To Live in Peace (21 page)

Picking up Carol’s letter, casting her eyes over it to answer Maurice’s query, Kitty realised that for the first time since she had been a widow, she had someone with whom to share: her worries over Carol, her anxiety about Rachel, her concern about Beatty’s lump.

“Alec’s still besotted,” she said, “Carol says he’s gone completely mad. When she talks to him about the children, he doesn’t want to listen.”

“Infatuation,” Maurice said, half closing his eyes as he added a brushful of madda to Kitty’s hair. “It’s a form of insanity.”

“Will he get over it?”

Absorbed with his palette Maurice worked in silence for a long while. At one time Kitty would have thought he had not heard what she said. Now she knew better. She had opened the letter in Sarah’s writing and read it before Maurice said: “Time will tell.”

“Listen to this,” Kitty said, “from Sarah.”

In the King’s Arms at the table at which they had first met, Alec sat opposite Jessica over the ploughman’s lunch neither of them had touched.

“When are you going to tell him?” Alec said.

“I’m waiting for the right moment.”

“You’ve been saying that for weeks.”

It was over a month now since their incriminating conversation had been overheard by Carol. The Queen Anne house was in the final throes of decoration – wallpapers and paint, about the colour and design of which nobody any longer cared – and would shortly be ready for occupation although its future, once so rosy, was in abeyance. Jessica said that if she divorced her husband, despite her beloved horses, she would not care to remain in Godalming. Alec, whose livelihood was in the High Street, had little choice.

He was aware that in the village, his association with Jessica had not gone unremarked. It was patent in the regard of his patients whose glance was no longer direct and who pointedly avoided their customary enquiries after Carol. Alec did not care. He surprised himself. He who had been devoted to, inextricably tied up with, every aspect of his wife and family, scarcely gave them a thought. He was oblivious to the gossip which he knew followed him as he made his house-calls – waiting only for doors to shut behind him – to the havoc he was creating in Jessica’s marriage, to the devastation in his own. He was sorry for Carol – he did not like to see her with her red eyes, her swollen face, her lumpy body not yet recovered from the birth – but he loved Jessica as he
had never, with hindsight, loved his wife. He could contemplate no future that did not include Jessica’s presence. Josh, who unbeknownst to Carol had come to Godalming as emissary, had said he was mad, he probably was, but in Jessica he had stumbled upon the complementary half of his divided self and would not let her go.

“You’ve had weeks.” Alec looked into eyes that were neither grey nor green.

“You’re not worried, are you?”

“I just want to be sure of you.”

“Aren’t you?”

Alec cast his mind back over the past few months: the guarded telephone exchanges; the hours at the
riding-stables
, ankle deep in straw, where Jessica had introduced her mounts, Shamus and Bianca; the afternoons in the cottage where he had kneeled to remove the crop from Jessica’s knee-length boots before pulling them off and making lazy love, urgent love, selfish and unselfish love, light-hearted, passionate, in-love and loving love. He tried, in this respect, not to compare Jessica with Carol, with whom love, even at its best, had always been restrained. Jessica, prodigal, emotional, physical, was a woman whereas Carol seemed not to have completed the transition from childhood to maturity. Life with Jessica would never be dull.

Josh had upbraided him with the children – Debbie, Lisa and Mathew – who in a sense had always been Carol’s, just as she had belonged to her father when he was alive, and to whose memory she was faithful now that he was dead. He tried not to think about the twins. The financial burden, he did not delude himself, was going to be heavy. The Queen Anne house would have to be sold. Alec did not care. He would make life as easy as possible for Carol who, with nothing to keep her in
Godalming, would probably prefer London and the family to which she was so attached. He would live in a garret with Jessica. He might even give up medicine. There had been idle talk, in each other’s afternoon arms, about a horse-drawn carriage in Ireland, romantic notions of a fresh start on the other side of the world. Life, for Alec Caplan, had unexpectedly blossomed and with Jessica at his side he was convinced that anything was possible.

