“‘Peace Now’ want to negotiate with the Palestinians, no matter who represents them,” Josh said.
“‘Peace Now’,” Rachel said scathingly. “They’re sick in the head. When everyone was fighting the Germans did they have ‘Peace Now’? When the French were fighting did they have ‘Peace Now’? Begin is ‘Peace Now’. He’s clobbered the Syrians, hit the Iraqis in their reactor, made peace with Egypt, is in the process of wiping out the PLO, and when he puts a few more settlements on the West Bank there’ll be peace and quiet there, too.”
“Begin should not be allowed to pursue his fanatical aims unfettered,” Josh said.
“Sometimes I wonder whose side you’re on.”
“It’s deeply hurtful, Rachel, to be accused of being anti-Jewish every time I happen to disagree with you.”
“What about the Warsaw Ghetto? They wanted ‘Peace Now’, but they left it too late. If they’d had the uprising when there were still half a million Jews left – instead of a few thousand – it might have been a different story. We can’t afford to sit and wait until they come and wipe us out.”
“We’re always the scapegoats,” Beatty said, warming to her theme. “As soon as there’s trouble anywhere…”
“Frieda and I have been thinking of buying a little place in Netanya,” Harry said. “Perhaps we should all go.”
“Rubbish,” Rachel said. “If every Jew in the world moved to Israel tomorrow there is no reason to suppose that antisemitism would disappear.”
“There’s been antisemitism ever since they accused us of murdering little children and drinking the blood,” Harry said.
“Uncle Harry!” Carol glanced at Debbie and Lisa who were sticking forks into the holes of the white lace tablecloth which Carol had lent Sarah from her mother’s collection for the occasion.
“The strange thing about the blood libel,” Sarah said, speaking from authority, “is that it was directed against the first people in history to outlaw human sacrifice, and the only nation in the Near East to prohibit the consumption of any blood. It’s all there in Genesis and Leviticus and Deuteronomy.”
“No Jewish mother ever so much as killed a chicken with her own hand,” Beatty said with satisfaction.
“Beatty’s right,” Harry said. “The blood libel’s the one thing we can’t be guilty of. Every Jew in the world who’s been brought up amongst Jews knows that it’s an indisputable fact…”
“You’re implying that we are guilty of all the other crimes we’ve been accused of,” Rachel said, “from the Crucifixion of Christ to the Plague – which killed hundreds of Jews as well as Christians – to the absurdity of Stalin’s doctors’ plot.”
“It’s the moral demands made on us,” Harry said. “The vocation of Israel which the world hates.”
“Does that embrace the murdering of innocent children in the Lebanon?” Josh said.
“What about the Jewish children,” Rachel said, “who died as the result of PLO attacks in Galilee, in Kiriat Shmona, Ma’alot, Misgav Am….”
“Since when have two wrongs made a right?”
“You know perfectly well Begin never gave orders to kill children.”
“Nevertheless more children have been killed already in Beirut than in thirty years of terrorism in Israel.”
“I am not sitting here,” Rachel said, standing up.
“We’ll change the subject,” Patrick said, pulling at her skirt.
“The Israel Defence Force,” Rachel laid down her napkin and stared at Josh, “a civilian army, does not, as you know perfectly well, aspire to kill children.”
“Look what you’re doing!” Carol said, pointing to Debbie and Lisa who were watching Rachel and Josh wide-eyed.
“Unless he apologises, I’m going home.”
“I haven’t the slightest intention,” Josh said. “You know I’m right.”
“I’m sorry Sarah,” Rachel addressed her sister-in-law, and went to the door followed by Patrick.
“Sit down and have your dinner,” Aunty Mirrie said, waking up for the first time. “He doesn’t mean it.”
“No more than Begin’s army, firing at the children,” Josh said. “Like the Nazis they were following ‘orders from above’.”
“Trust you, Beatty,” Harry said when the front door shut after Rachel and Patrick, leaving two empty chairs and an uncomfortable silence at the table.
“What did I do?”
“Started the conversation. You know Rachel gets all worked up.”
