Her Victory (36 page)

‘You're right,' he said. ‘They've got to be tackled' – knowing that if he hadn't brought her to the flat he would have slung the lot out with no thought of what was in them.

PART FOUR

The Women

1

Clara began with her mother, whose maiden name was Moss, and first name Rachel. She was born in 1860, and her father was a tea merchant who had settled in London from Hamburg thirty years before. By intelligence and toil he became well-to-do. A birth certificate in the first box was leaved between yellowing paper headed by a stark engraving of warehouse and offices. The engraving for the export house was of a clipper in full sail and, small as the letter-head was, a child had put tiny men on the mast tops with coloured pencils.

Rachel was the middle daughter of three, and the mother had died after the birth of the third child. ‘I am big, gawky, with scarlet flamy hair and with freckles like sparks, and I do not like myself,' she had written in a school exercise book. There was a small painting taken at some time from its frame which, though as unclear as if seen through a window beaded with moisture, showed her hair to be plentiful and auburn, as firmly tied by a band as her spirit seemed to be held behind her unhappy eyes and shapely sensitive mouth. She had a high clear forehead, and the only freckles visible on the cracked portrait appeared to be on the wrist which rested on her knees.

A clutch of pages had been torn from her leather-bound diary. The spine was worn away, and the ink brown where it had been black: ‘The one I am to marry is an honourable man. He is good and pleasant, but I don't love him. The rabbi who spoke to me about it is an honourable man. My father, whom I love, is an honourable man. They are all honourable. But they are all men. What can I do, being alone as I am? I shall ask questions at Passover, but they won't hear what is in my voice. Miss Silver, who talked to me for so long about free will, denies now that she did, and says I ought to marry whomsoever my father wishes, and that I am lucky a husband has been found for me, and that I am to be taken care of, and that she wished she had a husband and children instead of having to teach for her miserable living etc. But I will not marry Benjamin Green, whether or not he is the rabbi's nephew, because I saw
him
while walking from Schule with Miss Silver last Sabbath, and he saw me, and I know that he followed us down Edgware Road as far as the Park, as he knew I wished him to do. I hoped he would follow me forever, and that I would walk until Miss Silver could keep her pace no longer, when I was on my own and still walking, and then I would turn and he would be there, and with no one else but the two of us we could meet and talk, just as one day we shall be together always.'

The script varied, as if the ink were from another bottle, or because of an indifferent nib and a nervous style of writing: ‘I spoke to him. We were shopping and I saw him on Oxford Street. He saw me, and stayed in one place, and I deliberately avoided Miss Silver. I took his hand and we walked up a court. His name is Percy Phillips, and to me it doesn't matter that he is not one of us. God is not blind when He looks on people, and must see that we are all the same.

‘“Why me?” he said.

‘“Because I have chosen you,” I told him.

‘He said he had loved me since he first saw me but couldn't understand why I should love him. I said that I did, and that he was mine, and wasn't that enough? Far more than any
elegant sufficiency
, he said with a smile. We were together for half an hour. Poor people were begging while we were talking, but they were shadows, because I was happy. “I will pass here next week,” I said, “and we can meet.” He nodded, and told me that he worked in his father's office in the City, from which the family property was managed, and that with so much work he might not be able to come. I said he must, and he agreed that he would. “You must also see me on Saturday evening,” I said, “whether we speak or not.” He said that, providing the family didn't go to their house on the Kent coast, which they did on occasional weekends, he would do so. I maintained that it would be a better plan if, when we next saw each other, we walked away together. I would never go back to my home. My life there had finished, so why not let our shared existence begin? I could not remain where it was abhorrent to me, nor stay away from where it would be heaven to be.'

A different handwriting, on smaller paper, seemed to be part of a letter. ‘… wrong, because my son tells me he wants to marry your daughter. I realize, as I am sure you also do, that because she is a Jewess, and as we are Christians, this is quite out of the question.

