Rose of Jericho

by Rosemary Friedman

  PS. In the Heiligenstadt testament Beethoven writes: ‘Sometimes I have been driven by my desire to seek the company of other human beings, but what humiliation when someone, standing beside me, heard a flute from afar off when I heard nothing, or when someone heard a shepherd singing and again Iheard nothing! Such experiences have brought me close to despair…’

  PPS. Wasn’t it Thoreau who said: ‘Most people lead lives of quiet desperation?’

  PPPS. Did you know that the Encyclopedia Judaica lists a hundred special Purims ranging from a Purim of Algiers to a Purim of Vidin (Bulgaria).

  PPPPS. I am not such a lobster-eating dumkopf as you thought. MM.

  “If we’d had a son,” Freda said, “a boy. What would you have called him?”

  Harry was getting dressed. The snows had melted from the golf course and the naked greens outside the window waited patiently for the approaching spring. Freda was trying to trap him. She was always trying to trap him, to find out to what manner of woman he had given his seed, where he was secreting the fruit of his loins. There had been other mauve letters. There was getting to be quite a pile of them in her underwear drawer. They were becoming vindicative. Harry, they said, would be named. Freda had tried to trace the writer from the postmark but it was never the same. Hammersmith, Ealing, one from Barkingside after which Freda had been sure. It had come after she had gone to Bond Street, to the shop, to look for Harry to check that he was there.

  “I came up to town this morning,” she’d said. “I called at the shop. Where were you?” “A client,” he’d said, “in Redbridge.” “You didn’t tell me you were going out.” They told each other everything. Freda had thought they did. “A silver valuation. It came up unexpectedly.” “What silver?” “Silver.” “What silver?” Freda persisted. Harry had looked at her. Searching for his alibi. “Tea service, entrée dishes, one rather nice casket, as a matter of fact, Omar Ramsden…” “Show me!” Freda had said. “Show you what?” “The valuation.” “You must be joking,” Harry said. “No.” Harry played for time. “Why on earth should you want to see the valuation for some old lady’s silver. It’s nothing special.” “I just do.” “Freda, I’m worried about you.” Changing the subject. “Where is it?” “What?” “The valuation.” “In the shop, Miriam is typing it. I’ll bring it home.” Crafty. “I’ll come to town with you. I want to look for shoes.” “Please yourself.”

  And she had gone with him to town, accompanied Harry along a waking Bond Street whose face was being washed and windows dressed, to his life. Freda had waited, crying silent tears, while he unlocked the door and turned off the burglar alarm, stood by the counter patterned by the diamond winter sun which came through the grille, watched as he searched through papers in the office at the back of the shop.

  “Freda, this is madness,” Harry called. “What’s got into you?” “The valuation,” Freda demanded. “Perhaps Miriam’s taken it home with her. She does sometimes.” Freda looked in the show-case at the grape scissors and the wine labels which paid for their oil central heating, and their summer holidays, and their subscription to the golf club. “Here it is!”

  Freda had been trembling. On Harry’s stiff notepaper with its logo of the British Antique Dealers’ Association, in Harry’s meticulous hand. ‘Mrs Eva Solomon, Applegarth Drive. Valuation for Insurance. Victorian Silver Pin-Tray 1887… Silver mounted cut glass claret jug… ‘Lighthouse’ sugar caster… Silver casket with rock crystal ornamentation…’ “What is it Freda?” Harry had said amid the wasters and the basting spoons, amid the hip-flasks and the fruit knives which, with their mother-of-pearl handles, reposed in their blue velvet nests. And Freda could not say. Not for the life of her. Could not voice the thoughts which had taken her over and which were reinforced at regular intervals by the mauve letters. Harry had put his arms round her, then taken his medallions and his sugar tongs from the safe and sent her off to look for her shoes.

  Now, from her bed, the morning song of the birds not cheering her, Freda watched Harry brush imagined fluff from the new suit he had had made by a tailor in Conduit Street, whose cloth she had selected from a swatch he had brought home, select a tie with care. She could see what the writer of the mauve letters saw in him. An ageing but still handsome lover. A caring and uncomplicated man.

