Helen Forrester - The Lemon Tree

Apart from his stock, American women found the Lebanese shopkeeper charming and they recommended the store to their friends. The tiny business began to prosper. The Al-Khourys hoarded every cent they could.

At the end of six months, Charles insisted that his wife give up her job with the tailor and stay at home. ‘If we are very, very careful, we can manage,’ he assured her. ‘I don’t like you doing menial work.’

Helena took her mother for granted; she did not realize that she possessed unusual beauty, and that, as she learned to dress in Western clothes, her father felt jealous when other men looked at her. He wanted her at home, not veiled like a Muslim woman but decently bundled up like a good Maronite.

Leila Al-Khoury was thankful to be released from the tailor’s stuffy attic, but she refused to wear her native dress or veil her hair. She had fallen in love with hats and bought herself a plain black straw which she trimmed with shreds of silk from her husband’s shop.

With this imaginative concoction on her head, she pressed herself lovingly against her husband and assured him that he had nothing to worry about. He was partially mollified, though the flowerlike face framed by the hat’s brim was, he felt uneasily, very attractive.

Helena had not inherited her mother’s beauty. Though she was not ugly, she had her father’s strong nose and wide mouth. She was sallower than Leila and there was no hint of pink in her cheeks; and her long oriental eyes with their secretive, sidelong glances were too foreign for Western taste. The tumbling black mass of her hair was restrained in a bun at the back of her head and gave little hint of its richness. Amid the babble of thousands of immigrants, as a skinny young girl she passed unremarked. Until she met Joe Black.

Curled up alone in a feather bed in Liverpool, her dream passed from the nightmares of the Lebanon and Chicago, to Joe.

She smiled in her sleep, as she seemed to hear herself saying to him cryptically, ‘You never gave me toffee apples.’ And his laughing back at her and saying, ‘I never thought of them. Want one?’

Joe had his own ideas of gifts. In her dream, she saw him lounge into their living-room, the original log cabin in which her stepfather had first lived in Canada. Peeking out of his jacket was a tame grey fox, a birthday gift.

One Christmas, he had brought her a muff made from a marten fur he had trapped; his mother had cleaned and tanned the skin and he had then given it to another Cree woman who had fashioned it for him. Sometimes, when he had been south to see his grandfather, he brought her a little opium to smoke, bargained from a lonely Russian farmer who had established his own patch of poppies, or, at other times, a small packet of tobacco from Virginia, passed from hand to hand across a continent, in trade.

The rising sun began to push long fingers between the heavy velvet curtains of her bedroom in Liverpool, and she sleepily stretched out to touch him. But he was six thousand miles away, harvesting a hay crop.

Leila Al-Khoury lamented bitterly that it was Mr and Mrs Ghanem who had brought the typhoid into their Chicago home. The infection had, in fact, sneaked through the tumble-down, crowded neighbourhood like a smouldering fire; but Mr Ghanem was the first person to die from it.

The local inhabitants were used to illnesses which ran their course, and the patients were nursed at home. Though guesses were made, no name was put to the sickness. Immigrants had little money, so doctors were rarely called.

Charles Al-Khoury, worked to a shadow of his former self, was in no state to withstand such a virulent infection. The Al-Khourys knew that Mr Ghanem was also ill. His wife told Leila that it was ‘Something he’s eaten.’ It was assumed that in both cases the fever would go away and the diarrhoea would ease, if the patients were kept on a liquid diet. Meanwhile, Helena served in their tiny shop and Leila nursed her husband.

When Mr Ghanem died, leaving a widow with five sons to feed, Leila realized, in a panic, that this was no ordinary illness. She sent for a doctor, only to be scolded by him in English she barely understood for not calling him earlier. Charles died in her arms.

Once more, Leila tore her clothes, and the household rang to shrieks of mourning. Both she and a terrified Helena were devastated, as was Mrs Ghanem in her tiny home. Other neighbours, afraid of being infected themselves, left small gifts of food at the shop door, but refused to come in.

Only Sally walked briskly up the stairs to the Al-Khoury flat, to bring some common sense into their lives. Hiding her own sorrow for a man she secretly adored, she instructed a grief-stricken Helena to get back to the store and mind it. ‘I’ll look after your ma.’

Helena had obeyed, but she quickly found herself in difficulties. Men delivering cotton and silk her father had ordered through middlemen refused to leave the goods without her father’s signature. ‘You’re too young to sign for it. You can pay cash, if you like,’ she was told.

‘Could Mother sign for it?’ she asked, afraid of parting with the small sum in the secret drawer of the old till.

A man delivering a roll of silk had hesitated at this suggestion, but finally said uneasily that he did not think his company would accept a woman’s signature, and went away with the roll still on his shoulder.

Beating down her increasing terror, she served customers from the existing stock with her sweetest smile, as she struggled with the heavy rolls. She knew that, unless she could buy replacement materials, the business was doomed.

Oblivious of the impending end to their sole source of income, Leila sat cross-legged on her bed, allowing Sally and Helena to minister to her. Occasionally, she would fling herself down on the pillows in a fresh burst of weeping.

Between bouts, Helena asked her urgently, ‘Couldn’t you run the business, Mama? I believe if you took it in hand, the suppliers would accept you – or perhaps we could import some silk direct from China?’ She sighed, and got up to pull back the closed curtains to let in the evening sun.

Leila put down the coffee her daughter had brought her, turned her blotched face away from the light, and began to cry again.

Helena went back to her, to sit beside her and put her arms round her. ‘Mama, dear, listen to me, please. If you can’t help me, we’ll have to close the shop – we don’t make anything like enough to employ a manager, even supposing we could find an honest one.’

Leila wept on.

As she patted her mother’s back in an effort to comfort her, Helena said savagely, ‘I know what to do – but nobody will trust me. The salesman from Smithson’s chucked me under the chin this morning, as if I were a baby. He actually said, “Pity you’re not a boy!”’

‘Mama, could we sell something to get money, so that I can pay cash for stock?’

‘I don’t know anything about business,’ her mother sobbed, and continued to moan into the pillows.

In despair, Helena held a big sale and then shut the shop. She made just sufficient to pay their debts, except for one.

‘Sally, dear. I don’t have any money left to pay you. Instead, I saved these for you.’ She proffered a package containing several pretty ends of rolls that she had been unable to sell.

Sally bent and hugged her. She sniffed, and then said, ‘You don’t have to worry about me, hon. There was many a time when your pa couldn’t pay me. You and your ma are welcome to anything I can do.’

Before letting her out of the door, Helena clung to her. ‘Thank you, Sally. Thank you.’

Left alone, she searched the little shop to retrieve the remaining bits of jewellery hidden there. ‘I’d better take a good look upstairs, as well,’ she thought, as she wrapped the pieces up in a scrap of cotton. ‘If we don’t pay the rent we’ll be thrown out fast.’