Chapter 6
THE next evening I drove David over to Jo’s and we helped them catch and saddle the ponies, and then we stood together in the middle of the paddock and ‘drilled’ the pair of them round and round, periodically shouting ‘Trot, please!’ ‘Canter, please!’ in deep, horsey voices, like the judges at tomorrow’s gymkhana. We had also been ordered to criticise their riding rigorously, but the first tentative attempt by her mother to check Amanda’s over-assertive bounce had resulted in tears and cries of ‘I wasn’t! That’s how Mr. Rogers told us to do it!’ So after that we had brief intervals in which to talk.
‘What’s up with you this morning?’ Jo asked.
‘Andy proposed to me last night.’
‘To judge by your happy bridal face, you thereupon politely declined.’
‘I had to.’
‘Do tell, how long are you going on like this?—WALK, PLEASE. I don’t see that you’ll ever get a better chance than Andy.’
I said nothing.
‘Still, presumably you’ve left your options open. I mean, you didn’t boot him out on his ear?’
‘No.’
‘So what? Not the old you-must-give-me-time-to-think bit?’
‘Something like that,’ I admitted.
‘Well I dunno,’ she said glumly. ‘I give you up.’ It was typical of her that she asked no obvious questions. I ordered an S-turn to set the show-riders going round the other way, and then apparently changed the subject.
‘Jo, I wanted to ask you . . . Could there be any shop-reason to go to Israel?’
‘Israel? Even if there were, I wouldn’t go there now.’
‘Why not?’
‘What do you want to go to Israel for, of all places?’
‘There’s someone there I want to see.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘Toby Cohen.’
‘Have I heard about him?’
‘I think I mentioned him to you once, ages ago.’ I paused, and added, ‘Maybe you know the name. He writes novels.’
‘Oh yes! Didn’t he write A Hole in the Wall? I liked that very much. Here, wait a minute . . .’ she said suddenly. ‘The girl in it—what was her name—’
‘Greta—’
‘That’s it! I remember as I read it thinking she reminded me of you. Well. Am I on the right track?’
‘Mummy, we’ve been walking round and round for AGES, you’re not watching!’
‘Sorry, love—from a walk to a canter—shorten reins—NOW. Oh, very good, Miss Barclay!’
‘David, you’re still trotting.’
‘Bee’s so damn fat.’
‘Whack her on the rump,’ suggested the successful Amanda, cantering round and lapping him.
‘All right, back to trot—Amanda reverse—meet at the top and go in pairs down the middle. So you want to go to Israel to see him. Before you can decide about Andy.’
‘Yes.’
‘Ah ha. But surely you’d be mad to go just now?’
‘Why not?’
Jo stared at me, hands on small hips, comically amazed.
‘My dear old duck, where do you live? Don’t you listen to the news? There’s going to be a war out there at any moment.’
I watched David and Amanda trotting sedately down the field towards us and then stepped aside to let them pass. I drew in a deep breath as they went by, and realised I hadn’t breathed for about a minute.
‘What sort of a war?’
‘A fairly murderous sort, to hear the BBC tell it. Egyptian tanks massing by the hundreds in Sinai, U.N. pulling out at any moment to let them have a go at each other . . . Oh Jesus, don’t look like that! Do you care that much? Listen, you can’t go just now, what about David if anything broke out and you couldn’t get back? It’d be completely—’
‘Selfish—’
‘Irresponsible, I was about to say. Same thing.’
‘Yes.’ I was silent for some moments, and then said, ‘But Toby’s got his little daughter out there. Surely he won’t keep her there if things are really dangerous.’
‘Well, listen to the news a few times, watch the preparations going on every night on telly. They’re going to massacre each other. I mean, I don’t care much, one way or the other, let them have it out and settle it, I say—better than going on for another 20 years snapping and snarling at each other. But then I don’t know anyone out there on either side, or I might feel different.’
I looked at my watch. There’d be a news bulletin in a few minutes. ‘Will you hold the fort out here?’
‘Sure . . . Jane, listen . . .’
‘What?’
‘If you decide to go, you might look at some of the embroidery and filigree silver stuff the Yemenite immigrants do, I hear it’s very nice. Only it’d have to be better than the tat they flog in the Israel Shop in London. None of those nasty green metal vases and olive-wood holy land camels . . .’
I sat in Jo’s double-ended living-room and listened to the news on the radio. As I listened, with my blood chilling at every sentence, I felt bemused that I hadn’t heard a word about all this before. After all, I have a radio too—but I seldom turn it on except for concerts and the occasional play, and as for newspapers I always start in the middle and work back towards the front page, but lately I’d hardly ever got there somehow. This is part of the penalty—or beauty—of country life. Everything around you is so peaceful that it seems no wars can exist anywhere—at least, none that concern you. Now a dark shadow of alarm fell over my self-contained little world, for I saw that Toby and Rachel, wherever in Israel they might be, were in appalling danger.
