Scattered Seed

Part One

Relative Values

Chapter One

Sarah stood by the window waiting for Abraham to arrive home from work. On weekdays, there was no fire in the parlour grate to warm the chill air and she had slipped her faded shawl around her shoulders. She preferred its comforting folds to the smart cardigans her children bought for her. And in a way it was like an old friend: from the days when she had not owned a coat and it had been her outdoor garment.

She could hear the wild autumn wind tearing the few remaining leaves off the tree by the garden gate, and the angry crackle of the bare branches as they were whipped this way and that. How quickly the seasons passed. Another winter approaching. Another year gone by. She rarely paused to think about it, but this morning the calendar had brought her up short.

She and Abraham had been in their twenties when they left Russia. Now, they were in their fifties. But she hadn’t noticed her ageing appearance until the date reminded her that the Sandbergs had stepped ashore in England thirty years ago today.

Her neighbour’s grandfather clock chimed on the other side of the wall, intruding upon her thoughts. Usually, she was busy in the kitchen at this hour, but she had prepared the evening meal early and had put on her best frock. She smoothed the box-pleats which fell from her still-slender hips and adjusted the white lace jabot she had pinned to the neckline to give the simple grey serge a festive touch.

The frock was not new, but she took care of her clothes and would probably still be wearing it five years hence; not like her daughter-in-law, Bessie, who discarded things the moment they were no longer fashionable, Sarah thought as her eldest son’s car pulled up outside and she went to open the door.

The cat joined her in the lobby and she bent down to fondle its marmalade fur. Tibby was pregnant again, but when had she ever had a cat that didn’t keep having kittens? And they’d all been called Tibby. Except the first one, the ferocious black tom named after the Tsar by the friends who’d given him to her. The calendar had reminded her of those friends, too, whom she hadn’t seen for years and rarely thought about, but the Berkowitzes had been part of her first weeks in England.

‘Hurry up and come in before it starts to rain, Abraham!’ she called, watching her husband ease himself out of David’s car. The night sky had a sullen look about it, with clouds the colour of dead cinders scudding across the surface of the moon. It’s a Manchester night, she thought, comparing it with the crisp, starry nights of her youth, which she had not done for a very long time. A sudden memory of riding in a sledge through snowy streets with a strong young man at her side assailed her.

‘Turn up your coat collar,’ she instructed the frail figure he had become.

‘You think I’ll have time to catch pneumonia walking up the garden path?’ he retorted spiritedly.

Everyone knows how delicate his chest is except him, Sarah said to herself exasperatedly. Would he bother to wear a muffler if I didn’t wind it around his neck myself every morning before he left the house? But at least he didn’t have to wait in the cold for a tram, like most people. Working for his son was a blessing: David drove him to the factory and brought him home.

‘You’re not coming in for a minute, David?’ she called as he stretched across the car to shut the door, which his father always neglected to do.

‘Not tonight, I’m late already and we’re going to a card party,’ he shouted back.

‘So enjoy it. Give Bessie my love, the children also.’

‘Such a busy life they lead, those two. Never an evening by their own fireside,’ Abraham muttered when the car had moved away. He wiped his feet on the porch mat, then followed Sarah inside the house and wiped them again on the extra one she had placed in the lobby to preserve the new carpet David had bought for them. ‘Every night with the card parties!’

‘And where do the winnings go?’ Sarah replied. ‘To the refugee fund, in case you’ve forgotten. A card player for the sake of it David isn’t.’

Abraham took off his hat and coat, and put on the shabby black yamulke he always wore on his head indoors. ‘It’s someone’s birthday?’ he asked, pausing in the kitchen doorway.

The table was covered with a lace cloth instead of the usual darned linen one, and it had been set with the best china and cutlery. A bowl of the Michaelmas daisies, which grew in profusion in the back garden, decorated the centre.

Sarah smiled at Abraham’s mystified expression. ‘My birthday is in March, and yours you had two weeks ago. Do you see anyone here but you and me?’

He gave the table another perplexed glance, then went into the scullery to wash his hands.

When he returned, Sarah was sitting by the hearth. ‘All he noticed is the table,’ she said to the air. ‘That his wife is dressed in her finery, he doesn’t see.’

‘I see that you haven’t got on the nice link of crystal beads David and Bessie brought you from Blackpool. A person could give you diamonds and you’d still wear that brooch you brought from Dvinsk!’

Sarah fingered the small gold filigree oval pinned to her collar. ‘So it’s my favourite. But even if it wasn’t, I’d wear it to mark the occasion. Thirty years ago tonight, you weren’t driven home in a motor car, Abraham. We had no home and a horse and cart took us from the railway station to the Berkowitzes’ house.’

Abraham stared into the fire for a moment, then a long sigh escaped him. ‘It’s really that long?’

‘In 1905 we fled here from the pogroms. You can’t add up any more? All day I’ve been thinking about it. And how we arrived in Manchester with only a shilling to our name.’ Sarah’s smile grew reminiscent. ‘Which David wanted us to spend on a cab, remember? Such big ideas he had.’

