Two Is Lonely

  Would Andy fill up that emptiness when I returned? Something would have to, for it was a vacuum which was already sucking at the fullness of my life around it, trying to fill itself up. And as I thought about this, I felt the beginnings of relief. I knew, suddenly, that part of the bill had already been paid. All that suffering I had done when Toby married, that was on account for this moment. I was in credit. One could not go through all that twice for the same person, any more than you can mourn twice for the same death.

  I went up to the kibbutz office once again and telephoned a hotel in Tel-Aviv, booking two rooms for the night. All of a sudden, they had plenty. On impulse I rang up the British Embassy in Tel-Aviv. As the number began to ring, I almost hung up, remembering it was Saturday and they would not be open. But they were.

  ‘British Embassy, good afternoon,’ said a cool, correct English voice.

  ‘I’m visiting Israel briefly on business. Could you advise me whether to stay a few more days, or—’

  ‘The only advice I can give you is the advice I’ve been instructed to give all British citizens who telephone. Get out as fast as you can.’

  I was taken aback. The cool voice and the terse injunction did not match.

  ‘Is the situation that serious?’

  ‘We can’t make any comment on the international situation, madam. We can only warn you that the Embassy cannot guarantee help to anyone who ignores our advice to leave immediately. If your business obliges you to stay beyond tomorrow, you’ll be on your own. Our advice then is to keep your belongings packed, and some food, but you will probably not be able to take more than you can carry, because the transport, if any, will be emergency transport. No scheduled flights can be expected after war breaks out.’

  ‘When is it expected to break out?’

  ‘I can’t say, Madam.’

  ‘No, I suppose not . . . Well thank you very much.’

  ‘A pleasure. Good afternoon.’

  I shivered in the sweltering heat of the wooden office. The secretary of the kibbutz, a little fat man with a bald head, smiled at me, shook his head, and lifted his shoulders in a shrug. I took the card my villainous driver had given me and dialled his number.

  ‘Sorry, lady. All that way out there, and back into town? No, not even for a hundred lira. Something could start any time. I want to be near home.’

  ‘You’re trying to get a car?’ the secretary asked me. I nodded. ‘Someone from the kibbutz is driving to town in about one hour. Perhaps he has place. I will ask.’

  One hour . . .

  I told John, and then went to Toby’s room. I stood outside for a long time in the shadow of the open porch. My hand just wouldn’t obey me and knock on the door. At last he heard the creak of a board, I suppose, and came out. We stood there looking at each other in the semi-darkness.

  ‘You’re leaving,’ he said at last.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Going straight back?’

  ‘I haven’t decided. We’ll spend tonight in this Hotel Yarden I’ve found. Then tomorrow I’ll make up my mind. I’d meant to do some business in Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem, but the war-situation looks so threatening, perhaps I ought not to hang around.’

  ‘Of course not,’ he said flatly. ‘It’s not your fight.’

  ‘Is it yours?’

  ‘Something’s got to be,’ he said oddly. And then: ‘What about Rachel?’

  I hesitated. ‘What about her?’

  He straightened away from the door-jamb where he’d been leaning as if tired. ‘I wish to God you would take her,’ he said unexpectedly.

  ‘But Toby, it’s absolute madness! You must know it is. She wouldn’t come with me.’

  ‘She’ll do what I tell her.’

  ‘But—but—what if anything—’

  ‘What if anything happens to me?’ He sounded indifferent to the point of coldness. ‘It won’t. Unless the country’s actually over-run we’re not in much danger here. But I want—I’d like you to have her. If only for a little while. I want you to know her. In a strange sort of way, you see, she’s yours.’

  ‘What on earth do you mean by that?’

  His sad eyes were fixed on me through the dimness, and I felt I was seeing him for the last time. ‘I’m going to tell you something,’ he said in a low, distant voice. ‘I said this morning that when Whistler and I were first married, the sex side was perfect. But of course that was a lie. It was perfect—apparently; but only because I imagined, every single time I made love to her, that she was you.’

