Love and Money (32 page)

“Excuse please this
fuss
about my bicycle,” said Edelmann, smiling and pronouncing the very English
word fuss
with relishing pride. “But you see, this bicycle save my life. Therefore I love it greatly, you see.”

“Saved your life?” said Cainge on a rather sarcastic and unbelieving note.

“Yes,” said Edelmann, nodding. “And gave me liberty too, you see.”

“Liberty?” said Cainge, unable to be quite uninterested in this word.

“Excuse please,” said Edelmann, drawing up a chair and gently urging Cainge towards it. “You sit down please, I tell you.”

It was hard work listening to the story, for Edelmann's English became more excited and less comprehensible as he went on. But after a while Cainge forgot the irritation of this difficulty, and simply strained to hear what Edelmann told. The seizing of Edelmann's country by the great foreign power. The persecution, the spyings, the executions.

“My older son is killed.”

Maria and the younger boy got away into West Germany, but Edelmann left it too late and could not follow them. But he always intended to escape if he could, and accordingly he rode about on his bicycle every day, so that the Russians
were accustomed to seeing him. Then at last one day he drew near to the frontier. Suddenly he put on a terrific spurt! His feet on the pedals drove hard and fast! The bicycle did not fail him, but flew ahead! The frontier guards fired on him! (Here Edelmann imitated the hollow whine and final
tock
of the bullets in a most realistic and terrifying way.) One bullet touched his cheek! It was bad when the bullet seared his cheek, because he was startled and his hands slightly jumped on the bars, and for a moment the bicycle —as it were—Edelmann showed the action with swaying hands——

“Wobbled,” supplied Cainge.

“Wobbled,” agreed Edelmann, nodding. “Wobbled and almost fall. If I fall——” he pursed his lips and shrugged his shoulders—“I not now talk to you, Councillor Cainge, you see.”

But the bicycle regained its equilibrium and Edelmann drove it fiercely on and at last got safely through. Then for many long months he languished in one German prison while Maria and the boy languished in another.

“But you managed to keep the bicycle?” queried Cainge.

“Yes. They laugh, you see.”

For long months he and his wife did not know whether the other was alive or not. It was very bad. But at last they were reunited and got to England. To England! To freedom ! Full of hope, of energy, of fresh courage, of loving gratitude!

“We are grateful, you see. We wish to work for England. So we are hurt, we are grieved, we are greatly disappointed, you see, when you do not want us, Councillor Cainge.”

“I see,” said Cainge.

He paused. He hesitated. He swallowed. He stretched across and with his hand touched Edelmann's knee. Then, in a very quiet sober tone quite unlike his usual grating aggression, he began to tell Edelmann a tale he had not mentioned for many long years, namely that in that terrible black year of unemployment, 1931, when one-third of the whole adult population of Annotsfield was unemployed and
on the dole, his great friend, Jack Taylor, had gassed himself. Yes, put his head in the gas oven, after eleven months out of work, when his wife Ethel told him there was another baby coming. He'd borrowed a shilling for the gas meter from his friend Cainge, who happened to have managed to keep his job, and gassed himself. Cainge married the widowed Ethel and brought up Jack's three children, but all the same, you see, Jack had gassed himself from despair, what with the unemployment and the Means Test and the new baby coming; he had gassed himself with a shilling borrowed from his friend.

“There were too many men for the jobs in the textile trade in 1931,” said Cainge: “And now, just because they've full order books, like, they want to bring you folks in, which'll make a surplus of workers bigger than ever, next time trade slackens a bit. So you see, it's difficult like for me to welcome you folks.”

“Perhaps you are not quite just to those gentlemen?” said Edelmann mildly.

“Happen not. But I can't ever forget how Jack looked, you see.”

“I see,” said Edelmann, nodding.

“I reckon we both see,” said Cainge.

“Yes. We both see. What we both do, then?”

“I reckon there'll have to be a bit of give and take,” said Cainge.

“Dear Mr. Mayor,” wrote Cainge in his fierce spiky writing: “My Council have agreed that they should be represented on the new Committee concerned with the welfare of European Voluntary Workers, and I shall be happy to represent them thereon. Yours faithfully, A. Cainge.”

This electronic edition published in July 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader

Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP

Copyright © Phyllis Bentley

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ISBN: 9781448204151
eISBN: 9781448203567

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