«How funny,» said Priscilla, «so do mine. It's as if it's always a rainy afternoon, that sort of light.»
I said, «I suppose we think of the past as a tunnel. The present is lighted. Farther back it gets more shadowy.»
«Yet,» said Francis, «we often recalled the remote past with greater clarity. I can remember going to the synagogue with Christian-«To the synagogue?» I said.
Francis was sitting cross-legged in a small armchair, filling it completely, looking like an image in a niche. His floppy wide-legged trousers were stiff with dirt and grease near to the turn-ups. The strained knees thereof were threadbare and shiny and hinted at pink flesh beyond the veil. His hands, podgy and also very dirty, were folded in his lap in a complacent position which looked faintly Oriental. He was smiling his red-lipped apologetic smile.
«Why, yes. We're Jewish. At least we're partly Jewish.»
«I don't mind your being Jewish. Only oddly enough no one ever told me!»
«Christian is sort of, well, not exactly ashamed of it-or she was. Our maternal grandparents were Jewish. The other grandparents were goy.»
«Rather funny about Christian's name, isn't it?»
«Yes. Our mother was a Christian convert. At least, she was the slave of our father, an awful bully. You never met our parents, did you? He wouldn't have anything to do with our Jewish background. He made our mother break off relations. Calling Christian 'Christian' was part of the campaign.»
«Yet you went to the synagogue?»
«Only once, we were quite small. Dad was ill and we stayed with the grandpops. They were very keen for us to go. At least for me to go. They didn't care what Christian did, she was a girl. And her name disgusted them, though they did call her by her other one.»
«Zoe. Yes. I remember her getting her initials C. Z. P. put on a rather expensive suitcase-God.»
«He killed my mother, I think.»
«Who did?»
«My father. She was supposed to have died after falling downstairs. He was a very violent man. He beat me horribly.»
«Why did I never know-Ah well-The things that happen in marriage-murdering your wife, not knowing she's Jewish-«Christian got to know a lot of Jews in America, I think that made a difference-I stared at Francis. When you find out that somebody is Jewish they look different. I had only after many years of knowing him discovered that Hartbourne was a Jew. He immediately began to look much cleverer.
Priscilla was restive at being left out of the conversation. Her hands moved ceaselessly, creasing the sheet up into little fanlike shapes. Her face was thickly patchily powdered. She had combed her hair. Every now and then she sighed, making a woo-woo-woo sound with a palpitating lower lip.
«Do you remember hiding in the shop?» she said to me. «We used to lie on the shelves under the counter and we'd think the counter was a boat and we were in our bunks and the boat was sailing? And when Mummy called us we'd just lie there ever so quietly-it was-oh it was exciting-«And the door with the curtain on it and we'd stand behind the curtain and when someone opened the door we'd move quietly back underneath the curtain.»
«And the things on the upper shelves that had been there for years. Big old dried-up inkpots and bits of china that had got chipped.»
«I often dream about the shop.»
«So do I. About once a week.»
