It was 1886 and the coldest February in London for thirty years. Snow fell remorselessly, day after shivering day, so that roofs were perpetually white with it, although the streets below were soon smeared and discoloured and ridged with frozen slush. In the dark alleys of the East End the usual mounds of horse dung, rotten fruit, decomposing vegetables and discarded ash had been embedded in ice for such a very long time that they had acquired the familiarity of permanence, and in the West End it was impossible to keep the pavements clear before the fashionable frontages of Bond Street and Piccadilly even with a willing army of underpaid unemployed to do the work. On many days a narrow pathway was all they could manage and even that was furred with snow again as soon as the ragged shovellers had moved on into the next street.
Above the dazzle of that white roofscape the sky was a dirty grey like unwashed underwear and the air it pressed down upon the inhabitants was so cold it bit their lungs. All outdoor work had been frozen to a halt at the start of the year, and now the unemployed were in a desperate state. Nobody who could avoid it stayed out of doors for long. The poor huddled beside their inadequate stoves and the rich built fires in every room. Between the blue-white of the snow and the grey-white of the sky, plumes of smoke rose from a million chimneys, thick and suffocating and in every shade of grey and brown and yellow, from slate to sulphur.
The river coiling between north and south of the powdered city was sluggish and sullen and looked curiously exposed, the few boats struggling in its chill waters black in the feeble light of a colourless sun. In the quieter reaches above London Bridge ice floes drifted on the surface of the water and knocked against each other with an eerily hollow reverberation. It was an eldritch city, a city bewitched, a city under a curse.
To Emmanuel Cheifitz, tailor and master cutter, in his one bleak room in Wilson Place down in the unfed tenements of Whitechapel, the intense cold was just the most recent in a long series of miseries and misfortunes, so frequent and persistent that, had it not been for the fact that his new wife Rachel was expecting their first child, he really felt he was almost immune to them. Despite his poverty, or perhaps because of it, he was an excessively proud man, and took a perverse satisfaction from the fact that whatever vicissitudes God might have in mind for him, he could endure without complaint. For was He not an inscrutable God, of infinite wisdom, and was it not His high purpose to test His chosen ones in the fires of pain and persecution?
So he ignored the ache of hunger in his contracted belly and the stabbing fire of chilblains on his fingers and toes, and when he could find work he worked, and when he couldn’t he did his best to cheer his neighbours. And from time to time when he needed comfort for himself he would play cards and gamble a little, Pontoon or Solo usually, and only for farthings, or ha’pennies, when the tailoring was paying better. But it was enough. It gave him excitement and a taste of hope and a sense that life could be enjoyable.
He was a gentle man and had a scholarly air about him, being tall and gangly with long thin hands and narrow feet. He wore the long black coat of the orthodox Jew, and the flat-brimmed black hat that he’d brought with him from Warsaw when he was fourteen, because it belonged to his father and his father was dead. His hair was limp and thin and mouse brown, and his beard was straggly and inadequate, but between them his face had character, with a long straight nose and high cheekbones and blue eyes capable of many expressions, tolerance, patience, a gamut of passions, and even an occasional flash of sardonic humour. It was a strong face, a face that knew how to endure.
But then, as if extreme cold were not punishment enough to test even the most devout, his inscrutable God sent him two further hardships. First his job disappeared altogether, then he received notice that he had three weeks in which to find other accommodation, because all the houses in the immediate area of Flower and Dean Street were going to be demolished as part of a slum clearance scheme. Now, just when he needed money for his new child, and money for food, and money for coal, and key money for another room, he was down to his last shilling.
The tailoring trade always went into decline after Christmas, when there was less money around and less demand for new clothes, but this year the decline had become a stoppage. Little work became less, and less, until finally in the first cold week of February there was no work at all, no cutting for Emmanuel and no basting or button-holing for Rachel. No work, no money, no food, and a baby due to make its appearance at any time.
