Percy later sent fifty pounds to the rabbi ‘to be distributed, as he thought fit, among charities which would in some way benefit his co-religionists’. Percy had always given to good causes, believing that those organizations for assisting the poor and the lower classes should be amply supported by the more fortunate, who ought to give as much as they could so that it would not be necessary for the state to help – which Percy would see as the beginning of universal corruption and degradation.
Each year he took a notebook and a list from his desk and, without a secretary, stayed at home to perform the charitable duty of sending cheques to asylums, hospitals, medical colleges, missionary societies, fishermen’s funds, lifeboat institutions, and soldiers’ homes. There were receipts for money he had sent to an organization for ‘Promoting Christianity Among the Jews’ and another for ‘Assisting Jews to Return to the Promised Land’ and Clara wondered how much their mother was aware of this, knowing it was probable that Percy never told her.
He had a life-subscription of two votes to an infant asylum for orphans close to London, to which he sent extra money when an appeal was made, or when his conscience urged him – as it sometimes did on recovering from one of his nervous attacks. He visited the orphanage twice a year because, he said, it did his heart good to see children being treated well who were, after all, those beings on whom the future of the British Empire depended.
‘Father said that Emma was much like mother had been when young. She had the same reddish hair, as well as a fine figure that turned every man’s head. Even women stopped to look at her. Her wit could be scorching, and her humour also had a bite to beware of. Her eyes were not good for any distance, and she tried to do without glasses, though on the visit to John’s grave near Arras she wore them all the time, frameless half-lenses which, hardly visible until you were quite close, gave an attractive and mysterious glitter to her face.
‘At the restaurant in the evening we were a typical English family making a visit to a dear one’s grave, as many parties did in those years. We were also, Emma said, enjoying the good food. Father’s pepper-grey hair was brushed straight back, and he wore a dark suit, with a high collar and tie, and a watch at his waistcoat. He smiled faintly at Emma and me when we talked about the events of the day in such a way that the people round about thought we were more carefree than we ought to be.
‘Father’s illness had improved in the last few years, Emma observed, because what attacks he now had were called grief, and that was something in which he was not alone in those days during and after the Great War.’
Rachel wore a high-necked black velvet dress, and a locket around her neck which held her dead son’s photograph. Under it, seen only when she leaned, was a six-pointed golden Star of David. Mostly she sat straight, and it was invisible. Her hair, pulled back and tied, was more ashen than red. To the daughters’ amusement and occasional embarrassment Percy would reach across and hold Rachel’s hand tenderly for a few moments. She told him not to be silly, though Clara knew that without such gestures she would wither and die. She spoke very little since John’s death, and none of us, said Clara, not even father, knew what she was thinking. Her pride was her strength, but her belief in God gave her both pride and strength. Which came first was impossible to say. God was her rock, and she turned into the rock on which the family leaned, though at a cost of denying her basic element which was that of speech. She could not take such weight and yet allow her heart to speak. The tragedy had worn her almost to silence. Speech was painful because her heart could no longer support her gaiety of spirit, and so she became sparing of words, an uncharacteristic state, but one which allowed her to go on living as their mainstay. She thought that because she had broken her father’s heart by marrying out of the Faith John had been taken away from her, but Emma said in that case what had the millions of others been punished for?
There was nothing to prove that if she had not fallen in love with Percy and run away from home she would have suffered any the less. Life was tribulation, whoever you were, and whichever way you looked at it, but what she had endured from her husband, and again by losing her son, at last forced her to wonder why she had been so mindlessly in thrall as to have broken connection with her family. She regretted nothing, but speculated on what had driven her to pursue something which, set far beyond Percy’s love of her and hers of him, seemed to have vanished in the ashes of life.
The folly of a childish and burning will had, on first seeing her future husband, sent her on a course that was endless. She fell in love with the expression on his face, sensing a vision of the future which, while not clear in its details, drew her even more strongly, a vision of his illness, and perhaps beyond that an intimation of the death of their son. She had been blind to this disaster and suffering that waited in the future, as everyone was, but a hint of it was there, and she knew it, and drove herself even more blindly to the actuality which would never let her go. She had been in the grip of a will so profound and valid as to make her commit the terrible sin of abandoning her family, so that when her parents died she could not go their funeral.
Yet even at this age, after all that had happened in her life, she knew she was the same daughter, except that she lived as if afraid to tread down hard on the soil under her feet for fear she would go on falling for ever.
In order to soothe her pain she lit a candle in a small brass holder every Friday night at the dinner table, which glowed by her side until the meal was over. On striking the match she said a phrase in the clearest Hebrew, and Clara remarked in her diary that while this took place the others remained silent. Rachel said to her daughters: ‘This is for John, for you two, for all of us, and for all Jews. We always lit the candle at home.’
She sat at the table of the hotel-restaurant in Arras with a husband who never ceased to say that he adored her, and she smiled and returned the pressure of his fingers over her wrist knowing that each morning she could wake up and thank God that she at least had the blessing of two beautiful daughters. On such a thought she lifted her glass of wine to drink.
Percy lit a cigar, and ordered coffee, and looked at his ‘Blue Guide to Belgium and the Western Front’ to decide where they would go in the morning. The girls smoked cigarettes. ‘It’s bad for your health,’ Rachel told them every time. ‘You should be careful with your health’ – which caused them to recall the constant phrase to men friends: ‘For God’s sake, do be careful! If you aren’t, it’ll be bad for my health!’
But their mother wasn’t to know such details about their lives. Not that Clara had been in love with any of the men. Well, not much, at any rate, though it had been the thing to do with one or two who were special, before they went to France or some such place. The only man she’d really loved was John, and still did, and wept silently at night, knowing he would not be in the house when they woke up in the morning. Now that he was dead she loved Emma, who was eerily like her mother and didn’t object any more to being told so. Yet it often seemed to Clara that John hadn’t been her brother, nor was Emma her sister, otherwise how could she love them so passionately, and at times with such misery in her heart?
3
Tom emptied a whole box which contained items devoted to the motoring tour in northern France: boat tickets, hotel accounts, petrol bills, maps and plans, pamphlets from the Syndicats d’Initiative, photographs and postcards, and bank receipts on money exchanged, as well as the Blue Guide and a diary kept jointly by Clara, and Emma his mother. They travelled towards the Channel along part of the route cycled by John twelve years before, with the intention of staying at Dixmude, but the place was still in ruins so they went on to Ostend, putting up at the Grand Hotel to eat oysters.