The German Boy

by Tricia Wastvedt

  She can’t move until Nanna pats the counterpane and says, ‘Sit over here, my chicky, on my other side, then I can see you both.’

  Elisabeth sits down and her head is empty air. Two days have arrived together – the one she prayed would never happen but knew must come, and the one she couldn’t even think of because she wanted it too much. She is cancelled out to nothing because Nanna is leaving her and Michael has come back.

  But in this moment, she has them both.

  She holds Nanna’s hand. It’s cold and clammy like a piece of uncooked chicken, but it is precious and Elisabeth examines the texture of skin, the shape and details of the fingers that have done a lifetime’s work. She holds firmly to memorize the feeling and to imprint Nanna’s hand inside her own. The room smells powerfully of disinfectant. Nanna’s Yardley Lilac flutters like a moth.

  Michael takes Nanna’s other hand.

  ‘Here we go,’ says Nanna, closing her eyes. ‘Mind the dog.’

  Elisabeth looks into Nanna’s face, trying to concentrate until her senses calm. Michael is so changed.

  ‘Would you like a slice?’ Nanna says. ‘Go on. It’s cold out there.’ She is a wisp. Her breathing whistles and her lips are tinged with blue, but they have been for weeks, it might mean nothing. Then she’s snoring.

  Vera comes in and stands watching for a while. ‘The doctor’s on his way. Rachel’s coming home from work.’ Then she leaves.

  ‘Elisabeth,’ says Michael softly, and Elisabeth looks up. She has seen scars before but this one is bewildering. It carves into him, cuts across his temple and down his cheek. It is brutal, she thinks. ‘I know,’ he whispers.

  Then Nanna is awake again. ‘Look out! The oranges are on the loose,’ she shouts. ‘Here they come, chook, chook, they’re being friendly, but oh no, little Bertie, he’s not fooled.’ She chuckles, but her eyes are troubled.

  Then the cloudiness clears and she looks squarely at Elisabeth. ‘You see, my sweet. I always told you.’ She lifts their hands, puts them together on the coverlet, Michael’s on Elisabeth’s. ‘I always knew,’ says Nanna sleepily, ‘didn’t I, my poppet? I said you and Michael would find each other one day.’

  His hand burns. It’s heavy. His fingers touch her ring. Nanna has forgotten about the wedding.

  Michael doesn’t flinch. He will say it for Nanna and Elisabeth will too.

  ‘You were right all along, Nanna,’ he says.

  ‘You were, Nanna darling,’ says Elisabeth. ‘We’re together now.’

  1931

  20

  The great shingle bank of Dungeness sprawls seven miles into the English Channel. This promontory of the Romney Marshes is pushed northwards by the sea; every tide scours six cartloads of pebbles from the southern side and carries them around the point. The summer long-shore raking is slow, but winter gales and spring tides gush through the rabbit warrens and badger setts in the Broomhill Wall and Green Wall bank, filling up the land’s capillaries and seeping northwards underground towards the old town of Lydd. These are the hidden tides of Dungeness, moving through the peat and shingle, under the black tarred fishermen’s huts and old railway carriages with stove pipes and washing lines, under the upturned boats and the hoofs of goats and ponies browsing the acres of sea kale.

  The shingle bank of Dungeness seems like land, but salt water moves under it and mists roll over it as if it is the sea.

  Elisabeth pedals hard, head down, into the wind. Her coat flaps and her face and knees are wet from the salt rain hanging in the air. Sometimes she takes the little train if she has too much to carry in the basket of the bicycle; a pie or potatoes in a bag to peel when she gets there, or mutton cut into cubes for a stew. Today she has a ripe cheese which is too unsociable for the train, and a loaf of bread which she’ll slice before she leaves. She knows Rachel took some eggs to Michael a few days ago and also a rabbit Eddie shot, so that will need cooking too if Rachel didn’t have time.

  When Michael came home, he couldn’t hold a cup, or shave, or fasten buttons. He couldn’t lift a saucepan unless it wasn’t hot, and then he would hold it in his arms. Now he has learned to do most things. He can’t use an axe or a knife. He still can’t hold a paintbrush.

