He was placating her, like her father did. A pat on the back and everything would be fine. ‘He’s not there, Leo,’ Katherine said. She paused for a moment. ‘I’m afraid of her. Can’t you understand,’ she met his eyes and held them.
Leo felt a chill go through him.
‘At least, let me stay here for a few days. Don’t ring her. I’ll arrange something,’ she said wildly.
‘Let’s sleep on it,’ Leo kissed her on the forehead. ‘It’s late now. You’ve been dreaming. Everything will be clearer in the morning. Alright?’ he gave her the slowest, steadiest smile he could manage.
A cold grey light made its way round the corners of the curtains and trickled into the room. Katherine woke from restless sleep and groggily studied her whereabouts. Then, in a rush, she remembered. She leapt from the narrow bed. There was a funny ache at the base of her spine. The knickers she had gone to sleep in felt wet. She looked down, saw a streak of red on her legs. It was on the bed, too. She groaned. Not that. Not that too. Not now. Angrily she pulled the sheet from the bed and thrust it in the corner of the room in a tight heap. She was dismayed and embarrassed. Her period. ‘The curse,’ Antonia called it, for she already had hers. She talked about it gaily, almost with pride. ‘Woman’s curse. For our sins. Every month, regular as the moon. A reminder.’ Almost, Katherine sat down on the bed and cried. She would have to wash the sheet later. Was there a machine in the house? She hadn’t noticed.
Her mother had sent the curse to her now, to punish her. ‘With a violent gesture, Katherine pulled her dress over her head, not bothering about the hideous bra her mother had bought her and forced her to wear to bind her small, pointed breasts. She rushed to the bathroom, washed and stuffed paper into her fresh knickers. Now to face her brother and his housemates. She felt depressed. Nothing was working according to her plan. Perhaps she ought simply to go home and lock herself in her room forever, like Rochester’s mad wife. No. Then her mother would have won. Katherine threw her shoulders back and walked slowly down the stairs.
When she reached the bottom, she could hear her brother’s voice from the living room. She took a deep breath, was about to go in when she heard her name. ‘Yes, yes, don’t worry, Katherine’s here with me. Yes, I’ll bring her back.’ She didn’t wait to hear the rest. In a trice, she had flown up the stairs, grabbed her coat and satchel, and quietly made her way out the door.
Her brother had betrayed her. Katherine was distraught. She couldn’t quite believe it. Why hadn’t he waited, at least until her father was home? She wandered aimlessly through the cold morning streets, not sure which way she was going or what direction to take. She found herself amidst a cluster of shops and saw one announcing Drug Store. Remembering her new needs, she embarrassedly asked the man behind the counter for a box of towels. He wrapped it in a brown paper bag, an object to be hidden. Katherine found a small restaurant with a soda fountain. She ordered a glass of milk, gulped it down and then rushed off to the ladies. She stuffed the remaining towels into her satchel. Something at least had been accomplished. But what was she to do next? A hotel? She counted her money. There were almost fifty dollars left. It would last her for a few days. Yet would she manage to register in a hotel without arousing suspicion? She examined her face in the small mirror. It looked strange and far too young. With a sinking feeling, Katherine rearranged the items in her satchel. A card fluttered out. Thomas Sachs.
The house, from the road, looked monumental, a colossus of a residence, with gothic spires, hewn out of dark stone. An ornate iron gate presided over its entrance. Large dark pines stood like sentinels guarding the sweep of wintry garden. To Katherine, a New Yorker, used to apartment blocks and intimate brownstones, it was trebly impressive. Had she felt less desperate, she would have turned back. But Thomas Sachs was now her only hope. She pushed the bell at the side of the gate. It let out a long clang. No one came. She waited and then tried the gate. It was open. She hurried along the path, past matching stone lions, up a few stairs to the imposing door. Here, she rang again quickly, before she lost her nerve.
A tall, suited man answered.
‘I have come to see Mr. Thomas Sachs,’ Katherine mumbled. ‘He’s not expecting me, but I would like to see him.’
‘Whom should I say is calling?’ the man said in an accent she had only ever heard in the movies.
