The German Boy

by Tricia Wastvedt

  Frankie had booked for lunch but there was no need – the Eiffel Tower was almost empty and the only other diners were her friends. She said hello but didn’t sit with them. Douglas and Venetia were deep in conversation, and Frankie wondered about the porter, Eddie Saunders, they had brought to her house six months ago. She had seen it all: Douglas smitten, Venetia patient and untroubled by another of his infatuations, and poor Saunders smitten with Venetia. It would run its course.

  Frankie sat at a table by the window looking out to the street. She lit a cigarette. A waiter brought vodka and she sipped it, sucking the ice into her mouth. The day was sweltering for September. There was the murmur of conversation at her back and the hiss of frying in the kitchen. The smell of melted butter, garlic and tomatoes made her stomach growl with hunger.

  Then Michael was coming along the street carrying a bundle of canvases in brown paper with his paint-spattered bag slung over his shoulder, and colours flared – the red-checked cloth, the jar of daisies on the table, the blue of Michael’s shirt. The silky condensation on the vodka glass froze her fingers and Frankie’s heart jumped in a way she thought it never would again. When he leaned across to kiss her, the heat of him smelled of linseed and turpentine.

  She said, ‘Hello, Hebrew.’ He sat down opposite her, leaning his arms on the table. The sun had made them brown. ‘They’re still cooking. I don’t know what we’re having today.’

  ‘When did you get back? You look tired, Frankie. You should have let me come to the house. Edith’s lunches aren’t so bad.’

  ‘This morning. The train got in at five.’

  ‘And how is Italy?’

  ‘Good. Beautiful. I wish you’d been there. As you see, I’m as pale as ever. It’s hotter here than it was in Naples.’

  Their food arrived and Frankie ordered him a beer.

  ‘No. Thank you.’ He reached across and squeezed her hand. It was fondness, nothing more.

  She said quickly, ‘I have a surprise for you.’

  ‘And I have Cara Fairhaven’s pictures. We could look at them here and I’ll leave them at the framer’s.’

  ‘She’s pleased?’

  ‘Yes, she’s given me more work. And you have a surprise for me?’ he said cautiously, as if she’d offered him another beer he didn’t want.

  ‘You’ll have to wait.’

  They ate and Frankie talked about Italy. She could see that he was troubled but she didn’t ask. He had been painting Cara and Pixie Fairhaven at their house in Bloomsbury, that was all she knew. It was a house with neighbours who would like her more than they liked Cara, and Frankie had thought of suggesting they exchange. Regent’s Park would be glad to see the last of her and have Lord and Lady Fairhaven instead, but in England one didn’t do such things as swapping property.

  ‘Now,’ said Frankie, pushing back her chair when Michael put down his knife and fork. ‘We don’t want coffee. You can show me the paintings where we’re going; it’s not far.’

  They crossed Goodge Street and then turned into Charlotte Street towards Fitzroy Square. The heat was heavy and the hubbub not far away was muffled as if a blanket had been thrown over the Tottenham Court Road.

  In Fitzroy Street, Frankie stopped at a plain archway between two houses in a graceful dilapidated terrace. There was no porch or step, and the flagstones from the pavement continued along a dark passageway, dipping slightly with daylight at the end.

  Frankie shut the door behind them and Michael followed her to an opening in the passage wall, up a wooden staircase and across a dusty windowless landing to another door. Through this was a walkway with an iron floor and a corrugated roof, lit dimly along the sides by panes of frosted glass. It was impossible to tell if they were somewhere inside the house or on a bridge across an overshadowed courtyard.

  ‘You see? A labyrinth and you won’t get out without me,’ said Frankie. Their footsteps thundered on the iron floor. There was barely enough light to see and Frankie fumbled with a key.

  Then suddenly they were blinking in bright white light in a dazzling whitewashed room. It was empty except for a wooden chair. The windows reached to the corniced ceiling and were pinned across with muslin so there was no view outside, only whiteness. Above a marble fireplace higher than Frankie’s head was a vast misted mirror and there were others on the walls. The reflections curved away, green-tinged as if there were glass rooms filled with water on every side. They might not be inside a house in Fitzroy Street but in a nowhere place of hundreds of transparent rooms, and in each one a sunburned young man – blue shirt and paint-stained trousers – stood beside a woman in a loose yellow dress with a sunhat in her hand.

