Young Adolf

by Beryl Bainbridge

  Adolf now realised that the vulgar patches of scarlet on her cheeks he had mistaken for rouge were in fact clusters of freckles, fading as he watched. Her eyes too were flecked with gold. ‘Is it bad news?’ he asked, but she rose from the table and left him without a word.

  When she returned some moments later, apple-cheeked as ever, she wouldn’t look at him directly. ‘Mr Meyer,’ she said, speaking to the wall, ‘is waiting downstairs to see you.’

  Adolf remained in his chair, baffled.

  ‘Don’t you remember?’ asked Bridget. ‘You met him the night you arrived. He’s the landlord.’ She grew impatient. ‘The man with the violin,’ she shouted, tucking in her chin and miming the scraping of a bow across strings. ‘The clever one …’

  Now Adolf knew whom she meant. Instantly he felt restored to health. Some of his so-called friends had been dreadful fools. The banality of their thoughts had appalled him. When talking to them he was oppressed by the feeling he mouthed on the other side of a thick wall, unheard, unseen. He had read that great artists, great people, felt exactly as he did, but it wasn’t much comfort. Now some instinct told him everything would be different. He forgot entirely his previous mistrust of the fiddler. He jumped up from the table, eyes shining, as though he was about to meet an old and valued comrade. But first he must wash up the dish and the spoon he had used.

  ‘Leave them,’ Bridget said curtly.

  He thought he had offended her in some way. ‘Thank you for the meal,’ he said. ‘I greatly appreciated it.’

  She snatched up his plate and turned her back on him before the words were out of his mouth.

  Later, Bridget went down to the basement to ask Mary O’Leary if she had any material suitable to be made into a shirt. She wanted to make amends to Adolf for having snapped at him earlier. It wasn’t fair to take it out on the poor young fellow just because she grew agitated whenever Meyer gave her so much as the time of day. She told Mary she didn’t mind what stuff it was. Anything at all would do. An old sheet perhaps.

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ asked Mary O’Leary. ‘Old sheets is all we have, and you’re not cutting them into pieces.’

  In the end she fished out a length of brown linen shut in a battered suitcase in the coal cellar.

  ‘Who does that belong to when it’s at home?’ said Bridget.

  Mary O’Leary explained that the gentleman in the attic had left it with her for safekeeping fourteen years ago.

  ‘Brown?’ Bridget said dubiously. ‘It’s an odd colour for a shirt.’

  ‘Get away,’ scoffed Mary O’Leary. ‘The one he’s wearing is like a rag the doggie brought in.’

  She beat the material with her hand to let out the dust. There was only a smattering of mildew along the creases.

  10

  Had the fiddler lived in tawdry surroundings, in a room filled with cheap knick-knacks and hung with second-rate paintings of the sort Alois admired, Adolf was prepared to tell himself it didn’t matter. A man, he felt, should be judged by his intellect not his possessions. As it happened, Meyer’s apartment had a grandeur that might have been oppressive but for the fact that each time the door was opened or closed quantities of plaster fell from the ceiling and clung like snow to every available surface. The furniture, old and dark, monumental in size, was liberally sprinkled with flakes of white, as were the windowsills. The effect was festive. Pinned above the fireplace was a collection of photographs cut from newspapers, showing workmen rioting, the Titanic on her maiden voyage, and a woman wearing an agonised expression holding a bundle in her arms. Propped against the straddle-legged clock on the mantelpiece was a faded daguerrotype of a young man with insolently staring eyes. Along the length of one wall stood an immense glass-fronted bookcase.

  That first morning, seeing Adolf gazing hungrily at those volumes behind the glass, Meyer had said: ‘Come here whenever you like, Adolphus. Read what you want.’

  Upon hearing these words, Adolf knew that he’d found someone worthy of his friendship. He’d had many acquaintances in his life – Hanisch, whom he had met in the Asyl at Meidling, Josef Neumann the art dealer, a one-eyed locksmith named Robinson. From Neumann he had once accepted the gift of a frock-coat and a pair of woollen mittens only slightly darned across the knuckles. Hanisch had taught him how to survive the winters, shown him what buildings he might loiter in to avoid the cold, where to find free handouts of food, how to earn a few kreuzer shovelling coal or humping baggage at the station nearby. Hanisch had even taught him the words of ‘Watch on the Rhine’ one night when, both cold and hungry, they grew quite hysterical with misery and could have been mistaken for drunk. But in his heart he had never thought of either Neumann or Hanisch as his friends. It was true he’d become almost fond of Gustl, the young musician from Linz, but it hadn’t lasted. First time round Gustl had passed the examination into the Academy of Music. With Meyer, Adolf sensed there would be no such betrayal. Meyer was old and could be trusted not to succeed where he himself had failed.