‘Today, tomorrow, next day maybe,’ Mrs Finkleheim said, sighing with the wearily satisfied resignation of her race. ‘Who knows? They come ven they good an’ ready. They ain’t buses, these chickens. Sense a’ time they ain’t got, yet’ She lived in the rooms below Emmanuel and Rachel, and having agreed to act as midwife was already in charge of them.
Emmanuel’s serious face was creased with the worry of it all. He knew that birth was difficult even at the best of times and that a labouring mother needed to be sustained by good food and warmth, and shouldn’t be worried. And, besides, this child was already dear to him, his first child, his first most wanted, most welcome child. He’d even given up gambling to save money for this child, and now it was all gone except for the shilling.
‘I will go to Goulston Street again,’ he promised Rachel earnestly, speaking the Polish of their native land. It was the third morning of his hungry unemployment. ‘I will stay there all day. Whatever work offers, I take. Tonight we eat, I promise. We still have a shilling. We are not destitute. I will earn money for food tomorrow, and money for another room. I promise.’
‘We try the Board of Guardians, maybe?’ Rachel offered timidly. The weight of her unborn child was dragging her down, so that her shoulders drooped and her face was gaunt and her brown eyes looked enormous. She was on her knees cleaning the stove, the battered brush trailing from her chapped fingers, her sacking apron taut across her belly, her skin grey with dirt and fatigue. The sight of her, meek and pregnant and unwarmed and uncomplaining, made Emmanuel feel more guilty than ever. He ought to go to the Guardians. She was right to suggest it. But going to the Guardians was begging, and he would do almost anything rather then end up a schnorrer.
‘I will try everything,’ he assured her. ‘All day. Everything.’ She continued to gaze at him, trustingly and hopefully, and the weight of her dependence drew a final painful promise. ‘If I still have no work by evening,’ he sighed, ‘I will see the Guardians.’
But no matter how eagerly he promenaded, nor how hopefully he caught the eye of the few sweaters who appeared in Goulston Street that morning, there was no work. He haunted every sweatshop the length and breadth of the area, in Wentworth Street and Goulston Street and Petticoat Lane. Then he tried Flower and Dean Street and Thrawl Street and all the dark forbidding alleys between them. But the tailors there, like him, had received notice to quit, and in the struggle to survive they had no work left to offer. He crossed the main road to try in Berners Street and trudged, rather hopelessly now, through frozen slush and over piles of rotting vegetables to the new market in Spitalfields. And there, in the late afternoon, when his back ached with the tension of walking and waiting, and his spirits were lower than they had ever been, he heard the whisper of the possibility of work.
It came from Abe Grodzinsky, who sold cucumbers for pickling and was a Polack too and went to the same synagogue.
‘Try Covent Garden. Portering. Bay 3. I didn’t send you, you understand?’
Emmanuel walked there at once as darkness intensified the cold and naphtha flares were grudgingly lit, to drop their yellow light on all the stalls as he passed. And he made himself remember the words of the Proverbs, and tried to draw comfort from them, ‘For a just man falleth seven times and riseth up again.’ But he was hungry and weary and demoralized, and when he saw Covent Garden rising so prosperously before him in arcades of glass and wrought iron he feared it would be no place to welcome a Jew. Nevertheless he picked his way over the black cobbles, past carts and steaming donkeys, and porters balancing incredible piles of baskets on their heads, until he found Bay 3.
The foreman was a formidable individual. He wore a good quality suit, as Emmanuel noticed at once, and a new bowler hat, very spruce, and although his shirt was sweat stained it was white linen, no less. He stood a full head and shoulders taller than the tailor and was more than twice his weight. But he admitted a need of porters. ‘Tem’pry. Unloadin’. Taters. Cabbige. Carrots. ’Ard work,’ he said, hooking a blunt thumb into the warm cloth of his fob pocket.
‘Yes,’ Emmanuel said humbly. ‘Alvays I vork hard.’
‘Tailor, intcher?’ the foreman said, looking at Emmanuel’s narrow shoulders, and noting his stoop and the thin wrists protruding from the shabbiness of that long foreign coat.
