by Clare Clark
‘Just before dawn,’ he said and he began to weep. Emmeline said nothing. There was nothing to say. She let Jacob hold her hands as the snow fell silently around them. Nadine Metz came out of the house. She touched Emmeline’s cheek lightly with her fingertips, then put an arm around Jacob’s shoulders.
‘Come inside,’ she said.
Elvira was laid out upstairs in the room where she had died. Emmeline kept saying the word in her head, dead, died, but the numbness did not go away. The bandage on her mother’s head looked too white to be real. Her face did not look real either. She did not look the way Emmeline remembered her. She was not sure if that was death or the wrongness of her memory. She had never seen her mother without her characteristic chignon, her immaculate daytime face. Someone had plaited her hair and laid it over one shoulder, tied with ribbon like a schoolgirl’s. She would never have allowed that when she was alive, Emmeline thought, and the dryness in her throat was an ache that could not be swallowed.
Her mother’s gold watch was on the bedside table. Emmeline touched the face with one finger. It had stopped. The time was wrong. Picking it up she shook it, holding it to her ear, listening to the tiny tick, and suddenly she was five again. Gently she opened the case.
‘The time is sad stuck in there, it wants us to let it out,’ she said but Elvira only took her hand away and shook her head.
‘We can’t do that, my dear. If you let time go, it will never come back.’
The tears burned behind her eyes but they had been unshed too long, all that was left of them was the dried-out scrape of salt.
She sat with Nadine in the winter garden. Elsewhere in the house people hurried through the stunned spaces, their voices low and urgent. Elvira’s body was to be taken back to Munich for the funeral. Otto too was to be moved to a private hospital in the city where an orthopaedic surgeon could operate on his smashed pelvis. It was Otto who had been driving the motor toboggan when it crashed.
‘He wants to see you,’ Nadine said. ‘I’ve asked him to wait. You have both endured enough.’
Emmeline was silent. She stared at the fountain, the water twisted in the air like a rope of ice.
‘Regret is a heavy burden,’ Nadine said. ‘It counts for nothing, changes nothing, but it cannot be put down.’
The water curved and broke into glittering chips. The same water, cycled round and round, and every time different and new. Nadine poured coffee.
‘My husband has a son, Klaus,’ she said. ‘His daughters are sweet and dull like their mother but Klaus is Otto all over again, impetuous, excitable, stubborn as a donkey. He lives in Chicago now. Otto has two grandsons he has never met. For a long time I puzzled over it. But now I wonder if it is the ones we understand best that we find it hardest to be kind to. The ones like us.’
Emmeline wished she would stop talking. Nadine put down the coffee pot and handed her a cup. When she took it, it rattled on its saucer.
‘Otto has been angry with Klaus for a long time,’ Nadine said. ‘He thinks he should have been a better son and he is right, but it’s Otto who bears the greater responsibility. He is the father and Klaus the child, however old Klaus is and far away.’
Emmeline took a sip of her coffee. It was strong and too hot, it burned her tongue.
‘You thought there was always tomorrow,’ Nadine said softly. ‘Of course you did. Your mother thought so too.’
Jacob returned to Munich with the coffin. As the hearse drew away, Emmeline thought of all the times she had stood with one nursemaid or another on the steps of the house in Frankfurt, waving a handkerchief as her mother’s carriage clattered away down the drive, and she put her hands in her pockets and drew out the only thing she found there, a page torn from a sketchbook, folded several times. Shaking it out she waved it once, twice, until the foolishness of the gesture undid her.
‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered to the disappearing tail lights and the words were like spider’s silk, all of her weight was in them.
She and Nadine were to return to Munich that evening. Late in the afternoon she went upstairs. The bed where Elvira had died had been neatly made. There were freshly folded towels on the wooden rack, a vase of flowers on the chest of drawers. The furniture gleamed. Nothing might ever have happened there, except that the windows were thrown wide open and the smells of lavender and beeswax were cut with the metallic tang of snow.
Emmeline crossed to the window and looked out, her arms wrapped around her for warmth. Above the black lace of the trees the moon was a pulpy half-circle with a white rim like the peel on a slice of lemon. The first stars were coming out. It was very quiet.
