The Mandelbaum Gate (24 page)

He
lifted the case, whispered, ‘We’re off!’ and opened the door. He whispered
again, ‘Not a whisper,’ and stopped to listen lest anyone in the house had been
aroused. The oldest nun, a scholarly antiquarian who was reputed to know more
about Jerusalem, more of its unrecorded secrets, than anyone else, was snoring
at the top of the house; she had told Barbara that she had been given a room at
the top of the house because she snored, and had mentioned the fact quite
casually, in the course of remarking on the difficulty to old bones of climbing
the stairs; the ordinary social vanities did not enter the lives of these nuns.

Freddy,
with the suitcase, had reached the landing below; he had one more flight to
descend. Barbara followed, gripping her hand-luggage and, quite unnecessarily,
the edges of her Liberty dressing-gown which were already held in place by its
tie. Freddy was now on his way down the last flight of stairs, to the ground
floor. She found herself palpitating with the thought of being discovered
leaving this place in her night-clothes with a man and her luggage; the other
residents were five middle-aged pious Catholic women from Stuttgart, and the
nuns were nuns, and moreover had particularly fussed over Barbara as being
Englishly cool, spinster-like and, as she supposed, a bit more nun-like than
the five loquacious matrons from Stuttgart. This breathless fear of Barbara’s
as she began to follow Freddy down the stairs then bore upon her common sense
as being so excessive as to weigh the balance of probability in favour of its
being groundless; the nuns, she reflected, were hard workers and hard sleepers,
while the Stuttgart pilgrims no doubt slept so very much like logs. By the time
she had turned the bend on the staircase towards the lower landing she had
become confident of an easy exit, and crept down the remaining steps in
synchronized time to the snores of the attic nun. She paused on the landing and
looked along the corridor to where the Mother Superior, a woman of about
Barbara’s age, had her quarters.

From
the floor above, where she had come from, a noise of running water and padding
footsteps came in muffled spasms between the overwhelming attic snores; this
was probably caused by one of the German women moving around in the night,
having awakened either by habit or by the sound of Barbara’s packing and
departure. A tinted glass window above the staircase she had just come down let
in the moonlight, but the next flight down to the front hall was in blackness
by contrast to that dusky amber window-light above. Barbara lingered on this
landing, between the half-light and the pure dark, as if waiting for something.
Along the corridor, where the Mother Superior slept, nothing stirred. Barbara
did not know why it should. Almost disappointed, she moved to follow Freddy
cautiously down the very dark staircase. Freddy, half-way, came to a curve in
the stairs and bumped the suitcase loudly into the wall. Barbara halted on the
third step and whispered down to him, ‘Are you all right?’ He did not reply,
but she could hear him continue to pick his step by muted step. She glanced
behind and upward, and could not place her sense of something unaccomplished in
the silence. The front door was unlocked and Freddy now held it open so that
the moonlight flooded her last footsteps from the sleeping convent. They had
got away.

Immediately
on passing into the night air she realized that she had almost hoped to be caught,
it would have been a relief and a kind of triumph and justification. For there
had been a decided element of false assumption in her reception at the convent
the previous day, after they had inquired politely, and estimated her type. Of
course she was an English Catholic convert. She was indeed the quiet type. But
there was a lot more than met the eye, at least she hoped so. She had thought,
as the Mother Superior made her benign speech of welcome, and the old
novice-mistress hovered with an admiring smile, if only they knew. And she was
inwardly exasperated, as she had been with her cousins last summer, when she
had carried on a love-affair with Harry Clegg, there in the house, and they, in
their smug insolence, had failed to discover it. And why? She thought now, with
the old exasperation, what right have they to take me at my face value? Every
spinster should be assumed guilty before she is proved innocent, it is only
common civility. People, she thought, believe what they want to believe;
anything rather than shake up their ideas. And if a nun had in fact put in an
appearance on the landing when Freddy had bumped her suitcase at the bend of
the stairs — a startled nun switching on all the lights, the Mother Superior
perhaps — what would she have said?

