‘Not the same, Elisabeth,’ Eddie said, the gentlest of admonishments. ‘She says there are too many children. She stays at home because it’s better not to see them.’
In the strange months following the end of the war when anything could happen, Elisabeth turned her back on the breakfast things waiting by the sink and walked with Karen to Eddie and Rachel’s farm.
It had been easy to do ordinary things that morning because she wasn’t really there. She was flying over the ruin of Germany, searching. The letter must be a mistake.
‘I’ll stay at home today,’ George had said. The light was playing on his spectacles, which were besmirched with little smears here and there, and she couldn’t see him clearly.
‘No, George. I’m fine. I really am.’
He smoothed her cheek, which was perfectly dry, and kissed her. He took Maud to school on his way to work and Christina and Alice sauntered off in the sunshine in their blazers and velour hats to catch the Romney train to Folkestone.
When the door shut behind them, the kitchen settled. Elisabeth was tired already. The activity and all the little knots and tangles in a family’s mood were difficult to follow with her mind elsewhere.
She heard Christina and Alice talking to each other as they walked past the kitchen window. Alice was saying softly, ‘It’s sad about Auntie Karen.’ Their footsteps on the gravel turned the corner of the house, then stopped. ‘I wish we’d met her.’
‘I know,’ Christina said. ‘We haven’t even seen a photo.’
‘They weren’t like you and me,’ said Alice. The footsteps started up again, with Christina’s voice very faint: ‘Perhaps they didn’t love each other much. Some sisters don’t. Perhaps they didn’t even like each other.’
A noise had been gathering all morning, deep inside her head, and Elisabeth leaned over the sink to let it out. The blast of it would split her open, the sky would shatter like a cup, the fields would curl up in a ball. The roar would be infinite, immaculate. But what emerged was a withered little cry, hideous, like a rabbit in a trap. Then the feeling vanished.
She wiped her mouth and sat down at the kitchen table in a patch of sunshine. The clock snipped off the seconds, each neat-edged bit of time dropping on the one before. Surely the matter of a square of paper was not enough to make a death.
She swept the floor and changed the water in the flower vases, hung some washing on the airer and made the beds, considering the oddness of a woman who had been whimpering and dribbling at the sink and was now folding perfect hospital corners and plumping pillows.
The woman’s sister was dead. And with the thought, she was running downstairs and scrabbling through the paperwork on George’s desk to find the letter which might be different this time.
Cause of death: unknown. Gestapo prison, Kaufering.
Some happenings are like a spill of bleach on the mind, burning off the pattern of mundane thoughts and eager little human wants. The selfish colour is taken out entirely and what is left is raw and unadorned, the plain material of a soul.
Time begins here. The human heart does not evolve, each one starts from scratch. There’s no knowledge on the subject and no one who can tell her; Elisabeth must discover for herself what it is to be the sister left behind.
She feels her mind turn white and then the understanding comes, pristine and astonishing as if it has never opened its wings before. The truth is this: everything is in her keeping now, two lives belong to her but one will be invisible. She must not forget that Karen’s hands are always warm and she likes blackcurrants more than strawberries. Karen sings too loudly and doesn’t care, and she will share or give away anything she has.
Elisabeth must look after every scrap of Karen or she will be lost. There is no one else to do it – no Ma who became Mrs Mole, dead in the arms of Mr Mole, buried in their Anderson shelter. No Nanna Lydia and Vera. No Michael.
There is Rachel.
Another moment and Elisabeth is standing in the kitchen. She notices the crockery ready to be washed, also some cutlery and a milk pan. But how to begin? What was it she had been meaning to do the moment before this?
She has a letter in her hand and she needs Rachel.
Elisabeth steps outside into the birdsong and the fragile air. She walks along the lane, across the sheep pastures and plank bridges, over the reedy ditches, to Eddie and Rachel’s farm with Karen beside her in the aqueous morning light.
‘Hello,’ Rachel says. The passing of eight years is subtle and it’s hard to see exactly what has changed, but Rachel’s skin is sallower and her eyes have shadows round them. She is drying her hands on her apron. ‘I wondered if you’d come.’
