Bells of Bournville Green (36 page)

‘David used to do that. I always dreamed of seeing the two of them here together – Peter and Shimon . . .’

She shook her head. There was no need to say any more.

Chapter Forty-Nine

Within a day of Gila moving from the hospital to Miriam’s apartment in Tel Aviv, David felt that he could stand it no longer.

Her mother was also staying, and as the apartment had only two bedrooms, David was sleeping on a mattress in Gila’s room and Rachel Weissman slept on a couch in the living room. Night-time was the only chance he and Gila had to be alone without her mother or aunt fussing over her.

Miriam already tried David’s patience. Her softer side had shown itself with Shimon, who had adored her, and David had never doubted her care for him, but in general she was a tough, bossy woman who had never married and was used to living alone and having her own way in everything. Her relationship with her nervy elder sister was quarrelsome and full of resentments of an intensity that David could never fathom. Gila had never been able to explain it either. Whatever Rachel said, Miriam had to contradict, had to be in charge of everything, and there seemed to be a power struggle going around Gila’s head all the time. It had enraged David before. Here they were, fortunate enough to be sisters, to have proper relatives when he had so few, and they couldn’t even manage to be civil to each other over the smallest of details! Now, after what had happened to his family, he found their self-absorbed quarrelling cruel and absurd.

‘Why don’t we just go home?’ he begged Gila one evening. He was sitting on the edge of her bed, the sound of angry female voices coming from the kitchen, Miriam’s powerful, like a foghorn, Rachel’s high and plaintive. A squabble seemed to have broken out over yoghurt, with no point to it that David could discern. It just made him loathe Israel more, with its loud, emotional people. Though he could see that the roots of their conflict and Rachel’s neuroses dated back further than anything he could possibly know about, at this time he didn’t care what they were or feel any sympathy. He was in too much pain himself, an anguish which enveloped him and Gila totally and separately, only isolating them more from each other.

Gila had become someone he scarcely recognized. She lay there day after day, with no energy, hardly speaking, locked in shock and grief. He couldn’t get through to her at all. And surely all these hysterics around her were not helping, he thought.

‘We can go back to our own place and you won’t have to put up with this all the time. We’ll sleep in our own bed together. You can rest until you’re better, with no pressure . . .’

Gila’s face remained blank. ‘No. I must stay here.’

‘But why? I’ll look after you. We can be together.’

He ached to have her at home. He had been back and forth twice now, trying to concentrate on his studies, to keep going. Facing the silent apartment had been terrible. There were Shimon’s toys, his swimming trunks wrapped in a towel, little winter boots still behind the door in the hallway, his bed with its blue and orange quilt, just as it had been before. He wondered whether he should just get rid of everything, bundle his son’s few possessions into a sack and dispose of them. But then he decided that he could not bear the apartment to look as if Shimon had never been, to be bereft of him. He was not ready for that to happen. And he knew Gila must come here first and see, and somehow say goodbye.

More than once he woke in the night, convinced he had heard his son cry out, as if Shimon was there, sleeping in the next room. One night, still befuddled with sleep, he got up to check on him. He found the bed empty, and climbed into it, curling up, needing to capture the smell and feel of his small son, needing to be held himself. He fell asleep, tears wet on his face.

If only Gila could come home, he thought, then slowly, slowly they could begin . . . They could try to find an idea of normal, if things could ever be normal again. They could have another child. As it was, everything seemed frozen, as if time had stopped when Shimon died.

Each time he went back to Tel Aviv, hoping. But she would not come, would not speak to him about their lost children, or weep with him. Each time he came into the room he would find her lying much as he had left her, on her back, her dark brows two slender arcs across her pale forehead, her dark eyes looking up to the ceiling, a slight frown on her face. If he spoke to her about something ordinary – did she want some soup? was she warm enough or comfortable? – she would answer him in a detached way as if he was a stranger. It was the same with Miriam and Rachel. None of them could get through to her.

‘I tell you, she should see another doctor,’ Miriam decreed as they ate dinner one evening while Gila stayed in her room and picked at a little food they took to her. ‘My friend Therese knows a very distinguished psychiatrist. . .’

