‘What should I do?’ he asked.
‘Nothing. There’s nothing you need do.’
‘Then why tell me? I’d never have found out.’
‘I think you might have. Elisabeth is taking her.’
So, another piece of him would be beyond his reach. He could not see Elisabeth and now he could not see his daughter.
The swan rose out of the water and beat its wings, stirring up a little tempest, then settled back. When Karen spoke again, the desperation had gone from her voice. She sounded unconcerned, as if she was returning to ordinary things before they parted. ‘I once thought Artur had you beaten because he loved me. Isn’t that so silly? It was because you are a Jew.’
Michael had come to realize that his Jewish blood was visible to everyone but him. Israel was in the bones of his face; he was Francesca Brion’s Hebrew, and the Jewish boy from Peckham bringing flowers to Elisabeth, and the English Jew who deserved a beating in Artur Landau’s Germany.
What Karen said was true but he could see how much it hurt her to acknowledge it. There was hurt whichever way she turned: either she had caused his beating, or, if she hadn’t, it was because Artur Landau had not loved her.
Cold was coming off the river. They watched the filthy tide rippling against the swan’s white breast. Karen’s face was tinged with blue as if bruises were just beneath the skin. She didn’t shiver any more. The life in her seemed almost to have disappeared.
After a while, they climbed the steps again and walked in silence. The swan came too, gliding on the wind-scuffed water beside them as if the three were going somewhere together. Karen took his arm, leaning into him, and another memory came: five years ago, a warm summer night, lying with her on a Kentish beach and listening to the drag of shingle under the sea. She had smiled up at the stars, elated because he’d said he’d forgiven her. The beating in Munich didn’t matter any more, he told her. The lie seemed easy.
They had gone swimming in the moonlight, she cut her legs on a mussel bed and afterwards couldn’t find her shoes. He knew she should go back to her hotel but she seemed drunk with gratitude and said she must be with him.
Now he was ashamed because Karen had been hurt more terribly than she deserved. The past was a knot of sins and punishments with no way of knowing where justice lay. She had lied in Paris for reasons he could not understand; jealousy of Elisabeth, perhaps, or protectiveness, or simply Karen’s need to shape life to her will. Whatever the reason, her lie had hurt them all.
They walked for a while along the Embankment, then back again towards Charing Cross. In the shelter of the bridge, Karen stopped and took her arm from his. Her voice was desolate. ‘I must do this. You see, don’t you? I must let Antje go. If I don’t, they’ll take her. They’ll punish me, send me away to die and be forgotten. It’s what happens in Germany to women like me.’
She smoothed her tight hair. ‘I shan’t want tea now. I must catch my train.’ She looked impatient to be gone. ‘I don’t think we’ll meet again. Goodbye, Michael.’ She turned quickly and he watched her walk away.
29
When the Fairhavens returned to Texas after the Crash of ’29, Francesca Brion bought their house in Woburn Square. She had always thought Bloomsbury would suit her better than the stupefying gentility of Regent’s Park, and that the artists, writers and poets who came to her soirées would prefer it too.
Along with the house, she purchased the Fairhavens’ furniture as a kindness to Lady Cara, who said she couldn’t face auctioneers and dealers ‘flicking their rattle-snakey tongues’ in her darling English home. ‘But I will not be parted from my Art. It is one’s soul, one’s consolation,’ she told Frankie, ‘and Urban says oil paint is the only safe investment left on God’s green earth.’ Cara’s paintings were shipped out to America.
Frankie was glad she would not see Pixie Fairhaven’s portrait again, haunted as it was by the luminous ghost beneath Pixie’s skin, the ghost of the girl Michael loved.
A rectangular shadow was visible on the wallpaper in Cara’s drawing room where the portrait had been, so Frankie had the men put up a mirror. She needed to look at herself, not at a reminder of Elisabeth.
The last time she saw Michael was so long ago. She had found him living in a fisherman’s hut out on the godforsaken pebble banks of Dungeness, and she understood why he had not come back to London. It was not because his face was scarred and he couldn’t paint, but because of Elisabeth. He didn’t say it – he didn’t need to; he stayed in Kent for her.
