Willard said, ‘I’ll go get a bottle of wine from our cellar.’ Over his shoulder he added, ‘She should never have gone to Germany. That Teutonic sense of duty has ruined her.’
Left alone, Marianne smiled apologetically as she and Felix drifted toward the half-finished kitchen. ‘He thinks if he makes enough jokes about it, Nicole might even laugh one day.’
‘Can I peel potatoes or something?’
‘We peel them after they’re cooked, don’t you? The English throw away the best bits.’ She set half a dozen to boil. The stove was not being used as a room heater.
‘Shell peas, then?’ He saw a basket of them behind the door.
‘Peas? You don’t mind?’
He shook his head. ‘I call them lifesavers.’
She tipped out a heap of pods on the plain deal table and put a large, broken-handled saucepan beside it. ‘We’ll save the empties in that for the chickens.’
‘Pods, they’re called.’
Occasionally their hands touched as they reached for the same pod. Their eyes met and they smiled. On the third or fourth occasion she squeezed his hand deliberately and said, ‘I am really grateful to you, though, Felix.’
‘For?’
‘You know what for. You give us hope that Nicole will one day be reconciled with me. If you were not here – and if you were not so . . . what’s the word? supportable to me – we should never have taken this apartment, though we love it so dearly.’
He continued shelling the peas.
‘D’you know what’s so wonderful now?’ she went on. ‘To wake up in the small hours and just listen to the silence. And to know it’s not the silence you get before a raid. To look up at the moon and clouds and not even think of bombers up there. And if you hear a lorry, it’s only for milk or cattle or something.’
‘To know it’s safe to make babies?’ he suggested.
She smirked.
‘That’s the usual consequence of waking in the small hours. In Vienna they used to call them “children of the night watch”.’
‘You should get married, Felix,’ she said.
‘Maybe one day,’ he told her. He thought of Faith Bullen-ffitch and then thought no. Faith was a collector, not a marrier. He wondered about the BBC woman, too – though he knew that was just fantasy.
‘That’s enough peas,’ she said, adding after a brief silence: ‘You must be psychic or something.’
‘Me?’
‘What you said just now – about making babies?’ She spread both hands across her belly, a protective gesture.
‘Oh! That’s marvellous! When?’
‘Sometime in July.’
‘Golly! You’re not showing?’
‘I know. To do with rationing . . . I hope! Willard and I started it last November, still in Hamburg . . .’
‘So that’s why he came back!’
‘No. He didn’t know until I told him that day – Thursday the fifteenth April. But his . . . Unterbewusstsein – what’s that?’
‘Subconscious?’
‘Yes. It must have told him. And now you’re the first I’ve told – in the community. Willard doesn’t want me to tell anyone until it shows – which it must any day now.’
‘So why tell me?’
‘I don’t know. I feel I sort of owe you . . . sort of more than most.’
They heard Willard talking to Tony on the stair.
‘So, Felix,’ he said when he joined them, ‘tell us about this publishing thing.’
Marianne stripped the parboiled potatoes and diced them into a pan of hot lard, adding chunks of carrot, spam, and sausage. ‘We call this pytt-i-panna,’ she said, though it wasn’t strictly true; it was the nearest the English rationing system would allow.
‘It’s a crazy world,’ Felix said. ‘The people who actually design the books and edit them and so on get six hundred a year . . .’
‘Hey!’ Marianne was impressed.
‘All I do is make some vague specifications and do one abstract sculpture, which we can colour and light in different ways for each chapter opening . . . and just look at things generally . . . “consultant”, they call it . . . one day a week . . .’
‘And?’
He was afraid to go on, after Marianne’s response.
‘They pay you double?’ Willard guessed.
‘More. Sixteen hundred.’
‘Felix!’ Marianne shrieked. ‘You’re going to be rich! Will you be godfather?’
Willard darted her a glance.
‘I told him,’ she said. ‘He won’t tell anyone else.’
