‘Fine. Had a letter last week. It’s spring in Auckland, he went with his brother’s family to look at Rotorua last week. It wasn’t raining for once.’
‘Still hasn’t met a nice Kiwi widow?’
‘He’ll never marry again. He was too devoted to Mum.’
A shadow crossed Geoff’s face; David guessed he was thinking of the woman in Kenya. He changed the subject. ‘Heard about Beaver-brook flying out to Berlin?’
‘Yes. According to the club tickertape, Hitler isn’t going to be able to meet him.’
‘Maybe it’s true Hitler’s dead, he hasn’t been seen in public for what – two years?’
Geoff shook his head firmly. ‘He’s not dead. The Nazi leaders would be fighting for his crown; they fought like rats over Goring’s economic empire when he died.’
‘I wish Hitler were dead.’
‘Amen to that,’ Geoff replied with feeling.
When he was growing up in Barnet David did not think much about being Irish. He knew bad things had happened in Ireland and that his parents had brought him to England when he was very small. His father’s parents still lived in Dublin and visited them occasionally when David was young; they died within six months of each other when he was ten. His mother never spoke of her family; over the years David gathered there had been some sort of quarrel.
There was always a burden of expectation from his mother. His father was a solid, unruffled, easy-going man, but Rachel Fitzgerald was small and thin and excitable, always busy, always chatting in her loud sing-song voice to her husband or David, the daily woman or her female friends from the Conservative Club. When not talking she was usually listening to the radio, humming along to the tunes and sometimes playing them, surprisingly well, on the piano in the dining room. She was forever telling David to work hard at school; with all the unemployment in the country since the War it was important to get qualifications. She spoke anxiously, as though their safe, secure life might suddenly be snatched away.
David was quiet and self-contained like his father. He looked like him, too, although his hair was curly like his mother’s, but black not red. ‘You and your da,’ his mother would say, ‘you’re alike as two peas in a pod. You’ll break all the girls’ hearts when you grow up.’ David would redden and frown. He loved his mother but sometimes she drove him crazy.
David went to a private day-school, then got a grammar-school place when he was eleven, passing the entrance exam easily. When they got the results his father said he was a clever lad, regarding him with pink-faced satisfaction across the dining table, but his mother looked at him fiercely. ‘This is your chance in life, Davy boy,’ she said. ‘They’ll expect you to work hard, so make sure you do now. Make your mammy proud.’
‘Please call me David, Mum, not Davy.’
‘You’re turning into a right formal English boy.’ She leaned across and ruffled his hair. ‘Wee curly top. Oh, that’s a scowl to give your ma.’
David did well at grammar school. He was taken aback at first by the severe formality of the masters in their black gowns, the obedience and quiet they demanded, and the amount of homework, but he soon adjusted. He made friends easily though he was never a leader, always held himself a little apart. In his first term the class bully started calling him Paddy and bog-trotter. David ignored him for a while, not wanting to make trouble, but one day the boy said his mother was an Irish peasant, and out of the blue David flew at him, knocking him down. A master saw the fight and both boys got the cane, but the bully left David alone after that.
He was near the top of the class. He was good at sport, too, in the junior rugby team though he didn’t much like the game. David was a very good swimmer and loved diving – climbing the ladder to the top board and jumping off, breaking the still surface of the water and going down and down into that silent world of pastel blue. Later he entered inter-school competitions. There would be a little crowd watching and cheering, but the best thing was still hitting the water, then that fall into silence.
He won cups, which his mother insisted go on the mantelpiece. Once or twice David came home from school when his mother had her friends round for tea, and she would call him into the dining room, saying, ‘Here’s my Davy that won all these cups. See what a handsome boy he’s getting. Oh, there, Davy, don’t look at me like that. See, he’s blushing.’ The ladies would smile indulgently and David would escape to his room. He hated the attention. He wanted to be just another boy, to be ordinary.
When he was eighteen he took his entrance exam for Oxford. He had extra tuition for it, and for the first time in his life he felt tired, not sure he could succeed in the task ahead. His mother didn’t help, pressing him about the exam, telling him he shouldn’t go out in the evening, give all his time to his studies. She had started to look strained and ill lately. The news in the papers sometimes upset her; it was 1935, the Nazis were in power in Germany and Italy had invaded Abyssinia. Unlike some of her Conservative Club friends Mrs Fitzgerald thought Hitler and Mussolini were monsters who would bring the world to ruin and never tired of saying so. But it was more than that, she was starting to lose weight and her endless supply of talk had dried up, like a tap turned off. David found he missed it. He wondered if it was because of worry over his exam and felt angry and helpless and guilty. He was doing his best as he always had. Why was it never enough? He became curt and rude with her.
One evening at dinner she started complaining about David wasting his time on swimming practice. He lost his temper, called her a shrieking colleen. Rachel burst into tears and went up to her bedroom, slamming the door. David’s father, who hardly ever got angry, shouted at him to show his mother proper respect and threatened to give him the back of his hand if he spoke to her like that again, though David was as big as him now.
The day the news came that David had got into Oxford, his father said quietly that there was something he must tell him. He took him into the dining room. They sat down and his father looked at him in a way he never had before, serious and sad. ‘Your mother’s very ill,’ he said softly. ‘I’m afraid she’s got the cancer.’ There was a tremble in his voice. ‘She didn’t want to tell you till after your exam, she didn’t want to worry you. But now – well, she’s feeling very poorly and she’s going to have to have a nurse in. She should have done before, really.’
David sat quite still for a moment. He said, his voice cracking, ‘I’ve been terrible to her.’
‘You weren’t to know, son.’ His father looked at him seriously. ‘But now you’ve got to be good to her. She won’t be with us long.’
David did something he hadn’t done since he was a small child; he put his head in his hands and burst into loud, sobbing tears. His body shook and trembled. His father came across and put a hand awkwardly on his shoulder. ‘There, son,’ he said. ‘I know.’
David spent the summer doing all he could for his mother. He helped the daily and the nurse, busied himself with jobs around the house and taking his mother’s meals up. He was consumed with guilt, all the more because her fierce, possessive love had faded to an exhausted dependent helplessness. He sometimes helped her in and out of bed; she was skin and bone now. She would smile bravely and touch his cheek with a shaking finger and say breathlessly that he was a good boy, she had always known that.
He was with her when she died, his father on the other side of the bed. It was a warm Saturday in September; he would be going up to Oxford in a few weeks. Rachel drifted in and out of consciousness, listlessly watching the sun drift across the sky. Then suddenly she looked straight at David. She spoke to him, in a voice full of sadness, some words he couldn’t understand. It was little more than a whisper. ‘
David turned to his father. He leaned forward and squeezed his wife’s hand. ‘We didn’t understand you, darling,’ he said.
She frowned and tried to concentrate, but then her head fell back and the life went out of her.
Afterwards his father told him the truth. ‘Your mother’s family were Jewish. They came from somewhere in Russia. In the Tsar’s time, during the pogroms, a lot left for America. Your mother’s parents – your grandparents – left Russia with your mother and her three sisters. She was eight.’
David shook his head, trying to make sense of it. ‘But how did she come to be Irish?’
‘There were a lot of crooked people involved in the emigrations. Your mother’s poor parents didn’t speak a word of English. A boat brought them to Dublin and they thought they were going to meet a boat for America but they were just left there, stuck in Ireland. Your grandfather was a cabinetmaker, very good at it, and through some other Jews he managed to set up a shop. He ran a successful business. The children grew up speaking English. They were encouraged to, so as not to be thought too different. But I suppose deep down they never forgot their first language.’
‘Was Mum speaking Russian?’
