Читать книгу Five Silver Daughters - Louis Golding - Страница 29

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Alexander Smirnof married Sarah Silver, without splendour, in the August before the War. Even if they had not got married in a register office, there could not have been much splendour about a marriage organised from Oleander Street. To have set up the marriage canopy in the Cromwellian fastnesses of the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue, to have celebrated the nuptials in the Convention Rooms on Begley Hill Road, would have gone some way towards appeasing Esther’s appetite for magnificence. But not the whole way.

She wanted the family to get out of Oleander Street as the Winbergs had moved out of Magnolia Street—she wanted them to move out of Longton altogether. Her ambitions were high, but she felt that no ambition could be so high that the secret conspiracy between Alexander Smirnof and Esther Tishler could not realise it for her. She thought, with longing, of the grand castellated mansions near Baxter’s Moor, the smart villas in Didsbury. The family would go first, and she and Joe would follow; they might even live in a wing of the same big house, or have a house built special for themselves in the grounds. That was exactly what Uncle Alex had recently done, as she had been informed by her cousin, Leon’s Esther, the one who was the same age as herself. Leon’s Esther wrote quite friendly letters nowadays, every two or three months, ever since it had become clear that her Aunt Hannah’s family was doing quite well, too, over in England. There used to be a couple of two-roomed peasants’ hovels up against the lower end of the orchard of the big house in Terkass. But Alex had pulled them down and put up a neat little bungalow in their place. For his wife and daughters disliked being away from the family at large during the winter months when all the windows were puttied up, and the farm was as dead and stuffy as an empty kennel. And he found it useful himself, too, when he went to a party at one of the fine Gentile houses in the town.

Yes, Esther would have liked a bungalow, too. A bungalow for herself and Joe in the grounds, and father and mother established rather feudally in a main house with an iron-studded front gate, and greenhouses—she thought she would like greenhouses. The Silvers would keep house in a style worthy of the Dobkins of Terkass. The anarchists would not follow them there.

There were only two of the sisters actually at home now, Esther and Sarah being married, and Elsie on tour. Susan and May did not back Esther up energetically in her idea of moving the family from Oleander Street, because they did not believe in backing Esther up in anything. But they did nothing to oppose her. Susan would have liked a large work-room all to herself, for her books, pamphlets and documents had accumulated alarmingly. But she did not feel strongly in the matter. She did not feel her roots deeply planted in Doomington, though she would rather have lived in Doomington than in Buxton, say, for Doomington was, at all events, a town of the proletariat. She still worked in the office of a big foundry, though her father had made it clear to her she could stay at home all day long, if she liked, with her studies. But she preferred to keep herself rather than be kept by money made out of the exploitation of her fellow-workers. She preferred, also, to maintain her contact, such as it was, with the workers at the foundry. That gave her more data, she realised, than a whole library of books. She had already made one or two week-end excursions with Polednik to London, to talk things over with the Russian exiles. She intended to go to Paris and Basle some time this year. She hoped she might some day get enough time off to go so far as Cracow, whence Polednik had returned not many months ago, having conferred with certain of the leaders of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in exile—Zinoviev, and Ulianof (usually called by his writing-name, Lenin), and certain others. There was a general air of ferment in Russia and along the Russian frontiers. The years of savage reaction that had followed the abortive revolution of 1905 had grown slack through the excess of their tension. The waters were beginning to seep up from the underground chambers. Soon—who knew how soon?—the great waters would be rolling, furious and free. Susan Silver was content in the sitting-room in Oleander Street to sit under the chuckling of the incandescent lamp with Boris Polednik beside her, deciphering the code-letters they received, exchanging notes with Stockholm, Prague, waiting, waiting for the signal that would be raised high.

May Silver was content, too, in the Oleander Street house, but less for her own than her parents’ sake. She would have preferred a larger house to live in, not because it was larger, but because it would of necessity have been nearer to the rough tangled meadows, the river’s shelving banks, where she and her friend, Harry Stonier, were so happy in their wandering that they would hardly speak a word to each other for hours. They would wander there, holding hands like children, or sit down in a small copse, under overhanging boughs, their heads together over some book of verse.

But May alone of the daughters knew how the happiness of her parents was bound up with the small house in Oleander Street. What more did they need? Neither of them had any sense of comfort. They could sit more comfortably on a chair with a hard seat and a broken back than many folk sit in deep-sprung armchairs. Apart from one or two dishes, which required for their preparation no chefs in complex kitchens, flanked by sauces and spices, food meant nothing more to either of them than the thing you put into your stomach when it feels empty.

It was, of course, inevitable that, sooner rather than later, they would have to leave Oleander Street. It was implicit in the situation. So, on those great revolving disks in fairgrounds, though for a certain time the children perched on them can keep their place, it is quite clear that soon they will be hurled off as the revolutions quicken. You could not go in business the way the Winbergs went, and these, and these, without, like them, being forced out of Magnolia Street or Oleander Street, or wherever it might be, into those regions where you keep servants, and have a garage, and a car in it, and a chauffeur in uniform to look after it, and different sorts of gardens for both flowers and vegetables, and conservatories. It was inevitable, a thing which Sam and Hannah Silver themselves recognised. Money was coming in so fast, and the firm’s credit was so high, that it became necessary now to keep up appearances. Smirnof had shown himself no spendthrift, but he, too, had pointed out more than once that the move couldn’t be much longer delayed. What sort of business would the contractors think it was if the proprietor couldn’t afford to move out of Oleander Street?

Only May perceived the real wretchedness with which Silver agreed to move. However many of his friends followed him to his rich house, the old grand nights of talk and smoke and anarchy and cards and tea-with-lemon, would be over for ever. And he knew that very few would follow him, and those few would feel themselves to be poor men sitting at the rich man’s board.

