The Mandelbaum Gate
‘Danger is pleasure. What else is pleasure when a man has been married to one wife thirty-two years? You are married with a wife in England?’
‘No. Few people know it but I was married once.’
‘She has died?’
‘No. It was when I was very young. The marriage didn’t last a year. She turned out to be no good. Incurably no good. What we call a bad lot.’
‘It was bad luck.’
‘Oh, I’ve forgotten about the whole thing. It was a misfortune that can happen to a family like any other misfortune.’
‘I had a cousin who was like this. In Beirut. She was with many men of different nationalities. I don’t know if she’s dead, living. We refused her in the end from the family. What could we do? We gave her money, but this failed. Nothing sufficed. She is perhaps in prison. Have you divorced this wife?’
‘Oh, yes, and made a settlement on condition of her not marrying again.’
‘This is honourable.’
‘It’s like buying a horse. If it turns out to be a bad horse, one should keep it off the market in case some other chap should get hold of it.’
‘Exactly. I do not disagree.’
‘Not everyone,’ Freddy said, ‘would agree with us. In Europe, these days, it’s considered unfair to stipulate a condition that might deter anyone from marrying again. But in my view I did the only possible thing. It’s a question of one’s point of view. It was the only conceivable thing to do. Anyway, it was a long time ago. Nobody mentions the affair in our family, except my old mother from time to time, when she wants to be tiresome. It was a long time ago. My goodness, it must be getting late!’
‘Only eleven o’clock,’ Alexandros said. ‘There are ahead all the hours of the night. And we have only to plan everything.’
They had not drunk a great deal; it was more the stimulus of their evening, wrenched as it was from the line of habit, that gave them heart to leave the house together at half past two in the morning, burning with an imperative sense of duty towards Barbara Vaughan. Freddy’s had been the idea of getting her up in Arab disguise, while Alexandros, his hand clapped suddenly to his brow to hold intact the brimming tide of inspiration, had contributed the Ramdez daughter as her best possible escort.
‘Which daughter?’ Freddy had said. ‘Aren’t there two?’
‘The unnatural one,’ Alexandros said.
‘With the blue eyes, like young Abdul?’
‘That’s the woman. She is not so bad. It’s only that she should have been a man. There was a mistake in the making of her. She holds opinions different from her parents. So here they say she’s the unnatural one.’ Alexandros sprang to his feet. ‘We go,’ he said. ‘It’s a matter that can permit only of arrangements in the dark of the night.’
He advised Freddy to keep well into the shadow of the houses, but himself walked with a sort of arm-swinging march in the middle of the street where the moonlight lay. He seemed to be exercising some of Freddy’s new resources of freedom as well as his own natural supply. Freddy kept pace with him from the shadows, not for one wild moment doubting the success of their plan, conceived as it had been in an hour of genius and of brotherhood; all was perfectly feasible, or as good as done, and he walked in that dispensation of mind in which impossible works are in fact accomplished and mountains are moved.
They turned into the Via Dolorosa, and there Alexandros strode on in the light of lamps and moon like the Archangel Michael leading his legions to storm the gates of Hell which should not prevail against them, as was written. Freddy moved in to keep pace beside him in the narrow street. They now walked shoulder to shoulder.
They came at last to the convent where Barbara Vaughan was staying. It looked very much closed for the night.
‘I speak personally to the janitor,’ said Alexandros, moving into the lamplight to verify the amount of paper money that he had produced from his pocket to harmonize with his intention.
‘This is on me,’ Freddy said, getting out his wallet.
‘The janitor is inexpensive. Keep your money to speak to the officers behind the desks if inquiries should arise concerning Barbara in the course of the holy pilgrimage.’
Freddy waited. The night now began to give out the chanting of the minarets, from Israel across the border to the west of the convent, then nearer, to the north, from the direction of the Holy Sepulchre. It was three o’clock. The chanting voices echoed each other from height to height like the mating cries of sublime eagles. This waiting for the return of Alexandros in the morning hours of Jerusalem was one of the things Freddy was to remember most vividly later on, when he did at last remember the nights and days of his fugue. From the east, beyond the Wailing Wall, a white-clad figure raised his arms in the moonlight and now began his call to prayer, and soon, from far in the south, then in the south-east, and from everywhere, the cry was raised.
