The noise would make me throw off my bedsheet and sneak downstairs in my bare feet to peep around the sitting-room door, where the odours of warm bodies, whisky, and cigarettes drifted toward me. In my memory, my father is leaning forward and thumping his knee, or stubbing out his cigarette so burning tobacco flies out of the ashtray and melts crusty holes in the rug or scorches the wooden floor. Then he is standing with his hands clenched and his arms held tight to his sides as if he is battling with the impulse to let his fists fly at the first man who stands up to disagree with him.
They wouldn’t wait for one another to finish speaking; it wasn’t a debate. Like my father’s lists, the men shouted over each other, interrupting and heckling.
“I tell you, it’ll be a natural disaster: tidal wave, flood, earthquake. What good will your shelter be then, James, when you and your family are buried alive?”
Standing in the hall, I flinched at the thought, my fists balled, and I held in a whimper.
“Flood? We could bloody do with a flood now.”
“Look at those poor buggers in that earthquake in Italy. Thousands dead.” The man’s words were slurred and he had his head in his hands. I thought perhaps his mother was Italian.
“It’ll be the government that lets us down. Don’t expect Callaghan to be knocking on your door with a glass of water when the standpipes have run dry.”
“He’ll be too busy worrying about inflation to notice the Russians have blasted us to hell.”
“My cousin has a friend at the BBC who says they’re producing public information films on how to make an inner refuge in houses. It’s just a matter of time before the bomb drops.”
A man with a greying beard said, “Frigging idiots; they’ll have nothing to eat and if they do the army will confiscate it. What’s the frigging point?” A bit of spittle caught in the hairs on his chin and I had to look away.
“I’m not going to be in London when the bomb falls. You can stay, James, locked in your dungeon, but I’ll be gone—the Borders, Scotland, somewhere isolated, secure.”
“And what will you eat?” said my father. “How will you survive? How are you going to get there with all the other fools heading out of the cities as well? It’ll be gridlock and if you get to the countryside, everyone including your mother and her cat will have gone too. Call yourself a Retreater? It’ll be the cities where law and order are restored soonest. Not your commune in North Wales.” From behind the door frame, I swelled with pride as my father spoke.
“All those emergency supplies in your cellar are meant to be just that,” said another man. “What are you going to do when they run out? You don’t even have an air rifle.”
“Hell, give me a decent knife and an axe and we’ll be fine,” said my father.
The Englishmen carried on arguing until an American voice cut through them all: “You know what the trouble is with you, James? You’re so damn British. And the rest of you—you’re all living in the dark ages, hiding in your cellars, driving off to the country like you’re going on a fucking Sunday picnic. You still call yourself Retreaters; the world’s already moving on without you. You haven’t even figured out that you’re survivalists. And James, forget the cellar. What you need is a bug-out location.”
The way he spoke was authoritative, with an assumption of attention. The rest of the men, my father included, fell silent. Oliver Hannington lolled in the armchair with his back to me, while all the others stared out the window or at the floor. It reminded me of my classroom, when Mr. Harding said something none of us understood. He would stand for minutes, waiting for someone to put their hand up and ask what he meant, until the silence grew so thick and uncomfortable that we looked anywhere except at each other or him. It was a strategy designed to see who would crack first, and nine times out of ten it would be Becky who would say something silly, so the class could laugh in relief and embarrassment, and Mr. Harding would smile.
Unexpectedly, Ute strode through from the kitchen, walking in that way she did when she knew she had an audience, all hips and waist. Her hair was tied in a messy knot at the back of her neck and she was wearing her favourite kaftan, the one that flowed around her muscular legs. Every man there, including my father and Oliver Hannington, understood that she could have gone the long way round, via the hall. No one ever described Ute as beautiful—they used words like striking, arresting, singular. But because she was a woman to be reckoned with, the men composed themselves. Those standing sat down, and those on the sofa stopped slouching; even Oliver Hannington turned his head. They paid attention to their cigarettes, cupping the lit ends and looking around for ashtrays. Ute sighed: a quick intake of breath, an expansion of her ribcage and a slow exhalation. She berated the men as she walked past them to kneel in front of me. For the first time, my father and his friends turned and saw me.
“Now you have woken my little Peggy, with all your talks of disaster,” Ute said, stroking my hair.
Even then I knew she did it because people were watching. She took my hand to lead me upstairs. I pulled back, straining to hear who would break the silence.
“There is nothing bad going to happen, Liebchen,” Ute crooned.
“And a bug-out location is?” It was my father who surrendered first.
There was a pause, and Oliver Hannington knew we were all hanging on his answer.
“Your very own little cabin in the forest,” he said, and laughed, although I didn’t think it was funny.
“And how are we going to find one of those?” one of the men on the sofa asked.
Then Oliver Hannington turned to me, tapped the side of his nose, and winked. In the glow of his attention I let Ute tug me by the hand up to bed.
When the work on the fallout shelter was coming to an end, my father put me into training. It started as a game to him—a way to show off to his friend. My father bought a silver whistle, which he hung around his neck on a length of string, and he bought me a canvas rucksack with leather straps and buckles. Its side pockets were embroidered with blue petals and green leaves.
