The German Boy

by Tricia Wastvedt

  It would be a blessing if this school which cost the earth in uniform and books would see Rachel settled with a doctor or a businessman in a nice new villa in Dulwich or Blackheath. Rachel was sensible – for a girl who’d been indulged – and had a loving generosity of heart. She made people laugh and she lightened things despite her snappish moods.

  Michael was a different fish. He didn’t have his sister’s cheerfulness or her talent for looking like an angel while doing as she pleased. Rachel would meet trouble head on, whereas Michael had a tendency to turn away. He had his grandfather’s looks, the same thick dark hair, wild if it wasn’t oiled down, and those eyes that drowned you. Lydia saw her beloved husband Lemuel in their grandson’s face.

  Unluckily – was it disloyal to think this way? – Lemuel’s need to have an artist’s paintbrush in his hand, which skipped a generation in Albert, had turned up again to trouble Michael. He had the face and soul of Lemuel, but Lydia could see it: Michael had been wounded by the war no less than Albert.

  On that day ten years ago when Lydia took little Michael’s hand, he didn’t flinch or cry out when he saw his father, but something in him changed. He stepped back from life and this caught Vera on the raw. She made him pay for it, not bullying exactly but hinting and suggesting in a hundred picky ways that he could make things right if only he were willing, as he ought to be, to take over from his dad.

  Lydia did not interfere. She understood that Michael couldn’t win. It would make Vera happy if he were more like Albert and filled his shoes, and it would also make her happy if Michael were less like Albert and did not remind her of what she’d lost.

  But this was Vera’s house. It was not Lydia’s place to criticize or judge; that was the way to divide a family. It would be foolish to risk more harm to what was already in pieces.

  Lydia contemplated her battered family. Their trouble had not brought them closer or made them stronger; they pretended like other families did. The war had wounded people’s hearts, shrivelled them, and brought a weariness so deep the soul just longed to float away, to be free of everything, even love.

  Lydia snipped a thread from Rachel’s dress. There was no sense in brooding.

  By lunchtime the light had gone so dim she could barely see. The rain hung in sooty veils and the stone steps outside the kitchen window were glistening. She warmed some mutton soup, put ice in a cloth and took them on a tray upstairs to Albert. He would probably not touch the soup, but he liked to melt the ice on his skin.

  • • •

  ‘Michael, thank the Lord you’re here.’ Francesca darted from behind the maid and tugged at his sleeve. ‘Quick,’ she said. ‘My house is full of people who hate each other. There’ll be murder. We must hide.’

  The maid, Edith, moved aside, lips pursed. She could not abide racing madam to the front door when the bell sounded. Americans had no notion of position: the employee opened and the employer sat tight and waited to be told. It must be so, and Edith would not be thwarted. ‘Who should I say is here, sir?’ she insisted.

  ‘Hello, Edith,’ said Michael. ‘It’s me.’ He had been here a dozen times before.

  ‘You’re wet through, you poor darling boy,’ Francesca said. ‘You’re dripping on me.’ She took off his hat and kissed him on the cheek. The tip of her tongue licked a drop of rain. ‘Come upstairs and I’ll find you a shirt.’

  ‘May I take your hat, sir?’ Edith tugged the hat from Francesca’s hand. ‘Mrs Brion will see you now.’

  ‘Yes, I will,’ said Frankie. ‘I’ll see him out of those wet clothes.’

  A sour smell rose from the saturated wool of the old greatcoat Michael had borrowed from his father, and he was ashamed to let Edith take it. ‘It’s all right, Edith, I’ll see to it.’ He put down the parcel he was carrying.

  Frankie said, ‘Oh, good. The paintings for the Fairhaven. Edith, would you mind taking them to the dining room? Michael, that coat smells like a skunk.’ She helped him out of the greatcoat and dropped it on the floor. ‘I’ve been pacifying Cara for hours. I said you’d be here at seven. Where were you? Oh, Michael, you walked! I told you I’d send a car. It’s too far in this damned and dratted English rain.’

  Edith picked up the coat and stalked off downstairs.

  Francesca took Michael’s hand. ‘They’re in the drawing room. Run! Don’t let them see us.’ There was the sound of people talking and a piano being played badly. The voices were argumentative and a child was wailing.