  On one occasion Harry had brought up one of the mauve letters himself with her morning tea. Laid it on the bed. “Aren’t you going to open it?” Freda had feigned sleep. “Eileen,” she lied, her mouth dry, mentioning the daily help. “…She’s on holiday.” “In Battersea!” “With her sister. Spending a few days…” Harry was looking into the mirror. New suit. New tie. She had bought it for Chanukkah. On a Thursday.

  “Where are you going?” Freda said, not properly awake. She had taken a sleeping pill. Harry smiled at her. Crossed to the bed. Rumpled her hair. Fobbed off. Like a child. Oh God. A child.

  “Where?” Her voice flirted with hysteria.

  “Vanessa’s wedding,” Harry said.

  “You’d think it was royalty!” Beatty said in the unmoving reception lines in Claridges. “I’ll pass out from the heat in a minute, and I don’t like the look of Freda – she’s like a stick…”

  “Vanessa looked lovely.” Kitty tried to change the subject, nurturing Freda’s secret.

  “…She needs an X-ray. I’ve never seen her so thin.”

  “She’s seen the doctor.”

  “Doctors!” Beatty shuffled forward an inch. The line was four deep, emerged from the furs and the overcoats in the cloakroom. “You have to tell them. They want to move Leon to a geriatric ward. Geriatric. I said over my dead body…”

  “I expect they need the bed,” Josh said from his mother’s elbow.

  “I’d rather look after him at home…”

  “You couldn’t…” Mirrie said, she was as small as her sister Beatty was large. As easy going as Beatty was demanding.

  “They’ll walk all over you if you let them,” Beatty said. She peered round the side of the queue.” It’ll be finished by the time we get in.” Her feet were spilling over her patent leather shoes. “It was the same with the kosher meals. Stone cold. Every day. I had to speak to Sister. I said, listen dear, I know you’re very busy – they work like nobody’s business – but even if a person’s ill he doesn’t have to eat cold food…”

  The line stretched along the tapestry carpets beneath the chandeliers. Standing in it, beneath the torrent of Beatty’s verbiage, the waterfall of her words, Kitty thought that Maurice would not have stood in it and that, in their wedding finery they were in line not to shake hands with Juda and Leonora and Vanessa in her tiara, but had been ‘selected’…she found herself thinking like Maurice, identifying with the terrible truths of his letters.

  Addie had brought the last one in with its drawing of Kitty supine on the waters of the Dead Sea, intercepting the postman. “So who do you know in America?” She had turned it over inquisitively, examined the envelope, the initials MM and the New York address – done everything but opened it. “A cousin. Of Sydney’s.” A duet of lies. Kitty had read it when Addie had gone, climbing with Maurice’s parents on to the cattle truck, passing, with her suitcase, under the birch tree. It required a leap. Of the imagination. She had not known anti-Semitism. Once in a department store she had been trying on hats when she’d overheard an assistant, holding a mirror for a tweed-suited matron up from the countries, “Not that one Madam, it’s a Jewish hat. They buy them for the Festivals.” She’d wondered should she call the buyer. Complain. She had done nothing. An innocent remark. In Germany, in the thirties, the Nazis had innocently decreed that the Jews were beyond the pale of citizenship, that they were really not human beings at all.

  Kitty found herself waiting for Maurice’s letters, drawing sustenance from them. She had gone to the library – where generally she filled out cards requesting undemanding novels, recommended by her bridge friends, or the Sunday reviews – and asked a girl behind a double-decker of ticketed books to dir
ect her to the works of Thoreau.

