At last he let me go, and, without looking at me, walked to the other side of the tiny room which contained a small bed, a plain table and two chairs and a few shelves of books. I, for my part, closed the door behind me and went without invitation and sat down in the armchair nearest to me. He sat down on the bed and we surveyed each other from that distance across a faded rug spread on the tiled floor.
I was horrified, and yet not in the least surprised, to see tears on his face. I didn’t realise my own until I found I needed urgently to blow my nose. I fumbled in my pocket, but of course there was nothing there. He saw my need and got up, went to a cupboard by the door, and got a clean handkerchief out of it. He stood near me and held it out; I took it slowly and made use of it. Then I lay back in the chair. I felt too tired to move a muscle. My eyes closed. I forced them open again as I felt him still standing there. We both, simultaneously, gathered breath into our lungs with deep sighs.
‘All right,’ he said at last. It was half a statement and half a question, which I answered.
‘Yes. And you?’
‘Yes. But remember, I had no preparation.’
‘I’m sorry about that. I don’t understand myself why I didn’t warn you. I knew I should have done.’
‘Of course. Perhaps you wanted me at a disadvantage?’
I sighed again. ‘Perhaps.’
‘Did you come alone?’
‘No. John’s here with me.’
‘John . . .?’ He threw up his eyes and his arms in a gesture of hopeless astonishment and resignation. He didn’t ask where John was at that moment. He knew him so well that his delicacy in leaving us alone was something he took for granted.
‘You look terribly tired,’ he said, and now there was a hint in his voice of the old Toby, the old, tender, protective relationship, which would have unmanned me completely if I had not already been beyond further unmanning. I looked at him again, and now I did see the changes: grey in the hair, lines of anxiety and sadness around the eyes, the mouth grimmer, the jaw more set. Seven years, for him too—not emotionally wasted like mine, but misspent, abused, struggled through, spoilt. I found my head shaking as I looked at him, and he said, ‘I know what you’re thinking.’
‘Do you? I don’t know what you’re thinking.’
‘Then I’ll tell you. I might as well . . . No. Better wait a little. Shouldn’t say anything committing in my present state of mind.’ He looked away from me and around the room, and moved about nervously, trying to calm himself. ‘On the other hand,’ he muttered as if to himself, ‘what else to say? Where else to begin except bang in the middle?’
He sat down on the bed again and lit a cigarette. ‘Do you smoke these days?’
‘No.’
‘Couldn’t you have managed to change just a little, to keep me in countenance?’
‘I’ve changed beyond recognition.’
‘You haven’t changed one iota. Even your hairstyle is the same.’
‘I have only one possibility there, because of my ears.’
‘Do you remember when I cut your hair and you looked like a cross between a turnip and a feather duster?’
‘You said I looked like a little Dutch boy. You never mentioned turnips.’
‘I’d done the deed. Why should I malign my own work?’
We stared into each other’s eyes. I felt laughter some distance away, but there was so much heaviness in me and in the air that I couldn’t reach for it.
‘We’ve got seven years’ catching up to do,’ I said. ‘Are we really going to spend all our time reminiscing about the L-shaped room?’
‘I’ve no intention of trying to catch up. And don’t start telling me what you’ve been doing. If I tried to tell you what these years have really been like, I mean swept clean of metaphors, I’d bore you to tears. Actually they were years of trial and error. And error, and error . . . I can hardly remember one right decision, one praiseworthy action . . . You do the wrong thing for the wrong reason and no right can possibly come out of it. Waste, misery and destruction.’
‘But you created, too.’
‘You mean my novels?’
‘And your children.’
He lay down on the bed, smoking towards the low plaster ceiling of the little room. Every move he made seemed like a picture hung back into a long-empty space in a familiar room. The nails were still there in the wall, and the wall was marked where the pictures had hung, and now they were slowly fitting back into their accustomed places. Just so had he lain on his bed, no narrower or more shabbily-covered than this one, on that Christmas morning when things had begun to go wrong, and his words came back to me. ‘I’ve nothing to give you . . .’ How true, and how totally false, they had proved in the event.
