“They think he’s going!” Beatty, distraught, said after the pips. “Pneumonia on his chest. His breathing’s terrible!”
“Leon?” Kitty said.
“Of course Leon. They’ve given him antibiotics but he hasn’t got the strength.”
“I’ll come,” Kitty said.
“I wish poor Sydney was here,” Beatty said by way of thanks.
Kitty had taken off her hat, her shul hat, and gone down to the car which was parked outside the flats. She felt like a criminal. As if she were stealing, robbing, murdering, instead of violating the fourth commandment. She had been putting the key into the ignition, when Louis Hyman, from the ground floor, in his trilby on his way to the synagogue, had looked at her in amazement, then looked again, as if his eyes were not to be trusted. Kitty had wanted to tell him about Leon, that her brother-in-law was dying, to explain, but by the time she had opened the window, her downstairs neighbour had walked self-righteously away. She had trouble starting the engine, for which she blamed God’s anger with her infringement of the seven day’s proscriptions, rather than the icy weather. The Saturday morning traffic was slow moving. Preoccupied with matters of the spirit Kitty had not encountered it before, could not credit that so many people were out, heavy with bags and children, doing their shopping when normally she was quietly at home or in shul. She watched the road, reluctant to turn her head to the bustling pavements, in case, in her shame, she encountered the gaze of anyone who knew her or whom she knew. It was as if Sydney were watching her mortification, her fall from grace, although she was aware that one of the permitted reasons for infringing the Sabbath was to save a life or to visit the sick who would otherwise be alone. Kitty was not sure whether the visit to the dying Leon fitted precisely into either of these categories.
The road to the hospital, which was not far from where Beatty lived, passed three synagogues. Stopping at crossings, for huddled worshippers in their Sabbath clothes, Kitty felt their condemnation and averted her eyes. ‘I don’t usually do this,’ she wanted to explain, ‘but I’m on my way to the hospital…’ She could not get it into her head that no one either knew her nor cared. It was as if hers were the only car on the stocks of the road, vulnerable to the derision, to the rotten eggs.
Leon’s skin had been the white of the pillow, two circles of scarlet were rouged by the fever on his cheeks. Beatty, not letting go of hid hand, willed him fiercely to live. Kitty had sat with her all day, adding her prayers to Beatty’s, although in view of the nature of Leon’s illness, and the fact that he no longer seemed aware of what was going on around him, she thought it would be a blessing if his tenuous hold on life were relinquished. As darkness fell in squares through the windows of the ward and the lamp was switched on by the curtained bed, the breathing grew quieter and Leon rallied, as if he drew sustenance from its light, and the Singhalese doctor – “he’s very kind” Beatty had said, surprised – with his stethoscope had proclaimed Leon’s pyrrhic victory over his secondary disease. “It will happen again,” he told Beatty. “It can’t be helped. Do you want us to give him the antibiotics?” Beatty had looked at the doctor as if he were mad. “He’s my husband,” she said and her voice indicated that Leon was also her sun, her moon, and her stars, for all that their life together had been a battle ground, and that she would fight to keep him in the world – in which he no longer acknowledged her – with the last drop of her blood.
Kitty had driven home among the paired stragglers emerging from the evening service where, with plaited candle and jingling spice box and with wine, they had blessed a God who discriminated between light and darkness, between the seventh day and the six working days, between the holy and profane, had asked for their sins to be pardoned – that their offspring and their possessions be multiplied as the sand and the stars in the night – and wished each other ‘a good week’. Back in her flat Kitty was surprised to find that everything was as she had left it, that there had been no apparent punishment for her transgression, that the heavens hadn’t fallen.
There were other changes. The afternoon of her life was turning out to be different from the morning. Through her evening class, her music, she had been attending concerts. She had confessed neither to the old man, eighty if he was a day, in his cloth cap and his green anorak – what he did not know about music seemed hardly worth knowing – by whom she usually sat, nor to the bearded, impoverished, Ph.D student on her other side, that it was for the first time. Sydney had had little time for secular music, with his Talmud study and his prayers. They went to the theatre sometimes on Saturday nights – a comedy, Sydney liked to be entertained – or to charity performances of musicals where they would meet their friends. Kitty had been neither to the Festival nor the Albert Hall for which the teacher of the class, a dynamic young man with patched jeans and a long, pudding-basin haircut, had obtained reduced price tickets, and certainly never to a Sunday Concert in the Conway Hall of whose existence she had not even known. On a hard cold chair with her classmates, she had sat in her coat and listened to a Mozart concert, enthusiastically executed by an unbelievably young and passionate string quartet, and in the interval read, on the notice-board in the draughty foyer, of Humanist Holidays which were a far cry from Herzlia, visits to Broadstairs to see the Dickens Museum – which reminded her of family holidays when the children were young – and the activities of the South Place Ethical Society.