Rachel’s dress is green and blue, and her apron has a merry print of frying pans cascading down the front. Elisabeth didn’t expect her to be colourful. There are white threads in Rachel’s hair, which is long again and loose. Perhaps she leaves it down because she won’t be going out and usually no one comes.
‘Eddie met George and your little Maud on the Brookland road. He came back home to tell me.’ Rachel has finished drying her hands and she regards Elisabeth. ‘I’m sorry. Poor Karen.’
Elisabeth feels obliged to respond in some way but the weight of all there is between them makes speaking impossible. The time for saying sorry is so far in the past, an apology is useless now.
‘I’ve got to feed the chooks,’ says Rachel. ‘Come with me.’ Her voice is ordinary. She pulls the door behind her and picks up a bucket by the step, then they walk across the yard together as if they do this often and there’s nothing unusual about today.
One of Bruno Schroëder’s black mares is still in Eddie’s paddock. The mare’s spine dips with age and the shine has gone from her coat. Eddie doesn’t ride her any more, Rachel says, because the other mare died two years ago and this one grieves so much she can’t be parted from the pony – it’s only Toby Schroëder’s old spotted pony can console her.
And there is the pony, Little Bear, asleep with his legs folded underneath him and his nose almost resting on the grass. Elisabeth walks across to him, he’s snoring, his ears flick and his head jerks up with a grunt but he doesn’t seem to see her. When she reaches out her hand to stroke him, her fingers understand the minute texture of each single oily hair coarsened with the wind and sun. She had always thought the pony was a cheerful vacant thing, but now she feels how wild and secretive he is. A muscle beneath his skin shivers to dislodge a fly. She has forgotten why the morning sun is terrible. She can’t lift her hand away.
‘Let’s leave him now,’ says Rachel softly.
The hens come running when they hear Rachel’s voice, dozens of russet Orpingtons with a froth of chicks in tow. Rachel makes little clucking sounds as she scatters the feed. The chicks squeak around her boots.
Elisabeth dips her hand into the bucket too and some hens sprint off towards the glittering shower of corn she makes; others stay loyal to Rachel. The chicks mill about and concentrate on cheeping. A few starlings arrive and then a crow, but the hens square up to him and he lazily flaps away.
So this is what happens every morning below the line of poplars.
Afterwards Rachel sits on the side of the cattle trough and Elisabeth sits beside her. The sunlight flexes and the light solidifies.
Rachel says nothing when she unfolds the letter and reads it, but she holds Elisabeth’s hand, and all of Elisabeth seems to rush into that hand, all the fear and disbelief and gratitude swarm to the place where Rachel touches. Something is eased and weakened, breaks apart and the mewing cries which have no words begin again.
1947
34
The freeze started in December 1946, when fuel supplies were already running low, and as the temperature plummeted coal stocks dwindled to almost nothing. There was still a healthy talent in the country for resourcefulness and making do, and the prospect of empty scuttles with no hope of filling them inspired a fashion for electric fires. Consequently, the Electric became endangered too.
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In February, the Kew Observatory recorded no sun for twenty days, there was pack ice in the Channel and ice floes in The Wash. German prisoners were put to work shovelling the ten-foot drifts to get coal along the railways but defeated soldiers don’t feel much urgency nor do they take an interest in helping those who’ve beaten them. Little was accomplished.
Mr Shinwell, His Majesty’s Minister for Fuel and Power – or lack of – solved the problem of supply by cutting down demand. Electricity was rationed along with jam and soap and margarine. Factories across the country were forced to close, television was off the air, broadcasts on the radio were reduced, also the size and thickness of the newspapers. Not much coal was saved and people were miserable for nothing. The war was over but life was still a battle with rations even meaner than before.
Vegetables had to be dug out with pneumatic drills. Sheep and cattle froze to death. Starvation was a possibility. But if people thought this was the worst to happen, they hadn’t tasted Snoek.
The Ministry of Food imported a million tins of it to ease the crisis. Snoek, South African cousin to the British mackerel, the posters said, was nutritious and wonderfully versatile; Snoek Piquante would impress at any dinner party, or mashed with an onion it was equally delicious plain for everyday. The average British palette even numb with cold found Snoek repulsive and most of the consignment was served to British cats.