He had put on a show of being glad when Frankie arrived unannounced. He was taller than she remembered, and heavier, a man now, not a boy. He seemed to be existing on what people gave him but he looked untroubled by his poverty and at ease living in a wooden hut, as he would be in a London villa or in a castle or in a cave. Michael could live anywhere, or he didn’t care.
They were so different, Frankie could see it now. He wore washed-out colours like the shingle, Frankie needed to be vivid or she would be lost. She sat at his driftwood table in her crimson coat and yellow scarf and cobalt velvet shoes, and wanted to apologize.
She took off her gloves but he didn’t take her hand or touch her. She had forgotten if they had ever kissed. Gulls were mewing and their cries were almost musical, like lamentations. Frankie wondered how people lived with so sorrowful a sound. The weight of each wave breaking on the pebbles came up through her feet as if the sea was underneath the wooden floor, and she could not stop the thought that Michael must make love to Elisabeth here. When they were lying in each other’s arms the birds would sound wild and magical and not lonely, as they did to Frankie.
She didn’t drink the tea that Michael made for her. His fondness had never been enough and now even that had gone cold. He seemed unmoved by her anguish at the injuries he’d suffered. She asked him to come back to London with her to see a surgeon, whom she would pay for. The studio in Fitzroy Street was still leased in his name, she told him, and she had two houses now, one in Regent’s Park and one in Bloomsbury. He could live in either, or anywhere he liked.
He was only half listening, half seeing her. The truth was he didn’t want her concern any more, or her money.
When she left, she forgot her blue kid gloves but could not go back. It would be humiliating to have him think she’d left them on purpose.
A long time afterwards, without her even noticing the change, she thought of Michael less. His absence closed over like the wound when a branch is broken off a tree. She was sealed up again. And although a part of her was lost, the freedom from missing him and wanting to see him one more time almost felt like happiness.
It would have been impossible, she told herself. She was forty-two, a widow, and asking for disaster if she tried to make a life with a man of twenty-nine. She was wealthy and he was poor. It was for the best that they had never been lovers and she had nothing to regret. She would forget him. It was good to visualize a future and only see herself.
So it was like crashing through a mirror when she came across the painting in a little gallery on the Embankment. The picture was bitter, restless colours: a hillside of acid-yellow grass and a green bruised sky. There was no card in the window saying who the artist was, but Frankie knew. It seemed he’d learned to paint again although the work was crude. She felt her own hands ache remembering the injuries to his.
She drove to Fitzroy Street. For years she had avoided the place and she didn’t know what she hoped for. Her body sparked like a girl’s but her mind was weighed down with defeat. After all this time she was still weak. She was opening a trapdoor and would fall into the past.
Night was coming down and the windows of his studio still had sheets pinned across the glass and she imagined the great mirrors on every side reflecting candle flames like constellations stretching off into infinity.
She walked down the passageway, up the stairs and along the echoing metal corridor to Michael’s door.
• • •
Toby Schroëder�
��s inky letters never said much, but Elisabeth was touched that he wrote at all. He was fifteen, still at school in Tunbridge Wells, had holidays in New York with his parents – Ingrid and Bruno, he called them – and weekends with his aunt, ‘Frankie’, in London.
Elisabeth went to London from time to time to see him, although he never asked her to. They would meet at a café, a museum, or take the ferry up to Kew or down to Greenwich. Toby looked pleased to see her and at least he didn’t seem bored in her company. He said he liked to hear about George and about little Christina. He asked after Rachel and Eddie and the spotted pony, Little Bear, who would be too small for him to ride now.
There was no residue of hurt in Toby’s eyes behind his flopping hair. Whatever Elisabeth had done in Kent to wound him all those years ago was probably too far in the past to matter. She was a not-quite aunt from an episode of his childhood that had shrunk into the distance behind him like something viewed through the wrong end of a telescope.
