by Jane Gardam
All at once it had become a sunny day once more, which might have been the reason why at this moment the hairdressing-salon’s blind was being urgently pulled down. He pushed his bike round the back, where, over the high yard wall, he watched other blinds being drawn down one by one, though the back part of the house was quite out of the sun. He imagined for a moment that Mrs. Vane was preparing the house for romantic daytime assignations, which gave him a small thrill of excitement. Then he remembered that he knew Mrs. Vane, and that she was a good woman. She would have no liaisons during working hours.
He disliked the sight of a descending blind and said to someone coming out of the post office, ‘It’s all curtains for me.’
Already he was missing Hetty. Soon Una would be gone, too. He had watched her grow from a small, fat bulb to a tall narcissus. She had always been about the house. All the young maidens departing. But of them all it was Una who stopped his heart.
And the Jewish girl gone too, and nobody seemed to know where. Sometimes the tide came in and took a whole generation. You didn’t see it coming until it was above you in its terrible power. He heard the screams, the senseless suicide of the guns, and the great wave curled and crashed over all.
He got off his bike and carried it down to the seashore, where he remounted and rode for several miles along the hard wet sand, and behind him his tyre marks made a beautiful deep pattern that was soon obliterated by the lacy, bridal sweeps of water spreading in arcs along the shore. He reached the esplanade of Shields West and rode among its streets until he found the Stonehouses’ address, where he sat down on the kerb beside his bike.
‘I think it’s a tramp,’ said Mr. Stonehouse.
‘Does he want food?’
Mr. Stonehouse went to the gate and leaned against it. ‘Hello? Have the Friends sent you?’
‘I have no friends. I am a grave-digger.’
‘Then you must be Hetty’s father. Come in.’
They sat with cups of tea. The silent room pleased Mr. Fallowes.
‘I have decided’, he said, ‘that I should become a member of the Society of Friends. The Company of Quakers.’ The silence continued. ‘I expect you’re missing the Jewish girl,’ he said. It was not put as a question, ‘You will have heard of the explosions in the Far East? Tens of thousands have been killed in Japan?’
‘Just over a year ago,’ said Mr. Stonehouse
‘So long? How the time goes. They say that the result will be enforced kinship throughout the world. From nuclear fission will come nuclear fusion. So violence has done the trick. Nevertheless, I should like to fill in the necessary forms to become a Quaker. Peace at any price.’
The Stonehouses sat on, waiting for a leading. Mr. Stonehouse said at length that Mr. Fallowes would be welcome at the Meeting House but that membership was not a matter of forms.
‘I was in the last war,’ said the grave-digger. ‘I was in the trenches for four years and I was never wounded in body. Can you explain that? I am good for nothing but continuing to dig holes for the dead. Now there will be no work for me at all. The Bomb eliminates graves. We shall only be painted shadows across whatever walls are left. We shall be as the flat hordes of the extinct animals that stampede across the cave walls of prehistory. But there will be nobody left to marvel at us.’
‘We can’t know that,’ said Mrs. Stonehouse, offering an oat cake and more tea.
‘I think you must be missing your daughter too,’ she said. ‘Isn’t she somewhere in the Lake District?’
‘Oh, she’s not at all political,’ he said. ‘But did you know she has surprised herself by getting a major award to the university? Herself, not me. She is a remarkable girl. But I could wish her home again. Of course we are at some distance from Hiroshima, but I feel it is best for those who love each other to stay together. They tell me, by the way, that my mind is getting worse, so if I have told you all this before, I apologise.’
‘She’ll be coming home again,’ said Mrs. Stonehouse, ‘I expect it will feel like no time at all.’
‘She’s very young, you know, my Hetty,’ said her father.
The Stonehouses sat thinking that their child, Lieselotte, had seemed very old, but they did not say so.
‘A thousand ages in Thy sight’, sang the grave-digger as he pedalled home along the virgin shore, ‘are like an evening gone.’ An evening gone. An evening with Kitty, if she’s back. Then the nine o’clock News on the wireless and a beer. Bedtime. That’s my lot.
