The Mandelbaum Gate (23 page)

‘This
makes more suspicion. You should know this, as you are in a foreign service.’

‘Indeed,
I understand.’

Alexandros
said, ‘Perhaps you must see the British consul and arrange for her to leave the
country. Keep her in the convent for the meantime. It is a pity, but—’

‘A pity!’
Freddy said. ‘It’s a damn disgrace that a girl can’t go on a pilgrimage of the
Holy Land, a Christian convert visiting the shrines, without fear of arrest.’

Alexandros
radiated response. ‘You are right! Perhaps you let her take the risk. Perhaps
the danger is not so much. The government spies will follow her but perhaps
they will hesitate to make an arrest.’

‘Ramdez
is her travel agent,’ Freddy said. ‘I can’t think what possessed her to go to
Ramdez. Obnoxious fellow.’

‘If
Ramdez is the agent, then she could meet danger from private retribution.
Ramdez is dangerous.’

‘Private
retribution?’

‘An
accident may befall her on her travels. Between the police posts are many miles
of desert. She may suffer an accident. This, too, you know of.’

‘I do
understand,’ Freddy said, struck now by his recollection of political deaths by
accident. He jumped to his feet. ‘Alexandros, we must do something.’

‘Be
seated, Mr Hamilton.’ Alexandros, in his usual manner, prolonged the last
syllable to synchronize with the action that accompanied it. His gesture now
was to place his two large hands on Freddy’s shoulders and press him back into
his chair. He then left the room, but without seeming to withdraw any of his
presence, for Freddy could hear his footsteps, heavy with long-accepted
proprietorship, beating towards the back of the house, and from there, his
voice domestically urging his requirements in Arabic, above a kitchen clatter.

Freddy
had an urge to make himself useful by piling the used plates together. It was a
habit he had acquired since the war when visiting servantless friends. But he
forbore. Alexandros would prefer to do everything himself. He was a marvellous
host.

Alexandros
could be heard on his return, treading more quietly in caution of the stuff he
was carrying, which nevertheless rattled a little as he entered. It was a dish
of fruit, coffee and a decanter of brandy with cups and glasses. ‘I make a good
waiter at the table,’ roared Alexandros, setting down the tray with the last
word, ‘tabe-oool’. And when he had shut the door he sat, clasped his hands as
if congratulating himself and said, ‘My wife and her servant are thinking I am
making big business with a representative from a great museum, as I have told
the household. I have said the negotiations are very secret as you are in
rivalry from another collector who follows you to gain knowledge of your expert
discoveries. We have many such dealings here in Jerusalem. There was much secret
business with great collectors and great museums and their spies, and also with
many governments when we came first to Jerusalem, as those were the years of
the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls. There were many fragments in many hands.
As also with other items of antiquity in Jerusalem. So Alexandros can make a
story to silence his household of this meeting tonight, and Alexandros is a
good waiter at the table.’

He
unclasped his hands and poured coffee, pushing the used plates and cutlery out
of the way. ‘And we make a plan for Barbara.’

‘Alexandros,
you’re a good fellow.’

‘I’m
not too old to enjoy this rescue of a woman,’ said Alexandros.

‘Neither
am I, come to think of it. I’m prepared for anything. But I don’t want to
involve you in any danger, Alexandros.’

‘Danger
is pleasure. What else is pleasure when a man has been married to one wife
thirty-two years? You are married with a wife in England?’

‘No.
Few people know it but I was married once.’

‘She
has died?’

‘No. It
was when I was very young. The marriage didn’t last a year. She turned out to
be no good. Incurably no good. What we call a bad lot.’

‘It was
bad luck.’

‘Oh, I’ve
forgotten about the whole thing. It was a misfortune that can happen to a
family like any other misfortune.’

‘I had
a cousin who was like this. In Beirut. She was with many men of different
nationalities. I don’t know if she’s dead, living. We refused her in the end
from the family. What could we do? We gave her money, but this failed. Nothing
sufficed. She is perhaps in prison. Have you divorced this wife?’

