The Mandelbaum Gate (39 page)

‘My
father,’ Suzi said. ‘He’s brought someone and he’s shouting to be let in.’

‘Do you mean that I am to
share this room with you?’ said Miss Rickward.

‘Of
course,’ said Joe Ramdez. ‘Or it is better to say I share it with you, since
you are my honoured guest and I have made you this room at your disposal. It is
yours, I share with you.’

‘But
where will you sleep?’

‘With
you, in the bed, my fruitful vine.’

It
seemed to her that she had always known that this was how it was done. Ricky
felt rescued, she felt vindicated, and she longed more than ever to crush
Barbara Vaughan.

When
Barbara first came to the fact, beyond all reckoning, the amazing fact, that
Ricky was having a romantic love-affair with Joe Ramdez, a serious relationship
and no mere spinster’s holiday fling, she began to work backwards from that
point to see where she had begun to miscalculate Ricky. Even doctors, she
thought, sometimes do not know why a person does not die. But there was no
telling at what point, over the six years she had known Ricky, she had failed
to discover a dormant capacity for going to bed with a latent Joe Ramdez. It
then occurred to Barbara, and recurred more strongly after she had learned of
Ricky’s marriage and her sale of the school in England, her eager embrace of
Islam, and the total handing over of her lot to Joe Ramdez, that there had been
no secret state of mind in Ricky. What had been overlooked was perfectly
obvious, and it was, after all, precisely a woman of virile ways and blunt
intellect, and yet of unfathomable emotions, who would respond and ramify most
sensuously towards a muscular ageing Arab of lordly disposition, should that
one chance occur, as it had done. Joe Ramdez was in fact the only type of man
that Ricky could understand, and Barbara reflected that, most probably, Ricky
imagined all love-affairs started and proceeded as directly as hers did, and
that all women who go to bed with a man go to bed with a type of Joe Ramdez.

It was
the only way she could explain the fact that Ricky, even after her meeting with
Joe Ramdez, pursued the purpose for which she had followed Barbara to the Holy
Land, which was to prevent her marriage to Harry Clegg. She had brought with
her, of all things, a copy of the records of Harry’s birth and baptism, which
in desperate zeal she had managed to dig up, where Harry and his lawyers in
their methodical defeatism had failed. Ricky’s wild intention in doing so had
been to prove to Barbara that the man she wanted to marry was illegitimate, a fact
that Barbara knew already. And it turned out that the document Ricky produced
for Barbara’s inspection made it perfectly easy for Harry’s previous marriage
to be annulled by the Church, and for her to marry him within its communion.
This business of the birth record was the joke of their lives.

But
what neither Barbara, Harry, nor the Church knew, and were mercifully never to
know, was that Ricky, shortly after her meeting with Joe, destroyed the first
paper she had brought so carefully with her, substituting a second one,
misguidedly devised, though brilliantly forged. This was done at the instigation
of Ramdez in his eagerness to avenge Ricky against Barbara Vaughan, her
treacherous friend who had grieved her, and his own enemy, the Jewess who
passed as it were through his fingers and escaped the country.

‘We
were told,’ said Ricky at that future date when she discovered that something
had gone wrong with the scheme, ‘… we were assured, that a certificate which
proves Clegg to be a baptized Catholic would prevent him from ever getting an
annulment of his previous marriage, since Catholics do not recognize divorce.
I simply cannot understand it.’

She was
then talking to a Catholic priest. He seemed aware of vexation in her tone, and
looked at her, puzzled. ‘Well, it’s better, this way, isn’t it?’ he said. “What
a good thing for the couple that you found this certificate.’

