Herr Landau had tolerated the arguments about Jews, about capitalists – like him apparently – who cheated and oppressed the ordinary working man. He agreed with Artur that Bolsheviks and Marxists were dangerous, and that Germany was being punished with poverty, not making reparation for the war but being humiliated, ground into the dirt. Herr Landau resented Versailles as much as any patriotic German would. The Deutschmark was worth nothing and if it weren’t for customers abroad their business would have failed like many others.
He had some sympathy but Artur’s fervour was not diminishing and this irked Herr Landau. The National Socialists as they called themselves, to whom Artur was so loyal, would never be taken seriously, but of late they were behaving in a thuggish, embarrassingly brutish way. Artur must be diverted. At twenty-eight, it was time to choose a wife and settle down.
Fräulein Karen Oliver was near-perfect in looks and nationality, and temperament, as far as one could ever know. Her certainty in being noticed and admired came close to arrogance but Herr Landau liked a girl with character. His son would need a wife who’d match his selfishness.
She was clearly not of peasant stock: she was tall and graceful, silver-blonde. Her limbs were too long, one might say if one were critical, and her hands and feet were delicate but large as if she’d grow into them. Her face was small: a pointed chin, blue eyes – no flecks of green or brown, the irises were pure china-blue. She had the hypnotic prettiness of a child. Her expression was intelligent and hopeful.
Herr Landau was confident that his son would see all this with more appreciation in the crystal air of Bavaria, so he offered her a position as clerk at his offices in Munich. Her duties would be broad: she would learn German, typing, shorthand and cookery. She would start work in one month’s time, and on the journey she would buy a wardrobe of good clothes at a particular boutique in Paris where she’d be advised on style and colour.
The arrangements were in place but it seemed Herr Landau had overestimated the effort and the money he needed to invest to bring about the igniting of the two blond hearts. During the last days of their stay in London, a change came over Artur. He was in a trance of infatuation and Fräulein Oliver was purple round the eyes.
Herr Landau knew the signs and was glad; he approved of healthy passions in the young. Artur asked to remain in London and travel with the girl to Paris, then on to Munich.
Herr Landau refused his son’s request: separation from each other would be sure to strengthen the bond.
• • •
Mrs Francesca Brion’s house in Regent’s Park was almost as Elisabeth imagined it would be: large, elegant, with a curved gravel drive to the pillared porch, although the Red Indian totem pole on the front lawn was puzzling, and in full view of the street there was a reclining granite figure with sturdy thighs and breasts like puddings. The sculpture was full of holes and could have been an arrangement of Swiss cheese and blancmanges.
Elisabeth’s visit had no reason except that Mrs Brion’s card was still in her purse and now the days were empty, this was as good a way as any to fill an afternoon.
She wore a bias skirt and tailored jacket, and the hat was Aegean Night to match the gloves that Karen had given her. She was smart enough to visit in Regent’s Park. The chasm that had opened inside her was invisible.
She pulled the brass handle but didn’t hear a bell. The door was opened by the housekeeper, and in the moment when the woman looked down at her, the courage that Elisabeth had guarded as she had walked from the station started to dissolve.
A voice called from somewhere inside, ‘Edith? Who is it?’
As if she hadn’t heard, the woman, Edith, said, ‘Mrs Brion has visitors at present. May I ask if she is expecting you?’
‘No. Yes. I have her card.’
‘Edith!’ the voice called again.
There was a long moment of appraisal. The woman’s eyes saw through her. ‘Perhaps you would kindly wait.’
‘It’s Miss Oliver! How lovely!’ Mrs Brion came pattering on bare feet across the chequered marble floor, a silk kimono fluttering around her legs. She seemed completely unconcerned that Elisabeth should see her like this. ‘I have some friends here who’d love to meet you. Come in, come in.’ She put her arm through Elisabeth’s. ‘I love your hair, and that little hat, it’s very pretty. Could we have more tea and sandwiches, please, Edith,’ she said. ‘And some toast for Toby.’ Mrs Brion seemed so small without her shoes.
In the drawing room the curtains were half closed against the sunlight slanting in. The air was heavy with cigar smoke. The arms of chairs and sofas, little tables and sideboards, were scattered with empty teacups and glasses, plates of half-eaten cake and sandwiches. There were sheets of drawing paper on the floor.
