All This by Chance Read online

  ‘It was all as if I began on the other side of a wall,’ Eva once said, ‘and yet further off than ever, once I knew about it. You understand what I mean?’ Meeting up with people like Mr Golson, with Sam, that was the closest she had come. She liked them—how could you not like them?—but they were still strangers who had become her friends. That phrase Becky kept returning to, ‘our people’. Nothing like that was there for her to feel.

  Stephen was surprised at how firmly she insisted on it. ‘But you don’t feel drawn to them at all? I mean to what they are?’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘I know nothing about Jewish things. Apart from here. I can hardly be drawn.’

  ‘There you are then,’ she said. Her English family had told her the little they knew, how her mother had been a journalist and disappeared, her father a journalist too, both of them socialists, but he was not a Jew. That was all she knew. He was in touch with important people and she had gone to an orphanage to be safe, and already she had another name by the time she came to the people who loved her here, when she was five. Earlier than those other children, the kindertransport, who came later. She had been brought across with a family who believed the same things as her English parents. Another boy and his sister who sat by her in the carriage. All too far now to remember. She had been given an orange that she held until they arrived.

  How much more it meant to her that they were soon to leave for Stephen’s country, a place that was as real to him as the creaking wooden peaceful house in High Wycombe had been to her. Never mind those awful stories about his father, the mud, the farm, the woman whose name he never said, only ‘the woman my father married’. There was so much more than that. There had to be. And for her, the newness of it. The fact it would be theirs, that was the thing, as nowhere else might be. The place they made together.

  In her lunch hours Eva walked up from the typing pool in Whitehall to New Zealand House in the Strand. A friendly middle-aged woman gave her books and brought out newspapers, most of which Eva made little of but liked to read the social pages, the columns that gave her some idea of the country that would be hers. She sat at the reading table with a pink-covered weekly, turning its shiny enticing photographs. So much forest. So many beaches. So much sport. The dark native people in some of them, although mostly the women and men in the photos looked as though they might have arrived that morning from where she was now. But people she supposed who would talk like Stephen. Who would take the same things for granted. Page after page told her how everything there was getting better, which more than anything the pages of the Free Lance and the Weekly News so wanted you to believe. While in the tea breaks in the little room behind the shop, Stephen heard Mr Golson’s own message that he came back to daily, that carried even for England the kind of optimism Eva read of, looked at, on the other side of the world. ‘A new age,’ he insisted to Stephen. He spoke of the health service Labour was on the verge of, the pensions the government declared as the right of every citizen, the opening doors of education, the trimming down of privilege. Mr Golson rejoiced—‘That is the word I must use, Stephen, rejoice’—in the workers’ country England was about to become. Just as Israel, distantly and yet with even greater promise, was about to make the deserts bloom. ‘It is a privileged time to live.’ And how closely, in David Golson’s mind, one future flourished beside the other, however much his friend Sam taunted him with his question of how could people who have lived so long as we have, David, who have seen what happened to us, play at optimism like that? ‘This time,’ Mr Golson assured him, ‘this time we know what to do, that is why.’

  He liked to remind Stephen not only that Marx had been Jewish, one must not forget that, but that his own grandfather’s brother, who already had come across, that far back, to live here, had seen the great man walking in Green Park with his clever daughter, the one whose own life turned out so badly. A moral to us all, he added at this point in his reminiscing, how great intelligence is no defence against our glands. Yes, he would see them, his uncle, as they turned in at the entrance not far from his own shop that was famous for its Italian-made umbrellas. They were talking, always talking, the father so often listening to the girl, that is what had struck him in those stories, Marx attending to the girl. That is the sign of a great and humble man. While Stephen listened, amused, when it was Eva rather than himself who liked to tell Mr Golson that such things as the Government now planned to do in England had been done years before in her husband’s country, that Marx’s daughter most certainly would have approved her own decision to marry a man from such a place. Stephen asked was that woman who put things aside for her at the High Commission also paying her to advertise? And a few days after her boasting, after Mr Golson had time to visit the library and verify with his own research, he informed his young friends that a prime minister in that distant place had himself been Jewish, Stephen of course did not know that? Not a specially enlightened one perhaps by Marx’s standards, but he had written a book about a future place where good things would evolve.

