The Enemy of the Good

by Michael Arditti

  ‘Are we going home now?’ Edwin asked, as they left the Rabbi to stand guard.

  ‘Of course not, darling. We’re about to begin the reception.’

  ‘But if Nanna and…’

  ‘Zvi,’ she said rapidly for fear of offending Etta and Chanan.

  ‘That’s right – have gone to bed.’

  ‘They’re just having a quick tea. They’ve eaten nothing all day. Would you like something?’

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m not much use, I know. I feel as if I have a removal van driving up and down in my head.’

  ‘Why a removal van?’ she asked, disturbed by the precision of the image.

  ‘I don’t know. That’s just how I feel.’

  ‘Maybe the Bishop would like to sit down?’ Rivka asked, pointing to a cluster of chrome blocks that looked more like a sculpture than seats. Taking up her offer, Marta was about to remark that he had a name as well as a title, only to recall her own references to ‘the Rabbi’. She struggled to check her irritation with a woman who had shown her nothing but kindness. Rivka’s adherence to her faith in the face of oppressors who, while less systematic than the Nazis, were equally murderous, had destroyed what little respect Susannah retained for her mother’s secularism.

  ‘I used to understand your rejection of God,’ she had said, ‘but now it seems too easy.’

  She reflected on her daughter’s newfound beliefs with a growing sense of disquiet. Susannah had always been an obsessive child, keeping everything from the toys in her nursery to the towels in her bathroom in perfect order. No nanny could have organised her charges with greater efficiency than she had her dolls. For years she had longed for a life of fixed boundaries, a formal meal as against the rest of the family’s potluck suppers. She only wished that she could have found it some other way.

  To keep from brooding, she made small talk with Rivka and Carla.

  ‘It’s good to see so many people.’

  ‘We’re a tight-knit community,’ Rivka replied.

  ‘Susannah tells me they’re going to throw a party for her friends in the autumn,’ Marta said, determined that the other side of her daughter’s life should be acknowledged.

  ‘I met the Bishop’s sister,’ Rivka said.

  ‘Oh yes?’ Marta asked, waiting for a qualifying comment while aware that, were she meeting Helena for the first time, she too would reserve judgement. ‘She’s here, along with her husband and children. Of course you understand why there’s no one from my own family…’ To her shame, she felt a need to assert her credentials.

  ‘Of course,’ Rivka said, stroking her hand. ‘But you know that in our tradition the deceased grandparents of the bride and groom are said to be guests at the wedding.’

  ‘Really?’ Marta asked, picturing the joint horror of her parents, who would have shrunk from what they saw as the primitivism of the proceedings, and her parents-in-law, who in their own way had lived in as closed a world as the Lubavitch, their country-house horizons as narrow as any in the shtetl.

  She pondered how to extricate herself from Rivka’s grasp, while Carla described how Curtis had wanted to gatecrash the women’s reception on the grounds that, in former lives, he had been both a geisha and a nun. Marta laughed with added gusto to make up for Rivka’s silence. For all that she longed for Carla’s happiness, she struggled to warm to Curtis. But she needed to tread carefully. Her mistrust of Peter, however justified, had created a chill between herself and Carla that lingered until his recent defection. She was eager not to fall into a similar trap.

  The Rabbi’s announcement that it was time to fetch Susannah and Zvi for the receptions enabled Marta finally to disentangle herself from Rivka. A veteran anti-racist, she preferred to reserve the term apartheid for its political context, but the all-female reception followed by the segregated dining room caused her to think again. As she studied the confident faces all around her, she saw women with so much sense of who they were and so little of who they could be. Inspired by the Hadza who placed equal weight on women’s gathering and men’s hunting, she had long opposed any form of separatism. Such divisions were doubly untenable in people who believed that the world was created by God.

