The German Boy

by Tricia Wastvedt

  Elisabeth in a blue costume was standing next to George. Nanna Lydia and Vera beaming fit to burst, and afterwards they all flung petals and bits of coloured paper that went up on the breeze.

  Rachel put her arm through his to have the photographic portrait taken which George Mander had arranged. Eddie stood motionless but Rachel suddenly turned to kiss him, and in the printed picture her face and the posy ribbons were like a puff of mist, the dress and her hair streaming out like smoke.

  There he was, smart in every detail, fixed to the earth, and Rachel like a wraith around him. She said it didn’t matter because this was how they were, him clear and still, and her all restlessness and muddle.

  Rachel had suffered sadness in her life just like him but she wasn’t cowed or beaten, and gradually he believed her when she said they’d both had their share of mourning.

  Now he knew they’d been distracted, looking in the wrong direction when all the time a different grief was stalking them.

  There was a shallow rise where Eddie stood against the tree and smoked. The apathy that wore him out these days made the effort of wading seem impossible. He could feel the tender sponginess of his feet after two long days of being submerged in old canvas ditcher’s boots and he thought of London streets with cobbles, a pavement and lamps along the kerb. It seemed miraculous that he had lived in a place where he could walk without the ground sucking at his feet.

  London brick never altered with the weather, the horizon of roofs and chimneys was rigid and dependable. Even in the freeze of winter, London smells were smeared across whole neighbourhoods and stirred around with drains and soot; the brewery at Greenwich, the abattoir and the stinking tannery at Deptford, were proof of activity and toil, proof he was alive because his lungs would heave and his nose was assaulted with every breath he took.

  Here in Kent the air was nothing. No shape to it and no knowing if anything his eyes could see was more than a watery illusion. Perhaps he should be grateful that at least one soft rank smell – damp dog – was available to convince him he was still alive on this dreary afternoon. The collie leaned against his leg, gazing out across the water.

  Eddie flicked away his cigarette and the movement let in the chill under his coat, distracting him for a second from the melancholy that had settled over him. The wind was getting up, roughing the surface of the water and scribbling over the perfect reflection of the church. There would be a skin of ice so fine it would feel almost soft when he started wading through it, and under the surface each blade of grass and twig and leaf would be magnified like something fixed in glass.

  He was thinking of Lucy and his baby boy again. The seven years with Rachel were not taking him away from Lucy but home to her. More and more, his mind flew back to London, back through the years.

  Lucy cradles new-born Archie at her breast. She looks up and smiles.

  The door to the street is open and Lucy stands on the pavement with Archie on her hip. She’s giggling with Florrie Tanner, and Archie swivels his head to gaze at Eddie, then seems to come to a decision. He will speak. DAAAAA, he shrieks, flinging out his arms as if the word has knocked him backwards.

  Then Eddie is sitting on a hard chair beside Lucy’s bed as he has been for three days and nights. Sometimes when he opens his eyes he doesn’t know if he’s been asleep or if this waking is another dream. There are noises in the ward, coughs and rasping breath, squeaking shoes on the waxed linoleum, and the sounds are part of him as if he’s lived here all his life.

  The curtain around the bed has a pattern of roses and pink ribbons. He knows he will never forget how the petals fold so tenderly and the ribbons are the colour of watery blood. When a nurse draws across the curtain and no one can see, he leans close to Lucy. She breathes slowly as if she is inhaling perfume, exhales, and he pulls down his mask and sucks in her poisoned breath.

  Lucy opens her eyes. Has Archie taken food today, she asks. She strains against the rawness in her throat and her voice barks, then disappears. Eddie strokes her hair, which has been cut because the Matron said the heat of it was worsening the fever. It will make no difference, Eddie knows it and the Matron must know it too. Lucy’s plait of hair was thrown away. Eddie wanted it but couldn’t bring himself to ask.

  Lucy says again, has Archie taken nourishment? Is he all right? Eddie tells her, yes. It is the only lie there has ever been between them, but it’s nearly the truth because Archie isn’t hungry. He is waiting.

  Lucy seems satisfied. Good. Our baby boy.

