The Mandelbaum Gate (25 page)

Words
cannot express my astonishment, my dear Barbara. let alone my horror. I said
that I, as your most intimate friend, must emphatically deny any such idea on
your part. I said that your acquaintanceship with Mr Clegg had been brief,
casual and quite innocent of any romantic nonsense, since you were, to my
certain knowledge, not in a remote degree inclined towards matrimony. It would
be disastrous if you made a mess of your life.

It was naturally disconcerting to me to be informed by
a third party that Clegg was in your part of the world. The fact that you had
spoken of him to Mr Hamilton would appear to me. pending further evidence, to
indicate …

Barbara
said aloud,
‘Pending further evidence
— Oh, my God! Oh, Jesus Christ!’
What has it come to, she thought, between Ricky and me? Ricky’s letters were
usually written with difficulty, woodenly. But this uncharacteristic
outpouring, this confession, almost — what had it come to? It’s like a letter,
she thought, from an insufferable man to his unfaithful mistress, or a wife to
a wandering husband, or a possessive mother to a teenage daughter, or a
neurotic Mother Superior to a nun with a craving to get out. Who am I to Ricky
and who is she to me? She’s only a friend. I’ve taken no vows.

Barbara
let up the venetian blinds of her room, hot as the Israeli morning already was.
She sat down and brought Ricky’s image to mind, her dark, short-cut, curly
hair, the plump, apple-coloured tomboy face. Small and sturdy, Ricky took shape
before her, wearing her tweed skirt and wool jumper with flat brogues in
winter, a cotton dress and sandals in summer; dark hairs showed through her
stockings on school days and, on summer holidays, shaggily coated her bare
legs. On many summer evenings before school broke up, Barbara had sat on the
small veranda outside Ricky’s sitting-room, drinking after-dinner coffee,
listening to the gramophone record in the background, her eyes fixed absently
on Ricky’s dark hairy legs. Barbara was aware of them now, as she recalled her
own fascinated stare, as she thought, how has an ordinary friendship between
two women reached this point? How? Ricky must be a latent Lesbian; and I? I’m
in her clutches, but she’s in mine. Yes, why, Barbara thought, haven’t I told
her about Harry? Why? Or why haven’t I written as I intended to do, why not? It
was only right if she was my closest friend, as I thought she was. It is only
natural that Ricky should expect me to confide what’s going on.

Only
the night before, Barbara had returned to the excessively difficult attempt
which had hung over the past three weeks, to write an honest letter to Ricky.
Again, it had been unsuccessful, Barbara could see, from where she sat, on the
writing-table close by, abandoned sheet after sheet of paper, not yet torn up
and tidied away for the morning, where she had left them on the frustrated
night before:

DEAR RICKY,

I have been meaning to tell you —

DEAR RICKY,

I know you will be surprised, but I feel I
must —

MY DEAR RICKY,

I have been touring strenuously so haven’t
had time to write properly. But now I want to write a decent letter and tell
you, first of all —

VERY DEAR RICKY,

You will be happy to know I am hoping to
marry Harry Clegg —the archaeologist whom I met last summer. We are very much
in love. Much depends on the decision of the Church as to the annulment of his
previous marriage, bu —

DEAR RICKY,

The heat, combined with strenuous —

I didn’t
tell her, Barbara thought, because I intended to write.

And I
haven’t written because I was afraid, and that’s the truth. It’s as if I were
married to Ricky, only worse.

She
thought, it’s the male element in Ricky that has attracted me. Then she
imagined herself in bed with Ricky, in physical contact, shuddered a lot, and
thought, I must get married, I really must. This is no good. She recalled the
freedom of last summer, and longed for her humorous lover.

At all
events, she thought, I must leave the school. Ricky has become over-familiar
and I must leave the school. Immediately; not even a term’s notice; I must
write and do that. This decision brought her immense relief. Barbara could not
understand why she had not thought of anything so simple before. She had small
private means and was not pressed to find another job immediately.

