She's Leaving Home (53 page)

‘What about you, Dad? Would you ever have contemplated a
shikse
as a girlfriend?’

Daniel shot a side glance at her as they moved away from the junction. ‘Good Lord. What prompted that?’

‘I dunno. Came out of the blue.’ That was true. ‘I don’t mean to pry. But might you have – before you were married, I mean?’

Her father seemed to be having trouble changing gears. ‘Has my sister Gertie been spinning you tales, then? I was never a great romantic, Helen. My health wouldn’t allow it.’

‘Mm, I know. Mum says you courted her right through the war but you still needed a nudge to propose to her.’

Daniel chuckled. ‘That’s about it.’

‘Is that why you didn’t emigrate? Because you decided to get married and settle down here?’

‘More or less. It might have been different, I suppose, if I’d met some dishy American Red Cross girl from a kosher family. But I didn’t. So here I am, and here you are too.’

It was a subject better left. She sensed also that before long her father might quiz her on Michael: his curiosity had not been allayed and he seldom forgot. But before Helen could dream up a more anodyne topic her attention was caught by sudden rapid movements to her left, under a street
lamp down a narrow side road. It was a mean, gloomy cul-de-sac with terraced houses crowded straight on to the pavement. Otherwise it was deserted. She stared hard, brow furrowed then quickly put her hand on her father’s arm.

‘Dad – stop a minute,’ she commanded.

‘What’s up?’ he asked, but complied and drew the car into the kerb. Behind them a lorry honked.

‘Some kids and an old man – I think they’re trying to rob him,’ was all she could say as she opened the door and jumped out.

The man was small and dressed in a shabby black overcoat of an old-fashioned style, a muffler at his neck and a battered trilby hat insecure and crooked on his grey head. He had his back to Helen as she raced up, and was clutching the lamp-post to keep himself upright. Around him four or five scruffy boys aged around ten or twelve circled and yelled at him. One, the biggest, held a stick in his hand with which he prodded the bowed figure; another with a piebald mongrel on a lead urged it to snap at their victim.

‘Go on, push off,’ Helen shouted in her most authoritative manner. It worked with the roughest girls at school and these underfed mini-yobs were a lot smaller. Her heart pounded but she did not have time to think. She reached for one of the boys and hauled him fiercely to her by the neck of his pullover so that his feet dangled an inch above the ground. ‘Does your mother know what you’re up to? Clear off, or I’ll take the stick to you myself. Get out of here.’ Reluctantly the boys pulled away, shouting obscenities, then ran off and disappeared around the corner chased by their own dog. A light went on in a window opposite and a woman could be seen banging on the window and shaking her fist at the fleeing children. Nobody emerged. The front doors remained shut tight.

Helen found herself sweating hard. She turned to the old man. ‘You OK?’ she asked. ‘Do you live near here? Can I take you home?’

The hat slipped off and the figure raised its head.

‘Yes, not far,’ he began to reply, then stopped. ‘Why, it’s my
schöne mädchen
. Helen, is it not?’

‘Mr Mannheim?’

It was. As she picked up the tailor’s hat and gently took his arm he explained that he’d recently rented inexpensive rooms nearby, and that the boys had often taunted him but generally did no harm and eventually allowed him to go. But there was terror in the watery eyes, and he kept looking over his shoulder in an agitated way.

‘Once I made the mistake of giving them some money, so now they expect it every time. Sometimes they ring my door bell and vanish before I can open it. They think it is funny,’ he elaborated sadly.

‘My Dad’s here with the car. We’re on our way home. Perhaps we can give you a lift. Or would you like to come to our house for some tea?’ Helen felt sure her mother would repeat the invitation when the incident was described to her.

Mannheim hesitated then raised a finger and stroked her cheek. ‘Knight in shining armour, eh? It would be churlish to refuse. If your father says so. Come, let us speak to him.’

Daniel had been forced to stay with the badly parked car but had speedily seen that the situation was not as dangerous as had first appeared, and that Helen was in control. In a moment Mr Mannheim was installed in the back seat and the Vauxhall had resumed its journey.