This provoked the most hysterical outburst that David had yet heard from Rachel Weissman towards her sister, and later she ambushed David in the tiny hallway, whispering urgently.

‘I do not want her to see a psychiatrist,’ she implored, weeping again. ‘Don’t make her, please . . . It will finish her . . .’ She leaned forward and touched David’s hand for a second. Instead of feeling comforted he found himself deeply irritated. He couldn’t stand these histrionic women with their tears and quarrels. But he also knew that the state he was in meant no one could do anything right for him.

Except Annaliese. When he spoke with her on the telephone, heard her gentle, kindly voice, he felt eased a little. With his mother, with Edie, it was less so, but he was still grateful to talk to her. He did not tell either of them the truth though.

‘Gila is getting stronger every day,’ he would say. ‘Yes – we are very sad, heartbroken. But we shall be all right. Don’t worry about us. We have had a terrible shock, but we are together and we will be all right.’

This was what he wanted to believe.

Sometimes when he could not stand any more of the atmosphere in the dark apartment he went out into the glare of Tel Aviv’s white buildings, walking towards the sea to stare at the endless blue choppiness of the waves. He felt lost. His son had been his direction, the one person in this world who pulled him into the future. Sometimes he sat on the sea wall staring out with tears running down his cheeks. It was as if he had been travelling a road and had come upon a high wall built right across it. He could not see who he was or where he was going any more.

Chapter Fifty

At the end of September, Greta’s divorce from Trevor came through. She stared at the papers without emotion. So she was no longer married to Trevor by law. She shrugged. Was she ever really married to Trevor? Not the way Edie and Anatoli were married, close and loving, with a real understanding between them.

She put the papers away in a drawer in the bedroom with a great sense of freedom, then looked at herself in the mirror over the chest of drawers, at her rounded, pretty face, the waves of blonde hair round her brow.

‘So – I’m Greta Sorenson again,’ she whispered. The little picture of her Dad, Wally, was propped up against a box of talcum powder. ‘Free as a bird.’ Here she was, in a lovely place, with a beautiful daughter. She wasn’t going to be like her Mom, chasing after everything in trousers. If she chose, she could keep away from men and marriage for the rest of her life!

She told Pat the next day, when they managed to coincide for a tea break at work. Pat looked stricken. Divorce to Pat meant disgrace.

‘You must be upset, aren’t you?’

Greta shook her head. ‘I s’pose it’s not very nice being divorced. No one sets out wanting to get divorced, do they? But it had to come and I’m relieved it’s over now. I mean, Trevor takes not the blindest bit of notice of Francesca now he’s got his own family. He was rude enough about her name, said it was too posh. I’m best off without him.’

‘I wish my Mom could say the same.’ Pat came out with this forthright remark so suddenly that she seemed to take herself by surprise and she went red. ‘Gosh – I didn’t know I was going to say that! But it’s true!’ she added defiantly.

Greta, who had privately thought Stanley Floyd was a nasty piece of work for years, looked at her sympathetically.

‘If I thought I’d ever marry a man like my father,’ Pat went on hotly, ‘I think I’d lie down on the railway track and end it all, I really do!’

‘Well, you won’t though, will you?’ Greta said. ‘And anyway, you live like a nun, so I don’t think that’s likely to happen is it?’

‘You’re a fine one to talk!’ Both of them laughed, ruefully. ‘We’re just as blooming bad as each other!’

Greta was so caught up in what was happening in the Gruschovs’ household that she didn’t see much of her own family. Though Edie struggled to be brave, Greta knew she was full of aching grief over Shimon and anguish for David, and that this only added to her worries about Anatoli’s health.

Though looking thinner and more tired than he had been before, for the time being Anatoli’s illness seemed to be stabilized, and the crisis of his operation faded into the background compared with the news from Israel.

As the summer truly died and they swished their way home through drifts of rusty leaves into autumn, the news from there began to improve. After several weeks at her aunt’s apartment in Tel Aviv, Gila was ready to go home to Jerusalem – but home would be another new apartment that David had rented.

‘Bless her,’ Edie said. ‘Oh, it’s going to be so hard for her when she walks in for the first time and there’s no Shimon, even if it is a different place! It breaks my heart to think about it.’

A brief letter came from David, saying that they had at last been able to have a proper funeral for Shimon, that there was a grave for him in a Jerusalem cemetery not too far away from home. He said that he had laid some flowers there on Edie’s behalf. Gila had had her plaster removed and was almost ready to take up her job back at her dental practice. He was studying hard and they were trying to look to the future. Edie had repeated her invitation for them to come to England, saying that she and Anatoli would pay for them. Everyone commented on how brave they were, how strong. They would have another child, people predicted, and try to keep moving ahead. Everyone’s grief for Shimon continued, mostly under the surface.

And then, overnight, the shadow which had faded over the summer gathered once more and grew darker. Anatoli was taken ill again. One day he was going along as before, the next he woke in pain and being sick, and could not leave his bed. He quickly grew weak, and Edie stayed away from work and called the doctor.

It was not Martin Ferris this time. From the kitchen door, Greta saw the man come into the house at dawn and go solemn-faced up to Anatoli. She was gripped by fear. For some time she could hear nothing except the faintest murmur from upstairs, and she carried on giving Francesca her morning milk, all the time straining to hear any movement in the house.

At last she heard footsteps down the stairs and the front door closing. Then Edie came into the kitchen. Greta could see everything by her face, the way she looked as if she had received a blow, the tears she was struggling to quell.

‘He says Anatoli will have to go up to the hospital for more tests, when he’s feeling a bit better . . .’ She couldn’t hold back her emotion any more as she choked out the words. ‘But he says it’s come back. And there isn’t any cure!’

‘Now, my dear, I think I have the strength to drink my tea, if you wouldn’t mind giving me a hand.’

It was a month later and Greta, home from work, was with Anatoli. On better days, like today, he came downstairs, where they made him comfortable on a couch in the living room.

‘If I stay all day every day in my bed I shall become a cabbage within a fortnight,’ he predicted wryly. ‘I must see you all and have some life around me. And these little children don’t want to come into an old man’s sickroom.’

He was recovering from a few days of acute sickness and was very weak, but Greta could see that he was happy to be downstairs, where the children could come and go and he could supervise Peter’s violin practice. They were learning to treat him gently, and even Francesca, though only eighteen months old, seemed to sense that she must not roar around Anatoli in her usual energetic fashion.

Edie had gone out to collect Peter from school. The days when Anatoli was at his lowest, wretched with vomiting and very weak, were a torment for her and she looked thinner and tired. Greta was feeling the strain too. She found it unbearable that this man whom she loved was suffering so much. But now there was a lull, and he could come downstairs on her arm. She loved tucking him up under the red and black rugs on the couch and pampering him. It was heartbreaking seeing how thin and weak he was, how his magnificent crop of white hair was thinning, compared with the strong, handsome man Greta had seen photographs of when she was younger. As an older man he had still been very striking to look at. These days his cheeks were hollow and his limbs so thin they looked fit to snap, but now he was feeling a little better his lovely brown eyes still danced with life and his sense of humour had returned.

She leaned over and offered her arm to help him and he hoisted himself up with a groan.

‘Oh!’ He sat back, in relief. ‘These days I am creaking like an old farmer’s cart!’

‘Can you manage anything to eat with your tea?’ Greta asked, hoping he would say yes.

Anatoli considered, rubbing his hand over his abdomen, wincing. ‘I shall have to be careful. Anything which brings back that sickness seems like poison to me. I feel as if a whole herd of cattle have trampled over me. But yes – I think I could manage a couple of those nice plain biscuits if we have any.’

Of course they had some! Edie went straight out and bought anything that they thought he might have a ghost of a chance of eating. Greta went gladly to the kitchen and arranged some biscuits on a plate for him. When she came back she was happy to see that he was sipping the sugary tea.

‘Where is that little one?’ Anatoli asked.