The Lemon Tree (18 page)

He felt better, and was able to write to her that he and Simon had got the barley crop into the barn, one day
before a heavy rainstorm carrying hail in it had destroyed neighbours’ fields. Yet, when he thought of Wallace Helena’s new world, the sense of inadequacy resurfaced. Against the comforts of a city, he had little to offer her, except himself, and the continuation of a harsh, uncertain life in a climate which would test anybody’s fortitude.

After her visit to Mr Benson, Wallace Helena asked the cabbie to put her down at the gates of the Lady Lavender. She walked slowly through the wicket gate. To her left was the carpenter’s shop, and she glanced through its open doorway. The boxes in which the soap was transported were made here, and at one end a young wheelwright repaired the delivery vans and their wheels. Heaps of wood shavings and sawdust lay in every corner of the shed, and, seeing them, she realized what a fire hazard they represented.

Without hesitation, she walked in and told the elderly carpenter to sweep them up and dispose of them. ‘They could cause a fire,’ she said sharply.

The man had taken off his cap when she entered, and now he scratched his head, while he gaped at her. ‘Never in me life have I bin told by a woman what to do in me own shop,’ he told his wife that night. ‘Who’s she to tell me what to do?’

Wallace Helena scouted round the rest of the shop. The young, dark-haired wheelwright ignored her and gave earnest attention to a wheel he was refitting to a light van; he didn’t want any trouble.

As it became apparent that she knew the names of most of the tools lying around the shop and what they were for, the carpenter began to recover himself, and when she returned to his side to remind him again to sweep up, he stammered, ‘Mr Al-Khoury were goin’ to get me an
apprentice, Ma’am. Me last one’s gone to be a journeyman in another place; done well for himself, he has. An apprentice’d clean up for me, like. I gotta lot of work here.’

‘Which Mr Al-Khoury?’

‘The ould fella – Mr James, Ma’am.’

‘I see. I’ll see what can be done. Meanwhile, perhaps Mr Tasker could spare his labourer, Alfie, to sweep up for you. I’ll speak to him.’

He heard the note of authority in her voice and muttered, ‘Yes, Ma’am.’

The stable was next door, and she realized that she had not yet visited it, though from the wage sheets she knew the names of the employees working there. The stableman was eating his lunchtime bread and cheese, while he leaned against the open doorway. A heavy, redfaced man, he straightened up as she swept in. Lifting up her skirts, she walked the length of the building and returned to storm at him. How could he expect the horses to be healthy with weeks of manure underfoot? It was enough to make employees ill, as well. She ordered an immediate clean-up and the establishment of a manure heap in a corner of the yard which did not seem to be used. Horse manure was valuable to farms; she would find a market for it and have it collected weekly. ‘It’s a wonder that the city has not complained at such a conglomeration,’ she raged. ‘How do you dispose of it at present – when it gets up to your knees?’ she asked with heavy sarcasm.

The man hung his head sullenly and did not reply. In fact, he periodically sold it himself; he considered it a perk which went with his job. But he wasn’t going to tell a bloody bitch like her.

There had been a solitary horse in the stable and Wallace Helena had taken a good look at it. Now, finding that the man was not going to reply to her, she said, ‘And
give that animal a hot bran mash. I’ll take another look at him in the morning.’

The man lifted his head and looked her angrily in the eye. ‘I done it,’ he replied.

Wallace Helena pursed her lips into a thin line. ‘Right. I’ll come in the morning.’

‘Sour as a bloody lemon, she is,’ this man told
his
wife, and then added thoughtfully, ‘Seems she knows somethin’ about horses, though.’

Outside the stable, Wallace Helena paused to scrape some of the muck of the stable off her boots. She sighed, as she rubbed the sides of her boots against cobblestones which she noticed were heavy with grease, presumably from the barrels of fat and oil stored on the far side of the yard. Here was another fire hazard, she considered uneasily.

Before moving, she pulled the hatpins from her hat and took it off, to let the light breeze cool a face flushed with anger. Not only did she feel hot, she felt nauseated from the reek of the stable. She thought she might vomit, and she turned to the office intending to run over to the latrine behind it.

