by Esther Freud
‘Why not let them manage as they are?’ he suggested. ‘At least we’ll have one less person to feed.’ And his words, impractical as they were, lifted her spirits. ‘How old is Eva anyway? Already turned thirteen? Well, it will be the best thing for them all.’
Marianna agreed. ‘After all,’ she said, ‘we don’t want them, middle-aged and still crying out for someone to run in and wash their necks.’
‘And, of course, Fräulein may reappear any day,’ Wolf said, and he shuffled through to the library.
They started with her dressing table. Eva and Martha could only stand and watch while, with plump fingers, Bina drew out each drawer. ‘She must keep some of her things in Berlin.’ She frowned when a stack of silk handkerchiefs, shaken out, did not disgorge a single ornament. Drawer after drawer revealed only dented beds of satin and the dried, dusty needles of lavender and pine. In separate envelopes they found locks of their hair, dry and curled from childhood. There was one for each of them and two for Bina. Bina, surprised, held the two curls up before her face, marvelling at the changing texture of the hair. The first was soft and brown, and the other sprang out from its ribbon, black and wild just as it was now. ‘How strange,’ she muttered, ‘and unusual,’ but she looked pleased as she folded both envelopes away. In a secret shelf above the turning figure of a music box they came across their mother’s ruby earrings. Bina held them up to her own ears and stood looking in the glass. She knew they had been a present from Papa on the day they married, and before that had belonged to Omi Josefa, the previous Frau Belgard.
‘Maybe when you marry they’ll be yours,’ Eva whispered, understanding for the first time the hard red planes of their beauty.
‘Not Bina’s,’ Martha said. ‘By tradition they should be passed on to the new wife. To whoever is the one Emanuel marries.’ And they all remembered their brother and what they had originally come here to do. Bina slipped the earrings back into their box and turned into the room.
‘Come on, you two.’ Bina allocated them each a bedside table, slipping her own hands into a wardrobe. Eva shivered as she stirred the private contents of the cupboard. There were books and letters and the broken strand of a necklace, so that as she pushed her fingers to the back, tiny glass beads caught below her nails. The envelopes were all addressed in a sloping, familiar hand. ‘What are these?’ she called to Bina, and Bina looked over her shoulder and reached for one.
‘From Papa to Mama, before they were married, as if he hadn’t better things to do,’ she said, and tossed it back in an arc so that the sharp corner struck Eva on the chin and a slip of paper fell out on to the floor.
‘My dearest love,’ she read, bending to retrieve it, and at the very bottom the postscript caught her eye. ‘My darling, surely you can tell me, is there a remedy for dreams?’
‘How long have we been in here?’ Martha whispered then, and they all turned anxiously towards the door.
‘Quick.’ Bina spun round. ‘Eva, search under the bed, and you Martha under the divan, and then we’d better get out.’ Eva pressed the letter back into the drawer and dropped down to her knees. She glanced along the floor, and with her fingers brushed the springs. There was nothing there, and just as she was about to crawl out, she heard the floorboards creak and a step outside the door. She swallowed hard, taking in some dust. There was another slow creak, a few fast steps, and then she recognized the old dry cough of Omi Lise. ‘Bina?’ she called sticking her nose out into the room, but she found that both her sisters had deserted.
Marianna was standing in her hat and coat, staring down at Wolf. She fixed him with a look of such severity that he jolted in his chair, rattling his paper where it drooped over his knee.
‘What is it, my dear?’ He reached for her hand. Marianna resisted, shaking him off, and Eva, her hand on the door, slunk back against the wall.
‘Wolf,’ Marianna stood a little closer so that her skirt brushed up against his knees, ‘listen to me. I don’t have anything at all to pay the gardeners. The stable roof needs mending. The girls from the village spent most of Easter grumbling. And much as we can let our debts build up in town, it is not so possible out here.’ She swallowed and her voice rose up with resentment. ‘You’ll have to help me. It’s impossible for me to understand how the business can fail when all over Germany people are talking about the huge profits to be made in agriculture from this war.’ Wolf wearily laid aside his newspaper. Marianna bit her lip, silently restraining a curse for their Kaiser who must, she assumed, have failed to pay up when making his enormous orders.
