One late afternoon in drab midwinter in the back room of Sammy Brassey’s salon, Mina succumbed to him fondling the nape of her neck. The salon was like a private club, a place of secrets unknown outside its four mirrored walls. Who had got a taxi with a dear friend to Rodney Street and returned empty and white-faced, a head supported by a fur shoulder. For these days, three children was enough, you had another one and you might put your head in the gas oven, so don’t say a word about it but you had the name and address on a slip of paper in your purse, folded up tight. The Brassey boy gave out the details. Everything a woman needed to know to navigate beyond Allerton Road came from him.
There were women who loved it in the neck. It had a profound effect on them, it was always surprising to Sammy to find out who. Some were numb in this place, others had nerve endings which led ‘straight downstairs.’ If you could get your hands on these women, they turned into putty, they couldn’t stop themselves, you had them for as long as you wanted. He knew which one Millie Polack was, he had known for a long time, from an expression on her face of boredom, a sunken look around the eyes some women got after twenty years of marriage. Something gone awry that needed to be fixed and the husband no idea how to do it, looking at her afraid, bewildered, and her not able to say what was wrong because she didn’t know. The wives of vicars and of rabbis, their days filled with good works, and the ones who had nothing to do, who went to the pictures on their own pursuing something that did not exist, he could only scratch the surface of what it was they were after, he didn’t know what they thought they wanted, he only knew what they didn’t yet know they were missing.
Now Millie Polack, who was supposed to be a communist, or a socialist, he didn’t know the difference, and what was all that about but deep discontent? She came in with her Red newspaper and spread it on her lap while she was under the dryer. ‘How is factory production this week in the Soviet Union?’ he would ask her. ‘On the ups?’
‘Everything is good in Russia.’
‘Everything?’
‘Better than you can believe.’ (Or that she believed herself, for wasn’t this news, too, a load of hooey?)
‘I heard a few bad things coming from over there.’
‘Propaganda.’
‘Listen, when we’ve finished, I’ve got something to show you.’
She was his last appointment of the day. ‘That’s the only time I’ve got this week, any good, Mrs. Polack?’ he had said when she rang. Oh, the dirty dog, she thought, I know what you’re up to, I’ve heard the rumours; for there was supposed to be a secret book with the names of all of his clients with a special mark next to those he’d invited for an unspecified extra treatment – was it a massage, a new formula, a look at the latest shade charts? The hell as like, said Ettie Beilinson, the dressmaker; we all know what goes on.
He led her to the back room. ‘It’s in here.’
‘What’s happening?’
‘This.’
His fingers moved to her throat and trickled down the front of her three-guinea navy polka dot with puff sleeves and a ruched neckline. Her hat was resting on the shelf next to the bottles of Broll cold wave. Her musquash coat was round her ankles. The fingers pushed into the silk of her brassiere and tweaked her nipples. Surrounded by cards of hair clips and hairnets, she thought, Well, anything is possible now. I should have seen this coming but what can you do?
Her underwear was on the floor, he was caressing the spot where her stockings, taut, met the dimpled flesh of her upper thigh. He gently twanged the suspender. ‘Are you all right, darling? Are you happy with your …’
His fingers crawled around. He was doing something to her and even in the blackout she thought she was going to black out even more.
Was she going to die? Was he going to kill her with sex, with just his hand?
‘Make as much noise as you like, Mrs. Polack my dear. Don’t worry, nobody’s going to hear you, you’re safe and sound.’
His wet fingers unsnapped the nylons from their clips. They trailed down her legs, lay in a mess by her feet.
‘Now we get to the grand finale, are you ready? It’s a surprise.’
She was far beyond ready, ready was a line in the past, a starting point that had long ago befallen her.
‘Just lean against the wall, here, if you don’t mind. I don’t want you to fall over. How good are you at standing on one leg?’
He picked up one foot, she felt nothing but a tickle. After a few minutes he picked up the other foot, she was in limbo.
‘Now we’re finished. You had the whole treatment, do you like it?’
Her face was blotched, a red rash had appeared on her cheeks.
‘What the hell did you do to me?’
‘A special treat for one of my special ladies, that’s all. Look down.’
Past her knees, past her calves, past her ankles, her two broad feet had erupted in vermillion nail varnish.
‘The shade is called Flamingo Nights. Very popular. We go through bottles of it every week. No extra charge, of course, it’s on me.’
‘And what do you get out of it, Sammy? I never even touched you.’
‘Good question. Nobody ever asked me this. All my ladies run home without a word, only Millie Polack wants to know. It’s a mystery, leave it at that.’
He winked. He was still wearing his white jacket, he smelled of chemicals and cigars. He was balder than when she had first come to him seven years ago, his moustache was going grey and his wolfish, sallow face had sunk, was jowly. A devourer of women who would never be satisfied. And did he not have a wife called Wendy tucked away somewhere in a house over the water while he slept in the flat above the salon?
Some of them cried afterwards, some thanked him, some left and never came back, one went home and put her head in the gas oven. One moved away to Wallasey where no Jews were. One told her husband who kicked her out. No one was ever invited into the back room a second time. There were always more depressed wives to start afresh with. He could never get enough of their feet; he thought of them walking home to their husbands, clattering along the avenue in their high heels, their toes blaring out a secret signal to one another. He had marked them, until they got the remover out, but still they remembered.
‘Millie, Millie! I adore you, you’re an attractive woman, I wish you’d make the best of yourself. You’re a plump little minx. I got through to you, what’s the harm in that? The citadel is intact, I made no invasion, it still belongs to your husband. Think of this as a beautiful dream you had, just a lovely dream. You’ll go to bed tonight with him beside you and you’ll wake up tomorrow and poof. Nothing happened, it was just a dream, a dream come true.’
