‘God bless us,’ cried Bridget, watching his frantic caperings on the pink carpet. His white face reminded her of the urchin on the tram. Was it mirth or belly pains that gripped him?
‘He’s off again,’ said Alois, rising from his chair. He pulled the sofa nearer the fire and taking Adolf by the arm laid him forcibly down and covered him with the plaid blankets.
‘I’ve had enough,’ he told Bridget. ‘I’m going out.’
‘Don’t leave me,’ she pleaded.
‘He’s not dangerous,’ Alois said. ‘The silly beggar thinks someone’s stolen his cap. Shut yourself in the bedroom if you’re worried.’
He turned out the electric light and picked up his coat and walking stick.
‘Is it catching?’ Bridget asked, concerned for darling Pat. But with a shrug of his shoulders Alois left her and went running down the stairs. It occurred to him that it had been the most regrettable action of his life to send money to his sister in Linz.
7
For five days and nights Adolf lay almost continuously on the sofa in the front room. He had only to stumble upstairs to the lavatory on the third-floor landing and back again to fall immediately insensible among the crumpled blankets. He slept in his clothes and ate nothing apart from a plate of mutton broth on the third day. The sofa, which for his greater comfort had originally been placed close to the banked-up fire, was dragged back by Alois and reversed so that it faced the wall and hid the sleeper from view.
It wasn’t a happy time for Bridget. She felt she was an intruder in her own home, compelled to walk on tiptoe, obliged to keep the baby from making too much noise. She didn’t want them both to be murdered while Alois was out selling his safety razors. She fled downstairs to the basement, looking for sympathy from Mary O’Leary.
Mary was sixty-five years old and Russian. Bridget supposed she was Mr Meyer’s maid-of-all-work. She did his washing and she certainly cooked him a dinner every Sunday at around four o’clock. At half-past three Meyer prudently opened both the lobby doors and the door on to the street in preparation for the fumes that would soon engulf the house from cellar to attic. Sometimes Mary scrubbed the front steps, and now and then she was to be seen on her massive knees in the hall, rubbing the oilcloth with a dry rag. Mostly she stayed below stairs and gave her full attention to the fire, careful never to let it go out. She stood at her post like an eccentric stoker, a shovel always by her side, wrestling hourly with the intricate series of flues and dampers that regulated the ancient range. Clamped on her grey head was a poke bonnet she had worn as a girl, its gaudy ribbons long since frazzled up into two charred knots that dangled on either side of her fiercely burning cheeks.
The basement was undoubtedly the warmest room in the house, though the underground spring that ran beneath the sloping street overflowed from time to time and flooded in knee-high over the stone-flagged floor. With its low ceiling, its gas chandelier of cast iron hanging like a lump of rock above the scrubbed table, the room had a dignity according to Mr Meyer that the rest of the premises lacked, having been torn apart and renovated and partitioned by a succession of ignorant landlords. Bridget herself thought it was a desperate hole to live in. There were rats leaping, supple as ferrets, through the coal cellar and strange vegetable growths sprouting on the damp walls.
Mary O’Leary was standing at the table manhandling half a dozen of Mr Meyer’s soiled and celluloid shirt fronts. She listened to Bridget’s complaints.
‘First he had no luggage,’ Bridget said. ‘And now it turns out he was robbed every step of the way. Books and clothing and things. He hasn’t even a change of shirt, and his shoes are worn through. He talks in his sleep. He has bad dreams.’
‘Great God,’ muttered Mary O’Leary, scraping at the collars with the worn heel of her scrubbing brush.
‘… He said he spent a fortune on some medicine that made his mother die. It stained her yellow and closed her throat.’
‘It’s a wonder he didn’t choke saying it,’ Mary O’Leary cried.
‘It was Alois that said it,’ admitted Bridget. ‘I don’t know what the truth is, but it can’t be good for the baby.’
