To Live in Peace (10 page)

Ed said it sounded like the super-Sunday Norman Mailer had suggested when he was campaigning for Mayor of New York, minimising traffic in the city and limiting transportation. Kitty said that the Jews had been observing super-Sabbaths for three thousand years and that Mailer’s idea was not so original.

She did her best to reproduce in Manhattan the Friday nights she had known, even to recitation, in its shortened form, of the Grace after Meals (insisting that the men covered their heads) but the spirit of the evening was marred by Herb and Mort who glanced constantly at their watches afraid they would be late for the ball game.

When they’d gone Maurice cleared the dishes and started to fold the tablecloth but she explained that it had to stay in place until the following sunset and Maurice put his arms round her and said: “You’re a good woman,
Kit, I’m sorry I can’t go along with all that praying.” And she’d thought that if her youth had been spent in Dachau and Bergen-Belsen instead of north-west London she might have a few questions to ask too. They had spent the evening listening to Bach’s B Minor Mass which Kitty thought went oddly with the Sabbath candles which guttered from the kitchen but she did not say anything and sat companionably close to Maurice in the knowledge that, without Sydney, as far as sanctifying the day of rest was concerned, she had done her best.

For Herb and Ed and Mort her Friday night meals became an institution and she was touched when Ed turned up for one of them with four embroidered velvet skull caps which he distributed proudly to her new family before she blessed the wine.

This evening she had spent with Bette who had entertained her with a blow by blow account of her day bedizening her clients with Calvin Klein and Albert Nipon and Bill Blass, and they had watched “Annie Hall” on video over plates of gravad lax on pumpernickel, leaving her “boys” to their poker game with a plate of butter cake she had made. Now, in the privacy of her studio which with its pots of trailing Alo’ and Dracino Marginata – which later would have star-shaped blossoms – selected by Bette, and her photographs of the family in their frames, already had the comfortable feel of home, she followed her mind across the Atlantic and opened her pad of airmail paper on the unfinished letter, her diary of the New World, and cast her mind back over the past frenetic week.

On the day that the electronically triggered bomb shattered the headquarters of the Christian Phalangist Party in Beirut, killing President-elect Bashir Gemayel, Alec sat in the bar of the King’s Arms and Royal Hotel in Godalming, with its red patterned carpet, its imitation gas lamp and arrangement of artificial flowers on the brick mantelpiece, and read the letter from Kitty which Carol had passed on to him. He had felt in a way a sense of relief when Kitty had elected to join Maurice in America. It was not that he did not get on with his mother-in-law – he was in fact quite fond of Kitty – but he had always resented her influence upon Carol, the fact that he had had to do constant battle with her for the affections of his wife.

The path of their marriage had not been smooth. Its early years had been dogged by Carol’s lack of physical response and Alec’s attempt to free her from the dependence upon her parents (Sydney in particular), on which he laid the blame for her condition. For years, until the time that Mathew was born, although Carol’s nights had been spent ostensibly with Alec, her days had been passed with Kitty near whom they lived and from whom she was inseparable. In an effort to sever the cord which still attached Carol, inappropriately, to her mother, Alec had taken the draconian step of moving to Godalming, leaving Carol to make up her mind whether or not she would follow him. That more than the
thirty-odd
miles which separated the town house in north-west London from Peartree Cottage was involved, they both knew.

When, after her father’s death and the birth of their third child, Carol had joined her husband, she had experienced an unexpected sensation of freedom which followed the period of mourning for Sydney. Her loss had been Alec’s gain. It was for a time as if life, having let Carol out on parole from her punishing conscience, had waved its magic wand. While Debbie and Lisa, released from the concrete constraints of the patio whose size had dictated their choices of pastime (sevenses against the wall or hopscotch), explored the delights of the countryside, their parents had enjoyed a second honeymoon, superior to the first, and for a long while their happiness had vindicated Alec’s summary decision to move.

The elation had not lasted. Alec could not put his finger on the moment of its demise. For a long while after his father-in-law’s death he had felt that Carol had belonged exclusively to him, and that his marriage was going to be all right. But even before Carol’s move back to London with the children to her mother’s flat, all had not been well. The decline had been gradual, the erosion of their relationship so imperceptible that neither of them had really been aware that they were – with the enthusiasm over the Queen Anne house, the new baby, and their disparate interests – papering over the cracks. Alec’s general practice, with its surgery in the High Street – his name in white on the darkened glass of the window – kept him busy. The demands and the douleurs of the local residents filled his days, and both eroded and prevented him from dwelling too long upon his unsatisfactory nights which he attributed to the fact that although Carol’s father was dead, he had not died within her. He loved his wife but with her recent withdrawal into herself, her insistence on keeping him at arm’s length,
he felt increasingly excluded. Her small success as a poet had not helped.

From the time her first verses had been published she had gone through the day with a faraway look in her eyes and often reprimanded him when he spoke for interrupting her train of thought. He had done everything to please her. Appreciating how much the religion, in which she had been so successfully
indoctrinated
by her father, meant to her, he had held Sabbath services at Peartree Cottage on every first Saturday and did his best to support her in bringing up their children in the ways of their faith.

As far as he himself was concerned, he was a backslider. His upbringing had been similar to Carol’s, but the years had brought a weakening of what had been carried out by force of habit rather than conviction. He no longer had any strong feelings about religion, and left to himself would have let any observances (which he privately felt had been postulated by the rabbis to suit the times and guard against assimilation) fall into desuetude. As far as the Middle East was concerned he was surprised to find that he felt personally responsible for Israel’s every move and in the past weeks, often against his better judgement, had leaped to her defence. With the assassination of the moderate Bashir Gemayel he feared an escalation of hostilities, realising that Israel had lost a friend.

