When We Were Bad: A Novel - Softcover

Charlotte Mendelson

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0330449303 ISBN 13: 9780330449304

Publisher: Picador, 2007

Synopsis

When We Were Bad

About this title

About the Author

Charlotte Mendelson was born in 1972 and grew up in Oxford. Her first short story was published in New Writing 7 and broadcast on Radio 4. This is her third novel. She lives in London with her family and works in publishing.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Prologue

Sunday 18 February 2001

The Rubin family, everybody agrees, seems doomed to happiness.

Today is the wedding day of Leo, the firstborn. He is thirty-four; he has not hurried, but now he is to marry and the next installment of family history has been ensured. There is, in the jokes of his many ushers, his parents’ smiling efficiency, the kisses and handshakes of his older relatives, a sense of relief.
The wedding will begin in fourteen minutes. Grandchildren frolic in the bright sunlight. Elderly and difficult cousins, naphthalene-scented in ancient Marks and Spencer’s good winter coats, raise their chins and ignore each other, their cheeks wet with wind-tears. Despite the intense cold of this February day, nobody wants to go inside. It is much more fun to circulate, speculate, pretend to ignore the onlookers, wait for the photographers to look your way.
But they will not. No one is interested in you. There is one star of this show: tall and distractingly voluptuous in sea-green silk devoré. With her in their midst, this brilliant schtuppable pioneer, who could not be happy? Every one of the three professionals’ cameras, the eighty-one amateur Nikons and Canons, points at that bone structure, that smile. Lean handsome old men, short dark sharp-suited young men, shrunken great- aunts with lizard eyes, watch each other, watch the celebrities, but most of all watch her. Even the passersby are unable to pass by. Whether or not they recognize her, their eyes are drawn in one direction, in her direction: at Rabbi Claudia Rubin, mother of the groom.

It is time to go in, but no one can quite break free. She shines among them, caramel-skinned, narrow-eyed, with a brain women envy and an opulent, maternal, fuckable body which makes men weak. Those guests who do not know her well mill cautiously in her direction, hoping for their moment. Those who do remain nearby, reluctant to release their hold.
Almost forgotten, the bride, Naomi Grossman, and her parents are approaching the synagogue in a car from Woodside Park. They are mute with excitement. Rabbi Rubin has been so good to them, letting their own rabbi lead the service, insisting on paying for the reception and flowers and photographers, for all that catering. What could they do but stand back and let her take charge?
Nearly time,” murmurs Claudia’s husband, Norman.
Mm,” says Leo.
Hooray!” says Claudia to one guest, then another. Her dress is tight: not unseemly, but it shows her at her confusing best. All the way from Newcastle with your sore leg! Thank God you’ve come. I have the most unbelievable blisters. You smell amazing. If it rains, we’re screwed.” Even her youngest children are attentive, affectionate, as close as a family can be: tall handsome Simeon at her left shoulder, lovely Emily at her right. If this, the few minutes before the wedding, could be frozen and kept unsullied by the future the Rubins in their heyday their happiness would be complete. But it cannot be frozen. Things happen.
One

It is beginning.
Come in!” says Claudia, waving her guests through. Sweetheart, how gorgeous you look. Hello! No, it’s not me, couldn’t possibly do it today it’s Naomi’s rabbi, Nicky Baum, you’ll know him. Oh, you hero you made it! Hello, gorgeous, how are you? ” They are all smiling as they approach. Her warm brown hand on their arms sustains them. The Rubins can be relied on. This will be a memorable wedding.

Beyond the railings the onlookers, dressed in their ordinary weekend clothes, begin to move away. Those who recognize Claudia or one of her friends will report their sighting later, proprietorially. Those who do not will ask themselves the same uneasy question as their day progresses: Who were those people? The old women with their foreign accents, the young men with their suits: they make them think of the Mafia, of rich foreign families with their secrets and their power. Look at those expensive handbags, the sunglasses on a cold Sunday afternoon. Who do they think they are?
A few others, the most observant a financial journalist, a French lawyer, an osteopath notice details: the clip on a skullcap glinting in the sun; the discreet brass sign beside the gates. They start to look more carefully at the hair, the faces. And, as they move on, one thought unites them: Bloody Jews.
* Are you ready?” asks Leo’s father, his sisters, his brother, as if he weren’t the famously steady son, the memory machine. They ask him anxiously, and so he reassures them.
Yes,” he says, touching his pocket, his heart. Of course I am.” Out of the corner of his eye he watches his mother speaking to her buffoonish stand-in, Rabbi Nicholas BBaum of West Finchley Liberal, his slender wife by his side.

Beneath the wedding canopy, Frances, the elder of Leo’s two sisters, is trying to feel moved..... This is, after all, an occasion. Her favorite sibling, after a life of diligent hard work and gentle correctness, has earned a clever moley wife who loves his mother almost as much as he does. She is his reward, as Frances’s reward for instructing him in the ways of normal people is an embarrassing place of honor under the chuppah where, in a few moments, his married life will begin.
Look at him now, bending down from the bimah to correct the angle of his one goyisher usher’s skullcap: at that stocky barrel-chested nervousness and extraordinarily square jaw and furry-eyebrowed frown. If anyone can be relied upon to make the cousins happy, to do his duty, he is the one. And he and Naomi, his bride, will be perfect together, testing each other on legal precedents, teaching their fortunate children to argue Talmudic niceties, very politely. He has found the only woman in the world willing to spend her honeymoon visiting the observatory at Salamanca. Truly, Frances is glad for them.
But, oh God, the future. She loves her brother, of course she does, but the thought of the obligatory Friday nights ahead, the unabridged prayers and poached chicken and bathroom full of peach hand towels, fills her with a strange disloyal heaviness. Besides, her imagination is wringing every last possibility for tragedy from the joyous scene before her: heart attacks during the service, car crashes en route to the airport; even a sudden fatal flaw in the synagogue’s foundations.
Relax, she tells herself, fiddling with the official pen for the signing of the Ketubah, but the truth is that she does not know how to. These huge family occasions are worse than shul. Everyone knows you, everyone wants to pinch your cheeks, remind you of the time you wet yourself at cheder, ask why you won’t grow your hair or go to ophthalmology school like your uncle. There is no escape.
And, as several of them have helpfully mentioned as they pressed her to their bosoms, today of all days she does not look good. The dress her mother had offered to lend her, clinging, patterned, size fourteen, made her look like a flagpole in a sack. When she was summoned to the bathroom this morning to model her own choice, Claudia’s face, framed in bubbles, made the scale of her error plain.
Oh Lord, darling,” she had said.
It is, admittedly, only creased green cotton but she has always thought it a relatively successful student purchase, concealing her lack of bosom with an interestingly forties-style tie at the side. She had planned to wear it with a new blue silk cardigan and a pair of silver earrings from the Moroccan stall at Camden Lock: Land Girl with a touch of the Orient. Through the steam, however, it looked very different: a housecoat, a hospital garment for the insane. Her fifty-five-year-old mother, naked, looked better dressed than she.
Claudia had sat up, slick dark hair like an otter, breasts and shoulders shining: too monumental to be beautiful but beautiful all the same. Couldn’t you,” she asked, at least have had a haircut?” The truth is that no haircut could possibly help. After an unlovely doughy girlhood the wrong bones poked through and now she is like a Victorian spinster, a tall thin unbeautiful woman, with pale wrists like light bulbs, a skinny breastbone, long cold feet. Even on her own wedding day she had fallen short of prettiness, as if the dressmaker had drawn the outline and then cut a centimeter outside it. When she had moved toward her perfect husband-to-be, the fabric seemed to hang back.
The others compensate. Not Leo, of course; he is a lawyer. No one expects them to be handsome. But look at her mother; even her father, with his brainy forehead and eagle’s eyebrows, his mighty nose, is growing into his face. Look at her little sister, Emily, plump-skinned and shining- haired as a French king’s mistress, not a modern girl at all. Or her younger brother, Simeon, thick-lashed as a baby, his dark dreadlocks tied in a topknot for the occasion like a bandit prince pretending to be tame. The older guests can’t stop kissing them: so charming, so naughty, so wonderfully talented, so prone to drama although, dear God, please not today. And, of course, their unwed state adds interest because marriage, apparently, is always a good thing.
Never forget,” her mother reminded her only this morning, what you and now Leo have is the greatest gift of all. You’re the lucky ones. Think of your brother and poor Emily. It’s very hard for them.” Frances knows she is lucky. It is emotion, purely, which makes her put down the glass she has been wrapping carefully in a double layer of napkin how many stamping grooms have severed an artery? and claw a fragment of tissue from her sleeve. Crying at w...

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0330449303
• ISBN 13: 9780330449304
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 368