The Flight of the Maidens

by Jane Gardam

  Every morning of that embalming gold September she set off up the area steps, past Mr. Feldman examining the interior of his Viennese hat. She marched out of Rillington Mansions, down Kensington Church Street, then left, along the High Street, past the great bare shops, along the side of the park and towards the West End.

  Sunlight stroked the pavements, the first leaves were beginning to fall from the avenue of elms that braced the long rise across the grass from the Albert Hall upwards and out of sight. Time and again she marched up and down this avenue of glorious elms, then circled the Round Pond. She watched the huge broken temple that was being taken from its wadding, the figure of a sad-looking, long-dead prince. ‘We knocked the top off that one ourselves,’ said a soldier. ‘They’d painted him black, you know, in 1914, in case the gold attracted the Zeppelins. Ugly great monstrosity.’

  She turned to gaze across the road at Albert’s decrepit Hall, still placarded with notices of valiant concerts that had somehow never been silenced. Then on she strode, down Knightsbridge, along Piccadilly, and, via Holborn, on to the City.

  Deep in the City ruins she sat on one of the rural-looking fences that encircled the craters of vanished buildings and streets, imagining them, peopling them—Threadneedle Street, Pudding Lane—considering the miracle of untouched St. Paul’s Cathedral standing above all the little, broken, burned-out churches. Inside, thick dust lay all over the black-and-white marble floor as if it would be there for ever. Outside, wild flowers waved in long country grasses, green jungle grew in sheets of creeper over toppling ruined walls. Insects hummed. There were cats and kittens everywhere. Bracken and chickweed looked indestructible. The London Fire Service had begun to grow rows of vegetables outside the London Wall.

  On she went all through the afternoons, eastwards to the Pool of London along the oily tired river. It was a long time before she dared go down to the tube, or step aboard a rocking scarlet bus. From morning to morning she walked, and never spoke to a soul.

  One day, looking for Covent Garden, she found herself outside King’s College in the Strand and stepped through sandbags and scaffolding into a big, colourless cloister full of building works and rubble. Sandbags like solid masonry were being chipped away from the pillars of a broken colonnade. She wandered among the arches and met a young man with a twitching face who asked, ‘You a student?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘D’you feel like going to the canteen?’

  It was underground and awful. From blunt thick cups, they drank coffee that was no more than coloured water, and she paid him back the tuppence. He said he was Polish. And Jewish. He had electric-looking black curls and excited black eyes.

  ‘Carl,’ he said. ‘Been to the NG yet?’

  They walked the Strand to the National Gallery with all its faded walls. Hardly anybody else was there. Their feet and voices echoed in the big sad rooms. An occasional attendant slept on an upright chair. There were very many clean squares on the walls waiting for the paintings to come back from Mrs. Feldman’s caves.

  ‘They say Arnolfini’s back,’ he said, and she looked round for a person. ‘There,’ he said.

  The little picture grew luminous as she looked at it. Pale Flemish light flowed over two fifteenth-century faces, the bridegroom’s tall white hand raised, sideways on, in blessing, the bride with downcast eyes clutching her heavy green and silver robe up against her tiny breast.

  ‘Mrs. Feldman would love that material,’ Lieselotte said. Arnolfini is not a handsome bridegroom, she thought. He is the colour of the Stonehouses’ white fat. He looks like a hare. Not much fun. He’s rather like Eustace.

  And, all at once, again she was with Hetty, Hetty’s feet waving in the air beside a sad old Yorkshire tomb, Hetty shouting with delight that she was Hester Fallowes. Hestah! Hetty the infantile, the innocent, the loved and greatly blessed. For the first time Lieselotte addressed herself to her parentless years.

  ‘You German?’ asked Carl. ‘Nice to meet you. Nice to meet an intellectual again. See you next term.’

  Intellectual? she thought. Am I? It must be my glasses.

  When she got back to Rillington Mansions (‘Ah—and so! The National Gallery? So empty and so sad. Ah—Schönbrunn.’) she took off her glasses and blinked at herself, but had to put them on again to read some mail that had come for her. It included a cheque from the Jewish Rehabilitation Board to tide her over until her grant came through at the beginning of term.