Ricky,
terrified of having aroused suspicion, agreed that it was. The priest said that
it was a common mistake, of course, to assume that a Catholic could not obtain
an annulment of a previous marriage, since in fact if the Catholic had been
first married outside the Church, as in the case of Harry Clegg, the Church did
not recognize the marriage. But where a non-Catholic applied for annulment in
such a case, difficulties arose, since this was outside the province of the
Church. It was all perfectly logical, really…. If only, Ricky thought, I had
given them the paper I brought over, that first paper … Born to Amelia Clegg …
Father unknown … Christened at Tate Street Methodist Chapel …

Ramdez
laid yet another curse upon his son Abdul for providing the false information
about Catholic divorces. Abdul had claimed, when he was in hospital in Beirut,
to have gone over to the Catholic Church. Ramdez did not know whether to
believe him, but he cursed him then, even although Abdul explained that he was
still a Moslem as well. Abdul had done that, if he had done it at all, to
offend and shame his father. And now, when appealed to for the information that
surely he, having received the Catholic teaching, was in a position to know,
Abdul had answered falsely to ‘spite his father’s new, fine, substantial wife,
who had come freely to him with all her confidence, her trouble, and her riches.
Joe Ramdez laid a father’s curse on Abdul again and yet again.

Barbara,
in her relief, kept saying to Harry, ‘I was going to marry you anyway.’

He
said, ‘I know. I’m not forgetting it.’ The Congregation of the Rota had turned
down his application for an annulment only a week before the new evidence,
Ricky’s bright information, turned up to make everything easy. He said, ‘My
aunts never told me my mother was a Catholic. Anyway, they were not really my
aunts. Perhaps my father was a Catholic, too. An Irish couple, I expect,
whoever they were. I know more about the Etruscans than I do about my own
parents, and in fact I’ve got no curiosity about them at all, whereas the
Etruscans —’

‘It’s
so funny, Ricky thinking this was going to mess us up.’

‘Yes, I
know, silly old bitch.’

She
said, ‘I would have married you, anyway. But it would have taken courage to
continue being out of the Church. It’s the keeping it up I was afraid of.’

‘From
the way those clerics spoke,’ he said, ‘I was sure it would be impossible.
Well, now it’s possible.’

‘With
God, everything is possible,’ said Barbara.

From
time to time for years afterwards, and far into her long widowhood, Ricky would
inquire of Catholic priests, as a matter of theoretical interest, what was the
position of a Catholic marriage based on evidence which both parties believed
to be true, but which, in reality, was faked.

They
would all look puzzled, at first, and ask Ricky if she had ever heard of such a
case. ‘No, no,’ Ricky always said. ‘Only I read of it in a novel.’ The priests
all said in effect, ‘Well, if both parties remain in ignorance and the Church
is satisfied, then it’s a valid marriage.’

‘According
to the logic of the Catholics, that seems impossible.’ No, they mostly said, it
was quite logical if one started from the right premise. Others said, well,
logic or no logic, that was the case. One of them replied, ‘With God,
everything is possible.’ Another went into the question of the validity of the
blessing Jacob received in place of Esau, even under conscious falsity.

If
Ricky had been anywhere close to Barbara during those years after Joe Ramdez’s
death in 1963, she might, sooner or later, have been unable to prevent herself
confessing to the forgery, at whatever risk. But she was nowhere near Barbara.
She had started a private school for the children of English and American
residents and wealthy Jordanians. She was not tempted to commit herself in any
letter to Barbara.

All
this was yet to be. The first night in the house at Jericho, Barbara on her
drowsy bed heard a man’s voice in the darkness. She felt cooler, and touched
her forehead to make sure she actually was cooler, and the fever had gone. She
did not care about the man’s voice but let fate blow over her and presently
fell asleep.

Suzi
had said to Freddy before she rushed from his room, ‘You are my tourist.
Tomorrow we go to Jerash and see the ruins. My father must see I take this
trouble over you as you are a British Government man.’ She had gone to her own
room, where she opened the window and called out in a sleepy voice, inquiring
what was the matter. She could not see her father from the window, but her,
voice was answered by her father’s from the front of the house. She had gone to
the door and let him in. Latifa was just coming out of her room, and Suzi could
hear her slopping along from the wing she occupied.