Wolf stood and put his arms around her. He could find no way of answering her question. But Marianna only backed away and, shaking her head and sighing, she hurried from the room.
Eva heard her mother’s thumbs at the piano hitting dark uneven notes. She glanced round the door. Her father was sitting exactly as before, his back bent into the leather chair, his face buried in the pages of the paper. ‘Papa?’ she called to him, and she hovered as she had seen her mother do. ‘Papa?’ But even when she passed a hand between him and the page he failed to register her presence. ‘We are going to Jerusalem,’ she whispered, remembering her childhood disappointment in him, and when he still failed to respond, she tiptoed out.
Chapter 12
My father stood in paint-splattered clothes. ‘Wait till you see this.’ It was a photograph, filmy with colour, and he laid it down over the rim of a cup so I could peer at it. It looked like a folly or a tiny bandstand, half enclosed with pillars. ‘It’s the ice-house,’ my father said, ‘at Gaglow.’ And I looked at it again. The roof was like a dovecote with rounded, sloping tiles, and I imagined the East German teachers eating their sandwiches in there.
‘Did you get another letter?’ I was feeding Sonny, weighing his little body down with milk, but my father said the photo had been sent by his first cousin John. Johann Guttenberger. Or John Godber, as he likes to be known. ‘He changed his name, poor sod, while he was still at school.’
‘Has he been out there?’
‘Yes.’ He looked faintly disgusted. ‘He flew to Berlin and hired a car and was there within an hour. I suppose this is a photograph to prove it.’
‘It’s odd he didn’t send one of the actual house.’
‘Well, I like to think it’s because the house is too big to fit into the frame,’ he laughed at himself, staring once more at the ice-house with its peeling pillars, ‘but I’m probably just making that up.’ He wheeled the easel round, squeaking it across the floor towards us.
‘So what else did your cousin say?’ I asked, once Sonny lay sozzled on my arm.
‘Well, apparently after the Wall came down they decided to use Gaglow as a centre for retraining all their teachers in good capitalist philosophy, so they did up the house, and then,’ my father stopped and waved a brush in the air, ‘imagine their horror to find that the whole place, the stables and the orchard, all belongs to a family of old Jews.’ He laughed and dipped his brush in leaf green paint. ‘They might have to be moved to some army barracks to finish off their course, and none of them are pleased.’
‘So what will happen to the house?’
‘Well, Johann says he offered to rent it back to them at some extortionate fee, but they weren’t able to afford it.’ And we laughed straight at each other, in surprised delight.
He was standing with his green brush poised, waiting to start. I laid Sonny down, cupping his head with my palm, transferring him on to the sofa as carefully as I could. I’ll wake him half-way through the afternoon, I thought, but he opened his eyes and whimpered so I picked him up again to see if he would burp. My father dropped his arm. ‘Sorry,’ I said.
Sonny burped, and I congratulated him. My father mixed more paint. ‘He should be all right now,’ I said, laying him down again, but immediately he began to cry. My father tried to get a quick stroke in before I picked him up. ‘Shhh,’ I soothed, and I put him back on for another feed.
Dad sat down in an armchair, the
springs spiralling down towards the floor. ‘So what will happen now?’ I asked, but he sighed to say he didn’t know.
Sonny was so full now that his face looked greasy and his eyes rolled back in his head. ‘Right.’ I lay down beside him, pressing one arm against his back so that he didn’t think he was alone, but before even one small lick of paint was laid, he’d woken up again and was mewling like a cat.
‘Is he all right?’ My father looked upset, and I propped myself up on one elbow and smiled as if I knew.
‘He’s fine, he just doesn’t feel like lying down.’ And I held him up against my shoulder and patted his back. All afternoon I laid him down and picked him up until my stomach ached and my hands shook with exhaustion. ‘It’s not going to work,’ I said at last, looking at my father, his face full of suspense, standing on tiptoe with one more fresh brush in his hand.
