The German Boy

by Tricia Wastvedt

‘You should. A man is free until he marries,’ said Eddie. ‘And if there’s love it’s freedom just to be with her.’

  ‘You have a wife?’ Michael asked.

  ‘No,’ said Eddie, and fell silent.

  The fire had almost died away but the air was stifling. Frankie’s house had no oxygen tonight. A child bounced on a sofa with her long hair flying and her dress ballooning out above her skinny legs. Her shrieks sliced through the clatter of conversation as two older children, a boy and girl, perched on the sofa arms regarding her, bored as cats. He had often seen these children at Frankie’s evenings; sometimes they were up until gone midnight. Their mother, Frankie’s sister, Ingrid, must be somewhere.

  Some people beckoned Eddie Saunders to join them. Michael knew he couldn’t put it off any longer and he should find Frankie and Lady Fairhaven.

  In the dining room the cherrywood table was covered with a cotton dust sheet on which stood the eighteen dining chairs. On each one was propped a canvas and people moved around the table to view them.

  ‘Your work is a little slapdash for my taste, Mr Ross.’ The conversations in the room were quelled by Lady Cara Fairhaven’s fortissimo. She was standing at the far end of the table. ‘I confess I’m rather old school in my fondness for accuracy and detail, but I much admire your portrait of the girl. You must have flattered her. It could be a whimsical notion of Salome. Who is she?’

  ‘My sister,’ Michael said. He had not flattered Rachel: she was more beautiful than he could ever paint her.

  ‘Well, I shall sit for you, and my daughter also. Pixie’s complexion is distinctive, and she is extremely good at sitting motionless. You will find her an obliging subject. Myself less so but then age has different qualities. I have discussed your fee and the appointments with Francesca.’

  Frankie said, ‘I’ve promised to let Cara know when you’ve finished your current work, Michael.’ She rushed on, ‘He’s hopeless with arrangements, Cara. Thank goodness he leaves everything to me.’

  ‘And I have purchased your charming watercolour sketch of two washerwomen in a cobbled yard hanging out a sheet,’ Lady Fairhaven continued. ‘It is wrapped and I shall take it now. It has an echo of the Fauves I fancy, so you see I’m not averse to modern styles. The strident colours and the coarseness of the figures are touchingly in keeping with the rustic subject.’ It was a picture of his mother and Nanna Lydia. ‘Well, I must say goodnight, Francesca. Urban will be fretting.’

  Cara Fairhaven exited the dining room followed by a young woman with sloping shoulders and sandy hair. Pixie, Michael guessed. She turned and smiled at him, showing large teeth in a narrow hot pink face.

  He looked at the other painters’ work for a while, then sat with Edith downstairs in the kitchen where she made him a sandwich and a cup of tea. It was almost two o’clock. ‘Mrs Brion tells me to go to bed when I like, but what’s the point? How can I sleep with all that racket going on?’

  He went up to Frankie’s room to change back into his own shirt and trousers. The little boy was still asleep in Frankie’s bed, and Michael wondered if he’d been forgotten; the other children had gone some time ago.

  From the hallway he caught sight of Frankie in the drawing room. He should feel grateful to her for the money she had brought his way, but his gratitude was tempered by the prospect of the days of tedium he would endure while earning it. He did not mind so much painting the cheerful red-faced Pixie, but standing for hours studying Cara Fairhaven’s flawless pearls and lantern jaw was too dreary to contemplate.

  He could hear a heated argument in full swing around the canvases in the dining room. The porter, Eddie Saunders, had disappeared and so had Louis Maier. Michael tried to catch Frankie’s eye to say goodnight, but couldn’t.

  When he closed the front door, the heat and voices were cut off. It was still raining and the pavement glittered beneath the street lamps. A sallow fog smelled of mildewed stone and soot. He thought of the soft black sky and silent fields waiting for Eddie Saunders down in Kent.

  5

  A summer morning, 1881, a silky breeze and ordinary sunshine. There was nothing to warn Lydia that by ten o’clock her life would be decided. She was seventeen.

  She had been sent to collect her father’s altered suit, the shop bell jingled over the door, in she went and there was young Lemuel Jacob Roth with his tailor’s tape around his neck and his melted cocoa eyes. He didn’t smile and he looked as flummoxed by the sight of her as she was by him. It wasn’t love at first, but recognition. Her body seemed to jolt, like a dream of tripping up a kerb, her heart faltered then beat forever afterwards in time with his.