Her
father had brought a visitor, a woman whom Suzi recognized as the tourist who
had approached her that morning when she was with Barbara in the Holy
Sepulchre. As they entered, Suzi stood well in the light so that the woman,
Barbara’s pursuer, could see her; and so she satisfied herself, then and there,
that Miss Rickward did not recognize her. Suzi thought, she is a real enemy;
and was partly resentful at not being recognized from their short encounter.

Miss
Rickward showed herself eager to please Joe Ramdez’s daughter. Latifa was not
introduced to her but stood by as part of the reception machinery. In Arabic,
Suzi explained to her father that a new girl had been sent that day and had
immediately gone down with scarlet fever. She had the girl in isolation in the
western section of the house, and warned her father not to go near it. The girl
was not gravely ill, but highly infectious.

‘See
that the authorities don’t get to hear of it,’ Joe said, ‘and start pushing
their noses into our affairs here. Why have these thieves and whoremongers sent
me a girl with disease?’

‘It’s
Allah’s blame,’ Suzi said.

‘Quiet,
blasphemous slut!’

He then
returned to the English tongue and Miss Rickward, enchanted as she was with
everything.

And
before long she was in the large dark-tapestried room with Ramdez.

‘I
share with you.’

‘But
where will you sleep?’

‘With
you, in the bed, my fruitful vine, my pillar of cedar, golden minaret.’

She
said, ‘I have always had a leaning towards Islam.’ She looked round for her
suitcase. Ramdez had placed it in a corner behind a dark screen that must have
been bright at one time. Ricky went behind the screen to undress. She said, ‘If
these lovely tapestries were cleaned, they would come up exquisitely.’

One way
and another the spirit of the Crusaders in their everyday aspect brooded over
the house that night. Ricky, when she had got into bed, sat up in it and
recited, in her buxom, bough-laden poetry voice, the famous Islamic Throne
Verse in the English Translation:

God —
there is no god but He, the Living, and Self-subsistent: Slumber seizeth him
not, neither sleep. To Him belongeth whatsover is in the Heavens and whatsoever
is in the Earth. Who is there that shall intercede with Him save by His Will.
He knoweth what is present with men and what shall befall them, and nought of
His knowledge do they comprehend save what He willeth. His Throne is wide as
the Heavens and the Earth, and the keeping of them wearieth Him not.

And He
is the High, the Mighty one.

‘My
rose of Islam!’ said Joe in admiration, heaving himself into bed beside her. ‘Well
of sweet waters!’

Ricky
said, ‘I am a virgin. Does it signify?’

‘It is highly
satisfactory,’ Joe said, as he used to say, long ago, when he was a young
schoolteacher, and was giving a lesson in Arabic to one of the British
administrators in his spare time.

Freddy contemplated a
meeting with Joe Ramdez without panic, not even that panic he had always felt
in his previous encounters, at the Cartwrights, with Joe, when it had been
merely a matter of mental association. Normally, of course, he was terrified of
blatant liars like Joe and always felt a ruinous urge to conspire with them, as
he did with his mother, to the effect that they were honest people. In his
youth at Cambridge Freddy had known a liar whom he hated so much that he had
given him a solid-gold hunter watch — not his good one, but a very good one.

This
Monday morning, however, Freddy felt quite equal to Joe Ramdez, whose daughter
was so sweet. He sat and had breakfast with Suzi while the rest of the house
was still asleep from its busy night’s doings. He said, ‘I’m going to miss a
day at the office. Oh, well —’ The day’s newspapers arrived and he sat screened
by the local English-language one, while Suzi waited with wifely patience to
talk to him seriously. ‘Australia Urges Britain Not to Join Common Market,’
Freddy read aloud. ‘What utter nonsense,’ he said. ‘Australia should keep her
nose out of it. We must have our markets abroad and trade with the foreigners.
We always have done and we always will. What’s the point of having foreigners
on your doorstep if you’re going to let them put you out of business?’

‘Very
wise and true,’ Suzi said.

‘We
simply must decide to join the Common Market.’

‘My
father has brought the woman called Miss Rickward. They both hunt for Barbara. I
want you to know,’ Suzi said.