The Rose Gardener

by Charlotte Link

  She hadn’t felt the slightest inclination to reveal to the officer details about the complicated relationship between her and Helene. “We lived together under the same roof for almost sixty years. That is absolutely an answer to your question. We had become a kind of family. You don’t choose the members of your family, and you don’t constantly call your relationship with them into question. You can’t change a thing. You’re forced to belong together.”

  He hadn’t let it go.

  “Was there often conflict between the two of you?”

  “No. We fought very rarely.”

  “Were there any reservations on your end? Mrs. Feldmann, after all, had originally come into your house as the wife of a soldier in the occupation force.”

  “Oh, God, I was a child back then! That hadn’t played a role any longer, not for a long while.”

  “What did play a role then between you and Mrs. Feldmann?”

  “We respected each other. And we’d gotten used to each other.”

  He had sighed. It was quite obvious that he didn’t know where to begin with this information.

  But really, Beatrice thought now, what I gave him was probably the only right answer. Respect and familiarity. That’s what it was these past years.

  Was it actually? She climbed the stairs, opened the door to Helene’s room, paused there, standing. The room looked unchanged, as if its occupant would be coming back at any moment. It still smelled like Helene too, like her perfume and like the talcum powder she’d often used. On the dainty writing desk by the window was a stack of papers covered in her handwriting. An enormous jumble of notes, letters, magazine clippings.

  Dear god, I bet she kept everything she ever laid hands on, thought Beatrice, it’ll be a chore to go through and sort everything.

  She would have to take the clothes and the underthings out of the dresser; one part of them she would throw away, the other she would donate to charity. Go through the papers, look for unpaid bills, look over bank statements.

  Who will even be inheriting her money? she asked herself. Is there a will?

  Should the room remain Helene’s room — even after her death? That would mean that Helene would still be there, even now.

  I’ll clear out the room, Beatrice decided. Just like I’ll give away the clothes, like I’ll throw out the papers. The room can become another space for vacationing guests.

  It horrified her a little, the speed with which she decided to rid herself of the old woman’s possessions.

  What was your relationship to Mrs. Feldmann?

  She looked inside the room. “She pretty much messed up my life. There were times when I wished the devil would take her.”

  Do you still wish the devil would take her now? the officer would have asked then.

  She considered this. “I don’t think that I ever stopped. Yes, I think I still wished the devil on her. Maybe on every single day of our lives.”

  Are you relieved that she’s dead?

  “I don’t know … I didn’t wish for such an end for her. But I think once the shock has passed, relief will set in.”

  I’d probably make the perfect suspect for a murder charge, she thought.

  Who could have done something so terrible to Helene?

  She and Franca had agreed in the days that had past that this was the act of a madman. It was the version that they both could most live with. The idea that a mentally disturbed murderer was out running around on Guernsey was bad, but even worse was the thought that someone could have developed such a hatred for Helene that he slit her throat and left her to bleed to death on a lonely country road.

  She heard a sound on the stairs that startled her. For a moment the absurd thought came to her that the police officer could have snuck back into the house after leaving, had now come quietly upstairs and had listened in on her one-sided conversation, which came close to a self-indictment. But that was nonsense, no English policeman would do such a thing.

  She stepped up to the railing and called out. “Hello?”

  At that same moment she saw Kevin, who was just starting to sneak up the stairs. It looked like her calling out had nearly scared him to death. A jolt went through his entire body, his face went pale.

  “My God! I thought no one was home! I knocked on the front door and then came in through the kitchen and called out … but no one answered.” He seemed nervous and fidgety. “Sorry that I just …”

  “Nonsense. You’re part of the family, Kevin.” She went down the stairs and realized as she did so that he had wanted to come up — which she did in fact find a bit strange.

  “What were you looking for upstairs, Kevin?” she asked as casually as possible, and kissed him on both cheeks.

  He returned her kisses, his lips felt cold. “I … I know it’s not proper. But I wanted to see her room again.”

