Felix sat and stared at her, his eyes fixed, still in his mind struggling in the black, night waters of the Gulf of Suez. After a few moments Mrs Ellis shook his arm:
‘Come on now,’ she said, ‘we must go over and speak to your Frau Wagner.’
When they stopped at the table, Frau Wagner was pretending not to notice their approach. As Felix said: ‘How do you do, Frau Wagner? May I introduce Mrs Ellis?’ she jerked her head round on her crêpey neck that the sun had burnt to peony red, and her blue eyes bulged with pleasure:
‘Please, please sit a moment. How nice it is. All evening I have been wishing a friend that I might discuss my fine new project.’
They sat on the edges of chairs, ready for a quick getaway.
‘A new project!’ said Mrs Ellis, ‘how interesting.’
‘Yes, to think – I have heard of a house to be let vacant. I shall hire it. Now I have learnt all, I shall start a pension and grow rich like Miss Bohun.’
‘You are lucky! Where is the house?’
‘Ah, that would be telling, would it not? But, can you believe me, I have already heard of a lodger.’
‘Congratulations. But what about furniture?’
‘I have my things lent at this moment to a friend in the censorship. And I have a packing-case with such fine linen, such glass and silver. They could not be found here. This lodger is a lady – I know, of course, to-day all are ladies – but this one, she is called Lady Evelina Lundy. It is a title, so I shall ask her to pay more, no?’
‘Who told you about her?’
‘My friend in the censorship.’
At this point Felix managed to get out the very grownup remark he had had on the tip of his tongue: ‘Drink that up, Frau Wagner, and have another on me?’
Coming in an unnatural voice, it now sounded a crude and silly remark, but Frau Wagner, her eyes bright, gave him an admiring, coquettish glance and said: ‘Ah, a so polite young man, is not?’ and drained the glass at a gulp.
Then they had an awkward few minutes while Felix tried to catch the eye of a waiter and give an order. Mrs Ellis was not helpful. Regarding himself as being under her orders, he had never thought to offer her a drink. Perhaps she was cross? – but surely she must realise this situation was different.
Frau Wagner, on the other hand, with one liqueur inside and another on the table, seemed to perk up and take it upon herself to do the entertaining just as when she had been alone with Mr Jewel and Felix at Miss Bohun’s. She said: ‘The house on which I keep my eye has many features but, alas, in the water-closet there is no water, and in the rooms only the jugs. So inconvenient to officers who have the lady friends. I shall tell them at once I can have here only those who make love without the h. and c.’
Felix, although he did not see the significance of this joke, thought it very funny. He laughed uproariously and Mrs Ellis, supposing he knew what he was laughing at, gave him a surprised look. Frau Wagner quickly put up a hand:
‘Please, please – I am thinking to ask you. This packing-case of mine, full of such valuable things – I am concerned because they say there will be fighting here. You know, the Arabs and the Jews – so dangerous for everyone. The Arabs will steal all, I have heard it said. I was wondering . . . you English people will get safely away; you always get away – would you take for safety with you my packing-case with the silver, glass and linen?’
‘Well!’ Mrs Ellis looked doubtful, then asked: ‘How big is it?’
‘Oh, very big. So . . .’ she stretched her arms to indicate the size of a cabin trunk, ‘I have some good things, you know. In Vienna we were big people. If you take it, you must put it in the Bank of England. I will keep the key, of course.’
‘Of course.’ Mrs Ellis rose with a more decided movement, ‘Now we really must go – or Miss Bohun will say I’m keeping Felix out of bed.’
Felix did not want to leave Frau Wagner so soon – now he had got over his first repulsion he realised again how entertaining she was – but Mrs Ellis seemed determined and he felt bound to move with her. As he went he waved to Frau Wagner and she waved back with a little fluttering movement of the fingers. In his annoyance at being forced to go, he began to feel again the guilt and wretchedness that had swept over him when Mrs Ellis called his mother a fool, but Mrs Ellis, as though relieved at having got away from Frau Wagner, was being very funny, describing how they would have to take it in turns to carry Frau Wagner’s packing-case out of Palestine and guard it until they reached the Bank of England – but Felix could respond only with an effort and when they got back he was glad to shut himself in his room away from the sound of her voice. Some time during the night he awoke with the thought perhaps it was understandable that Mrs Ellis should think his mother was a fool. All she knew of his mother was what Felix had told her, and how inadequate that had been! Perhaps if he had tried to tell his mother about Mrs Ellis, his mother would have thought Mrs Ellis a fool. Although he could not quite convince himself of this last, he awoke next morning prepared to show Mrs Ellis that he no longer gave the matter a thought.
When he went downstairs to breakfast, Miss Bohun was brooding over a letter. The opened envelope with its Egyptian stamp lay on the table. She murmured to herself once or twice as she turned the pages over and re-read the beginning, then, putting them down, said: ‘Here is a most charming person, a Lady Evelina Lundy with her little boy, looking for somewhere in Jerusalem so she can spend the summer here. She wants no grandeur – just a comfortable place at a reasonable figure. A gentleman she knows has written to me. He says he knew your father. How nice of him!’
