He had given no proper and binding answer. To make it firm – so that he could not turn back for fear of damaging his pride to the extent that he would never have the spiritual strength to move more than five miles beyond where he lived for the rest of his life – they would have to talk about his departure before Judy and the children.
21
‘Israel!’ Judy exclaimed. ‘You must be stark raving bonkers!’
They talked on Saturday afternoon when it was raining too hard for any of them to go out. Pam thought Judy might be envious, and also afraid, because she seemed, after all, less adaptable to change than any of them. What she or anybody thought was unimportant. While holding Rachel to her chest so that she could look at the children playing Monopoly on the floor, Pam felt that once changes began out of a centre of consciousness, as they had with her on leaving George, there was no stopping further developments spreading in their wake. She was no longer safe or happy at being settled. She had opted for adventure, and even the final conversion, wanting the new life to go on, no matter how disturbed others would be by her wanderings. If they were in the same state would they consider her? She doubted it, and would not blame them if they did not.
Judy stood by the mantelpiece, a hand at the side of her face as if Tom’s information had struck and left a mark there. ‘There’s a war every five minutes,’ she said.
‘They have them everywhere these days,’ he answered, ‘or are likely to. You’re never far from the riot, or the terrorist psychopath with his so-called explosive device. There’s no use worrying about that sort of thing any more, or using it as an excuse not to act. If anything happens to me, all I have goes to Pam, but if we both end up dead before our time, which I consider unlikely, by the way, then whatever’s left goes to you. You’ll be taken care of, in any case. As I’ve told you before, there’s enough for everybody here.’
She knew he was Jewish, but even so, didn’t you only go to Israel if, say, some nut like Hitler came up from the sewers? ‘They don’t even have proper frontiers,’ she said.
‘They will have. Every country starts that way.’
‘You like to make things all neat and tidy,’ Judy said. ‘But that’s not what I mean. Your sort of tidiness makes me want to puke. You can’t move us around like pieces on a chess-board. I love you both, so I don’t want either of you to go.’
‘I’m not going,’ Pam began.
Judy put a hand to the other side of her face, as if that cheek was also in pain. ‘What?’
‘Well, not straight away.’
‘I can’t get a proper answer on that matter,’ Tom said. ‘Things aren’t as tidy as you think.’
They looked at each other helplessly, as if they would have rushed to be physically close had no children been by. Judy went into the kitchen. ‘I’ll leave you to sort yourselves out.’
He settled himself in an armchair, and lit a cigar.
‘I think you offended her,’ Pam said.
He puffed smoke towards the fireplace. ‘What? By talking about money? Possessions?’
She looked out of the window, her back to him, raising her voice to make sure it was heard in the kitchen. ‘Perhaps. But it’s you she doesn’t want to lose. She doesn’t care about anyone else. You can hardly leave yourself to her in your last will and testament.’
He put his cigar in the ashtray and stood. ‘Is that why you want us to go?’
‘I wish you’d sort yourself out,’ Hilary said to Sam. ‘All you’ve got to do is sell Piccadilly, and one of your railway stations, and then you’ll have some money left to go on playing.’
Sam groaned. ‘I know. But I don’t want to lose any of my complete sets.’
‘She told me about it last night,’ Pam said, after a silence. ‘What happened when I was in the hospital.’
He held her shoulders, feeling the warmth under her blouse, and looking down over inflated breasts at Rachel peacefully sleeping. ‘I’m sorry about that.’
She was surprised that it did not matter. And she told him so. ‘Somehow, it doesn’t, not with Judy.’
Nevertheless, he thought, it was best forgotten. ‘I’ll be unhappy to leave Rachel,’ he said softly, ‘and more than sad to leave you. I’ll also regret leaving Judy, and those two.’ He nodded towards the children on the floor. ‘But I have to go, whether or not I want to, or whether or not you now want me to. I’d have come to it of my own volition, otherwise I wouldn’t have agreed to your wish, suggestion or command, or whatever you like to call it. But it’s easier for me to go knowing that you won’t be left here alone, and that you and Rachel will come to me after a while.’
He was rational and cool, and she was afraid as she turned to him, and wondered why he insisted on tormenting her and everybody, till she remembered having pushed him towards the move. ‘What if I said don’t go? Forget what I said when I was in a stupid and destructive mood? Somebody told me at the hospital that her husband never took any notice of what she said till the kid she’d had was a year old.’
He was bewildered. There was, she knew, no greater suffering for a man of his sort. He was fearless, and probably cared little about pain, but chaos inside was intolerable. She weighed him up as he looked at her, and such total consideration was the only act of love she could muster at the moment. That she loved him was indisputable, but she wanted him to go, if for nothing more than to prove that he recognized her love, and loved her in return. It was the only test she could make. Having grown to a state when she could confidently test a man whatever the risks, she felt that she had achieved some sort of equality at last.
The children were looking at them, and listening with interest. But it was open-house for that sort of thing.
‘Yesterday,’ he said, ‘I collected my plane ticket to Athens, and my boat ticket to Haifa – both one-way. I prefer to go in by sea, to land from a ship. Even the remnant shall return. The sand of the sea shall be washed on the shore. That sort of thing.’
Before she could ask the date of his leaving, Sam called: ‘Can we come with you to Israel, Tom?’
‘Why,’ he turned with a laugh, ‘are you going to be Jewish, as well?’
Hilary pushed the heaps of false money aside and stood up. ‘I am. I’m Jewish, Tom. Daddy was Jewish, wasn’t he, mummy?’
‘No, he bloody well wasn’t.’ Judy came in with the tea.
‘And the strangers shall be joined with them,’ Tom said. ‘To it shall the Gentiles seek.’
Hilary wept with chagrin. ‘Oh why wasn’t he?’
‘He was no bloody good, that’s what he was.’
Tom grimaced with disapproval. ‘He was no more no-good than most, I suppose.’
‘You know nothing.’ Judy’s words were so fierce that all were fixed by them. ‘I loved him. No matter how much of a swine he was, and I knew he was bad, I loved him, even though I knew I ought not to, and felt ashamed and degraded that I couldn’t help myself. I went on loving him through more than I dare tell about, and it went on for years, and that’s what I can’t forgive myself for. And he didn’t love me, not a bit, though I was handy as a bit of furniture, and to scrounge money from. I was pregnant when we got married, but had a miscarriage just after the wedding because he got drunk one night and pushed me a bit too hard. That was at the beginning, but he calmed down, for a few years, till I had these two. Then one day he saw me kissing a woman who came to the house. He’d probably already had an affair with her, though I wouldn’t have known. But the penny must have dropped, because from then on he was in love with her. It was disgusting the way he crawled and grovelled. Either that, or he would go into such fits of violent hatred, far worse than before, that the danger finally got through to what bits of goodness were buried deep inside him, which even he only caught a glimpse of about once in ten years.’