  Intellectual? she thought.

  The next day she went to Lilley and Skinner in Oxford Street and bought some shoes with high heels, and on to Selfridges, with Feldman coupons, to buy slacks.

  ‘I want some very well-cut slacks. I have rather short legs.’

  The assistant said, ‘Do you mind my saying, madam, that we don’t wear high heels with trousers? Just as we never wear earrings with trousers. We can’t be too careful these days, can we? There are so many people now who aren’t English.’

  She left the store in the trousers and the high heels, on the way home calling in at a Woolworth’s and buying some diamante earrings.

  ‘No,’ said Mrs. Feldman. ‘Nein. I have earrings for you. Take off those trash.’

  Mrs. Feldman heaved her huge self sideways and burrowed in dark places. ‘These,’ she said. ‘With the court shoes they are acceptable, but not the trousers. You don’t see Jewish girls in trousers.’

  But the next day Lieselotte set off in the trousers, the high heels and Mrs. Feldman’s amber earrings and beautiful amber bracelets, and got whistled at by workmen on a crane. They were demolishing part of Eaton Square, its façade both blanched and black, and hollow-eyed. Lieselotte thought this must be the slums.

  She went swanking into a Lyons tea-shop, and the waitress in her little black dress and pinny said, ‘Where’d you get your slacks, ducky? They’re smashing.’

  And when she came breezing home in the evening, pink-faced and with her hair cut for five shillings in the Bayswater Road, Mr. Feldman said, ‘I believe that you are getting a waistline.’

  ‘Oh. Is there a mirror?’

  ‘Now, that is a good sign,’ said Mrs. Feldman. ‘I have never seen you look in the glass.’

  They sat, all three, that night with their bits of supper on their knees, listening to the Hallé Orchestra on the wireless, Mrs. Feldman sometimes dabbing her eyes and wheezing, the acreage of red plush still untacked, uncut-out upon the table, in case perhaps there might be further adjustments to come.

  And that was the night that Mrs. Feldman broke the chandelier.

  Lieselotte had by now become used to the many nocturnal noises about the basement of Rillington Mansions, for ‘Mr. Feldman and I have both reached that age where we have to get up in the night at least once,’ said Mrs. Feldman. ‘Mr. Feldman, being sixteen months older than I am, he finds it difficult to get to sleep again afterwards, and he calls out. He likes to chat. This tends towards refreshment.’

  Lieselotte had grown used therefore to thumps and grunts going on around her sofa, the pacings about, the filling of kettles, the pulling of the Niagran lavatory chain, the quiet, relentless birdsong of old-folks’ arguments. A week ago she had begun to try to find a little more privacy for herself of a night-time and made space in what had once been a small storeroom or larder, by removing some crates and boxes. Dragging her chaise-longue inside, she found that it fitted exactly, and since the door opened outwards she was able to pull it to behind her and have a cabin to herself. Above her head was a small barred window, covered with meat-safe mesh. From the ceiling an electric light bulb hung from a threadbare twist of purple flex. It was an illumination very different from the huge Venetian chandelier of rose-pink and yellow crystal drops that hung from the ceiling of the rambling main room, the Feldmans’ valuable advertisement for their careers as packagers of works of art.

  How Mrs. Feldman, who was not a tall woman,
managed to bring down this chandelier at two o’clock in the morning was to be a matter for vituperative discussion for many years to come. She had been carrying a saucepan of milk in one hand at the time and a Sèvres coffeepot in the other, and it may be that she had become confused by the rearrangement of the room now that Lieselotte had shifted the chaise. It is also possible that Mrs. Feldman in her long nightdress had mounted a sofa in her pre-war bedroom slippers, boat-bottomed and trimmed with imitation pink ostrich plumes, en route to the gas ring, and was walking therefore about a foot off the floor.

  Mr. Feldman, asleep in some antechamber, awoke to hear his wife wheezing and talking to herself as usual. Then there was silence for a time. And then there was the most almighty explosion and crash of falling glass, and Mrs. Feldman’s screams. Her screams were piercing, but as the showering waterfall of glass ceased, followed only by the sound of the neck of the chandelier swinging and creaking and groaning very slowly, were heard other screams which did not stop.

