The Mandelbaum Gate (6 page)

Barbara
went and looked at herself in the mirror, full-length, in her room. Her hair
was drawn back tight, her face was thin and smooth, her blouse and skirt were
neat. Everything was quite neat, prim and unnoticeable. She had not guessed she
looked quite like that, but now that she saw herself almost through the eyes of
others, she was amazed. She wondered if she was a hypocrite; but that
appearance in the glass, she thought, comes of long habit. Having restrained
the expression of my feelings over the years I look as if I had none. It comes from
a long habit of approaching the world with caution, this appearance of being
too cautious to live a life of normal danger.

The
figure in the looking-glass fascinated her. No wonder Miles did not really know
her.

She had
thought then, but who am I?

I am
who I am.

Yes,
but who am I?

Because,
in fact, she was already deeply involved in a love-affair with Harry Clegg,
the archaeologist. The local country people had taken note of them during the
first week of their meeting. But her cousins would never do so. They would
simply ignore the evidence. She looked in the mirror and understood why. And
understood why she attracted the man. It was the very quality that deceived her
friends. It was this deceptive, ascetic, virginal look that Harry found
intriguing. It was not her mind alone, she told herself as she sized up her
appearance.

All the
summer weeks of their first meeting she had felt in a state of complete
liberation from guilt. Moral or social censure were meaningless. The hours and
days were barricaded with enchantment. She prolonged her stay on the simple
excuse to Miles and Kathy that she was enjoying it. They accepted this, they
were delighted. She did not mind baby-sitting in the evenings with Harry Clegg
to keep her company. Harry Clegg was a scholar, of course, but not their type
socially; he was a mild joke to them, a small, dark, scowling creature with too
much untidy hair. A scowling creature except when he smiled. He was brilliant,
the Vaughans admitted, a dedicated scholar. That he was regarded in every
informed society but theirs as a distinguished man, the Vaughans did not know.
They conveyed, with innocent remarks, in their diffident way, their amusement
at the points where his lower-class origins were evident. Harry would never
have entered Kathy’s drawing-room or Miles’s consciousness, nor would have
wanted to do so, had he not been dabbling in the local excavations Miles and
Kathy merrily departed for dinner parties, leaving the professor baby-sitting
with Barbara and presumably discussing archaeology with her for all he was
worth.

But
Barbara and Harry Clegg were in the spare bedroom, making love, just like the
nannie and the butler in the absence of master and mistress in the old days.
Sometimes one of the children would wake and call. Barbara would swear and get
up. Just like the old-time nannie.

Sometimes
they settled down in the rough hut on the site of the excavations, like
teenagers stormed by the sensual presences of the summer night. At any other
time Barbara would have thought it ludicrous. A few weeks before she would have
thought it absurd. But this was no time for sophisticated thoughts. She felt
herself to be in love with Harry Clegg in an entirely exclusive form as yet
unrealized in human experience. It made nonsense of the rules. There were no
moral laws to fit it. The form of their love seemed to her to derive from a
faculty of inner knowledge which they both possessed, a passionate mutual
insight so unique in her experience that she felt it to be unique in human experience.
Harry Clegg — shock-haired, unhandsome — who would have guessed he would be her
type? Miles referred to him as ‘the red-brick genius’. But that was to reckon
without Harry Clegg, who loved her. He loved her disguise as an English
spinster, not merely as disguise but as part of her inexplicable identity. She
was not an English spinster merely, but also a half-Jew, and was drawn to the
equivalent quality in him that quite escaped both the unspoken definition ‘Englishman
of lower-class origin’, and the spoken one ‘red-brick genius.

It
happened one day that Barbara’s cousin, Michael Aaronson, came down for the
week-end with his wife. He was a recognized expert in International Law, with a
subsidiary interest in a firm of solicitors who had dealt with the Vaughans’
family business for the past ten years, such being one of the odd and latter
results of that Vaughan—Aaronson marriage which had caused so much alarm at the
time. Business apart, other Vaughans and Aaronsons of their generation were now
on visiting terms, this having happened gradually from some point after the
war, when wedding invitations and acceptances had started to flutter between
the two families; while Barbara, who was now the only visible link between
them, tended to be regarded as something practically invisible by both sides.
She now saw them infrequently, her life being centred in the girls’ school
where she taught. Michael was the only one she corresponded with, he was still
her best-friend of the Aaronsons.

