anything was wrong with their son had always troubled Sammy. Everyone loved their kids, but not in the obsessive way Miriam did. If Martin so much as pricked his finger, she would panic in case he got blood poisoning. Sammy too wished his sister was still at hand as he limped downstairs and went to fetch their neighbour. Mrs. Hardcastle was a kindly woman, but full of old wives’ tales and would probably work Miriam up instead of calming her down.
“Do you think a hot water bottle’d help?” Miriam asked anxiously when Mrs. Hardcastle entered Martin’s bedroom bringing with her the smell of the bacon she had been frying.
“Lawks-a-mercy no, lass! ’Eats’ t’last thing ter put on a bad stomach ache, in case it’s appendicitis. Best wait for yer brothers-in-law, Miriam.”
“Is that what I’ve got, Mam?” Martin asked. “Will they have to cut me open?”
Miriam could not reply. Her tongue had cleaved to the root of her mouth.
Mrs. Hardcastle sat down beside Martin. “Now don’t you fret, lamb.” Beads of sweat had appeared on his forehead and she wiped them away with a corner of her flowered overall, her homely face crinkling into a reassuring smile. “Me grandson Albert ’ad ’is took out, but they put ’im ter sleep. ’E knew nowt about it.” She glanced at Miriam. “Yer mam looks a sight worse’n you do, Martin. Ambulance men’ll be cartin’ ’er off on a stretcher’n if they only fetches one wi’ ’em, you’ll ’ave ter walk!”
Nathan had left on his rounds when Sammy telephoned his home, but Rebecca said Lou was at the surgery and she would ring up and ask him to call.
“Get a grip on yourself, Miriam!” Lou instructed when he arrived and found her sitting tying knots in her dressing gown cord, her thick, black hair in violent disarray as though she had run her fingers through it a hundred times.
“That’s what me’n Sammy’s kep’ tellin’ ’er, Doctor,” Mrs. Hardcastle said. “Poor Sammy doesn’t look too good ’imself. I don’t know which ’e’s worried about most, ’is son or ’is wife.”
Lou sent the neighbour downstairs to make some strong tea while he examined Martin.
“I wish I ’ad ten bob fer every cup me’n Esther’s ’ad ter make ’er since Martin ’ad ’is first tumble when ’e were knee ’igh t’a grasshopper,” she said as she departed.
It did not take Lou long to complete the examination. “I’ll take you to hospital in my car, chuck,” he told Martin, hiding his grave thoughts behind a smile. “You’ve never had a ride in it, have you?” The boy’s soaring temperature indicated the presence of peritonitis and waiting for an ambulance to be arranged could mean the difference between life and death.
Miriam slumped to the floor as Lou and Sammy left the room carrying Martin wrapped in a blanket.
“Mrs. Hardcastle’ll take care of her. I can’t spend all morning with you Sandbergs,” Lou said.
But his expression told Sammy this was not the reason he had not turned back.
“I’m taking you to the Royal Infirmary, chuck,” he smiled to Martin. “Where your Uncle Nat and I trained to be doctors.”
By one o’clock, Martin was in bed on a surgical ward, minus his appendix. But the deadly infection was rampant.
Lou telephoned Nathan.
“You’d better tell Miriam. I’m glad it isn’t me who’s got to,” he said ruffly. “Give her a good talking-to and bring her to the hospital. I’ll stay with Sammy until you get here.”
Nathan stood gazing through the hall window at a clump of laurels in the front garden that were eternally fresh and green. If God could create plants that living didn’t diminish why hadn’t He created Man that way? And why had He allowed diseases to scourge mankind, so that chaps like Nathan had to spend their lives battling against them?
Sometimes Nathan wondered if there was a God, but his religious conditioning would conflict with his reason as it was doing now, and he’d expect to be struck down for his treacherous thoughts. Saturday morning always depressed him. It was the time that he set aside to visit his housebound geriatric patients. To check on the progress of their decay, he thought cynically, though his compassion for them was boundless.
Who wouldn’t be cynical after being confronted with all those senile smiles and wrinkled faces? The shrunken, bent-over bodies and gnarled, liver-spotted hands. The eyes dimmed by cataracts. And the abject gratitude for ten minutes of a young man’s time. But Man was not a laurel bush, Nathan reflected bitterly, and there was no medicament to halt the ravages of old age. He replaced the telephone receiver which was still in his hand after Lou’s call. Or to wipe out infections like his nephew had.
Rebecca had come out of the parlour and was standing behind him. “What is it, Nat?” she asked quietly.
“It’s possible Martin’s going to die.”
Her hand flew to her throat. “What’s the matter with him? Can’t you and Lou save him?”
“We’re doctors, not miracle-workers!” Nathan exclaimed angrily as the limitations of his profession hit home. “And the same goes for the surgeons at the Infirmary, who are a damn sight cleverer than we are. People seem to think doctors are endowed with magic powers, they won’t accept it when there’s nothing we can do.”
He went to fetch his coat from the cloakroom. “And now I’ve got to try to make Miriam accept it. Tell her she’s just got to hope Martin will be one of the lucky ones whose body can fight the infection.”
“I’ll come with you.”
“What for?” Nathan said venting his feelings on her. “She’s bound to take it badly and you’ve made it plain you don’t approve of the way my family behave in a crisis.” He left the house without giving Rebecca time to reply.
Miriam lay on the kitchen sofa trying to draw a veil over her mind. It was only a dream, she had not really emerged from a faint to find Mrs. Hardcastle waving smelling salts under her nose and Martin gone, not downstairs reading at the table, not anywhere in the house, but whisked away to an operating theatre. She opened her eyes and saw Nathan standing with his back to the fire looking at her.
He had entered the back way and had sent the neighbour home. Miriam had seemed to be asleep, but he realized now that she had just been lying with her eyes closed, shutting everything out. How was he to tell her what he must? He made himself do so and her lack of response chilled him more than if she had screamed.
“We’d better go now,” he said gently.
“I’ll have to get dressed first. I’m still in my dressing gown.”
“You’re wearing a jumper and skirt, Miriam.”
She glanced down disinterestedly and saw that she was.
“Don’t you remember putting them on?”
Miriam shook her head. She did not want to remember anything.
