The Mandelbaum Gate (26 page)

The best piece of
furniture in the room was the camp-bed, and Barbara lay upon it, awake, gazing
straight through the small window at the night sky, which, by contact with her
emotional eyesight, was elated with stars and lyrical energy.

The
camp-bed was so new that the old monk’s domestic man, himself an ancient, but
sturdier, benignity, had to untie the cords and wrappings, fresh from the shop.
The servant’s few teeth caught the light from the paraffin lamp as he gloated
over his treasure of a camp-bed: ‘One of our ladies, not rich, has given this
to keep open the door for strangers. Here the officers are afraid to come at darkness.
God is good.’ He muttered on, while they set up the bed, stiff at the joints as
it was with newness. Through the thin walls Freddy could be heard moving about
and creaking his bed as he sat, presumably taking off his shoes since a
shoe-like thud on the floor, dropping dead-weight with tiredness, was followed
presently by another. Alexandros’s car started up below; he was to send early
tomorrow a young woman, Suzi Ramdez, who was accustomed to taking English
visitors around the country, and who could be trusted.

Now
Barbara lay awake, marvelling at her escape from the convent. She was also
extremely intrigued by the change that had come over Freddy Hamilton, and by
the fact that he had engineered the escape at all. She thought, it’s like the
enactment of a reluctant nun’s dream, and she laughed softly in the darkness,
thinking of the absurdity of the phrase ‘escape from the convent’ that had kept
recurring in their conversation in the car, on the way to the Potter’s Field,
and which didn’t really apply to her, a free, travelling Englishwoman, at all.

But it
had been an escape of a kind, as witness to which she could cite her present
sense of release. She was sure there was a certain amount of physical risk in
her venture into Jordan. But try as she might, she did not care. And the urgent
sense of apprehension she should be feeling, all facts considered, was
lacking, try as she might to reason with herself. If she should be arrested
openly there would be some sort of fuss, if she were to come to some secret
harm, well that was that. The reality of the hour was her escape from the
convent, and there was no room for any sense of a more immediate danger in the
face of the familiar and positive dangers of heart and mind that were, in any
case, likely to arise anywhere one went, across all borders and through all
gates.

She
thought, it was really very funny, that escape from the convent. It would make
a good story to tell her cousins on the Vaughan side when they asked her about
her visit to the Middle East. And the Vaughan side of herself lay on the
camp-bed considering the funny aspect of the affair, since this was what they
liked best to do; whenever the Vaughans were thrown, provided they managed to
pick themselves up, they usually ended by making a good story of it.

For the
first time since her arrival in the Middle East she felt all of a piece;
Gentile and Jewess, Vaughan and Aaronson; she had caught some of Freddy’s
madness, having recognized by his manner in the car, as they careered across
Jerusalem, that he had regained some lost or forgotten element in his nature
and was now, at last, for some reason, flowering in the full irrational norm of
the stock she also derived from: unselfquestioning hierarchists, anarchistic
imperialists, blood-sporting zoophiles, sceptical believers — the whole
paradoxical lark that had secured, among their bones, the sane life for the
dead generations of British Islanders. She had caught a bit of Freddy’s madness
and for the first time in this Holy Land, felt all of a piece, a Gentile
Jewess, a private-judging Catholic, a shy adventuress.

‘This
is more fun,’ Freddy had said in the car, ‘than I’ve had for years.’

‘It is
for me fun that I have sent to Suzi Ramdez a secret message in the middle of
the night, to her bed where she sleeps. A very fine woman, Suzi Ramdez. Her
father would come to me with a knife —’

‘Is
there any danger of his finding out?’ Freddy said.

‘Plenty
danger. But Joe Ramdez does not kill. If he comes to me tonight, tomorrow, with
the knife, still he does not strike. Alexandros has plenty friends, and those
friends are enemies of Ramdez,’

‘You
never have a dull moment out here,’ Freddy said, meanwhile grinning at
Barbara, who sat in the back with her suitcases and savoured Freddy’s phrase ‘out
here’. Every place east of Europe or west of the Atlantic Ocean was more or
less one of the colonies to Freddy.

‘We did
that escape from the convent beautifully,’ Freddy said. ‘Great fun. We did it a
treat. Every stair was creaky —’

‘Every
stair,’ Barbara said. ‘I nearly died.’

