by Susan Green
We went to the nearest pub. After a few drinks, I realised with relief that he wasn’t as ugly as I’d thought. He had the most beautiful eyes – deep, dark and brimming with sympathy, rather like Tyrone Power’s – and once the tension was erased from his face, the bony beakiness became less pronounced and he appeared sensitive, poetic. He was in antiques, he told me. He worked for Norman Adams in the Brompton Road, specialising in Regency furniture but with a sneaking, secret love, he confessed, for Victorian bric-a-brac.
‘Wax flowers, moustache cups, ear trumpets, mourning jewellery.’
‘How very avant-garde of you,’ I said, and he laughed immoderately, as if I’d said something very witty. We talked and drank and talked, and I found myself telling him about Gerald and me. He gave me his handkerchief when I began to cry, and took my hand in his.
A week later, he rang and invited me to afternoon tea. At the zoo.
‘I haven’t been since I was a child,’ he said gaily. ‘Lucie’s coming too. A family outing.’
Creatures in cages and then sticky buns in the tea gardens. Felix told us how during the war, after they shifted the larger animals to Whipsnade, the keepers were ordered to kill all the snakes and lizards and creepy-crawlies.
‘That’s horrible,’ I said. ‘Why?’
‘It was in case of a direct hit, you see,’ he said. ‘Imagine meeting a cobra in the blackout.’
‘It seems so unfair. Caging them all their lives and then deliberately exterminating them. It wasn’t their fault, after all.’
‘Can we change the subject, please?’ said Lucie. She seemed disproportionately upset and I wondered why.
‘I’m sorry I mentioned it,’ he said quickly, and put his arm around her shoulders. ‘Cheer up, Luce.’
Another topic of conversation was needed. I asked. ‘You were here, in London, all through the war?’
‘No. I was still living with my foster parents in the country – I’d been taken out of school – appendicitis, wasn’t it, Lucie? And then I went to Australia for a year or so.’
‘Australia! Where were you?’
‘Melbourne,’ he said and then, looking at his watch, stood up. ‘Feeding time for the pelicans,’ he said. ‘Anyone?’
Lucie shook her head, but I went with him.
‘I wonder if they know they’re ugly,’ he said. ‘I wonder if they mind.’
‘Of course they do. Poor pelicans.’
‘What does it feel like, Elizabeth, to be so utterly, perfectly beautiful?’
I looked at him. ‘If you want to know the truth, it doesn’t feel like anything. It’s nothing to do with me. It’s not my –’ I was going to say ‘fault’, but it wasn’t quite the right word – ‘not my doing.’
‘Does it ever get in the way?’
I thought I knew what he meant. ‘Well, sometimes women don’t like me. And men tend to grab.’ I thought of Neil Offren. ‘Or get nasty because they don’t stand a chance.’
‘It’s hard for ugly men, if they worship beauty.’
‘But you’re not ugly!’ I said, impulsively taking his hand.
And then I was, as they say, covered in confusion, but he laughed, keeping my hand in his. ‘It’s hard to be worshipped, isn’t it?’
‘Harder than you might think,’ I said, and then Mrs Eck’s soft, flabby tumour came into my mind. ‘I must sound ridiculous. There are people who are disfigured, injured – like those poor airmen – or have scars or . . . or growths . . .’
‘You’re thinking of Simone?’
‘Yes, and I feel so ashamed. I found it difficult and so I didn’t visit as much as I could have. She was lonely. I am not a kind person.’
‘Yes you are. You had a drink with me. And you’re here with me today.’
With a strange sense of vertigo I realised that Felix was looking at me with a completely naked face. I wanted to look away but I couldn’t. How often do people reveal themselves like that? It can’t be often, for the radiance is hard to bear. Something shifted in me. It was one of those instants that seem to last an infinity while the world turns. I know, I know; this sounds like a love song, a romance novel, and I was no longer a silly young girl. Why, a week ago I’d been having it away with my ex-husband on a grave, so what was I thinking, to fall like this?
‘Have you ever been in love?’ I asked him.
‘Yes.’
‘And?’
‘It’s over.’
