‘And I wasn’t here. Elsa told me about it. Said he’d presented himself as a friend of mine. Asked if he could look around. She was rather taken with him, so she let him. This Max of yours, if it is him, obviously has a way with women.’
‘And what did he tell her?’
‘I wasn’t curious enough to ask, I’m afraid.’
Helena leapt up, ‘Is she here now?’
He shook his head. ‘Not till Wednesday.’
‘Wednesday!’ Helena felt a tug of desperation. ‘Could I go and see her today?’ She couldn’t bear the thought of waiting any longer.
‘You could. Though if they spy you in that get-up they may not open the door,’ his eyes skimmed over her playfully. ‘I’d come with you, but I have this nagging sense of impending deadline.’
‘I wouldn’t want to put you out any more than I already have,’ Helena murmured, meeting his eyes. ‘But…but I’d be grateful.’
‘Now that is exactly the kind of encouragement a man needs,’ he chuckled. ‘Come on. It’s not very far. If you drive and let me hold that briefcase of yours, I’ll sit back and show you the way.’
‘What more could a woman ask!’ Helena murmured, not altogether sure it might not have been better to try her luck on her own.
Chapter Eighteen
It was after they had turned into the fourth steeply banked and fiendishly narrow country lane that Helena Latimer began to feel not a little grateful to the man at her side. Not only had Adam Peters directed her with thorough equanimity through the sudden driving rain, but she hadn’t seen him stiffen once when she took particularly dangerous curves too fast. A man who allowed a woman to drive without offering a single comment was a rare creature indeed.
To top it all off, this decidedly mercurial man seemed now to have taken her search altogether to heart. She had told him more about Max, implied something of what he meant to her. Told him a little about her work, too; about being in Bhopal. And he had spent the rest of the drive itemizing the possibilities for any green action in the immediate vicinity and instantly discounting them. It was a quiet part of the world, small traditional farms, timber, tourism, a few new high tech plants, nothing he concluded which could warrant covert action, unless Max Bergmann had a particular animus against pig and dairy farmers.
‘Certainly not,’ Helena glanced at him curiously, ‘If I didn’t know better, I’d say you sounded like a friend of the earth today.
‘More of a distant cousin,’ he chuckled, returned to his subject. ‘Now in the northern tip of Bavaria, near the Eastern frontier, it might be different. And just outside Munich, there’s an atomic research centre. But you say the letter led you here. Perhaps you’re on the wrong track; perhaps there’s another place that in prose sounds exactly like Seehafen.
‘No,’ Helena was adamant, ‘Max Bergmann has definitely been around here. Several people have confirmed that.’
‘Which leads us to Elsa,’ Adam sat up straighter. ‘Next right and we’re there.’
‘By the way, I was told he wrote a letter to you.’
‘To me? Not as far as I know. Never had it in any case.’
‘Well to someone at Seehafen. Does anyone else live there?’
‘We’re here,’ he pointed to a small shabby concrete house. Beyond it there was a ramshackle barn. ‘Park on the verge.’
They ran through the heavy rain, heard chickens squawking, a dog’s frenetic bark. He loped towards them, a large black hound growling through bared teeth.
Adam knocked.
A pair of eyes peered through a yellowing net curtain. ‘It’s Adam Peters,’ Adam called out. ‘I’ve brought a friend.’
The door opened slowly. Elsa was wearing the frock she had first seen her in. But she looked different. It was the expression in her eyes. She seemed frightened.
‘Can we come in Elsa? Only for a moment. Look I’ve brought a bottle,’ Adam pulled one magically from his jacket pocket.
The low, darkly cluttered room had a hot fetid smell, the odour of bodies too close together, of eternal cabbage and persistent poverty. Something in Helena recoiled. She perched at the edge of her chair, felt herself grow dizzier with each rancid breath. There was a pot on the table in front of her, meat swimming amidst flecks of fat.
It was Adam who addressed Elsa. ‘My friend here is looking for the man you told me visited while I was out. Can you remember what he said, Elsa?’
She looked at him vaguely, mumbled something in that thick accent Helena couldn’t make out.