He’d had a letter from his mother-in-law, from Kitty in New York, had it still in his pocket. He had expected nothing but recrimination but found it imbued with understanding. In it she implored him not to act in haste. Looking at Jessica in a black polo-neck sweater against which her skin took on a Rubens’ luminescence, he knew that if he took all the time in the world it would make no difference. He was sorry for Carol. He would do everything within his power to make life easy for her and his children, but Jessica was something he was both unable and unwilling to fight.

“Jessica Caplan,” Alec said, trying it out on his tongue. “It used to be Cohen. How does it grab you?”

Jessica took his hands in hers, caressing them.

“Like everything else about you.”

“What are you waiting for, then?”

“He won’t know what’s hit him,” Jessica said of her husband. “He’s going to be very hurt.”

Carol sat nursing her babies, responding in kind to the changing grimaces that passed involuntarily over the tiny faces, ten delicate fingers curled tightly round her own. Just as at first she had wanted nothing to do with her twins, now she would not let them go. She sat, for hours sometimes, as if she had never had a child before, not tiring of the trusting eyes searching her own, the tiny legs – deceptively fragile – in perpetual motion, the
gossamer cheeks, the nacreous ears. How soft their heads, one sable, one Titian. Silk or satin. She swaddled them in their shawls, knitted – the second one post haste – by Aunty Mirrie, and swayed them back and forth as if by the movement she could assuage her hurt.

At the table Debbie looked up from the letter she was writing to Kitty in New York.

“When will our house be ready?”

“I don’t know,” Carol said, pulling a shawl more tightly.

“Why doesn’t Daddy ever come?”

“He’s very busy.”

“He’s got a rota.”

“He’ll come when he can.”

“He used to come every weekend.”

“I told you, he’s busy.”

“Did you and Daddy have a quarrel?”

“What makes you think that?”

“I heard you. In the bedroom.”

“You shouldn’t eavesdrop.”

“I didn’t. We heard in the sitting-room. Me and Lisa. I don’t like it when you shout.”

“Get on with your letter.”

“When can I see my new bedroom?”

“When it’s finished.”

“When will that be?”

“I’m not sure.”

“You promised by the Christmas holidays.”

“The builders are very slow.”

“I don’t like it here.”

“It’s bathtime.”

“I haven’t finished my letter.”

“Finish it tomorrow.”

Debbie sat defiantly at the table.

“Didn’t you hear me?”

“I want my daddy,” Debbie said.

Despite the fact that her blood pressure seemed now to have returned to normal, Rachel was still at Hettie Klopman’s. They had been about to move to Putney when Herbert, who had been complaining of indigestion all week, had woken in the night with chest pains which had been diagnosed as a minor coronary thrombosis, for which he was prescribed bed rest, and Hettie had urged them to stay.

“He could be ill for ages,” Rachel said, “we can’t live here forever.”

“Just a couple of weeks,” Patrick said.

“To please your mother.”

“Is that so terrible? She’s looked after you all this time.”

“If it is a couple of weeks. I’m not having my baby in this house.

“I didn’t say you should. They feel safer if I’m around.”

“Blackmail.”

“He could have another coronary.”

“Are you going to stay home all day from the hospital?”

“You know what I mean, Rache.”

Kitty put a double fold of white card, engraved in black copperplate, on Maurice’s bookshelf.

“What’s that?” Maurice, his head on one side, was thumbing through his record collection.

“A wedding invitation from my nephew Norman.”

“He’s the one who’s marrying that South African girl?”

“Sandra. He’s waited long enough. He looked after his mother, my sister-in-law Dolly, until she died, then
Sandra came along and scooped him up. They’re getting married in December. I’ll send a nice present – not that they’ll need anything. Sandra’s a little heiress. Rabbi Magnus is officiating at Sydney’s synagogue – funny, I still think of it as Sydney’s. We’d given up hope for Norman.”

“Emperor?” Maurice straightened up, the record in his hand.

It was one of her favourites. “I thought I’d go to bed,” Kitty said.

“At eight o’clock?”

“My head hurts.”

The pattern of their evenings had changed. Although Maurice tempted her, La Forza del Destino or Boris Godunov (sung in English to make her feel at home) at the Met, or dinner in Little Italy, which she had always enjoyed, Kitty no longer wanted to go out. She declined all his invitations and, tired and listless, hardly bothering with dinner, went earlier and earlier to bed. Although all the hospital tests had proved negative, Maurice was worried about her. He was not the only one.

