Читать книгу Five Silver Daughters - Louis Golding - Страница 25

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By the time Esther had waited twenty-five minutes in Smirnof’s office, some of her fury had evaporated. It was a small office, but it had a carbolic smell of efficiency. It wasn’t easy to go on being furious in it from minute to minute. Smirnof was out interviewing a contractor, and there was nothing to do but wait. She refused to see her father. Her father was relieved that she refused to see him. She waited. Smirnof arrived fifteen minutes later.

He was in the room before she was aware he had opened the door and closed it behind him, almost as if he had not come in at all.

“Esther,” he said, “how nice to see you. It would have been nicer this evening, after office hours. I have a big order to work out; it must be worked out to the sixteenth of an inch.” He said it all so pleasantly, it was difficult to take any offence. He looked at his watch. “How many minutes would you like me to give you?”

The thing she had come to see him about was, however, a matter not of minutes but of a lifetime. The watch threw her heart up inside her and tossed it over, like an omelette tossed in a frying-pan.

“Put your watch away,” she bade him. “I have come to talk about my sister.”

He pursed his mouth as if he intended to whistle, but no sound left it. He sat down and drummed with his fingers on his knee.

“Well?” she asked, a little flustered by his silence.

“Well?” he repeated. “It was you who came to talk to me,” he reminded her gently.

“Sarah told me to-day you two are going to get married. In a register office!” she added with a snort.

“That is accurate,” he said.

“Oh, is it? I’m not so sure! Look here, Smirnof——”

“I’m looking!”

“Well, it’s a shame! To get married in a register office like a girl from an orphanage! I’ve never heard such a thing! In our family we don’t get married in register offices. Do you know who we are? My grandfather’s one of the richest men in Russia. He has farms and wine-businesses and we keep horses. And now my father, too, he’s becoming a big man! I heard last week they’re going to ask him to stand for Town Councillor as soon as his papers come through. When we have a wedding in our family, it’s going to be a wedding, I tell you. With champagne and bridesmaids and not gold rings—platinum. And if you think——”

He saw she was gradually working herself up like a dervish revolving more and more swiftly on one toe.

“Please!” he bade her. “Please!”

But she went on for another three minutes, five minutes. Such a shame, in a register office. Uncle Alex—in England they’d have made him a Sir a long time ago. Champagne. Scandal. Scandal. Bridesmaids.

He leaned towards her and touched her large red cheek with the cold tip of his forefinger. She stopped. There was a white place in the redness, where he withdrew his finger. Then the blood flushed back upon it angrily and obliterated it.

“What—what——” she stammered.

“Listen,” he said. “You’re a clever woman.”

“If you think you’re going to get round me——”

“No, I mean what I say. You’re a clever woman. You said your father’s becoming a big man. Is that so?”

“Yes, well?”

“I think you know that I’ve got a certain amount to do with that. You know that your father and I work very well together, don’t you?”

“Yes, oh, yes, I know that.”

“You know very well that if I left the business, things wouldn’t go so well.”

“I know you’re clever,” she said reluctantly.

“Now listen. It’ll do you no good to be up against me, and it’ll do me no good if ... I want you on my side, Esther.”

“What do you mean? What good will that do me?”

“You know perfectly well what good that will do you, and what good it’s done you already. It’s only because our firm’s been doing so well Pliskin made your husband his manager. When our firm does a little better, Joe will buy Pliskin out. He’ll want capital; or credit, at any rate.”

“Listen, Smirnof,” she said. Her anger had quite evaporated. She eyed him shrewdly. “What are you after?”

“What I’m after?” He looked her straight in the eyes, with those eyes which were as grey and vague as cloud. “It’s quite simple.” But he did not go on. He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. Then he opened them again. “You see,” he said, “I’m so tired.”

“Tired? What do you take me for? You work very hard for a tired man!”

“No, it wouldn’t be easy to explain.” His head fell forward on to his chest, as if he were falling asleep, there, before her eyes. He was speaking so low she could hardly hear him. It was as if she had stumbled upon him, who knew so well how to keep his own counsel, at a moment when he was in intimate communion with his own heart. “I have my chance,” he said. “I know I must work hard. Then I’ll rest.” He opened his eyes again. “What I’m after?” he repeated. “I told you, it’s quite simple. I think”—he was evidently calculating—“I think—I want to make, yes, a clear twenty-five thousand pounds.” He was about to continue. Then he stopped. It was as if he saw before him the figures inscribed on phantom gold-sacks, the sum of money he had, so to speak, already accumulated. He pondered them a moment. The mouth sagged a little; the chin dropped; there was weakness in both. But the eyes grew hard, alert. They were windows through which one might have looked into that large skull. And one might have seen? If one had the fore-seeing eyes, one might have seen green-shaded lights burning chalkily down upon account-books in which columns of figures were marched and counter-marched in subtle strategy. One might have seen men bidding and outbidding under an echoing dome, men bent down towards machines that ticked and ticked like an infernal machine awaiting its moment, while yards and yards of tape emerged from their entrails, and encircled their feet and thighs and bound their arms to the waist, till the grip that held them was more inexorable than the grip of the snakes that held Laocoön.

