The Mandelbaum Gate
But there was no end to Ricky and the various ways in which Barbara genuinely missed her. Barbara was, moreover, aware of various ways in which Ricky resembled Harry. The main difference was that Harry was a man. The next difference was his actual achievement in life, which was already recognized every. where; whereas Ricky, of South African origin, having come to England on a scholarship, had gone far, but achieved little. Both, however, had done what they had done through their own efforts without family advantages. And Harry seemed to resemble Ricky in appearance, more in Barbara’s memory than in the presence of either. Barbara had never seen them together, and she partly knew that the resemblance she discerned was, after all, a matter of the lights and shadows cast on their features by some lonely lamplight of affection within herself.
Ricky was a keen promoter of Scripture-reading at school; she was herself a lapsed Congregationalist with a puritanical bias. Once, after last summer’s holidays when Barbara had fallen in love with Harry Clegg, Ricky was setting the senior girls an essay on the subject of the Second Coming to be illustrated by scriptural texts; she demonstrated this procedure by quoting a passage on the return of Christ to judge the world: ‘Then shall two be in the field; the one shall be taken and the other left. Two women shall be grinding at the mill: the one shall be taken and the other left. Watch therefore …’ Barbara, standing by, listened distantly to Ricky’s moral implications, but heard closely the literal ones. It’s certainly a point, thought Barbara, that two engaged in a common pursuit do not consequently share personal identity, and absurd though it is to affirm this evident fact, Ricky feels towards me as if the opposite were true. Sooner or later she’ll have to find out that my destiny is different from hers.
She had opened Ricky’s letter first. The one from her cousin Michael was not likely to be a personal stimulus one way or the other. The letter from Harry was what she had wanted, and with that instinct for any sensational distraction, any quarrel, any irritant, of one who has endured a near-miss, she opened Ricky’s letter first. Disappointingly at first, and then astoundingly, It read:
MY DEAR BARBARA,
Thank you for your two postcards which both arrived last week, on Tuesday and Friday, respectively. I am pleased to hear you are having a not uncomfortable trip. The experience should be a profit. able one — in the spirit if not in the letter!
I hope the food (if I am not treading on holy ground by mentioning that mundane but essential factor) is not unwholesome. How well I remember those weeks following your return from Spain … ‘Nuff said!
You will be surprised to learn that I have been through a very strange experience during the past fortnight. It is an experience that can only be described as a troubled if not a shattering one. Indeed, I was undecided, or, as one might say, torn in mind, with regard to the advisability or otherwise of mentioning the matter to you. Suffice it to say that my nights. for the past week, have been both anguished and sleepless. Yesterday I arrived at the decision to inform you of my distress, giving you the full account of its cause, and …
Bewildered, amazed at the emotion and mounting tone, Barbara sent her eyes flowing down and across the next few pages in frantic grasp of their gist. Ricky had learnt of her engagement to Harry Clegg, that was all. Elsie Connington, a mother of one of the pupils who had become more closely connected with Ricky than with herself, and whom Barbara now recalled having once met, had entertained Ricky for the week-end, in the course of which they had visited Elsie’s mother at Harrogate, a Mrs Hamilton. Elsie was Freddy Hamilton’s sister, it appeared … Freddy had written to his mother that he had made the acquaintance of a Miss Vaughan, who hoped, the Catholic Church permitting, to marry a Harry Clegg, an archaeologist. And the old woman had passed this on to Ricky, So it appeared, and so it was. Barbara felt furious, first with Freddy for his gossip. She wondered why he had failed to tell her that his niece was at her school: then, realizing he was probably unaware of this fact, she turned on herself for confiding so much in Freddy. At last, she read through the letter again, and began to feel a wholesale sense of nausea:
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-familia
r 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.
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.