  There is kiddle fishing on the shingle beach near his hut and he knows how to string a net along the poles. If he catches anything, he shares it with his neighbours, who share their catches with him. The neighbours are better fishermen. They sell their surplus at the market in Rye and bring back tea and tobacco which they exchange with him for whisky. Elisabeth brings the whisky for him because it dulls the pain.

  She turns on to the track to Michael’s hut. The compacted shingle glitters under her bicycle wheels, which judder in and out of potholes and splash in puddles. Huts are dotted here and there across the flats as if the gales have scattered them. The people who live out here are generous and solitary. They nod to her when they see her passing on her bicycle or walking across the pebbles from the train, but even after all this time they rarely speak.

  Today the sky is blue, the clouds are blowing inland and the April sun climbs higher. Sometimes this place is almost colourless but today the brilliance makes her eyes ache. In the sunshine the black huts are like holes in the tumps of flickering pink and yellow flowers. A goat looks up, chewing, and its creamy coat could be a splash of bleach on patterned cloth. She can see Michael’s blue shirt hanging on the washing line and, out on the point, the lighthouse cut out red and white as if it’s made of cardboard.

  There are no contours in the land to cast shadows, no subtle tones and no indecisive curves. Everything is flat and bright like Toby’s paint-by-numbers pictures. The horizon looks higher than the land and the sea seems to encircle Dungeness as if it is an island.

  Long before she gets there, Elisabeth sees Michael stacking driftwood by the hut and from here he looks the same: his hair is too long, he’s wearing working clothes, an ochre shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and his arms are brown. She smiles although he hasn’t seen her yet and she pedals harder and skids sideways, jumping off the bike. The shingle scatters and he looks up.

  ‘Here I am,’ she says.

  He raises his hand as if she’s a long way off even though she’s standing right in front of him. Since Nanna held their hands together on the day she died, they do not touch unless it is by accident. A month after he came back to Kent, this almost changed.

  It had been a day of thick sea mist and the waves were pressed flat by the weight of water in the air. When Elisabeth arrived, the fire in the stove had gone out and the hut was cold. The windows were blank as if the hut was floating in a cloud.

  Michael was sleeping. She put a blanket over him and sat down at the table. There was food to cook, but if she moved around in so small a space she would disturb him. The silence seemed to thicken like the whiteness at the windows and it was dark enough to light the lamp, but Elisabeth remained still, watching Michael sleeping in the dusk.

  He had been lying with his face to the wooden wall, now he turned on to his back. There was no scar on this side. His skin was smooth, with a sheen of sweat from the pain he felt even in his sleep.

  She got up from the table and knelt on the floor beside the narrow bed, leaning over him, and she shut her eyes to breathe in the smell of soap and brine, and linseed, very faint, as if he was still a painter. She could taste the warmth of him.

  There wasn’t the yearning or the sadness she thought she’d feel so close to him, but only wonder. It was as simple as another breath; she would lie down beside him.

  She slipped off her shoes, unbuttoned her coat and put it on the table. The sounds she made dropped into the silence and disappeared. There was no ticking clock to separate the minutes. Time had folded like a wave. The dark hut with blank white windows was a white room coloured pink by firelight with a painting on an easel of a naked girl. There was no difference between then and now. She took off her ring.

  Her body had never felt like this before and the longing f
or him dragged inside her. His face had been imprinted on her heart for so many years, but it was unfamiliar, barely known. Elisabeth unbuttoned her dress and let it fall on to the floor. The cold poured over her like icy water.

  Then the thought came: what would happen after this? Hurt and guilt. George could not know she cherished him, that she tried so hard to be a loving wife. And Michael – did he want her now? He had seen her wedding ring the day they said goodbye to Nanna Lydia and he had never tried to persuade her. He told her he would not go away again and being near her was enough. He had not asked for more.

  If he opened his eyes, he would see her stranded stupidly in her slip, shivering with cold and caught out halfway to betrayal. After so many years, this was not how it should be.