‘A cutter,’ Emmanuel said proudly, because he was a skilled cutter and he knew it.
The foreman wasn’t impressed. ‘Not your line a’ country, this,’ he said. ‘Not be a long chalk, I’d say. Ain’t fit fer tailors. Not be rights.’
‘Alvays I vork hard,’ Emmanuel promised and now he sounded anxious.
‘Tell yer what I’ll do,’ the foreman said, rocking back on his heels as he gave the matter thought. ‘Take you on spec. See ’ow yer do. Start now. Work two, three hours. We got a lot ter shift. Then I’ll see. Carn’t say fairer’n that, can I?’
‘Thank you,’ Emmanuel said.
But the man wasn’t listening. He’d already turned and was walking away. ‘Horrie!’ he yelled as he went ‘Number 3 bay. Taters.’
So for the next three hours Emmanuel struggled with round baskets full of potatoes and heavy as lead. After a while he learned the knack of balancing two of them on his head, but their weight made him unsteady on his feet, so that he was jostled and thumped and kicked wherever he went. But he worked quietly and fearfully, trying to keep out of the way of the busy feet around him, and to ignore the ache of hunger in his belly. And at last the potatoes were shifted and the carts loaded, and the foreman returned to give his verdict.
‘Four o’clock termorrer mornin’,’ he said. ‘Three bob, two shifts, an’ that’s ’andsome.’
Hunger and need drove Emmanuel to ask for an advance. ‘I have no money,’ he confessed. ‘Could…’
‘Work two shifts termorrer, then I’ll pay yer. Carn’t ’ave nothink yer don’ earn, can yer?’
‘No,’ Emmanuel had to agree. But how would they manage with only a shilling?
Miraculously, when he got home the stove was alight and a stew cooking most succulently in the saucepan. ‘Rachel, bubeleh,’ he said, speaking Yiddish, ‘how did you manage this?’ She must have spent more than sixpence.
‘Good neighbours we have,’ she said, taking a sixpence and three pennies from her apron and showing them to him. ‘You will eat now?’
‘We will repay,’ he said, as she spooned the stew into his bowl. The warmth of the steam made his chilled face prickle, but the smell of it was unalloyed pleasure. Good neighbours, lending from the kindness of their hearts. Not charity from the Guardians. ‘We will repay.’
‘Yes,’ she said, breaking the remains of a half-quartern loaf into three pieces and taking the smallest portion for herself. ‘Eat, Emmanuel, my dear. You have earned it.’
He took the bread, smiling at her, and watched as she wrapped the remaining third in a piece of cloth and set it on the shelf beside the stove. ‘For the morning.’
‘Tomorrow you will take the sixpence and buy coal and food,’ he said. They would just about manage now.
‘I should cook a meal for you midday?’ she asked, anxious and timid and affectionate. ‘You will come home?’
‘I will come home, maybe,’ he said. ‘Buy bread and herring. Things that will keep till evening. Feed yourself and the child. That is important, Rachel. If it is possible I will come home.’
‘You don’t come home, you have money for a meal midday?’ she persisted. ‘You should eat midday, Emmanuel, or how will you have strength to work?’
‘I have money,’ he lied, and bent his head to eat his first spoonful of stew, and to hide his shamed expression. Because even such a necessary lie troubled him deeply. Once this child was born, he must be certain to avoid all lies, of whatever kind. For children learned by precept, and his must learn to be upright and honest in all their dealings.
That night they piled their clothes over their one remaining blanket, as usual, and went to bed early while the stove was still giving out some heat. For the first time in weeks they slept warmly. ‘Tomorrow the foreman he promised to pay me,’ Emmanuel said. ‘You must redeem the blankets so soon as I return. It would not be seemly for the child to be cold.’
‘A piece of chicken for Shabbas, maybe,’ she murmured. The warmth was drifting her into sleep.