The class ‘Listening to Music’ had also taken her, for the first time, into the saloon bar of a pub. Most of her fellow students who did not have trains to catch, gathered there every week, after the class. They always invited Kitty politely, but politely – because she did not drink – she declined. Recently inspired, she felt by Maurice, to broaden her horizon, she had timorously accepted the invitation and followed the two Italian girls, one inky dark, one corn fair, and the bulging lady with her bulging shopping bags seeming every week to overflow, and the neat civil servant with his rimless glasses and his brown shoes who was the wit of the class – “I’m coming to sit next to the ladies if I may” – and the other, with the corduroy jacket, who was always the first to put up his hand, along the shadowed streets and into the orange glow of The Three Musketeers. She didn’t know what she had expected. A bordello. A den of vice. Certainly not the cosy room with two or three evening drinkers and a tired little girl behind the bar.
They had pooled their money on the beer mat and the men had fetched their drinks, mostly Guinness and draught lager, and brought them to the table – they had moved three together – where Kitty, feeling wanton, abandoned, had sipped a vodka and orange. She had enjoyed it. She could not contribute to the conversation concerning Finland – they had spent the evening with Sibelius – but she had blossomed in the warmth of the realisation that in the saloon bar she was not Sydney’s widow, nor Rachel’s mother, nor the Klopman’s mechutanista nor Beatty’s sister-in-law, nor Norman’s aunt. Not even Mrs Shelton, but Kitty. First names, she had noticed, were de rigeur. It became a weekly ritual, the vodka and orange. Sometimes she had two. Now, when Rachel told her she was meeting ‘this girl’, ‘this guy’, in the pub, Kitty no longer tutted with disapproval.
In the melée of Vanessa’s reception – “It’s a blessing…” Beatty, crushed and perspiring, said, “…it only lasts an hour!” separated by the crowds, Kitty had hardly spoken to Rachel whose bizarre appearance had made ripples in the family mill-pond. Rachel had arrived, with Patrick in a blue serge forties suit and short back and sides, in a square-shouldered new-look dress complete with forward tipping black-veiled hat and scarlet lipstick. Kitty had telephoned her later – when Josh had taken her home from the reception and she’d collapsed, exhausted, slipping her shoes from her aching feet.
“If you’ve telephoned to tell me off…” Rachel, always on the defensive, said, “I bought it in Portobello Market…”
“I thought you looked lovely, darling,” Kitty, to whom Rachel’s appearance at the wedding had come as a bit of a shock, said.
“What did you ring up for?”
“I wanted to know,” Kitty said, “about Nietzsche.”
Rachel, whose subject was philosophy, paired with psychology, had been taken aback. Kitty could tell from the momentary silence at the other end of the phone.
“Nietzsche!”
“Nietzsche,” Kitty said firmly.
“I’ll bring you a book,” Rachel told her, when she’d recovered.
A life of the Protestant pastor, the grandfather of German philosophy, now lay alongside the Thoreau by Kitty’s bed. Rachel had tried to extract from her the reason for her strange request, but Kitty had kept to herself the new dimension which had come into her life with the letters from Maurice. Rachel had shrugged – she had other things to think about, not least herself.
