To Live in Peace (8 page)

Kitty’s letter encompassed several pages. To Sarah, reading it, it was as if her mother-in-law was in the room:

“What news from New York?” Hettie Klopman said.

They were having dinner around the mirrored table at the house in Winnington Road, Herbert and Hettie and old Mrs Klopman and Rachel and Patrick and Carol, who was on her own in London and whom Hettie had invited in Kitty’s absence.

“Talking of New York,” Herbert said, “did you hear the story of the Jap who was walking along Fifth Avenue, looking for Tiffany’s? He goes up and down the street but can’t locate it. Eventually he stops a little old lady. ‘Excuse me, Madam,’ he says politely, ‘but can you direct me to Tiffany’s.’ The little old lady looks him up and down. ‘How come you got problems finding Tiffany’s?’ she says. ‘Pearl Harbour you found!’

“And there’s another one about the millionaire who fancies himself as a naval man. He buys himself a ninety-three-foot Browerd and moors it on the Hudson River. He gets a white jacket with Captain’s braid on the sleeve, and a peaked Captain’s cap, and throws a magnificent party on the yacht. He welcomes his passengers as they come on board, orders the crew around, takes the wheel in his snazzy uniform. When the party’s over and the guests have all gone he says to his wife: ‘How did I do?’ She shrugs her shoulders. ‘Fine,’
she says. ‘To me you’re a Captain, to the guests you’re a Captain, to the crew you’re a Captain, to the children you’re a Captain. But tell me something, Hymie, to a Captain are you a Captain?”’

“She doesn’t like the heat,” Rachel said of Kitty, answering her mother-in-law’s question.

“She’s lucky,” Hettie said. “We could do with a bit of it here. It’s supposed to be summer still but it’s freezing outside. You could shut that window a bit, Herbert.”

“Will that make it warmer outside?” Herbert said, getting up from the table.

“The heat wouldn’t worry me,” Hettie went on, ignoring the witticism, “it can’t be too hot for me. What I’d be terrified of is getting mugged. Before you know where you are they stick a knife in your back and take everything you possess.”

“That reminds me of the story,” Herbert said, “about the Jewish couple who had the corner shop. They were locking up one night when Becky says to Abie: ‘Abie, you know something, all week I’m working and you never take me out anywhere. You never take me to a theatre, you never take me to a restaurant, you never take me to a film. Take me to a film, Abie.’ ‘How can we go to a film?’ Abie says. ‘What about the takings?’ ‘I’ll look after the takings,’ Becky says. And she takes the bag with the cash and puts it in her knickers.

“They go to the cinema, sit through the whole programme, and when they come out Becky says: ‘Abie, I got something to tell you. The takings is gone!’ ‘How come the takings is gone?’ Abie says. ‘Well I’ll tell you. There was this man sitting next to me in the pictures and the whole time he had his hand up my skirt. When the film finished and the lights went up I realised the takings had gone.’

“‘Becky,’ Abie says, ‘how can you let him do such a thing?’ ‘I’m sorry Abie,’ Becky says, ‘but how was I to know he was a thief?’”

Rachel had to laugh. It was not so much Herbert’s jokes as the way that he told them. He was much sought after as an entertainer at charity events or as an after dinner speaker.

She had ambivalent feelings about Patrick’s parents. There was no denying their affection for her but sometimes Rachel felt strangled by it, wishing that they would leave her and Patrick alone. Not a day went by when Hettie did not ring up, on one excuse or another, to speak to her son, and sometimes Rachel wondered if he had ever, other than physically, left home. Take tonight. Two of Rachel’s college friends, Sue and Duncan, had invited them to drive out to the river and have dinner in a pub. Because it was Tuesday they were expected at Winnington Road. It had become a ritual, as had Friday nights.

“I don’t want to go there every Tuesday,” Rachel told Patrick.

“Grandma gets upset.”

“Duncan only sees his grandmother once a year at Christmas.”

“She lives in Perth.”

“Sometimes I wish we lived in Perth. Ring up your mother.”

