This was the world of the medieval woodcut, with salvation on one side of a cliff and damnation on the other. The path was steep and craggy but, as her aunt explained, it was all that they had. She urged her niece to be brave, an unnecessary injunction since, at least in retrospect, her sole thought was to outwit the oppressor. In the event, Fortune smiled – she refused to credit any higher deity – and they evaded capture. Somehow her aunt had passed word to one of her father’s ex-comrades, now active in the Resistance, who was waiting with money and papers to take them to a flat where, for the next two years, Marta lived as Christina. It helped that she not only looked the part but spoke it. Her parents’ rejection of their heritage meant that she had been brought up speaking Polish and lacked all trace of a Yiddish accent. Try as she might, she could not recollect how she had occupied the time, a regrettable lapse when telling the story, its tone subtly altered from horror to adventure, to the twins for whom boredom was a fate worse than death. Their string of questions as to what she ate, how she paid for it and whether she was searched, exposed further gaps to shake their faith in the narrative.
She never saw her parents or sister again. She knew that they were deported after the doomed uprising in the ghetto, although she didn’t discover where until much later. She too was deported, along with most of the population of Warsaw, after the equally abortive nationalist revolt the following year. If nothing else, she was glad that her parents had been spared the knowledge of their Soviet allies abandoning the city to its fate. With their Polish papers and Aryan looks, she and her aunt were sent to a work camp in Germany. They arrived in the autumn and she spent most of the winter shovelling snow in the biting cold. In the spring, with the war turning against them, the Nazis put their prisoners on trains to the Ruhr, which were heavily bombed by the RAF. Several years later, she learnt that Edwin had been a navigator on the raids. While aware that it was futile – even dangerous – to do so, she could not help wondering whether his had been one of the planes that had shot at her as she scrambled out of the burning train and ran for shelter in the woods. Later still, in the adventure story she made of her life, this was the point when Mark would yell out, more excited than appalled, ‘Daddy, you tried to kill Mummy!’ It was also the point when, as she buried her head in the hotel pillow, her eyes filled with tears.
The next morning they hiked to a nearby farm and, claiming to be refugees from the fighting, offered to work in exchange for food. The farmer’s wife, with a husband at the Front, could not afford to ask questions. She housed them in the barn and fed them on mealy porridge which, however unpalatable it might sound to her finicky children, was manna after the cabbage soup in the camp. They stayed there, milking cows and planting turnips, until the advent of the British troops. For the first time since their escape from the factory, Christina reverted to Marta. They were introduced to an intelligence officer, Squadron Leader Marks, who explained that he was on a mission to assist any surviving Jews. He pledged them his support and, with the help of an American refugee agency, set about finding them a home. This caused their greatest heartache since leaving the ghetto, for her aunt moved to Amsterdam to live with her one remaining cousin while agreeing with the Squadron Leader, soon to become Uncle Leon, that the best place for Marta to resume her education would be England.
Whenever she had told the tale to her children, she skimmed over the next three years since, impatient with their own schooldays let alone anyone else’s, they had no interest in her long struggle at the age of sixteen to make up for the lost years of study and, moreover, to do so in a foreign language. They were anxious for her to forge ahead to Oxford and their father, so that the story could reach its climax in them. Pondering it in private, however, she could not dispose of it so fast and, despite her exhaustion, she was transported back to the Southampton villa where, in the company of children from all over Europe, she had been taught English by a Hungarian professor with a horror-film accent. They were not encouraged to talk about their former lives, either their means of escape or their families’ annihilation. Most were grateful for this code of silence. They were still young enough to feel joy at being alive and eager to explore the new world in which they found themselves. The past was a closed book. It was only sixty years on that it had become her regular bedtime reading.
After she had been there several months, a middle-aged woman with plaits, wearing a felt suit and kid gloves – gloves which made a lasting impression on Marta – interviewed her about her future. Putting her respect for her dead father over her longing for independence, she expressed a wish to go to university. The woman promised to do all that she could to help. This turned out to be a mixed blessing when, to improve the mathematics that had been a weakness even in Warsaw, she had her placed in a class of eight-year-olds.