Nathan brought her gabardine from the lobby and bundled her into it. She made no attempt to help him, letting her arms fall limply to her sides after he had put them into the coat sleeves, sagging like a rag-doll while he fastened the buttons and pulled out a pocket flap which his meticulousness would not allow him to leave tucked in.
When they got into the car, he opened the windows wide so that the cold air would blow in her face. But her cheeks remained chalk-white and her demeanour lifeless.
“I think we should take Mother,” he said pulling up outside his parents’ home. The need for Sarah’s strong and comforting presence had suddenly assailed him.
“Take anyone you like,” Miriam answered indifferently as if they were going to the cinema and not to where her child lay perilously ill.
Nathan bounded up the path and kept his finger on the bell until Sarah opened the door. He glanced back at the car before entering the house, but Miriam had not so much as turned her head and remained silent when he returned with both his parents. What’s going to happen to her if Martin dies? he asked himself. If just the possibility of it is enough to reduce her to this?
“Get out and sit in the back with Mother, Miriam,” he said opening the door for her. Having Sarah beside her might help.
Nathan had warned Sarah and Abraham that Miriam was in a state of shock, but they had difficulty in suppressing their own when they saw her appearance.
“No tea party today, Ma,” she said in a brittle voice as they set off. “What will you do with all the cakes?”
Abraham invoked an old Yiddish curse to blight the jam tarts and strudel instead of his grandson. “Let the cakes be a kapora for our Martin.”
Miriam’s lips trembled, but she said nothing.
Sarah took her hand and remained silent, too. Sometimes contact could say more than words. She wanted to tell Miriam not to worry, that her neighbour’s grandchild had recovered from the same illness Martin had. But it wouldn’t be the truth. Little Tommy Evans had been spared the terrible complications. It was no use saying anything, all a person could do was pray.
They passed through the town centre, across Market Street thronged with shoppers laden with parcels. Sarah had never seen it so busy before, but she had never been to town on a Saturday before. Or ridden in a vehicle on Shabbos. She hoped the Almighty would understand why she and Abraham had broken His law. That any Jewish grandparents would have to in such circumstances.
“Martin likes reading the Manchester Guardian,” Miriam said tonelessly as they passed the newspaper’s office on Cross Street.
“He’ll be reading it on Monday,” Abraham assured her. “God won’t let a good boy like him die.”
Miriam remembered her gentle mother whom He had allowed to die after years of suffering, and her sweet-natured brother-in-law Saul Salaman who had met death brutally on a battlefield. I don’t trust God any more, she thought, and it was as if a rock which had always been there to lean upon had been taken away.
When they reached the hospital, Nathan put a firm arm around her while they traversed a long, covered way leading to the wards.
“A big important place like this can’t afford corridors with windows?” Abraham muttered.
“Turn up your coat collar,” Sarah ordered him. A person could catch pneumonia from the icy blasts here instead of getting better! She eyed a couple of hurrying nurses and hoped they were wearing wool vests under their thin uniforms.
They found David, Esther and Ben waiting near the entrance to the surgical unit, with Sammy.
“Rebecca phoned me, and I rang Esther,” David said.
“A nice Shabbos gathering, eh?” Abraham said sounding choked.
Seeing them all there affected Sarah, too. Then Lou came out of the ward and told Nathan to take Miriam and Sammy inside.
Sammy had been alone in the corridor when Lou went to have a word with the house surgeon. “What’re you all doing here?” Lou asked the family.
They looked at him wordlessly.
“All right. You don’t have to tell me, I know,” he said with feeling. “But this isn’t the Jewish hospital where the staff are used to having patients’ relatives cluttering up the place. If Sister Reilly finds you all hanging about here, she won’t like it.”
“Is that so, Dr. Benjamin?” a soft brogue inquired from behind him.
Lou turned and saw the silver-haired angular woman eyeing him. “I was explaining they can’t stay, Sister,” he said respectfully.
“An’ I’ll be after telling them meself, if I see fit, thank you.” She surveyed Sarah thoughtfully. “It’s young Dr. Sandberg’s mother, isn’t it? And the little lad who’s so poorly’ll be your grandson though he doesn’t favour you, nor his mammy and daddy neither.”
“He looks like his other grandma, rest her soul,” Sarah explained.
Sister Reilly’s starched features creased into a smile, which Sarah would not have thought possible.
“Let me think where I can put you, Mrs. Sandberg,” she said as if her survey of Sarah had brought her to a favourable decision. “You can’t be standing here for Lord knows how long, and I can tell just by looking at you wild horses wouldn’t drag you away.”
“Jewish families like to be together when there’s trouble,” Sarah felt constrained to tell her.
“Catholic ones are no different. It puts me in mind of me own family in Tipperary when my mother, God bless her, had her first stroke. But the nuns were awful good and found us a place to be. Even though we weren’t like you, with a doctor in the family.”
Lou was listening with an expression of profound astonishment on his acne-scarred face. “I wouldn’t have believed it,” he exclaimed when the Sister had swept away.
A few minutes later, they were installed in a two-bedded side ward.
“Lucky for you it’s a weekend, when most folk are too busy enjoying themselves to take sick, or it wouldn’t be vacant,” Sister Reilly said when she had ushered them there. She patted Sarah’s shoulder. “I’ll tell Dr. Sandberg where to find you. And don’t you be giving up hope now, my dear. The little lad hasn’t got any worse, even though he hasn’t got any better. Would you like me to light a candle for him when I go off duty?”
Abraham almost swallowed his tonsils at the thought of his grandson’s deliverance being prayed for in a church.
Sarah felt apprehensive about it, but wasn’t there one God for everybody? So, what did it matter if Jesus and the Holy Ghost heard the prayer, too? “I’d be much obliged, Sister,” she said gratefully.
They were sipping strong, hospital tea when Nathan joined them.
“A nice little ward-maid brought it. Her name’s Lucy,” Sarah, who always got on personal terms with everyone, informed him. “Sister told her to look after us.”
Nathan was as surprised as Lou had been. “We used to call Sister Reilly the Dragon when we were students,” he recalled.
“To me she’s an angel,” Sarah declared. “And from her I heard hopeful words about Martin, which I haven’t heard from anyone else. Miriam and Sammy are still sitting with him, Nat?”
