by Rosie Alison
He had avoided intimacy, retreating instead into the excusable solitude of the Bodleian Library, and seeking out neglected books from the stacks. As a Classics student, the ancient poets had offered him unexpected consolations; their stoic forbearance eased something in him, as if all his recent family losses were but a passing shadow beside their epic grief.
I am seges est ubi Troia fuit.
“Now there are fields of corn where Troy once stood.” Ovid could conjure the vanished traces of a human glory greater than anything the present could show. As he edged towards aline’s meaning, he had often felt himself almost touching the allusive grace of lost times.
By now, Thomas had abandoned his evening’s reading, and poured himself a whisky instead. Rapidly, the drink relaxed him. Reminding him that he hadn’t always just been solitary and bookish, that there were other versions of his past too. He thought back to his years as a junior diplomat in Weimar Berlin, where the embassy had been so formal and yet the city so free. Where he had seen all his polite assumptions so swiftly dismantled.
It had been a lucky posting for him. Inside the goldfish bowls of Oxford and London, he had always been so guarded – but amongst foreigners, in the overcranked atmosphere of the Weimar Republic, he had at last felt liberated to experiment.
He had visited every kind of theatre. At the Wintergarten and the Metropol he watched extravagant displays of barelegged dancing girls – but then a raffish young German diplomat, Max, took him downtown to the bawdier cabaret clubs, the Weisse Maus and its rival, the Schwarzer Kater.
Tentatively, Thomas allowed his eyes to meet the predatory glances of women in unsuitable bars, and began to find himself stirred by meetings with strangers. He even took Max’s lead and followed a prostitute with a swaying walk into a tenement block. Away from the mysterious shadows of the streetlamps she looked suddenly old, and the skin about her neck was loose. But Thomas’s gallantry would not let him back away from the poor woman’s unwilling pretence that she had any allure at all. So he had his first sexual encounter on an ageing woman’s narrow bed in a room which smelt of cabbage and herring. They did not kiss, nor even look at each other, and it was all a mistake, an act of strange repulsion. Nevertheless, the startling intimacy of seeing a woman’s unguarded nakedness did awaken something in Thomas.
Half-repelled, half-seduced by new sensations, he began to savour the cabaret scene. The women he met in bars reeked of cigarettes, and their clothes looked faintly soiled, yet he was oddly aroused by their smudged make-up and frank eroticism.
But he still kept his distance from these women. Until one evening he found himself seated beside the fifty-year-old wife of the Austrian ambassador at dinner, after a Beethoven concert. Their first conversation was deceptively stiff, banal even.
“My name is Margarete,” she told him with a tilt of her face – an engaging, intelligent face, he noticed.
“Do you follow music?” he asked politely.
“But of course. I grew up in Salzburg, beside Mozart’s house.”
“I’m afraid we lack your great composers.”
“Ah, but London has many other things to offer. You must miss it?”
“I am too busy exploring Berlin now—”
“No doubt there are a few sad hearts in London missing an attractive young man like you.”
Margarete spoke with such rueful warmth that Thomas felt suddenly self-conscious, and attended to the guest on his other side. But within minutes he turned to her once again, wanting to talk further.
Margarete was confident and worldly, with an erect carriage and a sensuous grace. In accented English she asked Thomas about his life in London, and was bemused by his formal prattle. She fattered him with her expansive appreciation of men. He resisted the eye contact with which she wooed him until the final course, but by that time he was enfolded by her warmth, and the glint of desire in her eye.
He began relaxing into the realization that she had set her mind on seducing him. She had shown him in her eyes that a connection was possible, and for the first time in his life he began to think about holding a woman. He wanted to see her again. He wanted to touch her – her fullness, her over-ripeness.
They met intermittently, at cocktails in the Adlon, at embassy receptions. The Austrian ambassador thought the polite young Englishman was a splendid fellow. On every occasion Margarete found a way to take the flirtation forwards – with her eyes, with a little pressure from her manyringed hand, or the sway of her walk as she came towards him or moved away.