‘Is it possible he just doesn’t want to be painted?’ He looked quite serious, almost put out, but I felt too drained to do more than shrug.
There was a message from Pam when I got home. Sonny had fallen asleep in the back of the cab, and I left him in his chair on the kitchen table while I sat down on the floor. Every part of my body hurt and the left side of my scar where they’d pulled Sonny out felt ridged and tender. ‘I’m so tired,’ I almost sobbed when I got through to her. She was in a double room at the Station Hotel in Leeds.
‘Why don’t you just stop? Say you’ll do it another time?’
But my theory was that while Sonny was so small, the picture would be finished more quickly. ‘We’ve already done his ear, it’s such a waste,’ and I heard myself and laughed. ‘How are you anyway?’ I longed to hear about someone else’s life and I could tell from her jaunty tone that she had news. ‘Go on,’ I urged her, ‘tell me every single thing.’
‘You’re not going to like it,’ she warned, and she mouthed the name, half whispered, of the actor Bradly Teale.
‘No!’ I wailed, already relishing the dreadful, inevitable course of events, but Pam only sighed. It was already much too late for no. ‘I know he’s famous for being a prick, but you have to admit he’s incredibly good-looking, and . . . well, in private . . . he’s actually quite sweet.’
‘Hmm,’ I glanced over at Sonny, whose sleeping face, squashed down against his chin like an elder member of the House of Lords, filled me with such a thrill of love that I felt irrationally hopeful. ‘Well, maybe it will work out.’ I made her promise to keep me up to date with news.
I carried the baby, still asleep, through to the bedroom and, with the telephone cradled beside me, I lay down and closed my eyes. Pam, I thought, Pamela Harris, so beautiful and bright, wasting herself on Bradly Teale. At least with Mike there had been hope. We’d had nine long months of bliss, and then a year or two of ambling happiness before things started to slide. His work had dried up and he’d begun to brood. He wouldn’t make any plans with me, refused to consider a holiday or even leaving London for the day. Now when he came in from an interview he’d move over to the television and stand staring at the screen. ‘You see?’ he shook his head, ‘What’s that idiot got that I haven’t?’ and he raised the volume higher.
‘Mike!’ I’d have to stand in front of him, rip the remote out of his hands before he’d look at me.
At Christmas time we held a party, and as we loaded up the car with food – sticks of French bread, crisps and cheese – he reminded me that they weren’t his friends, the people we’d invited, and that the flat we lived in wasn’t really his. He’d just moved in with me, that was all. I snapped a stick of bread into the boot, tensing up my ears, and although his confession seemed to ease him, allowing his affection to shine through, I felt a sliding out of faith. He made love to me again, but in the mornings only, reaching out hungrily before he’d opened his eyes, and he held my hand in public, dropping it as soon as we closed our front door. ‘This summer, shall we go away somewhere, work or no work?’ I tested him, as we walked home through Regent’s Park, our fingers clinging coolly, and I looked sideways at him to gather in his doom.
I didn’t take Sonny to the studio for a week. ‘He’s enormous,’ my father said when we arrived, and we started immediately before he could grow a millimetre more. ‘He’s only a month old.’ I laughed, but it was true he’d filled out so that his cheeks looked like a hamster’s. I felt refreshed and optimistic. Thank God, I thought, as the first green stroke of paint went on and the outline of his collar frilled under his chin in white. But then his arms began to wave and he turned his head from side to side, sticking out his lower lip in preparation for tears. I pushed a pillow under my arm, turned him towards me and attached him quickly to my breast. The rising purple of his face subdued and he looked at me, long eyes dark blue with joy.
‘Do you mind?’ my father asked, readjusting the easel, and although I didn’t want my baby’s head ballooned out of proportion by one enormous breast I saw there was no other way.
‘Happy now,’ I whispered, as, still sucking, he closed his eyes and I saw the perfect painted ear rubbed out and moved a fraction round.