‘But are you still –’
‘No,’ he said, and the keeper tossed the last fish into the air. The pelicans snapped at them with their absurd beaks and we all clapped, as if doing something so natural was somehow very clever.
The pelicans. Yes, but I am seeing the wrong ones. I see a pair floating in the shallow water at the tideline, majestically ugly among the black swans and silver gulls. The birds are waiting for an old Greek man to finish gutting his fish. I sit at the table with Alec’s binoculars and watch another pair land with spectacular clumsiness among the more elegant fowl.
Alec says, ‘They remind me of Flying Fortresses,’ and drops a kiss on my forehead.
Go away, you pelicans! The pelicans I want are at Regent’s Park Zoo.
Later it was a joke between us that we fell in love while the pelicans bolted their fish. Felix even found, at a country-house sale, a Victorian cameo ring with a pelican on it. Apparently it was a symbol of maternal sacrifice; the mother pelican was supposed to rend her own breast to feed her young. It was an odd piece of jewellery. The pelican was white but unfortunately the base colour was a rather flesh-like pink, reminiscent of gums. It got lost, somehow, when I packed up to move back to Australia.
Only once did we make love. Poor Felix. He accepted my ministrations passively – was he too astonished, bewildered or even terrified to resist? His face, with those dark, liquid, fathomless eyes, looked up at me and it was only near the end that he took my face between his two hands and drew me down into a kiss.
‘What an instinctual girl you are, Elizabeth,’ he said afterwards. Lying there together on the carpet of his bedsit, he said dreamily, ‘It would be fun to be married, wouldn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘And live together. A room with a view, for two . . .’
‘Such fun.’
‘We could play house.’
‘Why don’t we?’
‘Why don’t we?’ he repeated.
‘Why not?’ I said.
And Felix invited me down to the country to meet his family.
I was miserable, sniffling and dabbing my nose with a handkerchief, when we left Victoria Coach Station. We passed mile after mile of grey houses in grey streets under a grey sky.
‘I hate London,’ I said viciously.
‘London is not all England, Elizabeth,’ said Felix.
‘It seems like it. Dirt, crowds, fog, cold . . .’
‘It’s summer!’
‘Summer!’ I wore a woollen jacket and a scarf; there was a hot-water bottle, Thermo-knit spencer and bedsocks in my overnight bag.
‘I shouldn’t have come. I’m sure I’ve got a cold.’
‘It will cheer you up,’ said Felix.
I shook my head. To tell you the truth, the idea of meeting Felix’s family – foster family, actually, for he and Lucie had lost their parents early in the war – frightened me. Our love affair felt like a tender plant, so new that the least amount of exposure could damage or even kill. I knew it needed to grow a little before we exposed it to the world, but Felix insisted.
It was raining in Aylesbury. We caught the connection to Winslow, and when at last from the window we saw green fields and a sky that was blue and smokeless we began, like birds at dawn, to chatter and laugh. It was sheer joy, the natural instinct of young things to be happy in the sunshine. The sniffles and headache disappeared.
From Winslow it was a local bus through lanes so ancient and deeply bedded down that they wound through the landscape like dry riverbeds. In ones and twos the other passen
gers got off and then it was just Felix and me until we pulled up in front of the village shop.
Gerda Butterworth was waiting for us. She was a short, sturdy woman, with badly cut grey hair and a rather masculine face. She embraced Felix, and then turned to shake hands with me. Her eyes, brownish hazel and very shrewd, seemed to take me in and sum me up all in one quick glance.
‘Welcome, my dear.’
I stammered a thank you, feeling obscurely guilty, as if she’d discovered that I was up to no good.
From the driver’s seat she darted glances sideways at Felix and back to me, asking in her deep, slow voice, ‘Was it a dreary journey? Are you tired? Poor Geoffrey – that’s my husband, Miss Adair – is still working on the Harrow Road slum clearance. He’ll be so sorry to have missed you again, Felix. Do you need your tea straight away?’