She almost knocked down a stocky, well-built young man in a black suit and bowler hat. Off balance, he stumbled and dropped the carpet bag he was carrying. He was saved from a fall by the vicelike grip of Wallace Helena’s long fingers on his arm. As he steadied himself, she took a large breath in an effort to quell her nausea.

Though the collision was not his fault, the man apologized for bumping into her, as he mechanically bent down to pick up his bag again. She nodded acknowledgment, and hurried away to the privy. He was left with the vague impression of a very thin, plain woman with a sickly, sallow face, dressed in shabby black and carrying a small hat; he assumed that she was the
wife of one of the workmen, bringing in his midday meal.

Only when Benjamin Al-Khoury was discussing a minor complaint with Mr Tasker, and Miss Harding’s name came up, did the likely identity of the woman in the yard occur to him.

The bitterness that had haunted him since his father’s death welled up once again. His father had failed both him and his mother; and he wondered for the hundredth time why his parents had never married. They were obviously devoted to each other and the home was a happy one. His own illegitimacy had been well known in the neighbourhood and he had suffered the usual snide remarks flung at such children; presumably his mother also had had her share of opprobrium. It didn’t make sense.

And now this wretched woman had been dug up by the lawyers as the legal residual legatee of his father’s Estate; his patrimony was going to a cousin he had never heard of, because she was the only legitimate descendant of the two brothers. And, to add to his sense of a world turned upside down, she was presumably his employer – unless she sold the business, as expected, in which case he could lose his job as the new owner moved in his own choice of men. It was not a pleasant prospect.

He left Mr Tasker amid his bubbling cauldrons and went to see Mr Bobsworth, with whom he intended to have lunch. He was met by the information that Miss Harding would see him at two o’clock.

‘Blow her,’ he muttered, though he realized he could not put off meeting her much longer.

As if reading his thoughts, Mr Bobsworth said, ‘Better to get it over with, lad.’

‘What’s she like?’

‘A Tartar,’ replied Mr Bobsworth gloomily. ‘Thinks she owns the place.’

‘She does, old man. Let’s go and eat. I’ll leave the orders I’ve got with Le Fleur – he can send them to be made up.’

‘I’ll check them as soon as we return,’ Mr Bobsworth promised. ‘I always label everything myself, you know that. Want a job doing well? Do it yourself.’

It was old Bobsworth’s usual remark, so Benjamin let it pass.

In the shabby dockside café, crowded with seamen, Customs men and men from the warehouses nearby, though no dockers – they had their own, even smaller, eating houses, where the stench of the cargoes they handled was more acceptable – Mr Bobsworth found his usual quiet corner table. They hung up their bowlers, undid their jackets and sat down. Unasked, a florid woman in a coloured apron put a pint of bitter in front of each of them. ‘Like to order?’ she asked, a stub of pencil poised over a grubby notebook.

They both ordered steak and kidney pudding, and, while they were waiting, Benjamin brought up the problem of the rabid competition in the Manchester area, where the cotton mills consumed a massive amount of soap.

‘This man Lever’s started to wrap his
bar
soap in bright yellow paper with
Sunlight
printed all over it. Even his delivery vans are plastered with sunrays and the same word. And he’s advertising “Don’t just ask for soap – ask for
Sunlight
.” He’s making a hole in our market, I can tell you.’

‘We make better soap,’ responded Mr Bobsworth uncompromisingly. ‘Tasker makes better soap than anybody.’

‘Yes, but we’re not telling everybody that – and women seem to love having their washing soap wrapped.’

‘We wrap our toilet soap.’

‘In mouldy grey paper – beige for the cinnamon and
fuller’s earth! Anyway, it’s plain bar soap that everything gets scrubbed with – it’s our bread and butter. I’m sure Dad would have done something about it.’

‘Your father had in mind to branch out into lotions and scents for working-class women. He’d even thought of a kind of paste to tint the skin – cream colour for pale skins, pink for rosy youth – packed in chemists’ little bottles and boxes. Vanity! Nothing but vanity, that’s what I say.’

‘Girls in the mills have a bit of money to spend, a few pence here and there. Dad would’ve been selling them something better than gin.’