‘The Lord is a buckler to them that walk uprightly,’ he said, and the words were a prayer of gratitude. He could feel warmth on his face even at this distance. What a difference a fire makes, he thought. ‘We will buy more coal tomorrow, Rachel,’ he said. Then sleep sucked him away, just as he was training his mind to be sure to wake before three o’clock.
And his mind was obedient. It woke him every hour, on the hour, to the clanging reminder of the church clock at St Jude’s. At three he got up, lit the stub of the candle, and used the chamber pot as quietly as he could, so as not to wake his wife. Then he put on all the clothes he possessed, even his long overcoat, for the room was freezing. The water in the washing jug was covered by a layer of ice which he broke quickly with his knuckles because that struck less of a chill. He washed his hands quickly too, but three times in the ritual way, and when he was cleansed he said the first prayer of his day: ‘Thanks be to thee, Lord, for thou hast returned me to my soul, which was in Thy keeping.’
His breath plumed before him, ghostly white in the darkness, and as he sat in his cane chair before the dead stove, patiently packing his boots with newspaper to keep out the worst of the cold and the damp, he could see that the windowpanes were almost entirely covered with the delicate, fern-leaf tracery of ice. Tonight, he comforted himself, they would have coal and food. The child would be welcomed with warmth and its mother fed with the best food he could buy. He ate the last portion of bread, chewing slowly, so that he could make the most of every mouthful, and washed it down with a little icy water from the tin jug.
Then he rearranged the piles of clothes on the bed, tucked their blanket firmly around his sleeping wife, took the candle stub in his hand and stepped quietly out onto the landing. The air there tasted of soot, and struck cold and very very damp, but it wasn’t until he’d eased open the front door and let himself out into the street that he realized why. He was engulfed in oppressive darkness, and after a while he saw that it was being made worse by the gathering mists of a fog.
For a second his heart contracted with misery at the thought that it would take him too long to find his way to Covent Garden in such darkness, and that he might be refused the job if he arrived late. Then he scolded himself for being so faint-hearted, plunged his hands into the pocket of his greatcoat and set off, following the damp black walls of Wilson Place until he had groped his way into the empty chasm of Flower and Dean Street.
He was completely alone there, without a glimmer of light and with only the sound of his own snow-muffled footsteps for company, and he was afraid. For the Flowery was a byword for violence, and a hiding place for every kind of criminal. Why, only last week a Russian Jew had been robbed and beaten on this very corner. And now, in this fog, how easy such an attack would be!
But no attack came and in Commercial Street two carts loomed out of the fog on their slow way to Spitalfields Market, and the sight of them cheered him a little. The drivers were leading their horses and they both carried lanterns, but the light they cast was dimmed to a diffuse yellow glow, haloed in eerie blue, and was lost as soon as they’d passed. He had no idea what time it was, but at least by following the walls he hadn’t lost his way.
The damp soon penetrated the thin doth of his sleeves so that goose pimples shivered onto his forearms and his toes numbed and his shins felt as though they were chapped with ice. What with the cold and the poor visibility, he was soon shuffling and stumbling, his forehead bowed against the evil-smelling vapour that hung and clung about him. He trudged through the deserted City, past the Bank of England, and found himself in a terrible emptiness with no walls to follow. And stumbled on, chilled and anxious, but doggedly trying several directions until he found Mansion House, a high white ghost looming out of the black pool where the seven roads met, and knew where he was again. Somewhere ahead of him church clocks were striking the three-quarters, and that made his heartbeats quicken with a terrible mixture of hope and panic. Only fifteen minutes to get there. Oh, if only it wasn’t so totally dark. He found the corner of Wading Street, crept round the edges of the great wet ship that was St Paul’s, and came at last to Fleet Street and the Strand where there were cabs creaking through the murk behind their glow-worm lights, and the vague shapes of other workers, bent and shuffling and on their way to the market.
Horrie was waiting for him, but the foreman hadn’t arrived. The relief of it made Emmanuel’s legs feel quite weak.