  Of course. How could he have deflowered his dream, his mirage? He would have been as impotent with her as he had been with me beside the pool. The frightening, bitter, deadly irony of all those wasted years struck its final blow at me, and for a second I hated him again, as I had hated him when he had made his first escape from reality and me. To think that he had been vicariously married to me, all the time! Abuse and curses crowded on the tip of my tongue, but I swallowed them, nearly choking with a kind of frustrated, angry grief.

  ‘I can’t take her,’ I said at last. ‘I’m not her mother. You’ll have to find her somebody who will mother her, somebody you will choose just for Rachel. I don’t think she’d be safe with a person you chose for yourself.’ And I wonder, I thought, if that isn’t equally true of me and David? Could that explain why I am going back to the security of Andy, when impractical sentiment still—despite everything—might hold me here?

  ‘Kiss me before you go,’ he said slowly.

  Our lips touched across the chasm.

  ‘Goodbye, Toby.’

  ‘Goodbye, Jane.’

  His voice was already distant, but his lips were warm, and I loved him still as I stepped off the dark porch into the sunlight and came away.

  Chapter 2

  ‘MEES Grey Ham?’

  The clerk, sallow and dark and showing signs of irritation, stood in the open doorway leading into the hotel, and craned to look round at all the people crowded onto the patio to catch a breath of sea air and have a pre-lunch drink under the dark shadow of the awning. I didn’t realise at first that he meant me. I was tired and my brain wasn’t working well enough to identify myself with the grey ham, although it wasn’t a bad description. It had been a long, hot, hard morning. We’d walked, bus’d and taxied from one end of Tel-Aviv to the other, locating workshops and talking to craftsmen. I’d placed three orders which I thought would commend themselves to Jo, and was feeling rather satisfied—I’d be able to tell her she’d been dead right about the belts. This afternoon we were due to go to Jerusalem to investigate the Bezalel School and several other possibilities, but first we needed a shower, a change, a drink and a meal. The drink came first, long and cold; as I stared at the congested strip of beach below us I thought longingly of the cold shower which was next on my list of priorities, but for the moment I was satisfied just to sit and savour, not only my lager, but my sense of self-conquest. I had successfully put heart-heaviness aside and done those things which I ought to have done; at the thought of this I put out my hand to John on an impulse of gratitude, and caught his withdrawn look, unseeing eyes fixed on the heat-hazy horizon; his hand felt dead under mine and I wondered where he’d gone.

  Then the clerk called again.

  ‘Here—’

  He came squeezing between the tables towards me.

  ‘Telegram.’

  ‘For me?’ How had it found me here? But then I remembered I’d mentioned the name of the hotel to Toby.

  I took it from him, a little square envelope made of the cheapest yellow paper. John had come back from his interior distances. As my hands moved to tear it open, he suddenly reached over and snatched it away from me.

  ‘What?’ I asked, sharp with fright.

  He held the yellow envelope gripped tightly in his fingers.

  ‘Wait. Don’t open it till we think what it could be.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked in swiftly increasing alarm.

  He had his eyes closed. ‘What
is the worst? Think of the worst first.’

  ‘John, for Christ’s sake don’t do your witch-doctor act! Give it to me. Nothing we think or prepare for will change it.’ But even as the yellow message changed hands, inevitably the words flashed across my mind . . . and were gone, tearing a bit of me away with them because such a terror is never far from the surface in any imaginative mother. And now that I’d paid for it not to be that, I could open it, but it still took an effort to unfold the paper and read the real words.

  DAVID HAS DISAPPEARED I THINK RUN AWAY POLICE NOTIFIED PLEASE RETURN IMMEDIATELY

  JO.

  When my brain cleared I was on my feet, leaning on the balcony rail, which was hot enough to hurt my hands. John had his arm around me and there seemed to be some disturbance at the tables near us, as if I had cried out or in some other way showed what I was feeling. John had the telegram and was reading it.

