The German Boy

by Tricia Wastvedt

  He hefted the gate back on its hinges and leaned on it to ease his shoulders. The evening mist was a milky blanket knee deep over the fields; the moon was up with a few stars sprinkled on the curve. Sunsets on the Marsh were fragile or serene or riotous, and Eddie admired this one’s carnival of colours. The sky was royal-blue lightening to turquoise with skeins of pinkish cloud low down on the horizon. The crows were clattering in their roost. A flock of starlings looped above his head in the icy shining air.

  There was another sound, a distant clopping. It might be a sheep loose on the lane. A lame sheep? A two-legged sheep? The sound slowed and quickened. Eddie stared into the gloom.

  It was a woman. She wobbled on heels too high for country walking and had her arms out, balancing, so her coat hung open like a cape. The day had been warm for March, but with the sun almost gone, it would be freezing soon. He could see the curve of her waist and hips, the dark blue dress against the yellow lining of her coat. Her handbag swung from her wrist. She looked at her feet, head down, legs splayed like a calf on ice. Her car must have broken down; there was no other explanation for her wandering up here.

  She looked up. ‘Hello, Eddie Saunders,’ she called. ‘I can see you don’t know me in a dress. It’s Rachel Ross. You haven’t seen me for a while.’

  She found an even patch to put her feet and stood up steadily enough to wrap the coat around her. ‘You came to Neate Street looking for my brother, Michael. Remember me? Now I’m looking for him.’ Her lips were red and her cheeks were powdered. ‘How are you?’ Underneath the make-up he could see the girl in shirt and trousers with earthy hands he remembered from all that time ago.

  ‘I’m well, thanks,’ said Eddie. ‘You’ve come all this way from London?’

  ‘Oh, no, we live not far. I’ve just come off the bus from work. You’re only three stops on from us. We moved, Mum and Nanna Lydia and I. We’ve got a new bungalow in Hythe. Michael doesn’t know. You’re a friend of his and I thought you’d have an idea where he is.’

  Eddie remembered her directness. It had unnerved him. When he last saw her she had long hair but it must be short now like women wore it these days; she had on a little close-fitting hat with a flower at the side, and her neck above the collar of her coat was long and smooth. Her scent made a wisp of sweetness in the air, which he caught sometimes in between the stink of sweat and chewed grass that was him and the cows.

  Eddie said, ‘Michael’s not been here for quite a while. He stayed a month or so helping out, then went off to get the Dover boat to France. A year or more, it must be.’

  ‘Oh.’ She looked hopeful as if she thought there would be more.

  ‘I’ve not heard since,’ Eddie said.

  ‘Well, thanks, Eddie. If you do, would you say … say we’re in Hythe and we’re not in Neate Street any more.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘Well, bye, then.’ Rachel turned herself around and he watched her tottering back along the lane.

  ‘Have a cup of tea with me, if you’ve the time,’ he called after her.

  ‘In your house?’ she called back.

  ‘The only place there is.’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind. You’ll have to loan me a torch, though, to see my way back.’

  He tied the gate closed and packed up his tools.

  In the kitchen he lit the lamp and the stove while Rachel sat on the edge of a chair. The house was cold. Some yellow flames nipped at the kindling twigs and it would take a while before the warmth came through. He left the stove door open.

  The lambs woke up and looked over the sides of their boxes at the collie flat out on the lino. There would be a whiff of dog when the collie’s coat began to warm. Eddie filled the kettle and used the bellows on the fire.

  He could feel Rachel looking at the ruin of a room he lived in. When he’d shown her in, he suddenly saw the place as if he’d never set foot in it before. The cabbage-green distempered walls were draped with sooty cobwebs, and there was a black stain above the range and across the ceiling. In places the plaster had fallen off and wooden laths showed through like carcass ribs. The floor was bare boards with scraps of lino. He used to take off his boots when he came into the house, but he didn’t any more.

  ‘I’m not started with the decorating yet,’ he said. There were rags, tools, a fence post, a box of straw in the corner where he’d hatched some chicks. His socks hung on a piece of string over the sink.

  ‘It could do with a few jobs doing,’ Rachel said. ‘You’re not a handyman, then?’

  ‘The roof’s seen to, and the plumbing.’