  When he woke, the stove was alight and Elisabeth was peeling potatoes on a newspaper at the table.

  Today, Michael picks up her bicycle, leans it against the hut and takes the loaf of bread and the package of cheese out of the basket. He walks easily now and is upright again, not hunched with pain as he was for so long. He doesn’t look so different from the person she remembers. The change in him is subtle and sometimes she thinks she imagines it, because she never knew him well. His battle with his damaged hands absorbs him and there’s something else – is it indifference? Or disappointment. He never looks at her as he did in the studio in Fitzroy Street. He does not seem to see her.

  She follows him into the hut, talking about nothing much and not expecting him to answer. In spite of everything, the happiness of being with him never lessens. Dungeness is like an island and Michael is too. He is another life.

  She loves her husband, his company, the fairness in him that puts her heart in balance whenever he is there. George does not understand deceit. His strength is in the clarity with which he sees the world; his weakness is in trusting her.

  1932

  21

  ‘People tell you lots of ways to stop a baby but not a scrap of good advice when it comes to making one,’ said Rachel. The Orpingtons were scuffling round her feet and she fed them corn from the pocket of her overall. ‘I wish we still had Nanna to give us tips.’ Then she giggled, ‘Eddie’s worn to shreds with trying.’

  ‘Don’t think about babies when you’re doing it,’ said Elisabeth, sitting on the edge of the cattle trough in Eddie’s yard and banging her heels. ‘Fretting gets the spermatozoa going round in circles.’

  Rachel shrieked. ‘My life, Elisabeth! The things you say!’ She flung some corn and the hens sprinted after it with their bloomers fluttering. ‘At his age, George must want a kiddie. What should we be up to that we aren’t? You’re a nurse, you should know.’

  ‘It’s luck, Rachel. That’s all.’

  Elisabeth didn’t mind her failure to have a child with George and it didn’t surprise her: her heart and body were separate. Rachel was impatient and beginning to feel anxious. Eddie had already been a father to poor baby Archie so it couldn’t be because of him that Rachel wasn’t pregnant yet.

  Little Toby Schroëder had to be shared between the four of them. He was nine years old, and the remnants of the Schroëders’ fortune paid the boarding fees at a school in Kent. His father was building a new career in armaments and had taken the family home to New York, but Toby suffered so badly with the separation from Elisabeth that Ingrid Schroëder agreed to send him back to England.

  Every Friday, George would drive the Daimler to collect him from the school in Tunbridge Wells and Toby spent weekends with them. His spotted pony, Little Bear, still grazed in Eddie and Rachel’s pasture. Sometimes Toby helped Eddie with the milking or Rachel with the hens, or he rode along the beach to Vera’s bungalow, where she fed him and scolded him for looking like a gypsy boy. No one worried where he was because all the land was home. He lived wild like a fox cub. The boy who used to worry about sun and wind didn’t care now if it rained when he was swimming with Little Bear in the sea, if he lost his shoes or slept in straw.

  His aunt, Francesca Brion, drove down from London occasionally to visit and she seemed to approve of the change in him. She was as lovely as Elisabeth remembered her, still neat and gracious. The silver in her hair made her dark eyes more beautiful.

  Once, on a visit, when they were having tea in the little sitting room and waiting for Toby to come home, Francesca Brion said lightly to Elisabeth, ‘I haven’t heard from Michael Ross for some time. He always lets me know his whereabouts. I’m wondering if you’ve heard anything at all?’

  For a moment Elisabeth didn’t know what to say. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I see Michael often. He’s living not far from here.’ She saw a minute flicker in Francesca’s eyes and it was acknowledged: the equalizing of that moment when they first met all those years ago outside Michael’s studio and Francesca had subtly claimed him. She had not been honest, Elisabeth knew that now.

  Francesca Brion looked down at her teacup. ‘I’m so glad he’s well.’

  ‘He came home when his grandmother was dying. I was close to Nanna and she asked for me. Michael and I –’

  ‘I wonder, do you have his address?’

  ‘There’s no address. I could take a letter to him, if you like.’

