Together they reach that part of the street where the crowd thins and eventually peters out and where the trams are still running. On the tram the passengers part, a seat appears. Maryanne sits. Or rather, they sit: mother and child. A portrait of a story: a story that she will not only tell the child but which will pass down through the generations of the family unquestioned, a story that, one day, when her memories and what happened and what might have happened have mingled with the years, she – the story-teller – will eventually come to believe herself.
Part Two
The Milhaus Case
November, 1917
5.
The Milhaus case has captivated the city. No, possessed it, like a dream that stays on into the day, and on into the next and the next. Maryanne follows it in the newspapers, for the newspapers are possessed by it too. They feed the crowd and the crowd feeds the papers. And every day brings a new detail. It is an inexhaustible, bottomless well. Every day the city comes to the well of endless loathing, and draws up its bucket of sustaining bile. The beast smells blood. And the head of Milhaus is the sacrifice the beast howls for; the very image, the symptom of sick times.
Maryanne sits at the kitchen table. She lifts her eyes from the paper. The baby is moving, revolving inside the universe of her belly. She waits till it settles, then returns to the paper. Milhaus: the angel who fell. Milhaus, who tumbled from the heaven he’d occupied for years and seemed destined to occupy forever. Adored by the city before the beast was born, and who seemed to be one of those that the years and misfortune could never touch. Then the beast was born, and wide, adoring eyes turned to slits of scrutiny. Who is Milhaus?
She looks at the photograph in the paper. Handsome, she concedes. One who moves in a different world from her. The type that would have no end of society women making eyes at him. Like actors do. But Jack Milhaus isn’t an actor; he was a footballer in a city that worships the game it invented and all those who play it. Especially the best. And Jack Milhaus was the best. Untouchable in life, untouchable on the field. Blessed. Then he fell, a fall as swift as Lucifer’s. And the city felt betrayed: Milhaus, the angel, was revealed in his true image, and had been a devil all along. The beast rose up, and every day the newspapers fed it.
To Maryanne, who is finishing breakfast, the newspapers are as fascinating as the beast itself: they are dictated by the beast, its urges come to life and given words. And she reads them in the same way that she reads a horror story. Except horror stories aren’t really that scary – the beast is.
From the start, when war was first declared, the city’s eyes turned to Milhaus and there were murmurings about him. Why hadn’t he enlisted? His team mates had enlisted, why not him? Was he better than the team? They could be dispatched, but not him? Did he really believe he was above everything? And everyone?
She watched her city change. At first, when far-off war was declared, there were joyous crowds waving flags and singing songs of king and empire, linking arms, hanging from office windows, gathering in city squares and streets, smiling in the winter sun. Swaying together as one. A city, a whole country, no longer at the edge of history but on the brink of leaping headlong into it, so that nothing would ever be the same again. Everybody laughing in delirious delight just to be alive at this glorious moment: savouring at last, after years of waiting and craving, the blessed release of war. Of glorious death. God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour.
Where are the poets of glorious death now? Even when the smiles faltered, even when the innocence was wiped from everyone’s faces, as it was always going to be, the tears that were shed were for glorious death. Blessed war with the gift of death. Everywhere – on the streets, in trams and shops and tea-houses – Maryanne heard the inescapable talk of war and felt the hunger for annihilation.
And then one day a million pairs of eyes looked up from a million newspapers filled with the names of the dead, as if to say: We never really thought this would happen. That it would come to this. But it had, and everything really had changed and nothing would ever be the same again and there was no going back. The smiles turned to blank faces of disbelief, which soon turned to anger, to sneers. And the laughter to howls of sorrow and rage. All of which had to go somewhere. Somebody was to blame. And so the beast that was always lurking in the laughing crowd, craving something – something final – began to reveal itself, becoming clearer with every day, until the transition was complete and it roared into life.
Maryanne watched, horrified and fascinated, as the beast rose up in city squares, on corners and back streets, scales shining in the sun, glinting in the moonlight, howling for death and vengeance. The beast was them and they were the beast, and had been all along, just waiting to be conjured up to feed upon the sickness of the times. And every day, everybody went to the well of loathing and drew up the very dregs of the worst of themselves, the sustaining slops that the beast craved and which kept it alive.
Women she knew were handing out feathers in the streets to men not in uniform. Older men and women, fathers and mothers, whose children had gone to war, were suddenly shaking their fists and spitting upon young men on trams, in theatres, on street corners. While in the evenings, barmen hosed out onto the streets the blood and vomit of public bars where brawls had broken out all across the city. And under cover of night, neighbours went to war with each other, throwing rocks through the windows of Hun businesses where they’d shopped all their lives. Children, she observed on schoolyard duty, suddenly weren’t playing with their old friends any more, barely understanding. She watched families split, friendships torn apart and never put back together. Gradually, the sun turned black. Blue skies filled with swirling grey clouds. Everything changed: familiar people, a familiar city, her city, became alien and strange – and the beast, like some fairytale monster come to life, was born.
