Nine

“Listen to this…” Rachel shouted from the bed to Patrick who was in the bathroom.

There had been other letters with Kitty’s postcard, as there were every day. Hettie Klopman re-addressed them, as did Josh from his mother’s empty flat.

“Dear Miss Shelton, We would like to congratulate you on your forthcoming marriage…and take this opportunity to invite you to see our beautiful bridal collection…wedding dresses, toiles, and designs for bridesmaids and attendants…ideas for head-dresses and other garnishes for the whole entourage.’ Garnishes! Or we could get married in a marquee.” Rachel picked up the lurid colour photograph which fell from an envelope on to the duvet. “It looks like something out of the Arabian Nights. ‘…draped, spun-glass satin in a variety of colour schemes…’ My Aunty Beatty had a marquee in the garden when Austin got married. We all sank into the mud!” She opened the next envelope. “This looks good! ‘A Reception Beyond your Wildest Dreams. A Banquet under Rabbinical Supervision…”

“Talking of banquets,” Patrick called, “any chance of some coffee?”

Rachel did not answer. “How does this grab you? ‘Coupe Florida, Smoked Salmon hors d’œuvres with Egg Mayonnaise, Kreplach Soup, Braised Ox-Tongue with Blintzes and Stuffed Neck, Grilled Tomatoes, Green Beans, Tangerine Sorbet…’”

“I’ll settle for a cup of coffee and one of those stale bran muffins.”

“Where was I? Oh yes, ‘Tangerine Sorbet, Roast Poussin, French Potatoes…’ What’s a French Potato? ‘…Garden Peas, Asparagus tips and Mushrooms’…”

Patrick came into the bedroom drying his hair.

“…Hot Cherries with Kirsch…”

“Seen my socks? I’m supposed to be assisting with a hernia at nine…”

“…Hot Cherries with Kirsch…”

“Stop it. You’re making me feel ill at this hour in the morning.”

“Ice Gateaux Surprise…’ I’m sure there shouldn’t be an ‘x’ on the end of gateau, or if there is it should be ‘iced gateaux’…”

“I’ve only got one,” Patrick held up a sock.

“Look under the bed. ‘Petits Fours…’”

“Rachel will you shut up!”

“Nearly finished! ‘Nougatine Baskets… Coffee…!’”

“Thank God for that!”

“‘Selected Fresh Fruit.’”

“That’s all?”

“Certainly not. Later on you get ‘Dainty Sandwiches and delicious Continental Pastries…’”

“Not to mention indigestion!”

“These menus can be varied’,” Rachel went on, “‘to suit your own particular requirements!’”

“My particular requirements at the moment…” Patrick said.

Rachel threw him a shiny leaflet. “This one’s for you.”

One arm in his jacket, Patrick’s face grew black. ‘Morning and Evening Dress Wear – Individual Service for the Discerning Man’.

“They don’t want a big wedding at all,” Kitty said to Maurice Morgenthau as they sat on a wall by the beach at Na’ama overlooking the sands, with the cross-crossing volley-balls, through which could be seen the coral reef and the deep waters of the bay.

After her experience in the Canyon of the Inscriptions, Kitty had not wanted to take any more trips. She had said so to Avi, as the bus stopped to let some of the passengers out in the main square of Eilat, where men hurried by carrying bunches of flowers to give to their wives for Shabbat. On the Sunday trip – Avi assured her – there would be no canyons to descend, no ladders to climb. After an early morning start to what was to be a whole day trip, they would drive along the fine highway which followed the track of the Israeli Army’s 9th Brigade in the race to capture Sharm-El-Sheikh from the Egyptians in 1956. “The Mediterranean you can leave,” Avi said. “The Sinai you must see. If you don’t look for only thirty seconds you miss something extraordinary…” Kitty imagined she could see tears in his eyes. “It’s your last chance.”

Kitty knew that he referred the returning of the seemingly worthless, underpopulated, undercultivated peninsula – which came close to claiming the distinction of being the most besieged territory in the world – to Egypt for a few weeks, in exchange for what Sydney had called, at the time of the Camp David agreement, ‘airy promises of peace from a shaky dictator.’

“Nothing to worry,” Avi reassured her as the bus, in the capable hands of Zvi, swerved into the drive and came to a magnificent halt outside her own hotel. He helped her down the steps. “I’ll see you on Sunday. Seven o’clock…” She would be awake, pursued by the grey ghosts of the night. “…Shabbat Shalom!”

“Shabbat Shalom,” Kitty said, reiterating the prayer for peace on the Sabbath which seemed to have so much more meaning in Israel. Theoretically the seventh day, on which God rested from the labours of creating man and his environment, began with the darkening of the Friday evening sky, but from lunchtime onwards, everything ground to a halt. With the appearance of three stars, 24 hours later, public transport would appear once more on the roads, and the cities, wakened from their Sabbath slumber, would erupt into life. The Day with its special serenity, was only one of the things that to Kitty were special about Israel which had so many faces. The past – seen from one’s car on the way to Tiberias where workmen cutting into the bank laid bare a row of Roman sarcophagi; the crunch of one’s shoe on a broke shard of ancient pottery on the Beach of Caesarea; the spines and carapaces of buses and armoured cars left where they fell, as memorials, along the road to Jerusalem. The present – from barren desert a land blooming with terraced hills and delicate orchards; hedges of rosemary, green orange groves, cypresses – like dark upward pointing candles against the blue sky – and windblown olive trees, their leaves tipped with silver. The future – in the faces of the children, into whose education so much of the country’s resources were channelled, bursting out of schools, indistinguishable in their coloured shirts and cotton dresses, only their features proclaiming their origins in Persia or Poland, Morocco or Hungary.