  ‘You want to choose a colour scheme in here. Get a pot of paint at Bellamy’s in Tontine Street and a nice cheerful picture. Some ornaments. You’ve been here a while, haven’t you?’

  ‘The sheds and the barn needed work. Things take time.’

  ‘Looks like they do,’ said Rachel. ‘You’re not comfy but I suppose you don’t mind.’

  ‘I get used to it. I’m out on the farm.’

  ‘Excuse my frankness,’ she said, ‘but a man can’t run a home and that’s a fact.’

  Eddie cleared away last night’s plate and saucepan, wiped the table with a cloth and sat down on an upturned poultry crate while the kettle boiled. Fatigue was beginning to defeat him. He felt his blood sinking to his boots and he wished he’d not invited her. All he wanted was sleep.

  Rachel tapped her fingers and jigged the toe of her shoe. She clasped her coat round her, sitting up tense with her handbag on her lap.

  The kettle began to wheeze. ‘Perhaps you’d like to skip the tea after all,’ Eddie said.

  ‘Oh, no, not a bit of it,’ said Rachel flatly.

  ‘I should tidy up,’ he said. This thought had never occurred to him before. ‘It’s not a place to invite a guest. You mustn’t feel obliged to stay. Perhaps another time, when I’ve got things straight.’

  Then she smiled. ‘Don’t be daft. You make that tea. I’m forgetting my manners, aren’t I? To tell you the truth, it’s Michael I’m thinking about. I’m worried. Not worried about him exactly, just worried where he is.’

  ‘He’s all right,’ said Eddie. ‘He’s bound to be.’ He didn’t know what else to say.

  ‘Oh, I know, I know.’ Rachel took off her hat and shook her hair. The hat had flattened it and her hair filled out like something taking in a breath of air. In the lamplight, her eyes looked peaty black and clear as if she saw more of him than he could see of her. ‘I’m a worrier by nature. Don’t mind me,’ she said.

  ‘Sugar,’ he said, passing her the bag.

  Rachel asked about his cows. He answered her in too much detail, he remembered later. She cooed over the lambs in their boxes and stroked the collie, which leaned against her legs. Then she told him about the shop in Folkestone where she worked and that the owner might open another one in Hythe which would be nearer and easier on the bus. ‘We’ll have a dressmaker for alterations on the premises – our clientele are ladies who want things exact, and the silhouette this year is glamorous and smart; Joan Crawford, Marlene Dietrich, Jean Harlow. Hythe might not be Hollywood but our ladies aren’t behind.’

  Eddie blinked to keep his eyelids up. It was dark outside and the yellow light cast shadows on her face and sparked lights in her hair and on her lips. The tiredness was like grit behind his eyes, but he wanted to keep on looking. He’d better walk her home.

  Suddenly she said, ‘I could live in a place like this.’

  He laughed and the sudden force of it cracked something open in his chest like a stuck-fast door blasted off its hinges. He laughed again, but softer now; she was sitting there so clean and beautiful in the devastation of his house.

  ‘The place we had in London was a bit like this,’ Rachel said. ‘You saw that old house in Neate Street. Nothing much but I loved it. We had hens, Orpingtons, the best. They’re loyal, good layers and good mothers to their chicks. Pigeons too – before Dad was ill. And when we moved to the place we’ve got now, with no upstairs, n
o cracks, and all square and straight, I thought I’d go mad.’ She smiled at him. ‘Perfect has no heart. You don’t want to do too much in here,’ she said. ‘It’s lovely as it is.’

  • • •

  The death certificate of Albert Ross did not put the cause as injuries of war: he’d been too slow to go. Mr Ross had recovered satisfactorily, the doctor said, and died naturally of old age. ‘At forty-eight?’ Vera had said. ‘Don’t make me laugh.’

  Were it not unseemly at a funeral, Lydia would have allowed herself a smile. She was thankful that her son was not in pain and never would be again, but she also felt the mortal injury of grief which is invisible and permanent. A soul joined with the deceased is a tree that’s grown against another; it never flourishes as it should when it’s half uprooted from the earth.

  However, Albert’s dying wasn’t terrible. His passing was delicate, quiet, like the final eddy of a capsized boat going under. Just a ripple to finish what had already disappeared.

