The purse Christina stole for him was in the coat too. When he had bought his ticket to London, he put the remainder of the money in his trouser pocket: three ten-shilling notes, some silver and bronze coins, which were called two shillings, sixpence, one penny and one farthing. How much it came to in Deutschmarks, which were worthless now anyway, he didn’t know, or if this money would get him back across the Channel when he left London.
The purse smelled sour and the silk lining was so frail with age it was disintegrating. A name was written on the silk: Elisabeth Mary Oliver. There were some shopping lists and unpaid bills for meat, coal and groceries. In an old envelope were two faded bus tickets and a yellowing photograph with Folkestone 1932 written on the back.
In the picture, three young women are standing on a promenade with their arms round each other’s waists. One is his mother and Stefan sees that she is not much older than he is now. She wears a dark full skirt and summer blouse and he knows that her hair will be a dozen shades of gold in the seaside light. She looks happy and there is no caution in her smile. She has twelve more years.
Beside his mother is Elisabeth, and the third young woman he recognizes too. Rachel Saunders does not look like a farmer as she did today, she wears a tight pale suit and heels. He sees the subtle proportions of her face that all good Germans of the Reich have been taught to recognize. It was clearer in her youth than it is now. She is a Jew. But no one who saw this picture of the three together could think they should not be friends.
Stefan leaned back in his seat and angled the picture to the light. It was 1932 when he came to England with his parents. He wondered where he was that day, and where his father was. Did his mother, or Elisabeth, or Rachel Saunders, already know Michael Ross? What were they doing at the seaside?
He examined the faces, but there wasn’t any more to discover, and he put the photograph in his shirt pocket.
In another compartment of the purse he found an old visiting card stained the colour of flesh, although the deckled edge and the name were still gold:
Mrs Francesca Blanche McCarthy Brion
The address was a place in London called Regent’s Park, and written on the back in pencil:
American lady who knows M. very well.
Given to me in Fitzroy Street outside M’s studio. Lunch hour
March ’29. Invitation to call.
E.
He put the visiting card in his shirt with the photo.
The light had almost gone. Far away at the house on Romney Marsh, the fire in the sitting room would be lit and George would be home from work. He and Elisabeth would have gin and tonic before supper, while Maud demonstrated what she had learned at ballet, and Alice and Christina would sit on the arms of the sofa and scoff or applaud depending on their mood.
Stefan wondered what Christina had told them and if they thought he was still out walking on his own. When the time came, he hoped she would deny knowing anything about the stolen money.
He put down the carriage window and threw the purse out into the dusk.
Lights began to cluster and string along the roads. The fields and cottages became suburban gabled houses with long gardens, then row on row of chimneys and black brick terraces so close together there could be only alleyways between them. He began to pick out empty spaces, the shapes of battered half-demolished structures, and sometimes there were neighbourhoods of ghost streets with pavements and kerbs, but where the houses had been completely cleared away. Weeds had grown through the remnants of foundations and there were solitary trees which must have been in gardens once.
The damage to London seemed slight compared to German cities. The bravery of the Luftwaffe didn’t amount to much, but perhaps it was good they never knew at home how little was achieved. Stefan wondered if the pictures of the Blitzkrieg had been faked.
The city gathered itself together, holed in places but closing in around the train. The upper storeys of houses and tenements were level with the railway, which ran along a viaduct. Through the lighted windows, Stefan glimpsed the English people in their sitting rooms and kitchens: a man in a vest shaving at a scrap of mirror with his braces dangling, some children jumping on a sofa, a girl lying on her stomach on a hearthrug, a woman in a floral apron reaching up to pull the curtains. Then the train crossed a bridge. The Thames was busy with tugs and barges. Yellow lamps along the banks cast reflections in the water.
At the station, Charing Cross, Stefan walked through the ticket barrier and out to a street. The sky was royal blue and the air was warmer than in Kent. The city sounded like a forest, with the din of birds twittering in the dusk above the lights of cars and buses and shop windows. Damaged buildings were scaffolded in readiness for repair. Everything seemed orderly and hopeful.