Then, as she watched, a cloud of starlings rose and filled the sky. Hundreds, thousands maybe, a vast rippling cape of them, surging and wheeling, stretching into swooping curves, twisting in helixes, rising in streamers on the wind, the whisper-roar of their wings like the sea or the thrumming of a thousand fingers on a thousand paper drums. There were so many of them, Emmeline thought stupidly as they banked steeply, spiralling into a figure of eight, and yet they all knew exactly what to do.
‘I thought you might be here.’ Nadine stood in the doorway, her shadow sharp-edged in the spill of light from the corridor. ‘It’s time to go.’
Emmeline looked back towards the window. The figure of eight unrolled into a pointillist veil that drifted for a moment in the air. Then, with a rushing noise, it coiled downwards like bathwater, disappearing into the fretted blackness of the trees.
‘She’s still here, isn’t she?’ Nadine murmured. ‘I feel it too,’ but Emmeline shook her head.
‘It’s much too cold in here for Elvira,’ she said, and she walked out on to the bright landing without looking back.
16
In Munich there were letters, visitors, funeral arrangements to be made. The same words: deepest regrets, sincerest condolences, rest in peace. Emmeline answered the letters, received the visitors, ordered food and flowers and service sheets and suitable clothes for Jacob’s stunned and solemn children. She looked away from Jacob as he stumbled through the house, his grief clutched around him like a blanket. Sometimes Emmeline found him standing in the middle of a room, blind-eyed as a sleepwalker, not knowing where he was or how he had got there. Sometimes, passing his study, she heard him weeping.
Nadine came every day to help.
The caretaker forwarded her mail. Balz wrote to her, he said he had work for her, asked her to get in touch. She did not reply. The day before the funeral the Köhler-Schultzes arrived from Berlin. Emmeline was surprised, she had not expected them. Julius did not look well. His skin had a yellowish pallor and his expensive suit sagged on his large frame. Even his bones looked too big for him. Amelia fussed around him as though he were an invalid or an idiot, but he made no protest. If anything, he seemed grateful. His eyes followed her around the room, as though he was afraid to let her out of his sight.
He shook his head when Emmeline thanked him for Böhm. ‘You should never have been caught up in that circus. They released Matthias, of course, that same day. The whole episode was shameful. They hadn’t a shred of evidence against him.’
Matthias was a fine man, Julius said, a man of courage who esteemed the principles of honour and loyalty more highly than he esteemed himself. Such men were rare. He deserved the country’s admiration, not its censure. He spoke emphatically, almost angrily, jerking his head, and when he gestured his hands shook like an old man’s. Germany had been full of such men once, he said, and his eyes were full of tears. Amelia put her hand on his arm and he clasped it.
No one mentioned Otto, not even Nadine. He was still in hospital but, though it was too early to know if he would walk again, he was out of danger. Soon he would return home. He would open the book on the bedside cabinet that still had the silk ribbon in it to mark his place, he would pick up the hairbrush with his stray hairs still caught between the bristles and fasten his watch and put on the clothes in the wardrobe that carried the smell of him, and e
verything would go back to the way it was before. Everything that had not been said would go on not being said.
Emmeline did not want his remorse. She wanted to see what he had seen, every glass-shard, scalpel-blade detail of that day until it finally sliced through the numbness and she could weep.
Scores of people attended the funeral. She walked to the cemetery behind the coffin, Jacob by her side, silent and stiff-faced in his expensive black overcoat. They were standing at the graveside when she saw her. She stood apart from the other mourners, a slight figure half hidden by a lichened headstone, her shoulders hunched against the wind. A man was with her. He was tall, much taller than her. He stooped to murmur something in her ear. Then he turned, and Emmeline saw that it was Julius. As the priest raised his hands he walked slowly back towards the mourners and took his place beside Amelia. She tucked her arm through his.
There were words, handfuls of frozen earth against the polished wood. She was wearing Emmeline’s cat’s-eye sunglasses and a black hat that Emmeline had never seen before. She looked like someone pretending to be a film star.