And Milhaus was the very thing it was looking for. Somebody was to blame; somebody would pay. Maryanne has no interest in football, or any sport at all. And she doesn’t understand why anybody does. But she has followed the Milhaus business, before it became a ‘case’, from the beginning. And it wasn’t the arguments this way or that that captivated her, but the hatred and the vitriol it unleashed, as every day the city pressed to the news-stands.
And she wonders now, staring at the newspaper picture, whether the beast would have bothered if Milhaus hadn’t been so gifted. Isn’t this the way, she ponders, that these angels, these half-gods, we create – a link between us and the gods – can only remain hovering up there in the heavens for so long before we drag them down?
In time, the newspapers were not just asking why Milhaus hadn’t enlisted but why he hadn’t changed his name. Everybody else had: Mullers became Millers (though not Viktor), Weiss became White. Not difficult, they said. He loses a few letters from a common alphabet, and gains a few others. Milhaus to Millhouse. No great matter. Others, he was reminded, were losing arms and legs. So what was wrong with Milhaus? It was a small gesture to make, but a patriotic one. Did he not love his country, a country that had taken him in from far away, given him a home and given him the game of football? Did his loyalty lie somewhere else? Was the country he loved far away? And after being asked again and again by the newspapers why he hadn’t changed it, Milhaus finally snapped back: Because it’s my name!
And Maryanne admired that in Milhaus. He didn’t bend to the crowd. Like her, he was not one of the crowd. Not one of them. And it was at this point that she started to feel an odd connection, an affinity with him, as if whatever happened to the one somehow happened to the other. Entwined fates. Kindred spirits. If Milhaus comes through, so will she and so will the child. It’s silly, she knows. Just superstition. Like crossing the paths of black cats or walking under ladders. But once these things take hold they’re hard to shake.
Then everything took a dramatic turn. Milhaus was arrested. Not because he wouldn’t change his name. That was forgotten for the time being. Suddenly, there were more important matters
. For Milhaus had a job. It seemed fantastic that a god of sorts should work, but this god was a public servant, with, it seemed, access to information crucial to the country’s defences. The very country that he refused to change his name for. The very country that he had proven not to love. The very country that had given him the game of football and turned him into a god. But then he was arrested for treason, and Milhaus fell from heaven into the lap of the waiting beast. The city felt betrayed. He had presented himself as a glittering angel, even a god, and was now revealed for what he always was.
Maryanne puts the paper on the kitchen table. Katherine is out working, as she is every now and then, washing and cleaning the large houses of those who can pay for her services. Maryanne has the house to herself, which she likes. Inside the paper there is a diagram of a rubbish bin, and beside it an impression of a screwed-up, handwritten note, which has been flattened out to be read. The diagrams and others like it, surrounded by advertisements for boot polish and furniture, fill much of the paper, because this is the evidence against Milhaus. For sometime after the war started, the government put a spy inside the Swiss consulate: a cleaner. Information was passing through the consulate and going to the enemy. Or might be. Such was the advice received by the government. The cleaner was the government’s eyes on the inside. And she eventually came up with the letter that is now as famous across the city as Milhaus himself. The writer of the letter was ready to sell secrets. The consular official who received the letter screwed it up with a laugh, so he said, and threw it into the bin. The writer of the letter, it seemed (and it is a long, detailed article she is reading over a second cup of tea, for she has long been eating for two), had assumed that this Swiss consular official would be happy to pass information on to the Germans. But he had assumed badly. Hence the laugh, and the automatic response of screwing the letter up and tossing the paper ball into the bin, where it lay all day until the cleaner came that evening, gathered the paper from the bin and passed it on to her boss. Maryanne shakes her head slowly; no wonder he laughed. It’s all so far-fetched. A few years ago, everybody would have laughed. Not now. Now, nothing is far-fetched any more. Everybody is ready to believe anything.
A few days later, Milhaus was arrested. Experts studied the writing in the letter, compared it to that of a number of public servants inside Defence, and Milhaus was plucked out. The writing was his. Confirmed. The experts couldn’t be wrong. Even though Milhaus claimed he was not even in the city the day the note was supposedly passed on. He was in the countryside, he said, went to a nearby town on a day’s break. By himself. No witnesses. And no witnesses came forward. All Milhaus had to offer was his word. And that wasn’t worth much. Milhaus, the god who had played everybody for a fool, who refused to change his name, who placed his personal feelings above the interests of his country and who proved himself not to love the country that gave him the gift of football, was a spy. No matter what he said. The blond-haired god who soared across Saturday-afternoon skies, drawing gasps of wonder from packed playing grounds, had fallen to earth with a thud. The devil had been unmasked. Maryanne finishes her tea and puts the cup back on the table.
The beast was roused, put its twitching nose to the air, and smelled the nectar of warm blood. Cries of innocence – from Milhaus, his lawyer – were drowned out by the roars of the beast. The smell of warm blood was in the air. And now that the trial has begun, the newspapers contain diagrams of the rubbish bin every day, as well as the screwed-up letter and a drawing of a machine gun, the details of which he is said to have been ready to pass on (and which looks like something out of last century’s wars, but nobody cares). And it doesn’t matter what Milhaus says. Innocent? He would say that. He has played them all for fools. He has no wife, no children. Has never settled, never really put down roots in the country that has given him so much, and to which, in return, he would not even give the gift of a name that would show them that this was his country and these were his people. No, he has played them all for fools. For behind that smiling face, all along, was the snigger of the laughing Hun.
