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dishes for the Passover. Everything separate. The usual plates and
things are not used during the Passover,’ said young Aunt Sadie, instructively,
to Barbara. Young Aunt Sadie tried to take the place of her mother, who, since
her father had broken his neck in a ditch, had married again, this time to a
Japanese embassy official, and lived in Paris; she was a very lost limb to the
Aaronsons.
    Barbara
surrendered the washing-up to her relations, feeling her ignorance in these
matters to be an abyss of details. She was aware, too, that she would never
make an attempt to acquire the missing knowledge; there were too many other
things that she had resolved to learn. She looked at Sadie and said
resentfully, ‘I’ll never learn your ways, I’m afraid.’
    ‘Well,
you might learn some manners,’ said quick-tongued Aunt Sadie.
    ‘Sadie!
Sadie! She is, bless her, a child only,’ said the very old Auntie Bea.
    Michael
said, ‘And she’s been eating ham sandwiches at her tennis party this afternoon.
Not kosher, that girl.’
    ‘Cucumber
sandwiches,’ said Barbara.
    Old
Auntie Bea, who was always anxious to make the peace, and the syntax of whose
utterances was the joy of the younger generation, dried her plump fingers, and
nodding her head towards Barbara, said ‘Cucumbers! I have made yesterday
cucumbers in pickle, twenty. Thirty-six last week in the jars I have with
vinegar made, cucumbers.’
     
    At Joppa, then, when
Barbara came to be leaning over the sea-wall, she said to Saul Ephraim, who
reminded her much of the Aaronson cousins of her youth: ‘My Gentile relations
tried too hard to forget I was a half-Jew. My Jewish relations couldn’t forget
I was a half-Gentile. Actually, I didn’t let them forget, either way.’
    ‘Quite
right. Why should you forget what you are?’ said Saul. ‘You were right.’
    ‘I know
that. But one doesn’t altogether know what one is. There’s always more to it
than Jew, Gentile, half-Jew, half-Gentile. There’s the human soul, the
individual. Not “Jew, Gentile” as one might say “autumn, winter”. Something unique
and unrepeatable.’
    He
smiled as if he had heard it all before.
    ‘Then
why did you choose the Gentile side in the end?’
    ‘I didn’t
choose any side at any time.’
    ‘You
became a Catholic.’
    ‘Yes,
but I didn’t become a Gentile. It wouldn’t be possible, entirely, seeing that I’m
a half-Jew by natural birth.’
    ‘Well,
but look, Christianity’s a Gentile religion. It’s all the same to me, but it’s
a question of fact.’
    Not
essentially. After all, it started off as a new ordering of the Jewish
religion.’
    ‘Well,
it’s changed a lot since then.’
    ‘Only
accidentally. It’s still a new order of an older firm.’
    ‘Did
you get your Catholic instruction from the Jesuits, by any chance?’ he said.
    She
giggled. ‘Yes, in fact I did.’
    ‘I
thought so.’
    ‘You
can discredit the Jesuits but you can’t refute the truth.’
    Well,
you can’t expect our population to make these distinctions. Catholic is
Gentile to them.’
    ‘Perhaps
I should hush it up while in Israel, that I’m a half-Jew by birth,’ she said.
    ‘You’d
be wiser to hush it up when you go over to Jordan. Here, you only risk an
argument, but there you might get shot.’
     
    The wall on which she now
sat on the summit of Mount Tabor was part of an ancient fortress, the
foundations of which lay about five feet on the far side. Looking behind her she
could see the weedy floor of this excavated plot. In the self-absorption of the
hour, even this small rectangle of archaeology related itself to her life. She
recalled the dig at St Albans in Hertfordshire last summer. A Roman villa was
being excavated. Her cousin, Miles Vaughan, now married and living at St
Albans, took an active interest in the old Roman area of the city and always
entertained the archaeologists when they came in the summer to work on the
ruins. Barbara was intending to spend only a week with