Raisins and Almonds (5 page)

'You're trusting me very far, Jack dear,' said Phryne gently.

He took her hand and clasped it. His forgettable face was blank with worry.

'I do trust you,' he sard. 'Is it a deal?'

'Deal,' said Phryne. 'And I know just the man to ask.'

Albedo is the flight of the white dove

Elias Ashmole,
Theatrum Chemicum Brittanicum
1689

Phryne left telephone messages for the beautiful Simon Abrahams and his elusive father, who were both out according to their maid. Phryne dined early because of the girls, and retired to her leaf-green bedroom with a couple of books on Judaism, a glass or two of champagne, and a headache.

This became rapidly worse as she read her way through Mr Louis Goldman's
The Gentile Problem.
The Jews, he proved, had always been people apart and distinct by custom and appearance, devoted to their own laws, which enjoined education, careful diet and cleanliness on their followers. This meant that, preserved from plague in filthy medieval cities, they had been accused of witchcraft and burned. They had been forbidden any business except that of lending money at interest, and they had been tried and condemned for usury. The Jew of Venice with his 'my daughter! my ducats!' did not seem comic to Phryne any more as she stared at the illustrations: Jews burned in fires, drowned in rivers, hanged higher than Haman. Instead she heard Shakespeare's Shylock saying, 'Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, do we not revenge?'

Except they had not revenged. Nowhere had the Jews, driven like cattle and slaughtered like them, fought back against their oppressors, and Phryne caught her lip, wondering what commandment she was outraging by washing for just a little rebellion, just one uprising, since the brave Queen Esther had told the Persian King that she was a Jewess, and the Jews had hanged Haman and his sons on the gallows they had thoughtfully built for the Semites—which was the feast ever after of Purim.

Of course, that did explain why neither Abrahams was available. It was Saturday, which was
Shabbes
, the Sabbath, and they could not talk on the telephone during
Shabbes
—that would be work. Presumably.

Phryne finished her glass of rather good French champagne and slid down into her dark green sheets. The wind was tormenting the tree outside her window, lashing the branches against the house. It was a restless, uncomfortable sound, and she could not concentrate. She laid the book aside, put out her lamp and closed her eyes, but the constant scratching at the glass irritated her so that she sat up, meaning to find another book or perhaps dress and go out to a certain nightclub which might yield her some interesting company. Her own house seemed silent as Phryne swung her feet to the floor, her silky nightdress sliding off one pale shoulder.

Something attracted her gaze to the window, and she saw two bright points, like eyes. She was so surprised that she sat quite still for perhaps ten seconds. Then she rose and moved towards the window and the little lights. She had almost reached the casement when a shrill howling broke out downstairs. Phryne was distracted, and when she looked again whatever it was had gone, if it had ever been there.

'Well, what did you make of that?' she asked the black Tom Ember, who had been reposing as usual at the foot of her bed. Ember really appreciated silk sheets. He had looked up when Phryne had moved, but appeared uninterested in whatever had been at the window. The wailing noise, however, galvanized the cat. He ran to Phryne's door and demanded to be let out immediately and not a second later, and when she opened the door he leapt down the stairs and vanished out of sight.

Phryne followed more slowly. She knew what the howling was. A small puppy had woken up and missed its mother, its siblings and its nice warm nest, and was telling the entire house that it was really unhappy. She hoped to get to the as-yet-unnamed beast before Ember, who appeared to be seriously displeased.

Phryne paced down the staircase into the parlour and turned on the light. The grocer's box padded with an old jumper was still in the chimney corner, but there was no warmth left in the ashes. She knelt down and looked in, and a small desperate creature tried to fit itself into her hand, stopping in mid-howl and whimpering.

'Poor little pest,' said Phryne, lifting the puppy and cradling it to her silky breast. 'I'll bet you're hungry and you are certainly cold. Let's go and warm you some milk, shall we, and we'll put your box next to the stove.'