Nathan nodded. “But he doesn’t know they’re there. He’s not round from the anaesthetic yet.” He felt stifled in the small room and went to open the window.
“You want your father to get pneumonia?” his mother asked reproachfully.
Nathan exchanged a smile with Lou and closed it again. The older generation of Jewish immigrants were all the same, equating fresh air with disease, and they had brought up their children to have similar ideas. The two young physicians could usually tell whether a house was occupied by Christians or Jews by glancing to see if the windows were open or shut. They had no need to look for the mezuzah on the doorpost of Jewish houses, and it had become a joke between them.
Abraham chose that moment to cough up some phlegm and spit it into his handkerchief. His family were accustomed to him doing this, but Sarah reacted as if the briefly open window had caused it.
“You see?” she exclaimed to Nathan.
Nathan sat down beside his partner on one of the high beds, with his legs dangling over the side. David was seated opposite him, on the other bed. his feet planted firmly on the floor. When I was a kid I thought I’d catch up with him one day, Nathan mused wryly. The difference in their height didn’t matter anymore; David was now thirty-eight and Nathan was twenty-five. They were both men now – not a man and a boy like it had been when Nathan was growing up. But there was no such thing as catching up with David, thought Nathan. David wouldn’t let you, he made you feel small.
His brother’s proximity was setting him on edge and he went to stare restlessly out of the window at the ward opposite. He could see the nurses pushing a surgical trolley in front of the beds. Was one of them Mary? The thought that he might encounter her had caused his throat to constrict when he entered the hospital with Miriam and his parents. What would he have done if they’d come face to face in the corridor? But it hadn’t happened, and he’d been thankful she wasn’t on duty in Martin’s ward, either. He wanted to see her, but there was a part of him that did not. And she certainly wouldn’t want to see him.
When he turned from the window he saw his mother eyeing him. Why did being here with his family in this small room make him feel trapped? Because he was trapped and always had been. Just being one of them made it so. It was as if the family were a huge web with the parent-spiders in the middle watching to make sure all the little ones stayed caught in it. With the elder-brother spider aiding and abetting them, Nathan thought with an acid glance at David.
“Who’s watching the shop?” he heard Lou ask Ben, and went to sit beside him again, grateful for his friend’s prosaic presence.
“The kids, who else?” Ben replied.
“Harry and Arnold and Marianne are in charge? Well how do you like that!” Sarah said approvingly.
“Our Arnold isn’t too keen,” Ben shrugged, then his saturnine face lit with pride. “But our Harry’s a chip off the old block. This morning a lady came in to buy a pair of twopence-ha’penny socks for her husband and –”
“You sell socks for twopence-ha’penny? How can you make a profit?” Sarah interrupted.
“The profit’s in the turnover, Ma,” Ben explained. “They come from all over Salford for them, like they do for our tenpence-ha’penny Brylcreem that everyone else sells for a shilling. But let me tell you about Harry. He sold the lady a gabardine for herself.”
Only Jews could have a conversation like this sitting in a hospital waiting for one of their own to live or die, Nathan reflected. They did the same at Shivah houses and the mourners they were there to visit sometimes joined in. But it was better than morbid conversation, or no conversation at all. It helped to take people’s minds off what they were there for.
“Tell Harry Mazeltov from me,” Sarah said to Esther and Ben. “For a boy not yet fourteen to have such a business head deserves congratulations. So, you’re selling raincoats also, now, eh? The last I heard you were stocking up with boiler suits and corsets. You did the right thing calling the shop ‘Ben’s Bazaar’!”
“I made him up a cheap range to see how he’d do with them,” David told her.
“And why not? It’s all in the family and business is business.”
Esther got up to stretch her legs and wrapped her rust tweed coat closer around her full figure, then leaned against the wall thinking of Miriam who was unable to have any more children. And now this terrible thing had struck down the only one she had. “Who cares about business at such a time?” she said emotionally. “Saturday’s our busiest day but when David rang up Ben got the car out right away, to come here.”
The brief interlude of normality dissipated into silence.
“Oy,” Abraham sighed fidgeting with his moustache.
“When something like this happens, it gives a person a sense of values,” David mused.
Nathan looked at him coldly. “I’ve always had one.”
Lou dug Nathan in the ribs to prevent him from saying more and changed the subject hastily. “D’you want me to bring Rebecca here, Nat? Though in her condition I wouldn’t recommend it.”
“Rebecca’s at my house,” David said before Nathan had time to reply.
“Thank you for mentioning it,” Nathan said sarcastically.
“I’m sorry, but I forgot. I’ve had other things on my mind. She sounded so upset when she phoned me. I decided to go and fetch her.”
“I wondered why Bessie hadn’t come with you,” Esther said. It wasn’t like his wife to let him out of her sight.
David allowed them to assume this was the reason. But he would not have brought his wife to the hospital anyway. All Miriam needed just now was one of Bessie’s spiteful outbursts. With what they were here for, Miriam must come first.
Lou got off the bed and smoothed down the snowy counterpane lest Sister Reilly’s eagle eye should discover a crease in it. He couldn’t stand the way David was cracking his knuckles, and the looks Nat kept shooting at his brother were enough to make anyone feel jumpy. The atmosphere was rippling with undercurrents
and Lou didn’t want to be there when they erupted. Every Jewish family had a touch of grand opera about it, but his partner’s was worse than most.
“I’ll push off home, Nat,” he said awkwardly. “Cora’ll still be keeping my cholent warm in the oven.”
“She cooks butterbeans for Shabbos?” Sarah asked him conversationally, ignoring the tension around her. “Malka Berkowitz used to give us cholent when we stayed with her and I haven’t tasted it since.”
“Such a memory my wife’s got!” Abraham exclaimed tetchily.
Lou edged his way to the door and tried to catch Nathan’s eye, but he was glaring at his brother again. Was Nat going to take it out of David for ever for stopping him from marrying a shiksah? It was time Nat grew up and accepted that he wouldn’t have been happy in a marriage that had broken his parents’ hearts. “I’ll pop back tonight,” he promised as he made his escape.
“I think we should have Martin moved to a private room. I don’t like him being on a big ward with all those sick men,” David said immediately Lou had gone.
“Are you at it again?” Nathan barked.