‘What does he look like?’ asked Mary, referring to the guest with nightmares. She wasn’t being nosey. Two months after her fortieth birthday, while working as a skivvy for her Uncle Reub in his watch-menders shop on Brownlow Hill, she had been approached by an Irishman, taken to a twopenny hop, briefly courted and unexpectedly married. On her wedding night her husband had protested that she was both old and hairy, and had departed in the morning, never to be seen again. Mary was no longer sure of the size of him or what colour his eyes had been or his hair, but she was still puzzled by his disappearance and far from convinced that his was a permanent absence. Often when Mr Meyer brought home friends she would steam up the hall and ask ‘Is it him?’, as though twenty-five years was yesterday and the elusive O’Leary had merely popped round the corner for a twist of tobacco.
‘He’s not tall,’ said Bridget. ‘But then I’ve hardly seen him on his feet. He has very blue eyes. His head’s shaved.’
‘How old?’ demanded Mary O’Leary.
‘Twenty-three,’ Bridget said. ‘Alois is worried about his papers. He doesn’t think they’re in order.’ She didn’t care to tell Mary that while his brother slept Alois had already rifled his pockets and found his passport incorrect.
‘He’s an artist,’ said Mary O’Leary. ‘Meyer told me. He said they don’t always do what’s convenient.’
Bridget didn’t know what to think. Alois was very contradictory in his statements. In the past he had called Adolf a gifted architect, a scholar, a man of special talents. His opinion was based on memories of his half-brother as a boy and information given him by his sister Angela. Why, when Angela’s husband had died leaving her with young children to support and Alois’s sister Paula to look after, Adolf had voluntarily surrendered the small pension left to him by old man Hitler and made it over to Angela. He was generous, clever and someone with a future. Now however, with Adolf slumbering in the actual heart of his living room, Alois fumed that he was a dead weight, a thief, that he had always been spoilt. In order to prise the money out of him Angela had been forced to take him to court. He had broken his mother’s heart and wiped his bum with his report card from the Realschule.
‘It’s certainly inconvenient,’ Bridget said, ‘to have him lying there all day long. I don’t know where to put myself.’
Mary O’Leary wanted to know if she could take a peep at him. Just to see what manner of person he was. She shovelled more coal on to the fire to make sure it wouldn’t die on her while her back was turned.
‘There’s not much of him visible,’ said Bridget. ‘He’s facing the wall and he keeps his head under the blankets.’
‘Great God,’ whispered Mary O’Leary. ‘That you should have a corpse on your hands.’ Elbows moving like pistons, she mounted the stairs to the second floor.
‘Is he all right?’ breathed Bridget. Adolf lay on his back with his arms folded over his face. Still attached to his frayed collar, her napkin, now limp and creased, rose and gently fell.
‘I have seen this before,’ said Mary O’Leary. ‘The wife of my Uncle Reub lay just so for many years. Now and then she called piteously for her Mammy.’ She stared thoughtfully down at the pole-axed visitor. ‘Possibly a sudden shock will bring him back.’ And she waved her arms above the sofa and emitted several guttural shouts as though she was engaged in riddling the boiler.
Darling Pat, lying peacefully asleep in the wardrobe drawer, woke and began to cry loudly.
Adolf slept on.
‘Perhaps a bucket of water would do more good,’ observed Mary O’Leary.
‘Years,’ wailed Bridget tearfully, picking up the baby and patting his back. ‘I can’t stand another day.’ If she hadn’t alienated her mother’s heart by running off in the first place, she might have packed her bags and taken the next boat home to Dublin.
‘
At least you know where he is,’ said Mary O’Leary.
8
Each time Adolf opened his eyes, huge shadows drifted above him. He knew there was a party in progress; he distinctly heard music and people singing. At one moment, despairing of ever persuading him to dance, they dragged him horizontally across the floor. A series of images flickered in front of him – a girl in a cream blouse, an old woman waving her arms in anguish, a man with hair the colour of silver, wagging a solemn finger – and Alois, holding a wine glass up to the goose-necked lamp on the wall, was talking about the day before yesterday: ‘… Of course Mother took his part … A bruise the size of an egg on my left temple … She said he would never have gone into the cemetery unless I led him …’
The unfairness of this conversation roused Adolf. He remembered quite clearly how he had pulled back and refused to enter the cemetery. He didn’t want to look directly at Edwin’s grave – it was bad enough seeing that small grey cross from the window of his bedroom. He struggled upright, determined to call Alois a liar, and found he was standing in a room facing towards a door inset with a panel of stained glass. There were no steps outside, only a drop to a small and azure blue backyard. In the middle of the yard stood a tall youth brandishing a chopper above the head of a child who crouched in the blue dirt on blackberry-coloured knees.