He put away Kitty’s letter which, in a loving postcript, sent hugs and kisses to Debbie and Lisa and Mathew whom she missed. Alec missed his children too. He spoke to them every night on the telephone as he did to Carol, and on Friday would be seeing them at his sister-in-law Sarah’s New Year dinner. Alone in the
saloon bar, separated from his family, the new house far from completion, he felt at a low ebb.

“This chair taken?”

“Sorry?” Alec, in his reverie, had not heard the words against the lunchtime laughter, the cacophony from the jukebox.

“Anyone sitting here?”

An extraordinarily tall girl wearing pale skintight jodhpurs, a white shirt and black tie, her hair – in a chignon secured by a net – auburn against an ivory skin, holding a slopping shandy, had her hand on the only vacant chair in the room.

“Go ahead.” Alec moved his lager on its Oranjeboom mat fractionally nearer to him on the circular black oak table on to which the girl put her hard hat.

“I’m dry as a bone.”

Alec could feel her skin glowing and wasn’t sure if he imagined a slight, animal smell.

“I’ve not seen you before,” the girl said. “Do you live round here?”

“I’m a local GP.”

“No kidding?”

“The High Street practice.”

“I wouldn’t know. We’ve had a doctor in Eashing for years. I come to Godalming for fabrics. I run my own interior decorating business. Take patterns and whatnot in the back of the Land-Rover. Personal service. Hotels, houses, offices, you name it. That’s better!” She put her empty glass, froth sliding lazily down its side, on the table and fixed Alec with eyes that were neither grey nor green.

“Will you have the other half?” Alec, surprising himself, said.

He fetched it from the bar and one for himself. The girl looked at the gold band on his left hand as he set down the glasses.

“Are you married?”

Alec nodded.

“So am I,” she said.

Sarah, in anticipation of Josh’s family, his Aunts Beatty (newly widowed) and Mirrie, and Frieda with her husband Harry who had with alacrity accepted her invitation – was putting finishing touches to her dinner at which she was determined to excel.

Her will and her staying power had paid off and she was shortly to take the final steps which would acknowledge her conversion, the criterion for which was love of Judaism rather than love of her marriage partner – an important distinction insisted upon by the rabbis as valid. Having completed the requisite period of intensive study with Rabbi Magnus, steeped herself in environmental experience both with Kitty and with Mrs Halberstadt, run her home in the prescribed way, attended synagogue services regularly and presented herself to the Rabbinical Court at six-monthly intervals, she was now ready to satisfy them that she was genuinely willing and able to accept the religious discipline – which would endure for a lifetime, and through children beyond – without reservation. This would be followed by the formal act of conversion, a visit to the ritual bath.

Rachel had said she was mad. Although she had herself (out of curiosity) visited the mikveh before her marriage to Patrick, she considered the hidebound laws concerning family purity both archaic and repugnant, and teased Sarah about her determination to live by them after her first immersion. The detailed code of behaviour
– the direct result, according to Rachel, of the fear and distaste with which rabbinic Judaism had regarded the primary functions of a woman’s body – designed to impose a suspension of all bodily contact during a woman’s menstruation and for seven days afterwards (during which time she could not even pass her husband the salt), implied a negative animus hardly calculated to enhance a woman’s self-esteem. She was unimpressed by the notion, subscribed to by Sarah who thought it both practical and romantic, that by denying a husband access to his wife for part of every month (at the end of which she would purify herself in the mikveh) their physical relationship would be raised to a spiritual level, she would remain as attractive to him as when she stood beneath the marriage canopy and the relationship would never grow stale.

Sarah was not bothered by Rachel’s ridicule. The institution of the Sabbath, she told her sister-in-law, had also been mocked until it came to be universally accepted. Their only meeting ground, as far as the religion was concerned, was their mutual condemnation of the fact that in Judaism while the men were well catered for ceremonially, from circumcision and redemption of the first-born to coming of age, there was no “hallelujah of childbirth”, no “barmitzvah of the menopause” to celebrate a woman’s rites of passage.

Now that she had come to the end of her course of instruction Sarah had, Josh said, an answer for everything. Often she kept him awake into the night with bizarre queries such as whether the blessing for vegetables was as pertinent to a bag of crisps as to potatoes, or an exposition of illegitimacy, which in Jewish law referred not to a child born out of wedlock but to the offspring of a proscribed marriage, who was
thereafter referred to as a mamzer, and could never be relieved of his condition.

She was a mine of information and was determined, starting with the New Year dinner, that the door of her house, like that of Josh’s mother and those of the Abrahamic tent, would always be open, and that she would be for Josh like “a fruitful vine in the innermost parts of his house”.

Coming into the kitchen Josh watched her at the stove, her hair casting shadows over her face, her tee-shirt tight over his child in her belly, and wondered how all his life both disappointed and a disappointment, he had got to be so lucky.

Being married to Sarah was, he thought, like being on perpetual holiday. He had not, as when he had lived at home beneath the aegis of his father, constantly to be minding his “p’s” and “q’s” for fear of giving offence; he was not required, as when he had been engaged to the demanding Paula, constantly to be dancing attendance on Sarah. There was in their relationship at the same time both a closeness and a distance, which he had never found in the confines of his own family where there had never it seemed been sufficient room to breathe.

Busy with tasting and with wooden spoons, Sarah had not heard him come in. He crossed the quiet vinyl of the floor and put his arms around his wife.

“Take care!” she said. “According to the school of Hillel you can divorce me if I spoil your cooking!”