‘I
expect I’d have been lynched by the nuns if I’d been caught. Have they ever had
a man in the convent before?’

‘Not in
the sleeping quarters. Maybe, of course, the doctor.’

‘The
doctor,’ said Alexandros, ‘is not a man. The doctor is permitted in the harem
after sunset even. “Many doctors come by night to the rich man’s harem”: Arab
proverb by author Alexandros.’

Freddy
went on elaborating his version of the escape from the convent, and Barbara
added her bits, slumped in her dressing-gown among the suitcases, building up,
for Alexandros, the breathless suspense of the descent down the convent
staircase. ‘I nearly
died!
’ It was not any escape from any real convent,
it was an unidentified confinement of the soul she had escaped from; she knew
it already and was able to indulge in her slight feeling of disappointment that
they had not been caught. It was fun to get away but it would also have been
fun to get caught and to have had to explain something, and for Freddy to have
explained. It would have made a funny story to tell Harry later on.

She
could not understand how Freddy, in the course of the few hours since she had
last seen him in the Cartwrights’ garden, had so come to lose his unbecoming
and boring balance, his tepid correctness. He was not at this moment so
terribly drunk, and had certainly gathered enough wits to plan the night’s
escapade and the elaborate course of the bright pilgrimage to come, the details
of which he was now explaining with enthusiastic precision. He had thought of
everything. ‘You, as Suzi’s servant, will have to be deaf and dumb, because, of
course, you can’t speak Arabic. I’ll come as far as Jericho with you, then
leave you with Suzi, as I ought to be back at the office Tuesday at the latest….
Suzi Ramdez apparently is experienced in Catholic pilgrimages … Marvellous
plan, don’t you think?’

Barbara
reclined, happily making her responses in the dialect of their tribe: ‘Absolutely
brilliant … terrific idea, Freddy … Yes, honestly, I’m thrilled…’

Well,
of course, Alexandros thought of it first.’

‘No,
pardon me, you had the first word.’ Alexandros rushed his car into gear as they
turned up the Hill of Evil Counsel.

We both
cast the first stone,’ Freddy garbled lyrically, and went on to tell Barbara
how he’d got some boring letters from home and written some boring replies but
had put them all down Alexandros’s lavatory.

‘What a
brilliant idea,’ Barbara said, and half-wished she had thought of doing the
same with Ricky’s letter and her reply to it. Ricky must have received her
letter early last week. Barbara had not expected to hear from Ricky, for her
plan at the time of writing had been to leave Israel within the next few days.
Fortunately, now, it would be ages before she knew, if she ever did know, how
badly Ricky had taken it. Barbara had not supplied an address in Jordan. ‘Marvellous
idea,’ Barbara said. ‘I had a ridiculous letter from England to answer last
week, but I answered it. I should have put it all down the loo, reply and all,
that’s what I should have done.’

‘One
always should,’ Freddy advised her, as from long experience. ‘Any
correspondence that’s bloody boring, just pull the chain on it. That’s my
motto.’

With
only a small delay after their first battering onslaught at the door, they were
handed over by Alexandros to the ancient monk, who peered and smiled behind his
lamp, and handed them over to his ancient friend who had turned up, crumpled
from sleep in his blue robe. They were then taken over a stony path through the
yard to another, more ramshackle house. There Alexandros left them, embracing
Freddy on both cheeks, while Freddy, first remarking cheerfully, ‘like a couple
of French generals’, responded.