The room was empty save for a rusted bath-tub in the corner; above it, riveted precariously to the wall, sagged an elaborate cylinder made of copper. Draped over the edge of the tub was a little red towel, scarlet as a poppy, so bright that Adolf stared at it for a long time thinking what a nice painting it would make – the towel, the cylinder, the panes of blue glass set in the door leading nowhere.
Suddenly he realised he was being watched, knowingly, by a man in a stained cravat who was standing on a wooden crate and urinating. White with disgust Adolf ran down the dark stairs, unsettling the aspidistra on its rickety pedestal, and glimpsed out of the corner of his eye the man with silvery hair, now dwarfed by the girl in the cream blouse who towered above him in some miraculous way as they waltzed sluggishly about the landing.
Alois was still talking, waggling the stem of his glass so close to Adolf’s face that it seemed he intended to grind it into splinters up his nostrils: ‘… Three had died, don’t forget … Gustav and Ida in infancy … Edwin at six of the measles … As mere stepchildren Angela and I didn’t get a look in …’
Adolf lay down and folded his arms over his eyes. Somebody was crying. An enormous tear splashed on to his mouth and saturated his chest.
9
Bridget waited at a safe distance while her husband emptied the jug of water over the sofa. Should a fight break out she was ready to tell Alois she had stood enough and was off to stay with her cousin Bernadette in Knotty Ash.
Adolf woke. He sat up and, like a swimmer breasting a wave, hung gasping over the back of the sofa.
‘Right,’ said Alois. ‘There’s a tap on the landing and a mirror in the lavatory upstairs. I’ll leave you my razor. When I return I expect to find you washed and shaved and moving about. You’ll lose the use of your limbs if you lie there much longer. Do you hear?’
‘Yes,’ said Adolf. Surely, he thought, Alois was talking with his tongue in his cheek – had he forgotten the beatings he himself had taken as a boy for not washing his neck properly, for not getting up promptly enough from his bed in the morning? How exactly like old man Hitler he sounded. He glanced at the wall half-expecting to see those lips, in the photograph above the hat-stand, opening and closing.
‘Now that you’ve come,’ Alois continued, ‘you might as well explore the city. No point in wasting the money you’ve already squandered on the ticket. But you’ll need clothes. If you were living next door with the riff-raff it wouldn’t matter. This however is a respectable house and you’ll only draw attention to yourself dressed the way you are.’ He looked meaningfully at Adolf. ‘We don’t want that, do we? Not the way things stand.’
‘No,’ said Adolf, though he wasn’t entirely sure what Alois was driving at.
‘There’s nothing of mine that will fit, but I’ll have a word with Meyer.’ Alois took out his pocket watch and studied it. He was still wearing his gloves and his expensive top-coat. ‘It’s ten o’clock,’ he told Adolf. ‘I want you on your feet in half an hour.’
Adolf looked at the windows to see if it was night or day. It was hard to tell; the sky outside was grey as slate. It had stopped raining.
‘Thank you,’ he said.
He gave a small submissive smile. He was thinking that until he had thought out why he was here and what he intended to do once he knew, there was no harm in appearing to be grateful. Alois was an open book to him. For all his blustering talk, his apparent firmness, he was goodnatured, tolerant and so completely without depth, that it was impossible for him to sustain rancour for longer than half an hour at the most.
Bridget went on to the landing with her husband. He was delighted at having dealt with Adolf so satisfactorily. He kissed Bridget’s cheek and laid a gloved hand on her breast. She drew instantly away, worried that Mr Meyer might be lurking round the bend of the stairs – she didn’t want him inflamed beyond reason with only the weary Adolf left to protect her. She sensed that her withdrawal had annoyed Alois; he had taken it for revulsion. She thought sadly that it was on such foolish misunderstandings that lives floundered and love went flying out of the window. But then his love for her, she well knew, had flown long ago and he would jump at the excuse to skedaddle.
