The Lemon Tree

HELEN FORRESTER

The Lemon Tree

Copyright

HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

This paperback edition 1995

Previously published in paperback by Fontana 1991

First published in Great Britain by Collins 1990

Copyright © Helen Forrester 1990

The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

Ebook Edition © JULY 2012 ISBN 9780007392155

Version 2017-11-14

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Chapter Forty-Six

Chapter Forty-Seven

Chapter Forty-Eight

Chapter Forty-Nine

Select Bibliography

About the Author

Author’s Note

Other Works

About the Publisher

Chapter One

‘He’s a woman,’ Mr George Tasker announced lugubriously to Sarah, his wife of thirty years. He pushed the dog off the easy chair by the fire and sat down to take off his boots; they were very wet and were covered with wavy lines of white sediment. He put them neatly in the hearth to dry, as he continued, ‘I’m workin’ for a woman.’ His thick Liverpool accent made him sound as if he had a heavy cold in the head.

‘George, you know better than to walk on me new coconut matting with your dirty boots,’ Sarah scolded. ‘And what do you mean – he’s a woman?’

‘Wallace H. Harding is a woman!’

‘Never!’

‘He is – that is, she is. The Ould Fella’s niece – not a nephew, like we imagined. She come into our department this morning, large as life, with the lawyer, Mr Benson, and Mr Turner, the chemist.’ He stood up and rubbed his cold hands before the glowing fire. ‘She stopped and shook hands with me, seeing as I’m the Soap Master,’ he added with obvious satisfaction.

Sarah Tasker paused in the act of getting a casserole of tripe and onions out of the oven. She looked up at him through a burst of steam. ‘Well, I’m blowed! How queer!’

She turned and laid the casserole on a white-scrubbed deal table. On a wooden board lay a loaf of bread with several slices ready cut; beside it, sat a small dish of butter. She said mechanically, ‘Come and have your tea, luv.’ She picked up a brown teapot from the hob of the kitchen range and put it on the table, beside two heavy pint mugs and a pitcher of milk. Then, from a built-in shelf, she lifted down the pride of her kitchen, a green glass sugar basin won at a fair. She put it by the teapot.

In anticipation of George’s return from his job in the Lady Lavender Soap Works, she had laid his slippers on the fender to warm. George now put them on. He rose and stretched himself, a big, corpulent man, with a ruddy, kindly face boasting three generous chins. He sat himself at the table, surveyed the dish of tripe with approbation, and then said to Sarah, ‘Nobody makes tripe better’n you do, luv. I can always savour a bit of tripe.’

He invariably made a similar remark, no matter what she cooked for this main meal of the day, and, equally invariably, she beamed as if she had never heard it before. It was what made George so nice to live with, she reflected. He always appreciated what you did.

‘What’s she like?’ Sarah asked him, as she ladled generous dollops of tripe onto his plate.

Before answering, he considered the question carefully. Then he said, as he stuffed a forkful of tripe into his mouth, ‘She’s furrin – she’s almost yellow. She int a lady like we understand one – and yet she is, if you know what I mean. And she’s smart, no doubt about that.’

Sarah did not understand what he meant. She served herself, however, and commenced her meal, despite the flutter of worry in her stomach. This woman, whoever she was, could make or ruin their lives, she considered anxiously. When old Mr James Al-Khoury had died suddenly in November, 1885, they had heard that he had bequeathed the whole soap works, in which George had toiled for nearly twenty-five years, to his brother in the United States. Then Mr Benson, the lawyer, had discovered that the brother had also died, leaving everything he possessed to his wife. It had taken him some time to find out that she had moved to Canada, where she, too, had died, leaving as her sole legatee, Wallace H. Harding.

When George Tasker heard the name, whispered to him by Mr Helliwell, old James Al-Khoury’s secretary, he had assumed that the new owner was a nephew of his late employer; Mr Helliwell, priding himself on his secretarial discretion, had not enlightened him further.

And now George was saying that it was a niece!

With a feeling that she was about to choke on her tripe, Sarah realized that this foreign woman from the Colonies, who wasn’t a proper lady, would not, of course, be able to run the works, since she was a woman. Presumably she would sell it – and what happened to employees when a firm was sold over their heads, she dreaded to think. Too often, the older men found themselves out on the street. And then what would happen to them, with George out of work at fifty years of age?

George himself was ruminating over the same threat, but it did not deter him from eating his way steadily through his supper. His silent wife leaned forward and filled a mug with tea. She handed it to him. ‘Like some more tripe?’ she asked mechanically.

George wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and said he would. Then, while Sarah served him, he confirmed her fears by saying heavily, ‘Rumour is she’ll sell the place ’cos she couldn’t run it – being a woman, like.’

‘Aye, that’s what I were thinkin’.’ Then she asked warily, ‘Who’d buy it?’

‘Well, it has gone down a bit, since the Ould Fella died,’ George acknowledged. ‘But there’s some as would buy it, I think, though times are bad. There’s that Mr Lever what has started up by Crosfield’s in Warrington. Soap mad, he is. And there’s Crosfield’s themselves. They might like it, seeing as it’s close to the Brunswick Dock and the Brunswick Goods Station – very handy, it is, for shipping and receiving.’ He sipped his tea and moved uneasily in his straight wooden chair.

‘Would you keep your job?’

‘It all depends,’ he answered gloomily. ‘I’m the Soap Master and they can’t make soap without someone like me. But they could buy it and then shut it down – to get rid of a competitor.’

‘Well, we’ll worry about it when we get to it,’ Sarah responded, determined to be brave and not increase her spouse’s misgivings.

She wondered how far their savings, hidden under the loose board in the bedroom above them, would stretch if he were unemployed. With jobs so hard to find, he would hardly be likely to get another at his age, even though his mates always said he had a wonderful feel for soap.

‘What’s she like to look at?’ Sarah felt very curious about this strange woman who had come all the way from Canada. Since she was the Ould Fella’s nearest relative – except for his illegitimate son, Mr Benjamin, who didn’t count, poor lad – she must be an Arab, like he had been. George had told her that James Al-Khoury had come from Lebanon, the same Lebanon that she had read about in her Bible. Did that really make him an Arab, she wondered suddenly, and was Miss Harding, therefore, an Arab lady, for all that she had a Western name? She smiled gently. The Ould Fella had been more like a friend than an employer. Many were the times when he had sat in this very kitchen, talking about the soap works. Always talked to George, he did, before making any changes. George and him got on like two o’clock.

With a sigh she pushed her plate of tripe to one side; she would try to eat it later. Arab or not, Mr James Al-Khoury and George had been happy together. Tears welled inside her, but she crushed them back; she must not let George know how worried she was.

While he ruminated over Sarah’s question about Miss Harding, George took another slice of bread and spread it thinly with butter.

Eventually, he replied, ‘Well, she’s tall; same height as me, I should say. Thin as a rake. But when she smiles she’s got a lovely face – and great brown eyes like a young heifer. She don’t smile much, though. She were talkin’ quite sharp to Mr Turner, the chemist. I didn’t hear what she said, but I could see Turner didn’t like it. He can be a bit uppity, and he wouldn’t like being put down by a woman.’

‘What was she dressed like?’

‘Oh, she were all in black, in mourning, with a black veil thrown back from her face. She’d great rings on her fingers, all gold. No stones. She’d a ring on her marriage finger what looked roughly made; ugly, it was – not much polished. Never seen one like it before.’ He picked up his mug of tea and held it between his great hands. ‘She int married, though. I heard her correct old Bobsworth, when he called her Mrs Harding. She’s got a proud, cold way with her and she said as tart as a lemon to old Bob, “Miss Harding, if you please, Mr Bobsworth.”’

Sarah knew Mr Bobsworth quite well and she smiled, despite her forebodings. The strange lady rose in her estimation. Though she would not have hesitated to call Mr and Mrs Bobsworth her friends, they did tend to put on airs, because he was the firm’s head bookkeeper and forwarding clerk. ‘And her only the daughter of a stevedore,’ thought Sarah sourly.

George was speaking again, his heavy, grey brows knitted in puzzlement

‘As I said. Miss Harding shook hands with me, and then with everyone – even Alfie. She asked Alfie if he were born in Liverpool.’

Alfie was the seventeen-year-old mulatto labourer who swept the soap-boiling area. He also fetched and carried for the temperamental soap boilers, who sometimes dared not leave their soap pans, for fear they might miss the moment when the soap must be proved, or brine added or the boiling mixture turned off and carefully left to cool. The soap boilers were like housewives producing fine sponge cakes – everything had to be done exactly right. Sarah knew that a few people still regarded Mr Tasker as a magician, because he said he could feel how his great cauldrons of soap were getting on. He knew, they said. What he knew they did not specify – it appeared to them to be magic.

