Losing Nicola

by Susan Moody

  ‘Yes,’ breathed Ava. ‘It was a notorious case a couple of years ago, in all the papers for days. I really thought his wife was going to Stand By Her Man, but as soon as he was sentenced, she divorced him and disappeared. And now she’s come down here, where nobody will find out who she is.’

  ‘You did.’

  ‘Only because I recognized that green costume she was wearing the other day.’

  ‘Maybe you’ve got it all wrong.’ I didn’t want Nicola tainted. ‘Maybe Mrs Stone just happened to buy her costume at the same shop as this . . . manslaughter person’s wife.’

  ‘No. She wore it on Day Three of his trial. I remember her in it. I cut it out.’ Ava kept voluminous scrapbooks full of newspaper-cuttings about notorious trials.

  ‘Who did Mr Stone kill?’ asked Orlando.

  Again Ava glanced at the door. Despite their mutual dependency, she was frightened of my mother. ‘That’s the awful thing,’ she whispered. ‘It was a little girl. Nicola’s best friend. Said he didn’t mean to, well, of course, he would say that, wouldn’t he? Said he didn’t realize what he was doing.’

  ‘Not the old red mist defence, I hope,’ said Orlando.

  ‘Is he going to be hanged?’

  ‘They don’t hang people for manslaughter.’ Ava gave a theatrical shudder. ‘I just hope he stays behind bars for the rest of his life. No one’s safe with monsters like that around.’

  ‘How can he be a monster if he didn’t mean to do it?’

  ‘How did he kill her?’ asked Orlando.

  ‘Strangled her with . . .’ There was another of Ava’s dramatic pauses. ‘. . . her very own scarf!’

  ‘Does it matter whose scarf it was?’ asked Orlando.

  ‘Not as such, I suppose, but somehow it makes it all the more dreadful.’ Ava checked the door again, and leaned in once more. ‘Pulled it round her neck as tight as he could,’ she said graphically, ‘until her eyes popped and her tongue stuck out. They found the poor little mite lying on the floor of his daughter’s bedroom.’

  ‘Horrible, Ava.’

  ‘How could he not mean to do it?’

  Unsure, she moved on to safer ground. ‘Not that his name was Stone,’ she added. ‘Louise has obviously gone back to her maiden name or something. He was called Farnham, Geoffrey Farnham.’

  ‘Gosh.’ We were speechless, plunged into the reality of the alien, morbidly exciting adult world that rarely intruded into our bookish lives.

  Belatedly, Ava realized that perhaps she had been indiscreet. ‘Now, don’t you go telling anyone what I just told you. It’s not fair to visit the sins of the father upon the children. Promise me, now.’

  We promised, but the knowledge only added to Nicola’s already considerable mystique and my own besottedness.

  That was also the summer when I woke one morning to find blood on my nightdress. I looked for scabs on my knees but found none so I went to Ava. ‘What’s this from?’

  ‘Oh, Alice!’ She smiled in a way that made me uneasy and embarrassed.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I said.

  ‘You’ve become a Woman!’

  ‘Have I?’

  She nodded and winked. ‘Better not tell the boys.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Boys can be very silly about things like that,’ she said.

  Like what? How exactly had I become a woman? What was I this morning, that I hadn’t been last night? Adulthood had been something which awaited far off, and which did not affect my current existence at all. Now, I saw that only the thinnest of membranes separated the girl I was from the woman I had apparently become. Somehow, the barrier between my past and my future had been breached. Unusually, Fiona was more helpful than Ava. Matter-of-factly, she explained about menstruating and monthly periods, showed me a sanitary towel, which she helped me to tie on with a piece of string. ‘I’ll buy you a proper belt when I go shopping later,’ she said. ‘Of course, you won’t be able to go swimming.’

  ‘Why not?’ I was appalled at this sudden curb on my freedom.

  ‘Because it’s safer and easier for you not to, not while you’re bleeding. Don’t worry, darling. I’ll explain to the boys.’

  ‘Please don’t. I’ll absolutely die if you do.’

  ‘You’re being awfully melodramatic,’ she said briskly. ‘It’s a perfectly normal physical function.’ She smiled the same way Ava had. ‘People call it The Curse, but it’s not really because it means that you’ll be able to have children now.’

