The German Boy

by Tricia Wastvedt

  He stood, unable to go on. The feeling for Elisabeth was the same. This was the disloyalty to Frankie: not the child he’d had with Karen but the truth of what he wanted. It seemed that nothing, no span of time, could wear it away. He had never felt this for his wife and he never would. It might be an illusion, nothing more, an unfulfilled desire, an idea of love, but the belief that it was real made it so – and that was all any love could be.

  Elisabeth. He wondered why they had never kissed in all the times they were alone in the black hut on Dungeness – he had wanted to and he had seen in her eyes she felt the same.

  If it was an illusion or a fine enduring love, it made no difference now. She was married and so was he. Today was the start of a new life, and coming here had entangled it with the old. He turned back from the house. How many times in this life would he walk away from her.

  The rain was coming in and he went inland, hoping to settle his mind while walking the miles of flat deserted lanes. His daughter had brought him here and even though he would not see her he should keep his thoughts on Antje.

  Four years ago, on an afternoon as blustery as this, he first heard that she existed. He was beside the Thames with Karen, but the memory of a swan was clearer in his mind than Karen’s face. If he’d had money then, he wondered, would he have said he would look after Antje?

  Soon after, he married Francesca and had more wealth than anyone could need but then it seemed impossible to ask his new wife to be a mother to his secret daughter. He thought Frankie wanted to erase his life before their marriage. He thought she didn’t want a child.

  He had turned out to be wrong on both counts; she had always wanted to be a mother, she told him, and she was not unnerved by secrets or jealous of the past. We’ve lived a long time, Michael, you and I. Neither of us can pretend we’re starting here.

  It was almost three o’clock and he should get the train back to London or he would be late to meet his new-born son. He cursed his stupidity in coming here on a sentimental impulse, prodding into life what should be left alone. He took a short cut towards the station, along a track across Eddie and Rachel’s land – he hadn’t seen Rachel for years – and saw a little girl standing on a gate ahead of him. She was so still he didn’t notice her at first. She looked over her shoulder, tossing back a curl of hair as vivid as a flame, and watched him walk towards her.

  • • •

  Alice wasn’t well and had been kept away from school. When Christina came home, they did puzzles and colouring, and played battleships, but Elisabeth said Christina must go outside for a while to get some fresh air.

  The sky was clear after rain and there was a faraway moon. Cold came up through her boots and socks, and Christina looked forward to the warm sitting room and the burn of her nose when she sat by the fire for tea. Her fingers and toes would ache.

  It was not interesting being outside on her own. She walked along the lane, then ran as far as the post box, then back the other way to the half-built house where the trees were cut down. The earth was churned up but grown over now with weeds. It was sad to see the places that would never have wild flowers again. The badgers would move somewhere else. Perhaps they had already gone.

  A dappled mass which must be cows was moving across a field, but it was hard to see because Christina had forgotten to wear her spectacles. The cows belonged to Mr and Mrs Saunders, Eddie and Rachel, her mother called them. Eddie Saunders came to the house sometimes to play cards, but they only saw Mrs Saunders when she waited at the bus stop in a hat with a shopping basket on her arm. She had slim ankles and heeled shoes although she was a farmer’s wife. Mr and Mrs Saunders had no children to be friends with.

  Christina stood on the gate and waited for the herd to come. The cows mashed the mud around the gate, and when their hoofs landed on a stone there was a grinding scrape, and with each suck out of the mud, a hoof-shaped hole was left for a second, then the mud caved in, watery as soup, and the hole was gone. Hoofs, dozens of them, smack, suck, splatter, the holes appeared and vanished almost too quickly to see.

  The cows jostled, lifting their wide slick noses to breathe the smell of bruised grass into Christina’s face. She breathed back at them, wondering if she smelled of sherbet lemons.

  A soldier was coming towards her along the track. Christina saw him give a start, and the cows skittered, barging into each other. She had been still and quiet so as not to frighten them but she’d frightened him instead.

