The Enemy of the Good (23 page)

‘Forgive me, Mrs Granville, but I thought you should know that the Bishop has passed out.’

‘What?’ Marta turned to see the Rabbi, the one man licensed to enter their preserve.

‘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.’ She discerned a hint of amusement at Anglican intemperance.

‘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.’

Making light of this further evidence of Edwin’s frailty, she gave Susannah a kiss and sat for an hour, sipping champagne and chatting to Helena and Alice, whose support for Susannah’s new life sprang from her own flirtation with the Alpha course at Holy Trinity Brompton, a source of considerable distress to her mother who looked to the Church of England to contain emotion not to ferment it. Slipping out to the loo, she was accosted by a plump woman who began by telling her to ‘call me Dolly Levi,’ which she did, only to find that it wasn’t her name but a hint at her role as matchmaker. ‘If it weren’t for me, they’d never have met,’ she declared. It seemed only polite to thank her, at which point the woman who identified herself as Rachel began to cry.

Seeing it as a sign, she took leave of her fellow guests and collected Helena who, with characteristic thrift, had asked if she and Harry might share the taxi. She sought out Susannah, explaining that it was time to take her father back to the hotel.

‘I hope you’ll be very happy, my darling.’

‘I already am, Ma. You don’t need to hope. Not only do I get to spend the rest of my life with the man I love, but all my sins are forgiven.’

‘Just because you’ve married?’ she asked incredulously.

‘Yes, isn’t it wonderful? The Rabbis say that today God wipes both our slates clean, so we can start again from scratch.’

Marta baulked at the words. Her own secularism, a term she preferred to the negative
atheism,
had been learnt at her father’s knee. Nothing in her life, not even marriage to Edwin, had displaced it. On the contrary, she was convinced that it was her distance from her husband’s beliefs which had spared her the disillusion common to clergy wives. The irony was that, whereas Edwin had moved towards her way of thinking, their three children had renounced it. Yet, for all the virtues of Mark’s meditative spirituality and Clement’s
prayerful
painting, she could find none in Susannah’s rigid rules.

The elation of the dance had vanished and she was overcome by gloom. She longed to leave before she infected the rest of the company. Lacking the Rabbi’s clerical immunity, she sent word to Edwin via a messenger system as tortuous as the one in his club. She arranged to meet him in the lobby and, ten minutes later, he was led out by two waiters to face the full force of Helena’s wrath. It was less his weakness that offended her than its public display. The vehemence with which he rebutted the charge convinced Marta of both his sobriety and his good faith.

‘I’m not drunk. And I wasn’t asleep. I had the strangest sensation in my head. I knew what was happening but I couldn’t respond to it. Like being under the knife without enough anaesthetic.’

‘Eddy, really!’ Helena said with a shudder, but his subsequent whimpering silenced even her.

‘Oh darling, I hope that it wasn’t that painful,’ Marta said.

‘Not painful, no, but frightening. It was so frightening and so odd.’

His exhaustion was evident as he sat with his eyes closed and his head on her shoulder throughout the drive, before slumping in a chair the moment they reached their room. His lack of coordination made the effort of helping him first into his pyjamas and then into bed so arduous that she fell asleep as soon as she lay down. Waking the next morning to hear of his disturbed night, she ascribed his headache to insomnia. Even so, she was loath to take any risks and insisted on calling the hotel doctor who, after a brief examination, agreed with Edwin that he was suffering from a mixture of fatigue and tension aggravated by the heat, and advised that the best remedy would be to spend the day in bed.

With the doctor’s backing, Edwin urged her to stick to their plan of
visiting
Clement.

‘I did say I’d give him a post-mortem on the wedding,’ she said, instantly regretting the phrase. ‘But, if you’re feeling the same this afternoon, we’ll head straight home.’

‘Impossible! There’s the Rabbi’s party. You know Nanna. She’ll be mortally wounded if we don’t go.’

‘You’re not going anywhere if you’re not up to it.’

‘I just need sleep. I’m so tired I can’t see straight. There’s a six-foot crevice running through the centre of the room.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Talking only makes it worse. Believe me, a few hours rest and I’ll be right as rain.’

