From the start it had been a shallow commitment. Henry’s chief concern had been to keep the whole thing a secret from Andrew, fearing that, if he discovered about their affair, he would blame himself for leading Anna into sin. He loved Andrew and wanted to protect him from the coarse realities of life. He loved him and he pitied him profoundly, having seen what he had suffered as a child. It was not so much the divorce which had hurt him, as the humiliation they both had witnessed, during the years which led up to it, of their weak father by their embittered mother.
James Nash had been an officer in the Royal Navy, and, in their infancy, both boys had seen him as a hero. Failing, in middle-age, to gain the promotion he felt was his due, he had retired from the Navy to work as a management consultant. This was intended to make him rich, but he was no more successful on land than he had been at sea. His wife, having suffered from the sneers of the naval wives whose husbands had risen faster than hers, now languished in genteel poverty in a villa in the suburbs of London.
Doubtless, there was sexual dissatisfaction too, but the complaints Henry remembered being shrieked at his father by his mother were more about the career she had sacrificed to marry him and the drudgery of domestic life. How he had longed for his father to answer her charges; instead, he had stayed silent, and, to escape his wife’s nagging, went to sleep on a narrow bed in the attic.
At the age of thirteen, Henry had been sent to a boarding-school that was both cheap and second-rate. Andrew had joined him three years later. It was here that they learned that their father had gone to live with his secretary, whom he later married. They now saw him only at odd weekends, and for a fortnight in the summer when he took them camping in Wales.
His departure exacerbated their mother’s discontent. She took a job as a receptionist in a doctor’s surgery, but this only reminded her of the career she might have had if she had gone to university instead of marrying and raising a family. With no husband to blame for her condition, she turned instead upon her two sons, making clear how much she resented having to cook their supper and wash their clothes. Her social circle contracted to a few other embittered single women and the boys themselves, after going to boarding-school, no longer had friends in the neighbourhood. As a result, the holidays in Wimbledon became tedious and tormenting. They were no happier with their father and stepmother in their cramped flat, and they both came to look forward to going back to the school which most of the other pupils found grim.
It was at school that the boys had their friends, and that there were also some inspiring teachers. As a result, they did well – Henry going on to study economics at Leeds University, and Andrew, four years later, archaeology at Huntingdon College in London. Nor, while they were at university, was there anything in particular to tell them apart from students from happier homes. Certainly, the qualities which Henry was aware of in himself, as he started out in life, did not appear as either strengths or weaknesses, but simply as features of an interior physiognomy. He did not feel, for example, that he loved Andrew because he pitied him but only because brothers loved brothers and Andrew, anyway, was a patently lovable young man. Nor did he ascribe his own determination to make money to the humiliation he had suffered in witnessing his father’s penury: it was a normal enough ambition in a young man at the time.
His attitude towards women, too, seemed not the fruit of a neurosis but the application of common sense to relations between the sexes. Desire, after all, was a given factor. Not only the promptings of his own instincts, but also the propaganda implicit in every book, every magazine, every film and every advertisement on television, confirmed the view that nothing equalled the delights of sexual love. If, on the first few occasions, the nervous fumbling in student hostels or shared flats in Leeds had not quite matched the ecstasy he had imagined, it did not deter him from continuing his pursuit of girls: seducing them brought about a catharsis which satisfied more than his senses.
In the isolation of his own ego, it did not occur to Henry that others found sexual encounters simple and fun. To him, just as nakedness was shameful, so copulation was degrading. It was the defiling of women which excited him, and led him to prefer those who were reluctant to sleep with him. To shift the source of a woman’s will from her mind to her groin, and see her shed the pose of an intelligent being to rut like a beast, filled him with a dour satisfaction. He did not feel that he was himself degraded as the other half of the copulating couple; he remained detached – not merely from what he was doing but from the very part of his body which was ramming home the resentment he felt against the whole female sex.
After graduating from Leeds, Henry worked for some years as a financial journalist and researcher, first for the Investor’s Chronicle, then the Economist, and finally the Economist Intelligence Unit, before leaving with a colleague to start a series of newsletters of his own. These picked the brains of dons, diplomats and international civil servants to provide both legal and technical data about trade to those who paid the subscription.
At first this enterprise had gone badly: it was too limited in its application and was inadequately financed. Understanding this, Henry persuaded his partner to sell him his shares, which he bought with borrowed money. He borrowed more to buy the lease on an office in Soho. He expanded the range of the newsletters, and took them to the limits of the laws on official secrets and industrial espionage. As a result, the Soho newsletters became essential reading for investment analysts and export managers wanting to know, for example, what standards were required for electrical equipment in South Korea, what products were being prepared by rivals in Singapore, or what bribes should be paid and to whom to get goods through customs in Ghana. As the newsletters grew both in size and scope, Henry increased the number of subscribers and the cost of the subscription. After two years, he was making a profit; after four, he had paid off his loans. By the age of thirty, he was a rich man.