“At what, exactly?” David inquired trying to keep his tone even.
“Dictating what should be done! And if I let you, it’ll be a fait accompli in no time. You’ll have it all arranged without even consulting Miriam and Sammy. But this time what you’re interfering in happens to be my province.”
“If I were you, I’d watch what you’re saying, Nat! Doctor or no doctor, you’re getting too big for your boots.”
Sarah quelled them with a glance. “I want you both to watch what you’re saying. Stop it, do you hear me?” Her voice was cool and calm, but her hands were trembling. “Thank goodness your wives aren’t here listening to you shout at each other. Worry we can’t avoid, but rows we can do without.”
Fifteen minutes later, their wives arrived, wrapped in their fur coats.
“How could we sit at home listening to the wireless, when our nephew is so ill?” Bessie demanded. “We wanted to be with the family.”
She means it, Sarah thought with surprise.
“If it was, God forbid, one of my kids, Miriam would be here,” Bessie added feelingly.
David had forgotten his wife’s emotions could occasionally function on that level. “Come and sit down, love,” he said putting his arm around her.
Rebecca did not look at Nathan. “We got a taxi,” was all she said.
“Make your wife comfortable on one of the beds, Nat,” Sarah instructed, noting her pregnant daughter-in-law’s exhausted appearance. “That nice Sister Reilly won’t mind.”
Rebecca sat down on a chair. “I’ll be all right here for the moment, thank you.”
Then Sigmund Moritz entered with Carl and Helga.
“Mrs. Hardcastle had the decency to let Helga know,” Sigmund said, implying that none of the Sandbergs had bothered to do so and stood shaking the raindrops off his Homburg hat in the uncomfortable silence.
Sarah had not noticed that it had begun to rain and now became aware of it lashing against the window. Sigmund was studiously not looking at her and she remembered how he had once let his pride cause a rift between the Moritzes and Sandbergs that had lasted for four years. But the joy of Martin’s birth had brought them together again and destined them to share this anxiety.
“It was wrong of us not to think of telling you, Sigmund,” she made herself say without offering excuses, though doing so was not in her own proud nature.
“I accept your apology,” Sigmund replied graciously, then his expression crumpled. “The Sister wouldn’t let me see Martin.”
Sarah got up from her chair and embraced him. Martin was very precious to her, but he wasn’t her only grandchild. “We haven’t seen him, either,” she said to let Sigmund know there had been no favouritism and patted his shoulder comfortingly while he shed a few tears.
Marianne stood on a stool behind the shop counter looking for the one-and-fourpence-ha’penny pure silk stockings.
“They’re in a box wi’ Prima Donna on it, luv,” the customer told her. “I know, ’cause I cum in fer a pair every Sat’day.”
“Excuse me a moment, madam,” Harry said to the shawled matron whose vast waist he was measuring in order to sell her a corset. “We’re out of that brand just now,” he smiled to Marianne’s customer. “But we’ve got some others and they must be good; my mother wears them herself.”
He found a shiny purple box and put it on the counter for Marianne. “Put your hand inside the leg,” he instructed her. “To show the lady how the shade’ll look on.”
“Where is yer mam terday, ’Arry?” the customer inquired after she had made her purchase and was waiting for her change. She wet her finger to fix a hennaed kiss-curl more securely to forehead in front of a mirror, then picked up a bottle of “Californian Poppy” scent from the array of cut-price sundries on the counter. “I’d rather ’ave ‘Evenin’ In Paris’ meself,” she said after sniffing it. “Yer dad’s not ’ere, neither, is ’e?”
Harry and Arnold exchanged a glance over their sister’s head which was bent over the cash till.
Harry’s customer looked up from the pink, whaleboned monstrosity she was examining. “Nowt’s wrong, is it? Not a funeral in’t family, I ’ope, or owt like that?”
Harry licked his lips as if they suddenly felt dry. “They just had to go out,” he replied with a forced smile.
“Jews don’t have funerals on Saturdays, or weddings either,” Marianne told the lady, raising her head from the till. “What’s one-and-fourpence-ha’penny from two shillings, Harry?” she asked desperately. Why couldn’t she add up and subtract like her brothers could? The florin the lady had handed her felt hot and sticky from being clutched in her palm while she tried to do the sum. She felt funny inside, too, from what the lady in the shawl had just said.
Harry came to her rescue as he had been doing all afternoon. But not knowing where her parents were continued to make her feel uneasy. She had returned from the library at dinnertime and found them gone. “We’ve got to look after the shop instead of going to Bobbie Sarah’s. Mam and Dad’ve had to go somewhere,” Harry had told her and had said he didn’t know where the somewhere was. But Marianne didn’t believe him.
“Go and set the table for our tea,” he instructed her at closing time. “Mam said we’re to have it if they’re not back.”
She stood watching her brothers bring in the overalls and raincoats which were hung up in the doorway, then went to pick her way through the bundles and boxes on the stockroom floor, breathing in the special, draper’s-shop smell of new clothing, cardboard and dust that she had already come to associate with home. But entering the living room was like stepping into a different world. Her mother had not allowed the business to overflow into her domestic domain. Here, the odours were those Marianne had always known. Mansion Polish and black-lead; damp pot-towels drying off by the fire; the lingering aromas of chicken fat rendered down with onions, and fish fried in oil. And, because today was the Sabbath, the tang of apples and oranges piled in a big glass fruit bowl beside the brass candlesticks on the table.
Marianne eyed the telephone on the sideboard. Her grandmother had no phone, so she couldn’t ring her up and ask if she knew where Mam and Dad were. The square wooden clock on the mantelpiece said 6.15: why weren’t they back yet? Perhaps Uncle David could tell her? His number was written on the front of the directory, with Uncle Nat’s. But how did you make a phone call? She read the instructions and got through.
“Who’s that speaking?” Shirley’s voice inquired.
“It’s me. Marianne.”
“I thought it might be my mam’n dad ringing up from the hospital.”
Marianne’s heart missed a beat. “Has Zaidie Abraham been taken bad with his chest? Is that why there’s no tea party?”
“It’s Martin who’s ill. He’s very poorly.”
“Who’re you talking to, our kid?” Harry said entering with Arnold.
