Some Old Lover's Ghost (59 page)

On the train, fighting her headache, she reflected guiltily that she had been too absorbed in her work to be a good sister to Erich. She should have spoken to him after she had seen him with Caitlin; she should have made sure that he was all right. She knew Caitlin to be capable of hurting him; Caitlin was careless of everyone’s feelings but her own. Her book open and unread on her lap, Hanna stared out of the window as the trees and fields, clad in their early summer brightness, trailed past with irritating slowness.

Erich went to The Red House. As he pushed open the gate and entered the garden, he knew that Caitlin had told him the truth. The garden was not his, and someone would take it away from him. People could take your house, he knew that, they could
just walk in and smash windows and pictures and crockery, and laugh, and no-one would try to stop them.

The sound of Caitlin’s laughter still echoed in his ears, mingling with the soldiers’ laughter from long ago. Since then, since the day when they had walked, heavy-booted, into the house in which he and his father lived, he had known that the world was random, predictable only in its casual cruelty. Since then, he had never been sure what people were thinking or how they felt. Though he might begin to trust them, they could always change, become different.

Erich walked through the box hedges. Their high, dark walls reminded him of the tall buildings in Vienna. After the soldiers had come to his house, he had lived alone in the streets for almost three months. Like a rat, a creature of the dark, scavenging, scurrying behind walls or into sewers when he saw the brown uniforms, or heard the strident voices. Then one day a woman had caught him searching through her dustbin for food, and a few weeks later he had found himself on the train with hundreds of other children, travelling through Germany. The fear he had felt during that journey was still vivid. When the Gestapo had walked through the carriages at the border with Holland, he had crouched over his case, trying to make himself invisible.

In Holland, there had been Hanna and, later, Tilda. He remembered the drive to Ijmuiden, where they had been too late for the ship and he had curled up, wanting to die. If you were dead it was all over and you weren’t afraid or guilty any more. He remembered sitting in the car next to Tilda, and the Nazi paratrooper stepping in front of them. He remembered how bubbles had risen to the surface of the dike as the soldier’s body had slid into the water. Then the boat – Felix adjusting the sails, Tilda working the tiller. The planes that had swooped down towards the tiny craft, and the glitter of tracer-fire in the sky. And much later, lying on the deck in the half-dark of dawn, the sea empty of ships, the sky free of aeroplanes. The silence. The charcoal-grey peace of it all. Like dying.

Erich crossed the terrace and stood on the steps, looking down
to his secret garden. He imagined how they would hack at the paths with pickaxes, and how they would uproot the flowers. How they would topple the statue from its plinth, breaking it in half. He knew that the good bits of his life were over. His mother, holding him in her arms; his father teaching him to ride his bicycle. Tilda: sometimes he had felt safe with Tilda.

And Caitlin. He had sat beside Caitlin on these steps, and longed to touch her black, cloudy hair, longed to press his lips on her soft skin. He knew that he would never do these things, because the past had marked him out, had made him different. The things that he had seen were written in his eyes. They were things other people did not wish to be reminded of.

He collected the trowel and fork from where he had left them the previous evening, knowing that he would not use them again. He said his farewells to The Red House, and walked back to the colonel’s garden. There, he opened the door of the shed, and hung the tools from the hooks on the shelf. He had always liked to be tidy. He looked around the little shed at the terracotta pots, the petrol can, the jars of nails and lengths of rope. He took what he wanted. Standing there, he made himself remember the night his father had died.

They had been eating their evening meal when the
Sturmabteilung
had come to the house. Fish and potatoes and beans. The wireless had been on, playing selections from operettas. Erich’s father had loved operetta, and had taken Erich to see
The Merry Widow
when he was only six years old. Erich remembered the knock at the door, the maid’s brief outrage, her screams. Erich had felt surprised rather than frightened, and he had put down his knife and fork and looked at his father. The wireless had played its happy music. The door had opened and the soldiers had come into the dining room. They had thrown the crystal glasses against the wall, and they had upended the sideboard. In the distance, from the other rooms, Erich had heard the chime of breaking glass mixed with heavy boots and loud laughter. One of the soldiers had begun to take plates from the dresser and to drop them onto the slab of marble in front of the
fire, and Erich had looked at him and had said, before his father could stop him, ‘Why are you doing that?’ The soldier’s blow had knocked his face into the polished mahogany table. Through the taste of blood, through his hurt and bewilderment and his father’s roar of fury, he had felt, for the first time, frightened.