Mrs. Vane watched him pass from behind her reluctantly virtuous blinds.
‘A lovely man,’ she said to a cat. ‘It’s a tragedy. But she’s lucky. He always goes home.’
10
Lieselotte, after her dazed and abrupt parting from the Stonehouses, had been driven first to York, this time in a much better car than Hilda’s in 1939. She was driven by a member of a Jewish rehabilitation organisation to a brisk and busy office. After the Stonehouses, the talking and shouting was like a furious debate. On and on. A man came up and shook both her hands together up and down and began to speak to her in German. Shortly, with less expressive people, she found herself on a train travelling south—or so she thought until suddenly she was in Edinburgh. She was met by a man with a clipboard of names, one of them hers, and taken to what looked like an abandoned hut. At some points during this day and night there must have been food and sleep, but later she recalled nothing except the packet of food Mrs. Stonehouse had given her, which she finished before she reached Scotland. In her purse was a one-pound note.
‘I should like, please, to get a telephone message to my family.’
‘Your family?’
‘Yes. The family with whom I have been living.’
‘Aren’t you going to London?’
‘I simply don’t know.’
A bright, black-eyed girl came up and said, yes, they were, and she’d find some change for a phone call, but Lieselotte must have refused it. There was a surreal moment when one of the people in charge asked if anyone wanted to go to the pictures.
‘What’s it all about?’ she asked the bright laughing girl.
‘We’ve been linked up. They’ve found us some relations, hey? Oh God!’
The next day Lieselotte found herself on a train to London with two thin women, scruffy and furious, who talked endlessly in Polish. They ignored her. As the overworked old engine staggered through Newcastle station Lieselotte could have sworn that she saw Hetty dropping a picnic about on a platform; but this seemed hardly likely.
The train stopped and started, started and stopped, sighed and clattered through the English midland plain. She dozed. At one stop the Poles got out and returned with unspeakable sandwiches with the corners turning up and the content, a smear of orange paste, smelling of fish. They did not speak to her until she spoke to them in English, when they asked her where she was being sent. Something within Lieselotte cringed with fear at the word ‘sent’.
She wanted to say, ‘Cambridge’, which she had last seen at Christmastime—the interview, the raw day, the river lashed by willows in a biting wind. For some reason she said simply, ‘To College,’ and this seemed to silence them.
‘Have you money?’
‘I’m paying for myself. I have a scholarship.’
‘You’ll need it.’ They gave her addresses that meant nothing to her. Later she threw them away. ‘How old are you? If you are not eighteen you may not be allowed to go. Not if there’s an American relative turned up. You’ll need authority.’
The train clanked on.
‘You’ve had confirmation? Of which camps? You’ve heard nothing?’
Lieselotte decided to stare and say nothing, and then pretended to sleep, and in the dreams that came were the brass coal-box and the knitting-bag, the piles of books around Mr. Stonehouse’s chair, the sea light over the cliff-tops. Hetty’s laughter. Una’s droll
face.
At Euston she was met by people who were decidedly expecting her, seemed to know her already. They shook her hand, greeted her by name, but forgot to introduce themselves. There was a tall and noble-looking Jewish woman in a beautiful coat and skirt and shining lipstick, who drove her to an address in the ruined streets of Notting Hill, where, at the foot of steep area steps and from behind a basement door, appeared a very old man with a carefully oiled and tended beard and moustache.
‘This is she,’ said the glamorous woman, ‘Lieselotte Klein.’ The man signed for her and the woman was gone.
‘Come,’ he said, and Lieselotte followed him down a corridor thick with dust, to a big room where every shelf, cupboard-top and sill was covered with plates. Plates, saucers, cups, cream jugs, sugar bowls, slop basins, butter dishes, little pots for conserves and honey. And every kind of teapot. They were ornate and very fine. Here and there were china figurines, painted porcelain people, cherubs and kings and corsairs and frilly ladies. An old woman was moving painfully about the room, flicking at everything with a feather duster.
‘She is here,’ said the old man. ‘She is come.’
