by Maisie Mosco
“We made a bargain, didn’t we, hon…?” Simon reminded her, “… when we decided to come here instead of returning to London immediately my business in New York was done. That we’d have one week entirely to ourselves, let nothing impinge upon it. I don’t see your family grudging you that.”
They had married in September and on their wedding eve Simon’s agent had called with good news. A publisher was interested in his novel but had suggested changes for Simon to consider and make if he agreed.
This had seemed more important to both than the holiday in Antibes that was to have been their honeymoon. Simon had already moved into Marianne’s flat, a more spacious home for a couple than his Highgate pad, and it was there that he settled down to work, Marianne finding that her reservations about sharing her life with another writer could be set aside.
Simon’s adherence to a strict routine was similar to her own. If things were not going well, he stayed at the typewriter trying to work it out, not so of all authors. Some found it best to take a break. For others it proved unproductive to work for more than a few hours each day.
It bodes well for our marriage, she had thought, that in this respect too we tick the same way. That we’re not going to irritate each other with inconvenient requests to be kept company.
Included in the sharing was Marianne’s mentally biting her nails along with Simon after the revisions were mailed to his agent, and the champagne toast to his novel when in December a deal was done, and Simon summoned to New York to meet the man who would be his editor.
Marianne had accompanied him, and they had afterwards agreed that it seemed fated for them to fly from there to Bermuda a year late, but husband and wife.
Tonight they would board the British Airways direct flight to London and spent their last afternoon in Marianne’s paradise shopping for gifts in the quaint harbour town of Hamilton, where the store frontages had, apart from a few, retained the appearance of a bygone era, gloss conspicuous by its absence, and on the main street the waterfront was unimpeded by buildings, enhancing the pleasant atmosphere as did the friendly faces of Bermudians going about their daily business.
Marianne watched some uniformed schoolgirls, panama hats atop their heads, turn the corner of a steep incline leading to the bus station, and remarked, “How very English Hamilton seems. I could live here and feel welcome.”
She gave her attention to some paperweights in a shop window. “I wouldn’t mind one of those for my desk.”
“Let me buy it for you, hon.”
“A useful souvenir of Bermuda,” she said with a smile.
Marianne chose an ovoid of solid glass in which was embedded spiky leaves of red and green. They turned it upside down to examine the base and burst out laughing. The useful souvenir of Bermuda bore a label: “Made in Scotland”.
“Please excuse us,” Simon apologized to the confused lady behind the counter, “my wife and I share a strange sense of humour.”
They left the shop with the paperweight which would ever after be for them a memento of a week of love and laughter.
The opposite of laughter greeted them on their return to London. A note informing them that Matthew was dead and buried had been slipped through their letter-box.
Marianne immediately called Laura and received from her a dressing down. “Only you could have dealt with Arnold at the funeral. He tried to keep Pete away from the graveside and ended up scuffling with him. Needless to say, Lyn was in a state of collapse without that. How could you just have gone off, Marianne, without letting anyone know where you were!”
“Isn’t that what you did when you eloped with Jake?” Marianne retorted.
“I’ve never been the one in the family whom everyone relies on –”
“And from now on, that person isn’t going to be me!” Marianne slammed down the receiver and found that she was trembling.
Further telephone calls to her relatives almost reduced her to tears. Though not all rebuked her as Laura had, she was in every case the recipient of reproach. When finally she steeled herself to call Arnold and Lyn, it was he who answered the telephone.
“Thanks for the expression of sympathy,” he said to her. “But when it came to it, you weren’t there when I needed you. If we’d known where you were… but you made sure we didn’t.”
Martin arrived to find his mother drinking brandy and her husband looking on silently.
“Laura let me know you’re back.”
“There was no reply when I called you.”
“I popped out to buy my Sunday morning bagels.”
“And have you come here to say I’ve let the family down, Martin? Which is how I’ve been made to feel.”
Martin eyed the bottle at Marianne’s elbow. “Something had to account for your early morning tipple and now I know what. So you weren’t here for poor Matthew’s funeral, a lot of good it would have done him if you had been.”