  Watching the women dance, she was bound to admit that they seemed to be contented. Young and old alike allowed their hair to stream and their faces to glow with a lack of inhibition more familiar from her health club than any previous wedding party. The one exception was Helena, as ever impeccably dressed and coiffed, who looked as though she were trapped with a group of hunt saboteurs. She greeted Marta with a guarded smile. Although the passage of time had reconciled her to her brother’s marriage to a Jewish refugee, curbing the need for coded references to the ‘ghastly childhood’ which made his choice akin to that of sponsoring a Nigerian orphan, she remained reserved, cloaking her distrust of Marta’s foreignness in an exaggerated deference to her intellect. Having long since ceased to take offence, Marta found her sister-in-law a source of constant amusement, not least when she contrasted Susannah’s wedding with those of Helena’s daughters, Alice in St Margaret’s Westminster and Sophie in York Minister, the one attended by half the Tory cabinet, the other by minor royalty, and neither with a pearl out of place.

  ‘This must take you back to your youth,’ Helena said, pulling up a chair beside her.

  ‘Quite the opposite,’ Marta replied. ‘My parents deplored what they saw as reactionary superstition. They were committed communists.’ She took a wicked pleasure in asserting the connection.

  ‘Well, we can’t choose our parents, can we?’

  ‘Not so far,’ Marta replied, dreading where the conversation was heading.

  ‘Any more than we can our children,’ Helena added with the smugness of one whose daughters could not have been more like her had they been cloned.

  ‘Edwin and I believed in letting the children find their own paths.’

  ‘Oh I know,’ Helena said with a grimace. ‘That’s why I always tried to make allowances.’

  ‘That was very generous of you,’ she replied. She knew how strongly Helena and Harry disapproved of her methods and how trying they had found their annual visits to Beckley.

  ‘Where’s Clement?’ Helena asked, as if reading her mind. ‘I know they’re fencing us off like livestock, but I couldn’t see him in the crowd. Is anything wrong?’

  Try as she might, Marta could detect no hidden meaning to the question. She determined to bluff it out. ‘No, unfortunately, he wasn’t able to come.’

  ‘He’s not ill, is he?’ This time the meaning was clear.

  ‘No, he’s fine. He’s just broken his leg.’ She took a large gulp of champagne.

  ‘At his age?’

  ‘It’s his leg, Helena, not his hip.’ She trusted that the ancient antipathy between aunt and nephew would prevent the lie being exposed.

  ‘And his friend?’ Helena was the only woman she knew who could give the word such sinister emphasis.

  ‘He’s looking after him. I shall give them a detailed report tomorrow.’

  ‘I suppose he can watch the video.’ Marta braced herself for the barb, which came perfectly on cue. ‘Two photographers! I always thought Jews were frugal… Oh I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I understand. You’ve known me so long, you sometimes forget I am one.’ She savoured Helena’s unease. ‘To be honest, I have the same problem myself.’

  ‘The husband’s mother told me he was a travel agent.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘So at least they can be sure of an exotic honeymoon.’

  ‘They’re not having one.’ Marta felt her stomach tighten. ‘It’s Zvi’s busiest time of year,’ she said feebly, the pattern of lies now established. For all her wish to escape Helena’s scrutiny, she found it painful to admit the truth even to herself. Given the strictness of their upbringing, the vast majority of Lubavitch brides were virgins. The blood on their wedding night was classed as menstrual so, as soon as it was spilt, the wife had to separ
ate from her husband for at least twelve days. Far from its being a time of unbridled passion, many newlyweds slept apart. Such constraints did not apply to Susannah, whose attempt to reinvent herself stopped short of claiming virginity. She and Zvi would have been able to spend the entire honeymoon in bed had she not been so determined to do things by the book that she refused to contemplate ‘cheating’. Marta trusted that, in the heat of the moment, she would let her heart rule her head.

  Her reflections were interrupted by Susannah herself, who walked up to the table and summoned her to dance. She hurried down, relishing the dual delights of escaping from Helena and taking her daughter’s hand.

  As she relaxed into the rhythm, she recaptured some of the joy she had known at Mark and Carla’s wedding. Banishing her qualms, she called down such blessings on the marriage that against her better judgement she longed for some all-powerful father figure to respond.

  Ten minutes on the dance floor brought a sharp reminder of her elder-stateswoman status. Susannah also needed a rest, and they returned to their seats to find Rivka adjusting her wig, which had been dislodged in the crush.