‘He had a job persuading their mams to let them have a bath with scented soap – and get the mams themselves to put a bit of lavender on their Sunday handkerchiefs.’ Mr Bobsworth was a Roman Catholic and did not think much of Methodist austerity. On the other hand, he did not like to think of his wife and daughters painting their faces like actresses or worse; so he was quick to condemn cosmetics.

Plates of steak and kidney pudding were thrust under their noses. Though the pudding looked as flaccid as chicken waiting to be cooked, the aroma was delicious, and both men were hungry. They were silent as they ate their way through the steaming mass.

Afterwards, Benjamin stretched himself over the back of his chair, and sighed. Reverting to the subject of their business, he said dejectedly, ‘It’s not much use our discussing what we should do about Lever. It’s out of our hands. Whoever buys us out will have to decide. And we’ll be lucky if we have jobs.’

Over his beer mug, Mr Bobsworth made a glum face, and Benjamin went on, ‘I don’t know why she bothered to come over. It’d have been a lot quicker if Benson had sent her all the papers and arranged the sale for her. Wish I could afford to buy it – I’d make something of it.’

Mr Bobsworth put down his mug. ‘She’s a rum type,’ he said. ‘She’s queer enough to think she could run the place herself. She’s bin lookin’ over everything.’

‘A woman? What a hope!’

‘Well, she’s not like any other woman I ever met. She’s smart at figures, I can tell you. Tasker says she’s got a huge farm in Canada and runs it. I’d say the question is, does she want to live here?’

‘Maybe somebody’ll marry her – and take over the works as well,’ Benjamin offered. He drained his mug and stood up, while he felt in his pocket for a tip for the waitress. He tucked two copper coins under his empty plate.

Mr Bobsworth rose, too. He wondered suddenly if Benjamin had the idea of marrying Miss Harding, and so gain control of the soapery. Perhaps he should remind the boy that, only a few years back, a law had been passed to protect the property of married women; it wasn’t so easy nowadays to take over their assets. In any case, he hoped that Benji would fancy one of his own daughters.

He said soberly, ‘Frankly, Benji, she’ll be lucky if she finds anybody who wants to marry her. She’s as thin as a flagpole – no comfortable pillow for a man’s head! And she can come over the acid like some spinster headmistress of a girls’ seminary.’

‘Well, I’ve got to see her this afternoon, so we’d better hurry.’ His usually lively expression drooped; he was suddenly aware that he had not shaved well that morning, and he supposed that his usual blue-black bristle was already visible. If he wanted to make a good impression, he should have gone home first, to shave and change his suit, creased with a week’s travelling. Then he decided that it did not really matter; the person to worry about and smarten up for was the man who would buy the soapery.

Before he had set out on his trip to Manchester, Benji’s mother, Eleanor Al-Khoury, had told him that, during the night, she had remembered his father saying that Charles Al-Khoury had a
daughter
. She looked exhausted from much weeping, and she added, as she wiped her eyes with a sodden handkerchief, ‘When your uncle died in Chicago, your dad wanted to bring his wife and child over here, to live with us. I was that upset about – about your dad’s passing, that I forgot. Funny to think you could’ve bin brought up together, in this house.’ Her nose was running and she sniffed:

He had looked down at her rather helplessly. ‘It doesn’t make any difference, Mum. It was my recollection, too. But I was put off by the name
Wallace
; I thought I’d been mistaken. Now, don’t you cry any more. I’ll look after you, you know that.’ He hugged her, and in hope of comforting her a little, he went on, ‘When I get back, we’ll go and find a real nice memorial for Dad’s grave.’

She rubbed the tears off her fair lashes, and said as bravely as she could, ‘Oh, aye. We’ll do that, luv.’

‘I’ll ask Mrs Tasker to step in, as I go down the street,’ he promised, as he kissed her goodbye. ‘I don’t want you to be too lonely.’

‘I’ll be all right,’ she told him, her face so sad he could have wept himself. She shut the door quietly after him and began to weep some more.

A few minutes later, a concerned Mrs Tasker arrived.
She had a seed cake, freshly baked, balanced on her ungloved hand, and she trotted straight into the big kitchen and proceeded to provide tea and kindly sympathy, while the bereaved woman sat by the fire and sang the praises of her Jamie. Mrs Tasker had heard it all several times in the previous few weeks, but she felt that the more Eleanor wept the quicker she would recover. She made the tea very strong.

