The Flight of the Maidens

by Jane Gardam

  ‘No. Actually, they were looking after me.’

  ‘No! Oh, my! Is there something wrong with you, then? Oh, that’s terrible.’

  ‘No, I’m perfectly well. They are just Jewish and paternalistic. I was their lodger.’

  ‘Oh, that’s great, then. I wasn’t sure you’d get this job, I might as well tell you, but I guess you’ll be just fine. I can see she likes you. You know you’re the only relative?’ Her eyes watched Lieselotte. ‘She’s no one else to leave it to.’

  ‘I . . . Mame, I don’t think she knows who I am. She thinks I’m someone to nurse her. I was told she wanted to adopt me. I didn’t know it was going to be a job.’

  ‘Oh, sure she knows. She said that. I heard her say “adopt”. She’ll be ready to have you if she takes to you. Well, it’ll give me a break. I don’t get paid for a thing I do, you know, but I guess you’d see I got the jewellery? We’re like sisters, Alice and me. And it’s a nice bit of luck for you.’

  ‘Luck? Nursing? I was just going up to the University.’

  ‘Oh, there’s plenty of nice Colleges out here, you know, and I dare say it won’t be for long. She’s . . . we won’t say how old. I wasn’t against you. I was for you. I thought it wasn’t one of her worst little notions. I’m married to a solicitor, a retired solicitor. He can do plenty about wills,’ she said with a whiff of menace.

  She was winding a long chiffon scarf round her neck, slowly round and round, not disturbing her necklaces, looking and looking at Lieselotte. ‘She has these tantrums, you know. You should hear her go for some folks. She’s all there for a bit yet.’ Mame stared and stared at Lieselotte, whose eyes could hardly stay open.

  ‘I’ll just step back in and say goodbye to her. You know where to find me. Next door. I’m in all evening—well, unless I go to a little bit more Bridge in Tiburon. I’ll look in. In the morning.’

  Lieselotte heard her shouting at Alice. ‘Well, sure she’s ash-pale. They got no vitamins over there. She’ll be great. She’s eighteen goin’ on forty. That coat! And you know I’d never leave you, Alice.’

  The door on to the perilous step slammed shut and Lieselotte was alone with her great-aunt.

  She was thirsty and rather hungry. But there was worse. There was a deadness, a hollowness, a deep, deep, shivering exhaustion. ‘I am a natural traveller,’ she said, but the throbbing of the ship had not left her and, when she forced it from her, there came the roar of the aeroplanes. Snapshots of airports flashed before her. All the different planes, all the faces, all the magician’s carpet of the world unrolled. And then the roller-coaster of the taxi ride. Part of her still paced a deck, listened to Rachmaninov and Ivor Novello in a slightly-moving hall, swayed with the underwater fronds of New England, danced with their eerie movements, rumbled across prairies in bonnet and shawl huddled against a mother and a father driving a little cob that pulled a covered wagon. Whatever time was it? It felt like morning but it was getting dark.

  She was so tired.

  She was so tired that she could hardly move her feet, pick up her luggage. She watched her feet in their tottering, high-heeled shoes walk out of the bedroom and towards the ancient woman who was still sitting like a waxwork, looking at the sea.

  I shall say—say now—that there has been a terrible mistake.

  ‘What say you to a great big fry?’ said Alice, still staring at the black horizon.

  ‘A fry?’

  ‘C’mon, just heave me around, let’s look at you. Oh my Gaaad! It’s Nina! You’re the spit of Nina!’

  ‘I’m like Nina?’

  ‘Nina’s my daughter, but I guess she’s gaan.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’

  ‘Do you know how to make a big fish fry?’

  ‘But she said—your friend—I had to give you a little jelly and put you to bed.’

  ‘Take my stick,’ said Alice. ‘Pull me up. Stick back. Thanks. Now, give me your arm, kiddo!’

  Alice was lighter than a child, and quicker than Lieselotte across the white carpet on her fuschia-coloured feet. She balanced herself down into a kitchen chair and pointed the shoes out in front of her. They sparkled here and there and the floaty bits of ostrich feather moved in the breeze. She tapped her stick smartly against the huge refrigerator. ‘Open it up.’

