The Summer came to an end. Katia and Daphne returned from Germany where their paths had not crossed. There seemed even less likelihood of their becoming friendly. Katia reported that the Germans were being asked to boycott Jewish-owned department stores; this was very bad for her grandparents, who owned a chain of shoe shops.
‘The Germans are jealous of anyone who makes money,’ she said. ‘They are too stupid to make it themselves.’
Her grandparents’ wealth meant a lot to Katia, who spent most of the year in straitened circumstances which must on no account be acknowledged. Jacov had found his way of dealing with this and the twins lived in a world of their own, hut Katia was confused and angered by the contradictions in her life.
Daphne dismissed Katia’s fears. ‘My father says Hitler has a lot of sound ideas,’ she told Alice as they walked home after a game of tennis in Acton Park. ‘He heard him speak at an open air rally.’ She stopped and pointed at a greengrocer’s stall. ‘Pomegranates! We must have one.’
When they had bought a pomegranate each. Daphne said, ‘Why do you take so much notice of Katia?’
‘It’s not just Katia,’ Alice said. ‘My father thinks Hitler is bad.’
‘Why?’ Daphne bit into her pomegranate.
‘He wants to get rid of people.’
‘Only gypsies and useless people like that.’
Alice could not think what to say in the face of this lack of sensitivity. Then she noticed that Daphne was throwing away the seeds of the pomegranate. ‘Daphne, what are you doing?’
‘I don’t like the pips.’
‘But there’s nothing else.’
‘I can’t help it; I don’t like them.’
Alice, who didn’t like anything about a pomegranate except its name and the fact that she never had one at home, munched in silence. She wished the people she loved could get on with one another better.
Claire was having the same problem in a more extreme form. She had made a bosom friend at Crusader camp. Alice was able to sustain several friendships at the same time; but Claire could not do this. Each friendship was exclusive and tended as a result to break down, since few could equal her capacity for singleminded devotion. Judith warned her about this tendency, but to little avail – it was as much a part of Claire’s make-up as red hair and freckles. In answer to her complaints that her friends were unfaithful, Judith would say, ‘You ask too much of your friends, Claire. You mustn’t always expect them to behave and feel like you.’
‘But I do expect that.’
It seemed she had found what she expected in Maisie Richards. Maisie, a scholarship girl, was a form higher than Claire, and they had not been friendly until they met at Crusader camp.
Maisie had told Claire about her working-class family, who had no time for religion. ‘It’s the same as voting Conservative to my Dad.’ They had talked a lot about this, and prayed for the conversion of Maisie’s family. Claire had told Maisie how upset she was because Alice no longer wanted her, and they had prayed about that, too.
When they returned to Shepherd’s Bush, Claire visited Maisie and was distressed by what she saw. The house was small, and Claire felt frightened by the proximity of people and furniture in the tiny overcrowded rooms. The garden in her own home was treated as another room in the house, used and tended; but here it was a waste area in which wood and coke, the handlebars of a bicycle, a broken handcart and other mechanical failures, had been dumped. Mr Richards, who was unemployed, sat in his shirtsleeves staring at the empty kitchen grate, and did not raise his head when Maisie and Claire came into the room.
Maisie took Claire up to the room which she shared with her younger sister and which, to Claire, seemed little more than a cupboard. ‘The beds weren’t made,’ she told Alice later. ‘And the chamber-pot was full of number two. I thought I was going to be sick.’
The stairs were uncarpeted. There were no pictures on any of the walls, and there were no flowers about the house. Flowers were very important to the Fairleys. Every Friday Claire saw her father come home with a bunch of flowers, which he presented to her mother with a joke about its being his ‘peace offering’. It was hard to imagine what peace offering would be acceptable to Mrs Richards, who raised her voice whenever she spoke, and always seemed to be angry.
Judith disapproved of the intensity of this new friendship. She hoped the attraction would pass, but as the autumn term wore on it seemed that Claire had found a friend whose devotion equalled her own.
There were arguments at Christmas. Claire painted a desolate picture of the way in which Maisie would have to pass Christmas Day. ‘They won’t go to chapel, and there won’t be any decorations or turkey or . . .’
Judith was adamant. Alice and Louise could not have friends on Christmas Day and neither could Claire. Christmas Day was given over to the family – including Grandmother Fairley, Aunt May and Ben – and six of the old folk from the chapel.
Louise took Claire’s part. ‘If Maisie can’t come, I don’t see why we have to have Ben.’
Since he came to London, Ben had been a welcome visitor at the Fairleys’ home. Stanley Fairley enjoyed having masculine company about the house, and Judith had suggested that Ben might like to live with them. He preferred, however, to remain in his digs in Camden.
‘I’ll be better off on my own,’ he had told Judith. ‘I’ve got to study.’
‘Don’t overdo it. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.’
