Mina and Louis’ sons, Benny and Harry, were rowdy. They had started their education back at the Jewish school in Hope Place, shadowed by the never-ending construction of the Protestant cathedral, a sandstone colossus which formed a pinkish hulk above the city. When the two families moved out to the suburbs the boys went to a new school with all the Robins and Peters and Jimmys and Brendans and Owens. They raised their hands to answer a question. A Jewy sound came out of their mouths. In the playground the other kids got up to their usual tricks of punching, kicking, biting, humiliating. From the Catholics, in particular, the perpetual cry of You murdered our Lord! When they came home and told their father this he thought about it for a day or two then assembled the family in the lounge and announced that he had a comeback.
‘Tell them this: tell them if we hadn’t killed Jesus, he wouldn’t have died for your sins like he said he did, and you wouldn’t be saved, you’d be in hell. So don’t you think you Christians owe us a vote of thanks?’
Benny said he couldn’t remember all that. Of the two brothers he was the least interested in the life of the intellect, preferring to square off like a prizefighter against all comers, though often getting beaten due to his lack of tactics. Harry took it all in. He went back to school the next day and tried it out on ‘Flinty’ McPherson.
Flinty said, ‘So you admit it then? So we was right all along? Come here and take your medicine, Christ killer. Kneel down so I can gob on your head.’
‘But,’ Harry replied, ‘you haven’t understood.’ The words were still passing through his windpipe when Flinty decked him with his leather satchel and spat on his hair.
One time they bunked off school to go to the Aintree races. Benny pinched a pair of binoculars from the camera shop on Bold Street, planning to give them back at the end of the day. ‘I’m no thief,’ he shouted when he was collared. ‘It was just an honest loan. I swear to God. I swear on my mother’s life, I was never going to keep them, what for, it was just the one time we wanted to see the gee-gees!’ Louis had to go in with the bins dangling from his wrist and make amends, smooth things over. ‘They’re just lively boys,’ he said, ‘they didn’t mean no harm,’ and the owner agreed they’d say no more because the people from the chamois business had a good reputation in the city for being honest and above board in their dealings. That was the last criminal act.
Harry was called up in 1940 and served in the tanks. He went off in a scratchy khaki uniform and returned on leave with a collection of coarse expressions which he passed on to his brother. Louis winced when he opened his mouth. Such a son that had sprung from his pale loins, a son who might be a mamzer in another life. Benny followed his brother into the army and after he was demobbed in 1945 refused the offer to go into the family business, the purpose for which sons were born, and behind everyone’s back got himself taken on at a men’s outfitters. He wore zoot suits and jazzy ties. He had a pen with a clear barrel, which if you upended it revealed the form of a scantily dressed blonde. Benny was into everything that was all the rage. He had some kind of mental radar, an alert system for what was coming next. Those watchful brown eyes, those ears out on stalks overhearing conversations on the street. He was absorbent for useful information.
In this family the Infant Prodigy had no confidante.
‘The trouble with my sister,’ Harry said, ‘is she’s complicated.’
Teenage Paula thought it was anyone’s fault but her own if she was complicated. She barely remembered life before the semi-detached house and the back garden, her mother’s grinning row of toby jugs, the patterned carpet, the sound of her father’s car purring down the road home from business. Paula was a walking talking doll that could be dressed up in outfits, clothes that Mina didn’t have the figure for herself, couldn’t carry off the style. But the slim neck and the fox-fur tippet were nothing compared to her great asset, The Voice. She had learned to speak listening to the wireless and talked as if she herself was being broadcast from the BBC at Alexandra Palace. ‘My daughter could go anywhere, be received anywhere,’ Mina said. ‘She could curtsey to the Lord Mayor and he’d never know she was born in the front bedroom off Brownlow Hill like Harry and Benny, and nobody would mistake them for native-born Englishmen even if they are.’ Her sister-in-law was jealous of Paula’s accomplishments; her daughter Bernice couldn’t keep up with her younger cousin. ‘But, big but,’ Lia said, ‘me and Bernice are,’ she entwined two fingers together, ‘like that.’ Could a mother and daughter be closer? Whereas Paula had her own private agenda and she did not tell Mina what it was.
Mina was unwittingly preparing Paula for flight, for disassociation and alienation, for the yearning for better things. In Ettie Beilinson’s parlour, Mina would hoist her infant daughter onto a stool and tell her to recite a poem. If she became sulky, scowled, shook her head, shrugged her shoulders, Mina would cajole: ‘Just say something, Paula, anything, tell us what you had for lunch.’ And eventually she would obediently reply, ‘Brid and butter, with sliced aig,’ inducing torrents of laughter and applause among the parlour full of immigrant ladies with their Brassey boy machineless-reagent perms and polyp-riddled ovaries. So Paula was learning to appreciate an audience; she felt the benefit of it in chocolates and biscuits and lime soda.
At weddings and bar mitzvahs matters escalated. She would be called on to do her party trick of speaking like the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret, once again standing on a chair but this time at the top table with the hosts and guests of honour. Her audiences grew and grew, just for opening her mouth, before she even started singing. There were many of these occasions, the family on her father’s side was huge, an extravagance of Polack relatives in Leeds and Manchester and as far afield as London and Glasgow, for his parents had come from Poland with five brothers and sisters. Weddings, engagement parties, bar mitzvahs were massive events, full of men slipping off their shoes, drinking whisky, inhaling cigars, women in feathered hats and diamanté brooches and mink stoles.
