If He had brought us out of Egypt,
and not sent judgement upon them,
It would suffice us.
If He had sent judgement upon them, and
not upon their gods,
It would suffice us.
If He had sent judgement on their gods and
not killed their first born,
It would suffice us.
The German child was following the Hebrew in her book with her forefinger, smiling with recognition. Barbara felt proud of the child in a Jewish way, and exchanged a glance to this effect with her young Aunt Sadie, who also glowed as Jewish women do, with approval of intelligent and happy children.
If He had parted the waters for us, and
not let us pass through it on dry ground.
It would suffice us.
The previous Sunday, at Bells Sands, Barbara had gone with Uncle Eddy’s two children after church to roll their bright dyed Easter eggs in a dell at the end of their woods, where she and her cousin Arthur had always rolled their eggs as children. Was it only last Sunday? The scene pictured itself without warning in Barbara’s mind, light-years away, and rapidly disappeared. Only last Sunday, the end of Lent 1939? She had a sense of temporal displacement. The Passover Feast was coming to an end. She heard the familiar lilt of the riddle song, ‘One Kid’, from the lips of her lolling cousins. They were supposed to loll. It was part of the ritual. Now, that was a thing her Vaughan grandmother, who complained of backache each Sunday after church, she being one who made a point of sitting up well, would never understand.
Afterwards in the kitchen, the small child helped with the washing-up. Nobody would let Barbara do a thing. All the women were anxious to spare her a job. It was always the same here, at Golders Green. None of her aunts, or even the old servant, would let her wash up. Now, seeing the pile of dishes, Barbara seized a dean dishtowel from a rack where it was hanging.
Her young Aunt Sadie attempted to take the cloth from her in a good-humoured way but very firmly, and vaguely Barbara was aware of a lip-silence among the women working and clattering among the plates and cutlery at the sink.
‘Hee-ee, you’re not kosher.’ This was her youngest Aaronson cousin, Michael, standing at the doorway of the kitchen, with his owl-like face, horn-rimmed glasses, wide smile, red cheeks and Jewish nose.
His young Aunt Sadie said, ‘Michael!’
Michael spread his hands and hunched his shoulders, pretending to be very foreign. ‘Vot you vont in my keetchin …
Young Aunt Sadie said to Barbara, ‘We use different dishcloths for drying the plates. Milk and meat are kept separate. We don’t eat both ‘together, that you know. But we don’t wash them up together, either. We keep the towels separate.’
‘Vot you expect?’ said Michael. ‘She is neither Yeed nor Goy ees mein cousin Barbara.’ He put his arm round her shoulder. ‘She ees a bit milk and meat in the same dish, vot you expect?’
‘Stop it, Michael. He’s a clown, that boy,’ said young Aunt Sadie, busy with the women. They kept pushing him tolerantly out of the way. Barbara, too, felt cheerful about his presence in the kitchen. The younger generation in this household were slightly more indulged than they were at Bells Sands, where all affection was casual, unstated, understood more or less. Barbara, who at Golders Green came in for a share of the unequivocal benevolence towards the young and their capers, their demands, and their wild theories, was automatically soothed by the tolerant atmosphere in the kitchen. But still, she was not permitted to stack the dishes away, lest she stack them in the wrong places.
‘We’ve got special dishes for the Passover. Everything separate. The usual plates and things are not used during the Passover,’ said young Aunt Sadie, instructively, to Barbara. Young Aunt Sadie tried to take the place of her mother, who, since her father had broken his neck in a ditch, had married again, this time to a Japanese embassy official, and lived in Paris; she was a very lost limb to the Aaronsons.
Barbara surrendered the washing-up to her relations, feeling her ignorance in these matters to be an abyss of details. She was aware, too, that she would never make an attempt to acquire the missing knowledge; there were too many other things that she had resolved to learn. She looked at Sadie and said resentfully, ‘I’ll never learn your ways, I’m afraid.’
‘Well, you might learn some manners,’ said quick-tongued Aunt Sadie.
‘Sadie! Sadie! She is, bless her, a child only,’ said the very old Auntie Bea.
Michael said, ‘And she’s been eating ham sandwiches at her tennis party this afternoon. Not kosher, that girl.’
‘Cucumber sandwiches,’ said Barbara.
