by Esther Freud
‘“But we are on our honeymoon,” Wolf protested. “My wife has been looking forward to this for several weeks.” But the manager only looked at us sadly and repeated the rules of the casino. Suddenly I remembered my mother’s letter. It was in my purse where I had folded it away. I pulled it out and showed it to him, “Herr and Frau Belgard,” he read, and in an instant we were inside, walking up the steps to the roulette tables where Wolf won enough money to buy me a white feather boa and a parasol.’ Angelika and Julika leant forwards, smiling in perfect joy. ‘And with the rest of the winnings we bought my mother some Swiss chocolate, and for years after she insisted it was the best she’d ever tasted.’
Eva watched her mother’s laughing face. ‘Can I pour you another cup of this disgusting coffee?’ Marianna asked, but the girls stood up to go. They left messages for Bina and Martha and, without having had a chance to commiserate at any length over Emanuel, the Samsons walked out into the street.
Chapter 14
My mother was the owner of a tiny garden, two floors down and reached through someone else’s hall. There was a plum tree in the centre and a small polythene pond. While we talked she pulled up stems of elder, tugging at the roots with her bare hands.
‘Well, I hope Mike is contributing.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He sends me money every so often.’
A root cracked out of the earth and almost shot her backwards. ‘You should insist on something definite, a regular allowance.’
‘Oh, Mum.’
‘Take him to court.’ She was fuelling to be angry. ‘Force him to pay you proper maintenance.’
‘It’s only been three months.’ When she sat down beside me, rubbing the dirt from her hands on to her shorts, I argued, ‘I don’t remember you taking my father to court.’
‘Of course I didn’t. That’s why I’m concerned.’ And with one muddy finger she lifted the corner of her grandson’s hat. ‘I was young and stupid,’ she said.
‘Well, now I’m young and stupid too.’
‘No,’ she insisted, ‘you’re not allowed to be.’
‘Oh, Mum.’ She was right. Twenty-seven wasn’t young. ‘It’s just so difficult . . .’
‘It’s always difficult.’
‘Well, you know . . . with him not wanting to have a baby, being so clear . . .’
‘You think your father–’ And she stopped herself in time. ‘Well, let’s face it, he wasn’t down on his knees begging for another child. And now,’ she tried not to look hurt, ‘he sees more of you than I do.’
‘Oh, Mum, that isn’t true.’ For a while we sat in silence, squeezed together on the tiny patch of lawn. ‘It’s just you work so hard.’
‘Yes.’ She smiled, indulgent. In the last few years my mother’s life had been transformed. She’d given up the part-time jobs, the cleaning and childminding that had seen us through, and had learnt how to lay out artwork on computers. She spent weeks bubbling and absorbed, laying the flowers she’d always loved to draw one upon another, swirling them round into patterns, and always with another commission looming up.
‘How’s the painting going?’ she asked eventually, and I told her that Sonny had almost outgrown his Babygro. The more he grew the less there was of me. ‘It looks finished but, of course, I don’t like to mention it.’ And we both laughed, glad to have something to share.
There was a painting that still hung on my father’s wall. It was of my mother, her limbs waxy and white, her hair like silk along her back. ‘You were lucky,’ I told her, ‘to be immortalized before realism set in,’ and I thought of my thick legs, blue-veined and raw around the knee. ‘Even Sonny looks as if he might be going in for the Middleweight Championship of Great Britain,’ and I glanced at the uncurling fingers of his fists.
‘Oh, let me hold him,’ she said, and I moved the bundle of his body over to her lap.
‘Anyway,’ I stretched my back and arms, ‘Dad is paying me to sit, and I just got a repeat cheque for that advert I did last year.’
‘Goo goo goo,’ my mother wasn’t listening, ‘who’s a beautiful little boy? Who’s a gorgeous little dote?’ And she squealed with delight when Sonny opened his gummy mouth and smiled back at her. ‘Isn’t he clever?’ she exclaimed. ‘Isn’t he extraordinary?’ And I had to remind her through my pride that all babies smiled at around six weeks.
‘And there might be some family money, you know, on Dad’s side.’