It was a long, cold, back-breaking shift, but it was a job and it would mean pay. He worked mechanically, straining under the weight of the baskets, his sweat as cold as he was, stopping now and then to cough the fog out of his lungs. A grudging daylight revealed that it was a real pea-souper, thick and greeny yellow, in which human forms were distorted into vague threatening shapes, hump-shouldered and faceless, glimpsed and gone, like creatures in a nightmare. Even their voices were changed, distanced and muffled by the pervasive murk, while the rattle of carts and trolleys and the scrape of boots and hooves were muffled too, as though the cobbles had been carpeted overnight. It is easy to be afraid, Emmanuel thought, when you are chilled to the bone and nothing is familiar. And he forced his mind to contemplate better and happier things.
At around eight o’clock there was a lull in the work and Horrie told his team that they could ‘cut off and get a bit a’ breakfast’ if they wanted, but Emmanuel had nothing to get a bit of breakfast with, so he stayed where he was, sitting on the edge of a discarded trolley and occupying himself with his thoughts.
He remembered the day the letter arrived from his uncle in Warsaw, and how happy he’d been to think that a marriage had been arranged for him, and that after sixteen years working in this foreign land and living in crowded boarding houses alone among so many lonely men he was to have a partner. He was thirty years old and at last he was to have a partner. And he relived the day she had arrived at Gravesend, looking so small and frail and shy and Polish, with her head and shoulders wrapped in a red shawl, and her spine bent in anxious self-effacement. He’d loved her at once, for her gentleness and meekness and because she was drooping like a flower in the heat, and because when she finally raised her head to look at him her eyes were brown and afraid. ‘I will care for you from now on, Rachel Rabinovits,’ he had promised. ‘I will be a good husband to you.’ And she had smiled at him shyly and held his arm as he led her away across the sticky cobbles. And finally he thought of the child that was coming, the family he was founding, life resuming in its old comforting pattern. Both his parents had been killed in the pogrom, before he and his two sisters fled to England, but life went on. It was a warming thought even in the thick of the fog.
But when the first rush of work was over and the porters sloped off through the murk to the nearest pubs and the eel and pie shops, and the donkeys were rewarded with nosebags and were soon chomping contentedly and much too audibly, he was so hungry and so fatigued that memories were no longer any sustenance at all. Horrie had told them to be back within the hour, so there was no possibility of walking home for bread and herrings, because he would never get back in time. There was nothing for it but to stay where he was and endure.
When the bay was empty and there was nobody left to see his shame, he picked over a pile of rotting carrots and found four that were almost good enough to eat, at least in parts. But they made a poor meal and after he’d chewed what he could of them his stomach was still yearning for more. He would have liked to return to the pile and find something else to assuage his awful hunger, but the scavengers had arrived in force and were turning over the debris like crows, and he simply couldn’t bear to be part of such degraded company. He might be poor and hungry, but he still had his pride.
He drifted away from the muddle of carts and baskets and discarded vegetables, glad that the fog had thinned a little and that now he could see to the other side of the road, and walked towards the Strand where the bustle of a busy thoroughfare would give him something to occupy his mind. He felt slightly sick and his stomach was strained with hunger.
He was rewarded by more activity than he expected. Something was going on, and in Trafalgar Square too, by the sound of things, for he could hear shouts and growls and hoarse cheers coming from that direction. Crowds of workmen were gathering outside Charing Cross Station and heading in small determined groups towards the square. He had nothing better to do, and he had to take his mind off his hunger somehow or other, so he followed them. He was curious to see what was happening. It might be a political meeting, it was true, and a gathering of that kind could be dangerous, but he decided to risk it.
It was a political meeting, and a very big one, complete with banners and men with loudspeakers standing on the fog-shrouded plinth of Nelson’s hidden column and booming incomprehensibly towards the ranks of white faces, damp caps and ragged coats below them. The fog was patchy here and Emmanuel could see that the crowd filled the entire space of the square, in dark shifting masses. Thousands and thousands of men, and more arriving by the minute.
