Snowleg (18 page)

The doorman, still holding her arm, thrust her forward and thirty faces – intrigued, shocked, amused – exchanged rapid glances. Together the couple walked towards the table as the guests sawed at their pork with their Potsdam cutlery and cast their eyes at the tablecloth, the wineglasses, the peculiar flowers on the curtain, the carpet.

The doorman moved her step by step down the length of the table until she stood opposite Peter. “Sir, this young lady says you invited her to dinner. Is she with you?”

His tone outside had been trenchant, but now he asked his question in a more reticent voice. Almost, in fact, as though he hoped that Peter would say “Yes”.

Peter heard the rustling quiet of the room. The people faded away and Snowleg looked directly at him, her large eyes imploring. Now she would be vindicated. Now he would rise to his feet. Now he would take one of the inlaid chairs from the wall behind and say: “Yes, I invited her. How wonderful to see you. Please, sit down.”

She waited for the answering gleam, but he stared back at her with a terrified glaze in his eye.

“No.”

A single syllable and yet as soon as he uttered it he had a terrible clairvoyance that he had become someone else.

Snowleg received the news with a look he would never forget. And then all expression fled from her face and disappeared, leaving her eyes dead, as if they had fallen into a hole.

“Thank you, sir,” said the doorman in a quiet, disappointed voice.

She stood for a moment, cradling her silence, and he was reminded of Sepp on stage at the end of the mime. It was the silence of someone betrayed and as the doorman began to pull her away it resonated in the room.

He regretted his answer immediately. With horrible detachment, he was released into seeing her beauty again. Something in the line of her back seemed straighter than before and the word “dignity” came to his mind and stayed there. What tortured him was that he could see himself getting up and running after her and it was a surprise to discover that he was still sitting there as though immersed in water. He couldn't feel himself, nor the air on his skin. He was seeing Snowleg as he saw her at the beginning, in church, at varying levels of depth.

“I think there must be some mistake, some mistake . . .” He broke through the surface and she was gone and the woman's hand on his was not hers, but that of the Permanent Representative's wife.

“Don't worry yourself. In Africa, we always had these people.”

Around him everyone started talking at once, but nothing was the same. His lips felt seared. The air was misshapen, unbreathable. He had flunked. And you can't do that if you're a perfect, gentle English/German knight. You simply can't. Someone at the table winked at him, another gave him a ruthless look. Teo leaned over and patted his shoulder and said something, but all he could hear was the shouting in his blood, the receding gallop of hoofs, of the visored figure he had once dreamed of being, in clinking armour, who tilted through a forest clearing to pluck maidens from the scaly clutch of dragons. He scraped back his chair and made to rise, but remained anchored to the spot.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“H
OW WAS
L
EIPZIG
?” IN Hamburg the following night, Anita sat beside him on his sofa. “Did you find out about your father?”

“No.”

“What happened to the hat and scarf I gave you?”

“I lost them.”

“Both?” staring down at her lap. Stricken, she began to separate the Polaroids. Grinning in a crowded church. Holding a dense bouquet of tiny white flowers. Trying on the veil.

Peter moved to embrace her. To assure her that his affections had in no way altered. But he had left behind more than a woollen hat and scarf. He had come back from Leipzig smitten in all directions. So in love, so muddled, so guilty that when Anita arched her back for him to unzip her dress, he felt like a creature asleep in formaldehyde. His features frozen in the reflex of his cowardice.

“Peter, I'm waiting.”

But he was still dreaming, dreaming of Snowleg. The thought of what he had done to her ripped into him. It had been there when he ran onto the platform at Leipzig's Main Station, and it didn't abandon him when the guard, noting the trickle from his eyes, said: “Yes, it's very hard to leave this beautiful country.”

At the end of the platform had stood three policemen in jodhpurs and jackboots and a furious-looking man with an Alsatian. Peter recognised him from outside the Thomaskirche. His dog was sniffing in an excited way at the corner of the wickerwork trunk. The man unholstered his pistol, his antagonism fuming up with his dog's breath. He pressed the barrel to the lid.

“Do you want me to open it?” said Peter.

The man looked at him with a smile that was almost pleased. “No need. I'll just put three shots through the middle. Just to be sure.”

Peter was surprised that the trunk should be quite so heavy, but all was explained in Hamburg.

“What the fuck is that?” cried Marcus. Into the space where should have been Snowleg was coiled a thick black painted rope.

It horrified Peter to think that the rope had been put there by people to whom Snowleg had talked about him. More unbearable was the idea that because of his cowardice she could have fallen into their hands. How differently his mother had behaved. She had stuck by his flesh-and-blood father and shown an unhesitating courage. Against her gallantry and prodigality, her reckless openness to adventure, what had been Peter's reaction when fate took him by the arm and asked to know the sort of person he was?

His denial of Snowleg in the Hotel Astoria was the moment that defined Peter to himself. He knew now who he was. A
Duckmäuser
. Someone who kept their head down. Someone who said: “I know thee not.”

At 11 a.m. the following Wednesday he wrote Snowleg a note on a postcard he had bought in Hamburg zoo. “How will you ever forgive me?” In a PS he added that the giraffe on the back reminded him of her. He addressed it to “Snjólaug” at the faculty of psychiatry at Karl Marx University. On Friday, he telephoned the faculty to find out if she had been awarded her place. He telephoned the following day and the day after that. Nobody picked up.

He was still writing letters six weeks later. In May he sent four of his favourite novels as well as an edition of Malory. He had no way of knowing if she had received the parcel, or whether she was choosing to ignore him.

One night Anita said: “Why do you do that?”

“What?”

“Shut your eyes.”

“Do I?” opening them at once. “I didn't realise.”

