Jubilee (Book 1 of The Poppy Chronicles) Page 7

  ‘We’ve come here for our supper, and our supper we shall have,’ he said and then a little more loudly, ‘Evening, Joseph. My usual table if you please.’

  ‘Yes sir.’ The maître d’hôtel had a bored expression on his face and she knew suddenly that he had no idea who Harris was, but was accustomed to customers assuming a familiarity with the restaurant that they did not have, and she felt, to her own amazement, a surge of protectiveness. This little man had dressed up in his very best clothes and made an arrangement to bring her to a fashionable restaurant where he was in all truth out of place, just to please her, and she was being churlish to object. And, oddly, she wanted to stay with him. He was undoubtedly far from the sort of person she was accustomed to know, and was in some ways rather ridiculous with his pretensions to West End high fashion, and yet there was about him an excitement, a kind of dynamism, which exhilarated and intrigued her. She found herself liking his company and warmed by his presence, and that truly was amazing. Why should she feel so? It was absurd.

  By the time she had collected her thoughts they were being seated at a table to one side of the restaurant and had menus set in front of them and she looked at hers a little helplessly and then around the room and then at Kid Harris sitting opposite her and the expression on his face made her swallow the words that had risen to her lips. He looked baffled, angry and doubtful all at the same time, and she registered the fact that the table he had been given was a far from favourable one, being set half behind a pillar and in a direct line with the busiest passage-way used by the waiters who were swishing past them at a great rate on their way to and from the servery. Almost as though she could read his thoughts she knew how he was feeling; affronted at being given such scant respect but not certain that making a fuss would gain him anything but opprobrium from the very dignified waiter who was now bearing down on them, and she said quickly, ‘I am glad this is your usual table. I much prefer to be a little private. It is much better than being in the centre where all can stare and gossip at you. Especially as I am not dressed as I might be for the occasion.’

  His face cleared and he nodded. ‘Not my usual table, really, of course, but I dare say it’s a busy night tonight and some other devil’s taking his time. But if you’re happy –’

  ‘As happy as I can be, considering I had not intended to remain.’ It was prudent to step back into her more chilly mode, she decided. Give this man an inch and he’d take several miles. And this fascination he had for her must on no account be encouraged. ‘I do assure you that I had not meant to –’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ he said, and lifted the menu. ‘Now, what shall it be? You choose whatever you want. Anything at all. Don’t you worry about nothing – you want it, you have it.’ And he began to study the large card.

  Just reading it made her hungry again and she let her gaze take in the great range of lobster dishes, from patties to grilled in rich sauces to poached in bouillon, and the bewildering list of sole dishes and game dishes and soufflés and pies and puddings galore, and knew thatshe was defeated. However good her intentions this was a treat not to be missed and she chose a fricassee of lobster and a dish of scalloped potatoes and green peas, and then leaned back in her chair and waited for him to make his own selection.

  When the waiter had taken his order, including a demand for champagne ‘– the best,’ he said loudly. ‘Not one of your cheap fizzes, the best –’ at which the waiter looked singularly wooden, he leaned back in his own chair and nodded at her.

  ‘Now, this is a bit of all right, ain’t – isn’t it? Just what a chap needs, end of a hard day. Did a good bit of business today, I did.’

  ‘Really,’ she said and gloom slid into her mind. This was the way her father talked at table, of business and making money, and this was what his guests always talked about, even if they had been invited as potential husbands for her. They certainly never made any effort to speak of matters which might possibly be of interest to a woman rather than to a man of business, and she looked across the table at the corrugated forehead and the protruberant dark eyes and sighed. All men were the same, after all, were they the middling sort like her father and his cronies, or this little East End oddity.

  ‘– but I shan’t tell you about it on account of it’s boring for ladies. I know that. You must never bore ladies. It’s the first thing I tell young ’uns as come to me for education. I tell Ruby all the time. Never bore a lady,’ he said blithely and gave her that odd gap-toothed grin of his and inevitably her gloom melted.

  ‘That is very kind of you,’ she said. ‘Business is indeed a very boring matter. My father talks of it a good deal. I try not to listen.’

