In the dining room, Karen looked scornfully at the other guests. ‘I’ve wasted so much time and money on clothes and silly unnecessary things. Women who spend hours adorning themselves are pitiful. Thank goodness I know now that health and motherhood are all a woman needs to make her beautiful.’
This didn’t seem to be directed at Elisabeth but the opals and the Coral Secret lipstick felt coarse and silly.
Karen drank too much and argued with the couple at the next table. ‘Juden,’ she said, not bothering to lower her voice. She accused the old gentleman of staring. She was insulted, she said, and it was also an insult to his wife. The woman looked alarmed and the white-haired gentleman said he was sorry if he had offended her but Karen had misunderstood: he had an interest in Germany and he’d merely been wondering if they’d like to join them at their table. The other diners gawped.
Elisabeth would not have blamed the gentleman, or anyone, for wanting to look. Nothing, not even her frumpish blouse, could make Karen less beautiful.
It was late when they went upstairs. Elisabeth found their keys and Karen leaned against the door frame. In the room the lamps had been lit and the covers turned down. Karen stumbled in, kicking off her shoes. She pulled out her hair pins and yanked at her blouse. It was half undone and she dragged it off her shoulders, fumbling with the buttons. She stood swaying by the bed, then sat down suddenly and flopped back against the pillows. Tears trickled into her hair and she was asleep.
Elisabeth looked at her and felt nothing except longing to be at home with George. She switched off the bedside lamp. Whatever the reason for Karen’s tears, they would be for herself.
Once upon a time, long ago, she always wanted to sleep beside Karen. Elisabeth remembered scooting across the freezing lino in the bedroom in Catford, so quickly the shadows couldn’t grab her ankles, jumping in, wriggling close but careful not to cling or Karen would be cross. There was often no room for Elisabeth’s legs, not enough blanket, a flat corner of the pillow, but it was still the best place to be.
Back in her room, Elisabeth undressed in the dark and opened the curtains. There was no moon. Yellow lights that must be the lamps of fishing boats were low down in the black like stars that had fallen in the sea. She could hear Karen whimpering and she closed the door between them.
In the morning the sea was white capped and brown. The grassy promenade was empty, and rain and sea spray spattered on the window. Elisabeth stood in her dressing gown looking out and she wondered what George and Christina were doing.
It was past nine when she knocked on Karen’s door, expecting the room to be in darkness but the curtains and the balcony doors were open. Rain blew in on the clammy wind, wetting the polished floor and the rug. Karen was standing in her nightdress.
‘For heaven’s sake, Karen, you’ll catch your death and they won’t like their carpet getting soaked.’
‘I’m paying, aren’t I?’ Karen said.
Elisabeth closed the doors, pulled the breakfast trolley to the table, and put out the cups and plates, lifting lids and dish covers. ‘Here’s our toast. Hot water. Jam. Do you want grapefruit? We have marmalade too.’
‘I must tell you something.’
‘Milk, and cream –’
Karen banged the table and the china rattled. ‘Your fussing goes on and on! You never hear anything because you never listen.’
Elisabeth felt a closing-up inside herself she hadn’t known for years, and it occurred to her that she could get up and leave and didn’t have to bear this any more.
‘Are you listening, Elisabeth?’
Elisabeth said nothing.
‘I shall give Antje to you,’ Karen said.
Elisabeth heard the words but what should be the reply? She picked up the teapot, put it down, lifted the lid from a silver dish. Her mind felt scrambled.
‘You will love her because of me, Elisabeth. That’s why I’ve chosen you.’ Karen spoke quickly as if she had rehearsed the speech. ‘I thought Artur wouldn’t ever know, but now it’s obvious. It’s impossible to have a mistake in his family. He can’t have a wife who has done … who has been disloyal. He – we are bringing up a child who is … who is … who isn’t German, so this is what I must do. You shall have her.’
The quiet beat softly on the walls. Elisabeth poured tea into their cups, because it seemed wrong somehow to let it stew.
