To Live in Peace (19 page)

It was ridiculous really. They were all in the same boat, having babies, and there should have been a pleasant atmosphere, a sort of jolly togetherness, instead of which, until her forced incarceration at Hettie Klopman’s, Rachel would not visit Carol when Josh was there and Josh didn’t want to meet Rachel – whose behaviour towards him he found offensive – and Sarah wasn’t too keen on talking to Rachel because Josh was
upset, and Patrick, taking Rachel’s side, thought it better that the two of them kept well away from one another. Kitty would not have stood for such nonsense.

Carol could see both points of view. She appreciated that although there were those, like her brother and sister, who cared vehemently, deeply, blindly, about issues, she seemed never herself to hold strong opinions about anything. Her shilly-shallying extended to her mother’s marriage. She wanted Kitty to be happy. It had been no fun, she could see, being a widow, but she wasn’t at all sure about Maurice Morgenthau. Firstly he was too old. Secondly they did not share a common background. Maurice had seemed a gruff sort of fellow, uncouth in a way, not like her late father with his impeccable manners. It was done now. She hoped Kitty wouldn’t live to regret her decision.

Godalming. The familiar station with its hanging baskets which in summer were ablaze with busy lizzies and geraniums, its ticket office, “Take Off for France” and “Day Trips from London”. It felt like coming home. In the station yard, peaceful as she remembered it, flooded with the pallid winter sun, there were no taxis. Carrying herself carefully, heavily, mindful of the jutting stones, she started to walk down the hill and through Mint Street, taking the short cut past the DIY centre and the Salvation Army with its weathered proclamation: “Jesus said I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” As she progressed warily along the High Street where the disposition of the shops was inscribed like a litany in her head, she glimpsed her reflection, rotund and cumbersome, against the seductive arrangements of wares in the sun-glinted windows.

At Alec’s hotel the receptionist in her glass booth was on the telephone: “…I paid £28 for the operation – it was
the biggest stone they’d ever seen – and when she came round they said ‘What sort of food does she eat? –’” which Carol thought was rather strange until she realised that the girl was talking about her cat.

She put her hand over the receiver while she told Carol that Alec was neither in the bar nor the restaurant, in fact if she wasn’t mistaken she had seen Dr Caplan go out half an hour ago, then waved dismissively and went back to her call. Although she was hungry, having expected to lunch with Alec at the hotel, Carol decided to walk, slowly, which was all she was capable of, up the hill to the new house where she guessed she would find him supervising the position of an electrical outlet, or the crazy paving on the broad terrace outside the dining-room into which, at Jessica’s suggestion, they had installed picture windows. She glanced in the shops, not hurrying, savouring the news that she carried. She wanted to tell it to the passing pedestrians with their baskets, to proclaim it in the Godalming streets.

The door of the Queen Anne house was open. Outside it she was relieved to see Alec’s Volvo – his stethoscope on the seat, and the sign on the windscreen “Doctor Visiting” – and Jessica’s Land-Rover with its chrome mascot. In the hall which smelled of new wood, particles of dust, floating in a beam of sunlight, followed her in from the street. The house was taking shape. Half closing her eyes she could imagine it, now that the steels and the joists were in place, occupied by herself and Alec and Debbie and Lisa and Mathew and the two babies, not like Peartree Cottage where there hadn’t been room to move.

In the quiet she moved silently across the ground floor. They were installing a country kitchen which was being made by Jessica’s local craftsmen out of yew. The pipes – essential services – were still being laid. Open-ended,
they traversed the floor and protruded from the walls. From the sitting-room Carol looked out at the pecking blackbirds on the neglected lawn. On the staircase, curved and romantic, down which she would sweep like Scarlett O’Hara – when she was no longer pregnant and like a barge in full sail – an electric drill and a neat pile of workman’s overalls blocked her way. On top of them she recognised Jessica’s hard hat. She stepped carefully, mindful of her condition. The rooms on the first landing were empty, the plaster newly wet. They would be ready soon for decorating, the final phase. Carol’s feet, in her sensible rubber-soled shoes – she wasn’t taking any chances – made no sound on the hardboard with which the builders had covered the oak floor as she approached the master bedroom.

She opened the door, taking pleasure in its width and elegance. Jessica and Alec were out of sight in the dressing-room; she could hear them talking.

“Are you going to be long with those swatches? We’re wasting the whole afternoon.” Alec’s baritone with which she had fallen in love.

Something in his voice made Carol pause, her hand on the old-fashioned doorknob.

“How does terracotta grab you for the blinds, darling?” Jessica’s clipped tones.

Carol blinked, wondering if she had misheard.

“They can be sky-blue-pink for all I care!”

“Alec! All those patterns were in order…” Jessica’s voice tailed off.

“God, I love you.” It was Alec who spoke.

There was a silence so long that Carol thought she would faint then a low laugh, Jessica’s.

“Look, you go ahead. The key’s in my bag. I must wait and have a quick word with the foreman…”

Another silence. Interminable.

“Don’t be long.” Alec again.

Jessica’s sigh.

Carol shut the door soundlessly. Afterwards she could not remember leaving the house.

