Dominion (12 page)

David turned to his father. He leaned forward and squeezed his wife’s hand. ‘We didn’t understand you, darling,’ he said.

She frowned and tried to concentrate, but then her head fell back and the life went out of her.

Afterwards his father told him the truth. ‘Your mother’s family were Jewish. They came from somewhere in Russia. In the Tsar’s time, during the pogroms, a lot
left for America. Your mother’s parents – your grandparents – left Russia with your mother and her three sisters. She was eight.’

David shook his head, trying to make sense of it. ‘But how did she come to be Irish?’

‘There were a lot of crooked people involved in the emigrations. Your mother’s poor parents didn’t speak a word of English. A boat brought them to Dublin and they thought they
were going to meet a boat for America but they were just left there, stuck in Ireland. Your grandfather was a cabinetmaker, very good at it, and through some other Jews he managed to set up a shop.
He ran a successful business. The children grew up speaking English. They were encouraged to, so as not to be thought too different. But I suppose deep down they never forgot their first
language.’

‘Was Mum speaking Russian?’

‘No. The Jews in Eastern Europe have their own language, Yiddish. It’s like German, but different. Feldman, that was the family name.’ He smiled uneasily. ‘Pretty
Jewish-sounding, eh?’ He was silent a long time. ‘Years later your mother became a music teacher. This was just before I met her. The Easter Rising was coming and things were getting
rough. Mr Feldman decided to sell the shop and go to America. They had relatives there. Better late than never, eh?’ He smiled again, sadly. ‘He insisted the whole family go. Your
mother didn’t want to, though, she wanted to stay in Ireland. There were other problems, too; the family was very religious but she thought it was all hokum, just as I do. So there was a
quarrel, her parents and sisters sailed off, and she never saw any of them again. They never wrote, her father ruled the roost and he cut her off. I think Mr Feldman was a bit of an old brute,
actually. I don’t know where her sisters are now. I can’t even let them know she’s dead,’ he added bleakly.

‘Why did you never tell me?’

‘Ah, son, we thought it better if everyone just assumed your mother was Irish. She wanted you to get on so much, and she knew that here –’ his eyes narrowed – ‘oh,
it’s not like Russia was, or Germany is now, but there’s prejudice. There always has been. Unofficial quotas for Jews. Even the grammar school has a quota, you know.’ He looked at
David seriously. ‘Your mother wanted her background forgotten, for your sake. Her immigration records were destroyed during the Troubles, I found that out. Our marriage certificate gives our
nationalities as British – Ireland was British then, of course.’ He burst out in sudden anger, ‘People dividing each other up according to nationality and religion, it’s the
worst thing, it causes nothing but misery and bloodshed. Look at Germany.’

David sat, thinking. There were a couple of Jewish boys at school who went out of assembly during morning prayers. Sometimes in the playground they got things called after them, Sheeny or
Jewboy. He felt sorry for them. There was enough prejudice against the Irish; he knew it was worse for Jews.

He said, ‘So I’m a Jew.’

‘According to their rules you are, since your mother was. But as far as we were concerned you weren’t Jewish and you weren’t Christian either. You’re not circumcised and
you’re not confirmed and –’ his father reached forward and took his hand – ‘you’re just your ma’s Davy, and you can be anything you want to be.’

‘I don’t feel Jewish,’ David said quietly. ‘But what is feeling Jewish?’ He frowned. ‘But, if Mum didn’t want me to know, why – why did she talk
to me in Yiddish? What did she say, Dad?’

His father shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, son, I don’t know. She never spoke it with me. I thought she’d forgotten it all. Perhaps at the end her poor mind was just going
back.’

David was crying, a steady flow of tears. He and his father sat in silence in the quiet lounge. When David’s crying lessened his father leaned forward, clutching his arm. ‘No need
ever to tell anyone else, David. There’s no point, it’ll only hold you back, and you’d be going against your mother’s wishes. It can just be our secret.’

David looked up at him and nodded. ‘I understand,’ he said heavily. ‘I understand. You’re right. And I’ll do it for her. I owe her, I owe her.’

