Paddington Green, page 23
‘Are your supplies secured?’ Snow said practically, as Nancy went rustling away to open the great door and shout at the people outside to go away. ‘Food and necessaries? For once the word gets out—as it surely will—you’ll get little help from any of your usual tradesmen.’
Abel nodded. ‘Nancy is a careful woman, and so is the Bursar. A sour-faced complaining whining maggot of a man though he is, he does his work well enough. I checked as soon as I got here this morning. We have food for eight days, except for milk, of course, but they can do without such luxuries as that. Bread and water is no unusual diet for these people. If we are reduced to that here after a week, well, we must think again. But we can manage well enough to start with.’
‘You do not get your water from the main pump in Broadwick Street?’
Abel shook his head. ‘No. We found we had a well of our own when we opened the cellar of the third house. We draw what we need from that. It is a good well, fed by a spring quite near the surface. It is only in the driest weather we must use the pump.’
‘And the nightsoil men? Will they continue to serve you?’ Snow asked shrewdly and Abel grimaced.
‘I doubt it, man, I doubt it! You know perfectly well they will not handle such situations as this. The more they are needed, the less good they are! No, we shall have to burn what sewage we cannot deal with in the cesspit. And hope the disease runs its course before it loses its usefulness. Oh, God, man!’ He rubbed his face wearily. ‘ ’Twill be the devil and all if it goes on like this! Seven cases, so soon! And two of’em babies at the breast! You’d think they took the distemper in with their mother’s milk, they get it so fast! Well, I’d best be about it. Thank you for your help, and for coming to see us, Snow. We welcome it. And you’d best be on your way now, had you not? You will have your own more fortunate people at Westminster to see—’
Snow shook his head and smiled thinly. ‘Well, no, I think I shall stay if you will have me, Lackland! After all, it could be your common-sensical Nancy is in the right of it, and I will take the disease with me, having been here among its miasma! They have doctors in plenty to manage at Westminster, more than you have here, and half the work. So I’ll stay about, I believe, and see what I can do with you. And I am interested, besides. Maybe, being here, we can see some evidence of how the damned disease does take itself so fast about among the poor and hungry! As I say, if you will have me—’
‘Have you?’ Abel grunted. ‘Good God, man, I’d be clean out of my wits not to snatch at you! You are more than welcome, more than welcome. And if you find the answer to the contagion here at Nellie’s—why, none will be more pleased than I will. But it’s the patients I must turn to now. Shall we about it, then?’
And together they made their way up the stairs to the long rooms above where frightened patients lay in rows, covertly watching each other for signs of the disease they most feared, and the disease they knew had come creeping into the place where they themselves had come, so hopefully, to be cured of other ills.
20
It was when they reached the synagogue itself that the full strangeness of it all moved into her so that in some peculiar way she no longer felt like herself at all. She was a different person, going through the actions demanded of her, moving, sometimes speaking, always looking and listening but not ever being involved in any real sense. It was like that painful afternoon when in the familiarity of her own little counting house in Irongate Wharf Road there had been a separate little Abby, sitting aloof and cool, watching all that befell the physical Abby far below her. That little Abby was sardonic and amused, even mocking, and for the whole of that March evening a shy and worried and deeply bewildered Abby shared an uneasy communion with her.
Moving through the darkness she had become aware of other figures joining them, of voices speaking in a strange lisping way, but not using words she could comprehend, of hats being doffed and bows being exchanged, until they were passing through a pair of heavy wrought-iron gates of most elegant design into a courtyard which was cobbled underfoot and surrounded by the shadows of low buildings huddled close.
There was a single lantern burning dully above a wide open pair of huge iron-studded wooden doors and they halted there for a moment, part of a small crowd which was pressing forwards, and Gideon murmured in her ear, ‘We must separate here. You will go up with my mother to the Ladies’ gallery—’ And then he was gone, and she was following Leah Henriques up a narrow flight of wooden stairs that were so ill-lit that she stumbled a little.
But at the top she caught her breath, and stood and stared and had to screw up her eyes against the brightness. She was in a narrow gallery which ran round three sides of the building; a gallery with rows of benches upon which well-dressed women were sitting close together, and edged with a low diamond-latticed screen which made a delicate fresco above the body of the building.
Leah Henriques was moving forwards, past women who nodded and whispered to her as she passed, and she nodded back and smiled, and Abby, following her, felt curious eyes upon her but could not actually catch any direct glances for they all wore large-brimmed hats behind which they could hide their faces.
‘Space at the front is a privilege reserved for me by virtue of my husband’s position in the congregation,’ Leah Henriques whispered, as they sat down. ‘He has always been much respected. He was once a most hardworking warden of this place—’
But Abby could do no more than nod her head in response as she looked downwards, for the sight that met her eyes was quite stunning in its effect. Seven vast candelabra with swooping curves of brass and elegant curling sconces, each blazing with two tiers of candles, hung at her eye level over the centre, and she could feel the heat of them moving across the air to strike her cheeks with gentle fingers. The light glittered on polished brass, on painted plaster, on ancient wooden benches and twisted polished rails.