“How should I know? I never see her. I never see anybody since Kitty left. Nobody comes to see me. I don’t see a soul except Mirrie and she’s not much use to anyone. I’m like a pariah as far as this family’s concerned.”
“We took you to the cinema,” Harry said.
“A lot of language,” Beatty said. “Disgusting. I’d rather stay home and watch television. You’d think he’d shave now and again.”
“Who?” Frieda said.
“Arafat.”
“There you go again,” Harry said.
In bed Josh said: “I suppose you think I’m to blame.”
Sarah put her head on his shoulder. “You’re entitled to
“Which you don’t go along with?”
“I suppose that if somebody continually throws stones at you while you’re sitting in your garden, it’s not unreasonable to go after them in the hope of a bit of peace and quiet.”
“Except that there have been no stones thrown for over a year. You can’t say a word to Rachel.”
“You do goad her.”
“I’m sorry she walked out. You cooked a splendid dinner.”
“Aunty Beatty didn’t think much of my tsimmes.”
“Aunty Beatty doesn’t think much of anything.”
“Do you think they’ll accept me at the Beth Din?”
“On the basis of tonight’s dinner they’ll probably make you Chief Rabbi. Come closer.”
“In eight things excess is harmful and moderation beneficial: travel, sexual intercourse, wealth, work, wine, sleep, hot water (for drinking and washing) and bloodletting.”
“Bloodletting was not what I had in mind.”
“According to the Oral Tradition – presented to Moses on Mount Sinai along with the written law – the sexual act was recognised as serving functions other than procreation. Cohabitation is not only permitted but required, as a mutual obligation of husband and wife during pregnancy.”
“Point taken.”
“The Talmud also provides a list of the times when a wife could expect her husband to be with her for the purposes of what you have in mind. Twice a week for labourers; once a week for ass-drivers; once every thirty days for camel-drivers; once every six months for sailors…”
“What about dentists?”
“It doesn’t mention dentists. Not in so many words. I love it when you do that.”
“And this?”
“A wife can demand that the sex act be performed while they are both naked,” Sarah said, removing the pyjama trousers in which Josh slept, “and if the husband insists on being clothed…”
“Not another excuse for divorce?”
“Why did Auntie Rachel go home?” Debbie said, as Alec sat on her bed to say goodnight to her.
“She didn’t feel too well.”
“She was fighting with Uncle Josh.”
“You fight sometimes with Lisa.”
“You told a lie.”
Alec said nothing. The girl in the saloon bar’s name was Jessica and she lived in Lower Eashing next to the riding stables. They had got into the habit of meeting, for lunch in the King’s Arms or in the car park behind the supermarket where he waited for the Land-Rover with its chrome horse mascot to turn into the space beside his. They were never at a loss for words. Alec told her about Carol and his children. Jessica’s husband, who was in oil, was away; Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia.
Yesterday Alec had driven out to their cottage with its bowed windows, its old slate roof, its c
limbing roses and wistaria, and parked his car behind the Land-Rover. He saw Jessica in a faded blue shift, strong back, stomach, arms, legs – “the legs are vital,” she had said, “they must be like steel” – through the wrought-iron gate, against the summertumbled urns, for the first time without riding habit. Even in her bare feet she was taller than he.
There was food on a rickety table in front of the swinging hammock. Alec couldn’t remember eating it nor drinking the wine, although the bottle was empty. The late bees investigating the antirrhinums, the nicotiana, the over-grown tubs, intercepted the stillness with their droning. He put his hand to Jessica’s ivory neck and released her chignon.
“Let’s go inside.”
He had been late for his clinic, had not paid much attention to his patients.
After the love Jessica had been the first to speak.
“How superbly we go together,” she said into the spent afternoon.
“You sound as if you’re talking to your horse.”
“Alec…how long did you say your wife had been away?”
In the light of the past hour it seemed that Carol had never been there. He had watched Jessica dress – breeches, white shirt, tall black boots – tie back the lustrous hair, secure it in its net.