He walked past a rack of bicycles, a horse and cart, a boy selling newspapers, and joined the flow of people on the pavement, not knowing in which direction he should go. There was a large square with fountains, stone lions and a statue on a column. The scene was familiar, like walking through a picture he had seen a hundred times.
He asked the way to Regent’s Park, struggling to find the English words. For the first time in months his thoughts were in German. A man gave him directions, then pointed to the rifle, saying something that may have been a warning. Stefan had not forgotten how to make his body still and ready. The man backed off and walked away.
Stefan asked for directions twice more before he found the address of Mrs Brion. It was a villa with a grand porch set back in an almost empty garden. On the scrubby grass stood a strange melancholy shape which could have been a rock worn into holes by the sea. It looked lost, the same as him, and people had chalked their names on it. Someone had drawn a cartoon of a buxom naked girl, and it seemed wrong that this lonely thing had been defaced and made to look ridiculous. Stefan walked across to rub away the drawing with his sleeve. He smeared the chalk across the stone but a ghost of the girl remained.
Half a dozen dustbins, a few bicycles and prams were by the porch steps. Toys lay about on the bald gravel drive. Several windows were broken and boarded on the inside, but there were lights on all over the house and he saw a row of new bell buttons beside the front door; Flats 1 to 8, with names. None of them was Mrs Brion’s.
P. Fairhaven & O. Layne was painted on the wall by the original brass bell and he pressed it, hearing a jingle far off inside, then after some minutes the door scraped open and woman’s narrow face angled up at him with rodent curiosity. She put on a pair of spectacles. ‘Yes, young man?’
Stefan retrieved some English words and said carefully, ‘I am looking for Mrs Brion.’ He held out the card and the woman took it.
‘Oh, my, you’re way out of date. She’s in Wyoming. She hasn’t lived here for years.’ The woman was an American. ‘And you are, if I may ask?’ Her wiry ginger hair was receding slightly and her forehead gleamed in the hideous light from a naked bulb.
‘My name is Stephen Lander.’
Another woman’s voice shouted from the open door Stefan could see across the cavernous hall. ‘Who is it, Pixie sweet?’
‘It’s a nice young man after Frankie Brion,’ Pixie shrieked over her shoulder.
‘Frankie’s in America!’ the voice yelled back.
‘I know, Ollie. I told him. Stop hollering at me. I’ll bring him in.’ She said to Stefan, ‘I have an address somewhere, though it’s years since I’ve made use of it. Francesca’s never one to keep in touch, and I’m just hopeless when it comes to pens and paper and the like.’ She giggled and two yellow teeth hooked her lower lip.
Stefan followed her into a room so packed with furniture he couldn’t see a route across to the man with a turquoise cigarette in his mouth who had swivelled round to look at them.
‘Here he is, Ollie dear, a visitor for us,’ said Pixie gaily, setting off. Stefan followed her along a winding path between occasional tables and footstools, whatnots of china animals, standard lamps and magazine racks, to the modern tweed armchairs
– his and hers – on either side of an electric fire. The room was brightly lit and sweltering. It smelled of old beef dinners.
The man stood up and said cheerily, ‘Heavens, Pixie, the boy has got a gun!’
It was the voice that had shouted to the hall – a woman’s voice.
‘Ollie’ was wearing flannel trousers with her shirtsleeves rolled up to her elbows, and her clothes were rather flattering to her large bosom and narrow hips. She had abundant, cropped, two-toned hair. She rested one elbow in her other palm, holding the cigarette between her long stained fingers. ‘What a splendid thing – your gun, I mean. Put it over there by the wireless. We don’t want it going off and killing old man River upstairs in his bed.’ She shook his hand. ‘I’m Olivia Layne.’ Her face was lined and heavy in the jaw, but she had a fine complexion and clear hazel eyes. ‘What a treat. A gorgeous boy – and wearing silver.’ She was referring to the locket. ‘Let me get you something, darling. Whisky? Gin?’
The pink-faced Pixie patted a chair and Stefan sat, then she went to a bureau and started searching through papers. ‘How is it you know Francesca Brion?’