  ‘What sort of business is he in?’ Harris looked alertly at her, and lifted his brows so that his forehead became even more ridged.

  She sighed. ‘There you are, breaking your promise already! Hardware. That sort of business. He has a number of shops, and each is as dull as the other. Though why I should discuss my father’s affairs with you is really not –’

  ‘Why not? We’re going to be good friends, you and me. And we ain’t talking about business. Not real business – my sort. We’re just finding out about your old man.’

  ‘Old man? He’d be most put about to hear himself so described. He says he is in his prime.’

  ‘You don’t like him one bit, do you?’ he said after a moment and her face flamed.

  ‘How dare you say such a thing!’ she cried. ‘He is my Papa and of course I love him!’

  ‘You might love him. Kids can’t help loving their parents. It’s born in ’em. But liking ’em – that’s another matter altogether.’

  She stared at him, a little nonplussed, and then said abruptly, ‘You said we – that you wish us to be friends. I really must tell you that I am here under – under a form of duress. I mean, I had no intention of eating here with you, and I certainly have no intention of ever doing so again. It is quite improper that you should consider any sort of – er continuing acquaintanceship between us, just as it was quite improper of me to discuss my Papa’s business affairs with you –’

  ‘You didn’t discuss nothing. I did.’ His speech was beginning to sound much more as it had last night, with some care to change the accent, but with only limited success. The more they talked the more relaxed and the less careful he became with his vowels. ‘Listen, Miss Amberly –’ He had leaned forwards to speak more confidentially and now he stopped himself and then said, ‘What’s your first name? I can’t go on calling you Miss Amberly all stiff and starchy like that. I’m not the stiff and starchy type.’

  ‘I had noticed,’ she said sharply. ‘But I am. My Christian name is no concern of yours.’

  ‘Oh, well, I dare say I was rushin’ things a bit,’ he grinned. ‘Wait till the end of the evening. You’ll tell me then. Me, you can call me what you like, as long as it ain’t Mr Harris, which is for waiters and youngsters and such like. My friends call me Kid. You can call me Kid.’

  ‘I don’t want to call you anything!’ she cried, almost banging her fist on the table. It was ridiculously difficult making this man understand. ‘I keep telling you – I had intended only to pay my brothers’ debt when I came here tonight, not to make this into some sort of social encounter.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why what?’

  ‘Why are you so set this shouldn’t be a – what was it you said? A social encounter? What’s wrong with being sociable?’

  ‘Nothing! I mean, in the right circumstances, with the right people and –’

  ‘Ah!’ Now he leaned back in his chair. ‘Right, now we got it, eh? I ain’t the right person. I’m a nasty greasy little Jew, and you’re a Christian lady and too good for the likes of me, is that it?’

  She took a deep breath. ‘I did not – I do not make any remarks about your religion, nor would I. I know that there are those who do, but I have never been one of them. For my part –’ She went a little pink. ‘I’ll tell you the truth, for my part, I thin
k religion treats people shamefully. I sit in church and hear the vicar speak of forbearance and love for all mankind and such matters and then watch him after the service wringing his hands in delight as the richer sort talk to him, and quite snubbing the other kind – and I think of the dreadful hypocrisy I see on all sides and I – well, I make no judgements on others’ religion when the one to which I have adherence offers what it does. If I were to speak as you say, I would be no better than the vicar, whom I dislike a great deal. So never suggest I did.’

  ‘All right, it ain’t religion. Mind you, I think you’re wrong. There’s good things about it. Keeps people together, doesn’t it? At least being Jewish does. It’s more to do with people than sermons, being Jewish is. Anyway, if it isn’t my religion that makes you not want to know me, is it because you think I’m poor and lives in the East End and you’re rich and lives up West?’

  ‘I’m not rich,’ she said bitterly. ‘I’m fully dependent on my father, and always will be. That is not rich.’