But the Hun isn’t laughing now, is he? Whenever he is taken through the streets from the police wagon to the court, crowds gather, jeer and shake fists, while the newspapers watch; the crowds feed the papers, the papers the crowd – there seems to be no end to it. It is there every day. A new detail. The Milhaus case captivates the city.
6.
It is late in the morning when she steps out onto the street. The streets are empty, the children are at school: restless and wriggling, no doubt, ears tuned to the sound of the lunch-time bell, when they can burst free of their cages. The memory of spring mornings like this, watching all that caged-up energy yearning for release, is almost pleasant. It is warm and sunny. A day to make you forget all those things you don’t want to know. Just up in front of her on the narrow footpath, a mother and two children – too small for school – are walking towards her. Maryanne pays them little attention; her eyes are on the blue sky and the late spring sun shining bright over the rows and rows of dark cottages. Huts from the Dark Ages.
She is thinking of different things: dark huts, the mineralwater town, the gardens that overlook it, Viktor and whatever he might be doing at this moment, Milhaus, Katherine and the baby – always the baby, moving this way and that, revolving inside the universe of her belly. And she is so preoccupied with the sky, the sun and her jumble of thoughts that she pays little attention at first to the sight of the mother taking both children by the hands, and dragging them to the other side of the street. Even when she notices that they have stopped, she imagines they have paused to say hello, chat even. It is that kind of morning: one for bright, spring greetings. The beast has taken a holiday: she smiles across at them, about to speak. It is only when she sees the glare in the mother’s eyes and fear in the children’s that she understands.
The mother, who has a husband at the front and five brats to look after, whom Maryanne has known for much of her life and who lives a few streets away, takes a bunch of feathers from a bag and flings them into the air, as if tossing a hand grenade or poisonous powder at Maryanne. The four of them, on opposite sides of the street, watch the feathers float and flutter to earth, the mother suddenly yelling at Maryanne.
‘Give that to your fancy man!’
The smile falls from Maryanne’s face. Whatever spring greetings she was about to offer are forgotten. Her shoulders sag, the sparkle gone from her. A moment ago she’d been happier than she’d been for so long. Life was good. People were good. The beast had taken a holiday. Now, this. The children are holding tightly to their mother. She is their rock. They are safe where they are. But on the other side of this small innercity suburban street is danger, like a stray dog gone wrong, carrying a disease. Maryanne is that danger, and she sees alarm in the children’s eyes, while the last of the feathers settle and the mother’s words ring out as they fall.
‘The Hun’s whore! Go back to your fancy man! Whore …’
With that, the mother strides off, dragging her children behind her.
Maryanne is shivering and shaken. Fragile, like that burst of happiness she felt. All changed. No, the beast doesn’t take holidays. The sun is obliterated, the warmth blown from the air; the street like streets from bad dreams where shadows lurk. Unreal and all too real. Are we all damned? She looks about her, as if having been thrown from the skies and only just landed this minute. Row after row of dark huts sit in moody, sullen silence. Dark, like a village scene from the Middle Ages. Or further, much further back. It is as though everybody has burrowed up from underground, from the very centre of the earth, and brought up hell with them. From the centre of the earth and from the centre of ourselves. She has known this woman for years, and yet never known her. But amid the suddenness of the incident (a suddenness that leaves her asking if it really did happen), she is also asking: how could she know?
And as she goes over everything, she comes to the conclusion that there is only one answer: Mrs Collins. M
rs Collins had a friend, headmaster at a nearby Catholic school, who might do the right thing by Maryanne, and she, Mrs Collins, undertook to contact her friend. Maryanne was told which school, but she hadn’t contacted the headmaster. Clearly Mrs Collins had, and this friend, upon receiving Mrs Collins’s report, presumably saw no need for privacy. To keep it to himself. Indeed, may well have felt a public duty to let people know that there was a Hun lover among them. A Hun’s whore. How else could it have come about? It is the only conclusion that makes sense, if there’s sense to be found in anything.
She watches the feathers being blown along the road. It’s not so much the glare in the mother’s eyes as the children’s fear that stays with her as she slowly leaves the street and makes her way down towards the gardens, leaving the gloomy medieval huts behind her, to board a tram at a stop near the parliament where the Wart sits: one of those dark magicians who conjure up the hell in everyone.
He has recently made a public pronouncement about Milhaus. Of course, he would. He called out to a crowd gathered along the banks of the river, asking them if we really wanted those kinds of people in the country. And the beast bellowed back: not just one thunderous, explosive NO, but a succession of them. On and on it went, followed by cries for the blood of Milhaus, until the beast, exhausted for the moment, fell silent. The newspapers reported the meeting in all its detail, dwelled on the words uttered by the prime minister – ‘honour’ and ‘blood’ and ‘death’ and ‘sacrifice’ – and how he held them all in his sway.
Year of the Beast Page 7