The Polacks were like the stars in the firmament, there were too many of them to count. One was a furrier, one ran a gown shop, one bought and sold gold and silver, one was in the wholesale bakery business, one was a rabbi (the naches!) who wore a full beard and a black hat, one was a teacher, one was in printing, one was a glove manufacturer, one had gone to the devil and nobody talked about him. And the women: one who ran her own gown shop, one who was an agent for Spirella corsets and one who played the piano in a Leeds branch of Lyons tea rooms. And on and on it went and there was no point, Paula thought, in trying to remember them all. Just perform her songs and recitations in the King’s English and submit to having her curls tousled, her cheek pinched, her dimples pressed, smothered against a suffocating bosom scented with lavender water or, worse, a musty suit with a stinky miasma of nicotine.
One time a relative from America turned up, that other shadow family, the ones who had made it safely to the other side. Hearing of Paula’s reputation, he taught her the words to the American Depression-era song ‘Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?,’ chronicling the fate of the doughboys – ‘Once in khaki suits, gee we looked swell …’ The words coming out of the mouth of a six-year-old with a cut-glass accent brought the house down, but nothing induced laughter like the time she innocently crooned the words and melody to ‘Away in a Manger.’ ‘The little lord Jesus lay down his sweet head.’
‘Where the hell did she pick that up?’ Jossel said.
‘The wireless, they play all sorts, but what can you do? This is the country we’re living in.’
Aged seventeen, she was vain, shallow, quick-witted. She had a sulky, sexy beauty, film-star cheekbones and her mother’s raven hair, as if, Mina stated, ‘Margaret Lockwood was waiting for the number 86 on Penny Lane.’ She saved up her coupons for a Horrockses dress. She liked wide patent-leather belts that showed off her waist, and experimented with eyeshadow. To her hard-working older brothers she was a daddy’s girl, a spoilt brat. She got away with murder and everyone let her because when she opened her mouth she sounded like the goyem, full of plums. ‘Oh Mother, why do you have to …’
Benny and Harry played practical jokes on her. Harry bought a joke-shop turd and put it in her bed. The boys were irredeemable. She felt she was on her own, an orchid rising from a dung heap.
But she was not on her own, she did have an ally. Her father. He had a secret life, not what you’d think – not women or gambling, or boys. Sometimes if he had half an hour he would go into the Walker Art Gallery and commune for a while with the pictures. He had an aesthetic sensibility, underdeveloped, autodidactic, and shared with not a single pal, so he was never able to tell a soul how much he hated the smell of chamois leathers, deplored their existence, wished they could have stayed on the goats and sheep they came from. A chamois buffed everything to a high sheen, you cleaned windows and motor cars with them, but he adored gauzy nymphs and modest blue-robed virgins and society figures dressed in satin, ruffs, lace. At first he had no idea of the meanings, symbolic or otherwise, in these works; he didn’t know ‘school of’ and ‘after’ and ‘provenance’ and ‘brushstrokes.’ He just derived a deep sensual satisfaction from the surface of the canvas, the richness of the costumes and the strangeness of the landscape. His heart was full. It was all going on in that beating region of his chest, romantically, emotionally.
Paintings moved him close to tears, and he couldn’t say why so he said nothing to nobody. He would have been mad even to try. He stayed mute with his secret escape to the wind-strewn plateau by St. George’s Hall, where the art gallery beckoned him in for half an hour with the Pre-Raphaelites, the hyper-colouration, their lushness, their strange deathliness. He did not want more than to be left alone for a few minutes before a Burne-Jones and come out thinking himself a fortunate man until he walked back to Mount Pleasant, where the smell of chamois leathers entered his pores again. His daughter was the only member of his family with whom he could share his secret tendencies towards the visual aesthetic. He wanted to see if Paula could feel what he felt when he stood in front of a painting, he wanted a life-companion such as he had never expected to find in marriage; it had not entered his head to look for a wife with whom he had something in common.
On Saturdays he went to shul in the morning in a suit and tie and came home and changed into slacks, a fawn-coloured cashmere cardigan with wooden buttons over a pale blue shirt. He had bought himself a pair of leather driving gloves. They would motor into town after lunch. The car smelled to Paula of masculine fragrances, of his aftershave and cigars.
In the glove compartment he kept his book. It was the Beginner’s Guide to Great Art, he had made a study of it. At the Walker Art Gallery he would position his daughter in front of a picture and try to sound knowledgeable. ‘Can you see that, Paula? What he did there with just a spot of colour, it changed everything, the whole thing would be different without that little brushstroke.’ He knew now what was meant by ‘perspective’ and ‘schools’ and the way each creative movement was a reaction against what had preceded it. He was self-taught with great gaps in his knowledge, but strolling arm in arm, the two of them seemed, he hoped, to others as worldly and engaged, that they had the right to be there, to discuss, to admire, to stand in silent contemplation, to point a finger, to study the card and memorise the name and dates of the artist.
Paula returned from these excursions energised. She saw young women walk about hatless and gloveless. They smoked cigarettes. They leaned their elbows against a wall and expressed trenchant opinions. These views were often at variance with her father’s timid art appreciation. What moved his breathing soul was condemned by them as sentimental. Beauty, it seemed, wasn’t the point. She aspired to their casual insolence.
After the war, when the light had risen once more on the world, Louis would take Mina to Paris. They strolled arm in arm along the Champs-Élysées and he said to her, ‘I hear they have a terrific museum here, full of the very best pictures.’ She replied, ‘What would you want with pictures? You never look at the ones on the wall at home. The little girl playing with the kitten and the ball of wool. It’s awfully cute.’ He suppressed the desire to say, ‘You call that art? It hurts my eyes.’