Old Auntie Bea, who was always anxious to make the peace, and the syntax of whose utterances was the joy of the younger generation, dried her plump fingers, and nodding her head towards Barbara, said ‘Cucumbers! I have made yesterday cucumbers in pickle, twenty. Thirty-six last week in the jars I have with vinegar made, cucumbers.’
At Joppa, then, when Barbara came to be leaning over the sea-wall, she said to Saul Ephraim, who reminded her much of the Aaronson cousins of her youth: ‘My Gentile relations tried too hard to forget I was a half-Jew. My Jewish relations couldn’t forget I was a half-Gentile. Actually, I didn’t let them forget, either way.’
‘Quite right. Why should you forget what you are?’ said Saul. ‘You were right.’
‘I know that. But one doesn’t altogether know what one is. There’s always more to it than Jew, Gentile, half-Jew, half-Gentile. There’s the human soul, the individual. Not “Jew, Gentile” as one might say “autumn, winter”. Something unique and unrepeatable.’
He smiled as if he had heard it all before.
‘Then why did you choose the Gentile side in the end?’
‘I didn’t choose any side at any time.’
‘You became a Catholic.’
‘Yes, but I didn’t become a Gentile. It wouldn’t be possible, entirely, seeing that I’m a half-Jew by natural birth.’
‘Well, but look, Christianity’s a Gentile religion. It’s all the same to me, but it’s a question of fact.’
Not essentially. After all, it started off as a new ordering of the Jewish religion.’
‘Well, it’s changed a lot since then.’
‘Only accidentally. It’s still a new order of an older firm.’
‘Did you get your Catholic instruction from the Jesuits, by any chance?’ he said.
She giggled. ‘Yes, in fact I did.’
‘I thought so.’
‘You can discredit the Jesuits but you can’t refute the truth.’
Well, you can’t expect our population to make these distinctions. Catholic is Gentile to them.’
‘Perhaps I should hush it up while in Israel, that I’m a half-Jew by birth,’ she said.
‘You’d be wiser to hush it up when you go over to Jordan. Here, you only risk an argument, but there you might get shot.’
The wall on which she now sat on the summit of Mount Tabor was part of an ancient fortress, the foundations of which lay about five feet on the far side. Looking behind her she could see the weedy floor of this excavated plot. In the self-absorption of the hour, even this small rectangle of archaeology related itself to her life. She recalled the dig at St Albans in Hertfordshire last summer. A Roman villa was being excavated. Her cousin, Miles Vaughan, now married and living at St Albans, took an active interest in the old Roman area of the city and always entertained the archaeologists when they came in the summer to work on the ruins. Barbara was intending to spend only a week with her cousin. She prolonged her stay. She went down to the dig as a volunteer. Miles said one day, ‘You’re causing a scandal, Barbara — you and Harry Clegg.’ He said it in an entirely jocular way, as one might say to a small boy, ‘My, you’re a big man!’ and Barbara was shaken by this. Miles had not for a moment realized how near the truth he had struck. Neither he nor his wife, Kathy, apparently, had noticed how dose her friendship with the archaeologist H
arry Clegg had grown in the past three weeks. They had simply ignored the evidence. ‘You’re causing a scandal, Barbara — you and Harry Clegg.’ Barbara was stabbed by his tone of voice. It affected her with a shock of self-recognition. She felt as if she had caught sight of a strange face in the mirror, and presently realized that the face was her own. Barbara understood then, that her self-image was at variance with the image she presented to the world. She understood that, to them, she was a settled spinster of thirty-seven, by definition a woman, but sexually differentiated only by a narrow margin, sharp, clever, set in her ways, a definite spinster, one who had embraced the Catholic Church instead of a husband, one who had taken up religion instead of cats. It was this concept that entitled Miles to tease her. ‘You’re causing a scandal, Barbara …’ But Miles, a grown man … he was too innocent for words. She had looked at him. Yes, he was joking. He gave her a little pat on the shoulder and went out to the car.
Barbara went and looked at herself in the mirror, full-length, in her room. Her hair was drawn back tight, her face was thin and smooth, her blouse and skirt were neat. Everything was quite neat, prim and unnoticeable. She had not guessed she looked quite like that, but now that she saw herself almost through the eyes of others, she was amazed. She wondered if she was a hypocrite; but that appearance in the glass, she thought, comes of long habit. Having restrained the expression of my feelings over the years I look as if I had none. It comes from a long habit of approaching the world with caution, this appearance of being too cautious to live a life of normal danger.