“We can’t let her down at the last minute. You should have said before…”

“How could I? Sue only just phoned.”

“Anyway, you can’t let Carol go on her own,” Patrick said. Rachel said nothing.

“And what about my shirts?”

Patrick’s shirts were a bone of contention and had been the subject of their first married row. Ever since leaving home Patrick had taken his dirty shirts home to Winnington Road where they were washed and ironed by the maid. Rachel had protested.

“Are you going to iron them?”

She looked at Patrick as if he had gone mad.

“Who irons shirts?”

“I happen to like them ironed.”

“I’ll buy you an iron.”

“When have I got time?” Patrick was working for his membership of the Royal College of Psychiatrists.

“I didn’t say you had. I just said…”

“She likes me to bring them.”

“I dare say she does.”

“I can’t see the objection.”

“Can’t you really?”

And he couldn’t. Any more than he could see that they should have gone out with Sue and Duncan. Patrick, Rachel had discovered, had a blind spot as far as his mother was concerned. It was as if she were fine china – when she was tough as old boots – which must be handled with care; a vintage wine which must neither be shaken nor upset. Rachel did not dislike Hettie but resented her hold upon Patrick. Lately her mother-in-law had been putting her oar in about where they should live. Although when they had to leave the council flat they had decided upon rented accommodation before their planned world trip, Hettie had made it clear that she thought they should “settle” and that their child should not be born in what she referred to as a “make-shift” home. Apart from offering to buy them a house (their wedding present), Hettie fed Patrick with details of
three-bedroomed
properties which happened, by chance, to be
just round the corner from Winnington Road, or sent estate agent’s details through the post of “suitable” residences and “convenient” semi-detacheds. Rachel, whose plans did not include three-bedroomed domesticity, threw the missives into the waste-paper basket without glancing at them, but sometimes she saw Patrick looking at her as if he were torn.

They had decided before they were married – theirs was to be a way of life which eschewed the bourgeois values in which they had both been reared. Watching Patrick engaged in conversation with old Mrs Klopman, Rachel knew that she was ensconced in the camp of the enemy and that it was going to be an uphill task. It was strange how she had been duped. Struggling to release herself from her own parental stranglehold, she thought she had found in Patrick a like-minded spirit whose thirst for independence matched her own, but it had been all talk. She wondered if she was going to succeed in prising him from his mother when she had not even managed to extricate his shirts.

Her sister Carol (who was deep in conversation with Herbert, Rachel would not have been surprised if he was telling her another joke) married to Alec, who had a country practice, represented the epitome of the lifestyle to which Rachel had been determined she would not subscribe. With lives circumscribed by the constraints of their religion, horizons bounded by the next festival or communal activity, what margin was there for growth?

“Found anything yet?” Hettie asked Patrick. She meant a house.

“I haven’t had time.” Patrick addressed his plate.

“We haven’t been looking,” Rachel said.

“You haven’t got long.” Hettie meant before the baby. “How are your renovations going?” she said pointedly to Carol.

“It’s still at the demolition stage,” Carol said of the Queen Anne House. “Another few weeks and it should be taking shape.”

“Six bedrooms, isn’t it?” Hettie said pointedly. “A guest suite on the top floor for your mother when she wants to stay, a nursery for the new baby, and a great big garden for the children.”

“Children need a garden,” old Mrs Klopman said. “I remember Patrick…”

“Did anyone hear the news?” Rachel said, changing the subject.

“The Israelis have bulldozed Arab houses,” Hettie said, successfully deflected from the topic of Carol’s new home, “I saw it on the six o’clock news.”

“To punish terrorists and their collaborators,” Rachel said, “which is exactly what the British did during the Mandate.”

“What annoys me,” Herbert said, “is that the whole meshugasse is described in Arab terms.”

“Herbert’s very touchy,” old Mrs Klopman said.

“They will talk about PLO ‘guerillas’…”

“For the love of God, Herbert, what are they then?”

“Terrorists. Murderers. Take Judea and Samaria,” Herbert warmed to his theme, “inaccurately referred to as the ‘West Bank’…”

“The Arabs don’t want a state on the West Bank,” Rachel said, “they want to eat us up alive!”