His signal was three short blasts on the whistle, which were sounded from the bottom of the stairs. Ute would have nothing to do with this either; she stayed in bed with the sheet over her head or played the piano, propping the top board fully open so the sound reverberated throughout the house. The whistles, which could happen at any point before bedtime, were my signal to pack the rucksack. I ran about the house, gathering the things from a list my father had made me memorize. I flung the rucksack on my back and sped down the stairs in time to an angry “Revolutionary Étude” by Chopin. My father would be looking straight ahead, the whistle still in his mouth and his hands clasped behind his back, while I raced around the newel post, the rucksack bouncing. I rushed down the cellar stairs two at a time and jumped the last three. In the fallout shelter, I knew I had about four minutes to unpack before my father blew the whistle again. I yanked out the chair at the head of the table, facing away from the stairs. And from the rucksack I pulled out a pile of clothes—underwear, denim dungarees, trousers, cheesecloth shirts, jumper, shorts, nightie—and, making sure they didn’t unfold, placed them on the table. My hand went back in the rucksack to snatch the next item, like a lucky dip at the funfair. Out came my comb, placed horizontally just above the nightie; to the left, an extending spyglass; my toothbrush and toothpaste, side by side on top of my clothes; and next, my doll, Phyllis, with her painted-on eyes and sailor suit, beside them. In a final rush, I produced my blue woollen balaclava and squeezed my head inside it. Despite the heat, matching mittens were meant to go on next, and when everything was perfectly aligned on the table and the rucksack was empty, I was supposed to be sitting quietly with my hands on my legs, looking straight ahead toward the gas stove. Then the whistle would go again and a nervous excitement would run through me, as my father came down the stairs for the review. Sometimes he straightened the comb or moved Phyllis over to the other side of the clothes.
“Very good, very g
ood,” he would say, as though it were an army inspection. “At ease,” and he would give me a wink and I knew I had passed.
On the final occasion that my father and I performed our drill, Ute and Oliver Hannington had been invited to be our audience. She, of course, refused. She thought it was pointless and childish. Oliver Hannington was there, though, leaning against the wall behind my father when he blew the first three whistles. Ute was in the sitting room, playing Chopin’s “Funeral March.” At first, everything went well. I gathered all the items and went down both sets of stairs in double-quick time, but I made an error in the laying out, or maybe my father, in his excitement, blew the second whistle too soon. I ran out of time and the mittens were not on my hands when the two men came down the cellar stairs. With my pulse racing, I stuffed the mittens under my legs. They itched the skin where my shorts ended. I had let my father down. I wasn’t fast enough. The mittens became wet beneath my thighs. The warm liquid ran off the chair and pooled on the white linoleum beneath me. My father shouted. Oliver Hannington, standing behind me, laughed, and I cried.
Ute rushed down to the cellar, swept me up into her arms, and let me bury my face in her shoulder as she carried me away from “those absolute awful men.” But like the closing credits of a film, my memory of that scene ends as I am rescued.
I cannot remember Oliver Hannington leaning in his indifferent manner against the cellar shelves with a smirk on his lips after I wet myself, although I’m sure that he did. I have imagined but I didn’t see him take the cigarette from his mouth and blow the smoke upward, where it would have crept along the low ceiling. And I didn’t notice how red my father’s face became after I let him down in front of his friend.
3
At the end of June, Ute went back to work. I’m not sure if she had simply had enough of being at home with us, or she craved a more attentive audience; it wasn’t because she needed the money. “The world wants me,” she liked to say. Perhaps she was right. Ute had been a concert pianist—not one of those second-rate piano players who is part of a third-rate orchestra. Ute Bischoff, at eighteen, had been the youngest-ever winner of the International Chopin Piano Competition.
On rainy afternoons I liked to sit on the dining room floor and take out her records from the sideboard. It never occurred to me to listen to them. Instead I played my album from the film of the Railway Children over and over until I could recite it by heart and examined the cardboard sleeves of Ute’s music in minute detail: Ute sitting at the piano, Ute taking a bow on stage, Ute in an evening gown and a smile I didn’t recognize.
In 1962 she had played under the baton of Leonard Bernstein in the opening concert at Philharmonic Hall in New York.
“Leonard was ein Liebchen,” she said. “He first kissed me, and then he kissed Jackie Kennedy.”
Ute was lauded and feted; she was handsome and young. When she was twenty-five and on a tour of England, she met my father. He was her stand-in page turner, and eight years her junior.
For the three of us, their meeting became one of those stories that every family has—often repeated and regularly embellished. My father shouldn’t have been at her concert at all. He was a ticket taker, covering someone else’s shift when Ute’s regular page turner tripped over a purchase line backstage and smashed his nose into the counterweight. My father, never squeamish, was wiping the blood from the floorboards with a rag when the stage manager tugged on his sleeve and asked in desperation if he could read music.
“I admitted I could,” said my father.
“But that was the big problem,” said Ute. “My page turners must always be watching me, not reading the music. Look for the nodding of my head, I say.”
