Young Adolf

by Beryl Bainbridge

  He fled, unable to be a witness to Meyer’s shame.

  At midnight he fully intended to avoid both Alois and Meyer and go home alone; but at eleven o’clock Alois came into the foyer and said that Meyer wanted to see him urgently. Would he go to B Corridor, below stairs, immediately?

  Mystified, Adolf did as instructed. He found Meyer, still sporting his paper hat, walking up and down in some agitation.

  ‘I must explain,’ Meyer said, and paused.

  ‘There’s no need,’ Adolf told him gently. ‘A man must work. Who am I to pass judgment? You mustn’t be at a loss for words.’

  Puzzled, Meyer stared at him. He said he thought Adolf had misunderstood his meaning. The matter was a delicate one. But for a certain happening, he would never have involved him – as things stood he had no choice. Certain persons, whom he couldn’t name, had for some while been involved in a certain type of activity. There was no time to go into details. Sufficient to say that it was socially important work, with political undertones. ‘I must stress,’ said Meyer, ‘the need for courage. The work is dangerous. It’s only fair I should tell you this.’

  ‘I’m not afraid,’ asserted Adolf, though his heart was beginning to thump in his breast.

  Placing an approving hand on the young man’s sleeve, Meyer continued. ‘Tonight I received information regarding certain events that may take place within the next two hours. I cannot leave here until twelve-thirty at the latest. A message must be delivered before then to a certain person. You yourself, after a week’s training running backwards and forwards across the lounge, are the one person capable of carrying a message at speed. Will you do it?’

  Flustered, Adolf asked: ‘This certain person – will he be in a certain place?’

  ‘In the basement of our house,’ revealed Meyer. ‘It is none other than Mary O’Leary. Tell her to go to the doctor’s house and arrange for drinks all round.’

  ‘Drinks all round,’ repeated Adolf. He was beginning to suspect that Meyer had already been drinking.

  ‘Mary O’Leary will understand what I mean. Will you do it?’

  ‘I cannot refuse,’ said Adolf. ‘Though after a hard day’s work I do feel—’

  ‘Rest assured,’ Meyer interrupted gravely, nodding his head in its paper hat, ‘that what you are doing is of the utmost importance. You are furthering a just and noble cause, young Adolf. And not a word to Alois.’

  Two minutes before midnight, the ends of his trousers tucked into the tops of his threadbare socks, Adolf slipped out of the side door of the hotel. Keeping his elbows close to his ribs and breathing rhythmically, he began to run strongly up Brownlow Hill.

  25

  After conveying his message to Mary O’Leary, Adolf was all for going upstairs and falling asleep. He had been on his feet, and running on them at that, for almost eighteen hours. Mary O’Leary, judging by the mottled complexion of her face and neck, had been sitting dozing by the fire for most of the day. ‘You’re needed,’ she said firmly. ‘You’re too fond of lying down. Come along.’

  Protesting, Adolf followed her up the area steps into the street. He couldn’t think what sort of important social work Mary O’Leary could possibly be involved in. He had attended many meetings in Vienna, of various political persuasions, and had never come across anyone remotely resembling this mountain of a woman, dressed in rags, the backs of her hands so covered in black hair that they seemed to be encased in mittens.

  ‘Let me take your arm,’ she said. ‘Support me. We will look less conspicuous.’ It being now one hour into Sunday morning and a day of rest ahead, there were still people in the streets, many of them walking the worse for drink or hanging on to railings, too confused to advance further.

  When they reached the doctor’s house, they found the front door already open. Peering anxiously into the road was a youth with crinkly black hair. Sighting Mary O’Leary, he jumped up and down and shouted: ‘He’s inside, Missus.’

  Mary O’Leary marched past him and down the hall without a word. Propped against the wall was a rusty bicycle.

  Upon entering the back room they were greeted not by Kephalus but by the man Adolf had surprised leaping through the wall in Stanhope Street. Though his head was no longer bandaged he wore on his feet those unmistakable golfing shoes first seen in Meyer’s wardrobe. Set on the table in front of the window Adolf was disgusted to see the plate of custard tarts offered to him, more than a month ago, by the doctor.

  ‘You’ve heard,’ said Mary O’Leary.

