Her Victory (72 page)

She was silent for a while, then Judy said: ‘Does all this mean you're going back to your husband, after all?'

‘No. That's unthinkable. Finished. But in five years I don't want to feel like that with Tom.'

Judy refilled their glasses. ‘You won't, though I understand your fears. Tom's the sort who won't let that happen. Plenty of knock-about life is in store for you yet, I'm sure.'

‘But will he ever feel like that with me?'

‘I don't expect so, but who knows? None of us is God.'

20

The choice came to Pam as a blinding revelation one night after Rachel was in her cot and Judy had gone out with the kids to the cinema. She looked over his shoulder at the Hebrew grammar and said: ‘You'll never know the language properly until you go to Israel to live, and hear it spoken all around you.'

‘I don't suppose I will. Yet I went into the local synagogue last week and heard it there.'

‘That's liturgical. I mean as an everyday language.'

On most Friday nights a solitary candle burned on the dining-room table. The children liked it, and even Judy was tolerantly quiet. Tom wore a black cap hardly visible on the back of his head, and hurriedly murmured a prayer. He opened a bottle of wine and, to the children's delight, poured a glass for everyone. That was the extent of his Sabbath.

‘Haven't you ever thought about it?' A recollection forced the question into her mind, of seeing the preacher clearly from ten years ago, in the chapel she had wandered into like a sleepwalker. She had found comfort in the strange words, and had gone back love-sick week after week to hear this unprepossessing yet mysterious man tell of the virtues of ancient and modern Israel.

Tom admitted that he had considered a visit to his second country, but so many things had happened to divert him from such an idea.

‘I don't mean a visit,' she said. ‘Wouldn't you like to live there? After all, your mother was Jewish, her mother was Jewish before her, and so was her mother. It would make sense, absolutely.'

He stood up and smoked a cigarette by the mantelshelf. She looked at him: fragile, vulnerable, uncertain. From the beginning she had known all too well what he must do, and so had he, but he had chosen to deceive himself so as to let her be the one to tell him. By doing so she was being more herself than she had ever been.

She had seen him looking at maps of Israel. For a year he had read continually books on Zionism and Jewish life, and studied intensely in his spare time, but the exact place of his yearning in modern terms had seemed too remote for her to divine the answer or him to make the connection. It was amazing how distant the obvious could be. But now she knew. If she hadn't sensed his ultimate destination right from the beginning she would not have lived with him and had their child. She would not have set out with him on such a long and perhaps endless journey. As for her independence, didn't she know that a passion for it carried to excess was a sure recipe for getting nowhere?

She would initiate the change, move him. She felt herself drawn towards Israel, because he saw it as a land whose light was as yet too far away. The preacher's sermons told of how the Jews were at last able to go back to the Promised Land, and she felt that circumstances had carried her inexorably this far towards it. Events always moved you to what was most profoundly wanted. She recalled the preacher's face, and his voice, and heard again what he had said, blushing at how she had gone week after week, unbeknown to George, to sit gawping like a young girl before a pop star.

He pressed her hand. ‘I don't know. I really don't know.'

But he did, and she knew that he did. He always had known. She had surprised him again. She surprised herself. She loved him because it was possible, and always would be possible, to surprise him. People went to Israel for holidays much as they did to Majorca or Italy, she said. The place isn't so remote any more, nor so strange, she supposed, unless you were like me who happens to be madly in love with someone who has a birthright connection with it.

It's part of my life to go there, she thought, to a country like any other, yet a place that nowhere else can resemble. Being Jewish was more significant to a person than being anything else. She hoped so. She knew so. She had seen the effect on him when he first found out about his mother. He still hadn't got over the shock. She would help him, and there was only one way. He was more than half-way there. She had seen him put money into the collection boxes on the counter of the delicatessen. She knew where they belonged.

He sat down. ‘It's something to think about.'

‘No,' she said scornfully. ‘If you have to think about it, it's impossible. One doesn't think about a thing like that. The thinking has already been done, though you haven't noticed, I dare say.'