This success had enabled him to acquire all the material appurtenances of a pleasant life, such as a flat in London and a house in France; but it meant that he lost through envy some of his oldest friends. He made others, of course, but of a more superficial kind – men who had also made money, usually in the City, and who were ambitious and selfish in the same way. It also enabled him to extend the range of his philandering into circles which had hitherto been out of his league; but he found, to his disappointment, that one woman’s body was much like another’s – and their minds not so very different. It was then that he decided all love affairs should end after three months: prolonging them invariably led to ragged and painful endings. As the length of each liaison was limited, so the period between them became longer. He grew bored by love as he had grown bored by business, and he looked for something new to engage his interest.
For a while Henry considered a career as a Conservative politician. He had grown rich as a result of his own initiative and hard work; he believed strongly in the Darwinian ethos of the government of the day. He joined the local Conservative association, went to one or two meetings and canvassed at a local election; but soon he realized that he was too easily exasperated to listen patiently to a constituent’s complaints, or to spend a lifetime trimming his opinions and kowtowing to people he despised – all for the remote chance that in due course he might exercise political power.
What was left? More money? To build his business into an empire? To fatten his fortune into twenty or even two hundred million pounds? For what? He was content with his flat in London and found his house in France a time-consuming encumbrance. He had more clothes than he could fit into his wardrobe and travelled whenever and wherever he liked.
He liked painting and sculpture and bought one or two works of art. He also liked reading, as Anna had noticed from the books on his shelves, and had taught himself French because French literature appealed to him, or had done when he was in his twenties and could relate his own experience to the escapades of Stendhal’s or Flaubert’s young heroes.
As he grew olde
r, he found that he had more in common with the nihilistic and pessimistic characters in the novels of Sartre or Céline. However, the more he became absorbed in a novel, the more he suffered from the banality of his own life. Films frustrated him in the same way. He felt he was watching life from the auditorium when he should have been on stage. He was sure that there must be more to achieve than what he had achieved already. At times, a sense of destiny convinced him that something glorious and extraordinary lay ahead; but, even as he felt this, the voice of common sense would remind him that man was no more than an evolved baboon.
This conflict between the vague but grand aspirations of what was poetic and romantic in his nature, and the prosaic expectations of the realist, came to torment him. He was determined that a man equipped with reason should be able to master his own mind, and refused to believe that we are all subject to the dictates of our subconscious. Such a hypothesis seemed to undermine the foundation upon which all science and philosophy depended; yet he had read the works of psychoanalysts and felt he understood quite clearly what had driven Andrew to become a priest. He was obliged to recognize that, if Andrew had been conditioned by his childhood, he too must have been affected – that his vengeful feelings towards women, for example, and his reluctance to commit himself in love, came not from an impartial assessment of the character of women or the drawbacks of marriage, but from the harm done by his irascible mother.
His affair with Anna might have been his salvation, or, at any rate, might have marked a change of direction, because she was so different to the girls he had gone out with before – different in size, different in style, simpler, funnier, cleverer and more serious-minded. For the first time in his life he had slept with a girl whose views he respected, not just on history or archaeology, but on general matters like politics and art. Her vocabulary was limited, and it irritated him that she so often expressed herself in cute college-girl slang, but her opinions were original, her judgements sound, and her gibes often painful to his self-esteem.
These qualities, however, which made him like her, made loving her out of the question. Courtesy and curiosity had led him to sleep with her in the first place. He had persisted only because, after the coffee and the Cointreau, it seemed the proper thing to do. The sex itself had passed off to her apparent satisfaction; he had found that, for all her delicate proportions, she had the appetites and attributes of a mature woman. However, she lacked the voluptuousness which in other women aroused his lust. She was too likeable and intelligent to be credible as an object of resentment and contempt, and, where sex did not express his vengeful passion for women, it became nothing more than a banal routine.
That he might love her, despite this absence of desire, was inconceivable; it went so radically against the teaching of that religion, preached not by priests from a pulpit, but from advertising copywriters through the flickering screen. Love was an appetite which, once satisfied, came to an end. That was why it never lasted; why most of his married friends were unfaithful and unhappy, their children millstones around their necks.
Yet, the more he raged against love, marriage and family life, the more he himself longed to love someone other than himself. He began to imagine a love that went beyond the tempestuous egoism of sexual passion – something like the idealism which had led patriots to die for their country or revolutionaries to fall at the barricades. But he was trapped by the disillusion of his generation which found idealism impractical and patriotism absurd. His yearning had no object. He had to live with it unfulfilled.
PART TWO
Nine
Anna Dagan had a friend from Brandeis called Naomi Sherz who was writing a thesis on Brancusi at the Courtauld Institute of Art. She was the closest thing to a confidante that Anna had in London – or, indeed, anywhere else in the world; and though she did not know the identity of Anna’s mysterious lover, she at least knew that he existed.