‘He hasn’t changed.’ Abraham got up from his rocking chair and went to eye his reflection in the sideboard mirror, as Sarah had done that morning. ‘Red hair I had when we came!’

‘Mine has gone grey, too.’

‘But otherwise you don’t look much different,’ he said, turning to survey her.

Sarah laughed and rose to bring a dish of sweet and sour mackerel to the table. ‘Put on your glasses and look at me again!’

‘So we’re not what we used to be, is that what we’re celebrating?’ Abraham asked dryly as they sat down to eat.

‘Thirty years of freedom’s what we’re celebrating,’ Sarah answered quietly, dishing up the fish. ‘For Jews that’s something to celebrate. Especially now.’

Abraham contemplated the sprig of parsley garnishing his plate. ‘Maybe one day we’ll drink to Hitler’s downfall, like we did when the Tsar got what was coming to him.’

‘The Tsar was toppled by his own people. Who is going to topple Hitler when the Germans believe in him as if he’s God?’

‘So what can you do?’ Abraham sighed. But it was the age-old Jewish question, to which he expected and received no answer. ‘A nice celebration we’re having, with what you’ve just reminded us of.’

‘A person can rejoice in their own good fortune without forgetting those who aren’t so lucky,’ Sarah informed him. ‘You had a good day at the factory? I didn’t ask you yet.’

‘I haven’t had a good day since David put in those Hoffman presses.’

Sarah shook her head disapprovingly. ‘Something to make things easier for him my husband doesn’t like. He prefers those heavy flat irons, from which he’s got stooping shoulders and still gets pains in his arms after using them all those years.’

‘So I’m old-fashioned.’

‘And if David was like you, where would the business be?’

‘Still in his father-in-law’s house in Southall Street, and he wouldn’t be having sleepless nights about his big overheads,’ Abraham replied.

Sarah squeezed some lemon juice onto her mackerel and kept her thoughts to herself. She could not change her husband’s nature, and saying too much would hurt his feelings. Abraham had never thought it necessary for people to strive for more than they had.

‘How many meals can a person eat? How many clothes can they wear?’ he asked, as though he had read her mind. ‘But David is never satisfied. He’s got too much ambition.’

Too much is better than none, Sarah thought. When David had told her he was moving to new premises, she had been anxious about his extending his business when others were cutting down their expenses. But he had said the time to do it was while property was cheap because times were bad. In good times a factory building would be beyond his resources, he’d explained. That had been two years ago, and now trade had begun to pick up and Sarah was no longer worried. What David set out to do he always did, he was the only one of her four children who took after her.

‘Fruit and cream on a week-night?’ Abraham said when they had eaten their fish and Sarah brought the dessert to the table. ‘We really are celebrating!’

‘But don’t mention we had a party to the children,’ Sarah said guiltily. ‘We never had one without them before, they might be upset I didn’t invite them.’

‘I’m surprised you didn’t.’

Sarah licked the cream off her spoon and smiled at him. ‘I wanted it to be just you and me. The children would make fun of me, they take freedom for granted.’ Her expression clouded as memory carried her back. ‘To value it, you have to know what it’s like to be oppressed, Abraham.’

Chapter Two

When David arrived home, the house was unusually silent. Generally, Bessie’s voice shrilled from the kitchen the moment he opened the front door, upbraiding him for being late, and his children rushed into the lobby to greet him and share a wink because their mother was behaving true to pattern and it had become a secret joke between him and them.

‘Where is everyone tonight?’ he called.

The maid’s voice answered him mournfully, from the kitchen. ‘Summat’s ’appened, Mr Sandberg.’

David saw his reflection pale in the hall-stand mirror, as he thought of some nameless catastrophe having befallen his children or his wife, in that order. Then Shirley and Ronald appeared at his side and his knees felt weak with relief. ‘Where’s your mother?’ he asked them.

‘It’s Mam it’s happened to,’ Shirley replied, and Ronald burst out laughing.

‘If you’re having a lark with me, I’ll lam the pair of you!’ David barked, though he had never laid a finger on either of them and knew he never would. He stalked through to the kitchen, where the angular Yorkshire housemaid, whose hands were never still, was seated on the overstuffed sofa, crocheting a white, rabbit-wool scarf for Shirley. ‘Where’s my wife, Lizzie?’

‘At the ’airdressers, ’avin’ a perm, Mr Sandberg.’

‘At this time of night?’

‘Summat went wrong wi’ t’solution’n ’er ’air’s fell out.’

‘What!’

‘It’s true, Daddy,’ Shirley said. ‘She phoned up to tell us not to wait supper for her.’

‘I don’t think I feel like any supper,’ David muttered, trying not to imagine Bessie’s pudgy countenance without a frame of hair.

‘Thi’re doin’ what thi can, ah expect, Mr Sandberg,’ Lizzie consoled him. ‘I expect that’s why t’missis ’asn’t come back yet.’

‘I don’t see what they can do if there’s no hair to do it to,’ Ronald said practically.