Lying in the pitch-black bedroom, Marta could feel the blush suffusing her cheeks as she recalled her unwitting response to a simple arithmetical problem. ‘If one train leaves the station at 9.30 a.m. travelling at 60 miles an hour with 45 people on board, and another train leaves the station at 9.45 a.m. travelling at 80 miles an hour with 30 people on board, how many miles will the whole group have travelled by 10.15?’ As her fellow pupils chewed their pencils, she struggled to choke back her tears. Her neighbour, a girl ten years her junior, tried to comfort her. ‘It’s not hard,’ she said, ‘I’ll show you.’ But the figures were far starker when the passengers she pictured were travelling in cattle trucks without food or water or sanitation, and the destination to which they were heading was death.
She matriculated at nineteen and gained a place at Oxford, where she confronted the full force of the English class system. As a foreigner, she had some measure of protection. People found her hard to pin down. With her exotic accent and murdered family, she might have been the granddaughter of the Tsar. She made no secret of being Jewish, but her friends made no mention of it either, any more than they would have done a harelip or a strawberry mark. She was invited to spend the weekend in country houses where grammar-school girls would never have been allowed through the door. She discovered the limits of toleration when talking to the grandmother of one of her friends.
‘Since the War, life has become so distressing,’ the old lady said.
‘What is it that most upsets you?’ she asked solicitously.
‘Hearing about refugee children.’
‘I agree. We must do everything in our power to find them homes.’
‘No, dear, you’ve missed the point. It’s not the children that upset me; it’s hearing about them.’
Although her memories of Oxford were defined by love affairs and sherry parties, she had spent the majority of her time in the library. She was far too conscious of the quirk of fate that had saved her from the camps to neglect her work. She gained a reputation for brilliance to add to her aura of suffering, a combination which proved to be irresistible to everyone from beaglers at Christ Church and poets at Magdalen to socialists at Balliol and rugby blues at Teddy Hall. It was not until Edwin, however, that she met a man whose intellectual quest matched, while never mirroring, her own. His gentleness, his passion and his military record enhanced the attraction of his rangy body and piercing eyes. Behind the cricket and crumpets and choral evensong, there was a touch of the ancient woodland about him, a primal energy that she was eager to tap. The irony was that she found herself allied to a family who were just as clannish as any of her weekend hosts. Edwin was destined for the church, a career (they never thought of it as a vocation) his parents had considered eminently suitable for a younger son but which, to their fury, he had refused to renounce after his brother’s ship was torpedoed in the North Sea.
They waited ten years to marry, during which Edwin served as a curate in Clapham, a vicar in Barnes and a chaplain at Oriel, while she travelled back and forth to the Hadza and wrote her first book, another bone of contention for her future parents-in-law, who held that the only acceptable work for women was motherhood for the upper classes, te
aching for the middle, and domestic service for the lower. In age-old fashion, they mellowed once she gave birth to the twins, becoming the most doting of grandparents. With Edwin’s blessing, she determined not to deceive the children as to her family’s fate. Her pride in telling the story so as to honour the loss without dwelling on the horror faltered only when she woke one morning to find Susannah inking a number on her arm. ‘I’m doing it for you,’ she protested. ‘We had a film at school and Julia said you weren’t a real refugee because you didn’t have a tattoo.’
The memory dispelled sleep still further and she lay back on the pillow, prey to morbid conjecture. The same inauthenticity that her nine-year-old daughter had identified in her life, others had identified in her work, maintaining that to locate Eden in a remote Stone Age tribe was a sign not of inspiration but of despair. Thrashing about in the heavy sheets, restless in mind and body, she feared that they might be right. Was her belief in childhood innocence the result of her early exposure to adult depravity? Had she misled generations of children, not least her own, by her insistence on human perfectibility, driving Mark to his death and leaving Clement and Shoana helpless against disease and indoctrination? Craving reassurance, she crept to the bathroom, but the splash of cold water failed to drown the accusatory voices in her head. So she slipped back into bed and, shrinking from Edwin’s warmth for fear of waking him, turned on her side and tried to sleep.