‘It’ll be better for you, too.’

And it had been. In the years after the Berlin Treaty his silence had saved his job, his career. But always a part of him felt he didn’t deserve what he had; he felt guilt and fear, but
also a strange sense of kinship when he passed those wearing the yellow badge in the street, looking shabbier and more forlorn every year.

O
N
T
HURSDAY MORNING
Sarah took the tube into London to attend a meeting of the London Unemployed Aid Committee, at Friends House
in Euston Road. On the journey she read her library book, Daphne du Maurier’s
Rebecca
. She reached the scene where the mad housekeeper, Mrs Danvers, urges the second Mrs de Winter to
jump out from a window:
‘It’s you that’s the shadow and the ghost. It’s you that is forgotten and not wanted and pushed aside. Well, why don’t you leave Manderley
to her? Why don’t you go?’
Sarah didn’t like the book; it was compelling, certainly, but sinister. Apart from romances and detective stories the library shelves were so thin
these days. So many writers she had liked were hard to get hold of – Priestley, Forster, Auden – people who had opposed the government, over the Treaty and afterwards, and who, like
their works, had quietly disappeared from public view.

She sat back in her seat. David had not made love to her again after Sunday. He did less and less now. For most of their married life his love-making had been slow and gentle but lately, when it
happened, there was a restless urgency about it, and when he came inside her he groaned, as though she were giving him not love but pain.
It’s you that’s the shadow and the
ghost.
She passed a hand over her face. How had it come to this? She remembered their first meeting, at the dance at the tennis club, in 1942.

She had been standing with a friend and her eyes were drawn to David, talking to another man in a corner. He was classically handsome, trimly muscular, but there was a beauty, a gentleness, even
then a sadness to him, that drew her. He caught her eye, excused himself to his friend and came over and asked her to dance, with confidence but an odd sort of humility, too. Sarah wore her hair
shingled then – how long that fashion had lasted – and as they circled the floor to the music from the dance band she made one of her bold remarks, saying she wished she had his natural
curls. He smiled and said, with that quiet humour that seemed to have quite gone now, ‘You haven’t seen me in my curlers.’

They had married the following year, 1943, and shortly afterwards David got his two-year posting to the British High Commission Office in Auckland. David’s father was already in New
Zealand, an older, plumper version of David but with a broad Irish accent. The three of them had often discussed the darkening political situation at home; they were on the same side, they feared
the German alliance and the slow, creeping authoritarianism in England. But that was before the 1950 election; Churchill was still growling from the Opposition benches in Parliament, Attlee at his
side, and there was hope the situation might change at the next election. David’s father had wanted them to stay, New Zealand was determined to remain a democracy; there was a freedom of
thought and life there which was vanishing from England. Over the weeks Sarah had begun to be persuaded, though her heart ached at the thought of abandoning her family; it was David who in the end
said, ‘What’s going on can’t last, not in England. As long as we’re there we’ve got a voice and a vote. We should go back. It’s our country.’ They
hadn’t known yet that she was pregnant with Charlie; if they had, perhaps they would have stayed.

Sarah looked out of the window of the tube. It was a bright day, but London seemed as bleak and grimy as ever. She had a sudden memory of a trip she and David had taken to the
far west of New Zealand’s South Island, camping in a big old army tent they’d bought in Auckland. Their days were spent among the huge, remote mountains covered in great tree ferns. At
night they heard the sound of silvery mountain streams and little flightless birds snuffling in the undergrowth as the two of them huddled together, laughing at how dirty and untidy and ragged they
had become, like pioneers in the wilderness or Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.

She jumped as the tube juddered to a halt at Euston. She got up, putting her book in her briefcase. A shop outside the station was already selling holly. It was little more than a month to
Christmas, and soon the usual false bonhomie would begin. It was hard to bear when you had lost a child.