David controlled a shudder. ‘You and the kids sit down and eat, Lizzie. I’ll wait for Mrs Sandberg.’

He went into the parlour and sat tapping his fingers on the arm of the chair, edgily, then fished in his jacket pocket for his packet of Goldflake. Some of his friends smoked cigars, but he had never learnt to enjoy them. Not in the way his late father-in-law had once prophesied he would, he thought as his mind swooped irrelevantly into the past.

Why had he suddenly remembered that? A picture of Isaac Salaman offering him a Havana swam before his eyes as he lit a cigarette. ‘I don’t smoke, Mr Salaman,’ he heard his own voice echo nervously down the years. Well, he smoked now, couldn’t open his eyes and start the day without one. Why had he ever started? he asked himself, stubbing the cigarette out. Was it living with Bessie that’d made him need something to calm his nerves? No, the need had been there before then.

He sat cracking his knuckles for a moment, then another voice echoed in his mind. ‘I wish you’d stop doing that, David. It sets me on edge!’ Miriam’s voice. He’d begun smoking to stop cracking his knuckles, he recalled with a wry smile, and lit another cigarette absently, thinking of the heartache he could have saved himself if he’d known then what he knew now.

That there was no such thing as a love you couldn’t recover from. That Miriam would marry his brother Sammy and the passion he’d once felt for her would die away and be replaced by uncomplicated affection. That he could share his life with Bessie, though their marriage was founded on nothing more than a bargain; a business partnership coupled with Bessie’s hand, offered by Salaman the day he’d said David would learn to enjoy cigars.

Maybe the recollection hadn’t been irrelevant. Hadn’t the early years of his marriage been beset by Bessie’s anxiety about her plainness, compared with Miriam’s beauty? She had doubted that David could really care for her and had made him miserable because of it. Her self-doubt hadn’t been in evidence for some time. Would it return because of what had happened to her hair?

It’s how it’ll affect me I’m thinking of, David admitted to himself as he got up to find the beauty salon’s number in the telephone directory, and was shocked because he had never considered himself a selfish man.

‘What’ve you done to my wife, Ruby?’ he said as lightly as he could when the hairdresser answered the phone.

‘I hope you’re not going to sue me,’ she replied nervously.

This had not entered David’s mind. ‘Don’t be daft!’

‘My parents would have a stroke. The Cohens and the Sandbergs came over on the herring boat together,’ she reminded him as if she were not convinced.

‘What would I want to sue you for?’ he asked impatiently.

‘Money. Revenge, maybe.’

‘Stop talking nonsense and let me talk to Bessie.’

‘She left here nearly an hour ago. Perhaps she called somewhere on her way home.’

But David knew his wife would have done no such thing. He lit another cigarette and began pacing the room, eyeing Bessie’s collection of cut-glass ornaments which filled every nook and cranny and wondering where she could be. Losing her crowning glory would devastate any woman. It was enough to make one of Bessie’s mentality jump into the Irwell. Appearance was all to her, it always had been.

His fears were cut short by the sound of the front door opening. He rushed into the lobby and found Lizzie and the children there, too.

‘It’s not the end of the world, love,’ he said comfortingly as his wife removed her coat, but not the scarf swathed around her head.

‘It is to me,’ she replied in a quivering voice. ‘I’ve been walking the streets. I couldn’t even bear to come home.’

Shirley touched her own carroty ringlets self-consciously. ‘Your hair’ll grow again, Mam. Don’t be upset.’

‘Course it will,’ Lizzie said encouragingly.

‘We’ll still love you even if it doesn’t,’ Ronald declared. ‘But let’s see what you look like now, without your scarf. In case it does.’

His mother gave him a withering glance. ‘Nobody’s going to see what I look like, Ronald.’ She glared at David as if he were responsible for her plight. ‘Nobody at all.’

David watched her walk upstairs, leaning heavily on the banister, and smiled reassuringly at the children. But an ominous sense of déjà vu had settled like lead in the pit of his stomach. Another stormy passage in his marriage had just begun.

Chapter Three

Marianne watched the high school boys and girls alight from a No. 11 tram. How she wished she was one of them, but next year perhaps she would be. If she’d been born a few months sooner, she’d have sat for the scholarship exam last winter when her cousin Martin did.

Her brother Arnold’s red head, under his Manchester Grammar School cap, and then her brother Harry’s dark one, capless, appeared in a noisy crush of lads jostling each other on to the pavement,

‘What’re you doing here, our kid?’ Harry inquired, loosening his Central High School tie.

‘Where’s Martin?’ she asked Arnold, ignoring Harry’s question.

‘I’m not glued to him just because he goes to my school now. Maybe he couldn’t find his way out of the building, it takes the new boys ages to find their way around,’ Arnold answered with the superiority of a second-former.

Marianne peered down Cheetham Hill Road to see if another tram was approaching.

‘You’d better come home with us, it’s getting dark,’ Harry said to her.

‘I’m waiting for Martin.’

Arnold grinned. ‘It’s no use arguing with that one, Harry. She’s only little, but she knows her own mind.’