Suddenly there was the sound of a door opening. A small blunt man with thick arms and tiny mean eyes stumbled into the room. He was slowly buckling the belt of his trousers.
‘What does he want, Elsa? Is he bothering you?’ he grumbled.
Helena saw the girl shiver, shake her head. From the room behind them there was a loud cry, a crash, then a baby’s squawl. Persistent behind it, the blare of a radio or a television.
‘Afternoon, Herr Müller,’ Adam said politely.
As he spoke, another figure emerged from the shadows of the room, a big man, no not a man, a stubby, overgrown boy with a squat forehead and a mute violent expression on his square face. He pulled up a chair close to Helena’s, so close that she could smell the sour sweat of him. He was staring at her.
Helena moved her chair to one side.
He edged his closer, smiled at her inanely. She moved away again, tried to concentrate on what Elsa was saying in that incomprehensible speech of hers. But the overgrown boy had tipped closer once more.
Suddenly she noticed that he had his hands in his pockets. He was rubbing himself furtively, his leg pressing against hers, the bulge in his trousers growing larger.
Helena felt her stomach rise to her throat, her head begin to swim. She was suffocating, the room closing in on her. She jerked her chair away from the table. ‘Excuse me,’ she mumbled, fled towards the door. It wouldn’t open. She panicked, rattled it, rattled and pulled until it gave way. She raced into the rain, skidded in the wet mud, almost fell. By the time she reached the car she was sobbing, great shuddering sobs.
She leaned her head against the steering wheel. It was all there. All still there inside her, despite the passage of years, despite Emily, despite Max, despite the life she had made for herself.
She saw the low dank room, the fly marks on the greasy old wallpaper with its endless procession of faded rosettes, saw the three cramped beds, felt her old nightly revulsion of getting into hers. For no sooner were the lights out, no sooner had the breathing in the bed next to her own grown even, than he was there pressing against her, his hand against her mouth, that heavy pungent smell of him, like old gym shoes stacked in a damp changing room, robbing her of breath, robbing her of everything including the desire to live.
Every night since his fourteenth birthday, their fat only son, with his beady bully’s eyes, the bristle sprouting on his sallow skin, clambering against her, threatening - ‘if you tell, if you breathe a word, I’ll say it’s your fault, tell how you undress in front of me, wriggle those whore’s hips, what’s a lad to do, and who d’ya think they’ll believe, me, their darling only son; or you, the whore’s child, who’s only here cause of the monthly tosh?’
And she hadn’t told, had known he was right, had simply struggled against his hideous weight, and kicked and clawed, only to find that thin stream of sticky cum marking her thigh, had scrubbed it off the next day, would have scrubbed all her skin off if she could.
She discovered that her kicking and clawing excited him more, made him thrash about, hit her. And she didn’t want to wake little Sandy, with her tiny waif’s face and her terror-stricken eyes. So she stopped struggling, learned. It was easy enough, though it made her retch each time. All she had to do was clasp his testicles in her hand and the sperm would spew out of him.
And then it stopped being enough. One night he tried to put that thing into her. Somehow, she slipped away from under him, stumbled down the stairs, locked herself in
the freezing. parlour. They let her come in here sometimes. To escape the noise. God, how she hated that noise - the violent brawls, the swearing, the blaring radio, the television gameshows. They had first let her stay in here when the note had come home from the headmistress, telling them she was clever, that she needed quiet in which to work. Sometimes they would forget about her and she would stay in here, the door locked, all night. But Billy spoiled that. He would remind them she was there. In the parlour.
It was in the parlour that they saw the social worker on her irregular visits. Mum, as she was forced to call her, powdered over her bruises for the social worker, pulled on that grey dress which puckered stiffly over her bosom. She would put on her sweetest smile then, and say how well Helena was getting on, brilliant reports from school. Once Helena had said to the social worker, right there, in front of Mum. ‘I’d like to go back into care.’ But Mum had stepped in with that false hurt look and said, ‘Don’t be silly, Helena. You’re so happy here. We all love you.’ And the social worker had picked up her case, and patted her, ‘There, there, Helena.’