Felix was aghast to realise that the information given Frau Wagner by her friend in the censorship must have come from Miss Bohun’s letter.
He said: ‘I saw Frau Wagner and she says she is going to rent a house and take in lodgers and . . .’
‘Indeed!’ Miss Bohun interrupted with a smile, ‘no doubt she thinks she’s going to get her employer’s house. Frau Teitelbaum told me some time ago that they’re going to Haifa – but Frau Wagner will be unlucky, I’m afraid. The Teitelbaums want key-money for that house, and, as a matter of fact, I’ve already put one of my “Ever-Readies” on to it.’
‘Oh! And what will Frau Wagner do?’
‘Get another job, that’s if she doesn’t want to go to Haifa with the Teitelbaums.’ Miss Bohun’s satisfied smile faded as she looked down again at her letter. She sighed: ‘A charming person! And a dear little boy who would love the garden.’ She reflected a moment before she said earnestly: ‘I know, Felix, Mrs Ellis is a friend of yours! I like you to have a friend. I am glad you get on so well together, but – I dislike saying it – I’m afraid Mrs Ellis is treating me very unfairly. You have noticed no doubt that she doesn’t come down for meals? Perhaps she hasn’t told you that she doesn’t pay for her meals now. She says her doctor – Dr Klaus, quite a good gynæcologist, I’m sure, even though he’s not an Englishman – has told her she’s suffering from malnutrition. She showed me a note about it. A lot of nonsense, I’m sure. Our meals may not be rich, but they’re wholesome – and Mrs Ellis is certainly not too thin. But, there, she’s made it an excuse to eat her meals elsewhere, and she just pays for her room. I don’t want to put her out, in her condition, but it’s very hard on me.’
Felix listened apprehensively but could think of nothing to say. Miss Bohun opened her writing desk and threw the letter in. The drawer was crammed full of papers and letters. When she returned to the table she brightened and asked in a lighter voice: ‘I suppose Mrs Ellis does have some sort of breakfast somewhere, but I don’t know where she gets it at the hour she rises.’
When Felix said nothing, Miss Bohun added in a pleasant, interested way: ‘She doesn’t drink intoxicants at night, does she?’
‘Oh, no, she only drinks coffee.’
‘Even coffee is not the right thing in her condition.’
When Miss Bohun spoke again she lowered her voice: ‘You know, Felix, I do not want to pry into
your life; if you do not wish to confide in me, I would not seek to force a confidence, but I am your aunt, in a way, and I feel I must ask you – what do you and Mrs Ellis do in the evenings? You can’t go to the cinema every night?’
‘We go to the Innsbruck café.’
‘The Innsbruck café! How strange to wish to spend the evenings in such a place! Does Nikky go there, too?’
‘Sometimes. He has lots of friends there – Jews and Arabs and Poles, and they’re very clever; they talk about art.’
Miss Bohun drew down her lips. At last she said with some portentousness: ‘I hope, Felix, when you are at this café you never do, say or think anything about which you would be ashamed to tell your mother.’
For some moments Felix contemplated this admonition with an easy conscience. The young Arabs and Jews were very frank about sex, but it was not a subject on which his mother had been secretive. The Freudian terms they used put the particulars of their talk beyond his understanding, but he had supposed they were saying very much what his mother had said when she talked to him from a religious viewpoint. Then he suddenly thought of something she often said: ‘Sex, you know, Felix darling, is very beautiful; it is something to take very seriously indeed. I do hope my little boy will never grow up into the sort of person who listens to jokes about sex. . . .’ Remembering now the roars of laughter that often resulted from obscure remarks at the Innsbruck, Felix blushed. Unfortunately Miss Bohun chose that moment to raise her eyes and look at him. Seeing his dark and guilty cheeks, she looked down again. After a pause she spoke gravely: ‘Felix, are you in the habit of going into Mrs Ellis’s bedroom?’
‘No.’ He was surprised, as he had expected her to ask him something much more difficult to answer.
‘You were in there the night I came home late.’
‘I only went in then, and one other time. You see, that night we were talking and Nikky . . .’
Miss Bohun again interrupted. She spoke quietly and firmly: ‘I must ask you another question. I want you to understand, Felix, that my position is a very difficult one. This is my house and my home. It is also your home: an important point to remember. I am responsible for its moral tone,’ here she broke off to say in a rapid aside: ‘And there I am stuck up in the attic. It is so inconvenient! What a pity I had that door put on. Anything could happen without my hearing,’ then continued at once with measured solemnity, ‘so, unwilling though I am, I feel bound, Felix, to ask you something. And I know you will tell me the truth.’
Felix, his hands clasped between his knees, leant with his chest against the table, his lips parted. The weighty nature of Miss Bohun’s preamble filled him with fear. He had no idea what she was going to ask him to reveal, but again, when her question came, it seemed to have the simplicity of idiocy. She pronounced it carefully: ‘Does Nikky go into Mrs Ellis’s room at night?’
Felix frowned in his surprise: ‘I don’t think so. Why should he? He has a room of his own.’