Willard glanced from one to the other. Felix had seen that same uneasy light in Adam’s eyes when he found Sally and him having tea together the other day. He was beginning to realize he’d have to get some sort of partner soon; what Adam called the ‘dynamics of the community’ demanded it. Especially if he was no longer the poor DP who roused that community’s impulse to charity.
‘Actually,’ Willard said, ‘it’s no more than your due, Felix. I assume the publisher . . . what’s his name?’
‘Wolf Fogel. The Manutius Press.’
‘I guess this Wolf guy gets to keep your piece of sculpture, eh? So he’s getting your consultancy services cheap.’
‘It’s sixteen hundred per volume. And five are planned.’
Willard whistled. ‘Seven and a half grand! That’s more like it.’ He laughed. ‘So how’s about the godfather thing?’
‘Marxfather?’ Felix suggested. ‘God never did too much for me.’
‘Marx? Are you crazy?’ Willard was genuinely shocked.
Felix backed out of the minefield. ‘Humanist father?’
‘That’s good!’ Marianne put in hastily.
Willard yielded. ‘Oh . . . I guess so. It won’t play too well in Peoria, but what the hell.’
Willard was right, Felix realized. ‘The Wolf guy’ would end up with a new, post-war Felix Breit to grace his Hampstead home, and all paid for by his firm. He realized he needed an agent – fast. Perhaps Corvo could suggest one.
Thursday, 15 May 1947
Sam Prentice, 3½, disappeared when he got bored with being shown over the Dower House. Arthur Prentice said he probably couldn’t come to any harm and went on asking about the price of season tickets on buses to Welwyn North and trains between there and London; May, his wife, who could not decide whether she liked the ground-floor front or the first-floor front better, went in search of the boy. Hannah, 2, toddled at her side, talking scribble.
She hunted through all eight cellars without success. Ditto the rest of the house, all the way up to the Johnsons’ top-floor flat. They were away – in Hertford, buying paint.
‘Look at these,’ May said to her daughter, walking among Marianne’s nylons, which were strung along the passage to dry. She let them brush lightly across her face. ‘Eight pairs! Just make sure you marry an American when you grow up, pet! I wonder what her frocks are like? D’you think we dare? D’you think Sam’s hiding in one of those wardrobes? I do.’
But Marianne’s wardrobe was a disappointment after the promise of those nylons.
‘Well, pet, we start off a bit more level,’ she sighed.
‘Sam!’ Hannah murmured, staring out of the window.
‘He’s not here. That’s definite.’
‘Sam.’
May went to join her and saw him at once – wrestling with a piece of timber twice his own length out in some sort of chicken run built against the outside of the walled garden. That foreign sculptor man was there, too. Mr Breit. He was also waving a bit of wood about. ‘Let’s go and see what they’ve found,’ she said.
It wasn’t that she distrusted Mr Breit – well, she did, really . . . a bit, anyway, or maybe not distrust. The thing was she couldn’t quite fathom him. The way he’d looked at her when they were introduced – if an Englishman had looked like that, she’d have been tempted to slap him. But with foreigners it was different. She’d learned that in the war, after Italy capitula
ted and they’d let the Eyetie POWS out to work on farms and places. Foreigners didn’t mean any harm by it; it was just their way. So she felt no distrust of him, just of his strangeness.
They were funny sort of chicken runs because there were no nesting boxes or places for laying eggs or anything. They ran the full length of the garden wall, about a hundred yards. They were roofed in corrugated iron, about ten foot high where it butted the wall, sloping down to about seven foot in the front, which was ten foot out from the wall. The front was of wire-netting down to knee height, then corrugated iron down to the ground. The floor was all sawdust, brown with age. At least, May hoped it was age. Someone had put up washing lines near the entrance. Two off-white sheets were hanging there, bone dry. May saw that they had been turned sides-to-middle, not very expertly in her view.
They stepped out from behind those sheets and saw at last what they were doing with those planks. An old car chassis had been pushed into these chicken runs at one time and Mr Breit was showing Sam how to get it moving, using them as levers.
‘Don’t you!’ Sam was pushing the man away. ‘I can do it. You watch.’