But Marianne was unable to reply, and he took the receiver from her. “We weren’t supposed to tell Marianne,” he said recognizing his cousin’s high-pitched voice demanding to know what was the matter.
“Well I didn’t know that, did I? Marianne phoned me up. Why weren’t we supposed to tell her?”
Harry looked at his sister and saw the distress in her eyes. “Why do you think?” he snapped and rang off.
Arnold put a kind hand on Marianne’s shoulder. “Mam’n Dad knew how upset you’d be. That’s why they decided not to tell you.”
“You’d miss Martin more than you would Arnold and me if we got ill and died,” Harry said gruffly.
It’s true, Marianne thought. They were her own brothers, but she loved Martin more. “Don’t be daft,” she said and avoided looking at them because she was ashamed of it.
“We’d better set the table, Arnold, seeing our kid hasn’t done it,” Harry said.
“I’m not hungry,” Marianne told him.
Arnold got out the plates and cutlery and Harry went into the scullery and returned with bread and butter and a platter of gefilte fish. “You not eating won’t help Martin,” he said ito Marianne in his down-to-earth way. “So, sit down and have something.”
She obeyed his instruction but ate very little. The two boys sat silently munching their food and she could hear the clock ticking away the minutes.
“I wonder if our kid’ll marry Martin when they grow up?” Harry said contemplatively, cutting himself another slice of chalah. He spread butter on the soft, golden-crusted bread. “If he gets better.”
“Of course, he’ll get better!” Marianne flashed fiercely because she could not imagine a world without Martin. “And you’re being daft again, our Harry. People don’t marry their cousins.”
After tea, Arnold got out the Ludo and they had a game, without the squabbles that usually resulted from the three of them playing together, in which Marianne always came off worst.
They’re being nice to me because they know I’m upset, she realized with surprise, and had to admit that there was something to be said for having brothers.
Nathan went to the big ward to look at his nephew and found Sister Reilly, beside the screened-off bed with Miriam and Sammy, taking Martin’s blood-pressure.
“Well, that’s all right, Dr. Sandberg,” she pronounced watching the mercury rise and fall.
Sammy was holding Miriam’s hand, but she seemed unaware of it, her features as well as her body immobilized by fear as she gazed at her son’s face.
“Does that mean he’ll get better?” Sammy asked.
Sister Reilly felt the boy’s steaming forehead, wishing, as she did every day of her life, that medical science would discover a drug to combat what ailed him. “It would if there were nothing else to worry about,” she replied gravely, unwinding the restricting band from Martin’s arm. “I’ll be after having a word with Staff Nurse when she takes over from me, Dr. Sandberg,” she said to Nathan as he left the bedside with her. “About the wee lad’s family being here, as well as his parents.”
Darkness had fallen outside the tall, narrow windows and the day nurses were tidying the patients’ locker tops before going off duty. Nathan glanced at his watch and saw that it was almost seven o’clock. “Who’s in charge tonight?” he made himself ask the Sister, though what he would do if she said it was Mary he didn’t know.
Sister Reilly paused before a long table in the middle of the ward and studied him surreptitiously whilst moving a jar of chrysanthemums an inch to the right to balance the distance between it and those on either side of it. Nathan was standing beside her with his hands nonchalantly in his trouser pockets, as if the answer to his question was of no importance to him, and she could barely restrain a snort. Did these young people think her blind to what went on under her nose? She’d have to be deaf, too! His broken romance had been the talk of the hospital.
“Tis nobody ye know, Dr. Sandberg, so don’t be after givin’ it a thought,” she replied to let him know she was not fooled and had the satisfaction of seeing him blush.
“By the way, Sister, I got married last year,” he said as casually as he could and returned to the side-ward wondering why he had told her.
Lucy, the ward-maid, was pouring more tea into the thick, hospital cups for the family, her freckled face registering her sympathy.
“I ’ope you all ’as a good night an’ t’lickle lad’s sittin’ up ’avin’ bacon’n egg when I get ’ere termorrer,” she said warmly. “Miracles ’as ’appened in this place many a time,” she added, before departing with a rustle of her starched uniform.
Nathan marvelled at how the staff managed to bring to this clinical institution a human touch which had escaped his notice when he was a student on the wards. Perhaps you had to be on the receiving end of it to know it was there. Even the dreaded Dragon was being pleasant to him because he was a patient’s relative.
“Doesn’t that ward-maid know Jews don’t eat bacon?” he heard Bessie say to David, but his brother did not reply. His mother was fingering her brooch pensively and his godfather Sigmund playing nervously with his watch chain. Rebecca was now lying on one of the beds and had taken off her shoes. He made a mental note to tell Lou her ankles were swollen. Doctors did not usually treat their own wives, so Nathan was supervising Cora’s pregnancy and Lou was looking after Rebecca.
He could hear his father’s phlegmy chest preparing for another bout of coughing and saw him take out his handkerchief in readiness. “You need some air, Father, it’s too stuffy in here for you. Why not go for a little walk?” he said, loosening his tie and knowing the suggestion would be ignored. Hunger had begun gnawing at his stomach and the others must be feeling empty, too. “There’s a café round the corner where they make sandwiches. Don’t you think we should have a snack?” he said.
“Who could eat?” Esther exclaimed.
Ben patted her hand and gave Nathan a reproachful look. He received one from Helga, too, and Carl eyed him rebukingly over the top of the newspaper he was reading. Nobody else so much as glanced at him.
“You’d think a ward-maid would know we don’t eat bacon, wouldn’t you?” Bessie harped. “They must’ve had Jewish patients before and they’ll have them again. Someone should tell her, so she won’t offend anyone else’s relatives.”
“Zelda Cohen put bacon on Yankel’s throat when he had the quinsies,” Sarah said. “But don’t tell her son-in-law Dr. Smolensky, he thinks he cured them. Her Christian neighbour swears by it.”
“I’ve got a patient who thinks wrapping a sweaty sock round his neck will cure tonsillitis,” Nathan revealed. But nobody seemed interested.
“So long as he didn’t eat it, what does it matter?” Abraham said impatiently as his phlegm rolled to a crescendo and was transferred to the square of linen.
“The sock or the bacon?” Nathan inquired facetiously, and everyone immediately fell silent.