‘Oh,
yes, and made a settlement on condition of her not marrying again.’

‘This
is honourable.’

‘It’s
like buying a horse. If it turns out to be a bad horse, one should keep it off
the market in case some other chap should get hold of it.’

‘Exactly.
I do not disagree.’

‘Not
everyone,’ Freddy said, ‘would agree with us. In Europe, these days, it’s
considered unfair to stipulate a condition that might deter anyone from
marrying again. But in my view I did the only possible thing. It’s a question
of one’s point of view. It was the only conceivable thing to do. Anyway, it was
a long time ago. Nobody mentions the affair in our family, except my old mother
from time to time, when she wants to be tiresome. It was a long time ago. My goodness,
it must be getting late!’

‘Only
eleven o’clock,’ Alexandros said. ‘There are ahead all the hours of the night.
And we have only to plan everything.’

They had not drunk a great
deal; it was more the stimulus of their evening, wrenched as it was from the
line of habit, that gave them heart to leave the house together at half past
two in the morning, burning with an imperative sense of duty towards Barbara
Vaughan. Freddy’s had been the idea of getting her up in Arab disguise, while
Alexandros, his hand clapped suddenly to his brow to hold intact the brimming
tide of inspiration, had contributed the Ramdez daughter as her best possible
escort.

‘Which
daughter?’ Freddy had said. ‘Aren’t there two?’

‘The
unnatural one,’ Alexandros said.

‘With
the blue eyes, like young Abdul?’

‘That’s
the woman. She is not so bad. It’s only that she should have been a man. There
was a mistake in the making of her. She holds opinions different from her
parents. So here they say she’s the unnatural one.’ Alexandros sprang to his
feet. ‘We go,’ he said. ‘It’s a matter that can permit only of arrangements in
the dark of the night.’

He
advised Freddy to keep well into the shadow of the houses, but himself walked
with a sort of arm-swinging march in the middle of the street where the
moonlight lay. He seemed to be exercising some of Freddy’s new resources of
freedom as well as his own natural supply. Freddy kept pace with him from the
shadows, not for one wild moment doubting the success of their plan, conceived
as it had been in an hour of genius and of brotherhood; all was perfectly
feasible, or as good as done, and he walked in that dispensation of mind in
which impossible works are in fact accomplished and mountains are moved.

They
turned into the Via Dolorosa, and there Alexandros strode on in the light of
lamps and moon like the Archangel Michael leading his legions to storm the
gates of Hell which should not prevail against them, as was written. Freddy
moved in to keep pace beside him in the narrow street. They now walked shoulder
to shoulder.

They
came at last to the convent where Barbara Vaughan was staying. It looked very
much closed for the night.

‘I
speak personally to the janitor,’ said Alexandros, moving into the lamplight to
verify the amount of paper money that he had produced from his pocket to
harmonize with his intention.

‘This
is on me,’ Freddy said, getting out his wallet.

‘The
janitor is inexpensive. Keep your money to speak to the officers behind the
desks if inquiries should arise concerning Barbara in the course of the holy
pilgrimage.’

Freddy
waited. The night now began to give out the chanting of the minarets, from
Israel across the border to the west of the convent, then nearer, to the north,
from the direction of the Holy Sepulchre. It was three o’clock. The chanting
voices echoed each other from height to height like the mating cries of sublime
eagles. This waiting for the return of Alexandros in the morning hours of
Jerusalem was one of the things Freddy was to remember most vividly later on,
when he did at last remember the nights and days of his fugue. From the east,
beyond the Wailing Wall, a white-clad figure raised his arms in the moonlight
and now began his call to prayer, and soon, from far in the south, then in the
south-east, and from everywhere, the cry was raised.

6.
Jerusalem, My Happy Home

‘Who’s there?’

