Chapter 11 Like a House on Fire
Saul sat up in bed and looked at the luminous hands on the alarm clock. He wasn’t sleeping through the night these days, not since his conversation with Jimmy in the pub. Nothing conclusive had been said, it was true. But neither had Jimmy allayed his fears. Quite the contrary.
He thought back to nearly a month ago, when he’d implored Honor to be honest, to explain her real connection to the young man who’d arrived at the house.
Unlike the other residents, Saul knew full well that Jimmy’s mother hadn’t been in service with Honor’s grandmother.
He’d seen where she grew up. Neither of her grandmothers, he’d warrant, had ever risen to the status of a housekeeper, let alone employed one.
If Jimmy was in fact Honor’s brother pretending to be someone else and she was covering for him—well, he wasn’t sure if he could ever forgive her.
He desperately hoped he was wrong, that his imagination was running away with him.
For why would Honor lie about it? When her brother was sent to prison, she had cut off all contact with him—that, at any rate, was her official story, related to him after Naomi had explained his dreadful connection to Elizabeth, as she knew her.
According to Honor, her new name represented a permanent break from the past. Not only had Saul accepted this, he’d felt flattered—special—that he alone knew the whole truth about her curious trajectory.
If only the prison service had provided the simplest of answers.
After his letter went unanswered, he had telephoned several times, and eventually he spoke to a polite but quite intransigent lady.
“The sole parties privy to such information,” she said, “were the victims and the victims’ families.
” “But I am the victim’s family,” he pleaded.
“No,” she said, “I don’t have your name on record.
” “I’m Naomi Cohen’s first cousin!” “Sorry, sir, but anyone could claim that. Would Mrs. Cohen like to contact us herself?”
At about four in the morning, Saul decided he was being ridiculous.
He sat up in bed and lit a cigarette. The British government didn’t let murderers back on the streets before they’d even served half their sentence.
You were lucky to get thirty years instead of hanging.
Jimmy must be a childhood friend from the East End, someone to whom Honor felt some sort of misguided loyalty.
You could never truly slough off your past, after all.
He of all people knew that. And yet, why had Honor wept?
Why had she stayed the night and clung to him so fiercely, as though they were lovers about to be torn apart forever?
It was no good. He gave up on sleep and made himself a cup of coffee, which he drank slowly while waiting for dawn to break.
He considered his choices. Confront Honor, tell her his suspicion, and risk their friendship if he was wrong.
It was a serious accusation, that she would force Saul to live under the same roof as the man who’d taken everything from him.
And—worse—that she would deceive him while doing so.
“Mina dear, I have a confession to make,” said Saul.
“I had an ulterior motive for inviting you out this evening.” They were at a chophouse near the cinema, drinking Hungarian red wine (Saul with gusto, Mina more gingerly).
“Not that your company isn’t always a pleasure in its own right, of course. ”
“Ooh, an ulterior motive. How exciting. I was going to say let me guess, but I’m afraid I haven’t the foggiest.” Usually when men asked her out, she grasped their motives only too bloody well.
But Saul wasn’t like that. If anything, women were always trying to catch his eye, while he didn’t seem to notice.
Anyway, he was old enough to be her father.
Although she had once got a proposal from one of her school friend’s fathers.
Mr. Pickering, from four doors down. She came home from the chocolate factory one summer evening, and he was sitting in the front parlor, talking to her parents.
“Love,” her mum said, “Mr. Pickering wants to take you for a walk. Isn’t that nice?
” Mina was baffled, but she went with him.
In the park, they sat on a bench. He pressed his leg against hers and started this speech about how ardently he loved and admired her.
Flabbergasted wasn’t the word. She’d never heard anything like it in her life.
She barely even knew him to say hello to.
Then he got a ring out. It was a nice ring, gold with little rubies and diamonds.
She remembered his late wife wearing it.
After a few moments of stunned silence, she said something like, “Thanks ever so, but I’m spoken for. ” It seemed the politest excuse.
At home, her parents said, all excited, did he ask you, then?
When Mina said she was too young to get married, and even if she weren’t, she didn’t want to marry someone’s dad, her mother said tartly, “But you’ll be sixteen next year.
