Pendel will give Benny whatever he asks, if only he will go on about the explosion.
‘It was the smell of her, your father told me,’ Benny resumes. ‘Pulling at his hair he was, with the remorse. Sitting before me as you’re sitting now except for the uniform. “For the sake of her smell I brought down the temple on my head,” he told me. Your father was a religious man, Harry. “She was kneeling at the grate and I smelt the sweet womanhood of her, not soap and scrubbing, Benny, but the natural woman. The smell of her womanhood overcame me.” If Rachel hadn’t been having a knees-up with the Daughters of Jewish Purity on Southend Pier your father would never have fallen.’
‘But he did,’ Pendel prompts him.
‘Harry, amid the mingled tears of Catholic and Jewish guilt, amid Ave Marias and Oi veys and what-will-become-of-me’s on both sides, your father plucked the cherry. See it as an act of God I can’t, but the Jewish chutzpah is yours and so is the Irish blarney, if you could only ditch the guilt.’
‘How did you get me out of the orphanage?’ Pendel demands, nearly shouting now, he cares so much.
Somewhere among his muddy memories of childhood before Benny rescued him there is a picture of a dark-haired woman like Louisa on her hands and knees while she scrubs a stone floor as big as a playground, watched by a statue of a blue-robed Good Shepherd and His Lamb.
Pendel driving the homeward stretch. Familiar houses long asleep. The stars washed clean by rain. A full moon outside his prison window. Bang me up again, he thinks. Prison’s where you go when you don’t want to take decisions.
‘Harry, I was magnificent. Those nuns were French snobs and thought I was a gentleman. I wore the full Monty, a grey suit out of the window, a tie selected by your Auntie Ruth, socks to match, the shoes hand-made by Lobb of St James’s which was always my indulgence. No swagger, hands to my sides, my Socialism nowhere to be seen.’ For Benny amid his myriad accomplishments is a passionate supporter of the Workers’ Cause and believer in the Rights of Man.’ “Mothers,” I say to them, “I promise you this. Little Harry will have the good life if it kills me. Harry shall be our mitzvah. You tell me the wise men to take him to and he’ll be there on the dot with a white shirt for his instruction. A fee-paying education at the school of your choice I guarantee, the finest music on the gramophone and a home life any orphan child would give his eyes for. Salmon on the table, idealistic conversation, his own room to sleep in, a down mattress.” I was on the way up in those days. No more shmatte for me, it was all golf clubs and footwear and the palace in Umbria just round the corner. We thought we’d be millionaires in a week.’
‘Where was Cherry?’
‘Gone, Harry boy, gone,’ says Benny dropping his voice for tragedy. ‘Your mother fled the coop and who can blame her? One letter from an aunt in County Mayo saying her poor sad Cherry was worn out from all the opportunities the Sisters gave her to wash away her sins.’
‘And my father?’
Benny falls back into despair. ‘In the soil, son,’ he says, wiping away fresh tears. ‘Your father, my brother. Where I should be for making you do what you did. Died of the shame in my opinion, which is what I nearly do every time I look at you here. It was those summer frocks that did for me. There’s no more depressing sight on earth than five hundred unsold summer frocks in autumn, as every shlemiel knows. Each day that passed, the insurance policy became a temptation of the devil. I was a slave to convention, is what I was, Harry, and what’s worse, I made you carry the torch for me.’
‘I’m doing the course,’ Pendel tells him to cheer him up as the bell goes. ‘I’m going to be the best cutter in the world. Look at this then.’ And he shows him a panel of prison cloth that he cadged from stores and cut to measure.