She was never allowed to see her alone.
It was after Billy had managed to put it into her one night and she had seen Dad’s eyes flickering over her once too often, that she started to hide in the school after hours. In the locker room, behind the showers. She had grown thin, so that she could see her bones jutting out at odd angles when she looked into the yellowed mirror.
For almost two weeks, bar the weekend, she managed to stay one step ahead of the cleaners and remain undetected. On her tenth day, she all but collided with Miss Latimer.
‘Are you still here then, Helena?’ she had looked at her with her kind eyes. ‘Don’t you want to go home?’
Helena had burst into tears.
‘Come on, my dear. I’ll get you some tea and sticky buns and you can tell me all about it.’
She hadn’t told her all about it, in that little cafe with the white net curtains just off the High Street. She couldn’t bring it up through her lips, but somehow Miss Latimer had understood, had dragged something out of her which let her understand.
‘Would you like to come home with me for the weekend?’ she had asked. ‘I’m sure it can be arranged.’
Helena had looked at her with wide eyes and nodded quickly.
She had been agog at the house, the beauty of it. But she couldn’t sleep, even there. The nightmares always came back. Billy suffocating her, making her gag. Even after Miss Latimer had adopted her, had become Em, they came back. And then gradually they stopped. Vanished. Until today. Helena shuddered.
‘Helena, what is it?’
For a moment, she didn’t know whom the voice belonged to.
‘Come on, move over. I’ll take us away from here.’
Adam Peters urged her gently away from the driver’s seat. She refused his eyes, made herself small against the door. He put the car into motion, sped them away, glancing at her every few moments.
What had happened to her, he wondered? The silky hair tumbled over her averted face hiding everything but that wave of a nose. A bare hour ago, she had been cool and proud and possessed, even bold, and now she was shivering, as vulnerable as a child whose pain couldn’t find words. Still proud though. And beautiful, so beautiful that it was hard to keep himself from staring at her, as if he were afraid of missing a single moment in that shifting stream of expressions. She made him think of one of those breezy spring days when fluffy clouds romped across the sky, cast playful shadows on the fields, only suddenly to give way to bursts of shower. And then with equal suddenness, the clarity returned, crystalline, pure, almost painful to the gaze.
Fool, Adam Peters, scolded himself. Fool, to wax lyrical over a chance passerby. Fool, to allow the equanimity he had attained here, to be broken.
It was as a fool that he had met her. She didn’t remember that, hadn’t recognized him without his carnival mask. But he had seen her beauty then, the purity of that profile and the shifts from poise to confusion to rage. She was good at rage. It fuelled her, fed the litany of her beliefs, gave them that fiery certainty that he had never been able to find in himself. Angered him, too, those certitudes, that assumption that one particular moral perspective was the correct one. But then everyone seemed to have certitudes these days, except him.
He glanced at her again. She had composed herself now, was looking straight ahead, wondering, he imagined, what story to spin for him. He didn’t mind. If it kept her here for a while, a respite from his imposed solitude.
‘They’re not exactly a prepossessing family, the Müllers,’ he cleared his throat. ‘I’m sorry if they upset you.’
She didn’t answer for a moment and he tried to reconstruct the scene. Was it when they had heard the child’s howl that she had raced out?
He tried another tack. ‘I’ve thought of doing up the little house in the back for Elsa. To give her a chance to get away from there.’
‘That would be a good thing to do,’ she was suddenly emphatic. ‘A very good thing.’
‘Done,’ he smiled. ‘And just before I bring out hammer and brush, shall we stop and have a bite. There’s quite a nice hotel restaurant not too far from here. You look as if you could use a pick me up.’
‘Alright.’ Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her shiver. Then she said, ‘And I’m sorry. Sorry to have rushed out like that.’
He shrugged, ‘It happens. Do you want to tell me about it?’
‘Not really,’ she murmured. After a moment, she added, ‘The place just reminded me of something. Dank, dirty. I had to get out.’ Her voice had a quiver in it.