‘Well,’ he said slowly. ‘Children are the great exception-makers. Children ratify everything. They underline everything. What’s wrong, they make worse; what little is good, they enhance and multiply until one can easily be deceived into feeling everything was justified . . . In the very act of wishing with my whole mind that I had never married my poor little Whistler, it comes to me that, with that thought, I am un-wishing Rachel and Carrie, and the wish instantly loses its dynamic and collapses . . . And yet, to have added two to the legion of children of unhappy marriages and broken homes . . . that is really the ultimate guilt.’
‘I’d like to see Rachel.’
He turned his head and stared at me.
‘Would you, darling? Then you shall. She’s the proudest thing I am of.’
‘Toby, isn’t she in danger here? Aren’t you both in danger?’
‘I see Billie’s been at you.’
‘Not recently. I didn’t let her know I was coming.’
‘Why was that?’
‘Well, in the first place it was all decided in a great rush. But the real reason, I suppose, was that I was afraid she’d impose some monumental responsibility on me.’
‘Probably. It’s only natural for her to grasp at straws. She must be intolerably anxious.’
‘If you understand that, then why don’t you send Rachel home?’
After a long time he answered, ‘Because I’m a bloody-minded Jew.’
‘Does that give you the right to risk her life?’
‘Jane—’ He stopped, frowned, and went on slowly. ‘Look, you’ve only just come. I feel instinctively there’s very little chance for us, but I’m not about to chuck away the tiny chance there is by launching into a lengthy, half-jelled credo which you won’t understand and which might frighten you off. If by some miracle that tiny chance developed into something, we’d have to talk about my Jewishness. It’s certainly something fundamental to me now which anyone who—was rash enough to care about me would have to come to terms with. But this is not the moment. My God!’ he said suddenly. He swung his legs off the bed and stood up, stubbing out his cigarette in a big, raw-clay ashtray. ‘We’ve forgotten old John!’
He ran to the door and threw it open.
‘John! Johnny!’ he called into the darkness.
John materialised in the doorway, the tall straight lines of him diagonally crossed by his guitar. His barrel-chest was heaving and his face seemed alight with sudden untrammelled happiness.
‘You no-good devil Toby, I thought you never get around to call me!’
He grabbed Toby and embraced him, rocking him in his great arms and rubbing his hands lovingly all over his hair and face.
Toby hugged him in return.
‘Come in, Johnny, you’re right, we’re monsters! Jane didn’t tell me you were here until this moment.’
I winced at the lie, but let it pass of course. I felt ashamed that we had left him out there so long, but I knew John would rather it had been my fault than Toby’s.
John came in and pulled me up and the three of us embraced. We stood like that in a triangle and each had an arm round the other two and we were, for a moment, like one animal with three heads.
‘You both! You two people—’ said John
exultantly. ‘I don’t care about nothin’ else now.’ He put his head down, first laying his cheek on Toby’s head and then on mine, hugging us fiercely until we both gasped.
Chapter 3
AFTER that, things eased a little. The strain between Toby and me softened and buckled in the robust heat generated by John’s uncomplicated love for us both, which fanned out on the room like the breath of a blast-furnace.
John sat on the floor between us, his feet crossed and clasped in his hands, rocking back and forth, laughing and shaking his head with delight. We exchanged a few words about nothing, but before any serious discussion could start, John, rocking and heaving as if he might soon explode with the pressure of his feelings, opened his guitar-case and began to pour it all into a sort of orgasm of music. The little room was filled with throbbing from wall to wall; again I had a drowning sensation. I caught Toby’s eye over John’s thrown-back head, and we exchanged a look which reverberated right through me to my loins. John and his music were generating such an atmosphere of love that the years were struck away. I saw Toby’s arms begin to move as if he would cross the room and take me in them. But his face then twitched into a little grimace of realisation and his hands corrected themselves, moving unsteadily to take another cigarette.
