Hannah & Emil (22 page)

Geoffrey was there to meet me off the tube. He stooped down to take my case as we met on the platform. He was tall now, implacable. His thoughts were his own, like other adults. Somewhere in this young man's face was the boy I had known. My anger dissipated as I took in his shabby trousers and worn jacket, his unwashed hair, his shoes as disgraceful as my own, his eyes distant, his fingernails bitten. To look at the distraction upon my brother's face was to enter instantly a world of illness and imminent death. My separation from it, my life in Paris and before, at Ruskin, seemed artificial, dreamed.

We walked straight to the hospital at Hampstead. I had never in my life entered such a place. We were robustly healthy children, and if my parents had periods of illness, they kept them quiet. The long corridor smelled of school: disinfectant and a kitchen somewhere producing vats of unappetising stew by the gallon. Our shoes squeaked down the empty hallway as we went along to his ward.

At the end of a row of beds in a dim room lay a tiny man in a long white bed with a little head adrift at the centre of a large white pillow. Occupying the other beds was an array of unfortunate souls coughing and hawking. I looked back at the little man and saw that it was my father. Even his hand, wrinkled and small on the white counterpane, seemed shrunken. My dear father, the grand Russian merchant of my youth, whose desperate boyhood poverty was ever the fuel of his compassion and energy, had been miniaturised. It was as though he had been reduced to some earlier moment, had been brought back to a time when he had nothing and was nobody.

Geoffrey shook his hand. Father lifted his other slowly from the bed and laid it on top of Geoffrey's long pink fingers. ‘Now, my Geoffrey. What did you bring me here?' he whispered. This was followed by such a bout of coughing that a nurse hurried to his bed, giving me a stern look, and sat him up by wedging her bottom in beside him, arm around his shoulders. Father shook his head, shooed her away, beckoning me closer. His big wet eyes did not leave my face. ‘Is it you, my Hannah? Look. You are a woman now.'

I sat next to him on the bed. He took my hands. His were as small as mine. He has been ancient in my memory but he was younger than I am now. How long has he been like this, I wondered, and no one thought to fetch me? I looked at Geoffrey looking at his father, recalled my desertion, and retracted the thought before it was expressed.

‘Now, Hannah. No tears. Not my bravest girl.' He patted my hand, turned to Geoffrey, who was peering now with a slightly appalled expression at the other patients, who were, if sentient, watching our little tableau unfold. ‘Do you see this, Geoffrey? My Hannah has come home.'

Geoffrey brought his attention back to us, nodded vaguely. He gave me a quizzical glance, as though to say, what will you do now?

‘Papa,' I said. ‘I did not know—'

‘Hush, Hannah.' His voice was so soft, where it had always boomed, too loud, too foreign. ‘You think I would prevent my Hannah and her grand career? The child of mine at Oxford!'

‘It was not the university.'

‘Hush, hush. You are living the life, my little. Speak to me something in French. I will remember.'

I took a quick look at Geoffrey. So far as I knew he did not understand French. ‘
Mon cher Papa
,' I whispered. ‘
Je suis désolée que
j'ai vous départis. Vous et Maman
.'

A little smile in his grey face, another cough.

‘
N'oubli jamais ta mére, ma petite
,' he said, and it was so strange to hear him speak in this language, though he had several. It was as though we were new people.

‘Now,' he said to Geoffrey, ‘take my little one home to see her mother. It is time for my nap.'

His eyes were closed before I was on my feet. I touched his sleeve, and Geoffrey stooped to pick up my case, and we walked past the row of beds, the men with their big harried eyes watching us depart.

We walked across the lovely heath, through its solemn corridors, a hundred shades of living green, towards our pond. As we approached it I broke our silence to say, ‘Do you remember the strike?' He nodded. ‘I was here,' I said. ‘By the pond. I heard the miners' choir sing to raise money for the families of the striking men. It was just before I went away to college. I saw you looking out from your window.'

He nodded again.

‘Did you see me, Geoffrey?'

‘Yes, Hannah. I did.'

‘Then why did you not come down to talk to me?'

‘You looked as though you were crying. I thought it—private.'

‘Oh. It was the choir. Did you hear them singing “Bread of Heaven”? I had never heard anything like it. It was—I can't explain. It was being poor, and I heard Wales, somehow, in the men's voices. And I was standing beneath our house and not able to come in. Did you hear them?'

‘Yes. I wrote about them for my paper.'

I laughed. ‘The
Hampstead Herald
? Did it take on a political bent?'

‘I worked for the real
Herald
by then.'

I looked at him. ‘No!' I put a hand to my heart. We were just reaching the foreshore. I stopped before the little gap in the hedge that took us through to our French windows. ‘You work for the
Daily
Herald
? You are a
writer
?' I realised that I had assumed he was a student without having bothered to ask.

‘Why so surprised?'

‘For the Labour Party?'

