New York has its funny side too (apart from me doing aerobic dancing at which you’d all have a good laugh). You know me and my feet – I have to put my shoes by the air-conditioner before I put them on in order to get a little relief – it seems to be a common problem here judging by the shops, ‘Accent on Feet’, ‘Ambulatory Foot Rehabilitation Services’, ‘The Foot Doctor’. Anyway I was having such trouble I went into one of these places and a very nice young man in a white coat, who seemed most sympathetic, attended to my callouses and massaged my swollen legs, then said would I like to come into his private office where he had some special equipment? Like a fool I said yes, and we went into a back room and he started this playing around which had nothing to do with my feet at all! I got out of there post haste and when I told Bette she laughed till the tears were rolling down her face. The ‘foot parlour’, with its handsome practitioners, is apparently well-known for its services to lonely middle-aged women such as myself. I didn’t tell Maurice!
I’m glad to hear that all the pregnancies are going well now, I really must get on with Rachel’s shawl (I just can’t imagine her with a baby). I hope Alec manages to get up from Godalming for Rosh Hashanah and that the locum doesn’t let him down. Look after yourselves. Maurice sends his love. Mine as always. MUMMIE.
Tsimmes with Dumpling (You’ll need to double everything up for all of you.)
2 lb carrots cubed, 1½ lb potatoes peeled and cubed, 2 lb brisket cubed, 4 tbsp golden syrup, 1 tbsp cornflour (they call it cornstarch here) Dumpling: 6 oz self-raising flour, 3 oz fat, 3-4 tbsp water to mix. Put the carrots and meat into a pan, barely cover with hot water, 2 tablespoons of the syrup, pepper and ½ teaspoon of salt, bring to boil and simmer for 2 hours (I do mine in the oven). Chill and skim off fat. Four hours before you want the tsimmes, make the dumpling by rubbing the margarine into the flour and salt. Mix to a soft dough with the water. Put the dumpling into the middle of a large casserole, with the meat and carrots round it. Slake the cornflour with water and stir it into the stock from the carrots and meat. Bring to boil and pour over. Arrange potatoes on the top (with more water if necessary so that they are submerged). Sprinkle with salt and two tablespoons of syrup. Cover and bring to boil (Gas No. 2) for 3 ½ hours. Uncover to brown for 30 minutes then serve. (The potatoes and the dumplings should be turning brown and the sauce slightly thickened.) Serves 6. God bless.
Eleven
On the day that the electronically triggered bomb shattered the headquarters of the Christian Phalangist Party in Beirut, killing President-elect Bashir Gemayel, Alec sat in the bar of the King’s Arms and Royal Hotel in Godalming, with its red patterned carpet, its imitation gas lamp and arrangement of artificial flowers on the brick mantelpiece, and read the letter from Kitty which Carol had passed on to him. He had felt in a way a sense of relief when Kitty had elected to join Maurice in America. It was not that he did not get on with his mother-in-law – he was in fact quite fond of Kitty – but he had always resented her influence upon Carol, the fact that he had had to do constant battle with her for the affections of his wife.
The path of their marriage had not been smooth. Its early years had been dogged by Carol’s lack of physical response and Alec’s attempt to free her from the dependence upon her parents (Sydney in particular), on which he laid the blame for her condition. For years, until the time that Mathew was born, although Carol’s nights had been spent ostensibly with Alec, her days had been passed with Kitty near whom they lived and from whom she was inseparable. In an effort to sever the cord which still attached Carol, inappropriately, to her mother, Alec had taken the draconian step of moving to Godalming, leaving Carol to make up her mind whether or not she would follow him. That more than the thirty-odd miles which separated the town house in north-west London from Peartree Cottage was involved, they both knew.
When, after her father’s death and the birth of their third child, Carol had joined her husband, she had experienced an unexpected sensation of freedom which followed the period of mourning for Sydney. Her loss had been Alec’s gain. It was for a time as if life, having let Carol out on parole from her punishing conscience, had waved its magic wand. While Debbie and Lisa, released from the concrete constraints of the patio whose size had dictated their choices of pastime (sevenses against the wall or hopscotch), explored the delights of the countryside, their parents had enjoyed a second honeymoon, superior to the first, and for a long while their happiness had vindicated Alec’s summary decision to move.
The elation had not lasted. Alec could not put his finger on the moment of its demise. For a long while after his father-in-law’s death he had felt that Carol had belonged exclusively to him, and that his marriage was going to be all right. But even before Carol’s move back to London with the children to her mother’s flat, all had not been well. The decline had been gradual, the erosion of their relationship so imperceptible that neither of them had really been aware that they were – with the enthusiasm over the Queen Anne house, the new baby, and their disparate interests – papering over the cracks. Alec’s general practice, with its surgery in the High Street – his name in white on the darkened glass of the window – kept him busy. The demands and the douleurs of the local residents filled his days, and both eroded and prevented him from dwelling too long upon his unsatisfactory nights which he attributed to the fact that although Carol’s father was dead, he had not died within her. He loved his wife but with her recent withdrawal into herself, her insistence on keeping him at arm’s length, he felt increasingly excluded. Her small success as a poet had not helped.
From the time her first verses had been published she had gone through the day with a faraway look in her eyes and often reprimanded him when he spoke for interrupting her train of thought. He had done everything to please her. Appreciating how much the religion, in which she had been so successfully indoctrinated by her father, meant to her, he had held Sabbath services at Peartree Cottage on every first Saturday and did his best to support her in bringing up their children in the ways of their faith.
As far as he himself was concerned, he was a backslider. His upbringing had been similar to Carol’s, but the years had brought a weakening of what had been carried out by force of habit rather than conviction. He no longer had any strong feelings about religion, and left to himself would have let any observances (which he privately felt had been postulated by the rabbis to suit the times and guard against assimilation) fall into desuetude. As far as the Middle East was concerned he was surprised to find that he felt personally responsible for Israel’s every move and in the past weeks, often against his better judgement, had leaped to her defence. With the assassination of the moderate Bashir Gemayel he feared an escalation of hostilities, realising that Israel had lost a friend.
He put away Kitty’s letter which, in a loving postcript, sent hugs and kisses to Debbie and Lisa and Mathew whom she missed. Alec missed his children too. He spoke to them every night on the telephone as he did to Carol, and on Friday would be seeing them at his sister-in-law Sarah’s New Year dinner. Alone in the saloon bar, separated from his family, the new house far from completion, he felt at a low ebb.
“This chair taken?”
“Sorry?” Alec, in his reverie, had not heard the words against the lunchtime laughter, the cacophony from the jukebox.
“Anyone sitting here?”
An extraordinarily tall girl wearing pale skintight jodhpurs, a white shirt and black tie, her hair – in a chignon secured by a net – auburn against an ivory skin, holding a slopping shandy, had her hand on the only vacant chair in the room.
“Go ahead.” Alec moved his lager on its Oranjeboom mat fractionally nearer to him on the circular black oak table on to which the girl put her hard hat.
“I’m dry as a bone.”
Alec could feel her skin glowing and wasn’t sure if he imagined a slight, animal smell.
“I’ve not seen you before,” the girl said. “Do you live round here?”
“I’m
a local GP.”
“No kidding?”
“The High Street practice.”
“I wouldn’t know. We’ve had a doctor in Eashing for years. I come to Godalming for fabrics. I run my own interior decorating business. Take patterns and whatnot in the back of the Land-Rover. Personal service. Hotels, houses, offices, you name it. That’s better!” She put her empty glass, froth sliding lazily down its side, on the table and fixed Alec with eyes that were neither grey nor green.
“Will you have the other half?” Alec, surprising himself, said.
He fetched it from the bar and one for himself. The girl looked at the gold band on his left hand as he set down the glasses.
“Are you married?”
Alec nodded.
“So am I,” she said.
Sarah, in anticipation of Josh’s family, his Aunts Beatty (newly widowed) and Mirrie, and Frieda with her husband Harry who had with alacrity accepted her invitation – was putting finishing touches to her dinner at which she was determined to excel.
Her will and her staying power had paid off and she was shortly to take the final steps which would acknowledge her conversion, the criterion for which was love of Judaism rather than love of her marriage partner – an important distinction insisted upon by the rabbis as valid. Having completed the requisite period of intensive study with Rabbi Magnus, steeped herself in environmental experience both with Kitty and with Mrs Halberstadt, run her home in the prescribed way, attended synagogue services regularly and presented herself to the Rabbinical Court at six-monthly intervals, she was now ready to satisfy them that she was genuinely willing and able to accept the religious discipline – which would endure for a lifetime, and through children beyond – without reservation. This would be followed by the formal act of conversion, a visit to the ritual bath.
Rachel had said she was mad. Although she had herself (out of curiosity) visited the mikveh before her marriage to Patrick, she considered the hidebound laws concerning family purity both archaic and repugnant, and teased Sarah about her determination to live by them after her first immersion. The detailed code of behaviour – the direct result, according to Rachel, of the fear and distaste with which rabbinic Judaism had regarded the primary functions of a woman’s body – designed to impose a suspension of all bodily contact during a woman’s menstruation and for seven days afterwards (during which time she could not even pass her husband the salt), implied a negative animus hardly calculated to enhance a woman’s self-esteem. She was unimpressed by the notion, subscribed to by Sarah who thought it both practical and romantic, that by denying a husband access to his wife for part of every month (at the end of which she would purify herself in the mikveh) their physical relationship would be raised to a spiritual level, she would remain as attractive to him as when she stood beneath the marriage canopy and the relationship would never grow stale.
Sarah was not bothered by Rachel’s ridicule. The institution of the Sabbath, she told her sister-in-law, had also been mocked until it came to be universally accepted. Their only meeting ground, as far as the religion was concerned, was their mutual condemnation of the fact that in Judaism while the men were well catered for ceremonially, from circumcision and redemption of the first-born to coming of age, there was no “hallelujah of childbirth”, no “barmitzvah of the menopause” to celebrate a woman’s rites of passage.
Now that she had come to the end of her course of instruction Sarah had, Josh said, an answer for everything. Often she kept him awake into the night with bizarre queries such as whether the blessing for vegetables was as pertinent to a bag of crisps as to potatoes, or an exposition of illegitimacy, which in Jewish law referred not to a child born out of wedlock but to the offspring of a proscribed marriage, who was thereafter referred to as a mamzer, and could never be relieved of his condition.
She was a mine of information and was determined, starting with the New Year dinner, that the door of her house, like that of Josh’s mother and those of the Abrahamic tent, would always be open, and that she would be for Josh like “a fruitful vine in the innermost parts of his house”.
Coming into the kitchen Josh watched her at the stove, her hair casting shadows over her face, her tee-shirt tight over his child in her belly, and wondered how all his life both disappointed and a disappointment, he had got to be so lucky.
Being married to Sarah was, he thought, like being on perpetual holiday. He had not, as when he had lived at home beneath the aegis of his father, constantly to be minding his “p’s” and “q’s” for fear of giving offence; he was not required, as when he had been engaged to the demanding Paula, constantly to be dancing attendance on Sarah. There was in their relationship at the same time both a closeness and a distance, which he had never found in the confines of his own family where there had never it seemed been sufficient room to breathe.
Busy with tasting and with wooden spoons, Sarah had not heard him come in. He crossed the quiet vinyl of the floor and put his arms around his wife.
“Take care!” she said. “According to the school of Hillel you can divorce me if I spoil your cooking!”
