‘It’s all right. But thank you. If there’s any need I’ll phone you. I’ll phone tomorrow, in any case.’
She couldn’t talk. Neither could he. Then she said: ‘Give Pam my love. And my love to you as well.’
‘We’ll be all right. Keep well.’
‘I love you both.’
‘I must hang up now,’ he said.
She put the phone down. Goodbye, you poor stupid kids without me to put in a harsh word. You don’t need Judy, either, do you? But what have you been up to? Wait till I get my hands on you. They don’t know how to look after themselves, because they have no idea what real love is all about.
Her drink unfinished, she went to bed without a book, and slept – though not before wondering whether to tell the kids when she woke up in the morning. But they were too grown up not to be told.
15
The smash had come from pink dust and white lights. She would tell Judy when she saw her that the explosion had shaken every molecule of her bones. The explanation ran through her mind while they stood silent on the platform waiting for the quick train to Paris. Tom paced up and down, but always came back in case she needed anything or wanted to speak.
Not even time to jam the brakes on, she would say, by then perhaps able to laugh about it. Why did I turn left on the roundabout, instead of right? The old subconscious was dead-set on my assassination, she supposed. Good to know it wasn’t as all-powerful as she had often given it credit for, since the plot or impulse had clearly failed.
The other driver was a woman, and neither had she put her brakes on. All happened too quickly. Good job she had been a woman, and hadn’t hurt herself. More helpful than angry she was, a schoolteacher on her way home, young but with a severe face, dark hair pulled back to show the shape of her skull, features I’ll never forget, but most likely won’t see again, though Tom in his appreciation left our address so that she could stay in England any time. He was always quick with the generous thought when someone did a favour, especially if it was for me. A wonder he didn’t have an affair with her while I was in hospital, but he couldn’t because he spent nearly every hour at my bedside.
I blubbered at the trouble I’d caused, but he laughed, and said it didn’t matter as long as I was all right, and I was, because everything turned out even more superficial than they had thought. ‘I got both of us, and the car,’ he said, ‘insured to the limit before we left, so the motor club can bring the car back when it’s fixed, and we’ll have a leisurely return by train and boat.’
The schoolteacher came to see me in the clinic, and brought flowers, as well as a get-well card from some of her pupils. I could have fallen for her myself with her English as good as mine, and probably more correct in its grammar. She was very charming – and generous. Tom took her to dinner one night, and I was glad, otherwise he would have drifted around the town like a lost soul, as if he’d just come off one of his old ships, or stayed in the hotel room supping on his bottomless whisky flask.
Why I turned left instead of right I’ll never know. I was happy and unthinking, a wrong state of mind because how can you be responsible if you are so stupidly relaxed? You have to pay for the air you breathe by being vigilant all the time, no matter how wearing. In the flash and crunch that followed I was in despair because he would think I had taken the car to do myself in, or get myself an injury so that I’d be in hospital for months and not have to worry about anything. Then he would wash his hands of me because I’d tried a silly stunt once too often. He’ll leave me high and dry, I thought when I was collapsed like a piece of regulation jelly outside the car, and then what will I be able to do except make my own way back and cry on your bosom for the rest of my life?
But when I told him it was no more than an accident, he believed me absolutely, a man of trust who takes things as they come, without panic or reproach.
16
The early train to Paris ran smoothly, and it was hard to believe that by midnight they would be home, except that the speed told them so and would not be gainsaid. The weeks had been difficult for him, and he must have fought his way through a few hard facts while she lay in the clinic. He sat opposite, looking at the pictures in Paris-Match.
‘Did you think of leaving me?’
She used to imagine abandoning George every morning, though only considered it now and again with Tom, a game which, she knew, must sooner or later be given up.
He rested the magazine on his knee. ‘I feel we’ve been married for decades, so why should I?’
She laughed. ‘What a load for you to bear, poor thing!’
He had carried bigger ones. ‘My shoulders are fairly broad.’