“But others were deprived of my moral support, for want of a better way of putting it! The one time I’m not where I’m needed everyone, in their own way, lets me have it. Even Alan seemed shocked that I’d gone away without leaving a phone number. What right has the family to take me for granted, Martin?”
“If you want the truth, Mum, I have to say it’s your fault. When did my mother not bend over backward to be where she feels she is needed? I’ve sometimes thought you’d elected yourself to fill your grandmother’s shoes.”
“If that’s how it appears, allow me to inform you that I was dragooned into it. First by Uncle Nat, and then by –”
“The person you are,” Martin cut in. “Learned your lesson now?”
“Too true I have and I’m thinking of doing what you once suggested Simon and I should do – pack our typewriters and go to live on a desert island.”
“No need to ask me twice, hon, only Bermuda isn’t a desert island.”
Chapter 18
Marianne’s decision to make her home in Bermuda was as if she had finally put her first marriage behind her. The flat in which she had, on her return there, expected to live out her years alone, redolent of her life with Ralph, was sold along with the furniture they had chosen together. Closing the door upon it for the last time had seemed to her a symbolic gesture.
When she boarded the plane which would transport her to her paradise island, it was without regrets. Gone were the shackles she had one way, and another worn since her twenties, the more so since her grandmother’s death. Though it had always been within her power to detach herself, it had not seriously entered her head to do so until events impelled her to take the step she had.
Impossible to detach, though, was her emotional tie with the family. Her departure from their midst had stunned her relatives and it was not without an occasional pang of guilt that she settled down to her blissful new life. From time to time she would wonder how those who had for so long relied upon her were coping in her absence and find it necessary to brush that thought aside.
Initially, she and Simon lived in a rented apartment. By the spring of 1989 they were installed in a rambling villa overlooking Elbow Beach, its verandah festooned with greenery and spacious enough for them to work at either end of a long table, their preference though the accommodation allowed a study for each of them.
“Want me to get it, hon?” Simon asked one morning when the telephone shrilled persistently inside the house.
Marianne rose and stepped over the extended lead from her electric typewriter. “I will, your deadline is sooner than mine. We must get some sockets fixed out here for our typewriter plugs, Simon, before we trip headlong on the way into the house.”
“How about having a phone out here?”
“Not likely!” Marianne replied. “One of us would snatch up the receiver the minute it rang, like I used to in England when someone interrupted my work. This way, I manage to shut it out and people don’t usually hang on too long.”
Marianne hastened to the hall to end the shrilling and was due for a surprise.<
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“How nice to hear your voice, Laura,” she said warmly, though assailed by apprehension. The days when she had received panic calls from the family were over and her contact with them maintained by letter. “Is something wrong?”
“Well, it’s ages since we heard from Janis, but I didn’t ring up to tell you that. I’d like the recipe for your Passover jam.”
The airy, flag-stoned hall was not yet furnished, work had come first for both Simon and Marianne. She carried the telephone from a window ledge to the foot of the stairs and sat down, her expression amused.
“Only a millionaire’s wife would call Bermuda from England to get a recipe!” she said to Laura after supplying it.
“Probably. But why should the family be deprived of the jam you used to make for them, just because you’re not here anymore? We shall miss you at the Seder, Marianne.”
“And I shall miss all of you.”
“Remember the time Jake and Martin were on guard duty at the synagogue on Seder night?”
Marianne saw herself and Laura standing by the hearth. Laura a radiant and seemingly contented woman. And I doubting that she could sustain the role she was playing. A pudgy Bessie clad in blue velvet was hovering beside the table, the dish of bitter herbs in her hands. There, too, the happy teenager Janis was.
Oh the traumas the family has since lived through, privately and together, Marianne reflected. “How long ago that seems,” she said.
“But Jake is down for the same duty this Passover,” said Laura. “Nothing has changed in that respect.”
“It’s nice to be where I don’t see the anti-Semitic graffiti I sometimes saw in England,” Marianne remarked.
