The Flight of the Maidens

by Jane Gardam

  ‘Of course the Germans are very flowery,’ she called through, and walking in with the Camp coffee, the last in the bottle, she said, ‘and although we shouldn’t say it, the Jews do exaggerate. I mean, look at their music. Though I’m very fond of Mendelssohn.’

  The Lonsdale café that morning looked like a chamber under the sea; the windows were steamed over and the glass roof darkened by the machine-gunning rain. The ladies had not been daunted, however, and arrived one by one, shaking drops about as they took off their noisy mackintoshes. Today, Mrs. Lonsdale herself took the wet things to a tall mahogany clothes-stand, ceremonially, for she had once been town mayor. Since the war, waitresses had been hard to find and she had to appear herself sometimes, though always in pearls and a nice dress and a perm. She was in no awe of the proprietorial group who gathered at their special table every Wednesday. Some of them may have been schoolmistresses but she felt superior to all of them in her knowledge of the world. Nothing about the war had shaken Mrs. Lonsdale in the least: not the air raids, not the bomb on the Gentlemen’s Club, not the films at the Palace cinema of the German concentration camps, which she had thought unreal and probably done with models, if they were honest. That woman who went over to see them with the Commission from London ought to have been ashamed of herself. Belsen was no place for a woman.

  There was an optimism about the gathering this morning. Each woman sitting with her handbag on her lap. One of them was even stroking hers.

  ‘I don’t think Mrs. Fallowes will be coming today. She doesn’t have a very easy time,’ said Mrs. Brownley.

  ‘You mean Mr. Fallowes?’

  ‘Well, yes. Though, of course, he’s not just anybody. He’s a highly educated man.’

  ‘I’m never sure that’s an advantage in a marriage,’ said Mrs. Pile. ‘There’s so little for intellectual men to practise it on at home, unless of course they are married to a similar wife.’

  ‘I’d not say that,’ said Miss Colne, who had been to teacher-training College and had an affair with a married man in Middlesbrough, but didn’t admit to either. ‘Kitty Fallowes is so nice, and, after all, they have Hetty. And she’s very lucky to have Kitty, now that he’s so peculiar.’

  ‘Well, of course. But, you know, I can imagine Hetty not being all that easy. She can look a bit surly. You know, as she went up through the school, she wasn’t anything. How she got that award to University! Lily Coulter tried to teach her Domestic Science and she was miles away all the time. The school staff even wonder if the examiners got the papers mixed up.’

  ‘No. I’m sorry, no . . . ’ said Dorothy, growing flushed, and Hilda said, ‘I’m afraid that is not fair.’ Dorothy added, ‘And Hetty’s such a nice, pretty girl, too.’

  ‘Well, yes. She’s nice enough. Well, I’d say attractive rather than pretty; she doesn’t have an outstanding feature of any kind, not like her mother—all that lovely hair. She doesn’t give out much.’

  ‘She never thanked me for the grapefruit,’ said Mrs. Brownley.

  ‘This coffee is very weak,’ said Joyce Dobson.

  ‘We’re waiting for the new bottles to come in.’

  ‘It tastes like acorns,’ said Mrs. Pile. ‘The Germans are having to drink acorns.’

  ‘I’ve never tasted acorns. Anyway, so they should be.’

  ‘I don’t expect they are,’ said Joyce Dobson, whose sister was working for the Control Commission. ‘They’ll have plenty of black-market stuff. I expect they’ve got cream back.’

  ‘When I was in Vienna before the war, you should have seen the cream,’ said someone else.

  ‘Vienna isn’t Germany.’

  ‘Not far off, from what I read between the lines. Oh, and the hat shops! Beautiful soft felts.’

  ‘Bobby, my brother, says he prefers the Germans to the French and he doesn’t mind who hears him. He said it all through the First War, and he was out there facing on to them with a bayonet. He says a lot of people did, on the quiet. He says the French think nothing of us, and never did. The Germans were always nicely mannered, though not very humorous.’

  ‘Did you ever have to do with any Italians?’ asked Ada Fisher.

  ‘Bobby has no time for the Italians, either, I’m afraid. He said they ran away, but when they didn’t they were cruel-hearted. Look what they did to that Duce.’