Alois’s irritation was momentary. Later in the day he had an important appointment with a manufacturer from Sheffield. He was convinced that it would lead to a substantial commission.
‘We won’t have any more trouble from him,’ he said, nodding in the direction of the front room. ‘Obviously he responds to authority.’ He descended the stairs two at a time, filled with optimism.
Bridget gave her brother-in-law a basin and a towel. She showed him the tap on the landing and the sink in the alcove. She said hesitatingly: ‘I’d wash your shirt, but there’s nothing you could wear in the meantime but an old blouse of mine. Alois is very fussy about lending his clothes.’
He looked at her blankly. Her knowledge of German was poor and her accent atrocious: it took a little time for him to fathom what she meant.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘Please don’t trouble yourself. Perhaps there is a muffler I could borrow.’
She found it equally difficult to understand him. He spoke differently from Alois. ‘No,’ she said, hoping that was the right answer.
When Adolf returned with the basin he was bleeding from several minute cuts on the chin. He flung the safety razor contemptuously on to the table. Now that his face was clean and the stubble gone from his jaw he appeared younger and more fatigued than ever. Watching him sidle across the room, Bridget nearly burst out laughing. She wasn’t an unkind girl, but with that funny walk and in his ridiculously shrunken jacket he reminded her of one of the broker’s men in a pantomine.
‘Food,’ she said. ‘You’ll need some food.’
She settled the coals and put the pot on to heat. While she stood there minding the soup she was thinking how like Alois he was and yet how different. Alois was flamboyant and confident, plumped out with self-regard. The young man standing at the window was painfully thin and his shoulders were rounded. He had a long bony face and a pointed nose. Unless she turned him to the light and deliberately stared into those bright blue eyes she had no means of telling why, though of the same colour and shape as Alois’s, they were so utterly dissimilar in expression. Perhaps Adolf took after his mother.
Despite his long rest, Adolf felt tired and weak. There was no strength in his legs and his heart was behaving strangely. Just walking from the door to the window had caused it to leap in his breast in a painful flutter of beats that left him sick and giddy. He clung to the window-frame – the row of black houses on the grey street tilted suddenly and slid towards the lead
en grey of the sky.
‘Are you all right?’ asked Bridget. He didn’t look it. He hadn’t a speck of colour in his face and he was buckling at the knees.
‘Quite all right,’ said Adolf, and forcing himself to stand upright he limped to the sofa and made a feeble attempt to straighten its wrinkled cover. He punched the cushions into shape and picked up the blankets.
‘No,’ cried Bridget, taking them from him. ‘It’s not necessary.’ She thought there was no sense folding them when possibly it was fumigation they required.
Adolf sat at the table and found himself facing the photograph of his father. He moved immediately.
‘When I was on the landing,’ he said, ‘I thought I heard shouts. And then there was a crash as if something fell.’
‘You heard right,’ Bridget said. ‘It’s them next door. They’ll be pulling up the floorboards to burn on the fire. They’re nothing but a heap of savages.’ Then, dimly remembering how Mr Meyer had explained to her that it wasn’t the fault of the poor if they were pig-ignorant but due to the greed of the ruling classes or someone like that, she added: ‘The woman on the second floor’s had nineteen children and there’s sixteen of them in one room, hacking the place to bits. The daddy’s a Portuguese man and she’s an albino. You know – she’s got pink, eyes and no lashes to speak of. Only the other day one of them ran amok with an axe. The family underneath are scared for their lives.’
Adolf had understood little of Bridget’s conversation. He noticed that she had a snub nose and a wide, rather brutal mouth. Standing there, waving that wooden spoon in the air, he thought she lacked refinement. His ideal woman, the divine Stefanie with whom he had fallen in love in Vienna, had been tall with hair as pale as glass.
While he was drinking his soup a man’s voice from somewhere outside on the stairs called Bridget’s name.
She sat as if turned to stone, the blood draining from her face.
Young Adolf Page 4