The boy rushes to the sofa where the models pose and he hauls off the cover, wrestling with it crazily to find a hem to rip, then he is hobbled by the trailing cloth, falls over and flails his arms like someone beating off a dog.
Laughter rises in Michael’s throat. He wonders where his missing fingers are. ‘Get someone,’ he says. His hand throbs softly in time with his heartbeat, and Stefan staggers up with the cloth bunched against him but he doesn’t seem to know what to do. He shifts and the glass grinds under his feet.
‘It was just an accident. I can walk.’ The voice is coming from somewhere else.
Then he’s lying on the sofa and his hand is swaddled in the cloth, which also covers his chest. When he looks around the room is empty but footprints of his blood track across the floor. There is so much of it. He remembers hearing thunder over Romney Marsh, but perhaps it was the boy running along the metal corridor.
He isn’t anxious any more. His mind is clear and he is content to lie in the sunshine with the room glittering around him like the sea, and it comes to him that the rippling green mirrors turned out to be water after all and two have burst and flooded the floor.
He moves his head and knows this is not a dream because his neck clicks and he hears himself swallow. He must have passed out, the boy carried him to the sofa and wrapped up his hand. Soon someone will come. A brief fear grips him because the door is shut and he knows he can’t get up to open it – but they will knock it down, that’s all. It doesn’t matter.
He remembers Nanna Lydia, whose dog came back to see her with the hens from Neate Street while he and Elisabeth sat by the bed holding Nanna’s hands. He looks around but the room is empty and he is still alone.
The scene jumps. The sun has moved. The wad of cloth is soaked through and he notices its weight. The sofa behind his back feels sodden too but there’s no pain.
In the street below the window someone is sweeping and he has never heard so quiet a sound outside before. Perhaps he never listened. Close by is the mothy flutter of muslin moving in a draught, and his ticking watch.
All his life he has tried to paint the light and now he sees it’s made of restless beads of salty blue. The perspective of the chair is wiser than he thought and he never noticed that shadows have quiet voices.
He remembers his missing fingers. He will have to learn to paint with his left hand, relearn for a second time, and by then he will have forgotten all this. With the thought he does forget. The air vanishes and the shadows are silent. His chest aches with sadness and he can barely draw in a breath; he’d rather die than never see again what he has just seen – and then suddenly the marvel returns.
Every piece of broken glass strewn across the floor carries its last reflection, and if he were to pick up any one, it would show a fragment of the room as it was this morning. This seems to him miraculous because it means his hand can be made whole again using the reflections on the pieces. He must remember to tell the people who come to help not to sweep up. The thought flickers like a reel running out of film.
It is pitch black and he feels the boy’s arms around him heaving him up so he half walks, half staggers in the darkness. The boy is strong and doesn’t let him fall. On the sofa, the cloth is wound around Michael’s injured hand, and although there is no light, he sees the boy pull the silver locket from his neck, break the ribbon and put it inside the wad of cloth. It hurts the boy to let the locket go. His grief has caused the blackness in the room. Then he leaves, shutting the door behind him.
Michael opens his eyes and knows he has been dreaming. From the way the shadows slant across the floor, it must be late afternoon. The boy left a long time ago.
In the dream, the boy put Elisabeth’s locket inside the cloth but Michael knows that moving his good hand to search for it is too great an effort and he wonders if he can see the locket anyway with the new sight he has acquired. He can. It is there deep inside his chest, a silver heart beating strongly. He is glad he is still all right.
The room stretches away, beautifully sunny but very cold, and Dungeness lighthouse stands on the splintered glass. The thud of the sea comes through the floorboards and into Michael’s body.
When the door opens, he expects it to be the boy returning, but it is Elisabeth. There must be a sea mist because her face is wet. She puts the basket on the table and lights the stove, moving quietly because she thinks he is asleep. From time to time she looks across and she doesn’t seem to know he sees her.
38
Alice said, ‘I don’t think this fits me well at all.’
Elisabeth had pins in her mouth or she would have said something about the ingratitude of daughters. She remembered Karen at Alice’s age, when life moved forward with such force that things were said or done before they could be considered, and she wanted to smile at the memory of Karen in spite of the pins and Alice’s rudeness, and the agony of accidentally kneeling on the handle of the scissors.
The evening was hot. The doors to the garden were wide open and the August moon was shining across the lawn. Alice stood on the piano stool while Elisabeth shuffled on her knees, trying to get the yards of skirt evenly hemmed. The dress had been cut from a voluminous silk coat given to her by Ingrid Schroëder many years ago. It was a handblock print, expensive and exclusive, as Ingrid Schroëder’s cast-offs always were, and there had been plenty of yardage to remake it as a dress in the New Look style Rachel had shown Alice in a magazine. Elisabeth fought with herself not to resent Alice’s head being filled with nonsense about fashion.
‘Alice, your middle is baggy,’ said Maud. ‘And your top.’
‘Well, it’s your fault,’ said Alice. ‘I never should have given you my coupons.’ Maud’s class at school were collecting clothing coupons to send to the Princess Elizabeth Alexandra for her wedding dress. Christina had given hers without regret but for Alice it had been a sacrifice. The dress was her consolation.
