She moved behind him and touched his neck. He did nothing for a while, feeling the pressure of her fingers. Then his hand reached slowly up and clasped hers and their fingers intertwined.
He stayed that night and in the morning they came for him.
She was standing in the front room without her shoes on. “La-la-la,” she hummed. “La-la-la.”
He looked at her, then back at her book.
“La-la-la.”
He tried not to look up this time. She saw him blush.
“La-la-la.” She was singing now.
He looked up. Half smiled. Shook his head to himself.
“La-la-la.”
“What are you thinking about?”
The door burst open. Out on the street the boy with stuck-out ears was laughing.
CHAPTER THREE
QUICKLY, NOT LOOKING AT Peter, his mother finished. “They bundled me out of the country. I stayed with friends in London – I couldn’t face going back to Lancashire. When I found out I was pregnant with you, I wrote to say I wouldn’t be coming home. You were born the following summer. I met Daddy at a firework party in Notting Hill. We were married by Christmas.”
Three pigeons flapped from the verge. Peter watched them fly off, feeling a chill in the back of his arms and in his kidneys.
“You’ll get to my age,” she said, rotating the watch like an amulet, “and you’ll learn there are things you cannot speak about right away. They need to be salted and packed in ice.”
Still she avoided his eyes. “The awful thing is, I’ve never been able to discover what did happen to your father. If the West Germans paid for his freedom or if he’s still in prison or if he died. Believe me, I tried. I wrote to the prison authorities in Dorna, Bautzen, Rottstockbei, Berlin, Leipzig, Dresden, Bützow, Ludwigslust, Waldheim, Torgau . . .” The recital had the desperation of her piano-playing. “But without a name – hopeless. And then the Wall went up. Not that that stopped me. Joachim, my music teacher, made persistent enquiries through his contacts in the Party. As did the Foreign Office. Nothing. Not a lead. I tell you, when your father was dragged out of that door, he vanished. But I doubt a single hour passes when I’m not aware of his face looking back at me.”
She started to undo the watch-strap. “I remember every useless thing he said. But I never knew what he was called apart from Peter or where he came from – or if he told me I can’t remember. All I have of your father is this.”
In a daze he put on the watch. Only now was she able to look at him through eyes she might have been rubbing. “You can make a life in a night, but that doesn’t mean –”
“Oh, Mum,” and put his hand on her shoulder.
“It’s all right,” she murmured in a low pressed voice, as if he was a child again. “I don’t have a photo, but you are very like him.”
“How?”
“Your eyes, darling. And the corner of your mouth goes down just like his.”
He felt her chin on his head. Looking down towards the radio mast in Sutton Mandeville. Her arms wrapping him. Endeavouring to keep something from falling apart. “I always thought that if he could, he would have got here. Absolutely, he would have got here. But how was he going to find me? He never knew I was pregnant.”
“Daddy knows all this?”
“Yes. If your father . . . if Rodney had had his way I would have told you many years ago, but – I’m going to start crying here – knowing how much he loved you I couldn’t bring myself to because he is your father and he will always be your father, and I think you’ll have to accept that this day is sadder for him than it is for you.”
This was too much for Peter. He burst into inconsolable tears. He didn’t work out then, not immediately, how much grief it had cost her, how much anguish she and Rodney had been through on the road to deciding when to tell him; nor that he was weeping not least because nothing had changed with his mother.
How long they sat in their peculiar embrace, he didn’t know. At some point, his mother stirred and when she spoke again he was reminded of how much he had inherited from her. Including a very English ability to tidy away. “You know, I think Rodney’s right,” slapping the grass off her damp yellow dress. “It’s not going to rain any more.”
He felt strangely suspended as he followed her back through blackberry bushes on which spiders had left their webs and towards the group sitting under the chestnut tree. In the far corner of the lawn, the sun shone on a straw hat.
“I suppose Grandpa knows all about it?”
“Your grandfather’s been an infernal pest all these years. It’s been very difficult –”
“Peter!” Rosalind’s voice floated to him. She was on her feet, hurtling over the grass. “Grandpa’s told me!” and threw her arms around his neck.
His mother glared at the old man sitting cross-legged on the beach mat. “Dad, what in God’s name have you done?”
Weathered and grey like a cemetery angel, he looked up. There was a brief benign smile. “Peter.”
“How are you, Grandpa?” and kissed him on his flaky cheeks.
“Well? Well? Well? Has she told you or hasn’t she?” His questions smelled of beer.
“Do shut up,” said Rodney, and to his wife, “I’m sorry, but there’s a limit.”
The air was livid with his mother’s concern. “You told Ros? How could you?”
“Of course I told her,” the old man grizzled in a voice slow but lucid. “Just like you should have told the boy years ago. He was perfectly capable of dealing with it at twelve. Don’t know why you had to wait until his sixteenth birthday. Anyway, where’s the cake? Rodney, get the cake.”
“For once in your life, father-in-law, will you piss off. Just this once.” His neck was inflamed and he was trembling.
“Easy for you to say piss off,” staring at Rodney in a baleful way. “Didn’t fight the buggers. In battle. Bastards. Not like us.”
He removed his panama, with its regimental hatband the colour of purple carbon, and fanned his face with it. Everyone knew what Milo Potter thought of the Germans. As an army doctor, he had fought against them in Egypt. Seen them blow up monasteries in Italy. Lost friends to them in the North Atlantic. The war continued to upset him.
“Dad, you’re a tiresome old baggage,” said his daughter, distressed. “That’s the past. We’re moving forward now.” She was trying not to cry and her face looked twisted with the effort. “Stay here,” to Peter, “I’m going to fetch your present.”
Moments later a golden retriever puppy ran across the lawn.
“She’s called Honey,” said the woman who had orphaned him. Her eyes, still red, fastened on him and waited for his reaction, smiling gamefully.
He looked at the puppy. Went inside.
Twenty minutes later, Rosalind came into his room and found him sitting at the window, a book open on his lap.
“Tea’s ready.”
“I’ll come in a moment.”
“Does that mean no Scrabble?”
“What? No.” Then: “Just set it up. I’ll be right down.”
She wanted to say something. “It’s brilliant!”
“What is?”
“Your being German,” almost proudly, staring as though at a steaming dish of lamb shanks.
He threw down the Malory. “It’s not brilliant. It’s not riveting. It’s not even interesting. It’s absurd. Everyone hates the Germans and so do I. So do you.”
Rosalind hadn’t seen him crying since they were small children. She stared at him with eyes wide open and ran from the room. Only then did he look into the mirror, and look away.
Outside on the lawn the palaver of tea. Of his stepfather’s distress. Of a cake sunk in the middle. His mother had forgotten to remove it from the oven and the disreputable heap lay on a green Tupperware plate, the 16 unlit candles like a bed of nails.
“I still say you shouldn’t have gone to Leipzig,” his grandfather said crossly – and Peter understood Milo Potter’s lapsed attentio
n towards his daughter, his grudging acceptance of her baskets of washed laundry, of the meals she brought to his spartan flat above the shoe-shop in Tisbury. The more she did for him the more he looked west, to Canada, where his two youngest daughters lived somewhere on the prairie. Viola and Ruth only came home for the big events, but he talked about them in a different voice. A voice in which his Lancashire accent all but disappeared. They wouldn’t have gone singing in Germany.
She drew up her knees under her and started to saw. “Here, Dad,” she sighed. “Sink your teeth into this.”
“What about the candles? He needs to blow out the candles.”
“Don’t worry about the candles,” mumbled Peter. He caught a whiff of Rodney’s Patum Peperium. Already it smelled oddly different.
“Then give that slice to the boy. It’s his birthday.”
A quarter of a century later, Peter could still taste it. The mess of dense banana-flavoured sponge and the dreaded fizz of baking powder.
Towards the end of the afternoon, Peter went into Rodney’s studio. The kind, jolly man he had, until now, called “Daddy” sat at a slanted desk making sketches for a wedding invitation.
Rodney didn’t glance up. He leaned over his drawing board and rubbed out a pencil outline calmly, with no excitement, the way Peter had seen a fisherman on the Yorkshire coast scrape the bottom of his boat. A vicar’s son from Tansley, Rodney had escaped the Church to study art at Camberwell, but he struggled after college to live off his paintings.
“Say what you like,” he said, speaking to the cherub, “I always thought of you as my son. I always will.”
“You’ll always be Daddy,” Peter said uselessly. “Always.”
“Your mother never told me who he was, nor did I ask. I adored her. Still do.” He examined the edge of his eraser with a fierce look. “But I can tell you the moment when I fell for you.” At a bonfire party in Elgin Crescent, the same evening that he met Peter’s mother. “She was holding this dark-haired baby and both of you were watching the flames. You stretched out your hand to me and kept on stretching it out. That’s when I had the feeling you could be my child.”
“I am your child, Dad,” and cast his eyes at what, until this afternoon, had been more fixed than any compass point. The maple-framed watercolour of a Derbyshire vicarage. The lime-washed floors. The tray of nibs that always had seemed an extension of his father.
“Just remember you are exactly who you want to be at any moment of any day – you have the opportunity. Remember that.”
“I will, Dad.”
At last it was time to go to the station. His mother insisted on driving.
Rodney tapped on the window for him to wind it down. “If you want me to, of course I’ll play in the Fathers’ Match.”
“Thanks, Dad.”
“Darling, will you tell Rosalind we had to leave?” called his mother across his lap.
“Bye, Peter,” bending down, his voice infallibly gentle. Behind, the blue ropes of a motionless swing.
“Bye, Dad.”
“See you in 20 minutes,” said his mother.
The car filled with her perfume as they drove towards Tisbury, filling the silence until she could bear it no more and started to lament the fact that her father had become senile. “It’s a pity you didn’t know him when he was practising.”
Two days later, there was a note from Rosalind to say that she had waited for him. She had laid the whole game out, prepared the score sheet. “But when I came to look for you, you were gone.”
CHAPTER FOUR
IT SHOCKED PETER TO return to St Cross. His mother’s revelation had removed him to a ridge a continent away from his previous life. As he walked from the station past Southgate Cinema, he noticed a poster for Where Eagles Dare and caught his breath. Richard Burton in Nazi uniform.
In Mugging Hall, the roll-call had begun. Like the Appell at Colditz.
“Tweed?”
“Sum.”
“Sibley?”
“Sum.”
“Rood?”
“Sum.”
Numbly, he sat in his toyes and drew his curtain tight. He felt fragile, exposed, like a fruit cut in half and stitched back together. He wanted to jump in the Itchen. He didn’t care if he never spoke to his mother again. What had she left him with as his identity? How was he to deal with Rodney?
“Liptrot?”
“Sum.”
“Leadley?”
“Sum.”
In a way, it would have surprised Peter less to discover that his mother was not his parent. Everything he was she had shattered and, all his solidity gone, he felt a complicated hostility towards her. This afternoon she had not simply lost him the father he thought he had, but she had given him one that was foreign. A German.
“Hithersay?”
Until he followed her onto “Revelation Hill”, the only German Peter had given much consideration to was a charred corpse in a cockpit. Beyond the pages of The Colditz Story or the Commando “trash mags” that circulated the dormitory, he had no vivid picture of the place or of its people. Germany, so he understood from his grandfather, was somewhere to escape from as soon as you humanly could, a blank region on the map over which his concentration skidded to the warm blue Mediterranean. East Germany was a greater blur. He had barely considered it.
“Hithersay?” repeated the testy voice.
Peter sat up. “Sum,” he called. I am. But now who was he?
That night, he attended evensong in Chantry, and singing the Nunc Dimittis he had a sense of what it must feel like to be excommunicated. The service drove home how English everyone was at school. He studied Tweed in the front row, tie tight-knotted, dressed in a new herringbone jacket of the same grey-green as the medieval glass. His voice bellowing for the Lord to let His Servant depart in peace. And all at once understood Tweed’s eagerness to fit in.
Among his friends at St Cross, the one Peter admired most was Brodie, a shambolic extrovert two years older, who spent his every spare moment with a split-cane rod on the Itchen. Brodie had, for all his bumptiousness, a side that was gentle and considerate, and Peter trusted him.
On the following Wednesday he and Brodie were taking a short cut through the War Cloisters when Peter found himself reading for the first time the words from The Pilgrim’s Progress carved into a stone plaque. “THEN SAID HE MY SWORD I GIVE TO HIM THAT SHALL SUCCEED ME IN MY PILGRIMAGE AND MY COURAGE AND SKILL TO HIM THAT CAN GET IT.” On pale columns the colour of his breath in the cold were plaques dedicated to fallen old boys in two world wars. A separate plaque was inscribed with two German names. “Members of the college who also died for their country. Here in equal honour.” The words provoked in Peter a feeling of such despondency that he couldn’t think straight. He blurted out his story.
“Well, you know the first thing you’ve got to do?” said Brodie in his sympathetic but firm voice.
“What?”
“Learn German.”
“You’re joking?”
“Seriously, Hithers.”
His French master queried him, surprised by the request, and Peter explained.
One afternoon Leadley clicked his heels in the tub-room. “Heil Hithersay!” He snapped out his arm and started to goose-step across the white tiles. “A Hun – and a Prussian at that!” Suddenly, he had the preoccupied smile of a baby filling its nappy. “Oh, I think I’m going to fart. Schnell, schnell!” He cocked his leg and something plopped out. Peter stared in mystified fascination at a mole-coloured turd.
Leadley’s instinctive slur wounded him. Peter didn’t know what it was to be German, hadn’t a clue, but Leadley had firm ideas: the Germans were an aberrant race with no culture, strange food and an ugly syntax.
“Germans are our enemies,” declared Leadley, casting aside the Hurricane comic, the two of them alone in the dormitory.
“Don’t be a prick. The Russians are.”
“You’re wrong, Hithersay,” and leaped up on the metal-framed bed and aim
ed his arm. “And unless you admit you’re a filthy Bosch, I’ll shoot you.”
The drama of Leadley’s turd took precedence over the novelty of Peter’s German ancestry, but not for long. By the end of term everyone at St Cross knew. Thereafter his Germanness became a badge. It defined and labelled him and he couldn’t escape it, not even in the Australian outback. In English they were reading Voss by the Australian Nobel-prize winner Patrick White. “‘Uggh!’ said Mary Hayley. ‘Germans!’”
Initially, Peter tried to pretend away his new identity as something to be suppressed and fought against. At the same time, it tallied with a feeling he had inside him of being odd and incomplete. He had often wished to be someone else. Now he was.
“Prepare to die Schweinehunde!” yelled Leadley one night, and from his vantage point on the coarse blue blanket he sprayed Peter’s stomach with a double-fisted rat-a-tat-tat.
Soon a fresh set of faces stared from his toyes wall. He replaced Steve McQueen with a portrait of Bach. He took down Camilla Rickards, the “I’m backing Britain” sticker, the House of Lords poster. The only survivors were a tanned half-naked model with a sandy elbow, and Sir Bedevere.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE NOTION THAT HIS mother would tell a difficult story straight was, of course, absurd. First time round, in her choppy and defensive way, she had given a watered-down version. At the start of the summer holidays, to fill in the shadows, he walked up Tisbury High Street and pressed a bell saying “Milo Potter”.
Peter enjoyed a close relationship with his grandfather. Unlike Rosalind, who had always been tricky with him. She hated his smell. Screamed if he tried to kiss her. Ran out of the room as soon as he embarked on one of his six war stories. “I can stand the blood and guts – but it BORES me.”
But with Peter something happened: Milo Potter lost his accusatory tone. All the warmth he couldn’t offer his daughter or granddaughter, with both of whom he shared a temperament, he concentrated on his grandson.
Consequently, Peter was the one his mother would take on visits. Peter never minded listening to him. It pleased his mother and it pleased the person he listened to. Old people, he learned early on, liked to talk.
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