The Enemy of the Good (22 page)

‘Soon, my love,’ he said, ‘and then forever.’

Dazed by his words, she lifted her hands to his face, stroking his hair and his cheeks and his beard. She ran her tongue down his nose and on to his lips, prising them open until her whole self seemed to be sucked into the kiss. Time expanded and dissolved, making their few minutes grace seem both to last forever and to pass in the twinkling of an eye. A knock on the door brought them back to the outside world, but she felt only a brief pang since she knew that, though separate, they would never again be apart.

Her assurance was put to the test when, after posing for photographs, they were led off to preside at different receptions. They met again at dinner, sitting together at the top table while their guests were divided by a fern
mechitza
. Following the speeches, where she felt a twinge of regret at the Rabbi’s
assumption
of her father’s prerogative, a four-piece band of fiddle, cornet, drum and tambourine played traditional Lubavitch melodies to a contemporary beat. Peering through the foliage, she saw a group of men gyrating in frenzy,
clapping
their hands and stamping their feet while they whirled their partners around, weaving in and out of the wider circle. As Zvi moved to join them, she felt a moment of panic, which she sought to escape by linking arms with a quartet of women who were themselves spinning across the floor. Having danced with Carla and Rebekkah, she approached her mother, who eagerly accepted. ‘It’s like being back at Greenham Common,’ she said with a smile. As they wheeled round, pushing themselves to the brink of collapse while the onlookers cheered, she had the disturbing sensation of dancing less with her mother than with herself thirty years on.

No sooner had they resumed their seats than the Rabbi edged towards them. ‘Forgive me, Mrs Granville, but I thought you should know that the Bishop has passed out.’

‘What?’

‘He appears to have overindulged a little. No matter. Only to be
encouraged
at a wedding.’

‘Is he all right?’

‘Perfectly. He was grinning and gurgling, then, when he tried to stand up, he collapsed.’ Shoana was moved by the note of concern in his voice.

‘Let’s leave him to sleep it off, so long as you’re sure he’s no trouble.’

‘None whatsoever.’

‘After all he has the right to celebrate his darling daughter’s marriage.’ Then, taking Shoana in her arms, she confirmed the sentiment with a kiss.

Resentment and anxiety were not emotions that Marta had expected to feel at her daughter’s wedding. The prospect of Susannah’s marrying had grown so remote over the years that she was ready to stomach a great deal in the cause of celebration, but it was hard to endorse a ceremony that seemed more alien than the puberty rituals in a Hadza camp.

As she walked around the
chupah
with Etta and Chanan two painful steps behind the bride, the Rabbi and Rivka, she was determined to keep cheerful. It was bad enough that Clement’s obduracy had led him to refuse his
invitation
, but it was even worse that, as a non-Jew, Edwin should be denied any part in the proceedings. She glimpsed him among the men and flashed him an encouraging smile. Quite apart from its cruelty, such a ban made no sense. Susannah had explained that the
chupah
symbolised Abraham’s tent, open on all sides to welcome guests of every nation. How then could they justify
shutting
him out?

As the presiding rabbi recited the prayers in a thick Australian accent, she was seized by a spirit of irreverence, struggling to blot out the image of him poised on a surfboard, beard streaming in the breeze and paunch encased in rubber, negotiating the breakers on Bondi Beach. Her failure to engage with the service drove her to take the opposite tack, summoning her professional detachment as if she were back in the Serengeti, but, to her dismay, her
hitherto
steadfast belief in cultural relativity broke down. There was too much at stake, too much of the old Poland she thought she had escaped but which remained buried deep inside her. Her journey from the Warsaw Ghetto to Wells Cathedral had been torturous enough without Susannah’s making it in reverse.

‘All I want is for you to be happy, darling,’ she had said when her
daughter
announced her engagement. Recent encounters with the Lubavitch had forced her to revise her view. Susannah’s alliance with these singular people, so confident of their own creed and so defiant of other peoples’, was even more perturbing than her relationship with the unspeakable Chris.

‘You’re the one I have to thank, Ma,’ Susannah had replied. ‘If it weren’t for you, I could never have become a full member of the community. Now, if I wanted to, I could even marry a
kohain
. Not that I do, of course. But, as I said to Zvi, it’s good to know.’

Marta professed satisfaction, but Susannah’s words had touched a nerve. Suddenly she was back in the ghetto, with her parents, grandparents, sister and aunt, when their already cramped room was invaded by a stranger. Her mother claimed that she was an old friend with nowhere else to go, but her father, less protective of her tender sensibilities or more conscious that the Occupation had hardened them, explained that she had been raped. ‘By a German?’ she asked and her father nodded. It was not, however, the Nazi atrocity that had roused his anger and prompted him to share their meagre resources, but the response of the woman’s husband. He was a
kohain
and, under the Law, forbidden to marry a harlot, which, under the same Law, his wife had now become. So he threw her out. Her face, which remained as clear as any around the
chupah
even though her name had been erased from
everything
but a memorial wall, stood as a haunting indictment of regulatory
religion
. At the thought, tears formed in her eyes and Etta discreetly passed her a handkerchief. She was grateful for the cloak of maternal happiness which allowed her to keep the horror to herself.

