It was good to have a little one to look after again, and original as he was, Master Tobias Schroëder made life normal and familiar. Lydia needed to remind herself to turn in the kettle spout and the handles of the saucepans, put across the fire guard and not to leave a cup too near an edge. Anything sharp or dangerous was put away although Toby was not the kind of child to dash about or meddle with a matchbox or a knife.
He had a face that haunted you – too pretty for a boy, angelic, as if he already had a toe beyond this life. He needed sun and puddings, Lydia decided, to give him colour and some ballast, or the Dymchurch breeze would knock him flat. She had never heard a boy so confident in conversation, even paying compliments and offering opinions, which Lydia didn’t think was healthy for a child. For all the indulgences he was accustomed to, it was as if he’d never been treated like a little one before. It was clear he loved Elisabeth.
And Elisabeth, still with the thoughtfulness and hesitation she used to have, but fuller now and colourful in graceful exotic clothes that Lydia had seen only in Woman’s Sphere. Her hair was short. She smoked cigarettes like Vera and Rachel and most women did these days as something stylish and feminine, although Lydia couldn’t see the appeal of breathing smoke when there was enough of that with fat dripping in the oven and fires that wouldn’t draw.
The evening they arrived in Kent, Elisabeth seemed almost as she used to be. Vera made a pot of tea after dinner and Nanna and Rachel sang songs for Toby, who sat on Elisabeth’s lap.
If you can’t afford a carriage, forget about the marriage;
I won’t be jammed, I won’t be crammed
On a bicycle built for two.
‘What queer words,’ Toby said. ‘What does “afford” mean, Elisabeth?’
Elisabeth sang too.
There’s a long, long night of waiting, until my dreams all come true,
Till the day when I’ll be going down that long, long trail with you.
She put Toby to bed, and not long after they all turned in too.
Lydia heard Rachel and Elisabeth giggling like they used to do as girls. Their voices kept at bay the monsters which shouldered through Lydia’s mind when the bedside lamp was out. She often couldn’t keep them away even if she talked to Lemuel, what with the groaning sea and cackling pebbles and the thick tar of nothingness against the window glass. But that night, the gossamer thread of Elisabeth and Rachel’s whispering held Lydia floating, and she bobbed away on sleep as she’d not done in months.
She woke up to shouting seagulls and thoughts she’d not had for an age: the preparation of breakfast. Snip bacon rind, stab sausages, wipe mushrooms with the Irish linen cloth that was coarse enough to slough off the earth but would not break the skin. Elisabeth had offered to help and Lydia looked forward to the talk they would have while they worked together. Lydia would pass on some tips on coaxing little Toby into line.
But in the morning, Elisabeth’s happiness had vanished and some trouble had overtaken her.
• • •
The Kentish wind bangs her hair against her ears and sounds are wavering and tinny as if they are coming through a wireless set; squealing children, a yapping dog and the skirl of gulls. Seaweed and rotting fish are sometimes at the edges of the wind but mostly the air smells of nothing and seems to fizz inside her head like liver salts.
The sand is full of colours. Elisabeth digs her fingers down and scoops a cool damp handful. She pokes through the grains and they’re spangled black and purple, white and pink. The mystery is there’s no yellow although the beach that stretches in both directions is the colour of straw.
The sky is white, the tide is out so far on greenish mud it’s only visible by the wrinkle of a wave that barely heaves itself over the popping suds of the one that went before.
The sea is doing nothing. It’s khaki to the pencil line of France. There’s no passion in it. She needs foamy horses flinging up their manes to match the tempest in her mind. Karen met Michael in Paris and they went to Munich, and why shouldn’t they? But why didn’t Karen say? There was nothing in the postcard from Paris, and nothing in the letters since.
Toby wants to fill up the tin bucket Nanna Lydia has given him so Elisabeth claps the sand off her hands and walks with him to the sea. They labour across the soft dry sand, then the hard ridges that press into the arches of their feet. He patters in the wet beside her, worrying that he’ll step on worm coils or rags of seaweed or bits of crab claw. She holds a fistful of her skirt to hoist it higher but the soaking hem slaps her legs. They walk into the wind. Ahead, the sea seems to get no nearer, while the bungalows behind them shrink to cubes of white and people are coloured dots along the promenade. Toby shivers at the emptiness.
