Chapter 5 The Next World
On the evening of Jimmy’s arrival, Saul was surprised when Honor, having wept intermittently and drunk too much, asked to spend the night.
He’d thought that was all in the past, had come to terms with her unspoken rejection, even if he never quite understood it.
Still, his heart was bruised, and he felt wary of repeating the cycle.
And yet what could he say? He hated hurting a woman’s feelings.
Once, when Marya was tiny, Gila needed to stay in the hospital for three days, and her sister, Malka, came to look after the baby.
Every night, his sister-in-law crept into his bed, as though helping Gila naturally meant performing her wifely duties.
Were Malka young and beautiful, Saul might have demurred at her silent advances, out of connubial loyalty but also because nothing was more robust than the ego of a lovely girl.
But poor Malka was nearly thirty, with a heavy figure and unplucked upper-lip hair.
So he closed his eyes and did the kind thing.
Malka’s pleasure was excessive, as was her gratitude.
Both were touching in a pathetic sort of way.
Forevermore she gave him satisfied complicit glances that went, thank God, unnoticed by Gila.
Well, not forevermore. Malka and Gila had both been dead for over ten years.
He hoped they were together in the yene velt—the next world—laughing at their silly husband and lover.
The next morning, Honor was back to her usual self: brisk, detached, haughty.
As she went off to do whatever she did during the day, he reiterated his promise to show his face in the communal areas of the house, for the sake of George and Mina.
“Especially George,” Honor had emphasized.
Saul wasn’t sure why. Perhaps she thought George needed protection from herself more than anyone else.
That he could see. He liked the girl, but he didn’t share Honor’s elevated opinion of her.
By no means was George too sensible to get herself into trouble, as Honor had said.
In fact, she struck Saul as precisely the type to get into trouble.
Girls with her wildness of spirit ought to be married off young.
It was a dereliction of duty on the part of her parents.
But the English, he reflected, were extremely stupid when it came to these things.
Saul had never got a woman into trouble, albeit more out of luck than design.
Occasionally, when the barber suggested something for the weekend, he accepted out of a fleeting desire to make his life seem exciting.
But he considered those devices degrading and wouldn’t dream of using one.
Instead, he was considerate (and unabashed) enough to make some relevant inquiries beforehand.
The time of the month mattered, he was vaguely aware—something to do with the cycles of the moon.
At the beginning of their affair, Honor had explained she was unable to have children, on account of a childhood illness.
He was too tactful to ask for details. She hadn’t seemed sorrowful about being robbed of motherhood.
Matter-of-fact, you might even say. Still, he supposed she’d had her whole life to come to terms with it.
On first meeting Honor at that publisher’s party, with her dying husband, Saul hadn’t contemplated a seduction.
Not specifically. It crossed his mind that the connection might be professionally advantageous, but he hadn’t pursued it.
Then the strangest twist of fate occurred.
He’d made his regular pilgrimage to Whitechapel, to eat a sandwich at Bloom’s and visit his cousin Naomi Cohen.
The woman who looked after Naomi answered the door and said, repressively, “She’s got a friend here. ”
Sitting in the front parlor, drinking mint tea, was Honor. He might have assumed it was her doppelg?nger, were it not for the expression on her face: guilty, frightened, caught out.
“Hullo, darling,” said Naomi from her wheelchair.
“This is Elizabeth, my old friend. She brought the most marvelous cakes, would you look at that.” On the table were two cream-filled sponges, one covered with glossy peaks of chocolate and the other with pink icing and strawberry slices.
How many sugar coupons had been needed, Saul couldn’t begin to calculate.
“How very kind of you,” he said. “I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure.” As he took Honor’s outstretched hand lightly in his, he gave her a smile that said, Don’t worry, whatever is happening here, I shall play along.
“Saul Reznikov is my cousin,” Naomi explained to Honor, who put down her teacup and said, “Oh, is this your cousin who… the one from…” In her face Saul saw fear turn to panic.
But he was used to this. People didn’t know how to act.
They worried about what to say. Was it rude not to offer commiseration?
And yet what form of commiseration could ever be adequate?