‘She told me she makes her own soap on her farm in Canada,’ expanded Mr Tasker. He put down his mug, leaned back from the table and belched. ‘She told me as the nearest soap works is hundreds of miles off and there’s no proper roads to it. Proper surprised I was, when she said it.’ His three chins wobbled, as if to indicate agreement with his remarks.

Sarah omitted to remind him that she never used any soap at all on her face, because she believed that soap spoiled her skin. As a country girl, she had always scrubbed her face with a rag dipped in water from the rain barrel at her father’s cottage door, and the present velvety smoothness of her complexion, despite her age, indicated that the natural oils of her skin had never been removed. Her five married daughters thought she was terribly old-fashioned and said that she owed it to her husband to use the soap he made. But she stubbornly refused, and told them that if they followed her example, they would not have to put that new-fangled cold cream on their faces every night. Lucky, they were, she thought, to be married to men with regular jobs, who could afford falderals like an occasional pot of cold cream.

‘It’s terrible she int a man,’ George said with feeling. ‘The Ould Fella was a good master, though he never paid out a penny he didn’t have to. Young Benji takes after him – pity the lad’s illegitimate; he could have followed him very nicely.’ He paused toget a bit of bread from between his stained front teeth with his finger. ‘Now, if she were a man, she’d be the same – a real firm hand on the tiller, she’d have. Backbone, she’s got, by the sound of her. But a woman? What can a woman do? In a soap works?’

He paused, as he contemplated in his mind’s eye the woman who now held his future in her slender fingers. Though she was so thin, he thought, she’d a nice waistline – and breasts like it said in the Bible, like pomegranates. Her long black dress fitted so closely, it stirred thoughts in a man, it did, he chided himself ruefully.

‘What about Mr Benji?’ inquired Sarah, interrupting his contemplation of the new owner’s charms.

‘Well, I’m sure James Al-Khoury were training him up to take his place when the time came, as a son should. But he only made one Will in his life, according to Mr Helliwell, and that were before Benji were born – and he were born on the wrong side of the blanket, so he int entitled to anything by law, poor lad. His dad could have left him everything in a Will and he would’ve got it all right. His mam and him and the lawyer has hunted everywhere, looking for another Will; but Mr Benson told Mr Helliwell that he’d have known if there was another Will – the Ould Fella would have come to him about it, ’cos Mr Benson used to vet all the firm’s legal papers, contracts and such – James Al-Khoury didn’t trust ’is own knowledge of English, so anything major he were goin’ to sign, he got Mr Benson, his lawyer, to check first.’

‘I suppose Mr Al-Khoury thought he’d plenty of time before he’d die.’

‘Oh, aye. He weren’t yet fifty. He never thought of a heart attack, that I’m sure; it come as an awful shock to all of us. Proper sad it is for Benji and his mam. And him a smart lad, too.’

That night, in many tiny homes round the Brunswick Dock, Wallace Helena Harding was the subject of anxious discussion; times were so bad that the very hint of the loss of a regular job was enough to cause panic. Even Alfie, the mulatto casual labourer, who slept in the back hallway of a nearby warehouse, courtesy of the nightwatchman of the building, and who had endured bitter hardship all his life, viewed with equal terror the possibility of starvation or, the only alternative, the workhouse.

The warehouse watchman was an old seaman with a wooden leg who had known Alfie and his slut of a mother all the young man’s short life, but as he sat beside him on the bottom step of the stone stairs of the great warehouse, a candle guttering in a lantern beside them, he could offer the lad little comfort.

‘She’ll ’ave to sell the soapery,’ he said finally. ‘It don’t mean, though, that the new master won’t take you on. Master Tasker’ll speak for you, I’ve no doubt.’ He paused to repack his clay pipe and then pulled back the shutter of his lantern to light it from the candle. He puffed thoughtfully for a few minutes. Then he said shrewdly, ‘A new master could buy it and then shut it down, to put an end to it. Sometimes happens when shipping companies is sold – every bleedin’ seaman that worked for the old company is out on the street – and the company what’s done the buying puts its own men in.’

Alfie, who at best was permanently hungry, sat numbly silent, and then nodded agreement. He foresaw a long vista of petty theft to keep himself alive, unless he was prepared to seek out the homosexuals who roamed the streets in search of entertainment; either way, he could land in gaol. He hung his head so that the nightwatchman could not see the despair on his face.

Chapter Two

Unaware of the stir She had caused in the heart of Mr Tasker, her soap master, or the depth of the fears she had raised in all her employees, the thin, yellow woman from the wilds of Western Canada sat at a cherry-wood desk in the bay window of her bedroom in a house in nearby Hill Street. She was in the process of writing a letter to Joe Black, her partner on her homestead in western Canada.