You could do a lot worse. Norman Pickering’s got his own pest control business.
It brings in a pretty penny. You know Hildie Burke, who moved in next door but one?
Got rid of her rampant woodworm.” Mina was outraged, and not only on aesthetic grounds (his age aside, Mr. Pickering was no Dirk Bogarde).
It was the notion of living forever in the same Billericay terrace of two-up two-downs when there was a whole exciting world out there, that struck her as offensive beyond belief.
Upstairs in her room, she did some sums and decided that, with some extra shifts at the factory, she could move to London in six months.
Saul drank some wine and continued: “Even for one as clever as you, I believe what I’m about to say would be impossible to guess.
It’s about our conversation on Sunday, when you told me Jimmy was lying about his past. Strictly between us—and I know I can trust you—I’m worried that young man is not who he says he is. ”
The waitress brought their food. Mina popped a chip in her mouth before remembering her manners and picking up her fork (tines pointing down, index finger on the handle). “Exactly what I said! There’s something shifty about him, isn’t there?”
“I have my suspicions about who he really is. I may be very wrong. I hope I am.” He tucked his napkin into his collar and stirred his stew.
“As you know, before the war, I lived in Eastern Europe with my wife and daughter. We wanted to leave. The Romanian government was confiscating Jewish assets, their possessions. They revoked our citizenship, placed quotas on schools and jobs. But we had one possession of considerable value. It was a portrait of my wife, Gila, by the great artist Marc Chagall. Gila’s mother was a cousin of Chagall’s wife, Bella, and when Gila was sixteen, they went to Paris.
Gila sat for Chagall, and he presented her with the painting afterward.
He was not yet as famous as he would become, and neither Gila nor her parents knew the artwork would one day be valuable.
“By the late thirties, Chagall was famous enough to be targeted by the Nazis, who classified his work as degenerate. I offered Gila’s portrait to an art dealer in the Bukovina, but the sum he offered was paltry.
Insulting. So many dealers were taking advantage of Jews’ desperation.
I knew that if we sold the painting in London, we’d receive ten times as much.
So I sent it, via a traveling friend, to my cousin Naomi.
She lived near the Whitechapel Gallery, and people at the gallery helped her find a buyer.
” It hadn’t been a great sum, the profit from selling this most precious item.
Around a thousand pounds. “The money would have been just enough to fund our escape to London, mine and my wife and daughter’s. ”
“Your daughter was only little, wasn’t she?”
“When the war began, Marya was not yet three. She’d be around your age now.”
“Who stole your money? Someone stole it, didn’t they?”
Saul dabbed his lips with the edge of his napkin.
“Naomi and her husband, Larry—a very nice fellow, he repaired wristwatches and clocks for a living—had a neighbor, Mrs. Shaughnessy. Respectable woman. A widow. Her son and daughter lived with her, along with the daughter’s husband.
This younger couple, Elizabeth and Thomas Armstrong, they were friends with Naomi and Larry.
Elizabeth and Naomi were particularly close, I believe.
They worked together at one time, as waitresses at a Lyons Corner House.
” Saul remembered a photograph, possibly still in existence somewhere, of Honor and Naomi in their uniforms, with those funny black-and-white hats.
“Elizabeth stole the money!”
“No, not Elizabeth. It wasn’t her fault, not really.”
He refilled their glasses. Then he began telling Mina what had happened, reciting almost verbatim the letter Naomi had written him from her hospital bed. He spoke as if Elizabeth were a complete stranger to them both. And wasn’t she?
“Larry, wake up!” Naomi’s voice was an urgent whisper as she poked her snoring husband in the ribs. “There’s someone downstairs.”
Larry’s eyes remained closed, but his face creased into a woebegone expression. “Don’t talk nonsense, Nay. You’re dreaming, just dreaming.”
From below came an unmistakable shuffle and crash. Now Larry’s eyes flew open. Naomi shoved him. “See?”
He threw off the bedclothes and pushed his feet into slippers. “Stay there,” he told his wife. But she was already knotting the belt on her dressing gown.