When they woke, the sun was slanting in through the window at a completely new angle and the canary was singing passionately, the feathers at his throat throbbing and fluttering, his high whistling melody flute-shrill in the sleepy room. In the street below a cart was creaking past, the steady clop clop of its horse’s hooves as slow and predictable as the tin clock on the dresser. It was nearly eleven o’clock.
‘We been asleep fer hours,’ he whispered, still lapped in contentment. ‘What a way to go on!’
‘Did we oughter get dressed?’ she said sleepily. But she made no effort to move away from his side. It was too warm and comfortable beside him.
She looked more beautiful than he’d ever seen her, but softer and vulnerable. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ she said rather fearfully, thinking, please don’t say we shouldn’t ’ave. I know we shouldn’t ’ave. But I done it fer you.
The anxiety in her voice released a flood of protective affection. ‘I shall love you fer ever an’ ever,’ he said. It upset him that she was feeling guilty, especially as guilt was creeping into his mind too.
‘I love you so, so much,’ she said touching his cheek tenderly. ‘It wasn’t wrong, was it?’
That was a question he couldn’t answer and remain truthful. ‘We will get married,’ he said. ‘Soon as ever we can. I promise.’
She remembered the newspaper cutting. Now, she thought, let him see it now. There’ll never be a better time than this. ‘I got sommink ter show you,’ she said, sitting up, but gently so as not to disturb him. ‘Stay here. I shan’t be a tick.’ And she eased herself out of the bed and padded across the lino to the tall chair where her bloomer suit was drying.
She’d found the cutting yesterday evening when she was getting ready to go and visit her mother. Was it really only yesterday evening? It had been folded away inside the brown paper cover of an old exercise book she was using to keep accounts in. When it fell out onto her counterpane she had no idea what it was. She’d opened it idly and glanced at the picture and read the headline before she realized how useful it could be. Now she took it from her pocket and padded back to the bed with it and spread it out across Aunty Dumpling’s patchwork quilt. ‘There!’ she said, more boldly than she’d intended. ‘Whatcher think a’ that?’
He read the headline aloud. ‘Slum houses make way for Mr Rothschild’s new Industrial Dwellings. Demolition teams at work in Flower and Dean Street.’ And looked at the picture, piles of rubble, jagged walls and a line of urchins all staring owl-eyed at the camera. ‘I remember that,’ he said with surprise and delight, ‘all them old places comin’ down. I was on’y a little’un. I went down ter see it, I remember. With Alfie Miller. Look, there’s ’is sister Ruby. An’ that’s me. An’ there’s Amy Miller an’ Johnny What-ever-’is-name-was. Where d’yer get it, Ellen? And that boy used ter foller Morrie about all the time. I remember him. An’ that awful Smelly Ellie, look, on the end a’ the line. Trust her ter push herself in where she wasn’t wanted. She was awful! Smelly Ellie Murphy. Pinched my cake, she did.’
He was so busy examining the picture he hadn’t noticed the distress on her face, but now she caught her breath suddenly as though she had a pain, and he looked up straight into her eyes, and her eyes were anguished. ‘Ellen?’ he asked.
‘It was a good cake,’ she whispered. ‘Tasted lovely.’
‘Ellen?’ he said again, scowling at her. She couldn’t be Ellie Murphy. No, no, no, it wasn’t possible. She was Ellen White, beautiful Ellen White. But then he remembered that awful room in Chicksand Court.
‘I never ’ad no breakfast,’ she explained and burst into tears.
Then how tenderly she was cuddled and consoled, and how anxiously he regretted his stupid thoughtless words. And she assured him that she was quite, quite changed now she was Ellen White, and he assured her that he knew it, that nobody could ever dream of calling her Smelly Ellie when she was the sweetest girl alive, and just let anyone try, he’d give ’em a right pasting. And her tears were kissed quite away and his battered hands were held tenderly in hers. And now there was no doubt at all that they would marry, and marry soon.
