by Polly Samson
Simon puts the cruise missiles poem down. ‘You poor little thing,’ he says, ruffling my hair, and I nearly cry. From the other room we can hear the blare of Cee-bee-bees and Angus’s throaty laugh. ‘Daddy,’ he calls.
I refold the poem and fix the lid back on the tin.
‘Your mother wants to know if we’re bringing the kids to the climate change demo on Sunday.’ Simon’s her messenger, returning to the kitchen with an article she’s clipped from the Guardian. ‘She said she thought we ought to.’
‘Did you tell her that last week Angus had nightmares every night about the sun exploding?’ I say.
Unlike my mother, I don’t want Angus and Ivan to have to worry about cancer or have images of people jumping from burning tower blocks scorched into their retinas. I don’t want the terror to live in the marrow of my children’s growing bones.
Simon shrugs. ‘It’s climate change,’ he says. ‘It’s all about them—’
I interrupt. ‘They don’t like crowds,’ I say, and gesturing with my thumb towards the noise of canned laughter: ‘And I’m not like her.’
Simon shushes me.
‘Remember when Angus was a baby and we took him to the Iraq War demonstration in Hyde Park?’ My mother has come back into the kitchen though she’d kicked her shoes off in the other room and I didn’t hear her approach. ‘You and Simon didn’t dress properly,’ she says.
‘What?’ I say.
‘You were both freezing.’ She says it as though somehow even in protesting we were deficient and I wonder if she overheard me telling Simon that I was different from her, telling him as though being different from her was something to boast about.
Remembering the demonstration makes me shiver. As it happens my clothing had been perfectly adequate against the clear cold day, as was Simon’s: thick padded jackets, pashminas and hats. My mother worried that people taking photographs were from MI5. ‘Look at that man,’ she kept saying when we’d finally come to a standstill with the crowds in the park. ‘Dressed in tawny colours, big camera. He’s not part of the protest. He’s here to keep a record of the people.’
‘Don’t be so paranoid,’ I said, laughing.
‘Look, he’s systematically moving along the lines. He doesn’t look right.’
There were two million people in Hyde Park that day and not a single arrest. Having Angus in his pushchair made me feel historic, like Demeter charged with a flaming torch. It was his future we were all shouting about, my fists were aloft with the rest of them. Ken Livingstone called for peace, and I looked at Angus sleeping, wrapped safe and warm in his cocoon, just his palely beautiful face appearing from the folds like a Russian doll.
My mother was carrying a banner that said NOT IN MY NAME, and wearing a colourful Peruvian knitted hat with little woollen plaits that made her look like a rather incongruous schoolgirl. She met a woman in the crowd and they embraced. ‘Yes, here we are again,’ she said, shaking her woolly plaits. ‘Nothing changes.’
It was during a lull in the speeches that she told me what she’d read in that morning’s newspaper. Something grisly about a missing girl and a man who drove a butcher’s van.
‘Remember the one?’ she asked. I shook my head. ‘It was a green van. When we lived at Riversdale,’ she prompted, raising her arm in a fist as high as her shoulder would allow her. ‘Impeach Bush, Impeach Blair!’
‘I thought you were vegetarians,’ Simon said, blowing into his hands and putting them back into his pockets.
‘We were vegetarians,’ said my mother, as wistfully as a woman remembering her miniskirt days, ‘but it didn’t stop him calling. No matter how often I told him we didn’t eat meat, he still called in the van every Friday.
‘Impeach Bush, Impeach Blair! It stank of meat,’ she said.
‘Sometimes, I think, he hunted deer with his dogs, and butchered them himself. Oh, what a horrible thought. It’s been in all the newspapers, you know.’
Something small but monstrous was hatching in my memory.
‘That’s what the smell was,’ she said, ‘the venison. In the end I had to ring up the butcher and complain but I think he still came even after that.’
I thought I could picture the green van parked outside our cottage, the blond man hulked at the wheel. The thing that was hatching grew tentacles that slithered down the back of my neck.
‘It’s horrible to think of myself talking to him now,’ she continued.
