Rose of Jericho

by Rosemary Friedman

  She had been a voice on the phone like many others, looking for a flat on Hampstead Heath. From the selection he had sent her she had chosen one to view and Norman had taken the keys to let her in.

  The appointment had been for eleven-thirty. At noon Norman, wandering moodily through the empty rooms, staring from the windows at the green expanse below which did not move him, decided to give her another five minutes. The estate agent’s life was beset by time-wasters, plagued by clients who failed to show. It was the distasteful thought of going back to the office that had made him wait for her so long. He found everything distasteful. Pleasure in nothing. Since his mother’s death. Measured out his life in a succession of uninviting days.

  He had left the front door open and did not hear her come in.

  “Am I late?” Her accent was South African. He recognised it. He looked at his watch.

  “You wouldn’t have believed the traffic!”

  She was small and slim with tanned limbs, dressed in a tan suit. Her handbag and her shoes, which had very high heels, were made of some sort of skin. She jangled as she walked towards him, the gold chains round her neck knocking one against the other.

  “Sandra Caplan.” She held out her hand. “You’ll be from the agent’s.”

  Her perfume had preceded her. Norman breathed it in.

  “This sounds just what I’m looking for. I have to be near the city – the boys go to school – but I like to smell the air.”

  Her hair was spun gold. Norman wanted to touch it. The desire shocked him. He put his hands behind his back.

  “Where would you like to begin, Mrs Caplan?”

  She was looking out of the window he had opened. Through her eyes he saw the delicate tracery of the trees, the undulations of the Heath.

  She turned to look at him and her face was laughing. It was a long time since Norman had laughed.

  “Just anywhere.”

  From her expression he guessed that the flat was sold. He could always tell. She had fallen in love with it and he with her. It was that simple.

  He showed her the three bedrooms, admitting the inadequate size of two of them – which she said would be all right for her boys – the out-of-date work-tops in the kitchen which Norman bemoaned as if he personally were responsible for their design. He agreed that the situation of the dining-room was ridiculous and apologised, looking at her band-box appearance, for the runnel of rust on the bath which had not, he confessed with embarrassment, been used for some time.

  Back in the hallway she made him an offer for the flat and Norman explained that the owner was abroad and would not be back for a few days.

  “Meanwhile, perhaps your husband…” He wanted to see her again. “If you would like to make another appointment.”

  With half-closed eyes she was looking down the corridor. “I’d like to bring my decorator. The place needs gutting.”

  Norman suggested a time the following day.

  “Great.” She turned her face to him. “Fortunately I can see the potential. You couldn’t sell an igloo to an Eskimo!”

  Norman knew it was true. It had been true before his mother’s death. Now it was more so.

  “You need to adopt a more positive approach. Be more assertive. I’ll bring you a book.” She held out her hand.

  “See you tomorrow.” Had she not moved away he would not have been able to let it go.

  “And just for the record,” she turned at the door. “There is no Mr Caplan.”

  Later he found out that she was divorced. It was like a dream. The boys were called Hilton and Milton aged eight and six. One played the cello, one the violin. They came to see the empty flat, hurtling up and down the corridors, their feet echoing on the bare boards. Their mother – she did not look old enough – dressed next time in a yellow dress with a pleated skirt, bringing the summer into the empty flat – brought Norman a paperback as she had promised. It would teach him how to be more confident in his job, in his life. He was too old a dog, he told her, to learn new tricks. She berated him for his self-defeating attitude. He took the book home and read it at night in bed. In every page he recognised himself; in his relationship with his late mother, letting her trample on him; his subservience at work, where he had never progressed to the partnership he had envisaged; his castigation of himself for every defect of each property he showed; his habit of agreeing with his clients when they were patently wrong. It was as if a door had opened, a mirror held up to the middle-aged Norman he had never before confronted. Tentatively, he tried, on Mr Monty, what he had learned at night beneath the covers. It was his dinner night with Aunt Kitty. She was making the stuffed cabbage leaves which she knew he liked. A client, leaving next day for Bahrain, had wanted urgently to view a house. In the office the typewriters were covered. They were packing up, going home.

  “Give it to Norman,” Mr Stewart said automatically, looking at the gold watch beneath his white cuff. He had tickets for the theatre.

