The Mandelbaum Gate by Muriel Spark Read Free Book Online Page A

Miles and
Kathy merrily departed for dinner parties, leaving the professor baby-sitting
with Barbara and presumably discussing archaeology with her for all he was
worth.
    But
Barbara and Harry Clegg were in the spare bedroom, making love, just like the
nannie and the butler in the absence of master and mistress in the old days.
Sometimes one of the children would wake and call. Barbara would swear and get
up. Just like the old-time nannie.
    Sometimes
they settled down in the rough hut on the site of the excavations, like
teenagers stormed by the sensual presences of the summer night. At any other
time Barbara would have thought it ludicrous. A few weeks before she would have
thought it absurd. But this was no time for sophisticated thoughts. She felt
herself to be in love with Harry Clegg in an entirely exclusive form as yet
unrealized in human experience. It made nonsense of the rules. There were no
moral laws to fit it. The form of their love seemed to her to derive from a
faculty of inner knowledge which they both possessed, a passionate mutual
insight so unique in her experience that she felt it to be unique in human experience.
Harry Clegg — shock-haired, unhandsome — who would have guessed he would be her
type? Miles referred to him as ‘the red-brick genius’. But that was to reckon
without Harry Clegg, who loved her. He loved her disguise as an English
spinster, not merely as disguise but as part of her inexplicable identity. She
was not an English spinster merely, but also a half-Jew, and was drawn to the
equivalent quality in him that quite escaped both the unspoken definition ‘Englishman
of lower-class origin’, and the spoken one ‘red-brick genius.
    It
happened one day that Barbara’s cousin, Michael Aaronson, came down for the
week-end with his wife. He was a recognized expert in International Law, with a
subsidiary interest in a firm of solicitors who had dealt with the Vaughans’
family business for the past ten years, such being one of the odd and latter
results of that Vaughan—Aaronson marriage which had caused so much alarm at the
time. Business apart, other Vaughans and Aaronsons of their generation were now
on visiting terms, this having happened gradually from some point after the
war, when wedding invitations and acceptances had started to flutter between
the two families; while Barbara, who was now the only visible link between
them, tended to be regarded as something practically invisible by both sides.
She now saw them infrequently, her life being centred in the girls’ school
where she taught. Michael was the only one she corresponded with, he was still
her best-friend of the Aaronsons.
    He was
surprised to find Barbara at St Albans on a long stay. More perceptive than
Miles, he noticed her absorption with Harry Clegg.
    He
said, when he was alone with her, ‘Are you getting attached to that
archaeologist? He seems keen on you.’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Good
luck, then.’
    ‘Thank
you, Michael.’
    ‘He’s a
distinguished fellow. Looks terrible. They always attract women, somehow, when
they look like that. Are you thinking of marriage? Because if you’re going to
get married the family won’t like it.’
    ‘Which
family?’
    ‘Oh,
the Vaughans, of course. He’s the wrong background.’
    ‘The
Aaronsons would have said the wrong blood.’
    ‘Yes,
the old people were upset by Spencer’s marriage.’ Spencer was one of the
cousins, who had recently married a Gentile.
    ‘They
wouldn’t worry about who I married, now,’ Barbara said. ‘They always knew I
wasn’t quite the right blood for them. Only half right. The other half was
wrong.’
    ‘Oh,
well, the old people—’
    The
Aaronson grandparents were dead, but numerous aunts and uncles had reached
their sixties and seventies since the Golders Green days before the war.
    ‘And
the Vaughans,’ said Barbara cheerfully, ‘always knew I hadn’t quite the right
background. They felt I was too fond of the Aaronsons. My