Like God in the Old Testament brooding over the abyss, Itzik considered the situation and made a plan for his revenge on all who had slighted him. Roland was not important but the man’s arrogance got up his nose (this was a new expression he had recently learned: the experience of an irritant in the nostril was exactly what Roland felt like).
First he dropped round one morning to the Primrose Hill flat. The place was in disarray, it smelled of spermy sheets and cigarette ash and sour spilt milk. Paula had evidently not been there in some time to do her womanish little things to the disorder. Roland did not even apologise for the mess; he seemed immune to the jumble of dirty plates and glasses in the sink. Itzik wondered how he still functioned at the BBC, but perhaps behind the wireless mesh they were all like this, with yellowish eyes, stinking of cigarettes.
‘Are you still stepping out with my niece?’ he said. This was another new English expression, which seemed to imply the opposite of what it meant. Roland and Paula, he supposed, spent most of their time at home, in bed.
Roland shrugged, as if to hoist the weight of a girlfriend off his thin shoulders. It had been nearly a fortnight since he had heard from her. He was too proud to nag her back to him. At night he thought of her, naked in his pea coat. He supposed he would never get to thrash her, see her skin turn pink with the excitement of it. He had been building up in his mind to bondage, none of that was likely to happen now. Unless he could put things right between them but he didn’t have the strength, he was ridiculously tired, he supposed he might be suffering from anaemia, needed a plate of spinach and fried liver to set him up. He had missed two appointments with his woman in Swiss Cottage. He didn’t feel like talking.
‘It is a good job,’ Itzik was saying, ‘you intellectuals don’t believe in bourgeois morality in your private lives, it would be so embarrassing for a different type of man, a conventional type, to bear the reputation of a cuckold.’
A sour possession rose up again in Roland’s throat like heartburn. He had thought of her as a butterfly, impaled on his pin, reserved for his inspection and admiration and enjoyment. Damn her, damn the bitch.
‘Yes, that’s all so very old hat.’ He raised his open palm to his mouth and patted the air, a Regency yawn.
‘So you don’t mind?’
‘Not at all, she’s free to do what she likes, with who she likes. I don’t want her to turn into a bore. Heaven forfend.’
‘Did she tell you who it is?’
‘She might have mentioned it, I probably wasn’t paying attention. We don’t have those kinds of conversations. Frankly I didn’t listen to her most of the time, she had nothing interesting to say.’
‘Well, at least the old chap is married so it shouldn’t last. Men like that always go back to their wives.’
Now he thought he should have insisted that she move in with him, she could have kept the place tidy and emptied the ashtrays and he would have slept with her every night and there would have been no opportunity for another chap to touch skin he thought of as satiny like a black-market blouse. But he’d let her move to Chelsea and she was out of his orbit now, she was spinning away from him. In fact, whichever way you looked at it, everything was. And it was his own fault, for giving her that introduction to Robin Rose instead of letting her continue in her position of secretarial inferiority where she would be under his thumb, subservient and servile. Then he could thrash her as much as he liked. The lost erotic potential of a live-in Paula depressed him.
They talked for a while about the situation in the Soviet Union. Itzik praised Stalin in the usual terms, phrases like blocks of wood and concrete, resisting slippage and misunderstanding. They bickered and then Itzik left and walked through Regent’s Park, past the nannies wheeling perambulators, looking for the ghosts of his wife and daughters running across the mown grass, wild and rambunctious and free. Why them? he asked himself. Why not these representatives of a rotten imperial power?
Next he wrote to Mina again, this time in the guise of a worried relation, stating that, and it had to be said with delicacy, her daughter was the girlfriend of a drug fiend and he was communicating this out of what he called concern and for the good name of the Mendel family. A name which had gone through a number of permutations to wind up as Phillips but the facts were the same.
Mina’s knowledge of intoxicants and stimulants stopped at alcohol: a champagne cocktail at Bernice’s wedding, the snowball at Christmas at the hotel. She had never heard of marijuana, let alone heroin. She consulted her younger son who had a reputation as a man of the world.
Benny listened in shock. He was currently courting a girl called Ruth Blackstone whose parents already did not approve of him because he had been rumoured to frequent public houses and drink pints of beer like the common folk. A sister mixed up with a drug addict would put the kibosh on that.
Benny said to his mother, ‘Don’t worry, Ma, let me and Harry fix this.’
‘How will you do it?’
‘All I’ll say is there won’t be any negotiations.’