3
Next morning, Edwin’s headache was so severe that Marta suspected her ‘better to be ill at home’ should be amended to ‘better to be admitted to the local hospital’. His complaints about the grey patches encroaching on his vision filled her with a new fear of his going blind. The hotel manager did all in his power to smooth their departure, even sending one of his porters to load their luggage on to the train. Much to her relief, Edward dozed through most of the journey, only to be roused outside Reading by a steward intent on serving him his complimentary coffee. They were met at Oxford by Mr Shepherd, who could barely conceal his distress at the changes four days had wrought on his employer. Edwin’s silence in the face of his questions forced her to speak for him, although she insisted that he would be his old self as soon as they reached Beckley. ‘Too much excitement,’ she said, feigning a laugh at a phrase with disturbing intimations of second childhood. At least his splitting head gave her the perfect excuse to urge caution on a driver, whose reckless way with bumps and bends looked set to increase the agony.
Each familiar landmark brought further reassurance. They drove through the blazoned gateway, past a weather-worn trio of naiads, to the walled garden where Charlie Heapstone was battling with a serpentine creeper, a stray branch dangling over his brawny back. They drew up beside the ancient laburnum, decked with sun-flecked flowers, and shuffled into the hall, where Ajax leapt joyfully at them and Mrs Shepherd offered an equally warm, if more sedate, welcome. Pausing to greet them, she led Edwin upstairs and, after seeing him into bed, made her way down to the kitchen to brief her housekeeper. No sooner had she sat down than she was accosted by Karen who, according to Mrs Shepherd, had come up from her cottage in readiness for her return. With a self-obsession which could no longer be excused by youth, she made no mention of Edwin but flung herself on to a chair and declared that she wanted to die.
The cause, as soon became clear, was Frank, who had left her for the high priestess of a rival coven.
‘I really miss him, Aunt Marta.’
‘Of course you do, darling.’
‘I really miss him looking after me.’
Grabbing some orange juice from the fridge, Marta escaped to check on Edwin. She made her way up the stairs, hiding the naked carton from the gimlet gaze of her mother-in-law, whose portrait hung ever-vigilant on the landing. She had reason to regret her impropriety when Edwin, determined to show that he was not incapable, insisted on opening the carton himself and pouring the juice into his glass.
‘It won’t come out properly,’ he said.
‘That’s because you’ve opened the wrong end. You should have held it the other way up.’ She watched aghast as he flipped it over, flooding the sheets with juice. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she assured him, contradicting herself by promptly bursting into tears.
The accident spurred her to action. Resolved to face up to her fears, she helped Edwin out of bed and, leaving him to dress, went down to her study to ring an old friend, the newly retired professor of cognitive neuroscience, Jacob Murr. While loath to offer a diagnosis over the phone, he listened as she listed Edwin’s symptoms, before advising her to bypass their GP and head straight for the on-call neurologist in the Accident and Emergency unit of the Radcliffe. Returning upstairs to find Edwin grappling with his shoelace as though it were a knotty theological conundrum, she relayed Jacob’s advice, expecting to encounter the usual resistance. His instant agreement filled her with both relief and dread.
Refusing to risk Mr Shepherd’s driving, she called a minicab, spending the journey rubbing Edwin’s cold hands and keeping up a constant flow of chatter in a bid to raise his spirits. As they turned into the hospital forecourt, she recalled her recent visit to a former colleague, Clive Gannon, in the urology ward. The elderly men were all sitting by their beds, their genitals laid out on their laps like hymn-books, with Clive at the centre, blithely unconcerned at exposing the object of pity that had once been an organ of delight.