  Taking seriously the invitation to visit the downstairs room whenever he wished, Adolf began to spend most evenings there, reading at the table until midnight. Sometimes Meyer, leaving the Adelphi by the side door, would find the young man waiting dog-like in the alleyway. Then, talking obsessively about various operatic productions he had seen in Vienna, Adolf would escort his friend home, never failing to remark that Meyer’s nightly playing of great musical works was of supreme importance. ‘You may be right,’ Meyer would murmur, jaded from an evening’s rendering of such classic pieces as the ‘Cock-a-Doodle Rag’ and ‘Hitchy Koo’ and ‘Everybody’s Doin’ It Now’.

  Alois grumbled frequently. Though he didn’t particularly relish the company of his half-brother, he was annoyed at his behaviour. He said he was sick of Adolf treating the upstairs room as a hotel, coming in for meals and rushing out again.

  ‘You presume too much,’ he criticised. ‘Meyer likes his privacy. It reflects badly on me.’

  ‘I presume nothing,’ cried Adolf, ‘I understand him perfectly.’

  Meyer gave him a top-coat which though warm was over-large. Bridget was always meaning to turn up the sleeves. It billowed about him as he walked. It had originally belonged, Meyer said, to a relation. Adolf thought the relation must have money to burn because the coat was practically unworn. In the same wardrobe hung a jacket of dark blue with buttons of gold. Beneath it, placed neatly side by side and stuffed with paper, were a pair of golfing shoes. Secretly Adolf thought the jacket splendid and was disappointed he wasn’t asked to try it on for size. Instead, Meyer foisted on him a pair of elastic-sided boots.

  ‘I don’t need boots,’ Adolf protested. ‘There’s nothing wrong with the ones I’m wearing.’

  He was mystified at Meyer’s insistence. The boots, being of supple leather, took him by surprise – he bounced as he stepped. When Bridget finished the shirt she was making and showed it to him, he was genuinely delighted. He changed into it at once.

  Alois, seeing him strutting about the front room, eyeing himself in the mirror above the fireplace, couldn’t help smiling.

  ‘It’s a queer colour,’ he said.

  Adolf took no notice. The brown shirt meant he needn’t sit wrapped in a blanket while his other one was in the wash. He hadn’t been so well-dressed for years. Sometimes, if the wind was behind him, in his spring-heeled boots and his voluminous coat he flapped down the hill like a black crow. Meyer had to run to keep up with him.

  Several mornings a week, whatever the weather, Meyer showed him something of the city. They would walk along Huskisson Street past the five-storey houses, built for the shipping owners and the cotton brokers, pillars and steps of granite at the front entrance and stabling at the back for carriage horses: every house decaying now, the stables torn down, the windows smashed, each one inhabited by a dozen families or more, their washing hanging sodden on the wrought-iron balconies and a herd of ragged children squealing pig-like in the gutter.

  �
��The rich have gone long since,’ observed Meyer. ‘Fled to the hills where the air is cleaner.’

  ‘Clean air or not,’ Adolf told him, ‘I have never been so well.’

  It was true. Even though the air was damp and in the past he’d been subject to bronchitis – here he felt exhilarated and full of energy. It had to do, he thought, with some quality of the northern light: the blackened city seemed to sail in an ocean of white sky, perpetually racing before the wind.

  ‘You’re just eating properly,’ Meyer said. ‘And then, of course, you don’t work.’

  On the corner of Hope Street, in a house with broken windows, lived Meyer’s friend, Dr Kephalus. His door faced St James’s cemetery. Whenever they drew close to the house Adolf quickened his pace or darted away over the road, pretending to be absorbed in a distant architectural detail. He didn’t like sharing Meyer with anyone. Then Meyer, smiling to himself, followed patiently. They would stand at the railings looking down into the cemetery below or descending by the path, meander between laurel and dusty rhododendron, discussing the merits of the new cathedral, one third built, rising like an improbable airship out of the sunken graveyard. Last year it had been taller and the year before taller still.