“If your friend Begin had his way,” Patrick said, “Israel will subject the Arabs on the West Bank…” he looked at his father “…all right, Judea and Samaria, to discrimination, as aliens, in a territory where many of them have lived for generations.”

“If a state created by newcomers on land where there is already a long settled population is illegitimate,” Rachel said, “then most nation states are illegitimate. Look at America, look at…”

“The land was promised,” Herbert said, interrupting. “And the settlers are there as proof of that promise.”

“The Bible also says that we must treat the alien and the stranger with kindness and sympathy,” Carol ventured. She was not well versed in the political argument but felt somehow that the activities of Menachem Begin, approved of by her sister Rachel, were not in accordance with the spirit of Judaism which she had learned from her late father.

“You can’t be obsessed with a Holy Land,” Patrick said, “to the extent of annexing great chunks of it and then expect to be respected as a Holy People. Rachel would like me to believe that the refugees simply don’t exist.”

“Not at all, merely that they have not been ‘displaced’.”

“If the Arabs feel themselves to be diplaced, Rache, then they’re displaced. You can’t tell an Arab you don’t really feel what you feel and I will define your feelings for you.”

Old Mrs Klopman nodded.

“To say that they’re not a group, with a separate national identity, is no different from Arafat saying that the Jews are nothing more than a religious sect with no rights to national self-determination.”

“Telephone!” Herbert said, looking to the women at the table as he heard the bell.

Rachael stood up and made for the hall.

“You shouldn’t have let her go, Patrick,” Hettie said in deference to her daughter-in-law’s pregnancy.

“It might be for me,” Carol said, “I left this number with the baby-sitter.”

“God forbid!” Hettie said.

“At least it’s a diversion,” old Mrs Klopman said.

“It’s Alec!” Rachel called to Carol. “I think he’s in a disco.”

“Will you excuse me?”

Carol picked up the receiver in the hall. The telephone was mottled to look like marble and trimmed with ormolu.

“Where are you?” she had to shout against the pop music that emanated from the instrument.

“In the bar.” Alec was staying at the King’s Arms and Royal Hotel in Godalming. “How are the children?”

“Fine. A bit cooped up in the flat. They keep squabbling. They miss the garden.”

“Wait till they have the new one.”

“How’s it going?”

“They’ve found some wet rot which is holding things up a bit, and one of the steels we’d waited two weeks for was the wrong size. Are you getting the curtains organised your end?”

“I can’t walk very far,” Carol said. “I get this pain…”

“Don’t overdo it. We’ll manage without curtains.”

“…and I’m still feeling sick.”

“When are you seeing Morris Goldapple?”

“On Friday.”

“Don’t forget to tell him everything.”

“I miss you.”

“I miss you, too.”

“We’re in the middle of dinner. And the West Bank. Rachel is doing her number…”

“Give my love to everyone.”

“What was that?” Carol said.

“What?”

“I thought I heard someone say something.”

“There are people waiting for the phone.”

“Love you,” Carol said.

“Love you, too.”

In Hettie’s dining-room the plates had been cleared away and a pavlova the size of a cartwheel, groaning with raspberries and kiwi fruit, had been set on the table.

“Pavlova was Jewish,” Herbert said to no one in particular.

“Alec sends his love,” Carol reported.

“Sounded as if he was having a rave up.”

“He was in the bar.”

“When the cat’s away…”

“Shut up Rachel,” Patrick said.

“Did you hear the one about two acquaintances who run into each other in a bar after an absence of many years?” Herbert said. “They have a few drinks together then one of them gets up and says to his friend: ‘I don’t like you, I can’t stand you, and what’s more I don’t want anything to do with you.’ ‘What’s the matter?’ the other one says. ‘What have I done?’ ‘I think you’re unpleasant, you’re overbearing, I don’t like your political views, and above all I think you’re pretentious.’ The second man looks at his friend in amazement. ‘Who on earth are you talking about,’ he says. ‘Moi?’”