Someone knocked on the door. John stopped playing abruptly and put his head down between his knees, like someone who has jumped up from sleep too suddenly.
Toby opened the door to Hava.
‘Is this a party?’ she asked, her plain face modifying towards prettiness as she smiled. ‘I’ve found a room for your friends. Can I take them there now?’
‘I’ll take them,’ said Toby. ‘Which is it?’
‘Abba Yacov’s old room. I’ve swept it out and put some sheets and blankets on the beds. You won’t mind,’ she added to me, ‘that it’s not very grand.’
We all thanked her. ‘For nothing,’ she said, smiled at us all again, and went out. She left something in the atmosphere behind her which made me frown. She had not looked at Toby especially, nor at me, nor had she said a word which would have led me to suppose she felt anything for him and yet—I felt it. I looked at Toby again, trying to see him through the eyes of another woman. Yes, it was unmistakable, the attractiveness . . . I remembered Billie, Melissa’s mother, trampling dents in her office carpet as she paced it, half-hoping I would tell her that her instincts were right and Toby was the wrong husband for her daughter, yet forced by her woman’s honesty to admit: ‘He is attractive, little and thin and all as he is, even I can see that . . .’
‘Come on,’ Toby said to us.
It was good to get out in the darkness. The air felt radically different, and as soon as we were outside Toby stopped dead and moved his head this way and that. ‘The sharav’s dropped!’ he exclaimed, with the intonation of joyful relief one might use at the cessation of a bombardment. ‘Thank God! Six bloody days of it we’ve had, I began to think it’d never stop.’
‘The taxi-driver said if it went on till tomorrow, he’d murder his wife.’
‘That’s a local joke. On the seventh day of a sharav, you’re not considered responsible for your actions.’
‘Is that the law?’
‘I’m not sure . . . It ought to be.’
We walked along the path, John in the middle, still strumming, Toby carrying the luggage.
‘It’s awfully pleasant here,’ I remarked. The absence of that punishing wind was so marvellous I might have turned a kind eye on almost any surroundings, but in fact it was pleasant—the heavy grey cloud-cover had begun to show rents crammed with stars, and the little balconies outside the houses were filling up with people, come out of their inner rooms to sit in the new freshness with glasses of tea and their newspapers and radios. Several of them saluted Toby as he passed, and glanced curiously at us.
‘Yes,’ Toby said. ‘It is. You have to live here quite a while to find out just how many advantages it has.’
‘You happy here, then, Toby?’ John asked.
After a moment, Toby answered ‘Yes’, but I sensed the qualification in it and so did John.
We came to a building which was much larger and differently shaped from the others. Toby stopped.
‘This is where my daughter sleeps,’ he said tentatively.
‘May we see her?’
He didn’t answer, but led us up the steps, across a large open porch and into a big room arranged like a classroom. Several doors led off it, and Toby opened one of them. There was only one light on, but when the door was opened it shone onto one of the three beds in the little room. Toby motioned me to go past him and pointed to this bed.
I stood still and looked down at Toby’s daughter. She lay in disorder, her dark curly hair pushed back from her face, short-legged, sleeveless pyjamas crumpled, a single sheet twisted round her feet. One thin brown arm hung over the edge of the little bed; one scabby knee was drawn up almost to her chin.
‘She has incredible eyes,’ whispered Toby. ‘Almost purple. Look at her little nose—poor Carrie inherited mine . . . and her hands . . . She’s got the loveliest hands I’ve ever seen on a child.’
I lifted the limp hand carefully. The long, damp fingers trailed across my own palm like tentacles. They were indeed lovely, with filbert nails and wrists of extraordinary fragility. Yet the skin was rough and brown and the backs were scratched. A tom-boy’s hand . . . I held it a moment longer, letting myself sense how easily those tentacle-fingers could get a grip on me . . . Toby’s child who should have been mine.
