The Rotters' Club

by Jonathan Coe

  The house itself was glorious. It stood right on the beach and its great, high windows allowed tremendous vistas on to the silver breakers which pounded the length of the seemingly endless strand. It had been built slightly apart from the rest of the village and had only one near neighbour, a more modest dwelling which nonetheless shared the same extraordinary views; shared more than that, in fact, for neither house had a proper back garden, merely stretches of rough turf which touched, blended and then ran together into the rising mass of dunes behind.

  Paul and I were so excited by this new habitat that we didn’t even baulk at the sleeping arrangements: we were to sleep together in the sitting room, on a pair of camp beds. Normally I had little to say to my brother; but that night, after the thrill of arrival had subsided, I felt my first and only pang of homesickness, listening to the angry roar of the waves and watching the moonlight throw eerie shadows around the room. I whispered to him as we lay wakeful in the dark:

  “I’m sorry we couldn’t go to Wales this year.”

  “We go to Wales every year,” he answered. “If it was up to you and Mother, this family would never do anything new or interesting at all. I like this place.”

  “So do I,” I admitted, “but I was thinking of Grandma and Grandpa.”

  My mother’s parents always came to Wales with us, staying at a guest house on the road to Porth Ceiriad bay. This year they would be going by themselves, and I knew that they would miss us.

  “They’ll be fine,” Paul said, dismissively. “Now let’s get to sleep. I want to swim before breakfast tomorrow.”

  It was new to me, this enthusiasm for swimming on my brother’s part. He is naturally slight of stature, but I realized over the next few days that he must have been taking a lot of exercise recently; his arms had grown strong and muscular, and the solid wall of muscle that had begun to appear on his stomach was explained by the production of a Bullworker from his suitcase: one of those fierce-looking devices which you see advertised in the back pages of magazines and comics, promising the sort of physique which will bring bikini-clad girls running admiringly towards you on the beach. It turned out that he was by far the best swimmer out of our party, ploughing ahead of Rolf through the ocean’s choppy depths while Ulrike, Ursula and I would remain floundering in the shallows.

  I am not, in any case, one of nature’s athletes. Because the countryside around us was completely flat I was happy to make use of the bicycles which we found at the house, but rarely for purposes more energetic than a journey to Skagen itself. Here I found pursuits more to my taste. I spent many hours in the Skagens Museum, which housed a fine collection of paintings by the members of the Skagen school who worked there in the early years of the century, drawn to this Northern outcrop by the special quality of light reflected from the surrounding seas. I enjoyed lingering by the busy harbour, watching the boats arrive with their vast trawls of skate and flounder and herring. I rode out towards Hulsig with my mother and father, to visit the Sand-Filled Church, once the parish church of Skagen but now almost half-buried by the drifting dunes. And it was pleasant simply to walk through Skagen itself, along the tranquil backwater of Østerbyvej, where the yellow and gold houses, with their half-timber work and tarred gables, seemed as trim, courteous and well-meaning as the Danes who inhabited them.

  But none of these words, sadly, could be applied to the Danish boys who lived next door to us at Gammel Skagen.

  Their names were Jorgen and Stefan, and they shared their small house with an elderly couple whom we took to be their grandparents. I would have guessed that Stefan was about fifteen, Jorgen perhaps two or three years older. From the very beginning, they seemed to take a dislike to us; or at least, if not to all of us, then certainly to the Baumanns; or rather, if not to all of the Baumanns, then certainly to Rolf, whom they teased, taunted and bullied at every opportunity.

  Rolf was a strong but clumsy and awkward boy of fourteen. Like all of the Baumanns he spoke excellent English and on this holiday, much to my surprise, he formed a rapid and powerful bond with my brother, who does not make friendships easily. They would engage in swimming contests, run races along the beach, disappear for long cycle rides together and play inexhaustible games of “three and in” with a football on the back lawn. It was in the middle of one of these games, as I watched from my reading chair at the sitting-room window, that Jorgen and Stefan first came to talk to them.