  ‘They keep knocking it down,’ said Meyer, ‘and starting all over again. Once it resembled a child’s sandcastle. Whatever it is they’re after, it seems to evade them.’ Soon, he fancied, the structure might escape altogether; bursting from its moorings, it would lift, zeppelin-shaped and pink as a rose, into the scudding clouds.

  Always Meyer took Adolf to the Pier Head. They stood, buffeted by wind, facing the mile-wide strip of river separating Liverpool from New Brighton. The ferry boats, encircled by screaming gulls, ploughed the muddy stretch of water towards the bulbous domes of the pleasure gardens and back again. Shouting to make himself heard, Meyer stabbed his finger at the skyline and named the docks, the Battery and the distant Welsh hills. He spoke of sailing ships forced to wait a dozen tides before floating into the Mersey, of the construction of the docks, of cholera, of how the monopolies of the great trading companies – the Hudson Bay, the Royal Africa, the East India – had eventually been broken. Finally, placing his arm enthusiastically about Adolf’s shoulder he would swing him round and point at St Nicholas’s church, the offices of the Docks and Harbour Board, and the vast bulk of the Royal Liver Building, its twin towers set with clocks like full moons and those giant birds, green wings spread, crouched under the sky. ‘Consider,’ he would bellow, ‘the advantages of cast iron.’

  His lectures, delivered in the teeth of the wind, entire sentences blown away, excited and silenced Adolf. Adolf didn’t wish to appear stupid. He stood with his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his fluttering coat, an expression of eager concentration on his gaunt face. All he wanted, deep down, was for Meyer to compare him favourably with the buildings, the people, the past. At times like these Meyer considered him a good listener.

  Shortly after midday, footsore and exhausted by the sound of his own voice, Meyer would suggest they go to the Kardomah Café or to a public house. Adolf invariably refused. ‘Ah,’ Meyer would exclaim. ‘I had forgotten you were a lone wolf.’ Thanking him profusely, Adolf would shake him by the hand and return to the house in Stanhope Street. He didn’t want Meyer to tire of him, and besides he hadn’t a halfpenny to his name. For an hour or so he’d help Bridget in small ways, carrying coals up from the cellar, rolling sheets of newspaper into wads to stuff along the cracks of the window frames. Remembering summer holidays in Spital when as a boy he had played near the blacksmith’s forge, he began to hammer a length of steel-piping into the semblance of a handle. He would kneel at the grate, the metal red-hot from the fire, and tap away at it with the heavy end of the poker. Bridget was terrified he might burn a hole in the carpet. ‘I know what I’m doing,’ he assured her, thinking it was typical of Alois to have a gramophone and no means of winding it up.

  Sometimes he would spend half an hour playing with the baby, tickling him under the chin or blowing gently into his face until the child blinked and gurgled and butted his forehead against the brown shirt. Then it was time to go downstairs and put the kettle on the stove in readiness for Meyer’s return.

  Adolf had now been residing in Liverpool for five weeks. It was difficult for him to remember that he had ever lived anywhere else, so secure did he feel, so cosily at home.

  11

  ‘How long are you staying?’ asked Meyer, a week later. They were walking up the Boulevard towards the park.

  Adolf stumbled and nearly fell. He had just finished discussing certain aspects of Alois’s character – his greed, his stupidity, his tendency to boast. He had then referred briefly to the time Alois was sent to prison. After all, on that occasion Alois had been little more than a youth. No malice was intended. Meyer, with his seemingly innocent enquiry had rapped him over the knuckles as though he were a little boy who needed to be taught his manners. The bourgeois rebuke was obvious – he shouldn’t bite the hand that fed him. Surely it went without saying that Alois provided him with food and lodging? Did Meyer take him for a fool? Had he not been so deeply wounded he might have borrowed Alois’s phrase and shouted in Meyer’s face that it took two to make the bargain. It was the word ‘staying’ that hurt most, implying that there was somewhere else he belonged. Dear God, he had been so confident of Meyer’s ability to understand him that he could have wept.

  ‘I am fifty-four,’ announced Meyer, continuing to pace the gravel walk as though nothing had happened. ‘I came here when I was twenty. I left Berlin thinking I would be absent for a few weeks. I did not mean to stay.’