  The soldier had his arm in a sling. He had a nice face, Christina thought, although there was something wrong on one side. He stopped and his eyes were level with hers because she was standing on the gate. Up close, she saw he had a scar. He looked into her eyes, at her hair, as if he was searching for something or she was particularly unusual.

  In towns, people didn’t introduce themselves if they passed on the street, but here on the Marsh they did – it was politeness – so she said, ‘Hello. I’m Christina Mander.’

  ‘I know,’ he said.

  He couldn’t know, but what adults said they knew often seemed impossible. Christina got down off the gate. He was tall now that she was standing on the ground. ‘Have you crashed your plane or did someone shoot you?’ she asked. ‘Is that why you’ve got a sling?’

  ‘No, actually I fell over.’

  ‘Oh.’ Christina wondered what more she could say to make conversation. The soldier did not resume his walk. Some people liked to talk if they were troubled and it was kind to spare a little time. Perhaps his arm was painful or his friend was dead. Christina was just about to enquire when he said: ‘Is Antje … Is Antje well?’

  The name ruffled something in her mind. ‘I don’t know. She isn’t in my class. I’ll ask my sister. I didn’t catch your name. Are you local?’ Christina had heard her mother say these things.

  ‘You have a sister,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, yes. I’ve got two. A baby one, Maud, and Alice is the same age as me. We’re eight. Well, goodbye,’ said Christina. ‘I’m going home now. I expect I’ll see you another time. Good luck, mate.’ People called this to the soldiers marching to the boats, but he might be an officer underneath the greatcoat so she added, ‘Good luck, sir.’

  ‘Thank you.’ He smiled and looked away over her head. ‘I wonder if I could give something to you, Christina.’ His breath streamed out of his mouth like a ghost.

  She knew she ought to say no but the soldier reached into his pocket, took Christina’s mittened hand and held it up, palm open, higher than her face. He folded her fingers over something too big for them to cover and held her hand in his. He touched his forehead to his hand, with her hand and the thing inside.

  Christina stayed very still. It must be very precious. Then he let go and stood back. ‘I’ve been carrying it with me much too long and I’m glad I’ve given it to you. Thank you.’

  She had never been thanked by someone who’d given her a present; it seemed back to front. He was walking away and very soon his earth-coloured coat was just a blur between the hedges.

  Christina opened her hand and in it was a locket, brownish-black like a pebble from the beach, a nasty battered thing. She could see it had once been the shape of a heart but now it was dented as if he’d trodden on it. No wonder he didn’t want it any more. It was puzzling that the soldier who looked so nice had given her this ugly broken present. She dropped it in the mud and poked it with her toe.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Alice had walked up the lane without Christina noticing. She had a scarf wound round and a bobble hat pulled down. Her arms stuck out and her stomach bulged with all the pullovers she must be wearing underneath her coat. Her legs were twigs in red wool stockings. Alice bent down and prodded the locket with her finger. ‘What is it?’ She looked up and her eyes were like peaty puddles in the rain.

  Christina waved her arm. ‘I found it over there. You can have it if you like.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Alice put it in her pocket.

  ‘Do you know a girl called Antje?’


  Alice blinked.

  ‘Well, do you?’ said Christina impatiently. ‘Antje, I said.’

  ‘Antje who?’

  ‘Antje no one.’

  Alice swivelled her eyes up to the sky like someone pretending to think. ‘Nope. Not ever. What shall we do next?’

  ‘Quick, he mustn’t see us!’ Christina shouted.

  ‘Where?’ shrieked Alice. ‘What?’ There was nobody, but Christina ran, screaming, and Alice ran screaming behind her.

  After tea, Alice wanted to play Peggity and Christina forgot about the locket and the soldier because meeting him had not been interesting, so there was nothing to remember.

  1944

  32

  On weekday mornings, Rachel would put down the bucket for the hens and run across the fields to the trees near the lane. She waited in the shadows for Alice to go past on her way to school with the other little girl, Christina.

