Dear Kitty,

Your letters are like music – a spiritual food for which there is no substitute and without which life would be a mistake. (Nietzche not MM!) It’s good that your classes have started again. That exaggerator Berlioz (both in his music and his lifestyle), with his incredible ear, and the tight-assed (excuse me) Ravel, were interesting studies, but I’m happy your term begins with Beethoven. The F minor is not my favourite but is both exciting (esp. last movement), and prophetic of the later quartets it took him fourteen years to get around to. I will listen to it and think of my fastidious Kitty on Monday nights in the Performance Studio, where the odours of the previous dance class still linger!

You ask me how it is I am lonely and if I am happy? I have been lonely since Dr Mengele put my mother (she was forty-six years old) and my father in a cattle truck (I thought how nice for them they wouldn’t have to walk!) and took my lame kid brother from the bunk where we slept together (I have a permanent cold shoulder in the spot where he lay) for his experiments in genetics. I am lonely when I see families with brothers and sisters and parents and grandparents (sometimes two sets!), a ring of uncles and aunts and hordes of cousins. I am lonely in that I have no one to love, no one to live for. This is not the same, Kitty, as being alone – I can live with my records and my books, I don’t need people around – which for an artist has two advantages. The first in being with himself; the second is not being with others. As for happiness, human beings do not need to be happy, nor can they be. Like other Jews I have a strong will to live (Got knows where we get it from, can it only be a reaction to persecution?), to paint my pictures (not because I think they are of value, an artist unless he is an imbecile never knows – Virgil on his deathbed wanted the Aeneid buried!), to testify, to bear witness to what is no longer.

Don’t think I mean to change the world. Men do not change nor do they learn anything (read any day’s newspapers) and no one has the right to speak for the dead or make them speak, as every day for some second’s fraction they speak to me; a can on the sidewalk brings back discarded canisters of cyclone B, flower beds (the Nazis loved nature and orderliness) and birch trees the entrance to Auschwitz (men and women from every European country passed under that tree). For me ‘Canada’ is not a country but camp-jargon for the barracks, where they stored the loot stolen from our numbers – calculated in men’s suits, children’s shoes, in spectacles and shaving brushes and artificial limbs – and ‘Mexico’ the woman’s section. I have to blink hard to restore the proper meanings to ‘haircut’ and to ‘bath’, and even now look for flotsam – buttons and bits of paper – in the bottom of my soup bowl.

You were right to give way about the invitations if it makes Hettie happy – what difference do a few words make – and to stick to your guns over your dress – never mind the feather she had dyed! So there’ll be two turquoise dresses. Rachel will still get married. Vanessa’s wedding sounds very grand. It’ll be a rehearsal for you.

Glad you’re going to Carol and Alec for Purim. Your grandchildren sound adorable – send me a photo Kitty, and one of yourself. Purim is one of the happiest holidays of the Jewish year. Will you go to synagogue to hear the Megillah? I remember, in Frankfurt, going with my mother and my brother and my three sisters, and stamping our feet and making lots of noise whenever the word Haman was spoken, so that you could not hear his name. The wicked Haman is still remembered. I wonder how long will Hitler be – and Goering and Goebbels and Streicher and Mengele…you see I am obsessed. But seriously, the destruction of the temples (Ninth of Av), the Fast commemorating the breach made by the Romans in the wall of Jerusalem (Fast of Tammuz), Nebuchadnezzar’s siege… Where is the Fast for my Uncle Oskar who was an engineer at the Vienna Technical Institute, for my grandfather who conducted opera in Berlin (Otto Klemperer, your Thomas Beecham, Monet and Rodin were his friends), for my uncle (my mother’s brother) Dr Felix Stein, for my Aunts, Leah and Lottie, for my pious father Dov, for my darling mother (she was beautiful Kitty), for the children on the street of the suburb where we lived… WHERE IS THEIR DAY? Don’t write me any more Kitty. It’s not good for you. I’ll look at your photograph (don’t forget to send it) and remember – Ofira and Masada, happy times. Look after yourself. Maurice

PS. In the Heiligenstadt testament Beethoven writes: ‘Sometimes I have been driven by my desire to seek the company of other human beings, but what humiliation when someone, standing beside me, heard a flute from afar off when I heard nothing, or when someone heard a shepherd singing and again Iheard nothing! Such experiences have brought me close to despair…’

PPS. Wasn’t it Thoreau who said: ‘Most people lead lives of quiet desperation?’

PPPS. Did you know that the Encyclopedia Judaica lists a hundred special Purims ranging from a Purim of Algiers to a Purim of Vidin (Bulgaria).

“If we’d had a son,” Freda said, “a boy. What would you have called him?”

Harry was getting dressed. The snows had melted from the golf course and the naked greens outside the window waited patiently for the approaching spring. Freda was trying to trap him. She was always trying to trap him, to find out to what manner of woman he had given his seed, where he was secreting the fruit of his loins. There had been other mauve letters. There was getting to be quite a pile of them in her underwear drawer. They were becoming vindicative. Harry, they said, would be named. Freda had tried to trace the writer from the postmark but it was never the same. Hammersmith, Ealing, one from Barkingside after which Freda had been sure. It had come after she had gone to Bond Street, to the shop, to look for Harry to check that he was there.