In the hotel, exhausted from the perils of her morning in the canyon, Kitty asked for her key at the reception desk, glancing as usual into the bare cubby-hole beneath her number for the message – telling her that someone wanted her – that she knew would not come, and made her way to her room.

On the dressing-table, in a narrow vase, was a single red rose with a white card. Her pulse quickening, Kitty picked it up.

‘Shabbat Shalom!’

It was from the management.

On Shabbat, from sunset to sunset as her Creator had done, Kitty rested. On Sunday, she was ready at seven for the drive along the western shore of the Gulf of Eilat to Sharm-El-Sheikh – the ‘Bay of the Sheikh’ – which was, according to Avi, a series of reef-bound bays, between the Gulf of Suez and the Gulf of Aqaba, where the waters were infested by the Red Sea sharks and by barracuda.

Kitty was excited. Despite the rigours of the excursion to the Canyon of the Inscriptions and the Valley of the Moon, she was getting a taste for expeditions and waited with anticipation for the bus. The Sinai was familiar to her from school and from synagogue. A land trampled by history, and embroidered with tales of her people’s survival, freedom and relevation. On the mountain which bore its name – not a holy place but an intangible symbol – the Law had been entrusted to Moses and – as the rabbinic story had it – all Jewish souls, past, present and future were assembled, when God made the covenant with his Chosen People. Sarah had asked, chosen for what? And Kitty had told her, it wasn’t such a wonderful thing to have been chosen to ‘hold fast to the covenant’ and that often it could be extremely hard. As Tevye had said in Fiddler on the Roof: ‘I know we’re the Chosen People but can’t you sometimes choose someone else?’ Into the Sinai the Hebrews had made their painful way, as they fled from Egyptian bondage, to end up as Jews amid the figs and the grapes and the pomegranates, the ‘milk and honey’ of the Promised Land. The Sinai, its sand and its rock, conjured up for Kitty both the wanderings of her ancestors – the manifestation of the Burning Bush – and the martyrdom of Baruch Ben Zion as he defended the Mitla Pass. With her hold-all and the new sun hat which she had bought in the boutique, she waited with the rest of the group, outside the hotel, for the motorised caravan, with Azi at its helm, which would transport her through the desert.

Avi had greeted them like old friends. An experienced sightseer now, Kitty had bestowed herself and her possessions in a window seat. As before they had made the rounds of the other hotels. Kitty watched as the passengers, many of whom she had not seen before, lined up in their morning sweaters to board the bus. Maurice Morgenthau, in his zippered jacket, seemed not to see her as he edged his way between the seats to the rear, although she had tentatively made room next to her for her hero, her saviour from the Canyon of the Inscriptions.

The Sinai, Avi explained, when with a full complement they bounded along its shore for Watir Brook and Neviot, was named by the Mesopotamians after the moon god, Sin. Ethnologically it was Semitic, but geographically it belonged to Egypt who once more was claiming it back. On the way, he told them, they were to look out for those living remnants of history, the Bedouin, who with their camels and their tents, their Bronze Age way of life, were as integral a part of the peninsula as the mauve mountains and the flinty plains. As the bus, manipulated by the chain-smoking Zvi, his shirt white against the sepia of his neck, twisted and turned around the granite passes, crossed wadi deltas and dunes which spilled into the gulf, Kitty gasped at the new vistas with which she was greeted at every turn. While Avi explained about the race of cavemen which, according to Israeli architects, had existed two hundred thousand years ago in this much disputed area, she thought how sensible she had been to come away, even without Addie, that there were sights to see, world to conquer which did not intrude themselves into her humdrum and everyday life at home. To travel, she thought, put one in perspective. Her small world was bound by mental and physical boundaries, from which she knew she must struggle to release herself: by the legacy she had been left by Sydney, of devotion to his family. The euphoria she felt, was not, she suspected, solely the effect of the crystalline desert air which blew in through the open windows of the bus, with their little curtains, which later she would pull against the sun. It was generated by a sudden awareness, a revelation as clear as that which had appeared to Moses on Mount Sinai, that from the chrysalis of her hidebound psyche was emerging a new Kitty Shelton.

