The Enemy of the Good (29 page)

‘No, but I believe in gifts, and this is the best I could ever have wished for.’ Moreover, with her daughter only four months married, she would never have dared to wish for it so soon.

‘Really?’

‘For you. For us. For us all.’

‘Yes, it’s wonderful,’ Carla said, as she crossed the room to hug Shoana, veiling the pain of frustrated motherhood in the joy of becoming an aunt.

‘Truly wonderful,’ Marta echoed. Neither Carla’s bittersweet tears nor the poignancy of learning of new life in a ward of deadly infection could dampen her euphoria. This was the news for which she had waited so long: the prospect of a grandchild who would legitimise her love for future generations. She had spelt out her priorities as a young woman, when she refused to marry Edwin until she had finished her thesis or to start a family until three fieldtrips later, but, while there was no point in regrets, let alone recantations, she was ever more aware that all the honours and awards on her shelves failed to conceal the lack of grandchildren’s drawings. She dreaded the invitation to another ruby wedding or seventieth birthday party where they were handed canapés by the hosts’ doe-eyed granddaughter or listened to an oboe recital by their precocious grandson. Shoana’s announcement opened up a world of
possibilities
where, in swift succession, she pictured herself gazing at the dinosaur in the Natural History Museum, shouting ‘Behind you!’ at the pantomime, and refurbishing the doll’s house in the nursery, her moist palm a token not only of her own excitement but of the hot little hand soon to be clutching hers.

She turned her attention to Edwin, whose vacant features were thrown into relief by the flurry of emotion around him. Pulling up a chair, she sat down and clasped his hand. ‘Did you hear, my darling? You’re going to be a grandfather.’ She broke off on realising how little chance there was that he would survive for seven months. ‘He smiled, did you see?’ She appealed to the younger women, both too caught up in their own fantasies to collude in hers.

‘I saw nothing, Ma,’ Shoana said sadly. ‘Not even a twinge.’

‘It’s the drugs he’s on to stop the fits. They wipe him out.’

‘But he has to take them for the rest of his life,’ Shoana said, her quavering voice suggesting that the phrase had been given new meaning by the life she was bringing into the world.

‘Now I don’t want you worrying about your father. He has the very best doctors and, as soon as they give us the go-ahead, we’ll take him back to Beckley, which is sure to cheer him up. The only thing you must think about – the only thing he’d want you to think about – is yourself.’

‘Can I be hearing right?’ Shoana teased. ‘Marta Gorski telling me to look after number one!’

‘But it’s not just number one, is it?’ Carla said. ‘Not any more.’

Marta promised Shoana to tell no one, not even Mrs Shepherd, at least until the end of the first trimester, but she secured a special dispensation for Clement, whose response when she broke the news at dinner, was further
evidence
of his depression.

‘Of course I’m pleased for Nanna, but it won’t make any difference to me. I can’t see Zvi letting a child of his spend time with wicked Uncle Clement, the one we don’t speak about, that is not until he’s old and toothless and it’s a question of wills.’

Marta lost patience with Clement who, in voicing his fear of rejection, had revived hers. She was determined that nothing should threaten her
relationship
with her grandchild and ready to go to any lengths, short of shaving her head, to show that she would not be an obstacle to a Lubavitch upbringing. Lying in bed that night, she was seized with regret that Shoana and Zvi were not Moonies or members of some other extreme cult, so that any responsible judge would award custody of the child to her. Having dismissed the thought as nocturnal whimsy, she found it returning over breakfast, on the drive to the Radcliffe and, most distressingly, as she sat watching Edwin take his day-long nap.

It felt somehow treacherous to be musing on her future grandchild while Edwin lay in front of her, as helpless as a babe in arms. For two days his
whimpering
as he wet himself was his sole sign of life. Then, as she sat by his bed struggling with the crossword, he began to speak.

‘Marta?’

‘Yes, my darling!’ She rubbed his hands, hopeful that the restored speech might herald a fuller recovery.

‘Do you love me? Did you ever love me?’

‘How can you even ask?’

‘Then help me to die.’ Her hopes fell as fast as they had risen.

‘You’ll feel better soon, I promise.’

‘I’m not a child!’

‘I know you’re not. You’re my brave, wise, honourable, wonderful man.’

‘Then why won’t you treat me like one? I can’t bear it. The noises in my head… are they in my head or in the room? The people… the questions… the pills. No more pills!’