“I came up to town this morning,” she’d said. “I called at the shop. Where were you?” “A client,” he’d said, “in Redbridge.” “You didn’t tell me you were going out.” They told each other everything. Freda had thought they did. “A silver valuation. It came up unexpectedly.” “What silver?” “Silver.” “What silver?” Freda persisted. Harry had looked at her. Searching for his alibi. “Tea service, entrée dishes, one rather nice casket, as a matter of fact, Omar Ramsden…” “Show me!” Freda had said. “Show you what?” “The valuation.” “You must be joking,” Harry said. “No.” Harry played for time. “Why on earth should you want to see the valuation for some old lady’s silver. It’s nothing special.” “I just do.” “Freda, I’m worried about you.” Changing the subject. “Where is it?” “What?” “The valuation.” “In the shop, Miriam is typing it. I’ll bring it home.” Crafty. “I’ll come to town with you. I want to look for shoes.” “Please yourself.”

And she had gone with him to town, accompanied Harry along a waking Bond Street whose face was being washed and windows dressed, to his life. Freda had waited, crying silent tears, while he unlocked the door and turned off the burglar alarm, stood by the counter patterned by the diamond winter sun which came through the grille, watched as he searched through papers in the office at the back of the shop.

“Freda, this is madness,” Harry called. “What’s got into you?” “The valuation,” Freda demanded. “Perhaps Miriam’s taken it home with her. She does sometimes.” Freda looked in the show-case at the grape scissors and the wine labels which paid for their oil central heating, and their summer holidays, and their subscription to the golf club. “Here it is!”

Freda had been trembling. On Harry’s stiff notepaper with its logo of the British Antique Dealers’ Association, in Harry’s meticulous hand. ‘Mrs Eva Solomon, Applegarth Drive. Valuation for Insurance. Victorian Silver Pin-Tray 1887… Silver mounted cut glass claret jug… ‘Lighthouse’ sugar caster… Silver casket with rock crystal ornamentation…’ “What is it Freda?” Harry had said amid the wasters and the basting spoons, amid the hip-flasks and the fruit knives which, with their mother-of-pearl handles, reposed in their blue velvet nests. And Freda could not say. Not for the life of her. Could not voice the thoughts which had taken her over and which were reinforced at regular intervals by the mauve letters. Harry had put his arms round her, then taken his medallions and his sugar tongs from the safe and sent her off to look for her shoes.

Now, from her bed, the morning song of the birds not cheering her, Freda watched Harry brush imagined fluff from the new suit he had had made by a tailor in Conduit Street, whose cloth she had selected from a swatch he had brought home, select a tie with care. She could see what the writer of the mauve letters saw in him. An ageing but still handsome lover. A caring and uncomplicated man.

On one occasion Harry had brought up one of the mauve letters himself with her morning tea. Laid it on the bed. “Aren’t you going to open it?” Freda had feigned sleep. “Eileen,” she lied, her mouth dry, mentioning the daily help. “…She’s on holiday.” “In Battersea!” “With her sister. Spending a few days…” Harry was looking into the mirror. New suit. New tie. She had bought it for Chanukkah. On a Thursday.

“Where are you going?” Freda said, not properly awake. She had taken a sleeping pill. Harry smiled at her. Crossed to the bed. Rumpled her hair. Fobbed off. Like a child. Oh God. A child.

“Where?” Her voice flirted with hysteria.

“Vanessa’s wedding,” Harry said.

“You’d think it was royalty!” Beatty said in the unmoving reception lines in Claridges. “I’ll pass out from the heat in a minute, and I don’t like the look of Freda – she’s like a stick…”

“Vanessa looked lovely.” Kitty tried to change the subject, nurturing Freda’s secret.

“…She needs an X-ray. I’ve never seen her so thin.”

“She’s seen the doctor.”

“Doctors!” Beatty shuffled forward an inch. The line was four deep, emerged from the furs and the overcoats in the cloakroom. “You have to tell them. They want to move Leon to a geriatric ward. Geriatric. I said over my dead body…”

“I expect they need the bed,” Josh said from his mother’s elbow.

“I’d rather look after him at home…”

“You couldn’t…” Mirrie said, she was as small as her sister Beatty was large. As easy going as Beatty was demanding.

“They’ll walk all over you if you let them,” Beatty said. She peered round the side of the queue.” It’ll be finished by the time we get in.” Her feet were spilling over her patent leather shoes. “It was the same with the kosher meals. Stone cold. Every day. I had to speak to Sister. I said, listen dear, I know you’re very busy – they work like nobody’s business – but even if a person’s ill he doesn’t have to eat cold food…”

The line stretched along the tapestry carpets beneath the chandeliers. Standing in it, beneath the torrent of Beatty’s verbiage, the waterfall of her words, Kitty thought that Maurice would not have stood in it and that, in their wedding finery they were in line not to shake hands with Juda and Leonora and Vanessa in her tiara, but had been ‘selected’…she found herself thinking like Maurice, identifying with the terrible truths of his letters.