‘Katherine Jardine.’ She hoped Thomas Sachs remembered her name. She waited in a hall rich in oak panelling. There was a series of engravings on the wall which caught Katherine’s eye: dark, sombre images where clusters of fraught figures seemed to howl.
‘Mr. Sachs will see you in the morning room. Come this way.’ The man’s face was expressionless as he took her coat and satchel. He led her into a large room where a floor-to-ceiling window gave out on a garden, dominated by a fountain and a single curving oak, its tracery of branches, lavish against the steel grey sky. The bergère he motioned her to sit on was plumply comfortable. Katherine waited. It was a good room, she decided, severe, yet opulent. She already had an eye for such things. The furniture was a trifle heavy for her taste, but its wood gleamed brightly and the deep blue hues of the rugs were softly reassuring. On the curve of one wall stood a beautiful old grandfather clock, its pendulum swinging rhythmically.
‘So, you approve of my Biedermeier.’ A voice startled her. Thomas Sachs stood to one side of her, his blue eyes bright beneath the shock of white, swept-back hair. He was wearing a grey suit with a light polo neck sweater which made him look younger and at the same time more intimidating than he had the day before.
Katherine nodded. ‘You see, I’ve come.’ She tried a smile which sat oddly on her worried features.
‘And I’m very pleased that you have,’ he said when she didn’t continue. ‘What can I do for you?’ he asked.
Katherine stalled. She didn’t know where to begin. ‘I hope I’m not disturbing you.’ It had suddenly occurred to her that he probably had a family, a wife.
‘Only a little. The telephone calls can wait and my first meeting is not until lunchtime.’ He examined her shrewdly. ‘But perhaps you might like a little something to eat now, a little hot chocolate and some cinnamon toast.’ Without waiting for her response, he pulled a long cord, gave instructions to the butler and came to sit opposite her. ‘Now, Schätzchen, tell me what is the matter. Truthfully, please. I am sure you have not come here to satisfy an old man’s whims.’ He gave her a kindly smile and waited.
‘My brother didn’t want me to stay with him,’ Katherine blurted out. ‘I’ve, I’ve run away from home you see and…’ Katherine poured out her story with not much sequence but with a great deal of feeling. She had never spoken to anyone so openly before, not even her father and when she had finished, she trembled a little with the emotion of it.
‘Poor Katherine,’ Thomas Sachs said softly. ‘Come let us have a little warming drink and then we will think.’ He motioned her to the small round table she hadn’t seen being laid out and urged her to drink and eat. ‘Now, Schatzie, how do you think I can help you?’
‘I don’t know,’ Katherine shook her head so that the long auburn sheath covered her eyes. ‘Perhaps I can stay here,’ she whispered an entreaty.
‘Tell me truthfully, now. How old are you?’ Thomas Sachs asked.
Katherine lowered her eyes. ‘Thirteen. I’m sorry I lied to you yesterday.’
He smiled, ‘Women rarely manage the whole truth about their age, at one end of the spectrum or the other,’ he said. ‘But let us think clearly. If you were to stay with me, it could only be with your parent’s permission. No, no, don’t interrupt me and look at me with those wild eyes. You know that is true. You wouldn’t want to have me arrested for abduction or worse crimes,’ he laughed his face crinkling. ‘Would you?’
Katherine shook her head. ‘But I won’t go home,’ she added emphatically.
‘No, not today. Perhaps not tomorrow. But in a few days time it might look a little different.’
Katherin
e rose from the little table. ‘Thank you for listening to me.’ She made to leave.
He caught her arm and held it hard. ‘Don’t be a stupid girl, Katherine. Sit down. Have you got money? Clothes, stuffed into that little bag of yours? What shall you do? Sleep in bus stations? Be picked up by the police? Sell that young body of yours?’
Katherine looked shocked.
He laughed. ‘You see. You have not thought things through properly. I know that you are serious in your wish to leave home. It is a wise decision on your part. You should not be in the same place as your mother. I shall talk to your father for you. I have been a good advocate in my time. We shall find you a school somewhere.’ He patted her hand. ‘For the time being, you shall stay here. Roberts will fix up a room for you. Later on today, we shall get you some clothes. That dress you are wearing is an offence to my eyes.’ He bowed slightly and left her.
