Seeing Carol brought home to Kitty how much she had missed her elder daughter. At first Kitty had been angry with Alec, but as time went by, observing Carol’s happiness with her family in Godalming the resentment had grown less. Kitty could talk to Carol. She was not like Rachel, wayward, headstrong, seeming to occupy another planet whose mores had to do neither with the religious observances, nor the behaviour patterns, in which she had been reared. Mother and daughter, they sat at Carol’s kitchen table, looking out on to the lawn where the children, anoraks over their fancy dress, had been sent to play. Kitty confided to Carol the arthritis in her neck which had been troubling her lately, the problems at the Day Centre, the fraught arrangements for Rachel’s wedding. Carol surprised her mother by telling her – bubbling over with news – that she had had a poem accepted by a woman’s magazine. It was about a city park and a country meadow, comparing them. In the park, on the benches, tired mothers sat with prams, transistors played, and office workers ate their sandwiches, while in the meadow, within the confines of the hedgerows, barefoot children picked the daisies. Mixed with her pride – Kitty had no idea that Carol could write poetry – was the fleeting disappointment that, as with Rachel’s wedding, Sydney had not lived to see her achievement. Carol in print. With her name beneath the poem. He had sown, but reaped only a small corner of his field.

When Alec came home from his surgery, greeting his mother-in-law fondly, they had a festive dinner – Debbie and Lisa showing off for their grandmother – and afterwards in the sitting-room with its log fire, the curtains drawn, played Purim bingo – with squares of cardboard, on which the children had drawn a star of David, the Israeli flag, a spinning top – ‘Pin the Crown on Esther’ and ‘Pass Haman’s Hat’. In the bosom of her daughter’s family, Kitty sighed a little for the passing of the years and of Sydney, seeing in Carol with her children the embodiment of all that he had wished for in terms of continuity, the fulfillment of his prayers. In the morning she took Mathew into bed with her, feeling the warmth of the small wriggling body, and made room for Debbie and Lisa, showing them squares of the organdie print Rika Snowman had suggested for their bridesmaids’ dresses, one pink, one blue. When Mathew, jealous, held out his pudgy hand for the material, she gave him the sample of yellow.

Together they walked in the dormant country, the children skipping by their sides like lambs, and Alec and Carol, proud possessors of another secret they had kept until Kitty’s visit, showing her their new house. It was Queen Anne, and far too large Kitty thought – three floors and two staircases – and in the village.

“Have you bought it?” Kitty said as they stood in what was once the drawing-room but was now to be the main bedroom after the structural alterations which Alec proposed.

Carl nodded.

Kitty looked at her daughter. When Sydney had been alive his advice had been sought not only by his children, but by the entire family. When a special purchase, a major step was proposed – in the case of Rachel and Carol and Josh when they were young, even a new coat – Sydney had expected to be consulted.

“We’ve exchanged contracts,” Carol said, “but there’s one snag.”

Kitty thought that, in the old, draughty house she would not have given a thank-you for, and which was right on the main road, there were several, but she held her tongue.

“There’s a lot of work to be done on it and we’ve got a buyer for Peartree Cottage…”

“We thought…”

“We wondered…”

They wanted Kitty to have the children, Debbie and Lisa and Mathew, after Rachel’s wedding, with Carol going up and down to supervise the work on the new home.

“Will you take us to the zoo, Grandma?” Debbie hopped on one leg.”

“And to Cinderella on Ice…?”

“There’s no ice in the summer, silly!” Debbie said.

“Of course I’ll have them.” Kitty would look forward to it to mitigate the silence in the flat.

“The builders want three months,” Carol said. “I’m afraid it would be until they go back to school.”

After the Queen Anne house, Peartree Cottage looked welcoming, as if it belonged to Carol and Alec and the children, and they to it. Kitty remembered with what horror she had regarded it, when they had first moved to Godalming. She was not good at changes. She liked things to be the same, for them to go on.

“It’s very grand!” she said to Carol of the new house.

“We were afraid you mightn’t like it,” Carol said, relieved, the dust of happiness in her eyes.

Alone, at night, with her Thoreau, beneath the eaves, Carol had come to sit on her bed. She took her mother’s hand.

“Guess what?”

“More surprises?” Kitty dropped her eyes to Carol’s waistline, whose secret she had already divined.

Carol nodded.

“When?”

“For Rosh Hashana.”

The New Year was only five months away. Carol had not confided in her.

“You don’t show!”

“I can’t do my skirts up!”

“You’ll have your hands full!”

“Mathew wants it to be a kitten.”

Even the children had been told.

Kitty pulled Carol close to her and kissed her dark head, her pleasure in the fact that she was to have another grandchild making up for the small hurt of her exclusion.