‘All the Jacks I know are going to be dull because they were content to stay where they were and play.’ University acceptance was the second great achievement of Ben’s life: getting his scholarship had been the first. He was moving well ahead of his contemporaries at a home, and he wasn’t fool enough to slacken his pace when he had a commanding lead.
‘He means to make people take account of him,’ Judith thought, and liked him for it. Louise disliked him for the same reason.
On Christmas morning Ben arrived while Mr Fairley and the girls were at chapel. He made himself useful to Judith in the kitchen. She could tell from the unfussy way he set about the small tasks she entrusted to him that he had been used to helping his mother. She wondered whether how was the time to have a talk with him about Lizzie; but it was difficult to know what to say, particularly as she hadn’t liked her.
Ben, in fact, was thinking how much Judith reminded him of his mother as she had been before hard work and illness wore her down. He went into the hall to put a piece of holly over the mirror. The door of the sitting-room was ajar, and he could see that the fire was alight. He stood in the doorway, observing the flames reflected on the long wall; and the neat preparedness of the room with bowls of nuts and boxes of dates, sugared almonds and Turkish delight upon the side tables, the piano open with music on the rack. The feeling of love and family closeness oppressed and confused him. He thought of Judith with resentment, because life had been so much kinder to her than to his beloved mother. Yet he was half in love with her and jealous of Stanley. He hated Louise, who would come in at any moment and draw the dancing firelight to herself. She, more than any of the others, made him aware of his emotional inexperience.
He felt an urge to run out of the house and get some space around him. But it was too late even for flight into the garden, because he could hear Stanley and the girls coming up the path. He was drawn into the ceremony of present-giving: at least he had come well prepared for that.
At dinner even Grandmother Fairley, who sighed over Christmases past, ate heartily and had two helpings of Christmas pudding. Claire, however, maintained an air of tragedy. In the afternoon she shut herself in her room, because she and Maisie had agreed to put aside a time when they thought about each other. She was not, however, proof against the enchantment of charades. This was the one theatrical entertainment permitted in the Fairley household. The dressing-up trunk was brought out and its treasures re-examined; mother-of-pearl fans and painted parasols, lace shawls and little sequin bags, long black taffeta skirts (there was a preponderance of black, as many items had been donated by Grandmother Fairley), white kid gloves which reached above the elbow and had little pearl buttons to draw them tight at the wrist, straw hats decorated with cherries, and a feather boa which had to be handled carefully, because it was moulting so badly.
Whatever the word chosen, the scenes enacted reflected the spirit of Punch and Judy rather than Christmas, and Claire and Ben were particularly uninhibited in their performances.
On Boxing Day evening the Fairley children had a party to which the Vaseyelins were invited, together with Guy, and Daphne, Angus and Cecily Drummond.
‘Why couldn’t I have Maisie?’ Claire complained to Alice.
‘Because if Maisie came you wouldn’t take any notice of Cecily.’
‘At least Maisie’s father hasn’t got another woman.’
‘It’s the first time we’ve been allowed to have a party on Boxing Day. You mustn’t do anything to spoil it, or we’ll never have another.’
The party went well. The Drummonds were a great success: Daphne had an instinctive social sense which enabled her to get everything right without making any effort, Cecily was polite and anxious to please, while Angus was adjudged by Louise to be ‘rather sophisticated’. Alice was proud of them. Ben and Jacov engaged in lively conversation on a wide range of subjects, Ben showing off shamelessly and Jacov matching his mental gymnastics without apparent difficulty. Guy, who always experienced a compulsion to adjust his personality to the requirements of the company in which he found himself, watched them with a certain amount of envy. Louise, who had also been watching them, said to Guy, ‘I wouldn’t have expected those two to get on; they are so different.’
‘I was thinking they were rather similar. Both a bit clever.’
‘Ben talks out of the top of his head.’ She shrugged Ben aside as not worthy of interest. ‘Jacov makes me feel there are things he knows that I don’t know.’
‘What sort of things?’
‘Dark things.’
As the party continued, Alice began to feel lonely. Claire had reconciled herself to Maisie’s absence, and she and Cecily were sitting in a corner whispering secrets. Daphne was being mildly provocative to the Vaseyelin twins, and Ben was arguing with Jacov. Louise and Guy were sitting on the rug by the hearth, roasting chestnuts. As Alice watched, he leant forward and poked one chestnut free, then he peeled it and offered it to Louise. She opened her mouth like a soft, downy bird, and he broke off a piece and fed it to her. In the glow of the flames, they looked warm and very happy. Louise said to him, ‘Can you see the gypsy in the fire?’ Alice wondered why Louise always saw a gypsy in the fire. As she watched Louise pointing, and Guy pretending to see – although it was obvious he couldn’t really – she felt an odd pain in her tummy. She looked round the room. There was no one here who was particular to her. She had never hitherto felt this as a loss, but now it began to matter. Katia would not speak to her, because Daphne had been asked to the party and she was now talking to Angus Drummond in a loud, showing-off voice. The sophisticated Angus looked a bit alarmed, which wasn’t surprising since she had bushed her dark gold hair so that she looked heathen as a Hottentot, and her eyes fairly popped out of their sockets in their attempt to rivet his attention.