  ‘Forgive me, Mrs Granville, but I thought you should know that the Bishop has passed out.’

  ‘What?’ Marta turned to see the Rabbi, the one man licensed to enter their preserve.

  ‘He appears to have overindulged a little. No matter. Only to be encouraged at a wedding.’

  ‘Is he all right?’

  ‘Perfectly. He was grinning and gurgling, then, when he tried to stand up, he collapsed.’ She discerned a hint of amusement at Anglican intemperance.

  ‘Let’s leave him to sleep it off, so long as you’re sure he’s no trouble.’

  ‘None whatsoever.’

  ‘After all he has the right to celebrate his darling daughter’s marriage.’

  Making light of this further evidence of Edwin’s frailty, she gave Susannah a kiss and sat for an hour, sipping champagne and chatting to Helena and Alice, whose support for Susannah’s new life sprang from her own flirtation with the Alpha course at Holy Trinity Brompton, a source of considerable distress to her mother who looked to the Church of England to contain emotion not to ferment it. Slipping out to the loo, she was accosted by a plump woman who began by telling her to ‘call me Dolly Levi,’ which she did, only to find that it wasn’t her name but a hint at her role as matchmaker. ‘If it weren’t for me, they’d never have met,’ she declared. It seemed only polite to thank her, at which point the woman who identified herself as Rachel began to cry.

  Seeing it as a sign, she took leave of her fellow guests and collected Helena who, with characteristic thrift, had asked if she and Harry might share the taxi. She sought out Susannah, explaining that it was time to take her father back to the hotel.

  ‘I hope you’ll be very happy, my darling.’

  ‘I already am, Ma. You don’t need to hope. Not only do I get to spend the rest of my life with the man I love, but all my sins are forgiven.’

  ‘Just because you’ve married?’ she asked incredulously.

  ‘Yes, isn’t it wonderful? The Rabbis say that today God wipes both our slates clean, so we can start again from scratch.’

  Marta baulked at the words. Her own secularism, a term she preferred to the negative atheism, had been learnt at her father’s knee. Nothing in her life, not even marriage to Edwin, had displaced it. On the contrary, she was convinced that it was her distance from her husband’s beliefs which had spared her the disillusion common to clergy wives. The irony was that, whereas Edwin had moved towards her way of thinking, their three children had renounced it. Yet, for all the virtues of Mark’s meditative spirituality and Clement’s prayerful painting, she could find none in Susannah’s rigid rules.

  The elation of the dance had vanished and she was overcome by gloom. She longed to leave before she infected the rest of the company. Lacking the Rabbi’s clerical immunity, she sent word to Edwin via a messenger system as tortuous as the one in his club. She arranged to meet him in the lobby and, ten minutes later, he was led out by two waiters to face the full force of Helena’s wrath. It was less his weakness that offended her than its public display. The vehemence with which he rebutted the charge convinced Marta of both his sobriety and his good faith.

  ‘I’m not drunk. And I wasn’t asleep. I had the strangest sensation in my head. I knew what was happening but I couldn’t respond to it. Like being under the knife without enough anaesthetic.’

  ‘Eddy, really!’ Helena said with a shudder, but his subsequent whimpering silenced even her.

  ‘Oh darling, I hope that it wasn’t that painful,’ Marta said.

  ‘Not painful, no, but frightening. It was so frightening and so odd.’

  His exhaustion was evident as he sat with his eyes closed and his head on her shoulder throughout the drive, before slumping in a chair the moment they reached their room. His lack of coordination made the effort of helping him first into his pyjamas and then into bed so arduous that she fell asleep as soon as she lay down. Waking the next morning to hear of his disturbed night, she ascribed his headache to insomnia. Even so, she was loath to take any risks and insisted on calling the hotel doctor who, after a brief examination, agreed with Edwin that he was suffering from a mixture of fatigue and tension aggravated by the heat, and advised that the best remedy would be to spend the day in bed.

  With the doctor’s backing, Edwin urged her to stick to their plan of visiting Clement.

