All This by Chance Read online

  I seem to strike him as a joke, Stephen thought. He felt himself warm with confusion. The man’s accent alone was puzzling for him, the kind he had heard only in the pictures, odder even than Mr Lewis’s. Yet so obviously there was kindness in his speaking too, even the sense that he was pleased the young fellow had arrived. And now that Mr Golson raised his hand to run it along the length of his tie, Stephen saw he wore a ring with a small black stone on his little finger, a ring which in time he would see so often removed and placed on a square cloth in the small dispensary out the back, as though to work while wearing jewellery was not the thing a professional ought do. But out here, in the shop, it was always there, the ring with the black stone.

  Then out of the blue Mr Golson was assuming Mr Lewis and the young man he had sent must surely have been friends. ‘And Nat?’ he was asking. ‘I don’t expect he’ll ever come back, not now?’

  Stephen again embarrassed, at his having to say Nat Lewis had been his teacher, that he himself was just one among other pupils, he hardly knew him well enough to talk about anything other than what they were there for, to become pharmacists. ‘Mr Lewis never talked about himself.’

  ‘I suppose not,’ Mr Golson said. He was disappointed. He turned and nodded at the shelves, while his hand indicated beyond where they stood, to the counter with its slew of papers, to whatever lay there beyond the counter, behind the curtain made from dozens of long beaded strings. Two lights in round white semi-transparent globes, set above curled iron brackets, lit the entire shop. Mr Golson said, ‘Different when my assistant was here. She believed in lighting up the street until the blackouts. Now it’s only me I get by on half.’ And laughing his almost silent laugh, as though there was a joke there somewhere Stephen failed to catch, ‘You’ll get used to it all. If you’ve a mind to.’

  And so it was done, as quickly as that. There was no further mention of the letter from his old friend, his fellow apothecary across there on what he imagined the world’s bright side to be, for it would become a habit, in the months ahead, even when the stream of traffic in the road outside glittered in sunlight, and people moved about in summer clothes, for David Golson to remark that his assistant must be missing it, surely, missing the grand weather he was used to over there, back home? The Pacific. The word itself was a flaring lamp.

  ‘It’s the end of winter there now, mind,’ Stephen had said at first, ‘it’s cold and slush just like winter anywhere,’ but his boss was not to be deceived. He knew it was a land of sun his assistant had come from, anything said to the contrary a mere modest disclaimer. At times when he looked at the young man whose shyness in the shop was less of a problem with the passing months, and was something indeed the ladies rather warmed to, it was palms and beaches and a flawless sky Mr Golson hung behind him, colourful as a stage set. Although what it had made him think of too were photographs his nephew had sent him from Haifa when he trained there for Special Ops a few years before. His nephew who did not return but Haifa, the beach and the beauty of it, must be there still. The Mediterranean and the Pacific had a lot in common, imagined from here.

  On that first late afternoon then Stephen was invited to the back of the shop, to the small room with space for not much more than two chairs set to either side of a bright yellow table, with a square of plain linoleum cut to fit its top and tacked down at each corner, and three shelves above it with folded papers, reference volumes and professional journals, and paper flags for the Allies pinned above those again. Two cups hung from screws at the edge of the middle shelf, and against one wall there stood a small metal sink, and a bench to hold no more than a kettle and a few plates. One bright naked bulb descended from a flex above the table. And oddly everything out here neat and tidily arranged, so unlike the clutter of the shop. As if saying, here is where life matters, out there is where so much else steps in. But Stephen already aware that you could not go round putting your labels on what you observed, or imagined things to mean. A courteous puzzlement at so much, already establishing itself as his way with the world.

  And the further embarrassment that first day in England, after Mr Golson made him tea and took biscuits from a tin, and explained the mess out front by telling him of Mrs Garnett, who had worked for him for years, and how there was no question of replacing her, although that was three years back now. Until the end of the war, that had been his excuse, everyone’s excuse for putting things off, once it’s over we’ll attend to things. ‘Now we can’t,’ he smiled, ‘can’t come at that one anymore. But I still say so. You’ll have to make what you can of it. Pick up the traces, isn’t that what they say, from where Mrs Garnett put them down?’