But she was playing peekaboo with Sonny’s bonnet, leaning him up against her knees and beaming victory each time he laughed.
‘Dad.’ I rang the bell again and called to him through the door. I’d brought Sonny over on the bus, enjoying the admiring looks and the repeated questions from old ladies. ‘Is he good?’ ‘Oh, yes, he’s very good.’ I beamed down proudly at my boy.
It wasn’t like my father to be late. He rarely left his studio except to shop for food, and then usually he went out in the early morning before any of us would sit. I rang the bell again just to be sure, and as I turned, a car slowed in the street. I saw my father, small and nervous, leaping out. ‘I’m sorry,’ he mouthed to me as he slammed the door, but the driver of the car had rushed round on to the pavement to intercept him. He was a small, plump man with round Mongolian eyes, and as he talked he nodded earnestly, making elaborate gestures with his hands. I stayed watching as my father backed away, giving out answers of a word. The car was double parked and people began to hoot and jeer behind them. ‘All right then, fine,’ I heard my father say, and with a quick shake of his head the man ran back to his side of the car and slipped into his seat.
‘I’m so sorry.’ He drew his keys in a long line from his pocket.
‘So who was that?’
My father rolled his eyes. ‘My cousin Johann.’
John Godber?’ Now I wished I’d gone over to be introduced. My uncle, I wondered, or my second cousin, and I tried to recall with more detail exactly how he’d looked. ‘Was that your Aunt Bina’s son?’
He winced. ‘The terrible Aunt Bina. You know she made my mother’s life a misery?’
‘How come?’
‘Just pettiness and jealousy.’ He had to think for a minute. ‘Yes, when my grandmother lived with us in the house in London, my mother had to pretend to hate her.’
‘But I thought you said she did dislike her. They all did.’
‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t think I meant that. But certainly my awful Aunt Bina really loathed her. Well, really, she disliked just about everyone.’
‘And Johann’s father? Who was he? She must have liked him for five minutes at least.’
My father, with an eye for gossip, told me he’d deserted. ‘He got as far away as he could – Lapland, I think he may have settled in.’
‘That’s ridiculous.’ I laughed, and watched him while he changed his clothes. He was wearing the suit he’d welcomed Sonny in, grey, with the same black, polished shoes, and as he slung it over a chair, I noticed rainbow welts of paint across his legs. He put on workman’s trousers, stiff with oils, and an old shirt, one sleeve torn around the cuff.
‘So what did he want, your cousin?’ I moved Sonny to my other breast as he wheeled the easel over.
‘That bloody house.’
‘Gaglow?’ I found myself offended. ‘Not Gaglow?’
He cranked the handle up to bring the picture into line. ‘I should never have got involved.’ He stamped hard on a tube of white to force out the thick paint.
‘What’s happened now?’
‘Well . . .’ He was eyeing Sonny with his head on one side. ‘Johann wants to sell it.’ He began mixing new white into green. I noticed for the first time how the towelling of the Babygro had faded with the wash. ‘And the maddening thing is that all sorts of people have to agree. Someone wants it rented out so it will be worth more in ten years, and there’s one old bat who thinks we should just donate it to the Germans so they don’t start thinking badly of us again.’ He gasped in open-mouthed amazement. ‘Of cours
e, Johann, who must be nearly seventy, would prefer the money now.’
‘Is there no one who wants to keep it?’ I asked. ‘We could use it as a sort of time-share holiday home.’ But my father was laying new strokes of thick pale colour and didn’t even take the trouble to look up.
‘The maddening thing is,’ he said, after a while, ‘Johann wants me to go out there. There are certain things that need to be sorted out, apparently, although really I can’t think what.’
‘Can’t he go himself?’
‘Well, he’s already been there once, and he runs some waste-disposal empire, can’t always get away.’
He worked on in silence, and then he said, ‘After the war, when I was seventeen, Germany had to make reparations to all the children whose education had been disrupted . . . I remember saying to my father then that I didn’t want their stinking money, and I have to say I feel the same way now.’