Taking him at his word, she made her way to Regent’s Park. Her heart sank when Clement opened the door, wearing a thick sweater despite the heat, his pallor accentuated by haystack hair and a wispy beard that only a
folk-singer
would think fashionable. He winced at the light and kissed her listlessly before hurrying back into the muggy drawing room, its star-stencilled walls a testament to more spirited days. Making no attempt to play host, he sprawled in a chair and told her to dump her bags anywhere, indifferent even to the two cakes Mrs Shepherd had baked for him. She perched on the arm of his chair, stroking his cheek, of which he was surprisingly tolerant, while resisting the urge to comb his hair.

‘How are you, darling?’ she asked tentatively.

‘I’m fine. Hunky-dory. I wake up every morning with a head full of soggy tissue-paper, and my legs feel as though they’re wrapped in rubber bands, but it’s bearable.’

‘Have you spoken to your specialist?’

‘I said it’s bearable. But I’m bored with me. I want to hear about the wedding. Every grizzly detail. Promise to leave nothing out.’

Mindful that his sympathy for Chassidic ritual stopped at Chagall, she passed over the more contentious aspects of the ceremony in favour of the music, which felt as partial as commending the canapés at one of his shows. She was on safer ground poking fun at Helena, playing up her pomposity and endorsing his description of her as ‘an old trout out of water’.

‘Did she ask after me?’

‘Helena?’

‘Susannah!’

‘Not to me,’ she said, wondering at her sudden inability to lie. ‘Actually, it’s Shoana.’

‘What?’

‘Shoana.’ She tried to shrug off a change that cut her to the quick. It felt as though Susannah were rejecting not just the name that they had christened her (in Edwin’s case, literally) but the love they had heaped on her for forty years. Yet she knew better than to hand any fresh ammunition to Clement. ‘From now on she wants to be called by her Hebrew name.’

‘Is there no end to it?’

‘There are honourable precedents. Think Saul to Paul or Simon to Peter.’

‘Sure, but the Bible doesn’t say if they kept their old names at home. Maybe Peter’s wife and mother-in-law called him Rocky?’

His sardonic laugh dashed any hope that he might be ready to make peace with his sister. The bitterness of their dissension unearthed her deep-rooted guilt. She stood up and moved to the window.

‘Would you describe me as a bad mother?’ she asked, fixing her gaze on the drive.

‘Why? What’s Susannah been saying?’

‘Shoana… and she’s said nothing. It’s me. I was away such a lot when you were growing up. All those field trips to Africa.’

‘Don’t flatter yourself,’ he said lightly. ‘We had Pa and Nanny. Then when you came home it was all the more special.’

‘Was it? Even then, how much time did I get to spend with you? I was too busy being Marta Gorski, ubiquitous author of
The Eden People
.’

‘Since when?’

‘So much easier being a mentor to thousands of ardent young admirers – basking in their clear, uncomplicated devotion – than a mother to my own children!’

‘That’s nonsense, Ma, and you know it.’

‘And what about Susannah… Shoana? If we’d been closer, would she still have left home at eighteen? Wouldn’t she have gone to university and met someone suitable instead of…’

‘Zvi.’

‘I meant Chris. But perhaps you’re right. Perhaps I’m to blame for both of them.’

‘When did I say that?’

‘It was obviously the sight of me forever on the move, abandoning the three of you – not to mention your father – that made her go to the other extreme with Chris and Zvi.’

‘They couldn’t be more different.’

‘Maybe not, but they’ve both asked her to play the same little-wifey role.’

‘Come on, Ma, you know very well that people are more complicated than that… and Susannah certainly is! I can remember hysterical scenes when she accused us all – not just you – of somehow suffocating and neglecting her at the same time.’ Marta smiled faintly. ‘So please, no more talk of bad mothers. You were the best.’

‘Thank you, darling. You’re very sweet.’

She was doubly grateful for his ‘best’. Her own mother had been killed in the war. She herself had survived by dint of a cunning beyond her years. She sometimes feared that, having been forced to grow up so fast, she had lost the ability to relate to her own children, crediting them with a resilience for which, in the gentle English countryside, they had had little call.

