On the floor in the hall Mathew, in his pyjamas, was playing with the red fire engine they had given him for Chanukkah. He held out his hand for the postcard: “Camel.”
Shivering, in her nightdress, from the icy draught that whistled through the old front door and the letter box, Carol turned the card over, fearing the worst. That the holiday was a disaster without Addie; her mother lonely, ill. ‘So far, so good,’ Kitty’s card read. ‘Hotel very comfortable, weather hot. Next week am going on some tours into the desert. Love to Alec and hugs and kisses to the children, especially Mathew. Tell him not to forget Grandma and that I’ll bring him back a camel like the one on the card. Look after yourself, Mummie.’
Alec had said that if she stopped calling her mother ‘Mummie,’ like a small girl, she might not feel so much like one.
An unexpected sensation beneath her ribs made her catch her breath. It was the first positive sign, the initial attempt at communication, from the child that she was carrying. “The baby kicked,” she told Mathew, who had lost interest in the postcard and gone back to his fire engine. Carol had not told her mother, who had been the first recipient of the news – in the case of Debbie even before Alec – when she’d been pregnant with the others. Her reticence was, she imagined, a victory, a breakthrough in the battle she was waging with her dependence. She would tell Kitty about the baby on her return. Meanwhile, a larger house was an urgent priority, nearer if possible to the girls’ school. They had looked at several. In all of them Carol heard Kitty’s appraisal, her father’s judgemental tones. ‘What do you want such a big place for?’ ‘How can you live in a house with so many stairs.’ She tried to shut out their voices but the echoes reverberated inside her head as she read the particulars of rambling, unmodernised mansions, and of cottages surrounded by what would have been to her parents – accustomed only to urban life – a terrifying acreage of land.
In the sitting-room, littered with Alec’s journals and Mathew’s toys, the silver Hanukkiah, a wedding present from Uncle Juda, was streaked with hardened globules of coloured wax. Carol picked one off with her thumb-nail. Separated by some 40 miles from Rabbi Magnus and his congregation, Carol had not thought that, religiously, they would survive. It had been surprising. Having to try harder to make her children aware of their heritage had been unexpectedly rewarding. Alec conducted services at Peartree Cottage on every first Saturday, and at school, where Carol helped in the kindergarten, Debbie and Lisa and three other Jewish children had followed the concert of Christmas carols with a Chanukkah play with which the teachers had been intrigued. Removed by Alec from the ghetto of North West London, in which she had been firmly entrenched, Carol had learned that, as far as Judaism was concerned, there was another way than that she had learned from her father, and which she had imagined to be the only one.
As she tidied the sitting-room, she could see through the window the pristine fairyland of the orchard with its snow-covered branches. She took Kitty’s postcard up to Debbie and Lisa who, wrapped in their sheets, were standing on their beds in front of the mirror, practising being bridesmaids to Aunty Rachel.
Aunty Rachel was in bed with Patrick when her mother’s postcard rattled through the letter-box of the council flat.
“You go.” She kicked Patrick.
“I’m asleep.”
“So am I.”
“Probably the gas bill. I had a strange dream. A penguin island. Hundreds and hundreds of them – as far as the eye could see. One of them was me. What are you laughing at?”
“Black and white! That’s you in your dinner jacket.”
“Do we have to get married?”
“It was your idea.”
“Not choral and floral!”
“You inviting anyone from the hospital?”
“They’d think it was the ‘Thousand and one Nights’!”
“I might ask my tutor. Sit him next to Aunty Beatty. Give him a taste of the ‘real’ world.”
“Shall I tell you a secret?”
“If you like.”
“My father’s planning to take you to Paris for your wedding dress…”
“Rika Snowman’s making it…”
“…one of the well-known houses…”
“…Cupid of Hendon. She made Carol’s…”
“…He’s quite excited about it…”
“…My mother will do her pieces…”
“…Once my old man gets a bee in his bonnet…”
“…My mother can be pretty stroppy too…”
“Let them fight it out.”
“They’ll do that all right. Do you think they’ll put our photographs in the Jewish Chronicle, making sheep’s eyes at each other? ‘Rachel Shelton and Patrick Klopman…’ Uncle Juda thinks you should change your name. He says you must think of the future…”
“Pinchas and Solly didn’t do too badly with Zuckerman.”
“…he says Klopman sounds like a meatball…”
“My grandmother would do her pieces. Honestly, Rache, I don’t think I’m going to survive this. I’m sick of the whole thing already. Where are you going?”
“To get the post.”
“Don’t go…now that you’ve woken me up…” He pulled Rachel to him.
“Okay, meatball!”
In Bushey Heath, Rachel’s Aunty Freda was making tea (which she would take up to Harry), and was looking out of the window at the golf course covered with snow, when she heard the postman. She did not hurry to pick up the letters – most probably nothing more exciting than the magazine sent by the credit card company or the monthly bulletin from the synagogue, bringing advance notice of a whist drive to raise funds for Israel, or reports of the children’s Chanukkah party which Freda did not want to see. All her married life she had an ache in her heart. Some days it was worse than others. This was one of them. The black mood had descended yesterday. Harry had seen it coming. After twenty-six years he knew her. Could divine her thoughts almost. Ridiculous really. You’d have thought she’d got used to her predicament after so long. She never had.