The order of things muddled up after that. Seeing the soldiers kicking his father. Sliding under the table, creeping out through the door when they were not looking. Wanting to go to his father, yet being afraid to. Spitting into the palm of his hand and seeing the little, bloodied, hard pieces of tooth. The sound of steel-tipped boots on soft flesh.
Dirty Jew. Dirty Jew
. Knowing he should help his father, but being too frightened to do so. Running into the cupboard below the stairs. His father’s screams, then his pleas. Peeping out of the tiny crack between the ill-fitting cupboard doors. In that long, thin line, with darkness on either side, glimpsing the soldier with the length of washing line in his hands. ‘We’ll use this. It’ll be easier.’ Realizing that he had wet himself, like a baby. The shame of that. The shame of doing nothing.

They had hanged his father from the balcony that looked down over the hall. The knot had been tied to the balustrade, and the noose placed around his throat. If Erich had been able to look up, he would have seen his father kick and jerk and then go limp. From the cupboard he had heard the rattle of air in his father’s lungs and the soldiers’ laughter. And the wireless, playing the catchy little tune. Boots echoing in the hallway as they left the house. After a long time, he had opened the cupboard door and come out. Looking up, he had seen his father. He had crawled upstairs and sat beside the balustrade, as near to the gently swaying body as he could get. He had not been strong enough to haul his father back over the wooden rails. The battery of the wireless had run down at last, but Erich had remained on the landing, one arm pushed through the balustrade, touching the top of his father’s head, singing the tune to himself, the catchy, happy little tune.

When Erich, who was usually very punctual, did not appear for lunch, Tilda asked Caitlin whether she had seen him that morning. Caitlin shook her head, and said nothing. Her eyes, Tilda noticed, were very red.

She enquired about Erich as she served the colonel his lunch. ‘That Hun? Saw him leave the place an hour or so ago. Damned nuisance. Wanted a hand tethering the goat. Damned thing’s in the asparagus bed.’

Tilda caught the goat, and washed up, but there was still no sign of Erich. She thought that he might have taken the spare eggs to sell at the shop. Once or twice in the past she had found him outside the shop, basket in hand, unable to pluck up the courage to go in.

Erich was not in the shop, and had not, she discovered when she enquired, called there that day. Tilda glanced in the post office and looked up the road. The Oxford bus was pulling up beside the village green. Tilda watched absently, wondering whether Erich might have decided to go to Oxford, dismissing the idea almost immediately. The passengers alighted from the bus: an old man with a walking stick, two women with small children tugging at their hands, and a girl who looked like Hanna. Tilda stared at the girl, and then she began to run.

She called out, as she reached the bus stop, ‘Hanna, why didn’t you tell me you were coming home? You’re not ill, are you? You look so pale—’

‘I’m fine,’ said Hanna. ‘I’m very, very fine.’ Her English still occasionally deserted her in moments of stress. ‘I was just worried.’

‘About your work?’

‘About Erich,’ she whispered.

‘Erich? Hanna, do you know where he is?’

‘Isn’t he here?’

‘He had breakfast with me this morning, but he didn’t come home for lunch. You know that’s not like Erich. I’ve been looking for him.’

Hanna’s face crumpled. Tilda said gently, ‘Hanna, tell me why you have come home.’

Sitting on the bench beside the duck pond, Hanna swallowed her tears and explained about her dream, and her fear that Erich loved Caitlin. And Rosi’s suspicion that Caitlin might use Erich to hurt Tilda.

And then, grabbing Tilda’s sleeve, Hanna pulled her from the bench, and said, ‘I think I know where he might be.’

Hanna ran ahead, her long plait beating against her back with the rhythm of her stride. Through the village, out towards the river, and then she flung open a gate and began to run down a path. Tilda followed her. The garden was wild and vast and beautiful, the house weathered and old. Hanna turned back to her and called, ‘Erich made it. He was making the garden for you, Tilda.’