One evening, in the gardens of the Belgian Embassy, they spoke alone for the first time.
“I have been thinking about you, Thomas,” she said. Her face was relaxed, amused.
“I think about you all the time,” he told her, his eyes agonized with longing. She looked at him fondly and told him where to come and when.
He arrived with a bunch of flowers at the given address. a sullen landlady showed him up to a room with a grand piano, where Margarete was waiting for him. She gave him champagne and led him to the adjoining bedroom. The heavy curtains were drawn, although it was early in the afternoon. The light was dun, with a streak of sunshine where the curtains left a gap.
She looked into his face and took him in her arms. They parted from their embrace only to kiss, and then Thomas felt her desire in the slippery urgency of her tongue. He undid her dress, then her corset, and watched her full body tumble forth. She bore all the marks of middle age – heavy breasts, stretch marks – but every imperfection only inflamed him further. She drew him to the bed and enfolded him with caressing arms. He saw the look of tenderness in her face, and heard her low, consoling voice. Years of boarding school absences from his mother vanished as he slipped into her. When the time came, her cry of release was the most intimate sound he had ever known.
Afterwards he buried his face on her breast. She stroked him and muttered tender words in German. He enjoyed her gentle hands, but even as they lay together, a part of him remained still detached: this was not love, he knew, this was a release of transgressive passion.
Nevertheless, he did feel tenderness for Margarete – a new feeling, which he cherished.
Their affair continued for six months. He loved to see her perfectly composed face at parties, so elegantly made up above the strictly corseted attire, when he knew her stripped bare, with legs apart and breasts tumbling. It was an eroticism which he worried might be unhealthy – a peculiar yearning for coarseness in women.
But his anxieties were summarily cut short when her husband was posted to Rome. There were mixed feelings in their parting, because their first lust was almost satiated, and unstated reservations were creeping in on both sides. But she insisted on an extravagantly loving final evening together, which eased them both.
Thomas tried to picture Margarete once more, and their intimate afternoons together. Her unstinting delight in his young body made him shiver a little, as he realized how sad she would be to see him now, so emasculated in his chair. He hoped she had never heard what had befallen him, wanting somebody, somewhere, to retain a clear memory of him as he had been. He was grateful now for the thought of her uncritical love.
She had sent him a telegram of congratulation on his engagement, he recalled. He had wondered whether to invite her to his wedding, but decided not to, for Elizabeth’s sake; he did not want to be distracted.
a sudden image came back to him from his wedding day, of Elizabeth in her ivory-silk dress walking down the aisle, her face lit up. He remembered how his eyes had welled as he watched her coming towards him; she looked so happy. After all his years of emotional distance, he had felt an unfamiliar surge inside as he made his vows. So this is love, he had thought. at last.
And yet their wedding had been followed by a spell of ill fortune. a few weeks later, as they drove around the Italian lakes on their honeymoon, a telegram reached them with news of his father’s fatal heart attack.
Thomas had barely buried his father and returned to
Berlin with his bride when the Republic’s most brilliant statesman, Gustav Stresemann, collapsed with a stroke, dying soon after.
“Germany has lost the one leader who was holding the country back from its own precipice,” the ambassador announced to his staff gloomily. Three weeks later came the Wall Street Crash, plunging the world into depression.
The auspices for their marriage had never been favourable, Thomas reflected. But as he turned out the lights and wheeled himself to their bedroom, he refused to lose hope, and accept that they had lost each other for good. Perhaps, with their work here together now, they might find each other again – over time.
Reaching their bedroom, he was relieved to find Elizabeth already asleep. He would try to reach out to her again in the morning.
15
In November there was a proper freeze at Ashton, and before any of the staff could forbid it, the more fearless children slid across the lake’s thick ice on wicker chairs. They had one day’s grace before the frozen lake was declared out of bounds.
