Read Online The Mandelbaum Gate by Muriel Spark - Free Book Online Page A

could be more helpful, dearest
Ma, but you must realize that things have changed and one has to put up with
much, nowadays, that would have been unthinkable in the past. Indeed, you are
fortunate in having Benny. She would not be easy — perhaps impossible — to
replace!
     
    Only a
few of Joanna’s wild plants were still in bloom. A young Arab boy in his teens,
with skinny, deformed legs, wearing only shorts, had come out of the house
with a watering-can and was drenching the precious clumps in their dark, shady
corner; he had an air of special concentration, plainly having been instructed
in the seriousness of the job. A few yards away, on the long green that led to
the house, the lawn-spray made a whispering splash under the sun while the Arab’s
watering-can in Freddy’s cool corner splashed intermittently. The small tickets
that Joanna had stuck into the ground to mark her plants showed up in their
black capital letters under the wash of water. Joanna had categorized them by
their place of origin. Partly from familiar memory and partly by his immediate
eyesight Freddy could read the tickets from where he sat; Gethsemane, Mount of
Olives, Valley of Jehosophat, Siloam, Jericho, Bethlehem.
    Last
spring, when he had begun to visit the Cartwrights at week-ends, these garden
beds had been in full bloom. To Freddy, although he was no botanist, they had
always looked very English, set here in the garden above Jerusalem; they
looked decidedly different, at all events, from what they had looked all over
Palestine in the prolific spring. And now, ambling about in the far
associations of his thoughts, Freddy contemplated the neatly printed labels of
each clump blossoming under the watering-can, and recalled another bold,
amateur-handed script, poker-worked into the wood by his great-aunt herself,
and how the letters had started up from her little skew-wired tickets. She had
been a wild-flower gatherer who had planted a patch of her garden in dumps,
labelled according to country names: Bird’s-foot Trefoil, Lady’s Finger, Tufted
Vetch, Hair Tare, Viper’s Bugloss, Forget-me-not, Ling, Small-Flowered
Crowfoot….
    ‘I
think, dearest Ma —’ Freddy’s fountain-pen moved like an energetic snail over
the letter-pad resting on his knee. He used a broad nib that left a trail of
familiar patterns, his words; it was always a matter of filling in a lot of
pages for Ma, she liked him to send long letters. The pen scratched noisily
against the splash of the. watering-can in the hot afternoon, and Freddy
functioned on with his letter, as he had done for thirty years of his natural
history, a letter a week.
     
    … both try to forget the garnet brooch
incident. I shall drop a note to Benny. It is true there was no reason for her
to ‘blow up’ about it. But do remember how touchy Benny has always been. Of
course, one should be careful to ascertain the facts before one speaks in
haste, although. goodness knows, as you say, Benny has known us long enough,
and really ought to exercise a little understanding, as you are good to her. At
the same time, dearest Ma, don’t please go giving away your stuff so readily. I
feel Benny is quite well off without ‘extras’, and indeed, the garnet brooch
must have become quite valuable by now. (You say it is only a semi-precious
stone, but these semi-precious stones in old settings are become very rare.)
However, I am glad that Benny is recovering her good sense and does not continue
to feel aggrieved. As I say. it would be hard to replace Benny in times like
these, and to be accused to her face of ‘borrowing’ the brooch was no doubt, to
Benny, a source of …
     
    Freddy
looked up. I mustn’t appear to carp at her, he thought. On the other hand she
looked in his letters for a certain amount of response to provocation. In a
manner, it kept her going, to have a sort of unreal running bicker with him,
serialized into his long weekly letters and her longer weekly replies.
    The
Arab odd-job