  Stephen would find in the months ahead that of Mr Golson’s many stories Mrs Garnett was the one he most came back to. Mrs Garnett whose name was Phoebe. She was not of the faith, he explained, but that had not mattered to him then any more than it did now, with Stephen. She had worked here four days each week; her husband was afflicted, a man in a chair who seldom spoke. She learned to read scripts, to make up prescriptions, as though she were born to it. A finely gifted woman. She learned things first as a surprise for him, she said he had given her another life. And then Mrs Garnett coming back one evening after playing bridge with her sister on the other side of the High Street because her house keys she had left in the storeroom. It does not seem logical, he said, that women can be so confused about something so important as keys, but there we are. This was in ’42, when things were at their worst. Her sister had said, Stay the night why don’t you, it’s late enough, you never know. Know when they’ll start that racket flying over and the rest of it. Well I need to get the ration book too in any case, she told her sister, it’s in the purse and what if anything happened to that? So that held her up, her coming back here to the shop, and then walking home when she might have stayed at her sister’s, and the sirens starting and instead of going to the shelter she just kept on walking back, that was what Mrs Garnett was like. And that was the night three houses copped it down in Fellows Avenue. There is no particular drama in the way Mr Golson tells it. But that is the reason, he says, why the place is not as it might be if Mrs Garnett had kept coming in. Mrs Garnett kept it neater than a pin. Then one month becomes a year and he thinks as soon as all this is over, the raids stopped so surely it is only time, a matter of time, until it’s back to how things were and there’ll be so many looking for work, women with their men back, he would wait till then to replace her. ‘But you’re here now, Stephen, so we can tidy up.’

  This first time he told the story he said something in another language Stephen of course did not understand and Mr Golson did not explain. He would come to understand that it was something the older man always said when one of his stories meant, So that is how it is, we can do nothing about it, it was meant to be. Phrases that in time Stephen would recognise and come to know and so much later use himself to make some of the older women laugh on the counter’s other side. Each day there would be other stories so that Stephen smiled and said to him, ‘I know as much about round here as if I lived here. Thanks to you.’ But this first day Mr Golson so strangely moved by what was he was saying so casually that he removed his spectacles and rubbed them with the handkerchief he took from his pocket. ‘You did not know Mrs Garnett,’ he said. ‘If I told you about her you would know everything.’

  Everything settled so quickly, then, on that afternoon when he arrived, a young man not able to explain why he had left a place where there were beaches and shops with more food than they could sell, and more work than there were men for, left what was there in fact and what Mr Golson imagined to be there, to come to this, where for weeks that smell of ash would come at Stephen when he did not expect it, when no one else remarked on it. And the sense of shame that same early evening, after the tea they drank at the yellow table at the back of the shop and the tentative conversing until at last there was a pause and Mr Golson turned to look up at the clock with its Coronation emblem and said as they stood together, ‘
You have somewhere to go now? You know how to get there?’ Stephen’s dreadful moment of awkwardness, how it must seem he assumed so much, coming directly from the wharves, as though the end of his journey was here, as though he had never considered beyond that. His first shaming at his own naïveté, a word he would not at that stage of his life have known and still less used for the sense of dumb emptiness, the feeling that his clothes were canvas against his skin. A shame sharpened by the memory flooding back to him of the man he had so hoped to forget, his father leaning forward, shouting at him, Go to bloody London then, find out what’s so grand about those doss houses he and his cobbers put up at on leave, what a bloody lie it was, all that London caper! His father shouting at him, jabbing with the poker at the opened door of the range, spit jumping onto his son’s sleeve, ‘Mix your bloody cough mixtures over there then if that’s all you want from life!’ And as the door to the range clanged shut his stepmother moving in front of them both, between his father’s anger and his own resentful silence, to place on the hob the big pot whose handles she held in her raised sacking apron. An image so sudden and searing in his mind that the sting of it seemed more real than where he now stood, the suitcase held against his side. The remarkable thing that Mr Golson seemed in some way to understand, as he looked at the confused young man in front of him.