Marianne flicked her black fringe away from her eyes and glowered at him. ‘What if I am little? Cousin Shirley’s packs bigger than me, but she never comes top of the class.’

‘Like you do,’ Arnold said teasingly.

‘Leave the kid alone,’ Harry instructed him with big-brotherly authority. ‘You know she hates being reminded of her size.’

‘I don’t appreciate being called the kid, either,’ Marianne said in a dignified voice. ‘And kindly don’t consume all the scones before I arrive home, you two.’

‘How can you have room for scones when you’ve just swallowed a dictionary?’ Arnold quipped.

Marianne opened the exercise book she was clutching in her hand and pretended to read, but she was listening to her brothers’ chortling as they strode away. Martin didn’t make fun of her because she liked big words. He didn’t make fun of her about anything. If only he was her brother and Harry and Arnold her cousins! But her life was full of if-onlys and she sometimes wondered if anyone else’s was.

Martin seemed perfectly happy with his, but Auntie Miriam was his mother and she wasn’t strict, like Mam. Anyone would be satisfied if they were allowed to read in bed and stay up late to hear grown-up programmes on the wireless, instead of nothing but Children’s Hour.

She gazed pensively into the chemist’s window at the brightly coloured liquids in fat-bellied flasks labelled ‘poison’, then averted her eyes with a shiver. How could something that looked so pretty be deadly, too? A figure was looming towards her out of the evening mist that had fallen patchily on the main road and she hoped it wasn’t Mam, coming to fetch her. Usually she went straight home, but she wanted to talk to Martin on his own, which she was hardly ever able to do now he went to a different school. Whenever she popped across the back entry to see him after tea, Auntie Miriam and Uncle Sammy were there. And Martin was always doing homework, or practising his Bar Mitzvah portion, though he wouldn’t have to say it in shul until he was thirteen.

Thank goodness she was a girl and didn’t need to have that on her mind as well as her other worries. Like not being good at arithmetic, even though her English made up for it. And having that awful period-thing to look forward to; and the terrible agony of having babies, which, Lizzie had told her and Shirley, was a woman’s lot.

The figure emerged from the mist into the pool of lamplight near the tram-stop and Marianne sighed with relief; it wasn’t Mam after all. Then a tram trundled into sight and clanked to a halt.

‘Martin!’ she shouted as he leaped off the step.

‘There’s nothing wrong, is there?’ he called, hurrying towards her.

‘Trust you to ask that!’

Martin tugged the peak of his cap sheepishly. Why was he always expecting something bad to happen?

‘If there were, d’you think I’d be the one the family’d send to tell you? Honestly, Martin! I just fancied walking home with you, like we used to.’

He flashed her a smile which animated his pale face, and hitched his leather satchel higher on his shoulder. ‘So come on then.’

They trudged along in companionable silence until they had turned off Cheetham Hill Road into a street of terraced, lace-curtained houses.

‘I’ve got something to tell you,’ Martin said. ‘About my grandfather.’

‘What’s Zaidie Sigmund been up to now?’ He was not Marianne’s grandfather, but she and her brothers had always looked on him as one and she smiled, thinking of how he was always in hot water with Martin’s Auntie Helga, who kept house for him.

‘He’s courting a lady.’

Marianne gaped. ‘Who is?’

‘Grandpa.’

‘Why’re you calling him that, when we’ve always called our grandparents Zaidie and Bobbie?’

‘I’m trying to stop using Yiddish words.’

Marianne thought of their mutual Sandberg grandparents, who used Yiddish words more often than Sigmund Moritz did. Zaidie Abraham had never learned to read English and enjoyed reading the Yiddish Gazette every week.

‘Bobbie Sarah and Zaidie Abraham won’t like it,’ she declared emphatically.

‘They’ll just have to lump it,’ Martin replied.

Marianne gave him a shocked glance. ‘I don’t know what’s come over you, Martin.’

‘You would if you were in my form,’ he said moodily. ‘They’re nearly all Christian and I feel a right idiot when I forget and call someone a shlemiel or something. It’s not like Temple School, Marianne, half-and-half. Where there aren’t any stuck-up devils who say things that make you feel like something in a glass case,’ he added heatedly.

Marianne was eyeing him with dismay.

‘They’re not all like that,’ he admitted, simmering down. ‘But how many does it take?’

‘Why don’t you punch them on the nose?’

Martin kicked a tin can which was lying on the pavement into the gutter, then slowed his pace, thoughtfully. ‘Remember what we used to sing to Shirley when we were all little and she was always saying horrid things to us?’

‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never harm me,’ Marianne chanted softly.

‘Well, that’s my philosophy,’ he told her, quickening his step again.

‘What’s philosophy?’ she asked, skipping to keep up with his long-legged stride.

‘It’s time you began reading books like the ones in my grandfather’s library, instead of stuff like What Katy Did, then you’d know. Look it up in the dictionary when you get home.’

‘I can’t,’ she giggled. ‘Our Arnold said I’ve swallowed it.’