‘May her soul, and the souls of all the faithful departed, through the mercy of God rest in peace.’
‘Amen.’
Emmeline touched Jacob’s arm and he put his gloved hand on hers, squeezing it in the crook of his arm. There was solace in it. ‘I’ll be back in a moment,’ she said.
People were dispersing, walking back to their motor cars. Their voices caught on the wind. There were clumps of snow in the grass between the neatly kept graves and bright flowers in metal vases like splashes of paint. Behind her, beside the stone gateposts, a row of cypresses cut dark gashes in the sky. Emmeline stopped on the path, her arms crossed.
Behind her sunglasses Dora’s cheeks were whipped pink with cold. She held out her hands to Emmeline. Her gloves were shabby, frayed at the fingertips.
‘Em, I’m so sorry,’ she murmured.
‘Why would you be sorry? It’s the perfect opportunity to catch grieving mourners with their guard down. What could be better?’
‘Don’t.’
‘You’re right, of course, you came out of the goodness of your heart. The chance for an exclusive interview with Julius Köhler-Schultz was just the cherry on Elvira’s funeral cake.’
Dora opened her mouth, then closed it again. ‘I shouldn’t have come. I’m sorry. It was a mistake.’
‘I’m sure it wasn’t a completely wasted journey,’ Emmeline said. ‘You’re a journalist, or you pretend to be. You can always just make it up.’
Dora said nothing. She did not look at Emmeline. She kept her eyes on the fringe of untrimmed grass at the base of the headstone. Down in the road the automobiles were starting their engines.
‘I have to go,’ Emmeline said and Dora nodded. She did not try to stop her as she picked her way back through the long grass to the path. Emmeline did not look back. As the loose gravel crunched under her feet she thought of the beach at Wannsee, of Dora’s white shoulders in her black bathing costume. She stopped. Then she turned around.
‘You should know, I’m moving out of the flat. Turns out one of the advantages of a dead mother is not having to live in a rat hole any more.’
The tide of voices and laughter and chinking glasses surged through the house. Emmeline went upstairs. She sat on the lavatory for a long time, looking out at the bare trees, the sloping slate roof of the villa beyond. She wondered where Dora was, if she was already on her way back to Berlin.
Someone knocked at the door.
‘Just a moment,’ she said. When she stood up her legs had gone to sleep. She leaned on the basin as the water tumbled in the cistern, and as she caught her reflection in the mirror it was her mother she saw, her mother’s grey eyes and full, amused mouth. Darling, you wont even know I’m gone.
Amelia Köhler-Schultz was standing by the landing window, looking out. She turned when she heard the door open. ‘Hiding?’ she asked Emmeline.
‘Something like that.’
‘Me too. Julius’s found some old friends. I’m not sure I can bear to be told yet again how much better everything was before the war.’
Emmeline managed a smile. It was the closest she had ever heard Amelia come to a criticism. ‘Is Julius all right?’ she asked. ‘He looks so thin.’
Amelia shook her head. ‘These last few months have been a terrible strain. He’s working too hard, of course, but it’s this Matthias business—I suppose you saw the piece in the Vossische Zeitung? It seems that this isn’t the first time Matthias has been picked up by the police for handling forgeries. There was a Corot, apparently, six or seven years ago. They didn’t prosecute, they couldn’t prove he knew it was a fake. I’m sorry, listen to me rattling on, you don’t want to hear all this.’
‘Actually it’s nice. Talking about something else. I’m sorry about Julius.’
‘Yes, well. It’s been very difficult for him. He believed in Matthias. Loved him, even. The idea that Matthias deliberately took advantage of him—’
‘You don’t think Matthias might have been duped himself?’
‘Not even slightly. Personally I wouldn’t trust Matthias Rachmann further than I could throw him. But Julius? Darling Julius still believes doggedly in the imaginary Russian.’ She sighed. ‘I think believing is the only way he can endure it.’
‘Is that why he was talking to Dora Keyserling, to give her his side of the story?’
Amelia frowned. ‘You didn’t hear? She left the newspaper.’
