Mrs. Kaplan shuffled into the surgery and sat down on the edge of a polished oak chair, her manner suggesting she was not sure if she would be staying. “Not a bad place you’ve got here, Nat,” she said grudgingly to the darkly handsome young man seated behind the desk.
Nathan Sandberg glanced around his prison and managed to smile.
The shrivelled-looking little woman fanned her beady gaze along the glossy cream walls, holding it for a moment on the framed certificate as if to satisfy herself that Nathan was qualified to attend her. “I want you should take me for a patient, Nat. A desk with a leather top must have cost something,” she added as though this were a deciding factor in her choice of practitioner.
“And what can I do for you?” Nathan inquired in his bedside voice, which at times sounded to him more like a shop assistant’s.
“Plenty, I hope!”
Nathan controlled the urge to laugh. Wait till he told his partner who the latest addition to their list was. “She’ll expect two bottles of medicine instead of one,” Lou would groan. Mrs. Kaplan had been called the meanest woman in Strangeways when they were boys. She hadn’t been the cleanest either, he recalled, eyeing the stains on her rusty black coat and trying not to wrinkle his nose as a mixed waft of moth balls and body odour drifted from across the desk. Would he ever become oblivious to the unsavoury side of his work? Others said you did, but it hadn’t happened to him yet.
“So, Mrs. Kaplan,” he said, collecting himself. “You’re not feeling too well, eh?”
Mrs. Kaplan inserted a black-rimmed fingernail beneath the roan’s flat cap she habitually wore and scratched her head vigorously. “I’m only middling,” she shrugged, producing a sniff then a cough. “How else can I be with my layabout sons?”
Nathan had not been in practice long, but he had already learned that a GP’s work included listening to his patients’ woes, as well as to their hearts and chests, and that often the therapeutic process of unburdening themselves did more good than pharmaceutical remedies. Mrs. Kaplan was not the first old acquaintance from Nathan and Lou’s Strangeways childhood to defect from another doctor’s care and place herself in theirs, and it sometimes embarrassed Nathan to find himself hearing the family secrets of people for whom he had run errands when he was a youngster.
Who am I to be advising them? he would ask himself. And why should they think I’m the oracle all of a sudden? “It’s because ‘doctor’ is a magic word,” Lou had said when they discussed this. “It puts you in a class apart.” Nathan was aware of this phenomenon, but still found it difficult to associate its manifestations with himself and Lou. Especially when they walked alone Lower Broughton Road to where their cars were parked, and men old enough to be their fathers touched their caps to them.
“Your sons’re giving you aggravation, are they?” he said sympathetically to Mrs. Kaplan who had stopped scratching her head and was coughing again. He picked up his stethoscope. “We’ll just have a listen to your chest, shall we?”
Mrs. Kaplan recoiled against the chairback and crossed her arms over her sagging bosom. “It’s really necessary?”
Nathan was as reluctant to look at it as she was to reveal it, but it had to be done. “I’m afraid so.” He averted his eyes to some papers on the desk whilst she prepared herself for the ordeal and told him about her sons’ gambling debts.
After he had sent her away with soothing words for her aggravation and a bottle of Mist. Expect. Sed. for her cough he pressed a bell to summon the next patient and went to scrub his hands with carbolic soap, marvelling that there was still skin on them, the way they got scrubbed a hundred times a day.
“Sit down, will you?” he said without turning from the washbasin when someone entered. “I shan’t be a tick.”
The tall, pleasant-faced man who had limped into the surgery smiled to himself and did as he was bid, running a hand through his curly red hair which was still damp from standing at a tram stop in the rain.
“Sammy!” Nathan exclaimed warmly when he reached for a towel and saw him. “Don’t tell me you’ve been sitting in the waiting room?”
“Sure, I have, Nat. Why shouldn’t I?”
“Because my family don’t have to.” Nathan perched on the edge of the desk and smiled at him. “You should’ve knocked on the surgery door to let me know you were here.”
“I don’t expect special treatment.”
A surge of affection for his self-effacing brother welled up in Nathan. You wouldn’t catch David waiting with the patients! But they were direct opposites in every way. “What’s the trouble?” he inquired.
“My leg.”
Nathan was momentarily surprised, then wondered why he should be. Perhaps because he was used to Sammy being lame and had never heard him complain about it.
“Also, my hip,” Sammy added. “But don’t say anything to Miriam. I don’t want to worry her.”
“You’d better undress and let me look at it.”
“Anyone’d think you’d never seen it before!” Sammy grinned as he lay down on the couch. “That we didn’t share a bedroom for umpteen years.”