‘There is nothing further to be said about it. I would not want to be an obstacle to anyone's happiness under normal circumstances, but nothing in this case promises the possibility of any progress towards bringing them together. It would be understandable to me that you do not want your daughter to become a Christian, and therefore you must see that it is quite unthinkable to me that my son should enter your Faith, even if that were possible.

‘This situation must be explained to them, and I shall certainly do my part in the matter, so that it shall not be allowed to get out of our control. You must see, my dear sir, that there is a danger of this, though I emphasize however, and I am sure you will agree, that the status of our families is such that were it not for the matter of Religion there would be no obstacle against the young people being joined in Holy Matrimony. How it began is beyond …'

‘She did not,' Clara commented in her journal, ‘fail to notice the gist of James Phillips' letter. All she had to do was become a Christian. There was no other way. Any self-respecting Jew – and all Jews are self-respecting, perhaps because they are more than usually God-fearing, so I understand – would be dismayed at her action. There was a lot of talk at that time of converting the Hebrews to Christianity, and many societies were formed to make the attempt. I've often wondered why, but I suppose there must have been some feeling among the more sincerely religious English that the only real Christians could be Jews, and that if numbers of Jews became Christians then the Christian religion might begin to appear more Christian than it seemed to be at the time. So the Phillipses would have been happy enough to make things easy for Rachel to become one of them. Their son Percy was an only child, and loving him as they did, and fearing for him as I understand one does for an only son, they did all they could to make him happy.

‘But father was never happy. No one could have made him so, though mother gave him more happiness than most. The very fact that he must use all his faculties, and fight every inch of the way to get to know her, kept him spiritually awake right up to the time of her death. With someone of his own sort, whoever that might have been, but whom he might more easily have understood both by heredity and upbringing, he would have quickly become dull and slothful. By continually making the effort to understand her – and at the end he was close enough – he stayed alive. Married to anyone else, his first attempt at suicide would have been his last. I'm convinced of it.

‘Rachel was only a lukewarm Christian, and so was he, come to that, though they believed in the same God. No form of worship would have been able to cure his melancholia. He would sit for days in his study as if fixed to the huge mahogany desk, moving only to light a cigarette, or to turn the page of a book or newspaper whose print his eyes couldn't fix on sufficiently to read a single word.

‘At five or six years of age I remember trying to look through the keyhole, or pushing the door further and further open, and waiting for him to waken because mother had said that he wasn't like other people because he could sleep while sitting at his desk. I stood there with Emma one day, who was a year younger, but after a few minutes she began to shake at the sight of our unmoving father, and wept in terror. “He's dead, Clara! Look! He's dead! Why doesn't he go to heaven?”'

He moved neither head nor hands, though Clara knew he must have heard, as she pulled Emma away. He was awake, but paralysed. When he wasn't, he went to his office, sometimes every day for weeks. He would walk in the garden and cut roses. There were occasions when nobody knew where he had gone. He would come home dirty and tired, carrying a picture, or flowers, or presents for the children. Then they would see neither their mother nor their father for days, going quietly to bed at night after spending their evenings in the kitchen with the cook. Clara told Emma that she would never marry. Emma said she wouldn't, either. ‘Nor shall I,' John said. ‘I'm going to be an engineer, and engineers go to foreign places, so they can't be married.'

‘But they get eaten by crocodiles,' Emma reminded him.

‘Not me,' John said. ‘I shall have a gun, never fear!'

Sometimes their father would go to hospital for a few weeks, and Rachel told them that because he went to sleep at his desk they had to take him away in order to wake him up. People went to hospital either to die or get better, and he went there to get better. An account book gave his income for 1895 as eight thousand pounds, and Clara had kept bills and receipts to prove that he had always gone to the best places.