  “Norman will do it,” Mr Bluestone said to Mr Pearl.

  Mr Monty put the details of the house on Norman’s desk. As usual he was in a hurry to see his girl friend before he went home to his wife in Potters Bar.

  It was six-thirty. Norman, his viscera dissolving, looked pointedly at his watch, which was neither gold like Mr Stewart’s, nor digital like Mr Pearl’s. They took advantage of him. Of that there was no doubt. He had been only vaguely aware of it before he’d read the book which Sandra had given him. He closed his eyes and visualised the chapter: ‘Working Late’. When he opened them Mr Monty was waiting.

  “I can’t manage it,” Norman said in a voice which seemed not to belong to him.

  Mr Monty stared. Mr Bluestone and Mr Pearl turned round in their chairs. It was as if a strange presence had entered the office.

  Norman swallowed. “I have a dinner engagement…” He hoped they would think it was a smart restaurant, a beautiful girl, and avoided the mention of his Aunt Kitty. “…I’m awfully sorry.” He stood up as resolutely as he was able on his rubber legs. “But I really have to go.”

  He wasn’t sure how he had managed to get to the door, out of it, along the street. He stopped in front of a shop, looked unseeingly at the underwear in the window. He had to reassure himself that he was more than forty years old. When he had recovered he could not hear his feet on the pavement. With every step his silent voice said: ‘I did it. I did it.’ He could not wait to tell Sandra.

  When he entered the office the next morning he held his head high. He had ironed the shirt which had dripped dry all night over the bath. Mrs Treadwell the receptionist looked at him. The word had clearly got round. He detected a change of attitude when she handed him the typed details of a new property. A strange and exciting world was opening up like a flower before him.

  Because of Sandra.

  She had bought the flat and taken him under her wing. He could not for the life of him understand why. She involved him in every aspect of its transformation, asking for his approval of every knob and knocker, his opinion on shades of broadloom and snippets of silk. They walked on the Heath with Milton and Hilton where Norman was surprised that Sandra didn’t stumble in her high heels. Sometimes she drove him in her smart coupé on which he thought he would drown in her proximity, her perfume, the sound of her voice. Her movements, delicate but strong, had entered his being and threatened to shatter his rib cage. It was as if he had had no life before. His mother, Della, faded into the unremembered background. He was like a man possessed, a wild thing. At work he had become a giant, a force to be reckoned with. He no longer bothered to care, to cringe, to bow beneath the menial tasks with which they overwhelmed him, for fear they would replace him with a brighter, younger man. His commissions, week by week, increased, keeping pace with his new-found confidence. It was self perpetuating. Accompanied by Sandra, Norman had bought new suits, new shirts, new ties. She took him to shops he had not dared to enter, to have his hair cut at a salon whose name was a household word. His improved
appearance – Sandra declared him handsome – had given Norman a new pride, a self esteem, which he had lacked but never felt the need of. Impressing himself he impressed his clients. They treated him with respect instead of as the ‘boy’ from the office. At Bluestone and Blatt they watched the metamorphosis with caution. He did not think it coincidental that they took on a school leaver for the chores, began to address him with deference.

  There were other things. Sandra took him to the theatre to see plays for which he would not have dreamed of booking, asking for his opinion, which previously he would have been too self-effacing to give; to see paintings in galleries he’d not considered for the Normans of the world; to concerts where monumental music elicited unexpected responses in his soul. It was as if Norman had died and a new Norman risen from the ashes. There seemed no end to the transfiguration Sandra had brought about. She told him she had done nothing. Merely released his true self. He did not believe it. Was a slave at her feet. Once in a restaurant he had been served with steak which had bled beneath his knife, although he had asked for it well cooked. Sandra had told him to send it back. “It doesn’t matter,” Norman said. Looking into the laughing eyes, now soberly appraising him, Norman knew that it did. His heart in his boots, he called the waiter who saw only a customer within his rights. Norman explained gently but firmly, as he had learned, that what he had been given was not what had been ordered. Apologising, the waiter took his plate away. Norman was sweating. He found his reward in Sandra’s eyes. Gradually it became easy. He expressed his anger when it was appropriate, declared his interest, stood up firmly for his rights. He was like a coil with the spring released, the possibilities were infinite. He was astonished how good it felt to have others respond to him attentively, day to day encounters he had not dreamed possible, to find situations, from which at one time he would have shrunk, actually going his way.