His finger was holding the place in a yellowed German paperback with red and black Gothic script on the cover. These fastidious fingers, the curly script, stirred some far back knowledge in Lieselotte. She had a plunge of terror that these were her parents, unloving of her and unrecognised by her. They had not even greeted her. The old woman continued to flick about among the figurines and teacups, and the old man stumbled away.
Lieselotte stood among the crowded furniture, where there was not room even to set down her small case. A gilded chaise longue was piled high with what looked like couture dress-boxes—she saw the word ‘Worth’. Again, a strand of thought trailed by. A great chair like a throne sagged on two legs and into the mountainous clutter a shaft of sunlight fell like a searchlight down from the street.
‘We brought everything,’ the old woman said. ‘Yes? Ha? We spent our small fortune. We are not fools. In 1934. We foresaw.’ She began to speak in German. ‘We did not lose one single piece. We were in Art Packing. I am also a specialist in fine cloth and brocade, but our profession was in Transportation, which has forever filled us with shame. The word. We transported great works of art, all over the world.’
‘Give us the David of Michelangelo,’ called out the old man, ‘and we could deliver it safely to El Dorado.’
‘As it grew more difficult, less safe for us, so we charged more,’ said the old woman. ‘There is no record now of what German treasures we saved from the Nazis. None. Except in here.’ She tapped her head. ‘In my head are Rembrandts, wrapped in linen. Not yet recovered. I could lead you to every one if someone would buy me airline tickets. Nobody else knows, not even my husband. He has forgotten, yes?’
‘Yes,’ said the old man, reading his book.
‘And here, when I was established in this country I was immediately recognised as an authority. I was put personally—personally—in charge of the train that went to Wales to hide all the paintings from the National Gallery in the caves. I was personally commended by Winston Churchill, and I shall show you his letter. But,’ she said, ‘I am now poor and forgotten.’
‘Excuse me. Is there a lavatory?’ Lieselotte asked in German, though it sounded like English. ‘I’m sorry. The train from Edinburgh was so crowded—’
‘And,’ said the old woman, leading the way through an obstacle course, round and round ottomans and humpties and piles of rolled-up carpets, ‘and you see what we have rescued? Do you know what remains of Dresden? This only,’ and she pointed to the motes of dust in the underground dwelling’s sunbeams. ‘Dust,’ she said, ‘and what you see here on these shelves at 34e Rillington Gardens. And millions of us dust too, not yet counted, not yet properly mourned. Not only the dead of the camps. Mr. Feldman and I have more to mourn than you. You have only your dead family, gassed at Auschwitz. We mourn a whole nation. It’s down the passage.’
There were faded old ribbons in the WC, twisted into a chain and ending in a bow, like a child’s plaited hair. So much china was stacked on the floor and on the high windowsill, it was difficult to manoeuvre oneself on to the seat. The tiny place was dark and smelled of something musky, velvety, not unpleasant. Like an old German theatre, long sealed up. How do I know this? thought Lieselotte. Pinned down the back of the door were pages from old magazines, pictures of opera stars and dimpled blonde women gazing at hair-pomaded men with whiskers and younger men with big porcelain teeth. The women’s hair had been tonged into ridges and they looked out on Lieselotte on the lavatory seat through garlands of rosebuds threaded round flimsy violins.
The old lady banged on the door and shouted something about musical comedy and then Lieselotte heard the words ‘Viennese opera’. Could the old pair have once been operatic stars as well? She felt relief, certain now that these people could never have been her parents.
Some way ahead in the rambling, sorrowful basement someone had now started up a gramophone and an aria—Lieselotte’s memory stirred again, this time in a wave of longing—crackled out across the listening rooms.
‘Is there . . . excuse me, but might there be a bedroom somewhere?’ she asked the old man, when she had at last found him standing in a cupboard, the old woman having vanished. He was watching a small kettle on a smaller gas ring.