6. Jerusalem, My Happy Home
‘Who’s there?’
The voice answered, very dose to her but on the other side of the door, with hushed urgency, ‘Freddy Hamilton. Don’t make a noise. Let me in.’
It impinged on Barbara that this was highly improbable, that she was in a convent bedroom, and that there was no lock to the door. She hesitated in a woken daze long enough for the voice to announce itself again. This time it said, ‘Is that Barbara Vaughan?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, it’s only me. Please open the door and I’ll explain.’
This sounded authentic. She slid one arm into her dressing-gown and was about to open the door when the handle turned and Freddy’s fare appeared.
He said quickly, ‘Don’t make a noise. This is a convent, you know.’
She said, while sticking her other arm into the sleeve, ‘What’s the matter?’
He came in then, and silently closed the door behind him. He said, ‘Forgive me for intruding like this. An emergency. I’ve come to get you out. You’re in danger, but I’ve got everything planned and you’ll be quite safe with me.’
She was still unclear about the reality of Freddy in the room. She had set the front of her hair in two rollers, which she now removed and put into the pocket of her dressing-gown as she said, ‘It’s terribly late. This is a convent, you know. What’s happened?’ But now she giggled, partly with relief that the quiet, repetitious tap-tap at the door which had eventually wakened her, was only Freddy’s.
Freddy said, Tm afraid it’s all very informal. But I just want you to pack your things and come with me. There’s a car coming round to pick us up and we’re going up to the Potter’s Field to spent the night. Everything is planned, so don’t worry. Just pack quickly and quietly, and come with me.’
She felt a returning wave of the fear she had gone to sleep with. ‘Am I to come like this?’ she said, plucking at her dressing-gown.
‘There’s nobody about outside. You won’t be seen. There’s only me and Alexandros from the curiosity shop, a man I could trust with my life. Alexandros will drive us to the Potter’s Field. Hurry, Barbara. In an emergency, one can’t be Victorian about things, you know.’
She started to pack her bags and laughed softly to herself again, for Freddy’s word ‘Victorian’ brought comfortably to mind a private family joke — how one of the deep-voiced Vaughan aunts had declared when her son had been ignominiously expelled from school: ‘I refuse to be Victorian about it. Of course, the boy is a little oriental in his ways, I’m afraid, but then his father is a little oriental and so was his grandfather. And in point of fact, no one in the family, right back to William the Conqueror, has ever been Victorian about it.’ Barbara said to Freddy: ‘How did you get in? Have I got to bring everything? I haven’t paid for the room. It’s ten past three.’
Freddy said, absent-mindedly, while looking round, ‘This is no time to be Victorian … Is there anything I can do? Don’t forget your sponge-bag.’
She packed on. ‘If any of the nuns …’
Freddy fastened the locks of her suitcase while she put
the final objects in her small case. She told herself that Freddy Hamilton was behaving unexpectedly and that it was an odd situation. Meanwhile she looked at the bed. ‘I’d better—’
‘Oh, leave the bed. Hurry.’
She fumbled with her hair, feeling it strange to be going out with her hair straggling loose, and wearing her slippers and dressing-gown as if being taken suddenly to hospital or prison. But it never occurred to her to object to this departure.
Freddy looked out of the window, peering sideways towards the front of the convent. ‘It’s there,’ he said. ‘Good old Alexandros. He’s waiting with his car.’ He lifted the suitcase and said, ‘I’ll go first. You follow when I get down the first flight. Not a sound, remember. This is a convent.’
She pulled the bed straight as he spoke, and tucked in the loose blanket to give it a made look. She put three pounds on the dressing-table. ‘It’s too much,’ Freddy said. ‘Three would be exorbitant.’ She took one back. ‘Quite enough,’ he said. ‘The Catholics are rolling in money.’ It was as if he had said ‘the foreigners’ in one of those private exchanges between Britons.