‘Isn’t she beautiful?’ said Toby, gazing at her.
‘She is,’ I said. ‘She really is.’
‘Tomorrow you’ll meet her.’
He bent to kiss her. Just then from another bed came a whimper. Toby turned quickly, bent over the child, murmured a few words to it, and pulled the sheet up. ‘Better cover them all, now the wind’s dropped,’ he said. He then proceeded to straighten all the sheets, and meticulously tuck them in—not just in Rachel’s room, but in all the rooms, one by one.
‘How many children sleep here?’
‘Fifteen.’
‘Is there no-one else to cover them up?’
‘Oh yes, someone will come and do it, but I’m here, so I might as well.’
‘All my sons,’ I murmured.
He glanced at me. ‘In a way.’
We went out again into the cool night and Toby took us to our room, which was like his, only bare and drab for lack of regular occupancy. Two beds, neatly made up, and a table between them with some fruit on it, a jug of orange squash and two glasses.
‘How nice of her,’ I remarked.
‘She’s always like that,’ said Toby. ‘Thoughtful.’
Or is it just because we’re your guests?
‘Are you hungrier than this?’ Toby asked.
‘I’m not,’ I said.
‘I am,’ said John.
We laughed. It was lovely to laugh again. Toby looked at me, a marvelling look which said, ‘We can actually laugh!’ And I nodded to him, forgetting he hadn’t really spoken.
‘I’ll take you along to the night-watchman’s kitchen and find you something. Will you be all right here, darling?’
‘Of course.’
They went off together and I was left alone. And very glad to be so. My weariness returned full-force the moment they were out of the room. I looked at my watch, forgetting again that it had stopped, and my eyes fastened themselves to its small, delicate face; the hands pointed to ten minutes past two; it must have stopped just after we arrived at Hydra two days ago. And why has it stopped, so conveniently symbolising this hiatus in my life? Presumably because, for the first time since Andy gave it to me, I neglected to take it off the night before our departure. The night I spent with Andy . . . Lying, as I had, with my head on his shoulder, how could I have dribbled on it? This ludicrous memory suddenly brought Andy back to me, and as he came back into focus I was terrified to realise how completely he had faded, become un-s
olid and unreal, since I had left him. Twice in three days I had felt some measure of desire—in Toby’s case much stronger than I dared admit—for other men. The thought of it appalled me. I sat down abruptly on the hard little bed and tried to force my tired brain to get to grips with it. But I was so exhausted that only fantastic scraps and images, mainly sensual and therefore frightening, floated about behind my eyes. Where was my Puritanism now, in my hour of need? Where my good, defensive wall of middle-class upbringing, which I had so often cursed? My body seemed suddenly to have turned traitor, reaching out covetously towards sensuality and forbidden delights in every direction. I’d imprisoned it in needful chastity for too long and now, the prolonged abstinence broken, it was running wild . . . From somewhere far, far back in the past, from that rep in Yorkshire where I had first met Terry, words from a play I had been in came back to me, and I flung myself down on the bed, burying snorts of half-hysterical laughter in the pillow: ‘’E seems to’ve woke up somefing inside me that keeps on gnorrin’ . . .’
It was all too much. My mind turned itself off, a relieving darkness flooded over me, and I fell asleep, quite suddenly, fully-dressed, with the light on.
For a brief moment I was dragged back some time later. Toby was crouched by the bed, holding my hand.
‘John’s sleeping in my room,’ he said. His face was very close to mine. He laid it sideways on the pillow and our noses bumped as he kissed me softly.
‘I can’t,’ I muttered beseechingly. I felt drugged. Anything could happen; I knew it. He had only to re-enact the first night we had ever spent together—gently take away my clothes and lay himself at my side, and I would be entirely helpless to resist him.