  Lieselotte beheld the land of Canaan. Shelves stacked with meat and fish and cheeses, packages of eggs and butter, huge flagons of milk, ice cream in fifty flavours and unnervingly clean vegetables all technicolour green. Fruit juices like Goblin Market.

  ‘Changed my mind: we’ll have steaks. Steaks top shelf,’ she said, pointing her stick. ‘Grill over that way, first knob left. We’ll have them with plenty of ketchup, and one helluva big salad. Now, do you eat chocolate cake? With chocolate fudge topping? Now, I’m a spirits drinker but we’ll open a bottle of the red and I might just take a glass. I won’t corrupt you, you know, Nina. We don’t want another Gilda, do we?’

  ‘I’m not much of a cook,’ said Lieselotte, looking at the giant steaks and wondering who Gilda was. It was the entire meat counter of the Notting Hill butcher. ‘I’ve never seen anything like this. It’d be a month’s rations at home.’

  ‘Your home’s here now,’ said Alice, ‘and don’t listen to Mame. She’s a terrible cook, that’s why I get only jello. It’s why I sent for you. You don’t have to get the lunch; we’ve got a black girl for that and I’ve got her bribed.’

  ‘And,’ she said when Lieselotte was sitting on a high stool, eating at a counter, and feeling much better, and when she herself was seated with a tray on wheels in front of the steel chair, ‘And we’ll hear no more of these padded panties. Unnecessary. I’ve done exercises all my life, every woman should. You should start now and you’ll never know the meaning of enuresis. I’ll show you. Flat on your back.’

  She wiped her bird-bone fingers with a paper napkin as thick as linen. Lieselotte had never seen paper napkins. ‘Bring me a flannel and I’ll go over my face; and I’ll brush my teeth, which are all my own. Apples do it. And my nightie’s where it always is, under my pillows, and I get into it myself. She’s trying to frighten you off, Nina-Lotte. She wants my money. She has so much already she doesn’t know what to do with it but she’s after mine. D’you want a small cheroot? No? Well, then away to bed. Even if you don’t sleep you can pretend it’s bedtime, it’s the only way to deal with airplane fag. I should know. I’ve been around. Kid the body and you’ll live for ever. Goodnight. You look a real good girl. I knew you’d be just like Nina.’

  ‘Do I . . . ? There was something I had to do about your hair, Tante Alice.’

  ‘What was that?’ The blue eyes turned to ice and fire.

  ‘I don’t quite know. I had to put it—’

  ‘Let her speak for herself. She may have to lift off certain portions of herself at night. I don’t.’

  In the small hours of the night Lieselotte awoke. Her body had been only temporarily kidded. She had slept deeply but for just four hours. The light was on in the passage outside her bedroom door and she sensed activity.

  She got out of bed and padded across the white wool to the kitchen with its almost adolescent mess of unwashed dishes. Then cautiously, gently pushing the slightly open door, she looked into Aunt Alice’s room. The centre light was on and both reading lamps, and Tante Alice was sitting up in bed with the newspaper and brandishing a gold pencil, not a hair of her head out of place. She looked over her spectacles at Lieselotte, and nodded.

  ‘Can I get you anything, Tante Alice? A drink?’

  ‘No, thank you. I’m busy with my investments. Can’t you sleep?’

  ‘I feel very wide awake. It’s still so dark. It doesn’t feel like morning. Or like any time.’

  ‘We might have a hand of cards if you’ve a leaning that way?’

  ‘Well, I’ve been living with Quakers for seven years. I never learned.
’

  ‘You don’t seem to have learned very much, Nina-Lotte, if you ask me. I guess I’m going to have my work cut aaht. Go to bed and if you oversleep you oversleep. It’s gonna drive Mame up the wahl. Then later on we can look at the photographs.’

  When Lieselotte awoke, it was late afternoon of the next day and growing dark again and her aunt and her three companions were hard at it over the Bridge table by the window. Behind her hand of scarlet and black Tante Alice stared out to sea. The other women smoked their sleepy-smelling cigarettes.

