Months later, his mother called, quite late at night, and said a better woman would have saved him. You didn’t love him right, she said. You didn’t love him like you should, you didn’t, Alice. It’s a shame, she said. Shame on you. Bitch. What? Bitch, she said. And they had wept at each other down the telephone line for a long time, then sniffed and said goodbye, and that was that, apart from cards on the boys’ birthdays with a five-pound note inside.
Three men in a lifetime. It hardly made her Messalina. Rupert Langley, who had been her first beau, her tennis partner and escort, the boy she lost her virginity to. Then Samuel Pinedo. Then Stephen. A few more fumbled with at dances before she was married, or who had taken her out in the years after the accident to dinners or the theatre and kissed her goodnight in their cars.
She still sometimes played the ‘if’ game, wondering how her life would have been with Samuel. If he had asked her. If she had said yes. If. She was thirteen when he was introduced to her as someone ‘Daddy knew in the war’. A man with black brilliantined hair, lounging against the window frame in the front room. Thin, pale, a rather prominent Adam’s apple. Not a really handsome man. But something in his gaze had disturbed her. She didn’t know what it was, what to call it, but when she thought about it afterwards, she decided that he was the first man to have looked at her as a woman rather than as a child, and that there was a generosity in it, a chivalry, which even after nearly fifty years she had not quite recovered from.
His people had been in the diamond business in Amsterdam. Jews from old Spain. Seraphic? When the Nazis came they sent his parents, uncles, cousins and two sisters to the camps in Poland. Samuel had hidden like the little Frank girl, though he was luckier, of course. Got out. Came to England in a fishing boat. Six months later he went back. Helped to organize escape routes for aircrew until they caught him. After the liberation Queen Wilhelmina gave him a medal that he kept loose in the pocket of his suit jacket with his lighter and cigarettes.
She was eighteen when they met again. Nineteen before they became lovers. He was at the embassy in London then, Hyde Park Gate, and came down at weekends on the train from Paddington, and she would go with her father to meet him, terrified in case he had got off at some quite different station with his coat over his arm and his little case, and smiled at some other girl. Her father called him ‘the best sort of Jew’. He must have guessed what was going on but he never said anything. People didn’t in those days.
Was Samuel still alive? If so he’d be almost eighty, which she found impossible to imagine. She’d seen his name in The Times once. Part of a UN delegation to somewhere, so he must have had some success. Become somebody.
Lord! They did it in the garden shed once, on the workbench. Torn stockings, bruised backside, the air stinking of petrol from the lawnmower. He had scars on his back. A dozen ridges of purple skin, and when she asked him about them he winked at her and said it was a girl in Amsterdam with long nails. But nails don’t make marks like that. She used to touch them, stroke them very lightly, as though his back were rucked velvet she could smooth with her fingertips. What had he done with his pain? Had it come out later? Did he take to drink too? Or had someone helped him when he needed it? Making love he called dancing. She’d known next to nothing about sex before Samuel, and after him hadn’t learned much that seemed worth knowing.
The year her father died he was posted back to Holland. He left her a ring – not a diamond ring, but a gold band that had belonged to his mother, and which had his mother’s name engraved in curly letters on the inside. Margot. It had been too small to wear and it wouldn’t have been right. It was a keepsake. A remnant. The little Jewess’s ring. The little Jewess they had turned into ashes.
How wonderful if she could believe she’d see him again ‘on the other side’; some celestial cocktail party where everyone was young and interesting and Nat King Cole was singing ‘When I Fall In Love’. But she didn’t believe it, didn’t believe in the other side at all. The last of her faith had ebbed away during the chemo. A night on her knees by the side of the bed vomiting into a bucket, and above her just miles of emptiness. No gentle Jesus. No saints or angels. Religion was a night-light for children – Stephen had been right about that. Eyewash. Osbourne was harmless. One of the old fashioned type. ‘Black cloth a little dusty, a little green with holy mildew.’ She could tease him, and he had always been nice to the boys. Rather fancied her once, when she was first a widow. Popping round for glasses of sherry, offering to do the lawn, carrying out the black bin-bags of Stephen’s things for the charity shop. Did he mean to try to catch her at the end? Run across the meadow with his box of tricks when he heard she was going? She would have to speak to him. No mumbo-jumbo, Dennis, dear, when I’m too weak to tell you to get lost. He could say what he liked when it was over. Whatever made it easier for the others.
But did nothing last? Was the ‘she’ who thought all this just a brain that would die when the last of the oxygen was used up? Surely there was something inside, some inward shadow, the part that loved Mozart or Samuel Pinedo. Didn’t that go on, somehow? Or was the afterlife just others remembering you, so that you died, truly died, when you were truly forgotten?
The children at school would remember her for a year or two. They had made a ‘Get Well’ card for her, with a picture of the school on the front, and each of them had written his or her name inside with great care, and some had put an X for a kiss. ‘DEAR MRS VALENTINE WE HOPE YOU GET WELL SOON.’ Row upon row of scrubbed faces gazing up at her at morning assembly. Mr Price thundering away at the upright. All good gifts. Morning has broken. The extraordinary thing was that Brando’s son had been one of them. She would have been a form mistress then but she thought she remembered him, a good-looking boy about Alec’s age. A doctor like his father now. Another doctor! In the end they were the only people you knew, though at least Brando was human. She could vouch for that. And what a relief when he took over from Playfair, that pompous little man who talked down to her because she was a woman. Thought himself so clever, but he knew nothing.
On the visits she made to Brando before feeling ill again, the check-ups, they used to talk more about the children, or about themselves, than about the cancer. His father had been an Italian POW in a camp somewhere in Somerset, married a local girl, then opened a little restaurant in Bristol that some nephew still owned. He said that in dreams sometimes he could smell his father’s home-made polenta pie, and she’d told him, laughing, that sometimes she dreamed of her mother’s chutneys, and of chutney-making day, when the kitchen was full of steam, a little sweet, a little savoury, that hung about the house for days.