He stood up and smoked a cigarette by the mantelshelf. She looked at him: fragile, vulnerable, uncertain. From the beginning she had known all too well what he must do, and so had he, but he had chosen to deceive himself so as to let her be the one to tell him. By doing so she was being more herself than she had ever been.
She had seen him looking at maps of Israel. For a year he had read continually books on Zionism and Jewish life, and studied intensely in his spare time, but the exact place of his yearning in modern terms had seemed too remote for her to divine the answer or him to make the connection. It was amazing how distant the obvious could be. But now she knew. If she hadn’t sensed his ultimate destination right from the beginning she would not have lived with him and had their child. She would not have set out with him on such a long and perhaps endless journey. As for her independence, didn’t she know that a passion for it carried to excess was a sure recipe for getting nowhere?
She would initiate the change, move him. She felt herself drawn towards Israel, because he saw it as a land whose light was as yet too far away. The preacher’s sermons told of how the Jews were at last able to go back to the Promised Land, and she felt that circumstances had carried her inexorably this far towards it. Events always moved you to what was most profoundly wanted. She recalled the preacher’s face, and his voice, and heard again what he had said, blushing at how she had gone week after week, unbeknown to George, to sit gawping like a young girl before a pop star.
He pressed her hand. ‘I don’t know. I really don’t know.’
But he did, and she knew that he did. He always had known. She had surprised him again. She surprised herself. She loved him because it was possible, and always would be possible, to surprise him. People went to Israel for holidays much as they did to Majorca or Italy, she said. The place isn’t so remote any more, nor so strange, she supposed, unless you were like me who happens to be madly in love with someone who has a birthright connection with it.
It’s part of my life to go there, she thought, to a country like any other, yet a place that nowhere else can resemble. Being Jewish was more significant to a person than being anything else. She hoped so. She knew so. She had seen the effect on him when he first found out about his mother. He still hadn’t got over the shock. She would help him, and there was only one way. He was more than half-way there. She had seen him put money into the collection boxes on the counter of the delicatessen. She knew where they belonged.
He sat down. ‘It’s something to think about.’
‘No,’ she said scornfully. ‘If you have to think about it, it’s impossible. One doesn’t think about a thing like that. The thinking has already been done, though you haven’t noticed, I dare say.’
She distrusted herself. No, she didn’t. All motives had a thousand strings attached. Ignore them. No, don’t ignore anything. To ignore is to fly in the face of God. Did she merely want to get out of the country because she couldn’t bear to bring Rachel up in this same old place? Would going anywhere else be better? She couldn’t bear to be seen pushing her about in a pram, a woman of her age with a child on the street, and old enough to be its grandmother! If she stayed she would really drop her out of the window, all love pulled away to create a vacuum wherein she didn’t know what she was doing. And that would be the end of them all. In any other country such an action would be unthinkable. The idea surfaced vividly to convince her, but seemed merely another motive that, unable to deny, she had to contend with and finish once and for all.
Nor could she bear to love two people at the same time. It was impossible for peace of mind, and tore her in two. Sleeping with Judy was like being back with her mother, a sensual restoration of all senses, which she ought to have outgrown long ago. Nothing but a sea-change would suffice. And yet again, why should she? She would always love women if she felt like doing so. She was tired of learning lessons when it was perfectly safe for certain parts of her to drift the way she wanted. All the same, you could not give in to such distractions if you wanted to guide your life in any positive way.
They were surface reasons perhaps, excuses and nothing more, yet the words had come spontaneously because whatever reason had put them there would never be defined. If it wasn’t already obvious, yet utterly buried at the same time, there wasn’t a reason and never would be. She didn’t know which it was, and didn’t care to. They would go to Israel, or she would return to living in a room of her own. She had said enough. He must do the rest himself.
‘Is that an ultimatum?’
It was.
He knew what he wanted, he answered. Nobody knew better, but he didn’t know whether what he wanted was what she really wanted, that was the trouble. Even though she had suggested accurately enough that he wanted to break off the present life – and he did, if only to end it – he had to be sure she wanted it as well. The idea that she was merely, if unintentionally, tormenting him could be countered for the moment by saying nothing. Be still, and know that I am yours, he wanted to tell her.
He said it.
She already knew.
It was irrelevant, he felt when he had said it.
So did she.
So much was.
How could it not be?
But to the extent that you had to say it, it wasn’t.
Nothing was.
Forget it.
Know that even love was something that had to be endured, a fact which, when realized, did not make him unhappy. Rather, it made him feel less numb than before he had said it.
He said it again to himself while walking through the park by the Pavilion on his way back from the public library on a fine April morning. She wanted him to go on his own, and then they would see, but if he did he thought he might lose not only her but Rachel as well. It was too much to ask.
But the chance had to be taken. He was never anywhere except in the middle of a storm, the never-ending turmoil of life. Momentous decisions had always to be considered and quite often taken, a state of mind not unfamiliar, nor even unwanted. Life at sea was like that, and the whole of life was being at sea, until you went under into the dark. There was no reason not to smile about it, as he did when catching a glimpse of himself in a shop mirror on his way through The Lanes. She wanted him to go to Israel by himself, and then he could tell her when she and Rachel were to follow, and though he couldn’t bear to leave his two-month-old daughter for as much as an hour, he would brace himself to do it.
In other words, he would leave his daughter with a feeling that recalled his mother’s action when she had taken a last look at him in his cradle before going out of his grandfather’s house never to come back. That event, and the one that felt too uncomfortable to contemplate, were close enough to produce a crushing overlap as he turned and walked with more speed along the seafront, a memory still too near for a proper decision to be made.
But having said it, it was as good as done. Speech was the point of no return. Discipline would take over. Otherwise what were words for? Blue sea worried the shingle with a roar before going out again. There was one last journey to travel, and nobody could say he was afraid to make it.
Sunlight was doled on to the water by a wind manipulating gaps in the clouds. Glistening acres came and went as he looked from the end of the pier. Smokestacks were alive, energy and purpose in their acute angles as when he had first been mesmerized by the expanse. They ran on diesel now and were plain blocks battling their way, but all alteration was progress, one way or the other. Sloth, which was sinful in the eyes of the righteous, meant in him a self-induced form of death that was far worse.