  ‘Yes,’ the man said. ‘Is it drinks all round?’

  ‘The sooner the better.’

  ‘I’ll be off on the bike. You sit here until I send word.’ The man left the room at once and was heard calling to the boy at the door to take the bicycle down the steps.

  ‘I’ll say goodnight,’ said Adolf.

  ‘You’ll stay where you are,’ ordered Mary O’Leary. ‘There’s work to be done before long.’ She inspected the cakes on the table. Finding them too far gone to be eatable, she shrugged and standing on the tips of her massive boots reached up to adjust the working lamp that hung from the ceiling.

  Adolf sat on the floor in near darkness. Tired as he was he couldn’t sleep. He wondered what Meyer had meant by danger. Was it imminent or to come later? Would he be set upon by thugs or shot at from a distance? He devoutly hoped the front door was securely bolted.

  ‘What are we to expect?’ he demanded at last. ‘Who are we waiting for?’

  ‘The night men are coming,’ said Mary O’Leary, perched on a beer crate beside the hearth. This sentence, once understood, struck Adolf as sinister in the extreme. His eyes widened in alarm.

  ‘I haven’t the words,’ said Mary O’Leary. ‘Meyer will explain later.’

  An hour passed. Mice could be heard squeaking behind the skirting board. Then footsteps sounded in the hall and the curly-headed boy burst into the room.

  ‘Argyll Street,’ he shouted. ‘Off Scottie Road.’ Speaking directly to Adolf, he asked: ‘Are youse the foreign fella?’

  ‘He is,’ said Mary O’Leary, bustling to the door.

  ‘Meyer says he’s to come with you, Missus,’ the boy told her.

  Stumbling down the steps, Adolf thankfully left the doctor’s house. He had no idea where they were going, but he thought he stood more chance of survival in the open.

  Once into the road, the boy disappeared. Beyond the black pit of St James’s cemetery, the lights of ships anchored in the river swung up and down against the sky.

  Mary O’Leary led Adolf back along the streets he had so strenuously run through earlier that night. Even at this hour the windows of the Adelphi Hotel blazed like beacons – the revolving doors still spun. They travelled the length of Lime Street and up the steep incline of London Road. Argyll Street was situated to the north of Scotland Road, an area of the city so wretched and notorious that Adolf was glad to be accompanied by Mary O’Leary. He had the feeling their progress was being closely watched. It seemed to him that they were both preceded and followed by a dark figure who from time to time darted away down side streets only to reappear either further ahead of them or some way behind. And yet this person, or persons, kept their distance.

  Though Adolf sighed heavily on occasions, signifying his exasperation at being expected to traipse about the town in the middle of the night, he felt curiously elated. No one, as far as he could remember, since he was sixteen years old had needed or asked for his assistance. He had always been shy and introverted, more so after the death of his mother and the death of his hopes, when they had deliberately barred him from the Art Academy. People hadn’t often told him jokes or sent him postcards when they went on holiday. Secretly he thought it was because he was disliked. Of course Meyer had intimated he had no choice – it was inconceivable to think of Alois in his homburg hat jogging hot-foot on such a mysterious errand – but perhaps Meyer had truly seen through the cold exterior to the warm heart within. It was a queer feeling to be trusted.r />
  Mary O’Leary was guiding him down a narrow street of workmen’s cottages. It was unnaturally quiet. Despite the thin drizzle that had begun to fall, a stench of garbage and something worse rose from the muddy ground. Not a soul was about and only one solitary lamp burned at the end of the street. Adolf had heard stories of the fearful happenings in this sector of the city – the drunkenness, the fights, the suicidal women who ruptured their wombs with the tip of a broken bottle. There wasn’t a single inhabitant, according to Alois, who wasn’t destined for the workhouse, the prison or the Infirmary. The police, if present at all, patrolled in groups of three.

  Suddenly Mary O’Leary said urgently: ‘Hold fast to my arm and tilt your face to the lamp.’

  Adolf didn’t understand her. As he hesitated, standing there in the middle of the gloomy street, he was encircled by shadowy figures and torn abruptly from her side. Jostled and manhandled, numerous fingers clawing at his throat, he was pushed against a wall.