Waking the next morning feeling miserable, Anna telephoned Naomi and arranged to meet for lunch. She liked the idea of telling her how she had lost both her lover and her professor in the space of a day; and though, to judge from the mess that Naomi had made of her own life, Anna did not expect any valuable advice, she knew she could count on some sympathy in return for the sympathy she had shown to Naomi on many occasions at the break-up of her own unfortunate affairs.
She spent the morning at Huntingdon College, hoping to see Andrew, but he did not come in. At noon she took a bus to the Courtauld. Reaching Oxford Street early, she went into Selfridge’s to kill time. She wandered through Miss Selfridge, wondering wistfully whether Henry might have kept her on if she had worn more elegant clothes, then she went up to the book store to look for a paperback novel.
Even as she had been strolling between the racks of dresses, she had felt she was being watched. Now, by the book-shelves, she sensed that a man was hovering only a short distance away from her. She turned. There was no one, or whoever was following her had ducked behind a pillar or a stack of books. She looked at her watch. There were still ten minutes to kill. She continued to browse among the books, still with the odd sensation that she was being observed.
When it was time to meet Naomi, she picked up a book almost at random – it was Jean-Paul Sartre’s Words – and went to the cash desk to buy it. She remained aware, as she stood there, that someone’s eyes were on her, and the feeling grew until she was certain that whoever it was stood directly behind her in the queue. Suddenly angry at being pestered in this shadowy way, she turned abruptly and found herself face to face with her brother Jake.
‘Hi,’ he said with an amused look in his eye.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘Buying a book?’ He showed her the paperback he was holding in his hand.
She stepped back to let him get to the cash desk and waited while he made his purchase. Then they both walked out of the department store and into the street leading to Portman Square.
‘But what are you doing in London?’ she asked.
‘I came to see you.’
‘Huh.’
‘Let’s say I was offered the trip and thought how nice it would be to see my sister.’
‘Why didn’t you call?’
‘I was busy.’
‘And Aunt Miriam? She thought you might stay.’
‘She knew I was here?’
‘Dad told us yesterday.’
He nodded. ‘Shall we go eat?’
‘I’m having lunch with a friend.’
‘Couldn’t you cancel it?’
She frowned because Jake had always taken it for granted that he would get his own way. ‘I could, I guess,’ she said, ‘but I’m not sure that I want to.’
‘I fly back this evening.’
‘So?’
He smiled sourly to acknowledge that there was little affection between them. ‘There are things to talk about,’ he said.
‘Like what?’
‘Like the death of Father Lambert.’
‘You heard?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you know what happened in Israel?’
‘I know, yes.’
‘OK,’ said Anna. ‘I’ll go tell Naomi that I can’t make it.’
They walked to the Courtauld Institute where, rather than wait for Naomi, Anna left a message at the desk. She rejoined Jake outside and went back with him towards Baker Street.
Anna felt ill at ease, as she always did when she found herself alone with her brother. She was particularly suspicious when he was friendly, as he seemed to be now, because she knew from experience that it meant he wanted something out of her. His usual manner was that of the sneering older brother who had resented her presence in the Dagan family ever since she was born. When they were young he had bossed her and bullied her in the ways boys often do; but maturity had not mellowed his behaviour. When they were apart – Anna in the United States, Jake in Israel – each had envied the other the company of their parents. Every time Anna had returned to Israel, Jake’s
disdain for his younger sister had become ideologically more explicit. She had grown into an easygoing American, he a determined Israeli; but it was not until he had joined the army that she had actually come to fear him.
He had always been older, taller and stronger than she was, and had dominated her when they were children with his greater aggression and superior strength. As a recruit in the Israel Defence Force, he had learned to use this strength and aggression in a lethal way. He was trained in the use of weapons and came home on leave with a machine-gun, which he left hanging over the back of a chair in the kitchen – all of which was normal enough in Israel, but alarming for a girl raised largely on the East Coast of the United States.
More disturbing to Anna than Jake’s familiarity with guns, was the training his mind had received in the army. He had chosen to serve for four years, and thereby gained a commission. Together with her parents she had witnessed his induction as an officer in the Armoured Corps in a torchlight ceremony held in the ruins of the fortress of Masada. When she had heard him take the oath that ‘Masada will not fall again’, she could imagine him like El’azar, the leader of the resistance to the Romans, killing the whole of his family, and then himself, rather than surrender an inch of the land of Israel to the Arabs.
Later, he had gone to the Lebanon and fought in the siege of Beirut. Once, when she had asked what he knew about the massacre of the Palestinians in the Sabra and Chatila camps, he had answered first that it was nothing to do with the Israeli army, and had then added, with a cold smile: ‘And where would Israel be without Deir Yassin?’ This massacre of Arabs by the Irgun and the Stern Gang in 1948, which had led to an exodus of refugees, was defended by Jake as the only way to get them off the land that God had given to the Jews. Anna had talked about self-determination and human rights, but always came up against her brother’s unshakeable conviction that no human concept of justice could override a divine gift to a chosen people.
On the Third Day Page 9