Читать книгу Five Silver Daughters - Louis Golding - Страница 22

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So Hannah Silver duly wore her pearls the evening of the day she became a house-owner, like her father, and her father’s father before him. She was a little fuddled with pleasure and excitement, but she presided over the tea-with-lemon like a duchess. She had even made varennikis that evening, which her mother used to make of old time, purses of dough, stuffed with kasha and dripping with chicken-fat. They were a little underdone or overdone, none of them were quite right. But everyone ate them with noises of exaggerated enjoyment, she beamed so happily as she passed them round.

They did not know—she only dimly knew herself—that Shevka and Gallia were part of her enjoyment. She was getting her own back, at long last, on Shevka and Gallia. Perhaps at this very moment, over in Terkass, they had acid on the stomach, or twinges in the knee, they knew in their hearts that Hannah was paying them back.

Here she was, Hannah Dobkin that used to be, sitting in her own house, with a grandson and grand-daughter already, and four other daughters—she could marry them each twice over to-morrow if she wanted to. And friends on all sides who had come into wish her mazel tov. With her own hands she had made varennikis for them. Yes, Mrs. Emmanuel, thank you, in a lucky hour they sent me two or three chickens round to choose from; I don’t have to go and buy them myself in the market. A penny or twopence in the pound, what difference does that make to me?

The pearls are round my neck, Shevka. Ho! Ho! If you could see me now, Gallia, you’d smile on the other side of your face. Ho! Ho! That’s it! Bandits! You tried to steal my pearls! Yes, Mrs. Billig, they were my mother’s. She wore them under the canopy when she was a fifteen-year-old bride. Have I told you the story how Sam got them back for me? I must some day!

Ponski, have another varenniki. And you too, Pontrevitch. There are plenty more in the scullery.

You couldn’t get away from it. There wasn’t quite so extremist an atmosphere about the Silver kitchen nowadays. After all, when you have a hostess in a pearl necklace dispensing bounty, and she’s a property-owner, you can’t say it’s what it used to be. The really intransigent spirits dropped off altogether. Polednik, who was the most intransigent of them all, turned up quite irregularly; he was always going off somewhere for months at a time. Of course Polednik had never been an anarchist. He had always emphatically not been an anarchist. Besides, he was officially courting Susan, so his politics were neither here nor there. A bitter futile little man, most of them thought him—a serpent biting himself with his own fangs. He’d die of poison one of these days.

Polednik was courting Susan, as they put it, and Smirnof was courting Sarah. So that, whatever the secret feelings of each for the other were, neither allowed the existence of the other to affect his behaviour. Or what is more accurate, neither showed himself aware of the other’s existence. If that seems improbable, it might be remembered that many a husband and wife, sister and sister, have co-existed within narrower boundaries, for many more years, with few or even none to share that incarceration, and have acted without a moment’s respite as if the other were imponderable air.

Polednik and Smirnof remained as remote from each other in the small crowded kitchen as if Smirnof were a turnkey in a Kiev prison and Polednik a prisoner of the Tsar at Tobolsk. And Ponski and Pontrevitch went on reading their poems about their absent mothers; and a shade of pink crept into Dan Jamieson’s red tie; and though it was rumoured that Joe Tishler had once manufactured a bomb, he made it clearer as time went on he wasn’t interested in manufacturing anything more dangerous than overmantels nowadays. As for Mr. Emmanuel, he was less embarrassed than he used to be at the thought of being seen quite patently entering the Silver house by the front door. He admitted that the cause of Love had not triumphed as signally as he had hoped it might during the last year or two, what with these troubles in South America and North Africa, and the full-dress wars in the Balkans; but he was pretty easy in his mind that by the end of next year the sun of perpetual peace would have dawned over the five continents. Silver wasn’t at all sure that the same sun could dawn all over the five continents simultaneously. Smirnof suggested gently he had a feeling that the biggest war in history was going to break out in a year or two. The prospect didn’t seem to disturb Smirnof, any more than an astronomer is disturbed by the prospect that on such and such a date a comet is going to become visible whose existence he has worked out by a process of mathematical reasoning. Perhaps he even derived a certain satisfaction from the thought of the coming war, for some reason not easy to divine; for his voice was unusually bland as he made his prophecy, and his eyes were quite amiable. But the young man, Harry Stonier, when he heard Smirnof talk of war as a thing purely of political and commercial stresses, a thing totally disrelated from the flesh and blood and bones of the human units that were involved in it, went pale with wretchedness, and his eyes grew hard with anger.