  For all this he had to thank Sandra and paradoxically his relationship with her was the only factor in his new life which he did not find satisfactory.

  She was friendly enough. That was the trouble. He wanted more than friendship. Wearing his new, cashmere sports jacket, he watched her at the top of a ladder as she arabesqued to measure windows, or busy with swatches of material on the floor, and thought that he had never seen anything in his life more beautiful than the graceful sight of her and mastered an urge to grasp the silken ankle, to run his hand up Sandra’s shapely leg, to take her in his arms and make wild passionate love to her. He waited for a sign. That she cared for him. That he meant more to her than a pupil she had trained to assert himself, to realise his potential. What was the use of his changed behaviour, his new-found attitudes, if they could not bring him the object of his sleeping and waking desire. Once Sandra’s foot had found a pot-hole on the Heath. Norman had put out an arm to steady her and thought that there must be a burn where her skin had touched his. She had thanked him, laughing, and run ahead after Hilton and Milton, leaving him unable to move, as if his entire body would be consumed.

  They met only at the new flat which was rapidly nearing completion. Because of Milton and Hilton, he guessed, Sandra never asked him to her rented house. Bit by bit, Norman had pieced together the marriage to Arnold Caplan. He could not understand how any man, when he had this treasure of a wife, this honey-coloured rose, could lust after other women, needing to possess them all. The infidelities had been numberless – his secretaries, casual encounters on planes and trains, a succession of mistresses – the divorce uncontested. He had been generous with Sandra whose parents were dead and who had money of her own. She had come to England, where she had friends, to start a new life. Norman was puzzled. She seemed to like him, wanting to occupy more and more of his time, but only her perfume, with which he was familiar and which permeated his dreams, embraced him. He guessed that she looked on him as a brother, a new toy. He saw her as a gift-horse sprung from some South African heaven and – terrified less it bolted – he was careful not to look it too closely in the mouth.

  When he’d picked up Aunt Kitty’s postcard from the mat, he had hoped it was from Sandra, who had taken the boys to Capetown to see their father.

  He stared, disappointed, at the pouting blue fishes, the other-world creatures, that swam in the Gulf of Eilat.

  Six

  Kitty stood on her sunlit balcony, poised between desert mountain and Coral Beach – on the very spot where according to local residents, King Solomon in all his splendour had come to welcome the Queen of Sheba – and looked out across the diamanté mirror of the Red Sea to the Jordanian port of Aqaba, clearly visible in the morning light.

  On previous visits to Israel, together with Sydney, she had sat on the broad beaches of Tel Aviv, trampled the streets of Old Jerusalem – stopping while Sydney prayed at the Western Wall – visited Haifa where they had friends. Standing before the tombs of Absolom and Zacharia, Rachel and David, Herzl and Weitzman, they had traced the thin line of their history: at Joshua’s Jericho and Abraham’s Beersheba – where she had taken a picture of Sydney in a kibbutz hat – the Bible had come alive. They had been to the Golan Heights – looking down, through the gunsights of a disused bunker, on Syria – the Mount of Olives and the Shrine of the Book, which guarded the Dead Sea Scrolls; by the Sea of Galilee they heard the story of the loaves and fishes, and the walking on the water by the Lord who was not their own; from a rock at Banias, they watched black-coated Rabbis cupping their hands to drink the melted snows of Mount Hermon, and noisy schoolchildren washing their picnic oranges in the crystal waters of the Jordan. Together they had laughed at the taxi driver who pointed out territory which had been apportioned by the ‘Leak of Nations’ after the First World War, and wept at the mute and painful witness to their people’s unprecedented martyrdom in their own lifetime, the Yad Vashem.