It was why, Carol said, they had to hurry with the house. The rest of the weekend passed in the warm glow of the expected baby. When it was time for Kitty to go they had seen her off – the children blowing kisses through the window – and Alec had waved her out into the narrow road. Leaving them, so patently happy in their leaning cottage, in the cocoon of their life, she was glad that she had not revealed her own secret to Carol. Her correspondence with Maurice belonged to the new Kitty, as did Thoreau and ‘Listening to Music’; and she had no wish to share him, she had discovered, as she did the other ninety-nine percent of herself, with Addie Jacobs, with Sydney’s family or with her children. When she got home from the country there was a letter waiting for her. She had hoped there would be.

Dear Kitty, dear Kitty –

Why do you persist? I tell myself you won’t bother any more, that each letter is the last, then can’t wait to go down to the mail-box. When it’s empty a gloom descends over my day. When I see your handwriting and those English stamps (I love your Queen) there is a whole new dimension to it. My spirit lightens, my mood lifts, my heart sings. I am a man given to great élans and deep discouragements – no more or less I guess than any artist – so what do you want with me? I am not like Sydney. Little by little, as I read your letters, I am building up a picture of him. What a fine and upright man. What a loss. Poor Kitty. If whom the gods love die young, this miserable old sinner will go on to eternity. I could never have been a good Jew, as Sydney was, even though I was raised to it. I kicked against the outward observances in my youth. One Sabbath I told my father I was sick and while the others were in synagogue (they burned it to the ground in the ‘Kristallnacht’ pogrom of 1938), I took the trolley down-town and bought a bratwürst (sausage!). After that it was easy. I obeyed my father, who was tryannically strict, traditional, and rigid (although he often kissed and hugged us), as did most children in that other life, but within, what a ferment, what an uproar. My body was enslaved but not my spirit. I guess it was the creativity, which had not then emerged, but which is the antithesis of the habit which was imposed on me.

One of my earliest memories of Frankfurt – I must have been about ten or twelve at the time – was a whole troop of brownshirts marching down the street singing a song about Jews and how their heads would roll. I didn’t understand but it frightened me. Later they trained dogs to run after us – ‘get the Jew’ – and there were park benches for ‘Aryans only’, pubs, theatres, cinemas and stores where ‘Jews and pigs’ were strictly forbidden – dogs were permitted! The signs bothered me but I learned to live with them (we all did), to expect kids to be waiting outside the synagogue with rocks to throw at us, to accept that anti-semitism was a part of everyday life. My Uncle Manny, who was a quiltmaker, had his business taken from him, they confiscated my Uncle Karl’s driving licence, ruining him (he travelled in pharmaceuticals). We had special passports with a yellow ‘J’ and the name ‘Israel’ (Sarah for the women) added to our own. The woman in the corner store, who had always been friendly, suddenly started hurling abuse at us – she made my sister cry. My mother lost her maid because she was not allowed to work for us. Jewish teachers and professors were expelled from their jobs, including my Uncle Felix who was given ‘immediate leave of absence’, and a few months later was dismissed from the university. It crept up on us. “It isn’t going to last” my saintly father said. “Hitler will disappear.”

People often ask why the Jews of Germany, knowing of the existence of Dachau (in 1934!) having read Mein Kampf, were so foolish as to stay on. Why didn’t we all just leave? If you told Josh or Alec or your brother-in-law, Juda, or his wife – Leonora isn’t it? – who scarcely acknowledges her Jewishness (Goering said “I’ll decide who’s Jewish!”) that something might happen in England, would they be so quick to move to a strange country where they don’t speak the language, and to which they could take neither money nor possessions, and would not be able to practice their professions or make a living? Anti-semitism is a disease. Its only fundamental cause, it has been said, is that the Jew exists. He will always exist. If we run away Mount Sinai runs after us. Anti-Semitism will not be eradicated any more than greed, which, contrary to the beliefs of our denigrators, is a human – Carnegie, Rockefeller, Frick, Mellon, Harriman, Huntington, Whitney – and not a racial prediliction. Because of my Uncle Felix whom I admired, and whose practical and colourful world I was more able to relate to than the sombre, and deeply spiritual one of my father, I had always wanted to study medicine. I think it saved my life. (Even with hindsight it is difficult to say what actions at that time were proper or improper, what decisions would save lives and what destroy them.) In the camp I told them I was a doctor, although I was nowhere near qualified as I had not been allowed to continue with my studies and they put me to work in one of the barracks where the transports disgorged their human cargo (five hundred thousand Hungarians in one month alone). I had enough to eat for a while and got some of my strength back. I tried to tell the newcomers what was happening (the crematoria were working overtime) but they would not listen. I could not make them believe any more than I had believed what I was told when I first came to the camp, any more than the world believed (your Eden knew what was going on), any more than we believe that husbands, brothers, fathers and sons are being tortured right now in Brazil and China, in Turkey and Iran. Where are the farmers falling over themselves to leave Rhodesia, (pardon me, Zimbabwe), the white South Africans? Yet the graffiti are there! Ugh, Kitty. Rather than change the world we go into therapy to make it bearable or put on sneakers and run. Tell me about the wedding. It’s getting close. You’re not going to believe this Kitty but I’ve only ever been to one (my office nurse, and that in a church), it’s what you get when you don’t have a family.