  “Go on up then. You need that goodbye from her as much as I do. I’ll make us some coffee in the meantime.”

  She heard him moving around upstairs while she busied herself in the kitchen. Maybe, she thought, I did him an injustice by always thinking he was just seeking out her company to ask for money. Maybe there was more that bound him to her. Maybe it was exactly as I said it was today to the officer: she was a motherly friend to him.

  She put the coffee pot, cups, sugar bowl, and milk on a tray and stepped out onto the porch behind the kitchen. She briefly recalled the New Year’s Eve when she had stood out here with Erich. One of the few moments when he hadn’t spoken of final victory. He had been afraid. He had known that his Führer had steered himself into a disaster and that they’d all go down with him. He had charged her with taking care of Helene.

  The tray shook, the coffee spoons clattered. She quickly set it down on the table.

  To hell with it, it wasn’t the time to think about it. That night was so many decades ago, an entire life separated then and now. A damp, cold night on which she’d caught pneumonia.

  Today was a hot day in May. A warm wind rustled the leaves in the trees.

  Beatrice took deep breaths. With Helene another piece of a burdensome past had disappeared. But after so long, so long!

  “I’ll never forgive myself for how that night went,” said Kevin. “The last night with Helene.” He’d walked outside without her noticing.

  “It’s not your fault, Kevin. It’s entirely normal to let a guest take a taxi home. You can’t even really reproach the driver, he couldn’t ever have reckoned with something like that happening. No,” Beatrice held up her hands helplessly, “it was fate. That’s how it was meant to be. No one can change it.”

  Kevin took out a cigarette and tried to light it. He broke three matches before he managed it.

  “Lord, Kevin, whatever is the matter with you?” Beatrice asked. “Since when are you smoking again?”

  “Since I’ve started drinking too much.” He took a few rushed puffs. “Beatrice, I’m in serious trouble. I know today’s not the day to speak about this, we’ve just buried Helene, and …”

  “If you’ve got troubles today, then you should also speak about them today. Things haven’t been going well with you for some time, anyone can see that.”

  “Yes … well,” he fidgeted around, smoked. He was so pale, it was as if he was gravely ill. “Beatrice, I’m in very urgent need of money. I need a rather large amount. It … Everything is riding on this for me. My entire livelihood, everything I have.”

  “How much money? For what?”

  “Fifty-thousand pounds.”

  “Fifty-thousand pounds? For heaven’s sake, that’s a fortune!”

  “I know!” In despair he ran his right hand through his hair, which stood up wildly. “I know, it’s so much money. I shouldn’t have let it get this far, but now it is how it is. And I have to have the sum as quickly as poss
ible.”

  “Whom do you owe it to?”

  “The bank. I’ve got loans on my house, my property, everything. There’s nothing left I can mortgage.”

  “But what do you need so much money for? You don’t just casually spend fifty-thousand pounds!”

  “Over the years,” Kevin said gloomily, “it’s been building up over the years. Life is expensive, and … well, I never got such terribly large profits from my roses.”

  “You didn’t do badly at all,” said Beatrice. “But you’ve lived a bit too lavishly. Your lifestyle was always a whole step above your income.”

  “Yes. That it was,” Kevin admitted in a small voice. “And that’s what ruined me.”

  “The bank is causing trouble now?”

  “The interest is breaking my back. I haven’t been able to pay them for months. And I don’t even want to talk about the principal, it’s not moving at all anyway. As far as the interest payments are concerned, though, they’re of course putting the screws to me.” He stubbed out his cigarette. There was anger and hopelessness in the movement. “Oh God, Beatrice, I’m going to lose everything. Everything.”

  “Then first of all it would help you if someone gave you a hand with the interest payments,” Beatrice said carefully. “To at least avoid seizure for now.”

  “Yes, but what use is it in the long run? The next month it’s the same thing, and then the month after that. I’d have to at least pay off most of it so that the total burden of the interest becomes less. Do you understand?”

