He wondered what Dr Littlestone was making of it all, but in fact he didn’t really care. He didn’t even care whether he found the story interesting. What was important was that the story should be told. Not even he was interested in the story any more which probably accounted for the dull fluency of its telling. It was as if he were relating the facts to a court of law, as if it had all happened to somebody else, and for some reason Norman had become the catalyst to pass it on. ‘I made lots of new friends in my job,’ he continued, ‘but it was David who remained my closest, and I would rush home from work to spend the evening with him, or to sit with him while he studied. He was in his last year of medicine. I used to sit with him in his room and watch him at his desk. His head always rested on his left hand, but he didn’t stoop over the books.
Even as he worked he was upright, and his face reflected the excitement of what he read and wrote. Often he would grasp his hands together when he had ferreted out the core of some problem, and he would try to share the magic of his discovery with me. He would explain as carefully and as patiently as he could. He was one of the few people I had ever met who was genuinely excited by knowledge.
When he put his books away, I would tell him about my day. He’d ask me endless questions. He wanted to know every detail of the case I was working on, and he was infinitely moved by the Law’s inadequacies and the wretchedness of those who came into contact with it.
Occasionally, if he could take off the time, he would come to court. I would wait for him to turn up in the public gallery and. I would save my oratory for him. Now I recollect it,’ Norman said, almost to himself, ‘I think I have never been happier in my whole life. When he qualified, we celebrated together, just the two of us, in his room.
We talked, I don’t know what about. All I remember was my joy at his success, and his joy that he could share it.’
Norman looked across the desk and seemed surprised that Dr Littlestone was staring at him. For the past few minutes, he had been talking, he felt, almost to himself, and seeing Dr Littlestone there, he remembered the object of the whole session. ‘I’m coming to Esther,’ he promised. ‘It’s just that I’m happier talking about him.’ He sighed with the weariness of having to get on with the job. ‘Well.’ he went on, ‘it was a long time before all this that the Esther business started, before David qualified, and my father was still a minister. We got back from shul that day, and I tackled him. I asked him what there was between him and my sister. He was absolutely honest with me, and surprised and a little hurt, I think, that I was angry. He told me that he had a very special feeling for her, that he would like to go out with her, that he hadn’t yet asked her, but that he was going to. He made that quite clear. We quarrelled. I was stupid. Even at the time I knew it. I went home and sulked. And naturally, while I was sulking, and refusing to go and see him, the thing took its course. He used to come over to the house and I avoided him, and Esther’s obvious happiness made me squirm.
I suppose I enjoyed my misery for a while. Whenever he tried to approach me, I brushed him off. I liked doing it. I wanted to provoke a precarious rift between us. so that our reconciliation could be that much more beautiful. They began to talk of an engagement, and marriage as soon as he qualified. Then, when it seemed a fait accompli, I got tired of the role I was playing. I missed him terribly, and it seemed that Esther would have to become part of us. So we made it up. Our reconciliation was not nearly as exciting as I had anticipated. I had sulked for too long. But we were still close. In fact, as far as he was concerned, I had the impression that his feelings towards me were intensified.
We still saw each other alone. He wanted Esther to make no difference to our friendship. This pleased me too; we had a kind of exclusive relationship that nobody, not even Esther, could even begin to understand. He didn’t talk about her, but I could see that they were very much in love, and I grew to be happy for both of them. He worked hard for his finals while my mother and his made plans for the wedding.
Then suddenly something happened to Esther. I don’t suppose it was sudden. It must have gone on for some time, but I didn’t notice it. Her face changed. I noticed it one morning at breakfast. It’s hard to describe what had happened. All the features were exactly the same as before.