On 5 March, the worst blizzard of the century, and on the 10th, a thaw. The ground was frozen solid and the snowmelt couldn’t penetrate, so water pooled and turned into streams, which poured into rivers, which flooded into lakes as big as parishes, which joined up into seas as big as counties. Farmers fought to save their livestock from another peril.
Eddie Saunders found himself wading through his pastures again with the swimming collie and the half-barrel for rescued lambs. This time, Rachel worked beside him.
She was glad she hadn’t seen Elisabeth again. It might have been the weather, or grief, or guilt that had kept her away – Rachel didn’t know and didn’t care. There were too many troubles in the present and too much owed to Eddie to waste time mending ruptures in a past she was sorry she had shared with Elisabeth and Karen Oliver.
Another spring turned up at last and so did Elisabeth for a second time. It was almost a year since she had arrived on Rachel’s doorstep, dumb with shock at the news of Karen’s death.
This Sunday morning Eddie was cleaning the shoes on the step and the collie was basking in the milky sun. Rachel was reading in a deckchair in her sunglasses and Eddie’s coat. She heard Eddie speak and when she looked up, Elisabeth was there.
‘I hope you don’t mind my disturbing you,’ Elisabeth said. Her face still had the stony look of grief. Rachel did not close her book. Whatever had brought Elisabeth here again would be for her own purposes and Rachel was not inclined to make it easy.
‘I wonder if I could talk to you and Eddie.’
‘Well, here we are,’ said Rachel, not getting up.
Elisabeth stood looking at her feet and at the reflection of herself in Rachel’s sunglasses until Eddie intervened. ‘Let’s go into the house and sit comfortably.’ He lined up the polished shoes, putting the brushes in their box. ‘I expect Elisabeth would like a cup of coffee with us.’
Elisabeth sat at the kitchen table with her handbag on her lap and Rachel wondered why she was so smart when she had only walked along the lanes. The war had made George Mander wealthy so perhaps a fur coat was nothing special to Elisabeth. There was a time when Rachel would have dressed fashionably on Sunday too, and would have tried to fill a silence, but not now.
‘I’ve come to tell you something,’ Elisabeth began, looking at the coffee cup which Eddie put before her. ‘This is difficult. It really is.’ She looked around the kitchen wildly as if she was having second thoughts, then she said, ‘It’s about … it’s about Karen’s son. His father is dead, he died somewhere in Poland, we think, and Stefan is alone. He’s coming to live with us.’
‘Oh? Is that a fact,’ Rachel said. ‘That’s nice. Another one.’
Eddie had come to stand near to her and he put a hand on her shoulder. ‘Shall we listen, Rachel? I think Elisabeth has more to say.’
Elisabeth stared at the clasp on her handbag. ‘George believes … George says we must explain to Alice that she’s … that she’s … You were right, Rachel. About Alice. She is Karen’s daughter and … and Michael’s. I wanted to tell you, Rachel, I really did, but I promised Karen I never would. Everything is different now.’
Rachel felt Eddie’s hand holding her still. The anger with Elisabeth was worn out and stayed meekly quiet. Everything is different now, Elisabeth had said, but it wasn’t because this house, this life with Eddie, the women in Hythe who tormented her kindly, couldn’t change. All the years when Alice should have known her were gone, and all the ordinary things aunts and little nieces do together would never be.
Rachel leaned her elbows on the table and her head was a boulder teetering on the matchstick of her neck. Alice’s family was Elisabeth and George, Christina and Maud. It could never be Rachel because Elisabeth had lied. It was too late.
Eddie’s hand was very warm, which was good because it was the only thing that ever soothed her.
Elisabeth continued, picking up speed now the confession was over. ‘George and I will take Stefan away for a few days when he arrives in England. He’ll start at George’s old school in Yorkshire and he won’t come home for a month, so it’ll give us all some time to get adjusted. It will be hard but George and I will explain everything to Alice.’ There was a pause. ‘Rachel?’
‘She’s listening, Elisabeth,’ Eddie said.