“I wasn’t a doctor then.” Nathan felt the mangled shinbone with gentle fingers.
“That Cossack did a good job when he galloped his horse over it,” Sammy said lightly.
How can he smile about it? Nathan thought. Most people would spit whenever they heard the word “Cossack” if they had had this deliberately done to them by one. But Sammy was too good-natured to bear even a brute like that any malice. “How old were you when it happened, Sam?” he asked.
“It was a few years before we left Russia,” Sammy said thinking back. “I must’ve been about two.”
“Who set your leg, afterwards? Or tried to, I should say, because it looks as if it was done by a carpenter! No wonder there’s arthritis there and this leg’s shorter than your other one.”
“Mother must have taken me to a doctor, but how can I remember?” Sammy studied his brother’s thoughtful face as Nathan continued examining him. Was this calm young doctor in the starched, white shirt and navy pinstripe suit little Nat who used to throw tantrums for no reason? But he’d always been clever, never without a book in his hands. “Miriam thinks our Martin gets his brains from their Carl,” he smiled. “And I let her think it, but in my opinion he takes after you.”
Heaven help him if he ends up like me, Nathan thought cynically.
“But David’s Ronald is the one who looks like you,” Sammy added.
“Yes, he does, doesn’t he?” Nathan agreed with a stiff smile. “Like that snap of me someone took when I’d just started at Manchester Grammar and I was showing off my school uniform.” He went to sit at his desk. “All right, you can get dressed now, Sam. I’ll give you something to help the pain and arrange for you to see an orthopod.”
“What’s that?”
“Medical slang for an orthopaedic specialist.”
“David said I might have to see one, when I told him about my hip before I left the factory.”
“He’s an amateur physician now, is he?” Nathan replied crisply. “As well as everything else he sets himself up to be.”
“Now, now, our Nat,” Sammy said awkwardly.
“You still think he’s Jesus Christ, don’t you?” Nathan answered with a bitterness he could not disguise.
Sammy tried to laugh it off. “A nice thing to say about a Jew from Cheetham Hill!”
“But he can’t put a foot wrong so far as you’re concerned, can he?” Nathan sat twiddling his fountain pen in an uncomfortable silence whilst Sammy finished dressing.
“David’s very good to me,” Sammy said quietly.
“Sure, he is, who could deny it? He’s too good by half! To all the family.”
Sammy fiddled with a button on his raincoat, an unhappy expression in his deep blue eyes.
“That’s why we’re all so indebted to him,” Nathan added flatly as if his sudden burst of emotion had left him drained.
“Whatever David’s faults are, his generosity makes up for them,” Sammy declared sincerely, thinking how strange it was to have to defend someone because they were too kind and remembering a similar conversation he had once had with Miriam about David.
“If you say so,” Nathan replied in the same tone. He was gazing at the photograph of his wife which Lou had deemed was a standard requisite on a doctor’s desk. The first time he had seen it, David had sat quietly smoking while their mother showed it to Nathan, after she had got it from a matchmaker.
“How’s Rebecca?” Sammy asked glancing at it too.
“She’s fine, thanks.”
Sammy winked knowingly. “All things considered.”
“She’s over the morning sickness now.” Nathan turned from the photograph to his brother and assumed his role of physician again. Sammy hadn’t come to the surgery to rake over old coals. “I’ll send you to see Mr. Latimer, Sam. He’s a very clever man.”
“David said if I need to see a specialist I should go privately, and he’ll foot the bill,” Sammy said and saw Nathan’s lips tighten. “Look, you know me, I wouldn’t mind sitting waiting at a hospital,” he added uncomfortably. The coldness between his elder brother and his younger one upset him, and he was beginning to feel like a bone between two dogs, even though one of them was not present.
“Sure, I know you,” Nathan smiled, then the smile disappeared. “And I know David, too. But there’ll be no bill to foot and you won’t have to sit waiting, either. Mr. Latimer’s son Paul was at medical school with me and we’re good friends. Paul was at my wedding.”
“I noticed there were some goyim there,” Sammy recalled.
Nathan laughed abruptly. How typical this was of the Jewish attitude. The Gentile one, too, only the other way round. “Anyhow, Paul’s his father’s house surgeon now,” he said to Sammy. “I’ll get him to fix it up.”