  Upstairs in Frankie’s sitting room the lamps were lit and there was a fire burning. The curtains were open and the London rain pattered on the glass. ‘I know, I know, the neighbours,’ said Frankie. ‘I’ll close the drapes. I wish they knew the Yankee widow and her rabble of Bohemians had Lady Fairhaven on the premises. They respect a title, even if they don’t think much of art.’

  She went into her bedroom and Michael could see someone sleeping in her bed. ‘It’s Toby,’ said Frankie smiling. ‘Ingrid’s youngest.’ She came back with a shirt and a pair of trousers. ‘They’re Mac’s. They’ll be too small, but never mind.’

  The shirt and trousers were soft expensive cloth, expertly tailored. Frankie’s dead English husband had money of his own but his marriage to Francesca made him rich. ‘I was too late to be a dollar princess,’ Frankie had once said. ‘American heiresses were out of fashion by the time I got to England. McCarthy didn’t care, he married me for love. That was out of fashion too.’

  She sat down on the hearthrug. ‘Oh, Michael, why do my guests behave so badly? Ingrid came for lunch and has forgotten to go home, and Ollie is in her suit, provoking everyone. Douglas has brought a delicious young man – Venetia loves him too. He’s a porter and Douglas found him on a train. Isn’t that romantic? Poor Douglas will want to paint him nude. Venetia will see to it he doesn’t.’

  Frankie put a cigarette into a holder. In the firelight she could have been much younger with her short hair and clear white skin. She hugged her knees. Her stockings were green and she was wearing an outfit she might have made herself from costumes she’d found abroad. The dress was Chinese printed silk and as short as a chemise. She wore a silver belt low on her hips and a loose jacket of homespun wool with coral buttons. Ropes of turquoise and amber beads as big as pebbles looped around her neck.

  There was incense burning, and a pitcher of lilies on the cabinet were dropping petals on the floor. The lilies gave off their honeysuckle sweetness and little wreaths of sandalwood smoke perfumed the air.

  ‘I’ve found some new people for you to talk to – that’s if we can stop everyone from arguing.’ Her frown showed a crease between her eyes. ‘One of them is a painter and shakes like a blancmange and the other two are nice young men who live together in a cottage – one has a wife, I think – and they do all sorts of things, designing books and carving and making prints. They knit and do needlepoint. Isn’t that just so enticing? Imagine great beefy hands holding an itsy little needle.’

  Frankie looked tired and her eyelids had a shadow of blue. Michael wished she could be at ease with him – then perhaps she wouldn’t mind a silence sometimes.

  He stood in his breeches, drying off the damp with her linen towel. The rain had gone through his shirt and it felt good standing barefoot in the warm of this peaceful room.

  The voices downstairs rose and fell, muffled by the Aubusson rugs and Apache beadwork hangings, the New York Dada abstracts and the French toile curtains. The bright chaos of America and the solidity of Europe were joined by Frankie’s New World dollars and her disregard for anything that England might expect of her.

  So many things in Frankie’s house belonged somewhere else, including him. The discordance was like an orchestra tuning up: it was unsettling and rubbed the senses raw, but made the heart fly up with hope.

  This house was not soured by pain and bleached out with grief like Neate Street, where his mother simmered bitterly, Nanna Lydia had surrendered and Rachel had built a barricade of selfishness around herself.
At home he was pressed back into a corner of himself and besieged by all three of them.

  He finished dressing and put on the soaking boots again. They had belonged to his father. Frankie had given him a pair of her husband’s hand-stitched shoes but they were too small.

  ‘You’re ready.’ Frankie stubbed out her cigarette. ‘Good. I’m going to get Fairhaven to open her dusty old wallet if it’s the last thing I do. Her daughter is here too, so we must butter them up and get you a couple of commissions. I know you hate portraits, but this is business.’ She jumped up.

  ‘Am I respectable?’ he asked.

  ‘No, I’m glad to say,’ said Frankie. ‘Kiss me and let’s pretend I’m young enough to be your lover.’

  The drawing room was full of people. Michael glimpsed the faces as Francesca led him to Lady Fairhaven who sat sweating by the fire in raspberry crêpe de Chine. She was in conversation with a man whose feet fidgeted on the carpet and whose shoulders convulsed from time to time as if he was shaking off a spider.

