Her aunt looked doubtful. ‘May I ask who?’
‘You don’t know him.’
‘Is he Jewish?’
‘Does he have to be?’
‘It would be better. My Peter was English but he was also Jewish and that made many things much easier.’
Anna laughed. ‘Thanks for the advice,’ she said, getting to her feet and kissing Miriam Lilien on the cheek before leaving to go upstairs to her room.
There, for a moment, she felt happy as she always did after talking to her aunt, who was the only member of her family with whom she felt in sympathy or who she felt was in sympathy with her. For Anna, like Miriam, had rejected the Zionism which the rest of her family had espoused. This had not been just an expression of adolescent rebellion but came from the confusion of her upbringing. Unlike her brother Jake, who had been brought up in Israel, Anna’s childhood had been spent largely in the United States. She had been born in Israel, but at the age of four had gone to Princeton with her parents. Throughout the 1970s, when Michal Dagan had held different posts in American universities, Anna had gone to American schools. Since her mother was originally American, English was spoken in the home. Anna had never learned more than a smattering of Hebrew, and often, when Michal and Rachel went back to Israel, she had remained with her grandmother in New York.
After graduating from Brandeis, her reassimilation into Israel might have been easier if there had been a more tolerant atmosphere in the Dagan household. Her father who, upon coming to Israel in 1952, had espoused the old-fashioned, secular, socialistic Zionism of the founders of the Jewish state, changing his family name from Fischl to Dagan, now attended the synagogue every Sabbath and observed many of the precepts of the Mosaic Law. Unclean food was banned from the kitchen and, to avoid the servile work of boiling a kettle on the Sabbath, water for making tea or coffee was kept simmering in an urn from sunset on Friday to sunset on Saturday.
All this, Anna knew, came from the influence of her brother Jake. Six years older than Anna, he had been left with friends in Israel whenever the Dagans had gone to America. His first language was Hebrew and, just as Anna hardly knew Israel, so Jake had little experience of the outside world. Raised on stories not just of Joshua’s conquest of Jericho, or David’s defeat of Goliath, but also of the assassination of British soldiers by the Irgun and the Stern Gang, Jake gloried in the military triumphs of his people, and never doubted their right to populate the territory that in antiquity God had given to the Jews. He supported the Likud, under Begin and then Shamir, and the policy of Jewish settlement on the West Bank. He also believed in an inner commitment to the Jewish cause, and had persuaded his agnostic parents to call him Ya’acov, and to reintroduce the pious practices which had been unknown in their family for three generations.
If strict observance of this kind had always been part of the Dagans’ way of life, Anna might have accepted it; but, as she scornfully pointed out to her parents, the tradition of the family was rather to play down the kind of scrupulous observance of the law of Moses which had so isolated the Jews in Gentile societies. The atmosphere of her grandmother’s flat in New York had been German as much as Jewish, and her father’s original commitment to Israel had been as a homeland for his people, not a colony of crazed fanatics like her brother Jake.
Michal Dagan had defended himself a little lamely on the grounds that a greater dedication to the Jewishness of Israel had become necessary ‘under pressure of events’. His wife Rachel, too, seemed now to accept that observance had always been part of the faith of the Jews. Anna, however, not only ridiculed this Jewish fundamentalism, but also flaunted her own secularism in any way she could. She would make herself bacon sandwiches and cheeseburgers, and go to the movies on a Friday night, just to exasperate Jake. The brother and sister had violent arguments, to the distress of their parents. Rachel Dagan would take her son aside to ask him to try to understand that, after so many years in America, Anna was bound to have a different point of view, while Michal would explain yet again to Anna how Israel could only survive if the Jews deepened their sense of who they were by observing those laws and customs which had preserved their identity over the centuries of the diaspora.