The ceremony over, she followed the bridal party indoors. The Rabbi led the way to a small room where, after a day of fasting, Susannah and Zvi would be able to enjoy a light snack and, more importantly, some moments alone. Marta, appalled to learn that it was the first time they were permitted to touch, trusted that, as in the white weddings of her youth, they had come to some kind of compromise. Not that she herself had resorted to any such subterfuge; on her wedding night it had been the bridegroom who blushed rather than the bride. From the moment she arrived in England as a war-weary sixteen-year-old, she had been determined to taste every freedom her adopted country had to offer. Oxford, with its surplus of men, had passed in a haze of romance. Edwin, meanwhile, true to both his creed and code, had preferred to save himself for the right girl. She smiled at the memory, still vivid after more than half a century, of his rapturous conviction that he had found her.

With similar conviction she took his arm, leaving him looking both
comforted
and confused. The surge of love she felt for him flowed out to Susannah and she longed to relieve her of a weight of responsibility which could only be increased by the presence of two sets of parents outside the door. Trusting that they would not spend too long on the tea and cakes, she wished them a cheery ‘
Bon appétit
’ and hurried out of the room.

‘Are we going home now?’ Edwin asked, as they left the Rabbi to stand guard.

‘Of course not, darling. We’re about to begin the reception.’

‘But if Nanna and…’

‘Zvi,’ she said rapidly for fear of offending Etta and Chanan.

‘That’s right – have gone to bed.’

‘They’re just having a quick tea. They’ve eaten nothing all day. Would you like something?’

‘I’m sorry. I’m not much use, I know. I feel as if I have a removal van driving up and down in my head.’

‘Why a removal van?’ she asked, disturbed by the precision of the image.

‘I don’t know. That’s just how I feel.’

‘Maybe the Bishop would like to sit down?’ Rivka asked, pointing to a cluster of chrome blocks that looked more like a sculpture than seats. Taking up her offer, Marta was about to remark that he had a name as well as a title, only to recall her own references to ‘the Rabbi’. She struggled to check her irritation with a woman who had shown her nothing but kindness. Rivka’s adherence to her faith in the face of oppressors who, while less systematic than the Nazis, were equally murderous, had destroyed what little respect Susannah retained for her mother’s secularism.

‘I used to understand your rejection of God,’ she had said, ‘but now it seems too easy.’

She reflected on her daughter’s newfound beliefs with a growing sense of disquiet. Susannah had always been an obsessive child, keeping everything from the toys in her nursery to the towels in her bathroom in perfect order. No nanny could have organised her charges with greater efficiency than she had her dolls. For years she had longed for a life of fixed boundaries, a formal meal as against the rest of the family’s potluck suppers. She only wished that she could have found it some other way.

To keep from brooding, she made small talk with Rivka and Carla.

‘It’s good to see so many people.’

‘We’re a tight-knit community,’ Rivka replied.

‘Susannah tells me they’re going to throw a party for her friends in the autumn,’ Marta said, determined that the other side of her daughter’s life should be acknowledged.

‘I met the Bishop’s sister,’ Rivka said.

‘Oh yes?’ Marta asked, waiting for a qualifying comment while aware that, were she meeting Helena for the first time, she too would reserve judgement. ‘She’s here, along with her husband and children. Of course you understand why there’s no one from my own family…’ To her shame, she felt a need to assert her credentials.

‘Of course,’ Rivka said, stroking her hand. ‘But you know that in our
tradition
the deceased grandparents of the bride and groom are said to be guests at the wedding.’

‘Really?’ Marta asked, picturing the joint horror of her parents, who would have shrunk from what they saw as the primitivism of the proceedings, and her parents-in-law, who in their own way had lived in as closed a world as the Lubavitch, their country-house horizons as narrow as any in the shtetl.

She pondered how to extricate herself from Rivka’s grasp, while Carla described how Curtis had wanted to gatecrash the women’s reception on the grounds that, in former lives, he had been both a geisha and a nun. Marta laughed with added gusto to make up for Rivka’s silence. For all that she longed for Carla’s happiness, she struggled to warm to Curtis. But she needed to tread carefully. Her mistrust of Peter, however justified, had created a chill between herself and Carla that lingered until his recent defection. She was eager not to fall into a similar trap.