“Maybe it's English,” with a buckled-up look. The women shaved under their arms while the men made love with their eyes closed. “It's just that you've never done it before.”

A fortnight later he telephoned Karl Marx University and this time someone answered.

He spelled out the letters.

“Snjólaug?” repeated a bureaucratic voice.

“It's her nickname,” said Peter. “Somebody in the department might recognise it.”

“We require a surname,” acidly.

Her silence reproached him. He waited in vain for a letter from Leipzig, a call. He hardly dared to leave his building. Fearful that the payphone in the hall would start ringing, Snowleg at the other end.

Sleep was his only refuge from her silence. He couldn't bear to wake because that was to be him again. He longed for the morning when he opened his eyes and didn't think, immediately, of Snowleg.

Each time he thought of her, currents of fear shot through him. In his obscure distress, he kept asking himself: Did she get into trouble that night? Would she forgive him? Had the university accepted her?

On good days he was able to persuade himself that his denial was unimportant. No-one had overheard her speak to him in the Rudolph Theatre. No-one knew of her intention to escape. She would be safe.

To get the guilt out of his head, his shocking behaviour, he tried to console himself. He wasn't the first person to have acted like this. He had done what any young man might have done in similar circumstances. Snowleg would have known the score. She might have been angry for a moment, but then she would have forgotten the incident. It was nugatory, the sin he had committed. Chances were she had folded him away and didn't think of him, not at all. Sometimes it's like that, he told himself. Those who are offended against forget everything while those who offend remember for the rest of their lives.

On bad days, he thought of himself as the boy on the bicycle who had reported his father in Dorna. In his mind he had murdered her. And in a way he did murder her by offering up a flawed version of that night.

In June, without telling Anita or warning his family, he returned to England for a school reunion. It was the first time he had been home since going to live in Germany. At the end of the meal – in a downstairs room of the Garrick – the old boys sat around and paraded their most embarrassing moments in the six years since they had met, before becoming bankers, lawyers, journalists.

Leadley told an unlikely story of how he had appeared in his underpants on a balcony of the British Residence in Paris and had been mistaken by a crowd below for President Nixon.

Tweed revealed that he had caught the clap off the sister of a friend at Cambridge who was an earl.

“What about you, Hithers?” said someone. “Fucked any strippers on the Reeperbahn?”

“Actually, I did meet a girl,” Peter replied, fuelled by calvados and laughter and an unanticipated desire to belong. “But not in Hamburg.”

They turned their heads to hear.

Sometimes you retell a story in order to reshape it morally and digest it. That night, as anyone does to quell something dreadful, Peter tried to refine and smooth his experience with Snowleg into a version he could live with. Even as he shaped it for himself, he wondered if he need include every detail. Much as his mother might have done, he started to offer up a drained account. One that thereafter became his account. In which Snowleg was converted into a girl whom he had met for the first time at the crush bar following the final performance. A person he barely knew. Who just wanted to come to his party.

Peter finished speaking and to his ears the silence was like the silence in a room where a hornet has settled and no-one knows where.

“Oh, that's not so bad,” said someone.

“No, I know, but it was pretty bad at the time.”

“So was she or wasn't she a prostitute?” asked Tweed.

Peter smiled enigmatically.

It was Leadley who rescued him, a bully's sad look in his small brown eyes. “Aren't they all?”

He flew back to Hamburg and retreated behind his door.

Anita left notes. She knocked and he heard her sighing on the other side. The more he ignored her, the more frequently she called at Feldstraße until one afternoon, returning from a lecture, he found her sitting in a heap on the landing.

“Teo let me in.” She scanned his face like a dog who has seen its master's suitcase. “Why don't you answer my messages?”

“I haven't been here.”

“What's the problem? Tell me.” She wanted it spelled out. A reason. Was it something she had said or done? “I didn't grow an extra head while you were in Leipzig. What happened? Did you meet someone? Be honest.”

He struggled with the urge to blurt it out, but it was too late to tell. “OK, you want me to be honest. Right.” He plunged his hand through his hair. “I need space.”

“I thought you loved me.” Not wanting to be excluded by them, she couldn't bear to look into his eyes.

“I do, but I'm not in love with you.”

She looked at him and burst into tears. “That's so awful! Listen, please don't make any decisions about us. I can give you space if that's what you want.”

“I don't want . . . That's not what I mean,” in the soughing voice of a man no longer in love.

She bumped into him two days later. He was sitting in a bar with a student nurse from UKE. He pretended not to see Anita. Her vulnerable, pale face. Her swollen eyes. They exchanged glances, but when he looked for her again she was gone. He continued his small talk, deep down hating Anita for her obvious suffering, and in the morning wrote her a letter. “I can't make any promises to you and it would be wrong of me to lead you on. But I don't see a future.”

When his door was taken off its hinges, he assumed it was Anita's brothers.

In August, he moved into digs in Haynstraße. He stopped playing in Teo's football team and strenuously avoided the two other members of Pantomimosa. All his chivalrous intentions having failed, he swore fealty to medicine and threw himself into his clinical studies. Trying to work so hard that it didn't hurt any more.

One term passed like this. Then another. Until, in his final year as an undergraduate, his sister came to stay.

Rosalind had finished catering college that summer. To celebrate, he invited her to Germany.

“I'll meet you in Berlin,” she said. She had a hankering to peer over the Wall.

On a cold July morning he examined the passengers emerging into Tegel airport. He hadn't seen her for six years, not since she had waved him off on his way to Hamburg.

“Bedevere!”

The voice he recognised, but not the face. Puffier, with her father's deep-set eyes, and framed by thick crinkly hair that reunited in the cleavage of a yellowish Laura Ashley dress. He was surprised at how small she was. The whiteness of her skin. How very English she looked as she took stock of him.

“Rosalind,” he said with formality.