shape.
However, at other times, David merely lay sunbathing on the terrace, or
fiddled with electrical plugs or other small tasks Debra had asked him
to see to about the house.
As he moved through the cool and pleasant rooms, he would find an item
belonging to Debra, a book or a brooch perhaps, and he would pick it up
and fondle it briefly. Once a robe of hers thrown carelessly across the
foot of the bed and redolent of her particular perfume gave him a
physical pang as it reminded him sharply of her, and he held the
silkiness to his face and breathed the scent of her, and grudged the
hours until her return.
However, it was amongst her books that he discovered more about her than
years of study would have revealed.
She had crates of these piled in the unfurnished second bedroom which
they were using as a temporary storeroom until they could find shelves
and cupboards. One afternoon David began digging around in the crates.
It was a literary mixed grill, Gibbon and Vidal, Shakespeare and Mailer,
So1zhenitsyn and Mary Stewart, amongst other strange bedfellows. There
was fiction and biography, history and poetry, Hebrew and English,
softbacks and leather-bound editions, and a thin greenjacketed volume
which he almost discarded before the author's name caught his attention.
It was by D. Mordecai and with a feeling of discovery he turned to the
flyleaf. This year, in Jerusalem, a collection of poems, by Debra
Mordecai.
He carried the book through to the bedroom, remembering to kick off his
shoes before lying on the lace cover she was very strict about that, and
he turned to the first page.
There were five poems. The first was the title piece, the
two-thousand-year promise of Jewry Next year in Jerusalem had become
reality. It was a patriotic tribute to her land and even David, whose
taste in writing ran to Maclean and Robbins, recognized that it had a
superior quality. There were lines of startling beauty, evocative
phrasing and penetrative glimpses. It was good, really good, and David
felt a strange proprietary pride, and a sense of awe. He had not
guessed at these depths within her, these hidden areas of the mind.
When he came to the last poem, he found it was the shortest of the five,
and it was a love poem, or rather it was a poem to someone dearly loved
who was gone and suddenly David was aware of the difference between that
which was good and that which was magic.
He found himself shivering to the music of her words, felt the hair on
his forearms standing erect with the haunting beauty of it, and then at
last he felt himself choking on the sadness of it, the devastation of
total loss, and the words swam is his eyes flooded, and he had to blink
rapidly as the last terrible cry of the poem pierced him to the heart.
He lowered the book on to his chest, remembering what Joe had told him
about the soldier who had died in the desert. A movement attracted his
attention and he made a guilty effort to hide the book as he sat up. it
was such a private thing, this poetry, that he felt like a thief.
Debra stood in the doorway of the bedroom watching him, leaning against