Felix rested on his length of wood like a warrior on his spear.
Sam inserted his lever under one of the flat tyres and, crouching beneath it, heaved mightily. Nothing moved.
May was about to cry out that he would hurt himself when he gave a shriek of triumph and rested. ‘It moved!’ he shouted. ‘You saw it.’
‘I saw it,’ Felix said, ‘but . . .’
‘I did it. On my own. I did it, didn’t I?’
‘You did, Sam. But that only makes me wonder – are you sure you want to come and live here? Is this the right place for you?’
‘Yes!’ the boy shouted, again at the top of his voice. ‘This is the bestest place.’
‘The bestest place,’ Hannah called out, slipping from her mother’s hand and running to join him. ‘Me! Me!’
May, knowing a fight was about to occur, ran to separate them. But the girl had barely begun to tug at her brother’s lever when Felix offered her his own. It was much too heavy for her but he let her wrestle a bit before he stepped behind her to help. Together, while May looked on, the three of them got the chassis to move several inches more.
‘What is this place?’ she asked when they tired of it.
‘We use it for hanging up laundry now. It was a pheasant run. They grew hundreds of pheasants here – fed them, admired them, smiled at their plumpness. Then shoo! Shoo!’ He flapped his hands toward the coppice beyond the walled garden. ‘And . . . bang-bang!’
May knew his story and was embarrassed. ‘The Wilsons and the Palmers . . .’ she asked. ‘Are they serious – all this community talk?’
‘It’s all still theoretical. We’ve already given up the idea of a communal kitchen and one communal meal a day.’
‘’Cos that Palmer woman can’t abide that Johnson woman?’
‘No flies on you!’
‘It stood out a mile. I asked Mister Wilson if I could take a bit of the walled garden to grow our vegetables in, like an allotment, you know?’
‘We will have a community vegetable garden,’ Felix said. ‘All contribute – all take. As you see, it’s already dug and manured.’
‘Where?’ She stared through the wooden rails of the ornamental oak gate that led into the walled garden. ‘I can’t see it.’
‘Precisely,’ Felix replied. ‘We have been here a month. The weeds are soon shoulder-high. The potatoes are like forests in all the fields around. And we have not dug a single . . . what d’you call it? A spade’s-worth?’
‘A spit.’ She laughed. ‘Don’t ask me why.’
‘I don’t think our “community spirit” will weigh too heavily. On any of us.’
‘We all learned to muck in together during the war,’ she said vaguely. ‘I doubt Arthur and me need any lessons.’ She turned away from the walled garden and stared out across the fields. ‘Where exactly is the boundary?’
‘The iron railing beyond the line of pine trees. We’re allowed to walk wherever we want though. And we can gather wood in the coppice and cut up any of these fallen trees. There’s a path to Dormer Green between that line of lindens – you’ll probably get to know it well.’
She looked at him sharply.
‘That’ll be your childrens’ way to school.’
She scanned the landscape with new eyes. ‘I’d like to see that.’ She looked dubiously at the ploughed field. ‘Can we?’
‘I’ll show you the way. There’s a gate somewhere in all that undergrowth.’
May took Hannah on her shoulders. Sam toughed it out for several dozen increasingly arduous paces and then yielded; once on Felix’s shoulders he kicked him hard and cried, ‘Giddyup!’
Felix obliged until a hidden vine nearly brought him low; it frightened Sam into behaving sensibly after that.
May complimented him on his English; she now felt much more comfortable in his company.
He explained about living in America until he was seven.
‘Fortunately you didn’t pick up the accent,’ she commented, adding hastily, ‘you’ve got a nice foreign accent, instead.’
They negotiated a patch of brambles and calf-high nettles in silence.
‘You were in one of those camps,’ she said.
‘Yes. Mauthausen.’
‘My Arthur filmed one of those places on the day they liberated it.’
‘Belsen, probably. That was in the British sector.’
‘Wouldn’t it be weird if it was the same one, though!’
‘Doesn’t he say?’
‘He won’t talk about it. Or can’t. I don’t . . . I mean I wouldn’t press it.’