Thomas Sachs was as good and as generous as his word. He was also a shrewd judge of character. In his nigh on sixty years, he had lost two fortunes and built up a third. A prosperous publisher in Berlin, he had left that city in 1935, with his paintings, some furniture, and what money he could easily bring with him. He refused to live under a regime which sanctioned the burning of books; nor, since many of his friends and the writers he published were Jewish - as indeed, he sometimes felt himself to be - would he tolerate the government’s anti-semitism. His wife and two sons, despite his admonishments, had said he was exaggerating the danger of the Nazis. They said they would follow later, perhaps, once he was set up in America. Meanwhile they would keep the family firm going in Berlin. He could do nothing to persuade them to join him and they had left it too late. Now they were all dead.
In the United States, he had begun by setting up a small press which published German writers in translation, books which kept the Germany he knew alive. The company had grown, diversified, prospered, amalgamated other companies. He was now a rich man. A rich man who had three loves - women, books, and the satisfaction of having made an unexpectedly canny deal, in that order. He had never married again, preferring the easy sensuality of mistresses and high, but fleeting, passion. Too much had been vested in his first family. Too much lost.
This little Katherine intrigued him. She had the makings of a passionate woman. He liked her spirit. He would see what he could do for her.
A few days later two men sized each other up none too discreetly in a Park Avenue office. One paced with long-legged strides behind an impressive desk and every now and then ran a hand through his tangle of salt and pepper hair. The room, despite its ample proportions, seemed too small for him. His brow, above piercing dark eyes, was furrowed in concern.
The other sat back in leisurely fashion in a comfortable armchair and elegantly crossed one loose-trousered leg over another. His blue eyes beneath the shock of white hair bore a trace of irony. But his face was set in sympathetic lines.
‘Let me get this quite clear. You say you met my daughter on the train to Boston, that she was running away from home, that she ended up on your doorstep when her brother refused to house her,’ Jacob Jardine eyed the smaller man suspiciously. He felt like hitting out at him, this kidnapper of his daughter. As if the movements of violence would eradicate a reality he preferred not to acknowledge and bring the girl back. But he controlled himself. He had sufficient cause to suppose that Thomas was only a messenger, merely the bearer of bad news.
He had come home late the previous evening from a tedious conference to find Sylvie in a strangely seductive mood, a champagne bottle at the ready, her favourite music pulsing through the house. Only when he had asked her about Katherine had he realised that something was seriously amiss. Sylvie had told him with a dreamy insouciance that Katherine was away in Boston, staying with a charming man called Thomas Sachs. And who, Jacob had asked in disbelief, is Thomas Sachs? Sylvie had shrugged and gestured carelessly towards the telephone, ‘There’s a number somewhere over there.’ Jacob had rung instantly and spoken to the man who now sat opposite him.
‘That is correct. And, as you heard from her own mouth on the telephone this morning, she is fine, though she refuses to come home to you and your wife,’ Thomas Sachs stressed the final word a little. ‘She wouldn’t even speak to her when I first rang your home.’
Jacob looked away, out the window at the stretch of blue winter sky above the uniform roofs of the Park Avenue apartment blocks. He had been half-afraid something like this might happen. He hadn’t acted quickly enough. Anger at himself coiled within him. He turned it momentarily toward the man in front of him. ‘I shall come and fetch her straight away,’ he said brusquely.
‘Come by all means,’ Thomas Sachs said patiently. ‘I can well understand that thinking of your daughter in a stranger’s house is not easy. But,’ and here he turned the whole force of his energetic presence on Jacob, ‘I would suggest that you do not attempt to bring her home. She is too frightened, too tense, like a coiled creature ready to do harm. To herself or to others. We have talked a little about it. And, though I believe she is at heart a sensible girl, she might be driven to do something silly. At the moment, she is quite well, having a little, let’s call it, holiday.’ Sachs smiled his irresistible smile. ‘And it makes me quite happy to have a young person with me.’
‘What has Katherine told you?’ Jacob asked, trying to keep his voice calm. It wasn’t that he feared betrayal. It was simply that the Katherine he saw through Thomas seemed a stranger.
‘Oh,’ Thomas threw off the question lightly. ‘That she doesn’t get on with her mother. That she fears her, when your wife has had a little too much to drink.’ He paused. Thomas, obedient to codes of privacy, didn’t want to overstep the line. But Jacob’s eyes encouraged him. ‘That she can’t communicate with her, particularly when your wife is depressed.’
