Only a fortnight ago it had been a scorching autumn, more like high summer, and people were still taking trips to Margate and the Romney Sands. Then winter arrived overnight and business dropped off as it always did when the season finished.
Eddie waited to be dismissed. He did not expect to be asked to put the luggage on the train. A good five minutes passed. The man seemed to have forgotten him, then suddenly he said, ‘You must want to get home to your wife. It’s a filthy night.’ He fumbled in his pocket.
‘No hurry, sir,’ said Eddie. ‘I’m on duty till the ten fifty Chatham–Margate leaves. No one’s waiting for me. My wife is dead, and my baby boy.’ He had no idea why he said it – perhaps he was tired, perhaps he was weakened by the yearnings for another man’s wife which he’d fought away because he would love no one else but Lucy.
My wife is dead, and my baby boy: he had told the man and they both froze with shock and embarrassment, the gentleman’s gloved hand holding some coins halfway to Eddie’s, and Eddie looking directly at him, which was something he’d never do, because that would be asking to be accused of insolence.
And to his horror Eddie heard himself stumbling on, stupidly, as if he was drunk or raving. ‘The influenza in ’19, Archie first, then my Lucy two days after.’ He swallowed down the words that were a pressure in his chest even after all these years, a dam fit to break. He shut his mouth and clenched his teeth together. The man did not look away and instead of dropping the money into his palm he did an unexpected thing: he put his hand on Eddie’s shoulder.
‘I have no wife or children, sir, but I can’t imagine how any man can bear such loss.’
That was how it happened. They began to talk as if the gentleman and he were equals, one a little older than the other but comrades like men are in war sometimes, when they know that grief and death do not recognize the differences.
The station master came down from his office to check that Eddie was not malingering and the gentleman, George Mander, as he introduced himself, confirmed that he had engaged this porter to put his luggage on the train whenever it might arrive and would pay accordingly.
Mander must be lonely, Eddie thought, but he seemed genuine and his kindness did not seem forced. To fill the time and to stop more talk of little Archie, Eddie told Mander about his plan to buy a farm, a plan he and Lucy had shared and he would carry out alone however long it took because he’d made a promise to her and that could not be broken, not even now. He went down to Kent whenever he had time off – his travel on this line was free so he could go any time he liked – and he’d talk to anyone who’d tell him about the land or livestock, anyone who’d teach him things.
After a while there was an announcement that fog at Ashford had delayed the Folkestone train but it had now passed London Bridge.
‘Well, that’s it, sir,’ Eddie said. ‘Your train. The Company’s apologies for your wait.’ The train pulled in and people got out. Eddie opened the carriage door. ‘The driver will be in a hurry to get away, sir, what with the delay.’
Mander took out his wallet.
‘No, thank you, if you don’t mind, sir,’ Eddie said. It hadn’t been a duty after all to talk to this quiet man. For a while a weight had lightened that Eddie had not realized was so heavy.
The guard was coming along the platform, slamming doors. George Mander hesitated, holding the open wallet. He began, ‘I hope I don’t offend you –’
Eddie wondered if he could simply turn and walk away from this second embarrassment. The guard passed them, ‘If you would, sir. All aboard.’
Mander still stood there, reluctant it seemed to board his train. ‘I wouldn’t wish to cause offence,’ he said at last, ‘but I have some land I’ve no use for. It’s been empty since ’17 and the tenant doesn’t need it now.’
‘Stan’away,’ the guard yelled above the shrieking steam and clanging couplings.
Mander raised his voice, ‘It isn’t much, a cottage and a few acres grazing on the Romney Marsh. There’d be no rent of course; such land has no value these days. I’d be glad to see it worked.’
The shunted carriages lurched and the whistle blew.
‘Come and look when you have the time.’ He took a card out of the wallet and handed it to Eddie. ‘Goodnight.’ He picked up the valise and climbed into the carriage.
7
It was three months since Michael had seen Elisabeth. She was always in his mind and this troubled him. His friends were women like Frankie and Olivia, and his lovers were girls like the waitress at the Eiffel Tower. Elisabeth was young and gauche, and she should not preoccupy him.
