"Daddy will clear up," Suza said. She grinned. "We have an agreement." "I'm afraid it is so," Ashford confessed. "She won't be anybody's drudge, least of all mine." The remark surprised Dickstein because it was so obviously untrue. Perhaps Suza didn't wait on him hand and foot, but she seemed to look after him the way a working wife wouldL "niwalkinto town with you," &=a said. "Let me get my
Ashford shook Dickstein's hand. "A real pleasure to see you, dear boy, a real pleasure." Suza came back wearing a velvet jacket. Ashford saw them to the door and waved, smiling. As they walked along the street Dickstein talked just to have an excuse to keep looking at her. The jacket matched her black velvet trousers, and she wore a loose cream-colored shirt that looked like silk. Like her mother, she knew how to dress to make the most of her shining dark hair and perfect tan skin. Dickstein gave her his arm, feeling rather old-fashioned, just to have her touching him. There was no doubt that she had the same physical magnetism as her mother: there was that something about her which filled men with the desire to possess her, a desire not so much like lust as greed; the need to own such a beautiful object, so that it would never be taken away. Dickstein was old enough now to know how false such desires were, and to know that Eila Ashford would not have made him happy. But the daughter seemed to have something the. mother had lacked, and that was warmth. Dickstein was sorry he would never see Suza again. Given time, he might ... Well. It was not to be. When they reached the station he asked her, "Do you ever go to London?" "Of course," she said. "rm going tomorrow." "What forTI ."To have dinner with you," she said.
When Suza's mother died, her father was wonderful. She was eleven years of age: old enough to understand death, but too young to cope with it. Daddy had been calm and comforting. He had known when to leave her to weep alone and when to make her dress up and go out to lunch.
Quite unembarrassed, he had talked to her about menstruation and gone with her cheerfully to buy new brassieres. He gave her a new role in life: she became the woman of the house, giving instructions to the cleaner, writing the laundry list, handing out sherry, on Sunday mornings. At the age of fourteen she was in charge of the household finances. She took care of her father better than Eila ever had. She would throw away worn shirts and replace them with identical new ones without daddy ever knowing. She learned that it was possible to be alive and secure and loved even without a mother. Daddy gave her a role, just as he had her mother; and, like her mother, she had rebelled against the role while continuing to play it. He wanted her to stay at Oxford, to be first an undergraduate, then a graduate student, then a teacher. It would have meant that she was always around to take care of him. She said she was not smart enough, with an uneasy feeling that this was an excuse for something else, and took a job that obliged her to be away from home and unable to look after Daddy for weeks at a time. High in the air and thousands of miles from Oxford, she served drinks and meals to middleaged men, and wondered if she really had changed anything. Walking home from the railway station, she thought about the groove she was in and whether she would ever get out of it She was At the end of a love affair which, like the rest of her life, had wearily followed a familiar pattern. Julian was in his late thirties, a philosophy lecturer specializing in the pre-Socratic Greeks: brilliant, dedicated and helpless. He took drugs for everything-cannabis to make love, amphetamine to work, Mogadon to sleep. He was divorced, without children. At first she had found him interesting, charming and sexy. When they were in bed he liked her to get on top. He took her to fringe theaters in London and bizarre student parties. But it all wore off: she realized that he wasn't really very interested in sex, that he took her out because she looked good on his arm. that he liked her company just because she was so impressed by his intellect. One day she found herself ironing his clothes while he took a tutorial-, and then it was as good as over. Sometimes she went to bed with men her own age or younger, mostly because she was consumed with lust for their bodies. She was usually disappointed and they all bored her eventually. She was already regretting the impulse which had led her to &ake a date with Nat Dickstein. He was depressingly true to type: a generation older than she and patently in need of care and attention. Worst of all, he had been in love with her mother. At first sight he was a father-figure like all the rest But he was different in some ways, she told herself. He was a faimer, not an academic--he would probably be the least well-read person she had ever dated. He had gone to Palestine instead of sitting In Oxford coffee shops talking about it He could pick up one end of the freezer with his right hand. In the time they had spent together he had more than once sur. prised her by not conforming to her expectations. Maybe Nat Dickstein will breA the pattern, she thought. And maybe rin. kidding myself, - Nat Dickstein called the Israeli Embassy from a phone booth at Paddington Station. When he got through he asked for the Commercial Credit Office. There was no such department: this was a code for the Mossad message center. He was answered by a young man with a Hebrew accent. This pleased Dickstein, for ft was good to know there were people for whom Hebrew was a native tongue and not a dead language. He knew the conversation would automatically be tape-recorded, so he went straight into his message: "Rush to Bill, Sale jeopardized by presence of opposition team. Henry~" He hung up without waiting for an acknowledgment. He walked to his hotel from the station, thinking about Suza Ashford. He was to meet her at Paddington tomorrow evening. She would spend the night at the flat of a friend. Dickstein did not really know where to begin-he could not remember ever taking a woman out to dinner just for pleasure. As a teenager he had been too poor; after the war he had been too nervous and awkward; as he grew older he somehow never got into the habit There had been dinners with colleagues, of course, and with kibbutzniks after shopping expeditions in Nazareth; but to take a woman, just the two of you, for nothing more than the pleasure of each otheescompany... What did you do? You were supposed to pick her up in your car, wearing your dinner jacket, and give her a box of chocolates tied with a big ribbon. Dickstein was meeting Suza at the train station, and he had neither car nor dinner jacket. Where would he take her? He did not know any posh restaurants in Israel, let alone England. WaWng alone through Hyde Park~ he smiled broadly. This was a laughable situation for a man of forty-three to be in. She knew he was no sophisticate, and obviously she did not care, for she had invited herself to dinner. She would also know the restaurants and what to order. It was hardly a matter of life and death. Whatever happened, he was going to enjoy it. There was now a hiatus in his work. Having discovered that he was blown, he could do nothing until he had talked to Pierre Borg and Borg had decided whether or not to abort. That evening he went to see a French film called Un Homme et Une Femme. It was a simple love story, beautifully told, with an insistent Latin-American tune on the soundtrack. He left before the movie was halfway through, because the story made him want to cry; but the tune ran through his mind all night. In the morning he went to a phone booth in the street near his hotel and phoned the Embassy again. When he got through to the message center he said, 'This is Henry. Any reply?" The voice said, "Go to ninety-three thousand and confer tomorrow." Dickstein said, "Reply: conference agenda at airport information." Pierre Borg would be flying in at nine-thirty tomorrow.