“You’ll come tomorrow?” She took her hat from the valet stand.
He had to touch her. Could not stop.
“I’m going to London tomorrow.”
He didn’t explain about the New Year.
“You’ll have to come early then.”
She said it for both of them.
It was the reason he had been late. He had come straight from Jessica’s arms in the cottage bedroom with its sloping ceiling, its view from the pillow of cornfields with their poppies, to Sarah’s. He had told Carol they had been busy at the clinic and that he had been late finishing his house-calls. She had no reason to disbelieve him.
He said good night to Debbie and Lisa, and kissed Mathew who was already asleep, and went into the bedroom where Carol was getting into the bed which had been her mother’s. The room depressed him with its thirties furniture – he dismissed an image of the cottage – and he didn’t much like sleeping in his late father-in-law’s bed.
“I’ve missed you,” Carol said, but he could tell by the way that she had secured her short hair with silver clips that she intended going straight to sleep. He undressed and put out the light.
“By the way,” he said into the darkness, “I’ve found an interior decorator. She can take over all the furnishing if you like so that you won’t have to worry.”
“They’re terribly expensive,” Carol said.
“Not this one.”
“It would be a big help,” Carol said. “It’s very difficult choosing everything from here and I still feel too sick to get about much. I’d have to discuss my ideas with her.”
“She wants to meet you.”
“Fix it up then. Rachel’s offered to look after the children.”
It was too easy. He had expected there to be some opposition, for his sins to be found out.
“Will you take Debbie and Lisa to shul in the morning? I’m not too good first thing.”
To stand in synagogue would be to accentuate his flouting of the fourth commandment for which he felt not the slightest remorse. He said goodnight to Carol and dreamed of Jessica. It was midsummer madness although it was the end of summer.
Thirteen
While Kitty presided over her New Year dinner in Maurice’s kitchen, a massacre was taking place on the other side of the world for which the Israelis were not responsible but for which the blame, both by direct accusation and by subtle innuendo, would be laid at their door.
At the very moment that Kitty served her tsimmes (the genuine article) and thought wistfully of her family at home round Sarah’s table, Lebanese Christian militiamen were murdering score of Palestines, including women and children, in the Chatila and Sabra “refugee” camps in the Lebanon. The Israeli cabinet denied responsibility for the incident. They knew that the Phalangists were planning to enter the camps but never imagined that a blood bath would occur. Their protests were not believed and in the eyes of the world the people of the Book were as guilty as if they had perpetrated the atrocities with their own hands.
Unaware of what was taking place in Sabra and Chatila (names henceforth to add fuel to the undousable flames of antisemitism), Kitty dispensed apples dipped in honey to her guests in Maurice’s kitchen in anticipation of a “sweet” year.
It had not started badly. Watching her make the preparations for her dinner – flitting from her pots on the stove to the salads she was preparing – Maurice followed her every move.
“What’s so interesting?” Kitty said, sculpting radishes expertly and dropping them into iced water where they would open like flowers.
“I was thinking how in tune women are with the harmonies of living.”
Kitty smiled at the tribute.
“We’re not much of a family for you,” Maurice went on, meaning Ed and Herb and Mort who were sharing the celebrations with them, and Bette who had also been invited. Kitty said nothing. That it was company was undeniable but it was not the same. The motley crew was no substitute for Rachel and Josh and Carol, and for the unmitigated pleasure of the grandchildren who would be growing up without her. It was at times like this that she really dwelled upon how much, in coming so precipitately to New York, she had given up.
“If it’s any consolation,” Maurice said, “I’ve never been so happy. I used to think that if you’re in good health, have enough money, and nothing is bothering you in the foreseeable future, that’s as much as you can hope for. Now I wake up in the mornings and look forward to the day. I might not say much, Kit, I find it hard to express myself in words – I could paint it for you – but from the moment you walked out of customs at Kennedy my life has been transformed. You’re not going to believe this, but since they took my parents away, I haven’t felt, had feelings. I imagined they were dead. That my heart was ice. It’s been melting at the edges, Kit.”
