The Writing on the Wall and Other Stories

by Penny Edwards

  “Better this,” his mother had whispered, “than flying splinters from the furniture,” and when they’d heard the drone, she’d folded herself over him where, goodness knows how, they’d remained for nearly an hour.

  He played excitedly with the toy train Auntie Gerda had given him for his birthday while she and his mother prepared their meal. It was only years later he learnt the train belonged to his cousin who was serving in France. He could never really hear what they said when they were huddled in the kitchen. For much of the time Auntie Gerda and his mother spoke in hushed tones. They were all glad of their fish and potatoes on such a horrible night and his mother had mashed the potatoes to perfection, particularly good as she had no butter or milk. He finished and felt, as he often did, that he’d have welcomed seconds if they’d had any.

  As his mother picked up their plates to take to the kitchen, they heard the siren. “Surely not,” and she limply let go of one of the plates. Auntie Gerda took control, for his mother couldn’t seem to move.

  “Come on,” she shouted, gathering him in her arms and practically shoving his mother towards the cupboard under the stairs. “Run!” As they obeyed her they heard the first bomb explode. The noise pierced his ears and his mother calculated it could have been only a street away, an utterance she seemed to regret as she immediately said sorry to him and pulled him towards her. He felt her lips on his head, her breath blowing gently on his hair. Another one fell. So close to their house it shook. Then another. And a crash, this time somewhere in the house, followed, as if triangles had joined cymbals, by what seemed like a mountain of glass shattering on the floor. He’d shook as much before only when he’d had that fever and he was clammy with a temperature of 103. His mother was hugging him so tightly now he was sure he would bruise and none of them speaking, thinking, probably, that if they did, the bombers may hear them.

  The bombs didn’t stop that night. Usually, they came in waves – the drone, the quiet, the drone, the quiet – and each period of quiet they’d learnt to take deep breaths, in relief and preparation. But that night, there was an unrelenting drone, a determination by their enemy to offer nothing in the way of respite. So they had to tolerate the combined sound of droning, crashing and the eerie crumbling of houses around them for over an hour, imagining, or trying not to, what they would see of their city when they could go out again.

  After about an hour, he remembered, it did go quiet for a while, but the all-clear didn’t sound and they braced themselves for another bombcarpet, as Berliners had begun to call them, Peter defying his mother by daring to go out of the cupboard for a few minutes as his legs couldn’t keep still any longer. Then the droning started again and he flew into their arms, where he stayed for what seemed like a lifetime. The all-clear came at 10pm, an hour after his bedtime, but no one was ready for sleep.

  They crawled out of the cupboard, their bones weary from the task of saving their lives. The telephone rang almost straight away. It was Herr Muller, checking to see if they were all right and apologising for his erroneous prediction. “Who’d have thought it, on a night like this?” his mother reassured, then put the phone down and reported Herr Muller’s words to them that the danger, he’d been told, was now a rising wind, which would be sure to make a fire storm in a few hours’ time. “The fires of hell,” she said and they all looked into the living room, which they could do now as the door had blown off its hinges.

  After they’d cleared up as much as they could, and Peter was pleased to see his train had also survived, they gingerly opened the front door and it was only when they saw that nothing before them was recognisable that they began to realise how lucky they’d been. His mother began crying and Auntie Gerda thrust him protectively into her stomach in a tardy attempt to stop him seeing the devastation. He could still hear his mother sobbing and he started to cry himself as hearing her like this was the thing he couldn’t bear the most. His tears soaked Auntie Gerda’s lavender-scented skirt, a smell he could still just detect underneath the stronger waft of smoke and an odd stench in the burning fires. He remembered he hadn’t cried since he’d been very cross with a friend who had come to tea but who wouldn’t let him play with his own toy plane. He’d got so cross he’d lashed out at and hit his friend. His father had come in and told Peter he was extremely disappointed in him. Somehow, coming from his father whom he loved beyond anything, disappointment was worse than anger and he’d gone to his room and cried until he was sure there were no tears left.

  Nobody said anything until he could hear his mother and aunt, in almost whispers, utter expected condemnations. Then, slowly, he heard them try to piece together what had been lost and he ran into the house because he didn’t want to know. They followed in quickly, frightened for his safety in what was now a fragile place to be.

  “Stop,” his mother shouted for there were no lights and it wasn’t long before they knew they didn’t have a phone anymore and nor had they water or heat.

  He stayed in the hallway with Auntie Gerda while she looked for candles in a drawer in a cupboard in the lounge where he liked to keep his pencils. She lit a match and he could now see her tear-stained face.

  “Be careful of the glass,” she advised them both and they followed her in, every crunch of broken glass under their feet seeming to lay their past to rest.

  Soberly, they sat and counted their good fortune and his mother found a small bottle of brandy. It was his first introduction to alcohol and he remembered he loved the warmth it gave his mouth and his tummy. Despite protests from Auntie Gerda and her son, his mother went upstairs and minutes later returned with pillows and blankets. They started to settle for the night. It felt important to at least try to do something normal, though the eerie sound of crumbling buildings did much to shake this attempt. He lay between them, wondering if it was possible that their hearts were beating as hard as his.