Age made her increasingly aware of her vanished childhood. There were no portraits or letters or diaries or objects, let alone people, to fill in the gaps. All that she had were archive pictures to give her a vicarious authenticity. The loss had been compounded by the need to disown her past on coming to England. It was not that people were cruel or that she suffered the prejudice which had blighted survivors in other parts of Europe, but that they had no wish to dwell on the horrors. The most precious reward of peace was peace of mind. It was safer to picture Hitler as a murderous psychopath than as an astute politician who had legitimised a nation’s – or, worse, a race’s – darkest fears. The truth was particularly painful for Edwin, whose faith had been rocked by the
revelation
of the camps. She had conspired in the reticence, as tight-lipped on the subject of her life before reaching Dover as the most fervid Little Englander. Yet now when, after more than sixty years, she found herself sharing her
solitude
with the sights and sounds of the ghetto, she wondered if, the spectre of Edwin’s Alzheimer’s notwithstanding, the real horror of growing old was not to lose one’s mind but to doubt one’s memories.

‘There were two photographers filming the ceremony,’ she said. ‘I found them intrusive, but I’m starting to see the point. They make up for the defects of memory.’

‘That from the woman who claimed that what we didn’t remember was as significant as what we did!’

‘Did I say that?’

‘I remember it word for word. Ha! You said we remembered what
mattered
to us and forgot the rest, or else our minds would be as stuffed as a
storeroom
.’ She tried to recall if she had meant it seriously or if it had been a stock formula to comfort a child. ‘These days people are so insecure, they’re more concerned to record events than to experience them, living not in the here and now but in some imaginary future. It’s sick!’

‘Darling, it was just a wedding video. Photographs by another name.’

‘It goes far deeper than that,’ he said, sinking back in his chair and flinging his right leg over the arm in a posture that looked as uncomfortable as it was ungainly. ‘Memory lies at the heart of what it is to be human. In fact I’d go further: it’s the reason we both need and respond to art. It’s the part of our brain that creates and shapes narratives, that filters images, that draws
analogies
and chucks away inessentials.’ Marta rejoiced to see him roused from his torpor. ‘What do you think, Ma? Can it be an accident that, at a time when we’re trusting less and less to our memories, we’re growing less and less discriminating about art? We’ve lost the power of selectivity and substituted choice. We may have a world of information at our fingertips, but we’ve got fewer and fewer ways to assess it.’

‘Then we’ll find more. The human brain is endlessly inventive.’

‘Not when it’s dumbed down. In any other context,
virtual
means
almost… not entirely;
on the Web, it’s become synonymous with truth. We no longer rely on our memories to retain the things that matter but delegate the
function
to a machine. Even if the motive is pure, the process is corrupt. When everything’s recorded, nothing can be valued.’

‘Don’t you mean evaluated?’

‘In this case, it’s the same.’

Despite the eloquence of his argument, she yearned for an album of
childhood
photographs to substantiate her memories. All she had been able to
preserve
was a single highly charged but painfully equivocal family portrait, so devoid of any frame of reference that she had no way of knowing which of the two little girls in the foreground was her.

‘Even an imperfect record is better than a fading memory,’ she said. ‘I sometimes wonder if my sister existed at all.’

‘I didn’t think you liked talking about Aunt Agata.’

Her heart soared at the spontaneous gift of the
aunt
. ‘The truth is that we weren’t very close. I’d find it easier if we’d been more like you and Mark.’

‘Easier to talk perhaps. Not to carry on living.’

‘You can’t imagine how happy it made me to see you together. I remember when you tied yourself to his waist and made out you were Siamese twins.’

‘Then you’ve forgotten how much Mark loathed it. He tried to rip off the cord but only managed to tie himself – and me – in knots. He hated any suggestion that we were freaks – or even curiosities, threatening to beat up anyone who stared at us at school. He longed for nothing more than to be ordinary. He felt better once I’d told him there were twenty million twins in the world.’