‘You’ve lived out of a suitcase all your life,’ Pam said, ‘or even a kit bag for some of it, so I expect you’re a bit scared. Maybe I would be.’
He had never been afraid of anything. If she thought that, he told himself, she didn’t understand him. But why should she, when they had known each other such a short time? To inspect Clara’s boxes, and relate whatever he found to himself, would be a surrender to the forces of continuity and order, the taking of which path he could hardly be expected to find attractive after a life at sea.
Whoever you were, you sooner or later became part of deaths and departures over which you had no control. It was not fear, he said, but inconvenience, and the distaste at being controlled by the uncontrollable which he had formerly been in a position to put up some fight against. Facing the unpredictable sea, you had training, experience, luck, intuition and native-born sense to match its antics, and so rarely felt total helplessness.
‘I once knew a man,’ he said, ‘who at sixty years of age went to Australia for a two-month holiday. At the end of his stay, while he was still there, he wrote to an estate agent in England, and signed the necessary papers for them to sell the house he owned and auction all the furniture and inherited possessions. Anything not saleable was for the junk man. He never saw the house again, and was not unhappy, with his two-roomed shack near Sydney. He got work, though he wasn’t short of money. It would be sensible for me as well, to go somewhere pleasant to live, and forget all this.’
The idea chilled her. He had made the story up, she decided. ‘It’s none of my business what you do.’
He was startled by her brusqueness. They sat in the living-room. ‘I’ve never known anyone who had much more than what they stood in.’
‘You’d better grow up, then,’ she said. ‘You always had this flat to come to, didn’t you?’
‘I know, but it’s hardly the billet for a seafaring man!’
She was irritated. His argument seemed silly. ‘What is?’
‘If I knew, I wouldn’t be here.’ He was aware of what he wanted, but couldn’t say it. There was nothing to do except continue talking, until she divined what he needed her to say, said plainly to him what he could not say to her, and mean what she said, till all certainty was gone and he was then able to say it for both of them. It was a perilous course, for though she might know what he wanted, she would strongly resent the onus of choice he put on her. In the meantime she might get bored or annoyed, and walk out, never to bother with him again.
She said ironically: ‘And where would you be, then?’
‘I’m a realist. I suppose I would be where I am at this moment.’
If he doesn’t search through the stuff now, she thought, he’ll never do it. Without knowing why, she felt it imperative that he look at the papers, because something important must be among them. He was aware of it also, which was why he felt an almost irresistible urge to discard the boxes. So much clutter was intimidating. They reproached him for a wasted life, or so he might have thought.
Whatever the risk, she must persuade him to get on with the process which could only eradicate the icy emptiness that took him over when he forgot for a few minutes that she was in the room. She didn’t like such a mood in him. It was threatening, almost frightening. She sensed it as much for him as for herself. She was aware of the risk if he opened them, however, and swung to thinking that whether he looked at his papers or not was none of her business. Why was she getting into a thing like this? Was she treading carelessly into a continent of misery? But she had learned something in the last few months, summed up by the fact that it was better to say yes than no.
His hands were cold when she turned and held them. ‘You won’t have much peace of mind till you get going on that so-called rubbish. I’m sure I shan’t.’
Her palms and fingers folded over the top of his fists. He may not have wanted such friendliness, but as far as she was concerned there was no substitute. Little as the gesture might mean, she had no control over making it, and if her motion could be described as letting herself go, she had the strength of mind not to be ashamed or draw back, but held on in all innocence for both of them because there was something he had to do, and she was determined that he do it.
‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘They’ve got to be tackled’ – knowing that if he hadn’t brought her to the flat he would have slung the lot out with no thought of what was in them.
PART FOUR
The Women
1
Clara began with her mother, whose maiden name was Moss, and first name Rachel. She was born in 1860, and her father was a tea merchant who had settled in London from Hamburg thirty years before. By intelligence and toil he became well-to-do. A birth certificate in the first box was leaved between yellowing paper headed by a stark engraving of warehouse and offices. The engraving for the export house was of a clipper in full sail and, small as the letter-head was, a child had put tiny men on the mast tops with coloured pencils.
Rachel was the middle daughter of three, and the mother had died after the birth of the third child. ‘I am big, gawky, with scarlet flamy hair and with freckles like sparks, and I do not like myself,’ she had written in a school exercise book. There was a small painting taken at some time from its frame which, though as unclear as if seen through a window beaded with moisture, showed her hair to be plentiful and auburn, as firmly tied by a band as her spirit seemed to be held behind her unhappy eyes and shapely sensitive mouth. She had a high clear forehead, and the only freckles visible on the cracked portrait appeared to be on the wrist which rested on her knees.
A clutch of pages had been torn from her leather-bound diary. The spine was worn away, and the ink brown where it had been black: ‘The one I am to marry is an honourable man. He is good and pleasant, but I don’t love him. The rabbi who spoke to me about it is an honourable man. My father, whom I love, is an honourable man. They are all honourable. But they are all men. What can I do, being alone as I am? I shall ask questions at Passover, but they won’t hear what is in my voice. Miss Silver, who talked to me for so long about free will, denies now that she did, and says I ought to marry whomsoever my father wishes, and that I am lucky a husband has been found for me, and that I am to be taken care of, and that she wished she had a husband and children instead of having to teach for her miserable living etc. But I will not marry Benjamin Green, whether or not he is the rabbi’s nephew, because I saw him while walking from Schule with Miss Silver last Sabbath, and he saw me, and I know that he followed us down Edgware Road as far as the Park, as he knew I wished him to do. I hoped he would follow me forever, and that I would walk until Miss Silver could keep her pace no longer, when I was on my own and still walking, and then I would turn and he would be there, and with no one else but the two of us we could meet and talk, just as one day we shall be together always.’