  ‘I have no intention of staying,’ cried Adolf instantly. He was so distressed he lost his sense of direction and began to bump into trees.

  ‘Mrs O’Leary is a different case,’ Meyer said. ‘She came here when she was a small child. In a sense she is not a foreigner. I have never been anything else. If you can believe the newspapers, myself and others like me are the sole cause of all the trouble in this town. We have infiltrated the Corn Exchange, the shops, the restaurants, the theatre orchestras. The agitators complain that we take employment away from the decent English working man. And have you any idea who he is, my young friend? Why, he is an Irishman.’

  He glanced curiously at Adolf who, with clenched fists, was veering from side to side on the path.

  ‘Let us sit down,’ Meyer suggested. ‘I am out of breath.’

  They sat at some distance from one another on a bench under a tree. They were sandwiched between two roads along which the trams rattled in either direction. The rain fell steadily, dripping from branch to branch, forming puddles in the hollows of the path.

  ‘A decade before I arrived,’ Meyer said, ‘water was supplied to the houses on only three mornings a week. Even for the rich. Just think of it.’

  It was difficult to tell whether Adolf was thinking of it or not; he was staring morosely at the toe-caps of his muddy boots.

  ‘First I was in Munich,’ Meyer reminisced. ‘Then Berlin. In neither place did it rain so often as here.’

  Still Adolf made no response.

  Meyer searched his mind for a topic of conversation that would raise the young man’s spirits. For some reason Adolf seemed to have fallen into an abrupt and black depression. His face was quite contorted with misery.

  ‘You would like Munich,’ Meyer remarked. ‘It is a city of artists. It’s not as beautiful as Vienna, but the people are more friendly.’

  ‘Doubtless it’s swarming with Jews,’ Adolf said.

  ‘German Jews, certainly,’ agreed Meyer.

  ‘It is my belief,’ Adolf told him, in a voice querulous with despair, ‘that European history is merely the history of racial struggle. The decline of the Roman Empire is a classic example of historical decadence resulting from contaminated blood. Like Rome, Europe is sinking under the burden of bastard peoples. Animals stick to their own kind. The tiger doesn’t mate with the elephant.’ />
  ‘It might prove difficult,’ said Meyer. ‘Unless the elephant could be persuaded to lose weight.’

  ‘Impure blood,’ shouted Adolf, ‘spawns impure ideas and creeds. We’ve not only the Jews to contend with but the Slavs, the Socialists, the Hapsburg Monarchists, the Roman Catholics, the Croats …’

  ‘There would seem to be no one left,’ Meyer observed mildly.

  ‘Europe is rotten at the core,’ spluttered Adolf. ‘Rotten.’ He couldn’t repeat the word often enough. That small adjective contained all the wretchedness he felt at Meyer’s rejection of him. Let Meyer buy him a ticket tomorrow, to Munich, to Africa for all the difference it would make. School had been rotten, and his father, and Linz and Vienna. Even his beloved mother had died rotten of a cancer. It was a rotten world.

  ‘My dear boy,’ said Meyer kindly, concerned by the whiteness of his face. ‘You are too sensitive. You shouldn’t upset yourself so much.’ He tried to pat Adolf’s arm, but the young man shrugged him off. ‘It will be no comfort to you,’ Meyer said, ‘but we have all felt the same at your age. Over one obsession or another. With me it was music. I wanted to be a success. I dreamed of being famous.’

  ‘Such things don’t interest me,’ muttered Adolf, lying.

  He was behaving, Meyer thought, for all the world as though they’d had a lovers’ tiff. ‘I’m going to visit my friend Kephalus,’ he said firmly. ‘You should come too. He is a remarkable man, a man of the world. He will cheer you up.’ He stood and waited a moment.

  Adolf couldn’t resist one last parting shot. ‘If Alois is doing so well in business,’ he said, ‘why on earth does he play the waiter at night?’

  ‘A man,’ replied Meyer quietly, ‘needs capital. So they tell me.’

  He began to walk briskly away down the avenue of trees. He half expected Adolf to remain where he was or to disappear in the opposite direction. However, when he reached the dairy and looked back before crossing Upper Parliament Street Adolf was behind him, sullen, but following.