To Live in Peace Read Free Page A

with Greek food and her child. “You’re being really stupid.” Rachel’s eyes were uncompromising, “You’ll hate it in New York.” Inside, Kitty had found the audacity to laugh at the role reversal. For so many years she had been the parent, advising, cautioning. “He’s probably after your money,” Rachel offered as a Parthian shot.
    “It’s time you started living for yourself,” Maurice had said. “The children have their own lives. They can manage without you. Give it six months. We’ll see how we get on…”
    She had bought her ticket, packed her case, said goodbye, tearful and choked, to the family who took advantage of her, to the children who liked her to be there, to her friends in the synagogue and neighbours in the flats, and the widows with whom she played bridge and who looked at her with disbelief, and to her grandchildren whose possessive arms almost made her weaken at the last moment.
    Josh took her to the airport. The last time they had done that journey was when she had been going to Eilat where she had first met the enigmatic Maurice with his flat cap and zippered jacket. This time it was different. Already the enthusiasm was wearing off. She wondered what on earth she was doing, with not a soul that she knew, sitting down to pass the time with coffee and aDanish pastry in the early morning tumult of the International Departure Lounge.
    In the plane, setting the seal on her commitment, she had altered her watch to New York time as the Captain announced the route – Northern Ireland, Labrador and Boston – that would be taking her to Maurice. Hemmed into the window seat Josh had secured for her, covered with the mauve cellular blanket and, plugged into the red plastic headset, trying to concentrate on the film, she realised how much already she missed her family and how very dear to her they were, the importance of one’s own flesh and blood which was more, so very much more, than the sum of its parts. Several hours later, after she had filled in her landing card and gone with her sponge-bag to the confined toilet to freshen herself up for Maurice, the First Officer’s voice – “We are beginning our descent for New York” – brought home to her the significance of the step she was taking. The landing at Kennedy, ill-timed and bumpy, had been the beginning of a dream from which she had still not woken. She did not need telling to remain in her seat until the aircraft had stopped and the seatbelt signs had been switched off; the 747 had become her home, her limbo, and she was terrified of moving.
    With one ear on the public address system which announced that she could retrieve her baggage from carousel number five (her lucky number, perhaps she would be lucky), she selected, as she did in the supermarket, the shortest and fastest moving queue for immigration. Standing behind the yellow line until it was her turn to approach the uniformed black woman (“One person or family group permitted in booth at a time”), she peered through the glass, vainly searching the alien faces in the customs hall for the familiar sight ofMaurice. With her passport unequivocally stamped and having lied about the purpose of her visit – which was neither strictly speaking business nor holiday – she had asked a well built man, no older than Josh, if he would mind helping her with her luggage, but he ignored her, as if she had not spoken, and she knew that she was in New York. Having neither contraband, vegetables, birds, nor birds, eggs to declare she had passed, with her swerving trolley, unchallenged through the green channel.
    Maurice, waiting anxiously, was in his shirt-sleeves. She hardly recognised him without his flat cap and zippered jacket which was the image of him (despite the handsome figure he had cut in his tuxedo at the wedding) she carried in her mind. The expression on his face when he caught sight of her, as if with his own eyes he had witnessed the coming of the Messiah, dispelled