The Mandelbaum Gate

  ‘You can trust me, Abdul,’ Freddy said. ‘If there’s something I can do to help her, anything that you may hear of, let me know. When will she be leaving Jordan? How will she manage it unobserved?’

  ‘I think soon. She will get away. I don’t know how it is to be arranged. I tell you all that I am able, as you are so anxious.’

  ‘I won’t forget this kindness, Abdul.’

  Freddy said to Joanna, once more, ‘Not a word. It might lead to bloodshed.’

  ‘Oh, Freddy, I wish you wouldn’t keep talking about bloodshed.’

  ‘It’s a dangerous part of the world,’ Freddy said. ‘So I beg you. not a word to a soul.’

  ‘Of course not. They would only start searching —’

  ‘Now, Joanna, don’t blame yourself,’ said her husband. ‘You were perfectly all right to her.’

  ‘It was I who was at fault,’ said Freddy. ‘It was—’

  ‘Now, Freddy, we’ve had all that. Do put your feet up and rest. It’s you we’re worried about.’

  ‘It was the beginning of my sunstroke,’ Freddy said. ‘You’ve got to rest. Sit on the sofa, Freddy. That chair’s uncomfortable.’

  ‘I can’t rest,’ Freddy said.

  He called the partial collapse from which he was still suffering his ‘sunstroke’ for want of any better explanation of its cause. Dr Jarvis, on his second visit to Freddy at the hotel, had thought it was probably an attack of ‘coast memory’, which he said was a type of amnesia that affected white men in the tropics. especially Africa.

  ‘That would be caused by sunstroke,’ Freddy had said.

  It was difficult to know the point at which one was justified in being affronted by a doctor’s remark. This particular quack, Freddy considered, had gone a bit far when he had replied, in an off-hand sort of way, that he believed this type of amnesia was sometimes hysteric in origin but that of course he did not know what type of amnesia it was — he wasn’t a specialist in that subject.

  ‘Well,’ Freddy had said, aloofly, ‘I hope — I hope — that it isn’t hysteric in origin.’

  ‘Hysteria in the medical sense doesn’t mean, necessarily, a wild outbreak of emotion, screaming and so on,’ the doctor said. ‘It’s a term we use.’

  ‘Oh, I know all that,’ said Freddy.

  This doctor said, ‘We may use the word “hysteric” to describe any symptom — it may only be a headache or a stomach disorder, caused by some form of mental disturbance.’

  ‘Yes, but I’ve got no mental disturbance,’ Freddy said firmly. ‘So if you are thinking of recommending me to see a psychiatrist, my answer is no. Not while I’ve got my wits about me, and remain officially sane, do I consult any psychiatrist.’

  ‘Your sanity isn’t in question,’ the doctor said, as one appealing to reason. Freddy felt deeply resentful of this doctor, who was an English Jew, now an Israeli practising in Jerusalem. His name was Jarvis. Many Foreign Service personnel, including the British, used him for their regular doctor. He had already attended Freddy, some months ago, when Freddy had arrived in the country with an arm swollen and inflamed from a new vaccination. Dr Jarvis had seemed a very agreeable and efficient fellow at that time, but now Freddy found himself in unaccustomed distress; he felt a choking resentment and could hardly recognize himself in the sensation. Why, he thought, is this Jew called Jarvis? It’s an old English name, how does he come by Jarvis? His father must have been Jarvinsky or something; I should just like to ask him which of the Jarvises he is, which of the two branches, the Kent Jarvises or the others in Wales. I should just like to see how he’d answer that question. Jarvis, indeed, with his talk of mental disturbances. But Freddy, in his distress, was still graced with those habits of good behaviour which restrain wild-running excesses of thought; he was endowed also with that gift which some men keep furtively out of sight like a family skeleton, an inward court of appeal with powers to reverse all varieties of mental verdicts. And in the space of time that it took Dr Jarvis to sit down at the table in Freddy’s hotel sitting-room and write out a prescription, Freddy reflected, I suppose the man is performing his job according to his lights.

