To Live in Peace Read online

  Maurice, how romantic he was – Sydney, loving and caring had never been romantic – had tied a knot in the fronds of the flowers he had sent her when he came to England for the wedding, the Bedouin way of saying: I love you. “Later on, is coming by his very dear one. If she does nothing, she is turning him down. If she opens up the knot…” Kitty had opened up the knot.

  The family, horrified, had tried to dissuade her.

  “A lot of silly nonsense,” Beatty had said, snivelling into her handkerchief when she got up from her week of mourning. She had visualised a new life for herself in which she would see more of her sister-in-law, Kitty, chumming up – although they had never been close – two widows, for shopping expeditions, and holidays in Bournemouth or Majorca. “Who do you know in New York?” she said.

  Her younger sister-in-law had been more honest. “What will I do without you?” Mirrie said. Mirrie had given up work now; sometimes she was unable to remember what day it was, or if she had turned off the gas. Kitty commended her to Beatty who would have time on her hands (although the two sisters had always been at each other’s throats) and to her brother, Juda, who had never been bothered with her but was now the head of the family. Juda had offered to have Maurice “investigated” but Kitty, less than politely (she couldn’t think where she had got her unaccustomed courage from) told him to mind his own business. Carol was put out (“I thought you’d be looking after the children while I had the baby”), and Rachel furious: “That old man!” “You hardly spoke to him,” Kitty pointed out.

  The women of the Ladies’ Guild were dumbstruck. She heard them whispering among themselves and felt that they regarded her with new eyes in which there was an element of jealousy, as if she had metamorphosed suddenly into an amalgam of Elizabeth Taylor and Sophia Loren. They treated her gently, like an invalid. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing, Kitty dear?”

  Of course she did not know. But with the advent of Maurice, a new dimension had come into her life which enabled her, uncharacteristically and late, to step forth into the unknown, to take a chance, to try.

  She had waited until Rachel came back from her honeymoon, golden and bursting with Greek food and her child. “You’re being really stupid.” Rachel’s eyes were uncompromising, “You’ll hate it in New York.” Inside, Kitty had found the audacity to laugh at the role reversal. For so many years she had been the parent, advising, cautioning. “He’s probably after your money,” Rachel offered as a Parthian shot.

  “It’s time you started living for yourself,” Maurice had said. “The children have their own lives. They can manage without you. Give it six months. We’ll see how we get on…”

  She had bought her ticket, packed her case, said goodbye, tearful and choked, to the family who took advantage of her, to the children who liked her to be there, to her friends in the synagogue and neighbours in the flats, and the widows with whom she played bridge and who looked at her with disbelief, and to her grandchildren whose possessive arms almost made her weaken at the last moment.

  Josh took her to the airport. The last time they had done that journey was when she had been going to Eilat where she had first met the enigmatic Maurice with his flat cap and zippered jacket. This time it was different. Already the enthusiasm was wearing off. She wondered what on earth she was doing, with not a soul that she knew, sitting down to pass the time with coffee and a Danish pastry in the early morning tumult of the International Departure Lounge.

  In the plane, setting the seal on her commitment, she had altered her watch to New York time as the Captain announced the route – Northern Ireland, Labrador and Boston – that would be taking her to Maurice. Hemmed into the window seat Josh had secured for her, covered with the mauve cellular blanket and, plugged into the red plastic headset, trying to concentrate on the film, she realised how much already she missed her family and how very dear to her they were, the importance of one’s own flesh and blood which was more, so very much more, than the sum of its parts. Several hours later, after she had filled in her landing card and gone with her sponge-bag to the confined toilet to freshen herself up for Maurice, the First Officer’s voice – “We are beginning our descent for New York” – brought home to her the significance of the step she was taking. The landing at Kennedy, ill-timed and bumpy, had been the beginning of a dream from which she had still not woken. She did not need telling to remain in her seat until the aircraft had stopped and the seatbelt signs had been switched off; the 747 had become her home, her limbo, and she was terrified of moving.

  With one ear on the public address system which announced that she could retrieve her baggage from carousel number five (her lucky number, perhaps she would be lucky), she selected, as she did in the supermarket, the shortest and fastest moving queue for immigration. Standing behind the yellow line until it was her turn to approach the uniformed black woman (“One person or family group permitted in booth at a time”), she peered through the glass, vainly searching the alien faces in the customs hall for the familiar sight of Maurice. With her passport unequivocally stamped and having lied about the purpose of her visit – which was neither strictly speaking business nor holiday – she had asked a well built man, no older than Josh, if he would mind helping her with her luggage, but he ignored her, as if she had not spoken, and she knew that she was in New York. Having neither contraband, vegetables, birds, nor birds, eggs to declare she had passed, with her swerving trolley, unchallenged through the green channel.