  They were loud, long and terrible, broken into by a torrent of German in a child’s voice. A child crying, ‘No!’ And ‘No! No!’

  —On and on, for her mother.

  They seemed to threaten the building, and they came from behind Lieselotte’s pantry door. This, when pulled open, revealed Lieselotte sitting upright in bed, eyes wide and open, screaming and screaming, hands over her ears. On, on, on she screamed.

  Mrs. Feldman tried to get to her across the broken glass and Mr. Feldman, holding up his flannelette nightshirt with one hand, leaned forward in an effort to stroke Lieselotte’s feet from beyond her threshold. The spate of terrified German continued, and the Feldmans took it up in reprise. But they could get nowhere near her because of the tight fit of the bed in the larder, only stretch out their arms. And on Lieselotte screamed. Someone in the flat upstairs began to thump on the floor with a boot.

  Soon there was infuriated knocking and shouting at the front door of the flat, and Mr. Feldman shuffled over to it in the dark, feeling for the bolts, and people came swarming in, clambering over the furniture, pushing Mrs. Feldman out of the way. They tried to pull Lieselotte from the bed. But still she screamed, though she was cold and rigid as a corpse.

  At last, quite suddenly, she stopped, turned her head sideways, and lay down. Somebody found brandy and somebody else was making coffee. Everybody seemed to be Jewish, frantic, foreign and wide awake. Conversation raged.

  ‘She is eighteen. She has come from Hamburg. It is Kristallnacht again.’

  One by one, and very slowly, the visitors departed but Mr. and Mrs. Feldman sat on, over the one-bar electric fire, and did not attempt to go back to bed. The birds began to wake in the remains of the bomb-sites and in the trees in all the parks. ‘It was Kristallnacht that decided them. After that, they sent the children away. She will be the only one of her family.’

  ‘Auschwitz,’ said Mrs. Feldman. ‘The confirmation must have come by now. A year ago it should have come. But she seems to know nothing.’

  In that dawn Lieselotte lay quiet, her head on the pillow, listening to them talk. She slept all the next day and night, and would not even drink water. The Feldmans picked up the pink and yellow splinters of glass and sorted them into old shoe-boxes, but agreed that there was no way of putting the chandelier together again. They reminisced about how expensively it had once been insured.

  Then, thirty-six hours later, Lieselotte got up, ate breakfast and said that she was going out. Wearing the trousers but not the shoes or the earrings or the bracelets, she set off without telling them where.

  ‘She has no longer the eternal smile,’ said Mr. Feldman. ‘So that is good.’

  Mrs. Feldman laid out the red velvet once again upon the table and began to pin the revised paper pattern all over it. ‘Aye, she has lost inches,’ she said, ‘inches all over her body,’ and she started to record Lieselotte’s new measurements in a notebook in elegant and businesslike calligraphy. Professionally she was a deft and accurate woman. She pinned and measured, carefully and sadly.

  17

  Una and Ray ate a thoughtful breakfast at the pub in Semerdale. The woman who ran it had looked them up and down and paid attention to them only because they had been standing with their bikes so early in the morning on the moor’s edge, as she was going out round the back to the pig. ‘We’re shut.’

  ‘We just want a cup of tea.’

  ‘I thowt ye said yer breakfasts?’

  ‘Well, anything you’ve got, really.’

  ‘Come on by, then. Roundt’ back.’

  And they sat in silence as she humped a great ham in a sacking cloth down from a hook somewhere above their heads and cut off two half-inch thick slices. Looking across at them she said, ‘It’ll be two shillin’, mind.’

  ‘Each?’

  ‘I’m not that bad,’ she said. ‘Two shillin’ the pair of yer and if there’s an egg apiece, one-and-three.’

  ‘Yes, we’d both like an egg.’

  ‘So, one-and-three? Two-and-six?’

  ‘Yes, please. Thank you.’

  ‘You’ve got it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Very well, then. They’re me own.’

  ‘Your own?’