  Eddie kisses her and his tongue touches her lips but they’re dry as chalk and there’s nothing for him. He is trying to steal from her, to take his share, although she doesn’t know and she smiles sleepily as if what he’s done is ordinary and nice.

  A creature with a blank white muzzle flaps aside the curtain and the runners screech along the rail. Her eyes flick across the bed, then fix on him. You should go home, Mr Saunders, and get yourself some sleep.

  A swan was landing and its great webbed feet skidded out in front, rumpling the silky flatness of the water. It settled, the wings folding away like a magic trick.

  He must get on with his work and he should keep his mind on Rachel, who deserved better than him fleeing to be secretly with Lucy.

  He must remember how Rachel used to be and must still be underneath the longing that tormented her. She used to sing to the hens and swing the bucket on her arm. She could bring back a lamb almost from the dead with whispering her will into the creature’s soul. And in their bedroom, in the lamplight, she didn’t used to care about the little cries she made like the night sounds outside in the blackness. Eddie remembered her smooth heavy limbs, and her smile through the tangle of her hair.

  Three years ago, Elisabeth had a baby girl, Christina, and that was the beginning of the change. Rachel was happy for Elisabeth but it had started – the closing up against him.

  ‘I can’t explain,’ Rachel told him angrily. ‘It’s all of me, all the time, every second, even when I’m busy, or talking, or thinking other things. It’s like being thirsty – the deepest thirst you ever could imagine and I’m not allowed to drink. I’m not a proper wife like Lucy was.’

  ‘I’m happy, Rachel,’ he used to tell her. ‘I don’t want anything but you.’

  This morning, in the dark, he could feel her mind clenched away and smouldering. She’d had a dream, she said, that she had a baby but she had forgotten where she’d left it. The baby was a sparrow in a knitted coat, then it was a foal with silver eyes, and then it was a human baby so tiny that she looked in all her pockets, in the kitchen drawers and behind the cushions on the sofa. The baby would die if she didn’t find it.

  The dream was terrible, she said, but still better than waking up and finding she had nothing. Her face was spiteful and triumphant as if this was a challenge he could not meet, a provocation to an argument he could never win.

  At one time, Eddie would have said, ‘You’ve got me, we’ve got each other,’ but he didn’t any more. She wanted to hurt him and to make him feel her pain. As if he didn’t.

  When he got up and dressed, Rachel didn’t come down with him to make his bottle of tea. She didn’t say goodbye and that was proof enough they had reached the end. Love always knows that any parting could be the last. A man and woman who don’t say goodbye have stopped caring if they’re tempting fate.

  The collie fidgeted and Eddie felt the chill where the dog’s heat had been. All this thinking would not save his sheep. Eddie flexed his hands and stamped his feet. The dog was wagging, looking back, and there was Rachel, wading out towards him. Her coat trailed in the water and a hunting satchel was slung across her chest. She looked mournful as a shadow with her long hair loose and her dark eyes so grave.

  ‘Hello, dog. Hello, Eddie,’ she said. ‘I brought some tea for you.’

  He told her he couldn’t stop because the evening was coming on, but the truth was he didn’t want her peace offering. He didn’t want to soften like he always did and be p
unished all over again.

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ she said, as if it was so simple.

  He said he’d have to carry her across or she’d be useless with the cold and he hoped she would decline, hearing the discouragement in his voice.

  ‘All right,’ she said.

  He didn’t want her company but he longed to be with her. He was glad she asked to be with him and angry with himself for giving in. He didn’t want more harm to his love for her, but then perhaps he’d never loved anyone but Lucy. The contradiction of it all took away his voice. The dog looked from one to the other, waiting for a resolution.

  At last, Eddie nodded and turned his back, and Rachel put her hands up on his shoulders and gave a little jump, like children do, expecting him to catch her. She put her arms around his neck and her cheek side by side with his.

  He had almost forgotten the feel of her, her faint musky smell like fresh planed wood and roses. She was a good even weight that would not trouble him. His arms were under her knees, her legs were around his waist and there was a time when this would have made him hot and tight with need for her and she would want him too, but their bodies were silent now, as if all the spark and hope between them had run down, useless.