Freddy
was opening the door of a large car, at the wheel of which sat a man whom she
recognized as the Arab shopkeeper from whom she had bought the ornamental fish
that morning. Freddy had pushed her suitcase in the back of the car, and
turning to her he said, ‘Hurry!’ She had never seen Freddy Hamilton looking so
happy. She had not thought he had it in him.

And
what would she have said if one of the nuns had caught them, if one of them
came to the door even now that she was getting into the car, lifting the Liberty
dressing-gown as if it were a long evening dress and she departing from a late
night party? ‘My dear good woman, things are not what they seem, as you in the
religious life ought to know. Foolish virgin, hasn’t experience taught you to
expect the unexpected?’

She
said to Freddy, ‘What on earth would we have said if we’d been caught?’

Freddy
said, ‘If they’re decent women, as I’m sure they are, you could have explained
about your Jewish side.’

The
faint sound of the bolt being slid into place behind the heavy studded convent
door reached them through the car windows. Whoever had let Freddy in was
locking up again.

She
said, ‘They’re decent women but I don’t think I would have got much sympathy as
a Jew, even if they’d believed the story. It would have embarrassed them, in
this environment.’

What d’you
think, Alexandros?’ Freddy said as the car started. He was in the front while
Barbara sat behind with her suitcase. She looked back. Not so much as one
belated inquiring light had gone on in any of the windows.

Alexandros
said, ‘Madam, they would think something else to see you come with a man and
your baggage. Maybe they shall say in the morning that you are a wolf in the
raiment of a sheep.’

‘So I
am,’ Barbara said.

‘What a
jolly good idea this is,’ Freddy said, and they all laughed at each other’s
words with an overflow of relief, success, and the moonlit morning air;
meanwhile, the car wound and swirled unhindered to the south, across Jerusalem,
in the direction of the Potter’s Field.

Ten days before she had
left Israel Barbara had received two unexpected letters from England and failed
to receive an expected letter from Harry Clegg in Jordan, smuggled to her in
the American bag from Amman. When returning to her room she always looked for
the envelope lying on the carpet by the door. The absence of any word from
Harry Clegg had made the presence of the two English envelopes, which arrived
together on the same morning, rather irritating. One was from Ricky, her old
friend, the head of the school where she taught. The other was from her cousin,
Michael Aaronson.

She
first opened Miss Rickward’s letter. In a way she had been missing Ricky, whose
faults were many but amorphous, and whose virtues were well defined, among them
being an exceptional capacity for retaining knowledge, shrewd intelligence of a
scholarly order, and a scrupulous, almost obsessive literal honesty; all of
which virtues, apparently in the nature of things, precluded humour. Ricky was
a good talker, in that she could converse seriously for hours on a subject, the
absence of any wit in her talk having the compensatory value of keeping the
main topic in line, without any of the far-flung diversions that humour leads
to. Ricky could discourse for hours on the history and development of the
existentialist philosophy. It had been pleasant for Barbara, it had given her a
remote sense that she was doing something in life, if only mentally, to sit
and listen, with an occasional comment, while Ricky expounded the doctrine
that existence precedes essence.

But
could Ricky apply this notion to the world she existed in? To Barbara? Herself?
Barbara had looked round the room of her hotel in Israel that morning, and was
irritated by the unmade bed. She decided to take her letters downstairs and
read them in the courtyard; then forgetting her decision, sat on. Ricky could
discuss the psychological and biological differentiations of the male in all
their subtleties past and present. She could speculate on their future. But did
she recognize an attraction between a man and a woman before her eyes? When one
of the girls at her school, a large-built matron of fifteen, was found to be
pregnant by the local cinema owner, Ricky said, ‘The poor child was only
proving the theory of reproduction for herself. She’s a natural empiricist, an
intelligent child,’ and might have written as much, as solemnly, in a letter to
the parents of a girl who had burnt her fingers on a hot test-tube.

Barbara
had glanced at the crack beneath the door, not quite aware of what she was
still hoping for; the stir and thrust of a white envelope from Jordan.