Twelve
By the time Maurice in New York bought flowers for Kitty for the New Year, and Sarah in London put the finishing touches to the table she had put up in her living-room to accommodate Josh’s family, the PLO had left Beirut, the remains of Bashir Gemayel had been laid to rest in a hill-top church, and to the disgust of Jews throughout the world Pope John Paul the Second had received their avowed enemy, Yasser Arafat, at the Vatican. Following the PLO’s withdrawal, it was the received opinion of Israelis that an assault upon the Palestinians in the camps – which still sheltered some two to three thousand terrorists – might be expected in revenge for the President’s murder. The names of the camps, as yet unknown to Kitty, and her family, who sat down to celebrate New Year 5743, on either side of the Atlantic, were Sabra and Chatila.
At Sarah and Josh’s with the company crammed round the trestle on the random collection of borrowed chairs, the subject of the Lebanon had been avoided until Beatty, who had a reputation for it, had opened her mouth and put her foot in it. Looking round the table – with Josh at its head, to whom she had said no more than to wish him a tight-lipped happy New Year – at the remnants of her father’s family, Rachel was aware of an altering of perspective, of shifting sands. It seemed so very little time ago that these gatherings, these holy day get-togethers, had been at her parents’ table, when her father had been very much alive and his sisters and their respective spouses had been forces to be reckoned with. She remembered that once she had been terrified by her Aunt Beatty with her opinions on everything; now, as she looked at her aunt, she seemed not only to have lost her husband, the long suffering Leon, by whose death she had been silenced, but to have an air of defeat about her, as if she had given up. Beatty had mesmerised with her tongue. Now that it no longer wagged so incessantly, she seemed like an old woman, her clothes slightly shabby as if she no longer cared, capable of no more than passing the time of day, the wind completely gone out of her sails.
Next to her, Mirrie, who had for as long as Rachel could remember fulfilled the traditional role of the spinster aunt – filling breaches in the exigencies of the family – sat with her pale eyes vacant, and although she smiled when you spoke to her you felt that she was not really there. She had never been all that bright but Rachel had always been fond of her Aunt Mirrie and was distressed that there were fears now for her safety in the flat where she lived on her own, and talk of putting her away in a home.
Frieda, too, seemed not the same. It was not exactly that she had become smaller, but she appeared (and it was not just the fact that the chairs were packed close together) to take up less room. Even her husband Harry, who spent his life on the golf course, looked less ebullient, less fit.
“The leaf falls that the bud may grow,” Rachel thought – and she was not pleased with her conclusion – the decay of autumn is necessary for the coming of the spri
ng, and sooner or later the non-viable material round the table would be removed from the gene pool to make way for the young. As Debbie and Lisa and Mathew, in their ignorance of the place they occupied in the inescapable order of things, fidgeted and giggled, Rachel, recalling her own youthful inability to sit still at her father’s table, understood how they felt and realised with a shock that now she too had become one of the “aunts”. She wondered if she were terrifying, as once she had found Beatty terrifying, and whether her nieces and nephew found her as formidable as at their age she had found Aunty Beatty.
Tucking into Sarah’s tsimmes with dumpling, which although prepared to the same recipe bore only a pale resemblance to her mother’s, Rachel wondered if the remnants of her parents’ generation gave any thought to their mortality or to the three new lives which would eventually replace them. In her womb – as in Sarah’s and Carol’s – her unborn child, presaging her own demise, awaited the moment of his birth and she realised with surprise, and for the first time, that with her perception altered by the small miracle which was taking place within her, she was seeing her aunts as people, as individuals who might too have feelings such as her own.
Alec, who to Carol’s distress had arrived late at Sarah’s from Godalming, was helping the two-year-old Mathew with the dinner which Sarah had so painstakingly cooked but which patently lacked the love which was the main ingredient with which her mother had seasoned it, when Beatty said: “I see the Pope’s been entertaining that Arafat!” and sparked by her unconsidered remark the dry tinder of the assembled company was not slow to ignite.
Frieda’s husband, Harry, who was in the antique silver business, said: “All at once he’s everyone’s darling while nobody’s got a good word to say for the Israelis.”
“Scratch a yok you’ll find an antisemite,” Beatty, who had a poor opinion of non-Jews, said. “They’re having a field day over this Lebanon business.”
To Live in Peace Page 10