Politics alarmed Emmanuel Cheifitz because they roused ugly emotions rather too quickly. But as the men nearest to him seemed to be in quite an amiable mood, at least for the present, and it would certainly be warmer inside such a crowd, he edged himself in and pretended to be listening. Even after seventeen years in the country he still found English an impossibly difficult language, especially when it was spoken quickly, or boomed through a loud-hailer, or argued passionately. But he did his best to concentrate and tried to ignore the fact that his belly was growling with hunger, and presently the word ‘hunger’ broke through both fogs and made sense to him.
‘No government ‘as the right,’ the speaker said, ‘to sentence ’onest workin’ men to ’unger an’ want an’ destitution. We ain’t criminals. We ain’t committed crimes. If there was work, wouldn’t we work?’
Agreement roared from every side. ‘Tha’s it! Work! Tha’s what we want!’ Determined roars, but not ugly yet, not dangerous.
But then a young man took the megaphone. A young man with a clear, strong, persuasive voice. And as he spoke, the atmosphere in the listening crowd changed and became sharper. ‘Our rulers don’t know how we feel, comrades. There they sit, all well fed and snug and smug in their gentlemen’s clubs, and they haven’t the faintest idea what it is to be hungry and desperate. They don’t know and they don’t care. There they sit, in their gentlemen’s clubs. In Pall Mall. A few yards away.’ He waved an arm towards Pall Mall. ‘And they don’t care. I will tell you what I think, comrades. I think we should leave this place. Nobody is listening to us here. We should leave this place now and march to Pall Mall and show them just how we feel. We should break their windows and beat down their doors and make them face us, man to man.’
Under the passion of his oratory the crowd seethed and shifted. Many were roaring approval, swaying towards him, faces lifted. Others were shouting him down and booing. Soon violent arguments were erupting on every side. The banner dipped forward and folded in upon itself and became a red arrow pointing the way, and a ragged column formed ready to follow it.
Time to move away from trouble, Emmanuel thought, for he knew from very early experience that men in a temper were just a little too quick to turn their wrath against the nearest Jew. Fortunately, his father had taught him how to handle this sort of situation, long ago, in Warsaw. He began to melt out of the crowd, quietly and unobtrusively, side-stepping and edging backwards so that he seemed to be facing the same way as everybody else, moving when others moved and careful never to look anyone in the eye. Becoming invisible. Staying safe. Soon there was a yard of sulphurous smoke and trodden snow between him and the nearest workman, and his heel had reached the kerb. He crossed the road quickly, head down, and went back to Covent Garden at once.
Rumours spread all through the afternoon. Thousands were said to be on the march. The West End was besieged. The police had been driven back and were powerless. Troops had been called out. ‘Great days, eh?’ Horrie said as he and Emmanuel loaded yet another stack of baskets. ‘We been downtrod jest a bit too long. Now we’ve turned. An’ ’igh time too!’
He talks as though he’d been part of it, the tailor thought, instead of working here all day, but he was too weary to do more than grunt in answer. There was so much anger and excitement in the market all around him that he felt quite drained by it, even though he knew it was nothing to do with him. By the end of his second shift he was stupid with fatigue. The whole of London could have gone up in flames and he wouldn’t have noticed or cared. Let other people have a revolution if that was what they wanted. He would be happy to settle for a fire and a meal and the quiet company of his wife.
At last work was over and he trailed wearily back towards the City, clutching his three precious shillings in the palm of his battered hand, aching for home. His pockets were heavy with potatoes and carrots and apples and nuts which Horrie had urged upon him as soon as work was over. ‘Go on, mate!’ he’d said. ‘Take yer pick. We all do it. Part a’ the job, pickin’s is. If they don’t want us ter take pickin’s, they should pay us proper.’ And although his conscience was troubled Emmanuel took what was offered, too tired and too polite to refuse. And in any case, there was a feeling of recklessness about this extraordinary day which communicated itself even to his sober rectitude. Perhaps this sort of behaviour was acceptable when you worked as a porter. He would ask the Rabbi on Friday.