‘You have Stefan, so how can Antje be wrong? Your children are the same,’ she said, setting down the pot on the silver stand. She had forgotten to put milk in their cups and a thought flitted in her mind that Karen would be cross.
‘Not the same,’ Karen said. ‘She’s Michael’s daughter.’
Elisabeth watched her own hand reach across to take a piece of toast. What she had heard was impossible, and inevitable. Michael was never hers. She stirred her tea and felt as weightless as the ringing of the spoon against the cup.
‘Say something.’ Karen sounded exasperated. ‘Do you hear me? Antje is a Jew and she can’t stay in Germany.’
There were muffled voices outside in the passageway, footsteps receded and a door slammed shut.
‘I must set an example,’ Karen continued as if Elisabeth had spoken. ‘I must be beyond reproach because of Artur. We’re trying to achieve something wonderful in Germany and everyone must search themselves, the Führer says, everyone must make sacrifices –’
‘Stop it, Karen. I’m not listening to any more. You used to say everyone should do as they please. You should have told me. How could you say nothing in all this time.’
Karen got up and wandered to the window. She stood in the puddle of sea rain and put her hands on the glass. ‘They read our letters.’
‘Who? Who reads your letters?’
The panes were running with water and the curtains were soaked as if it was raining inside the room. ‘Please don’t ask me any more.’
The second night in the hotel that Karen had booked was pointless now. They sat in the empty sun room waiting for Elisabeth’s taxi while the summer rain washed the windows and beat on the glass roof. Karen talked about the future all true German people shared, like a close and loyal family. She barely paused for breath as if the wall of words would stop any doubt or argument. Elisabeth felt numbed by the logic of it.
Karen lit a cigarette and arranged the pleats of her skirt. ‘If you don’t want Antje, a family in Holland will take her. It’s all arranged. It’ll be no trouble.’
Elisabeth had thought nothing Karen might say could shock her now. She leaned across and grasped Karen’s hand. ‘What’s happened, Karen? I want to understand. Please.’
Karen gazed out at the rain. Her voice was calm, as if she had been waiting for this moment all along. ‘You’re like a child. You expect people to take care of you and you’ve no idea how the world is. You couldn’t understand because you think life is fair and everyone is nice.’
The old humiliation. Karen knew her better than she knew herself. Arguing was useless, but Elisabeth was on her feet, stamping her foot – like a child, just as Karen had said. ‘You don’t know me at all! You take what you want and you don’t care what it costs. You hurt people, Karen, everywhere you go.’
Karen stubbed out her cigarette. ‘Well? Will you have her?’
‘I’m not sure what I shall tell George.’
‘Thank you,’ Karen said, as if everything was settled.
• • •
Mr Pearce, the doorman, was on his break, so Awkward Sidney was at the ready, blushing with the challenge of showing Mrs Mander to her car. Her mood had changed since her arrival yesterday, Stubbard thought. She looked tired as if she’d had a sleepless night, and blank as if she’d had a shock – or perhaps she was counting down the minutes till she could say goodbye to the Frau, just like they all were.
Now the two were leaving and Stubbard busied himself behind the desk. He was interested in the women’s farewell. Ladies usually made a show of pecking at the air on account of not wanting to disrupt the pow
der and the lipstick, or they gave an icy little gloves-on squeeze, but these two embraced hard and tight, though only for a moment, as if they loved and loathed each other.
Frau Landau looked the worse for wear this morning – not surprising after last’s night débâcle in the dining room. Elsie told him the story at the start of morning shift. Apparently a waiter – Walter, most likely, seeing as he and Chef were ‘friendly’ – had told Chef, who’d told Mrs Cubsy, who told the girls in the laundry room, who told Elsie.
Frau Landau had fired a broadside at old Mr Aaronheim, Elsie said, suggesting he was leering, and Mrs A, who was teetotal on account of her tablets, downed a scotch and didn’t touch her Cabinet Pudding. This morning, the two ladies hadn’t eaten their breakfast, there was rainwater all over the floor and the carpet was wringing wet. The girls downstairs were already run ragged in the summer season without grown women larking about and making extra work. The curtains in the Frau’s room were damp and would have to be taken down and pressed, and silk moiré was never the same after water had been on it.