  Nanna Lydia used to say Rachel had a lioness’s heart and it may have been true long ago, but she was different now. Since finding the photographs, she’d never had the courage to question Michael. What would be the point? Choosing not to tell her was another way to turn his back and another betrayal. He might not even know if Alice was his daughter – it would be just like Elisabeth and Karen to have lied to him as well.

  Michael never came to Kent and Rachel never visited him in London. He had fallen into a different world when the pretentious American widow snared him, or perhaps he had snared her money and connections.

  He had left a hole in Rachel to add to the other holes of Albert and Vera and Nanna Lydia. There was the bitter loss of Karen and Elisabeth too, and the ghost children pleading to be born. There were so many holes but what was there of interest to explain to anyone? There is nothing to be said of absence other than that it is.

  The women at the shops in Hythe all seemed to be martyrs to abundance and of that there was always plenty to discuss. Little gatherings of wives with prams would dam up the pavement outside the butcher’s or the grocer’s. ‘Good morning, Mrs Saunders. Come and have a peek at Mrs Wilson’s new arrival. Go on, dear, he’s fast asleep. Up all night and now look at him, butter wouldn’t melt. Aren’t they all the same? I was just saying to Mrs Paine and Mrs Turner here …’ Rachel had to listen.

  Oh, the trials of being needed, the women confided in each other, the relentlessness of babies, and the children, the children, the children clambering all over you and dragging on your hands. The organization of crayons and Plasticine just sucks the life right out of you, and oh the utter weariness of washing little clothes and reading bedtime stories. How hard it is to be a mother but how funny and unique it is when baby Susan yawns. And Keith, he’s such a little gentleman and only six, and Marilyn lost a tooth the other day, her first, and asked if Father Christmas would bring a new one!

  Rachel saw the women’s eyes glaze over while they waited for their turn to speak, although there must always be a smile with aahhs and ooohs from the audience however dull the story, because that was the etiquette.

  She seemed to be the only one who listened. A heart that’s being cut apart always pays attention.

  She stood quietly, singular and tidy with her smallish shopping basket on her arm: just a few things for her husband’s dinner. They must think she was used to it.

  It’s a shame no babies came along for Mrs Saunders, but it’s not the joy she thinks. She just doesn’t understand. Well, you can’t, not until you’ve had kiddies of your own. She’s got no one to consider but herself, no worries about accidents or upsets like you always have with offspring, and look at her, in her thirties and the figure of a girl, that’s got to be a plus. No veins or drooping derrière, or little problems down below. Don’t we wish we had the luxury!

  If Elisabeth had told the truth about Alice, it would have been different. It would have gone like this: Rachel would glaze over too, then take her turn, raising her voice a notch to drown out the competition, ‘My Alice? Oh, heavens, yes, she’s eleven now, started at the grammar and doing very well. She’s got two left feet thanks to me, but she’s talented, artistic, she gets that from her daddy.’ Hushed, leaning in: ‘Michael? He never comes to see her, poor little scrap. I blame the wife. It’s a funny situation but you know how it is. Families! You do what you can and make the best of it. My brother’s always been a dark horse.’ A sigh, a wistful smile: ‘And Alice, she can be a little madam – well, they are at that age, aren’t they, but she’s a good girl, she really is. She’s my Eddie’s angel, he adores her. We couldn’t ask for more.’

  This other Rachel Saunders lived behind the curtain of Elisabeth’s deceit, and Alice, the real Alice, was oblivious. She probably never thought about the odd reclusive neighbour who fed her hens, had no children and might as well be living on the moon.

  Since Alice and Christina had been going to the grammar school in Folkestone, they walked in the opposite direction and Rachel never saw them. On clear days, she shaded her eyes and thought she could make out two specks in the distance in blue dresses, swinging their satchels or swinging their school hats. They dawdled, heads together, discussing nothing as girls do, then sudden bursts of skittishness would start them running and their shoes would be clacking on the lane. Rachel imagined it; she couldn’t really see them, they were too far away.