Several people were in the room although Elisabeth could not take in how many, and a little boy was lying on his stomach by the fire colouring with crayons in a book that did not look as if it was meant for a child. An easel was set up and a woman in a blue cotton smock stood with charcoal in her hand.
All the faces turned to look.
‘This is Miss Elisabeth Oliver, a friend of Michael,’ said Mrs Brion. She waved her arm into the smoke and sunshine. ‘This is my sister, Mrs Ingrid Schroëder. Mrs Venetia Gibb’ – she indicated the woman at the easel – ‘Miss Pixie Fairhaven and Miss Olivia Layne.’
Ingrid Schroëder was small and fragile like Mrs Brion; Pixie Fairhaven was younger than the other women, near Elisabeth in age, thin, red-faced and ginger-haired; Venetia Gibb was aristocratic.
Elisabeth was confused: there were three women and a dark young man in a suit, smoking a cigar.
‘Well! The Hebrew’s friend,’ he said, leaping up and kissing her hand. He was wearing lipstick. ‘I’m Olivia.’
‘And this is Toby, my youngest nephew,’ said Mrs Brion. The small boy continued his colouring.
Elisabeth perched on a Dorset chair beside the fire and the faces followed her. Suddenly the bias skirt and jacket were wrong; she was a girl in her Sunday best bought off the peg and chosen with no style or originality or taste. These women – except for Olivia in her suit – wore long soft clothes that seemed to be neither dresses nor skirts and blouses, but a mix of everything that looked comfortable and beautiful. Pixie Fairhaven was a little more conservative in dark blue, but even she had an exotic beaded cap on her wiry orange hair, and dangling amber earrings.
There was a hush and Elisabeth knew that before she arrived they had been talking and laughing and the room had been alive. She wondered when she could leave.
‘Edith is bringing us more tea,’ said Mrs Brion. She lay down on the sofa amongst a pile of cushions, pulling the kimono off her shoulders. ‘Am I right, Venetia? Were my arms like this?’ she asked the woman at the easel, who nodded and began to draw.
‘This lovely girl needs refreshment. I’ll get you something until the tea arrives. One never knows when Edith will turn up.’ Olivia went to a tray of bottles on a cabinet and poured some spirit into a glass as big as a vase. She filled it to the rim with orange juice from a jug. ‘Frankie’s favourite: Russian vodka. We had ours with sandwiches so you’re only catching up.’
The drink tasted of the freshest oranges but warm, as if the sun was still inside them. Elisabeth took a mouthful and the heat sunk to her stomach.
‘My word! Look at the time. I should be running along,’ said Pixie Fairhaven – an American like Mrs Brion. ‘Shall I tell Mama you’ll come in August, Francesca? And everyone, of course. We’ll get a girl to help with the children, Ingrid darling. Italians are marvellous with little ones.’
‘How sweet you are, Pixie,’ said Mrs Schroëder. ‘Toby does not take the heat but I’m sure we’ll manage something.’
‘Venetia? Might you persuade Douglas to abandon France this summer and join us?’ asked Pixie.
‘I’m not sure,’ said Mrs Gibb absently. She stood back to regard her drawing. There was a smudge of charcoal on her cheek. ‘He says Italians are hyste
rical and overwrought, not the peasants, just the middle classes. I’m not sure I shall sway him.’
‘We shan’t need to see Italians,’ said Pixie brightly. ‘Douglas need not go out. We have a pool and views from the terrace. Do try, Venetia.’ She turned to Elisabeth. ‘Papa has just bought a villa in Amalfi.’
‘You’re moving with your family to Italy?’
‘Oh, heavens, no! I couldn’t live there. We have a house in New York, which is home to me, and here in England we live in Bloomsbury. Mama has a little castle in Corfu – it’s so sweet and tiny, nothing like the castles in your Scotland, and we have the Innsbruck chalet for when we ski. The villa in Amalfi will be a dream and I’m longing to take everyone to see it. It’s such a thrill to spend holidays all over the place and take one’s friends, don’t you think so, Miss Oliver?’
‘Oh, yes,’ Elisabeth said.
‘Americans are making money so fast they need us to help them spend it,’ said Olivia.
