Hannah & Emil (16 page)

‘Do you really think so, Father?'

‘Yes, what are we waiting for? You practise at home for me and Mama. What is it you talk about after last Labour meeting? Birth control? Excellent topic. Too many poor children running round streets for lone mothers to feed. Begin to study—tonight!'

Birth control! Was I up to that? But if Father said I was, then why on earth not. I had come home from the meeting ranting, lifting chunks of the speaker's stump speech verbatim, afire with the passion that women's lives must be improved. Well, I could just do it again, and no matter that I had no life experience of anything at all that might lead to a requirement for birth control.

I held Father's hand as we walked. Oh, he could be a wonderful father. He would always be a foreigner, with his anachronistic manner of trimming his moustache, as though it would be a betrayal to change it after thirty years in England. And he boomed every word, wherever you were, so that no conversation was ever truly private. But I felt a stab of love for him, walking in the park on that long summer evening. He had no affection for the Labour Party, but if that was my training for a life of opinions and argument, then he would allow it. I did not mind who saw me, an almost grown woman, holding his hand. Here we were at the green centre of London, in the heart of England. I was flooded with newness and sensation. Father, still a wide-eyed foreigner, was right. Anyone could speak here.
I
could speak.

Later that summer, I was put under a curfew, which I ignored. Youth Labour meetings went on until late. Young socialists are world-class gabbers, and so here I was inching along a stone wall in the last of the evening light, shoes in one hand, the other gripping the ivy-covered bricks of the house, when I came to our tenants the Gasks' window, and was forced to pause. Small things rustled in the black leaves. I bent carefully so as not to fall backwards into the damp grass and inched my feet side to side along the ledge. The maisonettes were split-level; the Gasks' study was next to my bedroom although their sitting room was upstairs. I had to pass a wide expanse of glass looking directly into the study to reach safety. The Gasks were the sort who still regarded the absence of blackouts as the ultimate freedom and never drew curtains that could be left open. I hoped neither of them had pressing deadlines that might keep them at the desk tonight.

The window was tall and as I crept along the ledge, leaning in a little to grip the upper frame, I was stretched as far as my small body could manage. My heart thudded. Though it was dark in the room but for a light spilling from the landing I dreaded being discovered like this by our wonderful neighbours, spread out like a butterfly under a pin as I took each wide careful step towards my own window. Hurrying a little, I lost my footing for an instant and righted myself, paused, looked properly inside the Gasks' study where there was, I knew, a little black desk. It was scratched and old and not quite level, and on it sat a glossy black typewriter, the thrilling clatter of whose silver-edged keys I often heard from my own room next door as I fell asleep at night and woke in the morning. I could see the typewriter and the desk, a lumpy shadow on top of a flat surface, as my eyes adjusted. Then I could see them very well; the room was brightening. The door next to the desk swung towards me and I took two long reckless steps towards my own window.

I made it, but I could not help lingering at the very edge of the Gasks' window, peering in from the side, a strange night-time creature of the heath clinging to the frame, as Mrs Gask, in a daring trouser suit with a silk scarf tied around her cropped hair and knotted at her bare neck, sat down at the typewriter and turned on a bright chrome lamp. She peered myopically for a moment at the sheet of paper then began to type quickly with two fingers, pausing now and then to read what she had written, nod, continue. I committed the image to memory, a grown-up woman typing by lamplight late at night, and took the last step to my own window.

On the sash of my locked window was a nail file. I jimmied it gently between the frames and flicked the lock open, the window instantly slipping down an inch with a thunk. I drew up the lower frame very slowly and stepped through onto my bed, which gave out a tiny squeak. My window rattled as I closed it and hurried under the covers, trying to silence my breathing, just as Mother opened the door. ‘Hannah?' I concentrated upon each breath, letting it in and out in increments, slow and quiet like a sleeper, though my heart was quick, my brow damp against the pillow.

After the following week's meeting, as I sailed down from the window to the bed, leg outstretched, Mother flung the door open, observed me bounce for a moment on the mattress, hot-faced in the light from the hall. ‘Hannah! We agreed. Ten o'clock! It is not
safe
. How many children must be murdered for you to be home by dark?'

I remained on the bed, where I was the taller for once. ‘But I am
not
a child. And I cannot simply leave the meeting halfway through. I have been elected secretary of the branch and I shall do my job!'

‘No, Hannah. You will be home at ten or you shan't leave the house at all.'