  ‘Thus truth slowly prevails, worldwide.’ Mr Golson liked to use phrases with such touches of eloquence. Stephen raising his brows behind his boss’s shoulders, Eva smiling and agreeing with the older man who regretted only one thing, the fact of what she herself had lost, the girl who had been one of themselves and had been deprived. And Sam reprimanding him, provoking him that the entire future of the world need not fit the requirements of a Hampstead Zionist.

  ‘Then so much the worse for that,’ Mr Golson said. ‘I know you disagree with me, my friend, but that I tell you as a fact. So much the worse.’

  Then the change, when the vane spun in sudden contrary winds. So often that is the image she will come back to. There had been a weather vane shaped like a whale on the gabled house in High Wycombe where Eva grew up. She could see it from her own bedroom window, the clipped tin shape and the swollen metal blob soldering it to the stem that allowed it to pivot and turn. Her English father explained to her how it was a useful lesson the tin whale with its mountainy back could teach us, that what seemed so certain might change so quickly as that, the blunt head pointing this moment to the hills, an hour later to the town. The whale knows that nothing lasts long enough to be sure of forever.

  How simply her kindly stepfather saw things, how wise she had thought him, how much he imparted to her. At first where rivers ran and what to call them, the capitals of distant countries, the music he showed her how to play, sitting beside her on the long piano stool, always showing her, never just instructing. As later on the mathematics that puzzled her at school became clear to her because of how he talked. All that he said and passed on to her beneath this great cone, as she had sometimes thought of it as a girl, where God and silence came together.

  She and Stephen were back from one of what they called their adventure weekends. They would choose a town they may not even have heard of, or knew about only because of something famous so far back it was now a different world, and take a train on Saturdays once the shop had closed. They stayed overnight in small country pubs, or took a room in a house with an advertisement in the front window, a written card propped against the curtains. The women who let an upstairs room and asked them about breakfast were mostly widows, women who sometimes wanted to talk more than did their young guests, who discreetly checked Eva’s hand for its ring. She and Stephen liked to walk a long way from a village and once they made love in a flare of wild flowers near Ascott-under-Wychwood. ‘There must be people who know the names of all of these,’ Stephen said. ‘You won’t see them like this back home.’ At times there was a story-book enchantment to where they found themselves spending the night. On the border of Wales once they came on a house that said ‘Guests Invited’, where the patterned wood around the windows and under the eaves was cut in scoops and painted red against the drab colour of the stone. It was as if a child had drawn it, wayward and attractive together, a house unlike any other they had seen. Their upstairs ceiling was a
narrow inverted V, where only one of them could stand upright at a time.

  It was here Stephen asked was she certain, utterly? ‘I don’t think you’d ever guess how different things might be.’

  She repeated, ‘Second thoughts?’ She pushed gently at him and both knocked their heads against the angle of the roof as they fell towards the bed. She told him, ‘I think of it all the time. Because it will be our place as nowhere else can be.’

  ‘Even if you can’t stand it?’

  ‘Then we’ll find somewhere else.’

  Another weekend they walked to a church whose arched stone doorway was nicked round with a pattern of triangles like teeth. There was a panel in the porch that told you how old the building was. There was a carving of an angel on a side wall, beside a tablet for a writer who had been born here and baptised in the church and died in the Great War. In the quiet there was that burring of flies on a high sill that so seemed the sound of such places. Stephen waited outside, as Eva sat for several minutes in the back pew. Any church was foreign to him, he supposed that was it. She told him as they walked back to the main road how it had never meant all that much to her. Not as it did to many people.

  ‘Churches?’

  ‘Praying. Those meetings when I was a girl. My parents. Other families like ours who did not attend the church where most people went. We sat in rooms without anyone preaching, without choirs or altars or whatever. I never knew what to pray about.’