  ‘But I don’t want to,’ I said. ‘Not now.’

  ‘You don’t have to.’ She gave me a short lecture in her embarrassing Wise Woman voice about being careful what I did with boys that left me none the wiser. I was fairly sure I didn’t like being a woman. I felt dirty. The string chafed the skin of my stomach, the pad felt awkward. I was sure that everyone could see it bulging inside my shorts. I’d never kept anything from Orlando before, but I felt instinctively that this was something I wouldn’t share with him.

  Perhaps it was because I was now a woman that Fiona decided I was to take piano lessons. Perhaps she thought I was becoming too much of a tomboy, or perhaps she simply wanted to help the lonely young refugee who was living up the road in Mrs Sheffield’s house. Grown-ups didn’t explain very much to us in those days but I vaguely understood that Mr Elias had escaped from Germany before the war.

  ‘I don’t want to waste the holidays on beastly music lessons.’ I kicked at the big Chesterfield sofa in our shabby drawing-room. Orlando had been learning the piano for years, along with several other instruments, but I’d never felt any desire to do so too.

  ‘Some of your friends are already going to him,’ Fiona said. ‘Mary Stephens. Rosemary Geoffreye. And that strange child from the North End – Nicola Stone.’

  ‘Nicola?’ I brightened. If Nicola went to him, it put a different complexion on things. ‘She never said anything about it.’

  ‘Well, she began in the Easter holidays, and goes once a week. She’ll be taking lessons at school from next term and her mother wants her to get a head start.’

  So it was with reasonable grace that I found myself on the stone doorstep of Number Seventeen, five houses down from Glenfield, lifting the green-tarnished brass knocker shaped like a bull’s head. When Mrs Sheffield opened the door, she let loose the smell of mould and damp stone and lack of upkeep, which was familiar from my own home.

  ‘Good afternoon, Alice,’ she said in her high-pitched, well-bred voice.

  ‘It’s for piano lessons,’ I said quickly, afraid that she might otherwise think this was a social call.

  ‘Of course. Your mother said you would be coming.’ From upstairs, we could hear something sad and beautiful being played on the piano. Mrs Sheffield’s face lifted to the sound like a sunflower. She sighed. ‘He’s such a talented boy. I wish my husband could have heard . . .’

  A boy? I found this strange. None of the boys I knew could have taught someone to play the piano, not even Orlando, and he was already preparing to take Grade 8. ‘Should I go up?’ I wondered.

  ‘Of course, dear. I’m sure Mr Elias is expecting you. First door on the right. Just knock.’

  I climbed the curving staircase while the music swelled. Another brass knocker, polished this time, in the shape of a trumpet-blowing angel, was attached to the middle panel of the door, and I lifted it, let it fall again with a small thud.

  The door opened, and Mr Elias stood there, staring gravely at me for a moment.

  ‘You are Miss Alice Beecham?’ He had a foreign accent and wore a pullover with holes in the elbows. His teeth were very white.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then please to come in.’ He stood aside and motioned me in with a bow.

  Immediately I felt lifted out of my usual self. A bow! This was not how I was normally treated. I floated past him and stared around me. The cluttered room smelled of coffee and wool and aniseed; it was an alien smell, and curiously exciting. After the austerities of my own home
, it seemed exotic beyond compare. Heavy velvet curtains hung from floor to ceiling on either side of the windows. A grand piano dominated the bay window, through which I could see Orlando kicking a stone along the promenade, occasionally glancing up at the window where he knew I was. The rest of the boys were down on the beach, aimlessly chucking pebbles into the sea. Nicola’s hair flamed between them.

  A sabre hung above the fireplace with a blue velvet gold-tasseled cap tied to it. On the mantelpiece sat a bowlful of pearls. Records in tattered brown slip-covers lay piled on the floor; a rack of china-bowled pipes stood on the mantelpiece and beside it, a tin where Mr Elia kept tobacco, with a girl painted on it, her long hair rippling over but not hiding her naked body. A red glass decanter stood on the window sill and, instead of lying on the floor, an oriental carpet was fixed to the wall. A record player in a shiny wooden cabinet stood beside the fireplace. On top of it was a primitive radio, with protruding antennae, and a pair of headphones lying beside it. There were faded sepia photographs everywhere. A plump couple beaming, two little girls with long hair held back in a big floppy bow, a group with the couple and the girls with a boy in grey shorts standing in the middle. Were these members of Mr Elias’s family? I wanted to ask him but just as we refrained from asking Julian or the other boys about their lost fathers, so I was afraid of stirring up the sadness which I sensed in him.