Now, on her way to Carol’s, of whom she did not see nearly enough, Kitty thought of her grandchildren. She missed them. Debbie, Lisa and the baby Mathew, whose growth she had not been able to monitor as she had done when they lived nearby. On the back seat of the car was a tin of hamantashen – three-cornered cakes – which she had baked for the children’s Purim, to remind them of the wicked Haman’s traditional three-cornered hat. Carol had made fancy dresses for the girls, the secret nature of which they had suppressed, in muffled giggles, on the telephone. The masquerading was an old custom. In Eastern Europe, where Kitty’s ancestors had lived, the community gathered together to watch a Purimspiel where clowns and ventriloquists and acrobats performed. In Israel today, the festival was celebrated with a big parade, Adloyada, with colourful floats and marching bands. Kitty thought of Maurice, with his hundred special Purims, and wished he could see her grandchildren, Debbie and Lisa, who waited excitedly on the doorstep, a diminutive Queen Esther tripping over her dress, cheeks rouged beneath her crown, and a masked Haman with his black crayonned moustache, as she turned into the drive of Peartree Cottage.
Twenty
Seeing Carol brought home to Kitty how much she had missed her elder daughter. At first Kitty had been angry with Alec, but as time went by, observing Carol’s happiness with her family in Godalming the resentment had grown less. Kitty could talk to Carol. She was not like Rachel, wayward, headstrong, seeming to occupy another planet whose mores had to do neither with the religious observances, nor the behaviour patterns, in which she had been reared. Mother and daughter, they sat at Carol’s kitchen table, looking out on to the lawn where the children, anoraks over their fancy dress, had been sent to play. Kitty confided to Carol the arthritis in her neck which had been troubling her lately, the problems at the Day Centre, the fraught arrangements for Rachel’s wedding. Carol surprised her mother by telling her – bubbling over with news – that she had had a poem accepted by a woman’s magazine. It was about a city park and a country meadow, comparing them. In the park, on the benches, tired mothers sat with prams, transistors played, and office workers ate their sandwiches, while in the meadow, within the confines of the hedgerows, barefoot children picked the daisies. Mixed with her pride – Kitty had no idea that Carol could write poetry – was the fleeting disappointment that, as with Rachel’s wedding, Sydney had not lived to see her achievement. Carol in print. With her name beneath the poem. He had sown, but reaped only a small corner of his field.
When Alec came home from his surgery, greeting his mother-in-law fondly, they had a festive dinner – Debbie and Lisa showing off for their grandmother – and afterwards in the sitting-room with its log fire, the curtains drawn, played Purim bingo – with squares of cardboard, on which the children had drawn a star of David, the Israeli flag, a spinning top – ‘Pin the Crown on Esther’ and ‘Pass Haman’s Hat’. In the bosom of her daughter’s family, Kitty sighed a little for the passing of the years and of Sydney, seeing in Carol with her children the embodiment of all that he had wished for in terms of continuity, the fulfillment of his prayers. In the morning she took Mathew into bed with her, feeling the warmth of the small wriggling body, and made room for Debbie and Lisa, showing them squares of the organdie print Rika Snowman had suggested for their bridesmaids’ dresses, one pink, one blue. When Mathew, jealous, held out his pudgy hand for the material, she gave him the sample of yellow.
Together they walked in the dormant country, the children skipping by their sides like lambs, and Alec and Carol, proud possessors of another secret they had kept until Kitty’s visit, showing her their new house. It was Queen Anne, and far too large Kitty thought – three floors and two staircases – and in the village.
“Have you bought it?” Kitty said as they stood in what was once the drawing-room but was now to be the main bedroom after the structural alterations which Alec proposed.
Carl nodded.
Kitty looked at her daughter. When Sydney had been alive his advice had been sought not only by his children, but by the entire family. When a special purchase, a major step was proposed – in the case of Rachel and Carol and Josh when they were young, even a new coat – Sydney had expected to be consulted.
“We’ve exchanged contracts,” Carol said, “but there’s one snag.”
Kitty thought that, in the old, draughty house she would not have given a thank-you for, and which was right on the main road, there were several, but she held her tongue.
“There’s a lot of work to be done on it and we’ve got a buyer for Peartree Cottage…”
“We thought…”
“We wondered…”
They wanted Kitty to have the children, Debbie and Lisa and Mathew, after Rachel’s wedding, with Carol going up and down to supervise the work on the new home.
“Will you take us to the zoo, Grandma?” Debbie hopped on one leg.”
“And to Cinderella on Ice…?”
“There’s no ice in the summer, silly!” Debbie said.
“Of course I’ll have them.” Kitty would look forward to it to mitigate the silence in the flat.
“The builders want three months,” Carol said. “I’m afraid it would be until they go back to school.”
