Rose of Jericho

by Rosemary Friedman

  Rachel sucked in her breath.

  “That’s funny!” Rika frowned. “Have you put on weight?”

  Rachel looked at Kitty.

  “I never make a mistake with my measures,” Rika said, examining the turnings. “We don’t leave all that much. Not with lace.” She ran her tape-measure round Rachel’s waist then consulted her notebook.

  “Twenty-two!” she said triumphantly. “I knew I hadn’t made a mistake.” She measured Rachel’s waist again and showed the tape-measure to Kitty. “Twenty-five and a bit!”

  Kitty, remembering with horror the Chinese take-away, looked at Rachel who lowered her eyes.

  “Rachel!” Kitty said.

  She was going to have another grandchild.

  Twenty-four

  Freda had never been in a Magistrates’ Court. In any court. It was the end of the road for her, the final confrontation. Sitting on the hard bench, with the friends and relatives of those whose cases were coming up, with an idle public whose curiosity took them into the dusty amphitheatre of the courtroom, she was vaguely aware that outside a sun was shining with a brightness that was rarely seen in England, and that it looked as if it was going to be a nice weekend for Rachel’s wedding, for which she had not even bought a new dress. She did not care. The last weeks had been torture. Freda had carried the summons round with her as an intimation, a reminder of her husband’s perfidy. Harry had tried to discuss the matter, but Freda would not listen. After the court case, after the hearing, there would be time enough for that. The house, Freda’s home with Harry where they had been so happy, where Freda had reared her family of fictitious children, had become a prison in which they shared a cell, although Freda slept at the very edge of the bed and would not let Harry touch her. She no longer bothered to clean it, letting the dust collect, and when Harry came home, reluctantly now, sadly, he had to get his own dinner, for Freda did not cook his meal.

  The family had poked their noses in. Trust them. Mirrie, her spinster sister, had begged to know what was the matter but what could Mirrie know of the sacrament of marriage, of infidelity? Freda had not confided in her. Lennie, the family doctor – at the instigation of Beatty, Freda was sure – had rung her up, tactfully, while Harry was at work, to enquire if she was feeling well, and whether he could be of any help. Nobody could. Not even Kitty to whom Freda unburdened herself. Her fidus Achates had always been Harry, by whom she had been betrayed. He was anxious, frightened, that much Freda knew. He had started to take tranquillisers – she had found the bottle when she went through his pockets – which she construed as evidence, if more were needed, of his guilt. What was going to happen to them, to their relationship, Freda did not know. She could not imagine that there was life beyond this day.

  Her sister-in-law, typically, had offered to come with her to the hearing, but Freda would not let her, not wanting a witness to her shame. Besides, with the Aufruf tomorrow, the wedding on Sunday, Kitty had enough to do. Some people had happy times to which they could look forward. Freda had only despair. With the rest of the court she stood while the Bench – two women and a man – were seated, pulverised a paper hanky in her lap, not hearing while they dealt, the dust filtering the sun on to their heads, with a dishonest youth wearing an ear-ring, a violent husband who faced a wife with a purple eye. If the case against Harry were proven Freda would be violent. She would murder Harry. The knife was in the kitchen drawer together with the egg slicer and the potato masher. She had made her plans. They would put her in prison. It was all the same to her. Her life was finished. The seal would be put on it in this courtroom. “Turnbull v. Goldstien,” the Presenting Officer called. Freda’s life. On the Bench they turned a page. Harry – how handsome he had been when she married him – in front of the dock, was conscience-stricken, pale. Catherine Turnbull took the oath, held the Bible in her right hand. In her cotton skirt and blouse, this scarlet woman, this voluptuary, to Freda’s astonishment, was little more than a child.

  “This is an application,” Miss Turnbull’s counsel said, “under the Affiliation Proceedings Act, for Mr Harry Goldstien to be declared the father of Damien Russell Turnbull, born on the 27th December…”

  Harry’s child had a name. Freda wanted suddenly to rush to him, to protect him from the mob.

  “Miss Turnbull…” In his well worn black Miss Turnbull’s counsel adjusted the glasses which had slipped down his nose, waved an accusatory arm towards Harry.

  “Is this man the father of your child?”