  He started wading and Rachel’s feet made furrows in the water. The collie swam beside the half-barrel for the rescued lambs floating on its rope. The evening yawned across the water. The cold was bitter.

  Up ahead, there was an arrowhead of phosphorescence and they saw a vixen swimming, then they came upon her cubs far behind her and almost drowned, with their heads straining up and their skinny bodies sinking. Their eyes were staring into death. Eddie scooped them up, the three of them, and put them in the barrel.

  His legs below him were scissoring in slow motion and so numb they might not be his. The pasture under his feet looked more luscious through the lens of water and the collie swam beside him, seeming to be running in mid-air with streamers of bubbles from its paws.

  A swimming hare, her nose a little prow, was pointing away from the church and out towards empty water. The collie circled twice using the tiller of its tail, then left the hare alone. Eddie was beside her, within reach of the flattened sodden ears, the bony skull and long dark body with its wake of turbulence. He had rescued the fox cubs – and him a farmer who should know better than to interfere – so why not a hare? Her eyes showed fear, not of drowning but of him, of the dog and cubs she knew were close. He would be pulling her from one terror to another, compounding her helplessness for his own sake, not for hers, and he fought inside himself to save the creature’s life. Then he saw it: the will to live was in the graceful motion of her legs and he knew the wisdom of a hare could be trusted more than his own. He let her swim.

  Rachel seemed heavier and heavier, silent, resting her chin on his shoulder and her arms around him. They passed a drowned lamb floating, spread-eagled like a woolly starfish, revolving slowly.

  The ground was rising and the weight of the water lessened against Eddie’s legs. Rachel slipped off his back.

  They found a single ewe on the island at Fairfield Church. Two lambs were dead on the grass and three were packed tight in the shelter of a buttress, their heads resting on their hooflets. The church doors were open and more sheep huddled by the pulpit. A steaming mud-caked plough horse was standing in the nave.

  They sat in the pews drinking tea from the flask, and the quiet between them was peaceful, as if the fury had gone for a while from Rachel’s grief. Outside, across the Marsh, the wind was picking up. The vixen and her cubs slipped underneath the shadows.

  Later, when the light had almost gone, they gathered up the sleeping lambs and put them into the half-barrel boat. The collie chivvied the ewes to follow.

  They rode the plough horse back through the flood, Eddie sitting behind Rachel, who leaned back on him with her hands on his hands holding the horse’s mane.

  Something had altered in her, surrendered. It might be that she was coming back to him or she might have set off swimming into nothing like the hare.

  • • •

  Karen remembered how eager she used to be, and sure of herself, leaping from one hope to another. Now she didn’t have the energy or the taste for taking chances and wasn’t fool enough to think the effort would be worth it.

  Her greatest wish was that she should remain exactly as she was, going through the days like a cow along a path. She would keep her eyes on small things on the ground and ignore the little diamond glints of happiness that vanished if she looked at them. Elisabeth used to tell her she was reckless and contrary. She was the opposite now – she was the absence of anything at all. The mystery was how still a life could be, so still its passing and its dying couldn’t be detected.

  I make myself busy doing this and that, but I’m inert. I’m nailed to the black.

  There was nothing she liked about herself except her patience and her marvellous ability to pretend. Hypocrisy hung round her neck as such deceits do hang, and it tired her. Every morning there was the job of raking around inside herself for sufficient docile cunning to get through the day and she would lie in bed and close her eyes – for trenches are best dug in the dark – until she felt invisible.

  I even fool my children. They don’t know I’ve given in. I pretend our life is wonderful but the world is mean, it cuts you down to nothing. Everything in Germany is squeezed too tight and stewing. Perhaps this is how a mother has to be because there’s nothing she can do.

  She knew there must be other women in Germany who were as false as her, but they would be hiding too, so how could they ever know each other?

  She needed Elisabeth. A sister is an anchor to the truth about oneself and Karen had drifted into nowhere. Even Elisabeth might not recognize her now, seeing the healthy flesh on Karen’s body but not understanding that the fat was not contentment but part of the disguise. It filled the bodice of an evening dress and distracted from the thinness of her conversation. She made as good a show as anyone at loyalty and hatred in accordance with Party lines.