But, of course, the conversation wasn’t usually as serious as that. It couldn’t be, with so many Silver daughters about the place, and a couple of Silver grandchildren. There was an air of comfort and plenty at number eleven. The old sofa had long been re-upholstered, there were new chairs, a beautiful new wallpaper, with not merely a wainscoting but a dado. There was as much tea-with-lemon as before, but there was brandy too, even on weekdays.

For the Silver-Smirnof firm was progressing the whole time. They took over a factory in Rochdale Road which had been damaged by fire. Smirnof was convinced that the damage was not so serious as it looked. The windows were all out, of course, and a good deal of floor space was unsound. But a certain amount was not. He thought quite a lot could be done with a plank here and there. Silver was rather frightened of the rent, and quite terrified of the rates and taxes; but when Smirnof began to show him profits that would have justified a considerably bigger outlay he felt that once again he had triumphantly vindicated his own sense of initiative, and that Smirnof’s diffidence was rather mean-minded. The firm now dealt with the biggest wholesale houses in the trade, and began, moreover, to develop an important foreign department. Smirnof was quite a traveller; he had travelled quite a lot for a number of years, though he never opened out on the subject; or, indeed, on any subject. He still had a Russian passport, but he had put in for naturalisation some time ago. One day he might be in Doomington. A few days later, Sarah might receive a post-card from him from The Hague or Christiania. By a carelessness which was quite unusual with him, he once left his passport on his desk among some circulars. Silver gleefully carried it off, and showed it to the guests in his kitchen.

“Look!” he was saying. “Would you think such a thing? Constantinople! Constantinople!” he repeated, marvelling, as one might say Atlantis or Xanadu. “Constantinople, eh?” And he held up the passport for them all to see.

Smirnof came in at that moment. The faint fluff of his red hair grew stiff with anger. His stomach trembled. “Give it back to me!” he said. “Who asked you to show it round?”

It was not at all the tone of voice in which a junior partner should speak to a senior partner. Silver wondered whether he ought not to try and feel indignant. The same moment, or a moment later, he found he was intensely ashamed of himself. There was nothing that filled him with so acute a sense of shame, whether he felt himself or another person to be guilty of it, as the tampering with another’s privacy.

“I’m sorry!” he said. He intended the words to be sincere but dignified. They were nothing but a sad croak.

“Oh, please, please, that’s all right, Mr. Silver. How about a game of chess? Shall I give you a pawn or a bishop? I insist. Let it be a bishop!”

Perhaps he shouldn’t have given away quite so much as a bishop—Silver won with ease. He often won, though Smirnof had the air and the style of quite a good player; and sometimes, when he seemed off his guard, so to speak, he would simply obliterate Silver. Silver knew that, taking it by and large, Smirnof was a better player; and that made it all the more gratifying that he beat Smirnof so often.

“After all,” he would explain, “I was playing chess, Smirnof, when you was in your cradle. Oh, well!” he sighed happily. It was a good world, after all. Business was going grand. Look at May, sitting there on her stool by the fire, did you ever see a skin like that, like a jug of milk? Hannah had gone upstairs to put her pearls on. Here she was, wearing them, looking as pleased and handsome as Queen Mary. It wasn’t a holiday or a Saturday or anything, and there she was with the pearls. Well, why shouldn’t she? He would buy her some more pearls some day. Some day they might go and live in a bigger house, too. It had already been suggested once or twice, by Esther and one or two others.

No. The thought of going to live anywhere else suddenly made him feel sad and empty. No. The way Hannah loved the house, it was a pleasure to see, she wouldn’t go and live anywhere else.

But she shall have more pearls some day. And the girls will have fine dresses, too. Business is going grand. It was a good thing getting in that second band-knife in the Rochdale Road factory. How many garments had they checked up last week? Five thousand? Was it possible? Five thousand?

“Have a cigar, Smirnof!” he commanded. “And you too, and you too!” he insisted, passing the box round.