It was one thirty by the kitchen clock. Phryne stoked the slow-combustion stove with chunks of red gum, lowered the lids and waited for a while until the firebox began to roar. Then she found a saucepan and heated some milk and water, half and half for a dog. She poured it into a saucer and watched the little dog wriggle and lap, reflecting how strange it was to be sitting in her own house at such an hour on such an errand. The rest of the house was asleep. Dot was asleep in her tower, and the girls in their bedroom under the jazz-coloured comforters. Phryne could hear Mr Butler snoring in the Butler's suite, beyond the pantry. It was strange to be awake, Phryne thought, when everyone else was so firmly in the land of nod.

Ember walked into the kitchen and sat down at Phryne's feet, tail curled around black paws, looking inscrutable as was his wont. The clock ticked. The electric light banished the darkness but made the garden outside Phryne's house as black as a pit, and she felt suddenly uncomfortable, as though someone was watching her. She pulled the creamy silk close at the front, swore and stood up, taking the poker. Action, she reflected, was always better than unease.

She unlocked the back door with its huge key and stood in the doorway, scanning her own domain. One tree, tall. One shed, whitewashed. Three garden beds, grey in the darkness. One small patch of lawn. Nothing else, no sound but the wind and no movement but the trees bowing under the wind. She stared out into the night, poker raised, for some time before she closed and locked the door again and returned to the puppy.

It had clambered back into the grocer's box, and was washing itself inefficiently with a small pink tongue like a scrap of ham. Ember, watching it with close attention, cleared the box lid with one complicated leap which took him into a reclining position with the puppy snuggled up to his side. He dipped his gaze and licked the top of its ragged black and white head, then began to wash its milky face.

'Ember, it's a dog,
canis
, you know, not
felis
,' Phryne informed him. Ember appeared unenlightened by this news. The kitchen began to warm. Phryne, fascinated, made herself some Dutch cocoa from the tin with the lady in a white cap on the front and sat sipping it, her bare feet on the hearth stone, the uncurtained windows as black as black glass, and listened to Ember's rising purr.

She put herself back to bed half an hour later, and the night seemed to have quieted so that she fell easily asleep.

All of which went close to explaining why, when Phryne woke suddenly to voices at her own front door, she was annoyed.

'Eight of the clock on a Sunday morning, what an hour!' she exclaimed, as Dot tentatively enquired if Miss Fisher wanted to see the apologetic young man now downstairs with a bunch of hyacinths (white) in his hand?

'Oh, all right, Dot dear, but I'm not getting up yet. Tell Mr Abrahams that if he cares to breakfast with me I will be delighted to see him in a quarter of an hour's time. Open the window, Dot dear, and bring me coffee, I want to see the spoon standing up in it.'

Phryne extracted herself from a tangle of green sheets and quilt, went into her own bathroom, made certain contraceptive preparations and washed her face. That was as far as she was intending to go in the way of hygiene, and her cream negligee which supplemented the remarkable appeal of her cream nightdress should be decent enough for a chat with a nice young man before Phryne went back to sleep. The insertion of her diaphragm was almost second nature now, with a young man in the offing. She stood at the window, looking out, until the rising wind chilled her and she wrestled the casement shut.

There were green leaves on the sill, recently broken, but whether they had been snapped off the parent stem by a climber or a possum or the weather, who could tell?

Simon Abrahams, who was escorted up the stairs to Miss Fisher's boudoir by a very respectable maid carrying a covered tray, stopped at the door and stared in a way which would have caused his mother to clip his ears. The room was lush, and the bed in which Miss Fisher reposed was hung about with cobweb-fine black gauze embroidered with ivy leaves and grapes. He looked aside and saw his own faun's face in a mirror wreathed with garlands. The bedchamber was opulent, unrestrained and entirely shameless he was glad to say, and he walked forward, his feet sinking into a velvety carpet like moss.

'Simon dear, do come in,' said the vision in the big bed. She was draped in milky Chinese silk and looked both sleepy and cross. He thought her very beautiful and dangerous, and sat down carefully on the edge of her bed and took her hand reverently between both of his own, raising it to his lips to kiss.

'Green leaves, lady?' he said in his lightly accented voice, noticing them on her pillow.

Tor spring,' she replied, and he presented his hyacinths. Phryne leaned forward and drank in the scent and he had a dizzying feeling that he was actually going to fall down her cleavage.