Pixie Fairhaven did not seem offended. ‘Papa has businesses on the Exchange, Miss Oliver. The Exchange is where people buy money.’ She seemed to assume that Elisabeth would need an explanation. ‘Isn’t that just so bizarre? Why would one buy money, why not just buy things?’
‘Money is just another thing,’ Mrs Brion said. ‘Sometimes it has value and sometimes it doesn’t. The newspapers say the New York Exchange is making people too rich.’
‘I love being too rich,’ said Pixie simply.
‘All bulls turn into bears one day,’ said Olivia.
The room was quiet again, and little Toby Schroëder went on colouring by the fire. Edith brought in a tray of tea. She ignored the crockery that needed clearing. Elisabeth sipped her vodka.
‘What shall you do about Lefèvre, Venetia dear?’ asked Mrs Brion.
‘It is depressing. I had a good deal of advice about my portrait and André said he thought it very nearly good except the head was not quite in proportion with the rest.’
‘You poor, poor darling!’ said Mrs Brion.
‘He made me square it out,’ continued Mrs Gibb. ‘I can think calmly now and you’ll say I’m prejudiced but I liked it better before. Lefèvre would be bad for me. They’re so tiresomely narrow, they’d have us resurrecting the Academies which Douglas would adore because he can do anything he chooses, but I should die. No, I shall cancel, I think, and keep things back for the Leicester in June, where my colour will be understood.’
‘How wise,’ said Mrs Brion.
Pixie Fairhaven said gaily, ‘Don’t listen, Miss Oliver. I close my ears or I should go quite mad. Art is a mystery. Thank goodness girls like us don’t have to puzzle over what it means.’
Elisabeth was annoyed at Pixie Fairhaven’s assumption that they shared an ignorance of art, but it was true she hadn’t a clue what or who Lefèvre was. Her mind felt slow.
‘How is it you know Michael?’ Olivia asked.
The room regained its sharpness. ‘His sister, Rachel, is a friend of mine. In fact I’m visiting her in Kent in August and I’m hoping to see him.’ Michael would not be there but it was not a lie: a part of her was always hoping. She stole a look at Mrs Brion, who had closed her eyes.
‘Frankie is bereft but I expect Michael will come back to us,’ said Olivia.
Mrs Brion said, ‘He has work to do.’
‘His letters are always vague,’ said Elisabeth more loudly than she meant. She had wanted to ask where he was travelling these days but it was impossible now. ‘He says he thinks of me often so I suppose that’s something.’
‘Indeed. It is something,’ said Mrs Brion. Her voice was kind; there was no edge of falseness at all.
Olivia gave Elisabeth a slice of cake and a cup of tea. ‘Your drink isn’t strong, but you may like to eat something.’ Elisabeth wondered if they all thought her so silly and naive that she would not know the effects of alcohol.
Pixie Fairhaven, who hadn’t gone home after all, and Ingrid Schroëder were smoking coloured cigarettes in holders. Mrs Gibb and Francesca Brion said they would not smoke until the drawing was finished. No one offered a cigarette to Elisabeth.
‘Miss Oliver is a nurse,’ said Mrs Brion. ‘Isn’t that wonderful? Little children with fevers.’
‘How brave,’ said Venetia Gibb. ‘It takes great generosity to deal with illness.’
‘And selfless maturity,’ added Ingrid Schroëder.
‘I so admire you,’ said Pixie Fairhaven. ‘You girls are angels. I declare, you’re positively saints.’
There was a pause in which Elisabeth realized that they expected her to speak.
She said, ‘I wonder, may I have a cigarette?’ The room listed gently. ‘I’m not a nurse any more. I have been dismissed. My lover was a married surgeon and I told him what I thought of him for lying about his wife.’
The words unravelled smoothly and it was pleasant to have them listening.
‘It was during a consultation, actually, with two doctors and a group of nurses – and Matron of course. He asked Matron to ask me to leave the room, so I told him I wasn’t deaf or foreign and could follow his request without translation, and did he not remember that I understood him perfectly in his bed in Pimlico when he gave instructions on fellatio.’
She could hear her voice clear and steady, ringing slightly like a bell. ‘Matron said I’d said enough. That was two weeks ago. I’m not a nurse any more.’
The quiet hissed softly in the room. There was the tiny scratching of Toby Schroëder’s crayoning.