Weddings are important. Rabbi Jose bar Halafta was once asked ‘How long did it take the Holy One, blessed be He, to create the world?’ The answer was ‘six days’. ‘And from then until now what has he been doing?’ ‘The Holy One, blessed be He, is occupied making marriages.’ Do I believe this? Kitty I don’t know. Sometimes I think he saved your cynical correspondent and sometimes how can He exist if innocent children had their heads smashed against a wall? There are some things that can be explained away (particularly by the behaviourists) but you cannot put down to hunger, sex, rage or fear the curious reactions one experiences when listening to Mozart (I have a seat for Don Giovanni next week at the Met.), looking at the ocean, or reading John Donne’s ‘Holy Sonnets’ for the first time. Tell me what happens with Unterman and about the wedding list. I should like to send Rachel a small gift – I feel I already know her. I know nothing about your Benjamin Britten (although I saw Peter Grimes which was commissioned by Koussevitzky), you will have to tell me. I look forward to it and your next letter. Bless you. MM.

PS. I am re-reading Thoreau with you and taking a fresh look at nature and society. ‘My life has been the poem I could have writ, but I could not both live and utter it.’

A sketch of Maurice, cap on his head, at his easel was attached to the back page.

When she’d read the letter and unpacked the small case she had taken to Carol’s Kitty picked up the phone to ring Norman who she felt had been avoiding her.

Norman, in bedroom slippers, gardening trousers and one of the mis-shapen pullovers knitted by his mother, could scarcely bring himself to answer the telephone. He roused himself sufficiently to do so, in case it was Sandra whose call he was expecting. ‘Yes’, he told his Aunty Kitty, ‘yes’, he was quite well. He wasn’t sure if this week he could manage dinner – even shepherds’ pie, his favourite, which was the carrot Kitty dangled. No, there was nothing the matter! It was not true, Norman thought as he replaced the telephone on the table in the hall, looking at his dishevelled appearance in the oval oak mirror as he did so. Something was the matter.

Something had crept in, like a thief in the night, between himself and Sandra, to undermine their alliance, the close harmony of their relationship, which had come like a shooting star into Norman’s life. That all was not well had been achingly clear to Norman from the moment they had transferred the protestations of their love from Sandra’s flat to his bachelor bed, since when the matter had gone from bad to worse. Sandra refused to acknowledge the impasse, which gave her, in Norman’s book, a place among the angels. The more discouraged Norman became the more she praised him, the more depressed he declared himself to be, the more reassuring was Sandra. He tried to attribute his slipping commissions to the general recession which, naturally, was having repercussions in the property business; Sandra would not let him. He was going through a bad patch, she said – she had faith in him – things would improve. He had left the suits he had so headily selected with Sandra hanging in his wardrobe, and gone back to his old clothes although Sandra had bought him a cashmere sweater – still in its cellophane in his drawer – and three new ties. Norman declared his life was over; Sandra – holding him close – said it was no such thing. He had made a resolution. If his own world was going to pieces he would not allow himself to shatter Sandra’s. He would give it one more chance. If tonight he found himself unable to love Sandra, if on this occasion, as on the other occasions lately, he failed, he would write a letter refusing to see her again; begging her to leave his life as decisively as she had come into it, and direct herself to her sons, Hilton and Milton and to their future. He was slightly drunk. He had been drinking lately. Just a little. Then a little more. Until the hateful image of himself was drowned, the pain of his debâcle less acute. He was pouring another drink, from the bottle on the floor beside him, into the glass in which he had given his mother her nightly medicine –the only one to hand – when Sandra, using the code they had adopted, tapped at the window.

She brought a lustre, a fragrant halo, into the dim-lit hall. Kissed Norman beneath the dead, black, light bulb he had not bothered to replace.

“Hi!”

He took her coat, from whose soft arms she got more consolation than from his own, and followed her into the sitting-room.

“Milton’s ecstatic,” Sandra said, “He’s playing the solo in the end of term concert. César Franck. In front of the whole school.”

Norman could not work up any enthusiasm for Milton’s musical prowess. He felt as disinterested in the week’s activities of her two sons as he was in Sandra’s breasts, whose outline was explicit beneath her angora sweater, and the symmetry – which once he had found divine – of her legs. She sat on the sofa and chattered, curled herself at his feet in place of the whisky bottle, undid buttons and zips, then led him upstairs to bed. He fumbled with the china doorknob of his room.

“Not in there,” Sandra whispered.

Norman looked at her, the whisky robbing her face of its outline. She opened the door of the other room, his mother’s bedroom, where the double bed had lain untrammelled since her death.

“Sandra!”

Sandra pulled at him but Norman would not come. He stood horrified on the worn axminster of the landing while she sat on the bed, Dolly’s bed – where she had breathed her last – and with deliberation removed her clothes.

“Sandra!” Norman, with a crystal clarity, could see his mother in the bed, lying there as he had found her, icy cold, then Sandra, her nipples erect, her arms extended.

“It’s all right, Norman.”

Norman flung himself, sobbing, on to the bedside rug, and buried his face in Sandra’s lap.