As she drove, she pointed out the chocolate-box village green, the public house, the church with its adjacent graveyard and then, further on, the Georgian houses of the well-to-do and the damp little workers’ cottages down by the river with their gardens all blowsy with summer flowers. Then we were out into the countryside again and finally through the gate and into the grounds of their house. It was called Bayards.
‘. . . as you see, quite modern for this area. We’re blow-ins to the village, really; we’ve only been here since 1927. It was built just before the first war, Miss Adair, before this calamitous century really hit its stride. They made it to last, to shelter a family and its servants, its horses and dogs, and to be handed down father to son, father to son. Sadly, all the sons died young. One at Ypres, one at Pozières and one in a field hospital somewhere in Belgium. We’ve been very lucky. All our sons returned from their war.’
Who wanted to think about war? Mrs Butterworth’s words flowed over me as I admired the solid, vine-covered Arts and Crafts facade, the tall windows, the terrace, the lawns and the big mulberry tree that had fallen on its side and was held up with chains. It turned out Mrs Butterworth and Lucie were making jam. She commandeered Felix to help them and instructed me to rest for half an hour while they finished bottling.
‘Then we’ll all have tea in the garden.’
It was too beautiful a day to stay inside. I wandered out of the side entrance and found an uncut lawn starred with daisies, a black-and-white collie, a rug on the grass, a straw hat, a pair of plimsolls and a dog-eared green Penguin. I lay looking up at the cloudless sky until I heard my name.
‘Miss Adair? Elizabeth?’
I opened my eyes. It was not Felix but another man, in faded khaki pants and an old white shirt with rolled-up sleeves. He was so ordinary-looking that I could have drawn him for My Journal to illustrate that stock male character, the hero’s best friend. He was sturdy and muscular, with mouse-coloured hair that flopped across his forehead as he bent down to take my hand with a smile. His hazel eyes were like his mother’s.
‘I’m James Butterworth,’ he said. He pulled me to my feet. ‘Tea’s ready.’
He led me round the side of the house to the back garden, where a lawn sloped gradually down to the river. Under a cedar of Lebanon, Lucie, Felix and Mrs Butterworth sat waiting at a table spread with a white cloth. Another picture, I thought; the cedar branches growing almost horizontally, with a greenish pool of shade underneath and the white cloth shining out . . .
Mother, spreading a white cloth on a table in the shade of the plum tree, laying on it the little Japanese tea set and a plate of tiny macaroons, serving milky tea. ‘Tea Party,’ she called it. It was a game of her invention, and our guests were three dolls wearing smocked and frilled party frocks.
For a few seconds I was near to crying, but then Felix, coming to stand beside me, grasped my hand and said quite loudly, ‘Shall we tell them, Elizabeth?’
‘Tell us what, my dear?’ Mrs Butterworth placidly stirred her tea.
‘We’re engaged.’
You could hear the buzzing of wasps in the loud silence that followed, and the old collie dog panting.
‘Engaged? To be married?’ Mrs Butterworth sounded bewildered, but James thumped Felix on the back, saying, ‘My dear Felix, congratulations!’
‘Congratulations, of course,’ echoed Mrs Butterworth. She got out of her chair and came around to us.
‘My dear,’ she said, embracing me.
Lucie said nothing.
‘A little bit of an anticlimax, don’t you think?’ said Felix.
‘No, no,’ said Mrs Butterworth. ‘We’re just surprised, aren’t we, Lucie? So sudden. But we’re terribly pleased, aren’t we?’
‘Terribly,’ said James, slightly mocking, and then he gave Felix a punch on the arm. ‘Well done, little brother.’
When Mrs Butterworth left to attend to dinner and Felix went with James to look at his motorbike, Lucie and I lay back in our chairs. Shutting my eyes, I turned to the sun. So, it was done, I thought. It hadn’t been too bad. And it was out in the open now. We hadn’t discussed a date or anything like that. Besides, my divorce was not final and would not be until next year. Everyone could just get used to the idea . . .
‘Elizabeth?’ Lucie was looking at my face, her eyes large, dark and sorrowful. She took my hand, and said, ‘You’re really engaged?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s not . . . not a joke of some kind?’
‘Of course not. Look!’ I held out my finger. On it was the cameo ring Felix had given me.
