‘Come in,’ he said.
‘The weather’s foul.’ She took the mackintosh into the bathroom and hung it to dry.
He had a rifle in his grease-smeared hands. ‘I was going to come with an umbrella and meet you, but couldn’t be sure of the direction.’
‘I was all right. I didn’t get wet. Where did that come from?’
His shirt sleeves were rolled up, and she noticed a tattoo on his muscular forearm, a fearsome dragon twisted around the words ‘Death or Glory’. Such things decorating men’s bodies made them look like woad-painted people from the Stone Age.
‘Youthful indiscretion,’ he laughed. ‘Done in a drunken moment, if I remember. And I only just do!’
‘I meant the gun.’
He held it high. ‘John must have brought it back – a genuine German rifle from the Arras battlefield. There are a dozen rounds as well. I’ll stow it where it came from. No good to us.’
‘Didn’t do him much good, either.’ She set her basket on the floor. A circular bronze plaque several inches in diameter lay on the piano top. Britannia with trident, and wreath held forth, were accompanied by a lion, surrounded by HE DIED FOR FREEDOM AND HONOUR, and the name JOHN CHARLES PHILLIPS in a rectangle above the lion’s head. She put it down quickly, as if it were still alive with grief and loss. The first of two telegrams said: ‘I regret to inform War Office reports Capt. J. C. Phillips died of wounds April 26th.’ The second contained words of solace: ‘The King and Queen deeply regret the loss you and the army have sustained by the death of your son in the service of his country. Their majesties truly sympathize with you in your sorrow.’
‘That’s how it was done.’ He put the rifle away. ‘Their son, and my uncle, may well have taught me a thing or two.’
‘Perhaps if he had lived,’ she said, ‘you wouldn’t have been packed off to the orphanage.’
2
Clara said: ‘It was too much to bear. No man was ever more destroyed by the death of his son.’ It must have been the same for all fathers, and worse perhaps for all mothers. The ranks of a family would be torn into by such a death as if a cannon ball had gone through, and they would not close for years.
Percy went to the recruiting office to enlist. He was nearly sixty. Too old. He offered money if they would take him. He wanted to go to France and die, or to get his revenge for John’s death. ‘He went day after day, and mother couldn’t stop him. She was too grieved to try. Father was utterly broken down. One of the sergeants brought him home, and mother thanked him with half a crown for beer. The same sergeant accompanied him a few days later, but refused another half crown.
‘Mother showed me a letter,’ Clara said, ‘that she would send to the War Graves Commission. John’s grave should not be marked with a cross, because he was Jewish. He must be buried under the Hebrew sign, no matter what religion he gave when he enlisted. Though he had not lived as a Jew he was nonetheless one by the Law, as were all children, she insisted, born of a Jewish mother. Father was apathetic, but when he saw the letter he commented that though John had been brought up as a Christian, Rachel was quite right. And what did it matter, since both Jews and Christians believed in the same God? As far as he was concerned they were one people.’
The reply said that in spite of the case being an unusual one it was quite possible and perhaps even proper for his grave to be marked as that of a Member of the Jewish Faith, but that since his records showed him not to be one, it would be necessary to have the authority of a rabbi before her wishes as Captain Phillips’ mother could be carried out. Rachel went from one synagogue to another until she obtained what she wanted from a rabbi who had known her father. Emma went with her, and the rabbi who gave his consent said that she was Jewish too, and ought not to forget it when the time came for her to choose a husband and have children.
‘We went to see John’s grave after the war. Going through the customs at Boulogne was a tedious business. The French officials were very thorough, and there was a long queue, but we patiently put up with it. Father had by this time sufficiently recovered to motor us to Arras, though the roads were still bad and many villages in ruins. Lodgings were scarce, and Emma and I shared a bed at the Hotel de L’Univers.
‘The French people were everywhere sympathetic, though Emma said she smelt nothing but death, and wished she had not come. Father enjoyed the travelling, seeming to forget his troubles and constrictions as we drove along the cobbled roads admiring the scenery. But Emma and I wept at seeing him and mother clinging to each other at the cemetery. At the same time father seemed younger than for many years because, as he said, he felt closer to John than when in England. We took a camera, and there is a photograph of the rabbi-padre standing between father and mother, with Emma and me behind. We were at the grave marked by John’s name and the Star of David. The Englishman in charge of the cemetery was much taken with Emma, and pressed her hand a little too hard and long, she said, when we left.’
Percy later sent fifty pounds to the rabbi ‘to be distributed, as he thought fit, among charities which would in some way benefit his co-religionists’. Percy had always given to good causes, believing that those organizations for assisting the poor and the lower classes should be amply supported by the more fortunate, who ought to give as much as they could so that it would not be necessary for the state to help – which Percy would see as the beginning of universal corruption and degradation.
Each year he took a notebook and a list from his desk and, without a secretary, stayed at home to perform the charitable duty of sending cheques to asylums, hospitals, medical colleges, missionary societies, fishermen’s funds, lifeboat institutions, and soldiers’ homes. There were receipts for money he had sent to an organization for ‘Promoting Christianity Among the Jews’ and another for ‘Assisting Jews to Return to the Promised Land’ and Clara wondered how much their mother was aware of this, knowing it was probable that Percy never told her.