The maid uncovered the tray, taking the flowers and placing them in a vase of exactly the right dimensions. She poured Phryne a cup of coffee from the copper pot, opened the napkin to reveal freshly made bread rolls, and left. Miss Fisher buttered a roll lavishly and poured coffee for her fellow breakfaster. Then she seemed to be struck by a thought.

'Simon, I'm sorry—can you eat with me?'

'Yes, of course,' he said, 'unless you were responsible for dosing my co-religionist with rat poison,' he added, taking a roll and breaking it. 'In fact, even if you were I would presume that you haven't a reason for killing me, eh?'

'Aren't you supposed to only eat kosher food?'

'You've been researching us,' he said slowly. 'Yes, my mother keeps a kosher house. No, I see no reason why your coffee, your cherry jam and your bread should not be perfectly all right. I can't eat dairy food at the same time as meat, that's all, and I'm destined never to taste
moules mariniere
or bacon, but that's no great loss. And we keep the Sabbath, so we don't do anything but rest on Saturday, which is something of an impediment in a world which doesn't do anything on Sunday ... including get up early, I had forgotten. But my father taught me never to be negligent to beautiful ladies, so I came as soon as I decently could to apologize for not returning your call yesterday.'

He gave her a lopsided smile which was very hard to resist and Phryne's mood was already improving under the onslaught of real coffee, hyacinths and charm.

'I had a disturbed night, with all that wind, and the puppy which the girls have wished on me started howling. I shall go back to sleep presently, but for the moment I am pleased to see you,' said Phryne, sipping the black caffeine-rich brew and surveying the young man.

He was very decorative. His hair was curly, and she wondered idly what it might feel like under her hand. His bright brown eyes were as alert as a fox's; indeed there was something foxy about him, except that he had the unshakeable confidence of being his mother's favourite or only child. His close-shaven jaw was slightly shadowed, his tie pin was a little too emphatic, his suit a little too formal for so early in the morning, and his buttonhole of a pink rose quite outrageous according to the canons of public-school taste. Phryne was very pleased with her acquisition.

'Delighted,' he murmured, looking into her eyes. She bit into a crust and the young man dragged his gaze away and caught sight of her bedtime reading. He shuffled quickly through the books.

'Ah, yes. Mr Goldman.'

'Have you read it?' asked Phryne, spreading cherry jam on her roll.

'\es, certainly. "The Jewish problem is not a Jewish problem, but a gentile problem, and only the gentiles can solve it." The trouble with being a Jew—apart from being Chosen and presumably God knew what he was doing when he Chose us—is that we have no home. There really is no place where the Jews have not lived for years and felt safe which has not turned against them. We exist everywhere on sufferance—here, for example.'

'Here?' Phryne sat up a little. 'There have been no pogroms here.'

'No, but immigration is restricted. If there was an emergency somewhere—Russia, for example—and the Jews had to flee, as they fled in 1492 from Ferdinand and Isabella in Spain, where would they go? Our own assimilationists would keep the Russians out, saying that there was no room in this country for the sweepings of the Soviet ghettos as they said about the immigrants fleeing the Czarist May laws in 1881. The Jews who have been here for a couple of generations—and Australia has only been settled for a few generations, you know—would keep the others away because they are afraid of turning even this laconic place against us. They are afraid of there being too many Jews attracting too much attention and envy. We have not forgotten Ikey Mo in the
Bulletin
in the nineties, you know'

'The
Bulletin
in the nineties hated everyone,' objected Phryne. 'Along with Ikey Mo there was Johnnie Chinaman and Jacky-Jacky the aborigine and Paddy the drunken Irishman and they weren't keen on women, either, looking on my own sex, as I understand, as the root of all evil. But what's the solution? If your own people want to restrict immigration, what is to be done?'

'A homeland,' said Simon, and his face shone with a pure light of dedication.

'Where?' asked Phryne, putting the tray on her bedside table.

'Palestine ...'

He looked so beautiful, his long lashes lowered over the bright eyes, that Phryne reached out and caressed the curly hair and the smooth cheek. Simon Abrahams nestled into the touch and kissed her palm, and Phryne gasped. Her hand dropped to the broadcloth lap, and Simon made the same noise. She undid his tie, shucked his coat, took the studs from his sleeves. 'Come and lie down with me,' she whispered.