The
voice answered, very dose to her but on the other side of the door, with hushed
urgency, ‘Freddy Hamilton. Don’t make a noise. Let me in.’

It
impinged on Barbara that this was highly improbable, that she was in a convent
bedroom, and that there was no lock to the door. She hesitated in a woken daze
long enough for the voice to announce itself again. This time it said, ‘Is that
Barbara Vaughan?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well,
it’s only me. Please open the door and I’ll explain.’

This
sounded authentic. She slid one arm into her dressing-gown and was about to
open the door when the handle turned and Freddy’s fare appeared.

He said
quickly, ‘Don’t make a noise. This is a convent, you know.’

She
said, while sticking her other arm into the sleeve, ‘What’s the matter?’

He came
in then, and silently closed the door behind him. He said, ‘Forgive me for
intruding like this. An emergency. I’ve come to get you out. You’re in danger,
but I’ve got everything planned and you’ll be quite safe with me.’

She was
still unclear about the reality of Freddy in the room. She had set the front of
her hair in two rollers, which she now removed and put into the pocket of her
dressing-gown as she said, ‘It’s terribly late. This is a convent, you know.
What’s happened?’ But now she giggled, partly with relief that the quiet,
repetitious tap-tap at the door which had eventually wakened her, was only
Freddy’s.

Freddy
said, Tm afraid it’s all very informal. But I just want you to pack your things
and come with me. There’s a car coming round to pick us up and we’re going up
to the Potter’s Field to spent the night. Everything is planned, so don’t
worry. Just pack quickly and quietly, and come with me.’

She
felt a returning wave of the fear she had gone to sleep with. ‘Am I to come
like this?’ she said, plucking at her dressing-gown.

‘There’s
nobody about outside. You won’t be seen. There’s only me and Alexandros from
the curiosity shop, a man I could trust with my life. Alexandros will drive us
to the Potter’s Field. Hurry, Barbara. In an emergency, one can’t be Victorian
about things, you know.’

She
started to pack her bags and laughed softly to herself again, for Freddy’s word
‘Victorian’ brought comfortably to mind a private family joke — how one of the
deep-voiced Vaughan aunts had declared when her son had been ignominiously
expelled from school: ‘I refuse to be Victorian about it. Of course, the boy is
a little oriental in his ways, I’m afraid, but then his father is a little
oriental and so was his grandfather. And in point of fact, no one in the
family, right back to William the Conqueror, has ever been Victorian about it.’
Barbara said to Freddy: ‘How did you get in? Have I got to bring everything? I
haven’t paid for the room. It’s ten past three.’

Freddy
said, absent-mindedly, while looking round, ‘This is no time to be Victorian …
Is there anything I can do? Don’t forget your sponge-bag.’

She
packed on. ‘If any of the nuns …’

Freddy
fastened the locks of her suitcase while she put the final objects in her small
case. She told herself that Freddy Hamilton was behaving unexpectedly and that
it was an odd situation. Meanwhile she looked at the bed. ‘I’d better—’

‘Oh,
leave the bed. Hurry.’

She
fumbled with her hair, feeling it strange to be going out with her hair
straggling loose, and wearing her slippers and dressing-gown as if being taken
suddenly to hospital or prison. But it never occurred to her to object to this
departure.

Freddy
looked out of the window, peering sideways towards the front of the convent. ‘It’s
there,’ he said. ‘Good old Alexandros. He’s waiting with his car.’ He lifted
the suitcase and said, ‘I’ll go first. You follow when I get down the first
flight. Not a sound, remember. This is a convent.’

She
pulled the bed straight as he spoke, and tucked in the loose blanket to give it
a made look. She put three pounds on the dressing-table. ‘It’s too much,’
Freddy said. ‘Three would be exorbitant.’ She took one back. ‘Quite enough,’
he said. ‘The Catholics are rolling in money.’ It was as if he had said ‘the
foreigners’ in one of those private exchanges between Britons.