Why must she start giggling in the middle of a serious conversation? Martin thought exasperatedly.

‘Made up any poems lately?’ she inquired out of the blue.

Her mind jumped about like a grasshopper, too. From one subject to another. But she was his favourite cousin all the same. ‘Poems don’t get made up. They get written,’ he corrected her.

They had reached the cobblestoned passage where the back doors of their homes faced each other and halted prior to parting. Martin stood stirring some mud with the toe of his boot. Marianne watched his long fingers playing with the buckle on his navy gabardine, then scanned his face uncertainly; the thick eyebrows, a shade or two darker than his light brown hair, drawn together in a thoughtful frown above the small nose; the thinnish lips and the tapering chin. He looked the same, yet somehow he wasn’t. She could feel something different about him, as if he was suddenly a lot older than her. But if she worked hard, next year she’d be at a high school and catch up with him, learn all the new things he was learning.

She had yet to discover that catching up with Martin intellectually would not be easy. They had been reared from birth in the same close family ethos and an extraordinary rapport had always existed between them, but Martin was Sigmund Moritz’s only grandchild and Sigmund had implanted in him a love of learning and literature, as he had with David and Nathan Sandberg when they were boys. Paradoxically, Martin’s father, Sammy, was the only one of the three Sandberg brothers who had had no taste for scholarship, and he had never read a book in his life.

‘All right, Martin,’ Marianne conceded with something akin to respect in her voice. ‘I won’t say made up any more. So have you written any poems lately?’

Martin surveyed the thin little figure leaning against the wall and smiled amusedly. One of her fawn bicycle socks had slipped down to her ankle, the top buttonhole of her blazer was fastened to the second button and there was a smudge of ink on her olive cheek.

‘I wrote one this morning, on the tram, as it happens,’ he said, fishing a scrap of paper out of his pocket and slipping it into hers. ‘Have you written any more stories?’

Marianne nodded and handed him her dog-eared exercise book. ‘You can read them in bed tonight. What’s your mam got to say about Zaidie Sigmund courting a lady?’ she inquired irrelevantly.

‘I don’t think she’s very pleased.’

‘Your Bobbie Rachel won’t let him marry the lady unless she’s nice, Martin. She’ll fly down from Heaven when he’s asleep and whisper in his ear that he mustn’t.’

‘There’s no such place as Heaven.’

Marianne felt as if a cold hand had touched her heart. What was the matter with him? ‘How can you say such a dreadful thing? It’d mean there’s nowhere for all the dead people to go to, wouldn’t it? And if there’s no Heaven, why would the grown-ups tell us there is?’ Something was prodding her memory. She was sitting on the grass under a tree, watching Martin chew a blade he’d just plucked from beside her. ‘The day of Bobbie Rachel’s funeral, we went to Bellott Street park and you told me you’d dreamed about Heaven!’ she accused him. ‘You even described the angels, and now you’re saying there’s no such place.’

‘That was ages ago,’ he said dismissively. ‘In some ways you’re still very childish, Marianne.’

Marianne watched him stride across the entry and disappear through his back doorway, then turned and entered her own yard. When she walked into the kitchen, her mother was turning over some clothes which were drying on the fireguard.

‘Is it true there’s no Heaven, Mam?’ she demanded, taking off her blazer and tossing it onto the sofa.

‘Twenty minutes late she comes home from school and right away she’s asking questions!’ Esther Klein exclaimed. ‘Hang your blazer up, my lady!’

Marianne took the blazer to the lobby and hung it on the low peg reserved for her garments.

‘Now she’s asking me about Heaven,’ her mother snapped when she returned. She cast a harassed look around the disordered room, which she had not had time to tidy since she arrived home from her husband’s shop an hour ago. ‘Why doesn’t somebody ask me about Hell?’

Marianne took the buttered scone her brothers had left on the plate for her and stood nibbling it. Arnold had gone to Hebrew school, but Harry, who no longer went because he had been Bar Mitzvah a few months ago, was seated at the table doing his homework and shrugged when Marianne exchanged a glance with him.

‘Mam never used to be in a bad temper all the time, did she, Harry?’ Marianne said, voicing their thoughts.

‘I had no reason to be,’ their mother retorted rolling up some garments that were dry enough for ironing.

‘Shall I do that for you?’ Marianne offered.

‘It wouldn’t do any harm if you did.’

Marianne fetched the clothes basket from the scullery. ‘Sit down and have a rest, Mam,’ she said, taking over Esther’s task.

‘Don’t be meshugah, love,’ Esther replied with a weary smile. ‘How can I, with all I’ve still got to do? Your dad’s entitled to find his home nice and shipshape when he gets back after a hard day’s work, not looking like a rag-bag.’ She began sorting out the jumble of odds and ends which had accumulated on the dresser, putting them away in the cupboards and drawers.

‘But you’ve been working at the shop all day, too,’ Marianne reminded her.

‘I know I have. But I’m a woman, and it’s a woman’s job to keep the house nice.’

‘Why should it be?’ Marianne demanded.