Harry knew that it was her fault, although Freda wasn’t responsible for her polycystic ovaries, her hormonal imbalance, her inability to conceive, but he had never blamed her. Not by a word. Not by a look. He didn’t need to. She blamed herself. The canvas of her life was coloured by the dark brown wash of her sterility. The other colours which were painted on it had left few marks. She and Harry were one of life’s more cruel jokes. They had met on a committee for under-privileged children. Become engaged on the beach at Birchington where they’d taken a coach-load of kids for the day. Harry had tied a piece of sea-weed round her finger by way of a ring as the boys pulled at him to play cricket. They would have hundreds of children. Well at least six. That was what they had agreed. They had bought the big house – in what was then country – at the start of their married life, intending to fill it. Although now they rattled in it, with its five bedrooms and the room Harry used for snooker and that was to have been the playroom, Freda refused to move. To do so would have been a public admission of the failure which she did not admit, even to herself in private. As if there was still hope. The family, her brother Sydney when he was alive, her sister Beatty, Leonora – Juda’s wife – had been unstinting with their advice. Adopt. Move to a flat. Get a dog…or a parrot…or a canary. She took none of it. As if the pain that overwhelmed her, the utter sense of frustration, of humiliation – that would, she thought, some day unbalance her – could possibly be dissipated by a canary. She hugged her failure to her, mentioning it rarely these days even to Harry who was her light, her life; and she’d rid herself of the tensions that surged up within her with her driver or her five iron on the golf course.
As she waited for the water to boil in her spotless kitchen, Freda day-dreamed, as she often did. In the early days their doctor had referred her to a psychiatrist who had suggested analysis. Freda had refused. She wanted to keep her fantasies. She did not want an analyst to take them away. Today, as she l
ooked out on the white vista of the ninth fairway, her kitchen was peopled with children. Her children. Four of them sat at the table eating the porridge she had made to keep out the cold. A toddler stared at her through the bars of his playpen. Upstairs a baby waited for her breast. She could see them clearly. They made a lot of work but she didn’t mind. It was the Almighty’s work. Life’s purpose. Her imprint upon the sands of time. Like Mary Poppins she cared for her shadow family without tiring, without soiling her hands.
The click of the switch on the automatic kettle brought back the empty kitchen. Freda made the tea and left it to brew while she went to see what the postman had brought. A postcard from Kitty – an aerial view of the hotel against a backdrop of granite mountains, with news about the weather and her greeting to them both – and a mauve letter addressed to herself in unfamiliar green writing, her name mis-spelt, ‘Goldstien’, the ‘i’ before the ‘e’. She put Kitty’s postcard in the pocket of her dressing gown, opened the strange envelope and extracted the single sheet of lined paper. She read the two-line message then read it again. She looked out at the frozen garden, at the golf course to see if it was still there, for the kitchen, with its waiting teapot, was dissolving before her eyes. The writing was barely literate. ‘Dear Mrs Goldstien, I think you should know that your husband Harry is the father of my child…’
Addie Jacobs limped to the door in her plaster cast and sniffed with self-pity at Kitty’s postcard with its picture of the sun beating down upon the sail-boats and her message ‘wish you were here’.
“There’s a card from Kitty,” Beatty shouted as she spooned baby cereal into the shaking mouth of her husband who sat at the kitchen table. Leon stared at her, the pap dribbling down his chin from where Beatty patiently returned it to his lips. She wasn’t sure that he had heard her. She never was. There were so many ravages of the rapidly progressing illness which had hit the little household like a thunderbolt some eighteen months ago. Cancer of the lung to start with – Leon had always been a heavy smoker, coughing his way through the day – followed by secondary manifestations of the disease, which were affecting his brain. Beatty went on chattering. She liked to imagine that Leon understood every word she said and talked to him day, and often in the night, just in case. For Beatty, it was no hardship. Her late brother Sydney had accused her of suffering from verbal diarrhoea. Since Leon’s indisposition her verbosity had stood her in good stead.
For years she had helped her husband in his fur shop. Now she had taken it over, her loquaciousness putting her customers at their ease and persuading them, with little subtlety, of their need for coats. When Beatty told her generously built ladies that they looked like film stars, like princesses, like a million dollars, they believed her. If they did not, she demanded that they bring their husbands into the shop where strong men wilted beneath the momentum of her salestalk, reached for their cheque books in an attempt to stem the apparently inexhaustible torrent of words that issued from Beatty’s mouth. There was no subject, no person, no event, about which she did not have something to say. Her spinster sister, Mirrie, in her more bitter moments, said it was Beatty who, after thirty years, had finally silenced Leon.