  The women looked into their coffee cups and saw blood on the piazza, the great pale upside-down face, the feet tied together with ropes, the baying crowds.

  ‘There’ll be beautiful coffee in America,’ said someone. ‘They’re partial to it. It’s the national drink. By the way, I’ve had a letter from the German girl. She’s in London. She’s going to America to be adopted by a remote relative.’

  ‘I’ve had a letter too. She thanked me for my friendship—’

  ‘I’m sure I didn’t expect a letter. I only gave her a little dish once Miss Wilkinson brought back from Czechoslovakia in the ’Thirties. I’m not sure that’s strictly in Germany now, but she was polite about it. She didn’t seem the type to gush, though.’

  ‘Well, I’ve had a letter too,’ said somebody else.

  ‘And so have I.’

  Four women, mothers of girls, looked at each other and each one took out of her handbag a sheet of paper covered in Lieselotte’s flimsy flowery script.

  Dorothy and Hilda looked stony, for they had received no letter; but happier when it was discovered that these letters were each one the same, word for word.

  ‘I expect they’re just formalities,’ said Mrs. Bainbridge. ‘The Germans are very formal people. And the Jews are all for rituals and keeping up the social niceties.’

  ‘The Jews we used to see in Harrogate,’ said Mrs. Lonsdale, butting in as she went by, ‘would never have anything to do with us. They just made us feel badly dressed and not well-off. Oh, but they did do their nails beautifully, like mussel shells. Though they weren’t our colours, of course.’

  ‘She’s a funny girl, Lieselotte Klein,’ said Mrs. Bainbridge. ‘She didn’t address one word to us for years when we went to the school for things or gave birthday parties and that sort of occasion. If she’d said more we’d have done more.’

  ‘Well, but she lived with Quakers. They probably got her out of the way of talking. It’s a pity. She was a girl I couldn’t take to somehow, I’m afraid. She was always smiling.’

  ‘They say Hamburg, where she came from,’ said Joyce Dobson, ‘is a paste. Just a paste.’

  ‘A paste?’

  ‘My brother Bobby went there—he’s still in the merchant navy, old as he is. He’s seen it all. Bobby’s been to Hamburg lately on a coal boat, carrying them potash, or maybe taking it away. He was below deck when they docked and then he came up in the morning, and it was a paste.’

  ‘You mean flat? Flattened?’

  ‘Miles and miles. As far as you could see on the landscape. Only rubble. We pulverised them, Bobby says.’

  ‘Like Coventry, then?’

  ‘Well, I dare say. Yes, of course. Exactly. Let’s not forget that.’

  ‘She’ll be happier in America, then. Nobody can deny that.’

  They put the letters, that were now proven to be only some sort of foreign valedictory formula, back in their bags. They were no longer interesting. Joyce Dobson alone said that she wished she had done more for Lieselotte. She didn’t mean money, for the Jews always had money—it was in their veins—but she would have liked to have given her some little thing. She had a party bag at home covered all over with Maltese embroidery, black silk with a long gold chain, the sort of thing you don’t see now.

  ‘But she never told you anything,’ said Mrs. Pile.

  On the same morning, however, Miss Kipling had unlocked the door of the Public Library and found another letter from America lying on the mat. She went to the Reference Room and lit the gas fire, for the rainy day wa
s cold. September was getting on now. Then she went to the wash-place, to take off her mac. She put a kettle on a gas ring for tea and then went back to the desk to remove the cloths from the card indexes and to dust the counter. This was not a job for a qualified librarian, but she was always the first to arrive. Her library was her natural home. She went into the bright room with little tables and chairs, the new children’s library, and laid out Chicks Own, Victor, The Children’s Newspaper, and rearranged some pale, beautiful new editions of Alison Uttley, who had disappeared during the war and just returned. She smelled and stroked them in welcome.

  Then she took the letter with Lieselotte’s name and address on the back and saw that it had been posted only a week ago. This is what is so unnerving about America, she thought. The inconsistency. This letter was all the way from California, the far side, and should have taken weeks. It must have come by non-stop plane. How amazing! Letters locally could take five days if your writing wasn’t clear. There was no rationale in the world.