He lifted the case, whispered, ‘We’re off!’ and opened the door. He whispered again, ‘Not a whisper,’ and stopped to listen lest anyone in the house had been aroused. The oldest nun, a scholarly antiquarian who was reputed to know more about Jerusalem, more of its unrecorded secrets, than anyone else, was snoring at the top of the house; she had told Barbara that she had been given a room at the top of the house because she snored, and had mentioned the fact quite casually, in the course of remarking on the difficulty to old bones of climbing the stairs; the ordinary social vanities did not enter the lives of these nuns.
Freddy, with the suitcase, had reached the landing below; he had one more flight to descend. Barbara followed, gripping her hand-luggage and, quite unnecessarily, the edges of her Liberty dressing-gown which were already held in place by its tie. Freddy was now on his way down the last flight of stairs, to the ground floor. She found herself palpitating with the thought of being discovered leaving this place in her night-clothes with a man and her luggage; the other residents were five middle-aged pious Catholic women from Stuttgart, and the nuns were nuns, and moreover had particularly fussed over Barbara as being Englishly cool, spinster-like and, as she supposed, a bit more nun-like than the five loquacious matrons from Stuttgart. This breathless fear of Barbara’s as she began to follow Freddy down the stairs then bore upon her common sense as being so excessive as to weigh the balance of probability in favour of its being groundless; the nuns, she reflected, were hard workers and hard sleepers, while the Stuttgart pilgrims no doubt slept so very much like logs. By the time she had turned the bend on the staircase towards the lower landing she had become confident of an easy exit, and crept down the remaining steps in synchronized time to the snores of the attic nun. She paused on the landing and looked along the corridor to where the Mother Superior, a woman of about Barbara’s age, had her quarters.
From the floor above, where she had come from, a noise of running water and padding footsteps came in muffled spasms between the overwhelming attic snores; this was probably caused by one of the German women moving around in the night, having awakened either by habit or by the sound of Barbara’s packing and departure. A tinted glass window above the staircase she had just come down let in the moonlight, but the next flight down to the front hall was in blackness by contrast to that dusky amber window-light above. Barbara lingered on this landing, between the half-light and the pure dark, as if waiting for something. Along the corridor, where the Mother Superior slept, nothing stirred. Barbara did not know why it should. Almost disappointed, she moved to follow Freddy cautiously down the very dark staircase. Freddy, half-way, came to a curve in the stairs and bumped the suitcase loudly into the wall. Barbara halted on the third step and whispered down to him, ‘Are you all right?’ He did not reply, but she could hear him continue to pick his step by muted step. She glanced behind and upward, and could not place her sense of something unaccomplished in the silence. The front door was unlocked and Freddy now held it open so that the moonlight flooded her last footsteps from the sleeping convent. They had got away.
Immediately on passing into the night air she realized that she had almost hoped to be caught, it would have been a relief and a kind of triumph and justification. For there had been a decided element of false assumption in her reception at the convent the previous day, after they had inquired politely, and estimated her type. Of course she was an English Catholic convert. She was indeed the quiet type. But there was a lot more than met the eye, at least she hoped so. She had thought, as the Mother Superior made her benign speech of welcome, and the old novice-mistress hovered with an admiring smile, if only they knew. And she was inwardly exasperated, as she had been with her cousins last summer, when she had carried on a love-affair with Harry Clegg, there in the house, and they, in their smug insolence, had failed to discover it. And why? She thought now, with the old exasperation, what right have they to take me at my face value? Every spinster should be assumed guilty before she is proved innocent, it is only common civility. People, she thought, believe what they want to believe; anything rather than shake up their ideas. And if a nun had in fact put in an appearance on the landing when Freddy had bumped her suitcase at the bend of the stairs — a startled nun switching on all the lights, the Mother Superior perhaps — what would she have said?