It was the ensemble that had changed. She looked older somehow, sadder, and even more beautiful. She was quiet and suddenly introspective. My mother ascribed her moods to love; my father said nothing, but I was worried. Often she would try and talk to me alone, but I avoided her. I suspected she wanted to discuss David with me, and I couldn’t risk the jealousy that would ensue. Something was happening to her that was outside us all. She saw David daily as before, but I noticed that she avoided being alone with him. She wouldn’t go out; she wanted to stay home with him and the family every evening. It was the summer holiday and there was no Hebrew school. Esther spent her day times working at her studies in the library. There was nothing untoward about that, yet sometimes I thought she spent an inordinate time there. Once I happened to pass her bedroom, and I saw her staring into the mirror. She had tied her hair back and tucked it tightly into a scarf.
Esther had intended to shave her head when she married in accordance with the Jewish law, and possibly she was trying out what it would look like. I thought perhaps it worried her and that was why she had changed. I felt a threat in the house, perhaps this is hindsight, I don’t know. But I definitely remember an unaccountable fear that no one else in the house seemed to share.
Then one night, it was a Sunday towards the end of the summer, we were sitting at home, that is Bella, me and my parents. David had gone to his uncle’s and Esther was out with an old school friend. My mother was knitting, I remember, and my father was reading in the prayer book.
Bella was reading too. I was doing some preliminary work on a case. We were all busy and it was my mother who first noticed the time. It was past midnight and Esther was not home. It was raining, and my father’s immediate concern was whether she’d taken a mackintosh and he sent Bella to Esther’s room to in her wardrobe. After a few minutes, Bella came back white-faced, holding a letter. ‘I found this on the bed,’ she said.
On the envelope, Esther had written, ‘To the family’.
but none of us at that moment were anxious for membership. She put it on the kitchen-table and it lay there, an object of terror. ‘You read it,’ my mother and father said together. Bella was reluctant to pick the letter up. Often if it’s bad news, as the letter obviously was, it’s the teller who takes the blame, and neither Bella nor I wanted that.
Yet we both reached for it at the same time, each wanting to save the other from blame. We were very close at that moment, with the kind of closeness families achieve when one of their members dies. ‘I’ll read it,’ we said together, and then I took the letter from her and I opened it. ‘I knew it, I knew it,’ my mother was crying, and all of us guessed what she knew. I only had to confirm it in my reading. I remember it by heart, though I only read the letter that one time, but each word seared me fourfold. for myself and the others around the table. ‘Dear my family,’ it said, and I remember the grammar offending me, ‘You will be shocked to read this letter, but I cannot hold the truth from you any longer. Two weeks ago I was married. I was afraid to look at my parents, but I heard my mother scream.
My father uttered a shrivelled moan, and started, as if automatically, to turn the pages of the prayer book he was reading. ‘Go on, go on,’ Bella said. hoping for some kind of denial in the next sentence. I wait back to the letter. ‘I’ve married John,’ it said. ‘I have been seeing him for many months, and I couldn’t fight it. I love him very much, and we are very happy.’
Norman looked at Dr Littlestone. ‘This John.’ he spat the name, ‘he was the librarian in the local library. Friend of the family for years. In fact, our only non-Jewish friend.
He used to keep books back for me. He sometimes came to the house when David was there. He used to bring books for my father.
He took some kind of lurid interest in Jewish things. Yes, where was I? Yes, ‘I love him very much and we are very happy. I have written to David, but please help to explain it all to him.’ After the mention of David, I lost interest in what had happened to her. I finished reading the letter that asked for our forgiveness, and I saw my parents’ pain, but I thought only of David, and I must admit, with a certain excitement, as to how I would comfort him. I wanted to get out of the house, but David was away and I had to sit there and see their torment. My mother’s screams had subsided; now there was a deep continuous moan, that racked her body with animal pain. She swayed to and fro, wailing and shivering with the horror of the news. I heard my father mumble, and when I dared to look at him, I saw that he had turned the pages of the book to the Prayers for the Dead.’