After he had finished the evening surgery, Nathan remained seated at his desk, enjoying the silence and the feeling that the pressure was off him for another day. Perhaps he’d be lucky tonight and not get any calls from patients to disturb his sleep. Oh, sweet oblivion! he thought, then told himself to stop couching his thoughts in the lyrical language he’d indulged in his youth. He was a professional man, engaged in matters of life and death, not the carefree classics scholar he’d wanted to be.
He glanced at his watch and saw that it was nine o’clock. He was later than usual because Lou had been called to a confinement whilst seeing his patients and Nathan had had to see them as well as his own. Most evenings, they chatted about their cases before they went home. About personal things, too. That’s when Lou keeps my feet on the ground, Nathan reflected wryly. As he’d promised to do when they were students. Only all Lou’s dreams had come true for him and Nathan’s had not.
“Dreams shmeams, life is what you make it!” he heard Lou say in his mind’s ear. It was a sound philosophy, but you had to be Lou’s kind of person to adopt it.
He got up and put on his coat and let himself out of the terraced house, his eye falling on the brass plate bearing his name and qualifications, as he shut the door. As usual, looking at it evoked a sense of unreality – enhanced the feeling that he was watching himself play a part. The feeling remained with him whilst he drove home. Even the word “home” seemed unreal when applied to the house where he now lived.
“Home is where the heart is,” David’s maid Lizzie had embroidered on the framed sampler she gave to him and Rebecca for a wedding gift, Nathan recalled with irony, heading towards the place where his heart was not. Was it talking about David with Sammy that had set his mind on this track? Most of the time he avoided it, aware of its futility. He had chosen his path, if chosen meant allowing something to happen to you. And reflections like those he’d just indulged in were links in the chain that bound him to the past. From which he was still trying to unshackle himself.
He drove along Bury New Road, past the darkened shops on Market Place, and stopped the car near the corner where Broughton High School for Girls stood secluded discreetly behind a clump of trees. Hunger pangs were attacking his stomach, he had not eaten since noon, yet he was reluctant to go home.
“If we have daughters, maybe they’ll be pupils there,” Rebecca had said when they bought the house not far from the school. Their first child was due in February, but the prospect of fatherhood seemed unreal to Nathan, too. It was as though he had been plucked from one life and replanted in another which included career, marriage and children. Commitments which caused most of his peers to flourish with pride, but to which he seemed unable to relate.
On his left was a short stretch of road known as The Cliff, which people said was liable to subside and crumble one day. He sat hunched over the steering wheel, gazing at the vast, industrial panorama below, its distant streetlights twinkling like an illusory fairyland, the tall factory chimneys poised against a sky rendered crimson along the horizon line by the hot glow from the furnaces in Trafford Park.
By day, the view was bleak and unwelcoming, as much of Manchester and Salford was, and David had not wanted Nathan to set up practice in a working-class district. “Why spend your life in seedy surroundings?” he had argued. But Nathan and Lou wanted to help alleviate the suffering of people still existing in the penurious conditions from which they and their own families had escaped and had bought and refurbished the surgery of an elderly overworked doctor who wished to retire.
Everything’s relative, Nathan mused, gazing down at the lights which lit the path of weary men returning each night to their smoke-grimed little houses, after toiling in the factories. Some of them were his patients and did not even have hot-water taps or own a towel worthy of the name to offer him when he washed his hands. His daily round sickened him with its ever-present squalor, but at least he was able to go home to Salford’s pleasant residential suburb of Broughton Park; he didn’t have to live that way.
It’s time you stopped kicking and screaming about your lot, Nat! he told himself as he started the engine and drove to the tree-lined avenue where his house was situated. But it was easier said than done.
A chink of light between the front-room curtains meant Rebecca was at home. Some evenings, she went with Lou’s wife, Cora, to a meeting of young women who were raising funds for German Jewish refugees and left Bridie, their maid, to serve Nathan’s meal. He let himself in and hung up his coat in the cloakroom which led off the hall, pausing to scan his fatigue-lined face in the mirror above the washbasin. When he emerged, Bridie was rubbing a thumbmark off the half-moon table with a corner of her starched white apron.
“Good evenin’, Doctor-surr,” she smiled.
Nathan had asked her not to address him that way, but her habit of doling out a double dose of respect each time she spoke to him seemed unbreakable.
Bridie straightened her cap, which was on at a lop-sided angle as usual, and put a thick forefinger to her lips as Nathan was about to reply. “Herself’s asleep on the sofa, Doctor-surr,” she whispered glancing at the front room door. “Lookin’ ivery bit of it like that picture o’ the blessed Madonna me mother sent me at Christmas,” she added reverently. “’Twud be a pity t’disturb her. ’Tis cold cuts y’re gettin’ t’night, Doctor-surr. Oi’ve laid ’em out f’ ye.”