‘She was my mother’s friend,’ Stefan said. The lies came easily but English didn’t any more. ‘They lose … they lost … connection in the war. But now I … remember it, she told me Mrs Brion is in America, but I forget … forgot. I would like to smoke, please. Do you have a light?’ He took out George’s cigarettes.
‘Oh goody, Players. Olivia only ever has Russians,’ Pixie said, when he offered a cigarette to her. She gave him a box of matches and he lit her cigarette, then his own. The smoke in his lungs was a relief.
‘There is someone in London my mother likes me also to find. A friend, she says, perhaps of Mrs Brion, so I come – came here to this house to enquire. Michael Ross.’
‘Hah!’ Olivia slapped her thigh. ‘What a hoot! Does your Mama know that Frankie nabbed the Hebrew? You remember, Pixie sweet – Michael Ross, the Hebrew. He was divine. Didn’t we all just lust after him. But Francesca was the one who got him up the aisle.’
‘They are married?’ Stefan asked.
‘It didn’t last, poor Frankie. I don’t think he ever really loved her. There was a girl, Frankie told me once. His heart belonged elsewhere and always had.’ Olivia handed Stefan a drink. ‘I say – it wasn’t your mother, was it?’
‘Ollie! Hush! What a thing to ask.’ Pixie had pushed the papers back inside the bureau and forced it shut. ‘Then you don’t need the American address,’ she said to Stefan. ‘You’d better try our old house in Bloomsbury. It belonged to Mama, you see, and Frankie used to live here in Regent’s Park. That must be why you have this address. Lordy, such a muddle when Daddy lost his money in ’29. We were in Amalfi and the pool had only just been filled. I thought I’d die. All our lovely houses had to go. Frankie bought our Bloomsbury place and said I could live in this one. So here we are, aren’t we, Ollie dear? We’ve survived.’
‘Indeed we have,’ said Olivia. ‘What times they were – until another blasted war and rations bored us half to death.’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Pixie dreamily. ‘I so miss steak.’
‘Remember, Pixie, Frankie Brion’s soirées – in this very room?’ Olivia mused. ‘Frankie brought in fascinating poor people for us to talk to. We all so adored genuine naïveté. She found the Hebrew in a park, if I recall. And how we travelled! Your mother’s bijou castles and the like across half the bloody globe. Happy times, Pixie darling, weren’t they just.’
‘After the Crash, Mama took to living on the river steamer Daddy bought to ease her lung, and my brother, Huttlestone, turned tragically to ballet … but you don’t want to know all that,’ said Pixie forlornly.
‘So I will find Michael Ross?’ Stefan said, standing up. The room was suffocating and he wondered why the women didn’t need air. ‘You know the house?’
‘No rush, darling,’ Olivia said. ‘Enjoy your drink, chin chin. I’m afraid Michael isn’t there.’
Pixie said, ‘Is he in Wyoming too?’
‘No, dear, he came home in ’41 or thereabouts to witness the hatching of the first-born, then off he went again, to Africa or some such illiterate warring place. Poor Frankie was exhausted with all the dashing underground to dodge the bombs and the water off every other minute. You can’t bathe a baby in a sink of bloody vodka even if you are Francesca Brion. She took the child to America in ’42, to her sister, Ingrid. The house in Bloomsbury was mothballed.’
‘I didn’t know all this,’ said Pixie peevishly. ‘No one tells me anything. So where is the Hebrew, Ollie? The boy needs to find him. Doesn’t anybody know?’
‘He never went to join Francesca, I do know that much. He could be anywhere. He had a studio near the Tottenham Court Road. Francesca used to say he practically lived in it before the war. Perhaps that’s where he is.’
‘I shall go now,’ Stefan said. ‘I trouble you too long. You can tell me where I will find Tottenham Court Road?’
‘I’ll sketch you a nice little map,’ Olivia said, downing her drink. ‘Are you sure you won’t have another?’ She perched her cigarette on the mantelpiece amongst an arrangement of china kittens and opened the bureau, setting off another slide of correspondence.