Freddy was opening the door of a large car, at the wheel of which sat a man whom she recognized as the Arab shopkeeper from whom she had bought the ornamental fish that morning. Freddy had pushed her suitcase in the back of the car, and turning to her he said, ‘Hurry!’ She had never seen Freddy Hamilton looking so happy. She had not thought he had it in him.
And what would she have said if one of the nuns had caught them, if one of them came to the door even now that she was getting into the car, lifting the Liberty dressing-gown as if it were a long evening dress and she departing from a late night party? ‘My dear good woman, things are not what they seem, as you in the religious life ought to know. Foolish virgin, hasn’t experience taught you to expect the unexpected?’
She said to Freddy, ‘What on earth would we have said if we’d been caught?’
Freddy said, ‘If they’re decent women, as I’m sure they are, you could have explained about your Jewish side.’
The faint sound of the bolt being slid into place behind the heavy studded convent door reached them through the car windows. Whoever had let Freddy in was locking up again.
She said, ‘They’re decent women but I don’t think I would have got much sympathy as a Jew, even if they’d believed the story. It would have embarrassed them, in this environment.’
What d’you think, Alexandros?’ Freddy said as the car started. He was in the front while Barbara sat behind with her suitcase. She looked back. Not so much as one belated inquiring light had gone on in any of the windows.
Alexandros said, ‘Madam, they would think something else to see you come with a man and your baggage. Maybe they shall say in the morning that you are a wolf in the raiment of a sheep.’
‘So I am,’ Barbara said.
‘What a jolly good idea this is,’ Freddy said, and they all laughed at each other’s words with an overflow of relief, success, and the moonlit morning air; meanwhile, the car wound and swirled unhindered to the south, across Jerusalem, in the direction of the Potter’s Field.
Ten days before she had left Israel Barbara had received two unexpected letters from England and failed to receive an expected letter from Harry Clegg in Jordan, smuggled to her in the American bag from Amman. When returning to her room she always looked for the envelope lying on the carpet by the door. The absence of any word from Harry Clegg had made the presence of the two English envelopes, which arrived together on the same morning, rather irritating. One was from Ricky, her old friend, the head of the school where she taught. The other was from her cousin, Michael Aaronson.
br /> She first opened Miss Rickward’s letter. In a way she had been missing Ricky, whose faults were many but amorphous, and whose virtues were well defined, among them being an exceptional capacity for retaining knowledge, shrewd intelligence of a scholarly order, and a scrupulous, almost obsessive literal honesty; all of which virtues, apparently in the nature of things, precluded humour. Ricky was a good talker, in that she could converse seriously for hours on a subject, the absence of any wit in her talk having the compensatory value of keeping the main topic in line, without any of the far-flung diversions that humour leads to. Ricky could discourse for hours on the history and development of the existentialist philosophy. It had been pleasant for Barbara, it had given her a remote sense that she was doing something in life, if only mentally, to sit and listen, with an occasional comment, while Ricky expounded the doctrine that existence precedes essence.
But could Ricky apply this notion to the world she existed in? To Barbara? Herself? Barbara had looked round the room of her hotel in Israel that morning, and was irritated by the unmade bed. She decided to take her letters downstairs and read them in the courtyard; then forgetting her decision, sat on. Ricky could discuss the psychological and biological differentiations of the male in all their subtleties past and present. She could speculate on their future. But did she recognize an attraction between a man and a woman before her eyes? When one of the girls at her school, a large-built matron of fifteen, was found to be pregnant by the local cinema owner, Ricky said, ‘The poor child was only proving the theory of reproduction for herself. She’s a natural empiricist, an intelligent child,’ and might have written as much, as solemnly, in a letter to the parents of a girl who had burnt her fingers on a hot test-tube.
Barbara had glanced at the crack beneath the door, not quite aware of what she was still hoping for; the stir and thrust of a white envelope from Jordan.
Ricky once had an admirer, the shy widowed father of one of the girls. He had sent her the enviable present of a bunch of roses, fourteen, each one of a different species. ‘I wonder,’ Ricky said, ‘where he got the impression that I’m a student of horticulture. Someone must have given him that impression, Barbara.’