“Oh my gooodness,” Mrs. Cass said, her hand going to her mouth. “Not Ute. Oh no, not Ute.” She looked around and behind her as if she wanted to sit down, but became distracted and instead said, “You poor, poor child.” She clasped me to her, pressing me into her soft bosom, then took me back to the chair and brought me thick, sweet tea in a cup with a saucer, as if it were me who had just learned of the car crash and not her.
Through the door, the headmaster said, “Surely we would have heard. Isn’t she that famous piano player?”
Mrs. Cass’s answer was too quiet to hear but it involved a lot of gasps, head shaking, and hand clasping.
When I had finished the tea, she guided me back to my classroom, her hand on my shoulder, both caressing and propelling me forward. She took Mr. Harding aside and had a whispered exchange with him; his expression moved from boredom to shock to a crinkled face of sympathy when he glanced at me, waiting at the front of the class.
On the first row, Becky mouthed, “What did you say?” and I tried to mouth back, “I told them she died in a car crash,” but the words “car crash” were too difficult to communicate without saying them out loud. Rose Chapman nudged and leaned toward Becky, who, in a hiss, translated my words into “Tabitha died in a rush!” The whisper spread from group to group, where children gathered around marbles, counters, and dice. Mr. Harding told me I was excused; I packed up KerPlunk and left.
At home, I saw little of my father and Oliver. Once, they went down to the high street and brought back fish and chips, which they laid out on plates and ate with knives and forks at the dining-room table. Oliver got out the cutlery with the ivory handles and selected Ute’s crystal Spiegelau goblets from the sideboard for the red wine they had bought at the off-licence.
“Prost! Toast! Der Bundespost!” shouted my father, and both men laughed in a slurred way while the crystal chinked. I carried my dinner, still wrapped in newspaper, into the sitting room and ate it in front of the telly. I went up to bed soon after. I lay still with my eyes shut, but sleep didn’t come and I worried I had forgotten how to do it. I hummed the theme music to The Railway Children and imagined that Ute was downstairs, conquering the piano, while at the kitchen table my father was flicking through the newspaper. Everything and everyone were where they were supposed to be. But I was still awake when my father and Oliver stumbled upstairs, calling goodnight to each other.
If the two men weren’t laughing, they were arguing. With all the windows in the house open to try to let in a breeze, I heard their shouting no matter which room they were in. They sounded like a Retreater meeting for two—the real ones had been suspended for the summer; apparently even survivalists took holidays. I tried to ignore them, but would find myself straining to make out each word. My father shouted the loudest, lost control first; Oliver’s voice remained a steady measured drawl that sliced through the other’s fury. The arguments seemed to be the same ones, going around and around again: the best bug-out location, city versus country, equipment, guns, knives. The noise would reach a crescendo, then a door would be slammed, the flare of a match as a cigarette was lit in the dark garden, and the next day all would be forgotten.
One evening I heard a noise from the hall, and it took me a moment to realize it was the phone. When I picked it up, Ute was on the other end.
“Liebchen, it is Mutti.” She sounded a long way off. “I am sorry I haven’t called earlier. It has been difficult.” I thought she must mean that there weren’t many telephones in Germany.
“Papa and I have been living in the garden.”
“In the garden? That sounds nice. So you are OK, and are you happy now that school must be finished for the holidays?”
I was worried she would ask about the lessons I hadn’t been to, but instead she said, “Has the weather been warm in London too?” She sounded sad, as if she would rather be at home, but then perhaps trying to make me laugh, she continued, “Last night, a fat lady fainted from the heat when I was on the second bar of the Tchaikovsky. I had to start again from the beginning; it was absolute shambles.”
“I’m very brown,” I said, rubbing dust off my legs and realizing I hadn’t had a bath since the day Oliver had arrived.
“How lovely it must be to have time in the sunshine. I am inside every day, in the car, or in the hotel and then in the car again to get to the performance.”
“Do you want to speak to Papa now?” I asked.