The fog was still mercifully patchy. On his return journey he could see well enough to recognize the landmarks as he passed, but he travelled slowly and by the time he reached Ludgate Hill he was ready to drop. When the demonstrators came marching up behind him, filling the road with their cheerful mass and singing ‘Rule Britannia’ at the tops of their voices, he hadn’t the strength to get out of their way. Their energy washed him like a tide, and caught him up and swept him along. He found himself in the middle of the crowd, in the middle of the road, marching despite his fatigue and smiling at their infectious exuberance. They traversed the City, buoyant with excitement and the satisfaction of anger used.
When they reached the East End, people came out on the pavements to cheer them on, and Emmanuel was alarmed in case someone should recognize him and think he’d been part of it. But he was embedded in the march and couldn’t side-step when they were all moving forward together.
‘How’d it go then, Jack?’ a woman called.
And several voices answered her triumphantly. ‘We give ’em what for, missus. Put the wind up ’em good an’ proper.’
‘Good fer you!’ the answer came back, and the crowd on the pavement clapped and cheered. They were like an army returning from a victorious war.
When they got to Commercial Street their ranks thinned as men stepped out of the march to left and right on their way back to their homes. They cast Emmanuel off at Flower and Dean Street like a small sprat tumbled from the edge of a great trawl net, and he scurried home through the foggy waters of Whitechapel with their song ringing in his ears, ‘Britons never never never shall be slaves!’
He was still uplifted as he climbed the stairs to his room, and cheered too by the smell of fried onions that filled the well of the stairs. As he opened the door to his room, his mouth was watering.
But the smell inside the room was strange and alerting, a heavy warm smell, musty but with a peculiar and familiar fleshiness about it. It was the smell of a woman’s blood, and as he received it and recognized it, he knew that it was the smell of birth too. The child, he thought, my child. Here at last. And this was a new excitement, welling up from profound depths, washing away all his other thoughts and reducing all the other experiences of his day to insignificance.
Rachel was still in the bed where he’d left her that morning, her body curled in a protective crescent round a fat bundle of shawls, and fast asleep, her eyelashes fringing her closed eyes with two patches of smudged darkness against the pallor of her skin. He was overwhelmed with tenderness at the sight of her, and torn with conflicting needs, wanting to wake her to be shown his child, and wanting to do the right thing and let her sleep, because sleep was natural after birth.
She solved the problem by waking of her own accord. ‘You have a son, Emmanuel,’ she told him dreamily, and her smile was beatific. ‘See!’
He was on his knees at the bedside at once, even before she’d pulled back the edge of her red shawl to reveal a little rounded head covered with soft dark hair. ‘A beautiful baby,’ she said, taking the child’s tiny hand between her finger and thumb and placing it delicately on Emmanuel’s forefinger. And beautiful he was, with huge dark eyes and the merest button of a nose, and a little red mouth, perfectly formed, the top lip shaped like the letter M.
‘A dolly,’ Emmanuel said affectionately, using his mother’s favourite endearment almost before he was aware that he’d remembered it. ‘Great is our God and greatly to be praised for His loving kindness.’ And the child grasped his finger and held it strongly.
‘Such fine fat limbs,’ Rachel said, lifting the shawl with her fingertips so that he could see the smooth flesh rounding their baby’s arms. ‘So soft’ She was languid with love for the child.
‘David,’ Emmanuel said. ‘We will call him David. David the Beautiful.’ And he looked down at the perfect features below him with greater pride than he’d ever felt in his life. From hardship and poverty, from persecution and exile, in the ugly squalor of this cold room, in the coldest winter in human memory, on a day of fog and violence and terrible despair, this child had been born. David the Beautiful. ‘Such a son we have!’ he said to Rachel.
And David looked up at his father with his huge dark eyes. And scowled.