  ‘My daddy was in oil,’ Lady Fairhaven was saying. The Deep South reverberated in her monumental bosom and her pearls trembled slightly. ‘And my husband, dear Urban, worked tirelessly on diplomatic aspects of the friendship between our two great nations. My sons’ – she patted her chest and coughed into her handkerchief – ‘my sons, Huttleston and Henry, were both in military service in Jaipur. So you see, my dear Mr Maier, I am closely acquainted with the world of men, and as a woman I suffer sympathetic agonies equal to the hardships you poor soldiers endured.’

  ‘Sympathy was just what we needed in the trenches,’ the man said. His face had flushed a savage pink.

  Cara Fairhaven patted his arm. ‘Surely, surely. I am comforted by your gratitude.’

  ‘May I interrupt, Cara dear?’ Frankie manoeuvred Michael to face Lady Fairhaven. ‘This is Michael Ross. People are just scrambling for his work.’ Frankie waved her arm, ‘He shows … all over the place.’

  ‘I’m sure he does.’ Lady Fairhaven lifted her hand which was as powerful as a blacksmith’s. The milky fingers twinkled with gems. She waved Michael aside, grasped the arms of the Dorset chair and rose to her feet. Beneath the upsurge of crêpe de Chine there was a wheeze of silk and the creak of stays. ‘I am troubled with a lung,’ she said, ‘I do not need to talk to him, Francesca, pleasing as he is, I only need to see what he can do.’

  ‘Come through to the dining room, Cara,’ said Frankie, standing clear as Lady Fairhaven organized her chiffon wrap. ‘I’ve set up a little gallery and some other painters have brought work this evening too.’

  Michael watched Lady Fairhaven tacking through the crowd, moving swiftly for someone so large. ‘Wherever did you find him, Francesca?’ he heard her say.

  ‘Oh, I stumbled over him in Richmond Park, making exquisite watercolours of the shrubs,’ Frankie answered, following behind. The drawing room was stilled as they passed, followed by a flurry like leaves stirred up by a train. A cloud of jasmine scent hung around the Dorset chair.

  The twitching man muttered, ‘So help me, I could’ve punched her.’ He looked up at Michael. ‘It would’ve scuppered your chances of a portrait if I’d blacked her eye. You make me sick, you call yourself an artist. I know what you are.’ He glared and fumbled for a cigarette. ‘Mrs Brion’s not bothered if you can paint – anyone can see what her interest is.’

  ‘Let’s keep it civil, sir. The gentleman’s done no harm to you.’ A big heavy-set man with wiry hair was standing with his back against the mantelpiece.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Michael said. He didn’t want an argument. He had seen this so many times in men who’d broken down; they stoked fury inside themselves to keep away the fear.

  ‘Here you are!’ A woman in a pin-striped suit kissed Michael on the cheek and put her arm through his. ‘Frankie’s darling Hebrew. I thought she’d hidden you.’

  ‘Hello, Olivia,’ said Michael.

  ‘And you’ve met Douglas and Venetia’s porter?’

  ‘Eddie Saunders, pleased to meet you,’ said the big man by the mantelpiece. His fraying collar was tight enough to choke him. In his straining clothes he looked hot and bulky, but his large face was good-tempered. ‘I’m at Charing Cross, the Ashford–Dover line.’

  ‘Charing Cross? How thrilling,’ said Olivia, as if any other terminus would have been a disappointment. ‘Francesca is just hopeless when it comes to introductions, so I suppose it falls to me.’ She waved her cigarette at the glaring man on the sofa. ‘This is Laurie Maier. He’s been in Cornwall, Michael. He does navy skies and scarlet trees and suchlike. His pictures are a little more conventional than yours.’

  ‘A modern are you – all ugliness and puffed-up theories,’ said Laurie Maier to Michael. ‘On second thoughts, I’d like to see old mother Fairhaven as a pile of cubes – or best of all inside one of Mr Jeanneret’s concrete coffins.’

  ‘But Mr Jeanneret is a visionary, is he not?’ Olivia said. ‘I understand he advocates large windows and a minimum of plasterwork. And underfloor heating. I’m not sure I’d want all and sundry peering in, but I’d adore a life without people clanging about with scuttles of coal and tongs.’