It was the nicest, the most romantic speech anyone had ever made to her and Kitty cried into the tsimmes. Maurice had looked at her, then out of the window.
“I’m not much good with women, Kit. I don’t know what to do when they cry.”
“You don’t have to do anything.”
“‘Never make a women cry, God counts the tears’.”
“I thought you were an atheist.”
“So did I. I’m beginning to wonder. If he sent you to New York I may be willing to reconsider.”
Kitty arranged the flowers Maurice had given her in the vase she had had to rush out and buy – he had never had occasion for one – and placed it in the centre of her table, smiling her thanks.
“A small token of my appreciation for sticking it out so long,” Maurice said. “I don’t know how you put up with me.” He meant his dark moods and silences.
“I don’t take any notice,” Kitty said, and she didn’t. On the days when Maurice found it impossible to speak, when she was aware that he was totally engaged in his struggle with the dark forces which occupied him at his easel, she’d leave him alone and go shopping, or sit in her own apartment writing her letters or go out with Bette until he had rid himself of his abstraction with the past which tortured him, which would not let him rest, and he would see her in the evening – although she had been in and out all day – as if for the first time.
He was not like Sydney, for whom she had been the traditional helpmeet occupying but never testing the boundaries of her clearly defined role. Here, nothing was expected of her and although she supervised Maurice’s flat and cooked his meals because so to do had been the pattern of her life for so many years, her life was assuming novel and interesting dimensions about which she wrote, covering pages of airmail paper, to her family back home. Apart from the cinema, the opera, the theatres and the concerts she went to with Maurice, the sessions with Bette and the aerob
ic dancing classes (which already were making her feel fitter) and Ed’s literature classes at NYU which she had started to attend, the most exciting change which had come about was that which she noticed within herself.
She was reluctant, almost, to admit it, it seemed somehow disloyal, but Sydney’s death had presented her with a newfound freedom, a sense that she was no longer accountable, with its rider that anything was now possible. Sydney had restricted her neither practically or financially but she could see now from her transatlantic distance that beneath the weight of his opinions her own had been stifled; against the demands of his uncompromising life-style her private wishes were both denied and suppressed. Although the words had never been spoken, Sydney had always given her the impression that she would die the second that he left her, but paradoxically since his death her life had turned out to be unbelievably exciting.
To be mistress of her own time, her own thoughts, gave her a sense of power and at times she became quite drunk with it. She was still lonely (as she recognised each night when, having said goodnight to Maurice, she went into her studio and double-locked the door), still aching from the wound, now cicatrixed, that Sydney’s death had left, but a joyous sense of self-awareness, of freedom, had forced its way through what she had once considered to be permanent despair. As, in her skintight leotard, she lunged and snapped and shimmied to the music in the church hall, or sat, an entranced tyro, in Ed’s class listening to him talk, and making notes, about literary genre, she felt with the tiniest sensation of regret that perhaps she had been too wrapped up in the raising of her family, in the meticulous running – according to Sydney’s guidelines – of her home. Where had it got her? To aerobic dancing and an Adult Education Class when properly trained she might have been a physician, or a lawyer, or a senior executive.
As she activated muscles she had forgotten she possessed or discussed Faulkner’s use of allegory, she considered such thoughts out of place and ungrateful, blasphemous almost, but was convinced (although she missed the children dearly) that in spiriting her away to New York, Maurice had given her, in her late middle age, a new lease on life. Her feelings towards what Bette referred to as her “young man” were hard to define, perhaps because she did not look at them too closely. That he was not Sydney she had established – God forbid anyone should take her late husband’s place, preserved for all time in her heart – but there was about him, despite his often patent despair and his melancholy, a sweet and loveable caring quality which, although Maurice was not demonstrative, shone through his quiet demeanour. As she moved about his apartment, picking her way among the books and the canvases, she would look up to find him watching her, and his expression said more than any torrent of words. If she was not clear as to her own thoughts on their relationship it was because she had not taken them out and examined them, possibly because she was afraid of what she might find.
To Live in Peace Page 11