  When morning came, both adults tried to do usual things, his mother saying she must go out and try to find more food, but her quandary lay in whether Peter and Auntie Gerda should go with her. The fear of what would happen if they let anyone out of their sight won the day and they all ventured out but were immediately stopped in their tracks by a cloud of smoke pushing its way past them as they opened the door. They immediately shut it again and Auntie Gerda said something about wet towels for their faces.

  “There’s no water,” reminded his mother, but Auntie Gerda said she’d thought of something. She emerged from upstairs carrying sodden towels, telling them as she did so with a slight self-congratulatory smile that she’d filled the sink in the bathroom just before the bombing.

  “I was going to wash my face to wake myself up a bit,” she said, glad that her weariness had had such a positive outcome.

  “Cover your face as much as you can, Peter,” his mother instructed him by demonstration, as she often did, a technique he’d always found useful in his teaching, and he could now see only her bright green eyes, which winked encouragement to do the same. He opened up the bundle of wet cloth and saw it was the same towel Auntie Gerda had used on his mother’s hair the day before. He put the icy towel against his skin and followed them outside. He wanted to know what had happened to his friends, to Friedrich and Gerhard – what would they be doing now? Where were they? – but didn’t ask, instead letting his imagination go to places he didn’t like and thinking of all the stories he’d read where heroes had ended up in sticky situations.

  It was horrible outside. He couldn’t recognise anything and he began to feel cross at his mother for letting him see such things. He couldn’t see the shops or the streets and most houses were a pile of rubble. He wanted to go back in the house where he could still see things he saw yesterday and hoped beyond hope they wouldn’t be out for long.

  It was difficult to walk on the piles of bricks and glass, but with his flat shoes he coped a little better than his mother and aunt who on various occasions nearly twi
sted their ankles with their heels. He felt frightened of everyone’s charcoal faces, which, along with the faces covered with scarves, looked like monsters from another planet and even though some raised their hands in greeting and said, “Hello, Peter,” he recognised none.

  No one stopped to talk, which was unusual in itself. Many a time, he’d stood patiently by his mother while she exchanged news with someone or other, so enraptured would the adults be that the only concession to his being there was a pat on the head by one of them. Now all he could hear was coughing. So much of it. And the odd car horn. Negotiating anything with hands pressed firmly against the wet towels was hard and as the once cold water gradually warmed and the initial relief lessened, they had to come to the miserable conclusion there was nowhere to get anything and they would have to rely on the mediocre provisions in the house. But complaining was not only not an option but was something none of them wanted to do and they turned round to face the same rubble and dust and the sound of firemen calling for people and trying to extricate them from buildings.

  Just before they reached their house, they saw a small group of women huddled round something that Peter didn’t quite see as Auntie Gerda had pulled his towel over his eyes and with a warm but firm hand kept it there despite his protests. What he didn’t see but what Herr Muller told him about years later was that his mother had joined the group and together they gathered around an English pilot, shot down hours before but in the chaos still where he’d landed, and stayed with him until his inevitable death, talking to him even though the one’s understanding of the other’s language was probably negligible. Nevertheless, they remained with him until he died.

  7

  Helen concentrated as hard as any predator, hungry for the right stop and determined that nothing should tempt her away from her task. She felt exhilarated, excited by the connection she was about to have with a past Stephen had talked of so often and comforted that there was a reason he should be brought into a conversation. She’d noticed she’d begun to feel less anxious and was beginning to celebrate the unfamiliarity of her surroundings, feeling less intimidated by them and more excited by the white or cream houses with their red or orange roofs, the billboards whose meanings she could only guess at and the conversations she didn’t understand. She enjoyed being on the other side of the road; it jostled with her mind a little, if only to challenge an instinct to call it the wrong side. Her mind was taken up with the other guest Margot and Hans had invited to the lunch who, they said, had been insistent on seeing her, but they had given her nothing else, so her anticipation leant more towards anxiety than excitement as withdrawal of information, in her experience, generally seemed to mean something was wrong.

  After about half an hour or so, she got off where Hans had told her to and she immediately rang him, also as he’d instructed. “I’ll be with you in a couple of minutes,” he said in a rushed but nevertheless pleased tone and she felt a sudden jolt to be hearing a voice she’d last heard when Stephen was alive. It reminded her how much she’d been striving to avoid this, how she’d tried to live away from him somehow, ensuring that she spent as much time as she could with people who hadn’t known him because those who did didn’t seem to know how to be around her and the mutual discomfort was not only something she could hardly bear but something that also made her angry because she’d found that she’d allowed the situation to engineer itself in such a way that she’d invariably try to relieve their awkwardness. She’d always hated the troubled minds of others; it was a difficulty of who she was that their ease took priority over what was attempting to unscramble itself in her own head, but this irritated her about herself no end.