“I guess I should carry you over the threshold,” Maurice said as they stood outside his apartment with their luggage.

“You’d have a job,” Kitty said, waiting while her new husband unlocked the door.

Joe had stacked the letters in neat piles on the sofa. At a quick glance Kitty recognised one from Carol, one from Beatty, one from Hettie Klopman and one from Josh.

“Nobody ever writes me,” Maurice said. “Why don’t you go ahead and read your mail while I see to the cases?”

Kitty sat on the sofa and picked up the letter from Carol. It was hard to believe that she had been away for three weeks which had passed as if in a dream.

“Ain’t but one road there and one road back,” their cruise table-companion Chuck had said when he’d heard
that they were driving to Key West. “Best sport fishin’ in the world…”

“We don’t fish,” Kitty said.

“…Mutton snapper, ballyhoo, barracuda, sharks, tarpon, bottom fishing for grouper…take you fo’er hours. Back in the old days would’ve tooken you twelve hours, if you made the ferry on time, if there weren’t a hurricane. An’ be sure an’ stop at the Green Turtle, everyone knows the Green Turtle.

“Ain’t but one road there and one road back.”

Chuck had been right about the road. Alone with Maurice, just the two of them after the distraction of the ship, Kitty had enjoyed the drive through the chain of islands which stretched from Biscayne Bay on the mainland to the Dry Tortugas in the Florida Straits. The first part of the journey had been disappointing as they passed mile after mile of liquor stores, boat rentals, motels, realtors and Highway Patrol stations, then suddenly they were slipping between the Atlantic ocean and the green Gulf waters, cruising without warning high over the ultramarine ocean on Seven Mile Bridge. Maurice switched on the radio: “A Stranger in Paradise”, “My Heart Cries for You”, and “Lili Marlene”.

Kitty had never been so happy. As far as her new relationship with Maurice was concerned, about which she had been so apprehensive, she need not have worried. She had forgotten, or blotted out, the importance of physical happiness between a man and a woman, the bond that it creates.

As they slipped silently through the changing landscape with its grey pelicans swooping overhead, its snowy egrets, Maurice covered her hand with his and they joined in with the tunes: “I Love You for Sentimental Reasons” and “Sentimental You”.

“Happy?” Maurice said.

There was no need for a reply.

“I told you it would be all right.”

And it was.

Kitty suddenly realised that, as Maurice had suggested when he’d asked her to come to New York, she was living for herself, for Kitty Shelton – Kitty Morgenthau, she would have to remember – and was neither worrying about Rachel and Carol and Josh and the grandchildren with their problems, nor the vicissitudes of the Day Centre, nor the problems of her sisters-in-law or her neighbour, Addie Jacobs, for whom life never seemed to go smoothly, but had a peace and silence in her head, a quiet acceptance (with Maurice by her side) of the here and now. She recognised it, at the same moment as she did its transience, as happiness.

“Never look for happiness,” she recalled her late mother’s voice. “It will land, like a butterfly, on your shoulder.” Kitty put a hand to the top of her arm.

“Cold?” Maurice said.

She shook her head.

Blue Crab, Stone Crab, Garlic Crab, Raw Bar, Conch chowder, Seafood…

“I’m on the sea-food diet,” Maurice – who would be in his element in the Keys – had said when they’d first met, “I see food and I eat it.”

Kitty had come to terms with her new husband’s dietary predelictions which at first, having lived so long
with Sydney, had shocked her, but she had learned to close her eyes to Maurice’s aberrations.

The Southbeach Oceanfront Motel, where they paid in advance for their room and carried their own bags past the swimming-pool and ice dispenser and the Coca-Cola machine at the foot of the wooden stairs, was not a place where Sydney (fussy about where he stayed) would have chosen. He would not have dined on Lobster Marquesa in “Louie’s Back Yard”, walking back beneath the stars along Duval, lunched at “La-ti-da” where the waiters, dressed in pink, flaunted their homosexuality, or relaxed in the evening bar at “Papa Hemingway’s”.

Her two husbands were as different as it was possible to be and Kitty realised that there was no question about not loving either of them. Now, back in New York, in Maurice’s apartment – her apartment, Maurice was going to redecorate it and move his paintings back to the studio – reading the letters which too quickly, too abruptly, brought back the real world, it was hard to believe in the lazy Key West days, the tropical Southbeach nights with Maurice. Reading her letters she doubted already if the Military Museum with its display of artefacts with which Maurice had been fascinated, the Sponge Market and the Shell Warehouse where she had bought the box for Bette Birnstingl had ever existed outside of her imagination. Until he came into the room with the cases, which later Joe would take downstairs, she almost wondered if she had imagined Maurice himself. He sat beside her among the discarded envelopes on the sofa and she noticed, for the first time, now that they were back, the depth of his tan.

“Kitty, what’s wrong?”

She looked at her sunhat on the easel where Maurice had hung it, at its red and yellow ribbons, as if to
reassure herself of her respite from the world before she came to meet it head on.

“Carol’s had twins, Rachel’s no better, Alec wants a divorce, and Beatty’s got a lump!”