  ‘These things are not impossible,’ he said. He raised his palm as if patting the air, and Stephen again put down his suitcase while the man went to the telephone at the end of the counter. He spoke quickly, quietly, and came back to stand in front of the boy with his lowered eyes, one raw hand drawing together the sides of his coat, fastening a button, unloosening it.

  ‘I cannot,’ Stephen began to say, but Mr Golson raised his hand for the second time. Then the old man asking him, with what even at that moment Stephen knew was said with a curious kind of humour, ‘I gather you have no strong feelings about Jews?’

  Stephen smiled, as if even that was a kind of awkwardness, as he looked to the strangely creased face, the glasses with a smudge mark where a finger had adjusted them. ‘I have never known any,’ he said. He could think of nothing else to say.

  ‘Don’t let our friend Nat hear you saying that!’ Stephen knowing then it would be all right to grin. He said, ‘I didn’t know. It didn’t matter.’

  ‘Lucky Nat, then.’

  Mr Golson fetched his coat from the tearoom. They walked for five minutes down a sloping street, and then along a road that levelled off. There were big trees on the edge of the pavement, tall gloomy houses behind low brick walls, the sharp angles of their roofs black against the tinted sky. They walked without speaking, as if the past hour had used up whatever might be important for their first meeting. Mr Golson hummed softly. The only other sound was the flat impact of their steps, and the bump of the suitcase brushing against Stephen’s coat. He was glad for the silence. He thought, Mr Golson mustn’t mind being with me or he’d not be making that half-singing sound.

  They stopped at a high house with steps rising from inside its gate to a porch at the side. There were lights showing on one floor, and when the gate clicked and then grated as it swung back, the curtains in the next house moved slightly, as though a breeze had stirred them. Mr Golson said, as if making a joke, ‘The English look out for each other.’ And then, ‘You will be all right here until you’re sorted out.’ He touched the brim of the black hat he had taken from the peg in the storeroom before they left the shop. ‘Sam will look after you. He is my good friend.’

  The door’s brass knocker was the shape of a horseshoe. The man who opened the house to them was short and balder than Mr Golson, and harder to understand. ‘Everyone is from somewhere else,’ he said. And that was almost all. He went ahead upstairs, nodded to where the bathroom was, and said only, ‘You must sleep as long as you need. I am always in the kitchen. If you are hungry you must tell me.’ And he too remarking something in another language, as he closed the bedroom door.

  It was on the top level of the house, a small room with bare walls and an ornate blue cover on the single bed against the wall, rucked and looped like the curtains in a picture theatre. A table and an empty glass, and a chair pushed in against the table. The room was musty. Stephen guessed no one had slept in here for a long time. He opened the window and the cooler air was damp, but good to let in. There was the slightest misting still of rain that fell across the street lights, a drift of trailed gauze. He saw now what he had not been aware of when he walked down the street with Mr Golson. From the window he looked across to the jagged fragments of what remained of a house across the road, most of which had fallen while the hedge in front of it, taller than a man, had survived and continued to grow. There was also in the air the scent of something neither bitter nor sweet, and yet distinctive, the slight fall of rain perhaps sharpening it. He thought, I am here, at last. I am alone in a room in England for the first time. It will be all right. He left the window slightly opened on its latch. Then the man was at the door again, to say he must come down. Not a feast, he said. But there is bread. There are sausages. He puffed out his cheeks. To keep the wolf on its lead, is that what one says? On its lead. From the door. To keep the wolf.