Daniel checked in the mirror and waited until his new passenger had closed his eyes. He nudged his daughter and whispered. ‘You see, Helen? You think it’s such a pleasant world out there, that Jews will find a welcome wherever they go. Well, it’s not so. What happened in Nazi Germany could happen in Britain quite easily. You’ve just seen an example.’

A deep sigh came from the back seat. Helen twisted around anxiously. Mr Mannheim opened
his eyes.

‘No, no, Daniel. Don’t get it wrong,’ came the remonstration. ‘Those boys did not chase me because I am a Jew. They don’t care about that.’ Zey
don’t care about zat
. ‘They chase me, they ring my doorbell, they try to make my life a misery, because I am a helpless old man. Because I am old. And that is far more terrible, do you not see?’

The envelope was there, ostentatiously placed by the telephone in the hall. A rectangular brown envelope with a prominent Oxford post-mark. Helen touched it gingerly.

In the fuss over Mr Mannheim and the necessity to set an extra place, it was put aside. But as her mother asked for the incidents to be described for the fourth time and expressed once more her alarm that both of them might have been injured, Helen found the excuse she needed to leave the table.

‘Mum, I didn’t think. Like I said, there wasn’t time. But if I had thought about it, I’d have done the same. I hope.’

And, she added under her breath, it wouldn’t have mattered if it hadn’t been Mr Mannheim. As far as she was aware when she went pelting down that street, it wasn’t him, anyway – she didn’t know that till afterwards. Her mother could not get her head round that: it would be family legend for ever more that Helen had spotted somebody she knew from
schul
, and that this was the entire explanation for her behaviour.

‘It’s over, Mum. Please leave it alone,’ she protested as she pushed away her plate. ‘I’m not a hero, but I’m not a fool either. If they’d been bigger than me I’d have yelled for the police. Now where’s that letter?’

She took it upstairs, switched on the bedside light and sat down on the bed with it. Her fingers shook slightly and it took an effort to calm herself. Would it be an interview? Might she expect to travel to one of the oldest universities in the world, to sit at the table with their most eminent tutors, to meet their gaze levelly and show what she was made of?

It was a standard printed letter, that was immediately obvious. A cursory examination showed no inked-in words with dates and times. It was not personally addressed and had not been personally signed. She guessed its contents almost before she read the first line.

A rejection. They did not want her at Oxford. They did not bother to ask to see her. They would not give her the ghost of a chance.

Maybe because she was too young: her seventeenth birthday was in a few days. Both Oxford and Cambridge expected applicants to be eighteen already and nearly nineteen on arrival for their first term. She knew nobody there, and nobody knew her. And there were so few places for girls, and a plethora of applicants, not only more mature but vastly abler than herself.

A cold sensation gripped her; an element of delayed shock, probably, from the confrontation with the street urchins. It would be sensible to go downstairs and drink some more tea. But not yet. She did not want to wallow in self-pity, but it would take a while to absorb the empty news.

Helen lay down on the bed and switched off the light. A sick feeling of dreadful disappointment and rejection seeped from the pit of her stomach. How she wished Michael were near to talk to. He would cheer her and hold her tight; he would remind her she was on the lists at other universities and could reasonably expect to take an honours course and complete a degree. ‘Miss Helen Majinsky BSc’ was still on the cards.

But her hopes of escape by this route were fading, it seemed. If she accepted her lowest offer, from Liverpool, t hen she’d still be sleeping in this same bed the day she took her finals; still jousting with her parents, still failing to make herself understood, especially by her mother. Still a child. She would have to apologise to Reverend Siegel and withdraw her criticisms. She would have to bite her lip whenever her father was around. Or else life would have become a permanent battleground of pain and anger, and that would have been intolerable.

The higher offer from Manchester carried much the same implications. Uncle Sammy and Uncle Abbie, her mother’s younger brothers, both lived there and would jostle for the right to house her for the duration. Both had married correctly; both as prominent businessmen kept strictly kosher homes. Neither was as widely read even as her father. Conversations over dinner in their establishments would be exceedingly limited. She would not merely be frustrated there, she would be bored out of her mind.