She distrusted herself. No, she didn't. All motives had a thousand strings attached. Ignore them. No, don't ignore anything. To ignore is to fly in the face of God. Did she merely want to get out of the country because she couldn't bear to bring Rachel up in this same old place? Would going anywhere else be better? She couldn't bear to be seen pushing her about in a pram, a woman of her age with a child on the street, and old enough to be its grandmother! If she stayed she would really drop her out of the window, all love pulled away to create a vacuum wherein she didn't know what she was doing. And that would be the end of them all. In any other country such an action would be unthinkable. The idea surfaced vividly to convince her, but seemed merely another motive that, unable to deny, she had to contend with and finish once and for all.

Nor could she bear to love two people at the same time. It was impossible for peace of mind, and tore her in two. Sleeping with Judy was like being back with her mother, a sensual restoration of all senses, which she ought to have outgrown long ago. Nothing but a sea-change would suffice. And yet again, why should she? She would always love women if she felt like doing so. She was tired of learning lessons when it was perfectly safe for certain parts of her to drift the way she wanted. All the same, you could not give in to such distractions if you wanted to guide your life in any positive way.

They were surface reasons perhaps, excuses and nothing more, yet the words had come spontaneously because whatever reason had put them there would never be defined. If it wasn't already obvious, yet utterly buried at the same time, there wasn't a reason and never would be. She didn't know which it was, and didn't care to. They would go to Israel, or she would return to living in a room of her own. She had said enough. He must do the rest himself.

‘Is that an ultimatum?'

It was.

He knew what he wanted, he answered. Nobody knew better, but he didn't know whether what he wanted was what she really wanted, that was the trouble. Even though she had suggested accurately enough that he wanted to break off the present life – and he did, if only to end it – he had to be sure she wanted it as well. The idea that she was merely, if unintentionally, tormenting him could be countered for the moment by saying nothing. Be still, and know that I am yours, he wanted to tell her.

He said it.

She already knew.

It was irrelevant, he felt when he had said it.

So did she.

So much was.

How could it not be?

But to the extent that you had to say it, it wasn't.

Nothing was.

Forget it.

Know that even love was something that had to be endured, a fact which, when realized, did not make him unhappy. Rather, it made him feel less numb than before he had said it.

He said it again to himself while walking through the park by the Pavilion on his way back from the public library on a fine April morning. She wanted him to go on his own, and then they would see, but if he did he thought he might lose not only her but Rachel as well. It was too much to ask.

But the chance had to be taken. He was never anywhere except in the middle of a storm, the never-ending turmoil of life. Momentous decisions had always to be considered and quite often taken, a state of mind not unfamiliar, nor even unwanted. Life at sea was like that, and the whole of life was being at sea, until you went under into the dark. There was no reason not to smile about it, as he did when catching a glimpse of himself in a shop mirror on his way through The Lanes. She wanted him to go to Israel by himself, and then he could tell her when she and Rachel were to follow, and though he couldn't bear to leave his two-month-old daughter for as much as an hour, he would brace himself to do it.

In other words, he would leave his daughter with a feeling that recalled his mother's action when she had taken a last look at him in his cradle before going out of his grandfather's house never to come back. That event, and the one that felt too uncomfortable to contemplate, were close enough to produce a crushing overlap as he turned and walked with more speed along the seafront, a memory still too near for a proper decision to be made.

But having said it, it was as good as done. Speech was the point of no return. Discipline would take over. Otherwise what were words for? Blue sea worried the shingle with a roar before going out again. There was one last journey to travel, and nobody could say he was afraid to make it.

Sunlight was doled on to the water by a wind manipulating gaps in the clouds. Glistening acres came and went as he looked from the end of the pier. Smokestacks were alive, energy and purpose in their acute angles as when he had first been mesmerized by the expanse. They ran on diesel now and were plain blocks battling their way, but all alteration was progress, one way or the other. Sloth, which was sinful in the eyes of the righteous, meant in him a self-induced form of death that was far worse.

