Maeve's Times

by Binchy, Maeve

  Sandy knocked at the door, and she didn’t seem happy at all and there was very little of that fey glow. ‘I’m pregnant,’ she said.

  Now what is so bad about a happily married woman having a third baby, you might wonder? The words didn’t strike the terror into me that they have when other people have said them. But then of course I remembered the kibbutz rule, two children and no more. There was every kind of birth control available free and medical help as well, as regards a choice. Anyone who miscalculated had to go to Tel Aviv and have an abortion, there were simply no exceptions. There was no shame about the abortion either in the community, people just laughed and said how stupid of you. But Sandy was really grey with worry. She would like another little Tommy or Frank. She didn’t know after all if they were going to be allowed stay there forever. Should she have the child and go? If she had the child, there was no way she could stay, we both knew that. We decided to ask David, he knew the answer to everything.

  David asked us in for coffee, he asked his wife to go off somewhere for an hour and she good-humouredly agreed. He said that in fact there had been a vote about allowing Sandy and Johnny to stay and that out of 300 people 287 had said yes. So they didn’t bother telling this to the two of them because they might go around wondering who the other 13 were and it might make them feel edgy. Go ahead and have the abortion, said David, there’s no fear.

  I went to Tel Aviv on the bus with her. We found the doctor.

  ‘Silly girl,’ he said kindly. ‘Sit up in the chair here.’

  ‘Now?’ screamed Sandy and I together in horror. We thought you went to bed for a day or two and got injections and tranquilisers and pep talks and anaesthetics and days to recover.

  ‘Now,’ said the doctor.

  A nurse came into the room. She was young and pretty, she was kind, she spoke English, which was a great help to me anyway. She said the doctor had done five that morning and would do another 11 before leaving. There was simply nothing to it. Sandy could go home to the kibbutz that night; there was just no problem. Her friend, who had had one done yesterday, was working again this afternoon. It’s all a matter of coming in time, like Sandy had; please stop getting excited now.

  Sandy begged me not to leave. She told the doctor I was her sister. So I held her hand throughout and looked out the window and thought perhaps life is tougher here, and maybe Sandy after a year here would be tougher, and I would selfishly wipe it all out of my mind, and perhaps I could be tough too. And in 20 minutes Sandy was lying, wrapped in a rug, in a sort of waiting room, and the nice nurse brought her a cup of tea as she was coming round from one of those anaesthetics you get to have your teeth out. And the nice nurse reminded us that we could only use the waiting room for an hour.

  I got a taxi and brought Sandy to a hotel. I telephoned the kibbutz and told them a lie, said we had missed the bus and that we would be back tomorrow. I said to tell Johnny that Sandy was fine.

  ‘Well of course she is,’ said whoever answered the phone, but whoever it was did tell Johnny anyway.

  All night we sat and smoked, and she told me about her life in England and her wealthy parents in Yorkshire who hadn’t wanted her to marry Johnny but softened a bit when he got a good engineering job, and how she believed that only in Israel could you be really decent.

  But now she had this awful feeling that it wasn’t a decent thing to do to kill an unborn child, and she wondered for the fiftieth time would it have been a boy or a girl.

  The doctor had said casually, ‘It’s not possible to know at this stage, Sandy, do stop worrying, will you?’

  And we went off on the bumpy bus next morning, and I deposited her at her bungalow, and Johnny came back from the dam and thanked me for going with her and asked me with his eyes would she be all right, and I kept nodding, and trying to put it all out of my mind.

  And the second long hot summer went on and though Sandy had lost what I fancifully thought had been the glow, she seemed fine. And we worked together one week at the potato-peeling machine, which was such a lousy job you only got it one week a year, and we had plenty of time to talk; she never mentioned the event again, and with great relief neither did I.