“No, not yet. I want to find out more about what my little Peggy has been doing.”
“I’ve been cooking.”
“That sounds very helpful. I hope you’ve tidied the kitchen afterward.”
I didn’t answer her; I didn’t know what to say.
After a few seconds, in a voice I had to strain to hear, she asked, “Perhaps you could get Papa now.”
I placed the receiver on the padded seat beside the phone and saw that my hands had made dirty marks on the yellow plastic. I licked my fingers and rubbed at the smudges.
When I told my father who it was on the phone, he jumped up from the swing seat, where he had been lying in the sun, and ran into the house. I went down to the bottom of the garden, where I had been baking burdock roots in the hot ashes of a fire I had made by myself. Without understanding why, I thrashed at the embers with a stick, scattering them like glow-worms into the evening. A few landed on the tent, burning black-rimmed holes through the canvas and the liner. When the fire was a grey blotch on the threadbare lawn, I walked through the house and up to my room.
An argument between my father and Oliver was building in the kitchen. It moved to the sitting room and on into the glasshouse; I put my head out of the open window. Below me were two shadows, lit by the lamplight that spilled from the sitting-room door. When I put my fingers in my ears to block out the sound, the black shapes became silent dancers, their movements choreographed, each action planned and rehearsed. I pressed my fingers in and out again in quick succession, which made the argument come to me in bursts of noise, disjointed and staccato.
“You f—”
“—ker. What—”
“—itch. How cou—”
“—you’re pathet—”
“—an anima—”
“—ucking ani—”
And then Oliver laughing, like a machine gun, jerky and uncontrolled. A dark object, an ashtray or a plant pot, broke off from one of the man-shadows and flew past the other into the glass roof. There was a pause, as if the glass sheet were holding its breath; then it trembled, rippling outward and splitting apart with a tremendous noise. In a reflex action, I ducked even while the glass rained down on the men below. The father-shadow crouched, his hands over the top of his head. Oliver yelled, “Whowwaa,” as his shadow backed toward the sitting-room door and disappeared inside. My father’s shape stayed bent, so that from my position above him, he stopped being a man with arms and legs and a head and became a crow with a beak and wings. He made a noise like a crow too. I watched him with my hands on the window sill and my eyes just above them, while the sound of Oliver moved through the house—to the kitchen and upstairs to the guest bedroom. I heard drawers being opened and closed, the long rasp of a suitcase zip. Then Oliver burst into my bedroom and I saw myself as he must have seen me, crouching by the window in the dark.
“Seen enough, have you, little girl?” he spat. “Get a kick out of spying on adults, do you? Well, don’t worry, I’ve seen enough too. Of you and your dear papa.” He laughed bitterly. “And let’s not forget the remarkable Ute. It seems I’ve given them both a present they won’t forget in a hurry.” He left and went downstairs.
For a second I was frozen; then, thinking he was going back to the shattered glasshouse, I spun around and looked out of the window again. But the front door slammed, shaking the house, and below me, my father’s crow-body jerked as though it had been caught in one of our traps, and then it slumped. I crept back to bed and lay with my eyes bulging into the darkness and my ears straining to hear the next so
und, which never came.
In the morning, I was woken by three short blasts of the whistle. My father stood at the bottom of the stairs, legs apart, head up. The backs of his hands had plasters stuck on them in several places, and there was another over the bridge of his nose.
“Pack your rucksack, Peggy,” he said, using his military voice. “We’re going on holiday.”
“Where are we going?” I asked, worrying what Ute would say about the broken roof and the glass all over the floor when she returned.
“We’re going to die Hütte,” said my father.
5
London, November 1985
At breakfast, I agreed to sit at the kitchen table to eat, instead of in my bedroom or on the floor of the glasshouse, where I could escape the stuffy warmth of the other rooms. Ute and I negotiated, and she said if I sat down with her and took time with spooning my porridge she would stop asking questions. I told her I would, because my father’s face was tucked away in a secret place. I knew she would continue to ask questions. She couldn’t stop herself.