She stared dismally at the soaking July downpour pattering against the glass. The room smelled damp and was unexpectedly cold. What a grey and black city Liverpool was and, yet, how exciting it was with its glittering gas-lamps and heavy traffic. And how alien she felt in it.

This proud Lebanese lady, who carried a man’s name and then the name of the patron saint of Beirut, St Helena, and who normally feared nobody, was, for once, feeling intimidated by men. ‘If you can call them men,’ she muttered. ‘Self-complacent barrels of lard.’

She scolded herself that she must not prejudge. ‘You’re tired with the journey, and the confinement of the ship. And being indoors all day. You must be patient.’

She leaned back and began to tug the hairpins out of her tight bun. ‘I don’t feel patient,’ she informed herself through gritted teeth.

‘Come on, now,’ encouraged her cooler self. ‘If you can make friends with miserable and angry Blackfoot and Crees, and cope with rebellious Metis – not to speak of Oblate Fathers with the power of God behind them – you can cope with an indifferent chemist named Turner, a Benjamin Al-Khoury, head of Sales and Assistant Manager, rude enough not to be here when the new owner of his company arrives – and a lawyer you don’t trust too much.’ She pressed a tanned fist hard onto the desk, as if to emphasize her thoughts.

Then she absently spread out her fingers to look at her gold, handmade rings. Her eyes gleamed, and she laughed sardonically.

What would these stuffy Englishmen think if they knew that she lived with Joe Black, the son of a freed Ontario black slave and a Cree woman? He would make two of any of them, she thought with quiet pleasure; a big man with a face filled with laughter lines, lines that could harden when he felt insulted, till his jaw looked like a rat trap and his huge black eyes with their back-curling lashes lost their gentleness completely. He rarely struck anybody with his great fists, but when he did it was with the punishing skill of a Cree guard warrior. He had a clear, uncluttered mind, well able to assess a situation, an ability to reason, to negotiate with patience, before he struck.

These latter gifts were invaluable, she reflected, in a country full of wrathful native people; the Hudson’s Bay Company had frequently used him as peacemaker between the Indians and themselves – and even missionaries were not past using him as an interpreter.

With one finger, she touched tenderly her gold rings. When Joe had discovered that she valued jewellery, he had panned for gold in the North Saskatchewan River and had fashioned the rings for her. Lots of men had subsequently tried to find the mother lode of the river’s gold, but no one had succeeded; it was the rich, black soil which held the real wealth of the Northwest Territories.

She laughed again. ‘These pink Englishmen would have a fit,’ she told the raindrops on the windowpanes. ‘But I’ll teach them to patronize a woman,’ she promised herself. ‘I will decide the future of the Lady Lavender Soap Works!’ In which remark, she was a little too optimistic.

As she met the various people in the new world she had entered in Liverpool, she had become slowly aware that she was shabby and out of date, almost a figure of fun – a small snigger from a messenger boy, hastily stifled, a raised eyebrow, a stare in the street. She found the crush of people round her difficult enough, after the emptiness of western Canada, and this added attention had bothered her; it was the first time since she had left Lebanon that she had thought of clothes as anything else but covering against the elements.

She was unaware that, despite her clothes, she had a formidable presence. She moved swiftly with a long effortless stride, and she had responded in cold, clear sentences to the explanations given her by her escorts through the soapery. When, later, she had asked for further explanation, she had surprised them by recalling exactly what had been said.

Most of the men in the soapery wore a head-covering of some kind; but only Mr Tasker, the Soap Master and key man in the whole soapery, had doffed his bowler hat, when she had been introduced to him by Mr Benson, the lawyer. He had answered her questions carefully, his blue eyes twinkling amid rolls of fat as he endeavoured to watch the great vats steaming and heaving, and occasionally said, between his answers to her queries, ‘Excuse me, Miss’, while he instructed one of his assistants in the delicate task of producing excellent soap.

After meeting Mr Tasker and his helpers, Mr Benson had handed her over to Mr Turner, the chemist, who was, in the lawyer’s opinion, in the absence of Benjamin Al-Khoury, the most refined of her employees. He should, therefore, know how to treat a lady.

A shy, retiring man, who wanted to get back to his little laboratory, Mr Turner’s conversation was strained and desultory and did not particularly impress Wallace Helena. She was interested, however, when he told her that Mr Tasker was probably the best soap man in south Lancashire and could probably have gone to a bigger company.