‘We’ll soon have you home. There’ll be no more noises.’

‘You stupid, stupid woman!’

‘Eddy, darling!’

‘I have nothing.’

‘You have me,’ she said softly.

‘And what do you have? A decrepit old man. Dragging you down. Down and down… down and down… down and down… down and down…’ The phrase revolved like a stuck record. ‘Sick and useless. Dragging you down.’

‘Never! How could you? You’re my life.’

‘Then prove it. Take that pillow. Smother me. Smother me. Smother me. Smother me. Smother me.’

With tears streaming down her cheeks, Marta moved to the window and stared at the unrelieved view of the car park. She wiped her eyes on her hand and her nose on a tissue, before returning to Edwin’s bedside to find him asleep.

Gazing at his bloated face, she wondered why she should object so strongly to what, in view of his condition, was a perfectly rational request. She had no faith in any God who might be offended by his words, while her faith in medical progress stopped short of miracle cures. It was as though she were turning her personal tenacity into a general precept. Even at the blackest moment of the War, she had refused to consider the possibility of defeat. But she had been young, with everything to live for. Edwin’s one hope was to be blind to his own decline, losing the very reason which she held to be
humanity’s
raison d’être.

Three days later, when he was satisfied that they had the fits under control, the consultant called Marta and Clement into his office and told them that they could take the patient home, promising that, when the strain of caring for him grew too great, he would refer them to a hospice. Marta baulked at a word which conjured up her last visit to Uncle Leon, stuck in a ward full of sad, shrivelled people, looking like balloons left up at the end of a party. She was grateful for Clement’s vehemence as he dismissed the idea out of hand.

‘Never! My father isn’t going to die among strangers. My father is going to die at home.’

Her suspicion that his resolve cloaked a darker purpose was confirmed over dinner.

‘I was speaking to Pa this afternoon.’

‘He’s so out of it,’ she said quickly. ‘It’s impossible to know what he’s saying.’

‘This was crystal clear. He asked me to help him die.’

‘He said something of the sort to me. I took no notice. It was the pain speaking.’

‘No, it was Pa. The doctor came in, and he begged him to stop his
treatment
… give the bed to someone who still had hope.’

‘He’s back in his own bed now, so the question won’t arise.’

‘“You mustn’t give up,” the doctor said in his greetings-card voice. “Your son’s here. Think of him.” “I am, Doctor,” Pa said and looked at me plaintively. He was thinking of me so much that he couldn’t ask me again. He couldn’t put me through the pain of relieving his pain. He should have had more faith. All my life he’s been here for me. Now I shall be here for him.’

‘You talk as though you were sending him off on a holiday!’

‘Aren’t I?’

‘Be real!’

‘I can appreciate that it’s hard for you. Anything to do with euthanasia must smack of the Nazis.’

‘Trust me, that’s the first time I’ve made the connection. My concerns are far more basic: to be one hundred per cent certain that, were we to take any steps to… to do what your father asks, we’d be freeing him from his misery not ours.’

‘His misery is ours. There’s no distinction.’

‘We can’t be sure what’s going on in his head.’

‘“Help me to die” is a pretty fair guide.’

‘But that’s only part of the time. Even your Aunt Helena opposed capital punishment because of the risk of hanging an innocent man. Who’s to say we wouldn’t be making the same mistake?’

‘Don’t pretend, Ma. You know as well as I do what he wants. You heard the doctor this morning say that he couldn’t guarantee he wouldn’t live for another few months. Live! When the only sign of life is that he’s pissed himself – bleating like a baby with a shitty nappy!’

‘You still haven’t explained how you can square your belief in a loving God with taking away the life He gave.’

‘The same way I can square it with my belief in abortion.’ She winced at the shrewdly chosen analogy. ‘God wants us to show how we can assert our humanity. And I maintain, with every ounce of my being, that humanity is a more precious gift than life. Euthanasia may be illegal, but Christ taught his disciples to put love before the law, and so should we.’