  ‘Leave him,’ he heard Mary O’Leary cry. ‘He brought the message. Leave him be.’

  Her words were repeated by a dozen voices … He brought the message … He’s the fella that brought the message … and then he was being supported on either side, a hand under each elbow, and run down the street at such speed that his ankles knocked together. Finally he was lifted from the ground and borne, coat ends flapping and head jiggling violently on the stem of his neck, around a corner and into a cobbled court. Narrowly escaping decapitation, he was carried through the doorway of a house and dropped on his feet. He faced a broken table, shorn up at one end by a pile of bricks, behind which Meyer sat, writing on a piece of paper by the light of a candle.

  ‘Excellent,’ cried Meyer at the sight of him. ‘Good work, young Adolf.’

  When his eyes had grown accustomed to the dim light, Adolf made out Kephalus standing in a corner of the room, clutching a torch and a Gladstone bag presumably containing medical supplies. Beneath a sink under the window huddled several women, holding children in their arms. Meyer seemed to be giving detailed instructions to the half-dozen men who had escorted Adolf to the house. At his elbow rolled a shillelagh. When the men trooped out of the door, the candle flickered in the draught.

  ‘There’s little time for talking,’ said Meyer addressing Adolf, who leaned more dead than alive against the sink. ‘The night men are coming. Go up on to the roof and keep watch. Kephalus will explain what is expected of you.’

  Pointing his torch downwards, the doctor preceded Adolf up a flight of stairs that threatened to collapse under their weight. On a torn mattress on the floor lay a row of children, turned on their sides and all packed the same way like sardines in a box. Flashing his torch upwards, exposing a ceiling that in places was open to the elements, Kephalus ordered Adolf to climb on his shoulders and push up the skylight.

  ‘I haven’t the strength,’ complained Adolf. ‘I’m not a mountaineer.’

  Ignoring his protests, the doctor squatted on his haunches and jabbed him in the shins with the torch. Adolf scrambled on to Kephalus’ back, gritting his teeth, and held tight to his ears. Rising together in an unsteady pyramid, they swayed back and forth searching for the trap door.

  Moments later, one elbow badly scraped, Adolf levered himself through the aperture and lifting the Gladstone bag and torch after him emerged on to the roof. Clinging to the chimney breast, he saw in the distance the lamps of Scotland Road and beyond, luminous against the dark clouds, the glittering rectangle of the Adelphi Hotel.

  Kephalus leaped for the edge of the trap door and athletically hauled himself upwards by the strength of his arms. Coughing and wheezing he wriggled his way on to the broken tiles and rolled towards the guttering.

  ‘Stay in one place,’ pleaded Adolf. ‘The roof will come down.’ Fleetingly he remembered, clinging there in the rain, how as a boy of eighteen he had prayed for a second Boer War. He had felt that until his life was blown sky-high by some monstrous explosion and fell earthwards in differently arranged pieces he would never, ever find himself.

  ‘Move over,’ ordered Kephalus. ‘You look north and I’ll look south. Keep your ears open.’

  ‘For what?’ asked Adolf crossly, unable to let go of the chimney stack.

  ‘Footsteps,’ said Kephalus. ‘Movements. When the call comes, drop through the trap door like a shooting star and shout to Meyer beneath. Then hand the children up to me.’

  He began to prowl about the chimney, slithering on all fours in the darkness. A tile bounced from the roof and fell into the court below. ‘Take care,’ called a voice, and the beam of a torch flashed for a moment somewhere to the right.

  ‘At this rate,’ whispered Adolf, ‘I won’t have to wait till the call comes. Nor will I need to use the trap door.’ He could make no sense of it. He couldn’t understand why the children were required to be lifted on to the roof. Was he about to witness some massacre of the innocents? He waited at least ten minutes before intimating to Kephalus that if it was all the same to him he preferred to go indoors.

  ‘I’ve been working since six o’clock this morning,’ he explained. ‘And my constitution is far from robust. I’m a martyr to bronchitis.’

  ‘Keep your voice low, you little twerp,’ hissed Kephalus.

