Last Things Read Online Free PDF Page B

wasn’t easy to notice who else was trying to edge in) was it true, the old story, that if one had been born rich and then had everything taken away one never minded much?
    Azik pronounced that he had known some who suffered. People were almost infinitely resilient, I was beginning, but Azik went on with a shout: ‘You and I, Lewis, say we’ve lost everything tomorrow morning. You aren’t allowed to publish a word. These children don’t believe it, but we should make do. You’d pretend that nothing had happened and go and get a job as a clerk. As for me’ – he put a finger to the side of his nose – ‘I should make a few shillings on the side.’
    He was benevolent and happy, parodying himself, showing off to Rosalind, whom he adored. None of us had such a flow of spirits, nor was so harmoniously himself. There might have been one single discontinuity, only one, and even that I could have exaggerated or imagined.
    It happened when Margaret asked about the second drinks. On the first round she and I had had our usual long whiskies, and so had Pat: Azik had had a small one. He refused another, and watched our glasses being filled again.
    Suddenly, quite unprovoked, he said: ‘No Jew drinks as you people do.’
    ‘Oh, come off it, Azik,’ I said. I mentioned something about parties in New York–
    ‘They are not real Jews. They are losing themselves.’
    Real Jews, Azik went on, took sex easy, took wine easy: they didn’t go wild, as ‘you people’ do. I had never heard anything like that from him before. He might be overpowering, but he didn’t attack. We all knew that he kept up his Judaism; he went, not to a reformed synagogue, but to a conservative one, even though he said that he had no theology. All of a sudden, just for that instant (or was I reading back to my first Jewish friends?) Judaism seemed the least natural, or the least comfortable thing about him – as though it were a proud hurt, an affront to others.
    He relaxed into paternal, prepotent supervision.
    ‘Ah well,’ he said, ‘enjoy yourselves.’
    He was the only one to enquire about young Charles. Last heard of in Persia, I said, on his way to Pakistan. We had heard nothing for a fortnight.
    ‘You must be worried, Lewis,’ he said, with a rush of fellow feeling.
    I said, ‘a little’: the dinner party had distracted me, until then.
    ‘Oh, he’ll be all right. He lands on his feet,’ said Pat.
    ‘That you should not say.’ Azik turned sternly onto Pat, who for once looked outfaced, sulky, quite aware that he had shown jealousy of his cousin, glancing at his young wife, whose face was reposeful, as though she had not noticed anything at all nor heard of Charles.
    As we sat at the dinner table, I was paying attention to Rosalind. Beautifully accoutred as she was, she had nevertheless let her hair go grey: that must have been a deliberate choice. She knew what was required of the elegant wife, no longer young, of a great tycoon. Her thin, freckled hands displayed her rings. As before, she sometimes gave me a look – sidelong from her cameo face – as though we shared an esoteric private joke. But all she talked about was Azik’s business, and how next week she would have to entertain the Prime Minister of Brazil. ‘It’s all in the game, you know,’ she said, with a dying fall which sounded sad and which was nothing of the kind. I sometimes wondered whether she ever thought that, if it had not been for fatality, she would still be married to a distinguished, perhaps an unbalanced, scholar (it was hard to imagine what Roy Calvert would have become in his fifties). Probably she didn’t. Rosalind lived on this earth. She might sigh over memories, but she would sigh contentedly and get on with the day’s work, which was to keep Azik cheerful and well.
    On my left, her daughter Muriel was quiet, cheekbones and jawline softened by pregnancy. Then I caught a flash of her eyes, as though she were surreptitiously making fun of