I found an atlas among Amanda’s school books and for the first time since my own school days had a close look at the Middle East. What I saw terrified me. Israel lay like a pointed thorn, a gnome’s dagger, sticking into the side of a vast hostile territory. The tip of my finger, anxiously probing the map, covered Israel, while my whole fist hardly extinguished the furthest borders of her enemies. ‘It’s hopeless!’ I thought. ‘An absurdity. Why doesn’t he come home?’
And then I suddenly thought that perhaps he had. That letter, so recent to me, was written some time ago. Probably he’d returned even before this crisis started. The strain of not knowing was so great that it overcame all my inhibitions. I picked up Jo’s phone on the spot and rang Billie’s home number.
‘Hallo? Billie? It’s Jane Graham.’
‘Hallo my dear! I’ve been meaning to get in touch. You got my letter?’
‘Yes. Listen, Billie. Is he back?’
‘Of course you’re worried. My dear, so are we. You can imagine. I mean it’s bad enough him being out there, but Rachel—! I don’t know how many telegrams I’ve sent already telling him to bring her home, or if he must stay himself, to send her. All I get in reply is “All quiet here don’t worry”.’
‘You mean he’s not coming back?’
‘It doesn’t look like it.’ Was I deceived, or was there a note of satisfaction in her voice?
‘But why not? I don’t understand—there’s going to be a war.’
‘Well, that’s not absolutely certain yet, though things look very bad of course. Very bad.’
‘So why doesn’t he come, Billie? For God’s sake?’
‘Hard to explain.’
‘But you understand,’ I said slowly.
‘Oh yes. He’s a Jew, after all. And he’s a man. And I doubt if there are many Jewish men of army age in the world at this moment who aren’t a little troubled in their minds as to where they ought to be. I’m a woman, and I’m nearly fifty, and I’ve never been noticeably Jewish in anything but looks, yet even I . . .’ There was an oddly emotional silence, which I broke into impatiently.
‘But the child!’
‘Oh God, yes, he should send Rachel home, I’ve told him that, and Melissa’s nearly out of her mind. Melissa phoned him at the kibbutz. She begged him. Do you know what he said? He said that nobody’s sending their children out, and he can’t be the first and only one. When she didn’t accept that, he said that he was fairly sure that there wouldn’t be a war, and that if there were, he was even surer that the Israelis would win it.’
‘They can’t possibly. I mean look at the map. They can’t possibly.’
‘We must hope you’re wrong about that,’ she said with a sudden slight coldness.
‘Oh Billie, stop that! I know you’re a Jew and you probably believe deep down that God’ll protect his people and all that, but just look at the population figures. They’re outnumbered something like 40 to one. No country can survive against odds like that.’
There was a pause and then Billie said in a strange, withdrawn tone, ‘Toby says they can, and Toby’s there. Everything about that country happened at odds-on.’
‘Can’t Melissa go over herself and bring Rachel back? Take the matter out of Toby’s hands?’
‘She would, she wants to. But I won’t let her.’
‘Why not?’
After another pause, she said, ‘Because I’m afraid that if she went out there she wouldn’t come back either.’
I almost physically threw up my hands. ‘Good grief, is she crazy too?’
‘It’s what I’d do myself.’ She laughed a little. ‘All we Jews are a bit crazy just now. Haven’t you seen the fund-raising rallies on TV? Tight-fisted hard-headed businessmen giving millions away at the drop of a yarmulka.’ She laughed again, exultantly, and suddenly said, ‘We’ll beat them, Jane—we’ll beat them, with or without God, you’ll see.’
I made a sound of exasperation.
‘Billie, listen to me. I know you’ll say it’s none of my business—’
‘Oh no I won’t,’ she said, sounding quite sober and calm again.
‘I can’t go into it all now, but I simply have to see Toby. I can’t move, somehow, in any direction until I’ve seen him. Now what if—’ I hesitated only a moment, but it was too complicated to think out, so I went on impulsively—’what if I went out there, very soon, I mean in the next few days. On my own private business with him. Is there anything you want me to say or do about Rachel?’
There was a long silence, so long that I asked if she were still there.
‘Yes, I’m here. I’m thinking. You won’t be going for a day or two anyway, will you?’
‘No,’ I said, suddenly getting frightened. Was I really going then?
‘So I’ll maybe talk to Melissa and let you know.’
‘You’re going to tell Melissa about me?’
‘My dear, don’t you think she knows all about you? She once told me you were breaking up her marriage by remote control.’ And on that stunning note, she said goodbye.