Sarah walked across the road to Friends House. As usual the Quaker headquarters had a policeman posted outside. The Quakers opposed the violence in the Empire, the war in Russia, and still
occasionally dared to hold sitdown demonstrations. Sarah remembered how when she was a girl she had thought of policemen as amiable, solid, protective. Now they were powerful, feared. In the
cinemas they were no longer portrayed as bumbling foils to private detectives but as heroes, tough men fighting Communists, American spies, Jewish-looking crooks. She showed her identity card and
her invitation to the meeting to the policeman, and he nodded her past.

The London Unemployed Aid Committee had been founded in the early forties to provide food parcels, clothes and holidays for the children of the four million unemployed. Sarah
was on the sub-committee that organized Christmas presents for needy children in the North. Sometimes she wondered how the parents must feel, passing on presents from unknown do-gooders; but
otherwise the children might get nothing. Sarah was good on committees, and occasionally she deputized for the Chairwoman, Mrs Templeman, a redoubtable businessman’s wife. Mrs Templeman was
firmly in charge today, though, a little round hat perched on her permed grey hair, a roll of thick pearls on her stout bosom. She nodded encouragingly as Sarah reported on her correspondence with
the big toy stores about discounts for bulk orders. Sarah said it was important to try to ensure the children got a variety of toys – they didn’t want every child in a Yorkshire pit
village to end up with the same teddy bear or toy train. She explained that ensuring variety was a bit more expensive, but would make a difference to the families. She smiled at Mr Hamilton, a
plump little man with a carnation in his buttonhole who was Charity Officer of a large toy store. He nodded thoughtfully, and Mrs Templeman watched her with approval.

After the meeting Mrs Templeman came over to Sarah, thanked her in her fulsome, patronizing way for all she had done and asked if she would like to come to lunch. She was wearing a heavy coat
and, round her neck, a fox-fur stole, a horrible thing with glass eyes that stared at Sarah, tail in its mouth. Mrs Templeman looked disappointed when she declined; Sarah knew that like her she was
bored and lonely, but when she had lunched with her before, Mrs Templeman talked endlessly, about her husband and her committees and her church activities – she was a committed Christian and
Sarah always felt she looked at her as a possible convert. Sarah didn’t feel she could put up with it today.

She didn’t want to go home, though. She had lunch on her own in a Corner House, then went for a walk; the weather was cold and clear, an icy tang in the air. Quite often, since Charlie
died, Sarah had gone into central London, to escape the loneliness of the house; usually she walked around the old streets of the city, with its warehouses and offices and the tiny narrow streets
Dickens had written about, the lovely Wren churches like St Dunstan’s and St Swithin’s where she would sit in quiet, if secular, contemplation. Today Sarah decided to walk to
Westminster Abbey; she hadn’t been there in years. She turned down Gower Street, past the great white tower of Senate House, the second-tallest building in London. The former London
University headquarters now housed the largest German embassy in the world, two giant swastika flags hanging halfway down the building from poles on the roof. Grim-faced Special Branch policemen
with sub-machine guns stood on guard all along the high railings with their covering of barbed wire in case of a Resistance attack; inside, an official in brown Nazi Party uniform stepped from a
limousine. He was being welcomed by a group of men, some in suits, a couple in military field-grey, one in the glistening black beetle’s carapace of the SS uniform. Sarah hurried past. When
uniformed German officials had started arriving in England in 1940 Sarah had been astonished by the vibrant slashing colours, the black swastika armbands with the bright red hooked cross worn in
its white circle; before, of course, she had only seen the Nazis on film, in black and white and grey. They knew how to use colour.

Walking along she thought, by contrast, how tired and cold and grey most people looked. A one-legged man sat on the pavement playing a violin, a cap at his feet,
1940 Veteran Please Help
scrawled on a piece of cardboard. The police would move him on presently; beggars had been a growing problem in London until a few years ago, when after a
Daily Mail
campaign they had been
forcefully removed to the ‘Back to the Land’ agricultural settlements Lloyd George had set up to grow food on wasteland in the countryside. She dropped half a crown in the man’s
cap. She noticed the depressing signs of poverty and oppression more and more these days. For years she had shut her eyes. When she had met David her days of political activism were already over,
it was too dangerous. She and David both thought, after they returned from New Zealand, that there was nothing to do but wait until things changed, as surely, eventually, they must.