‘No,’ he said, ‘no,’ swinging a little Meissen teapot between finger and thumb. ‘No. But there is a variety of sofas. We ourselves do not sleep very much now. We sit up most nights. We have our music, thank God. We took up the habit during the Blitzkrieg, five years ago, and then the doodlebugs. We never suffered. You are not from Dresden?’
‘No. My father was a doctor in Hamburg.’
‘And when did you have the confirmation? When we applied to adopt a child from the Kindertransport we insisted on a child who was a certified orphan. Auschwitz was certainly where your parents died. It is better for you to be told. I see you have not been told. Yes?’
‘Could you,’ she said, calmly, ‘by any chance tell me how long I shall be staying here?’
‘We should be happy for you to live with us for ever. If of course the suggestion of a relation in the USA is found not to be true.’
‘I’ve heard nothing,’ she said. ‘I go to the University in October. To Cambridge.’
‘Then you shall live here with us.’
‘I have no money. I’m very sorry to mention it.’
‘You shall share our bread.’
‘Thank you. Actually, I’m sure the people I have lived with in Yorkshire must have had some allowance for me.’
‘Weren’t they the Quakers? Then I think not. And now in this house you will also share our bread. We eat and pray together—though Lena, poor soul, does little praying now—and we shall be your parents and you shall be our child.’
On a tin tray he had arranged exquisite cups of gold and rose, a cream jug and teapot frilled and encrusted with tendrils and flowers as limpets and corals decorate rocks. The tea was laced with more sugar from a thick blue paper bag than Lieselotte had seen in such bulk for many years. The jug was for ornament only. Condensed milk was poured from the tin into the cups and all was stirred round with a communal silver spoon. ‘This is, after all, a celebration,’ he said, tidying up the rim of the tin with his fingertip which he then licked.
‘I am so sorry,’ she said, ‘that I have less than a pound in the world, but would it be possible to telephone some friend of my Yorkshire family?’
‘We are quite penniless ourselves,’ he said. ‘There is a call-box in the street, but a trunk-call can take up to an hour.’
The old woman came by and stopped to watch Lieselotte drinking tea. She made the odd flick with her duster here and there. She said, ‘Oh, how she is like Berenice!’
‘Aye, aye,’ said the old man.
‘She
’s got her very eyes.’
‘Now, now. It’s time to go to bed.’
The old woman, Mrs. Feldman, began to remove piles of newspaper and old blankets from a sagging sofa. ‘Here’s your bed, girl. Lieselotte.’
‘But,’ said Lieselotte, ‘it’s only seven o’clock.’
The Feldmans stood considering, as those who have forgotten clocks.
‘It can’t be more,’ she said.
‘But you must be tired,’ said Mr. Feldman. ‘I’m sure we always seem to be tired. We hardly ever go out now. Well, where is there to go? And yet we are always tired.’ He took a stool and climbed on it and began to draw several heavy bolts across the door.
‘The china,’ said Mrs. Feldman, addressing Lieselotte: ‘we have to be vigilant. London is not what it was before the war. There are a great many foreigners.’
‘We never went down to the shelters,’ said Mr. Feldman, ‘and, as you see, here we are quite safe, and so is the china.’
They muttered and pottered and grumbled at each other in German, clattering in the cupboard of a kitchen, and brought her at length a piece of cold meat on a plate and then a honey cake out of a tin, some bread and a glass of wine. The honey cake was like wood but the wine was sweet.
She lay down on the sofa, which smelled the same as the WC, of old theatrical violet scent and dust.
Dust, dust, she thought, and slept at once. To find herself in the Yorkshire churchyard, in the happiness and sunlight beside the sad old tombstone; the tossing of the English trees, the cold rain after unexpected thunder. Hetty’s laughter. Hetty swinging from the bar of the bus. ‘Sorry I asked about your mother, Lieselotte.’ Una: ‘There’s something climbing up this stalk. It’s like a bullet. It wants to explode.’ The soaring clouds, the Christian steeple.
She heard the old man talking in some cluttered corner. ‘I’d say this was a good girl.’
‘She’s like Berenice,’ the old woman answered from some nest of rugs. She seemed to be having trouble with breathing.