“Thank you, Bridie.”
Nathan went into the parlour, which his wife called the lounge, and stood with his back to the fire looking down at her. The smooth, oval face and heavy eyelids fitted Bridie’s description of her. But the rest did not. Madonnas didn’t have sensuous lips darkened to an inviting mulberry-red, nor long-legged voluptuous bodies like Rebecca’s which fired him with desire when she lay in his arms. A crude remark David had once made drifted into his mind. A man can enjoy a woman without loving her, his brother had brutally implied and Nathan had been shocked, had thought this could never apply to himself. But now he knew differently, and the knowledge had diminished him in his own eyes.
Rebecca stirred drowsily, brushing away a lock of ebony hair that had strayed from her chignon to her cheek, then rested her hand upon the swell of her belly and Nathan felt ashamed of the hardening in his treacherous groin as he watched the gentle rise and fall of her full breasts.
The photograph provided by the matchmaker had not prepared him for her breath-taking loveliness in the flesh. Nor for the sweetness of her nature. Why did he feel no love for her, though she had shared his life and his bed for more than a year? But the chemistry that people called love could not be analysed like the contents of the bottles in his dispensary, nor was there any antidote for its painful effects. Living with Rebecca had not made him forget Mary.
Rebecca opened her eyes and gave him a welcoming smile. And then a quizzical look from their tawny depths. “What’re you standing there thinking about, darling?”
“You.”
She laughed with pleasure. “What’re you thinking about me?”
“How beautiful you are,” he said telling her half of the truth.
“I don’t feel beautiful, with a stomach the size of a football and all done up in maternity clothes!”
“You always wear shades of brown,” he remarked, eyeing her chocolate-coloured skirt and the beige Shantung blouse which would make most women look drab, but somehow enhanced her dusky complexion.
“Don’t you like brown?”
Nathan smiled at her anxious expression. But his amusement was tinged with guilt because she was always so eager to please him. There’s never a strident note about her, he thought, or about anything she does. The way she had furnished their home was the essence of subtlety. The curtains and upholstery in this room were sage green and the carpet a dull gold which complemented the oak-panelled walls. A silver candelabra stood graciously alone on the mantelpiece and the only other ornament was a big Chinese vase, at present filled with bronze chrysanthemums, on a pedestal by the window. David’s house had just been refurnished and Bessie had been lavish with the money she inherited after father’s death last year. But you can’t buy good taste, Nathan reflected, comparing his brother’s over-adorned parlour with his own.
“I like everything about you,” he told his wife sincerely. But liking, even coupled with admiration, was not love.
Rebecca held out her hand to him and he went to sit beside her on the sofa, breathing in the fresh soapy fragrance which always surrounded her.
“I felt the baby move today,” she said in the husky voice with a London accent that still sounded foreign to him.
“Well, you’re five months on, aren’t you?” he replied clinically, wishing he could react like a prospective father instead of a doctor.
“At first, I thought a fly’d got under my clothes and was crawling about on my tummy. It felt as if something was fluttering its wings against me, Nat, and I even got undressed to have a look,” Rebecca went on excitedly. “Then I phoned Cora and she said the first time hers moved it felt like that. So, faint you couldn’t tell whether the movement was on your inside or your outside.”
“You’ll know when it lands you a hefty kick!”
Nathan got up and went to a small mahogany table where some thick slices of salt beef and a leg of roast chicken awaited him. Rebecca’s excitement and his own inability to share in it had heightened his feeling of playing a role. The Crown Derby dinner service and monogrammed cutlery did, too.
How did an ordinary chap like him, the son of poor immigrants, come to all this? The elegance that he admired but felt strange with. The tasteful trappings of wealth. He began eating, but a great surge of resentment had welled up inside him and he could hardly swallow the food. He’d succumbed to his brother’s emotional blackmail, that was how he’d come to it! Sacrificed himself on the twin altar of religion and family, abandoned his Gentile sweetheart and allowed himself to be sold in the marketplace. To a Jewess whose family had the wherewithal to buy him for her, he thought, casting a smouldering glance at Rebecca and suddenly not liking her at all.
“What’s the matter?” she asked.
Nathan stared down at the table. The cutlery and china were wedding presents from her relatives, whose affluent lifestyle made him feel like a pauper in their midst when he visited them in London. “I was just thinking that your background lived up to the matchmaker’s information about you,” he said, wanting to wound her.
Rebecca looked as if he had slapped her face.