  Maurice, waiting anxiously, was in his shirt-sleeves. She hardly recognised him without his flat cap and zippered jacket which was the image of him (despite the handsome figure he had cut in his tuxedo at the wedding) she carried in her mind. The expression on his face when he caught sight of her, as if with his own eyes he had witnessed the coming of the Messiah, dispelled the doubts and the agonies, the vacillations and the weaknesses of the last days. When he put his arms around her and his cheek against hers, wordlessly, she had the impression that for the first time since Sydney’s death, after which she had wandered in the wilderness, she had come home.

  For some reason she had not expected Maurice to have a car – MM 200 – certainly not a Mercedes. Sydney, even so many years after the war, would not buy anything that was overtly German. Not because he thought he could achieve anything by boycotting German goods but because he considered it wrong for Jews of his generation, which had suffered so grievously at the hands of the Nazis, to display any symbol so incontrovertibly associated with their martyrdom.

  As they adhered strictly to the fifty miles per hour speed limit on the Van Wyck Expressway – eight lanes of traffic – passed Jewel Avenue and Flushing Meadow, which sounded more romantic somehow than Shepherd’s Bush and Hammersmith, they were overtaken by blue-rinsed grandmothers, men in vests, and bearded elders in trilby hats, at the wheels of Chevrolets and Pontiacs and Buicks (which seemed to go on forever), and Kitty tried, so that she could later describe them in a letter to her children, to formulate her first impressions of New York. Beneath the puffed clouds in a turquoise sky they followed the signs, brown on white, to Manhattan. “Welcome to Queens”, and “Liberty Avenue” with its lush trees and clapboard houses, “Soul Food” and “Chicken and Ribs”. “New York City Ice Skating”. Debbie and Lisa would have liked that. “Catch a Hit Yankee Baseball.”

  “Yankee Stadium,” Maurice said, pointing out the concrete circle.

  At the traffic lights a diminutive youth in a tattered shirt smeared the windscreen with a sponge at the end of a stick. Maurice put the washers on and gave the boy a quarter.

  The temperature in the purring car with its tinted windows gave the lie to the fact that outside, according to the latest illuminated sign, it had reached the nineties. The news on the radio broadcast the latest developments in the Israeli siege of Beirut: “…despite calls for a cessation of hostilities Israel has violated the ceasefire and there is sporadic shelling in West Beirut. Israeli Defence Force tanks have moved into the central area clo
se to the Green Line and have prevented UN observers from reaching Beirut.”

  “They’ve been cut off for a week,” Kitty said.

  “The siege is to prevent food, water and fuel from getting to the strongholds of the PLO. Unfortunately everyone suffers in the interests of nationalism,” Maurice replied. “Flags. Emblems. Passports. Anthems. Israel’s no longer a model for western civilisation, some sort of wunderkind. She’s just like the rest. ‘If you will it, it is not a dream,’ Herzl said, but I think the time has come to wake up.”

  “I keep thinking about the women and children…”

  “Israeli planes distributed leaflets urging civilians to leave the area. There are escape routes open. Thousands already have.”

  “They don’t tell you that.”

  “They’ve got the fire brigade reporting. Kids from the networks with their inevitable sympathy for what they feel to be the underdog, who come crashing in when there’s trouble anywhere, making simple divisions between the ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’. The less informed they are the more sensation and violence minded they become, photographing the same streets of damaged houses which the Israelis were probably not responsible for anyway.

  “They’d be amazed if you told them that in 1947 the United Nations proposed that there was to be a Jewish state and for the first time ever an Arab Palestinian state. The Jews accepted the offer: the extremist Arab leadership wanted all or nothing. It got nothing, and the Palestinian refugee problem was created. That in 1948 nine hundred thousand Jews had their property confiscated by Arab governments and were driven out of Arab countries. That the Palestinian Liberation Organisation has never been used to liberate the Palestinians at all, but to keep them in misery, discriminating against their own people, depriving them of human rights…”

  Maurice pressed the button, truncating the newsreader. “Not that I condone this war. It’s doing inestimable harm to history’s impression of Israel which is lying and deceiving for the first time. Frankly, I think Prime Minister Begin has taken leave of his senses.”

  “I’m glad Rachel can’t hear you,” Kitty said. “She gets hysterical.”

  “Tempers are running pretty high here. The antisemites – anti-Zionists they call themselves now – are crawling out of the woodwork.” He put a hand on Kitty’s. “War is a terrible thing. But there are worse things. Don’t let’s talk about it, Kit. Tell me how you’ve been.”

  Talking to Maurice was like finding sanctuary. In London she had been surrounded by people, but they had their own problems, none of them more than superficially concerned with what Kitty Shelton had on her mind. The children were good, nothing to complain about there, but she was aware of a look, glazed and faraway, that came into their eyes when the conversation got round to topics that did not immediately concern themselves. It was the same with her bridge circle. The four widows brought their own problems to the table and laid them down with the trumps on the green baize card-tables in the various flats, but each marched to the music of her own drummer and could not hear the other’s tune. Maurice listened, as he had in Israel when the confidences had come tumbling out. He did not say much but he gave Kitty’s outpourings, trivial as they may have been, his undivided attention, and could, she swore, have taken an exam in the altercations she was having with her landlord who wanted the tenants to pay for the installation of new central heating boilers before the onset of winter; in the state of the portfolio bequeathed to her by Sydney; in Rachel’s refusal either to move from her council flat or to make any practical preparations for her forthcoming child. If Maurice could not provide the solutions to her problems at least he provided the sympathy. It was what she wanted. What she missed. Everyone needed somebody. She wondered if the yearning for the soul-mate she had lacked since Sydney’s death had been worth the transition to New York.