“I couldn’t. I was in awe of you.”
“The silly boy, he must turn too early, and then he turned two pages,” Ute said, smiling. “It was absolute disaster.”
“I wrote you a note to apologize.”
“And then you invited him to your dressing room,” I joined in.
“And then I invite him to my dressing room,” Ute repeated.
“And she gave me a lesson in page turning,” my father said, and he and Ute laughed.
“Such a handsome, clever boy,” she said, cupping his face with her hand. “How could I not fall in love with him?”
But that was when I was five or six. When I was eight, asking for the story got me a quick, “Oh, you don’t want to hear that boring thing again,” from Ute.
For the public and critics, her relationship with James Hillcoat was a scandal. Ute was at the height of her career and she gave it all up for the love of a seventeen-year-old boy. They married the next year, as soon as it was legal.
The day the fallout shelter was completed, Oliver Hannington left, and when I came home from school, Ute had gone too, on a concert tour of Germany which I knew nothing about. I found my father lying on the sofa, his blank eyes staring at the ceiling. I ate cereal for supper and stayed up until the television screen swam in front of me.
The next morning my father came into my bedroom before I got up and said I didn’t have to go to school.
“School, schmool.” His laugh was too loud, and I knew he was pretending to be happy for my sake. We both wanted Ute to be at home, huffing at a sink full of washing-up, making the beds with loud sighs, or even deliberately thumping on the piano, but neither of us would say it to the other. “What’s the point of sitting in a classroom when the sun’s shining and there are plenty of things to teach you at home?” he said. Without him saying so, I understood that he didn’t want to be alone. We put up a triangular two-man tent at the end of the garden, just where the parched lawn gave way to bushes and ivy-covered trees. At night we had to wriggle inside it feet first; by morning the guy ropes had loosened and the top ridge had sagged, until it was only inches above our bodies.
Our house—a large, white, oceangoing ship of a building—stood alone on the crest of a gentle slope. The garden, which rolled downhill, had been designed and planted long before our family had moved in, but neither of my parents took care of it and what had once probably been separate and well-kept spaces now blended one into the other. A swing seat stood close to the house on a brick terrace, which was disintegrating while the moss and creeping thyme thrived. At the edges, the brick crumbled into the encroaching lawn so that it was no longer possible to see where one ended and the other began. In the sunshine of that summer, the grass all but disappeared from the centre of the lawn, rubbed away by our feet, growing lank and yellow only around the sides. My father made plans on paper for a vegetable patch—scale diagrams of the distance between rows of carrots and runner beans and the angle of the sun at particular times of the day. He said he had grown radishes when he was a child, spicy roots the size of his thumb, and wanted to teach me to do the same, but he got only as far as marking out the area he had in mind and was too easily distracted even to put a spade in the ground.
At the bottom of the garden, clumps of dock and dandelion had taken root, their downy heads spreading seeds in the smallest breath of wind. A wild blackberry lorded it over all the other plants, sending thorny advance guards arching into the air, each with hundreds of buds packed into tight whorls. And all the while, under the straggling flower-bolted beds, the treacherous plant was sending secret messengers, which reappeared as far up as the terrace in small flowerless tufts. The end of the garden was a wild and exciting place for an eight-year-old, because beyond the raggle-taggle border was the cemetery. The scented overgrowth gave way to towering trees, enveloped in twisting ivy all the way up into the canopy. My father and I waded through the nettles, our arms held above our heads to avoid the stings. The daylight under the trees was lazy and the air always cool.
We trod narrow paths into the dilapidated cemetery that led the way to the sweetest elderflower bush, a patch of ground elder which had found sunlight, and the best tree for climbing. I could stand on its lowest branch, and my father would give me a leg up into the tree’s crotch, where its branc
hes, each the size of his waist, curved up, then outward. With our legs dangling either side, we shuffled along one of these, me first with my father close behind, until we could look down through the waxy leaves to the graves below. My father said it was called a Magnificent Tree.
The cemetery was closed to the public—lack of council funds had locked its gates the year before. We were alone with the foxes and the owls; no visitors or mourners came, so we invented them. We pointed out a tourist in a Hawaiian shirt with his loud wife.
“Oh gee,” said my father in an American falsetto, “look at that angel, isn’t she just the cutest thing!”
Once, we swung our legs above an imaginary burial.
“Shh, the widow’s coming,” whispered my father. “She’s blowing her nose on a lace handkerchief. How tragic, to have lost her husband so young.”
“But just behind her are the evil twins,” I joined in, “wearing identical black dresses.”
“And there’s the despicable nephew—the one with egg in his moustache. All he wants is his uncle’s money.” My father rubbed his hands together.
“The widow’s throwing a flower onto the coffin.”
“A forget-me-not,” my father added. “The uncle is creeping up behind her—watch out! She’s going to fall into the grave!” He grabbed me around the waist and pretended to tip me off the branch. I squealed, my voice ringing amongst the stone mausoleums and tombs surrounding us.
Our Endless Numbered Days: A Novel Page 2