  “Hey! Germans!” Jorgen called out. “This is our back garden. Who said you could play your stupid games of football on our lawn?”

  Rolf said nothing; just looked at the two tall Danes apprehensively.

  Paul said: “I’m not German, I’m from England. And this is the back of our house, as well as yours.”

  “But your friend is German, yes? He looks like a tyg Tysker. ” (Meaning “fat German,” I was later told.)

  “His name’s Rolf,” my brother said, “and I’m Paul. And I bet we can beat you six-nil if we play for ten minutes each way.”

  By this means he managed to defuse the situation, and soon the four of them were involved in a keenly fought contest. Perhaps too keenly fought, to tell the truth: for I could see that every time a goal was scored, it was bitterly disputed by the opposing side, and other loud arguments would erupt every minute or two. The two Danish boys played aggressively, homing in on Rolf whenever he had possession and often scything him to the ground with a vicious tackle. Later that evening I heard him protesting to his mother that he had bruises all over his shins.

  “I don’t like those boys,” he complained again, as we all sat down to dinner that night in the enormous family kitchen. “They’re too tough and too rude.”

  “We still beat them, though,” Paul boasted. “A notable victory for the Anglo-German alliance.”

  “You didn’t take part, Benjamin?” Gunther asked, as he passed me a plate of cheese and cold meat.

  “My brother doesn’t play games,” said Paul. “He’s an aesthete. He sat by the window all afternoon with a funny look on his face: probably composing a tone poem.”

  “Really?” said Gunther. “I knew you were hoping to be a writer, Benjamin. You compose music, as well?”

  “Not really,” I answered, shooting Paul a resentful glance. “I just like to write tunes sometimes, inspired by people, or places.”

  “Well.” Gunther seemed impressed. “Perhaps you would try to compose something inspired by my two beautiful daughters.”

  I looked across at the Gruesome Twosome, as Paul and I had privately designated the twins, and could not imagine anything more unlikely.

  “Perhaps,” I demurred.

  “How’s the car, Gunther?” my father asked, introducing a welcome change of subject.

  “Oh, it’s not too bad. A little scratch. Nothing that can’t be put right easily enough when we get home.”

  Earlier in the day Lisa had contrived to damage their car—a large BMW estate—while driving to the supermarket in Skagen with her two daughters. She had gone the wrong way down a one-way street, then attempted to perform a three-point turn which went badly awry. The car had actually got jammed sideways in the narrow carriageway and another German holiday-maker had had to rescue her, by completing the turn himself. We were beginning to realize that Lisa was prone to such disasters. The previous night she had broken two plates while doing the washing-up, and I had heard my mother remarking loudly, “You’d think she’d never seen the inside of a kitchen before.” I could see that the two women were unlikely to become friends.

  There was something untamed and out of control about the Danish boys, it was clear; some kind of instability which made them unpredictable and prone (in Jorgen’s case) to sudden acts of aggression. Their grandparents—whom they called Mormor and Morfar—were unfailingly polite and friendly towards us, but every time we tried to play with Jorgen and Stefan, some sort of violence or injury was the outcome, and usually the victim was Rolf. When they weren’t attacking him with their fists or their feet, t
hey would attack him with words.

  “Hey, German,” I heard Jorgen say to him once on the beach. “What did your father do in the War? Was he a Nazi?”

  “Don’t be stupid,” Rolf replied. “My father was only a child during the War.”

  “If he’d been old enough, I bet he would have been in the Gestapo,” said Jorgen, and his brother added, “Yes: just like Bernhard.”

  None of us had any idea what they might have meant, and I was amazed by the fortitude and resilience with which Rolf bore these insults. It seemed to be almost the case that the more they bullied him, the more eagerly he sought out their company and fought for their approval.