‘How dare you! I shall speak to Father about this.'

Mother closed the door, leaving me standing on the bed in the dark, the window open to the late summer night. Where is Father? I stormed silently. Listening in the sitting room, newspaper in his lap? He would never ask me to give up my position. After weeks of lobbying I had managed to oust the elderly and entirely ineffectual membership secretary and I could not abandon my duties now. This was where I was supposed to be. It was what I was supposed to do.

It was hours before I slept. I gave up believing that I would manage it. I could not, before I had hauled Father out of bed to demand he state his own position. He! He was the one who had just last week accompanied me to Speakers' Corner, carried a crate from the shop for me, hushed anyone who dared to interrupt as I gave my first rather haranguing attempt at a stump speech on, as he had suggested, birth control. But I slipped under, eventually, my reading light still shining on the book open on my stomach. The next I knew there was daylight on my eyelids, a light hand on my shoulder, Mother leaving the room, turning off the lamp on my bookshelf as she went. By the time she reached the doorway the viciousness was fully awake in me. ‘It is because you have no intellectual life of your own, isn't it?
That's
why you torture me.'

Mother's hand reached behind her for the doorknob. She hesitated for a narrow instant and was gone, the knob unwinding, the latch clicking gently into its groove.

At dinner the following night I sat, chewing my beef slowly, saying nothing, as the boys enthused about a new footballer whose exploits had captured the hearts of boys and men the length and breadth of the land. I waited for Father to speak. He and Mother remained silent throughout the meal though the boys did not notice. They were wild about their new hero. Geoffrey, somehow, had got hold of a hand press some time before and printed a weekly rag made up largely of gossip about the people who lived on our street. Though his portraits were thinly disguised, they were clearly recognisable, and Father had told him never to let copies circulate among our neighbours. The sketches were a little cruel but rather funny. He was stashing the money under a floorboard for Lord knew what venture. After bolting down his food, he hauled Benjamin upstairs to help him write a special feature, to be entitled: ‘The Most Skilful and Modest Footballer England Has Ever Seen' or some such. I pushed my own chair back.

‘Not you, Hannah,' Father said.

I sat heavily, sighing, as I heard the boys dragging the press along the floor above. It was just about the longest day of the year. Outside the window the oak was dark green and voices drifted in from the heath.

Well then, I thought. I will set this straight. I will make Father understand.

Mother stacked the dishes, not looking at me, and took them out to the kitchen, leaving me alone with him at the table.

‘You will come home from the meetings at nine o'clock.'

‘What? No, Father, no. They never finish before ten. How can I?'

‘Then you leave early.'

‘I will lose my position! I worked so hard—'

‘You must have safety, Hannah! This precious Labour Party needs the blood of young girls now?'

‘You have gone mad. There has been one murder—in Stepney, mind you—and the whole of London has lost its head.'

‘She was the same as you. Young girl walking around the city alone. Thinking what could happen? Then dead. Like that. You must not be stubborn. Not attractive, Hannah.'

‘Attractive? What do I care about that? Father, really.'

‘There is a solution. You know it.'

‘No.' I would not look at him. Mother was in the kitchen, washing the dishes. I heard the clink and slosh intermittently, between the volleys of our argument.

‘Hannah, it is so simple. I wait outside for you. You finish when you like. I will be there. No matter if it's eleven, twelve. I may get cold, yes. Boring. Daughter busy turning into Bolshevik. But Mother can sleep tonight. I can sleep tonight.'

‘I cannot, Father. I
cannot
. I do not require the protection of a man.'

‘This thing is not because you are a woman. This is because you are a child. My responsibility. My daughter.'

‘Father!'

‘Then you are home at nine. That is all. We agree.'

The sound of Mother at the sink had stopped, though she had not come out of the kitchen. ‘Happy, Mother?' I called as I thundered out of the dining room and into my bedroom.

When I returned from work the next day everyone was out. I opened the door to my room and stared. The bed had been moved away from the window to accommodate a table. It was the little black desk of the Gasks, on which thousands of words of newsprint had been produced. I ran across the room and laid my hands on its surface, nicked and scuffed as though each story written atop it were the result of some violent struggle. If I did not have my hands here lying on its cool surface, could not see the light falling from the window reflected in its shiny black paint, I would not believe it. Was this some trick of my parents to make me amenable? A sharp pain knocked at my ribs.