They drove down to London on Saturday morning in their father’s Humber. All week they had gone to business in suits with ties clamped down with tiepins and decorative folded handkerchiefs in their breast pockets like good Jewish boys in family businesses, sons with war records and campaign medals who marched with the Jewish ex-servicemen’s association. Now in their father’s car they turned into hooligans itching for a fight, practising poking the air with their fists and coming out with crude expressions about what they were going to do to that mamzer who had ravished and brought low their sister.
The English countryside rolled away beneath their wheels. Lancashire turned into the Potteries. They drove past farms and fields, cattle and sheep; they shared the driving, stopping at a lay-by to gulp down wurst sandwiches and, turning their back to the traffic, irrigate the grass verge with volumes of piss. London eventually loomed in front of them, they hardly knew it. It was not their territory but now they had to find their way to Roland’s address, a place with a hill, named after a flower. They got lost in Hendon, recovered their position in Golders Green, navigated Alexandra Palace, stopping to take a photograph of the BBC transmitter which beamed out Roland, got badly lost again in the vicinity of Hampstead Heath when they thought they had taken a wrong turn and left London altogether, then finally reached Primrose Hill which was the northern margins of the West End.
They hung around waiting for Roland to come home. From high ground they looked across to St. Paul’s, ‘the big goyishe shul,’ Benny called it. Then, like fox hounds, they saw their quarry. The door of the house was usually kept unlocked, in those days when there wasn’t much to steal, and the flat door was ajar, as if Roland was waiting for someone. Waiting for their sister? Neither of them was a large man, they were not beefy shtarkers like Osher Blackstone back in the old days on Brownlow Hill, but there were two of them, they had the advantage of surprise and Roland was in an advanced state of what was called in those days ‘nerves.’ They were able to take out his front teeth.
‘Left him whimpering on the floor,’ Harry said proudly when they got home late that night, stiff after hours behind the wheel. ‘We didn’t kill him, we just made him wish we had.’
‘And left him a reminder that the Jews are not so weak anymore,’ Benny added, with a wink.
Looking down on his mouth full of blood, spitting out dental enamel onto the carpet, the brothers saluted each other, raised their hands to their foreheads as if they had won the war. Then they drove to their sister’s flat. Eric Fulton had not long left, she was curled, soft, warm, kissed in all the right spots. He had told her she was gorgeous; he would, for as long as it was possible, make her as happy as he could. There would be presents, ‘parting gifts,’ she thought.
When she heard a knock on the door of her flat she assumed Eric had come back for something, perhaps his keys or his lighter. She looked around her little sitting room for a lost object which she could give back to him, smiling at having known what he had returned for, and receiving another kiss.
Harry rushed in and started packing up her life. He threw her things into a suitcase, jumbled up together, the face creams next to the dresses. The diamanté clips skittered across the floor and fell through a crack in the skirting board. Benny, who was fastidious, said, ‘Take care, you’re making a right mess there, they’ll come out all stained.’
‘What the hell is going on?’ Paula said. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’
‘We know about that boyfriend. Has he got you on opium yet?’
‘Oh, him. I haven’t seen him in weeks. I’m finished with him. You can go back home and impart the news that I’m safe and sound.’
‘Impart? Big word.’
‘It only has six letters, Benny.’
‘You know what I mean. Anyway, we promised Ma we’d fix it and that’s what we’re doing.’
‘She has sanctioned this?’
‘By any means, Paula, any means.’
‘Oh, just listen to yourselves, you’re absurd.’ She turned her back on them and reached for a cigarette. The little drama could not go on too long, they would all go out for a bite to eat and then the boys would be on their way home. They were behaving like they were in a film. It was all too ridiculous.
The heel of her shoe came off as they were dragging her downstairs. The neighbours came out of their flats and stood on their doorsteps, Benny shouting, ‘She’s our sister, she’s not well, we’re taking her home.’
And she was screaming back, ‘You pair of bloody hooligans. I wish you’d never been born, I wish I was an only child.’
Then she was in the car and they were driving through the night, back to the north, back to her childhood bedroom, her parents waiting up in the lounge in their nightclothes, bread and butter and cheese under a damp tea towel, a plate of biscuits, a jug of orangeade. Paula ashen, like a walking statue, her mother thought. She went straight to bed, eating nothing, and woke the following day at noon, Mina sitting at the end of the bed watching her daughter stirring from a heavy sleep.
‘I’m sorry we did this to you, but don’t forget, once I nearly got into trouble, my brother got me out of it, Harry and Benny were only doing the same thing. I know you’re upset. But mamzers are mamzers the whole world over.’