‘Well, why don’t you leave me?’
‘You want problems?’ he said. ‘Be careful. They only bring others, often worse.’
She felt light-spirited. ‘How can you be sure?’
He had read somewhere (though who needed to read it?) that a man without a woman was not a human being. There was equal truth in saying that a woman without a man was not a human being, either. He held her hand, and told her so. ‘I’ll never leave you. If ever you want us to separate, you’ll have to be the one to do it.’
He’s a sharer, she thought, all open and above board, who imagines that to pay for one’s mistakes is merely showing a sense of responsibility. ‘Why put everything on my shoulders?’
He leaned back in his seat. ‘I don’t believe in that kind of self-sacrifice.’
She kissed him. ‘Don’t worry. I won’t go through that again. I don’t want to leave you. Nor do I want you to leave me.’
‘Why talk about it?’ He rolled his magazine into a baton and tapped the window, as if testing its strength, she thought, before hitting me over the head.
‘I talk about anything,’ she said. ‘I wondered how you felt.’
‘Now you know, my love.’
The seat was empty, so she sat by his side and caressed his face. ‘I do.’
‘Does it make you feel better?’
‘Even happier.’
‘So while you’re happy, I’ll tell you, once and for all, not to do anything like that again.’
‘The third time will be final,’ she said, ‘but I hope I’ll be ninety years old by then.’
‘God might have a thing or two to say about that.’
A provision trolley stopped at the door, and he bought two large oranges. She sat back in her place, bones still aching from the bruises. ‘Do you believe in God, then?’
‘Certainly. The fact that I’m a Jew might have something to do with it.’
‘Is your God like the captain of a ship, steering the big world from the bridge?’
He took out his penknife, cut two circles in the top and bottom of the first orange, then scored the sides. ‘He’s nameless, faceless, and formless. That’s how I think of Him. But He has His people, and His people, though scattered over the world, have their country.’ He pulled off the segments of skin, and took the fruit neatly to pieces before passing them to her.
‘In many ways,’ she said, ‘I don’t feel I have a country any more.’ Her mouth was momentarily full before she squeezed the delicious fruit into juice and felt it pour in and revitalize her. ‘I don’t know why, but I seem to have lost it. You and I, and Judy and the kids together – maybe we’re our own country.’
He dissected an orange for himself. ‘I have two countries,’ he said, ‘if I want them – England and Israel. And my country is your country. That’s how I feel. Every Jew has the automatic right of return to Israel – and that means me. I’m lucky to have two such places, which both have great merits. If they joined forces they’d make an unbeatable combination. The two peoples Hitler hated most in the world, so I read in one of my potted history books, were the British and the Jews.’
He took some Kleenex to the toilet and dampened them so that they could wipe their hands. When he came back she said: ‘You seem to have been thinking while I lay in my bed of pain!’
‘
The only time I’m not is when we’re making love, which I suppose is a fairly normal state of affairs. One day we’ll go to Israel, and you’ll see what your other choice of country would be like.’
She gazed out of the window at suburban houses. The future, as always, was impossible to handle. Thinking about it never brought anything but trouble. At least it hadn’t so far. But she said: ‘Maybe I’d like that.’
‘I’d expect you to think about it.’ He joined her gaze out of the window. ‘We’ll soon be in. We’ll get a taxi to the Gare St Lazare, and snatch something to eat before setting out for Dieppe.’
‘We ought to be home by ten,’ she said.
Because the sea would be rough he obtained a cabin for her before the ship sailed. She was glad, for her back was sore and she wanted to lie down, fearful of going home now that they were so near, but excited at the idea of seeing Judy, and staying in one place for a while. Tom sat by her, as if afraid she might get up if he didn’t keep guard, and go on deck to throw herself overboard. Simple man who was too good for her. She only wanted to sleep an hour or two. ‘I’ll be all right. You go up and walk around the deck.’