She sat
up to the table and wrote:

DEAR RICKY,

There are many things I cannot explain at the
moment, but I shall do so in time. I do beg you to have patience with me, both
for failing to discuss my plans with you and for now reaching a decision I feel
must pain and know must inconvenience you.

I can’t return to school, and regret very
much that I can’t give you a term’s notice. I can only hope you will be able to
replace me at this short notice, and it won’t upset your trip to Brittany.
Please, dear Ricky, go to Brittany for my sake, or I shall feel bad about it.

My plans for the future are so far
unsettled, but I truly
can’t
return to school.

I’ll let you know later about collecting my
things, and will ring you myself. as soon as I get back to England. I’m going
to Jordan next week to visit the shrines — can’t say how long I’ll stay there.

Don’t worry about this, will you? I assure
you there’s nothing to worry about.

Love,

BARBARA

She
saw, without stopping to bother about it, that her handwriting was slightly
larger and heavier than usual. She sealed and stamped the letter, took it down
to the letter-box, thrust it through the slit, went and had a look out of doors
at the shining street and returned to her room, where she pulled down the cool
blinds and slumped, heavy with relief and the recent weight of what she had
been carrying. She felt very much one of the Vaughans at that moment. Whatever
the points of inward debate or the pinchings of self-accusation, none of the
family would have hesitated to act otherwise; intrusive people must be put
down, and that was the long and the short of it. She now remembered saying to Harry,
when they had discussed their marriage:

‘I don’t
know how I shall break it to Miss Rickward.’

‘How do
you mean?’

How did
she mean? It was only possible to answer, ‘Well, she’ll miss me. We’ve become
very attached after six years, and she doesn’t think of me as marrying.’

‘Oh.,
bugger
her,’
said Harry.

Recalling
this, Barbara laughed to herself and opened the letter from her favourite
cousin, Michael Aaronson. She had not expected to hear from him as they did
not correspond regularly, but she reflected that Michael always seemed to turn
up, by mail, or in person, at a welcome time. And his news was, in fact, an
announcement of his arrival in Israel the next day. He had been ‘sent or
called, depending on how you look at it’ to ‘confer or be conferred with’ on
the Eichmann trial.

Michael
was diffident about his career. He had taken his degree in international law
before the war, and had been called in for the Nuremberg Trials. He had since
been occupied in practice as a solicitor, but Barbara perceived his pleasure at
being once more involved in an expert’s field. He expected to be in Jerusalem
for two weeks. He would be fairly occupied, but ‘Be sure to be there,’ he
wrote.

She
realized how lonely she must have been, and felt so good about the prospect of
seeing Michael that the thought of Ricky’s lonely distress came back guiltily
upon her, but even so she did not regret her letter. She went out for a walk,
called in at the travel agent and rearranged her dates; today was a Monday, and
she had planned to cross into Jordan on the Wednesday of that week. It was
necessary to give advance notice to the travel people, since they were obliged
to make advance arrangements for a crossing of the Mandelbaum Gate, and only
certain days were available to individual travellers. She obtained a permit for
Friday of the following week, which would probably precede Michael’s departure,
but she was unwilling to linger in the country much longer.

For it
had become imperative for her to continue the pilgrimage. She sat in a café,
trifling with her coffee spoon. The relief of leaving her job and learning of
Michael’s arrival enabled her to summon peacefully to her attention the image
of Ricky, still mutedly importuning. Ricky would, of course, ascribe hypocrisy to
her motives in coming to the Holy Land ‘on a pilgrimage’. Barbara was content
to be thought deceitful, hypocritical. It consoled her guilt towards Ricky.
And yet her own ruthlessness and swift action continued to surprise and please
her. She thought, I’m satisfied with that letter. But Ricky’s a kind woman, she’ll
be hit by my leaving her. In a sense Ricky gave me a home.