The figure in the looking-glass fascinated her. No wonder Miles did not really know her.
She had thought then, but who am I?
I am who I am.
Yes, but who am I?
Because, in fact, she was already deeply involved in a love-affair with Harry Clegg, the archaeologist. The local country people had taken note of them during the first week of their meeting. But her cousins would never do so. They would simply ignore the evidence. She looked in the mirror and understood why. And understood why she attracted the man. It was the very quality that deceived her friends. It was this deceptive, ascetic, virginal look that Harry found intriguing. It was not her mind alone, she told herself as she sized up her appearance.
All the summer weeks of their first meeting she had felt in a state of complete liberation from guilt. Moral or social censure were meaningless. The hours and days were barricaded with enchantment. She prolonged her stay on the simple excuse to Miles and Kathy that she was enjoying it. They accepted this, they were delighted. She did not mind baby-sitting in the evenings with Harry Clegg to keep her company. Harry Clegg was a scholar, of course, but not their type socially; he was a mild joke to them, a small, dark, scowling creature with too much untidy hair. A scowling creature except when he smiled. He was brilliant, the Vaughans admitted, a dedicated scholar. That he was regarded in every informed society but theirs as a distinguished man, the Vaughans did not know. They conveyed, with innocent remarks, in their diffident way, their amusement at the points where his lower-class origins were evident. Harry would never have entered Kathy’s drawing-room or Miles’s consciousness, nor would have wanted to do so, had he not been dabbling in the local excavations Miles and Kathy merrily departed for dinner parties, leaving the professor baby-sitting with Barbara and presumably discussing archaeology with her for all he was worth.
But Barbara and Harry Clegg were in the spare bedroom, making love, just like the nannie and the butler in the absence of master and mistress in the old days. Sometimes one of the children would wake and call. Barbara would swear and get up. Just like the old-time nannie.
Sometimes they settled down in the rough hut on the site of the excavations, like teenagers stormed by the sensual presences of the summer night. At any other time Barbara would have thought it ludicrous. A few weeks before she would have thought it absurd. But this was no time for sophisticated thoughts. She felt herself to be in love with Harry Clegg in an entirely exclusive form as yet unrealized in human experience. It made nonsense of the rules. There were no moral laws to fit it. The form of their love seemed to her to derive from a faculty of inner knowledge which they both possessed, a passionate mutual insight so unique in her experience that she felt it to be unique in human experience. Harry Clegg — shock-haired, unhandsome — who would have guessed he would be her type? Miles referred to him as ‘the red-brick genius’. But that was to reckon without Harry Clegg, who loved her. He loved her disguise as an English spinster, not merely as disguise but as part of her inexplicable identity. She was not an English spinster merely, but also a half-Jew, and was drawn to the equivalent quality in him that quite escaped both the unspoken definition ‘Englishman of lower-class origin’, and the spoken one ‘red-brick genius.
It happened one day that Barbara’s cousin, Michael Aaronson, came down for the week-end with his wife. He was a recognized expert in International Law, with a subsidiary interest in a firm of solicitors who had dealt with the Vaughans’ family business for the past ten years, such being one of the odd and latter results of that Vaughan—Aaronson marriage which had caused so much alarm at the time. Business apart, other Vaughans and Aaronsons of their generation were now on visiting terms, this having happened gradually from some point after the war, when wedding invitations and acceptances had started to flutter between the two families; while Barbara, who was now the only visible link between them, tended to be regarded as something practically invisible by both sides. She now saw them infrequently, her life being centred in the girls’ school where she taught. Michael was the only one she corresponded with, he was still her best-friend of the Aaronsons.
He was surprised to find Barbara at St Albans on a long stay. More perceptive than Miles, he noticed her absorption with Harry Clegg.
He said, when he was alone with her, ‘Are you getting attached to that archaeologist? He seems keen on you.’
‘Yes.’
‘Good luck, then.’
‘Thank you, Michael.’
‘He’s a distinguished fellow. Looks terrible. They always attract women, somehow, when they look like that. Are you thinking of marriage? Because if you’re going to get married the family won’t like it.’
‘Which family?’
‘Oh, the Vaughans, of course. He’s the wrong background.’
‘The Aaronsons would have said the wrong blood.’