She told herself that he must be here, in this sanctuary that he had made. Each time she ran down a path or ducked the overhanging branches of a tree, Tilda thought she might glimpse him sitting on the lawn, or lying on his stomach beside the pond, watching the tadpoles. Through her fear, another emotion surfaced: an awe at what he had done. This huge garden, tamed by an ailing boy. This wilderness, made into something exquisite. Her poor, damaged Erich, whom she had plucked out of danger and transplanted to a sort of safety, had made this.

But the garden was deserted. Tilda went back through the ranks of box hedges, Hanna following after her. Hanna was crying, Hanna who had hardly wept a tear on that long, dangerous voyage across the North Sea. ‘He’ll be all right, won’t he, Tilda?’ Hanna wailed. ‘It is my fault! It’s all my fault!’

As she closed the gate of The Red House behind her, Tilda remembered Erich’s euphoric happiness of the last couple of weeks. And Caitlin screaming at her. ‘
I hate you! I hate you, and I’m going to pay you back
!’ At Poona she began methodically to search the garden. The vegetable patch, the orchard, the pigsties. The sheds and summer house, with their dusty, spidery clutter.
The outside privy, and then the woods that separated Poona’s vast garden from the fields beyond.

The leaves of the beech trees were like lime-green lace against an azure sky. Looking up, she thought she saw a black sack, caught up in the branches by the wind. Or a coat, discarded by Josh while climbing the tree. Then she saw the rope.

C
HAPTER
E
IGHTEEN

Melissa was crying. I had to swallow hard to keep the tears from my own eyes.

She said, ‘I was in France when he died. There was a telegram. We left for England the next day.’ Her tears made rivulets through her make-up, but she did not yet dab them away. ‘I didn’t know about Caitlin’s part in it at first. Rosi told me, after the funeral. Caitlin had gone by then and Hanna was ill, and my mother … I’d never seen her like that before. She seemed so
beaten.’

She looked up. ‘I’ve a photograph of Erich. Would you like to see it?’

As she went to fetch it, I looked out of the window to her back garden. A week had passed since the episode with Charles. The hospital had kept me in overnight, but my body had clung to this unplanned, unexpected child. Charles was now in a private nursing home, recovering from a nervous breakdown. His sister had told me that his production company had gone bankrupt. From the events of that night I still endured a lingering sense of shame, combined with a guilty relief that Charles was still considered too ill for visitors. Tall trees surrounded the velvety lawn in Melissa’s garden, but I was
afraid to look at them in case I saw a dark shadow in their branches.

‘There.’ Coming back into the room, Melissa handed me the snapshot. ‘That’s Erich.’

His face looked back at me, thin and dark with haunted eyes. The black and white image reminded me of those photographs one sees in the newspaper of other lost boys: runaways, and rent boys, and the residents of remand homes. I asked Melissa if I could borrow the photograph.

She agreed and, in the distance, I heard the front door slam. A voice called out, ‘Mum!’

‘Matty!’ cried Melissa, and leapt from the sofa, darting out of the room. As I gathered my belongings, I couldn’t help overhearing the conversation.

‘Matty, I expected you yesterday.’

‘I missed the ferry, Mum.’

‘And you are so brown – and so thin – you have been eating properly, haven’t you?’

‘Mum, don’t fuss—’

‘I don’t want you to catch anorexia—’

‘You can’t catch anorexia, Mum, it’s not contagious. And I’m fine – starving actually—’

Matty wore the familiar Doc Martens and layers of black T-shirts. Her hair was a furze bush of snaking dreadlocks, and the nose-ring had been augmented by a little loop of silver in her eyebrow.

I thanked Melissa and took my leave, and drove home carefully. The events of the last week, and Melissa’s story, had made me aware of the fragility of life. At home, after I had eaten, I typed up my notes. No wonder Tilda had found it difficult to talk to me about the postwar years. Her husband and her daughter had left her, the child whom she had, at great risk to herself, saved from the terrors of occupied Holland had killed himself. Her lover’s daughter – her own niece – had been, if not responsible for Erich’s death, bound up in it in a disturbingly unpleasant way.