‘Ivy. I know you and Abe are close.’
‘But we’re not. Honestly, Mum we’re not …’ We weren’t.
But Mum was never going to believe me.
Except she did. ‘You’re not?’
‘No. I promise. I just picked it up on the train.’
‘You haven’t?’
‘No.’ I don’t think either of us wanted to be having that conversation.
‘Okay.’ She appeared to relax. ‘It’s just … you need to be careful, if you’re going to. You don’t want to get pregnant.’
‘I’m not going to.’
‘If you are, I can make you a doctor’s appointment.’
That wasn’t what I expected. ‘I’m not, Mum.’
‘It’s important that you don’t get pregnant. Not yet. Not now.’
‘I know that. I’m not going to.’ That was the last thing I wanted.
‘Ivy. It’s not just …’ She was becoming tearful.
‘Mum, I’m not going to get pregnant.’ I couldn’t stand it when she cried. It was awkward.
‘Okay.’
And that was the last time she brought up anything like that.
There’s an empty space between my seat beside the window and a young English man sitting on the aisle. I wonder if this is a random seat allocation or if the check-in girls deliberately match nationalities. Around us there are several men in skull caps with side curls. A young couple with a toddler and a baby are seated across the aisle. Everyone seems to be speaking Hebrew and smoking.
My seat is in the row just in front of the last row of smoking seats. The differentiation is pointless.
‘Hi,’ I say, as I force him to stand up while I get in. He’s a redhead too, his skin pale and freckled. I wonder how he’s managed in the heat. I find it hard, but at least my skin tans, eventually.
Sitting a foot away from him and heading home, I’m aware that I’m newly full of myself and bursting with it all: bursting to share my experiences and wear the stamps in my passport on my sleeve. In a way I’m already doing that. The leather sandals bought from the market in Tel Aviv, the loose tunic from a stall in Haifa, the Hand of Fatima – a present from Nathan – which I am wearing on a chain around my neck, and the suitcase Madame Cahn in Paris had given me.
I must surely look like someone who’s seen something of the world. I want to latch on to someone, to engage them in conversation, to let them know I’ve seen things and been to places that have changed me. And I need to talk so that I don’t think about the possibility that, amid the sea of Jewish faces, there are a couple of Arabs. I don’t want to think what I’m sure a lot of the other passengers are thinking. I don’t want to think the way Nathan had revealed he’d been thinking. I don’t want to be suspicious of these men just because they’re Arabs.
I put my copy of Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha in the pocket of the seat in front of me and stick the small canvas bag containing my passport and a few oranges under the seat in front. Rachel, who shared my dorm at Rosh HaNikra, gave the novel to me when I left.
‘Have you been in Israel long?’ I ask the English bloke
‘A month or so.’ A pause. ‘I was working in Tel Aviv.’
‘Oh.’ That isn’t what I expected. I expect everyone to have been working on a kibbutz as I have. ‘Where?’
‘At an architect’s.’
He could be Abe a year down the line.
‘Tel Aviv’s an amazing city,’ he continues. ‘Did you get to see it?’
‘A little.’
Nathan and I had taken the bus down the coast a couple of days earlier and checked into a cheap hotel. It was basic but all the better for saying goodbye in. Somehow its tatty décor and fraying edges had begun to rub off on us so that by the time we were at the airport saying goodbye wasn’t as hard as I’d thought it might be.
‘It’s got the greatest concentration of Bauhaus buildings anywhere in the world,’ the Englishman is saying now. ‘But it’s going to change. It’ll get a lot bigger – probably end up looking more like New York than Jerusalem. They’ll probably have towers as high as the World Trade Center in New York in a few years’ time.’
I’m about to ask him if he’d seen the Frenchman who’d thrown a tightrope between the Twin Towers and danced his way from one to the other, but we’re interrupted by the arrival of the occupant of the middle seat. A tall elderly man who says something in Hebrew as he sits down and nothing further for the rest of the flight.