  Her previous impressions of the city had been gleaned from the television – “49th Precinct” and “Starsky and Hutch”. She had been unprepared for the relentlessness and volume of the traffic, dumbfounded by the oscillating mass of multi-ethnic, summer-clad humanity in perpetual motion in the sizzling streets, overwhelmed by the tottering menace of the preposterous buildings, and doubted the wisdom of her decision – despite the comforting presence of Maurice – before she reached his flat. Apartment. She had to remember to say it. There was so much to remember. So much that was new.

  She did not know what she had been expecting, she had not really thought about it. As she wrote the address, East 85th Street, on her letters to Maurice, she had not had any clear picture in her mind of where he lived. Seeing the elegant striped canopy which stretched from the doorway of the building, across the wide pavement, to the kerb, Kitty had at first thought that Maurice must be taking her to an hotel. When the doorman, short and swarthy in his neat grey uniform, rushed out to take her cases and greeted Maurice with a “Hi, Doc!” she knew that he had not.

  “This is Joe,” Maurice said, introducing him.

  “Hi, Mrs Shelton.” Joe proffered a hand. “How y’a doing today?” Kitty was surprised that he had addressed her by name. There seemed no end to the surprises.

  “Joe knows everyone on the block,” Maurice said with pride, “including the man who runs the numbers. Anything you want to know about the Yankees or the Mets, ask Joe.”

  Kitty had a vague impression of a smart foyer – “All visitors must be announced” – with a red carpet, gilt bamboo mirror, porter’s desk and ornate lamps on either side of a silk-covered sofa.

  “I got the bagels,” Joe said, going up in the smooth elevator, “and some blueberry pie.”

  It was Joe, who as Kitty was later to learn came from Puerto Rico, who had helped Maurice prepare his studio for her and had carried the melancholy accumulation of paintings to Maurice’s apartment across the hall. The studio consisted of one large white-painted room with polished boards covered with vivid oriental rugs, at one end of which was a low bed with an American Indian throw-over spread, and at the other the pale and gleaming surfaces of a high-tech kitchenette. Louvred doors led off the room to a walk-in closet and a stripped pine bathroom. On a chrome and glass table, which served as a room divider, was an arrangement of flowers in a pottery crock such as Maurice used for his brushes.

  Maurice and Joe watched as Kitty picked up the card: “Welcome to New York. And to my heart. Maurice.” She could not say thank you. Could not breathe. She rushed to let some air into the room although it was cool, hammering at the glass.

  “Double windows,” Maurice said, “we don’t open them.”

  It was one of the things she had to get used to: the fact that she was fifteen floors up with a view only of the apartment building across the street and had to rely for ventilation upon the noisy mechanism of the air-conditioning which kept her awake at night; the confines of the studio when she had been used to space; and above all, the heat. You shivered in the buildings and died in the streets. The blistering city was an inferno.

  Maurice’s apartment was high-ceilinged, harking back, Kitty thought, with its large dark furniture, its book-lined walls, to central Europe. He had rolled up the rug at the window end where he had placed his easel, and worked surrounded on three sides by his canvases stacked face to the wall.

  In the kitchen, with its Bauhaus table, Joe took the bagels from a brown paper bag and, opening Maurice’s cupboard, put them on a plate. He seemed very much at home.

  “Coffee?” Maurice, his hand on the steaming glass jug in the coffee machine, addressed Joe.

  “I already had.”

  Joe set the pie, topped with the dusky blueberries Kitty had never seen before, in its fluted baking-foil case on the table.

  “Enjoy,” he said to Kitty, and to Maurice: “You want anything, Doc, you call.”

  “He looks after me,” Maurice said when he’d gone. “Anything you need, ask Joe.”

  It had all been too quick. That was the trouble with flying. Your body was transported while your grey matter was still packing its bag
s. Kitty could hear herself speaking to Maurice, answering his questions, filling in the weeks since Rachel’s wedding, but she felt that she was imagining her presence in his apartment and that she would shortly wake up in her own bed to find that it had been a dream. Outside, the orange ball that was the sun shone fiercely but Kitty’s internal clock told her that it was time for bed.

  Maurice took cream cheese and pale Nova Scotia salmon from the refrigerator. Kitty drank the coffee he poured out for her and toyed with the food.

  “I can’t believe you’re really here,” Maurice said.

  “Neither can I.”

  He cut a slice of pie and put it on her plate. “From the patisserie on Madison. People come from all over town.”

  He wanted to please her. Had arranged the studio with Joe, bought the flowers and the pie, wanting everything to be nice. He could see that she was dropping.