Marta escaped further debate by claiming exhaustion. Once again, she envied the Hadza their simple accommodation with death. At first sight it had been deeply disturbing. No dish of roast locusts or unwashed body had posed a greater threat to her professional detachment than the moment a sick old woman announced that she would not be travelling with the tribe when they set off for the next camp. Neither the woman’s family nor the elders sought to dissuade her. They merely ensured that she had a sufficient supply of food and water and then left with the minimum of fuss. Six months later they returned to discover her bones, stripped clean by predators and scorched white by the sun. No one displayed the least shock or grief. The woman remained with the tribe but at a different level of consciousness, one of the living dead whose spirits survived through the stories that were told of them, rather than the dead who vanished from memory.

Illness imposed an inexorable rhythm on the house. With Edwin no longer able to climb the stairs, they converted the morning room into a bedroom. The makeshift arrangement filled Marta with foreboding, which was
compounded
by Clement’s reminder that it was where they had placed his
grandmother’s
coffin. He himself had taken up permanent residence at Beckley, his mournful presence adding to the prevalent gloom, although, when she suggested that he might be happier spending a few days at home, he was so offended that she never raised the subject again.

At least she managed to dissuade Shoana from travelling back and forth, on the promise of regular – albeit heavily censored – bulletins on her father’s state. She relished their nightly conversations and the link to a world in which health was a given not a gift. Although
godsend
was not a word that came easily to her, no other began to convey the marvel of Shoana’s pregnancy. It was only the thought of the new life growing inside her daughter that saved her from despair at the malignancy growing inside Edwin. She mulled over every change in Shoana’s condition, offering advice when asked, calming fears when needed, rejoicing at how the imminent birth had brought them closer.

One evening, however, their conversation took a different turn. From the start she could tell that Shoana was worried, the suspicion that she was holding something back increasing when, without a word of explanation, she announced that she would not be going into the office the following day. The more she denied that there was anything wrong, the more Marta felt the need to see for herself. Having reflected on it overnight, she decided to take the train up to London after breakfast, waiting only to tell Clement, who showed as little interest as if she were setting off for the shops.

Her resolution held firm until she reached the house and recalled
Shoana’s
lifelong dislike of surprises. Even as a child, she had filled her letters to Father Christmas with strict instructions on models and sizes. The memory unnerved her and she hurried up the drive before she had a chance to turn back. Zvi answered the door, seeming to confirm her worst fears, until he explained that both he and Shoana were at home for Yom Kippur. Without a pause, she told him that she had come to be with her daughter on the holy day. Ignoring the distrust in his eyes, she followed him through the house and into the garden, where Shoana, inadequately dressed for the blustery October weather, stood next to a sturdy man with a matted beard, wearing a butcher’s apron and clenching a knife. As she recoiled in alarm, the cluck of a hen at his feet made her feel both foolish and ashamed.

‘Ma, what on earth are you doing here?’ Shoana asked, brushing her cheeks with cold lips.

‘She’s come to keep Yom Kippur with us,’ Zvi said.

‘Nonsense! She’s never kept Yom Kippur in her life.’

‘But what are you doing, darling?’ Marta asked rapidly. ‘It’s freezing out here. Why the chicken?’

‘It’s
kaparot
,’ Shoana said. ‘Part of the ritual. And I can’t stop to chat. Rabbi Silberman has a busy day.’ Marta apologised silently to the rabbi for her mistake. ‘Are you sure you want to watch, Ma? You must be tired after the journey. Go indoors. I won’t be long.’

She insisted on staying, choking back her revulsion as Shoana took the white hen in her right hand and, under the rabbi’s guidance, swung it above her head. Seeing her daughter’s distress as the bird shuddered and squawked, its feathers flying, she longed for Zvi to intervene, but he stood impervious, bobbing back and forth as he read aloud from the Bible.

After Shoana had swung the bird three times while muttering a prayer in broken Hebrew, the rabbi grabbed it from her and crossed to a pile of sawdust, where he cut off its head in a neat stroke, carefully holding the twitching body so that its blood spilt on to the wood. He then spoke a blessing and covered up every drop of blood.

‘Are you all right, darling?’ Marta asked anxiously, as her daughter began to retch.

‘I’m more than all right; I’m blessed,’ she replied. ‘That’s the point of the ritual. By rights I should die for my sins, but by God’s mercy a hen has taken my place.’

‘I think you’ll find your ancestors in Poland did
kaparot
for hundreds of years,’ Zvi said.

‘But Shoana’s pregnant,’ Marta said, blotting out the image of her
tender-hearted
grandmother brandishing a headless chicken. ‘Couldn’t she be granted an exemption?’