‘I do some pieces for Pankhurst's commie rag too, under a pseudonym. Don't tell anyone. I'd lose my job.'

‘I am astounded.'

He laughed, and we went in, and Benjamin was tearing down the stairs, all his baby fat gone, as lean and eager still as a puppy, and wearing, quite miraculously, an RAF uniform. What a handsome young man he was. I was, again, astonished by a brother of mine. His black hair
gleamed
.

I did not see Mother until the next day, when she returned from the hospital at dawn. I was in my old bed, my room just the same as it always was, except Geoffrey had stolen my desk, and when I woke she was sitting beside me in the chair in the horrible void the desk had left. She did not say a word, but as my eyes lit upon her face, older now, everyone older, her chin crumpled for a moment and I knew that Father had gone, and I wept on her chest until the boys came in, and we all sat together on my bed holding hands until the sun came into my room. I had wasted time so irretrievably, the last of Father's years, and yet neither my mother nor my brothers, not at that moment nor any after, ever uttered a word of reproach.

I slipped back into my London life of Labour Party meetings and haunting the bookshop at South Hill, wishing I had a source of income that would allow me to buy everything I laid my hands on. Some evenings I lounged on Geoffrey's bed while he sat at my little black desk over a shiny typewriter with silver keys. He curled himself around it, as though he were drawing it into the workings of his body. His shoulder blades stretched the fabric of his tweed jacket and he smoked, peered out the window or fixed his gaze on me, without I think really seeing me, pecking out words furiously, reading them back to me after a couple of paragraphs. He wrote about the rising unemployed, the Wobblies in America, fascism in Germany and Italy. He had friends in these places, but he also travelled widely. He referred to Pankhurst by her first name:
Emmeline
. He had become something quite incredible while I had been looking in a different direction. I coughed in the smoke from his endless cigarettes and said, ‘Yes, bravo. Very stirring!' at intervals. Occasionally I might add a suggestion of my own, which he would accept and include, nodding seriously, and I had to still the little leap in my chest.

Benjamin came home from base some weekends and everything was cheerier when he was about the place. He palmed me the odd shilling—to buy hats, he said, but I bought books and eventually a pair of shoes. I was aware of preparation, of stocking provisions for my next adventure. One Saturday I went with them both to the pub. At the southern corner of the heath was a smoky, dark little tavern filled with working men and a couple of tarted-up women who looked glamorous from a distance but old and heavily set, mannish, up close. We sat with half-pints of ale in front of us and told stories about Father, did his voice—Benjamin was spot on:
Children! There are Christians
at the door! Come, come! Convert them!
—and banged the table until eventually we looked up to find the landlord standing over us. ‘You oughtn't to have this young lady here. Is she even twenty-one?'

‘She's no lady,' Benjamin snorted. ‘She's our sister!'

Geoffrey stood, took my elbow.

‘You're a rude man,' I said, shaking my gloves at the landlord. ‘For your information, I am twenty-three and a woman of the world!' I slipped a little on the stair on the way out. I should not have begun on that second glass of beer.

I was desperate to be away again. I felt I had been snapped back like a piece of rubber from the life that beckoned me. I wrote letters constantly to old friends from Ruskin, to my contacts in the Labour Party who had begun to spread about the country, to anyone I could think of that might know of an opportunity for me to travel and work, to restart my faltered career. It was thrilling to watch Geoffrey at his life of the newspaperman, but searing too, to witness him pounding out his stories at my very own desk.

One morning in August I received a letter from a friend still in Oxford, a lovely Scot, Annabel McCloud. Mother brought it into my room with my cup of tea. I had attended economics lectures with Annabel, we girls sitting to one side, away from the young men, but nevertheless in the theatre, allowed to listen, and to notate, and to learn. Here is her letter, in schoolgirl handwriting, tucked in my journal for the ninth of August, 1930.
Dearest Hannah
, it begins.
You
have been much on my mind lately. I have a proposition to put to you . . .

It seemed that she had won a travelling scholarship from Ruskin which presented the princely sum of fifteen pounds to a woman for the purposes of travel and study ‘with a particular focus on the education of working people'. Oh, I thought. Such a thing was made for
me
! Her mother was ill, she went on to explain, and Annabel could not now take it up. The college would be happy to give it to me, as its purposes were so close to my own frequently expressed wishes. The scholarship must be for travel to Berlin, as Annabel had already made arrangements there. They would house me with workers, and I must attend classes at a workers' college for a period when I arrived, and after that I was free to fulfil the terms of the scholarship as I saw fit. Annabel could not know the course she set me on. I am very glad I still have her letter, and indeed that her mother was ill, though I hope of course that she recovered quickly and completely and carried on robustly into old age.

I ran into Geoffrey's room, letter clutched in hand. He was asleep, having worked late on a piece, laid out fully clothed atop the blankets. I shook the letter over his face. ‘I am to go to Berlin! I am to attend a workers' college there! Geoffrey, wake up!'