The script varied, as if the ink were from another bottle, or because of an indifferent nib and a nervous style of writing: ‘I spoke to him. We were shopping and I saw him on Oxford Street. He saw me, and stayed in one place, and I deliberately avoided Miss Silver. I took his hand and we walked up a court. His name is Percy Phillips, and to me it doesn’t matter that he is not one of us. God is not blind when He looks on people, and must see that we are all the same.
‘“Why me?” he said.
‘“Because I have chosen you,” I told him.
‘He said he had loved me since he first saw me but couldn’t understand why I should love him. I said that I did, and that he was mine, and wasn’t that enough? Far more than any elegant sufficiency, he said with a smile. We were together for half an hour. Poor people were begging while we were talking, but they were shadows, because I was happy. “I will pass here next week,” I said, “and we can meet.” He nodded, and told me that he worked in his father’s office in the City, from which the family property was managed, and that with so much work he might not be able to come. I said he must, and he agreed that he would. “You must also see me on Saturday evening,” I said, “whether we speak or not.” He said that, providing the family didn’t go to their house on the Kent coast, which they did on occasional weekends, he would do so. I maintained that it would be a better plan if, when we next saw each other, we walked away together. I would never go back to my home. My life there had finished, so why not let our shared existence begin? I could not remain where it was abhorrent to me, nor stay away from where it would be heaven to be.’
A different handwriting, on smaller paper, seemed to be part of a letter. ‘… wrong, because my son tells me he wants to marry your daughter. I realize, as I am sure you also do, that because she is a Jewess, and as we are Christians, this is quite out of the question.
‘There is nothing further to be said about it. I would not want to be an obstacle to anyone’s happiness under normal circumstances, but nothing in this case promises the possibility of any progress towards bringing them together. It would be understandable to me that you do not want your daughter to become a Christian, and therefore you must see that it is quite unthinkable to me that my son should enter your Faith, even if that were possible.
‘This situation must be explained to them, and I shall certainly do my part in the matter, so that it shall not be allowed to get out of our control. You must see, my dear sir, that there is a danger of this, though I emphasize however, and I am sure you will agree, that the status of our families is such that were it not for the matter of Religion there would be no obstacle against the young people being joined in Holy Matrimony. How it began is beyond …’
‘She did not,’ Clara commented in her journal, ‘fail to notice the gist of James Phillips’ letter. All she had to do was become a Christian. There was no other way. Any self-respecting Jew – and all Jews are self-respecting, perhaps because they are more than usually God-fearing, so I understand – would be dismayed at her action. There was a lot of talk at that time of converting the Hebrews to Christianity, and many societies were formed to make the attempt. I’ve often wondered why, but I suppose there must have been some feeling among the more sincerely religious English that the only real Christians could be Jews, and that if numbers of Jews became Christians then the Christian religion might begin to appear more Christian than it seemed to be at the time. So the Phillipses would have been happy enough to make things easy for Rachel to become one of them. Their son Percy was an only child, and loving him as they did, and fearing for him as I understand one does for an only son, they did all they could to make him happy.
‘But father was never happy. No one could have made him so, though mother gave him more happiness than most. The very fact that he must use all his faculties, and fight every inch of the way to get to know her, kept him spiritually awake right up to the time of her death. With someone of his own sort, whoever that might have been, but whom he might more easily have understood both by heredity and upbringing, he would have quickly become dull and slothful. By continually making the effort to understand her – and at the end he was close enough – he stayed alive. Married to anyone else, his first attempt at suicide would have been his last. I’m convinced of it.
‘Rachel was only a lukewarm Christian, and so was he, come to that, though they believed in the same God. No form of worship would have been able to cure his melancholia. He would sit for days in his study as if fixed to the huge mahogany desk, moving only to light a cigarette, or to turn the page of a book or newspaper whose print his eyes couldn’t fix on sufficiently to read a single word.
‘At five or six years of age I remember trying to look through the keyhole, or pushing the door further and further open, and waiting for him to waken because mother had said that he wasn’t like other people because he could sleep while sitting at his desk. I stood there with Emma one day, who was a year younger, but after a few minutes she began to shake at the sight of our unmoving father, and wept in terror. “He’s dead, Clara! Look! He’s dead! Why doesn’t he go to heaven?”’
He moved neither head nor hands, though Clara knew he must have heard, as she pulled Emma away. He was awake, but paralysed. When he wasn’t, he went to his office, sometimes every day for weeks. He would walk in the garden and cut roses. There were occasions when nobody knew where he had gone. He would come home dirty and tired, carrying a picture, or flowers, or presents for the children. Then they would see neither their mother nor their father for days, going quietly to bed at night after spending their evenings in the kitchen with the cook. Clara told Emma that she would never marry. Emma said she wouldn’t, either. ‘Nor shall I,’ John said. ‘I’m going to be an engineer, and engineers go to foreign places, so they can’t be married.’
‘But they get eaten by crocodiles,’ Emma reminded him.
‘Not me,’ John said. ‘I shall have a gun, never fear!’
Sometimes their father would go to hospital for a few weeks, and Rachel told them that because he went to sleep at his desk they had to take him away in order to wake him up. People went to hospital either to die or get better, and he went there to get better. An account book gave his income for 1895 as eight thousand pounds, and Clara had kept bills and receipts to prove that he had always gone to the best places.
A photograph showed him at Broadstairs after coming out of the convalescent home. On his own at the time, he had arranged for a local photographer to take the picture in the open air. His hands rested on a silver-headed stick, and he was looking towards the water. Forty years old, he was wearing a derby hat and an overcoat, and rimless spectacles. His thin lips curved down with settled apprehension, and his eyes seemed to be looking at the vision of an eternally receding mountain range whose heights he knew he would not be able to scale. Nor would his thoughts catch up with those fragments of his mind that always eluded him. His faculties at times were clear and active, but there was part of himself that he could never find, and the effort to do so occasionally became too much. Clara thought it was this vacancy in his powers of perception that Rachel had sensed at their first chance passing in the street. Something was missing that yet belonged to him, and she thought that by searching, and firmly tying down whatever it was, she could thereby give it back to him whole, an action that would produce a lifelong stability of soul between them.
Perhaps in more lucid moments he had seen that something similar needed to be done for her. However it was, they sought each other’s soul all their lives, and didn’t give up even at the darkest hours. Because they did not entirely find in each other that which they knew to exist, though at times they were closer to it than anyone incapable of making the effort, they never stopped being in love. ‘Your mother,’ Percy said to Clara after he had become a widower, ‘was from a devoted race,’ implying that she had given everything to him, as he at his best moments had tried to give all that was good in himself to her.