  An American sitting at the adjoining table got to his feet.

  ‘Have you had bad news? Can I do anything?’

  ‘My little boy—’ The stranger’s face seemed to come and go through a haze of terror.

  ‘Sit down here.’

  ‘No, I must—’

  ‘You just sit right down. Francie, help this lady, she’s had some bad news.’

  The American’s wife was already at my side, pressing me down again into the hard chair, patting my hand with her plump, damp one. The man took John’s elbow and edged him away, beckoning the waiter at the same time. I heard him order me a brandy. The wife patted me and made soothing nasal noises. As for me, I was strongly aware of the sun’s glare on the sea reflecting straight into my eyes. I kept seeing the clerk’s face as he handed me the telegram. Those were my most prominent conscious thoughts. Below, turmoil, and the deep stirrings of the strength to gather myself together, in just another moment, and take action.

  When the brandy came, which it did more promptly than anything else I had asked for at the hotel, I took it up and drank it at once, knowing I needed it. It took effect quickly, bracing me and numbing me just enough.

  The telegram was lying on the ground. I picked it up and read it again, with the American woman doing the same out of the corners of her eyes.

  ‘Oh, my Gahd, you poor thing! You poor, poor thing!’

  I stood up quite steadily and walked into the hotel. It seemed pitch-dark in there; it took me some moments to adjust my eyes and then I could see John and the American standing at the desk. The American was telephoning. He beckoned when he saw me.

  ‘I’m ringing the airport,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you. I’ll just go upstairs and pack.’

  ‘I’ll come and help you, honey,’ said the wife, who was fussing about behind me.

  ‘There’s no need, thanks. John, will you pay the bill?’

  My mind was a merciful blank as I pushed my few things back into the suitcase and went next door to gather up John’s belongings. It took me a few moments to find the duffle-bag under the bed. While I was kneeling on the floor I said aloud, with grating emphasis, ‘Please, God.’ Later I tried to tell myself that that was not a prayer—how dare one pray at a time like that, when all the rest of the time one abjures belief? But it was.

  John came into the room in time to help me down with the things. It was fortunate the American had been on hand, for John was helpless, and in fact in tears. But at least he had hold of himself sufficiently to do the basic things and not actually to impede me.

  The American couple were waiting with a taxi.

  ‘The planes are all very crowded, but they might find you something on some flight going out tonight. I think in any case you’ll be better off out of here—tomorrow might be too late.’

  Only much later, I remembered the war. At the time I thought he meant, too late to find David.

  ‘Do try not to worry. My boy used to run away regularly, but he always came back—at least, until he was nineteen.’

  The American woman squeezed my hand in both hers. She had the face of a kindly, bewigged sealion, with enormous, lustrous black eyes bulging with sympathetic tears. ‘I shan’t sleep a wink tonight . . .’

  The man disengaged her rather firmly and gave me his card, saying something I didn’t listen to. Americans always give you their cards. I took it and put it in my bag.

  In the taxi, John broke down completely and I had to console him as well as I could. The worst thing was that he kept saying, aloud, all the things I was trying not to think.

  ‘He’s so little—all alone somewhere—he be so frightened—or maybe someone take him—’

  At last I lost patience.

  ‘Will you shut up?’ I said on a rising note of helpless anger.

  We sat in silence for the rest of the journey to Lod. But my imagination was not silent. John’s sentimental outpourings were all it had needed to over-activate it to a point where it began to inflict actual tortures on me. What could Jo have meant, ‘I think run away’? Running away was clearly preferable to simply disappearing. David, at eight, knew his home address and telephone number and was capable of finding his way around. He knew how to travel, at least on the local buses, though he had never done so alone to my knowledge, and in any case everyone in the neighbourhood knew him by sight. He had no inbuilt reservations about approaching people for help, and he had been thoroughly briefed as to the uses of the police-force. The bewildering, the nightmarish question was, why should he run away? From what, to what? David was not given to daring acts of mischief or bravado. Amm, now—Amm might well have gone off for a dare or to pay her mother back for some punishment. But with Amm, one wouldn’t worry so much. Or would one? Amm, when all was said and done, was a girl. Yet little boys, too, are attractive prey to the more depraved monsters of this world. Especially when the boys are as beautiful as David.