“There’s a picture of a swimming pool,” Beatty said. “Kitty always was a good swimmer. A cocktail bar right in the water! Meshugger! Who wants cocktails in the water? There’s tables and chairs out. Umbrellas. For lunch I suppose. Talking of lunch I’ll bring you a nice fillet of lemon sole, you’ll like that. You think it’s easy knowing what to give you every day? Looks like a nice place, the hotel. Nebach, on her own. Should have taken Mirrie, not that she’d be much company. Think she’s going a bit ‘up there’ if you ask me – never was strong – or one of the children. Rachel could have gone, or Carol, or Josh with his shiksa. One mother can look after three children but three children can’t look after one mother. I suppose she’ll find other widows to talk to. We’re always the ones left. I’ll read it to you: ‘A bit windy but otherwise gorgeous. It’s lovely to see the sun. Next week I’m going into the desert…’ I can just see Kitty on a camel! ‘…It’s a bit lonely without Addie but I’m managing.’” Beatty raised her voice. “‘Give my love to Leon…’ Hear that? ‘…and hope the cold snap has improved business. See you soon, love Kitty.’”
Beatty put the postcard up to Leon’s face. “See the swimming pool? When you’re better we’ll go to Israel – remember when we went to Netanya for Pesach? – somewhere warm! Will you eat a piece of toast if I make it?” She put the postcard on the top of the fridge against the Hanukkiah whose candles she had lit for Leon each night of the festival. “I’ll show it to Austin and Charles when they come.”
The Klopmans had been to Marbella. Kitty’s postcard, stacked neatly with their other mail, was on the satinwood table in the hall.
“Kitty!” Herbert said, reading the signature but not the message, and handing the card to his wife. Hettie, her mind occupied as it usually was these days with weddings, looked unseeingly at the copper mines of Timna. “We’ll have to start talking about numbers,” she said, “as soon as she gets back.”
Mirrie showed the picture of the palm trees and the straw shades – like sun hats – on the beach, to the other ‘girls’ at the knitwear shop where she had worked all her life.
Juda, in his Hyde Park flat, glanced at his sister-in-law’s card propped up against the silver toast-rack, while opening a letter from an art dealer in New York with whom he was negotiating for a Dürer. He forgot to show it to Leonora who did not rise till ten.
Josh and Sarah were in the country. Kitty’s good wishes and her love lay on the Bayswater mat together with their Christmas cards.
Norman put his striped fishes on the mantelpiece next to the clock which he had not wound since his mother had died.
Eight
“Four times a year,” Avi said, “Flash floods come sweeping down the Canyon. How do we know that?” He looked round his group, pausing only a moment for the answer to the Talmudic sing-song of his question. He put his hand into a crevice from which a clump of green leaves sprouted. “Look the tumbleweed! This tells us there must be water.”
He moved on a few paces and pointed upwards towards a small carving in the face of the red rock. “Can anybody tell me what this is?”
“A fish,” the Australian girl said.
Kitty thought the rough drawing resembled a bird but she did not speak. She had got herself down into the canyon, catching Avi’s firm hand and throwing herself into the arms of the grey haired American who was still carrying her hold-all, but there was no way that she could see that she was going to get out of it again.
“A bird,” the youngest of the Nigerian children said excitedly, putting up her hand.
“A fish, a bird,” Avi said. He was enjoying himself. “I’ll tell you. It’s not a fish and it’s not a bird…”
Kitty had seen the ladder.
Perpendicular against the rock face, it appeared to be the only route out of the canyon. To go back the way she had come was impossible. Throwing herself from the boulder was the most frightening thing she had ever done; to climb it again – twelve feet of smooth surface – was out of the question. So was the ladder. The canyon was deeper at the far end and the ladder seemed to go on for ever, fastened insubstantially into the cliff. There was no way she was going to scale it. She still hadn’t recovered from her jump.
“…It’s a bucket!” Avi said.
Kitty did not care.
“And this is a rope.” He picked up a stick to demonstrate its outline. “It was the Bedouin way of telling each other ‘here is water’ when they travelled through the desert. Like today we might write ‘Ike was here’…” he pursued his point, “…the Bedouin wrote, ‘Salaam. Here is water!’… only by picture!”
Kitty looked about her to see if there was another way. The granite stretched threateningly over her head. Sometimes she fell even if she stood on the step-stool in her kitchen. Once she had had to have stitches in her head. She pu
t a hand involuntarily to the scar. The schoolchildren were clambering up the ladder. Those who had reached the top looked like flies.
They left the representation of the bucket with the rope and walked on a few paces, joining the photographers of the party who had gone ahead to take pictures of the group on the floor of the rock-funnel. Avi picked a pod from a spiky plant, broke it open to exude a single drop.
“Used by the Bedouin women to make the beautiful eyes. Who is going to tell me the name?”
The grey-haired American in his zippered jacket stood at the edge of the group, Kitty’s bag behind his back. “Belladonna.”
“Absolutely!” Avi said. “In Italy they make from it a cosmetic. The leaves and the root are poison, from it is made ‘atropine’. Don’t touch please!”
Kitty, her heart pounding with apprehension at what lay ahead, had no intention of touching. She longed for Sydney. He had always looked after her.
The couple from New Mexico sat entwined on a rock while the German photographed them together.
Rose of Jericho Page 7