‘Mummy, you needn’t have worried, Mr. Fulton was looking after me.’
‘Oh, was he? That was nice. What does his wife think about such niceness?’
‘We were making a picture, your picture, that’s all.’
‘And we will all go to see it when it comes out. I wonder what he has done with my life.’
‘It’s not a biopic.’
‘I know. I’ve got the soup on, come down for lunch when you’re ready. The boys will be back from golf in a minute. We can all eat together like the old days.’
At the table Louis said, ‘I suppose I should blame myself for giving her ideas. I never thought, I mean how could it have come to this? London is a big place, millions of people go about their business respectably, yet she has to get mixed up with undesirables.’
‘Maybe she gets it from me and Jossel,’ Mina said. ‘Maybe we’ve got a bad seed we pass on.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. There’s no such thing. The fact is, she fell in with the wrong type of goyem, bohemians. They lead a rackety life. I took her to the Walker, I took her to the theatre, she read books. She had the taste for another way of life and I gave it to her.’ He theatrically mimed banging his head against the table laid with silver-plated cutlery.
‘I don’t know what to think. We gave her everything, the very best, you’d have thought she could have been more … I don’t know the word.’
‘Discerning?’
‘Is that a good one? Okay. This terrible man she was carrying on with, what did she see in him?’
‘What do women see in any man? I don’t know, you tell me. Did you ever hear the stories about the Brassey boy who had the hairdresser’s on Allerton Road? They say he was quite a card with the local housewives.’
‘That’s just gossip, I don’t believe a word of it.’
‘Not you, of course, I never meant you …’
Mina had not thought of Sammy Brassey for years. Men, she thought, aren’t very complicated. They want what they want and say so. A woman has to hide a lot away. It gets into a mess. Now there was going to have to be a story, her daughter was going to have to save face. Something happens to you, your brothers rescue you from danger, you go on to lead a different life as if it had never happened, but it did happen, you’ll always remember, and how you tell it is who you are going to be in your future. They would find a way of telling this new story, as they had told the story of the forest and of Jossel’s flight from his family into the arms of the shiksa. There would be contradictions, false clues, Harry and Benny would play a heroic role, Paula would be blameless. Yet Mina was secretly pleased and did not say so, told no one that her daughter had had her moment in the forest and no real harm had come to her.
When later in the day Paula went to turn on the wireless, Louis got up and intercepted her before her hand could reach the knob. ‘Haven’t you heard about television?’ he said. ‘I’ve ordered a set, it’s coming on Wednesday. The Wattses two doors down already have one, it’s the talk of the avenue.’
She knew her brothers had taken out Roland’s teeth, they had boasted about it on the drive back, where from the back seat, watching the road signs pointing to the north, she heard them say, ‘The shmuck, the lobos, he won’t forget us in a hurry.’
She was fond of her brothers and ashamed. Harry proclaimed himself to be a good boy, but Benny was squaring up to be a wise guy, a Dutch Schultz type, a movie gangster. She had thought it was no more than a pose, a style, like a certain type of hat worn at a rakish angle.
‘What on earth did you think you were doing? Who asked you to interfere? What has my life got to do with you?’ She felt for the familiar seam of her glove but her hands were bare.
‘You had a reputation, we couldn’t stand for that. You’re our sister, we gotta look out for you.’
‘I was perfectly—’
‘Yes, we all know you’re perfect.’
‘I never said that.’
‘Listen, Mummy packed us a lunch and a supper, we can stop in a lay-by if you’re peckish, we ate all the hardboiled eggs, but there’s Cheshire cheese sandwiches and still some kichels left.’
‘Oh, why can’t you call them biscuits?’
She knew she sounded petulant and spoilt. She remembered when Roland had asked if her parents loved her, and her reply, ‘Of course! I’m their princess.’ She had taken their love for granted, thinking of it as a given, not a bond that would interfere with her life. Strong love like this could, it turned out, do what it liked. It could inflict violence on a person.
In the weeks that followed her return, she supposed Roland must be being fitted with dentures before he could return to his post at the BBC. When the television set arrived she kept expecting him to turn up on the screen which peeked like an eye from the great wooden cabinet with drawers for the Radio Times. Roland in a dinner jacket and a bow tie, reading the news, and she would be able to decipher all his discontents and deceptions, the glib mouth, the mad eyes. But he seemed to have disappeared. Her brothers had ruined him before he could completely ruin himself.