  The blue-black sea seemed to be eternally at rest, filling the acreage of window. Twenty-four hours could surely not have passed? It was still yesterday. Or it might be tomorrow. It might be in the far future, or long ago. It might be eternity.

  I can’t stay, thought frowsty Lieselotte, rolling back to bed in Carl’s parting present, his yellow pyjamas. The dancing goddess plugged into the rock wall seemed to look her way. Oh, but there is no hope of getting out. These people are too much for me. I am without money except for her change from the journey. There is no possible hope of getting away.

  As she drifted into sleep a queer hollow voice said to her, at the edge of a dream, ‘This is your greatest danger yet.’

  There was a dream next, and inside it she knew she had dreamed it so many times that it had become a depth of dreams, layered and flaked, interleaved like a stack of cards, melded, a thousand dreams yet all the same. It was a spyglass view of a figure at a great distance, growing smaller all the time. The figure was the size of a pin but she knew it was a man. Behind it there was a smaller shadowy figure, greyer, with sloping shoulders, but it was the man who mattered most, and from and for him—even as he grew so small as to be only a spot on the lens—she felt a terrible love and grief. Then he vanished in a roaring of wheels and steam that blew across her vision.

  The dream had never woken her before. She knew now, sitting up in bed in the dark, that it had never followed her into consciousness until now, but she had had it countless times. She felt her face and it was wet. She got out of bed and climbed into Mrs. Feldman’s coat, although the house was very hot. Then she climbed back into bed and sat bolt upright looking at the dark wall in front of her. She must not sleep again, for the dream would come back. She sat for an age, until her eyes could keep open no longer, and as she fell, slowly and sideways, back on her pillow, her bedroom door opened a little wider and one of the skulls of the Belsen films looked round it, and then disappeared.

  The next day she stayed in bed. She did not take off the coat. Mame arrived and from a great distance Lieselotte watched and listened to herself being harangued. Alice did not appear. Somebody shut her door and the day moved on, the sculptured figure outside her window hung in shadow among the ferns until it merged with the dark wall and became the night. The servant looked in once, bringing a glass of milk, standing about, talking a nice singsong. Had the black fur in the bed put her off? Through her thoughts Lieselotte heard voices raised, telephones ringing. Maybe a doctor came in.

  The next day she went to her bathroom and ran a bath, but sat looking at it, not removing the fur coat. The servant came to her room with a plate of sweet cakes, and sat on the end of the bed and did a sort of crooning at her, but all Lieselotte could do was stare. Mame came in and slammed about and gave her views on many things.

  After her bath, Lieselotte climbed back into the bed and gathered everything around her from her cases, and began to write a letter which to her surprise she found was not to Hetty, but to Hetty’s parents. It was a formal letter and she thought, This might have been written in Germany and be from some old woman.

  Dear Mr. and Mrs. Fallowes,

  You will be surprised to get this letter from me, and also to see the address from which I write. I have recently arrived in America to join the aunt of my father, my only surviving relative, who has lately been discovered. She intends to adopt me. My decision to accept her kind offer was taken very swiftly. Before I left England I tried to write to a number of people who have been so kind to me during my English childhood, but the nearer they had been to me the less possible I found it to tell them.

  So now I am trying again, drawing nearer to the most important letters. I practised first on those I knew less well. Soon I shall be writing to Hetty, but first I should like to say how much I owe you, her parents, for your unquestioning kindness all the time I was at the High School. Perhaps you can imagine how much I envy Hetty her great love for you, as well as your love for her.

  Here she stopped. She wrote the next sentence with tight-shut eyes.

  Here is like the very faint memory of my own childhood in Germany.

  She sat still. Then opened her eyes and wrote:

  Of all the people I knew in England, your warmth and openness, Mrs. Fallowes, and your silent and humorous watchfulness, Mr. Fallowes, will always stay in my heart. Before I left my London friends, 1 received a surprise. Una’s mother wrote to me. I have no idea how she found my address, for I was remiss about sending it to anyone, but she says that she has ‘connections in Scotland’! Why this should have helped, I don’t know, unless it means that she is blessed with second sight. Hetty told me Una never knows what her mother will do next! I have been out of touch with maternal feelings, I regret to say. She told me that Hetty is on a reading course in the Lake District and that she is to be married to Eustace. If this is so, I must beg you to tell her to write to me at once, for I am now very aware of the folly of a leap in the dark.