He had gone out to buy paint and, walking along the Tottenham Court Road, he wondered where she was and what she might be doing at this moment – then she was there coming towards him as if he’d conjured her. She was wearing a heavy skirt, a beret and woollen gloves, and a cape with tapes that crossed over her chest. She had nearly passed him when Michael put out his hand and touched her arm.
She looked startled but he could see she knew him at once. ‘I didn’t think I’d see you here,’ he said, racking his brains for something to say that would keep her for a moment. ‘Are you visiting? Did you travel up alone?’
She patted a parcel in brown paper she was carrying. Her grey eyes were watering with the cold. ‘I’ve come up to buy a book.’
‘A special book?’ he asked, then gritted his teeth at a question one would ask a child.
‘Anatomy and Physiology. I have a place at St Paul’s Hospital. It’s preparatory reading. I’m going to train to be a nurse.’
‘A nurse,’ he repeated stupidly.
‘I’m leaving school – with Rachel. Didn’t you know? We’re all leaving. My sister Karen too.’ Her voice was confident but her eyes had not met his after that first moment. ‘And are you visiting?’ she asked.
‘I have a studio in Fitzroy Street.’
They stood together on the pavement, pushed closer by the afternoon shoppers. It was half past three but already dusk. Christmas candles lit up the shops and sleet had made the road a mess of mud and slurry.
‘Well, goodbye,’ she said. ‘My bus goes soon.’
‘Shall I see you again at Neate Street?’
She looked puzzled and he realized how odd this question was. It was up to him; he would see her if he chose to be at home on Sundays.
‘Where is your studio?’ she asked.
‘Just around the corner. In Fitzroy Street.’
She was not turning to go, clasping her book and shivering. Her hair was tied with ribbon that matched the collar of her school blouse.
‘Would you like a cup of tea before you get your bus? I have a stove and a kettle,’ he said.
She walked with him the five minutes to the studio and all the time he knew he should not have invited her.
She followed him through the archway in Fitzroy Street, down the stone passageway, up the stairs and along the clanging metal corridor. In the studio, she stood just inside the door while he lit the stove. He moved the chair next to the dying fire, which had turned the white walls to pink.
Instead of sitting down, she went along the row of pictures propped against the wall. There wasn’t much. Three canvases for Cara Fairhaven: a portrait of the whiskered Urban in uniform; a stringy adolescent Fairhaven nephew; Pixie, posing coyly on a garden swing. He wished he had turned them to the wall. There was an abstract for a friend of Olivia and a few canvases he would paint over. That was all. He would leave London soon and saw no point in filling the studio with work he wouldn’t finish.
On the easel was a nude he had been working on today. The model was the waitress at the Eiffel Tower and she had left half an hour ago to start her shift.
Elisabeth stopped, and, as she leaned closer to look, a curl of her hair like a lick of flame slipped forward on to the shoulder of her ugly cape. She gazed into the picture. Her cheeks were flushed with the cold, but Michael knew her skin would naturally be pale, almost bloodless if she was tired, al
ways a little transparent and difficult to paint, blue veined on her breasts and also where the flesh was fine – the insides of her arms, the arches of her feet, the tender place between the hip and thigh.
She looked up and caught him watching. ‘Your friend looks lovely without her clothes,’ she said. Was it innocence or did she know what had been in his mind? She stood back from the picture, considering it. ‘Her face is very peaceful, as if she’s not thinking anything at all.’
‘Don’t we always think? Even if we take no notice.’
‘Oh, I don’t mean she’s dreaming in an empty-headed way, she’s wide awake but not fretting and worrying like the rest of us because … because she knows.’
‘What does she know?’
‘Oh, I couldn’t say.’ She smiled. ‘Everything. Everything we forget because life muddles us.’
‘It must be a better picture than I thought.’
She was still gazing at the girl. ‘You are a good painter. She seems real.’