There was something glinting in my mother’s eyes that made me think of a cat bringing a mouse to the door. ‘It must have been around the same time that he did it,’ she said, shuddering. ‘Around the time he used to park outside our place. They only caught him because of his DNA on a completely separate charge.’
Just then Angus started to whimper. My breast tingled, filling with milk. It was as though it was a separate entity, beating to a different tune, with a different conductor from the other parts of my body. A man from the United Nations had just taken to the podium and a cheer went up from the crowd. The rest of me was running with ice but my only thought was that I would have to find a bench to sit down and produce warm milk to comfort my crying son.
LEAVING HAMBURG
Aurelia Lieberman didn’t give a damn what the driver thought. ‘Slow down!’ she shouted and grabbed at her seatbelt, tugging hard at the inertia reel, too hard to be effective. The wheels of the taxi spun a little as the driver took pole position at the lights and a red rose flew from the seat so she had to strike out a hand to stop it being thrown to the floor.
Langsam! she almost snapped at him, hoping the word applied to the speed of a car as it did to music.
Snow was piled deeply by the kerbs, it wasn’t the time to be playing Michael Schumacher. It was still snowing lightly, though thankfully the roads had been efficiently gritted. She tugged again at the seatbelt, another sullen clonk.
What was it about this wretched driver that was making her so pissed off? Normally she would be careful to hide her nerves beneath a veneer of good manners. She’d endeavour to fasten her seatbelt sneakily, quietly, minding too much about a leather-gloved ego. She was the same with waiters: it was impossible to send back corked wine or point out when a bill had been wrongly added up. The bouquets she received in her dressing room after a piano recital were always deemed by her to be lovely, really lovely, even the ones that contained lilies or tuberoses to which she was allergic. She had never once in her life, as far as she could remember, taken anything back to a shop.
With the seatbelt clipped, at last, firmly into place, Aurelia briefly checked the plane ticket in her wallet; out of habit she extracted a slightly dog-eared picture of her only child, Claudine. Looking at her daughter did nothing to improve her mood. This elfin child was years out of date but she didn’t feel exactly impelled to replace it with the current mouthy version: a Claudine who had confessed only last week to a tattoo; a garish butterfly inked for ever on to her previously lovely ankle. Aurelia leaned her forehead against the cool glass of the window and settled her gaze on a Hamburg cloaked by the snow.
Claudine’s tattoo: a single splash of graffiti, no longer a guilty secret; a lone dark dog shit scrawled on the snow-covered pavement.
The hiss of the snow against the tyres gave her a chill. She should have thought to bring a proper coat. The first flurries arrived last night while she was being so courteously delivered from her hotel to the concert hall, a better driver than this one and a smarter car – wasn’t that always the way before the concert – and Hamburg still just any city, then.
Dressed in her finery: the full-length black velvet that she favoured for performance, eyes closed, hands in a knot. A modest jewel at her breast: Ann Boleyn on her way to the Tower. Blood rushing, nerves thrumming, except only in the usual pre-concert way, not like she was about to lose her head. She was not under-rehearsed, she knew that. And Brahms had always been kind. By the time she opened her eyes she was surprised to see the snow swirling all around like freshly plucked goose f
eathers, enough for the chauffeur to switch the wipers to full.
The pillow fight must have lasted all night and still no sign of an armistice, as bursts of snow whirled and tumbled around streets of solemn houses lying beneath pristine eiderdowns.
Tucking the angelic Claudine back into her wallet with a sigh, Aurelia remembered a time, before airport security became such killjoys, when, from a trip just like this, she had filled a cool bag with Alpine snow and taken it home for Claudine. There had been enough for a small snowman and a couple of snowballs and Claudine’s serious little face had been pure sunshine.
‘Your first time in Hamburg?’ The taxi driver interrupted her thoughts. His English was better than his driving.
Aurelia nodded. ‘But my father’s family …’ She trailed off, hoping he’d ask her no more and concentrate instead on the road in front, where a tall coach was scattering blinding white flurries in its wake.
