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

boy finished his watering and silently returned to the house.
Like that young Hardcastle, Freddy thought. Like Hardcastle, the gardener’s boy
of Freddy’s youth, who had moved back and forth, remotely attending to things,
unloquacious, unsmiling, totally unwilling to conspire in Freddy’s games. ‘Still
waters run deep,’ Freddy’s mother had said, and true enough, young Hardcastle,
when he attained the age of fifteen, had disappeared from the job, from the
village, from his home, last seen by the bus driver who had borne him away
never to be heard of again. Many young Arab boys in Palestine reminded Freddy
of Hardcastle. They slightly disturbed him. He preferred the vivacious type in
the alley bazaars, arguing, cheating, flashing Arabic code-words at each other
in the presence of a stranger, or shouting cheerful abuse at their
fellow-youngsters who led the mangy over-laden donkeys up the narrow pathways
of Jordan’s Jerusalem continually.
    Freddy
saw the morose boy approach once more from the house. Freddy, in his shaded
arbour, wished to break the silence, if only to make concrete his mournful
sense of its being ultimately unbreakable. But his Arabic lessons had not
progressed so far as to enable him to say, as he desired to do: ‘You fellows
are lucky being able to stand the sun direct on your skin in the heat of the
afternoon. We English have to keep in the shade.’ Freddy looked down at the
letter and thought he must work round to write something on the question of the
Arabic lessons he was taking from Abdul Ramdez, since his mother had replied to
his first mere mention of the lessons: ‘I hope you are not getting too thick
with that Arab teacher, When your Uncle Hamish was stationed in Egypt, his Arab
teacher was quite scandalous.’ Yes, and so was Uncle Hamish.
    The
odd-job boy had moved the lawn-spray to another part of the lawn, and had
returned to the house. Freddy listened for voices; Joanna had evidently not
returned, for he heard none.
    Usually,
on his week-end visits to the Cartwrights, Freddy left his office on the
Israeli side of Jerusalem early on Friday afternoon, plodding through the
Mandelbaum Gate with his diplomatic pass in one hand and his zipper-bag in the
other, always blinking in the glare, since he hated wearing sunglasses, which
made one look so much like a rotten gigolo or spy. He came in the heat of the
afternoon so as to reach the cool bungalow sooner. Both Cartwrights were
usually out till five, busy with their work. But Freddy would make himself at
home. Lemon tea, then a seat in the arbour, writing letters.
    ‘Dearest
Ma …’ Freddy stared at the bungalow to gain thought. It was a slightly
crooked house. He had heard that the Arab builders simply built a house, they
did not use any instruments, not even a set-square. The walls and windows were
slightly crooked. But the bungalow had a decidedly English appearance, probably
due to the chintz curtains flapping in the breeze, and to the garden that
seemed to support it. Joanna’s geraniums were marvellous, massed by the back
porch. And the lawn really was green. Most of all did he feel at home with the
wild-flower clumps. He had, in fact, contributed a few plant roots from the
Israeli side of the border, some of which had flourished. Joanna’s labels bore
witness to Freddy’s contributions from the Israeli side: Mount Zion, Galilee,
Nazareth, Mount Tabor … Bulbous Buttercup, Speedwell, Yellow Cow-wheat, Hound’s
Tongue. Freddy supposed he was wrong, he knew little about wild flowers,
really, but he had a theory that these plants that he had pulled from the soil
for Joanna, and those she had gathered for herself, were not indigenous at all.
Their seeds had been brought to Palestine and sown, he suspected, by a
conspiracy of the English Spinster under the Mandate. A second cousin of his
had done the same service for India, where she had returned after every home
leave with a shoe-box full of wild flowers gone to seed. This