What good are we doing sitting here like this? he thought. But nobody would leave until Martin’s medical crisis was over one way or the other, though their presence was serving no purpose. Why didn’t he go home himself? His professional assistance wasn’t required and his concern for his nephew would be no less if he were seated by the fire in his own house. Get up and go then, he ordered his body, but it refused to obey his brain. The inexplicable something, destructive and at the same time sustaining, which he had tried to exorcize from his soul and deny was in his blood, was holding him captive with his fellow-prisoners whose habits and stupidities would probably drive him up the wall before the morning.
Mary Dennis was drying her hair by the gas-fire when her friend entered. “Be a pet and draw the curtains for me,” she requested, grimacing at the rain gushing down the long windowpanes. “I’ve been spending my weekend off doing all the chores I’ve let pile up since my last one.”
“How thrilling!”
“As I’ve nothing better to do, I might add.”
Ann Barker surveyed the lavender curtains with which she had just shut out the dismal night, and the patchwork quilt and cushions on the narrow bed. “You’ve been titivating your room, too. I’m surprised you could afford to on our lousy pay.”
Mary smiled. “Well everyone knows nursing’s a labour of love, don’t they? If you’re interested in money you don’t go into it. Fortunately, I’ve got my Aunt Mabel who lets me rummage through the trunks in her attic and take what I want.”
“It looks a real home from home now,” Ann pronounced.
“It might as well be, as I’m likely to live here forever,” Mary answered dryly.
Ann moved a pile of black stockings and a workbox from a chair and sat down. “What d’you mean, you’re likely to live here forever?”
“I’ll be my brother’s kids’ maiden aunt, like dear old Mabel’s mine, that’s what I mean,” Mary declared with a grin. But her cornflower-blue eyes remained serious.
“For heaven’s sake! You’re only twenty-six.”
Mary began brushing her tangled blonde curls. “So are you. But we’ve been at the Infirmary nine years. I feel like a fixture already. And you’ll certainly be a maiden aunt, Ann, the way you’re going on.”
Ann shrugged her shoulders but said nothing.
“We’re a right pair, aren’t we?” Mary said quietly. “I lose my heart to a Jew and you lose yours to a married man.”
“Rob’s going to get a divorce,” Ann replied defensively.
“Is that why he’s still living with his wife?”
“Stop it!”
“When’re you going to come to your senses?” Mary sighed. “He’ll never leave her. He hasn’t got the guts.”
Ann sprang up from the chair and glared at her.
“He’s been making a mug of you since we were probationers, Ann.”
“Nat didn’t make one of you, I suppose?”
“What happened with us was entirely different,” Mary said, reflecting that everyone else called him Nat, but she had called him Nathan.
“The only difference was he was married to his religion,” Ann retorted.
“That’s one way of putting it.” Nathan had told Mary he wasn’t all that religious and in her view it was his family he was tied to. “But he didn’t promise to marry me.” She avoided Ann’s eye. “He didn’t sleep with me, either.”
“Oh, don’t be such a prude!” Ann snapped, then her voice grew sympathetic. “You still care about him, don’t you?”
Mary stared at the flickering gas-flames. She’d been out with several men since her affair with Nathan ended, but the thought of him had intruded between her and them. A young radiologist who had just joined the hospital staff was pursuing her at present, but she wasn’t interested in him.
“Would you start seeing Nat again if he asked you to?” Ann asked her.
“Probably.”
Ann sat twisting a lock of her long, dark hair around her forefinger edgily and Mary noted the anxiety lines beside her mouth and the hollowness of her cheeks. Her green wool dress hung loosely about her spare frame and the three-quarter-length sleeves revealed wrists thin enough to snap. Ann had been plump and pretty once, but her traumatic relationship with Rob had reduced her to this haggard state.
“Nathan didn’t let me go on waiting forever,” Mary said to her. “Spending all my off-duty time hoping he’d ring up.”
“That was Rob on the phone before,” Ann said, ignoring the inference. “He’s had another bust-up with her and she’s gone to sleep at her mother’s.”
“Well he’s out of luck, isn’t he?” Mary said brutally. “You’re on nights, so you’re not available.”
Ann fiddled with her coral necklace. “I came to ask if you’d go on duty for me.”
Mary picked some loose hairs from her shabby red dressing gown and did not reply.
“You know I’d do it for you.”
Even if you knew it wasn’t helping me? Mary wondered. But she couldn’t dictate her friend’s life. All she could do was advise; and support when the advice was ignored. They had been close since their training days, sharing their clothes and their troubles; had taken their SRN exam on the same day and been Staff Nurses in the same surgical unit, Mary on a male ward and Ann on a female one. Over the years, they had gone together to the weddings of girls who had trained and qualified with them and had each, more than once, caught the bridal bouquet when it was tossed from the going-away car. But this had not made either of them the next bride. Now they were Sisters and sometimes attended the weddings of young nurses who had worked under them. Ann still reached out hopefully for the magic posy of carnations and orange blossom, or whatever it might be, but Mary did not bother. The only man she wanted was forbidden to make her his wife.
“You don’t like Rob, that’s why you won’t do it,” Ann declared, though Mary had not said she would not.
Mary thought of the handsome laboratory technician who was responsible for her friend’s plight. He worked at another hospital, but often came to the Infirmary staff dances, as a senior nurse had told them on the evening they met him at one – without his wife, she had added warningly, but Ann had not heeded the warning. “There’s no harm in dancing with him,” she had said and had been dancing to his tune ever since. How can I like a man I can’t respect? Mary asked herself. But Ann’s dejected appearance moved her to get up and kiss her pale cheek.
“All right. I’ll go on duty for you,” she sighed. “Though it’s against my better judgement. And you can borrow the bath salts and talc Mum gave me for my birthday, if you like.”
Ann watched her getting out her uniform. “Bless you, Mary.”
“I don’t know who’s the bigger fool, you or me.”
Love, Mary thought wryly, as she left her quarters in Lorne Street and cut across the blustery forecourt of the Private Patients’ Home which adjoined the hospital. And the things it does to people, came the bitter addendum as she entered the covered way. Once she’d been carefree and content in this big sprawling place; had walked these long, dismal stretches unaffected by the bleakness. But sharing a bench in Whitworth Park with a boy one autumn morning had changed her, heightening her perceptions and honing her sensations to a knife edge.