A photograph showed him at Broadstairs after coming out of the convalescent home. On his own at the time, he had arranged for a local photographer to take the picture in the open air. His hands rested on a silver-headed stick, and he was looking towards the water. Forty years old, he was wearing a derby hat and an overcoat, and rimless spectacles. His thin lips curved down with settled apprehension, and his eyes seemed to be looking at the vision of an eternally receding mountain range whose heights he knew he would not be able to scale. Nor would his thoughts catch up with those fragments of his mind that always eluded him. His faculties at times were clear and active, but there was part of himself that he could never find, and the effort to do so occasionally became too much. Clara thought it was this vacancy in his powers of perception that Rachel had sensed at their first chance passing in the street. Something was missing that yet belonged to him, and she thought that by searching, and firmly tying down whatever it was, she could thereby give it back to him whole, an action that would produce a lifelong stability of soul between them.

Perhaps in more lucid moments he had seen that something similar needed to be done for her. However it was, they sought each other's soul all their lives, and didn't give up even at the darkest hours. Because they did not entirely find in each other that which they knew to exist, though at times they were closer to it than anyone incapable of making the effort, they never stopped being in love. ‘Your mother,' Percy said to Clara after he had become a widower, ‘was from a devoted race,' implying that she had given everything to him, as he at his best moments had tried to give all that was good in himself to her.

A photograph taken in the garden showed Rachel as a grave-looking women with a high forehead and an abundance of hair. Clara was fifteen, her sister Emma fourteen, and their brother John sixteen. Emma had at this time the same tormented eyes as her father, and a distortion of the mouth which was due as much to having moved as because she was horrified at being fixed for ever at this time with people to whom, she said afterwards to Clara, she did not feel she belonged. But her eyes stayed still and were perfectly caught, vainly trying to grasp a vision that would not come to her. In physique she was slight like her father, but grew taller in the next few years. Her look suggested that she had already experienced much suffering, and would spend the rest of her life trying to forget the ordeal. ‘She had seen none at all,' Clara commented, ‘though what she appeared to feel might have been a preview of what had yet to happen.'

The cardboard boxes devoted to John were marked
NOT TO BE OPENED – EVER!
But traces of broken sealing wax showed that they had been examined more than once by Clara. There were school reports, textbooks, letters sent home, a picture postcard from Cromer (‘seashells good, weather bad') as well as a cloth cycling map marking a tour through Belgium, on which each night-stop was shown in such heavy pencil that the name of the place was almost obliterated.

Letters from the trip were tied up with a Baedeker guidebook that was falling to pieces. After Ostend, on the way out, John stayed the night at Dixmude: ‘A level run of nearly thirty kilometres along a poor road of paving stones which can't be much good for my old bone-shaker. We passed many dairy farms – Lord, how many! It rained some of the way, but my cape kept most of it off. Arthur had a puncture near a village called Keyem, and I think all the children of Belgium watched him mend it. They thought it a great lark when we knocked on a door and asked for a bowl of water to find the hole.

‘We got a room at the Hotel de Dixmude (unpretending, but good enough for us), had a wash, then went into the church, and inspected the fine rood-loft my tutor told us about, as well as an Adoration of the Magi by Jordaens. Tomorrow, we go on to Ypres, then east to Menin, Courtrai and Audenarde and, Oh dear, I don't know how many places yet, but I don't doubt, and neither do you, dear mother and father (and Clara and Emma, as well as that horrid little dog), that there will be a letter from each benighted spot.

‘I'm sore from the saddle, though am told such an affliction will pass with time and wear, but in all other ways it is wonderful being awheel in flat-as-a-pancake Flanders. I understand that the Ardennes area is hilly! I shall have to stop being silly! All we hope is that the weather stays dry.

‘Arthur sits on his bed playing the flute, and if he doesn't
pipe-down
soon I shall throw my pillow at him, and they have very big ones in Belgium. So that you don't know of our fight, dear parents, I will close this fond epistle from the almost benighted bicycle-pilgrims!'