‘On the contrary,’ Shoana said defiantly, ‘it’s because I’m pregnant, I have to do it twice.’ She nodded as the rabbi pulled a rooster from its cage. ‘The hen stands for me and a girl baby. The rooster’s for if it’s a boy.’

Marta’s resolve to respect her daughter’s beliefs was sorely tested as she watched her repeat the ritual with an even more recalcitrant fowl. She waited while the rabbi once again drained its blood over the sawdust before curiosity got the better of her. ‘How many sins can an unborn child commit?’

‘It’s in case the mother eats – inadvertently in this instance, I’m sure – a proscribed food,’ the rabbi replied. ‘That would become part of her flesh and therefore of the foetus.’ He picked up the still pulsating rooster and put it in a basket along with the hen. As though reading Marta’s mind, he explained that they would be given to the old peoples’ home.

‘Two birds with one stone!’ she exclaimed.

Sighing heavily, Shoana accompanied Zvi and the rabbi inside before returning to the garden. Marta feared that she had driven Zvi away, until Shoana revealed that he had left to go to the Chabad House.

‘He’s to be flogged. Largely symbolically,’ she said in an unsought
reassurance
. ‘The men all take it in turns.’ She led the way into the house and Marta was once again saddened by how little of the furniture she recognised from the Notting Hill flat.

‘I can offer you something to drink, but no food. We’re fasting.’

‘That’s fine. So am I,’ Marta said, with a blush. ‘But is there no exemption from that either?’

‘Sure, but I don’t need it. I’m fine.’ As if to belie her words, she clutched her stomach. ‘It’s nothing. Just wind. How’s Pa?’ Then a second wave of pain shattered the facade and she turned to her mother for support.

‘What is it, darling? Tell me,’ Marta asked, uneasily stroking Shoana’s wig.

‘I’ve been bleeding,’ she said, sounding like a frightened child.

Marta let out a silent scream. This was one horror from which she would never recover. For the first time she envied Edwin his incomprehension. ‘How much?’

‘It won’t make you squeamish?’

‘I’m your mother!’

‘There were reddish-brown stains on my pants. Not plain red; then there would have been no confusion. Something else. So Zvi took them to the Rabbi.’

‘What? Why?’

‘I was too embarrassed to go myself.’

‘No, I don’t mean why Zvi and not you! Why show them to the Rabbi at all?’

‘I had to make certain that I wasn’t
niddah
, that Zvi and I could still touch.’

‘You need a doctor, not a rabbi,’ Marta said, biting back her rage. ‘You must have a scan. I’m sure – absolutely sure – that everything’s fine. But just to relieve any doubts.’

‘I saw the doctor. She said it’s nothing. There’s no sign that it’s coming from the uterus. She thinks there must be a scratch on my cervix and that the
internal
examinations I’ve been giving myself have made it worse.’ Marta struggled to maintain her composure. To comply with the modesty laws, Shoana was putting her baby at risk.

‘I’m due for my eleven-week scan at the end of the week. I might be able to ask them to bring it forward.’

‘Would you like me to ring my friend Jan Walters? She’s head of obstetrics at King’s.’

‘They can’t do anything invasive. Zvi wouldn’t allow it and I would never go behind his back.’

It was clear that Shoana’s deference to Zvi went way beyond the decor. Marta felt the blow to her lifelong principles as her daughter walked meekly into her cage and handed her husband the key. Nevertheless she held her tongue for the sake of the child.

‘I promise Jan will respect your wishes. It’s south London: they deal with every creed and culture under the sun. She’s sure to give you the all-clear and we’ll feel complete fools for having made a fuss. Too bad! You need to set your mind at rest.’

Shoana’s swift compliance betrayed the extent of her fears. She steeled herself for disappointment by insisting that a top consultant would never be free at such short notice, but Jan proved her wrong, as Marta had predicted, by agreeing to see them that afternoon. She quickly rang Clement to warn him of her late return. He assured her that he had nothing to report, since Edwin had spent the morning asleep, and sent his love to Shoana.

Despite her mother’s appeals, Shoana refused to eat so much as a piece of matza. ‘You must have something,’ Marta urged. ‘You’re in danger of stunting the baby – or worse!’

‘This isn’t cheating at Champney’s, Ma,’ Shoana said with a wounded expression, ‘it’s deceiving God.’