  One afternoon, Rolf stayed behind at the house with his mother and sisters, while the rest of us rode our bicycles up to Grenen, at the northern end of the peninsula. We had been told that it was the meeting place of two seas, the Kattegat and the Skagerrak, but I had not appreciated what a strange sight this would be. As we walked the slow distance along the beach towards the very edge of Denmark, the sun was shining brilliantly and the ocean was a breathtaking aquamarine: but I should say oceans, rather, for what we saw, where our path petered out into a sandy nothingness, were two sets of breakers rolling into each other, a beginning and an ending with no distinction between them, just furrows of clear water running together in wave upon wave of foamy, promiscuous couplings. It was such a delightful, eccentric sight that we wanted to laugh out loud. But the guide who drove us back to the car park (in a peculiar, hybrid vehicle consisting of a railway coach towed by a tractor) assured us that the waters at this point were anything but playful. There was no more dangerous place to bathe, he said, in the whole of Jutland, and the attempts of some swimmers to follow a course between the two seas had led to many fatalities.

  When we arrived back at the house, you would have thought from the commotion that a fatality had already occurred: for Lisa, Ulrike, Ursula and Rolf were all in tears, although only the latter had any reason, in the form of a rather impressive black eye. We guessed, correctly and at once, that it was Jorgen who had given it to him. After his father had heard the story—a somewhat confused affair, to do with a row of beer bottles, a stone-throwing competition, and an elaborate set of rules which somebody or other had breached—he sat in the kitchen for many minutes, frowning heavily. Then he stood up and announced, “I’m sorry, but this ridiculous business has started to ruin the holiday,” and went next door to speak to the boys’ grandparents.

  There were two immediate consequences. Later in the evening, both Jorgen and Stefan called round, apologized to Rolf, and shook him by the hand: a gesture which for some reason occasioned more crying on the part of the twins, but seemed to satisfy everybody else. More unexpectedly, Rolf, Paul and I received an invitation to go round to our neighbours’ house the next afternoon for tea. We were told that Marie (for this, it appeared, was the grandmother’s name) particularly wanted to speak to us.

  We arrived at the appointed hour, four o’clock.

  There is a certain kind of smell you find in old people’s houses. I’m not talking about anything unclean, I just mean that there is often a smell of memories, of doors which have been left shut for a long time, a kind of heavy, nostalgic inwardness which can be close and oppressive. Here, there was quite the opposite. Every room was clean, airy and flooded with light from the sparkling ocean. It was so bright in the sitting room, in fact, that the blinds had to be pulled partly shut as we settled ourselves into the sofas and armchairs. The furniture was smart and unfaded but it seemed ancient compared to the low, angular, modernist fittings of our own beach house.

  Marie was a tiny yet forceful woman, whose face—once fair, I imagined—seemed to have been scribbled over many times by the Skagen wind and sun until it formed a complex manuscript, a palimpsest of wrinkles and serrations. She served us curious open sandwiches followed by rich, glutinous pastries, and laughed when I asked for milk with my camomile tea, saying that I could have it if I wanted, but it wasn’t the custom. Paul smiled and looked superior. Her husband Julius was very tall and very dark and very short of breath; he sat in an upright chair and leaned on his walking stick and never spoke a word all afternoon, just watched his wife’s every move with adoring steadiness.

  After we had eaten, and made halting conversation about our impressions of Skagen and our homes back in Munich and Birmingham, Marie cleared her throat.

  “I wanted to talk to you,” she said, “about my grandsons, Jorgen and Stefan. I gather there was an unfortunate happening yesterday afternoon.” (Rolf touched his black eye.) “I know they have apologized, so I won’t say anything more about it. But I have been watching you playing together over the last week and I must say it has given me great pleasure. I know there have been quarrels but I don’t suppose you realize how unusual it is for them to play with other children at all. I want very much, very much indeed, for you all to be friends for the rest of your stay here and perhaps even for longer, and that is why I should like to tell you some things about who they are and why they behave as they sometimes do.”

  I wondered, briefly, where the two boys were at this moment. Obviously she had sent them away on some errand, in order that she could speak freely to us.