He had written that he wanted to see the ruin of the Crystal Palace at Sydenham before the site was cleared, so they arranged that he would take the train from Victoria out to Penge. Elisabeth would drive from Kent and meet him at the station.
When he walked towards her on the platform, she stopped herself from saying how much he’d grown. He was taller than her now. She told herself not to stare at his face, which looked new, not quite finished or properly proportioned, but so big, so almost like a man’s. He was wearing long tweed trousers, a blue silk scarf and an olive leather coat. The coat and the trousers flapped around his stringy frame. Elisabeth thought the clothes unsuitable – too flamboyant for a schoolboy, but typical of his mother and his aunt to encourage him to dress that way.
Elisabeth remembered she once dressed like this too, a long time ago in a life that had come and gone, left her married and wearing mealy tailored coats and provincial hats that nobody would notice.
She walked with Toby through the park to see the great cage of buckled iron which used to be the Crystal Palace on the crest of Sydenham Hill, and from the distance of the safety fence the wrecked structure looked almost delicate, like a giant heap of blackened lace. The stone head of Sir Joseph Paxton on its plinth stared at empty air and a pair of sphinxes guarded a flight of steps up to nothing. There were already weeds pushing up through the grand terraces and walks, and everywhere was green broken glass, acres of it. Someone had climbed up and put a tin hat on a marble nymph.
Toby was impressed by the devastation. ‘Jeez,’ he said. ‘It looks like a bomb’s gone off. Holy smoke,’ and they both giggled.
‘How awful,’ said Elisabeth.
‘Wish I’d seen it burn.’
They walked to the tea house by the lake.
‘You think there’ll be a war?’ said Toby.
‘No, of course not. Why would there be?’
‘Boys at school say the fighting in Spain will spread. Peecock’s brother’s gone to drive an ambulance. I’d go if I could. To fight.’
‘I’m glad you can’t.’
A waitress came with a tray of tea and they were silent for a while.
‘I wondered if perhaps you’d like to come to Kent,’ Elisabeth said. ‘You haven’t seen George for an age.’ She often asked but Toby never came.
‘Sure.’
‘Do you still like to ride?’
‘So, so. I ride sometimes back home. Bruno got a horse for Bonnie May but she’s scared to death of it.’
‘Your sisters must be grown-up young ladies now.’
‘That’s what they’d like to think.’
Elisabeth swallowed, put down her cup, dabbed at her lips. ‘George and I are considering adopting a little girl.’ She could hear herself squeaking slightly with the effort of sounding casual. This was the first time she had spoken about Karen’s daughter to anyone but George, and it was strange to hear the words sound straightforward and adoption so ordinary a thing to contemplate.
Toby flicked a look at her. ‘Hey,’ he said.
‘You don’t think it’s a bad idea?’
‘Nope. Why would I? It’s great.’
Another silence.
‘How is your Aunt Francesca?’ she asked, as she always did.
‘Don’t know,’ said Toby. ‘I haven’t seen Frankie much lately. She’s been in Italy and Greece, and somewhere else, Corsica, I think. They came back last week.’
‘How wonderful. She’s been travelling with a friend?’
‘She got married. She married Michael Ross. You know him. He used to live in Kent near you and George. Well, now he lives in Bloomsbury with Frankie.’
• • •
It was a surprise to get a telegraphic booking from Frau Landau so soon after the last time: three nights, a child’s bed in the room, a sea view, and also a booking for Mrs Mander: adjoining suite, two nights.
Stubbard entered the details in the ledger. It was typical of the Frau to assume there would be vacancies to suit however late she left it. As it happened there were, but Stubbard had half a mind to put her at the rear without a view just to make a point. He didn’t, though; the fuss wouldn’t be worth the satisfaction.
As it turned out, he was glad they had nice rooms. Frau Landau’s child was a fairy of a thing, tiny as a wisp and so pretty your heart would break just to look at her. They all made a fuss. Pearce bowed and shook her teddy’s paw, and she took a shine to Awkward Sidney, who seemed to understand her even though she hardly spoke and neither did he – maybe that was why.