What about staying in Hall? Out of the question in Liverpool, of course; the grant for a local university would barely cover the bare expenses of staying in her own home. And the row which would ensue with the family if she suggested it in Manchester! She shut her eyes tight and shuddered. She would have to take on not only her mother but two uncles and their wives, all deeply hostile to the whole idea, who would allege that she wished to ignore their hospitality and live in a tower block of students so that she could stop eating kosher and misbehave in other unspeakable ways. Which would be precisely true, though she would deny it vigorously. Everyone would be terribly upset, cut to the quick, and they would go on about it. For ever.

And in those scenes there’d be no room for Michael: none at all.

There was still Cambridge. No news was good news. Next week Miss Plumb might telephone her friend Dr Swanson and check privately if the rejections had gone out, and the dates set aside for interviews. But Cambridge had fewer places for women than Oxford, and was held to be less progressive. The odds were stacked against her.

Cambridge, then, it had to be. That was her only hope. But it had become alarmingly, terrifyingly, a slim one.

It was a mistake. Right from the start, Morrie Feinstein knew it.

Not that he was averse to trying. A little experimentation was fine; he was prepared to be a modern man, or at least to do his best. And he was a man, with few doubts about his virility. The existence of his son proved that.

Nor did he jib at sex outside marriage – not if, as he argued to himself, it was truly sex
before
marriage – a trial marriage, you might say. It was sensible to check whether he and Vera could get along, especially in that particular field. Neither would be well served had they tied the knot and it proved a disaster, too late. Divorce was still frowned on.

There was nothing unattractive about Vera: on the contrary, a great deal about her appealed to him. She wouldn’t be the perfect stepmother to Jerry but that was probably no longer necessary. She was about the right age, too. Not so advanced that she would embarrass him – indeed his pals would call him a lucky cuss to capture a pretty younger woman. Nor was she such a child that he could be accused of cradle-snatching or make himself look ridiculous. No, in many respects she was ideal. Far more so than Nellie, say, in the shop.

Vera had gone to a lot of trouble with the dinner. A beautiful embroidered cloth, a single silver candlestick with a tall pink candle, a pot of late rosebuds rescued from the garden, a bottle of Italian wine chilled and opened: his heart had leapt as she had shown him in, and fluttered more than somewhat as she dimmed the lights. That was a new scent she wore – exotic, musky. The house was stylish with a few good pieces of furniture, though Vera’s mother’s taste ran mainly to G-Plan. The chandelier in the dining room was grander than any he had seen in Liverpool. Its facets twinkled
enticingly and were reflected in the sparkle of the wine as she poured.

Consummation. Funny word. He tried to explore it as the lamb, pale and moist, appeared on first his plate then his fork. It meant food, by which he earned his livelihood: people always had to eat so he would never starve. But it meant – something else, as he eyed Vera across the rim of the glass. It meant the completion of an act, of a process started by both in hope, driven along by loneliness: or at least, by a dragging awareness of being incomplete alone.
Consummation
. He rolled the word around his mouth with a second, then a third glass of wine, and ate the last green pea and mashed potato with relish. Then Vera stood up and held out her hand to him.

‘We’d be more comfortable upstairs, Morrie.’

His mouth went dry and he rose a little unsteadily. ‘What about pudding?’ he asked uncertainly.

‘Later,’ she answered. ‘This way. I’ve put the hot water on. We can have a bath together afterwards if you like.’ At the top of the stairs he tripped and she lifted his arm. ‘I hope you don’t think I’m always like this,’ he muttered thickly. ‘Don’t drink much as a rule.’

‘Don’t worry. You won’t be the first I’ve put to bed in a state,’ Vera replied, matter-of-factly. Fuzzily he wondered how to respond, then decided to focus on the next few minutes. It was years since last time. Would he remember what to do? Would it be in working order? Lord almighty, was he supposed to impress her?

At the top he drew himself up to his full height but Vera had stepped smartly ahead and with a swish of skirt and perfume disappeared into a bedroom. He stumbled after.

His tongue felt strange, with a winey taste. His knees and legs wanted to operate independently of each other and of his intentions. The bedroom, with its startling rose-pink plush, was lop-sided. The pink light bulb in the bedside lamp was on, but no other illumination. Liked pink, did Vera. The wallpaper covered in scarlet peonies moved as he moved. It seemed wise to grab the bedpost.