Immediately below her was a dais, railed with curling wooden balusters, with two flights of carpeted steps to give entry to it, and with a reading desk covered in heavy green cloth at its front. Behind it clustered more benches, and before it, leading away to the far wall where there was no gallery but which was pierced by a pair of tall windows with myriad leaded panes edged in a most vivid blue, were rows of sombre pews.
It was the far wall which most engaged her interest then, for the space between the handsome windows was dominated by a huge wooden cupboard-like edifice which bore a pair of great wooden doors, flanked by two more doors of the same heavily-polished wood. They were inlaid with gilt, and a fan-shaped architrave surmounted the central doors, while gilded leaves and garlands and shells, richly clustered and entwined, embellished the other two. Before the central door on an intricately curved and decorated bracket hung a pierced brass lamp within which a little light glowed dully, while above it soared a most curious object, to Abby’s bemused eyes.
Surrounded by small squared and richly carved pilasters and surmounted by a pointed arch were a pair of round-topped black-painted panels, each bearing gilt characters of so foreign an appearance that they filled her with a very curious foreboding. She looked at them again and faint memories of her schoolroom days with Miss Ingoldsby and seeing Hebrew script in an old book jostled in her, so that when Leah Henriques beside her, following the line of her gaze, murmured, ‘Those are the Ten Commandments, given to Moses for us,’ she could nod and understand.
Her eyes were becoming more accustomed to the brightness now, and she looked away from the walls and furnishings of the synagogue to the people below, and marvelled again.
Only men. A mass of men in sober black clothes were sitting there below her, but each of them looked exotic in the extreme for over their shoulders and looped across their backs they wore great white silken shawls. Even from up here she could see how very costly and beautiful they were, many embroidered in rich detail in silk of the identical colour of the fabric upon which the stitches were set, so that they looked as though they were embossed, all edged with a heavy silk fringe of great length which lay across those prosaic black coats and trousers in incongruous frivolity.
Some of the men had their shawls pulled up over their heads, and were bent over their books and swaying to and fro with a curious brisk movement as they read, their lips moving, and indeed the whole building was filled with the soft deep buzz of masculine voices as the men muttered and murmured, and almost without thinking Abby said softly, ‘They are praying.’
‘Yes,’ said Leah, and raised her head from her own book to look at Abby. ‘They are praying aloud in the house of their God. It is customary with us,’ and she bent her head again, and Abby, looking at her, saw her lips move and heard the soft whisper of her voice as she said her strange and lisping syllables. The book she was using was also written in Hebrew, Abby could see, and she looked away again, embarrassed. It was almost as though she had been prying in a secret letter about personal matters that were not meant, nor ever could be meant, for her eyes.
So she looked down again beyond the lattice of the screen and now saw that every head was covered. Some of the men were wearing top hats, and some round black skull caps, but the effect of that sea of covered heads was the same; she could feel a sense of solemnity, of a dignity born of practices hallowed by centuries of unchanging observance coming up at her in great waves with the heat of the candles and the soft rise and fall of the praying voices.
She turned her head then, her eyes pulled almost against her will towards the dais and now she saw Gideon there, standing with a white shawl about his shoulders and a skull cap on his head about which his glossy hair sprang rich and buoyant.
He was looking at her with his eyes wide with some sort of appeal, and she stared back at him for one long unsmiling moment, and then bent her head a little. And he looked back at her, and she felt the way he relaxed and could be comfortable, and knew he had recognized her assurance of her own wellbeing, there far above him, and was comforted in her turn.
She did not know at which point the private praying ceased and the service proper began, but she became aware of a single voice that rose above the others; a voice of great sweetness and richness, making deep throaty sounds and sending notes of pure tone and perfect pitch soaring into the hot air. Entranced, she turned her head to look and saw a big man wearing a shawl of surpassing richness above a black cassock, so heavily bearded that greying curling locks were spread on his broad chest. Behind him boys’ voices took up the music, and it filled the building with such sweetness that suddenly her eyes stung and her throat contracted at the loveliness of it.
And so the time went on and she sat there in a sort of enchantment, listening and being soothed and then uplifted and then soothed again by the changing pattern of the singing, feeling the blaze of the candles on her face, and the scent of wax heavy in her nose.
And when with much pomp several of the men moved slowly to the vast doors at the end of the synagogue and opened them to bring out great scrolls clothed in silver armour, tinkling with silver bells and wrapped in velvet cloths, to parade them all about the building while men bent their heads before the words of God being carried before them, and touched the passing scrolls with the fringes of their shawls and kissed the fringe in an aching need to have contact with the wisdom of their chosen God, she was not surprised.
Indeed, she could no longer be surprised by anything, and she watched the procession, and listened to the sonorous and incomprehensible reading from the scroll and watched the silver objects lovingly borne back to their secret place to be locked up again under the eye of the watching single light that hung above it, and was very aware of the two separate selves that were Abby. Marvelling puzzled Abby, sitting in the Ladies’ gallery beside the stiff-backed Leah, and grinning, almost laughing Abby, perched high in a remote corner and whispering, ‘What are you doing here? You have no right to be here! You are quite, quite ridiculous! Get up and go away, away and back to Paddington Green where you belong!’