  I shivered and swallowed and put my hand over my eyes as if to shut the horrors out. They played on, visible and tangible as cavorting demons, showing off their obscene caperings behind my eyelids, unstoppably . . .

  The airport lounge was like a crazy-house at a fair. Noise, movement, the blurring of many colours and shapes . . . and a feeling, overall, of distortion, timelessness, unreality. There were officials, but they were Kafka-esque beings who seemed to have no real power to effect anything, to solve or clarify or bring any sort of order to the chaos. The multi-coloured fat and thin, tall and short shapes besieged them with a babel of demands, requests and complaints in a dozen languages, and the male and female figures in their uniforms, partially isolated from the hoards of would-be travellers by the stout counters, shrugged and gestured and babbled back, scribbled on scraps of paper, beckoned to each other, occasionally emerging from their little waist-high fortresses to hasten back and forth, exposed to the sleeve-tugging and imprecations of the crowd. All this under bright, hard lights that seemed to make no shadows.

  John stood like a tree in the midst of it, swaying a little with the jostle of hurriers-by, and guarded our luggage, while I joined the besiegers and tried to get to grips with some official who might, conceivably, be able to provide me with what I wanted.

  Looking back now, I feel I probably exaggerated the chaos because of the chaos within me; in any case, it can’t have lasted as long as it seemed to, because eventually I did arrive at the head of some middle-eastern institution only remotely related to a queue, produced our documents—and a miracle happened. As I took the leather pocketbook holding our passports and return tickets out of my bag, a little white card fell out face upwards onto the desk and the weary official before me picked it up and read it. He glanced at me, called somebody else over, and they had a short conference. Suddenly, efficiency, speed and courtesy reasserted themselves. A few scribbles; a brisk, all-conquering thump as an official stamp descended—and the next thing I knew, our luggage was on the scales and we were hurrying out over the bubbling tarmac to a waiting aeroplane.

  ‘What happened?’ John asked as we struggled on board and slotted ourselves into our seat
s. The plane was mercifully air-conditioned.

  ‘I just don’t know . . .’ Only then I remembered that the card had been handed to me by the kindly American at the hotel. I took out my wallet again and found it.

  ‘It seems that man at the hotel was the Air Attaché at the American Embassy,’ I said, more than ever bemused. ‘He must have done some string-pulling for us over the phone. Funny he didn’t tell me to show them his card—it just fell out by accident.’

  John leant back and closed his eyes.

  ‘Or maybe I made magic,’ he said.

  We pulled up and away from the gnome’s dagger country and headed back towards our own. There was a feeling of craven relief throughout the plane. I heard one woman behind me crying, and exclaiming in a shrill American voice: ‘We shouldn’t be leaving—we shouldn’t be deserters—’ and her husband’s soothing mumble, something about having to get back because of the children. I felt a strange pang of conscience myself, which had some connection with Toby and Rachel. But it got submerged in the greater pain of fear for David.

  I stared and stared through the small window at the silvery wing. Travelling by air, I always feel suspended—even when there are clouds to prove that one is moving, I tend to interpret the movement the wrong way round, seeing the clouds rushing past the stationary wing, rather than the wing racing through the clouds. Today the sky was empty except for ourselves, and we hung in space, between two worlds of impossibility—the one wherein I had turned my back on Toby, and the one in which David had ‘disappeared, I think run away’ . . . (If only Amm had run with him—but no, that was wickedness, to desire, even indirectly, that Jo should join me in my wilderness of fear.)