Addie had brought the last one in with its drawing of Kitty supine on the waters of the Dead Sea, intercepting the postman. “So who do you know in America?” She had turned it over inquisitively, examined the envelope, the initials MM and the New York address – done everything but opened it. “A cousin. Of Sydney’s.” A duet of lies. Kitty had read it when Addie had gone, climbing with Maurice’s parents on to the cattle truck, passing, with her suitcase, under the birch tree. It required a leap. Of the imagination. She had not known anti-Semitism. Once in a department store she had been trying on hats when she’d overheard an assistant, holding a mirror for a tweed-suited matron up from the countries, “Not that one Madam, it’s a Jewish hat. They buy them for the Festivals.” She’d wondered should she call the buyer. Complain. She had done nothing. An innocent remark. In Germany, in the thirties, the Nazis had innocently decreed that the Jews were beyond the pale of citizenship, that they were really not human beings at all.

Kitty found herself waiting for Maurice’s letters, drawing sustenance from them. She had gone to the library – where generally she filled out cards requesting undemanding novels, recommended by her bridge friends, or the Sunday reviews – and asked a girl behind a double-decker of ticketed books to direct her to the works of Thoreau.

Haltingly, a few pages at a time, at night, she had begun to follow Henry David Thoreau’s existence in the woods of Massachusetts, his determination to reduce life to its lowest terms and find its essence, as she searched for the essence of her strange correspondent. Having shed her clothes and her cares concerning the small dilemmas of her daily life, and of the Day Centre, and Addie’s grumbles – her ankle was still troubling her – and Rachel’s wedding, for which Kitty had started to compile a guest list – including, then striking out again, friends and relatives who over the years had drifted away, or with whom she had lost – she transported herself to Concord from which the hooting owls, with ‘their wailing hymns or threnodies’ serenaded the lamplit bedroom and the pink satin quilt which flatly protected the emphatic emptiness of Sydney’s bed. Kitty had not removed it. Josh had wanted her to. Sometimes she closed her eyes and spoke to Sydney as if he were there. Lately, when she waited for his answers, it had not been easy to hear his voice. It bothered her that she had difficulty at times in conjuring up his face. She’d put a hand on the coverlet wanting to cling on, to prevent the memory of her soulmate, her husband, and the father of her children, from disappearing altogether. She did not want Sydney to vanish. Not before the wedding. Issy Miskin had recalled him when Kitty had asked him about the champagne in his cellar. “He knew he wouldn’t live to see Rachel married,” Issy Miskin in his cappel said. “But Sydney will be there.” Kitty knew what he meant. Sydney would be under the chuppah, in her heart – as he would be in Rachel’s – as he would be for ever, but she did not much care for the fact that his voice was receding.

“Lord and Lady Brownlow!” the tail-coated toastmaster who could himself have graced the House of Lords called. “Miss Clarissa Brownlow.”

“She’s not going to like it when they call out Solomons,” Mirrie said, meaning her sister-in-law Leonora. Leonora had been born Levy, her father an aspiring barrister – later to take silk and become a circuit Judge – who had put her through Roedean and afterwards a Swiss finishing school, which expunged, like a carwash, all but the most stubborn traces of her origins. As a child reared in an observant home, Leonora had attended synagogue regularly, and a Hebrew teacher had been entrusted with her religious instruction. Now she purported not to know. When her brother had died one August, when many people were away, she had asked Sydney to be sure to bring Josh to morning prayers, as she didn’t think there would be enough men to make up “whatever that thing was called beginning with ‘m’.” Ever since, when minyan, the quorum of ten, was mentioned, it was ‘that thing beginning with “m”.’ A family joke. As was Leonora with her airs and graces which Kitty thought, in pre-war Germany, in Hitler’s and Maurice’s Germany, would not have saved her, would not have earned her one extra ounce of camp bread.

“The Right Honourable Mr Terence Ormerod and Mrs Ormerod.”

“My feet are killing me,” Beatty said, shuffling towards the hubbub from the smoke-filled room ahead. “I’ll be glad to sit down.” She spoke her name to the dignified figure in his morning suit.

“Mrs Beatty Wise!” he called, and when she was safely launched inclined his elfin head towards Mirrie.

“Miss Mirrie Solomons!”

“You’ll come with us,” Josh said.

He was considerate, Kitty thought, both he and Sarah. Kitty was getting used to being an oddment. It was not like Mirrie, who had always been on her own, or Beatty who still had Leon although he was in hospital. For so many years it had been Mr and Mrs. They had imagined they would grow old together, she and Sydney, spoken of golden weddings. So often she wanted to go back now along the railroad of their life amending here, putting right here.

“Mr and Mrs Joshua Shelton and Mrs Kitty Shelton!”

Leonora, in pale grey crêpe extended a limp, gloved hand, as though it were too heavy for her to lift. Leaning forward into the stratosphere of ‘Opium’, Kitty kissed her sister-in-law.

“Vanessa looks gorgeous!”

“Please God by Rachel!” Juda by his wife’s side said, before Leonora quelled him with her glance.