The kitchen table had shrunk since I had been away, but everything else had multiplied and I found the kitchen was the most unsettling room of all. The quantity of things, the overwhelming choice of what to look at, pressed me to my chair and made me shut my eyes. The row of pots with always available tea, coffee, and sugar; larger containers marked SELF-RAISING and PLAIN; a blender gathering greasy dust; a roll of soft paper on a wooden stick; a shiny toaster that I avoided eye contact with; hooks with assorted mugs; a white fridge made multicoloured by magnets. I couldn’t understand why a family of three needed seven saucepans when there were only four rings on the cooker; why the utensil pot held nine wooden spoons if there were only seven pans; and how we could ever eat the amount of food available in the cupboards and the fridge.
Oskar was at Saturday morning Cub Scouts, helping to tidy the grounds of an old people’s home. I knew Ute had chosen this particular morning, with Oskar away, to ask me to sit at the table, because she thought that sitting down to eat with my eight-year-old brother might be one step too far. Oskar, Oskar, Oskar: I had to keep repeating his name to remind myself that he existed, that a boy was born and grew for eight years and eight months without me knowing. He was almost as tall as me, but so young. I was still shocked, every time I looked at him, to think I was exactly his age when my father and I left this house. While Ute was ladling porridge, made with water—the way I liked it—I wondered whether the Scouts had taught Oskar how to light a fire without matches, or how to catch squirrels by their necks, or use an axe with one smooth, swift motion. Perhaps they were things he and I could discuss another day.
At the table, Ute tried to engage me in conversation.
“Do you remember that summer?” she asked, her mouth still full of z’s and v’s, even after all these years. Straight away she began with a question, even though she had promised.
I shrugged an answer.
“I have been thinking of your father, the summer you went away,” she said. “Went away” was the phrase she always used—innocuous, with no blame attached. “I think perhaps I was too old for him. Too steady. He wants to have fun with his friend Oliver.”
“Wanted,” I corrected under my breath, but she didn’t hear; she was staring through and beyond me.
“They were like boys. They were swinging the garden seat too high. I was afraid it would be damaged, and also the grass with their shoes. That seat belonged to your grandmother; Omi had it delivered all the way from Germany, you know. And then, when they were so hot, they took off their shirts and ran around the garden, playing at tomfoolery with the hose, even though the Water Board said it was not allowed. I watched them from your bedroom window, then I went down to ask them to be careful with the seat.” She paused, recollecting. “Oliver, he teased me and said, ‘Ja wohl.’ Maybe that’s when it started. Yes, maybe then.”
I didn’t ask Ute for these confidences, but still they spilled from her, as if, in the telling, she was assuaging some kind of guilt. In my mind’s eye I saw my father, so unaware that one push with his heels against the earth, in time with Oliver Hannington, or a single yelp of delight when a splash of water hit his freckled back, would create a hairline crack in his family’s footings. Ute said my father didn’t give a damn, that it was all about quick pleasures for him. But the evidence of the fallout shelter still below the kitchen, and the lists I had found down there, told me a different story.
Ute’s eyes refocused on me and the way I was eating. She asked whether I was enjoying the porridge, and I became aware that I was shovelling it into my mouth and swallowing, although it burned my tongue. I slowed down and nodded, chastised. I scraped the bowl clean and she gave me a second helping. I had filled out since I returned—my breasts swelling into my new bras, the elastic on my pants leaving a red groove around my hips and stomach, the shadows under my cheekbones fading to pink.
“What did you like to eat when you were away?” Ute asked in her bright and cheery voice.
I wondered if she imagined a daily menu where I had been able to check on the freshness of the fish if I didn’t fancy the nut roast. I considered answering, “Reuben and I ate raw wolf, ripped apart with our bare hands, and after we had eaten it we used the blood to paint stripes across our noses,” just to see the look on her face. But it was too much effort.
“We ate a lot of squirrel,” I said, keeping my voice level. “And Kaninchen.”