‘She is real,’ he said, then saw his teasing had confused her. He walked across and pointed to the model’s face. ‘Painters use the light – the way the light falls. You see? On the cheek and the lip. Along the jaw.’
‘Yes! I see exactly what you mean.’ She looked up and examined his face. ‘There’s light here and here.’ She almost touched his cheek.
‘The tea is ready,’ he said, and turned away from her.
She put down her book and sat on the chair with the cup and saucer on her lap. ‘If I were an artist, perhaps I should see clearly too,’ she said.
‘Painters see what they allow themselves to see and that’s not clear at all. We’re as blind as anyone. What we do is make pictures of our blindness, but we try to be truthful, I suppose.’
‘Are you? Honest, I mean.’
‘I’m not sure I am,’ he said. ‘Sometimes when I work, I imagine I’m seeing as I should if I weren’t human and … and arrogant. And everything, even dust on a shelf or a lump of coal, is beautiful, as if the gods have shown themselves. Then later, the next day perhaps, I see my self-delusion painted on the canvas and it’s hard to understand why I thought it was anything at all.’ He wondered if he’d bludgeoned her into silence with this speech. Her face had changed as if she took seriously the nonsense he was talking.
‘But if you see the self-delusion, then you’ve seen the truth about yourself and that must be good,’ she said carefully.
‘I wish it were true, Elisabeth.’
‘I’m certain. Don’t you think so?’
‘No,’ he said, and laughed. ‘I’m not thinking any more.’ He sat down on the floorboards on the other side of the fire. The corners of the room were dark with the winter afternoon closing over. The windows shuddered in the wind.
Elisabeth stared into the fire. In this light she looked beautiful, but he knew he should not say it. A model posing for him or a girl he wanted to seduce would understand that flattery was a ritual to dissolve the layers of reserve. ‘I should like to make a drawing of you,’ he said. ‘Not now. One day.’
He got up to put on more coal. She looked down at her lap, her head bowed, and he wanted to put his hand on her dark warm hair.
The new flames came through with tiny hissing flares of blue or green. Outside, the city was quiet; snow must be falling. He heard the small sounds of her breathing and swallowing.
‘I should tell you this,’ she said softly. He didn’t speak, knowing it would silence her. ‘I’ve always thought I wasn’t anyone at all. Like being made of air, or … nothing. When I met you, I knew it wasn’t true. You were the beginning of knowing I am me. She chafed her hands and he wanted to hold them still. ‘You see?’ she said. ‘I’m really rather peculiar.’
The quiet closed in again. The room seemed to have a pressure in it as if air was weighted.
‘Something else, can I say?’ She knotted her fingers to stop their restlessness. ‘Just now, for a while – a very little while – when I looked at your painting, I wasn’t in this room, I was outside too, and everywhere. And I understood it all. Do you see?’
She looked up, waiting, but an answer would bind them to this moment and he said nothing. Her courage must have been greater than his because she reached across to touch his hand. ‘I don’t suppose you do. I shouldn’t if I were you.’ She wasn’t tense with self-consciousness as women often were, and he was aware again of the responsibility of asking her here and her recklessness in coming with him. She hadn’t known she could trust him – or perhaps she had. He did not close his hand around hers. ‘It’s an odd thing to be alive,’ he said, not knowing what he meant.
She sat back, taking her hand away and smiling as if the doubt was gone. ‘When I visit Neate Street again, would you take me to meet your father? When he’s feeling better.’
‘I should like you to meet him, but he won’t get better.’
‘Oh, he will! I’m sure he will,’ she said earnestly. ‘You must hope. It’s wrong to give up.’
‘It’s wrong to pretend.’
‘Well, I shall hope for you. That’s what I’ll do.’
She couldn’t know his father was dying, but the impatience that flared up in him was a strange relief. The tenderness for her withered and he felt a kind of bitter satisfaction. He did not want to feel like this about her. He wanted nothing to keep him here in London. The need to be rid of her – her trust and hope, her naive cleverness – filled his chest like water drowning him. He got up and switched on the electric light. The glare made her wince.
‘Elisabeth, I’d forgotten, I have something I should do this afternoon.’