  When Hans walked towards her, she felt both sorrow and contentment. It was a confusion she supposed she would have to get used to for the rest of the day but one she ultimately welcomed. She could see the last five years had served him well. He was no different from the Hans she remembered: tall, a little portly with a thick head of hair where grey and blond strands seemed to be in conversation with one another.

  He held out his arms. “Helen, how good to see you.” There was a tidy formality about Hans that took his involvement with people to concern but not a step further. He knew what he was supposed to do and he did it beautifully. She allowed him to hold her and for a few seconds there was a silence in which all she let herself feel was relief that she’d arrived at her destination. “I’m so sorry about Stephen,” she heard him say. “It’s too young.”

  She gently pulled away. “It’s really good to see you, Hans. How’s Margot?”

  “Swearing amongst a lot of steam in the kitchen,” he laughed.

  “I hope she hasn’t gone to too much trouble.”

  “Not at all. She’s been very excited about seeing you again. She’s just such a perfectionist, never thinks the food will be good enough.”

  She remembered that about Margot, the attention to detail and a slight apology never far from her lips, which told anyone who did feel something she was responsible for was less than perfect that she was the first to realise the error. It was almost as if her fear was that of being taken by surprise.

  She told Hans she was famished, so anything Margot had made would be eaten with relish.

  Hans smiled. “You look very well, Helen, considering what you’ve been through. I hope you don’t mind me asking what happened.”

  She did mind, but she didn’t tell him that and as Stephen was going to come up quite a lot in conversation, she thought she might as well get used to it. So she told him how Stephen had gone out for petrol, how he’d been a long time, but she’d thought perhaps he was at the supermarket. She’d asked him to get some matches and maybe the petrol station didn’t have any. But it had got late and every time she phoned him, it had rung out, then gone to answerphone. She’d said to Emma she should go and look for him. And that was when their phone had rung.

  Hans listened with polite attention; he had no wish to venture further and as ever Helen was happy to accommodate this standard social normality. It came as no surprise to her; Hans wasn’t naturally empathetic. But he still had an attractiveness that was drawn, she’d always felt, from a good helping of self-confidence rather than attributes that may have required a greater humility. Stephen’s friendship with Hans had intrigued her because there had never been anything brash about her husband who was surely too shy and cautious for the man who was walking alongside her now.

  They carried on walking for what must’ve been another five minutes or so, with Hans asking her what she’d seen in Berlin and canvassing her opinion of his city, to which he was obviously expecting favourable replies and to which, she suspected, he would have slightly mocked anything to the contrary. But no such controversy emerged and he was pleased his city had walking around it another satisfied customer. After turning into the street he declared was his and passing three or four houses similar to the ones she’d seen from the bus, they turned left onto the gravel forecourt of his and Margot’s house. She smiled as she looked at it: detached and cream, as the others they’d passed but grander in size and appearance, as if everything was meant to lead to this one.

  As their feet crunched their way through the gravel, the large, panelled front door opened and Margot, ever the enthusiastic hostess, came running towards them with outstretched arms and Helen knew that being bundled into her arms was all but inevitable. How lovely it was to see one another was both articulated and meant; there was a genuine warmth between the two women who’d been thrown into one another’s company and obliged to get on.

  “But Hans tells me you’ve been stressing in the kitchen,” said Helen.

  “What did you tell her that for?” She shook her head. “Come on in.”

  Margot seemed to have got older than Hans, Helen thought, as if both she and time had fallen out and either time had reduced its favours or Margot had stopped accepting them. It was disconcerting to see a friend
after an interval of some time because in witnessing a friend’s ageing, it somehow made you see your own mortality more clearly. In that sense, far more comforting to see your friend in your mind’s eye.

  Margot carried on holding her tightly round her waist, as she showed Helen through the front door and into their house. She expressed her condolences and said how fond she was of Stephen.

  “We were so sorry to have missed his funeral,” she said and Helen detected a regret in Margot’s voice she immediately felt obliged to reassure because her absence from Stephen’s funeral had clearly caused Margot great concern. So she told her friend that she mustn’t worry, that Stephen always avoided funerals where he possibly could and that she knew they were thinking of her. Then, without a moment’s pause, she changed the subject to that of their house, which was taking her breath away, so grand and imposing was it with its high ceilings that created a slight echo when everyone spoke, so that Helen felt she was in a home a guide might be taking her through, rather than one a friend inhabited. Margot smiled at her raptures, taking Helen’s raincoat that she’d needlessly brought with her and put it in what seemed like a room underneath the stairs. Then they both showed her through to the dining room.

  They had prepared everything beautifully. Helen was guided into a large room with French windows, which, half-opened, invited the eye into an oval-shaped princess of a garden, prettily groomed and not one that expected to look after itself very much. The brown oak table, polished and seeming to serve as a reflecting river for the swan-shaped napkins that glided across it, was laden with silver, a white dinner service and a platter hosting a pyramid of lemons.