When I Lived in Modern Times Read Online Free Page B

confidence. Who was I to think I could be anything other than an amateur, a private painter? And if he wasn’t prepared to pay, that was the end of the matter. I took the job. I walked to Holborn every morning and made tea and ran errands and watched the men in their shirtsleeves, with bow ties knotted round their necks and I tried to pick up some techniques from them. But God, they were a dull lot, too old to fight or still waiting for their call-up papers.
    Eventually they gave me a little job to do. An advert for a women’s magazine for “feminine hygiene” in which the facts of biology were rendered so vague that in the end my drawing depicted a woman sitting in an armchair with nothing more than a pained expression on her face. My boss came and took a look. “No good,” he said. “You’ve done laxatives.”
    I only had to endure the office for a few months. Fate had a greater indignity for me. Something about my mother was unraveling. She was coming apart at the seams. She took more and more days off from the salon and sent me in her place. She sat at home, a nervous wreck, crying.
    “Why can’t things be nice?” she asked me, over and over again.
    Sometimes I thought that when she addressed me, it was as one of her sisters. “Gittel,” she said, “make us a nice cup of tea, will you?”
    “Evelyn,” I said. “I’m Evelyn, not Gittel.”
    “Yes. Evelyn. Has someone fed the horse?”
    “Mother, pull yourself together.”
    “Yes, I must. Mum will be back soon.”
    “Stay home,” Joe said. “Look after her.” So I did. And who could blame me for feeling so low in London, going to the salon for a couple of hours every afternoon when she was sleeping, doing perms and sets and nearly knocking myself out on the stench of peroxide in the back room.
    May 1945. The war over. The camps liberated. The voices of the pacifist appeasers not believing what they found there, saying it was war propaganda. Then sitting in a darkened cinema watching the newsreels. Uncle Joe sobbing, his head on my mother’s lap. Sixteen cousins gone. Sixteen.
    Next day he said, “Never mind the six million. What about the eleven million?” And he put a five-pound note in the JNF tin.
    The survivors sat in the displaced persons camps. No one wanted them. Britain said no. America said no. After a while they began to organize. They started up schools and synagogues. They elected their own police force. With the past what it was, they had nothing to do except think about the future.

I N the summer I came home one day from the shops to find my mother sitting on the step, her face full of cold, heavy sweat, and her eyes crazy. She tried to speak to me but I couldn’t understand what she was talking about. “Put the poppy back,” she said, slurring her words like a drunkard. “On the leg. Puss.”
    I held her in my arms and stroked her hair while the doctor was sent for. The Frenchman who ran the pub around the corner where my mother occasionally went for a small brandy with Uncle Joe sat down next to us and took her hand. We formed a kind of pietà sitting there, triangular in composition, as if we were a living Leonardo on that doorstep on Old Compton Street amid the traffic and the tarts and the spivs and the black-market types in their flashy suits and the expressionless men on their way to see strippers in upstairs rooms and the muscle boys in their prime coming back from shooting the breeze with a punch-ball at Mike Solomon’s gymnasium and the dour Hungarian waiters going to work at the Budapest restaurant in Dean Street and the drunk and disheveled old women in broken shoes and moldy hats with dusty feathers and the bohemians in colored shirts opening the doors of the public houses where they would stay until closing time and then vomit in the streets. It was the world I knew and it was about to be overthrown.
    They took my mother away to the Middlesex Hospital where a second stroke, a few hours later, poleaxed her at the