He was
surprised to find Barbara at St Albans on a long stay. More perceptive than
Miles, he noticed her absorption with Harry Clegg.

He
said, when he was alone with her, ‘Are you getting attached to that
archaeologist? He seems keen on you.’

‘Yes.’

‘Good
luck, then.’

‘Thank
you, Michael.’

‘He’s a
distinguished fellow. Looks terrible. They always attract women, somehow, when
they look like that. Are you thinking of marriage? Because if you’re going to
get married the family won’t like it.’

‘Which
family?’

‘Oh,
the Vaughans, of course. He’s the wrong background.’

‘The
Aaronsons would have said the wrong blood.’

‘Yes,
the old people were upset by Spencer’s marriage.’ Spencer was one of the
cousins, who had recently married a Gentile.

‘They
wouldn’t worry about who I married, now,’ Barbara said. ‘They always knew I
wasn’t quite the right blood for them. Only half right. The other half was
wrong.’

‘Oh,
well, the old people—’

The
Aaronson grandparents were dead, but numerous aunts and uncles had reached
their sixties and seventies since the Golders Green days before the war.

‘And
the Vaughans,’ said Barbara cheerfully, ‘always knew I hadn’t quite the right
background. They felt I was too fond of the Aaronsons. My environment was half
wrong.’

‘Then
you’ve got something in common with Clegg,’ Michael said. ‘The outcast status.’

‘Yes,
quite, but we also have common intellectual interests. We’ve got a lot to talk
about.’ She had turned sharp and defensive, like Aunt Sadie.

‘That
sounds more like sense, I’ll admit. You’re the most sensible woman I know.’

‘I’m
not. He’s a married man.’

‘Any
chance of a divorce?’

‘He’s
got a divorce,’ Barbara said.

‘Oh,
Christ, yes, you’re a Catholic. What are you going to do?’

‘I
haven’t begun to think.’

‘Keep
me informed,’ Michael said, ‘when you do begin to think. Anyhow, I’m glad this
has happened. I thought you’d given men up.’

‘Well,
evidently not.’

‘I
know. Silly of me.’

Down at
The Fighting Cocks, the public house that stood on the verge of the Roman area
of St Albans, small murmurs passed round concerning the midnight movements of a
couple of the current archaeologists (for the patrons thought Barbara was one
of the team). ‘You’re causing a scandal, Barbara — you and Harry Clegg.’ Yes,
but Miles and his social circle never got to hear of the small scandal at The Fighting
Cocks; nobody there knew the archaeologists by name, or cared. The local people
grinned as the lovers left the pub. ‘Free love on the old Roman road,’
commented a man, and it was left at that. Meanwhile, Barbara and Harry walked
along the ramparts of Watling Street by moonlight and bedded down in the hut.

A year
later, on the summit of Mount Tabor, where the warrior poet, Deborah, once
mustered her troops against an enemy of the Lord named Sisera, Barbara turned
and gazed out towards the Dead Sea, where her lover now was working on the site
of Qumran. She recalled, the day she left St Albans, saying good-bye to Miles,
Kathy, and the children. Miles took her to the station, talking of his married
plans as married people do — the holiday abroad and the new garage — suspecting
her of no other passion than her recent one for botany and no deeper regret
than that she had given up playing the cello. She had felt then, how much more
of a sexual person she was than he. She could not remember when first she had
associated her Jewishness with her sexual instincts and distinguished herself
from her Gentile relatives by a half-guilty feeling that she was more afflicted
by sex than they were; so that, when she fell in love with Harry Clegg, she
felt more blessed by sex than they were, by virtue of her Jewish blood. This
basic error with an elusive vapour of truth in it persisted so far as she
continued to associate, without even questioning the proposition, her
Jewishness with sex, and to feel that she partook of the sexual virility of the
world in consequence. Miles had said, as he kissed her on the platform at St
Albans, ‘It’s been lovely having you.’