  ‘Le Corbusier, he calls himself.’ Maier’s nerves had set him shivering again. ‘What kind of idiocy is that? Le Corbusier. Ha! He advocates ugliness, Olivia. Ugliness, and people living like chickens packed together in a coop – not the rich, of course, oh no, just the common man who’s risked his life for values Mr Jeanneret wouldn’t understand. He’d have us tearing down the beauty of Wren and Nash, and Mr Pugin. Even Mr Paxton constructs iron and glass with sensitivity. Jeanneret would brutalize us all.’

  ‘Heavens! I’d no idea a builder could be so dangerous,’ Olivia said. She turned her back on Maier. ‘You’ve brought some paintings for us, Michael?’

  But Maier’s anger was rising. ‘A painter! He licks the arses of the French; he thinks they’re intellectuals. Hah! They’re lunatics. Braque’s spectacles must be cracked as well as his mind.’ Maier slapped his thigh at his own wit. ‘Picasso and his one-eyed tarts, it’s a bloody insult. England, the land – that’s the only thing worth painting.’

  ‘My goodness, let’s not squabble,’ said Olivia. ‘And isn’t Mr Picasso a Spaniard? He paints bullocks and mandolins. I’m sure that isn’t French.’

  ‘I think Mr Maier’s right: the land’s what counts,’ said Eddie Saunders peaceably. ‘It’s what we fought for. There’s farmland lying neglected all over the country and going for a song. I’ve been keeping an eye out down Folkestone way and I’ve a mind to buy a field and a cottage for myself when I’ve saved some cash. I’m no artist, so working the land will have to do for me.’

  ‘What fun,’ Olivia said. ‘You must talk to André and Charles – they’re over there, with the plain girl in mauve. She’s Charles’s wife, or is it André’s? They have a cottage somewhere and they find the bleakness and the hardship terribly inspiring. Well, I must leave you.’ She blew a kiss in their direction. ‘We’re simply swamped with men this evening, all needing attention. You are so few these days, but with astonishing good fortune a little herd has gathered here. I should have worn a frock.’

  Olivia moved away and Maier got up. He nodded to Michael and to Eddie Saunders. ‘I meant no offence.’ Head down, he shouldered his way towards a maid who held a tray of glasses.

  ‘I had it easy compared to him,’ said Eddie Saunders when Maier had gone. ‘I was in France in ’18 at the end and all I fought was mud. I did six months digging pits for what we couldn’t identify as man or beast. The stench of it and what I saw coming home in boxes … I can smell it sometimes now.’

  Michael felt Eddie Saunders’s affable, unassuming look, waiting for him to tell his story in exchange. This was what men did for each other these days. No detail – hardly anything at all but just enough to acknowledge what was shared and could not be borne alone. Michael had nothing to say. His age was a lame excuse for standing here with no scars on his body or mem
ories to torment him. Talk of the war always brought with it the feeling of the house on Neate Street, and something in him vanished like a wisp of smoke. So this could happen even in Frankie’s house: he had disappeared and nothing was left but the clothes of a good man who was dead and the boots of one who should be.

  Eddie Saunders wiped the sweat off his face and lit a cigarette. He said, ‘No sense in stirring up all that.’

  ‘I didn’t fight,’ said Michael. ‘I was eleven when it ended.’

  ‘Is that so? I took you for a gentleman a little older.’ He put a hand on Michael’s shoulder and the huge heavy palm radiated heat like a warming pan. ‘My apologies. It’s long past and done with and lads like you shouldn’t have to hear it. So, here we are, the two of us, as sane and whole as we’ve ever been.’ He lowered his voice: ‘Not like poor Mr Maier.’ He tapped his glass against Michael’s. ‘We should drink to our good luck, the luck of being fit and free to get on each other’s nerves in whatever way we like. Here’s to the future.’ He took a swig. ‘I don’t suppose the likes of me will come to ownership of land, but I’ve a right to try the same as anyone, after what I’ve lost.’

  A brother? A father? Michael didn’t ask. So this was how it was: dreams could be earned with grief, and perhaps his own liberty would be earned with Albert’s death. His mind always swerved away from admitting he was impatient for what would also break his heart, but this squeamishness was cowardly; it was a delusion to think that staying to witness his father’s dying would absolve him of the sin of wishing for it. He felt sick with restlessness. He should leave now, get his coat and walk right out of London. ‘I must get away,’ he said.

  ‘Well, it’s been a pleasure,’ Eddie Saunders said. ‘Perhaps we’ll meet again.’

  ‘No. I mean London. I’ve got to leave and I don’t know why I don’t.’