  ‘You mean believing?’

  ‘Oh, that didn’t really come into it. You don’t think about that as you pray. And yet I loved the silence of it. The silence you get in an empty church like the one we’ve just been to. The way it has to take you in. If you want it to. That’s what my father used to say. It lets anything in except unimportant things.’

  It was that evening, after the afternoon in the church. As Eva sometimes thought of it, amused that it came to her like this and yet knowing that even Stephen would think it strange should she say it to him, ‘The day the whale turned, remember that?’

  Back at Sam’s, friends from the social club sat in the sitting room. Two elderly men in black suits and tieless white shirts who formally shook hands and smiled when it was explained to them that these were the young married people who lived upstairs, who were soon to leave the country. The men were drinking from the blue glasses that Stephen knew must mean a special occasion, but they spoke too little English for Sam to press the young ones to join with them as he otherwise would have done. The men looked almost shyly at the tall handsome Englishwoman and Stephen guessed Sam already had told them the story of what, alone with them, he called ‘the lost girl’.

  ‘We’ll take our tea upstairs,’ Eva said, ‘in case you’re using the kitchen.’ As she went back across the hall she saw the white envelope addressed to Mrs S. Ross, aware that Sam watched her from the doorway to the sitting room. ‘May it be good news,’ he said to her. An odd thing for him to say, although later, once she had read the letter, and again took in the address stamped on the envelope’s back, she understood why he had said it, and the expression on his face.

  She did not recognise the name of the group it came from. The letter asked her to attend an appointment at a building near Russell Square. She sat with the letter still in her hand until Stephen brought up the tray with the toast and the poached eggs he had prepared for them, and the brown china pot of tea, and placed them on the small table she had drawn between where she sat on the edge of their bed and the chair her husband took across from her. She passed him the letter to read. He looked across at her, at the steady clarity of her looking back.

  ‘I don’t quite get what it’s about. What woman?’

  Eva told him simply. ‘It’s a relative they have found from over there.’

  It took a moment before he answered. ‘From before?’

  ‘Before all this.’ One hand lifting slightly from her lap, and then again resting on the palm of her other hand. So small a gesture as that to take in ‘all this’, the room they sat in, the husband facing her, the street outside and all the streets of London, the years from the time a train had drawn in beneath the high black roof of Liverpool Street and through the rise of steam and the high echoing noise a child was lifted down from the doorway of the carriage and swung onto the flickering movements of the platform, and she had looked up to a yapping dog a lady held at a lowered window high above her. The day memories began. ‘From then.’

  A blur, as the next few weeks would always seem for them, with ‘life’—Eva’s word for so much that could not have been guessed at—so suddenly catching up. Yes, she had said when the next morning she telephoned the number at the head of her letter, when the man asked her would she be alone, or who would be with her? She would like her husband to come with her, there was nothing which might happen now that did not concern them both. At eleven in the morning, then, two days from now?

  Eva knew the street behind the British Museum, where she had gone to children’s Christmas meetings at Penn House. There were flowers in the foyer of the building they entered, and what came across as a mix of efficiency with a not quite convincing attempt to make all this seem an occasion, this ‘coming together’, as a man with a strangely narrow face described it as he first spoke to them across his desk. He introduced himself as Henry Scherr. He looked at the address on the sheet of paper in front of him. ‘Belsize Park?’ he asked, meaning one of the synagogues they might attend. ‘There may be other affiliations?’

  ‘No,’ Eva said, ‘no affiliations.’ It was not a word she had ever used. If her answer disappointed him, Mr Scherr was too well trained to let her see. He looked at them, benignly, Stephen thought, that is what he is intending us to think. He was here to help, he said, and to say the important things first. He quite understood if the news had come as more than a surprise to them. As a shock even, perhaps?

  ‘Perhaps,’ Eva said.