Naomi rescued her. “That’s right. He’s come to London from France, haven’t you, darling? We hope he’ll stay.”
Saul inclined his chin in affirmation, his mind ablaze with the possible meanings of Honor Wilson’s manifestation, under another name, in Naomi’s humble home.
Faithful to his tacit assurance, he betrayed nothing.
The threesome chatted about this and that while he, under urging from Naomi, ate two large slices of cake.
After an hour, he glanced at the mantel clock and said he must be on his way.
Immediately, Honor said that she, too, had to be going.
It was a clammy late-September day, a pinkish twilight shimmer in the air. “May I walk with you?” asked Saul. If Honor hadn’t wished to talk privately, he reasoned, she’d have stayed at Naomi’s.
“Of course,” she said, and they set off down Whitechapel High Street. Despite her expensive pale-beige dress and matching coat, her crocodile handbag, Honor didn’t seem ill at ease in the insalubrious district.
As if reading his mind, she said, “My father used to take me to that café when I was a girl.”
She pointed to a small glass-fronted establishment with a red-and-white-striped awning.
Outside, a gang of young lads with pompadour-ish hairdos were smoking and lobbing saucy remarks at passing girls.
Next door (except there was no door), several children played in the exposed cellar of a bombed-out building.
They were inadequately dressed against the encroaching evening, the small girl in wrinkled ankle socks and a smocked dress faded from countless washings, the boys in obvious hand-me-downs.
One child, a dirty-faced urchin in a sleeveless pullover—he couldn’t have been more than four—saw Saul staring and winked at him like an old sailor.
“Going there was a special treat,” Honor went on. “They served the most delicious lemon cheese tart. And iced coffee with ice cream! Yum.”
Saul asked, as he supposed he was meant to, “So you grew up around here? How interesting.”
She nodded. “I rarely talk about my childhood. Or the time before the war at all. It makes it easier, you see. Easier to forget the times I was unhappy. I just pretend, to myself and everyone else, that it all happened to a different person.”
“To Elizabeth.”
He said this as a statement, not a question, and she looked at him with gratitude. “To Elizabeth.”
“Does your husband know about Elizabeth?”
“No. By the time I met Gerald, I’d already done away with her. He thinks I grew up abroad. That I have no family. That part is true, more or less.”
Saul thought this over as they stood aside to let two young mothers with baby buggies pass by.
“But you’ve stayed in touch with Naomi?”
“Naomi doesn’t know I’m Honor now. Naturally, or she wouldn’t have introduced me as Elizabeth. I take it she hadn’t told you about me?”
“Not that I recall, unless…”
“I’m a Gentile, in case you were wondering. Well, mostly. On my mother’s side, there was… but that’s not important. We were neighbors with Naomi and her family.”
“I see.” He sensed she was leading somewhere momentous, that this wasn’t simply small talk.
It didn’t take exceptional powers of perception; she fairly glowed with intention.
“If you don’t have any appointment to keep,” he said, “perhaps you’ll allow me to buy you a drink?
If we can find anywhere suitable, of course. ”
Honor smiled. “That would be lovely.” She looked at her wristwatch. “It’s opening time. I know just the place.”
She led them a couple hundred yards to Aldgate High Street and an old pub, the Hoop and Grapes. Surprised, Saul followed her inside. The place was half full already, and a haze of smoke hovered beneath the low ceiling.
“Another of your old haunts?” he inquired.
“Heavens, no. Women didn’t go to pubs in those days. Not nice women, anyway. That’s one good thing about the war, don’t you think? A lot of the silly old rules fell away.”
Be that as it may, Saul couldn’t see many women drinkers.
One strikingly ravaged old lady, her face scored with crisscross grooves, sat alone with a glass of beer.
She wore a curious mix of rags and finery: a coat with a brown fur collar and a glittery brooch, and a dress that was patched and fraying.
The once-elegant shoes on her deformed, swollen feet were reinforced with knotted twine.
She gazed at some fixed downward point, only occasionally reaching for her drink.
There was a solemnity about her, a stillness, like she wasn’t quite of this world.