Across the room, Alice could see her mother looking at her. The last thing she wanted was for her parents to feel sorry for her because she had been left out. She got up and went out of the room, coughing as if she had a piece of one of the chestnuts she hadn’t been given caught in her throat. She had a drink of water in the kitchen, and then studied herself in the hall mirror. She had parted her hair in the middle and secured it with pink bows, which stuck out like extensions to her ears; a pink velvet band across the top of her head connected the ears and compounded the silly, pantomime effect. Her dress, the pattern for which she herself had chosen, had tucks and pleats in all the wrong places. She returned to the sitting-room, where her absence appeared to have passed unnoticed.
They were about to play charades. In a surge of self-pity, she thought how all the other girls would enjoy letting themselves go and looking ugly, because they knew inside themselves that they were attractive – even Cecily seemed quite pleased with herself today. Jacov had produced a brown paper bag and was taking something from it; he spoke in his most foreign way, as if he was making a speech, ‘Our contribution to the dressing-up trunk, which you have often so generously shared with us!’ He took out of the bag a peacock-blue shawl studded with ruby and amethyst beads, unpatterned, as though jewelled dust had been blown across it at its making. The thing was quite dazzling in its beauty: whoever conceived it was a foreigner to sober English notions of unpretentious good taste, and it looked strange and exotic in the Fairley’s homely sitting-room. It was obviously old because Alice, who was now sitting on the piano stool close to Jacov, could smell the stale perfume which hung about it – but this only added to its enchantment. It was old because it was the Arabian nights, the desert sky into which God had tossed the stars . . . it was . . . oh, she would think of other things when she wrote about it in her diary at night. Perhaps Louise might let her take it up to her bedroom if she promised not to crumple it. Alice looked at Louise, rosy in the firelight, eyes shining: beyond a doubt, the shawl must be hers.
Louise looked at the shimmering silk in admiration but, confident that life would bless her, she was neither acquisitive nor competitive, and did not stretch out a hand. Guy, however, looked at the shawl and then at Louise as though it already adorned her; and Alice felt the pang in her stomach again, but sharper this time. She said, ‘It will go with Claire’s hair, won’t it?’ It was one of her few moments of pure spite, and as Claire’s face lit up she got no pleasure from what she had done, and would have spoilt things for Claire, too, had she seen her way to it.
Then Jacov had one of his unaccountable lapses. It had been noted before that he seemed on occasions to suffer from a defect of vision, which made him see things quite differently from normal people like the Fairleys and their friends. He had, moreover, the disturbing ability to fracture their clarity and impose on them his own distorted impressions. Now, easily and unselfconsciously, as though performing an act they were all awaiting, he took up the shawl and, turning so that he stood behind her, laid it around Alice’s shoulders. ‘Alice is to be its custodian.’
Alice sat dumbfounded with the glory of the shining thing about her. Although in fiction she relished the moment when the self- effacing heroine is honoured by the hero to the chagrin of those who judged themselves better qualified to receive his attentions, she now discovered in herself a strong aversion to being thus singled out. It was not something for which her life had prepared her, being a middle child at home and a middling performer at school. Not only was she unwilling to accept this undreamt-of gift, but she rather resented the threat to her middlingness, and felt a need both to question the motives of the giver, and her own worthiness to receive. Jacov must surely know that of all the girls present she was the least suitable, not being the youngest, or the most beautiful, and not having either the style or the confidence to wear such a gorgeous thing. He was making fun of her.
Yet it was not mockery which most troubled her. It was an unfamiliar, prickly sensation occasioned by the feel of his hands laid on her shoulders; light though the touch was, she was aware of each fingertip, and it seemed as though the gesture as well as the shawl was a gift to her. Alice felt an impulse to sink down beneath this gentle pressure, overwhelmed by so much individual attention.
Her mother said, breaking the surprised silence, ‘Alice will take care of it. Alice always takes good care of things.’
They were all going to be kind about it, and she hadn’t earned the kindness. Above all, she hadn’t earned the shawl. If anything, it was a reward for spite and envy! She smoothed it over her wrist. The material was so fine that even the movement of her soft flesh against it produced a slight friction. It was altogether too exquisite for her. She did not know where to look.
Ben said, looking at Louise, ‘Alice should have the prize; she is a nice, modest girl.’
Louise said, ‘Alice has a beautiful nature. She’s not one of those people who are always getting at other people.’
It was so unexpected, so unsuitable and so undeserved . . . Oh, the very un-ness of it! She wanted to run out of the room and hide herself.
Her mother said, ‘It is most generous of you and your family, Jacov. Alice is so pleased she can’t speak.’
When the party was over, Alice put the shawl away in a drawer and did not take it out again for many years.