A crafty smile sat about the corners of Smirnof’s mouth. A thin circlet of bluish-whiteness showed under the slightly raised eyelids.

He was lost. He was lost. In that moment he sealed the unrepealable doom.

“I think”—his voice was dry and faint—“I think it should be thirty-five thousand clear.”

“Yes,” he went on, “I shall need that.” His voice was still so low that it was almost inaudible. “I’m so tired, you see. I deserve some rest now. I’ll take her away to the South somewhere, where the sun’s hot and the sea’s blue and warm, like it was that time in Yalta. And there’ll be fine music, opera and a famous orchestra. We’ll go to Naples. No, not Naples. That’s too near. Buenos Aires, I think. Or Rio. Yes, it will be Rio. In the evening, in the cafés, when the moonlight comes through the palm-leaves, I’ve heard say the little cut-throat players in the cheap orchestras play great music. Beethoven, Handel. They’ll play the saraband from Rinaldo. How does it go now? ‘Lascia, ch’io pianga ...’ ” He hummed a few notes and beat time to them almost invisibly with one hand. Then he was silent.

They sat in silence for some minutes. Then Esther sighed heavily, as if her breath, too, had been labouring in some state of trance.

“Yes,” she muttered, “we’ll be working with you, me and my husband. I trust you to do the right thing by us before you go off. I know you will. You’re an honest man.”

“You can trust me,” he assured her softly. Her eyes were wide open now. He stroked the back of her hand with the tips of two fingers. She did not draw her hand away.

“I know I can trust you,” she repeated. “You’re clever, but you’re honest. Yet why ... yet why ...” She was finding it difficult to formulate what she meant—or what she felt, rather.

“Yet why?” he said after her. “I think I know what you want to ask me.”

The words came in a sudden rush to her lips. “If you’re so clever, what do you need him for? Can’t you do it all yourself?”

“I can’t do it all myself,” he said softly. “I can’t do anything myself. Did I look as if I could do anything myself—that night I came, and he made me his book-keeper?”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve tried. If you knew how hard I’ve tried. They won’t let me, not me by myself. They listen to me for some time, and they say yes, and then they look at me, and it’s as if I wasn’t there. They forget they said yes; or they say no, quite sharp, and get down to their papers again. But with him.... I always knew if I could meet a man like him ... some people think he’s soft. But he’s not soft. The centre of him is something like ... like steel. No, not like steel. Something that won’t rust or wear out. Diamond....”

“I think you’re talking nonsense.”

“I think not. Together we can get anywhere.” He lifted his voice. “Anywhere, I tell you.”

Then suddenly, acutely, she remembered her sister. She remembered who the woman was he had threatened to take away to world’s end. It was Sarah—her own sister, Sarah. She remembered what she had come for. After all, Sarah was a Jewish woman. It was not enough, it was not the end of everything, that Joe should buy out Pliskin’s business; or that her father should become one of the biggest men in the trade. It was not enough. There had been no piety in her family on either side of it for two or three generations, it was true. But they had been Jews, they had gone on marrying Jews, in blind obedience to a law it had been unthinkable to question.

If Sarah should marry a Jew, there would be no talk of register offices. There would be a canopy and a cantor and a glass broken, and crying and kissing and laughing, and Jewish children and circumcisions and all the timeless intimacy of Jewishness. If Sarah should marry a Jew ...

“Why, oh, why,” she burst out, almost weeping with annoyance, “must you marry Sarah?”

“Because I must have rest,” he said.

“Rest!” she snorted. “Rest! But you’re not a Jew!”

“No!” he answered shortly. “I am not!” Then he started again, very quietly: “If it’s a matter of interest to you, I am half a Jew. My mother was a Jewess!”

“So it is true!” she cried hopefully. “I heard that already. Well, listen. Perhaps—perhaps——” The thought she had in her head was not too easy to enunciate.

“Yes?”

“Perhaps it might be possible,” she brought out, the words tumbling over each other, “for you to marry in a synagogue? I mean, you needn’t do anything. But for the marriage you could say you were a Jew. See? Then nobody——”

“I think not, Esther!” he interrupted her coldly. “I think not! It would not be suitable.”

“And why not suitable?” She was up in arms. “Wasn’t Beaconsfield a Jew? If it was good enough for Beaconsfield——”

“Please be quiet!” he said. He looked at her with distaste. “It’s got nothing to do with that. It wouldn’t be suitable because—because my father was a priest, an unfrocked Roman Catholic priest.”

“A priest! A galluch!” She savoured the full hideousness of it by rolling on her tongue the Yiddish word. It was like a pellet of wormwood. Her stomach heaved with the stench of it.

She rose suddenly from her chair. “Go and get married,” she cried, “anywhere! In a pigsty, if you like!”