He stood by the open window of the radio officer’s cabin listening to the singing of the morse, but from thinking of Paul and his outlandish theories of British Israelitism he retreated into his own musings. The squall cut visibility, and the old unsteady rolling of the boat put the familiar strain back into his legs. He was a blind man at sea – l’homme qui rit – wanting to find a way off the eyeless ocean to a land he could feel was his for eternity – even if only to be buried there. Nothing had been his since being carried in his cradle to the orphanage, not school, ship, furnished room or the flat of his Aunt Clara, not motor-car nor even the deck or ground he stood on. His shoes burned and would not let him be still.
Cold water beckoned, but he spat into the lee of it, walked the length of the deck and back. Figures huddled on seats were covered by capes and raincoats to get away from the stench of frying and cigar smoke where they would assuredly have been sick. He stood at the rail to be alone, the sea in front, no ships visible. Life seemed endless. Only a happy man would see an end, and he hadn’t yet found an existence which took happiness into account. After the age of fifty something happens. Time regains its meaning. When one was young, he thought, time also had significance, with the difference that most of one’s years were still to come, whereas two-thirds were now behind.
With little time left, it must be treated with a new respect. There was less to waste, and far more to do before none remained. Yet one still can’t act – know or not what you want to do. One could create a positive end, but the ensuing blackness and silence is the final rebellion against God, and suicide the last rebellion against yourself, the vilest form of murder and no more to be thought about, a passing reflection as he turned and laughed so loudly into the wind that one of the huddled figures stirred and a pretty young woman with a face made tragic by the motion of the boat looked at him crossly for disturbing her. He resumed his pacing, smiling at the notion that even the long fart he gave sounded like a cry for help, and knowing that the only course to follow was to endure till a landfall came that he and Pam would somehow make together.
Before the boat docked he found a steward to take tea and biscuits to Pam’s cabin. She had undressed, and was resting between the sheets. The rough bumping of the sea had made her drowsy, did not let her sleep but scraped continually at the cabin to the rise and fall under her bunk, more soporific than the train, keeping nerves on edge while relaxing her limbs. In her waking dreams she seemed deep under the sea. The capsule she lay in was at the whim of unseen currents. She couldn’t imagine being in a normally lighted room, with the floor unmoving and no other noise than laughing and talking, with Judy and the kids. If the sea came in she would be glad, yet use her last strength to stay alive.
She was surprised at being left alone for nearly three hours. He couldn’t desert her on board ship. Where would he go, even if he wanted to? They were in it together, and would stay that way. Her belly was taut, increasing in size. Was the baby swimming in its own inland sea? There was no future while it was, but she didn’t doubt that it would start one day. Would all hell be again let loose? She had no option but to wait and see, and endure, until the future, with a great cry, turned into the present, which would, she supposed, cry even louder.
The cabin was hot, and after her tea had been put down she got out of bed and stood up. He knocked and came in, wearing his heavy gaberdine raincoat, and cap which he took off. ‘We’ll be in in a few minutes. Newhaven’s ahead.’
‘I don’t feel the same person going back as I did when we left.’ She pulled on her dress. The only way he could respond was to go up for air and light, and watch the ship sliding into harbour while he laughed into the wind.
17
Judy didn’t like living off a man, and told the bastard so in no uncertain terms. Certainty of meaning in such cases was a letting go of the self, and she had, she decided in that floating ecstatic moment before speech, as much right to it as anyone else. But her voice was not too loud, nor her terms so brash as the throbbing in her veins had led even her to expect. ‘I shall be leaving as soon as I can get something fixed up that won’t let the kids down too badly.’
Tom was no fool. Nobody thought so, himself least of all. Let the sky come down, but he would not raise his voice beyond the normal pitch to meet any onrush. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘but listen to me. I’ll talk to you as to a woman. Or a man, if that’s what you want. Or any other being you care to imagine yourself if you’ll just tell me what it is. Whoever and whatever you like.’