Ricky
once had an admirer, the shy widowed father of one of the girls. He had sent
her the enviable present of a bunch of roses, fourteen, each one of a different
species. ‘I wonder,’ Ricky said, ‘where he got the impression that I’m a
student of horticulture. Someone must have given him that impression, Barbara.’

But
there was no end to Ricky and the various ways in which Barbara genuinely
missed her. Barbara was, moreover, aware of various ways in which Ricky
resembled Harry. The main difference was that Harry was a man. The next
difference was his actual achievement in life, which was already recognized
every. where; whereas Ricky, of South African origin, having come to England on
a scholarship, had gone far, but achieved little. Both, however, had done what
they had done through their own efforts without family advantages. And Harry
seemed to resemble Ricky in appearance, more in Barbara’s memory than in the
presence of either. Barbara had never seen them together, and she partly knew
that the resemblance she discerned was, after all, a matter of the lights and
shadows cast on their features by some lonely lamplight of affection within
herself.

Ricky
was a keen promoter of Scripture-reading at school; she was herself a lapsed
Congregationalist with a puritanical bias. Once, after last summer’s holidays
when Barbara had fallen in love with Harry Clegg, Ricky was setting the senior
girls an essay on the subject of the Second Coming to be illustrated by
scriptural texts; she demonstrated this procedure by quoting a passage on the
return of Christ to judge the world: ‘Then shall two be in the field; the one
shall be taken and the other left. Two women shall be grinding at the mill: the
one shall be taken and the other left. Watch therefore …’ Barbara, standing
by, listened distantly to Ricky’s moral implications, but heard closely the literal
ones. It’s certainly a point, thought Barbara, that two engaged in a common
pursuit do not consequently share personal identity, and absurd though it is to
affirm this evident fact, Ricky feels towards me as if the opposite were true.
Sooner or later she’ll have to find out that my destiny is different from hers.

She had
opened Ricky’s letter first. The one from her cousin Michael was not likely to
be a personal stimulus one way or the other. The letter from Harry was what she
had wanted, and with that instinct for any sensational distraction, any
quarrel, any irritant, of one who has endured a near-miss, she opened Ricky’s
letter first. Disappointingly at first, and then astoundingly, It read:

MY
DEAR
BARBARA,

Thank you for your two postcards which both
arrived last week, on Tuesday and Friday, respectively. I am pleased to hear
you are having a not uncomfortable trip. The experience should be a profit.
able one — in the spirit if not in the letter!

I hope the food (if I am not treading on
holy ground by mentioning that mundane but essential factor) is not
unwholesome. How well I remember those weeks following your return from Spain …
‘Nuff said!

You will be surprised to learn that I have
been through a very strange experience during the past fortnight. It is an
experience that can only be described as a troubled if not a shattering one. Indeed,
I was undecided, or, as one might say, torn in mind, with regard to the
advisability or otherwise of mentioning the matter to you. Suffice it to say
that my nights. for the past week, have been both anguished and sleepless.
Yesterday I arrived at the decision to inform you of my distress, giving you
the full account of its cause, and …

Bewildered,
amazed at the emotion and mounting tone, Barbara sent her eyes flowing down and
across the next few pages in frantic grasp of their gist. Ricky had learnt of
her engagement to Harry Clegg, that was all. Elsie Connington, a mother of one
of the pupils who had become more closely connected with Ricky than with
herself, and whom Barbara now recalled having once met, had entertained Ricky
for the week-end, in the course of which they had visited Elsie’s mother at
Harrogate, a Mrs Hamilton. Elsie was Freddy Hamilton’s sister, it appeared …
Freddy had written to his mother that he had made the acquaintance of a Miss
Vaughan, who hoped, the Catholic Church permitting, to marry a Harry Clegg, an
archaeologist. And the old woman had passed this on to Ricky, So it appeared,
and so it was. Barbara felt furious, first with Freddy for his gossip. She
wondered why he had failed to tell her that his niece was at her school: then,
realizing he was probably unaware of this fact, she turned on herself for
confiding so much in Freddy. At last, she read through the letter again, and
began to feel a wholesale sense of nausea: