The Mandelbaum Gate by Muriel Spark

to
see you. She is decidedly the same Miss Rickward who is a close friend of Miss
Vaughan out here. You were right in assuming that Miss Vaughan’s fiancé is an
archaeologist who is working at present in the Dead Sea area where the Scrolls
were discovered. Apparently there is some hitch about the proposed marriage,
since he is divorced and she is R.C. Of course, it is quite absurd, in my
opinion, when a couple of grown-up people …
     
    Freddy
had filled most of the pages he had to fill, and it was time for bed.
     
    At eleven o’clock on
Saturday morning Freddy took Joanna and Matt to Alexandros’s shop to show them
the icon. Joanna, sitting at the back of the car with quantities of shopping,
waved to everyone whom she recognized, including Joe Ramdez, who stood in the
street outside his business premises, wearing a red fez, talking to another
Arab.
    ‘He
hasn’t set off for Amman yet,’ Freddy said.
    ‘They’re
going to Amman in the symbolic sense,’ said Matt.
    ‘He’s
waiting to pounce on Miss Vaughan,’ Joanna said, for the subject of Miss
Vaughan and her difficulties had by now taken a fantastic turn among them, from
so much talking it over. First thing in the morning Joanna had declared she had
thought about Miss Vaughan far into the night. She regretted talking to Ramdez
about Miss Vaughan’s impending visit. But she was used to dealing with other
people’s predicaments, even when she had helped to induce them, and in fact
could not easily adapt herself to the idea that anyone outside her immediate
acquaintance had no problems to be sorted out. Her imagination clung to the
intricate danger attached to Miss Vaughan’s story, and she had managed, in the
course of the morning, by batting the shuttlecock of Miss Vaughan’s name back
and forth between herself and the two men, to infect even them with a kind of
irrational excitement over the ways and means by which Miss Vaughan could be
trapped by her Jewish blood, could be arrested as an Israeli spy far beyond the
assistance of the British Foreign Office, on her arrival in Jordan.
    Freddy
had begun to feel a little frightened. He certainly did not want to be involved
in an international incident. And for Miss Vaughan’s own sake, he really must,
he had decided, somehow prevent her from visiting Jordan. He had a strange
difficulty now, in remembering what she looked like; he had in his mind only
the outline of a frail, sharp, nervy, dark woman, fearfully indiscreet.
    Matt
himself said to Freddy, as they drove into the Old City:
    ‘Can’t
you do something at the office to prevent her from coming over — take away her
passport, or something?’
    ‘Oh,
no,’ Freddy said. ‘Anyway, she’s nothing to do with us. ‘He did not like the
sound of his words as they were the sort of words that always, to the outsider,
suggested Pontius Pilate washing his hands of a potential source of
embarrassment; none the less, Freddy felt sympathy for Pontius Pilate, a government
officer, and for all those subordinates of Pilate who, like himself, no doubt,
had been officially dim, dutiful, and absolutely against intervention between
individuals and their doom. Freddy said, ‘If she gets into trouble we can make
a protest afterwards.’ His reflections had been unusual in the form they had
taken, and he felt they were quite absurd; it was only because Matt had now
parked the car and they were emerging from it to face the narrow Via Dolorosa
within sight of the Ecce Homo Arch, the place from where, by erroneous
tradition, Pontius Pilate had addressed the crowd. The real Judgement Palace of
Pilate had newly been excavated, and was some yards distant from the Via
Dolorosa, and some feet deeper. Miss Vaughan herself, of course, was the sort
of person who somehow induced one to think in terms of religion if one thought
about her at all.
    Most of
the way to Alexandros’s shop Joanna kept referring with genuine concern to Miss
Vaughan’s predicament, hushing her voice