‘I tell you, bubeleh,’ he said passionately. ‘I say thanks to the good Lord every single day a’ my life fer lettin’ us meet. An’ now we’re man an’ wife – yes, yes, we are. Man an’ wife in everything bar the ceremony – I shall be grateful to Him for ever an’ ever. It don’t matter what you was like as a kid. That’s all over an’ done with.’
‘Oh!’ she said, tearful with joy this time, ‘I shall love you fer ever an’ ever. You’ll see.’ And she kissed his battered hands. ‘Oh your poor hands.’
The sight of his torn knuckles and the knowledge of who she was triggered another memory. ‘We ’ad a fight once, you an’ me,’ he said. ‘D’you remember?’
‘No we never,’ she said, surprised into forgetting her tears. ‘Boys don’t fight girls.’ She’d given plenty of boys a thump in her time, but not David. Never gentle Davey Cheifitz.
‘It was down the Lane,’ he said. ‘We must ’a been about seven. No more. I ’it the wall, I was so wild. Cut all me knuckles. You called me a mug.’
‘The ring trick!’ she said, remembering. ‘They made yer pull the ring trick. Alfie Miller, wasn’t it? Alfie Miller and the bloke they called Crusher. Oh Davey! Fancy me callin’ you a mug!’
‘I was a mug,’ he admitted ruefully. ‘Caught me good an’ proper they did with that ol’ ring trick. You knew though, didn’tcher?’
‘You learn young if yer live in Dorset Street.’
‘You’ll never live in Dorset Street again,’ he promised.
‘I’d ’ave a job,’ she grinned at him, ‘seein’ they’ve pulled it down.’
‘Oh Ellen!’ he said laughing at her, ‘That’s what I love about you. Give us a kiss!’
Three kisses later, and at last, they remembered the poor canary and hastened to fill his seed bowl and clean his cage and provide him with fresh water, allowing themselves to feel safely ashamed of this particular unworthiness.
Then it was time to put on their clothes and tidy the bed and resume the rest of the day. They dressed slowly, partly because they were still languid with lovemaking, and partly because they recognized that every movement they made was taking them back into the ordinary world again, where neither of them wanted to be.
‘No point us trying to catch the club up,’ he said as he tied his bootlaces. ‘They’ll be gone much too far by now.’
‘We could ’ave a pie somewhere an’ go to Hyde Park,’ she said pinning up her hair, and watching her daytime face reappearing in the looking glass. They were two separate people again, two individuals, not man an’ wife, and the corners of her mouth were drooping at the sadness of it.
‘Soon we’ll be married, bubeleh,’ he said, putting his arms round her. ‘I shall speak to my father tonight, the minute I get back.’ He hadn’t the faintest idea what he would say, but he knew it would be done.
It was past ten o’clock when he got home that night. The air brooding over Whitechapel was still warm and the sky was the dusty mauve of untouched grapes, but for the first time in his life the beauty of it didn’t move him at all. He was tense with the certainty of conflict. ‘Soldier of the line prepares fer battle,’ he told himself, trying to make a joke of it. But he couldn’t fool himself. Whatever he said in the next few minutes and however carefully he said it, somebody was bound to be hurt. Oh, if only he could restrict the damage to his own emotions. Halevai!
Most of the parlour windows were open to the heavy air, and behind them the gaslights shone like Chinese lanterns. His parents were sitting underneath their particular gaslight, beside their open window, he reading studiously, she sewing buttons on a shirt, and both of them lapped in contentment with each other, the very picture of sholem bayis, the ideal of Jewish domesticity.
The sight of them squeezed David’s heart with a pang of foreboding and regret. Until this summer he’d loved them so entirely and easily, his thin, stooping, upright father, a chawchem, a man worthy of admiration, and his pale, hardworking mother, with her chapped busy hands and the humility of that downcast look, a woman to shield. Now he remembered all the errands he’d run to save her strength and all the odd jobs he’d undertaken to earn her the money for this flat, and all the old protective love for her filled his chest and made his eyes sting with tears.
He hung Aunty Dumpling’s key on the nail above the dresser, glad that it was down at the dark end of the room and that he could stand with his back to them for a second and recover the calm he needed.