Norman shivered. He realised that he had forgotten that last incident. Suddenly, he wanted to be with his father, to go home and to love him. It was the safest thing any man could do, he thought, just to love and care for somebody. It wasn’t a happy thing, it wasn’t even a justifiable thing to love, it was safe, that’s all it was, and he longed to give himself just that kind of security. ‘Poor Pop,’ he said to himself. He stared out of the window. Poor everybody, in fact, and the misery of all their lives, Bella, his parents, and David’s came to overwhelm him. ‘And David,’ he said softly. ‘I waited till the following day. I was going to see him in the evening after my work. He would have read Esther’s letter by then, and the whole day, I rehearsed to myself how I would help him. I was excited as I reached his room, and I remember feeling that it was wrong to be so excited. I called his name as I climbed the stairs. I always did that, so that by the time I got to his door, he would be expecting me. He didn’t answer, but I went in anyway. At least, I tried to get in. His door opened about six inches, then it seemed to be blocked. As I pushed the door open, I felt myself sweating, and I knew as my mother had known before I had opened the letter.
‘There’s not much more,’ Norman said in a sudden matter-of-fact voice. ‘He was on the bed dead from the bleeding. He was so soaked in his death, that it was impossible to tell where it first sprouted.’ Norman paused. His eyes were burning with dryness, and he wished that he could cry. ‘I went to his funeral,’ he said. ‘Because he was a suicide, they buried him against the wall. And no-one was allowed to mourn for him, but on the quiet I sat on a low stool, because I’d lost a brother. That’s all,’ he said quickly.
‘That’s all I had to tell you.’
He got up. He was afraid that Dr Littlestone might say something and he was in no mood for another’s opinion.
He was acutely disappointed with the whole session. He had pinned so much hope on getting the story out and it had left him sadder than he had been when he rolled agonised down David’s stairs. The pain, as now, was physical and exhausting. He went to the door. As he opened it he turned and saw Dr Littlestone, not as the listener he had been, but in his white-coated function, his pad and pen within his grasp, and he was swept with a loathing for him for having received his confidence. ‘And if you’re in the least bit interested,’ he said, with a contempt that crept reluctantly into his voice, ‘if you’re interested, it was then that I started on the pills. I’d been offered them before, of course, but this time, I took them.’
He closed the door, and went down the corridor to the ward. He slouched close to the wall, bent with his melancholy. He’d often experienced a dream to be more disturbing than the reality, and he felt the same kind of disturbance after telling his story. What’s the good, he thought? I’ve told him about David, and there’s really nothing more to tell about anything, yet I feel as I feel and shall be in this place for ever. He walked through the swing doors. At the end of the ward he saw a group of men. Someone stood in the centre, and they seemed to be listening with avid interest to his story. One of them turned at the noise of the doors.
‘Look who’s back, Norman,’ he shouted. He stepped aside so that Norman could see through the circle. In its centre was Minister. Pyjamaed, and back in harness. It was as if David had not died at all. Norman rushed up to him, and Minister opened his arms. ‘I know what you want, mate,’ he whispered in his ear. ‘ ‘Ow you been going in my absence then?’
‘Oh, thank God you’re back,’ Norman said. ‘I missed you.
Where have you been?’
‘I was called to a Cabinet meeting,’ he said.
The other men laughed nervously, afraid to mock him, yet equally afraid to take him seriously.
‘Called in on my Mum on the way from Parliament,’ Minister was saying, and I found a man in Mum’s bed.
“ ‘Ullo, ‘ullo,” I said, “and what are you doing in Mum’s bed?” “I’m your new Dad son,” he said, and I said to meself, this lot isn’t for you, lad, so I upped and come back to the office.’ The men laughed, with a little more confidence this time; madness became acceptable if it were mad enough, and if it went on for long enough, and it was as if Minister had never left the ward. He went over to his old bed and Norman followed him.
‘Prices has gone up a bit,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘Cost of living and all that. Been doing a bit of studying while I was away. I told them in the Cabinet. Pills, I said, is essential like soap. They sat there scratching themselves like they never used soap neither. You can’t tell ‘em anything.
Soap’s gone up, too, on the outside. So ‘as everything else.
My mum sends you ‘er love,’ he said irrelevantly, ‘and you can ‘ave it, as far as I’m concerned, every rotten drop of it.