She
smiled at this in the train. She was fond of Miles and his thin, but so
innocent, imagination. He would use that correct phrase, ‘It’s been lovely
having you,’ to departing visitors on platforms, without variation, till he was
too infirm to see people off at all. Kathy, at the door of the house, had said
the same thing. Kathy always had a full day, full of social activities and
routine. It took this sort of English couple, Barbara thought, to let a
love-affair ripen and come to flower under their roof without suspecting
anything. They would have been horrified to know about the spare bedroom
episodes. Barbara, who on later reflection was herself mildly shocked, was at
this moment amused. She was in love. A trite late-flowering. A very late one.
She didn’t care. She would not have cared if Miles or Kathy had discovered her
in the spare bed with Harry Clegg. What could they have said? ‘Oh! sorry —’ and
withdrawn. And later: ‘Look here, Barbara —’ And what would they have said?
That would have depended on the inspiration of the hour. She was merely amused
at the notion, when it occurred to her that she had taken some sort of revenge
on them, in return for the evening when she had listened to Kathy and Miles,
for a few moments, gaily mimicking Harry’s Coventry vowels. They were as good
as foreigners, herself and Harry Clegg. And they made love like foreigners,
which was all right, too.

The
train carried her away to London, and all things considered, she decided she
would never be able to convey to Miles the exceptional event, her love, that
finally justified her abuse of his hospitality. Miles would have been afraid to
listen, lest it upset the brotherly arrangement he had come to with his wife.

I know of thy doings, and find thee

neither cold nor hot.

It was
after her return, in the new term, to the school where she had been teaching
for six years, that her normal process of reasoning set in, and as her love
took greater hold of her, so did she take hold of it. There was a deadlock.
Their love letters became a vehicle for arguments that gruelled her in the new
term and infuriated her, with their revelation of something absolutely
undisplaceable in her nature, her Catholic faith.

They
wrote the love letters of academic intellectuals, that is to say, they were not
much as love letters. Her references to their love were light and frivolous, as
if it were something that didn’t matter basically but was a mere luxury of
civilization. She partly believed this. His were funnily crude. On the question
of what was to be done about it she was serious and practical, assembling and
setting forth arguments in sober order. The nature of their love-affair
underwent a change in the course of this correspondence. Barbara’s letters at
times resembled essays in theology. She gripped her fountain-pen with tight,
tense fingers.

For in
the first month of the new term, as she uneasily took up her old teaching life,
she felt the relevance to the situation of her being a Catholic. As matters
stood, she could not marry a divorced man and remain within the Church, unless
his marriage was in fact invalidated by the Church. All this she wrote to Harry
Clegg, with supporting theology, in the excessively rational terms employed by
people with a secret panic or religious doubt. ‘The Church,’ she wrote, ‘is
nothing if not logical. You, above all people, will understand, even if you
cannot …’

He turned
up at the school to see what the hell she was playing at. He, above all
people, the third Saturday of term. She was standing at her sitting-room window
using it as a looking-glass while she tied a scarf round her head. She was
about to go down to the post office to send off a fat envelope, a letter to
him, bulging with pregnant hopes and theological debate. She heard a scrape on
the gravel as of a wild old motor-car, and saw, beyond her reflection, his
quite tame Consul, a shining two-year-old, which he always drove so hard.

She ran
down to meet him. She now realized quite clearly that she did not want Ricky to
meet him; Ricky had become, over the past six years her closest woman friend.
Ricky was Miss Rick-ward, the headmistress. They had frequently been abroad together.
It had even been suggested by Ricky, and vaguely assented to by Barbara, that
they would share a flat together on their retirement. Ricky was forty-two, a
knowledgeable spinster. Somehow, at some time, an unspoken agreement had been arrived
at, to the effect that they shared the same sense of humour and disregard of
men. It was, in a way, understood that when they retired … How? Why had all
this been understood? At what point in their talkative and confidential
relationship had it become a difficult thing for Barbara to speak of a
prospective husband, a lover? — leave out the question of a love-affair?