I didn’t see my parents at first, when I emerged through Customs and scanned the rows of faces waiting for loved ones to arrive. Then I saw Dad towards the back of the crowd. I’d been away for less than a year but he seemed older. Maybe I’d simply forgotten exactly what he looked like. Perhaps you never really take in the details of the people you see every day and only notice them properly after a prolonged absence.
I couldn’t see Mum, but as I walked towards him, I spotted her, sitting on her own, a few feet away.
‘Mum!’
She glanced around, eyes darting, until she eventually focused on me. ‘Ivy.’ She smiled but remained seated.
Then Dad was beside me, kissing me stiffly and saying, ‘Go over to your mother.’
Mum was standing up now, with a stick for support. ‘Ivy,’ she said again, and tried to hug me, but it was awkward with the stick and she shuddered as she held me, almost pushing me away. I stood back. ‘You look so different,’ she said to me. ‘Your hair’s lighter. The red’s nearly gone.’
‘I’ve faded in the sun.’
It’s a redhead trait to get lighter as you grow older, progressing from red, through strawberry and dishwater blonde until you eventually reach a silvery grey.
‘But what about you? Have you had a fall?’
‘I’m just a bit unsteady …’ Mum stopped as another shudder convulsed her. ‘I’ve lost my balance a bit.’ She screwed up her eyes and shook her head.
‘Let’s get you home, Ivy,’ Dad said. He gave his arm to Mum for support. ‘You’re probably tired, after travelling, and you must have lots to tell us.’
I walked beside them. We went slowly to the car and they kept asking me questions, the sort of questions I’d expected.
‘What was the weather like?’
‘Was it hot?’
‘What were the other people like?’
‘Were they all from Israel?’
‘Was it hard work?’
‘So you picked bananas as well as avocados?’
‘There were reports on the news about Arabs crossing the border to attack the Jews. And we knew you were close to the border although, of course, you’re not Jewish, but even so.’
I’m not sure my father had ever asked me so many questions or said so much in such a short space of time.
‘We thought you were probably having a marvellous trip but, still, we worried.’
‘I was fine. I always felt safe.’ I felt bad now. ‘I should have written more often.’ I didn’t tell them I’d barely thought about home: I’d been too caught up in what I was doing. But now that I was back, I was worried too – about them.
I suppose I’d known before I went away that there was more to whatever was going on with Mum than ‘the change’. I noticed now that the moments of clumsiness, the mood swings and memory lapses had multiplied and magnified. Where previously she’d sometimes lose her balance or drop something, her body often took her by surprise, jerking in a way she couldn’t disguise. She was forgetful and angry most of the time.
Had she got so much worse while I’d been away? Or had I just been blind to the symptoms that had crept up on her so gradually that she seemed normal?
It was normal not to talk about illness, to behave as if all the signs and symptoms and outward bodily changes were unremarkable.
‘Why is Mrs Brown in a wheelchair?’ I remember asking Mum, of a woman who went to the same church as we did and had been healthy and able-bodied.
‘She had an operation,’ Mum had replied, as if that was expla
nation enough.
I’d presumed the operation had left her weak and that the wheelchair was temporary. Only when she died did Mum tell me she’d had cancer. Only when she died did her own children discover that was the cause of her weight loss and diminishing ability to breathe. I knew now, looking at my mother, that there must be more wrong with her than her nerves.
Dad made the dinner that evening. I hadn’t seen him cook before. He might have made the occasional boiled egg or beans on toast but not a proper meal. Now he was brandishing saucepans and stretching for ingredients as if he was in some sort of elaborate choreographed routine.
‘I’ve made a pie,’ he announced. ‘And I’ll do some fried potatoes. I’ve even got an avocado to make you feel at home.’
‘At home?’ I felt as if I’d left home and come back to a strange discombobulating place. I thought I’d grown up, but here I was feeling like a child again, uncertain and a little scared.
‘They’re from Israel.’ Dad brandished the avocado. ‘Bought it in Marks & Spencer’s. Perhaps you picked it.’
‘Maybe.’