  The way they work things on a kibbutz is often by rotating the horrible jobs with the good ones, so that even if you are a specialist like Johnny was and are needed on the dam you have to take your turn in the kitchen as well. There is no status, which is what Sandy loved about everything, and at the end of August when it was Johnny’s turn to work in the kitchen, he was also in charge of the money, which had to be paid out to some delivery man who came once a week. Nobody in a kibbutz sees or touches money, their meals, drinks, clothes, accommodation, and cigarettes even, are all free. So Johnny got the £45 from the kibbutz secretary and left it on the window under a big jug of orange juice to wait until this man would come to be paid. In a kibbutz £45 in cash would probably be like a thousand, because it just isn’t used or seen.

  When the delivery man knocked at the door, the money wasn’t there. Johnny was disturbed, but not greatly so; someone must have taken it away for safer keeping. But a huge search was mounted and no one could find it. There was no question of the delivery man having snatched it because he hadn’t even come in the kitchen door.

  Suddenly the whole atmosphere changed. Suddenly there was suspicion. In the 28 years since the kibbutz had been in existence, nothing like this had ever happened before. Johnny was scarlet with horror and Sandy was white with concern. They begged to have their bungalow searched and poor Johnny tried to account for his movements like an Agatha Christie villain, saying, ‘Well I moved from the window to the dish-washing machine and then I went to see how the fish were frying and then ….’ The kibbutz secretary had given another £45 to the bemused delivery man, who thought that all kibbutz dwellers were mad anyway.

  Sandy went around saying to everyone very reasonably but also very repetitively, ‘What would we want with £45 anyway, supposing we were the kind of people who would steal?’

  Everyone shrugged, some more sympathetically than others, but they all, we all, said it was a great mystery, all right, and money didn’t fly off a window sill. I tried to tell her it would die down like rows did in a school or an office, but she was deeply disturbed and kept saying it was a plot. It was one of the 13 who didn’t want them to stay. She went to David’s house day and night to ask him who the 13 were, and he begged both Johnny and myself to keep her quiet, she was upsetting the even tenor of their ways. Then Sandy would come to my room at all hours and beg me to realise that they were under suspicion and that the kids would hear about it, and really hadn’t they a right to know who the people were that didn’t want them to stay. And why couldn’t we call in the police, or the army or someone with a lie detector.

  One evening about a week later, when it all had far from died down like in an office or a school, Sandy stood up during dinner and became hysterical. She shouted and cried and said that she wasn’t a thief and her husband wasn’t a thief, and everyone was treating them as if they were. She then said, as I dreaded, ‘It’s just because we’re not Jewish, because we’re different, that you’ve picked on us. We aren’t the same as you, that’s what it all boils down to. It’s a question of race. We’re different.’

  David stood up too. He had a calm voice and was a leader in every possible sphere of their life in that community. He spoke very gently. ‘Sandy, that’s not so. You, yourself, said you felt the same as we did, you wanted to build a new land, you wanted to live near and on the land, and you wanted to share. The day you and Johnny asked to be members of our commune you said you weren’t doing it for atonement about Hitler or anything. I asked you not to look at the numbers on people’s arms from concentration camps because you just might begin to feel different. You assured me that you felt one of us and we made you members. The fact is that Johnny “lost”£45 and that never happened here before and so people are upset.’

  Six hundred eyes stared at them both, for what seem
ed an hour. Sandy spat at David and left the room, Johnny followed. They spent two days telephoning London getting £100 which Sandy threw on the floor of the kibbutz secretary’s office, and they packed one small grip bag and their two startled children on to the bus. They wouldn’t say goodbye to anyone.

  Terrible, unforgivable, tragic were the words people used as the bus went away in a shower of dust and hot smoke. Every single person was upset; it was too small and parochial for people to be above judgment and comment. They wondered aloud at Sandy’s bitterness, had it been latent there all the time, at whether she believed Johnny might have taken the money. They wondered why she had been so keen to come in the first place, they wondered could the abortion have unhinged her, they asked me to remember everything she had said to me. They really cared what was going to happen to her. Not so much about Johnny, he was sort of adaptable, they thought.