‘Because it always has been!’ Esther exclaimed impatiently, brushing some crumbs off the sofa. She fetched the carpet-sweeper and began running it over the rug. ‘Nobody seeing the state of this room would believe I’m really a neat and tidy person,’ she told her son and daughter. ‘But I can’t be in two places at once and I’m not going to be for much longer.’

‘Are you going to stop helping Dad in the business?’ Harry asked her. ‘I’ll be fourteen soon, then I can leave school and work for him,’ he added, putting down his pen, which he wished he could do permanently.

‘The while you’re still thirteen,’ Esther answered. ‘And there’s good living accommodation behind the shop.’

Marianne stopped folding a shirt. ‘You don’t mean we’re going to live there?’

‘We shouldn’t have waited this long to do it,’ Esther nodded. ‘Why should I tear myself in two like I’ve been doing? It’ll be easier for me when the house and the business are both in one place.’

‘Mam’s right,’ Harry said.

‘But what about us?’ Marianne blurted. ‘You and Arnold and me?’ She knew she should be considering her mother, but a feeling that her world was turning topsy-turvy filled her with alarm. ‘We’ll have to leave all our friends and the shop’s miles away, near the docks where the people aren’t Jewish.’

‘They’re the people your dad makes his wages from,’ Esther told her sharply. ‘And they’re nicer than some Jews. They’ve always got a smile for you, though most of them are much poorer than us. Dad was going to tell you about this when he comes home and Arnold’s back from Cheder, but now you know.’

Marianne sat down on the padded lid of the coal scuttle, looking the picture of misery.

‘Buck up, our kid!’ Harry jollied her. ‘We can come to Cheetham and see everyone at the weekends, can’t we, Mam? It won’t be that bad.’

‘There’s a sensible boy!’ Esther applauded, patting his head approvingly on her way to stir the pan of split-pea soup she had put to simmer on the blackleaded hob. ‘One of you kids’ll have to come after school once a week, as well, to fetch the chicken and meat. There’s no kosher butcher in that part of Salford. Our Marianne can do it if she likes, and have her tea at Bobbie Sarah’s.’

‘I won’t need to come to Cheetham after school, Mam,’ Marianne pointed out. ‘I’ll still be at Temple School until I pass the scholarship. I’ll be coming here every day.’

Esther was tasting the soup. ‘Of course you won’t, you silly girl,’ she said distractedly, adding more salt to it from the jar she kept on the kitchen mantelpiece because the scullery was damp. ‘After we remove, you’ll be going to Stowell Memorial School, Marianne. Near the shop.’

Harry looked shocked. ‘But that’s a church school, Mam. Dad told us when he took us to see how he’d dressed the shop windows all in white for Whitsun and we passed it. He said all the little girls who go there’d be buying their Whit Walk frocks from him. Don’t you remember, Marianne?’

Marianne did not reply.

‘Our Marianne can miss the scripture classes when they’re reading the New Testament, nobody’ll mind,’ Esther answered. ‘And it’s no use you sitting sulking, love,’ she added briskly to Marianne. ‘We’re removing because it’s best for us and that’s that. I’ve always been a good saleswoman. Remember me telling you I worked in a gown shop when I was a girl? With me there all the time, the business’ll do a lot better and we’ll be able to afford a lot of things we haven’t got now.’

‘Will Arnold and me be able to have bikes?’ Harry asked eagerly.

Esther glanced around the shabby room, at the threadbare purple carpet which was not her taste, but that of her sister-in-law Bessie, who’d passed it on to her, the darned upholstery of the sofa and the blue chenille curtains faded to grey from years of laundering. ‘After we’ve bought a few other things, Harry,’ she told her eldest son, whose ideas were as big as his Uncle David’s.

‘I’d rather stay here and not have any new things,’ Marianne whispered.

Esther surveyed her tense expression and the little clenched fists which meant she was trying not to cry. How do I come to a kid like this, who gets worked up over everything and nothing and doesn’t want to see reason? she asked herself with the surge of exasperation and love combined that her daughter so often aroused in her. Who did Marianne take after? It had to be something in her blood that made her as different from Harry and Arnold as chalk was from cheese, because all her children had received the same upbringing. Marianne had a will of iron, too, but she’d got that from her grandmother, who seemed to understand her better than anyone else did. The rest of her troublesome nature must come from those relatives of her father’s who’d been writers and artists in Austria. And here am I having to deal with it, Esther thought wryly.

She went to kneel beside the coal scuttle on which Marianne was still hunched, and stroked her silky black hair for a moment, enjoying the feel of it.

Marianne looked up at her with surprise; her mother was not given to such demonstrativeness. Harry seemed surprised too.

‘I don’t have much time for you kids these days, do I?’ Esther said, aware of their reaction. ‘But it doesn’t mean I don’t love you. And things’ll be different after we move, you’ll see.’

‘I don’t want them to be different,’ Marianne declared, deliberately missing the point. ‘And I don’t want to leave Temple School until I’ve sat for the scholarship, even if we are removing. They’re teaching us special things to make sure we pass.’