‘So you fed the bird, nu?’ his mother said mildly.
‘Yes.’
‘No troubles?’
‘No.’
‘So vhy she don’t let me feed that bird I can’t imagine. After all these years. I should give it the evil eye maybe.’
‘Rachel!’ Emmanuel demurred, drawing his eyebrows into the downward flicker that was the nearest he ever got to frowning at her.
‘Come and sit beside your Mama,’ Rachel said, patting the chair beside her. ‘You had a good day vid your cycles, nu?’ Then as he walked into the gaslight she saw his torn knuckles and let out a little shriek, dropping the shirt and stretching out her hands towards him. ‘David, bubeleh, vhat they done to you?’
He’d forgotten all about his injuries. ‘Drunks,’ he explained waving away scars, concern and explanation. ‘Shouting their mouths off. Bit a’ punchin’. Nothing, Mama. Nothing really. I got something much more important to tell you.’
‘So let me see,’ she said taking his right hand firmly and turning it towards the light. ‘Ai-yi! Vhat more important than your health, I should like to know. Did you bathe it? Show me the other one. Ai-yi-yi, vhat a state!’
He looked at her face, all loving concern, all innocent loving concern, and he felt like a butcher. ‘I want to get married,’ he said.
Emmanuel closed his book and set it aside, and David knew he was alert and attentive even though he could only see him out of the corner of his eye. But his mother paid no attention at all. ‘You should have come home,’ she grumbled affectionately. ‘I vould a’ bandaged you up good. Vhat a state! Ai-yi!’
‘You vant me to make inquiries?’ Emmanuel asked. ‘Somebody to make a match, nu? Shadchanim ve don’t have in Vhitechapel, but there’s plenty here know the art.’
‘He’s too young for matchmaking yet,’ Rachel said too quickly, giving his hands a little shake of exasperation.
‘Don’t it say in the Shulchan Aruch, “At eighteen a young man should take a wife”?’ David tried, looking his father full in the eye and wishing he could control his erratic breathing.
‘True,’ Emmanuel said. ‘That is vhat it says in the Shulchan Aruch. But you should know it is also written there, “Marry an estimable woman of respectable family”. I start to ask for you, nu?’
‘No,’ David said, staying calm with a great effort. ‘I’ve already found a wife, Papa. I know who I want to marry.’
‘The idea!’ his mother exploded. ‘So vhat next? I never heard nothink so ridiculous. A meshuganer we bred, Emmanuel. Chose your own vife. Ai-yi! Vhat sort of a vorld ve live in?’
‘Her name’s Ellen White,’ he said, speaking quickly before they could stop him or he could lose his courage. ‘She’s eighteen. She works in ’Opkins an’ Peggs, where Josh works. She’s very pretty, and I love her.’
‘Ellen White?’ his mother said. ‘So vhat sort a’ name’s that? That ain’t a Jewish name.’
Tell them quickly, David thought. Now, while it’s possible. ‘She ain’t Jewish, Mama.’
‘A shiksa!’ Rachel wailed, both hands fanned across her mouth as though she could prevent any further upsetting speech by their pressure. ‘He vants to marry a shiksa. Speak to the boy, Emmanuel. A shiksa! Ai-yi-yi-yi-yi!’
‘You ain’t got no choice, David,’ Emmanuel said. ‘You must marry a Jew.’
‘No,’ David said, stubborn but still reasonable. ‘I want to marry Ellen.’
‘Ve marry for life,’ Emmanuel warned.
‘Yes,’ rapturously, ‘that’s what I want.’
‘How vill you keep Shabbas vid a shiksa for a vife? You ain’t thought of that, nu?’ his mother said. ‘Does she cook good? I bet she don’t cook kosher.’
‘It don’t matter how she cooks. We’ll manage. We love each other.’
‘Love!’ his mother snorted. ‘Such nonsense. Love!’
His father sighed anxiously. ‘You ain’t thought of your childer?’ he asked.
‘No,’ David answered honestly. ‘What’s to think?’