  A last shudder was to come. The three of them were washing up the crockery on the January evening after Albert’s wake, Lydia at the sink, Vera with a cloth and Rachel putting things away. The kitchen was peaceful with the gentle ringing in the air that comes after a houseful of guests has gone and it’s just family again. People had spoken respectfully and fulsomely of Albert, and somehow the presence of the man he used to be had filled the house again.

  Then Vera said it: she was selling up. She wanted somewhere fresh. She fancied a nice healthy modern house away from London.

  Rachel smacked down a stack of plates on the table. ‘I’ve had enough. I’m not choosing between you and Nanna. I can’t. I’ll cut myself in half, I will.’ It wasn’t Rachel’s style to be hysterical but when Vera said her mind was set, the girl went wild with anguish, like a little one you couldn’t reason with, more desperate than anyone had seen her in all the years of sadness they’d endured. What else could Lydia do but sell her cottage and go with them?

  So: a bald new bungalow in Hythe a stone’s throw from the Channel, pebbles for a garden and a glass lean-to at the back where they could sit and sun themselves on windy days. The windows and front door were yellow with leaded lights of rising suns, the guttering and the gate were painted sailor-blue, the walls were red brick to the windowsills, white stucco above, and the roof tiles were tinged with green. Too many colours and not Lydia’s notion of a home at all.

  The worst was having no upstairs. The laws of nature are disrupted without a third dimension in a house. There was back and front, left and right, but no up and down.

  Leaving Peckham had affected Lydia. Since coming to the bungalow, words in conversations were sometimes like little balls in bagatelle ricocheting too fast to follow, and she was like that too: she seemed to bump about inside this bungalow; it was unknown terrain. How could a household be organized with the kitchen and the bedroom side by side, the bathroom off the hallway and the lounge adjacent to the WC, which ought to be outside? There was an attic room where Rachel slept, but the stairs were more a ladder, and Lydia could not see the point in struggling up to what should rightly store the suitcases.

  Vera didn’t seem to mind the oddness of their home, and in any case she was indoors much less than Lydia. It was good to see Vera full of energy again, so different from her brittle fidgets of exhaustion in the years of Albert’s dying. She had found work as housekeeper to a Mr George Mander, who owned the land farmed by Rachel’s young man, Eddie Saunders. Mr Mander’s elderly mother was difficult and had worked her way through a string of local girls who couldn’t cope or wouldn’t stand for it. Eddie Saunders had brought about Vera’s introduction.

  It was a happy thing that Rachel had found herself a beau, although Eddie wasn’t young – ten years ahead of Rachel, a farmer, a widower and not what Vera had had in mind. She said he looked uncomfortable inside his suit, inside a room, inside a house. His legs were too big underneath a table and his fingers were like sausages around a teacup. He sweated with the awkwardness of organizing that bulk of his.

  ‘A good judge of an onion has fried more than one,’ Vera told Rachel. ‘Spread your wings. At your age you should be having fun.’

  Eddie was the first Rachel had brought home for tea. She’d had lots of interest, as of course she would, but hadn’t bothered, even for amusement.

  ‘I wouldn’t waste my time, Nanna,’ Rachel had said privately to Lydia. ‘I’ve got better things to do and they get on my nerves, these boys, fussing with their hair and trying to impress me. I want a man who knows himself.’

  Eddie Saunders was a Londoner and a kind man to his bones, Lydia could tell, and Rachel had the wisdom some are born with that isn’t distracted by appearances. She liked to go out dancing and was good at looking glamorous, but Rachel was also practical. She’d taken on the vegetables and hens in Neate Street when Albert couldn’t and no one else had the heart. At twelve years old, she’d put on Albert’s gardening things, which swamped her, struggled with the digging and taught herself to grow things without help or encouragement from anyone. Rachel would be a good wife for this farmer, Eddie Saunders, if he was her choice.

  So life was unfolding for Rachel, and Vera seemed buoyant without the weight of Albert. At eight o’clock each morning, Rachel took the bus along the seafront in one direction and Vera, at half past, went in the other.

  Lydia had most of the day alone, with no routine and no one needing her. She could prepare the meal any time, do a little ironing and watch the clouds that were so different by the sea.