‘But, really, it’s not their money –’
‘My father said, “Look, if you don’t take it, all the more for them.”’
‘And did you?’
He didn’t answer.
‘I suppose you could take it and then just give the money away.’ I thought of myself in a cottage in the country. I would choose one without too many stairs with a flat lawn on which Sonny could play. We could have a tree for climbing and a fence around a deep, cool lake where, once a year, we’d skate over the ice.
‘Yes, that’s what I thought. I took almost all of it and put it on a dog. Well, the rotten thing came in, and so with the winnings I went out and bought myself ten boxes of the most expensive paints.’
‘You tried,’ I told him quickly. ‘What more could you do?’
‘Yes, and anyway I made sure to use only the winning money on the paint. The rest,’ he said, after a minute, ‘I just let dribble away.’
I kept my head down while he worked on and on, and thought of our three mothers, who wouldn’t have cared one way or another where the reparation money had come from.
‘You have to understand that I was very young,’ he said, as if he’d heard me, and he stamped hard on another tube of paint, stooping to catch the thick sludge with his knife.
Pam was back in London. She came round on her first day off, radiant in a rose-patterned dress. ‘You’re looking great,’ she told me, grazing my cheek with sugar-candy hair. ‘You’ve lost all your baby fat.’
‘It’s the stairs,’ I told her, ‘and rushing round after the great Lord Sonny.’
She looked at him, his wrists and ankles braceleted with fat, his skin thick apricot. ‘I can’t believe he’s yours.’ She laughed.
We both peered into his face. ‘His eyes could still get lighter,’ I said hopefully, and in silence we both wondered about Mike. ‘So,’ I caught her grinning, ‘things are looking up?’
She told me that Bradly Teale had had a change of heart. ‘He’s really very special,’ she said, and I tried to suppress a groan.
We went out for a walk and every twenty yards she stopped to check that her mobile phone was working. ‘I thought that was just for me,’ I joked, half-heartedly, and she tried to link her arm with mine.
We walked up into Primrose Hill, and just as we stepped on to grass the call she was expecting came ringing through. She turned away from me to talk. ‘Of course,’ she breathed, ‘I’d love to,’ and her legs and arms twined and twisted like a colt’s. ‘No, absolutely that would be fine,’ and she murmured on and on seductively for fifteen minutes using a minimum of words. Prickly and hot with irritation, I lifted Sonny out of his pushchair.
‘Tonight at eight fifteen, the Ivy,’ Pam breezed, and just then I felt a cool wet trickle as Sonny was sick over my shoulder. Pam threw herself down beside me on the grass. ‘What now?’ But I was dabbing at my shirt with a wet cloth.
‘Just wait a minute.’ I laid the baby down to change his nappy.
Pam looked on appalled. ‘It’s non-stop, isn’t it?’ She lit herself a cigarette.
‘Well, it’s not as if I’ve anything else to do.’ I rubbed cream on to his bottom. ‘My love life’s over and so is my career.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ and she reminded me she’d just wasted a month of her life in Leeds, careering round the streets in white high heels, taking orders to keep her hair out of her eyes and not to blink so much. ‘At least you’ve got something real, something permanent.’
‘Yes.’ I breathed in a trail of her white smoke. ‘A job for life.’ I looked at Sonny in his clean striped vest.
‘Cheer up,’ Pam said, forcing me to take her cigarette, and after a few quick puffs I gave in and asked about her man.
‘So, come on, is he really awful?’
Pam, thrilled finally to be asked, spent the rest of the afternoon telling me exactly how hopeless he was turning out to be. ‘And Mike?’ she asked, just as we were parting for the day, but I was much too tired for Mike, so I shook my head and told her I’d heard nothing from him at all.
‘I’ve got some rather creepy news.’ It was Kate. ‘Guess what? Our mothers have been meeting up regularly for supper.’
‘Christ.’ It seemed almost incestuous. ‘I don’t think you should mention it to Dad.’ I heard Kate laugh, as if she might just save up the information.
‘But, then, maybe that’s what they think about us.’ It had never occurred to me before. ‘You know, us all being such good friends.’