Alice had altered in these last few months. She was elated that her neighbour, Rachel Saunders, was her aunt. The story told to her was a sketchy version of the truth: some papers at the orphanage had been discovered and the connection with Mrs Saunders had come to light. Alice accepted the vagueness of the details and the coincidence. She wasn’t interested in what was over and done with, only in the present; this was her nature, like Karen’s. If her father lived in America, Alice said, she would look for him one day but not just yet.
Elisabeth felt a new and different tenderness for Alice and Christina. The separation was beginning – from her and from each other.
Christina looked up from her book, taking off her spectacles and rubbing the bridge of her nose. ‘I think the dress is nice,’ she said.
She had been quieter since Stefan left, turning in on herself as a young girl does when her heart has encountered something she has no name for.
The night Stefan disappeared George was telephoning the police when she told them Stefan had gone home to Germany. ‘His girl is called Gerda,’ Christina wept. ‘He wants to be with her. Please don’t bring him back.’ In spite of her tears she said nothing bad had happened to make him leave, he just realized he should, that’s all, and they must be happy for him because he loved Gerda and that was that.
The port authorities at Dover had no record of a boy alone having been a passenger, but George had gone to Germany to search for him. Finding Stefan seemed impossible unless he wanted to be found. The Landaus’ last address could not be traced, no paperwork had survived for Artur, nor was there a record of his death in Poland. The Gestapo prison at Kaufering where Karen died had been burned down.
George said he would go back to Germany again. ‘He’s our family, Elisabeth. We must know he’s all right even if he doesn’t need us any more.’
To Elisabeth, there were two Stefans – the orphan, Karen’s boy, who shivered with the memory of horrors that could not be imagined, and the almost-man, Artur’s son, calculating, watchful, and far older than his years. She wished him safe, but she did
not wish him back.
She hoped that explanations and confessions to Alice might never be necessary now. ‘Why should we tell her unless we find him?’ she had said to George. ‘It will only hurt her.’
‘For the same reason all the other things we’ve hidden should be told – because Alice’s past belongs to her,’ he had answered, baffled as he often was at Elisabeth’s reasoning. ‘Surely you want her to know who you are?’
‘She does know,’ Elisabeth said. ‘I’m her mother in every way that matters.’ If this was right or wrong, she had no idea. Her motives and loyalties, the decisions they all had made over the years, were too tangled to understand.
‘Turn,’ Elisabeth said, patting Alice’s tanned legs, and Alice revolved on the piano stool. Elisabeth sat back on her heels and the heat prickled on her skin. There was no breeze coming in and moths flickered round the light. ‘Would you shut the doors, please, Maudie darling? We’ll suffocate but we can’t have insects in the house.’
‘Then Maudie better go outside,’ Christina said.
‘Put her in a jam jar!’ said Alice. ‘Ouch, a pin. I’m stabbed.’
Elisabeth got up off her aching knees, pushing back her hair. ‘Let’s stop now, Alice. It’s too hot. I’ll finish the hem tomorrow.’
Alice had already jumped down off the piano stool and was jiving across the carpet in her pinned dress.
‘Alice, help me squash the insect!’ Christina yelled, and her book fell on the floor. Maud shrieked and Christina tickled her.
‘Toot, ta toot, ta toot-tootle-ee-oot toot toot …’ Alice was singing.
Elisabeth put the heavy scissors and the pins in the sewing basket. She went to close the doors, but stepped outside, shutting them behind her, and walked across the terrace to find the breeze that might be coming from the sea. Through the study window she saw George at his desk under the yellow electric light, running a hand through his hair and rasping his stubble. The wireless was on and Elisabeth could hear voices and then applause.
She leaned on the garden wall and listened to the frogs croaking in the ditches and sheep bleating out across the Marsh. The night air moved and the damp on her skin cooled.
She remembered the painting Stefan had given her, unrolling it and seeing herself and Michael. A shapeless hope or the memory of a hope had pulled at her as if a thread from the past was tightening. She had thought something would happen. Nothing had. Stefan had left them and gone home to Germany.
The more she examined it, the more absurd the feeling seemed. There was no reason to think the painting was a sign, or the girl was her. The face was in shadow and long auburn hair was not so unusual. It must be someone Michael had met in France.
And the memory of the studio in Fitzroy Street was nothing too. She had simply walked with him on a winter afternoon to a dusky rose-lit room where he made some tea. There was a painting on an easel and she imagined or dreamed something. That was all.
She knows this isn’t true. She had glimpsed beneath the opaque shifting of her life to something luminous and certain. Perhaps this is what she longs for: a single moment which seemed to hold more life in it than all the years that followed. If it could be found again, she would know it this time and she would understand.
Two days after Stefan disappeared, thoughts of Michael and the need to go to Dungeness had got hold of her once more. Suddenly, on an ordinary afternoon which should be like any other, time seemed folded back, as if fifteen years had disappeared and Michael was there waiting for her in the hut out on the Point. The girls were at school and George was at work, she picked up a scarf and the car keys and locked the door behind her.