  Freda’s life was over. She had not lived it for this. She called upon her parents, long since dead, glad they had not lived to see her shame. Images invaded her mind, shameful, erotic, involving Harry and the waif-like Miss Turnbull with her spiky hair. From the witness box, where she had promised to tell the truth and nothing but, this girl gripped the pale wood with bitten nails. She stared at Harry. A puzzled expression crossed the homely face.

  The court waited.

  “I never seen this man before.”

  Freda was aware of a voice, seeming to come from far away, declaring, “I think, Madam, there has been some mistake in this case…” But she did not hear how Miss Turnbull’s lover had been a man who called himself ‘Smith’: how she had found a football coupon in his pocket, made out in another name; how she had looked up his address in the telephone book and lit upon the wrong Harry Goldstein; because, like a sigh, in her summer dress, she had slipped sinewless to the ground. “If you don’t eat,” Beatty said to the supine Leon, as if the soup, thickened with groats, with which she was feeding him, was in the British Pharmacopaeia, “you won’t get better.” It was a dictum in which she believed with a doggedness as thoroughgoing as her refusal to acknowledge that her husband’s life – despite the marvels of modern medicine which were rapidly losing ground in the battle against his disease – was slipping away. “And if you don’t get better I won’t go to the wedding on Sunday. You want me to tell you about Rachel’s wedding, don’t you?” She looked at the high window, the other side of which the healthy were going about their business, with their arms, and their legs, and their circulatory and alimentary systems in working order, oblivious to the pain and tribulation of the eighteen men whose lives did not extend beyond the boundaries of the geriatric ward. Leon would not go on for much longer, the doctor had warned her. Beatty did not believe him. Fortified by her beef tea, revitalised by her custards, there would be no surrender. “You want me to wear my new dress, don’t you?” she demanded of the unresponsive Leon.

  She had already explained to him, with his sunken cheeks, his fleshless fingers, that the dress was apple-green – her favourite colour as a child when her hair had an auburn which owed nothing to the hairdresser and his bottle – embroidered with lurex thread. She had had her shoes dyed apple-green to match. “I’ll be here on Sunday as usual to give you your lunch – I’ve cooked a bottom quarter, I’ll mince it, you like that – then Sister will keep an eye on you. I’ll ring up from the King Solomon Suite, she doesn’t mind. Funny, Rachel getting married. I remember when she was born. Sydney was like a cat with two tails. Poor Sydney, he had no right to go like that – he was never ill. I think they should have asked the children. Austin and Brenda aren’t a bit pleased. They’re leaving them with Brenda’s mother. For two pins they wouldn’t have accepted, but they didn’t want to upset Kitty. Poor Kitty all on her own. You have to take your hat off to her. I thought without Sydney she’d go to pieces. She’s marvellous. Travelling on her own. I wouldn’t have the nerve. Going to classes. It’s like she’s got a new lease of life. I told you about Carol’s baby. And Sarah’s. Kitty won’t know which way to turn. I don’t think Austin and Brenda will have any more. Not unless they guaranteed a girl. Won’t be long before they can do that. No sooner turn round than they’re getting married. I’ll bring you a piece of wedding cake – crumble it up small – you used to like fruit cake. Remember the one I always made with the glacé cherries? Austin never could stand glacé cherries. Used to pick them o
ut.” Beatty scraped the last of the broth from the bottom of the jar and inserted it, heaving a sigh of relief, as if she had caught the last post, between Leon’s lips. “You’ve done very well.”

  “Tea or coffee?” The disinterested ward-maid, with her trolley of pots and cups and sugar lumps, enquired from the end of the bed.

  “He’ll have coffee,” Beatty said, and asked for an extra sugar as if the additional lump would be instrumental in turning the tide of the battle waged by the drugs.

  In her kitchen Kitty, helped by Rachel, counted out the silver-plated forks, King’s pattern, which had been her wedding present, hers and Sydney’s, from Grandma Solomons, and wondered whether the salmon, which lay curled beneath the cling-wrap in the refrigerator, was going to be big enough for the luncheon following the Aufruf. She was serving it buffet-style – there were far too many people to sit round the dining-table from which the wedding presents had now been removed – and had been busy all day, helped by Addie and Mirrie and Rachel, scraping new potatoes, washing lettuce, and grating cabbage for the salad. Rachel had made the mayonnaise. She had been a great help.