Neither child was convinced, and the arguments became so unpleasant that it was finally decided that Anna should study for a postgraduate degree abroad. If her grandmother had still been alive she would have returned to New York; instead, she went to London to lodge with her Aunt Miriam and study under Father Lambert. She told herself that she was happy to go: she found Israel provincial and claustrophobic and had no intention of serving in the army; but she felt, all the same, that she had somehow been driven out of her home by her older brother and that her parents had allowed it to happen because they loved her less than they loved him.
The room she had been given in her aunt’s house was large and light, looking out over the garden to the backs of the houses in the adjacent street. Having been that of her cousin Rosie, it had a girlish look with blue and white striped wallpaper and a shelf of china ornaments; and Anna, though her taste was different, had done little to change the décor – substituting only a poster of a Bonnard exhibition which she had seen in Paris for a picture of Rupert Everett, an English actor she did not know.
Now, with time to kill before she left for her date, she started the kind of footling around with which she always wasted an hour or so in the evening – arranging the work she meant to do rather than doing it; skimming through an article to see if she wanted to read it, but, upon deciding that she did, putting it on one side, preferring to tidy her clothes which were either draped over her chair or hanging out of the open drawers and cupboards.
In doing this, she would come across some garment – a skirt or a waistcoat or a blouse – which she had forgotten about, and she would try it on to remind herself how she looked in it, turning first in profile and then to face the cheval mirror in the corner of the room, looking less at the clothes which were her excuse for this narcissistic study than at her own childish face – the tiny nose, large eyes and black hair; and at the still adolescent figure – narrow hips, thin legs and barely perceptible bosom.
She studied herself with alternating admiration and despair – at one moment thinking that she was really rather pretty in a waif-like way, and at the next concluding that no man could possibly want someone so skinny and small. She knew, of course, that strictly speaking the second statement was not true. She had been to bed with half-a-dozen boys – fellow students in America, young soldiers in Israel and, most recently, Andrew’s brother Henry, who was taking her to the opera that night.
This current affair had been complicated by Henry’s insistence that it should be kept secret from Andrew, and her own determination that it should also be hidden from her family. That was why, until that evening, she had always pretended to her aunt that she went out with Andrew rather than Henry; and why she had listened to Andrew talk about his brother as if she hardly knew him. She disliked deceiving someone who, she knew, would never deceive her, but, just as she knew that it would upset her aunt to know she had a Gentile lover, so she accepted from Henry that Andrew would suffer if he thought she had been seduced by his degenerate brother.
She also knew that Andrew would not understand how she could sleep with a man she did not love. He would assume, if she slept with him, that she must love him, when she knew she did not. She had never, since her adolescence, considered herself to be in love. Few of her earlier affairs had been one-night stands, but none had lasted for more than a couple of months. If Anna had let them, one or two of the young men she had slept with might have followed up the casual encounter with the kind of friendship that could have led to love; but invariably they had been dismissed – or had felt themselves to be dismissed – by the harsh things she had said to them later; for she was caught in the trap of desiring the kind of man she despised – someone physically large and mentally slow – as if the demands of natural selection obliged her to balance her
own quick wit and small stature in the genes of the next generation.
When Andrew had first introduced her to Henry, she had found him snobbish and affected. He was taller and better-looking than his younger brother and in almost every way created a contrary impression. While Andrew was naïve, unkempt and cheerful, Henry was cold, secretive and demanding. He dressed formally and fastidiously – he had appeared almost foppish to Anna – and always seemed on the brink of exasperation, as if expecting everyone and everything around him to fall short of the exacting standards which he set for himself.
He was aged around thirty-three but seemed older to Anna, partly because of the severity of his manner, partly because he was rich and so had all the appurtenances of the older generation, like a well furnished flat and a silver BMW with telephone and electric windows. He also wore suits and took her to restaurants where he never ordered the house wine but chose some rare claret with a musty flavour which doubled the already considerable bill.