  Sam Abrams liked to talk. ‘I ask nothing,’ he said on the first morning after he had done his friend a favour and taken in the young stranger who had crossed oceans, now of all times, to live here, where he supposed half the world must like to live as well. Crazy, he thought as he watched the quiet young man at the kitchen table, crazy whichever way you look at it. And that first morning too, saying the visitor could use the room another night if he liked, which in turn became another night after that and then another, and it was a week later when Stephen asked, ‘Am I your boarder then, Sam?’, and he was looked at with surprise, as if why would he have thought anything else, was he sleeping across the road Sam asked, and only pretending to be here? You would never miss Sam’s jokes because his own laughing told you. And as Mr Golson liked to say, sometimes several times a day, ‘Things will be fine.’ Zorg zich nisht.

  Mr Golson liked to explain with care, believing it the first step to accepting his own point of view. Each day they talked as they drank tea in the storeroom, until the bell sounded as a customer entered from the street, or Stephen reminded him, ‘If I’m to get on with things,’ and Mr Golson would look at the clock and tell him, ‘One day you will be a hard man to work for,’ and tap the young man’s shoulder as he walked through to the shop. Mr Golson also liked to think he was helping the boy from so far away, from his place of sun and ignorance, to understand what the true world was. ‘Your chance to start over,’ he would say. And Stephen began to pity him a little, suspecting there was a sadness which he could only guess at behind the code of what he said.

  With Sam his landlord it was so much more open, more direct, this facing the business of how things were, how life turned out. In his quick tumble of words that seemed at times as though he were talking in a language that was only partly the one he shared with his young friend, Sam would tell him, ‘David Golson, God be good to him, believes we must hold on to ropes that are not there. Not now. Not anymore. But he will not believe the world is bad, as we know, you and I, Stephen, as we know it is, eh? Of course we know that.’ But saying so without rancour, as if to face the grimness of things, could be said lightly enough, for Sam so openly enjoyed what he called ‘the business of getting on’. ‘You got that,’ he told Stephen. ‘I see it just the way you walk up the street. You get on.’

  ‘I don’t know with what,’ Stephen said.

  ‘You get on,’ Sam repeated. ‘You listen to me.’

  Wednesday nights, especially, Sam liked to talk. Wednesday nights he would come in late, and Stephen knew the old man was pleased if he was still there in the sitting room, pretending to study the most recent book Mr Golson told him he would be the smarter for getting on top of. Sam flushed from the entertainment, the glasses of schnapps, coming in from the club up in Finchley Road. ‘That Herz! That Viennese
! He makes everyone forget, can you imagine a gift so big as that? Everyone in the room close to everything bad and he has us laughing before we know we laugh. These Viennese!’ He insisted Stephen join him with a glass before he went up to bed. ‘He is something I can tell you. Laugh!’ Holding the small blue glass with its gold rim, the liquor Stephen disliked the taste of, but it was Sam’s mood that warmed him, Sam raising his own glass as he says, ‘Because we are here together, my friend. Because we can do this,’ and leans across to tip the rim of their glasses against each other.

  ‘And Mrs Einhorn,’ he liked to say, ‘Ah, we drink to Mrs Einhorn.’ His repeating ‘Ah’ but drawing it out halfway to a song rather than just a sigh, their drinking to a woman who could not be put into words. ‘Impossible in English,’ Sam regretted, thinking of what surely must be said to do justice to the figure, the presence, the shaina maidel they raised their glasses to.

  Sam drank only that one night of the week, at the cabaret as he called it, and Stephen having no more idea of what that might be other than a room where only Jewish people went, and heard performers, and where stricter people would keep away from, the cabaret was no place for them. You will not see hair locks there, Stephen, I tell you that. Not even our friend David. At home with books. Do I not tell him, ‘You cannot be serious every day,’ but will he listen? You work with him. When does David listen? But sorrowful then as he thinks of it, of his friend David who is never the same after the night of the bomb, when the lady who worked in the shop died. He raises both his hands, and lets them fall on his knees. ‘I know nothing about that, Stephen. I tell you nothing because I know nothing.’