Men are such swine, she thought as he helped her into her musquash.
Penny Lane was shut up for the night. The façades of the shops were dark, cups and saucers and other pretty little things had their heads down in the unlit windows. If she never went back to the salon then everyone in the know would guess why. The pig had got her, she could not tell a living soul.
She passed a man in a mackintosh with a satchel over his shoulder. He looked back at her as she walked on, leaving the shops behind, treading along past the never-ending ribbon of houses each flying a small flag of individuality in the form of a bay window or an olive-green front door and brass knocker. Gardens full of shadowy rose bushes and glittering alpine rockeries had eaten up the farmland.
As she walked, leaving behind the man trailing fumes of breath, she returned to the darkness of the back room and experienced again the sharp pang of pleasure she was not able to suppress. You have fallen off the edge of the world, she thought. How can you go back now, back to that grey life?
She was too close to home. She could not open the front door in this state. Louis would be there, the boys would be racing around, Paula would be listening to her programme on the wireless – she was such a fan of the concerts and plays and high-minded talks, though Mina thought she didn’t understand a word of what she was listening to, just taking it all in like she was being breastfed words. They would all look up, they would detect something wrong, she might pat her hair and pretend that she had taken up a new style, she had nothing to explain, it was the last appointment of the day, ‘I know I’m late but it was the only time he could fit me in.’
Footsteps approaching, the man with his white breath, his leather satchel. ‘Good evening, are you quite all right? You look done in. Do you need any help?’
A tall bony Englishman. A long face under a soft felt hat. A belted fawn mackintosh flapping round his knees.
‘I’m … I’m …’
‘Look, I’m a doctor, you may know my surgery, I’m on Smithdown Road near the hospital. If there’s anything I can do, you seem—’
‘I come over with feelings, terrible feelings.’
‘Oh dear, what sort of feelings? Is it pain?’
‘Not pain.’
‘Nerves, then?’
‘Yes, maybe it’s my nerves.’
‘Do you live far? I can escort you home if you like.’
‘I’m only round the corner, but I don’t need no help.’
‘I’m going your way, you know. I have some leaflets to deliver. I wander the streets on my little route.’ He smiled. ‘You might be shocked at what I have in my satchel.’
‘I’m beyond shocking tonight. What have you got?’
He withdrew a bundle. ‘Do you see? Are you sympathetic?’
She laughed. ‘You don’t know what you’re asking me. Oh, it’s funny.’
‘You find the Party humorous?’
‘No, but I keep running into you people. I don’t know if it’s a blessing or a curse.’
She had left her paper in the salon, too flustered to pick it up when she left. And had thought, Someone else will maybe read it. Now here was a man, a good-looking Englishman, a professional type, with Communist Party leaflets on a suburban street. The leaflets were all about the coming war. In this battle the Soviet Union must do everything in its power to save itself, the price of not doing so was too high, for saving itself it would save the world. One made alliances that were not necessarily savoury, but then the imperialist Churchill … and so on. Russia should not become involved in a bourgeois war, it should pit the capitalists against the fascists and stand back and watch them destroy one another. Stalin was always right.
‘Once upon a time,’ she said, smiling, for it was funny to her that that long-ago meeting in the forest should come to this, a suburban road in Liverpool and a respectable Englishman spouting the same material as her boys. She began to tell him about the forest.
‘Is this a fairy tale you read somewhere?’
‘No, it happened to me when I was a young girl, almost a child but not quite.’
But his face was stern and unsympathetic. ‘At that time,’ he said, ‘there were enthusiasts for the coming revolution who were not properly aligned with the common purpose of the Party. Some of them were just romantics, or anarchist hotheads. We had to purge them from the Party so they would cease to spread like a toxic stain. Today, we …’ And on his words coursed, like a dam that floods a valley and with it a village, until her memories were nearly all drowned.
She felt the colour return to her face. He noticed it under the street light, and said, ‘You look a little better. Might you be well enough to come to a meeting? We have an excellent speaker next week.’
Was there anything between a meeting and Sammy Brassey’s back room? It was funny that Sammy Brassey and Stalin had the same moustache. But she did not know if she would like to go to a meeting. She did not know either how she would explain such an excursion to her husband. It would be a form of disobedience. He voted Conservative. He put up with her meshugenah ideas. But a meeting? No, she thought not.
The man, who now introduced himself as Christopher Tinline, seemed to her to oscillate between his roles as GP and local Party functionary. ‘Well, do ring me in the morning if you’re still unwell, I’m in the book.’
‘I think the feelings are all gone by then.’
‘Perhaps, but you know where I am. Please don’t hesitate to—’
She broke away and walked quickly home where Louis was sitting in his armchair, drinking a glass of whisky.
‘Don’t you look nice,’ he said, remembering where she had been. For the men of Allerton, who did not take their alterations in to Ettie Beilinson’s, had no idea what went on.
She locked herself in the bathroom and took the varnish off her toes.
To hell with it, she said the next morning emptying the ashes from the grate. To hell with men and everything.
A few weeks later Molotov and von Ribbentrop signed their non-aggression pact. Coincidentally, on the same day Sammy Brassey, possibly drunk, fell under the wheels of a tram on Mather Avenue and died in Sefton General before they could amputate his legs. ‘He’d be nothing without his legs,’ they said at Ettie Beilinson’s. ‘Or his hands,’ several added. Or his tongue, thought a couple who had experienced something experimental. The back-room women did not attend the funeral, so everyone knew who they were. A week later the war started and the previous life was put away.
Rivka, Solly and Dora fell into a ravine of silence.