  He was not a complete stranger to me. I had seen him several times walking along the promenade, his head down, his shoulders hunched. And I vividly remembered another time. On a night of storm and gale, Orlando and were I woken by the wailing of the lifeboat maroons. As we lay there in the dark, listening to the wind howling under the roof tiles and rattling the window-frames, Fiona came in to our bedroom.

  ‘Hurry up and get dressed,’ she said. ‘Plenty of warm clothes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To be there when the lifeboat comes back. You can carry this Thermos of tea, Orlando, and Alice, you take this blanket.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘There are sailors wrecked on the Goodwin Sands,’ she said patiently. ‘We must do what we can.’

  We trudged along the sea front towards the stone-built lifeboat house, battling with the wind and the scream of the storm. People had gathered there, clothes pulled on over their pyjamas, clutching blankets and vacuum flasks, string bags of sandwiches, even ancient sweaters. It was very dramatic. Minutes after we arrived, the lifeboat surged out of the darkness and up onto the shingle bank. A German ship, someone told us, had run aground, its hull holed, men thrown into the waves. They began to unload, first the lifeboat crew in yellow oilskins, then the rescued men, blond, good-looking, bewildered, shivering under wet grey blankets.

  Someone behind me began to swear under his breath, on and on in a furious monotone: ‘Bastards. Sons of bitches. Schweinehunder. Nazi Schweinehunder. Filthy bastards. They should have left you there to drown and go to hell.’

  I recognized him now. It had been my new piano teacher standing there, cursing the shipwrecked Germans.

  Much later I would learn that he was only twelve years older than myself, but at that first meeting, he seemed immeasurably ancient, in his grubby uncollared shirt, and round tortoiseshell spectacles. Orlando had a similar pair. I knew you could prise the tortoiseshell off, like a scab. I wondered if Mr Elias had discovered this, whether I should ask him.

  That first afternoon, he sat down at the piano stool and placed me between his knees. ‘Now Miss Alice Beecham, we shall start with the scale of C,’ he announced, and proceeded to play it, fingers rippling like water on the keys. He put a warm hand over mine and bent my fingers one after the other up the keyboard and down again. ‘Up,’ he said. ‘And down again. Up . . . and down.’

  ‘Did you bring that piano with you from Germany?’ I asked, when the lesson appeared to be over. I envisaged him bent double, the piano strapped to his back, and wondered what he did with the legs. Perhaps he carried them with him in a bag, or perhaps . . .

  ‘It is not my own piano.’ He smiled at me, and I felt a kind of warmth between my legs, the same inexplicable feeling I sometimes had when I watched Gregory Peck or Audie Murphy when we went to the cinema. ‘It belongs to Mrs Sheffield.’

  ‘She’s a widow,’ I said. ‘Her husband was killed in the war.’

  And immediately I blushed with mortification. How cross my mother would be if she knew I’d been rude enough to mention the war when this man was from Germany, and might think I was making some kind of dig at him.

  ‘The piano is one of the reasons I came to live here,’ Mr Elias said. He spread his beautiful hands and smiled. ‘Otherwise I would not be able to become a poor piano teacher.’

  He didn’t seem poor to me, with his sabres and pearls and velvet caps. ‘Were you always?’ He smelled of cigarettes, but not the kind my father smoked, of something more exotic, as though some kind of spice had been mixed in with the tobacco.

  ‘I have only done this for a couple of years.’

  ‘What did you do before that?’

  ‘Before that, I lived in London with my cousin and his wife. When his wife became pregnant, they needed the bedroom where I was sleeping.’

  ‘Did you escape from the Nazis?’

  ‘More or less.’