  The word, though unfamiliar to Adolf, wasn’t, he thought, an endearment. He slid downwards until his buttocks rested upon the tiles and his feet sloped towards the guttering. If he was quiet and made no trouble, perhaps the doctor would cease his perilous meanderings about the stack. It was possible, Adolf hoped, to fall twenty feet and live. Somewhere behind him a match was struck; he caught the faint drift of tobacco smoke.

  ‘Listen,’ whispered Kephalus. ‘It may be that in most cases it is better for the children to be taken into the care of the authorities. They get rid of the lice and they cut them out of their undergarments. But emotionally it is disruptive and cruel. Do you agree?’

  ‘I do, I do,’ said Adolf.

  ‘It’s not overcrowding in the bed that causes contagious diseases – it’s the state of the drains and the Catholic Church and the rats coming through the woodwork. It’s the lack of food. How do they expect a man to provide adequate nourishment for his wife and himself, let alone fourteen children?’

  ‘He could work harder,’ suggested Adolf, recklessly.

  ‘Work harder!’ cried the doctor. His voice from behind the chimney rose in outrage. ‘What is that supposed to mean? By my information, until this week you’ve spent the greater proportion of your time flat on your back. Do you know that at the gates of the docks at five o’clock every morning they fight like animals for the privilege of working for three shillings a day?’

  ‘I spoke without thinking,’ said Adolf hastily. ‘I’m ashamed.’ He was desperately afraid the doctor meant to leap on him and dash him to the cobbles below. He said again, and with as much feeling as he could muster: ‘I spoke without thinking.’

  A child whimpered in the room beneath. The doctor grunted and fell silent.

  26

  Two figures appeared at the far end of the street holding storm lanterns. They stood motionless on the corner, giving no sign that they intended to approach further. From somewhere at roof level Adolf heard the incongruous ringing of a bicycle bell.

  When the call came, seconds later, it was surprisingly muted, a low wailing that hardly rose above a murmur. Adolf, who had expected to hear a pistol shot or the thrilling blast of a trumpet, strained his ears to catch its drift. They are coming … The night men are coming …

  ‘Quick,’ urged the doctor, but already Adolf was clinging upright to the stack, only too eager to leave his precarious post. Judging by the commotion from the downstairs room, the scuffle of boots and muffled cursing, he had no need to warn Meyer. He had just managed to turn about and was lowering himself feet first through the trap-door when a hand gripped him by the hair.

  ‘Too late,’ cried Kephalus. ‘The bastards have come from both directions.’

  H
auling Adolf skywyards again, he kicked the trap into place and forcing Adolf to lean at an acute angle against the roof flung a weighty arm across his shoulders. They lay cheek to cheek on the wet tiles. On his re-entry through the sky-light Adolf had struck his forehead on the corner bricks of the crumbling chimney stack. He couldn’t be sure if the moisture beneath his face was rain or blood. The flimsy guttering beneath the toe-caps of his boots was all that stopped him from sliding earthwards, locked in a comradely embrace with the doctor.

  It was impossible to see what was happening in the little court, but now the sounds of the battle were clearly audible – doors slamming, children crying, tables being overturned.

  Then voices were heard directly beneath them and Meyer’s voice raised louder than all the rest. ‘God damn you,’ he was shouting over and over. ‘God damn you to hell.’

  By moving himself fractionally from the doctor’s side and tucking in his chin, Adolf was able to peer, through a gap in the leaking roof, into the room below. The scene he witnessed was so melodramatic in content and so jerkily enacted, that he felt he was watching a show at a moving picture house. Against the wall were ranged four or five women, each clutching a child to her breast. Facing them and holding a lantern at shoulder height was a burly man in a raincoat. Between the trembling women and their persecutor stood Meyer in an heroic pose, brandishing his shillelagh. There were other persons in the room but they were merely onlookers. The man in the raincoat was deliberating upon which child he should snatch from its mother. Meyer was waiting to strike him dead if he took a step forward. At that instant a boy some two years old, clinging to his mother’s neck, uttered a piercing shriek of terror. Adolf remembered suddenly a day in summer when in a field he had watched a dog chasing a dozen rabbits up a grassy slope. There had been no reason to suppose that the dog would be swift enough to catch any of them. And then one rabbit out of all the rest, as if sensing it had been chosen for death, froze in its tracks and screamed. Pouncing, the dog was on it and breaking its back in the grass.