Stubbard watched Frau Landau gazing after her friend’s departing car and she stood there long after it had disappeared, looking queenly in spite of the hangover she must be suffering. Her hair was loose and she was informal in a way that ladies these days seemed to think acceptable. He wondered how long she’d stand there looking out at nothing.
Then it happened. She collapsed as if someone had cut her strings. Her lovely body folded over and there she was on the carpet, with her bleached silk hair spread out and her cheeks all milk and roses. The bad temper was smoothed away and she could have been a sleeping angel. It unsettled him – somewhat unprofessionally – to see her lying there.
They called a doctor and she came to in no time, then she was taken to her room. Stubbard sent up a message saying the hotel would organize a telegram, free of charge, to her husband or some member of the family she might like to escort her home, but the Frau did not contact anyone at all.
Later that day, whey-faced and civil for once, she asked for her luggage to be brought down, settled her account and left.
28
In 1928, when Michael left England, British artists knew their place – above the coarse Americans and well below the French. Modernism belonged in Europe although weak rays of its glassy intellect reached across the Channel and Michael had believed he was one of the few in London who were illuminated. He felt at home in the icy Gallic light. A glow worm thinks he has something in common with the moon.
In Mazamet he learned his mistake. His art is plain; a subject is observed and remade in paint. But his efforts are deficient because a likeness, however true, can’t catch the birth and death of every moment. Time cannot be preserved. It is a grief to Michael to see a shadow sliding on a curve of ground, a yawning cat, a drop of water on a tap, and know it can’t be saved.
Then Artur Landau taught him another lesson. Michael is a coward who only paints to save himself. It is his own life he strives to preserve, and so the years on Dungeness when he could not paint had been a kind of dying. If Elisabeth had not been near, he would have walked into the sea.
She saved him but she also made him suffer. A thousand moments of Elisabeth are lost; she walks across the shingle with a basket on her arm. She reaches up to the washing line, her bare heels are dusty and her sunburned hands peg his shirt against the sky. There’s a breeze and the shirt billows green and yellow shadows on the blue. The sun is in her eyes as she sits at his table peeling an orange on the grey wood.
Life fades like a comet’s tail and there is no trace of her. No proof of him.
He returns to London and lives in the studio on Fitzroy Street. He learns to paint again and finds solace in leafy streets with people walking, markets, parks, children playing on the pavements. He can’t control a brush as he once did, but there are buyers for his work, ordinary people who want a picture for a drawing room or study. ‘We don’t understand the modern art,’ they tell him. ‘It’s everywhere these days – all cleverness and temper. You are a good painter,’ they say, as if he is a good man.
• • •
On a hot summer morning, Michael walked from the studio to the Post Office on the corner of Warren Street. There was rarely anything for him to collect, although his mother wrote occasionally and sent a card with some small gift for his birthday. Her writing was becoming spidery as Nanna Lydia’s had been and the messages were brief. Vera had never asked him why he left Dungeness five years ago, abandoning her for a second time.
In the Post Office, Michael signed at the counter for his correspondence, mostly envelopes containing money orders from the galleries which sold his work. He made a living and had loyal customers but his paintings were an oddity in London now, and so was he. He did not align himself with any of the warring factions – Modernists, Realists, Abstractionists, Surrealists – and at their gatherings, he would be received with warmth and tolerance like an eccentric cousin who cannot grasp the intricacies of the family feud.
A new style of soirée had superseded the good-natured evenings of the kind that Frankie used to hold. The drink these days was beer, the food was nil, the mood was cynical and grim. The demons were Fascism and poverty, the grail was Eternal Truth.
Some believed that Art in the modern age should be a vision of perfect order, others said it must be spontaneous. Art should poke fun at bourgeois vanities, but it must strive for social unity. Art is timeless. Art is now. It is a madman’s scribbles, a raw pork chop, a tiger in spectacles, a diver’s suit with a mask of roses.