‘So I wanted to ask you, Rachel … I wanted to ask if you would like to look after the girls while George and I are away with Stefan. You can get to know them. Will that be nice? Alice won’t have been told by then of course, and I’d ask you to respect that, but very soon everything will be out in the open. Everything. I promise you.’
Eddie’s voice was somewhere close. ‘I think Rachel must have some time to think this over.’
Rachel didn’t need more time. She said from the dark behind her hands, ‘Will you really tell her?’
‘Of course.’ Elisabeth sounded surprised. ‘Of course. George and I have agreed we will.’
‘Then, yes. I’ll look after her. Only Alice.’
‘Christina and Maud won’t be any trouble.’
The old anger sparked and Rachel could lift her head to look Elisabeth in the face. ‘It would be convenient, wouldn’t it, Elisabeth, if I do as I’m told. But I’m telling you, this is what I want and you owe it to me. I’ll have Alice, that’s all – the other two are nothing to me.’
Elisabeth was silenced for a moment, then she said carefully, ‘But we can’t leave Alice on her own, surely you can see that, Rachel.’
‘She’ll be with me.’
‘She doesn’t know you. What will we tell her?’
Rachel was too tired to take much notice of another hurt inflicted so easily, and the answer had been waiting all the years, the days and hours and minutes since Nanna Lydia’s photographs showed the truth.
‘You’ll think of something, Elisabeth. You’re good at telling lies.’
35
Stefan is uneasy about leaving the school in Yorkshire for the holiday. He has grown accustomed to isolation and he likes it. Although he has been surrounded day and night by boys, he can tune them out.
A claustrophobic home with conversation and attention on him is an unappealing prospect, but when he comes to the house in Kent, he finds his new English family undemanding. For most of the day, he can avoid them. The house is large, he stays in his room, and he walks alone on the Marsh. They don’t require him to be sociable and for this he is grateful.
It is Maud’s seventh birthday a week after he arrives and for the first time he is expected to participate. She wants to play Crazy Golf, so George drives them in the yellow Daimler to the li
ttle port of Rye, which has a silty tidal river, some tea shops and a park with a bowling green, swings and Crazy Golf. A woman in a hut tucks her knitting under her arm to receive George’s money and to hand over a club and a golf ball for each of them.
Crazy Golf is the maddest thing Stefan has ever seen. The game is to hit the ball across the drawbridge of a model castle, then up the trunk of a wooden elephant, over a humpbacked bridge the shape of a shoe, and along a slalom course between little metal flags. They take their turns and the girls shriek all the time, especially Maud, who knows this outing is for her. But soon there’s confusion about whose go is next and which ball belongs to whom. Stefan is befuddled by the pointlessness. Other adults are playing, bent double with mirth and whacking golf balls everywhere. He wonders how these people ever won a war.
Across the park, the town rises up on its bluff. Rye is knapped flint and timbered houses, and he can pick out fire-blackened windows and gaps in the skyline where bombs fell. There are sea defences in the harbour. These things make sense, Crazy Golf does not.
He lays his club on the grass. The more delicately primed the anger, the more careful any movement needs to be in order not to detonate it. He strolls across the road and up the hill into the town. They let him go. No one calls him back and no one follows him. He feels a liking for them he hasn’t felt before.
When he first came here, they tried to distract him as if he was a child or an idiot. A heap of ash in the fire might start him shivering, or the wireless howling off the wavelength, or Maud chanting as she skipped on the path. When the shaking started, it couldn’t be reasoned with and resided in a place inside him which was inaccessible.
He wasn’t troubled by anything at school in Yorkshire, perhaps because the place seemed familiar and not so different from the Reich School – except that English boys were not united by love of their country as his friends at Mittenwald had been, but by a cheerful contempt for everything, including each other. The headmaster instructed Stefan not to speak German or talk about his past, but the boys in his dormitory went on and on baiting him, thinking he had a shameful secret. Patriotism might be different in England; bullying was the same. Eventually, he told them he had a girl, a blonde with techniques they couldn’t imagine, and his father had been an SS officer who put a bullet through his head rather than be taken prisoner. The information spread, the little ones scuttled out of his way, and the thugs wanted more detail about the blonde and to take him on.
The German Boy Page 33