Ed, who was now dating Bette – to the chagrin of Mort who had lost out – had brought her The Dangling Man and Dublin’s Lives to read, in hopes of enticing her back to class which she no longer attended; Bette, who lectured Kitty at length about looking after her body and combating disease, now went to class on her own. Mort had bought a scrabble board and taught her to play but her heart wasn’t in it and whenever he challenged the words she had made, she did not really care. As she grew increasingly disinclined to cook, Herb, who came almost every night, had taken over the kitchen. He made special dishes in order to stimulate her appetite – Chicken Cacciatore and Baked Alaska – which Kitty only picked at to please him.

Tonight, Ed’s birthday, the four of them had gone to a show but Kitty, feeling she could not sit through it, had declined the invitation. In her bedroom, her’s and Maurice’s, redecorated with the help of Bette Birnstingl who had used a ribbon and bow design in shades of nectarine and peach (romantic without being frilly), Kitty got into bed looking forward to an evening spent re-reading her letters to the accompaniment of the Beethoven which came from the sitting-room. Bed was the only place that she felt comfortable, where she was able to rest her weary limbs and her constantly aching head.

At the moment her greatest worry was Carol. It was no joke to be abandoned with five small children. Although Kitty had written twice to Alec, she seemed to have had no luck in getting him to change his mind about leaving her eldest daughter. At moments such as this she wished Sydney was alive. Happy as she was with Maurice, it was Sydney, with whom she had brought up her children, who would have known what to do. Thirty odd years, she supposed, could not easily be discounted. A lifetime together had forged her relationship with Sydney and because there was no shared memory bank she could not expect, hard as they both might try, such understanding, such rapport with Maurice. That she loved him there was no question, as Maurice loved her, but it was different. Neither better nor worse, but different. You could not have everything and she had much to be grateful for.

Rachel, still at Hettie Klopman’s, was her next problem. Although Kitty told herself, in all honesty, that among her children she had no favourite, perhaps because she was the youngest she had a special feeling (despite the fact that she had always been a renegade) for Rachel, and found it hard to convince herself that her own baby was about to give birth to a child. After what
she had read about toxaemia in Maurice’s encyclopaedia, Kitty would be relieved (although Rachel had assured her that she was now better) when the child was safely born.

Sarah, whose confinement was to be at home, – how the pendulum had swung! – would have her own mother in attendance. What was it she had said in her letter about “to know” and “to love”? Kitty loved Sarah as her own daughter and the letter had touched her deeply. Josh, who had never managed to live up to his father’s expectations of him – which had always distressed Kitty – deserved a little happiness. She wished that he would stop this silly backbiting with Rachel and realise that life was too short for vendettas and that there was room for more than one opinion in the world.

Beatty was her latest worry. She had been having radiotherapy for her tumour but it didn’t sound as if it was terribly successful. According to her last letter – in which Beatty’s terror had leapt from between the lines and Kitty recognised the loneliness and hopelessness of widowhood after a lifetime of having someone to care – they were taking her into hospital for a mastectomy, the success of which in combating the disease seemed to be in some doubt. Sydney, as the head of the family – although he was not the oldest – had always been responsible for his sisters and they looked to Kitty now that he was dead. She made up her mind to write a long letter to Beatty in the morning, probably – she always woke these days in the small hours – while Maurice slept.

Preoccupied, Kitty did not hear Maurice come into the room. He brought her a cup of tea – which he had learned to make to her liking – as he did every night, and putting it on the table next to her sat down on the bed. Seeing him look at her Kitty put a hand self consciously to her fading scar.

“Headache?”

“Not worse than usual,” Kitty said.

“You know something, Kit?”

Kitty waited. She loved the way he said it: “You know something, Kit?”

“I’ve never given you a wedding present.”

Kitty had not given Maurice one either. In the excitement of the event and the planning of the trip to Florida she had quite forgotten.

“I’d like to give you one now.”

She looked about his person but could see no gift-wrapped package, no box.

“How would you like to go to Norman’s wedding?”

Kitty looked to see if he was serious.

“I’m going to take you back to England, Kit. There’s no reason I can’t paint there.”