‘Did she? When?’
‘I think it was after she found the police searching your apartment, when she telephoned Julius and asked him to help you. She didn’t tell you? Anyway, her editor demanded she write a piece about it, made quite a song and dance about it by all accounts, and when she refused he fired her. Either that or she resigned. You’d have to ask her. She’s here, isn’t she, or has she left? I know she had to get back to Berlin—Julius offered our driver to take her to the station.’
The Munich Hauptbahnhof was crowded. Heavy snow had caused problems on the lines, many of the trains were delayed. Emmeline pushed through the crowds, past men with briefcases and mothers with bundled-up children and pinched-looking women in mothy fur collars and jumbles of piled-up boxes and grips. Platform 7 for Berlin, the conductor said when she reached the gates, but there was no need to hurry, the train was delayed, they would not be boarding for half an hour at least.
‘Buffet’s over there,’ he said. ‘You’ve time for a cup of coffee.’
She saw her as soon as she pushed open the door. A slight figure in a black hat at a corner table, her head bent, her chin resting on her clasped hands. Emmeline stood in the doorway, tracing the familiar shape of her.
‘You going to stand there all day?’ snapped a slab-faced woman in a brown tweed coat behind her, and, as Emmeline stepped aside to let her through, Dora turned her head. She had a dark scab across the bridge of her nose and a black eye that was not black so much as purple and red and yellow-green. When she saw Emmeline her arms jerked upwards, her hands covering her mouth, and then she let them fall and she smiled, a smile so full of hope and apprehension that Emmeline’s heart turned sideways, pressing itself against her ribs.
The slab-faced woman reached the table first.
‘This seat free, is it?’ she demanded, slamming her handbag down on the table, but Dora shook her head. She looked up at Emmeline, her teeth catching the corner of her smile, her hands clasped together against her chest as though she were praying.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said and the smile broke free, creasing the skin around her bruised eye into a green and purple fan. ‘I’ve been waiting for my friend.’
Dora went back to Berlin. She had to get back to Oma. The woman she had found was kind and competent, but she already had her piecework and a family to take care of, it was not fair to ask any more of her. When she told Frau Schmidt she would no longer be needing her help, the caretaker had protested and then cursed, mutte
ring under her breath about criminals and their associates. The police who came to search Emmeline’s flat had not brought the proper warrants, but Frau Schmidt had shrugged and let them in anyway. Dora had seen her in the hallway, picking her teeth with a match while they turned the place upside down. Doing her civic duty, she called it. She had even showed them the trick to opening the wardrobe with the lock that stuck.
‘You’re right,’ Dora said. ‘The place is a rat hole. Perhaps we should all move out together,’ and Emmeline smiled and closed her fingers around the thought of it, a stone still warm from Dora’s pocket.
She stayed in Munich for another week. She did not want to leave Jacob alone with Nadine. Besides, someone had to sort out the mountains of clothes in her mother’s wardrobes. Jacob could not bring himself to go into her dressing room.
‘Take whatever you want,’ he said. ‘I’d like to think of you using her things.’
Elvira’s clothes were arranged on rows and rows of matching silk-covered hangers. There were dozens of evening dresses, some of them achingly familiar. It occurred to Emmeline that she knew them mostly from the back. She laid them on the bed. She would ask the housekeeper to arrange for them to be given away.
A different house, a different husband, but the dressing table was arranged just as it had been when Emmeline was a child: the bevelled mirror with its three panels, the silver-backed hairbrushes engraved with a curling E, the same flower-painted porcelain pots with rosebuds for handles on their lids. She opened the drawers to find neatly folded handkerchiefs, a pot of pins, her mother’s leather manicure case. Nothing else, no letters or photographs, no clumsily crayoned drawings. Elvira had disapproved of clutter almost as much as she disapproved of sentimentality.
Emmeline took out the manicure case and opened it, touching the nail files in their little compartments, the silver scissors with their curved blades. As a child she had been sure that if you just followed the curve of them you would cut out a perfect circle but her mother had put them out of reach, she had said that they were not a toy, that paper would blunt them.