It was going on towards
four in the morning when she was left alone in the little attic room to which
she had been taken. It contained a large, sagging horse-hair arm-chair with
the stuffing emerging from both arms, two sacks which served for floor mats, a
marble-topped table on which stood a basin and a ewer filled with dusty water,
a wooden box on which stood a pair of field-glasses in good and shiny
condition, a new cake of carbolic soap, a dented celluloid miniature of the Taj
Mahal, an English novel, dated 1910, entitled Diamond Cut
Diamond,
a tin
of lighter fuel, a broken pottery beaker, a small rough towel marked ‘Hotel
Dixie’, and a pair of elephant-figure book-ends. Another large wooden box,
marked ‘Fragile’, was open and contained, at the bottom, about six pairs of
unused sandals; there was a large wicker hamper with the lid half-gaping to
reveal a top layer of gold-embroidered ecclesiastical vestments, and the room
also contained an icon hung on a nail in the wall, a tarnished silver
altar-lamp, a pair of primitive mill-stones such as the country women still
used for grinding corn, and, on the flat top of this hand-mill, a well-worn
pack of playing cards and a packet of drinking straws. Barbara, her luggage,
the new camp-bed and a grey army blanket had now joined the company. She,
having taken some note of all this, had turned out the lamp, and now lay in her
dressing-gown, with the blanket folded at her feet in view of the warmth of the
air that coursed in towards her from the stars, and was moved to praise the
sweet Lord’s ingenuity, marvelling at her escape from the convent and at Freddy’s
unexpectedness. Later, when she discovered that Freddy had obliterated these
days from his memory, what shocked her most of all was that so much of that
carefree and full-hearted Freddy had turned sour with guilt. She herself then
reminded him of this or that delightful incident, piecing the days together for
him, fragment by fragment. But they were, to him, stolen days, and not for many
years could he come to think of them with total pleasure.

But
even now, before the pilgrimage had begun, Barbara discerned some temporary
quality in Freddy’s mood. Not knowing the cause, she formed the theory then, as
she lay contemplating the early morning sky above the Potter’s Field, that
Freddy was given to fluxes of temperament, and, like a man who knows he has
played the fool while drunk, might presently regret or might laugh unhappily
about all this wild commitment of his. Not that Freddy’s new spontaneity and
forthcoming spirits resembled a fearful mania. He was decidedly at ease.

A
change began to come over him, she thought, in the Cartwrights’ garden, when
everyone was arguing so absurdly about the rights and wrongs of my Jewish
blood: ‘Jewish blood or not,’ had said Freddy, ‘the point is, it’s hers…. And
the trouble with you,’ Freddy had said, ‘is that you blow neither hot nor cold,
you are lukewarm — how does it go, Miss Vaughan? — lukewarm, and I’ll vomit
thee out of my mouth.’ It would make a splendid story to tell her Vaughan
cousins. Freddy must meet the Vaughans; his next home leave, she would get her
cousin Miles Vaughan to ask Freddy to dinner. Very likely she would be married
by then. Very likely. The Vaughans would accept Harry Clegg without a murmur
once she was married to him, and they had seen the funny side of everything.

The
expected letter from Harry had not arrived, but a note from his friend at the
American Embassy in Amman had been enclosed in the envelope, smuggled in by the
American bag, which had appeared under the door last Wednesday morning. This
friend, whom she had never met, was obviously well informed about their
situation; he wrote informally but cautiously, and she understood that she
must read between the lines:

DEAR BARBARA,

Harry asked me to let you know he has left
for Rome to see some members of the Congregation of the Rota about some ancient
documents. He’ll write you from there some time next week. He’ll be staying at
the Hotel Regina Carlton.

He doesn’t feel, by the way. that you’d be
vitally interested in the excavations at Qumran at the moment, and he isn’t
there to show you around. I’ve been to that area myself, of course, but, not
being an archaeologist, I get more fun out of the many books that have been
written about the findings of the scrolls and the excavated Essene community
offices. There’s some talk of a documentary film of it though. Some of the unit
(though not the producer, of course …) who are working in the Transjordan at
the moment, on the Lawrence of Arabia movie, toured the site and think there’s
good material for a documentary..

Well, Harry looked fine and sends his love.
But you’ll be seeing him yourself quite soon, I hope.

Sincerely yours,

MARTIN J. FONTEYN

From
this, she gathered that Harry had gone to be interviewed about his plea for
annulment at the Congregation of the Rota in Rome, where all the documents had
been sent. And also that he did not want her to go to Jordan, not only because
he was no longer there but also because he now thought it unsafe. The whole
rigmarole about the film unit visiting Qumran was plainly an occasion for citing
the case of the producer, a Jew who was prominently reported to have been
conceded permission to work on Jordanian location only on the strength of the
film’s economic benefit to the country, but was obliged, so people said, to
sleep on a yacht each night, three miles away from Arab soil. Barbara rightly
deduced that what Mr Fonteyn was trying to convey was that Harry now considered
it risky for her to travel into Jordan on account of her Jewish blood.