With an extended drive ahead of them to the south, they did not spend long at the coastal settlement of Neviot – Bubbling Springs – which lay between the shallow bay of Nuweiba Tarabin, with its driftwood shacks, and Nuweiba Muzeina where palms waited regally for their summer dates. Avi called it ‘Hippyville’. Beneath the trihedral tents on the beach, rootless young from the middle-class homes of Europe, the United States and Scandinavia, with their tattered vests and their guitars, stared stonily, anachronistically out to sea. A girl, with a tattooed arm and hennaed hair, reminded Kitty of Rachel. In earnest conversation with her, an Arab squatted on his haunches. Avi said he was most probably peddling dope, and in his flowing robes he made a striking contrast to the girl’s near nudity.

A fat Bedouin, who introduced himself as Suleiman, invited Kitty into his arisha for coffee. When she refused to enter the tent with its carpeted floor, in which middle-eastern music crackled from a transistor radio and flies swarmed around a cooking pot, he offered her a coconut, a necklace made of olive wood, a ride on his moth-eaten camel. Trying to decline politely, she did not notice his companions who had come to surround her with offers of trinkets, or to stand beside her while she had her photograph taken. She looked round helplessly at the sandy robes, the dark eyes beneath the black and white kaffiyehs and wasn’t sure how she had become separated from the group, which had made its way to the cafeteria. She felt Maurice Morgenthau’s hand on her arm, his voice in her ear, as he came to rescue her from the importunate circle.

Inside the cafeteria her knight in shining armour disappeared once more. Kitty had coffee with two Germans and could catch the drift of their conversation because of the smattering of Yiddish she had learned from her father whose parents had been born on the Vistula.

When she came out, the albino from New Mexico, whose name was Maisie, was having her picture taken on a camel, while her red-faced husband haggled over the price of the favour.

This was not the Sinai Kitty hoped to see, and she wasn’t sorry when Avi put two fingers between his teeth and whistled his party to the bus.

Refreshed, warm sweaters now stowed on the overhead racks from which sleeves dangled in a rainbow of colours, they set out again for the Sharira Pass, where stark walls loomed up on either side of them, plunging the bus into shade, following the natural course of the old Wadi (named Samaghi, for the sap of the acacia tree). As they bounded along, twisting and turning, clouds intermittently covered the fiery sun, changing the craggy landscape, through which they sped, from yellow to rose like a geographical chameleon. Descending to the shore again at Dahab – the golden – a Bedouin at his mid-day prayers, against a backdrop of mountain and of sea, his sandals by his side, put his face to the ground. While Avi told them about the Greek Orthodox monastery at the base of Mount Sinai where the monks, in reverence to the God whom they served, laid out their dead in rows and carefully preserved their bones, Kitty took out her happiness and examined it. It was the first time for eighteen months she had felt light of heart. Her contentment made her feel uneasy, as if Sydney had taken with him her right to be joyful. She wanted the bus to go on for ever through the mountain passes, through the blue waters, through the forbidding cliffs and the desert sands. She did not want to go home, where it was snowing and only Addie Jacobs waited for her, to her children who had lives of their own.

At Na’ama they stopped for lunch; the amenities were better, Avi said, than those they would find a few kilometres down the road at Sharm-El-Sheikh. With the rest of the party Kitty joined the slowly moving queue for the ubiquitous turkey schnitzel with its accompanying mashed potato which seemed incongruous with the outside temperature which had now climbed to thirty-five degrees. She put a bread roll and a large bottle of mineral water on her tray and carried it to a bare, plastic topped table where Maurice Morgenthau sat alone.

“No lunch?” Kitty said, surprised.

“I never stand in line for food.”

“Eat this,” Kitty said, putting her tray down before him and going back to join the end of the queue.

He seemed lonely, like a lost lamb, she thought, as she shuffled along the counter for the second time with her damp tray. She knew all about loneliness, it was her constant companion.

He neither thanked her for his tray nor seemed particularly pleased. Just gave her the money and addressed himself to the food. His table manners were not good. Sydney’s had been impeccable. She discovered that Maurice was a physician who lived in New York. He was mostly retired now and devoted himself to painting which, he told Kitty, gave direction to his life.

When she’d finished her lunch, Kitty excused herself. She wanted to go to the Ladies’. She had left her bread roll on her tray. Maurice Morgenthau picked it up and put it in the pocket of his jacket.

When she came out of the Ladies’ Room he was standing on the path. She wasn’t sure if he was waiting for her. He fell in step with her, silently, and they walked towards the beach where Avi had told them they could spend an hour before returning to the bus for the short drive down to Sharm-El-Sheikh and Ras Muhammed.

They sat on the low wall in the sun – there was no shade – while Kitty chattered about her family to the strange, silent man. She told him about her son-in-law Alec, in the same profession, and about her grandchildren; she told him about Rachel and Patrick who did not want a big wedding. There were beads of perspiration on Maurice’s face which looked as if it had been chiselled out of Sinai rock. Kitty suggested that he remove the zippered jacket but he appeared not to have heard. She told him about Sydney, although he had not asked. Thoughts and memories of him, their happy days, came tumbling from her lips.

“Do you have a family?” she asked.

“‘The stars through the window pane are my children’,” he said.

Kitty wondered if he were quite right in the head.

When Avi’s whistle summoned them from their post-prandial leisure to the bus, Maurice Morgenthau – Morning Dew – walked towards it as if she did not exist.