Pixie Fairhaven held a cigarette in one hand and a piece of cake in the other, both halfway to her lips. ‘Italian is such a musical language, I always think,’ she said. ‘I’m so looking forward to Amalfi.’
12
After Michael left Amsterdam, he worked his way though France and Italy, earned his ticket on a steamer from Sicily to Spain, and walked inland, westwards, toiling up the baking mountain roads to Madrid. At the Prado, the work of Goya and Velázquez burned his eyes with beauty. Picasso was more sorrowful a painter than he had realized and Dalí more cunning and more arrogant.
Michael travelled north again, over the Pyrenees to Languedoc, where he stayed for several months in a loft above a bakery. The village was called Mazamet, high on a rocky hillside above the River Tarn.
He had a lover, a young widow called Delphine, and he grew fond of her. It was more than a year since he had left the house in Neate Street.
He made a painting of the square in Mazamet and what he saw in that picture – or could almost see – made him long for home. In the spring of 1929, he decided to return to England.
Delphine walked with him as far as the railway which ran east to Narbonne. They said their goodbyes without regret. ‘We have been happy, I think. You will be a good husband, Michel. She will be content.’ They kissed fondly and chastely, and Michael watched Delphine walk back up the dusty track to Mazamet, her dark head bowed with the effort of the steep climb. She did not look back.
At the station in Narbonne, he bought a ticket to Paris and as the train went north through France the crags and precipices became wooded hills and pastures. The southern colours were left behind.
On the luggage shelf was the hunting rifle given to him by Madame Baumanière. In his rucksack was the painting of Mazamet which had shown him he should go home.
A silver locket was in his jacket pocket and he held it in his hand, turning it over and smoothing his thumb over the engraved letter E.
He watched France moving by the carriage window, remembering a snowy afternoon in London two Christmases ago: Elisabeth walks beside him. She holds a book wrapped in brown paper against her chest, and when he looks down he sees her copper hair against the dingy cloth of her cape. Her cheek, the tip of her nose and her lips are just visible, but the memory doesn’t move, she does not look up and he cannot see her face.
He calculates that he will be home in three days and even so short a time is hard to bear.
• • •
&nbs
p; The mornings in Mazamet were always cold until the sun was high. The plane trees in the square were still and shreds of mist hung in the leaves and blurred the ridges of the tiled roofs. The granite cliffs rising up behind would be invisible, and from somewhere high up on a ledge muffled bleats and the clop of bells would sound as if goats were airborne in the mist.
At this hour, the old men who played boules and argued at the tables had not risen yet, only Madame Baumanière, squat as a jug and dressed in mourning would sweep her step with a twig broom. Later she would sit on a chair by her door peeling vegetables, crocheting or plucking a bird, her knees apart, her feet at ten to two, with barely room on her sloping lap for her bosom and her work.
Michael cleared away the leaves and dust with his sleeve when Delphine brought a tray to his table: coffee, bread, goat’s butter and cherry jam. She shivered. ‘Il fait froid ce matin, Michel, n’est ce pas?’ She leaned down to kiss his hair.
Delphine’s daughters in their brown school coats and berets waited by the fountain for the bus to Carcassonne. They played hopscotch on the bald earth and puffs of dust rose from under their feet – un, deux, trois – and their satchels thumped on their backs. ‘Look, Maman!’ Eugenie cried. ‘And me!’ shouted Augustine. Delphine tucked the tray under her arm and watched.
Four years ago, Delphine’s husband had fallen into a ravine while out hunting. He broke an arm, a rib, and cracked his skull. He seemed to recover but there was pressure on his brain, the doctor at Narbonne had told Delphine, and this accounted for her husband’s agonizing headaches, the rages and the melancholia.
Gradually, he began to lose his speech and his coordination. His memory and his temper worsened. Sometimes he did not know his children, or Delphine, and her heart was numb with sorrow for the man he used to be. He tried to beat the pain out of his head and when he died his face was grey with bruises.
The darkest grief had passed. Delphine told Michael she had no wish to marry again and had become accustomed to the weightlessness of solitude. She had her daughters and the people in Mazamet were kind, but she missed the smell of a warm shirt and the level conversation of a man. She missed the leaden dreamless sleep that comes after sex.
The German Boy Page 12