  “I would like to help you Kevin, but I don’t have that much money. Not by any stretch of the imagination. Come,” she poured coffee, sat down and gestured invitingly towards the second chair. “Sit. Have some coffee. We’ve got to calmly discuss what we can do.”

  When he brought the cup to his lips, his hands were shaking so violently that he spilled coffee on his pants.

  “Helene helped you out again and again, right?” Beatrice started in carefully.

  He nodded. “Yes. Without her I’d have been lost a long time ago. She gave me a great deal more money than you know about. Tens of thousands.”

  “Where did she get the money?”

  “She just had it.”

  “She received a pension, but it wasn’t all too lush. I can hardly imagine that she could’ve put together a large amount of savings from it.”

  “On the night she died,” said Kevin, “I described to her for the first time the full measure of my hopeless situation. I told her how high my debts had actually run.”

  “She didn’t know it by then?”

  “I hadn’t ever spoken about it so concretely. I just kept saying that I needed this or that sum.”

  “Didn’t she ever want to know what for?”

  “No, she did, but I always had the sense it was more of a rhetorical question. She wasn’t interested in the details. I told her the basic truth, namely that I was in debt to the bank. She just didn’t know the whole extent of it.”

  “And on Monday night …”

  “… I laid all my cards out on the table.”

  “How did Helene react?”

  “She was in no way as shocked as I’d feared. She scolded me a little because I hadn’t been open with her from the beginning. She said I didn’t have any trust in her, and so forth. And I noticed I was getting calmer.” He tried to take another sip of coffee, and stained his pants another time. “She sat there in her silly, sky blue dress, way too much makeup on, her hair too long, an old woman who was trying in vain to look like a young girl, but all at once she had something of the kindly grandmother about her. Suddenly she seemed so mature. You know, with Helene you never actually got the sense that she’d ever grown up …”

  She nodded. How often had she thought, irritated, that Helene could get to be a hundred years old, and she would still act like a child.

  “She said everything would be good,” Kevin continued. He had to swallow, he was forever on the verge of tears today, Beatrice could see this clearly.

  “She would help me, and I should stop my worrying.”

  “Which was certainly nice of her to say,” said Beatrice. “But she was of course venturing far beyond any kind of reality. Your mountain of debt far surpassed her means.”

  He made to try again with the coffee cup, but this time he gave up before he started. He wouldn’t be able to bring the cup to his lips. “She told me she would give me the money,” said Kevin. His voice sounded brittle. He had been so close to his mark. The crash had hit him hard and brutally. “She was going to go to the bank the next day. I was supposed to pick her up and drive her there. She was going to lend me fifty thousand pounds.”

  Beatrice leaned forward. She furrowed her brow. “Where was she going to get that much money?”

  Kevin looked at her, his gaze was tired and almost expression-less. “You don’t know everything about Helene,” he said. “As fervently as she always described herself as your best friend and closest confidant, she nevertheless was just as shrewd at hiding a few essential details from you about her life. Beatrice, Helene was a very wealthy woman. She was sitting on a fortune. The tiny, modest pension that she always invoked to make it clear to you that you had to look after her — it was a farce. She would have paid me the fifty thousand pounds out of her coin purse.”

  Beatrice sensed she was getting pale. “How did she get the money?”

  “It’s a long story,” said Kevin. He didn’t sound like he was enjoying being the bearer of this sensational news, and with it, revealing his secret years-long complicity with an old woman who had just been murdered in horrible fashion. He was too exhausted to feel anything but his own weariness. “If you want, I’ll tell it to you.”

  “Please do,” said Beatrice.

  PART THREE

  1

  When you meet someone new, your whole life can change, Alan thought, and it’s the same when you lose someone.

  He sat in The Terrace on the harbor in St. Peter Port and tried to make sense of the fact that Helene was no longer alive.