  ‘I did say I’d give him a post-mortem on the wedding,’ she said, instantly regretting the phrase. ‘But, if you’re feeling the same this afternoon, we’ll head straight home.’

  ‘Impossible! There’s the Rabbi’s party. You know Nanna. She’ll be mortally wounded if we don’t go.’

  ‘You’re not going anywhere if you’re not up to it.’

  ‘I just need sleep. I’m so tired I can’t see straight. There’s a six-foot crevice running through the centre of the room.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Talking only makes it worse. Believe me, a few hours rest and I’ll be right as rain.’

  Taking him at his word, she made her way to Regent’s Park. Her heart sank when Clement opened the door, wearing a thick sweater despite the heat, his pallor accentuated by haystack hair and a wispy beard that only a folk-singer would think fashionable. He winced at the light and kissed her listlessly before hurrying back into the muggy drawing room, its star-stencilled walls a testament to more spirited days. Making no attempt to play host, he sprawled in a chair and told her to dump her bags anywhere, indifferent even to the two cakes Mrs Shepherd had baked for him. She perched on the arm of his chair, stroking his cheek, of which he was surprisingly tolerant, while resisting the urge to comb his hair.

  ‘How are you, darling?’ she asked tentatively.

  ‘I’m fine. Hunky-dory. I wake up every morning with a head full of soggy tissue-paper, and my legs feel as though they’re wrapped in rubber bands, but it’s bearable.’

  ‘Have you spoken to your specialist?’

  ‘I said it’s bearable. But I’m bored with me. I want to hear about the wedding. Every grizzly detail. Promise to leave nothing out.’

  Mindful that his sympathy for Chassidic ritual stopped at Chagall, she passed over the more contentious aspects of the ceremony in favour of the music, which felt as partial as commending the canapés at one of his shows. She was on safer ground poking fun at Helena, playing up her pomposity and endorsing his description of her as ‘an old trout out of water’.

  ‘Did she ask after me?’

  ‘Helena?’

  ‘Susannah!’

  ‘Not to me,’ she said, wondering at her sudden inability to lie. ‘Actually, it’s Shoana.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Shoana.’ She tried to shrug off a change that cut her to the quick. It felt as though Susannah were rejecting not just the name that they had christened her (in Edwin’s case, literally) but the love they had heaped on her for for
ty years. Yet she knew better than to hand any fresh ammunition to Clement. ‘From now on she wants to be called by her Hebrew name.’

  ‘Is there no end to it?’

  ‘There are honourable precedents. Think Saul to Paul or Simon to Peter.’

  ‘Sure, but the Bible doesn’t say if they kept their old names at home. Maybe Peter’s wife and mother-in-law called him Rocky?’

  His sardonic laugh dashed any hope that he might be ready to make peace with his sister. The bitterness of their dissension unearthed her deep-rooted guilt. She stood up and moved to the window.

  ‘Would you describe me as a bad mother?’ she asked, fixing her gaze on the drive.

  ‘Why? What’s Susannah been saying?’

  ‘Shoana… and she’s said nothing. It’s me. I was away such a lot when you were growing up. All those field trips to Africa.’

  ‘Don’t flatter yourself,’ he said lightly. ‘We had Pa and Nanny. Then when you came home it was all the more special.’

  ‘Was it? Even then, how much time did I get to spend with you? I was too busy being Marta Gorski, ubiquitous author of The Eden People.’

  ‘Since when?’

  ‘So much easier being a mentor to thousands of ardent young admirers – basking in their clear, uncomplicated devotion – than a mother to my own children!’

  ‘That’s nonsense, Ma, and you know it.’

  ‘And what about Susannah… Shoana? If we’d been closer, would she still have left home at eighteen? Wouldn’t she have gone to university and met someone suitable instead of…’

  ‘Zvi.’

  ‘I meant Chris. But perhaps you’re right. Perhaps I’m to blame for both of them.’

  ‘When did I say that?’

  ‘It was obviously the sight of me forever on the move, abandoning the three of you – not to mention your father – that made her go to the other extreme with Chris and Zvi.’