  ‘How can there be no address? How strange.’ Her sweet American voice didn’t falter in its gentleness and good manners.

  Anger that should have died long ago rose up inside Elisabeth. She did not feel guilty for inflicting this humiliation; it was deserved. ‘Dungeness doesn’t have streets. If you send a letter it might be delivered or it might not.’

  Francesca smoothed the pair of blue kid gloves lying on her lap. ‘Then perhaps you would tell him,’ she said evenly, ‘that the studio in Fitzroy Street is still in his name. I should like Michael to know the lease will be renewed for him.’

  ‘He doesn’t paint any more.’ Elisabeth was swept along by spite and it came easily now. ‘He won’t want your studio.’

  Francesca sipped her tea. ‘He may not want it now, but things change, Elisabeth. When we last met you were not married, as I remember.’

  They never mentioned Michael again and somehow they found a way around this boulder on the path of a friendship which must be maintained because of Toby.

  Elisabeth knew when Francesca had found Michael on Dungeness because the blue gloves were on his table. He didn’t hide them and Elisabeth didn’t ask. What was between them could not be altered by Francesca Brion, but Elisabeth took the gloves and flung them in the sea.

  • • •

  The house in Munich had been oppressive for so long, but now, almost empty and being left behind, it seemed to Karen to be full of wistful benevolence. The fir trees weren’t sinister any more and she couldn’t imagine why she’d ever thought their branches moving in the wind were an ogre in the forest.

  She was eating lunch in the dining room. The dust disturbed by all the movement in the house streamed in the icy sunshine, and if she blew softly up into light, the motes wheeled and twinkled.

  It was easy to be alone now. Solitude was simple and she could not recall how it felt when she was never by herself. Far away, in a different life, snoring Betty had shared her room at the hotel – or Stan sneaked in when Betty was bribed to spend the night elsewhere. And all the years at home in Catford, Elisabeth was always trailing after her.

  The house was full of people today but Karen had no part in the work that needed to be done, so she was eating slowly, keeping out of the way and waiting to be told when to move so the dining table could be loaded on to the lorry. The legs of the table and the chairs were already wrapped in cardboard, the curtains had been taken down and the carpets rolled up. The furniture to be left behind was covered with sheets and looked like icebergs sailing across the bare floor.

  Outside on the gravel were trunks of linen and crates of crystal and china packed in straw. The mirrors were laid flat on the lawn, and various armchairs, armoires and tables huddled together in the cold breeze like people waiting, aimless and homeless, for whatever might happen
to them next.

  The largest pieces of furniture were being carried out of the front door, up the ramp into the lorry with Hede shouting directions to the men.

  Hede had seen the house in Salzburg, although Karen hadn’t. Their new home was large and well decorated, Hede said, and the previous inhabitants had left behind a library of books and dozens of oil paintings on the walls. The Jewish family who used to live there had decided to emigrate, as many were these days, and hadn’t wanted the inconvenience and expense of taking all their things. Although it was odd, Hede said, that the cupboards were still full of clothes and the beds were made.

  The bodies of two shepherd hounds had been thrown into a flowerbed and a starving kitten was mewing in the cellar. Hede brought back the kitten in a box, but when she opened the lid to show little Stefan, it shot away into the forest and disappeared.

  Artur had gone ahead to Salzburg a month ago. Karen did not know much about his work these days. She understood the new administration was reforming the economy in Germany and, necessarily, it was Jews who were most affected. Only those who opposed the general good were forced in any way – and that was the same for anyone who did not support the Führer’s plans.

  Some people were more fervent in their views than others and at first it had been shocking to see the insults daubed across the shops and businesses of Jewish people, but now it just seemed part of the change in Germany.

  Elisabeth had written that newspapers in England were full of stories of bullying and violence. People outside Germany didn’t understand, Karen wrote back. Progress is always painful for a few, but the difficulties weren’t significant and no one was being hurt. It was a matter of putting proper Germans first. No one shopped at Rosenbaum’s any more and that was the only way she was personally affected. Rosenbaum’s used to have the nicest dresses anywhere in Munich.