He was glad to part with Logan and Oliver. They had so much to settle with each other that he felt he was an unnecessary third. Paris had done violence to their relationship. They had gone there light of heart; they had returned oppressed and entangled. . . . And in London it was raining; but that was good, because familiar. It was good to go out into the friendly streets and to see them shining like black rivers, and to see the people hurrying under their dripping umbrellas and the women with their skirts up to their knees.
He seemed to have been away a very long time, and yet Paris seemed very far off too, an unreal memory, like a place of which he had read or seen in photographs. He was glad when he mounted a bus and knew that it was bearing him towards his own people.
Golda was very excited. She had had a letter from Harry, who had seen his brother in Paris, but had been too shy to speak to him because of his friends.
“You should have gone to see your brother,” she said.
“How could I?” asked Mendel. “I did not know where he was.”
“You speak Yiddish. You could have found him. He has done very well, but he is coming home to us. He does not like to live away from his people, and he says England is best.”
And Mendel thought that England was indeed best. For him, then, England meant his mother’s kitchen, with its odd decorations from Tottenham Court Road, its dresser crammed with gilded china and fringed with cut green paper, its collection of his early pictures, almost all hanging crooked, and the hard wooden chair in which Golda sat all day long with her hands on her stomach, dreaming and brooding of her life, which through all her hardships had been sweet because of her beautiful child whom everybody loved and spoiled, as she herself loved and spoiled him because he was not like other children. England was best because it could contain that peace and that beauty, and there was nothing in England to harm it or in envy to destroy it.
Mendel could understand his brother wanting to come back to it; for he, too, from all his adventures, returned to its simplicity for strength and comfort.
Moscowitsch came in with a Jewish paper. He was in a terrible state of anger and hatred. His eyes flashed and his nostrils quivered as he read out how a Jew in Russia had been accused of killing a Christian boy for his blood, and how over a thousand Jews had been massacred on the instigation of the police.