She stared at him and he fought himself, wanting to take back what he’d said, then she jumped up, slopping tea on her skirt. ‘Yes, of course.’
‘I’ll come with you to the bus,’ he said. She was already going to the door, pulling on her gloves, and she stood with her back to him, waiting to be let out. He reached over her shoulder to turn the latch and he could smell her hair, so faint it was hardly there, like the scent of water.
They walked back to the Tottenham Court Road; snow was falling and the streets were empty. Her skirt swung heavily as she hurried beside him. He wanted to say he was sorry before they said goodbye and to repair the damage he’d done, but the bus came and she was gone.
He followed their tracks back to the studio. His boots had pressed the snow to water. Her footprints, small beside his, sparkled at the edges and each imprint of her sole was a shadow of blue. In the studio, he found her book beside the half-filled teacup.
• • •
As Elisabeth drops her cape on the floor, undoes the hooks on her skirt and unbuttons her blouse, she is staring at the pattern on the bedside rug, fawn and grey, and she is back in London: the slushy pavement is speeding under her, her itchy skirt is flouncing, and her feet are whisking forward, back, forward, as she walks beside Rachel’s brother. She is going to his studio.
His boots are heavy hoofs beside her trotters. His arm swings and if she lets hers swing too they will bump together, his hand against her glove, but she is holding a book against her chest which is fluttering like a moth because Christmas lights are shining and she is going alone somewhere with Michael Ross.
She follows him down a flagstoned passageway, up some stairs, along a pitch-black corridor which clangs like thunder in a pantomime. In his studio, which is so far inside the house they could be lost, there is a picture of a naked girl.
Then it happens – she looks into the picture and the painted girl looks back. The girl begins to sing a low plain note, its pitch too perfect for a human throat. The sound expands, passing through the walls and outside to the dusk; it unfurls across the city, down into the black mud of the Thames and up into the night. Elisabeth hears the fall of time, she knows the sun’s dark eye, the leaning seas, and here, inside the room, she knows the heat and bone and tide of Michael.
Then it vanishes. The girl is just a picture, the room is ordinary. Elisabeth looks up and he is w
atching. He sees her, far back, waiting, where no one else has ever found her.
Later, he sits on the floor and the firelight is a cave with shadows all around. He comes close and in a moment –
‘Go to bed,’ her mother says, palm on her forehead, looking at her face but not her eyes. She is assessing heat and colour; this daughter is unfit.
Karen comes in to look. ‘Dishrag,’ she says, although she isn’t being unkind. ‘Pastry face.’ Then she shuts the bedroom door. Elisabeth takes off her stockings, her petticoat and her drawers. Her nightdress slides over, smelling of old sleep and tucked-up bedtimes gone cold. The icy cotton slithers down her back.
She has a headache, although there are no thoughts to ache, and the coldness in the bedroom makes her sweat.
Something happened – or was it nothing? – then she sipped the tea and suddenly he hated her. She must go. Now. Walking again, quicker this time, swishing her skirt and cape. The snow under her blurry feet is blank as if she isn’t moving. The omnibus comes straight away so it is just as well he made her run.
She did not see his eyes again, and his voice said, Goodbye, Elisabeth.
• • •
Michael stopped to buy some flowers, carrying them awkwardly inside his greatcoat to stop the stems from snapping in the wind. He wondered if he should have chosen roses or chrysanthemums, which wouldn’t be so easily damaged, but he bought delphiniums, deep blue like summer twilight. Was Elisabeth too young for flowers?
What happened yesterday still pained him, as if her hurt was hurting him. He needed to apologize.
Yesterday he couldn’t think clearly but today he would explain that it was vital that he collected a picture from the framer’s because it was promised to a client, and this was why he had hurried her so rudely. The lie would not excuse the discourtesy, but perhaps it would ease her hurt.
He could not tell the truth: that he had work to do; that she was too young for good conversation and asked too many questions. And there was another reason why he had sent her away – he had seen her trust and her assumption that their meeting meant something. It didn’t.
The German Boy Page 8