He had a life-subscription of two votes to an infant asylum for orphans close to London, to which he sent extra money when an appeal was made, or when his conscience urged him – as it sometimes did on recovering from one of his nervous attacks. He visited the orphanage twice a year because, he said, it did his heart good to see children being treated well who were, after all, those beings on whom the future of the British Empire depended.
‘Father said that Emma was much like mother had been when young. She had the same reddish hair, as well as a fine figure that turned every man’s head. Even women stopped to look at her. Her wit could be scorching, and her humour also had a bite to beware of. Her eyes were not good for any distance, and she tried to do without glasses, though on the visit to John’s grave near Arras she wore them all the time, frameless half-lenses which, hardly visible until you were quite close, gave an attractive and mysterious glitter to her face.
‘At the restaurant in the evening we were a typical English family making a visit to a dear one’s grave, as many parties did in those years. We were also, Emma said, enjoying the good food. Father’s pepper-grey hair was brushed straight back, and he wore a dark suit, with a high collar and tie, and a watch at his waistcoat. He smiled faintly at Emma and me when we talked about the events of the day in such a way that the people round about thought we were more carefree than we ought to be.
‘Father’s illness had improved in the last few years, Emma observed, because what attacks he now had were called grief, and that was something in which he was not alone in those days during and after the Great War.’
Rachel wore a high-necked black velvet dress, and a locket around her neck which held her dead son’s photograph. Under it, seen only when she leaned, was a six-pointed golden Star of David. Mostly she sat straight, and it was invisible. Her hair, pulled back and tied, was more ashen than red. To the daughters’ amusement and occasional embarrassment Percy would reach across and hold Rachel’s hand tenderly for a few moments. She told him not to be silly, though Clara knew that without such gestures she
would wither and die. She spoke very little since John’s death, and none of us, said Clara, not even father, knew what she was thinking. Her pride was her strength, but her belief in God gave her both pride and strength. Which came first was impossible to say. God was her rock, and she turned into the rock on which the family leaned, though at a cost of denying her basic element which was that of speech. She could not take such weight and yet allow her heart to speak. The tragedy had worn her almost to silence. Speech was painful because her heart could no longer support her gaiety of spirit, and so she became sparing of words, an uncharacteristic state, but one which allowed her to go on living as their mainstay. She thought that because she had broken her father’s heart by marrying out of the Faith John had been taken away from her, but Emma said in that case what had the millions of others been punished for?
There was nothing to prove that if she had not fallen in love with Percy and run away from home she would have suffered any the less. Life was tribulation, whoever you were, and whichever way you looked at it, but what she had endured from her husband, and again by losing her son, at last forced her to wonder why she had been so mindlessly in thrall as to have broken connection with her family. She regretted nothing, but speculated on what had driven her to pursue something which, set far beyond Percy’s love of her and hers of him, seemed to have vanished in the ashes of life.
The folly of a childish and burning will had, on first seeing her future husband, sent her on a course that was endless. She fell in love with the expression on his face, sensing a vision of the future which, while not clear in its details, drew her even more strongly, a vision of his illness, and perhaps beyond that an intimation of the death of their son. She had been blind to this disaster and suffering that waited in the future, as everyone was, but a hint of it was there, and she knew it, and drove herself even more blindly to the actuality which would never let her go. She had been in the grip of a will so profound and valid as to make her commit the terrible sin of abandoning her family, so that when her parents died she could not go their funeral.
Yet even at this age, after all that had happened in her life, she knew she was the same daughter, except that she lived as if afraid to tread down hard on the soil under her feet for fear she would go on falling for ever.
In order to soothe her pain she lit a candle in a small brass holder every Friday night at the dinner table, which glowed by her side until the meal was over. On striking the match she said a phrase in the clearest Hebrew, and Clara remarked in her diary that while this took place the others remained silent. Rachel said to her daughters: ‘This is for John, for you two, for all of us, and for all Jews. We always lit the candle at home.’
She sat at the table of the hotel-restaurant in Arras with a husband who never ceased to say that he adored her, and she smiled and returned the pressure of his fingers over her wrist knowing that each morning she could wake up and thank God that she at least had the blessing of two beautiful daughters. On such a thought she lifted her glass of wine to drink.
Percy lit a cigar, and ordered coffee, and looked at his ‘Blue Guide to Belgium and the Western Front’ to decide where they would go in the morning. The girls smoked cigarettes. ‘It’s bad for your health,’ Rachel told them every time. ‘You should be careful with your health’ – which caused them to recall the constant phrase to men friends: ‘For God’s sake, do be careful! If you aren’t, it’ll be bad for my health!’
But their mother wasn’t to know such details about their lives. Not that Clara had been in love with any of the men. Well, not much, at any rate, though it had been the thing to do with one or two who were special, before they went to France or some such place. The only man she’d really loved was John, and still did, and wept silently at night, knowing he would not be in the house when they woke up in the morning. Now that he was dead she loved Emma, who was eerily like her mother and didn’t object any more to being told so. Yet it often seemed to Clara that John hadn’t been her brother, nor was Emma her sister, otherwise how could she love them so passionately, and at times with such misery in her heart?