Outside lessons, the evacuees spent hours wandering through the park, getting their shoes muddy. Anna enjoyed kicking through the leaves, but she did wonder how much longer she would be stranded in this place.
At one end of the games field stood a sombre oak tree struck by lighting, whose charred branches reached out towards the sky as if in prayer. The children often played tag there, but something about the tree’s stark shape always tugged at Anna, and made her quiet – until she could feel a pulse of homesickness inside.
Her next letter home was more subdued than usual.
When she read it, Roberta wondered whether she shouldn’t bring her daughter back home after all, while London was still safe. Every night she scanned the sky for bombers, and waited for apocalyptic air raids, but none came. The milk arrived, she went off to work, the BBC played music, and yet – London was a city on guard.
“The bombs will come,” warned the papers. Roberta reminded herself that her daughter’s letters were not actually unhappy; better perhaps to leave her where she was, she decided, as she ironed her blouse for the morning.
She missed her daughter every day. But she was, too, just beginning to enjoy the surprise taste of a different life. All of them were standing at their own crossroads now, and she felt the possible arrival of something new every time she walked down the street. Roberta was Galway-Irish by birth, and sometimes wondered if those shifting West-Coast skies hadn’t given her a clairvoyant streak, for she could sense things – pick up other people’s minds and moods. She could make rapid connections with strangers, just by divining what they were thinking, what they were feeling. She could persuade her friends to dance down the street, so vivid was she, so vital.
She had first arrived in Fulham as a child, after her widowed mother Iris found work nearby as a maid in alarge Chelsea house. Iris took care to teach her daughter poise and cheerfulness, and Roberta would sometimes join her to polish the parquet floors of the Wyndham family house in the Boltons.
She loved going there. The large sash windows opened onto half an acre of lawns and roses, and the airy reception rooms had the varnished glow of old paintings and antique furniture. a taste for fine things filtered through to Roberta. She always kept her fingernails clean, and her hair neat, and her shoes polished. If she ever met guests, they looked at her in approval, she noticed. Because she had natural manners.
At twenty-two, she found work with a small family-run firm of furniture restorers in Fulham Broadway. She was good with her hands, and her experience at her mother’s side in the Boltons had given her a sure appreciation of antiques. The owner soon recognized her special social skills, and Roberta was quickly groomed to deal with customers. She would go to large houses and assess the job. Where work could be done on site, she would be dispatched to replace pieces of veneer or leather on old desks and tables, working alone in high-ceilinged rooms with fragile, priceless antiques.
From her first week at work, Roberta caught the eye of her boss’s son, Lewis. He was attracted by the way she believed in her own life; she had style and zest, and a passion for dancing. He took her to as many dances as she wanted, and danced as late as she wished. She looked into his eyes and saw his determined devotion: he was romantic enough to risk her rejection.
His emotional certainty won her over. She married him, and their child – Anna– arrived soon after. Roberta haemorrhaged badly at delivery and was advised that further pregnancies would be risky. But both parents were delighted with their daughter.
They moved into a small terraced house in Fulham, and Iris gave them a much-loved old piano as a present. Anna became the focus of Roberta’s hopes. She wanted to pass on to her daughter her spirit and verve. She taught her the piano, and danced down the street with her. More, she taught her joy. That was Roberta’s talent.
But now, with Anna and Lewis gone, Roberta’s talent for happiness had no audience. Her working life continued, but felt like a spurious activity. What was the point of restoring furniture in houses which might soon be blasted to bits by German bombs?
For the moment, there were only false alarms. No planes, no raids, nothing but sandbags and empty streets and airraid drills. Blackout curtains and loneliness. Roberta lay on her bed and wrapped her legs around the sheets. She thought of her husband, with his neatly cut hair and his cautious gestures. She felt tenderness for him, and loyalty, and familial love. But little ardour. Her body was in full bloom now, and she couldn’t help longing for somebody new to enter her life – a passionate man, more spontaneous than Lewis.