  ‘All right then, upper class,’ he said, dismissing the matter of her poverty as though it were quite unimportant, which stung her somewhat; to admit to this total stranger that her father had complete control of the purse strings, even being free to dole out her small legacy from her mother entirely as he saw fit, had been a considerable effort for her. She had become so embarrassed by the turn that the conversation had taken that she had wanted to show Harris that she was not what he thought, a person who valued money above all things, yet now he treated her admission as though it was insignificant. That nettled her and made her speak more waspishly than she intended.

  ‘Very well, if you insist, yes, we are of different classes. Ladies of my sort do not normally behave in the manner you seem to regard as reasonable. They do not accept invitations to dine from strangers, and then go off and sit about in fashionable restaurants with them –’

  He produced a smile of total triumph. ‘But you’re doing it, ain’t you? So you ain’t so different to me after all.’

  ‘You are impossible!’ she flared at him and made to push back her chair to jump to her feet and run as far as she could get from this tiresome man and his ridiculous logic, but even as she tensed her thigh muscles to move the waiter arrived with a bottle in a bucket of ice and a trolley bearing their supper, and began to flourish glasses and napkins, which made not only movement but also conversation impossible.

  And when the food was set ready in front of her and the champagne, wonderfully cold and glinting in its dew-hazed glass, invited her to drink it, the moment to protest seemed to have fled. All she could do was sip at the drink in response to his lifted glass – and it really was extraordinarily delicious – and start to eat. And that was even more delectable. She could not remember ever eating anything quite so rich or taste-laden, or at least not since she had first eaten ice cream when she had been a child, and she ate with gusto, savouring every bit of it.

  ‘What’s it like, that lobster?’ he asked after a moment, sitting with a forkful of sole mornay poised before his lips, and she looked at him and said, ‘It tastes very good indeed. Why did you not choose it?’

  He seemed to give a small shudder. ‘No, not lobster. Couldn’t eat lobster. Tref.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘It’s tref. Forbidden. Yeah, I know, you don’t think there’s anythin’ much to religion, but to Jews like me, it’s everyday things, you see. I don’t go to no services much. Got better things to do on a Friday night and on a Saturday morning – but I can’t bring myself to eat foods I been brought up against.’

  ‘I know you don’t eat pork,’ she said, remembering one of her father’s guests needing to have some special dish prepared, and he grinned at that.

  ‘Everyone knows that. It’s all they do know. That and that we’re greasy and make a lot o’ money, and so forth. But it’s other things as well. It’s shellfish. It’s meat from an animal that don’t chew the cud or have cloven hoofs. It’s mixing milk and meat in the same dish. Things like that –’

  ‘It sounds complicated.’ She was feeling rather dreamy and comfortable now, for the food had made her a little sleepy, while the wine was sparkling inside her eyes and making everything she looked at shimmer a little. He poured her another glass – the third – and she made no protest. ‘And rather a pity too. Lobster is really very good.’

  ‘I’ll take your word for it.’

  ‘What would happen if you didn’t? I mean, if you decided to eat it anyway?’

  He made a small grimace, turning his lips down to make a doubtful crescent. ‘I don’t know. I just wouldn’t – couldn’t – do it. It’s no trouble breaking the other rules – and God knows there’s enough of ’em – but the food ones –’ He shook his head. ‘It’s what you learn from your Momma. That you can never forget. What your Poppa tells you and your schoolmasters tell you – this you can forget. But what Momma does when you’re a kid, this stays for always.’

  He was silent for a while and then said abruptly, ‘I’m sorry your mother died. That must be very unhappy for you.’

  She didn’t look at him. ‘Yes,’ was all she said, and sat and stared down at her glass of wine which stood gently sending its pinhead bubbles to the surface, and whether it was the effect of staring at that or the wine already inside her head she was never to know, but suddenly she remembered her Mama as she had actually looked. It had been almost fourteen years now since she had died of the same diphtheria that had killed Mildred’s two sisters, and which she and Basil and Claude had been fortunate enough to survive, and almost that long since she had wept for her, but now, sitting at Romano’s restaurant in the Strand, with a total stranger, she saw that much loved face. Lined and tired, and as plain as her own, with the same long features and rather irregular nose that she had bequeathed to her, Maria Amberly looked at her daughter through the bubbles in a glass of champagne and made her feel so lonely and so bereft that tears lifted in her throat, needle sharp, and pushed their way out through her eyes to trickle down her sallow cheeks.