  ‘Dear Miss Kipling,’ she read—and then, with growing amazement, read on.

  Lieselotte wrote letter after letter hunched up on her bed. Sometimes the bed was a boat and she was being taken across the ocean upon it, letting it wander where it wished. The ocean became ink. She floated on ink to the ink-blue horizon. She wrote in frenzy and sometimes, behind what she wrote, images broke the surface of the sea.

  She had locked her door. There was her own bathroom off the dark bedroom, and a glass there for water. ‘I must measure my water supply,’ she said to herself on her raft of paper as it tossed and drifted and spun her away over the ink ocean. The pages of the letters were covered with writing, and flowed away from her on the bed and across the floor, drifting down and away on the white waves of the carpet.

  Going north, she thought. Into the ice-cap.

  There came a moment when the supply of writing paper ran out and she stopped to listen to a long, patient tapping at her door. She got out of bed and opened it a crack. The black servant stood with a tall glass full of raspberry-coloured something with cream and nuts. Behind was the sharp face of Mame, her throat wrapped round in pink silk. There was no sign of Alice.

  The end of that day was muddled then. By nightfall Lieselotte seemed to have taken off the coat. Soon it was next day and she washed and dressed and looked at her bedroom door, and unlocked it. She went through it, to find Alice sitting alone playing patience, with her back to the sea.

  ‘Well, hi,’ said the midget figure. ‘How are ya feeling? Better? It’s terrible how travel destroys. You been away two days. You need the sun, girl, now. Are we going to look at the photographs?’

  Lieselotte sat down. ‘It is not a success, Tante Alice. I shall have to go home.’

  ‘Not look at the photographs?’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘You can. You just must.’

  A tray of coffee was brought. The great sea swooned outside the window, two huge currents meeting. Islands of dark trees. Far, far away the red bridge glowing.

  ‘It’s so still,’ said Lieselotte. ‘It’s as if it’s waiting. It is terrifying.’

  ‘Y’know,’ said Alice, ‘it’s the earthquake. There’s a feeling we should none of us be here. We’re just too small. You couldn’t do any work in this place, y’know. Not in Belvedere. It’s a waiting room. You just get sucked into this wet-an’-dry great beautiful globe. There’s never winter here nor summer. It’s never cold. And there’s so much, so much that’s out of sight. I’ve seen a whale out there, y’know. It’s that deep. Sitting here with Mame screeching, behind the cards I seen a whale. It rose up out of the sea just there—see? Just there. A great black mountain. A warm creature that suckles its young. The sea went slahdin’ off its sides. And then it rolls away, rolls away and down it goes. D’you know, we don’t know what goes ahn here yet in this world? In the air and in the earth and in the waters under the earth. That’s the Bible, Nina.’

  ‘I must go back. To Europe, Tante Alice.’

  ‘Do nothing yet, girl. Take it slow. I’ll leave ya the albums. I’m going out this afternoon.’

  ‘Going out?’ Lieselotte couldn’t think for a moment where she was. This jewelled little old creature’s life was like the existence of a Venetian princess, watching the water, watching Venice embracing the sea. She remembered the halls of the Wallace Collection in Manchester Square, the Bonington with the sun full on a balcony on the Grand Canal. Carl’s brilliant eyes. ‘It’s a sort of Venice here,’ she said, ‘but it’s the size of a world.’

  ‘Venice is the size of a hazelnut,’ said Alice. ‘Do we know yet whether it’s still there? I’d guess it would be under the lagoon by now.’

  The room grew still.

  ‘My father loved Venice,’ said Lieselotte. ‘He loved the sea. Mother loved the trees and forests. We were going to travel the world. I decided, before I was nine, that I would travel and travel. I don’t know why. It might be because, if you see everywhere in the world, you won’t get this feeling that you belong to any of it. Maybe that’s what’s been wrong. Patriotism. Nationalism.’

  ‘No promised land,’ said Alice. ‘Make no promises. All you’re saying is you’re Jewish. You are always on the move.’

  Lieselotte did not look at the albums that day but returned to her room and slept. Then she gathered up all the letters and put them in their envelopes and addressed them. When the servant left the house next day Lieselotte gave them to her with the money, and some money over. It was her last money.