  Bewildered as Freddy was, and gripped intermittently by waves of panic about his forgotten days, he said, ‘My father had a favourite joke about psychiatrists. He used to say, “Anyone who consults a psychiatrist wants his head examined.”‘

  Dr Jarvis smiled as one who tries to do so. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘I haven’t said a word to you about a psychiatrist. In fact, I haven’t got a great deal of time for them, myself. They all hold different theories. There’s hardly two who would treat a patient in the same way. You don’t know where you are with them. They’re a lot of bloody robbers as well. I’ve known people, sick people, remain in the hands of psychiatrists, two sessions a week, for twenty years, and nothing to show for it.’

  ‘You don’t say so!, Freddy said, cheering up a little. ‘Twenty years …’ A few days’ temporary absence of mind due to sunstroke was really nothing to worry about.

  ‘All I was going to suggest,’ said Jarvis, ‘was that we get a diagnosis, as far as that’s possible, to see what caused your loss of memory and perhaps prevent it happening again.’

  ‘What sort of diagnosis? Who from?’ Freddy said. ‘I don’t want to be unreasonable, but these mental specialists — as you say yourself, they aren’t agreed, they’ve got no proof, no unassailable theory. Whereas if you settle for sunstroke, well, that’s an old-established thing, and you know where you are.’

  ‘Let’s make it sunstroke,’ said Jarvis.

  ‘Oh, all right, I’m willing to be diagnosed,’ Freddy said. ‘I’ll go as far as that. But I won’t necessarily accept their diagnosis, or act on it, or answer their probing questions. Probing questions are plain bad manners to me, and that’s the long and the short of it.’

  ‘Oh, well, bad manners, good manners — they don’t exist in the Unconscious.’

  ‘I don’t believe there’s such a thing as the Unconscious,’ Freddy said. ‘How could there be a certainty about something unconscious? If something is unconscious then it’s unknown. So the Unconscious is only a hypothesis at the best.’

  ‘Hypnosis is sometimes employed in cases of amnesia,’ said the doctor, his face abstracted from Freddy’s protests, ‘to establish association with whatever has caused it. There’s also a recent drug that releases memory, but I’d have to look into it.’

  ‘I would never agree to be hypnotized. Out of the question. No one should submit their mind to another mind:

  He that complies against his will

  Is of his own opinion still.

  — that’s my motto. I won’t be brain-washed, thank you.’

  Jarvis was unmoved. ‘I don’t advise further consultation at the moment. Seeing how you feel about it, there wouldn’t be any point. It would only tend to make you feel worse. I’m going to insist that you take some leave. Get these pills: three a day, half an hour before meals.’

  ‘Are these the memory drugs?’ Freddy inquired, scrutinizing the prescription.

  ‘No, that isn’t the drug I referred to. Those are just old-fashioned sedatives.’

  ‘I feel perfectly all right, actually,’ Freddy said. ‘Perfectly normal.’

  He felt terrible, actually, and when the doctor had left, he sat with his head in his hands, while currents of horror, unidentifiable, unknown to experience, charged through his mind and body continually. Mind or body, it was impossible to distinguish one from the other, they were both and neither. The telephone rang. It was Gardnor, wanting to come round for a little chat, as he put it. Freddy said he would see him at five-thirty. He shivered although the day was warm. He poured lots of water on his neglected geraniums. He shivered again. Then he got his winter suit out of his cabin-trunk where it hung among the moth-balls. If he still shivered by evening, Freddy decided, he would then put it on. What day of the week was it? Time was apt to become confusing.

  Before lunch that day, some letters were brou
ght up to him. One from Ma, one from his sister Elsie and one from Joanna. Freddy decided to spend the afternoon writing letters. He took his letters down to lunch with him, but read only Joanna’s:

  Thank God you’ve been found, Freddy dear, we were off our heads with anxiety. And whatever can you have done with Barbara Vaughan? — Of course, it’s only a coincidence, your disappearing together, but really Freddy, we did seriously wonder if you’d eloped with her!! I’m in constant touch with the people at your end, in case there’s anything I can do at this end, Rupert Gardnor tells us you’re in good hands. Follow the doctor’s advice, won’t you, Freddy dear, and…

  Freddy decided to start a set of verses in terza rima for Joanna. He did, in fact, start them on the way upstairs after lunch, but then he fell asleep. When he woke it was half past three. He wondered what had happened to Miss Vaughan. then lost the thought. He checked the calendar — Wednesday, the 16th of August. It would not do to go wrong again. He opened Ma’s letter.