The echo of her shoes treading the concrete floor increased the loneliness that thinking of Nathan always evoked. Other nurses were going on and off duty, too, huddled into their navy-blue, red-lined capes. Some were walking along in groups, chatting to each other and several exchanged greetings with Mary. It was a familiar scene. The end of the bustling day-stint and the beginning of the long night’s vigil on dimly-lit, hushed wards where some patients would sleep peacefully, set on the road to recovery, and others would breathe their last before the morning.
Why can’t I just take it in my stride, like I did before I knew Nathan? Mary asked herself. When they’d first met, she’d lectured him about his sensitivity and had helped him acquire the dispassionate approach his profession demanded. But he had never lost his deep concern for the human condition and the way that he felt had eventually rubbed off on her.
She hugged her cape closer around herself, but the comfort she needed was not to be found within its sensible folds. She hadn’t found it in an increased dedication to her work, either, though she had sought it there. Work, however rewarding, was no substitute for the right man’s arms. Why had she let herself fall in love with Nathan?
“All he thinks of is his stomach!” Esther expostulated after Nathan had been out and returned with a bagful of cheese and tomato sandwiches.
Everyone else took a sandwich to munch with their third cup of tea, which Staff Nurse Flaherty had just sent in.
“When Martin gets better, I’ll bring a pound of Lyons to the hospital,” Abraham promised.
“If” would be a better word, Nathan thought grimly. His nephew had been delirious and burning with fever when he looked in at the ward before going out to the café.
“A giver-away of tea leaves I’m married to!” Sarah exclaimed glancing at her husband. “Since 1905 he’s been taking tea to the Habimah Shul every week, a present for Rabbi Lensky. And I’ve never known why. Sugar he takes also.”
“So now I’ll tell you why,” Abraham smiled. “When I was out of work, every day he gave a hot drink to me and Shloime Lipkin and Yankel Cohen. And to plenty of others.”
“That’s what you’ve kept a secret from me all these years?” Sarah asked looking perplexed.
Abraham shrugged, but said no more. How could he explain the feeling that had existed between the unemployed immigrants who had gathered by the fire in a back room at the shul? The shame they had shared because they couldn’t support their families. A shame that was so demeaning, they had not wanted their wives to know of the brief respite they allowed themselves from the day-long, fruitless search.
It was now nine o’clock and the night-time hush that had descended upon the hospital had permeated the room. Every shuffle of a foot. Abraham’s sporadic coughs, the replacing of a cup in a saucer and the sound of the tea being thirstily gulped down lent emphasis to the stillness.
“Sitting here makes a person feel cut off from everything,” Ben said brushing some crumbs off his trousers.
“But no man is an island,” Nathan quoted.
“What d’you mean?” his prosaic brother-in-law inquired.
“There’s nothing that happens in one part of the world that doesn’t affect the rest,” Sigmund supplied.
“I’d say the interpretation was open to debate, Father,” Carl said. “Ben was thinking about it on a personal level.”
“Who, me? I wasn’t thinking about islands at all.”
“He’s got better things to think about,” Esther declared.
Bessie felt her wig to make sure she still had it on straight. “Some people’ve got worse.”
Sigmund ignored the interpolations as he often did in order to pursue his own point. “While we’re sitting here with our load of tsorus, our brethren are being persecuted in Germany.”
“Oy,” Abraham sighed.
“Listen, a person’s own sorrow has to come first,” Sarah told Sigmund.
“Am I arguing about it?” he retorted. “That’s the trouble with this world. Everyone’s got their own packet. They don’t have time to think about other people’s.”
David stopped eating his sandwich. “Unless it arrives on their own doorstep.”
“A clever boy you always were, David,” Sigmund applauded. “And Nat also, but he’s suddenly gone shtum.”
“I wish I’d kept quiet in the first place. You daren’t open your mouth in this family in case it builds up into something you never intended,” Nathan said irritably. “This isn’t the time or place to be worrying about what’s going on in Germany –”
“Didn’t I just say that’s the trouble?” Sigmund interrupted. “There’s never a right time or place until it happens to you, like David said.”
“The English aren’t like the Germans,” Esther chimed in.
“What about that Mr. Mosley?” Sarah demanded hotly.
Rebecca had a remote expression on her face, as if she had dissociated herself from the heated discussion taking place around her. There were times when Nathan agreed with her opinion of his family and this was one of them, though he would never admit it.
“I don’t think Mrs. Evans and Mrs. Watson could be like the Germans,” Sarah declared.
“The fact that it couldn’t happen here is no reason to turn our backs on those it is happening to,” David asserted.
“Who is turning their back?” Sarah said sharply. “But it can’t be in the front of our minds all the time. We can only help those who manage to escape and in between we’ve got our own lives to live.”
“That’s not the right attitude, Mother,” David persisted.
“You’d like me to get on a boat and go to Germany to fight with Hitler?”
“That’s what it’ll come to in the end,” Sigmund declaimed. “Another war.”
“You always were a warmonger!” Sarah accused him.
“It’s true, Father,” Helga endorsed.
“You’d prefer I should say what I don’t think, just to please you?” Sigmund shouted.
“I’d prefer you shouldn’t say anything!” Sarah retorted. “I’m upset enough already…” Her voice petered out when the door opened. Then her fingers tightened on her brooch. The girl in the snapshot she had found in Nathan’s pocket was standing in the doorway.
Oh God, Nathan and David thought simultaneously.
“What on earth’s going on in here?” Mary inquired, surveying the littered room which momentarily distracted her attention from its occupants.
The pages of Carl’s newspaper had found their way on to the floor, a pile of coats lay haphazardly on a bed, some discarded bits of sandwich were scattered on a table and there were cups and saucers everywhere.
“This is a hospital, not a station buffet,” Mary said entering to gather up the disordered Manchester Guardian, “I could hear you shouting outside in the corridor. I’d be obliged if you’d remember there are patients here, trying to sleep.”
Nathan had not known she was now a Sister. The dark uniform suits her, he thought. Then she turned and saw him, and the colour drained from her face.
“Hallo, Mary,” he made himself say. Only David knew who she was, and the others wouldn’t think it strange for him to be acquainted with others on the staff as well as Sister Reilly.
