To Live in Peace Read Online Free Page B

multinational peacekeeping force to enter Beirut…Shlomo Argov, the Israeli Ambassador to Britain, whose attempted assassination purportedly sparked Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, has been flown home from a London hospital…”
    Kitty wondered what she was doing three thousand miles from home sitting next to this strange man. She put her fork down on the blueberry pie and felt her eyes close. Maurice took her by the hand and led her across the hall. In the studio he shut the blinds, fussed with the lights.
    “There’s a house phone if you need anything.” He showed her which button to press, “Call any time, I don’t sleep.”
    “You’re very kind,” she said, as if to a stranger.
    She went with him to the door, with its safety devices and its spy-hole.
    “Lock two turns,” – Maurice said, demonstrating. “Use the chain. Don’t open to anyone. And Kitty…”
    She raised her heavy eyelids. She must either sleep or weep.
    “It’ll be okay.”
    She wished she could be so sure.
    “In the morning it’ll look better.”
    She hoped he was right.
    From Maurice’s flat across the hall she could hear the unfamiliar accents of the newsreader: “…an eyewitness report…” accompanied by the sound of gunfire and of ricocheting shells.

Three
    “Mrs Klopman!”
    “Ms,” Rachel said.
    “Mrs” made her feel like her mother (of whose present behaviour Rachel did not approve) from whose mould – inadequately equipped to deal with the very different world she found outside – she spent her life, unlike Carol, struggling to escape. As far as Rachel was concerned, Kitty had always been middle-aged, middle class and predictable, occupied with the nurturing of others to the extent of neglecting herself. She had devoted her life to the well-being of her children and supporting the goals and ambitions of a husband (defining herself as relative to him) who allowed her to spend herself in the onerous running of his household while referring to her as his “queen”. Often Rachel had needled her, accused her of never having an opinion of her own, of not thinking for herself; she had hovered around the light of his lamp, a pale shadow of Sydney, treating her husband deferentially and accepting his natural dominion over her.
    Kitty’s only interests outside the home and her family had been her charity work – Soviet Jewry and Israel rather than Vietnamese boat-people – about which she had countered Rachel’s allegation that Jews only look after their own with the acerbic retort that when non-Jews made such accusations – which Rachel was parroting – what they actually meant was that only Jews look after their own. Her mother was always busy, lame dogs and the less fortunate, preserving the fabric of the family of which Sydney had been the uncrowned king.Even after his death, her mother’s life had continued along the same lines as before. She had worked for the synagogue Ladies’ Guild, cooked for her nephew Norman and for Josh, providing the time honoured dishes into whose mysteries she was initiating Sarah, knitted for the grandchildren. Maurice had come as a shock. Rachel had seen him as an interloper, disliked him on sight, could not understand her mother’s enthusiasm for the elderly European with his enigmatic demeanour, his foreign accent.
    Kitty had dropped her bombshell at the celebration dinner she had arranged for Rachel and Patrick on their return from honeymoon. Carol and Alec had come up from Godalming for the occasion. They had had the pink beach at Skiathos (cicadas in the olive trees, the smell of thyme and warm grasses) and the sunstruck white of Hydra with Kitty’s cold borsht – in which Sydney had always liked her to serve a floury hot potato – and the air, land and naval bombardment of West Beirut over the chicken which had been roasted (the neck stuffed separately and sliced) for family gatherings for as long as Rachel could remember. Over the years the bird had fallen into natural