  Haltingly, a few pages at a time, at night, she had begun to follow Henry David Thoreau’s existence in the woods of Massachusetts, his determination to reduce life to its lowest terms and find its essence, as she searched for the essence of her strange correspondent. Having shed her clothes and her cares concerning the small dilemmas of her daily life, and of the Day Centre, and Addie’s grumbles – her ankle was still troubling her – and Rachel’s wedding, for which Kitty had started to compile a guest list – including, then striking out again, friends and relatives who over the years had drifted away, or with whom she had lost – she transported herself to Concord from which the hooting owls, with ‘their wailing hymns or threnodies’ serenaded the lamplit bedroom and the pink satin quilt which flatly protected the emphatic emptiness of Sydney’s bed. Kitty had not removed it. Josh had wanted her to. Sometimes she closed her eyes and spoke to Sydney as if he were there. Lately, when she waited for his answers, it had not been easy to hear his voice. It bothered her that she had difficulty at times in conjuring up his face. She’d put a hand on the coverlet wanting to cling on, to prevent the memory of her soulmate, her husband, and the father of her children, from disappearing altogether. She did not want Sydney to vanish. Not before the wedding. Issy Miskin had recalled him when Kitty had asked him about the champagne in his cellar. “He knew he wouldn’t live to see Rachel married,” Issy Miskin in his cappel said. “But Sydney will be there.” Kitty knew what he meant. Sydney would be under the chuppah, in her heart – as he would be in Rachel’s – as he would be for ever, but she did not much care for the fact that his voice was receding.

  “Lord and Lady Brownlow!” the tail-coated toastmaster who could himself have graced the House of Lords called. “Miss Clarissa Brownlow.”

  “She’s not going to like it when they call out Solomons,” Mirrie said, meaning her sister-in-law Leonora. Leonora had been born Levy, her father an aspiring barrister – later to take silk and become a circuit Judge – who had put her through Roedean and afterwards a Swiss finishing school, which expunged, like a carwash, all but the most stubborn traces of her origins. As a child reared in an observant home, Leonora had attended synagogue regularly, and a Hebrew teacher had been entrusted with her religious instruction. Now she purported not to know. When her brother had died one August, when many people were away, she had asked Sydney to be sure to bring Josh to morning prayers, as she didn’t think there would be enough men to make up “whatever that thing was called beginning with ‘m’.” Ever since, when minyan, the quorum of ten, was mentioned, it was ‘that thing beginning with “m”.’ A family joke. As was Leonora with her airs and graces which Kitty thought, in pre-war Germany, in Hitler’s and Maurice’s Germany, would not have saved her, would not have earned her one extra ounce of camp bread.

  “The Right Honourable Mr Terence Ormerod and Mrs Ormerod.”

  “My feet are killing me,” Beatty said, shuffling towards the hubbub from the smoke-filled room ahead. “I’ll be glad to sit down.” She spoke her name to the dignified figure in his morning suit.

  “Mrs Beatty Wise!” he called, and when she was safely launched inclined his elfin head towards Mirrie.

  “Miss Mirrie Solomons!”

  “You’ll come with us,” Josh said.

  He was considerate, Kitty thought, both he and Sarah. Kitty was getting used to being an oddment. It was not like Mirrie, who had always been on her own, or Beatty who still had Leon although he was in hospital. For so many years it had been Mr and Mrs. They had imagined they would grow old together, she and Sydney, spoken of golden weddings. So often she wanted to go back now along the railroad of their life amending here, putting right here.

  “Mr and Mrs Joshua Shelton and Mrs Kitty Shelton!”

  Leonora, in pale grey crêpe extended a limp, gloved hand, as though it were too heavy for her to lift. Leaning forward into the stratosphere of ‘Opium’, Kitty kissed her sister-in-law.

  “Vanessa looks gorgeous!”

  “Please God by Rachel!” Juda by his wife’s side said, before Leonora quelled him with her glance.

  Nineteen

  Driving down to Godalming Kitty had to smile at Beatty’s face. When they had finally been processed by the wedding party – Vanessa’s handshake had been even limper than her mother’s and Kitty hadn’t cared for her dress even encrusted as it was with a million pearls – and shunted forwards into the reception room, there wasn’t a chair to be had. A thousand people seemed to have been compressed into a space for half that number, and, face to face, shoulder to shoulder, to be enjoying the privation. When a waiter finally reached them with a silver salver of champagne, Beatty had sent him away for orange squash.