  Artur seemed satisfied. He never minded if his statuesque English wife was surrounded all evening by leering Party friends, and this was how dinner this coming Saturday would go. Karen’s ravishing décolletage and perfect manners would mesmerize her guests, and her mind would be as blank as a plate.

  • • •

  Karen asked Knitted Dog and One-eared Bear, ‘Where’s Antje? Where can she be?’ Antje squealed behind the curtain, screwing up the tassels in her fists – more marks on the silk for Hede to suck her teeth at, Karen thought. It didn’t matter; they would have new curtains. Karen crawled across the floor looking under the chairs and her hair came out of its pins. She looked inside a puzzle box, in Antje’s shoes and behind the cushions on the sofa. ‘No, she’s not here. Or here. Or here.’

  Antje lost her balance and fell out from behind the curtain, dashed away across the polished floor, slithered in her socks and Karen chased her, scooped her up. ‘Ich habe dich. I’ve got you!’ Antje squirmed in her arms. ‘Quick, off you go. I’m counting again. One. Two. Three …’ Antje fled.

  ‘Is Stefan home yet, Hede?’ Karen called. On these summer evenings, Stefan would be with his troop learning to pitch a tent and march straight, practising his Heil Hitlers to get them exactly right.

  ‘Mutti, I’m here,’ Stefan said. He had Artur’s skill of slipping in unnoticed and Artur’s habit of swallowing down a smile. Karen kissed his hair. Antje hugged his waist and Stefan pretended to gnaw at her. ‘I’m the ogre. Yum Yum.’

  Antje’s shrieks brought Hede to the door, hands on hips. ‘Our baby child is breaking glass in Timbuktu. The food is ready. Now, madam.’

  Karen had given up asking Hede not to call her madam; it was Hede’s notion of Englishness and class, Karen supposed. The dishes were on the table and Hede was cutting up Antje’s food.

  ‘I’ll do it, Hede.’

  ‘You see how I cut it, madam? Our baby girl likes her food just so,’ s
aid Hede fondly. ‘Heddy knows a game and Antje will finish everything.’

  ‘Antje will sit by me, Hede. I’ll see to her.’

  Hede settled her bulk and loaded up her plate. Since Antje was born and Artur was away so much, Hede ate with them. They had Cook and girls to serve, so Hede had become a companion of sorts to Karen, although they had little to talk about other than the children and the running of the household.

  The meal was quiet. Stefan made faces across the table and hummed his Hitlerjugend songs for Antje, who giggled and forgot to eat unless Karen reminded her. Hede chopped and ate methodically. The maid brought in the pudding.

  ‘I’ve decided on the menu for Saturday, Hede,’ Karen said. ‘There’ll be eighteen of us so the caterers will come. Tell Cook to take the evening off. Herr Bölling and Doktor Grundmann will sit near Artur.’

  ‘Ja, madam, okay.’

  ‘Stefan will stay up for dinner and I should like you to bring Antje in to say goodnight.’

  Hede looked up, chewing slowly. ‘To see Herr Bölling and Doktor Grundmann? These men, madam?’

  ‘Antje is old enough to meet people, don’t you think? It will be good for her.’

  Hede put down her spoon.

  ‘What is it, Hede?’

  ‘It is nothing.’

  ‘If you’ve finished, Stefan darling, would you take Antje in the garden,’ Karen said. Stefan took Antje’s hand and a moment later, through the window, Karen saw them on the lawn, Antje on Stefan’s shoulders, holding his ears and swiping at the blossom on the cherry tree.

  ‘What is it, Hede?’

  Hede dabbed her lips, tipped her plate for the last drop of cream. ‘You are her Mutti and must know best.’

  ‘You think it’s too late in the evening for her? I’m sure just this once won’t hurt.’

  Hede put down her spoon, delicately positioning it to line up with the pattern on the plate. She frowned as if she needed to gather up her thoughts. ‘It is not that, madam. Ah, my mind is such a muddle. You will tell me I am crazy. Mad, you say in English, as a hat.’ Hede folded her hands in her lap and looked up to the ceiling. ‘It is this. We visit England … it is, I think, five years ago. Herr Landau, little Stefan and me, we were in London and you were staying with your friend.’