She
sagged with relief. It felt marvellous to be homeless. Ricky would think of the
motives that had drawn her here to the Holy Land. A religious pilgrimage! A
lover. A man. Barbara was already a Catholic when she had met Ricky; they had
carefully avoided religious discussions; and only once or twice had she
discerned Ricky’s irritation with some observance of her religion, and felt
irritation when Ricky let fall a remark about some Catholic dogma which
revealed not only her disapproval, but a muddled notion of what the dogma was.
Ricky was all for doing the right thing for the right reason; she was
fierce-principled about motives. To Barbara, one of the first attractions of
her religion’s moral philosophy had been its recognition of the helpless
complexity of motives that prompted an action, and its consequent emphasis on
actual words, thoughts and deeds; there was seldom one motive only in the grown
person; the main thing was that motives should harmonize. Ricky did not
understand harmony as an ideal in this sense. She assumed that it was both
right that people should tear themselves to bits about their motives and
possible for them to make up their minds what their motives were. Herein,
Barbara reflected, lies the difficulty in dealing with Ricky if I should ever
be drawn to have it out with her. For she has settled with herself that her
motives are sound, and she opposes my marriage in good conscience.

She
decided, in any case, never to have it out with Ricky. Having it out with
people was not in her nature, all the Vaughan in her upbringing went against
it. She longed for Harry, the only man she had known who conducted his courtship
with few words and without any demands for heart-sought declarations and the
wear and tear of mutual disclosures from the interior.

She
thought of Ricky, sitting in her room on a winter evening, leaning back,
relaxing among the effervescence of school life, the tumble of books and
papers, with her legs dark-shadowed under her stockings. Ricky’s own books,
clean and bright, lined the walls to the ceiling. Ricky had no doubt read most
of them, closed them, and put them away, unchanged by them as they were by the
passage of the years. Titles that she had not been conscious of taking special
note of appeared before Barbara’s inward eye:

The
World of Zen, Antic Hay,
The
Notebooks
of Sigmund Freud,
A
Skeleton Key to Finnegan’s Wake,
Neurosis and Human Growth, Thus Spake
…
One way and another, she felt she knew Ricky through and through, and firmly
closed her mind to its whispering intelligence that Ricky, having now, in that
letter, surprised her, might do so again. Coleridge’s
Table Talk,
Aristotle’s
Poetics … Oh well, thought Barbara, paying her bill. And, feeling specially
strong, healthy and Vaughan-like she returned to her hotel to see if any word
had come from Harry Clegg. At the front door she met Freddy Hamilton emerging
with a zipper-bag in his hand and a suitcase at his feet. A Legation car drew
up.

‘I’m
just off to Tel Aviv; got a job to do there,’ he said. ‘Hot, isn’t it? I’ll be
glad to be back with my friends in Jordan. weekend after next. It’s cooler
there. When are you going over?’

She was
involuntarily reserved. ‘Next week, probably. It depends.’ But she told him of
her cousin’s promised arrival the next day. ‘Something to do with the Eichmann
trial.’

This
seemed to remind Freddy Hamilton of something. He said, ‘I’m not sure that it’s
safe for you to go over, really. Let me make some serious inquiries first. I’m
sure they don’t welcome Jews or part-Jews, especially coming by way of Israel.
At the worst you’d probably be deported. Probably — but one never knows — they
get hot-headed. Is your fiancé meeting you in Jerusalem?’

‘I don’t
know. I don’t think so.’

‘It
might be better if he could. Those Dead Sea scholars might get better
protection for you than the British Government could. That’s what things have
come to. How well you’re looking! The climate must suit you.’

Thereupon
she forgave him for gossiping about her to his mother. All the same, she would
be careful what she told him in the future, now that Ricky had met the old
lady. And so, on that Saturday of the following week, when she next saw Freddy
with his friends, unexpectedly, in the curiosity shop in Jordan, she decided to
answer, if he should inquire about her fiancé, ‘I’ve gone off him.’ That would
put an end to the gossip. ft was not Freddy Hamilton’s business, certainly not
his mother’s, nor Ricky’s. ‘I’ve gone off him’ — light and airy. She decided to
stick to that, and they could think as they pleased.