“Good evening,” Mary said stiffly, aware of her heart fluttering wildly in her breast.
“I’m sorry about the mess,” Nathan apologized. “We’ll clear it up before we go.”
“Sister Reilly left a message that she’d given permission for a patient’s relatives to wait in here. But I’ve been doing my rounds, I haven’t been on the ward yet. I’d no idea it was someone of yours.”
“They don’t have a Sister on every ward at night, it isn’t necessary,” Nathan explained to the others. “It’s my brother’ lad,” he told Mary.
Mary’s gaze moved to David and flickered with hostility. She had only seen him once before but would remember the occasion always. He had found Nathan with her in the park one day and had treated her as if she didn’t exist. He appeared not to recognize her, but she knew he had.
“My other brother,” Nathan supplied.
Mary removed her gaze from the man she had come to think of as the representative of the enemy, who were all now collected in this room regarding her impassively, like a solid bloc united against an outsider. “I’m sorry your nephew is so ill,” she said to Nathan.
Rebecca became aware of something in the atmosphere that had not been present a few minutes ago, and of her mother-in-law and David glancing at her uneasily. She looked up at Nathan and saw that his eyes were riveted to the Sister’s. What she could feel was coming from the two of them! A wave of shock stirred the child in her womb. This young Gentile woman with the English-rose face was part of her husband’s past and he was still in love with her. It was her shadow that hovered over their marriage.
Sarah saw the brief, unguarded glance of shared pain and longing, too, but hid her alarm. Everything is bershert, she told herself philosophically. She had always believed that Fate took a hand in people’s lives. Her children scoffed at the notion, but it was Yiddish folklore that everything was fated, and over and over again she had found it to be true. It was fated for Martin to be a patient in this hospital, so Nathan would re-encounter his shiksah sweetheart and his mother would have the opportunity to put paid to it once and for all. The knowledge that Mary ought not to have been on duty that night would have lent confirmation, but Sarah needed none.
“It’s nice to meet people my son used to know,” she said putting Mary firmly into the past tense. “Did you hear he’d got married, Sister?”
Mary’s expression revealed she had not known, as Sarah had suspected.
“His wife Rebecca is resting on the bed,” she added with a smile. “Her baby’s due soon, we have to look after her.”
Mary managed to return the smile. “Congratulations,” she said to Nathan.
“Jewish people say Mazeltov,” Sarah told her emphasizing the difference between Mary and the family.
“I know,” Mary replied. You’d be surprised at the things I learned about Jews in the years I went out with your son, she thought bitterly. And the main one was the power of the blood-tie. She surveyed the silver-haired lady who had taken charge of the conversation; her birdlike proportions did not detract from her matriarchal bearing and behind her equable exterior was a hint of something that told you she would protect her family against whatever might threaten it.
“I must get on with my rounds,” Mary said wanting to escape though she was no longer a threat.
Nathan took a step towards her and she saw David glance at him warningly.
“Shall I come to the ward with you, Mary?”
Mary let her eye rest briefly on the beautiful young Jewess with the Old Testament name who was Nathan’s wife and would soon bear his child, and accepted, as she had not really done until now, that a chapter of her life was irrevocably over. “It isn’t necessary, thank you.”
“A nice girl,” Sigmund pronounced when the door had closed behind her.
And a sensible one, thank God, Sarah said to herself with relief.
Nathan went to stare out of the window, so nobody would see his face. He would have been surprised to know that David wanted to comfort him and that his mother was similarly affected.
Later, Lou returned with a pile of smoked-salmon sandwich wrapped in greaseproof paper.
“He thinks it’s a wedding!” Esther snorted.
“Food is Jewish comfort,” Sarah declared.
But nobody could bring themselves to eat.
“Let’s have a peep at Martin, Nat,” Lou said.
“Mary Dennis is on duty tonight. She’d rather we didn’t.”
“Is that so?” Lou replied putting two and two together and making five. “Well she isn’t going to frighten me off!”
It was Lou who went back and forth between Martin’s bedside and the family, as the uneaten sandwiches dried up and the long night dragged on. At four in the morning, the boy’s condition raged to a crisis and Lou brought Miriam and Sammy to the side-ward at Mary’s request.
Another hour passed by and nobody spoke a word. But Sarah prayed silently and knew that Abraham and Sigmund were doing the same. Daylight was filtering into the room when a young doctor entered rubbing the morning stubble on his chin.
“The lad’s going to be all right,” he smiled and went to pat Miriam’s shoulder when her pent-up emotion was released in a flood of tears.
There’s never an ill wind, Sarah mused, travelling home in David’s Morris Cowley saloon through the wet, deserted streets.
“That Sister who ticked us off didn’t seem to like Nat, did she?” Bessie remarked cutting into her thoughts.
David supposed it might have appeared that way to someone who didn’t know what he did. “I wasn’t in the mood to notice,” he lied.
“When I see how those nurses boss doctors about, I’m glad I’m only a presser,” Abraham declared.
Sarah said nothing. But she was thinking that the ill wind had done a power of good. Any ideas the shiksah might have had about Nat still being interested in her had been hit on the head now she knew he was married. She hadn’t even let him go to the ward with her, which was as good as telling him his place was with his wife. Sarah couldn’t help feeling sorry for her and hoped she would find a nice husband from among her own people.
A milk float was clanking its way to the local dairy as David stopped the car outside his parents’ home. Tibby was asleep in the porch and Sarah carried her damp, furry pet into the kitchen, full of contrition that it had had to spend the night outside.
Abraham went immediately to the kitchen dresser to get his prayer shawl and the phylacteries he must put on to say the morning prayer. “This is the first time I’ve laid on my tefillin before going to bed!” he yawned putting on the tallith and rolling up his sleeve to strap one of the small leather-boxed, holy texts to his arm.
Sarah had just poured some milk for the cat and was eyeing the array of cakes on the table. She’d been putting them on to dishes for the tea party when Nathan came to fetch her. She watched her husband strap the second phylactery to his forehead before beginning the prayer.
“Today we’ve got plenty to thank God for,” she smiled. Martin would get well. And Nathan would settle down now and be a happily married man.
She would have been less sanguine about the latter had she known how the night’s events had affected his wife.