  “Not that I’ll ever see him again,” she said resignedly. “Did you notice what they’re handing round? Dates. Dates! They keep you standing out there for more than half-an-hour, take away the chairs, and give you a date. I don’t suppose it’s cheap either!”

  Beatty was greatly concerned with her comfort and her stomach. In happier days, before the recession in the fur trade and Leon’s illness, she’d entertain on Sunday nights asking relatives and neighbours for what she called a ‘bite of supper’ in her semi-detached house, where her sons Austin and Charles would have carried the three-piece suite into the garage, and lined the walls of the knocked-through sitting-room with hired gilt chairs. Pre-supper drinks of advocaat and cherry brandy would be accompanied by balls of Beatty’s gefülte fish, and chopped herring on water crackers, handed by the daily help, in carpet slippers, who went round with napkins and small plates.

  Beatty’s dining-table would be groaning beneath the weight of her stuffed carp in its pale jelly, her expertly fried haddock fillets, her halibut in sweet-and-sour sauce. Afterwards there would be Beatty’s stewed fruit and her trifle, her plum tart or her cherry, according to the season. Back on the hired chairs, the men on one side of the room, and the women on the other, would talk of synagogues and politics, children and schools until the help, flagging, came back with the tea trolley, and you refused her kipferl or her almond cake, her yeast ring – ‘light as a feather’ – or her butter biscuits, at the risk of mortally offending Beatty.

  She had neither Sydney’s intellect – although Beatty was by no means stupid – nor his refinement, but she shared her late brother’s concern for other people and stood out, in an increasingly egocentric world, as a human being. If a neighbour was ill, lonely or in the midst of a family crisis, Beatty was there. She could be relied upon to fetch and to carry, to succour and to nourish, characteristics of the Shelton family, which manifestations in Sydney’s brother Juda, had been summarily nipped in the bud by Leonora, who was the epitome of selfishness.

  Vanessa’s wedding had provided a timely dummy-run for Rachel’s now incredibly only fifteen weeks away. After Passover, for which Kitty had been invited by Juda and Leonora as she had been the previous year – when the Klopmans would be back from their cruise – it would be time to get down in earnest to table plans and brides’ lists, although goodness knew when Rachel and Patrick would ever have a proper home. They were talking about going round the world or some such nonsense before they settled down.

  Passover would not be the same. Had not been since Sydney’s death. The warm, family seders, when the Hebrew songs of liberation had flowed like honey over the traditional table – with its matzo and its Shank Bone and its Bitter Herbs – had been replaced by Juda’s rendering of the service in which the questions were asked in English, because of the inadequate Hebrew knowledge of the guests, the debate was non-existent, and the main object of the exercise was clearly to reach the celebratory meal. The yearly communal reading of the Hagadah, the Passover story, which had degenerated almost into another of Leonora’s dinner parties – they did not even bother with the post-prandial portion of the service – was one of Juda’s vestigial links with his up-bringing, the seder and the two white candles at Friday night’s dinner with kiddush before and gra
ce following the meal after which he and Leonora very often went out. Juda put in a brief appearance at the synagogue on Yom Kippur but he did not close his art gallery on that day. It was not the same. Nothing was the same, as Kitty herself was finding out.

  With Sydney as her mentor it had not been difficult to lead a fully Jewish life following the dicta which governed every aspect of daily life. In principle she still adhered to the old ways, but she was slipping. Had slipped. Alone, she switched on and watched the television on Friday nights, resorted to the calorific comfort of milk chocolate before the statutory time had elapsed after her meat dinner, and paid the milkman on the Sabbath on which day she had also driven her car. True, the latter had been in response to a summons by Beatty – an emergency almost– but even with Kitty’s new, more, liberal attitude to life it had not felt right. She had been getting ready to go to synagogue, which she attended at least every other week, more out of habit than conviction.

  She had been putting on her hat when Beatty phoned.