  The noise of traffic was very faint, and after the clanging of the iron corridor, the quiet seemed to pulse.

  Frankie held Michael’s hand and dropped the key into it. In the mirrors, ranks of small neat women dropped keys into the palms of ranks of rough-haired young men.

  ‘It’s for you,’ she said. She saw he was confused and she filled the silence, as she always did. ‘There’s a little room through there which used to be a scullery, so you have water, and the way we came in is the only entrance, so no one will bother you.’ She walked to the far end of the room. ‘You’re painting in the street and in parks, Michael, with nowhere to work that’s your own. They almost paid me to take it and it’s yours now – the papers are in your name and it’s settled so I’ve nothing more to do with it. Please don’t say you won’t. All I want is a picture now and then. You’ll have to bring coal up for the fire in winter, that’s the worst of it. The framer is two minutes away and … and you can eat just along the street,’ she finished.

  ‘I have everything I need. Thank you isn’t enough, but thank you, Frankie.’ Michael circled the room looking at the whiteness – there was nothing else to see and she knew he was battling inside himself. Whatever had been on his mind since they’d met an hour ago had not receded but was more pressing now.

  Then he smiled at her. ‘I should show you Cara Fairhaven’s pictures and prove I’m worth your patronage.’ That stung her and she felt her throat contract with tears. ‘Oh yes!’ she said, and busied herself unwrapping the canvases.

  Cara Fairhaven: raspberry crêpe de Chine and pearls, exactly as she was that evening six months ago. ‘You’re clever, Michael. I don’t mean you’ve been dishonest,’ Frankie said. ‘She’ll think her scowl is majestic – damn proof at last of her aristocratic blood even though her folks were dirt poor wiener-eating immigrants like mine. And little Pixie?’

  The portrait of Pixie Fairhaven: pointed chin, sharp nose, the slightly downturned lips she inherited from Mama and the heavy brow of her papa, but somehow – Frankie saw it – this girl was beautiful.

  The girl’s back was turned and she looked over her bare shoulder in rosy light, as if she was sitting by a fire or in candlelight. The blue-black satin of her dress disappeared in shadow, with strokes of cobalt in the folds. It was Pixie’s likeness, but not the Pixie with bony shoulders and ruddy rasping cheeks that Frankie knew. This girl was as smooth as petals with the faintest flush on her skin, as if she had just bathed or had come in from the cold. Her shining copper hair curled down her back and over the midnight satin of her dress. Where was the sandy wiry chignon with a thousand pins of Pixie Fairhaven? This was Pixie but it was not.

  ‘Do you like her?’ said Michael, and Frankie knew. Her heart had been dropping and tumbling all this time since he’d touched her hand kindly and comfortably, as a friend would after two months apart in thanks for a beer offered and not wanted – and although she’d tried to save it and to hold it safely, her heart kept fluttering and struggling. She knew when he said ‘Do you like her?’, not ‘it’, that this was not another dull portrait done on sufferance for money, but a picture of a girl Michael loved.

  ‘She’s beautiful,’ Frankie said. Her heart struck hard like a bird against glass, but there was no sound, only quiet in the room. There was no sensation, nothing: Michael’s lover, who
was eighteen, and Frankie, almost twice as old.

  They stood looking at the painting and Frankie knew that in a while, if she didn’t speak, he would tell her.

  ‘Frankie, while you were away I decided to leave London.’

  ‘Then you must go.’

  ‘That evening before you went to Italy, I realized I can’t stay here any longer. I can’t paint in London.’

  ‘Good,’ said Frankie. ‘You must go.’

  He held out the key.

  ‘No, the studio is yours, Michael. You might want it one day.’ So he can’t tell me, Frankie thought, there isn’t even that much trust between us. ‘I wouldn’t have guessed you’d fall for Pixie,’ Frankie blurted. ‘Is she going away with you?’ There had never been reserve between them, so why now? ‘You can’t hide it. I can see.’ Frankie pointed to the picture. ‘That’s how you see her – lovely, perfect.’ She was thankful to sound easy, light, and no different from the way they always spoke to one another.