If a woman (or anyone) slammed into him he slammed straight back. No messing. It was the stiff-necked part of him you could always reckon on coming into operation when you least expected it. Judy had had enough, though, Judy had, she told herself, and Judy – thought Judy – would sling her bloody hook no matter how deep in anybody’s back it was buried. But there was no stopping him, until such time as she got up and walked. For some reason or other she couldn’t, and meanwhile he went on:
‘I’ll tell you, what’s more’ – he tapped a two-fingered rhythm on the piano top to mark off and emphasize each phrase – ‘that the money you’re too scared or too proud, or too mean (let’s face it) to share with us, isn’t mine, and never was. It came from my family – if you can call it one – by no other route except that of accident. That was the only way it got to me – and therefore to us.’
Fed up with such confrontations, Pam would have told her to go if she wanted, though knew she would be out-voted on the matter. But there was more to the clash than mere argument suggested. There always was. Whoever loved each other could do so from a distance, for all she cared. She wondered whether Judy hadn’t wanted Tom to respond in exactly the way he was doing. A person like Judy didn’t know anyone until she had made them angry, though it had to be admitted that she was sincere in all her principles, and fervent in any sacrifice she would make for them.
Judy needed an emotional base, however, and once it was found she considered it too good to relinquish easily, as Pam gathered from their conversations in the darkness of the bed they had twice shared since coming back. Judy had discovered ease not in material things, which to her were dispensable, but in the security of communal friendship not before experienced. The seeds of trust had slipped into her and taken root, but the rougher part of herself that sometimes demanded change threatened her with havoc.
While it was reassuring to know that everyone was a battleground, the consequence when those battlegrounds came into contact with each other could be anything but pleasant. Yet she saw the justice of Judy’s case. Judy wanted formal and open avowals that she and her children could stay, to be cemented by anger as much as with friendship and love, enabling her to agree before both Tom and Pam as witnesses, so that from then on she would not be tempted to thoughtlessly leave. Any arrangements half-defined, or allowances given on su
fferance, or terms made plain yet not specifically numbered, were no good to her. It was too English a method – too, in a way, oriental. Only the rich could live by it, but in the present case an unspoken agreement to hang on as long as you liked suited no one, certainly not Judy, and Pam saw immediately that she was right. It must be roughed out (in anger if need be), drawn up, ratified, and thoroughly understood.
Pam loved him for falling for such tactics, or for falling in with them, which was more likely, as he continued: ‘And the money’s now in my name, but don’t let that gall you. We can do something about that – since the notion clearly does.’
Judy played the game her way, while he made the moves his, and Pam marvelled how neatly the methods dovetailed when they met. She coloured at his deviousness, and at Judy’s, and at her own when an occasional small contribution came into effect. Either that, or they all had a well-developed talent for self-preservation in the midst of an incipient chaos.
Then another truth came to her, the one that said he would promise anything to Judy because he knew, she thought, that as long as she stayed so would I. This made her feel trapped, and also angry, but it was a trap she herself had engineered, every twig, leaf and piece of bait. She had deliberately made it, walked into it willingly, and feathered it almost without knowing. Now she was to give birth in it. What had she left the old one for? The question was as unnecessary as it was for her to say that she liked it here.
‘As far as possible,’ Tom said, ‘I’m trying to make out that we own the wealth – if that’s what it is – in common. I don’t really know how far back it goes, and don’t much care, because I have no guilt feelings whatsover about using it to our advantage. My grandfather accumulated property. He bought stocks and shares. Maybe he owned half a coal-mine, and inherited a few miles of some branch-line railway. It could be that he even sweated the proletariat in sundry mills and slate quarries, as your former husband might have put it. But now the residue is ours. Ours, not mine, and if you don’t want any advantage from the money, that’s your decision. But if you take your children back to anything like the life you were living in West Eleven, then you’ll be far more immoral than staying here and living off money you think is tainted because it supposedly belongs to a man.’
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