  At dinner the night after they went, there was a terrible argument at one table with people screaming and shouting in Hebrew. I couldn’t understand a word of it, so great and frightening was the intensity. An old man was being hustled out the door, a nice old man, he used to work in the chicken place with me one year and help me with holding them so they would feel comfortable. He was crying, and his whole face was distorted. It took me an hour to find out what had happened; he had suddenly put his hand into his pocket and taken out £45, and said something like, ‘Now that the hypocritical Goi have gone, here’s the money; I have no secrets, and I don’t steal from my own.’ Instead of being congratulated, as the old man thought he would be, he was turned on by everyone. His shouts about what the Goi had done to his wife and children and everyone he knew in Treblinka were ignored, his rage that the Christians, especially the English Christians, had stood by in 1948 and let seven Arab states attack the new pathetic Jewish homeland, went unheard. He was marched to David’s house, where David was minding Malka, his quiet wife, sick with a kind of flu and a kind of depression over Sandy and Johnny’s terrible exit.

  David wasted no time. He tried to find out had they left the country. No, they were booked for the following morning, someone in the airlines told him eventually. He took a motorbike and went miles through the night to find their hotel; he didn’t, but he was at Lod Airport before they arrived. That much we knew as we waited in the hot day. David will bring them back, it will all be made up, we told each other. The other poor man is sick, he will be taken away to hospital. Johnny and Sandy will understand; they will come back. We didn’t really believe it.

  David came back alone with a scar on his face. Sandy had hit him in the departure lounge with her handbag. She and Johnny and the two toddlers had got on the plane to London. They had said, David told a few people, that Treblinka hadn’t been half hard enough for the old man.

  It was a sad summer.

  I wrote to them, and said I was often in London and that if ever they would like to meet me, we could talk about other things, not Israel. I heard nothing for two years, so after two letters I left it.

  Two years later I got a letter from Johnny, he said he had just heard me on a radio programme and thought he’d like to meet me for a meal sometime I was in London. We arranged a place, and I asked, with some kind of unexpected sensitivity, first about the children. They were fine. I wouldn’t know Tommy now, he was a little man; and Frank was a real character. I asked about his job and he about mine, we talked about the cost of holidays, and whether Snowdon would have been a good photographer anyway or had made it because of Margaret. When we started talking about the scampi we were eating I couldn’t bear it any more.

  ‘Where’s Sandy?’ I asked very quickly, hoping that the best he would say was that she was a bit depressed and didn’t want to meet anyone with associations with the unhappy incidents. I thought the worst he might say was they had parted, because he seemed to be talking about the kids as if they were his sole responsibility. Nothing prepared me for his equally quick answer.

  ‘She’s in jail,’ he said.

  When they had got back to England her parents had been no help. They had told everyone that their crazy little daughter and son-in-law had done their stint out in the sun for the Israelis and had now seen sense and come home again. Sandy then turned against her mother. They had rented a flat in London and he got a job; Sandy seemed cheerful, for a while. They decided to have another child and somehow she wasn’t getting pregnant. She went for an examination and was told that the abortion had done something which would not only prevent her having children, but might lead to a hysterectomy. Johnny was vague; I think he suspected that Sandy made it up, because he said pleadingly either you have a hysterectomy or you don’t, isn’t that right? I didn’t know.

  And then Sandy had lost all control. One day she had gone to Stamford Hill, Golders Green, and a couple of other areas where Jews lived in numbers. She had thrown stones in windows of jewellers, of places with Jewish names, of synagogues when she could find one. She had hired a motor scooter, and got away each time before she was caught. It was evening before the police came and found her with a bagful of stones on the pillion of the scooter, heading off again and laughing.

  Of course he had got her psychiatric help. She was in a very nice place for a month, and convinced everyone, himself included, that it had been a wild aberration. She had seemed so ashamed of herself and asked everyone nervously was she going mad, and promised that she would make up the damage she had done so sincerely that she had fooled even the psychiatrist.

