After Ben’s defection, his mother, a stately, large-busted matron, often moved by compassion, came presently to visit her son’s abandoned common-law wife. She found two little girls of whose existence she had not known. Both stared up at her with her son’s sad defiant eyes. Their hair was uncombed, their white dresses soiled, their mother distraught. The maid had left: the rent was unpaid. There was no food in the cupboard. Ben’s mother left quickly, in her chauffeured Rolls-Royce.
A letter from solicitors followed, hand-delivered the next day. The rent was to be paid: the little girls provided for. If their mother was in financial or practical difficulty, she could make special application to the solicitors at any time, who would judge the merits of the case, and pay out accordingly.
Goodbye, Benjamin Duveen. Off to greener golf-courses; three fine sons: and Ruth, a woman who loved him for what he was, and not what he wasn’t.
Lucy presently wrote to the solicitors asking if she could move away, move house, start a new life somewhere else with the girls, and still have the rent paid: but they would not hear of it. Continuity, they said, was important for children. So Lucy perforce stayed where she was, seldom leaving the house. She should have been grateful to the Duveens, and so she was. Many families would have preferred to have ignored her existence altogether. She could have gone into service, to the work-house, or on the streets. The little bastards to a Barnado Home. Henry Whitechapel, arriving in the May of the following season, looked out for Mrs Duveen on the beach, and missed her. He made his way to 109 Holden Road, and found the garden unkempt, the gravel drive full of weeds, the motorcar gone and curtains drawn, so that he thought at first the house was empty. But Hypatia and Praxis were playing on the lawn. Or rather, Hypatia was sitting sketching a plant, and Praxis was sitting in a puddle and her wet drawers, when she stood, hung down muddily round her knees.
‘Where’s your mother?’ he asked.
‘Crying,’ said Praxis.
‘Shush,’ called out Hypatia. ‘You silly little girl.’
‘Well, she is,’ said Praxis. ‘Silly girl yourself.’
Hypatia sighed heavily and raised her narrow eyebrows. She had a receding chin and slightly buck teeth, yellowish: a muddy complexion and dull brown hair with a tendency to grease, but was either unaware of these deficiencies, or affected unawareness. Her look was supercilious.
‘And your father?’
‘He’s left,’ said Praxis.
‘He’s away at the moment,’ corrected Hypatia.
Henry took the opportunity of knocking at the door. He was not normally so bold, but his life that day seemed desperate, and the season stretched ahead, meaningless, filled with grinning, eager, silly faces, craning for a likeness; cheated and derided as they were all year, at work, and now at play, by someone of their own kind, who ought to know better. It made him feel bad but what could he do?
‘Mrs Duveen?’ he enquired. ‘You remember me? The beach photographer? I came to check that your photographs arrived.’
He thought he had never seen anyone so changed. She seemed like a little old woman, with her hair scraped back, her kimono clutched round her with a hand whose nails were none too clean.
She shook her head, vague. Then she nodded.
‘If by any chance you need frames – and a photograph looks twice as grand in a frame, I always say – I stock a special line. Very reasonable.’
She did not want the frames, but showed him the photograph stuck any old how on the mantelpiece in the dusty parlour.
‘A big house you have here,’ he remarked kindly. ‘Difficult to keep up, for just one person, I should say.’
At which she burst into tears. Her life was finished; over. Benjamin had gone. She kept her breath in her body for the sake of the girls, nothing else.
He took a room in the house. She had a male lodger! She, a woman alone. What did it matter what people said? In fact, knowing so little about her, they said nothing. Had they known more, no doubt they would have been kind: but the kindness, or lack of it, with which one regards oneself finds its echo in the outside world: and Lucy could not forgive herself. All her fault. Her lost marriage, her failed love, her bastard children, her dusty home, her condemnation to this cruel street, this unfeeling, gossiping town – all her fault. Seeking out more degradation, the seedy lodger, the false photographer, slurping milk through his moustache at her breakfast table, she began to feel better again.
Lucy curled her hair and pressed her clothes. She weeded the drive. She dressed Hypatia and Praxis in pale pink – they had somehow lost their right to white – and wrote to Butt and Sons, the Duveen solicitors, for money to hire a servant, as befitted the litle girls’ state as descendants, albeit on the male side, of King David. Butt and Sons at first demurred, but then conceded.
Benjamin’s mother paid another visit, and seemed relieved by what she saw. (Henry was banished to the kitchen for the occasion). She left the girls a signed photograph of their father; but Praxis had already forgotten what he looked like; he seemed a stranger to her, with his glowing eyes and large nose. Hypatia took the photograph, in any case, and slept with it under her pillow. Praxis set up a howl, discovering this, but Henry dealt her a sharp cuff and she soon stopped.
Lucy presently found pleasure in telling Henry what to do. He followed on her heels like a little pet dog: she scolded and chided and soon had him fetching her bag, her book, her wrap, and so rebuilt a little world around herself, and even came down to the beach on warm days.
The girls watched their lodger take photographs, though pretending to be nothing to do with him. Nothing. A street photographer, after all. None too honest, either, with rotting lungs and bad breath; and their mother a doctor’s daughter, and her daughters of the line of King David. Lucy told them so, frequently: proud of it at last. They had no concept of the notion of Jewishness: either of pogroms or passover. Lucy was vague enough about it herself.
Hypatia and Praxis went to school and suffered with Jesus on the cross, gasped at the beauty of the Virgin Mary, drenched their souls in the blood of the lamb; were slapped if they stole or told lies, heard that they were daughters of Eve and responsible for leading men into sin and for the loss of Paradise, and must make amends for ever. Praxis cleaned Henry’s shoes in penance: Hypatia actually learned how to develop his prints. And he did develop them nowadays, all of them, and Lucy would send them off. His teeth never lost their blackness, but he seemed on the whole, as the years went by, less dejected. Lucy even scolded him into a vague sexual response: human beings, he perceived through her, added up to more than the tattered shreds of flesh he had observed hanging on the barbed wire of the Ypres front; the grinning faces, skin stretched over bone, which presented themselves before his camera. The world was something more than a charnel house, a human factory farm, insanely breeding flesh out of flesh as its way of cheating death.
Presently they slept together in the big brass bed: she a little brisk woman with a tight mouth, prophesying disaster even in her sleep, tossing and turning; he coughing and spluttering all night long, trying to be rid of something; both somewhat healed by virtue of the other: both older than they used to be.
Praxis and Hypatia slept soundly but woke anxious, eyes wide and stretched, for ever fearful that something unexpected might happen. No one explained anything to them: where Ben had come from, where he had gone: who Henry was, and why. Why their mother cried, scolded or laughed, for no apparent reason. Who the woman in the Rolls-Royce was. If everything was inexplicable, anything might happen.
Anxiety ironed itself into their souls.
Praxis thought Hypatia might know more than she did about it all, by virtue of the extra two and a half years to her credit, but if Hypatia did, she said nothing. Hypatia kept herself to herself: she was aloof, like a cat. Praxis more like a clumsy puppy, leaping up with muddy paws, enthusiastic but ridiculous.