Mr Tasker had said that the Will held, no matter whether Eleanor was married to James Al-Khoury or not. But Eleanor knew that a wedding cancelled out earlier Wills; if she’d been married and there had been no other Will, Benji would have inherited; and she mentally belaboured herself for accepting the status quo for so long. She wept not only for James Al-Khoury but also for her sadly humiliated son.

While she sipped the tea made by her friend, she recounted to her the story of how the handsome, cheery young James Al-Khoury, who spoke English in a proper funny fashion, had come to her front door in search of a room to rent. ‘He hadn’t even the money to pay for a week in advance,’ she said with a dim smile. ‘But he looked that handsome, I took a chance on ’im. Put ’im in me best room – front ground floor. And, aye, he were lovely.’

Ten months later, little Benji had been born, as Mrs Tasker knew, though it was before she had come to live in the same street. Eleanor must’ve endured a fair amount of backhanded whispering over that, Mrs Tasker meditated, as Eleanor droned on. Why hadn’t the stupid woman insisted on marriage if she loved the man so much? And he was lovable, there was no doubt. She wondered suddenly if James had left a wife in Lebanon, to whom he had intended to return in due course.

‘He charmed the hearts of the women round about,’ Eleanor reminisced tenderly, ‘and they bought his soap,
what he made in me cellar, without hesitation.’ She stopped and then smiled at her friend, who had joined her by the kitchen fire. ‘Then he met your George – and we never looked back, did we? And just when it seemed nothing could stop him, he goes and gets a heart attack.’ Her face became ugly with grief and again the tears trickled down her lined face. ‘You take care of your Georgie, Sarah. He int gettin’ any younger.’

‘Oh, aye. He’s all right,’ she replied with more certainty than she felt. George worked very hard and was on his feet all day.

‘Our Benji’s got his dad’s charm. Not so fine looking, but a nice lad,’ Eleanor said after drinking her tea down to the dregs. She put her cup down in the saucer, as a memory struck her of Benji coming home from school with a bruised cheek and an oozing nose. He must’ve been about nine, she thought, and a couple of bullies had called him an Arab and a bastard. Lucky for Benji, he was a heavily built boy and he had fought back. After that, Jamie had shown him a few ways to defend himself which must have been shudderingly painful to the recipient of the blows. Gradually, the boys left him alone – too alone. His best friend had been George Tasker’s eldest, Albert, who’d gone away to be a soldier. In India, now, he was.

Mrs Tasker was fond of Benji and agreed with his mother that he was a nice lad. She laughed unexpectedly, and added, ‘Maybe he could charm Miss Harding into marrying him; then he’d get the soap works right into his hand.’

Eleanor forgot her grief for a moment. ‘You’re right. But you never can tell with young people, and I’m told she’s quite old.’ She put down her cup into the hearth and stood up. ‘I must start tea for me gentlemen. They all like a hot tea.’

‘How many have you got?’

‘Three of ’em. All very respectable.’

Mrs Tasker sighed. Lodgers would be a lot of work for Eleanor and she nearly fifty years old. ‘Lucky for you, you own the house,’ she said. ‘Though I’m sure Benji’ll take care of you.’

‘For sure he will,’ Eleanor agreed. ‘But me dad thought I’d be alone all me life, so he made sure I had the house. He left it in good order, too, just like his auntie left it to him. We always had lodgers; it kept him in his old age.’ She began to take out her mixing bowl, rolling pin and wooden spoons. ‘And he had a water closet put in the back yard,’ she added proudly. ‘I started looking for good lodgers the minute our Jamie was buried, in case Benji loses his job. Gives us a bit of independence, it does.’ She took out her scales and began to weigh flour for pastry. Through the dust rising from the shaken-out flour, Sarah Tasker watched her friend’s face. It was pitifully woebegone.

To cheer her up, Sarah said, ‘Well, let’s hope Miss Wallace Helena falls for Benji. Then you could live like a lady, like Jamie managed for you these last few years.’