‘Willows whiten, aspens quiver, little breezes dusk and shiver …’ Paula recited as the Lady of Shalott came into view on the gallery wall, floating, eyes closed, russet hair flowing down her back, bosky, doomed, deathly. ‘How marvellous.’
‘My God, you don’t like this awful muck, do you? It wants burning down. The rotted, decomposing Victorian soul that blights us half a century since the old grandma breathed her last.’
‘But, the colours!’ Paula cried. ‘That little spot of green that—’
‘Oh, gawd, you’ve been reading a book, art appreciation by numbers.’ He laughed. ‘And how green you are, my dear. How provincially new.’
Roland took her arm, steered her out of the room through to another gallery where the Turners hung.
As if a knife had rent the canvas of The Lady of Shalott, Roland had slashed through the memory of those Saturday afternoons with her father at the Walker, where, companionably together, they had sighed in front of the beauty of the Pre-Raphaelites. And she had not known that his love of them was foolish, crude, common.
Roland had met her on the steps of the Tate. It was an arrangement designed to reassure her, because looking at stale British art was the kind of genteel thing girls liked. He was late. She stood looking across the river to its southern shore. Terra incognita, he would call it when he eventually turned up, looking pale and bruised under his eyes, but smiling, glad to see her because she was ten times sexier than anyone else he had passed that morning. She knew what she was doing with a lipstick and a vial of scent. And even buttoned up in a coat she had a promising shape.
He had not meant to humiliate her. Her greenness was kind of adorable. She had a plasticine quality he was sure he could mould to his own wishes. And related to old Itzik! What a turn-up. Amongst the Turners he took her hand, raised it to his lips, kissed it. It was the kind of old-fashioned gesture girls fell for, and one that was totally misleading. But cheaper than a bunch of flowers.
He took her to lunch at ‘a little Italian place I know, down some steps but the grub is decent,’ where she drank a glass of Chianti which seemed strong, and learned how to impale bootlaces of spaghetti on her fork, swivel it up the tines and lever it messily into her mouth, her chin spattered with tomato sauce, feeling inelegant and even dirty, watching him laughing at her across the tablecloth, and sticking out his tongue, saying, ‘I could lick that off if you like; I could be fairly unobtrusive, it’s quite dark in here.’
And did she want to be licked by nose-boy, as she thought of him, aquiline, goyishe nose-boy, sitting across the table from her in a tweed jacket and striped tie with some kind of small crest on it, so at ease with himself, with her, with the place, with the situation? Inside she was morphing into the kind of girl who allows herself to be licked at a restaurant table. And doubtless thrown out immediately by the outraged waiters for creating a scene. It seemed to her like fun. But he had withdrawn his tongue and was smiling, like the cat that’s got the cream, she thought.
She felt the pull of her sex appeal. She could reel him in from across the table if she wanted to. Men were so stupid, a little cleavage and they were babies crying for the nipple. You crossed your legs and the gesture looked like a lottery.
She felt his hand reach beneath the tablecloth and brush along her leg, she shuddered with pleasure while she was jabbering about bed sheets and bolsters and what an awful bore it all was, and how everyone kept clear of her, and her boss was the dreariest man in England. And somehow it all kept coming back to bed linen, so no wonder he had gone so far up her leg to have felt the nubs of her suspender belt, pressed them gently into her flesh. How could she let him do it? Why did she not angrily swat that hand away, as she had actually been taught to do at the college, because they knew all about wandering palms there, and the definition of a man who was unsafe in taxis and those who were too safe? But she didn’t, because she was drunk on a glass of Chianti, and Roland suited candlelight at lunchtime, and appeared younger and more film-star-like. In profile, he resembled a canteen of cutlery, all angles, his nose and chin cutting through the clammy winter day. There was little flesh on him, he was a scarecrow, but facing her across the restaurant table lit by a candle’s low-wattage glow he was softer, kind of rubbed out, she thought, as if he might begin to evaporate in the warmth of the wine. Oh, he was what her father would call a so-and-so, of course he was.
They said goodbye on the street. ‘Toodle-pip,’ he said. ‘Got to go to work. See you later.’ And he legged it across the traffic to jump onto a bus to Oxford Circus. She had forgotten to ask him what he did for a living and now she didn’t know why he was going to work in the middle of the afternoon on a weekend. She supposed she had not given satisfaction, with her humiliation over The Lady of Shalott, and he was making a quick getaway.