  Very sincerely yours, and with very good wishes from Lieselotte Klein, who misses you with all her heart.

  23

  Mrs. Fallowes had been in two minds about going down to the Lonsdale. The rain was dreadful.

  ‘It’s the rainiest summer I remember,’ she called to Mr. Fallowes. ‘I don’t feel at all well. Why don’t you answer me?’

  He was watching raindrops on the pane.

  ‘Have I upset you, Malcolm?’

  ‘There’s nothing to say.’

  She put on her coat and hat and then a transparent mackintosh and pixie-hood over both, and went to the front door, where she found Lieselotte’s letter lying on the vestibule mat. At once the world shone with delights.

  ‘Malcolm! It’s a letter. From America. Who do we know in America?’

  ‘Theodore Roosevelt?’

  ‘Don’t be silly. Though Eustace’s cousin once saw him in the flesh, but then he lived in Washington, and he had no legs.’

  ‘What, the cousin?’

  ‘No. Mr. Roosevelt. He hides it so well. It’s why he’s always sitting down. At that Yalta business they were all wearing aprons.’

  ‘Aprons?’

  ‘Well, travel rugs, even that Stalin, whom I cannot like, I’m afraid, whatever they say about him being a Colostomy.’

  ‘Colossus.’

  ‘Yes. Well, look at his cruel little eyes . . . Goodness gracious! It’s from Lieselotte! She’s in California!’

  ‘To us, not to Hetty?’

  ‘No, it’s addressed to you and me. California, it’s where the syrup of figs comes from and by the way we need some more. You’re having trouble again.’

  ‘Don’t talk bilge. Read the letter.’

  ‘Well!’ she said, having finished it to herself. ‘Well! I’d never have guessed any of it. What an eye-opener. She feels us real friends, Malcolm, and yet she never opened her mouth about it before. And we’ll have to put her straight about Eustace. I hope she’s wrong. That Dolly Vane’s an imbecile. Engaged. Where did she get that? . . . Malcolm?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Malcolm, you don’t think it’s true? And Hetty’s told Dolly Vane before she’s told us? That’s something I’m afraid I could never forgive a daughter. Never.’ She began to cry. ‘Never. It would be a public declaration. To tell a stranger about your engagement before your mother. And . . . ’

  ‘And w
hat?’

  ‘To announce that she does not love us. Oh, Malcolm, read this letter, so full of love and appreciation and I’m sure we did nothing for Lieselotte except pay for her at the pictures once or twice because those Quakers were so pure. Didn’t we take her to the terrible Belsen film? Though I never thought that was wise.’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I didn’t take her!’ and read the letter. ‘She’s in a real old tangle. A real old snuff-out. She’s sure that Eustace is the wrong one,’ he said. ‘I take to this girl.’

  ‘My heart is beating so hard I can hear it,’ said Kitty. ‘Look, you can see it going up and down inside my mackintosh.’

  ‘A heart doesn’t go up and down,’ he said.

  ‘I must go to the Lonsdale. They’ll want to hear all about this. Oh, I do feel red in the face. I might look in at the surgery and get my blood pressure done.’

  ‘You can get me a cup of coffee instead,’ he said, ‘while I read this through. Can you not see how you talking to all that lot of silly rubbish at the Lonsdale is a betrayal of trust?’

  ‘Trust? Why trust? I’m sure I always keep my word. She doesn’t say we’re not to talk about her. She’d want me to tell them all that she’s all right. And they’ll want to hear about America.’

  ‘She’s not all right,’ said the grave-digger. ‘She is clearly not all right. But then I don’t know who is. Our Het’s not. They never had enough fun, any of these girls. Never, since the war, and they were only kids before it started. They don’t know where they are.’

  ‘I’m sure I never had any fun at their age, either. They suspected I had a fractured heart.’

  But she took off her outdoor clothes and put the kettle on, thinking all the time of Lieselotte’s praises. ‘Open-heartedness’. ‘Love’. Hetty would never have said anything like it. But then Hetty was English. The Germans were very flowery.