They arrived at the gate, which was, in fact, a swing-stile that would pass one person at a time.
‘D’you think that’s right?’ she asked when they were all through.
They were into parkland now, where the grass was cropped by sheep, who gazed at them with placid wariness, and rabbits, whose white scuts and panic-stamping filled the panorama.
‘Everyone must find their own way,’ Felix said. ‘If you mean do I refuse to talk about it, no. It’s hard to think it was real now – except in dreams. This is the path. It must once have been the family’s way to church.’
‘Dreams!’ May said. ‘That must be terrible – not being able to wake up from it.’
‘Waking up is like a new liberation, though.’ Felix stared across the fields and coppices ahead of them. ‘Dormer Green church,’ he said, pointing out the spire. He put Sam down and let him run free. Hannah struggled to be let down and then tottered after him.
May said, ‘It’ll be quite a walk in the rain. You don’t want to talk about it. I understand.’
‘It’s not that,’ he assured her. ‘It’s trying to explain why it isn’t terrible. Why it stops being terrible after a few days . . .’
‘This tree’s empty!’ Sam cried from a little way ahead of them along the path.
‘Hollow,’ May said when she came up to it. ‘D’you want to go inside it?’
Felix lifted the boy and set him down inside the trunk, which was, in fact, a cylinder of living wood, about three inches thick and furnished with bark on both sides. Her mother did the same for Hannah.
They stood inside, jostling and giggling until Felix went round the far side and put his lips near a hole where a branch had once sprouted. ‘I’m so old!’ he moaned, putting on the quavers and wheezes of an old man.
Hannah screamed in happy fright and cried, ‘Again!’
Sam stared up uncertainly at his mother.
‘It’s the tree talking,’ she said. ‘Didn’t you know some hollow trees can talk.’
‘And I’m bored!’ Felix added in the same geriatric tones. ‘Five hundred years! Day and night . . . wind and rain . . . sun and snow . . . I’m so old!’
Fascinated, May watched him assume the part, saw him shrivel into himself, saw his knuckles become gnarled and r
heumatic . . . and she wanted to fling her arms round him and mother him – or something.
Saturday, 17 May 1947
It was a local train to Hemel Hempstead, fussy, self-important on skirts of steam, and slow. The coaches must have been built back in the twenties – no corridors, just six-a-side compartments, each with its own slammer of a door. The wartime years had left them battered and smutty. Through its grimy window Felix could just make out Faith in the last compartment of the last carriage – Ladies Only, No Smoking.
He whistled and waved.
She sat up with a jolt, grabbed her bag, and made it to the platform just as the guard blew his whistle and leaped aboard the caboose – no . . . the guard’s van – at the tail. She laughed across the five or six yards that separated them. ‘That was a bit of luck – spotting you!’
She was wearing a white lace bolero over a pale floral print dress – couture, he felt certain – a cutely angled white beret, and white kid gloves that matched her white leather shoes. No jewelry . . . oh, except for a little brooch above her left breast pocket. She seemed to float up the stairs and across the footbridge; he wondered if she had been schooled as a mannequin before she took that secretarial course.
‘Were you expecting the train on this platform?’ she asked as she joined him.
‘Steps,’ he said, knowing he ought to say more.
‘Oh. Heart . . . or something?’
‘That sort of thing. The pony and trap’s just outside.’ The porter tore off half her ticket and tipped Felix a wink. ‘Hope this weather holds, sir,’ he said.
The brooch was a silver lozenge, set about with small diamonds framing a round glass window behind which a decorative letter F was embroidered, in what was surely human hair, on a pale blue silk. ‘F for Felix,’ she said, following his eyes. ‘That’s why I chose it for today. Actually, it was my Great-Aunt Frederika’s.’
He helped her up into the trap and said he’d walk with the pony to the top of the hill. ‘I can’t imagine having a great-aunt,’ he said. ‘My father had a brother – Tony Bright, b, r, i, g, h, t – born Anton but he Americanized it. We lived near him in New Jersey, when I was about four.’
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