  She was baffled at the complications of having so much time and would sometimes forget her purpose between the sink and the pantry door, or puzzle over which knife was best to scale the fish, or be mesmerized like dogs and babies are by ordinary things that suddenly seem miraculous, like dust motes twinkling, a coin of sunlight on the floor, a curtain breathing in a draught.

  10

  Karen was late, as she often was, and Elisabeth ordered a pot of tea and two lunches of ham and potatoes, hoping she wouldn’t have to eat them both herself.

  The restaurant was full: a few gentlemen dining alone but mostly ladies together. Shafts of watery sunlight illuminated dabs of colour in the gloom: a pale green teacup, a red silk scarf, a blue corsage.

  She was tired, almost too tired to eat at all. She wanted to close her eyes, lulled by the clicking cutlery and quiet voices. Tomorrow was her day off from the hospital and after having lunch with Karen she would catch her train and go home to sleep and think, and decide what must be done.

  ‘Hello, you,’ said Karen. ‘I hope you’re paying. I haven’t got a farthing. Heaven knows how I’ll live till pay day.’ She leaned down and her hair smelled of cigarettes. She kissed Elisabeth on the cheek.

  ‘You look worn out,’ said Elisabeth.

  ‘So do you. Awful. At least take off that horrid hat they make you wear. You go first. What’s up? It’s your doctor, isn’t it?’

  ‘He’s not a doctor, he’s a surgeon. And nothing’s up except that you’ll end up in hospital yourself one day.’

  Karen took off her coat and as always people looked. She smoothed her dress and said, ‘I bought it yesterday in Dickens. And gloves. See, they match. The shade is Aegean Night and the collar is the real fur of something. What do you think?’

  ‘I think that if you don’t watch out, the species of your collar won’t matter much.’

  Karen’s eyes seemed bigger and darker, and her skin was sallow under her face powder and rouge. Sometimes Elisabeth wished she hadn’t learned to recognize the damage the rheumatic fever had done to Karen nine years ago.

  ‘What are we eating? I’m starving,’ Karen said.

  ‘Ham. You’re blue under the eyes and your poor heart is struggling to keep you upright. Please, Karen, listen to me. Try to remember sometimes.’

  ‘I will, I will, I promise. I’m so glad to see you, little nurse. I’ve got lots to tell you and I wish you had more time.’

  ‘I’m here –
and so are you now.’

  Karen leaned closer. ‘I’ve met someone.’ She pushed the napkin and the cutlery aside. ‘I think he’s it. I swear he’s perfect. He doesn’t speak much English but he’s heaven. I nearly fainted when I gave him the keys to his room. His name is Artur Landau and he’s staying for two weeks to see London with his father who’s doing some business thing. Artur says London is dull compared to Munich, so I said, “You should come to the Locarno in Streatham and that’ll change your mind.” We’re going dancing there tonight.’

  ‘How do you know he’s nice if he can’t talk to you?’

  ‘You should see him, Elisabeth. There’s other ways of telling.’

  ‘What about Stanley?’

  ‘Stan won’t be bothered. He knows it wasn’t serious.’

  The lunches arrived and Karen ate and talked about German Artur Landau, while Elisabeth pushed her food around the plate and tried to listen to keep her mind off the nausea roiling in her stomach.

  ‘Now you,’ Karen said. ‘No, wait, I’ll guess; the doctor has proposed, you turned him down, then changed your mind because he’s got good hands.’

  Elisabeth giggled in spite of everything. Her stomach wrenched and made her eyes water. ‘He’s not a doctor, he’s a surgeon. And he’s married. He forgot to tell me.’

  Karen had been giggling too but now she stared. She reached across the table and took Elisabeth’s hand, knocking over a tulip in a vase which flooded both their plates. The salt cellar and a fork pirouetted off the table.

  ‘I hate him,’ Karen said. ‘He’s a fool.’

  ‘I’m the fool.’

  Elisabeth found she was crying and the waitress came and asked if she’d finished and was there anything wrong with the lunch as she’d barely touched it. If there was, it should be reported to Chef, so would madam like to make a complaint? Elisabeth swallowed down the tears and the sickness and couldn’t speak.