‘Vhat’s to think?’ his mother shrieked. ‘Vhat’s to think? Ai-yi-yi! She’s put the evil eye on him, this shiksa. Vhat’s to think? So vhat vill they be? Half an’ half, neither one thing nor the other, poor childer. Vhat’s to think!’
‘So maybe they’ll be Jewish, Mama. I don’t know.’
Emmanuel’s long face was pale even in the gaslight, the lines denting his cheeks and forehead deeper and blacker than ever. The family is the centre of life,’ he said, passing his long hands over his eyes with a terrible weariness. ‘The core. There ain’t nothink more important Ai-yi! Is this for vhy I send you to study the Talmud? Vhat you thinking of? Vhere’s your modesty? You don’t choose your own vife? It ain’t modest. You think I chose your mother? Nu, nu!’
‘Times change,’ David said stubbornly. ‘This ain’t Poland.’
‘You ain’t thought of Yom Kippur,’ his mother accused, weeping freely. ‘And how vill you celebrate the Passover, you tell me?’ And she blew her nose as though that was a clinching argument
‘I’m goin’ ter marry Ellen,’ he said and his spine was rigid with determination. It wouldn’t matter what they said now, he had made up his mind by action.
The argument went on and on, round and round, threshing and struggling and making no progress at all, a snake eating its own tail. When the church clock struck twelve, Emmanuel decided to call a truce. Tomorrow ve see the Rabbi, nu?’ he suggested. ‘Ve hear vhat he says, nu? Now ve sleep, odervise ve ain’t fit fer nothink in the morning.’
David agreed to see the Rabbi even though he knew it wouldn’t make the slightest difference. Rachel wailed into the bedroom and cried herself to sleep, and Emmanuel sighed with distress and guilt, remembering the words of Deuteronomy, This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice.’
And one crowded mile away, among the muttering sleepers in Mr Pegg’s second dormitory, Ellen lay wakeful, tossed between ecstasy and worry. Now that she had time to think about what they’d done, she was remembering that it could have awful consequences. What if she had a baby? Plenty of girls did, as she knew only too well from her life in Dorset Street. Perhaps they ought to have waited till they were married. That was the proper way to go on. But oh, the memory was too close and too rapturous to be denied. And they’d be married as soon as ever they could. He’d promised. Married and together for ever and ever, sleeping in the same bed, loving like that whenever they wanted to. Even the thought gave her goose pimples.
But then practical considerations came plodding into her mind. If she got married she would have to leave her job, because Hopkins and Peggs didn’t employ married women. And that would mean the loss of at least half a guinea a week. And the more she thought about it, the more stupid it seemed that she should have to forgo her wage simply because she and David had decided to live together. ‘I shan’t tell ’em,’ she decided. ‘It’s no concern a’ theirs what I do with me private life. I’ll ask permission to live out. I don’t ’ave ter say nothink about getting married.’ She could tell them she was living with a relative, which would be true enough. That way she could have the wage and David. And goodness knows they’d need the money. She was still plotting warmly when sleep drifted her away for the second time that day.
David was late for work next morning. He was most upset and apologetic, especially when Mr Quinton assumed he’d got a thick head and made a joke of it.
‘We’re doin’ a piece on the Thames Embankment,’ he said. ‘Cleopatra’s Needle, Hotel Cecil, Savoy, Somerset House. All straight lines. Draw a straight line, can yer?’
‘Don’t tease the lad, Quin,’ Mr Palfreyman said, stepping neatly into the office. ‘Good morning, Cheify. Fine weather again. Five minutes at the end of the day to make amends. Is that acceptable? Yes, yes, of course.’
‘You got off light, Cheify,’ Mr Quinton said as they went striding off towards the Embankment. ‘Think yerself lucky an’ don’t go makin’ a habit of it, that’s all.’
‘No, Mr Quinton,’ David assured him. ‘I won’t.’ And he sighed deeply. Telling your parents you were going to marry someone they couldn’t approve of wasn’t something you’d ever want to repeat. Nu-nu!