Moreover, she insisted on driving to the hospital, leaving Marta uncertain whether her irascibility owed more to hunger or the busy road. On arrival, they took their seats in the crowded waiting room, the only two skirts in the array of saris, niqabs and shalwar kameez. After ten minutes Jan came to fetch them, full of apologies for the wait. Marta felt awkward that her first phone call in months had been to ask for a favour, but Jan made it plain that their
friendship
, which stretched back more than three decades to an anti-apartheid rally in Trafalgar Square, transcended such niceties. They had time to exchange only the most basic news, Marta congratulating Jan on her girlfriend’s taking silk, Jan condoling with Marta on Edwin’s illness, before Jan ushered Shoana into the consulting room. Marta remained in the outer office, studiously ignoring a secretary who did little to hide her disapproval of the special treatment.

After twenty minutes, Jan came out to explain that Shoana had gone for an ultrasound and wanted her mother to join her. Although at any other time she would have relished the request, her one concern now was with what the scan might reveal. Assuming an air of confidence, she strolled into the room and introduced herself to the radiographer, who asked her to take a seat while she gently rubbed gel on Shoana’s stomach. She gripped her daughter’s hand as the radiographer switched on the machine. At a stroke, all her fears were dispelled by the flicker of life on the screen.

‘It’s alive,’ Shoana said, her voice a mixture of awe and relief as she gazed at the tadpole-like body and pounding heart.

‘It most certainly is,’ the radiographer said. ‘Listen, you can hear the
heartbeat
. Perfectly regular.’

‘That’s my baby, Ma.’

‘I know, darling. What did I tell you? He… she’s beautiful.’

As the radiographer took measurements, clicking buttons that sent dotted lines across the grainy, ghostly image, Marta stared at the giant head which, however much other organs might challenge it in the future, was asserting a primal precedence. She felt a deep surge of love for Shoana, who barely
registered
the radiographer’s commentary as she contemplated the living,
breathing
being in her womb.

At the end of the scan they returned to the waiting room while Jan assessed the results, a procedure Marta had come to regard as a formality. As Shoana sat in a daze, she worked on a smile that would penetrate her neighbour’s niqab. After half an hour, Jan called them into the consulting room, where she explained with a bluntness more suited to her clash with a policeman outside South Africa House that, given Shoana’s age and symptoms, they had done a test to measure the Nuchal Fold Thickness: in laywoman’s terms, the
thickness
of the skin at the back of a baby’s neck. ‘I’ve found an abnormality which might – and I stress
might
– be indicative of Down’s syndrome.’

As she strove to take in the news, Marta longed to tear away the euphemism and be left with the savagery of
Mongol
, to create a world where the ugliness of language matched the bleakness of reality. For the first time since receiving the call about Mark, she found herself wishing that there were a God so that she could justify her despair. She wanted to comfort Shoana, who sat motionless beside her, but she was afraid to look her in the face. So she squeezed her hand while fixing her eyes on the pens in Jan’s pocket.

‘You’re lucky to be at one of the few centres in the country where the test is routinely carried out,’ Jan said, stripping the words of their meaning. ‘You’ve got two choices. The first is to wait another four or five weeks for an amniocentesis.’

‘No!’ Shoana cried, sounding more alarmed by the procedure than by its possible result. ‘My husband would never allow it. Nor would I. It’s against our beliefs.’

‘Which leaves the second choice.’ To Marta’s relief, Jan made no comment on the marital veto. ‘A Chorionic Villus Sampling, which you can have at eleven weeks. In fact, I’d strongly recommend you have one this afternoon. We pass a tube through the vagina and cervix into the womb. It sucks off a small amount of foetal tissue in the placenta. There are no needles. It’s no more invasive than a smear test.’

‘I don’t know. I need… I really need to talk it over with Zvi, my husband. But I can’t call him. Not now.’

‘Of course not. It isn’t something you can discuss on the phone,’ Marta said, worried that Zvi would object.

‘No, what I meant is that his will be off. He’s spending the day at the Chabad House.’

‘It has to be your decision,’ Jan said. ‘But my advice is to take the test for your own peace of mind. If it makes you any easier, I’ve personally carried it out on several Orthodox Jews.’

‘You have?’

‘Several.’

‘And did you find any… any Down’s?’

‘In some cases. By no means all.’

‘And what did they do? No, I don’t want to know!’