  She had never spoken to Alice and Christina except for the time she came upon them in Eddie’s hay field on a hot breezy afternoon in the fourth summer of the war. There was a tangle of woolly tracers high up in the blue – the dog fights were over and this was just the Hawkinge boys practising their loops. Rachel was collecting wild plums and cherries from the trees that grew along the ditches, and the girls must have been lying on their backs looking at the sky because they suddenly sat up out of the grass, both with pairs of cherries dangling on their ears. Their ribbons had disappeared and their little manes were stuck with bits of straw and grass as if they’d been playing in the hay. They scrambled up and stood side by side in their shorts and cotton blouses, holding hands.

  Ten years old, fine and long like foals, flat chests and still with that delicate bluish tinge beneath the skin that little children have. Christina was the bigger of the two, with Elisabeth’s molten copper brightness in her hair.

  And Alice: the smoky eyes of Michael although her colouring was fairer. She had the same long unruly curls as Rachel but pale brown with glints of fawnish gold like rumpled beach sand in the wet.

  Alice looked at the ground, twisting her hand in Christina’s and fidgeting as if she was about to run.

  How strange this must seem to them, Rachel thought, a grown woman out here in a field in the middle of the day with her hair as wild as theirs, bare legs and an old print skirt bunched in her hand to carry the fruit she’s gathering. They must think she was a gypsy.

  Christina said, ‘We hope you don’t mind us being in your field.’

  ‘No,’ Rachel said. ‘You know who I am?’

  ‘We often see you,’ said Christina, surprised. ‘We only live just over there. Didn’t you know?’

  Rachel couldn’t think of a reply that wouldn’t open a door which must stay shut.

  ‘We like your old pony and we stroke him sometimes,’ Christina went on politely with the effort of a smile. ‘He used to belong to Toby. We know Toby Schroëder too. He’s in America and you’re Eddie’s wife, you’re Mrs Saunders. We’ve always known about you, haven’t we, Alice?’

  Alice flapped at a fly and the cherries on her ears jiggled. ‘Your name is Rachel,’ she said. ‘Eddie told us.’ Her eyes flickered up for a moment, and the look in them was embarrassment and boredom and anxiety all at once.

  Rachel could say nothing more and after a long moment, the little girls edged away and ran.

  1946

  33

  The Saunders’ cottage was a mile away behind a line of poplars Eddie planted eight years ago. When Elisabeth stood at the sink she could see the silvery tops of Rachel’s trees way off in t
he distance and she sometimes wondered if Rachel was washing dishes too, both of them up to their elbows in suds, looking across the level fields lying beneath transparent or hazy air, or the mists, or the rainstorms that seemed to bring the taste of salt into the house.

  They shared the changing Marsh weather and sounds that carried, like cuckoos calling on still days and the occasional motorcar. If a goose honked overhead, Elisabeth knew Rachel would hear it in her sky a moment later.

  When the Blitz was on and Elisabeth was woken by the night bombers heading towards London, she would think of the house in Catford and the other houses she used to know – in Neate Street and Richmond – which might all be rubble by the morning, and listening to the enemy going north across the Kentish Downs she knew Rachel would be awake and thinking of Michael too – Michael and Francesca Brion in London, Karen somewhere in Germany, and Vera and Nanna Lydia both gone now and spared another war.

  Elisabeth wondered if Rachel ever thought of her. They hadn’t seen each other for all the time the poplars had been growing. It was only a mile of sheep pasture and reedy ditches, but it was a distance impossible to cross.

  Eddie still came to play cribbage with George, and Elisabeth asked after Rachel because it seemed strange and awkward not to.

  ‘She’s well,’ Eddie answered in that neutral kindly voice of his that said, I have no part in whatever trouble is between you. I shan’t be drawn either way.

  ‘Give her my love, would you, Eddie. I expect she’s awfully busy.’

  ‘She’s busy enough,’ Eddie said. ‘She doesn’t leave the farm much these days.’

  ‘Oh, I know. There’s always too much to do what with meals all the time, it never stops. I’d love to go out more, to Folkestone or even Rye, but I just can’t get away.’ She knew she was prattling. ‘I know what Rachel means. I feel just the same.’