  Alice was being collected today by a chauffeur for a lunch and Bridge, taken up from the main room in a lift to the road, disappearing behind the lift doors like an oracle departing.

  Lieselotte was alone, and slept again and the photograph albums lay unopened on the glass table.

  The next day she got up at a proper time, dressed and went to prepare her aunt’s breakfast. She knocked on her aunt’s door and carried in her tray.

  ‘So you are rested and you are here at last,’ said Alice, ‘and today I go out again. I’m saarry. Mame is coming to see you.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I can’t tell her not to. Keep very cool.’

  ‘Oh, hi,’ said Mame during the morning. ‘Well, so here you are, all fixed up? I would just like a little word with you before Alice and I go out.’

  ‘We’ve had it,’ said Alice. ‘The word is said.’

  ‘Is this crazy scheme gonna work?’ asked Mame.

  ‘We are thinking about it,’ said Alice.

  Mame had brought a marketing list and now flung herself about the kitchen looking in cupboards to see that all was adequate.

  ‘There’s a pack of steaks missing,’ she said. ‘Better stock up there. We don’t agree with too many steaks in Belvedere, Liese; it’s not appropriate for a healthy locality. It’s a Wild West concept, and an East Coast fad. This has been a Spanish city. There’s goin’ to have to be big withdrawals from the Bank if it’s always gonna be steaks. Now, you have to go out today, downtown. Help get your bearings. You just leave the orders in the shops, so they know your face. They’ll deliver it all here till you can drive, no worry. Get yourself a caaffee an’ a muffin while you’re down there. There’s plenty of drugstores. There’s a cinema over in Tiburon.’

  ‘Is that far?’

  ‘Oh, you can take a cab.’

  ‘But I haven’t any money.’

  Tante Alice later, being wheeled round again by the chauffeur to disappear into the steel coffin in the wall, said, ‘Nina, you can walk round there. No cabs. Get yaself moving. There wasn’t a day your age when I didn’t play a game of tennis an’ a raand of golf.’

  ‘Have a heart, Alice,’ said Mame. ‘It’s two miles.’

  ‘I was walking ten miles,’ said Lieselotte, ‘twelve miles, twenty miles, all over London.’

  The two enamelled faces turned to her, q
uite blank.

  ‘I forgot you knew London.’

  ‘I didn’t know there was anyone walked about London,’ said acid Mame.

  ‘What’s left of it. I should know. I’ve only been away less than two weeks. It is in ruins!’

  ‘Now, that’s a real shame,’ said Mame.

  ‘Is Gatty’s there, and Gunter’s?’ asked Alice. ‘Did they get the Trocadero? I learned to gargle the tune of “Garn are the Days” in the Café Royal—I heard that was garn all right—gargle with champagne; I was famous for it.’ The lift doors closed and the two women vanished.

  Later, after cutting her finger-nails and toe-nails and washing her hair and examining and inhaling and spraying herself with some of the scents in the minarets, Lieselotte fell back on the white sofa and picked up the photograph albums. But then she put them down again and went out.

  She walked down the cold-shouldering street of cement and lilies and castrated vines, until the houses stopped and she was on the wet, salt jetties licked by the sea. The inescapable glowing bridge floated across the water, like a rose-tinted error. Along from the buildings were go-downs and stores and an iron jetty for trucks, and already a few urban-looking shops with expensive clothes. The place was developing. She came to an old bar with a sawdust-covered floor, mahogany and brass, cowboy-style. A lean man in a trance stood there, in front of mirrors and bottles. Painted signs, like flags, were draped about, saying how old the place was. Lieselotte read them, but could not understand. Two men lazed in a corner drinking spruce beer from dark bottles. They didn’t serve no coffee, the drowsy man said.

  She found the general store and handed over the shopping list.

  The woman behind the counter smirked at her accent and said, ‘Oh, fine. Right. Sure will,’ put the list on the counter beside her and continued: ‘So. You from Canada, honey? Or Britain?’

  ‘Hamburg,’ said Lieselotte.

  ‘Is Hamburg Britain?’

  ‘Hamburg’s Germany. It’s been blotted out.’