  The fact that he was a Jew and she was Church was nothing to them, even when his family turned their backs and said he couldn’t keep their god or their name if he went through with it. Her mother told her she was a fool if she thought two faiths and races could make a happy union and normal offspring any more than sheep could marry hens.

  If the weather was fine on Sundays, Lydia and Lemuel would picnic in the park at Greenwich or at Richmond, or on Hampstead Heath. It was good to get away from Peckham for the day – they had no god to worship – and be like any other heathen family together. They gave their baby boy a solid English name, Albert, in the hope of diverting the gossip and the nastiness that came from both sides of the neighbourhood, Synagogue and Church.

  Young Albert was a little Anglo-Saxon, pale and freckled. He took after Lydia in looks, and although she grieved that he had not inherited Lemy’s handsomeness, a bigger part of her was glad. His path would be smoother with his Jewish blood invisible.

  So the shock was all the more when at twenty-two years old, Albert announced he would not skulk as if he was a criminal, nor would he pander to other people’s ignorance. He and his young wife, Vera May, would give their baby son a Jewish name: Michael Jacob.

  Lemuel explained that Jewishness did not work that way. It was the mother’s line that counted. If Lydia had been, then Albert would be too, but, as things were, he wasn’t Jewish in the proper sense and neither was Michael.

  ‘That’s as may be,’ Albert said. ‘I don’t know all the ins and outs, but I know the birds and bees. I’m half of you and my son’s half of me. Michael’s got a right to own both sides of his family.’

  Then four years later came little Rachel Hannah. And the second shock was that these grandchildren were the son and daughter Lemuel should have had: dark-eyed and beautiful, with the sun of Palestine in their skin.

  By the time the new king was on the throne, there were six of them for picnics. On Sundays that were wet or cold they visited the Crystal Palace or the hothouses at Kew, or Lemuel would take his little grandson Michael to look at paintings. Lydia and Vera May went off together on the tram with baby Rachel to window-shop somewhere fashionable and way beyond their purse like the Burlington Arcade.

  When the orchards were in bloom, Lemuel bought tickets for the train and they’d picnic all together in real countryside in Kent.

  That was another England.

  In the second August of the war, the postman brought a letter from the king. Lydia did not faint or weep as some wives did. Her heart already knew. She put Lemuel’s scroll and plaque amongst her stockings and her petticoats. She burned the letter. He had not fought for the king, or for any god, but for England and his fellow man.

  Then came news of Albert. Her son was wounded but alive.

  Since Albert had come back from France in ’17, Vera refused to take Sunday trips without him. She insisted that when he was strong enough to stand and they could get him and his chair on and off the tram, the outings would resume.

  Lydia knew Albert should not be seen outside when there were children to consider. Did Vera not remember the effect on little Michael all those years ago? And getting Albert down the stairs, let alone on a tram, would never be, but saying so would only anger Vera. Even Rachel’s wheedling did not move her.

  Then out of the blue, one Friday in early May when the weather
had been warm and sweet for days, Vera said to Rachel, ‘You see to it you get your homework done, my girl, we’re going out on Sunday.’

  Lydia and Michael looked up from their plates of herring pie. This was unexpected. Lydia said, ‘I’ll be here to see to Albert, and Michael will help me out, won’t you, ducks? Where are you and Rachel off to, Vera?’

  ‘Sevenoaks. You’re coming too – and Michael if he likes. All of us,’ said Vera. ‘Ada Hobbs from Number 12 has offered to sit with Albert, so we needn’t get back till tea.’

  ‘I’ll bring a friend from school,’ said Rachel.

  ‘You can take your paints, Michael. There’s some nice views out at Sevenoaks,’ said Lydia.

  ‘I’ll stay here, Nanna. I’ll stay with Dad,’ Michael said.

  ‘I told you, Michael,’ said Vera irritably, ‘Ada Hobbs is coming in. What could you do for him, for goodness sake?’

  On Sunday morning Lydia and Vera made the picnic and packed it in the cardboard suitcase they always used for outings. Vera had fetched it down from the attic and wiped off the dust. When they last set eyes on it, it was in a different life.