Anna was not seduced by these luxuries – indeed, she found them unnecessary and absurd – but she had been pleased at first that a man of his kind should feel that she merited his attention. She had then become curious because he was English in the way she had expected Englishmen to be – not cheerful and casual like Andrew, but formal and reserved. Getting to know Henry better had seemed like going to see the Tower of London or a Shakespeare play at Stratford-upon-Avon.
The more she saw him, the more she felt drawn to him without quite knowing why. She could not say that she had become fond of him because he would not allow her to come close enough to feel affection. She could not say that she was attracted to him – not, certainly, with the kind of straightforward lust she had felt for some of her previous lovers. It was rather that she was fascinated, even challenged, by a man of a sort she had not come across before; and, while most of her earlier boyfriends had been wholly preoccupied with themselves, boring her with long, introspective monologues and demanding constant compliments to bolster their egos, Henry never spoke about himself or looked for reassurance. It was from Andrew that she knew about his unhappy childhood and his successful career. If Anna herself put any question to Henry of a personal kind, it either returned like a boomerang, or it was simply ignored, as if she was a Delilah seeking the secret of his strength.
Yet he was constantly asking about her past life, not with the solicitude of a psychoanalyst or a confessor but with the cold curiosity of a scientist or a collector. This detachment did not offend her. Instead, it stimulated a desire in her to seem interesting enough to form part of his collection, to help prove or disprove whatever hypothesis about human nature was running through his mind. She realized, when she had first set foot in his flat, that there was more to him than an up-to-date version of the classic bowler-hatted English gentleman. Many of his books, for example, were in French, and by writers she had heard of but never read. The paintings, too, were strange – some large and colourful, others figurative and weird, and all quite unlike the dreary works in her parents’ flat in Jerusalem, or the restrained abstracts in her uncle’s collection in Belsize Park.
These manifestations of his taste, taken with the impersonal elegance of the clothes he wore and the furnishings of his flat, formed an image in her mind of an intriguing man whom she would like to intrigue in her turn. Sex seemed an obvious way to establish that she had succeeded. She was feminist enough to feel that a casual affair could be an adventure for a woman as well as for a man; and emancipated enough from Jewish ethics to discount any qualms she might have about going to bed with a man she hardly knew.
If she had hoped, by sleeping with him, that she would get to know him better, she was quickly disappointed; for, when they did make love, he remained as detached as he had been before. He caressed her naked body as if he was repelled by what he desired and despised her for responding to his gestures of affection. Even as they made love, he seemed removed, watching what they were doing with distaste; but, far from offending Anna, this ambivalence had enhanced her own pleasure, for she too felt the same blend of excitement and shame.
That evening, since she was going to Covent Garden, she chose the clothes she was to wear with great care, changing back and forth two or three times, wanting to look elegant yet also to give Henry the impression that she had not bothered much at all. It was the same when she came to make up her eyes – adding a barely perceptible line of mascara to her already dark lashes and a small smudge of shadow. All the time, while she was doing this, she was brooding about Henry’s ‘three-month contracts’, but it was only when she was ready to leave that she went to her desk, looked at her diary and flicked back through the pages to find out if her time was up. She found the entry for their first dinner together at the beginning of February: she had written his name out in full. Then, on the pages which followed, there were increasingly abbreviated entries until it had become simply an H.
She knew the date she had first slept with him: she had made an appointment to see a doctor two days later to get a new prescription for the pill. It had been at the beginning of March. Now it was early June. Her three months had run out at the weekend.
Seven
She caught the tube at Belsize Park and emerged forty minutes later at Sloane Square. It was an area of London where she felt ill at ease. Hampstead had something cosmopolitan about it while Belgravia, for all the foreign embassies, felt alien and English. Eaton Square in particular, with its classical façades of white stucco, seemed as cold and aloof as the lover who lived there.
When she reached the entrance to the building whose top floor formed his flat, she rang the bell and waited for his voice to ask harshly who it was. When it did, she barked back, ‘Anna’, regretting, as she always did, that the evening should start by shouting her name into a microphone embedded in a wall.