Aurelia wiped condensation from the window with her sleeve. All along the pavements the snow was unsullied. Not even a snowman in sight. In the gardens the trees and shrubs had been silenced by it, expertly iced, even the sleeping cars looked festive so she could almost believe it was pretty.
She checked her watch. Still early for snowmen. She reminded herself to leave enough time to stop at the Duty Free for a bottle of pong requested by Claudine, something called ‘Destiny’, or was it ‘Dynasty’? She settled back and let her fingers play at the familiar round pip of her grandmother’s moonstone, fastened to the grey scarf at her neck.
Bobo’s moonstone had passed to Aurelia at a time when the death of her grandmother was enough to send her so deep into the black hole that she thought she might never climb out. The bad news came at the same time as her break-up with Leszek Smolsky. Leszek, the possessor of the most beautiful fingers she had ever seen on a keyboard: long and pale and fluent as hands are in a dream of water. Leszek: young, Polish, a pianist who would break anyone’s heart just by playing.
Her grandmother’s death was a very dark darkness, even before Leszek’s decision. She was already down when he kicked her.
Aurelia had never managed to imagine a life without Bobo. She grew up with the delicate weight of her grandmother’s dreams draped around her shoulders like a well-chosen shawl. She played most expressively when Bobo was in the audience. And it wasn’t only music: when Aurelia was a reluctant reader at seven or eight, books with exciting heroines would arrive in return for short reviews. Where the brightly painted school craft things that Aurelia occasionally presented to her father went largely unnoticed, her artistic endeavours, however cack-handed – blobby flowerpots, papier-mâché fish and the like – were received by Bobo with more joy than anything anyone could have bought from a shop. She was an exceptional pen pal, often including bars of Lindt or marzipan with her letters. She sent sheet music from Chappell’s. She liked to know that Aurelia had a clean face flannel and made chocolate mousse from whipped cream and grated chocolate and jumping jacks from cardboard and thread. Bobo paid for all the music lessons, though it was a mystery how she managed it.
Aurelia’s father brought her Bobo’s moonstone with an inadequate hug in the late morning of that dismal November day. Leszek arrived empty-handed in the evening. One look at Leszek with his arms hanging by his sides told her everything: it seemed pointless to mention her grandmother. No, there wasn’t anyone else, he assured her. He’d decided to go while there was still time for her to meet someone else. If she should want children, she’d need time. His decency rankled, even now.
She remembered how he did it: in a letter that she’d refused to read that he’d propped on the music stand of her piano, tears inking his already ludicrously dense lashes. Leszek’s eyelashes would always make every woman he met think about having his baby. That and the way he played Chopin, long strong fingers playing the keys so softly they might have been stroking the cheek of an infant.
She couldn’t look at him when he came back for his things: his camera, his books, his leather music case, his black cashmere jumpers; not many things but everything so right. An old-fashioned camera, the jumpers folded neatly one on top of the other, shaving cream that smelled cruelly of lilacs, an apologetic smile.
So there she was with Leszek in the doorway, too handsome to look at; dishevelled and still in her nightie, talking to a mouse that had appeared from behind the piano: ‘Oh, Bobo, what am I going to do?’
And maybe because he realised that her grandmother had died, he had taken pity on her one last time, or maybe it was simply because the rain hammered the windows and he didn’t feel like getting wet. It rained like that all through the night and though it was punctuated by shuddering sobs, it had been the sweetest that Aurelia had ever known.
The traffic had slowed and the driver drummed his leather fingers on the steering wheel before switching on the radio. Synthesizer pop jangled her ears.
Bobo’s moonstone was a typically modest jewel set in a plain gold bar, silky beneath the tip of her thumb. Bobo had worn it pinned to a scarf or on the lapel of one of the suits of fine grey and blue wool that had lasted her a lifetime. She had style, was clever with a needle, invisible mending, mothballs. Her ground-floor flat had bright red chairs and proper linen at the table, a bit elegant for the brick-built block in Muswell Hill, where the rowan berries made a mess on the pavements in the autumn, and rowdy children snogged and jeered and drank cheap cider outside her bedroom window all year round.