  She had been at home for a week now, living with Kitty. Kitty had insisted. She wasn’t having her getting out of Patrick’s bed in the council flat and going to her wedding. Kitty’s rooms were full of flowers. People had sent them. The door bell had been ringing all day. Kitty had forgotten how exciting it was – Carol’s wedding seemed so long ago. In the hairdresser’s, to which she had popped out during the morning – although she thought it dreadful the way some of the women unburdened themselves to the stylists, nothing was sacred – she was unable to keep the elation from her voice. She watched tensely, anxiously, as she was combed out, and asked Jon if he didn’t think her cut the least little bit too short, as if she were the bride. On Sunday Jon was coming to the flat with his heated rollers – her hair would be flattened after Saturday morning in her shul hat – and to put up Rachel’s hair beneath her head-dress. The girl at the reception, with her scarlet nails, framed by the canisters of hair-spray, wished her mazeltov.

  It was a mazeltov. There were several. Rachel had passed her exams, a second class degree which, Kitty thought, was well as could be expected considering the amount of work she had done – what she was going to do with it goodness only knew – and there was the baby. Rachel’s trousers, as she grouped the forks into neat piles on the metal tray, were fastened with a safety pin. Kitty would not forget in a hurry the moment at Cupid of Hendon when the bombshell had been dropped. Not that anything had specifically been said, but Rika Snowman, tight about the lips, had summoned the fitter, and in between them they had worked out how best to deal with an insertion of lace into the ‘gown’. “Better make it four inches,” Rika had said pointedly. “There’s still a few weeks to go!” In the car Rachel said: “I’m sorry Mummy” as if she were a child apologising for some misdemeanour. “I thought you had pills and things…” Kitty said. “I must have forgotten.” “Do the Klopmans know?” Kitty felt as if it were a personal disgrace. Rachel shook her head. “They’d be furious with Patrick.” “Thank God your father’s not alive,” Kitty said. She shuddered to imagine what Sydney’s reaction would have been, and drove in silence as she thought about it. When she glanced at Rachel she was crying, slow tears drifting down her face from overflowing eyes. “What’s the matter?” Kitty pulled up at the lights too close to the car in front. She didn’t know what she was doing. Rachel scrubbed at her cheeks with what had once been a paper hanky. “I thought you’d be pleased!” she sobbed. God, children! Kitty thought. She put a hand over Rachel’s. “Of course I’m pleased.” It was only partly true. “You haven’t even asked when it’s due.” A car behind hooted. Kitty hadn’t noticed the lights change. “When?” “Five months,” Rachel said. Within a few weeks of Carol’s and Sarah’s.

  Extraordinarily, then, as if she was glad the secret had no longer to be kept, Rachel chattered on about her trip round the world with Patrick which was going to be postponed until the baby was three months old – when they would take it with them on their backs – and meanwhile could they come anyway to stay with Kitty? The baby would sleep in the room with herself and Patrick, and she was going to breast feed, so they’d be no trouble. Karl Popper and Wittgenstein had since been replaced by books on natural childbirth – Rachel’s baby would be delivered on a birthing stool – and the wedding, if one were to listen to Rachel, had taken a secondary and unimportant place. Now, carrying the tray of cutlery into the dining-room, Kitty watched her daughter. There was something she had been trying to say to her. She waited until Rachel came back with the empty tray.

  “I’ve asked a friend to the wedding,” Kitty said, cutting a cucumber finely. She had left the cucumber till last as it was inclined to go limp.

  Rachel helped herself to a few of the slices as they dropped from Kitty’s knife.

  “What’s her name?”

  “It’s a man,” Kitty said.

  ‘Have you told Rachel about me?’ Maurice had asked.

  “A man!”

  Her tone, Kitty thought, revealed that Rachel had considered her mother to be of an age beyond friendship, beyond feeling.

  “From the evening class?” Rachel looked at her watch. She was expecting Patrick who would take her for Friday night dinner at the Klopmans’, to be introduced to Hettie’s parents who had arrived from Florida.

  “I met him in Israel,” Kitty said, an image flashing into her mind of Maurice, in his zippered jacket, his flat cap.

  “You’ve kept him very quiet.”

  “There was nothing to make a noise about,” Kitty said.

  “Why on earth should he want to come to my wedding? He doesn’t even know me!”

  “He knows you.”

  Rachel got up from the corner of the kitchen table on which she had been sitting.

  “I went to visit Daddy’s grave,” she said.

  Kitty looked at her, surprised.

  Rachel was at the door. “There were a few weeds. I pulled them out.”