But what I really wanted was familiar food that made home feel more like home.
Before I left, avocado was a colour not a fruit – the colour of Lisa’s bathroom suite. Nobody bought or ate them.
And a pie? And fried potatoes? It was unnerving enough that Dad was cooking but at least if he’d been cooking bangers and mash I’d have felt vaguely reassured.
‘When did you start cooking?’
Dad looked at Mum, who was taking cutlery from the drawer and moving it carefully to the table. It was clearly an effort. ‘I burned myself a few months ago, Ivy,’ she said. ‘I knocked a pan of boiling water off the hob. I get these spasms.’
‘Are you going to tell me what’s wrong?’
‘Tell us about what you’ve been up to first, Ivy,’ Dad said.
‘There’s so much.’
Dad poured me a glass of homemade wine, and Mum sat, awkwardly, twitching every now and then, her head jerking away from me as I talked.
I told them about Paris: about my attic room in the house on the rue de Lille, overlooking the Seine. I told them about the Cahns and their children, how Isaac Cahn had suggested I apply to work on a kibbutz and helped me. I told them that Israel had seemed like a different world, with a different landscape and climate, unfamiliar food and people speaking a strange ancient language I’d never heard before, alongside English.
I described my room at the kibbutz and my room mates: Rachel, from Düsseldorf, Emma, who was also British, and Maria, from Spain, who each morning at breakfast said, ‘Viva el té de Tel Aviv,’ which meant ‘Long live Tel Aviv tea.’ She said it even though we were in Tel Aviv and the tea was always weak and lukewarm. She said it because it was a palindrome and it pleased her.
I described the games room and the bar and the social areas and told them that, as well as the Mediterranean Sea being nearby, there was a communal swimming pool that was several times the size of the Van der Zees’.
‘I bumped into Peter Van der Zee in the village,’ Dad said then. ‘They said they’d like to see you.’
‘And Paula Turner.’ Mum mentioned a school friend. ‘She’s got a job in Sun Alliance. You might want to see if they’re taking people on, when you’ve got used to being back.’
I wouldn’t. I was back but not ready to slot into anything that vaguely resembled my life as a child or the life of my parents. I wanted to be off again. I thought I might learn to teach English as a foreign language and spend a few years in Europe. But I didn’t tell them that, not yet.
Neither did I tell them about Nathan. I didn’t tell them we’d worked the same shifts on the avocado plantation when I’d first arrived. I didn’t tell them he played the guitar and I’d first noticed him when he was singing a song I recognized from somewhere, ‘This Land Is Our Land’.
‘It’s a Woody Guthrie song,’ Emma had told me. ‘But he’s changed the words. It’s supposed to be “This Land Is Your Land”.’
I didn’t tell them he was a few years older than me or that other kibbutz members would agree to be absent from their rooms at certain times. I introduced him into the conversation in a roundabout way. I told Mum and Dad that some of the people on the kibbutz were Israelis but others came from all over the world. For example, there was an American boy called Nathan who was studying biochemistry at Harvard and had chosen that particular kibbutz because they were pioneering some sort of plant technology that I didn’t really understand.
‘They alter the genetic makeup of plants in a lab,’ I tried to paraphrase what Nathan had told me, ‘so that they’ll be stronger and can withstand disease.’
‘This is probably the point at which we should tell her, darling,’ Dad said.
And I knew then that it was serious because Dad never used terms of endearment, and my mother only when she was cross. I used to think ‘darling’ was a swear word when I was younger because Mum would snap it at Dad when they were arguing.
‘Tell me what?’
‘Do you want some tea or coffee? We can leave the washing-up for a while.’
It must be serious, I thought. ‘I’m being allowed off washing-up?’ I tried to lighten the mood. ‘Is that because I’m adopted?’
‘This might be easier if you were,’ Dad said.
After dinner Jon came round. He was a solicitor, the kind of job that made my parents happy and proud but that struck me as dull. He dealt with wills and probate for a local firm and still lived in the village. I’d never understood why he’d chosen not to leave, not to go somewhere more exciting, at least the next town, if not London or abroad.