The new ear wasn’t quite the same. It was rougher, coiled and brown, and shadowed with the dark lines of baby hair I’d been told would disappear.
‘Oh, this is much better.’ My father rocked forward on his feet, and I thought of all the times he’d taken out a smile, a nose, the soft slope of a wrist for being too easy on the eye.
I pressed a quick kiss on Sonny’s face and thought of how I’d always been too busy for perfection, using up my time on dreams. Once, during the last act of a play, I’d drifted off into a fantasy of romance and forgotten to say my line. ‘Tssk.’ It was the actor about whom I’d just been thinking, looking far from pleased. He nudged me in the ribs, and I blushed up through my costume as I spluttered out the words.
I didn’t suffer over my work like Mike, sitting up all night with scripts, locking himself away, and shaking with pure terror when he went out on stage. It made me nervous certainly, but I was too easily distracted, sidetracked by the people in my life.
‘Dad?’ I asked. ‘Have you heard anything else about that theatre?’ But he only shook his head, mixing up more paint and frowning as he laid it on.
I’d told my agent I’d be up for work again when Sonny was three months old. Kate said she’d mind him if I got an audition, but I hadn’t taken account then of his ravenous desire for milk. ‘You should try a bottle,’ Kate said, ‘so I can feed him when you go out.’ But the thought of brand names, teat sizes and twenty minutes’ sterilizing sent fear into my heart. ‘I don’t have time to make a bottle,’ I told her, ‘I’m too busy breastfeeding,’ and anyway my agent never rang.
Pam’s agent, a sun-tanned, glinting head of a conglomerate, was making business calls from her hospital trolley as they wheeled her back up to her room. ‘But did she have a Caesarean?’ I asked, refusing to be impressed, and Pam laughed.
‘You think Camilla Heston was going to waste days of her life in labour? She booked in three weeks early to coincide with Christmas and was back at work straight after New Year.’
‘That’s disgusting.’ I felt relieved that my own agent, a timid, balding man of fifty-two, was most unlikely even to know about such things.
‘That’s wonderful news, darling,’ he said, when I told him I was pregnant, and apart from a large and inappropriate card of animals tearing into flesh, I’d heard nothing from him since.
‘Dad,’ I tried again, as he clattered round the kitchen, ‘what’s happened about this theatre?’
He had to think for some time to know what I was talking about. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said at last. ‘Your theatre.’ A pan jumped twice as it hit the floor. ‘I’m afraid we were slightly mis-led over the theatre.’ He explained that it was, in fact, a grain warehouse that had been used by a nearby theatre to store their props. ‘The warehouses will be sold on together as a lot,’ he said. ‘They’re not even worth much, according to Johann.’
‘Have you heard from h
im again, then, your cousin?’
But the subject was putting him into a bad mood. ‘Oh, endless, ridiculous complications.’ He turned a flame up high. ‘I’ve said I want nothing more to do with any of it.’
I felt a sudden, irrational slump of gloom. It’s Sonny’s inheritance as well, I found myself thinking, and I shook my head, knowing it was easier not to think about such things, to expect nothing and then only be surprised.
My father passed me a plate of quail eggs, tipping a mound of celery salt onto the side. ‘Thanks.’ I cracked the dappled shells, peeling them away with the fingers of one hand. It was true he’d never shown much interest in money. His pictures he sold to his friends, who often sold them on for more, and any spare money he collected he used to lure his models with sumptuous food. He paid us by the hour, and when and if the painting sold, he always gave over a small sum.
‘Will you let me know if you need anything?’ he said that evening, tweaking Sonny’s nose, and it made me think of Mike and how he’d mumbled the same message into my machine.
It was a beautiful blue day, spring blazing into summer with blossom giving way to fat green leaves. I walked between Kate and Natasha, the long way round to buy ice cream.
‘Have either of you seen Dad?’ I asked, as we walked up towards the Heath. ‘I mean, have you heard the news about Gaglow?’
‘No.’ Natasha laughed. ‘What is it?’