‘You all come home together, I suppose?’
‘Yes, sometimes.’
‘And Nikky parts from you in the courtyard?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you go straight to your own room?’
‘Yes.’
Miss Bohun’s interrogation of him reminded him of those witness-box scenes in films and he had to admire the sensible, straightforward way in which he played his part. His answers, however, did not seem to please Miss Bohun very much, and the cross-examination left him befogged as to its purpose.
‘Now,’ she said, as though she had been leading up to this point, ‘I want you to think carefully for a moment, Felix . . . Do you ever hear anyone else coming up the stairs after you have gone to bed?’
Felix frowned more deeply and stared at his plate. He appeared to be thinking carefully as suggested, but indeed he was a complete blank except for a sense of the unpleasantness of this last question with its suggestion of the supernatural, the mysterious and, for some reason, the indecent. It came to him suddenly exactly what all these questions meant. He blushed with an acute sense of shame. Dropping his head he answered gruffly and angrily: ‘No, never.’
Something in his changed attitude must have warned her, for, as she rose, she said quickly: ‘Please don’t mention anything I have said to Mrs Ellis. At a time like this it would be dangerous to upset her.’
When she went to the kitchen, he went out to the garden. It was the delicious time of the year before the sun became unbearable. The crinoline branches of the mulberry tree were now completely hidden in leaves. The seat beneath the tree was shut as in a green tent. Instinctively Felix went to this seat as into hiding to reflect on Miss Bohun’s questions. His face was still flushed; the shame he had felt was now curiously shot through with jealousy that Miss Bohun could imply, even imply, that Mrs Ellis could be so intimate with Nikky. He did not for a moment believe there was any basis for the implication, yet his jealousy made him feel sick. At the same time he felt for Miss Bohun a loathing that made the thought of her unbearable. If she had come near him then, he would have had to move away. As the thought of her passed through his mind, his face twitched with distaste as though he remembered with her an unpleasant odour. Curiously he felt something of the same distaste for Mrs Ellis. He did not want to see either of them for a long time, or Nikky either. He did not want to see any human beings at all. When he heard a movement in the tree and looked up, he called to Faro as though he were calling for and from the depths of his distress. She moved down slowly, her eyes upon him.
‘Faro, Faro,’ he whispered urgently, ‘darling Faro. . . .’ She dropped easily and happily to the lowest fork of the tree and stood there purring. He lifted her into his arms and pressed his face into her fur. It seemed to him that since his mother’s death, Faro alone had loved and needed him. The feel of her warm, living body beneath her fur comforted him and filled him with tenderness. He said: ‘I love you better than anyone, Faro,’ and after a few minutes he added: ‘But I don’t love anyone else, anyway.’
10
When he saw Mrs Ellis again, he believed he was quite indifferent to her, but after he had been in her company a little while, the indifference was disturbed by the fact she was so clever and funny and so often said what, with a sense of baptism, he recognised to be the truth. He knew then that he was not indifferent to her at all: he liked her very much, but for all that the first excitement had gone.
When he looked at her now he realised she had lost completely her fragility, her paleness and her remote look. Her skin had turned golden in the sun and as her figure grew heavy, she began to look robust and more a part of the everyday world. She no longer when she sat, lounged as though too frail to hold herself upright, but she planted herself down, legs apart, with an ungainly firmness. She was no longer very beautiful, but, strangely enough, he liked her better and felt more at ease in her company. She was a companion, a friend, someone he could trust, but the thought of their ultimate separation of their lives no longer filled him with despair. He would see her again somewhere sometime – why should he not?
Now that the afternoon sun fell so intensely into the back rooms of the house, he and Mrs Ellis took to sitting under the mulberry tree, she with a pad on which she wrote letters to friends in Cairo or reading a novel; he with his school work, which had become simpler for him as his brain adapted itself to the necessity for study. Mr Posthorn occasionally admitted now that Felix might scrape through the London Matriculation when he reached England.
One day in May, when the late spring had changed to the heat of summer and only the leaves on the trees and the protected garden flowers remained, the war in the West was declared to be at an end. No one seemed very happy about it. There was a bleak little procession with a band and speeches, and in the evening, after sunset, people trailed about the twilit streets. But there was no enthusiasm. Indeed, at the Innsbruck, there was apprehension, for many thought the really important war – the war for Palestine – would break out straight away
. The young Arabs and Jews were more conscious than ever of the uniqueness of their friendship and some were indignant that they, of all people, might be dragged into the struggle in spite of themselves. The party was much disturbed by Nikky’s describing how a couple of years before, when the Jewish authorities felt it politic for their men and women to join the Allies, tough members of a Jewish youth movement used to do the round of the cafés to ‘persuade’ young Jews to join up. They agreed if they stuck together, protecting one another, press gangs of that sort would hesitate to pick on them. But the days following the war’s end were so like the days preceding it, people settled down again, forgetful that they were now supposed to be living in the midst of peace. The war, after all, was still going on in the Far East and this fact should give Palestine a respite.
School for Love Page 17