She shrugged off the memory as they walked into the waiting room, where a host of hostile glances betrayed the fear that their age would grant them precedence. After installing Edwin in a chair and outlining his symptoms to the receptionist, she waited for his preliminary examination, while her neighbour, a ragged man with a grimy face and tombstone teeth, described how, having slipped in the street with a bottle in his pocket, he had stood up to find that his thigh was soaked. ‘But thanks be to God,’ he said in a thick brogue, ‘it was blood, not whisky.’ He cackled, emitting a stench, half-dungheap, half-brewery. Edwin sat, oblivious to the rankness, while she searched for a way to escape without destroying what remained of the man’s self-esteem. She spotted a pair of empty chairs beside an elegantly dressed middle-aged woman but, just as she was plotting the move, the woman turned to the girl next to her. ‘Excuse me, miss,’ she shrieked. ‘If you don’t listen to me, I shall write to Interflora and have you arrested. I’ve written letters… I’ve lost my teeth and my eyes and my hair writing letters.’ Marta pondered which was more painful, what the woman was saying or the fact that no one, not the receptionist nor the nurses nor the security guard nor a single patient, paid it the slightest heed.
After a ninety-minute wait in which she diagnosed Edwin with every disease known to science, he was summoned to see the neurologist. Her nerves were so frayed that she almost asked the drunk if she could take a nip from his bottle. The Interflora woman left without seeing a doctor. Marta imagined her returning to a frowsty flat crammed with china figurines and stray cats, a mainstay of her local church until the mania finally took hold and she started to polish the brasses in the nude or desecrate the altar. Edwin had had to arbitrate in more such cases than she cared to remember. No sooner had she brought him to mind than an Indian doctor came out and called her name. She wanted to tell her about Mark, as though his sacrifice on behalf of her country would ensure his father the preferential treatment they had hitherto refused. In the event, she sat beside Edwin in silence while the doctor explained that, after testing his eyes and reflexes, she had run an emergency CT scan which revealed an abnormality.
‘Where?’ Marta asked.
‘The brain,’ the doctor replied, as casually as if it were the elbow. ‘We’ll put you on an immediate course of steroids,’ she told Edwin. ‘They should reduce the headaches. Plus some anti-ulcer pills for the side effects. In the meantime, I’d like to admit you, ready for an MRI scan tomorrow.’
Edwin’s look of horror led Marta to suggest the alternative of taking him home overnight and bringing him back first thing in the morning. H
is relief when the doctor agreed strengthened her resolve never to let anyone put administrative convenience before his comfort. She knew that there were a thousand questions she should be asking but she needed time to absorb the news, so she sat quietly holding Edwin’s hand while the doctor wrote a letter to their GP. As she saw them out with a friendly but not ingratiating smile, Marta wondered if it were fears for Edwin’s future or deference to his past that kept her from giving them the usual message of hope.
As soon as they returned home, Edwin went upstairs, rejecting her offer of help as though it were his last chance to demonstrate his independence before submitting to the medical machine. Marta went down to the kitchen and steamed open the doctor’s letter. Although her respect for other peoples’ privacy was such that Shoana had once accused her of showing an insulting indifference to the contents of her diary, the gravity of the case outweighed her scruples. The doctor wrote that he had a lesion on the corpus callosum, which a swift glance at the dictionary revealed to be the band of nerve fibres linking the two hemispheres of the brain. She was more exercised by lesion, a commonplace word that she now suspected of having a technical meaning. Looking it up, she found ‘a region in an organ or tissue which has suffered damage through injury or disease such as a wound, ulcer, abscess or tumour’. Dismissing the ulcer, abscess and, especially, the tumour, she focused on the wound and, by bedtime, had managed to convince herself that what they had found was a superficial swelling caused by the shattered glass.
Her stratagem was exposed the following day when, an hour after Edwin’s MRI scan, the consultant neurologist, a more conventional authority figure than his colleague, called them in to his office to explain that the scan had shown up the presence of a tumour.
The Enemy of the Good Page 26