The driver turned off the main Grindelallee and into wide streets that were more Belgravia than Muswell Hill. Creamy, cold imperious houses presided and no one about to enjoy the snow. Aurelia found herself scanning the powdered facades: a colonnaded porch here, an ornate balcony there, a cupola fringed with snow.
Bobo had shown her a drawing once, on a much-folded and refolded sheet of green writing paper, of the house in Hamburg. It was a house of pleasing symmetery, with bay windows and a wisteria climbing to the third floor. There had been, Bobo recalled, a plaster centaur above the front door. ‘Always such a cheerful creature to pass on the way in.’
The snow was thickly padded all the way up the edges of the Mittelweg, for as far as the eye could see. The driver seemed to have slowed down, as though out of respect for the houses they passed, and Aurelia couldn’t help looking for the centaur above every door. She imagined Bobo setting off along this very pavement: a determined young woman, coiled dark plait pinned at her nape, woollen coat and laced-up leather snow boots, flanked by two shyly smiling boys, each with a hand in hers, and bending forwards from the waist, telling them not to slip.
Aurelia remembered the squeeze of that hand. Her grandmother’s voice, she never lost the accent, of course: ‘Give me deine kleine paw to keep you safe, mein Baerchen.’
Their boots would have made the only footprints.
Second-hand memories were blowing about the Hamburg streets like litter. Kristallnacht. In the morning Bobo told her two little boys to look at how prettily the glass glittered on the pavements to stop them feeling so frightened. She never once let them see her cry.
Aurelia felt the heat rise from the pit of her stomach, last night’s embers, the red rose blazing.
‘Bitte …’ She leaned forward to the taxi driver and said in her faltering German: ‘Zur Jüdischen …’ and then she couldn’t remember the word and had to fumble for her phrase book.
‘Friedhof,’ he said, before she had found the word ‘cemetery’, and with a rather exaggerated performance of the U-turn that this entailed, he agreed to take her there. She held the rose on her lap and tried not to become engulfed by thoughts of last night’s audience and the panic attack that had left her speechless and graceless standing before them.
It happened as the rose was thrown on to the stage at the end of her performance, while she was standing from the piano offering a silent prayer of thanks to Brahms and to the grandfather she had never met. The audience clapping, and the rose arriving in an arc from several rows back, landing at her feet,
long-stemmed and glamorous. As she bent to pick it up, suddenly she could hear Bobo’s voice. The blood rushing in her ears. At first just a whisper: ‘They smashed his violin’, and Aurelia, taking her bow, eyes lowered, found that she couldn’t bring herself to look up at a single face of the audience.
‘I was glad he was already dead and didn’t have to witness it.’ There was a pulse of her heart, a bitter taste in her mouth and in her ears more insistent this time: ‘They smashed his violin.’ Who smashed his violin? Roaring in her ears. The audience cheering as one, but still her eyes were fixed to the polished wooden boards. She thought of Bobo in Muswell Hill. She didn’t think she could move. Bobo pouring coffee from a tall bone-china pot, telling her about Georg who could make an audience weep, so exquisite was his feel for the strings of his violin. Someone whooped. She was still too afraid to look up. Her grandfather probably played this very hall. Who smashed his violin? Without a word, she picked up the rose that was lying at her feet and fled.
Who smashed his violin? When Bobo told her stories, Aurelia hadn’t always paid as much attention as she now wished she had; it seemed there had always been something else on her mind.
Whenever Aurelia took a plane she thought of Bobo. Bobo was nervous when her loved ones had to fly. She impressed on Aurelia that survivors were generally the people with a plan: they paid attention to the safety demonstration, she said, and counted the seats to the nearest emergency exit; they kept their shoes on their feet in case they needed to escape over jagged surfaces and took care to dress in natural fibres that wouldn’t melt and burn their faces off.
Aurelia stashed the Duty Free bag containing Claudine’s perfume into the overhead locker and briefly nodded to the man in the window seat. He looked pleasant enough. She took a small Valium as she settled into her own seat beside him, kicking off her shoes and ignoring the air hostess who was gently choreographing a really quite boring disaster at the front. She touched the moonstone pin and offered a prayer to anyone who cared to listen.