At last they are standing in a few inches of water. The Channel is so listless they don’t know where it begins. Toby trawls the bucket and suspended in the water are tiny transparent creatures with tentacles and bobble eyes. He shrieks, flings the bucket in the sea.
‘That’s kind of you, Toby. We should always put creatures back,’ Elisabeth says, hitching up her hem again and wading for the bucket.
Now she is sitting on the sand once more and Toby digs with a spade. He has no coordination, Elisabeth observes. He can’t keep the spade level and the sand keeps sliding off. He can’t visualize a moat and castle so the trench he’s dug and the pile of sand make no sense.
A moat, a castle and a spade. It began here. Or perhaps before.
Karen is six. She wears white bloomers, sailor pinafore and sunhat. It is hot; bleached-out sky, tawny sand, and their mother is knitting in a deckchair in a flowered dress and sunglasses. Their father lets the sun polish up his face. He has a book open on his chest, but he doesn’t read or doze because Karen keeps on and on telling him he must watch.
She squats like a grasshopper, knees up, head down, and her thin legs are brown. She says Elisabeth is a piglet because she’s pink and fat. Elisabeth is four. Her skin is scorched by the sun and her bare feet are tormented by prickling things in the sand.
They have dug a moat and when the sea comes in they’ll stand on top of the mound that is their castle. The moat will fill up and overflow, then join the tide, and they’ll be way out in the ocean. The ramparts will slide away under their feet, the towers with paper flags will topple and dissolve, and they’ll screech with terror although the water is only inches deep and if they wanted they could splash to the shore any time.
Rescue will come when their father rolls up his trousers and paddles across. He says Karen doesn’t need to be carried any more with those long legs but he’ll swing Elisabeth on to his shoulders because she is small. He’ll save her.
But not yet. They dig the moat, piling up sand for the castle, and they needn’t talk because they have a system: Elisabeth works from one corner, and Karen from another.
The sea is coming. The deckchairs are moved back, resettled, their mother is knitting again, their father stands with his hands in his pockets and his summer trousers snapping in the breeze.
The sea is coming and it pushes a creamy scum ahead of it. They climb on to the castle and Karen has her arms around Elisabeth, hugging her. They shiver, wrapped together, waiting for the siege. The water sidles up, backs off. Nudges, sinks away. This time is it. The froth spews into the moat, stirs around the corners and maroons them.
The sea comes quickly now it’s made a start. It’s confident. They cling and squeal, trample the collapsing castle, and their bloomers are splashed, their sunhats drip. Their castle is doomed and they will drown together.
Then Karen is squealing differently, louder. She hops, pushes Elisabeth away and topples her knee-deep in the water. Karen lifts her foot, mewing. Perhaps she stepped on a shell, perhaps a stone, a piece of glass, perhaps, perhaps …
She stands on one leg, keening, and Dadda is coming, four strides, and here he is. ‘Carry me,’ Karen says, holding up her arms, and then, ‘My toe hurt on her spade.’ She looks coldly at Elisabeth. He lifts Karen up and c
arries her.
Elisabeth is alone in the circling sea which sucks at her feet, shoves her knees craftily when no one sees. Their castle has nearly gone, and real fear, not pretend, is muddling up her limbs. She will drown this time, properly, because she can’t keep up with Dadda’s legs scything through the water. Karen looks over his shoulder. She smirks down at Elisabeth.
It is nothing. They splash out of the sea, Karen’s toe is better, the things are packed up, and they go home.
Nothing happened but something did, and this is how it has always been: moments Elisabeth can’t foresee or guard against when Karen proves that things can always be adjusted to her liking. The balance between them is corrected although Elisabeth hadn’t known anything was wrong.
And now, again, it’s nothing. Karen saw Michael in Paris and they went together on the train to Munich. Why shouldn’t they?
Elisabeth mashes sand between her palms. The day seems endless.