In the afternoons, after a lunch her mother put on the table and took away, only pecked at, she went for walks in Calderstones Park. Dead limbs dragging through the grass. Hollow mind. Eyes that took in familiarity, an old world and an old time. Her childhood. The place that was a shoulder an arrow rested on aiming at the far distance. An arrow rebounded.
But I’ll find my way back, she thought, feeling a lot like Scarlett O’Hara and that tomorrow was another day. I have to, I can’t stay here for the rest of my life, I don’t belong anymore. How can I be nothing more than Paula Phillips of Allerton confined to a mean little social circle, controlled by my brothers? I’m bigger than that.
She stayed in her bedroom and used her dressing table as a desk to write letters to Eric Fulton. He replied charmingly, with wit and kindness, sorry, he said, to lose her so dramatically. She thought he might turn up on her doorstep in his car. Make it all right with her parents, bring her back to the King’s Road flat and the exciting, clattering, trivial life of the film business. But that was a romantic fantasy, a fairy tale, for he wrote of the new continuity girl, ‘not a patch on you, my dear, but hey ho as the English say,’ and after a few weeks no more replies came.
A month later, an envelope with a snapshot of himself, his wife and a baby wrapped in a shawl sleeping in his arm. ‘It all came right in the end,’ he had scrawled on the back. ‘Best regards, Eric Fulton (your dear Flossie!)’
So London’s great indifference carried on without her. A few friends already had babies, and she passed them wheeling coach prams through the park, chattering to one another about teething rusks and knitted booties. The best boys were being snapped up, not that she wanted any of them but she was used to being amongst the first rank of the available choices among the young Jewish girls of Liverpool. Might she have to settle for a second-best, early balding businessman’s son her father fixed her up with, some profitable extension of the chamois trade, another business merger like the thwarted hopes of Mendel-Clumpus? But even they, she had heard, spoke of her as shop-soiled, a display model like a marked-down television set. This was what Roland had meant by provincial morality, though there was more than one bride who walked down the aisle in a forgiving empire-line wedding dress, the little hypocrites, and she could name names if she wanted.
I am in hell, thought Paula Phillips, with a segment of wider experience she was going to have to eke out for the rest of life.
Then, in the months that followed, there was Ringo, the Schwartz boy, who was opening a new gown shop on Bold Street catering for women who wanted Paris styles at north of England prices. Who knew from his time in post-war Germany how easy it was to fall in love with a survivor and be their saviour, bring a girl with a number on her arm back to Liverpool and promise that nothing now would ever hurt her, and her bad dreams were only bad dreams. A few of his army buddies had done that, and were married to fragile, difficult wives with terrible memories, girls who woke them up in the night demanding comfort. One had grown enormously fat, eating up the whole world to fill a starvation hole, and force-fed her children. He knew educated Jewish women who had had professions, written academic papers, even books, marooned in Liverpool among the vulgar Ostjuden, playing the cello at home with the curtains drawn and not daring to let the German language pass their lips when out at the shops. That was a whole basket of trouble he could do without, their hang-ups and neurosis and lack of the comfort of Yiddishkeit.
He was holding out for Paula Phillips whom he remembered as a sulky, beautiful teenager he had danced with at Bernice and Lionel’s wedding and smoked French cigarettes on the steps of the Adelphi, the wedding which had begun the precipitation of the whole family’s reputation. He liked that about them, he found the whole set-up interesting. (And they had no idea what they were getting into letting his cousin Lionel Clumpus into that family. They’d learn, sooner or later. Good boy, my eye. Poor Bernice, who had no idea what she had walked into.) Now, Paula seemed even more lovely, more volatile – whatever had happened in London had not humbled her, he was glad of that. She was wounded, but not scarred, he felt, as he watched her coming down the steps of shul with her mother. She walked as a princess, a proud head tilted to look above the crowd of women in their Shabbos hats. He winked at her. She was pretending (badly) not to recognise him. Women’s tricks, he thought. It didn’t matter, he would get her attention. She was beautiful and damned – irresistible!
‘No one wants a cake with a slice cut out of it,’ his mother said.
‘Yes, they do, it shows it’s a good cake, delicious.’ He laughed. What would he want with a wedding-night virgin? From what he had heard through Lionel, who heard it from his wife, who heard it from her mother, she had had two men, one of them older, married, experienced. He would not need to pretend he didn’t want what he wanted.
‘If you like what you see I think we could easily make a go of it,’ he said to her. ‘I’ll give you everything and I’ll take you everywhere. It wouldn’t be just this, I’m a man of the world and so are you, a woman, I mean. I believe we could make a life for ourselves that would be something wonderful.’