  Rachel was meeting her friend off the bus at half past nine. There was a sound of giggling and voices, and then shoes clattering down the area steps to the kitchen.

  ‘We’re here,’ said Rachel. ‘This is Elisabeth.’

  The girl was as tall as Rachel but did not look her sixteen years. It wasn’t that she was younger in the face, thought Lydia, but she seemed to come from a time when children didn’t grow up so fast, another age before the war when girls wore white embroidered organdie on Sundays and ribbons in their hair. The girl had such a look of sweetness that it made you worry straight away she hadn’t got the hang of modern life, the way a young girl should in 1927.

  She wasn’t built how they liked to be these days – she was too curvy in the figure and had freckles on her nose. Like as not Elisabeth would be the ugly duckling of the class. Girls that age never know what proper beauty is; they all wanted to be like boys and have no bosom or waist to speak of, and hair chopped short as if they’d been in gaol. Beautiful carroty hair like Elisabeth’s, long with natural waves, was never in the fashion pictures any more. It was worth all the worry and the scrimping to see Rachel with such a lovely friend.

  And then a minute later another girl arrived, clacking down the steps outside the kitchen window and coming in without so much as a tap on the kitchen door to introduce herself. She was blonde and skinny as a spider and wore a cherry-red crêpe dress the ugly modern shape that Rachel liked but Vera wouldn’t let her wear: a tube with no bodice darts or shirring, as if it was designed to fit a sausage, and a kick of cloth around the knees that called itself a skirt. This girl could have stepped out of the window of a shop in Piccadilly. She was pretty in exactly the modish way that Elisabeth would never be.

  ‘This is Karen,’ said Rachel. She gave no explanation to her mother as to why she’d invited two friends when she’d asked for only one.

  As usual, Vera didn’t correct Rachel for presuming but Lydia said pointedly, ‘Perhaps you’d be kind enough to make an extra round of sandwiches, Rachel, and wrap up another plate for your guest.’

  ‘I’ll do it,’ said Elisabeth.

  The two girls were sisters who lived in Catford and were in Rachel’s class at school (‘Well, I couldn’t just ask one of them, could I, Nanna?’). Karen was two years older than Elisabeth and Rachel but had suffered the rheumatic fever so was in a class behind her age.

  Rachel propped herself against the dresser while Karen chattered and told stories about the mistresses at school. She did a little show of mimicking the Mademoiselle – Oo la laa. Eet iz so ot een eere – and flapped her skirt, showing a pair of slender stockinged knees and a glimpse of garter. Rachel screeched and pointed in a way that wasn’t ladylike and for the first time in years Vera laughed as if she meant it.

  It was plain to see that this blonde friend of Rachel was always at the hub of things but Lydia did not warm to her. Karen stirred up the air like the beginnings of a storm and made people skittery and bold. Lydia had seen her kind before.

  They were almost ready to leave. Ada Hobbs arrived, the girls fussed with their hair, and Vera was rinsing off the cutlery at the sink. Then it happened.

  Michael came into the kitchen and Elisabeth looked up from wrapping the extra sandwich in a paper bag. He stopped dead as if he’d hit a wall halfway between the dresser and the cellar door. It is not a myth, the arrow through the heart that stops it beating for a second.

  There was a sliver of quiet so fine it slipped past unnoticed by Rachel and Vera, and by Ada Hobbs taking off her coat, but Lydia saw Karen look across, sensing what had passed between Michael and Elisabeth.

  ‘The artist!’ Karen said, raising her voice. She smiled, perhaps lifting her chin, perhaps arranging her long limbs more gracefully. ‘Are you coming on our picnic, Michael?’

  ‘No, I’m afraid I’m not.’

  ‘Oh, how unkind of you! Our little sisters will be haring about and playing games. If you were there, I should sit quietly and you would paint me.’

  Any other girl would have sounded cheap saying such a thing, but there was a touching courage in Karen. Girls who blaze so bright take too much upon themselves, Lydia thought. They overestimate what life will give them and are often hurt and disappointed.

  Rachel asked, ‘Elisabeth? Are you ready?’

  Elisabeth had a little colour in her face – perhaps on her own account, or perhaps because of the brazenness of her sister.

