East Into Upper East (45 page)

Si had fled in the same way, afraid to look back. That had been almost two years ago, when he had first moved out. He had come in unexpectedly early while she had some friends in for lunch. They were having a Tarot reading, so she was embarrassed by his arrival because he always laughed at her for believing in the cards. Well, he could laugh—but there
was
something: why else should the Knight of Wands have turned up reversed three times for Wally Roth, before she had even had a suspicion what her then husband was up to? Si had gone straight into the bedroom, and Donna was having such an interesting time—she was getting the most brilliant reading that afternoon—that she was reluctant to leave her friends and follow him. When she did, she found him with two suitcases open on the bed, packing his clothes. She sat down next to the suitcases.

She didn't know what it was about. Of course she had been aware he was playing around, but that was nothing new. He had never moved out before: why should he now? Although she was silent, sitting with her pounding heart beside the suitcases, he said: “Don't
try to stop me. You can't.” He went on packing and she went on sitting. When he had finished, he shut the suitcases and put them on the floor. They were heavy to lift, and his face grew red with the effort. She still hadn't spoken one word. He said, “I'll call you. I'll be at the Pierre if you need me.”

She nodded; they both looked at his suitcases; she said, “You want help with those? I'll call someone from downstairs, if you like.”

But he was getting his strength together to pick them up himself. Before he could do so, she threw herself against him; she clung to him. At first his body was hard and unyielding against hers; he said again, “You can't stop me.” But she wasn't even trying to do that; she was only sobbing helplessly, unable to believe what was happening. Suddenly he too clung to her as she did to him—as though he were parting from her not of his own volition but compelled to do so by some outward agency such as fate.

After Si's departure, she had gone back to her friends and they had finished their reading. No one suspected anything; and for the rest of the day Donna had remained calm. It was the same now in Reba's cabin: Donna was quiet and accepting. She ran a comb carefully up her dome of golden hair; she ate one of the pastries she had brought. Then she went to find the girls, stepping out of the cabin straight into the wood. Ancient layers of mould crackled under her high heels. The summer was just past its height, with the leaves too heavy for the branches that had to bear them, and also dusty and unfresh. She could hear the girls plashing around in their swimming hole. When she approached, she didn't step into the clearing but stood watching them through the shrubbery. They were naked, and Reba was splashing water against Lisette, who had her eyes shut and her arms crossed in front of her. Like a couple of mermaids, Donna thought without pleasure. A stone had lodged in her sandal and she lowered herself on to a mossy patch to take it out. Something pricked through her silk dress where she sat, and something else was creeping up her stockinged thigh. The one thing she regretted at that moment was that she hadn't asked the chauffeur to come earlier to take her home.

TWO MUSES

Now that my grandfather, Max Nord, is so famous—many years after his death, a whole new generation has taken him up—I suppose every bit of information about him is of interest to his readers. But my view of him is so familiar, so familial that it might be taken as unwelcome domestic gossip. Certainly, I grew up hearing him gossiped about—by my parents, and everyone else who knew about him and his household set-up. At that time no one believed that his fame would last; and it is true that it did not revive to its present pitch till much later—in fact, till everyone had gone: he himself and his two widows, Lilo and Netta, and my parents too, so that I'm the only family member left to reap the fruits of what now turns out to be, after all, his genius.

Max, Lilo, and Netta had come to England as refugees in the thirties. I was born after the war, so I knew nothing of those earlier years in London when they were struggling with a new language and a new anonymity; for it was not only his work that was in eclipse, they themselves were too—their personalities, which could not be placed or recognized in this alien society. At home, in the Germany of the twenties and early thirties, they had each one of them had a brilliant role: Max of course was the young genius, whose early novels had caused a sensation, and Lilo was his prize—the lovely young daughter of a banking family much grander than his own. Netta was dashing, dramatic, chic in short skirts and huge hats. She loved only artists—painters, opera singers—only geniuses, the more famous the better. She never found one more famous than Max, which was maybe why she loved and stayed with him for the rest of their lives. It always seemed to me that it was Netta, much more
than his wife Lilo, who fussed over him, adored him, made excuses for him. Lilo sometimes got impatient with him, and I have heard her say to Netta, “Why don't you take him home with you and make everyone happy, most of all me?” But the moment she had said this, she covered her face and laughed, and Netta also laughed, as at a big joke.