After the Queen Anne house, Peartree Cottage looked welcoming, as if it belonged to Carol and Alec and the children, and they to it. Kitty remembered with what horror she had regarded it, when they had first moved to Godalming. She was not good at changes. She liked things to be the same, for them to go on.
“It’s very grand!” she said to Carol of the new house.
“We were afraid you mightn’t like it,” Carol said, relieved, the dust of happiness in her eyes.
Alone, at night, with her Thoreau, beneath the eaves, Carol had come to sit on her bed. She took her mother’s hand.
“Guess what?”
“More surprises?” Kitty dropped her eyes to Carol’s waistline, whose secret she had already divined.
Carol nodded.
“When?”
“For Rosh Hashana.”
The New Year was only five months away. Carol had not confided in her.
“You don’t show!”
“I can’t do my skirts up!”
“You’ll have your hands full!”
“Mathew wants it to be a kitten.”
Even the children had been told.
Kitty pulled Carol close to her and kissed her dark head, her pleasure in the fact that she was to have another grandchild making up for the small hurt of her exclusion.
It was why, Carol said, they had to hurry with the house. The rest of the weekend passed in the warm glow of the expected baby. When it was time for Kitty to go they had seen her off – the children blowing kisses through the window – and Alec had waved her out into the narrow road. Leaving them, so patently happy in their leaning cottage, in the cocoon of their life, she was glad that she had not revealed her own secret to Carol. Her correspondence with Maurice belonged to the new Kitty, as did Thoreau and ‘Listening to Music’; and she had no wish to share him, she had discovered, as she did the other ninety-nine percent of herself, with Addie Jacobs, with Sydney’s family or with her children. When she got home from the country ther
e was a letter waiting for her. She had hoped there would be.
Dear Kitty, dear Kitty –
Why do you persist? I tell myself you won’t bother any more, that each letter is the last, then can’t wait to go down to the mail-box. When it’s empty a gloom descends over my day. When I see your handwriting and those English stamps (I love your Queen) there is a whole new dimension to it. My spirit lightens, my mood lifts, my heart sings. I am a man given to great élans and deep discouragements – no more or less I guess than any artist – so what do you want with me? I am not like Sydney. Little by little, as I read your letters, I am building up a picture of him. What a fine and upright man. What a loss. Poor Kitty. If whom the gods love die young, this miserable old sinner will go on to eternity. I could never have been a good Jew, as Sydney was, even though I was raised to it. I kicked against the outward observances in my youth. One Sabbath I told my father I was sick and while the others were in synagogue (they burned it to the ground in the ‘Kristallnacht’ pogrom of 1938), I took the trolley down-town and bought a bratwürst (sausage!). After that it was easy. I obeyed my father, who was tryannically strict, traditional, and rigid (although he often kissed and hugged us), as did most children in that other life, but within, what a ferment, what an uproar. My body was enslaved but not my spirit. I guess it was the creativity, which had not then emerged, but which is the antithesis of the habit which was imposed on me.
One of my earliest memories of Frankfurt – I must have been about ten or twelve at the time – was a whole troop of brownshirts marching down the street singing a song about Jews and how their heads would roll. I didn’t understand but it frightened me. Later they trained dogs to run after us – ‘get the Jew’ – and there were park benches for ‘Aryans only’, pubs, theatres, cinemas and stores where ‘Jews and pigs’ were strictly forbidden – dogs were permitted! The signs bothered me but I learned to live with them (we all did), to expect kids to be waiting outside the synagogue with rocks to throw at us, to accept that anti-semitism was a part of everyday life. My Uncle Manny, who was a quiltmaker, had his business taken from him, they confiscated my Uncle Karl’s driving licence, ruining him (he travelled in pharmaceuticals). We had special passports with a yellow ‘J’ and the name ‘Israel’ (Sarah for the women) added to our own. The woman in the corner store, who had always been friendly, suddenly started hurling abuse at us – she made my sister cry. My mother lost her maid because she was not allowed to work for us. Jewish teachers and professors were expelled from their jobs, including my Uncle Felix who was given ‘immediate leave of absence’, and a few months later was dismissed from the university. It crept up on us. “It isn’t going to last” my saintly father said. “Hitler will disappear.”
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