  The great reward of his work, if he might mention that, was to play some small part in occasions such as this. When you felt history did not always have the last word. Or as you might even say, when we begin to make our own. When lives reconnect. Take up where they left off. Stephen supposed what they heard was a necessary preliminary, a little set speech. He admired his wife’s almost icy calm. He knew the effort it cost her. At the moment she seemed a woman he scarcely knew. When Stephen spoke it was to answer the man on their financial position, for Mr Scherr had said it was, they would appreciate, a matter he must touch on? Stephen explained that they were very soon to leave, and where for.

  ‘The outer reaches,’ the man said, as though quoting something he had heard before.

  ‘Not for us,’ Eva cut across him.

  ‘But you are living here? For the moment?’, pointedly directing his question to her husband.

  ‘No.’ Eva again was the one to speak. ‘We are living there.’

  The official looked at her more carefully. He was that in both her mind and in Stephen’s too, rather than Mr Scherr. The functionary whose opened folder with its neatly clipped papers struck them as about to throw his shadow across their lives. He would always remain to them simply ‘the man’. He explained the facts to them clearly, concisely. The family connections, the reasons for only now informing them, the parts of the story that were still obscure. ‘You might be surprised,’ he said, ‘how loose ends from so many places are resolved every day. So many families brought together.’ The merest hint, perhaps, of reprimand in the way he told them, noting the absence of obvious joy which, as he also told them, was the deepest satisfaction of his work, the joy of bringing people together, when hope so often had been given up.

  As though for the man’s sake, Stephen said, ‘We had no idea of any of this. You’ll appreciate that.’ Even his wife’s real name, or the fact there was an aunt she had never imagined, or details of how the child was brought here.

  ‘So much was done against the clock,’ the man reminded them. ‘It had to be. The miracle is what we can still ret
rieve.’

  ‘But you are certain now, though?’ Eva asked.

  ‘The paperwork, now we have the names sorted, was exemplary at the other end. A case of a deliberate mistake being made. Earlier along the line.’

  ‘For Eva?’

  ‘For Lisabet,’ the man said, glancing at his folder. ‘Then a girl with another name,’ he smiled, checking the dates in front of him. ‘To help you get away. And now of course your own. As you’ve now become.’ He said the three names together. Lisabet, Gerda, Eva.

  ‘I was called that from the start,’ Eva smiled back, reminding him that in so far as her memory went, she was Eva to begin with.

  ‘To begin with here.’ The man meant England.

  ‘Three names, then,’ he went on. ‘The first on this,’ he said, again laying a finger on a paper he turned to. ‘Then the one the institution who first took you, back there, used to protect you. Before the one you were given here. There are cases more confused than this, I assure you.’ He did not say how rare it was to see those his work brought him in touch with seem so unmoved. It was not for Mr Scherr to guess. He then asked if they would like tea? He tapped a bell on his desk which must have been for that alone, for no one responded until a few minutes later a girl carried in a tray, placed it on a table without looking at those it was intended for, and the man told her, ‘Thank you. I’ll take over there.’

  He knows we are nervous, Stephen thought, he knows it is an ordeal and he is disappointed in both of us. Even when the photographs had been handed across to them, Eva had taken them, looked at them for perhaps a full minute, then passed them on to her husband without speaking. One was of a young child, unmistakably her, the hair much lighter, almost white, but the steady gaze, the distinctive eyebrows, straight as if drawn with a ruler, the slight dip to one side of her mouth. It moved Stephen to look at it. The child who had no notion of what her world was, or would come to be. A lucky one. The man said, ‘As you can see from the table it was some kind of event. Perhaps your birthday?’ He told them other things important for them to know. Her mother had died of what then was simply called anaemia, which nowadays would cover other possibilities as well. He shrugged. There were some questions not possible to ask. Her father was later with a workforce in a camp to the north of Berlin. He had represented workers on some committee so one should not be surprised. He had written for magazines, although not always political ones. He was a man with contacts, obviously. The people who cared for her before the train to England were of quite a different kind from those one might expect him to know. ‘There were good people everywhere.’