  ‘How?’ Orlando was obsessed by the recent war, and had urged me to read the accounts of daring escapes from Colditz and various Stalag Lufts, the Wooden Horse, The Cruel Sea. We’d seen films starring Jack Hawkins and Richard Attenborough. We knew all about plucky Douglas Bader with his amputated legs, Wing Commander Guy Gibson, The Naked Island. ‘Did you dig a tunnel, or dress up in disguise?’ I wanted to know all the details of fake passports and imitation uniforms, in order to carry the information back to Orlando.

  He shook his head. ‘Nothing like that,’ he said. ‘When my family . . . when they were . . .’ His face clouded for a moment, ‘. . . my aunt Lena brought me to England, along with my cousin, just before the war had started. I was still a boy. I went to school in London, in Richmond, and all the time I studied. Then one day I saw in the paper where there was a job teaching at a school nearby this little town, and I moved down here.’

  ‘Lucky for me, then?’

  ‘Do you really think so?’ He said ‘sink’, instead of ‘think’.

  ‘Of course.’ We were neglected children, but well-brought up.

  ‘When I came to view the room, Mrs Sheffield told me that this used to be her drawing-room, but that it was too large and too cold for her now. She said she couldn’t move the piano, and she didn’t want to sell it, because it belonged to her father, so whoever took the room would have to share it with the Steinway.’

  ‘You must have been very pleased.’

  ‘Pleased?’ My new teacher lifted his hands in the air. ‘I could feel stars in my ears!’

  ‘We say “stars in our eyes”, not in our ears.’

  ‘Oh, but I felt these stars in my ears,’ he said. ‘So I asked Mrs Sheffield if I might play the instrument occasionally, and she says . . .’ He clasped his hands together. ‘“Oh, my dear Mr Elias, it would give me the greatest of pleasure if you would. It might need tuning, of course . . .”’

  ‘Did it?’ I asked. He fascinated me, not simply because of the glamorous strangeness of the space he inhabited but also because of his magical ability to conjure up someone outside himself.

  ‘A little. I did it myself. It took me a long time, but luckily I have perfect pitch, I learned about tuning because back home in Germany, no one would come to the house to tune a piano, so my mother and I had to teach ourselves.’

  I frowned. ‘Why wouldn’t anyone come to your house?’

  ‘They were too afraid of being tainted. Or accused of collaboration.’

  ‘Tainted?’ I stared at him in surprise. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because we were Jews,’ he said.

  It was not the first time I had heard that richly sinful, shameful word, though it was never used in my own household.
Jew . . . Although I wasn’t sure exactly of the resonances the word encompassed, I was embarrassed and ashamed, both on his behalf and on mine.

  ‘You won’t find anything like that here,’ I said in the same brisk tones that Fiona might have used, though as yet I knew nothing about anti-Semitism. ‘I hope you’ve found us very welcoming.’

  ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Before I came here, I heard very often about the snobbish English, and the way they can smell an alien or an inferior through a wall, but I have never since I got here experienced anything but kindness.’

  ‘Good. That’s good.’

  ‘I admire so much these faded, war-weary women here in this little town,’ he said. ‘So brave, so indomitable, hanging on, keeping their homes going, their children fed and educated and clothed. Just like mothers in Germany, I hope.’

  ‘Did . . . do you have a family, Mr Elias?’ I asked. Beyond the thick red curtains, I could see the boys on the warm shingle, devising games to pass the time, games I’d joined in dozens of times, over many summers, which belonged to a much simpler world than the one I was hearing about now.

  ‘Pappi, my father, was a surgeon, my mother – Mutti – a Professor at the Conservatoire. She was from Russia, her people were high-class landowners but they had to flee from the Bolsheviks.’

  I was storing these words up to ask about when I got home. Jew. Bolshevik. Conservatoire.

  ‘Also,’ he went on. ‘I had two little sisters, Anna and Magdalena.’

  That past tense burned in my chest. Had. Beside his mouth, a tiny muscle jumped. I knew that if I reached out and pressed my finger to the flinching skin, I could stop it. I wanted to. I knew how his skin would feel under my touch. Beneath my Aertex shirt, my nipples softly ached.

  I watched his face shut down and though I longed to know more about Mutti and Pappi and the two sisters, I kept quiet, sensing something heart-deep and wrenching in him, a loneliness, an unfulfillable yearning to belong.