‘While Ollie draws your map, I’ll show you Michael Ross’s work,’ Pixie said, ushering him along a different pathway through the furniture. ‘When I was just a girl, he begged Mama to let me sit for him. He told me that of all the beauties he had ever painted, I had the most exquisite skin.’
On the far wall, amongst framed tapestries of cats with balls of wool, was a painting of a girl. ‘There,’ Pixie said. ‘Mama says it’s so me.’
In the picture, the young Pixie’s back was turned and she looked over her smooth bare shoulder. Her copper hair curled down her back and over the dark blue satin of her dress. An open fire or candles were somewhere near, edging her lips and cheek and shoulder with light.
It seemed to Stefan impossible that it was a portrait of the florid little woman standing beside him, with her horse teeth biting on her lip. ‘You were like this?’ Stefan said, realizing too late how rude it sounded, but Pixie seemed accustomed to people noting the discrepancy between the youthful portrait and her middle-aged self because she didn’t look offended.
‘Oh, yes,’ she said, taking off her spectacles as if that would do the trick. ‘Michael was entranced by me. Bewitched. I was his muse, you see.’ She peered foggily at the picture. ‘He painted flame-haired girls for years and years. I was his Janey Morris. His Lizzie Siddal.’
‘He was an artist with unusual vision,’ Olivia said crisply. She handed Stefan a piece of paper. ‘That’ll get you somewhere near the studio, then you’ll have to ask. I don’t suppose you’ll find him. Do come back if you need a bed for the night. We have a put-u-up behind the piano.’
Pixie blinked her chalky lashes. ‘It’s surely been a pleasure.’ She led him across the room via the electric fire, then back along the route towards the door.
‘Good luck!’ called Olivia. ‘If you find him, tell the Hebrew we’re still alive and single.’
Stefan was glad to be outside after the stifling meaty air of Pixie and Olivia’s flat. He had Olivia’s map to follow but as he walked out to the street, the thought came into his head that he should go to Müllerstrasse. Weariness was overlapping different times and places, and he knew he must keep reminding himself that he was in London looking for the Jew. What he would do if he found Michael Ross, he did not know. The hatred and the reason for it seemed vague, like something he used to understand but wasn’t sure of any more.
He walked along a street Olivia had drawn for him: Portland Place. The moon was hidden in yellow clouds and misty rain had people hurrying with their heads down. No one took any notice of a young man walking alone.
The map directed him into an adjoining street, so he left the pavement and cut across an empty expanse of concrete gleaming with puddles. Thickets of weeds grew up here and there. A
halved building was on one side with a mountainous pile of rubble against it.
Stefan stood for a moment with the clean English rain on his face. It was peaceful away from the street lights. The scent of nettles reminded him of the walk with Christina on Romney Marsh a few hours ago. It seemed like another life. The ruin gave off a subtle smell of rotting wood and old burning which was repulsive but comforting, because it reminded him of the place where he and Gerda had lived.
He climbed the pile of broken bricks and sat on an upstairs windowsill to have a cigarette. Below his hanging feet were charred joists and, below them, a void with water at the bottom where ripples glimmered – rats swimming, he supposed.
He lit a cigarette with the matches Pixie told him he could keep and wished he had talked to her about America. He hadn’t thought it out before, but perhaps he and Gerda should forget Müllerstrasse, just pack up and go to New York or California. Why not? Gerda had her blue jeans.
Then with a shock he realized he didn’t have them any more. They were not with him at Pixie and Olivia’s flat so he must have left them on the train or dropped them somewhere in the street. The jeans were for Gerda – what she most wanted in the world, and he had forgotten all about them.
His stupidity and carelessness made him wince, his mouth flooded and the walls of his throat squeezed tight with the fear he could never keep at bay for long. He had lost so many things, there would come a time when he had nothing left. The shaking started.
He touched the locket around his neck to calm himself, fixing his attention on the vaporous drizzle lit up by the street lamps. The floating rain was specks of gold dust, spinning when he exhaled, then drifting down again. He followed the minute drops of moisture, barely falling, alight, then extinguished by the shadow.
The German Boy Page 36