“Oh, Peggy,” she said in a concerned tone, and reached out a hand to me, but I was quick and pulled mine back. She tucked her hands under the table and pursed her lips.
“When you were away . . .” she started to say.
“When I was taken,” I cut in.
“When you were taken,” she repeated. “When I understood you had really gone, I went down in the cellar. You remember the cellar, how it was like?”
I nodded.
“All those shelves with food, tins and tins of food. I went down in the cellar and it was just how your father had left it, natürlich. Packets with rice, dried peas, beans—all with dust everywhere.” Ute sounded as if she was repeating a story she knew well, one she had told many times, to many people. “I tried to imagine what you were eating, whether it was healthy, and I worry you are hungry, wherever you are. I take a tin of baked beans, another of peaches, and one of sardines from the shelves and I put them on the table in the cellar. The table is still down there, you can see it, but I threw the food away years ago. An absolute waste. I took a tin-can opener and a fork from the drawer under the cooker, and a metal plate. And I line them up on the table, Peggy, just how you liked to line up all those things from your rucksack, remember? I line the tins neatly beside the fork and the plate, and I look at them. It made me cry, thinking about where you could be, and maybe my little daughter still arranging the things from her rucksack.” Ute’s voice broke, and I looked up from my empty bowl. Her face was stricken; tears had welled in her eyes and it occurred to me that they were genuine.
“I was crying,” Ute continued, “but still I sat there, because I thought you could be sitting somewhere too, with your doll and your nightie lined up. And I open the beans and the peaches and also the Sardinen with the little Schlüssel, the little key. I was pregnant, natürlich . . .” She paused, to calculate. “Expecting Oskar since two months, I think, and feeling very sick. With the fork, I eat the beans and peaches and Sardinen. I eat them at once, and all the time crying, crying. I make myself swallow, because maybe you don’t have the food you like. I eat until I am sick.”
I couldn’t work out what response she wanted. Should we cry together and hug, or was she expecting me to volunteer a story of my own? So I just sat, looking down at my bowl again, with my licked-clean spoon placed to the side. It, too, reminded me of the tidy piles of my belongings, taken from my rucksack. The idea that I was still putting things in lines made me smile, but I hid it from Ute, behind my hand. Minutes passed, with both of us silent and not even t
he scrape of cutlery on porcelain to make the kitchen seem lived in. Eventually I said, “Oliver Hannington ate some of the food from the cellar.”
Ute jumped backward in her seat, the legs of her kitchen chair grating against the floor. It wasn’t a response I had anticipated, and for the first time since I got home we really looked at each other—my eyes seeing into hers, and hers looking back into mine; both of us trying to work the other out, as if we were new to each other, which we were. And then the moment was gone. A mask had come down over her face, the same mask that Dr. Bernadette uses—calm, beneficent, like one of the stone angels in the cemetery.
“Really?” Ute asked. “Is that true? Oliver Hannington?” Her overreaction made me curious, as though there was something I had missed, something that was right under my nose.
“He told us we should eat the food and replace it, so it didn’t go out of date,” I said.
“You are sure? He came to stay, with James? When?” she asked, jumpy.
There was an itch under my right breast as she said my father’s name, and I rolled my shoulder to get rid of it.
“Just before. Just before . . .” I trailed off. It hadn’t occurred to me that she didn’t know this. Every session, the first thing Dr. Bernadette said to me was, “Whatever you say in this room will stay in this room.” The same line, every time. After each session I would come out to the waiting room dry-eyed, and I could see Ute was disappointed. I would sit on an upholstered chair while she went in to see Dr. Bernadette. I would wait for twenty minutes, and each time Ute came out she would be dabbing at her eyes with one of the pink tissues that the doctor kept handy on her coffee table. I had assumed that everything I said to Dr. Bernadette was repeated to Ute.
“There was an argument,” I said. “Oliver argued with, with . . .” I couldn’t work out what name to use. “My father.”
“Oliver,” she repeated. “What did they argue about?”
Our Endless Numbered Days: A Novel Page 4