  Michael nodded politely to each of them and raised his hand towards Elisabeth, a strange little gesture that seemed to be his wanting to touch her, although he couldn’t. ‘Yes,’ he said softly, as if he was speaking to himself. Then he turned and left them.

  • • •

  Elisabeth and Karen came to Neate Street every Sunday and the three of them spent hours in Rachel’s room twittering together and preening. This was normal nowadays, but what Lydia found annoying and rather silly for girls their age was the bickering and the vying for Elisabeth, as if Karen and Rachel both wanted ownership, as if they were tussling over having her like one of them the best.

  ‘A friendship doesn’t come by fighting for it, poppet,’ Lydia said gently to Rachel.

  ‘I’m not fighting, Nanna. Who said I was? I’m stopping Karen from taking over. She thinks she knows what’s best for Elisabeth and she doesn’t. Elisabeth would go along with anything Karen said if someone didn’t stop her.’

  ‘You girls,’ Lydia said. ‘I shouldn’t say it but mind you’re careful and don’t end up the loser. They’re sisters and you can’t compete with that.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Nanna darling.’

  So the two of them went on scrapping like a pair of hounds over a hare.

  Michael was at home less and less. He was earning money somehow, which he put in the tin on the scullery shelf. ‘Portraits, Nanna,’ he told Lydia when she asked. ‘People pay money for them.’ She could hear the bitterness but did not know its cause. He seldom talked to her these days. She could accept the rightness of a young man growing apart from his grandmother, but not the unhappiness she saw in him.

  It puzzled her that Michael wasn’t often in the house on Sundays when Elisabeth was there, and she began to wonder if she’d been mistaken. Perhaps he had someone – why would he not, when there were single women in their hundreds and him looking as he did?

  She did not consider herself to be a sentimental woman given to imaginings or silly fancies – the weight of these last years had buried all that along with Lemuel – but what had passed between her fine young grandson and the quiet lovely girl was like a window opening and letting in a fresh new day.

  It was true the world did not work the way it used to, and she wondered if she had deceived herself with wanting; she’d run ahead with dreams of love between Michael and Elisabeth when the evidence was no more than a look between them. Lydia had hoped the suffe
ring they’d all endured had earned the family something good, but she knew she should let go of childish notions that life was fair. Reward came in subtle unexpected ways and one must have the patience and the wisdom not to question life’s complexity. This was the only way to a peaceful heart.

  Elisabeth might still be something to Michael, but it was not for Lydia to know what or when.

  Whatever the future might be, the girls’ visits made the house a more cheerful place and life seemed to begin again. There were outings and shopping trips, and Vera stopped making plans for the time when Albert’s health improved.

  Albert never spoke these days, and Lydia knew it was through choice and not because he couldn’t. She liked to think he’d found a way to leave the ruin of his body, shut up shop and take excursions to visit Lemuel, or to watch the cricket with the lads who’d gone ahead of him. Sometimes he was out for hours.

  On other days he couldn’t seem to find the way and the shadow of his agony fell on every stick of furniture and every plate of food, and on every moment she breathed freely and could do nothing to share her breath with him.

  6

  In the Tottenham Court Road, omnibuses rattled up and down. The pavements were crowded with shoppers walking slowly in the heat and stopping to consider a dress or hat, or blooms in buckets, or a marble slab arranged with chops and liver. Office workers rushed between the dawdling shoppers like water around rocks, to a pub for a lunchtime drink or to a quiet square to eat their sandwiches.

  Fumes of motorcars snagged the breath and horses coughed; blowing nags with loaded carts, cobs with hackney carriages, jingling the complications of their harness. The heavy oiled hoofs cupped on the cobbles and thudded on the piles of dung. Shoals of delivery boys on bicycles slipped between the motorcars and dripping flanks, pedalling hard against the thick air.

  Turn down Percy Street and suddenly there was cool and quiet, not much traffic in the narrow thoroughfare and few pedestrians. The shops were the kind that people didn’t wander past but went to with a purpose: picture framers, artists’ colour suppliers, lithographers, with cheap rooms in the basements or painters’ studios above. There were delicatessens, and foreign restaurants where the food and drink were cheap and the proprietors had no objection to their customers sitting smoking, reading, arguing about art and politics long after their plates were empty.