In the morning she set off to Regent’s Park, to restore a table in one of the mansions there. She arrived at the colonnades of the Outer Circle, where the houses glowed with an eerie ivory sheen under an overcast sky.
She pulled the doorbell, and a housekeeper with remote eyes showed her to the drawing room. There was the table – walnut with inlaid brass. Years of sunlight through the long windows had warped the wood a little, and the brass detailing was sticking out of its grooves. There were a few edges of veneer missing too. Roberta set to work with her box of tools, her pliers, her glue and her wood pieces in many colours and sizes.
This vast house was so empty. Without any sound but a ticking clock and the occasional passing car. Roberta looked out onto Regent’s Park, the bandstand, the empty lawns, the unappreciated trees. The looking-glass lake, so still and passionless. She felt a pang of distance, as if everything was away, apart – her husband, her daughter, her own life.
I’m alone too much, she told herself. She finished her job as soon as she could, eager to leave the silent house. Emerging onto the street, she avoided the park because it looked too melancholy without children, and headed instead down Park Crescent, towards Oxford Circus.
“Roberta!”
She turned to see Martha Cox, someone she had known back in her courting years at the local dance hall.
“I work just around the corner, at the BBC – the building that looks like an ocean liner,” Martha told her.
“What do you do there?”
“Sort the archives – their shelves are overflowing with recordings. But why don’t you join us? Another girl just left us for the Wrens.”
As she chattered on, Roberta’s heart leapt at the chance of doing something different, something somehow linked – however tenuously – to the war effort. Restoring tables in empty houses seemed altogether less valuable than sorting dance records for a deprived and grateful nation.
The women walked off, arm in arm, to the reception desk where Roberta was fixed up with an interview.
She hoped her father-in-law would understand; their firm had fewer and fewer job requests, after all. She had her own needs too, barely admitted even to herself.A part of her was longing for new excitement, and now this opportunity had arrived. Increasingly, she tingled with formless romantic hope. She found it hard not to look into the face of any man she met, in case she found a return. She did not want to threaten her marri
age or home – but nevertheless, if she caught the glance of an interesting new stranger, she could never quite resist the thought of fresh eyes, fresh love.
16
When Anna next received a letter from her mother, she learnt that she had started war work now, a busy job at the BBC. “So I’m afraid I won’t be able to visit you quite yet. But I was so glad to read your last letter, my darling. you are clearly so happy at Ashton Park…”
Anna felt defated. She was longing to see her mother, yet now she could see nothing ahead of her but school for ever.
Perhaps it was this upset which made her reckless that weekend, because she joined up with Billy and euan, the boys who were always in trouble. They persuaded her to go stair-sliding with them. First they sneaked into the kitchen to find some tin trays, and then took them right to the top of the art-room stairs, which were lined with a tattered green carpet.
Billy was the first tray slider. Anna watched him hurtle downstairs – banging against the wall, then thrown off his tray at the bottom.
“It’s flun,” he cried, and raced upstairs again for another go.
“My turn—” said Anna, bracing herself and closing her eyes. Her ride was fast, bumpy, scary – and she lurched at the bottom. But she landed well, and the boys clapped when she stood up.
The three of them took it in turns, sliding faster each time. Euan, who never usually said much, took to whooping on his rides, and it was his cries which drew Miss Harrison to the staircase.
“Will you stop that at once—” She was furious, her face clenched and her eyes even more twitchy than usual. She stormed and spluttered at them about the danger, the broken legs and necks, then she marched them off to be punished.
Anna and the boys followed her in silence, dreading what was to come. But they were lucky: it was Mr Stewart’s day off, and so they were led to Mr Ashton’s study instead.
When they entered his room, he was behind his desk. He wheeled forwards to address them, looking at them carefully while they stood there in silence. His quietness put them all on edge: Annacould not tell how angry he was.