The love and exasperation rose in Esther again, with the latter well to the fore. ‘You’ll do as you’re told, you’re only a little girl,’ she snapped, going to give the soup an angry stir.

Marianne got up and went to fetch her blazer.

‘It’s nearly teatime, your dad’ll be home soon. Where d’you think you’re going?’ Esther demanded, watching her put it on.

‘To tell Bobbie Sarah what you’re doing to me!’ Marianne said hotly as she fled into the scullery and out of the back door.

Chapter Four

Sarah was preparing pastry when the doorbell rang. She took off the old blue, wrap-around overall she wore to protect her clothes from flying flour and went to see who the caller was. At noon on a Thursday, her Jewish neighbours would be busy with their pre-Shabbos cooking, as she herself was. There were so many different things to prepare, it took her two whole days. Her Christian neighbours would be getting their dinner ready, or eating it; most of them made themselves something hot and thought it strange that she couldn’t be bothered to do this just for herself.

‘Sigmund!’ she exclaimed with surprise when she opened the door. ‘You’ve got no customers for try-ons today?’

Sigmund Moritz followed her into the kitchen and lowered his short, plump frame into Abraham’s rocking chair. ‘Let them wait,’ he answered nonchalantly.

‘So what brings you here, when my husband isn’t home?’ Sarah joked. Sigmund was like a brother to herself and Abraham and his wife had been like a dear, sweet sister. Rachel had been dead for four years, but a day never passed without Sarah thinking of her.

‘There has to be a reason?’ Sigmund said, unbuttoning his coat and avoiding her eye.

‘With you, yes,’ Sarah replied bluntly. ‘In all the years we’ve known each other, whenever you’ve paid me a morning visit it’s been for something.’ She had a good idea what the something might be and Sigmund’s demeanour was confirming it. ‘Remember when we lived in Strangeways and our children were young, how you used to walk in through the back door when I wasn’t expecting you? In those days you were like a mouthpiece for David, always encouraging his impossible ideas.’ Sarah smiled, though she had not smiled at the time.

‘So here I ring the front doorbell, coming the back way is a longer walk. And David doesn’t need me to speak for him any more,’ Sigmund said brusquely, swallowing his regret that his mentorship of the young David Sandberg had led to nothing.

Sarah put on her overall again – with Sigmund Moritz she did not stand on ceremony – and began the delicate process of pulling her pastry to make it paper-thin.

‘When Helga does that it always breaks,’ Sigmund remarked.

‘It has to have just the right amount of oil in it.’ Sarah stretched the dough carefully with her small, strong fingers. ‘So?’ she said questioningly. ‘To watch me make strudel for the Shabbos tea party you haven’t come.’

Sigmund’s gaze roved casually to the brass candlesticks on the mantelpiece and the gleaming mortar and pestle that matched them, but Sarah could feel a sudden tension emanating from him, as if he were steeling himself.

‘Maybe I came to ask you to make an extra piece,’ he said quietly.

He’s going to ask if he can bring his lady-friend, Sarah thought. And he hadn’t yet mentioned her to his own children, though Helga and Carl live in the same house with him. Tell me about her already, she wanted to urge him. Get it off your chest and you’ll feel better. Did he really believe that none of the family knew about the woman? But he had always been a man who contained his deepest feelings, hiding himself behind a book, losing himself in music. When she and Abraham had first met him they’d thought him eccentric and rude. Time had proved them right about his eccentricity, but they’d learned long ago that the rudeness was part ego and part absent-mindedness, never personal.

‘There’s someone I’d like you to meet and Shabbos afternoon, when everyone comes here, would be a good time,’ he said.

Beating about the bush was not Sarah’s way. Until he himself broached the subject, she would not have dreamt of doing so; he was entitled to his privacy. But now that he had, she spoke her mind. ‘Someone you’d like to marry, maybe?’

Sigmund looked startled and then guilty, fidgeting with his watch chain, his pinkish complexion reddening, as if he were a small boy caught with his hand in the biscuit tin.

‘It isn’t a crime,’ Sarah said gently. ‘But why did you wait so long to tell us?’

‘My son and daughters know, too?’ he said resignedly.

Sarah nodded. He had been seen in Mandley Park with the woman, during the summer. It was not a park the Sandbergs and Moritzes frequented, but one of the small, grassy retreats in Salford, which was probably why Sigmund had selected it as a meeting place, the family had surmised. David and Bessie’s maid used it as a short cut to Higher Broughton when she went there to visit a friend and had loyally reported her observations, which had included that she had not liked the look of the lady.

‘Listen, who can keep a secret round here?’ Sarah jested, swallowing her misgivings. ‘But why did it have to be a secret?’

Sigmund took off his pince-nez and studied them. ‘Nobody minds?’

‘All they mind is the way you’ve kept it to yourself,’ Sarah lied. But sometimes a person had to lie because the truth would cause trouble. Helga, who hadn’t shed a tear in public when her soldier husband, Saul Salaman, was killed in the Great War, had wept on Sarah’s shoulder at the prospect of some unknown woman taking over the household she had run from the time her mother’s illness began. Miriam was concerned for her elder sister, but more so for her father when she heard Lizzie’s description of his lady-friend.