“Removed yourself from a lot of things, haven’t you?” Laura said lightly.
Marianne was nevertheless aware of an implied reproof. “Physically, yes. Mentally and emotionally, no,” she replied. “There’s no escaping from oneself, Laura, as events in your own life must have proved to you.”
“That makes it no easier for me to understand your doing what you’ve done, Marianne. There’s never an ill wind, though!” Laura went on with a laugh. “Now you’re out of the picture, my mum has come into her own. Lyn says she doesn’t know how she’d get by without her. She’s taken to keeping an eye on Uncle Nat, which he won’t let Leona do. And the Manchester Seder will be at her place this year.”
“It was never at my place, too much work,” said Marianne recovering from her astonishment.
“Could be my mum is trying to outdo you!”
Or that Shirley was the sort who blossomed when made to feel needed. Whatever, Marianne was pleased that her cousin was at last tasting the rewards of putting others before herself.
“Mum has also persuaded Arnold to take Lyn on a world cruise,” said Laura, “to help them put time and distance between themselves and their tragedy. She says she wishes she and my dad had done something like that after my brother died.”
“Let’s hope that going off on their own will do something for their marriage,” said Marianne.
“Mum has that in mind too,” Laura answered. “She’s told Arnold that Lyn isn’t to know it wasn’t his idea.”
A behind-the-scenes string-puller in Sarah Sandberg’s class, thought Marianne, which I never was, though in character for Shirley. Possibly Sarah’s matriarchal qualities were dispersed between her three granddaughters, though Leona had yet to prove that she had inherited any of them other than Sarah’s shrewd mind.
“Tell your mother I wish her well, Laura. And good luck with the jam-making.”
“Want me to send you a pot?”
“Why not? I’m still one of the family.”
Marianne returned to the verandah, but not to her typewriter. Instead she stood feasting her eyes on the view, the lush vegetation, palm trees gently swaying and beyond, the ocean seeming as smooth as azure glass.
“Why the rueful expression?” Simon inquired after hearing the gist of her conversation with Laura.
“I had to come and live in Bermuda to find out I’m not indispensable!”
“And as my agent would say, every author should have such a punishment. It isn’t like you not to see the funny side, hon.”
“I do.”
“But you expected the clan to fall apart without you. When it comes to the crunch, family-wise and otherwise, our people have a history of doing the opposite. It’s what we’re renowned for and why we’ve survived to tell the tale.”
Simon came to stand beside her. “You’ve done your bit, Marianne. Time to rest on your laurels.”
Though Marianne would not have put it that way, the parallel Simon had drawn was as balm to her soul. Since the Sandbergs and Moritzes put down roots in England, eight decades ago, their seed had scattered. But the unity bred in us in the home, generation after generation, is still going strong and so it was for Jewry itself. The two were inextricable and there could be no stronger weapon against the renewed attempts, overt or insidious, to complete the task Hitler had begun.
Marianne switched her mind to matters more mundane. “I made us some tuna sandwiches for lunch.”
“Why don’t you go get ’em, while I cover our typewriters? Those little yellow birds that waken us in the mornings are liable to gunge up the works again when we’re taking our lunchtime stroll!”
Such was the peaceful pattern of their days – the shared interest their work was to them, the loving companionship of their marriage. Minutes later they were walking, hands entwined, beside the surf.
What more, thought Marianne, could a woman in her autumn years ask? For herself, nothing.
“When the guest room’s fixed up, I’d like to invite Howard and Karin to stay,” she said, halting to pick up a cowrie shell. “They could use a break, and without the socializing that goes on in hotels. My sister-in-law who lives on the West Bank too.”
“You’ll never change, Marianne.”
“If I did, I wouldn’t be the person you married. Any regrets?”
They sat down on the sand to eat their lunch and Simon eyed the filling oozing from the bread roll Marianne handed him. “Only when she forgets to go easy with the mayonnaise on my sandwich, like she did today.”
Copyright
Copyright © 1989 Maisie Mosco Manuscripts Ltd.
Copyright © 2019 Classica Libris
All rights reserved.