  This was Kitty’s first time without Sydney, the sine qua non of her life. The first time she had been as far south in the country as Eilat. There had been no one to take her elbow as she negotiated the steps of the aircraft at Tel Aviv – where bearded passengers prostrated themselves, putting their lips to the tarmac – no one to help her with her baggage in the confusion at the carousel. As she stood in line to have her passport stamped, eight branched candlesticks, anomalously, on every airline desk reminded her that it was Chanukkah. A smiling girl with dark hair, who looked like Carol, offered a tray of traditional doughnuts to the waiting passengers. It was a welcoming touch. Kitty hesitated, thinking of her figure, then took one, the powdered sugar falling on her hand. About to put it to her mouth, she saw that the girl was waiting for her to pronounce the blessing. Sydney would have needed no prompting. “Blessed art thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who createst various kinds of food.” Kitty recited it in Hebrew. A Scotsman next to her put on the proferred skull-cap, and tutored by the girl with the tray and those queuing, both behind and in front of him, repeated, good humouredly, the words of the benediction. Her mouth full of doughnut, which was heavier and stodgier than it looked, Kitty handed her passport to the official who wished her Hag Sameach. She realised suddenly that she was in the land of her fathers, bound by the Law of Return, and had an impression of belonging, an acute sense of chauvinism, of being amongst her own. To her surprise she managed the formalities attendant upon her internal flight and congratulated herself silently on her achievement as she found herself in the right place, at the right time, to board the plane for Eilat. It had been a long day, made longer by her anxieties, and she had been glad, at midnight, to reach the lobby of the hotel where a Hanukkiah, sculptured in margarine and donated by the chef and his staff, guttered proudly. ‘Hag Sameach!’, the desk clerk greeted her. She would have a happy festival.

  The iron of the balcony was cold to her morning touch. By the end of the day, as she hung her swim suit on it, the metal would be fiery. A painted sail boat, silent on the water, caught her eye. She followed its smooth progress across the straits. It did not seem that she had been away for a week. She had missed Addie. Being
on one’s own in a hotel, she had discovered, was a disability. One had to adapt to it, like deafness, or being lame and having to walk with a stick. In the old days, on holiday with Sydney, the day had been effortless: shared walks, tables for two, a brace of deck chairs in the sun. How wrapped up in themselves they had been, how inward looking in their contentment. She had had to learn new skills. Like a child. To hold her head up as she entered the dining-room, needing to decide whether to go down early – when the room would be empty and her feelings of isolation enhanced – or later, when her solitary condition seemed accentuated by the tightness and rightness of family parties in the noisily crowded room, and whether to take a book.

  There were other decisions to be made. When she sat by the pool did she put herself next to a couple, or a crowd – who had obviously come away together – or pull a chair, in solitary seclusion, into a patch of shade? If she smiled at children – thinking of Debbie and Lisa at home in Godalming – might the parents not think she was trying to impose herself upon them? If she addressed strangers, passing the time of day, might they retrain from answering, rejecting her, for fear they would be lumbered with her company? She was learning, rapidly, growing new skins. In her weaker moments she was cowed, self-pitying, crying inside for her loneliness, at other times she managed to convince herself of her own right to exist. It had on the whole been a good week, a marvellous week even, despite the pungent reminders which struck, at unexpected moments, to emphasise her anchoretic state.

  As she had sat on the beach or by the pool, watching the swimmers, and the children at play, or the exercise group swinging to music, a nasal call would come over the loudspeaker for ‘Dahlia Jacobson. Dahlia Jacobson b’va kashaí’, or ‘Mr Ben Amon, Mr Ben Amon to reception please’ and she would know with absolute certainty, that no one would call ‘Kitty Shelton’. One night before dinner she had walked along the corridor which led to her bedroom to be stopped in her tracks by the strains of Moaz Tsur, the hymn of Chanukkah which came through a closed door. She stood outside, a stranger at the gates, she who throughout her life had been warmly surrounded by relatives, by Sydney, and listened while the family – she could distinguish the separate voices of mother and father and children – gave themselves enthusiastically, tunefully to the nostalgic melody. A tear, in remembrance of Chanukkahs gone by, escaped her eye and wet her face as she made her way with slow steps to her room. The beds suddenly looked lonely, hers and Addie’s, the impersonal room foreign. Despite the sun-filled days and the swimming pool, the Reef – with its rainbow-hued fish, thickets of sea-plants and gem-tinted coral – she wanted to be home, where it was snowing. The mood did not last. She had a good cry, sitting on the dressing-table stool, then realised that she was weeping for herself when there was so much in the world to cry for. She blew her nose on a tissue and dried her eyes.