  She was on the probation act or under it or whatever you are, and Johnny had to give up work for a couple of months and go cap in hand, he said, to her father for money to look after her. She read a lot, and wouldn’t talk about it, and refused a psychoanalyst, and then six weeks later took a fire shovel and broke three windows again of Jewish shops, and said so coldly in court that she was perfectly sane, but just wanted to equal an old score, that this time the Law was a bit suspicious of her, and it was all at the time when people were beating up Pakistanis. Poor Johnny’s face was more bewildered than when the £45 had disappeared.

  She chose jail, and she said she would do it again when she came out. So they had better keep her there a long time. Her psychiatrist said she wasn’t fit to be imprisoned.

  He had begged everyone to let him state the facts and the history, but Sandy was so cold, so full of hate, so full of the Enoch Powell phraseology that really the Law had no option. She had been in prison now for two months with four more, two if her behaviour was good, but she said that if they were going to release her early she would shout out more anti-Semitic things and be kept in.

  The psychiatrist, who was fuming because she was in jail at all, said that he would get her into a good place and they would cure her, but Johnny didn’t believe they ever would. He wanted to know about the kibbutz, had I been back? I had. Did the tomato scheme work? Did the dam still go peculiar? Was the food any better? Had they made a profit yet on the chickens? Did Ari and Miriam get a divorce? Nothing about himself and Sandy, it might have been a book that he had read, and been interrupted in. He wanted to know how the serial was continuing.

  ‘They are always asking do I see you,’ I said diffidently. ‘They want news of you terribly.’

  ‘Well you’ll have plenty to tell them this year,’ he said bitterly.

  Pageantry and Splendour at Westminster for the Royal Wedding

  15 November 1973

  The ushers were simply delighted to see me. ‘Splendid,’ they said, ‘absolutely splendid. Let’s have a little look. Oh, yes, seat number 17 this way. Super view, and just beside the telly, too. Super!’ They could have been brothers of my dearest friend, instead of members of Mark Phillips’ regiment examining the press ticket, which had cost £23.

  Westminster Abbey was lit up like an operating theatre; the light from the chandeliers was only like candlelight compared to the television lights. Well, since 500 million people, including the Irish, were meant to be looking in, I suppose you had to have it bright enough
to see something. There was plenty to see from the top of a scaffolding over the north transept. Grace Kelly staring into space, looking like she always looked, kind of immaculate. Rainier has aged a bit oddly and looks like Marlon Brando in The Godfather. Harold Wilson, all smiles and straightening his tie, his wife looking as if she were about to compose the final poem on the occasion. Jeremy Thorpe was all giggles and jauntiness, Heath looked like a waxwork.

  Anthony Barber looked suitably preoccupied, as well he might, with a State-of-Emergency going on outside the Abbey doors, and Whitelaw looked as if it was his first day off in two years. There were a lot of people whose faces I thought I knew, but it was no help asking for advice on either side. The man from the Manchester Evening News seemed to be writing an extended version of War and Peace in a notebook and on my right an agency reporter was transcribing a file of cuttings.

  And then the royals started to arrive. We could see them on the television set – which was six inches from me – leaving Buckingham Palace in their chariots, and like characters stepping out of a film, they suddenly turned up a hundred feet below our seats. The Queen Mother looked the way she has ever looked – aged 56 and benign. The Queen looked thin and unhappy in a harsh blue outfit. Princess Margaret looked like a lighting devil with a cross face and an extraordinary hideous coat, which may have been some multi-coloured fur. But then was there ever an animal or even a selection of animals that would have been given such a coat by Nature.

  The Phillips’ parents looked sick with nerves; nobody in the place was hating it as much as they were. Mother Phillips nearly tore her gloves to shreds, father Phillips let his invitation fall and it struck me as odd that the groom’s parents should have had to carry an invitation at all. The son and heir stood smiling and resplendent in scarlet, dimpling and smiling, and you felt that if all else failed and he doesn’t become a brigadier or something in six months, he will have a great living in toothpaste commercials.