  ‘Pigs an’ chickens.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘All ont’ quiet?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  And quiet’s the word, thought the woman, for Una and Ray sat in silence, Ray looking over at Una all the time. Once he gave her hand a stroke.

  ‘You been turned out of somewhere? Not being married and that?’

  Una blazed with blushes.

  ‘Why do you think we’re not married?’ asked Ray.

  ‘Because she’s but a bairn. Are you in trouble?’

  ‘Certainly not,’ said Una, all at once the professional man’s daughter. ‘And might we have some salt and pepper, please?’

  ‘So what’s up, then? So early int’ morning? Here y’are, and some new bread and a pot of tea. Good eggs?’

  ‘Wonderful, thank you. Nothing’s the matter.’

  ‘We’ve a friend in trouble,’ said Ray.

  ‘I’ve heard yon before today. Now then, I’ll give yer advice. Tell yer mothers. And go to no doctors. Have it. You’ll nivver regret it. There’s nowt like havin’ a young mother. And don’t have no truck with goin’ out to work, you miss.’

  ‘I’m leaving,’ said Una, getting up.

  ‘No,’ said Ray. ‘Eat her blasted ham and egg and forget her. She’s a peasant.’

  ‘I thought you were a Communist?’

  ‘I am. Peasants are part of the class system.’

  Clanking around outside in the yard, the woman called that she could let them have a pheasant, first of shoot, well, first of shoot be a long way, and no questions.

  Breakfast had at least been a respite from the shock of the revelation of Eustace’s perfidy and on her bike again Una felt much calmer. The road before her shone purple and wet in the morning sunshine, and in the dale below black clumps of trees stood on the tops of round green hills, white mist still about them.

  When they reached the ruins of Rievaulx Abbey they propped the bikes against the walls of the hospitium and walked among the sunken white boulders in the grass, then down into the vaulted crypt and up the shallow old steps into the novices’ dormitory. Through empty graceful windows they looked at all the rising slopes of the trees, and the sky. Then they wandered out again and lay side by side in the grass of the great cloister. Nobody else was there, and the early silence was beautiful.

  They lay there for a long time in their grey shorts and old shirts. Ray offered Una a cigarette and they smoked contentedly on their backs.

  He said, ‘You’ve got to learn you can’t live Hetty’s life for her. You can’t save her from everything. She’s just a friend. You’ll be losing touch next year
anyway, you at Cambridge, her in London.’

  ‘I’ll have to tell her, though.’

  ‘Why? She probably knows. He’s probably written. He’ll have to write now, whatever. Mebbe she’s the one who’s written to him calling it off. Keep out of it.’

  ‘Well, maybe.’

  ‘She’s seen sense, I’d guess. She always looked thoroughly moped, Hetty, whenever I saw them dangling about together.’

  ‘Well, it’s difficult, isn’t it?’

  ‘What’s difficult?’

  ‘Knowing whether you love someone or not. I mean, it’s been friends one’s bothered about until now. With girls it is, anyway. Otherwise, it’s been only talk about boys, nothing more . . . and, well, sex talk. And so on. Though mostly it’s just being each other’s friend.’

  ‘I don’t have a lot of friends,’ said Ray.

  ‘D’you have any friends?’

  After thinking about it he said, ‘No, I dare say I don’t have any friends. I have mates—those as think same as me int’ Union, since I joined LNER.’

  ‘Well, friends are vital for girls,’ she said. ‘More than any Politics. And she’s like a sister as well, because I’ve known her for ever, and we’re both only ones. No brothers or sisters.’

  ‘Well, let her mother tell her, then. I’d think from what’s said she’ll have heard already.’

  ‘However do you know that?’

  ‘I know things. I’m not just Politics.’

  ‘Oh, it would be terrible if your mother had to tell you.’

  ‘Tell you what? That someone’s gone off yer?’

  ‘Ray, yes! Unforgivable. I’d never speak to my mother again.’

  He rolled over and, looking close at Una’s face, began to tickle her nose with a stalk of grass.

  ‘Get off!’

  She kicked him and they began to plunge about in the holy ruins, laughing. A stone face looked down at them.