Karen is marrying Artur Landau and must have forgotten meeting Michael – that’s why her letters never said. If she was here, she would laugh and say it doesn’t matter because Michael is just someone they used to know in London and Elisabeth is tying herself in knots. She’s inventing drama where there is none.
Elisabeth can’t keep this thought from being pushed aside by another: Karen didn’t tell her and there’s a lie in the omission, a deceit that is impossible to grasp and as slippery as sand.
• • •
It had been five months since Karen arrived in Munich. She had learned some German words. ‘Karte, Hede, please. Map of Munich, bitte,’ she said to Hede’s rear and the pinned-tight coils of her yellow plaits. Hede was bending over, putting clothes away, and there wasn’t a flicker of a pause in her folding. There would be no hurrying someone so substantial with so methodical a hairstyle.
At last Hede straightened up, rubbed away the bend in her back and sighed. The embroidery of alpine flowers on the bosom of her blouse lifted up and settled again. ‘Ah mep?’ she said. Her face was as flawless as an egg, with a puff of pink on each cheek from the exertion. Close to, there would be lupin-blue reflections in Hede’s eyes of Karen’s face staring up out of a mound of pillows.
‘Fund, Hede. Karte. Chop, chop,’ said Karen.
Hede was learning to make sense of the skinny Fräulein’s flailing German. She filled the bath and laid out Karen’s clothes, then went off downstairs, returning with a breakfast tray and an atlas.
‘But there are no streets in this, Hede. A map of München. Oh, bother. Oh, never mind.’ Karen waved away the atlas. Not knowing how to ask for things was like being small again. There must have been a time like this long ago when the world was made of wild things that didn’t answer to a name. It was lonely when the sounds you made were gibberish to everyone. No wonder babies cried so much.
Artur was the only one who understood. He was teaching her to summon all the skulking, untamed things: like hairbrush, Haarbürste; brassière, Büstenhalter; lipstick, Lippenstift.
In the mornings Karen saw no one except for Hede. Pappa Landau left for work at six and Mutti Landau didn’t come downstairs until lunch.
Soon, Karen and Artur would move into the house Pappa Landau was giving them as a wedding gift. The house was already furnished: heavy lace, dark wood and crystal lamps – a small version of this one. Karen had nothing to do.
There had been a fuss a month ago when she had a bout of the tiredness. Her ankles and stomach swelled, which had never happened before, and she explained to the kindly Doktor Hartog who spoke English that it must be because of the rheumatic fever she had when she was ten.
Then there were some different symptoms, and yesterday the Doktor had confirmed the news, telling Pappa and Mutti Landau that Karen should not work from now on and that she must rest in the afternoons.
Artur did not know yet. He had not come home again last night.
This morning she would find the restaurant where Artur met his friends and she would surprise him. He would be sitting at a crowded table and he’d look up and not recognize her at first with her hair put up and wearing a new pale pink velvet coat. He would get up to kiss her, put his arm around her waist and introduce her to his friends as his fiancée, his Verlobte. Then she would tell him she was pregnant.
At the mirror, she smiled, didn’t smile, licked her lips and pulled the pins out of her hair, which looked too severe. She noticed that her hands were shaking. She hadn’t expected to feel like this about Artur Landau and never in her life had she missed a boy before. It made her edgy. Artur was out so much, her nerves were taut, and even when she was distracted for a while, part of her was always listening for his car.
When he was home and close to her, the bunching of her nerves didn’t stop because the missing went too deep. There was never time enough for her heart to settle, to drink her fill, to let him soak her through before he left again.
He was out most days and often at night too, busy with Party work. ‘There are sacrifices when a cause is great,’ he often told her. She wondered what the cause might be, but she must trust him; he was working for their future and for Germany’s.
Karen understood this, although Pappa Landau clearly did not. He and Artur had arguments over dinner which Karen could not follow. Artur would shout and bang his fist on the table.
If she didn’t know he cared for her so much, she’d think he was furious with her as well. He made love as if he was taking out his anger on her body. Afterwards he fell asleep in the wreckage of the sheets that were soaked with his sweat and hers, and she would ache from the wrenching of her arms and legs. Her skin was stinging with the roughness of his hands, and his making love so hard she had to stop herself from crying.