Mr Quinton gave him a quizzical look but no further comment. And presently they arrived on the Embankment where the roadway was rattling with cabs and trams and scuttling with pedestrians, and the river was choppy with the wash of boats and barges. ‘River scene fer a start,’ Mr Quinton said and darted across the road to Somerset House, notebook in hand, leaving David to get on with it
Work was a blessing that day. It occupied his mind and passed the time and, rather to his surprise, gave him an appetite. But he was preoccupied, despite all his efforts to appear as normal as he could, and the perceptive Mr Quinton noticed, of course.
‘There’s sommink up wi’ young Cheify,’ he told Mr Palfreyman, when the two gentlemen met in Craig’s Oyster Bar for their usual liquid lunch with shellfish.
‘Cherchez la femme, dear chap,’ Mr Palfreyman said, and, turning to the waiter, ‘Could I have a dry glass, do you think? Thank you so much. Is it affecting his work, would you say?’
‘No.’
‘Then it’s his affair, not ours. Yes, indeed. He’ll sort things out, I daresay. He’s a sensible lad. Just keep an eye on him.’
‘I’d every intention,’ Mr Quinton said. The speed and delicacy of those drawings were too good to be lost. And besides, he liked the kid.
Ellen worked hard that day too, for the store had plenty of custom. But she worked automatically and that gave her plenty of time to daydream. It seemed an age since she’d last seen him and seven o’clock was hours and hours away. She’d have liked to have told Maudie she was going to get married, but she knew that wouldn’t be at all wise, because Maudie was such a gossip. On Wednesday she’d tell Ruby and Mrs Miller, and see what they said about it. But in the meantime she’d just got to get through this Monday. Oh what a very long day it was!
And it got longer. For when the goods had finally been covered and the shutters drawn and the doors bolted, and she had gone skimming up the stairs to the dormitory to change her clothes and escape, there was a postcard waiting for her. ‘I told my parents. Now I got to see the Rabbi tonight. I will be outside the store at nine o’clock, I promise. I.L.Y. David xxxxx.’ Two more hours! It was a lifetime. But if he was seeing the Rabbi that probably meant he was fixing the wedding, so it was time well spent, even if they couldn’t see one another till later. When they met again they’d know when they were going to get married. We shall ’ave ter find somewhere to live next, she thought, and decided to occupy the intervening hours reading the advertisements.
It never occurred to her that his parents would actually refuse to accept her. They’d go on making a fuss, for a little while at least, because Jews usually married Jews, but she felt vaguely sure that they’d come round to the idea in the end. She knew they were good caring parents because they’d always fed him well and seen to it that he had warm clothes and that his boots were mended. So they’d hardly refuse him now, over something as important as this. Not when he’d made up his mind. There was an inflexibility about him when he’d made up his mind, a quiet unspoken determination that would be very difficult to oppose. No, it would all come out right in the end. She was certain. Well, very nearly certain.
So it upset her to see how downcast he looked as he came up Shoreditch High Street to meet her just after nine o’clock. He was striding, because his legs were too long for him to walk in any other way, but there was no eagerness in his stride, and his face was taut and hard with unhappiness. ‘Oh Davey!’ she said, slipping her hand through the crook of his arm to comfort him, and the tone of her voice told him at once how well she understood what he was feeling.
‘I can’t get them ter see sense,’ he sighed. ‘They just keep on an’ on.’
‘Did yer see the Rabbi?’
Oh yes, he’d seen the Rabbi, and a fat lot of good that had done. Sitting blackly in his high carved chair with a brown dusk filling the room around him and three thousand years of tradition heavily behind him. He’d been kind and courteous and quite quite firm. Jews married Jews, honoured their fathers, perpetuated their race. The only possible hope he could offer was the thought that the young lady might care to convert to Judaism.
‘She ain’t Jewish,’ David had said, recognizing how unpleasantly truculent he sounded, but powerless to say anything else.
‘You have asked her?’
‘No.’
‘So, maybe you should, nu?’
And that was how they’d left it, with no decision made, and no hope of making one. Impasse.
‘I won’t give in,’ he told Ellen fiercely as they walked north past the Music Hall towards St Leonard’s Church. ‘One way or the other we’ll get married.’