‘Well, this will make a change.’ He pulled the car into the drive of a Gothic structure which looked as if it might have had its origins on Ludwig of Bavaria’s drawing board. The rain was still pelting down grimly, great sheaths of it from a darkened sky. ‘Shall we make a run for it?’
He put his arm lightly round her, more firmly when she didn’t edge away. They dashed for shelter.
‘The food’s better than the architecture,’ he whispered as their coats were taken. Her face was still tear-stained, her eyes too large for it.
‘Excuse me a moment.’
He waited for her by the ornate wooden fireplace in the bar, watched the flames rise, then turned to watch her cross the room. Long legs moving gracefully in the trim skirt, her lipstick brilliant again beneath the shadowed eyes, the hair still ruffled from the rain. There was a boldness about her and a rectitude. He had heard that when she had talked about her work. But there was something else, too, something he couldn’t quite describe. What was it? A kind of alertness, like the utter watchful stillness of a forest creature sensitive to any sound. In any event, he wasn’t the only one to watch.
‘Is it hard being a beautiful woman?’ he asked her when they had sat down.
She laughed at that, the first laugh he had had from her in hours. ‘Easier perhaps. I don’t know. We only get the one skin. Ask me again in ten years time and I’ll tell you what it feels like when the men neither stand to attention nor aggravate you with their advances.’
‘That bad, eh?’ he raised a querying eyebrow.
‘That bad,’ she smiled, but there was that shiver again, the storm gathering in her eyes. She looked out the window at the side of their table. There was a little valley below them, a stream and then beyond, lost in cloud, the mountains. She turned back to him suddenly, as if everything else had lost its importance, ‘Tell me what Elsa said about Max.’
He waited for the waiter to pour the claret, warmed the balloon of a glass in his hands. ‘I don’t know that it was worth the misadventure, but here goes. Elsa found the glasses by the way, stepped on them accidentally. In the conservatory. ‘Apparently the man, let’s call him Max since it pleases you, was exceedingly polite, asked her a few questions about Johannes Bahr, which, needless to say, she couldn’t answer. Also asked her about his wife, the family, all to very little avail. Then he went into the conservatory
and sat. Sat and stared at the mural of Anna. She knows this because when she brought him some tea, that’s what he was doing, just gazing at it. And when she peeked in on him later, he was still there, just staring. Do you think your Max is just a dirty old man perhaps?’
Horror spread over her features, seemed to jerk her hand so that she involuntarily struck a glass. Red wine spilled on the white cloth, a brilliant splash of it.
‘Sorry,’ Adam murmured, dabbed at the stain with his napkin.
She moved her chair away, seemed about to get up, flee. There was a stricken look on her face.
‘Helena, please, I’m sorry. It was just a joke. Silly,’ he put a staying hand on hers. The fingers were icy.
It was then that it came to him, as if he had registered it without seeing it at the time, Elsa’s brother on the chair, moving closer and closer to Helena, the jiggle of the worn plastic cloth. ‘Was it Elsa’s lout of a brother who offended you?’ he asked softly.
She stared down at the stain on the table, nodded almost imperceptibly. He kept her hand in his, felt as if he were a blind man in big clumsy boots treading on eggshells.
‘It’s all right now,’ she looked up at him with a little forced smile, retrieved her hand. ‘Tell me the rest. But no more jokes. Max is very special to me.’
‘So I’m beginning to realize.’
They ordered: a pasta with asparagus for her, a steak for Adam. They watched the waiter spread a new cloth on the table.
‘And then your Max apparently asked Elsa about me,’ Adam laughed, his eyes crinkling.
‘Why is that so funny?’
‘Why on earth would he want to know about me?’
‘You tell me. I don’t know anything about you.’ As she sat back, Helena realised how true it was. She watched his face, the irony filling his features, the full lips curling.
‘I should think you know a lot more than Elsa,’ he chuckled. ‘Let’s see, why would your Max want to know about me? Perhaps he’s read my books, my travels into deepest Amazonia, doesn’t find them green enough, and has decided to do away with the author. Or…’
Dreams of Innocence Page 53