‘Her name is Gertie Fish and she lives in Salford,’ Sigmund supplied. ‘I met her when I was looking for fancy buttons for Paula Frankl’s spring coat and I couldn’t get them at my usual place.’

So Paula Frankl’s to blame! Sarah thought irrationally. Rachel Moritz had not liked her.

‘Gertie’s got a trimmings shop,’ Sigmund went on. ‘Before her husband died, they had one in Sheffield.’

‘How come she moved to Salford?’ Sarah inquired.

‘To be near her family. Mrs Radinsky is her twin sister.’ Sarah could not conceal her consternation. Mr Radinsky was a lovely man. She and Rachel had bought their fruit and vegetables from him when they lived in Strangeways. But his wife!

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Sigmund said defensively. ‘But identical twins they’re not.’

‘I didn’t say a word.’

‘Your face was enough.’

Sarah began filling the pastry with apple and raisins, trying to check her flustered feelings. ‘Perhaps you should mention her to your children before Saturday?’

Sigmund replaced his pince-nez on his nose and mopped his brow, which was noticeably perspiring. ‘And go through with them what I’ve just been through with you?’ He sprang up and laced his stubby fingers behind his back. ‘Once is enough!’ he snorted irascibly. ‘I’m my own boss, I can please myself what I do! My children are adults, who I marry won’t affect them.’

‘Miriam, maybe not, she doesn’t live with you. But Helga and Carl—’

‘A lot of companionship I’ve had from those two since Rachel went,’ Sigmund cut in with a bitter smile. ‘Helga’s across the street at Miriam’s every evening. And Carl – well you know what he’s like. I might as well be in an empty house as living with him.’ He stood staring into space morosely.

‘You should have told them how you feel,’ Sarah said softly, distressed by the sadness in his eyes.

‘Should my own flesh and blood need telling?’

‘You can’t blame them, Sigmund. All their lives you’ve let them think books and music were all you needed.’

‘Maybe I thought that myself,’ he admitted grudgingly. ‘When Rachel was alive.’

A man needs a woman’s presence, Sarah thought. Even one like Sigmund, capable of being so wrapped up in his own interests he’d forget his wife was there. But a deep love had existed between him and Rachel and had made what most women would find intolerable tolerable to her. Would Mrs Radinsky’s sister be the same?

‘So you’ll bring Gertie to the Shabbos tea party,’ she said, forcing a smile which belied her misgivings. ‘And I’ll tell the family she’s coming.’

Sigmund’s expression suffused with relief. ‘From you it would be better than from me,’ he said gratefully. ‘Then on Shabbos, there’ll be no need for any discussion. Everyone will just wish us Mazeltov and we can arrange the wedding date.’

Sarah saw him to the garden gate and watched him head back towards his house where he had his tailor’s shop, noting the spring in his step. Unloading his burden had done him good. And now it was up to her to pave the way for him with his children. But hadn’t it always been like that with the Sandbergs and Moritzes? Feeling and doing things for each other, their lives woven together by time and events, joys and sorrows shared.

She waved to her neighbour, Mrs Watson, who was cleaning the upstairs windows. Then, as she gathered up some sheets of newspaper that had blown on to the path, she reflected that Mrs Watson had a lot of relatives, too, but they weren’t always running to her with their problems, like Sarah’s did. Today it was Sigmund. Last night it had been her granddaughter Marianne, then her son-in-law Ben Klein, still not sure it was right to take his children to live near the docks. Who would it be next?

She thought about her son Nathan and the pain he had caused her and smiled down at the cat which had come to rub itself against her lisle-stockinged ankles. ‘Everything passes, Tibby,’ she told it. ‘The trouble is there’s always something else around the corner to take its place.’

Chapter Five

Mrs Kaplan shuffled into the surgery and sat down on the edge of a polished oak chair, her manner suggesting she was not sure if she would be staying. ‘Not a bad place you’ve got here, Nat,’ she said grudgingly to the darkly handsome young man seated behind the desk.

Nathan Sandberg glanced around his prison and managed to smile.

The shrivelled-looking little woman fanned her beady gaze along the glossy cream walls, holding it for a moment on the framed certificate as if to satisfy herself that Nathan was qualified to attend her. ‘I want you should take me for a patient, Nat. A desk with a leather top must have cost something,’ she added, as though this were a deciding factor in her choice of practitioner.

‘And what can I do for you?’ Nathan inquired in his bedside voice, which at times sounded to him more like a shop assistant’s.

‘Plenty, I hope!’

Nathan controlled the urge to laugh. Wait till he told his partner who the latest addition to their list was. ‘She’ll expect two bottles of medicine instead of one,’ Lou would groan. Mrs Kaplan had been called the meanest woman in Strangeways when they were boys. She hadn’t been the cleanest either, he recalled, eyeing the stains on her rusty black coat and trying not to wrinkle his nose as a mixed waft of moth