  ‘Hey, hey!’ he said softly. ‘I didn’t think to upset you so.’ And he leaned forwards and his hand closed over hers, warm and firm. ‘I wanted only to say I was – oh dear, oh dear.’ And he reached into his pocket with his other hand and gave her a large white handkerchief. ‘I wish you long life, my dear.’

  She took the handkerchief and sniffed and rubbed her face and eyes with it, not caring whether it made the tip of her nose red. ‘What – I beg your pardon?’

  ‘It’s what we say to people as have been bereaved. We wish them long life. It’s what upsets the living most, you see. Thinking of when it’ll be their turn.’

  ‘It doesn’t worry me,’ she said and gave him back his handkerchief. It had comforted her to use it, smelling as it did of lavender and tobacco and something else she couldn’t quite define but liked. ‘I often wish I had died when Mama did. I’d have been no worse off than I am.’

  He looked shocked. ‘You musn’t say that, a young lady like you! You got your whole life ahead of you!’

  ‘And what use is that when it is so deadly dull and miserable and lonely?’ she said passionately and stared at him through a mist of tears and the wine’s shimmer. Somewhere at the back of her mind a small warning voice tried to make itself heard, to tell her she was behaving quite incredibly stupidly and to stop it at once, but she ignored it without any difficulty at all. ‘If you knew, if you only knew, how dismal it is to be there at Leinster Terrace and to know how they all despise me for being so ugly and wish to see me off their hands and wed, and knowing I never shall be – oh, if you only knew you would not speak so about the joys of remaining alive!’

  ‘Ugly?’ he said and lifted his brows so that once again his forehead collapsed into a series of tight ridges. ‘Ugly? How can anyone say that of you? You aren’t a fancy madam, that’s true, but you don’t need to be. A lady of your character can’t ever be called ugly! I never heard such a thing. Not a beauty, no one ca
n’t deny, but very pleasant. It’s a face I like, anyway.’

  She stared at him and now at last the warning voice was able to make itself heard. This was dreadful, quite dreadful. Not only was she sitting with this peculiar man and eating his lobster fricassee and drinking his champagne, while her family, if they thought of her at all, believed she was doing good works at a Mission for poor chidren, but she was also telling him things she had never told anyone ever before, putting into words feelings she barely dared to admit to herself that she had. And what was perhaps worse, she was hearing him say things to her that she couldn’t have imagined any man ever saying, and liking it. To be told that she looked pleasant – it was the kindest remark any person had ever made about her and she put both hands up to her face to cover the heat that she knew filled her cheeks, and did not know where to look.

  ‘Listen,’ he said comfortably, and grinned at her. ‘Listen, already, don’t look like that. A man tells you he likes your face, that ain’t no reason to look like you been poleaxed! Have some more to eat. Have some ice cream, some cake, some more wine. Come on, we’ll enjoy ourselves. What do you say?’

  ‘No,’ she whispered. ‘Really, no – I must go home. This is mad. This is quite ridiculous and I must go home and never ever see you again and –’

  ‘So, why?’ He lifted his brows at her, his face full of humour. ‘Why, tell me? Is home so wonderful? Of course it ain’t. You told me that. You don’t have no objection to me being a Jew. You told me that. And you ain’t the sort of snob some people are, like that vicar. So why not see me again? The thing of it is I like you, and I think you like me. Eh? Am I so bad to like?’

  She looked at him, at the face through which beard was once again struggling to escape and creating blue shadows to mark its efforts, at the protruding dark eyes and the corrugated forehead and lustrous curly hair and thought – he’s a ridiculous little man. So short, so oddly lumpy, with his thick shoulders and arms so bulging that they strain against the sleeves of his jacket and he can hardly rest them at his sides, so very much everything she found unfamiliar – and yet so –