‘Don’t be insulted, Elizabeth; it’s just . . .’
‘Has he been engaged before and broken it off? Is that it?’
‘God, no. I worry about him, that’s all. He was always so artistic and sensitive, not at all robust, and when the war came he was taken from school – he was only fifteen – and deported to Australia. Fifteen, and they were scared that he was a Fifth Columnist.’
I’d heard that phrase before. I knew what it meant. ‘But that’s ridiculous! How could Felix have been a traitor?’
‘Felix and I are German, Elizabeth. We were sent here just before the war, when it was clear how badly things were going for Jews in our country.’
I began to stammer something about perfect English, but she kept going.
‘Felix was interned as an enemy alien. Alien, Elizabeth, like a creature from another planet. He was a schoolboy! And even though he was a Jew, and they knew – they knew – what was happening in Germany, they sent him halfway across the world, like a prisoner, a convict . . .’
I hung my head, mortified. A world of ugliness lay behind the prettily painted backdrop I took for reality. I hadn’t even thought – was I incurious or simply thick? – about what Lucie and Felix had been through.
‘He’s always been so highly strung.’ She began to repeat herself. ‘Very artistic, but not robust, Elizabeth. Easily hurt and . . . and confused. Have you . . .’ She was finding this excruciating, I could tell; she wouldn’t look at me and her face had gone red. ‘Have you been to bed together?’ she said all in a rush.
‘Lucie!’
‘I’m sorry, but have you?’
‘Well, if you must know, yes.’ I felt I had to excuse our behaviour. ‘It’s only happened once.’
She jumped suddenly to her feet. ‘I’m sorry. Forgive me. I didn’t want to pry, Elizabeth, but he’s my little brother and I have to look after him. He’s my little deer, my fawn. “Hirsch” means “deer”, did you know that?’
‘Hirsch?’ What was she talking about?
‘It’s our name.’
When we got back to London, there was a telegram and a couple of phone messages waiting for me. Aunt Emu had had a stroke, and I had to get to Melbourne as quickly as I could to be with her.
It all took longer in Australia than I’d have thought possible. Seven months, actually, and my return to London was underwhelming, to say the least. Not that I expected fanfares, a triumphal march, ‘The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba’, but where was everybody? I’d wired Felix but he wasn’t there to meet me. At Waterloo I rang his landlady’s tel
ephone number; no answer. Exhausted, I caught a taxi and tottered into Eric’s house. I let Miss Eales bring me up a tray of tea and toast, and then I slept.
The following afternoon, I went to see him. His rooms were on the top floor and the usual depressing smell of cooked cabbage assailed me as I climbed the stairs. I thought, I must get him away from this. We’ll just live together. We’ll find somewhere nice and just live together – live in sin, I don’t care – until we’re married.
The door opened before I knocked.
‘Lucie?’
She was thinner than ever, with shadows under her eyes. Looking past her into the room, I couldn’t see Felix. I couldn’t see the travel posters and reproductions of paintings he’d tacked to the walls, the fringed velvet curtains we’d bought together at a flea market, the shelves full of art books. It was as it had been when he first moved there; a furnished room. A mean bed, a chest of drawers, a table and chair. The only thing of his was the Regency secretaire.
‘Where’s Felix? Has he moved? When did he –’
‘I didn’t think you’d come back,’ she said.
‘Why not? Where’s Felix?’
‘You didn’t get my telegram? My letter?’
‘No. Lucie, where’s Felix? What’s the matter? Stop looking at me like that.’
‘Felix is dead, Elizabeth. He hanged himself.’
I didn’t believe her at first. When I was finally convinced, she sat me down on the mattress and held me as I cried. But as my sobs died down, she backed away and said, very quietly, ‘I blame you, Elizabeth. You hounded him. You wouldn’t let him be. All those letters, those plans, the engagement –’
‘He loved me!’
‘Yes, he loved you! But you shouldn’t have tried to get him to marry you.’
‘Why not? I don’t understand.’
She stood staring at me with Felix’s eyes. ‘Are you really that stupid, Elizabeth?’