They always spoke in English to each other; it was a matter of principle with them, although they must have felt much more at home in their native German, its idiom packed with idiosyncratic meaning for them. But they had banished that language, too proud to use it now that they themselves had been banished from its precincts. Lilo had had an English governess as a child so that her accent was more authentic than that of the other two—though not quite: I myself, an English child growing up in England, never thought of my grandmother as anything but foreign. Max's accent was so impenetrable that it was sometimes impossible to understand what he was saying (
always
impossible for me, but then I didn't understand him anyway). Yet, although he did not speak it well, Max's grasp of the English language must have been profound; he continued to write in German but spent weeks and months with his English translator, wrestling over nuances of meaning.

Since Max's work is so well-known today, I need not say much about it. This is just as well, for his books are not the slender psychological novels I prefer but huge tomes with the characters embodying and expressing abstract thought. Today they are generally accepted as masterpieces, but during his last years—which are those that I remember—this estimate was confined to a small group of admirers. In his own household it was of course accepted without question—even by my grandmother Lilo, although I now suspect that she was not as devoted a reader of his works as she should have been. In fact, I wonder sometimes if she read them at all, especially the later, most difficult ones. But Lilo was not really a reader. She liked to go for long walks, to make odd purchases at antique stalls, and to play tennis. Yet as a girl she had read the classics—mostly German, and Russian in translation—and, with all her desirable suitors, she had chosen to marry a young writer of modest means and background. An only child, she lived—an enchanted princess—in her father's villa in the salubrious outskirts of the city. Max would bicycle from the less salubrious city center where he
was a lodger in the flat of an army widow. He brought his latest manuscript and they sat under the trees in her father's garden—in their memories, as transmitted to me, it seems to have been always summer—and he read from his work to her till it got too dark to see. He was so engrossed in his own words that he noticed nothing—it was she who cried, “Maxi! A bee!” She saved him from it with vigorous flaps of the napkin that had come out with the coffee-tray. This tray also bore, besides the voluminous, rose-budded coffee-pot, an apple or other fruit tart, so that Lilo was constantly on the alert with the same napkin; and in other ways too she was distracted—for instance, by a bird pecking away in the plum tree, or by Max himself and the way his hair curled on the nape of his strong round young neck where it was bent over his manuscript. Sometimes she could not refrain from tickling him there a little bit and then he looked up and found her smiling at him—and how could he not smile back? Perhaps it didn't even occur to him that she wasn't listening; or if it did, it wouldn't have mattered, because wasn't she herself the embodiment of everything he was trying to get into words?

After they were married, they lived in a house—it was her father's wedding present to them—not far from the one where she had grown up; it too had a garden, with fruit trees, bees, and flowers, where Lilo spent a lot of time while he was in his study, writing (it was taken for granted) masterpieces. As the years went by, Lilo became more and more of a home-bird—not that she was particularly domestic, she never was, not at all, but that she loved being there, in her own home where she was happy with her husband and child (my mother). During the summer months, and sometimes at Easter, the three of them went to the same big comfortable old hotel in the mountains where she had vacationed with her parents. During the rest of the year Max traveled by himself, to European conferences, or to see his foreign publishers; he also had business in the city at least once a week and would go there no longer by bicycle but in his new Mercedes sports car. And it was here, in their home city, which was also hers, that he encountered Netta—or she encountered him, for there is no doubt that, however their affair developed, it was she who first hunted him down: her last, her biggest lion.