But Kate insisted it was different. ‘We’re related, you idiot.’
‘Yes, but, then, in a way so are they,’ and it suddenly surprised me that they hadn’t become friends before.
Natasha rang later, and we had the same conversation, giggling like spies, until it occurred to us that we should have a supper party of our own. ‘You’ll have to come here,’ I said, ‘because after nine at night I can’t face getting back up my stairs.’ It was arranged that on the Thursday after next we’d meet up for a rival supper.
‘Can I come?’ Pam asked, when I told her, and I tried to explain to her, an only child, that she’d be welcome on any other night. ‘Still no news from Mike?’ she asked, as if to pay me back, so I told her that actually I’d had a card from him that day.
‘Where from?’
I glanced over at the mantelpiece. ‘I’ll give you a clue,’ I told her. ‘There’s a picture of the Loch Ness monster on the front.’
‘He’s not in the new series of Kilmaaric?’
I wasn’t sure.
‘I’ll find out,’ Pam insisted, ‘I know a make-up woman whose friend is working on it,’ and she rang off.
‘Dear Sonny,’ Mike had written. ‘It’s beautiful up here, all purple and blue and smelling of heather. By the time I see you you’ll be as big as King Kong, if not my old friend Nessie,’ and he’d put two kisses beside the word Dad.
‘It’s from your daddy,’ I held it up to Sonny’s face, but the word coiled up inside my mouth and made me blush. Sonny flailed his arms for it, so I put it safely with the others on the mantelpiece.
‘Dear Sarah,’ Mike wrote the next day, ‘Here’s something to keep the boy in nappies. The job has all the usual problems, but you know me, it’s nice to have something real to complain about. I’d ask you both to come up, but . . .’ here he’d scratched something out ‘. . . you know what these places are like.’ And there was some more money, slipped into the paper fold. I lay awake that night, wishing that Mike would stay away for ever, sending sweet-smelling cards while I lived on and on in hope.
‘Is there much more to do?’ I was unpicking the seams of Sonny’s Babygro to let his toes stretch through. The picture was thickening and bending, taking on new meaning with each layer of paint. ‘That’s better,’ I murmured, as his legs eased through and I saw my father eyeing the unused feet. ‘Oh, no, don’t start adding anything new.’ But I raised my voice to turn it into a joke as I saw his shoulders stiffen with intent. He cut a knot of old paint off his palette and flung it to the floor, rinsing off the wood with turps and mixing up a
soft fresh mound of oils. ‘This suit really is only going to fit him for a few more days,’ I protested, ‘even without the feet,’ but I trailed off as he began to work.
Sonny seemed to have come round to being painted. As soon as we arrived he curved his face towards me, nuzzling my shirt, expecting to be fed, so that I had to sing at him to keep him happy while I took off my clothes. Sometimes while he sucked he looked up at me and smiled and then, very slowly, his eyelids fluttered shut and he sank into a sound, gluttonous sleep. It was almost as if he knew, while we lay there against the flowers, that for hours and hours he had me to himself.
‘Apparently,’ my father said, ‘my mother’s brother . . . What was his name?’
‘Emanuel?’
‘Yes, apparently he was taken prisoner by the Russians. I think he may even have worked in their mines during the war.’ He paused, and it occurred to me that he was trying to placate me for these endless extra weeks. ‘Anyway, I remember hearing that while he was on a train being transported from one place to another he tried to escape by climbing out of a window. He was just slipping through when the guards caught hold of him. Instead of pulling him in and punishing him they trapped him there, left him caught up in the window all night, so that his legs were damaged horribly.’
‘How terrible.’ I shivered at the thought of him hanging head down over the rails while the bone and flesh all buckled up.
‘When he did eventually come home he was a broken man.’
‘Yes.’ I imagined him on his ruined legs, limping through the city of Berlin.
‘What do you think?’ He stepped back from the easel, and there were two tiny feet, bursting like a strong man’s through the cloth.
I sat up to look.
‘No,’ he shook his head before I’d had a chance to decide, ‘it was better as it was.’ I lay down again and watched while from memory he tucked the feet back up into their towelling socks.