  All around him was life’s bustling activity; the cafe was full of tourists. The sun burned down from the sky; people crowded under the sun umbrellas, all of them trying to snag a bit of shade. The air smelled of French fries, hamburgers, and grilled sausages; the cafe’s patrons carried around bottles of water and wine and huge cups of ice cream to complete the scene. Down on the harbor the yacht owners were getting their ships ready to sail. Given the almost complete lack of wind, the motorboats had the advantage; they wound their way out of the harbor to then race over the waves, tanned people at their helms sporting sunglasses, hair blowing in the breeze, the carriage of their bodies expressing pure joy in life. They would drop anchor out in one of the bays, and there they would spend the day swimming, diving, sunbathing, only then in the evening, tired and hungry, to storm the bars and restaurants of the island’s capital and enjoy themselves into the late hours of night. How happy they all are, thought Alan.

  His gaze was drawn to a girl down below, who sat leaning on the harbor’s stone wall; she wore cut off jeans, the fringe of which tickled her tanned knees, and a bikini top with straps that she’d slid off her shoulders. She turned her face towards the sun and kept her eyes closed. Next to her was a bottle of water.

  All things that Helene can’t do anymore, Alan thought, and knew in the same instant that the thought was absurd, since Helene had never done things like that anyway. She had neither gone sailing nor raced around in motorboats, and she would never have draped herself over a harbor wall and sat there dreaming while she looked out over the water. Such activities required a capacity for relaxation that Helene wouldn’t have been at all capable of mustering. If Helene had ever once lain out in the sun on the harbor — and he had no idea if that had ever been the case — then it for sure hadn’t been in sh
orts and a bra, and most definitely not with her eyes closed. Helene had constantly looked at, analyzed, surveilled her surroundings. She had sensed danger lurking in every corner. It was rare for Alan to see her when she wasn’t whining, moaning, complaining of her fate or indulging herself in dark prophesies concerning all of their futures. It was really only in Kevin’s presence that she’d ever displayed any kind of cheerfulness. Kevin had understood how to reach a side of her that no one else could. The careless young woman that perhaps she might once have been was awakened then. It had been like a brief glimpse at an unknown part of her personality. Alan had always felt deeply, oddly moved by this.

  He was drinking his second wine and asking himself why he had again ordered half-dry — the wine was abundantly sweet and tasted like alcoholic sugar water. At least he had managed to wait until noon today before he started drinking. For all that morning he had stayed sober — though that also had to do with Argus-eyed Beatrice keeping watch over him. To take even a sip of alcohol in his mother’s house seemed to him a thing of sheer impossibility by then. She was always behind him, next to him, suddenly popping out of the least expected nooks and spoiling his plans to at least have a sherry or a port wine in secret. Because of this he had finally just nabbed her car — which hopefully would prevent her from following him — and sped to St. Peter Port. The very first sip of wine had already brought with it a feeling of relief. The first drink of the day was always the best.

  Helene had been laid to rest two days earlier, and he should have been back in London long ago. He had a great deal of work waiting for him, especially since he’d already allowed himself his absence the week before. His secretary had been in a hopeless state when he’d announced he wouldn’t be back in the office till Monday of next week.

  “I don’t know how I …” she’d begun, panic in her voice, but he’d cut her off at once. “You do know that my mother’s lifetime companion was murdered in a rather horrible manner. I can’t just up and leave my mother on her own.”

  She hadn’t been able to say anything to that, of course, and how was she supposed to know that he was lying through his teeth? Beatrice didn’t have to be comforted. True, she went around with an expression on her face like it had been carved out of stone; true, she gave the impression that she was resurfacing from a faraway world whenever you said anything to her; but in spite of everything she didn’t really seem to need any help. Maybe Helene’s grisly death had shocked her more deeply than she was able to express, but in any case she would work this out for herself, alone. She had always worked things out alone. Sometimes he asked himself if Beatrice even knew what it was: accepting help and support from other people.