She’s got soap all right. Scrubbing the bloody place from morning till night, and there’s cowpads up to your knees.
Two pounds a day they’ve gone up to,’ he said without a pause. but as many as you like. I bought a job lot, ‘olesale.
Where’s Billy?’
‘He’ll come back,’ Norman said, ‘like you came back. Like I’ll come back,’ he said to himself, ‘if I ever get away. Can I have some now, Minister?’ Norman said. ‘I’ve got the money.’
Tomorrow,’ Minister said, as he turned back the bed.
clothes. ‘Tomorrow, you’n me ‘Il make a fresh start. White for breakfast, mate?’
Now they were within his reach, he was impatient. I’ve got to have them,’ he said, and he even felt a twinge of withdrawal pain.
‘Tomorrow,’ Minister said with finality, and he crouched down between the sheets. Must get my beauty sleep, he said.
Norman looked at him lying there. What hell was his outside, that he should be happy to return to a place like this. Or had they forced him back, lying at the back of a handle-less car, his body pinned by a welfare boot. He went over to his bed. The prospect of a white tomorrow heartened him. If David could not die in him of his own accord, when he had given him every chance, then he would have to whiten him into oblivion.
Chapter 14
Rabbi Zweck no longer had the nagging urge to ransack Norman’s room for clues. After the fiasco of the whore’s address, he was reluctant to follow up any more of his findings. Yet he went into the room occasionally to sit on the bed, to keep it warm, as it were, against his son’s return. As the weeks passed, the nightmare of Norman’s detention faded. He went to see him once or twice a week, and sometimes Bella would go on her own. Norman had stopped nagging to come home, and apart from the period of his deep sleep, the visits were less disturbing. Sometimes it frightened Rabbi Zweck that he had found the situation so acceptable. He wondered what had happened to Billy. A few weeks ago he had been to the hospital, and Billy’s bed was empty. Norman said he didn’t know where Billy was, and nobody else would volunteer any information. Rabbi Zweck had hoped that Billy had gone home. But when the next day, as he was walking to the bus-stop after his visit, he saw Billy’s father and mother waiting there, he lagged behind and waited for the next bus, because he could not bear to face them after his hopes for their boy had been shattered. He wondered where Billy was incarcerated. He half-knew, but he tried not to thi
nk about it. He worried about Billy as much as he did about Norman. Somehow, he saw them doomed or saved together.
During the past few weeks, while Norman had been away, he had grown very close to Bella. And he had noticed a reciprocal gentleness from her. There was often laughter in the house between them. It was like in the old days, when Sarah was alive, and Esther was home and Norman was well. Lately, too, since Norman’s departure, he had thought more often of Esther, and with less bitterness. Secretly he often wished he could see her again, and it was largely out of respect for Sarah’s memory that he had never asked her to come home. Esther’s marriage had broken Sarah. It had not caused her death. No-one dies of a broken heart. But the cancer that carried her off, did so obligingly, because Sarah had begun to die the moment she had seen Esther’s letter. A child, Esther was, only seventeen, and almost twenty years ago. Had the marriage lasted that long, and could she possibly be happy, without even a child to hold it together? He wondered whether he should write to her. He knew Bella kept in touch with her and he was grateful for that. Perhaps he could offer to add a line to her next letter.
He wondered whether she knew about Norman, and whether she wanted to come and see him. He made up his mind to write to her. She was entitled after all to know about her brother, but almost at the same moment, he decided against it. It would be disloyal to Sarah.
He was restless. He had never been at a loss for something to do. Ever since his retirement from his services to the congregation, his studies of Jewish history and religion had occupied him, and there was always the shop to vary the routine. But they were not busy downstairs, and Bella and the assistant could more than manage on their own. Normally at this hour, he would be reading, but in the last few weeks he had been restless with that too. It was as if everything was pushing to come to a head, and could not ripen without his participation. He didn’t know what it was, but there was no doubt that things in the house were changing. Norman’s absence, his closeness to Bella, and these constant thoughts of Esther.
The Elected Member Page 16