  He could not make head nor tail of most of it. She kept referring to her ‘last letter’ in which she had apparently described some dreadful threat of Benny’s following some new dreadful upset about the old garnet brooch. It was plain, Freddy thought, that she had forgotten to post, or perhaps had not even written, this last letter. At all events, Freddy did not know what she was talking about, and could only guess that the two old women were being tiresome as usual. He decided to ignore the bit about Benny, her threats, and the garnet brooch, and reply only to Ma’s query about Eichmann. who she fancied was a famous pianist she had met in the old days.

  His sister’s letter was a brief intimation that her friend, Miss Rickward, was to arrive in Jordan next week-end and that she believed Freddy knew a Barbara Vaughan, who taught at Miss Rickward’s school. ‘Between ourselves,’ Elsie had written, ‘it was a shock for Miss Rickward to learn that Barbara Vaughan was engaged. Poor Miss Rickward is making a trip out there to see what Miss Vaughan is up to and so on, and any assistance you can give …’

  Freddy put them aside. He would answer all the letters tomorrow. Perhaps in the morning. Abdul was coming tomorrow. Freddy fell asleep again till Gardnor arrived at five-thirty.

  By the end of that week Freddy realized that he was more than ordinarily a subject of concern at the Legation. Gardnor came on four successive evenings, and on Friday took Freddy to his flat for dinner. Freddy was touched beyond the ordinary. There was a look of private strain about Gardnor that Freddy had not noticed before.

  It appeared that Gardnor’s report had set off an agitation in the office. Freddy was not quite clear what it was about, but it seemed that most of them felt he should be in hospital, receiving treatment for his lost memory.

  ‘It will come back in its own time,’ Freddy said.

  Rupert Gardnor was now very much on Freddy’s side. He was extremely anxious to impress on Freddy that any form of treatment, especially hypnosis, would constitute, in his view, a weak course of action.

  On Friday they sat drinking in the leafy courtyard of Freddy’s hotel.

  ‘I feel,’ Freddy said, ‘that if I concentrate on other things, the memory will return in due time.’ And he thought desperately of some other thing to talk about to Gardnor, there and then. He could only think of a successful bet he had once laid with his fellow officers at sea during the war, already having tried it successfully in a forfeit game with his nephews and nieces at a Christmas gathering. ‘I bet you a round of drinks,’ Freddy now said, ‘that you can’t spell desiccated.’

  Gardnor took him on, and spelt it ‘d-e-s-s-i-c-a-t-e-d’.

  ‘Wrong,’ said Freddy.

  Gardnor tried again, for another round, spelling it ‘d-e-s-i-c-a-t-e-d’.

  ‘There are two c’s,’ said Freddy.

  ‘Well, I never knew that before.’

  ‘No one does,’ Freddy said.

  ‘You could make a living out of it.’

  ‘So I shall, if I lose my job.’

  Well, I hope it won’t come to that.’ Gardnor spoke with such a trace of seriousness that Freddy looked to see what expression he wore. But he seemed cheerful enough.

  ‘We’ve got a new man coming from London next week,’ Gardnor said. ‘I’ve no idea who he is.’

  ‘Really? ‘What’s his job?’

  ‘I don’t know. I only heard about him late this afternoon. But I suppose he’s from “Q”.’

  ‘Q’ was the Foreign Office Internal Security department. Gardnor spoke softly. Two or three other tables on the terrace were occupied.

  ‘Why d’you suppose that? Has anything new been going on?’ Gardnor looked round casually and beckoned to a waiter who was hovering in the vine-framed doorway that led from the terrace to the hall. He ordered some drinks to be served indoors. When they had moved indoors and got their whiskies-and-soda in a quiet corner of the big room, Gardnor said, ‘There’s been a leakage about the agreement with Kuwait. The Jews don’t think it comes from any of their men, they think it’s us.’

  ‘Well, that’s the Embassy’s affair,’ Freddy said. ‘It’s nothing to do with us here in Jerusalem. Whitehall should send its snooper to Tel Aviv, that’s where he should go.’

  ‘Oh, we can’t pretend to know nothing of Kuwait,’ Gardnor said.

  ‘No, that’s true. Well, we’ll discuss it another time.’

  ‘Everyone feels you should have treatment, Freddy. But I disagree — I mean, for your own sake. You look jolly fit to me.’

  When Barbara Vaughan turns up, if she does turn up safely, she may throw some light on the mystery. I don’t know, of course; but she did disappear from the convent on the same day that I disappeared from myself, so to speak.’