Mina did not reply to her daughter’s letter introducing the curious evening she had spent with Itzik, which Paula had relayed with uncertainty, not knowing whether to be tactful and evasive or tell it as it happened, amusingly, including the arrival of Roland at the table. Which necessitated revealing that she had been inside the premises of a public house, which no one from her family, as far as she knew, had ever stepped foot in. In the end, she left in the crack about the boyfriends in the forest, thinking it was some kind of in-joke between the siblings which might amuse her mother and bring back old times.
Mina did not believe in committing words to paper. She was self-conscious about her handwriting, the alphabet was a thicket of prohibitions, letters could be written two ways, according to a set of rules she did not get, could not commit to memory. P’s and d’s presented their own problems, bulbous faces that could go either way.
Mina rang the telephone in Paula’s digs, where her daughter came running down three flights having been called up over the banisters by the landlady, thinking it must be Roland, for it was not the usual time her mother rang from the telephone stool in the hall alcove beneath the rows of ornaments at home.
What did he say, what did he look like, what did he say about me and Jossel, what does he want from us, what did he mean I had boyfriends in the forest, I never had a boyfriend in my life till your father came to the door, what is the poison he is planting in your mind, because it is poison, believe you me. Ask your Uncle Jossel about him, he knew him better than me, for years they had to share a bed and he tells me terrible things. And is he married, does he have his own children, and if not, why not, why is he all alone, what did he do to deserve such a fate? And after the waves of agitated sound had washed over Paula’s lug-holes, she managed to get a word in edgeways to say, ‘Any message?’
Mina hesitated. A message could be misinterpreted. The words could come back to hit her in the face like a wet flapping fish.
‘To him? To that mamzer? Nothing!’
When she got off the phone, the ivory Chinaman trembling on the shelf from the torrent of speech, Mina made herself a glass of tea and tried to remember her brother. Maybe she had been too quick to write him off. He was a big shot now, he had a position, he was adjacent to greatness, though the Soviet Union’s shine had somewhat worn off for her and the photograph of Joseph Stalin was closed up in a trunk in the spare room with a lot of other paraphernalia which did not seem to pertain to post-war life. She had stopped her subscription to the communist paper. She supplied trays of egg-mayonnaise-filled bridge rolls and cakes and poured tea and glasses of whisky for the Wednesday-night clandestine meetings Louis held in the lounge to raise money to buy guns for the Jews in Palestine.
She rang Jossel.
‘You’ll never guess who has turned up after all these years. We thought he was dead, he wasn’t dead, he’s an important man, it turns out.’
She outlined the edited version of the strange meeting Paula had relayed to her.
‘He told her the boys in the forest were boyfriends.’
‘Same old Itzik, wanting to cause trouble.’
‘You were right about him.’
‘Of course I was right.’
‘Still, what does he know?’
‘About what?’
‘The family, where they are, what happened to them; he’s all we have left of the old world, the old life, don’t we owe it to …’
But Jossel’s mind turned to stone when he thought of his brother, how one time, on the street, he had … But why did he even have to remember all the evil Itzik had done to him?
He described Itzik to his second wife as ‘that little shit,’ but then Louis, talking to him on the telephone after he had calmed Mina’s shock, said, ‘Don’t you think many little shits went into the camps and never left and don’t we count them among who we lost? Terrible people went in, terrible people up the chimney as well as the beautiful children and the balabatish housewives and the doctors and the violinists. I think there are so few of us, each life must be held precious. Wouldn’t you still have saved my life on the battlefield if I had been an embezzler?’
‘What are you telling me? That we should say it’s okay for Paula to see him, that we should invite him for afternoon tea, that Mina should entertain him?’
‘If she wants she wants.’
Jossel felt that his brother-in-law was an innocent, a native-born Englishman with no memories of the old times. A good man, he was kind, he was always doing the right thing. He was a pillar of the community. As Jossel had been forgiven, so, Louis implied, Itzik could be brought back into the world of Mendel.
Still, Jossel felt, hadn’t the wrong Mendel survived? Why not his mother, that uncomplaining woman who had stood between him and his father? And if the old ones were not to be spared, what about the unknown fate of his little sister Rivka and her husband and three children, the silent ones. She had sent a photo in 1933 of herself as a young mother with a smudge of a husband next to her, his face obscured by the brim of a hat, wheeling a pram, a sleeping baby under a cover, and in the background a street, cars, passers-by. What of the half remembered Solly, also married? They might still be alive, there were no graves, but who had a grave? Now a brother who was not so nice had re-emerged from the great wound of the century and wanted to be in touch. What right did he have, he told Mina, what right?
Mina said to Louis, ‘All my life he has looked out for me when I no longer had a mother and father to tell me what was wise and what to do. Why shouldn’t I listen to him now?’
‘If that’s what you want, my dear, we’ll have nothing to do with him.’