‘Yes, the old people were upset by Spencer’s marriage.’ Spencer was one of the cousins, who had recently married a Gentile.
‘They wouldn’t worry about who I married, now,’ Barbara said. ‘They always knew I wasn’t quite the right blood for them. Only half right. The other half was wrong.’
‘Oh, well, the old people—’
The Aaronson grandparents were dead, but numerous aunts and uncles had reached their sixties and seventies since the Golders Green days before the war.
‘And the Vaughans,’ said Barbara cheerfully, ‘always knew I hadn’t quite the right background. They felt I was too fond of the Aaronsons. My environment was half wrong.’
‘Then you’ve got something in common with Clegg,’ Michael said. ‘The outcast status.’
‘Yes, quite, but we also have common intellectual interests. We’ve got a lot to talk about.’ She had turned sharp and defensive, like Aunt Sadie.
‘That sounds more like sense, I’ll admit. You’re the most sensible woman I know.’
‘I’m not. He’s a married man.’
‘Any chance of a divorce?’
‘He’s got a divorce,’ Barbara said.
‘Oh, Christ, yes, you’re a Catholic. What are you going to do?’
‘I haven’t begun to think.’
‘Keep me informed,’ Michael said, ‘when you do begin to think. Anyhow, I’m glad this has happened. I thought you’d given men up.’
‘Well, evidently not.’
‘I know. Silly of me.’
Down at The Fighting Cocks, the public house
that stood on the verge of the Roman area of St Albans, small murmurs passed round concerning the midnight movements of a couple of the current archaeologists (for the patrons thought Barbara was one of the team). ‘You’re causing a scandal, Barbara — you and Harry Clegg.’ Yes, but Miles and his social circle never got to hear of the small scandal at The Fighting Cocks; nobody there knew the archaeologists by name, or cared. The local people grinned as the lovers left the pub. ‘Free love on the old Roman road,’ commented a man, and it was left at that. Meanwhile, Barbara and Harry walked along the ramparts of Watling Street by moonlight and bedded down in the hut.
A year later, on the summit of Mount Tabor, where the warrior poet, Deborah, once mustered her troops against an enemy of the Lord named Sisera, Barbara turned and gazed out towards the Dead Sea, where her lover now was working on the site of Qumran. She recalled, the day she left St Albans, saying good-bye to Miles, Kathy, and the children. Miles took her to the station, talking of his married plans as married people do — the holiday abroad and the new garage — suspecting her of no other passion than her recent one for botany and no deeper regret than that she had given up playing the cello. She had felt then, how much more of a sexual person she was than he. She could not remember when first she had associated her Jewishness with her sexual instincts and distinguished herself from her Gentile relatives by a half-guilty feeling that she was more afflicted by sex than they were; so that, when she fell in love with Harry Clegg, she felt more blessed by sex than they were, by virtue of her Jewish blood. This basic error with an elusive vapour of truth in it persisted so far as she continued to associate, without even questioning the proposition, her Jewishness with sex, and to feel that she partook of the sexual virility of the world in consequence. Miles had said, as he kissed her on the platform at St Albans, ‘It’s been lovely having you.’
She smiled at this in the train. She was fond of Miles and his thin, but so innocent, imagination. He would use that correct phrase, ‘It’s been lovely having you,’ to departing visitors on platforms, without variation, till he was too infirm to see people off at all. Kathy, at the door of the house, had said the same thing. Kathy always had a full day, full of social activities and routine. It took this sort of English couple, Barbara thought, to let a love-affair ripen and come to flower under their roof without suspecting anything. They would have been horrified to know about the spare bedroom episodes. Barbara, who on later reflection was herself mildly shocked, was at this moment amused. She was in love. A trite late-flowering. A very late one. She didn’t care. She would not have cared if Miles or Kathy had discovered her in the spare bed with Harry Clegg. What could they have said? ‘Oh! sorry —’ and withdrawn. And later: ‘Look here, Barbara —’ And what would they have said? That would have depended on the inspiration of the hour. She was merely amused at the notion, when it occurred to her that she had taken some sort of revenge on them, in return for the evening when she had listened to Kathy and Miles, for a few moments, gaily mimicking Harry’s Coventry vowels. They were as good as foreigners, herself and Harry Clegg. And they made love like foreigners, which was all right, too.