  ‘We’re more or less certain she’s gone away. Her boy-friend left Jordan about that time. They’ve gone off together.’

  ‘I hope so,’ Freddy said.

  The following week Joanna met him at the Jordan end of the Gate and drove him to the house. She said, ‘I’ve made inquiries of anyone who might have recognized you on those days last week-end, Freddy, but no one saw a sign of you. I’ve asked Ramdez, I’ve asked Alexandros and all the shops, even the barber. No one saw you at all. Of course, they always deny everything, on principle. Where can you have been?’

  ‘I must go over everything carefully from the beginning. Perhaps here in Jordan it will come back to me.’

  It was now ten days since Barbara Vaughan’s disappearance. She had not, been seen since she left the Cartwrights’ house on that Saturday afternoon of her visit, when Freddy had unaccountably turned on the Cartwrights: ‘The whole trouble with you is, you blow neither hot nor cold….’ Of course, the row had blown over. The Cartwrights had apologized effusively for their tactlessness and for blowing neither hot nor cold. ‘Yes, it is true, Matt,’ Joanna had said to her husband. ‘There are some things too serious … poor Freddy is right. Poor Barbara …’ All that fuss had blown over. Barbara had returned to the convent-hostel where she was staying; at least she had been driven to the door by Matt and Joanna; at least that was what Joanna and Matt said. Freddy found himself in an uncomfortable state of suspecting absolutely everybody’s testimony and this, in turn, made him feel guilty. But he was certain, now, where at first he had only begun to notice, that small silences occurred in the course of conversations with visitors and friends from the legation. They were keeping something back from him, he was sure. When at last he had agreed to come across to Jordan to stay for a while with the Cartwrights, there again he noticed the hesitation, the silences.

  ‘Has Barbara Vaughan been found?’

  ‘No, Freddy, you know we’d tell you if she had. Personally, I think she’s left the country.’

  ‘If you hear that she’s been found, be sure to tell me. I was privately informed that she is safe so far. I can’t tell you more than that, and I can only tell you that much in confidence. But if you should hear that she is dead, killed, by whatever means, be sure to tell me.’

  A little silence. Th
en, ‘Freddy, dear, you’re being morbid.’

  ‘I know, Joanna, but one must face the —’

  ‘Freddy, you know that Clegg had gone on leave just before she disappeared. It’s only reasonable to suppose they’ve eloped.’

  ‘I don’t believe it, Matt.’

  ‘But he went away, just as she did, without telling anyone where he was going. She must have got out of the country somehow. There’s a Dutch line from Amman. Goodness, it would be easy. She was just another tourist with a passport; how could they remember her face? It’s such an ordinary face.’

  ‘Well, Joanna, there’s no record of the name Vaughan on any of the airlines. I don’t —’

  ‘Oh, it’s easy to move about and pass these border posts, Freddy. A little money goes a long way out here. Everyone’s bribable.’

  ‘Well, I’m not convinced, that’s all. She had changed towards Clegg, you remember.’

  ‘Well she must have changed back again.’

  Freddy said, ‘If one wasn’t involved, it would be awfully funny. In fact, it is funny. The woman disappears, then it turns out that Clegg has disappeared; and at the same time I disappeared for a few days. It’ll make a jolly good story one day if Barbara Vaughan gets out of it alive.’

  The small particle of silence flickered in the air between Freddy and the Cartwrights again. Then Joanna said, gaily, ‘It will all blow over, Freddy.’

  ‘Time for drinks,’ said Matt. ‘What will you drink, Freddy?’

  ‘Promise me one thing, Joanna,’ Freddy said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That you’ll be careful when you go clambering about the hills up here looking for wild flowers. That short-cut to the Potter’s Field, you know it’s dangerous. It borders on Israel. In fact, it’s disputable whose territory it is.’

  ‘Oh, Freddy, I’ve done it dozen of times. Why do you say this?’

  ‘I’ve got a premonition of bloodshed,’ Freddy said. ‘Which isn’t like me at all. But somebody — I can’t help feeling — is in danger of bloodshed.’ He was thinking, wildly, as he had done all week, it might be Abdul on his smuggling trip, if he’s to be believed … It might be Barbara … Joanna, gathering wild flowers … Somebody I know.