He had given no proper and binding answer. To make it firm – so that he could not turn back for fear of damaging his pride to the extent that he would never have the spiritual strength to move more than five miles beyond where he lived for the rest of his life – they would have to talk about his departure before Judy and the children.

21

‘Israel!' Judy exclaimed. ‘You must be stark raving bonkers!'

They talked on Saturday afternoon when it was raining too hard for any of them to go out. Pam thought Judy might be envious, and also afraid, because she seemed, after all, less adaptable to change than any of them. What she or anybody thought was unimportant. While holding Rachel to her chest so that she could look at the children playing Monopoly on the floor, Pam felt that once changes began out of a centre of consciousness, as they had with her on leaving George, there was no stopping further developments spreading in their wake. She was no longer safe or happy at being settled. She had opted for adventure, and even the final conversion, wanting the new life to go on, no matter how disturbed others would be by her wanderings. If they were in the same state would they consider her? She doubted it, and would not blame them if they did not.

Judy stood by the mantelpiece, a hand at the side of her face as if Tom's information had struck and left a mark there. ‘There's a war every five minutes,' she said.

‘They have them everywhere these days,' he answered, ‘or are likely to. You're never far from the riot, or the terrorist psychopath with his so-called explosive device. There's no use worrying about that sort of thing any more, or using it as an excuse not to act. If anything happens to me, all I have goes to Pam, but if we both end up dead before our time, which I consider unlikely, by the way, then whatever's left goes to you. You'll be taken care of, in any case. As I've told you before, there's enough for everybody here.'

She knew he was Jewish, but even so, didn't you only go to Israel if, say, some nut like Hitler came up from the sewers? ‘They don't even have proper frontiers,' she said.

‘They will have. Every country starts that way.'

‘You like to make things all neat and tidy,' Judy said. ‘But that's not what I mean. Your sort of tidiness makes me want to puke. You can't move us around like pieces on a chess-board. I love you both, so I don't want either of you to go.'

‘I'm not going,' Pam began.

Judy put a hand to the other side of her face, as if that cheek was also in pain. ‘What?'

‘Well, not straight away.'

‘I can't get a proper answer on that matter,' Tom said. ‘Things aren't as tidy as you think.'

They looked at each other helplessly, as if they would have rushed to be physically close had no children been by. Judy went into the kitchen. ‘I'll leave you to sort yourselves out.'

He settled himself in an armchair, and lit a cigar.

‘I think you offended her,' Pam said.

He puffed smoke towards the fireplace. ‘What? By talking about money? Possessions?'

She looked out of the window, her back to him, raising her voice to make sure it was heard in the kitchen. ‘Perhaps. But it's you she doesn't want to lose. She doesn't care about anyone else. You can hardly leave yourself to her in your last will and testament.'

He put his cigar in the ashtray and stood. ‘Is that why you want us to go?'

‘I wish you'd sort yourself out,' Hilary said to Sam. ‘All you've got to do is sell Piccadilly, and one of your railway stations, and then you'll have some money left to go on playing.'

Sam groaned. ‘I know. But I don't want to lose any of my complete sets.'

‘She told me about it last night,' Pam said, after a silence. ‘What happened when I was in the hospital.'

He held her shoulders, feeling the warmth under her blouse, and looking down over inflated breasts at Rachel peacefully sleeping. ‘I'm sorry about that.'

She was surprised that it did not matter. And she told him so. ‘Somehow, it doesn't, not with Judy.'

Nevertheless, he thought, it was best forgotten. ‘I'll be unhappy to leave Rachel,' he said softly, ‘and more than sad to leave you. I'll also regret leaving Judy, and those two.' He nodded towards the children on the floor. ‘But I have to go, whether or not I want to, or whether or not you now want me to. I'd have come to it of my own volition, otherwise I wouldn't have agreed to your wish, suggestion or command, or whatever you like to call it. But it's easier for me to go knowing that you won't be left here alone, and that you and Rachel will come to me after a while.'