‘I know,’ she said, giving his arm a squeeze. ‘What say we catch the last house? Cheer ourselves up. My treat.’
So they went to the Music Hall, although he wouldn’t allow her to pay for the tickets, and were cheered for an hour. But when he kissed her goodnight in the staff porch his eyes were sombre again.
‘It’ll work out, you’ll see,’ she said, with her arms about his neck and her cheek against his chin. ‘Just so long as we love each other. P’rhaps your Aunty Dumpling’ll bring ’em round.’
But he groaned into her hair. ‘Bubeleh, bubeleh.’ He was ashamed even to think about Aunty Dumpling after what they’d done in her room. Oh why was something as simple and wonderful as love so terribly complicated?
Had he known it, Dumpling was doing her best for him at that very minute. At the end of the interview he’d stormed out of Rabbi Jaccoby’s room and rushed down the stairs two at a time in his anger, and his father had gone sloping back to the flat. And there he’d found both his sisters waiting for him, Rivke eagle-fierce, Raizel all tremulous anxiety.
‘Veil?’ Rivke said.
He sat wearily in his chair and told them what had been said. ‘He ain’t move an inch. He says he’ll marry her.’
‘Ai! Ai!’ Rachel wailed. ‘Vhat ve gonna do, Dumpling? Like a madman he is.’
‘So the boy’s in love,’ Dumpling said, defending him although she wasn’t sure she ought to, knowing what they’d been up to. Her neighbours had been quick to tell her all the scandal the minute she got back.
‘I seen your nephew, Sunday, Mrs Esterman,’ Mrs Smith said. ‘Brought a young lady wiv ’im. Did yer know?’
‘Yes, yes,’ Dumpling assured her. ‘They come to feed the bird.’
‘Took ’em hours!’ Mrs Smith said. ‘Can’t think what they could a’ been doing up there all that time.’
‘Cleaning the room, Mrs Smith,’ Dumpling said, covering for them at once. ‘Left it lovely, they have.’
‘Very kind of ’em, I’m sure!’ Mrs Smith said, and her expression said, you don’t fool me!
Ai! Dumpling thought. So young and so much in love, vhat you expect? It’s only human nature.
‘A shiksa!’ Rachel moaned. ‘I never hold my head up in the Buildin’s ever again. Ai! Ai! Ai!’
‘We should’a found him a vife months ago,’ Rivke said, lopsided but stern. ‘This never vould’a happen, we found him a vife months ago. Nice Jewish girl. Izzie’s girl maybe.’
‘She’s twenty-five already,’ Dumpling pointed out reasonably. ‘She got a wall eye.’
‘So who’s perfect?’ Rivke said. ‘She’s a good Jewish girl. Make a good Jewish vife. Ai-yi, dolly! Don’t you vish you listen vhen ve tell you?’
But Rachel was too grieved to hear the rebuke. ‘Vhat for he do this to his Mama? I never hold my head up again. Maybe ve find him a pretty girl, nu?’
‘You could take the prettiest girl in the whole a’ Whitechapel, and plate her vid gold, vouldn’t make no difference, bubeleh. Still he vould love this girl.’
‘It’s so unreasonable,’ Rachel complained.
‘She vants love should be reasonable!’ Dumpling said to her brother.
Emmanuel had been sitting quietly in his corner, listening to the storm of his wife’s distress. Now he lifted his head and gave his opinion, quietly and sadly. ‘Ain’t no earthly use ve oppose,’ he said. ‘Raizel’s right. The boy’s in love. Ve got to accept.’
‘But he’ll marry her!’ Rachel wailed. ‘Ai-yi-yi! It’s the end a’ the vorld. All my life I say I should only live to see him under the chuppah! And now …’ And she dissolved into bitter tears and refused to be comforted. ‘Vhat for he do this to his Mama?’
‘So you vear him down,’ Rivke suggested. ‘He’s young yet You vear him down.’
Emmanuel shook his head. ‘Von’t vork,’ he said.
And it didn’t