  Michael considered the painting for a moment. ‘You’re right. I should have noticed.’

  Hearing him confess made Frankie’s skin go cold. Once, long ago in Texas, she’d shot a cony and had this same shock when her aim was true. Some part of her had trusted she would miss.

  Michael said, ‘There’s a girl who comes to Neate Street. My sister’s friend. I haven’t met her more than three or four times and she’s very young, she’s still at school.’

  Frankie could make no sense of it: a portrait of a girl who wasn’t Pixie or a lover, but who somehow was both – and neither. Then Michael said, ‘I see her in my mind but it doesn’t mean anything, it’s what painters do. It often happens.’

  Suddenly Frankie didn’t want to know more or to understand. ‘Let’s go. I’ve had enough of all this dratted whiteness. I need lots of colours and some cake. Let’s have tea in Regent’s Park and then go dancing at the Palais. Come with me, Michael. It’ll be full of women in suits like Olivia; don’t make me go alone.’

  He put the key in his pocket. ‘I won’t leave London until the New Year comes,’ he said. ‘Frankie, I will come back.’ He touched her cheek.

  The circle was complete; she had died, dust to dust, and now she was alive again.

  • • •

  The thin early morning sunshine was cool. The air would be sweet for a while longer before the stink of drains and horse dung was stirred up by the day. It was eight o’clock and Eddie Saunders had risen late, a free man.

  Yesterday he’d given notice to the Company, bought a single ticket to Hythe and told Mrs Creak he’d pay out the month. He gave back his key to her this morning.

  He had one call to make before he took his train, and he was walking from Greenwich up the Old Kent Road to find a young man, an artist, Michael Ross, who lived at an address in Peckham. Michael Ross had said he wanted to leave London and perhaps Eddie’s luck would help him.

  Traders were already opening and carts were unloading from the city markets. The sun had not long been up and lamps still lit the windows of the houses Eddie passed. He imagined families having breakfast together and husbands getting off to work.

  He shivered. He had burned his boats and he laughed out loud with the intoxication of it. He was nuts, he was bleedin’ daft, the boys at Charing Cross had told him when he emptied his locker and shook hands round the porters’ room.

  The station master, Mr Brisley, said Eddie shouldn’t trust the man, he was probably a loony with his head not right – there were lots of them about these days. But Mr Brisley was kind enough: ‘The Company will have a job for you, lad, when you come back.’

  Two nights ago the man on Platform Number 4 had not seemed mad, and if he was, well, the world was so mixed up these days that anything could happen; the rich man’s cream had curdled in the heat of war and now anyone could have some fat; a working man could own some land; a porter could become a Kentish farmer. The gentry weren’t so high and mighty now they’d had a share of suffering, and perhaps it was grief had thawed the hearts of some of them. Rich or poor, you didn’t know what was round the corner – like the man on Platform 4.

  Eddie hadn’t seen the land or written to the gentleman, but this chance had come and who would look a gift horse?

  He walked for an hour or so and asked in a butcher’s shop for directions. Neate Street turned out to be a terraced row with a park behind. The houses would have a patch of garden for vegetables and a wash-house, just what he and Lucy would have wanted if they’d stayed in London; a street where you’d be happy for your nipper, for Archie, to play outside.

  It was pleasant with the plane trees and had a peaceful prettiness in spite of the overgrown hedges and scratched front doors. With husbands gone and wives struggling alone, most of London was falling into disrepair.

  He asked a woman sweeping and she pointed to a house across the road. A girl opened the front door.

  ‘Yes?’

  He knew her. That evening months ago at Mrs Francesca Brion’s party he had seen a painting of this girl and it wasn’t a face you could forget. ‘I’m looking for Mr Michael Ross,’ he said.

  The girl folded her arms. She was young, sixteen perhaps, not much more. ‘He’s out.’ She looked squarely at him, not at all shy or prim, tall with slanting eyes. Her hair was black and crinkled like a pony’s mane, loose on her shoulders. A Persian princess in Peckham, Eddie thought – except for the boots, the shirtsleeves and the baggy corduroy trousers. She saw him looking. ‘I’m digging up some spuds. And Michael’s not here.’