Thomas was polite, matter-of-fact, as if he were speaking of everyday matters. But Jacob read what was unspoken. It grieved him. He turned away, stared out the window. The move to America had never achieved its aims. It had not helped Sylvie get over Caroline’s death. She had never found a life here, a raison d’être. She had remained a stranger and her bouts of listless depression had grown along with her drinking. She would take no counsel from him. When he had realised that she was closed to him, he had suggested that she consult an analyst. To no avail. However, on the advice of an acquaintance, she had gone to a clinic in Pennsylvania: she retired there periodically now. They pumped her full of drugs.
Jacob paced the room for a moment. When he was honest with himself, he had to confess that he had tried to draw brackets around that part of his existence that was Sylvie. In the normal course of things he was benevolent, but absent: he did not allow himself to be drawn either in anger or passion. And when he was drawn, it was usually in rage. Attempting to keep the semblance of peace, of ordinariness, he had, he now realised, sacrificed Katherine.
He turned back to Sachs, warming to the man because of his evident concern for Katherine. ‘You see all this, Mr Sachs,’ Jacob gestured at the wall of books, at the divan where his patients normally lay, ‘I have read and thought and practised and observed and written for over a quarter of a century, survived a World War, and still I have not been able to provide a home in which my children may be happy.’
Thomas Sachs chuckled. He had taken in the shelf full of Jacob’s own writings, he had paused at the artful photograph of a striking blonde woman whom he had no doubt was Jardine’s wife. He knew that he was in the presence of one of the few men he might recognize as an equal, a kindred spirit. ‘That, Dr. Jardine, is not a challenge many of us can say we have met. Though at least,’ he added with a hint of grimness, ‘you still have the wherewithal to keep trying.’
Katherine spun round the room and watched the bottle green fabric of her new dress lift and swirl with her. She caught the effect in the floor length mirror and smiled. It was a new kind of smile. Slightly tentative, it warmed her eyes and elicited response. The few days she had spent in Tho
mas Sachs’ company had already begun to have an effect on her. Under his generous tutelage, she was developing an interest in herself.
It was a healthy narcissism. Up until now Katherine’s posture of confidence had been an act of will, a daring of elements which might prove as hostile as her mother. The show of bravura hid a guilty timidity. Inside her, there lived a small frightened creature she felt was unlovable. Thomas’s eyes forced her to take account of something different in herself and to begin to value it. He nurtured the young woman in her. And Katherine began to like this young woman who swirled gracefully in front of the mirror.
He had taken her to Boston’s leading department store. There with an expert hand, he had picked out an assortment of dresses, skirts and blouses for her to try.
‘But I don’t need all this,’ Katherine had protested.
He looked at her sternly, ‘Beauty is not a question of need. If you are to sit opposite me at table and walk through my house, then I prefer you to look your best, which I know will be very good indeed.’ He lifted out a white silk blouse trimmed with fine lace, felt the fabric and handed it to the sales assistant who stood behind them. ‘We will try this one as well.’
Katherine shook her head mournfully, ‘I won’t be able to repay you for years.’
‘Katherine,’ he gave her a fond smile. ‘You have still not realized that I am a very rich man. I have very few desires left - a fine picture, a good bottle of wine, a visit to the opera. My payment will be to see you in these clothes. That will give me far, far more pleasure than my money. And now run along and try these garments. And remember, I want each one paraded before me.’
She had dutifully done so and together they had selected an array of clothes in the deep greens and blues, the rich wine shades that Thomas said best set off her porcelain skin and burnished hair. ‘Black will come later. You are still too young and I shall save myself that delight,’ he had added. Then he had sent her off to the lingerie department with the assistant, admonishing her to choose the prettiest undergarments. ‘Even if they aren’t for my eyes,’ he had added with a twinkle. ‘It is important for a woman to feel beautiful everywhere.’ Finally there had been shoes and a fine pair of leather boots. Katherine had been as excited as a child on Christmas morning. She only wished Antonia were there with her to help her think over all the things Thomas said. As it was she stored his words to mull over in her room.
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