One publication said, Left, right, black, red (and white too, for the fools who won’t take part and so constitute a battle line all of their own), Hampstead, Bloomsbury, surrealist, abstract, social realist, Spain, Germany, Heaven, Hell … All colours turn to mud when stirred together.
Michael sorted through the bundle of correspondence he had collected from the Post Office, standing in the shade of the Warren Street Underground to open the envelopes. One had German stamps and had been forwarded from the bungalow in Hythe where his mother lived.
He sat for a while in a café with the envelope in front of him on the table. It was a note from Karen Landau.
… You might tear it up and if you do, it would be no more than I deserve … It made him sad that Karen assumed he was angry when the anger should rightfully be hers. His hatred of Artur Landau had dissipated and the residue was shame for the hurt he had done her the last time she was in England.
In June I shall come to Kent for a few days. If you contact the bookings clerk, Mr Stubbard, at the Metropole in Folkestone … I must talk to you, Michael. Please say you will.
The letter was dated six weeks ago and he might have missed it but for the chance collection of his post. He left the café and returned to the Post Office to telephone the Metropole Hotel. The desk clerk told him that Mrs Landau would arrive in Folkestone the following week.
When Michael called again to speak to Karen, it took several attempts for the switchboard to make the connection. Karen’s voice sounded weary and she seemed exasperated by the hissing and clicking on the line. She made the arrangement quickly and without warmth; she would come up to London and meet him in the tea lounge at the Charing Cross Hotel. What she had to tell him would not take long.
He was early and he met her walking along the Embankment, filling time as he was. He almost passed her when she said, ‘It’s me, Michael. Hello.’ If she hadn’t spoken, he might not have known her, but he would still have noticed her. She wore a drab green coat of some stiff hairy cloth which would be ugly on any other woman but Karen looked modest and rather touching, like a peasant girl who doesn’t know how beautiful she is. She had lost the raw, electric quickness he remembered, she was heavier and her hair was held tight in an elaborate plaited coil at her neck. Her thickened features seemed immobile. She looked oddly still standing beneath the wind-blown trees by the choppy water of the Thames.
‘You look well, Karen,’ he sai
d lamely.
‘I look like a school matron,’ she said, and for an instant he recognized the smile as if the intervening years had disappeared. He took a step towards her to kiss her but her stillness made him stop. He had never seen indifference and the flatness of neutrality in her.
‘It’s cold. Shall we walk?’ she suggested. They came to some steps down to a concrete landing just above the waterline. ‘I’d like to be out of the wind,’ she said. On the steps, she slipped, clutching at him, and he caught her and held her until she steadied. The feel of her in his arms brought back memories of the Paris train. She pulled away, her eyes not meeting his, and she flicked at her coat fussily as if she was brushing off his touch. There was nothing to show that she remembered.
They stood on the landing looking out across the river. A swan came, expecting to be fed.
Then she opened her handbag and took out a photograph. ‘This is Antje Eva.’ The little girl had dark eyes, an elfin face and fair curling hair. Karen put the photograph away again.
Afterwards, when she had gone, Michael could not recollect the words she had used to tell him this child was his daughter. He remembered watching the oily water with the swan glowing bluish-white as if the moon was in its feathers, and the world had seemed to shift while she was speaking, the understanding dawning in his senses rather than in his mind, like an alteration in temperature or light. He remembered his wonder at the miracle of a child who was part of him.
‘Antje can’t stay in Germany,’ Karen had said. ‘You know why, Michael. She is …’ She faltered. ‘Antje isn’t safe.’
‘I should like to see her, Karen, if she’s mine.’
Karen laughed, a shrill kind of yelp. ‘Oh, yes, she’s yours! If there were any doubt, do you think I would be here? You mustn’t ever contact her, Michael, that’s why I needed to see you. You must promise me you won’t.’
‘I’d like to know her.’
‘Don’t you see it isn’t fair? She must belong to her new family. She mustn’t know you and she must forget me. If she ever looked for me, if the authorities in Germany should ever know … I can’t tell you … if someone were to hear of it …’ He saw in Karen’s eyes that she was desperate and would have begged if it had been in her nature.
The German Boy Page 29