  ‘I have a message for him.’

  ‘Leave it with me if you like.’ She held out a dirty hand.

  ‘It’s not written down,’ said Eddie. He had retreated back down the steps. ‘Could you tell him Eddie Saunders the porter has got a place in Kent? He’ll remember me.’

  ‘Oh,’ said the girl.

  There was a pause. His eyes were level with her breasts, her face was too beautiful, and he couldn’t find a place to look. ‘We met at Mrs Brion’s house,’ said Eddie. ‘She’s the one who gave me this address. Michael told me he’d like to get away from London and I have recently acquired a place in Kent.’ He winced at how pompous he must sound.

  ‘Who’s Mrs Brion?’ the girl said. ‘I’m his sister. I’m Rachel, and he doesn’t want to get away.’ Suddenly she seemed annoyed as if Eddie was at fault. ‘Our dad’s ill, Michael can’t go away.’

  ‘Well, perhaps you’d just let him know. I don’t suppose he’ll come, but if he does, tell him he should take the train to Hythe and ask for me at Mr Mander’s farm. That should do it.’

  ‘And who are you?’

  ‘I’m Eddie Saunders,’ he said again. ‘And Mr George Mander’s farm is where I’ll be.’

  ‘A farm? You?’ said Rachel. ‘You said you were a porter.’

  Eddie felt himself redden. His suit was tight and it always made him hot. ‘I work some grazing on the Romney Marsh.’ Of the two of them she looked more the farmer. ‘Would you tell him, please?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Rachel. ‘I’ll tell him. Cows or sheep?’

  It was too complicated to explain the reason why he didn’t know. ‘Thank you, miss,’ he said. ‘Good day.’

  A few nights ago he was portering for late travellers as usual. He’d work every evening if he could get a chit from Mr Brisley. His room at Mrs Creak’s was not a place he liked to be.

  At Charing Cross the cab rank was covered by a tin canopy, but the wind gusted the drizzle underneath and Eddie had been sorry it was his turn to leave the stove and the fug of smoke inside the porters’ cabin, in spite of the good tip he knew he’d get. He saw it straight away: this customer would be no trouble, and fair.

  The gentleman had only one valise but he nodded when Eddie came out to offer service. The man was as big as a bear, good shoes and heavy Harris overcoat of quality but showing wear. His shoulders were wet and he must have walked for a while before he took the cab; watching his expenses perhaps, a gentleman with money but
less than he would like – less than he once had, Eddie thought. People imagined they weren’t giving much away but all it took was looking to pick up clues.

  The gentleman paid the cab driver from change in his pocket, tucked his woollen cravat under his lapels and put on his gloves, all unhurried and deliberate.

  ‘Goodnight to you,’ he said, lifting his hat to the driver. ‘Thank you,’ he said to Eddie.

  So: a customer with the time – or the vanity – for courtesy to the common man, and no axe to grind. He was youngish by his face, thirty-five? Not so much more than Eddie but his thick hair was going grey. A businessman or a doctor who’d been signed off active service. He didn’t have the look of a man who’d fought. Had he been a conchie? You could never tell. Whatever his life was for him, he seemed a little defeated but not bitter or grieving.

  The gentleman knew the platform he wanted because he walked ahead of Eddie and directly to Number 4. The attaché case he carried was stained with rain and the valise was wet too; Italian leather with solid brass catches and buckles on the straps, and a hand-engraved lock face. The stitching had repairs, neatly done, no labels – so he didn’t go abroad – and tooled initials, small and discreet, G. L. M. It was a shame to let good luggage get spoiled by wet, and Eddie hoped it was soaped properly or at least waxed once in a while as it deserved to be.

  The Folkestone train should have pulled in by now but it hadn’t. There was fog down in Kent. They stood on the platform, the gentleman shifting his bulk gently from foot to foot to keep out the damp.

  Usually the din inside the station was enough to wake the dead, but tonight there were only two engines dripping by the platforms and not many travellers. The rows of gas lamps had misty haloes from the steam hanging in the freezing air. It was even colder in the station than outside on the street.