She saw him in a restaurant—one of those big plush bright crowded expensive places she went to frequently with her artistic circle of friends, and he only very occasionally, and usually only with his publisher. He was with his publisher that time too, the two of them dining together. They were both dressed elegantly but also very correctly, so that it would have been difficult to distinguish between publisher and author, if it had not been for Max's looks, which were noble, handsome. “Oh my God! Isn't that Max Nord? Catch me, quick, I'm fainting—” and Netta collapsed into the lap of the nearest friend (an art critic). Soon she and Max were introduced and soon they were lovers—that never took long with her, at that time; but for him it may have been his first adulterous affair and he suffered terribly and made her suffer terribly. He would only meet her when he traveled to other cities, preferably foreign ones, so that they were always in hotel rooms—he checked in first, and when his business was concluded, he allowed her to join him. She wrote him frenzied, burning letters, which have since been published, by herself—“. . . Don't you know that I sit here and wait and die again and again, longing for a sign from you, my most beloved, my most wonderful terrible lover, oh you of the arched eyebrows and the—I kiss you a thousand times there and there and there . . .” Years passed and the situation did not change for them: he would still only see her in other cities, stolen luxurious nights in luxurious hotel rooms; and she, who had always lived by love, now felt she was perishing by it. She had divorced her husband (her second), and though she still had many men friends, she no longer took them as her lovers; later there were rumors that she had sometimes turned to women friends, her tears and confession to them melting into acts of love. Her looks, always brilliant, became more so—her hats more enormous, her eyebrows plucked to the finest line; she wore fur stoles and cascades of jewels, she glistened in silk designer gowns slit up one side to show a length of splendid leg.

It has never been clear when Lilo first found out about the affair. There was always something vague about Lilo—also something secret, so that she may have known about it long before they realized she did. But whatever upheaval there may have been in their inner lives became vastly overwhelmed by what was happening in the streets, the cities, the countries around them. They, and everyone they knew, were preparing to leave; life had become a matter of
visas and wherever possible secret foreign bank accounts. Even when he went abroad, to conferences where he was honored, Max had only to lean out of his hotel window—Netta was there beside him—to witness marching, slogans, street-fights, trucks packed with soldiers. Everyone emigrated where and when they could; farewells were mostly dispensed with—no one really expected to meet again, or if they did, it would be in countries so strange and foreign that they themselves would be as strangers to each other. Max, accepting asylum in England for himself and his family, left at what was almost the last moment. Only a week later his books were among those that were burned, an event that must have seared him even more than his parting from Netta. He was by nature a fatalist—he never thought he could actually do anything in the face of opposition, and indeed he couldn't—so he did not let himself hold out any hope of meeting Netta again. But she was the opposite: she
knew
she had her hand on the tiller of fate. She told him, “I'll be there soon.” And so she was—she and even some of her furniture; all were installed in a flat in St. John's Wood, within walking distance of where Max lived with his family in another flat, up a hill, in Hampstead.

I always assumed that the three of them—Max, Lilo, and Netta—all lived in the Hampstead flat, and on the few occasions when Netta took me to St. John's Wood, I would ask why we were coming to this place and who lived there. It was very different from my grandparents' home, which was in an ornate Edwardian apartment house buried among old trees, whereas Netta's block had been built ultra-smart on a Berlin model in the thirties and had porters and central heating. Her flat was light and sparse, with her tubular furniture and her white bear rug and the large expressionist painting she had brought of a café scene featuring herself among friends—chic women and nervously intellectual men, whom I thought of as the inhabitants of this place. For Netta herself really belonged in the other household where she appeared to be in complete charge of all domestic arrangements. Had Lilo ceded this place to her over the years, or had Netta usurped it? Probably it had fallen to her lot by virtue of temperament—especially during the early years of their
exile when they were aliens, refugees, with thick accents and no social circle. Only Netta knew how to cope; and when war broke out, it was she who sewed the black-out curtains for their flat as well as her own and stuck tape over the windows so that they would not splinter during an air attack. She always managed to get something extra on their ration cards, and in the winter she unfroze the pipes with hot water bottles and managed to get a fire going with damp lumps of rationed coal. She found domestic help for them—another refugee, Mrs. Lipchik from Aachen, who was still with them by the time I began to visit the household. Even so, Netta's greatest contribution was not practical but what she did for their morale, or for Max's morale: he was the pivot of everything that had meaning for them.