As she turned on to the shingle track, her heart lifted as if Michael would be there. She stopped the car and got out. The pearly air, the stones rolling under the waves and the lighthouse against the sky seemed the same. Sea spray was carried on the wind. She walked along the shingle bank and back again to find the place where the hut had been.
Here would be the door, the table, and on the other side, above the wooden bed, the window which looked out to sea. She closed her eyes to feel the current of the past and Michael, somewhere, knowing she had come. When I open my eyes, I’ll see him.
Slowly, the feeling fell away. There was driftwood and seaweed on the shingle, nothing else. Even the stove had disappeared.
• • •
There was a theory that the atom bomb which finally beat the Nips also put the earth out of kilter; the blast had jogged it nearer to the sun and this explained the scorching summer. Other people reasoned that the recent atrocious winter proved all the seasons had been disrupted by the war and this was punishment for the evil men had done, and for the devastation.
Eddie was not one to think that anything the human race could do would trouble Mother Nature or provoke her to revenge. Working on the land soon teaches a man how small and insignificant he is.
On the Romney Marsh, the summer dawns were crystalline pink, poised on the edge of blue, and Eddie and Rachel rose at four to work until the night breeze from the Channel dropped and the heat thickened with the day. There had been no rain to speak of for weeks and the ground was like rock, so Rachel put down a heap of straw in the paddock for the old pony to rest on.
The sheep blundered after any shade or scent of moisture. Eddie had to keep hauling them out of the ditches so he called in the shearers to give the animals some relief.
The men sweated through the night, working by touch and moonlight. They sat round the lamps to drink the beer and tea Rachel brought out to them and agreed there had never been a hotter summer. The trees against the stars and the soft clicking of moths on the lamp glass made the world seem innocent and trusting, so the men talked about brutal unsettling things to keep the magic of the night from overwhelming them: a spaceship had landed in America at a place called Roswell and the Russians were edgy and belligerent for no reason anyone could understand. Another war was on the cards and if it wasn’t the Ruskies, it would be the Martians.
By July the pastures were yellow. Rachel’s new niece, Alice Mander, often walked across to see them, and she and Rachel sat in the cool of the kitchen talking about fashion and suchlike – things Eddie didn’t understand. In their summer dresses with their arms and faces beautifully brown, they looked comfortable in the heat, like creatures born to it.
The summer had divided the population, Eddie noticed, into those who burned in the sun and sweated like him, and those who thrived. Elisabeth and Christina belonged with Eddie in the scorched tormented tribe, Rachel and young Alice, with glints of sunshine in their eyes and hair, were in the other.
The other likenesses between Rachel and her niece were subtle. They discovered that their ears were similar and also the shape of their ankles and their knees. Eddie was touched by their fascination with the evidence of their shared blood, but he didn’t let himself dwell on it too long. It was an ordinary joy he would never have in this life.
Rachel had gone up to London to see her brother Michael for the first time in years in the hope that a family of sorts could be salvaged and he would want to see his daughter, but the house in Bloomsbury where he used to live was closed up. The neighbour said Mrs Brion had returned to Wyoming and no one had lived there for years. They used to see her husband occasionally but not for months now, and everyone assumed he’d joined Mrs Brion in America. There was no forwarding address.
‘I can’t do any more,’ Rachel said to Eddie. ‘Michael’s always been the same. He’ll turn up one day, he always does.’
So Rachel’s brother had disappeared, but she had found a niece, and Eddie was glad that fate had been kind to Rachel at last. He was thankful for her happiness. Although the years of painful disappointment could not be wiped away entirely, Alice was a gift that had not come too late.
It was odd about the German boy. He had been at the Manders’ house for only ten days or so when Eddie met him out in the fields late one evening as the dew was falling.
The boy
was taken by surprise by the unexpected encounter, and he looked tensed to run, like a wild thing with good reason to be afraid. Eddie said, ‘Quiet, lad. Steady. I’ll leave you now,’ and went on his way.
Two days later the boy had gone. George Mander went to Germany to look for him, but Elisabeth seemed to put the whole affair away as if the brief visit in their lives was of no account.
Eddie would keep the memory of the meeting in a misty Kentish pasture. It was only a passing moment of the boy’s lost life, of no significance or interest to anyone, but it was right that somebody should remember him.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to the following for their advice and wisdom, and all their help in getting this story into shape: Richard Francis, Mark Vidler, Val Bridge and Christine Purkis; to Peter Garner for his memories of Paris and Germany; to Beverly Stark and Jonathan Carr for our seaside conversations, and also to Jules Stanbridge. To Heather Malcolm for the sustenance she has given me in all ways; and to Ruby Wastvedt for her golden optimism.
To Mavis Cheek and Paul Sussman for their faith and encouragement when it was most needed; to my agent, Judith Murray, and to Venetia Butterfield at Penguin.
To my father, and to my mother, whose letters from Gerda were the beginnings of this story.
The German Boy Page 38