3
Tom emptied a whole box which contained items devoted to the motoring tour in northern France: boat tickets, hotel accounts, petrol bills, maps and plans, pamphlets from the Syndicats d’Initiative, photographs and postcards, and bank receipts on money exchanged, as well as the Blue Guide and a diary kept jointly by Clara, and Emma his mother. They travelled towards the Channel along part of the route cycled by John twelve years before, with the intention of staying at Dixmude, but the place was still in ruins so they went on to Ostend, putting up at the Grand Hotel to eat oysters.
In the morning Percy could not get out of bed. Or he would not. He was ill. From what? He said to Rachel that he did not care to leave the Continent, that he could not bear to go back, and wanted to return to Arras and be close to John’s grave till he too died.
Rachel said that she also would like to do such a thing, but what was the use? What God gives, He takes away. She held his hand, wiped his tears, kissed him, and steadied a cup so that he could drink tea. She comforted him, but he wept and would not move. He was ill. But there were no symptoms – no headache, palpitations, vomiting, diarrhoea or sweats. Talk of getting a doctor enraged him. Nevertheless, he was ill, because he would not get out of bed.
The girls pleaded. They had to be back in London because there were people to see, dates to keep, shows to go to. When they suggested getting on the boat by themselves, Rachel’s face stiffened in an anger they had never seen. They must wait until their father was well, when they would go home together. Emma said she wanted to leave now, and didn’t see why they both shouldn’t. Or they could all get on the boat, even father, and have the motoring club bring the car back.
Rachel’s voice came close to a shout. ‘We’ve come here as a family, and we will go back the same way, as soon as your father’s better.’
Moody and subdued, the sisters wanted something to happen but didn’t know what. They walked around the town till, in half an hour, they decided that they had ‘done it’ and there was nothing more to see. They sat in a café, passing and repassing the diary to each other. ‘You write about this place,’ Clara said. ‘I wrote all that rubbish about the last one.’
‘And a fat lot you wrote, after all,’ Emma said. ‘Only two lines.’
‘Two and a half,’ Clara said. ‘I say, don’t look now, but look at that fat old man over there.’
‘What fat old man?’ asked Emma.
‘I said don’t look now,’ Clara snapped. ‘But look! He’s looking at us. I’m sure you could do a whole page on him.’
‘You do it, then,’ Emma suggested.
‘It’s you he’s looking at,’ Clara pouted.
‘I’m bored,’ Emma said.
‘You’re lazy.’
Emma scribbled several lines, then rested the pencil across the coffee-cup saucer.
‘Dirty old devil!’ Clara said loudly. ‘Just look at him.’
‘Oh do leave him be,’ said Emma. ‘He’s only reading the paper.’
‘He’s not. He’s fiddling with himself. He really is. Would you believe it? And it’s an English newspaper he’s reading. He must be from Birmingham – or Bradford! It really is too much.’ She laughed. ‘I’ll call the manager.’
‘Oh don’t, please.’ Emma knew her to be capable of it. ‘He’s not doing anything at all. Stop joking.’
‘Well,’ Clara said, ‘I’m bored as well. Damn this life. I want some fun.’
They rented a hut on the beach, and swam in the sea, but the breakers were grey and cold, and sent them shivering back up the sand. At a hotel dance they met two officers on leave from the Rhine, and did not get to their own beds till two in the morning.
Rachel said, with a lift of her eyebrows, that they seemed to be taking very good care of themselves.
‘If we can’t,’ Clara said, ‘who can?’
Percy stayed in bed for three days. He was il
l, and they weren’t allowed to doubt it. From the window Rachel could see boats leaving for Dover. Waves erupted against the groynes. She played cards with him, and at such times he was cheerful and competent. But after a game or two he would throw the cards off the bed, and begin weeping again. He was ill, he said. Why did she look at him as if he was not? No one believed him. The world was a black glove, and he was inside it.
Rachel looked away. How could a face change so quickly – and what was the reason? – from being fairly normal to one streaked and shivering with an agony she couldn’t bear to look at? She felt like the young girl she had been when his first attack came on soon after they were married. Now he had something to grieve for, and so had she, but her feeling of shock and pity was the same as it had been then. His despair was so intense that her own wracking sorrow had no chance of expressing itself. He was ill, and it was easy to see that his spirit was fixed in such fear and torment that he was beyond help – though she would never admit it.
She calmed him by reading in English from the Hebrew Bible she carried, comforting him by intoning in her beautiful voice verses from Job or the Psalms. He held her hand, and adored her, and became still. He thanked God for sending her, for only through her did the darkness recede, and the black glove relax its grip. When he was finally calm she fought to stop her own tears breaking forth, something which his illness never allowed.
He got out of bed, and they stayed three more days so that he could recover before going home. Rachel sent the girls back as they wished, and she and Percy were alone. They held hands when standing on the beach, and while shopping, and made love in the afternoon and at night. They drove up the coast into Holland for a distant view of Flushing on the opposite shore that was pinned down by sunbeams from the troubled sky.
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