The Frau was a surprise – as loving and tender a mother as ever there was, and so quietly proud, Stubbard could see it, to have so much attention for her daughter. It caused a stir having the little one on the premises and everyone was in a tizzy wanting a slice of Antje Landau. Mrs Cubsy took her down to meet the girls, Chef made her a plate of toffee, and Elsie and the other maids went broody so you couldn’t get any sense out of them, or any proper work.
But it was pleasant, Stubbard thought, to have all the staff drawn together, and Frau Landau was a different woman this time, gentle and polite to people, hardly able to tear her eyes away from Antje as if she’d disappear, as if Frau Landau was hungry for every precious second of her daughter.
‘They grow up so fast,’ said Mrs Cubsy wistfully. ‘They’re gone before you know it without so much as a backward glance. I understand how Mrs Landau feels.’
Mrs Mander arrived and for the following two days they were off out the three of them in their summer frocks, coming back windswept and full of sun. Every day, little Antje had too many treats to carry, paper windmills, a kite, a bucket or balloon, or some other seaside toy her mum had spoiled her with. The women seemed easier together with their attention on the child, and who wouldn’t be content in the company of so sweet a thing. It almost made Stubbard have regrets.
The last evening, after dinner, Frau Landau came to the desk alone. She paid the bills for herself and Mrs Mander, and booked a taxi for four o’clock next morning. Four o’clock! No breakfast, and she said she would put her luggage outside the door so the porter was not to knock. An envelope was to be given to Mrs Mander in the morning.
Stubbard did not see Frau Landau again. She left before his shift.
Mrs Mander came down at nine and the little girl was hanging on her skirt or pattering behind, looking all around with those big smoky eyes and not mithering or asking for attention but quiet like she always was.
Pearce did his turn, bowing to her teddy, and Awkward Sidney mumbled and blushed, which made Antje nearly smile, then Mrs Mander took her hand and they stood outside on the step together looking at the sea, silhouetted, just like the first time when Mrs Mander came two months ago.
They waited there a minute, the two of them, until a big old yellow Daimler drew up at the kerb.
• • •
When Elisabeth had woken up, Antje was beside her. Karen must have brought her in and put her in the bed. Elisabeth leaned on her elbow and watched Antje sleeping in the blue half-
light. Michael’s daughter, deep inside soft untroubled dreams. Soon the first day would begin, and as the mornings came and went this little German girl would disappear. To be so small and lose everyone, everything, was so hard a thing to bear.
The sun was lighting up the curtains. Michael would be waking beside Francesca Brion.
Elisabeth got up and dressed. As she clipped on her earrings, she saw Antje in the mirror standing behind her watching, barefoot in her nightdress. ‘Mutti,’ she said. Elisabeth picked her up, wrapped her in a cardigan and stood at the window pointing to the waves, then to a woman with a dog, a fishing boat, a pigeon. ‘Sea. Lady. Boat. Bird.’ Antje stared into Elisabeth’s face, watching the sounds coming from her lips. See. Laydee. Boht. Berd.
When they left, the staff all came to say goodbye. Mr Stubbard at the desk handed Elisabeth a manila envelope which contained some documents and a letter.
Elisabeth, here are the papers you will need. They have been prepared carefully and there should be no difficulty. You and George must sign where I have marked. The witnesses have already signed.
She belongs to you now. If she ever asks, you must say you know nothing about me. She must never know who I am. Promise me. You think you understand how it is in Germany, but you do not.
Please don’t write any more, and if you must for any reason, I ask you from my heart to make sure you never mention her. No one must know. I beg you.
Please don’t think badly of me.
Karen
The adoption papers said the child’s mother died two years ago. The father was unknown.
• • •
‘Darling, would you like some milk? Milk?’ said Elisabeth, pointing to the milk jug.
Antje stared from the dusty corner by the press where the brooms were kept. She had dressed herself, put on her coat over a party dress with pink silk rosebuds round the hem, and knitted trousers. Her colouring book and crayons and her nightdress were in a heap at her feet. Elisabeth knelt down and Antje pressed herself against the wall.
The German Boy Page 30