The buzzer sounded. She pushed the door and went up the carpeted stairs to the top floor. Henry was waiting by the entrance to his flat. She glanced at his thin face to assess his mood, but he greeted her, as he always did, with a mask of courtesy – an empty smile, a brushing kiss on her cheek – before closing the door behind them and guiding her into his living-room, where the flames of a gas fire flickered soundlessly over asbestos logs.
She had no coat, and sat down at once on one of the large sofas while Henry crossed the room to pour her a drink. He was wearing, as he always did, a double-breasted, grey pinstriped suit which somehow suited his tall, slightly stooping figure.
‘Have you heard about Father Lambert?’ she asked.
He handed her a glass of white wine. ‘Yes. Andrew told me.’
‘Isn’t it sad?’
‘Particularly for Andrew.’ He returned to the tray of bottles and glasses to fill his own glass with whisky and water.
‘Did he tell you that it was suicide?’
‘Yes. Or murder.’ He sat down on an armchair which faced her.
‘And about the woman?’
‘Yes.’ He gave a sour smile.
She smiled too. ‘Poor Andrew.’
‘It had to happen, sooner or later.’
‘What?’
‘A crisis of this kind.’
‘Why?’
‘Because sooner or later, anyone in religious orders suffers a breakdown of some sort. With Lambert it came later, that’s all.’
‘How can you be so sure?’
‘Because a religious vocation is the symptom of a psychosis.’
‘Always?’
‘What else can it be?’
She shrugged. ‘Well, I sure don’t want to be a nun, but that doesn’t mean that anyone who does is crazy.’
He frowned. ‘By definition, isn’t it demented to lead a life in which you suppress all your natural desires?’
She thought of the bed next door where they so often ended the evening, and acknowledged to herself that it did seem odd. She was irritated, however, by the confidence with which Henry passed judgement on others and said: ‘Perhaps you just don’t have the
imagination to envisage a life that is different from your own.’
This appeared to irritate Henry. He swirled the ice in his glass of whisky. ‘I can envisage a different life only too well,’ he said with a sidelong glance at Anna. ‘I can also envisage a different life for my brother.’
‘Well, so can I, I guess,’ said Anna.
‘It’s so patently obvious to me that after being deserted at a vulnerable age by our weak father, and then bullied in adolescence by our emasculating mother, Andrew found a psychological haven in the Catholic Church with its strong but kindly God the Father and passive, patient and ever-loving mother of Mary.’
‘Sure.’
‘Add to that the personal influence of Father Lambert, who was determined to bring fresh blood into his decrepit order, and at the same time recruit a secretary without having to pay for one …’
‘That’s very unkind.’
‘I think he was unkind to bamboozle my brother. And now, having led him up the garden path, he confesses, if not in word, then in deed, that the whole thing was a grotesque fraud.’
She sighed. ‘I really think he seems OK – Andrew, that is.’
‘For the time being, maybe. He’s clinging to the idea, which your father seems to share, that Father Lambert did not kill himself but was murdered.’
‘I don’t know why Dad thinks that.’
‘Andrew feels frustrated because he can’t call on the police. He wants me to play the detective.’
‘And will you?’
‘I’ll do anything to help my brother.’
‘That’s the …’ She faltered. ‘It’s one of the nicest things about you,’ she said.
‘The only nice thing?’ he asked, finishing her first sentence. He stood up before she could answer and moved towards the door.
They drove to Covent Garden to see Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito. She had been to the opera with Henry twice before, and on neither occasion had she enjoyed it – not because she had disliked the music or the production, but because she had felt Henry was uneasy at being seen with her in public. In the four months since she had known him, she had never met any of his friends. She knew that they existed because the telephone often rang when she was in his flat, but it had soon become clear that he did not intend to introduce her into his circle.