But she turned her head and looked at Gideon, standing there among his fellows, his book in his hands, his shoulders shawled and his head covered, and she saw him not as the boy she had known for so long that he was part of her life, not as the staunch friend upon whom she leaned, but as a man. A man among others, a man of value and importance and strength.
A man she loved.
She sat there and looked at him, and let the feeling move in her as it wanted to. She could no longer deny it, and no longer wished to deny it. The man there below her, so like all the others and yet so totally unique, was for her the only man there was. For ten long years she had loved a shadow, had subsisted on the recollections of the brief months of life they had shared, had maintained her deeply passionate nature on the fragile memories of the physical love they had known so few, so pitifully few, times. And now, in the deepest shadows of her mind James stood wraithlike and transparent, looking at her with a vast sadness in every line of him; and then, at last, vanished completely. All that would ever be left of him now was a little painted miniature on the table in her sitting room at Paddington Green, the glint of red in Frederick’s hair as he turned in the sunshine, a name above the door of the factory he had founded. His place, his special place in Abby’s soul, had been superseded at last and she let the pain of the final parting wash over her and fill her chest with unshed tears, and then let it drain gloriously, joyously away as Gideon’s figure, in all its strength and firmness, all its elegance and deep animal excitement, took James’s place.
And as though he knew her thoughts were on him he looked up, his lips still moving in the words of his praying, and gazed at her, and she looked at him and leaned forwards, staring back, trying to fill her eyes with the message she so wanted to convey. The message that said she loved him, and needed him, and ached for him, and always would.
And in some way he seemed to understand, for a faint tide of colour rose in his cheeks and then subsided and he no longer spoke the words of his prayers, but stared at her as she stared at him across the broad space that separated them. And the secret separate Abby did not mock or laugh or comment, but watched in silence and knew of the irrevocable decision that had been made.
And afterwards, in the comfortable dining room of the house in Lombard Street with Leah on her left and old Nahum on her right, and facing Gideon across a table spread lavishly with white linen and gleaming silver and the most sparkling of crystal, the sense of wonderment filled her more richly than ever.
There was the way the old man sat with a great goblet of crystal filled with crimson wine before him and read those lisping singing phrases from an old leather-bound book and nodded his capped head as he sent his voice rising and falling through the antique story. From time to time he would look up to give her a simplified account in English of what he was reading, telling her how the Lord God of the Jews had delivered his people from the machinations of an evil Pharaoh, of plagues and sufferings, death of children and survival of hope, and she nodded and listened and nodded again.
There were the times they drank wine with him, a sweet and cloying wine that tasted of raisins and Gideon bade her drink it to the dregs, laughing at her flushed face when she did, and telling her of the tradition that demanded four such cupfuls should be taken on this special night.
And there was the time when Leah, the tall and stately Leah with all her aristocratic bearing held about her like a rich robe stood up and took a silver bowl and ewer and a soft white towel, and with careful humble ceremony poured water over the hands of her husband and son so that they could wash; and she caught Abby’s eye on her and said with an oddly triumphant air, ‘It is the privilege of a woman of our people to make such services to our men. In the synagogue the man is supreme, but in the home, oh—here, I am a queen. And as a queen, it is my pleasure and my right to humble myself in this way—do you understand that?’
‘I think I do,’ Abby said, and caught Gideon’s eye on her, and smiled at him, but as Leah went soft-footedly to return the basin and ewer to a side table she said softly, ‘I think you do not. You cannot, if you have not grown in this manner, and been taught in this manner.’
And Abby opened her mouth to speak, but had to close it again, for she could not find words to deny the truth of Leah’s speech.
It was all so strange and so mysterious, the whole of it, and sometimes it was also faintly absurd, as when Gideon opened the door and they all watched a wine-brimming red Venetian glass goblet in the centre of the table for, Gideon said, ‘The prophet Elijah comes to each of our houses for his refreshment at this moment on this night’—and she had to smile at that; but Leah and Nahum looked at her solemnly and did not smile.
At last they ate, a meal that was lavish and impeccably presented and served, but she could not manage to eat more than a mouthful of the excellent mutton set before her. (’It is a traditional meat for this festival,’ Gideon said, and she murmured back at him, ‘Dear Gideon! Is there anything you do that is not steeped in centuries of tradition?’ and he had smiled and looked at her with grave eyes and said simply, ‘No. Nothing.’)
And then, more reading, more wine, even a little singing, with Gideon’s strong young voice lifting above his father’s rather cracked notes and Leah producing a startling contralto, and at last, some four hours after she had arrived in Lombard Street, but feeling as though it had been a lifetime, Abby rose from the table and followed her hostess back to the drawing room, while Gideon pushed his father’s wicker chair before them both.
They sat engaging in the normal desultory small talk that could be heard in any drawing room in London after dinner and that made what had gone before seem even stranger in Abby’s mind. Involuntarily she yawned, and then blushed. She had not realized how tired she was. At once, Leah looked up at Gideon and said, ‘I think, my dear, that you must take Mrs Caspar back to Paddington Green. It is late and she has had much to tolerate with us this evening.’