In the morning, Artur would touch the marks he’d made and tell her he was sorry. He stroked her face and kissed her. He would spread out her arms and legs, kiss her bruises, her breasts and her aching belly, and she knew the pain wasn’t only hers but shared between them.
When he stayed away for a night, or two or three, she would remind herself how much he needed her.
He seemed different since she had come to Munich, and perhaps this was the proper change from the first infatuation. In London he had been doped and drunk with love for her; now his eyes had other thoughts in them as if he looked at her through glass. But the wedding plans were being made so everything must be right.
The car drove through the suburbs, large square houses with wooden shutters, iron gates and stands of blackish firs that looked like remnants of an ancient forest, then into the city.
As they passed the station, Karen thought of Michael Ross. It seemed odd he hadn’t been in touch. Artur told her he had called at the boarding house but Michael had already gone. He had left behind a rolled-up canvas. ‘You should have it,’ Artur said to her. ‘He is your friend. A picture of a pretty girl. Not thin. Not you.’
In the painting, the girl held on to her sunhat and her hair was wild in the breeze. Her face was in shadow but Karen knew it was Elisabeth. The picture proved how right it was that Michael had not returned to England; he might think he was in love but he would never be a man like Artur. Elisabeth should have a husband who could look after her. What good was love when you were scraping out a dreary little existence with nothing to look forward to? There had been enough of that in Catford.
But the colours in the picture, Elisabeth’s bright hair like a flame against the sky, made Karen’s heart drag as if a part of her was breaking. Was it because she missed Elisabeth, or was it longing for the feelings that had painted her this way?
Whatever it might be, the picture was too much to bear. Karen put it away in a cupboard.
The car stopped near the Hofgarten. The place where Artur met his friends was just along the street and she didn’t need a map after all. When she opened the door, the heat fell on her, the tables were full with lunchtime diners and people were standing drinking. Karen pushed her way between them, asking if they would please move, although mo
stly they ignored her or couldn’t hear. Empty plates had smears of fat, full ones were loaded up with meat. She could taste cigarette smoke in her mouth.
There was the embarrassment of not knowing her destination, of having to turn around and ask people to move a second time. Everyone could see she was alone. Two women with vermilion lipstick looked her up and down, and smirked. A group of men wouldn’t move aside and Karen was forced between them. They unfolded their arms, lifting them so she was pressed between their paunches. She sweated in the velvet coat.
Then she saw Artur. The heat was spiking up his hair and his shirt was open to the chest. He was sitting with his back against a wall amongst a crowd of men who were leaning on tables pushed together and loaded with beer flagons, steins and empty coffee cups. He chopped the air with his hand, emphasizing something, then he laughed. She watched, waiting for the moment when he would look across and see her.
He leaned forward to light a cigarette from someone sitting across the table. With both hands, Artur steadied the hand held out to him – a smooth muscular arm with the sleeve rolled up. His blue eyes looked up at the man she could not see; two seconds, three, four. This look was not through glass. She wanted to turn now and go.
Then Artur noticed her, stood up and smiled. He clambered out from his seat, climbing across his friends who were shouting and jeering. They hardly glanced at her. The tables rocked and glasses tipped and spiralled in the puddles. She waited, buffeted at her back, until he reached her, then he took her hand and led her through the crowd towards the door.
She can see he expects an explanation so she says it in a rush, clumsily, almost like an accusation. In the street with people walking past, she tells him she is pregnant.
So many thoughts are in his eyes she can’t follow what they are. His skin is waxy as if he hasn’t slept, he smells of stale cigarettes and beer, but his face is beautiful and she has to stare because he is new again, astonishing.
Then he drops his jacket on the pavement and he kisses her. Exhaustion sinks through her as it always does when she’s close to him again. It has only been two days but it feels so long. Her legs are heavy and she wants to lie against him in his arms, not making love, just sleeping. This weariness always comes after the hours and days and nights alone. She is so tired she would fall down right here on the pavement if he wasn’t holding her.
The German Boy Page 17