Now it was beginning to dawn on me. Maybe he felt he should stick around.
‘He’s got a new girlfriend,’ Dad had told me. ‘A lovely girl. It’s early days yet but …’
But what? I wanted to ask. Do you want them to get married? Are you hoping for grandchildren? Do you worry she might have ambitions to move elsewhere and he won’t be on the doorstep to help you? Does she know too? Did she know before I knew? Does she know and might she still marry Jon? And have his children? Will anyone ever want to marry me?
But I couldn’t say any of those things to my parents.
I think I said something like ‘It’s going to take a while for it all to sink in.’
When Jon arrived, Mum said she had to go to bed. Dad helped her because she couldn’t manage to undress by herself, even though she was only in her forties.
Jon and I were left alone, facing each other across the kitchen table.
‘I hadn’t thought coming home would be like this,’ I began.
‘They didn’t want to spoil your trip by telling you earlier.’
‘It’s so shit. I can’t take it all in.’
Jon fumbled in his jacket pocket. ‘Mars,’ he said, producing a half-eaten bar. ‘Want some?’
‘Yes, please,’ I said, and smiled because, for the first time since I’d come home, something felt normal and familiar.
Deauville, 1969
Time forks perpetually towards innumerable futures.
Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’
I spotted them when we arrived, swarming out of the bar, happy and noisy, a large family group. They were a blur of teenage boys and girls but one swam into focus as they passed through the hotel lobby, where we were handing over our passports and waiting to be allocated rooms.
He looked nice, the boy, about my age, and he appeared to pause as they made their way towards the staircase, as if I had come into focus for him too, rather than simply being part of another family group.
He smiled, then bounded up the stairs two at time, but he had made an impression because he was a boy and I was fourteen, and if a boy smiled at me, it made an impression.
‘So, is this your first time in Deauville?’ the hotel receptionist was asking Jon.
‘It’s our first time abroad,’ Jon said.
It would turn out
to be a week of firsts: the first time man landed on the moon, the first time Mum had one of her ‘incidents’ – or, at least, the first time I noticed. And the first time I saw something that had seemed almost as unbelievable as man landing on the moon. The sighting, and what followed, another first, lodged in my mind for longer than it might have otherwise.
‘Looks like it could be any time soon.’ Dad glanced up from yesterday’s Times, which marked him out as British, and eyed a basket of croissants, as if he didn’t quite trust them. ‘They might actually land on the moon.’
‘I feel like we’ve landed on the moon.’ Mum waved her hand at the room and the windows that opened on to an enclosed garden with sculpted hedges. It wasn’t that strange but it was definitely ‘foreign’.
The weather was hot, the language alien, the food different. Even the bathroom in the hotel was weird. ‘What’s that for?’ I’d pointed at the low-level sink. ‘Is it for children?’
‘It’s for washing your feet after the beach,’ Dad said.
‘It’s not,’ Jon contradicted. ‘It’s for washing your –’
‘Jonathan!’ my mother warned him, as she took her flannel out of her washbag and hung it over the edge of the basin.
I wasn’t sure why.
Later, when our parents were out of earshot, he told me. ‘It’s for washing after shagging.’
‘How do you know?’ I was shocked and intrigued.
‘I just do. The French do it a lot.’
‘Do they?’
‘Yes. That’s why the bed in Mum and Dad’s room jiggles too.’
‘They said it was to relax you.’
The bed in their room had a switch, which made it vibrate. It was bizarre, like so many things here.
Only the jams and spreads looked familiar, and the boy standing by the table they were arranged on, the one who’d smiled at me in the lobby the previous evening.
‘There’s the boy who was having drowning lessons.’ Dad nodded to him.
Dad had been up at the crack of dawn, strolled along the seafront before breakfast and taken in the grounds of the hotel.
‘What’s the pool like?’ I’d asked, as we were shown to the table where we would eat breakfast for the next seven days.
Ivy and Abe Page 26