They were in the lounge bar of the Philharmonic Hotel. She had passed it many times on the bus but never been in it. The place was all stained-glass and mahogany opulence. Already he was taking her to new territory, that was in his favour. It was the first time she had been out in the evening since the great comeback. But she looked around at what she had been missing and was unimpressed. Roland would doubtless have said something withering about the place, a cruel put-down of his own invention.
‘But we’ll always have to come home, to this.’ She looked around at a provincial crowd of insurance men and other labourers in the world of commerce, their wives and sweethearts straining to look smart but missing the mark.
‘What’s so bad about it? I’ve travelled, I’ve seen how people go on. Anyway, I’m in love with you and I don’t like to be thwarted. You don’t love me yet, but you will. And one thing I’ll promise you: I won’t let your brothers interfere with a thing. No repetition of that business.’
She considered him across the table drinking his gin and tonic. She took in the backs of his hands covered with dark hairs, his black eyebrows, his gold tooth when he laughed, his tie, his suit, his shoes, a disarmingly casual effect it was clever of him to pull off. A man without hesitation, who knew what he was doing. She imagined what he might be like in bed. Energetic, certainly. She thought of him on top of her, heavy, panting. Growling like a bear. Might be fun, she would have to see. No threats of thrashing but there could be other surprises.
‘I know you’re a little bruised,’ he went on, ‘but you’ll get over it. I’ll make sure you do.’
‘You’re a good talker, I’ll say that.’ And as if trying to present some clinching argument for or against this businesslike proposal, she said, ‘Will you take me to New York?’ It was the highest card she could play. America was still the Promised Land.
‘Of course, how could you think any different? By aeroplane, too, no schlepping across the sea by boat. We’ll be there as quick as a flash.’
‘I’ll think about it.’
A few days later Mina said, ‘I’m hearing a lot about you and the Schwartz boy.’
‘Oh, yes?’
‘I have an opinion.’
‘Do I want to hear it?’
‘I don’t know, I’ve never been able to read your mind.’
‘That’s a relief.’
‘Paula, you won’t do better, not in Liverpool, he’s made for you. He’ll give you the earth. Take him before he gets bored, a man like him can lose interest.’
‘He’s waited for me long enough, since the wedding. Anyway, I don’t think I’m in love with him.’
‘You will be. You’ll fall for him sooner or later, don’t leave it too long.’
‘That’s what he says.’
‘Same with me and your father. It all worked out in the end.’
‘Mummy, was there ever a point at which you thought, just because he’s come all the way from Leeds I don’t have to say yes?’
‘Of course, I didn’t give in the minute he turned up. But I knew he was a good man.’
‘But what if—’
‘I’ve had my say.’
And Paula waited for a few weeks. She waited for Roland’s voice to come back on the radio, but others had taken his place. She waited for a reply to her letter of congratulations to Eric, but there was silence. By the time the picture came out they were engaged. She had thought, Oh well, I suppose I must.
The first time they slept together, at his flat above the Bold Street shop, she realised she had made no mistake. Sitting on the edge of the bed in his dressing gown, one furred thigh crossed over another, he said, ‘How much would do you for a dress allowance?’
‘Do I need one?’
‘I’ll make you the best-dressed girl in Liverpool.’
‘And the best fucked, too.’
‘I didn’t know you knew that word, you trollop.’
‘Someone once said I was fuckable.’
‘Well, you are.’
‘I think this is all going to work out well.’
‘Told you.’
The family travelled to London for the premiere.
Mina watched it in silence; she didn’t laugh, she didn’t smile, she didn’t cry. When the credits rolled up, she said, ‘Very good, well done. I hope it makes a million pound.’ Paula didn’t know if she was being sarcastic, or if it had touched a nerve in her. Maybe now she wanted to turn into a snow bird and fly away? She couldn’t read her at all. Eric came over, bending down to the small round woman in her satin dress and her silver evening handbag looped over her wrist. He held his hands together in an imploring gesture. ‘What did you think?’
‘Very good, very good indeed. You did me proud.’
‘Thank God for that. Did you ever hear what Orson Welles said about stories?’
Louis said, ‘We don’t know Mr. Welles, but we heard of him, we saw a couple of his pictures.’
‘What he said was no story has a happy ending unless you stop telling it before it is finished.’
Mina looked at him, and rolled her eyes. ‘So what’s next?’ she said.