  Kitty opened the kitchen door to Patrick who followed her into the kitchen.

  “Excited?” Kitty said.

  “I haven’t eaten a thing for the past two days,” Patrick said. “And God knows what I’ve been writing up for the patients!”

  “Nerves,” Kitty said, “Don’t forget the ring!”

  “I’ll be glad when it’s over.”

  “Don’t let Rachel hear you!”

  “It’s worse than the finals!”

  Patrick stood awkwardly by the sink.

  “I love Rachel.”

  Kitty, covering the cucumber dish, looked at him.

  “I should hope so!”

  “I just wanted you to know. That I’ll look after her…”

  Kitty put the dish into the fridge in which there was no longer an inch of room.

  “…I wanted to thank you…” Patrick said. “…For Rachel…”

  Kitty put her arms round her son-in-law to be. “There’s no need to make a speech,” she said, her eyes pricking with tears. “Leave it for Sunday!”

  When Rachel and Patrick had gone the flat was quiet. Kitty was glad, after the comings and the goings of the past week– the last of the presents, the flowers, deliveries of food and wine for the Aufruf, and dresses, Rachel’s and the bridesmaids’, and head-dresses, and telegrams of good wishes – to have it all to herself. Outside she was calm – “don’t know how you cope with it all”, Addie had said – inside was a maelstrom of emotions. She felt sad, conscious at every moment of excitement, every salutation of mazeltov, at the absence of Sydney, although somewhere she felt that he knew, exactly, what was going on; ambivalent about Rachel’s baby, so soon, she was so young; excited about the wedding, but at the same time apprehensive lest the well laid plans, the long-standing arrangements, did not go right; in a state about Maurice. Rachel had not been interested. Kitty didn’t know what she had expected. There had been another letter. A short one only. To tell he
r a final Mazel Tov and that he was counting the days until he would see her in the shul. The dining-room table had been set by Mirrie ready for the luncheon on Kitty’s Madeira cloth which cost so much to launder. The sitting-room looked as it had not done since Sydney’s death, decorated with anticipation, bright with flowers against which Rachel would have her photograph taken on Sunday. Kitty adjusted a bloom here, a stem there – how kind people were, Hettie and Herbert had sent an arrangement which took up so much room she’d had to stand it in the hearth – then shut the door on the heady perfume of the summer roses.

  In Rachel’s bedroom the wedding-dress – beneath its white sheet, on which Rika Snowman had pinned a horseshoe for good luck – hung from the cupboard door. Her case was packed. Case! A nylon hold-all, into which Rachel had thrown her trousseau – a new pair of jeans (maternity) and a few tops – which was all she had allowed Kitty to buy her, and a sweater of Patrick’s. Kitty thought of her own trousseau which had, she remembered, to do with hand-made underwear, with pretty dresses, a fur coat bought by her father – not a piece of skunk from Camden Lock – and, how extraordinary it seemed now, with hats! She sat down on Rachel’s bed and picked up the ragged bear, its glassy eyes sewn on more times than she could remember, that Rachel had kept from her childhood. It didn’t seem long since it had been bootees and matinée jackets, which Kitty had knitted in a trice and threaded with pink ribbon. Soon she would start knitting for Rachel’s baby. For all the babies! It was going to be a busy year. It was better that way. But at this moment, she would have given it all up, all the excitement, all the babies, for a quiet half-hour with Sydney.

  Twenty-five

  Kitty, in her turquoise dress, stood beneath the satin marriage canopy with its embroidered inscription from the book of Jeremiah – ‘The voice of mirth, and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom, and the voice of the bride’ – and waited for Rachel. She was trembling. As if she had not done it before. She had. But with Sydney by her side. This time she stood alone on the heels which were too high for comfort – the day had dawned clear and hot and already her feet were beginning to swell – on the bride’s side of the chuppah, opposite Herbert and Hettie and Mrs Klopman, who, resplendent in purple silk, was sitting on a chair, and Magda and Joseph Silver who had flown in with their suntans from Florida. The synagogue was packed, the women fanning themselves with the white copies of The Marriage Service – personalised in silver with the names of Patrick and Rachel – the men, with their handkerchiefs, discreetly mopping their brows. The choir, in especially good voice, Kitty thought, were singing ‘O Isis und Osiris’ from Die Zauberflöte as Maurice had suggested. Kitty had to admit that it was beautiful.