As for Mrs. Silver, she was more than wretched—she was terrified. The house in Oleander Street had been beyond her power to manage, even when Esther was in charge, with one or two of the other girls ready to give a hand now and again. She was thankful no one ever suggested a servant. A servant in that house, in that street, would have been more than grotesque. The very thought frightened her. Yet, somehow, the house got its stairs and floors scrubbed, its meals prepared, if not by skill, then by love. She loved the small house with a dumb passion. It was her own, her own, she had papers to show it was hers, and no one else’s at all. When she thought no one was looking, she would go up to the wall of any room she might be in, and place the palms of both hands on it, feeling the thrill of her ownership tingling upwards along her arms.

She had all she wanted, much more than she had ever dreamed of. She had grandchildren by Esther, she would soon be a grandmother by Sarah, too. She had money to give away to charity in ample measure. She had her mother’s pearls, and her own house to wear them in. She turned in the direction where she conceived, beyond the lands and the seas, her step-mother, Shevka, and her step-sister, Gallia, might be going about their businesses at that moment. She had drawn even with them. She wished them no hurt at all, neither that they should have acid on the stomach nor twinges on the knee. Only that they should admit she had drawn even with them. She insisted on that.

She did not want a bigger house. But she knew she would have to have one. Her eyes slowly filled with tears.

The War had actually broken out and was nearly a year old by the time it was thrust upon her. Not merely was it far bigger than the house in Oleander Street; it was far bigger than any house Esther had presented to her imagination, and her ambition had not been humble. It was, in fact, not quite suitable; but Esther determined that if she wouldn’t get on with it nobody would. Silver and Smirnof were night and day busy with their rainproofs and waterproofs. She was aware that, in the press of terrific events, undertakings even vaster than theirs were controlled from nuclei even meaner than Oleander Street. So she clinched the matter, for fear it might be postponed indefinitely if they waited till a more suitable house came into the market.

The house was a castellated fortress of the Ruskino-Gothic period in the Baxter’s Moor neighbourhood, though its name, Ivanhoe Towers, referred it to an earlier period in the evolution of Gothic architecture. It looked down on a bend of the River Mitchen. A thin gauze perpetually obscured the view, for, though the house was only two or three miles away from Longton, there was much more rain about, and the river-mists never seemed to shift. Even in the rare lapses of sunshine there would be a sudden overflowing from the devious roof-gutters, where the rain had been disconsolately roaming for some time in the effort to find a decorous issue, and had, in a fit of temper, abandoned the search. There was an acre or two of flower-garden and kitchen-garden and lawn attached to the house, though it was difficult to decide where one ended and another began; attached was the word, for windows, walls, borders, trees, were hooked on to each other by a tangle of creepers, burrs, brambles, tropical in their complexity.

The whole place was, in fact, in a ramshackle condition, having been untenanted for years. It is possible that Esther did not try too strenuously to find out why the house had had no tenant for so long. Or, if she did actually find out, the fact that the previous tenant had been a “Sir” may have made up for the fact that he had committed suicide. So, in point of fact, he had, some months after his wife had died of a long and somewhat mysterious illness—the sort of illness concerning which you will not prevent people from uttering unpleasant insinuations up hill and down dale. They said the husband had poisoned her; so, whether he had or had not, it was not strange that the “Sir” did away with himself some time later.

Esther may have been aware of all this; yet it would not be kind to condemn her out of hand for moving her parents into Ivanhoe Towers. For in a time when death was busy on a scale that the biggest big-scale industry had never approached, it would have been pedantic to let one suicide and one murder—nothing more was alleged—incommode you. Besides, there was clearly room enough in the garden of Ivanhoe Towers to set up that bungalow which was to be the vis-à-vis, so to speak, of Uncle Alex’s bungalow at the bottom of the orchard in Terkass across the sea.

The house would have felt and looked empty even if all the regular anarchists who used to visit Oleander Street had come along with camp-beds and bivouacked in it. The Silver parents and the five Silver daughters could have had a suite apiece and never come up against each other except by appointment. But of the daughters, only Susan and May were available, and only one of these ever lived in Ivanhoe Towers. For Susan was in Paris the week the War broke out. And, instead of returning to Doomington to resume her post in the office of the foundry, a call was issued to her to attach herself to a group of workers, it would be more accurate to call them conspirators, in Geneva.

Polednik was in Cracow at the same time, where, like the leader of his party, Lenin, he was arrested. He, too, like Lenin, was released, on the assurance to the Austrian authorities that he was at least as implacable an enemy of the Tsar Nicholas as was the Emperor Franz-Josef. He was requested to present himself at Geneva, where Susan Silver had arrived some weeks earlier. There they got married, partly because they were fond of each other. They had intended to get married for some years now, but had decided against getting married in Doomington. They knew that that could not have failed to involve the sort of fuss that was repugnant to them both. It had not occurred to them, either, that they should get married in Paris when they met there. The word Paris had not the sexual connotations for them that it has for most young men and women. It did not thrust nightgowns, pyjamas, bidets, into the forefront of their minds. There was matter enough to occupy them, very remote from such triviality. As for instance: when the test came, could it be conceived that the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks might actually work together? The infinitesimal whisper that had gone abroad that this-and-this comrade was an agent provocateur, what substance was there to it?

Polednik and Susan got married, partly because they were fond of each other; also, because it made for greater clerical efficiency. So Susan did not return to Doomington to occupy that large room—that whole floor of large rooms, if she had wanted them—in which she had sometimes looked forward to getting all her data scientifically assembled. So, of all the five daughters, it was May alone who accompanied the Silver parents into their tatterdemalion wilderness. And, though the old folk did not know it, it was with a heavy heart that May went with them.