The Rabbi’s announcement that it was time to fetch Susannah and Zvi for the receptions enabled Marta finally to disentangle herself from Rivka. A veteran anti-racist, she preferred to reserve the term
apartheid
for its political context, but the all-female reception followed by the segregated dining room caused her to think again. As she studied the confident faces all around her, she saw women with so much sense of who they were and so little of who they could be. Inspired by the Hadza who placed equal weight on women’s
gathering
and men’s hunting, she had long opposed any form of separatism. Such divisions were doubly untenable in people who believed that the world was created by God.

Watching the women dance, she was bound to admit that they seemed to be contented. Young and old alike allowed their hair to stream and their faces to glow with a lack of inhibition more familiar from her health club than any previous wedding party. The one exception was Helena, as ever impeccably dressed and coiffed, who looked as though she were trapped with a group of hunt saboteurs. She greeted Marta with a guarded smile. Although the passage of time had reconciled her to her brother’s marriage to a Jewish refugee, curbing the need for coded references to the ‘ghastly childhood’ which made his choice akin to that of sponsoring a Nigerian orphan, she remained reserved, cloaking her distrust of Marta’s foreignness in an exaggerated deference to her intellect. Having long since ceased to take offence, Marta found her
sister-in-law
a source of constant amusement, not least when she contrasted Susannah’s wedding with those of Helena’s daughters, Alice in St Margaret’s Westminster and Sophie in York Minister, the one attended by half the Tory cabinet, the other by minor royalty, and neither with a pearl out of place.

‘This must take you back to your youth,’ Helena said, pulling up a chair beside her.

‘Quite the opposite,’ Marta replied. ‘My parents deplored what they saw as reactionary superstition. They were committed communists.’ She took a wicked pleasure in asserting the connection.

‘Well, we can’t choose our parents, can we?’

‘Not so far,’ Marta replied, dreading where the conversation was heading.

‘Any more than we can our children,’ Helena added with the smugness of one whose daughters could not have been more like her had they been cloned.

‘Edwin and I believed in letting the children find their own paths.’

‘Oh I know,’ Helena said with a grimace. ‘That’s why I always tried to make allowances.’

‘That was very generous of you,’ she replied. She knew how strongly Helena and Harry disapproved of her methods and how trying they had found their annual visits to Beckley.

‘Where’s Clement?’ Helena asked, as if reading her mind. ‘I know they’re fencing us off like livestock, but I couldn’t see him in the crowd. Is anything wrong?’

Try as she might, Marta could detect no hidden meaning to the question. She determined to bluff it out. ‘No, unfortunately, he wasn’t able to come.’

‘He’s not ill, is he?’ This time the meaning was clear.

‘No, he’s fine. He’s just broken his leg.’ She took a large gulp of champagne.

‘At his age?’

‘It’s his leg, Helena, not his hip.’ She trusted that the ancient antipathy between aunt and nephew would prevent the lie being exposed.

‘And his friend?’ Helena was the only woman she knew who could give the word such sinister emphasis.

‘He’s looking after him. I shall give them a detailed report tomorrow.’

‘I suppose he can watch the video.’ Marta braced herself for the barb, which came perfectly on cue. ‘Two photographers! I always thought Jews were frugal… Oh I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t worry, I understand. You’ve known me so long, you sometimes forget I am one.’ She savoured Helena’s unease. ‘To be honest, I have the same problem myself.’

‘The husband’s mother told me he was a travel agent.’

‘That’s right.’

‘So at least they can be sure of an exotic honeymoon.’

‘They’re not having one.’ Marta felt her stomach tighten. ‘It’s Zvi’s busiest time of year,’ she said feebly, the pattern of lies now established. For all her wish to escape Helena’s scrutiny, she found it painful to admit the truth even to herself. Given the strictness of their upbringing, the vast majority of Lubavitch brides were virgins. The blood on their wedding night was classed as menstrual so, as soon as it was spilt, the wife had to separate from her husband for at least twelve days. Far from its being a time of unbridled passion, many newlyweds slept apart. Such constraints did not apply to Susannah, whose attempt to reinvent herself stopped short of claiming virginity. She and Zvi would have been able to spend the entire honeymoon in bed had she not been so determined to do things by the book that she refused to contemplate ‘cheating’. Marta trusted that, in the heat of the moment, she would let her heart rule her head.

Her reflections were interrupted by Susannah herself, who walked up to the table and summoned her to dance. She hurried down, relishing the dual delights of escaping from Helena and taking her daughter’s hand.

As she relaxed into the rhythm, she recaptured some of the joy she had known at Mark and Carla’s wedding. Banishing her qualms, she called down such blessings on the marriage that against her better judgement she longed for some all-powerful father figure to respond.

Ten minutes on the dance floor brought a sharp reminder of her
elder-stateswoman
status. Susannah also needed a rest, and they returned to their seats to find Rivka adjusting her wig, which had been dislodged in the crush.