  “It is not because you are German that they have been nasty to you,” said Marie, looking at Rolf now. “You may think this is the case, when I tell you their story, but I don’t believe so. Anyway, it is for you to judge. I must simply warn you that this story is very long and I hope you will be patient with me when I presume to tell you things about my family that happened many years ago, before you were even born.

  “To begin, then: we are a Jewish family. My ancestors, who were Sephardic Jews, came to Denmark in the seventeenth century, from Portugal, and we lived here in peace for almost three hundred years. I was born in the very year this century began, and I married Julius in the nineteen-twenties. We had only one daughter. Her name was Inger. In those days we lived in a little town about sixty miles west of Copenhagen. The name of the town is not important. Julius was a lawyer and I looked after the house and some of the time I taught in one of the local schools.

  “I don’t know what they teach you in your history lessons these days, but every Danish schoolchild knows that the Germans invaded Denmark in April 1940, and from that time until the end of the War, this was an occupied country. I will not say that it was a terrible time to be a Jew—the really terrible time came later—but it was very difficult. There was no real persecution at first, but it was always in the air, as a threat. There were Gestapo men on every street. Many households had German officers billeted on them. Some Jewish families changed their names. Nobody fled, at first, because there was nowhere to flee to. Germany to the south, occupied Norway to the north. You could not get to Britain, because the Germans were patrolling the seas. Only Sweden remained neutral, but it had given no sign that it would open its borders to Danish Jews.

  “Inger left school when she was sixteen, in the summer of 1943. She started to earn some money waiting tables in a café in the town square, but had not yet decided what she was going to do with herself. It was impossible to plan for the future anyway. Everything in her life was uncertain: except for one thing. She was in love with a man. A man called Emil. He was the son of one of my husband’s friends, a local doctor. Also a Jew. She had known Emil for less than a year but she loved him with the intensity that only a very young girl is capable of. And he was very handsome, actually. Here. Here is a photo.”

  She took down a small unframed black and white photograph from the mantelpiece and handed it to me. I sensed that it was not usually kept on display; that she had retrieved it today from some long unvisited drawer or album specifically to show to us. We passed it around carefully, handling it as if it were a sacred relic. Two young people, a man and a woman, sat on a wooden bench in the arbour of a rose garden and gazed at the camera. They had their arms around each other, cheek to cheek, and were smiling blissfully. I suppose there must be hundr
eds, thousands, hundreds of thousands of photographs like this in existence. It was hard to say what was so special about this one, except that there was something about the lovers’ smiles that made it more than just the record of one passing moment in time. There was nothing transitory, nothing evanescent about those smiles. There was an agelessness about the picture. I felt that it could have been taken yesterday.

  “Here. Here is another.”

  This time the lovers were sitting at a table in a café—perhaps the one where Inger had used to work—and there was a third person in the frame with them. A tall, burly, fair-haired man in uniform.

  “Who’s that?” I asked.

  “His name was Bernhard. He was a German officer, who was staying with a family just along the street from us.”

  Emil and Inger were again looking at the camera. Bernhard was looking half at the camera, and half at them. The intimacy between them was violated, this time, partly by the way he looked at them, and partly by his very presence. It was an eloquent photograph. It told its unhappy story concisely, and without ambiguity.

  “As you can see from this picture, Bernhard had feelings for Inger. He had met her at the café but also before that when she was still at school. Because she was a Jew and because of what he had been told to believe about Jews it made things worse. He must have hated himself for the way he felt about her, and hated her too, in some sense. It was a very bad situation. And of course he couldn’t bear the fact that she was in love with Emil, another Jew. Many times he had made advances to my daughter, and she turned him away. Once . . . Inger never told me the whole story, but he was violent towards her. I don’t think he actually raped her, he was not quite an animal in that way, but it was an ugly scene. Humiliating for him, one imagines. But it didn’t turn him against her. He kept bringing her flowers, chocolates, stupid things like that. It was Emil that he was determined to punish. Emil was beaten quite badly in the street one night and I have always thought that Bernhard might have been responsible for that.