The Journey Home: A Novel (10 page)

“It began to rain while we were eating,” he said, “and her sister was worried that she would get wet on the way home and Lore started to tease her and we laughed and laughed for no particular reason, just like old times.”

Anna knew Jakob was enjoying himself at her expense. Her expression changed swiftly.

“Lore has always been so warm and fun,” said Jakob. “And there’s nothing wrong with her looks either.”

I nudged him. He realized he had gone too far and tried to make amends but failed miserably: “I don’t know how you always get these beautiful girls . . .”

The three of us ate every last mouthful of the pigeon but Anna appeared to have lost her appetite, merely prodding at each breast a couple of times before putting down her knife and fork. I could see that she was in the mood for revenge.

We drank coffee at the table since we didn’t feel like moving. Darkness had fallen outside but inside it was warm and cozy in the light of the candles and the flickering glow from the hearth. How the conversation turned to swimming, I don’t remember; I may have mentioned the pond where we had been taking dips for the last few days and the rocks on the bank which were hot by day but swiftly cooled as the sun got lower in the sky. I may have begun talking about the pond but it was Anna who suddenly cleared her throat and leaned forward in her seat.

“I adore swimming,” she declared. “Simply adore it. Even during a civil war.”

She looked at David.

“You remember what I wrote to you from San Sebastián, darling, don’t you?”

David hung his head.

“It was so gorgeous by the beach,” she continued. “After lunch everyone hurried down there because the more people went swimming, the more likely it was that someone would have a chance to escape. You known—refugees trying to swim over the border to France. Pretending to be on their summer holiday like us. It’s perhaps shameful to admit it but we all found it exciting too. The Spanish guards always noticed them because they swam too quickly. Couldn’t hold themselves back.”

“What happened then?” asked Jakob in an expressionless voice.

“Well, the guards began to shoot. And we raced for the beach, swimming as fast as we could, and ran up on to the hot sand until there was no one left in the water except the fugitives. The end of the game was simple. It was sad. They never missed.”

We sat in silence for a while. The fire crackled. But she hadn’t finished.

“I know David doesn’t want me to talk about it but we never saw the bodies, fortunately. The current carried them away toward Bordeaux, the very place they had been trying to get to in the first place.”

She slept late the following morning. When she awoke, they came to say good-bye. David was subdued. Jakob kissed him on both cheeks and patted him on the back.

We breathed more easily once they had left the house.

I have often wondered whether I was genuinely pleased for my sister Jorunn when she wrote to me about her forthcoming marriage to Gunnar Olafsson, a chemist. I didn’t know the man but judging by her description you would have thought he could walk on water. It didn’t bother me but I found it strange that she didn’t ask my opinion at all about the marriage. Admittedly, she had mentioned Gunnar two or three times in her letters, but not in a way that prepared me for a wedding in just a few months’ time. I’d like to emphasize that it never occurred to me that she should need my consent—quite the contrary—but all the same it took me by surprise that she didn’t even ask my opinion. I would have thought we were close enough that she wouldn’t have chosen to tell me the news in a way which amounted to a public announcement. I have to admit I was quite upset.

At the same time I had given her clear hints about my feelings for Jakob. Naturally, I didn’t go so far as to tell her in so many words that we were “living in sin,” as they called it then, and I convinced myself that my caution was because I didn’t want to get her into trouble. However, I realized later that underneath I had not entirely trusted her. And when I read her letter I was convinced that I had been right.

I was particularly annoyed by the postscript. She had obviously written the letter before I rang Mother and told her that I was engaged to Jakob but had not yet posted it.

P.S. Mother told me about your conversation yesterday. As you know,
she is at her wits’ end. I tried to calm her down but it wasn’t any good.
Father didn’t say much. Let me know if there is anything I can do to
help . . .

At least she had had the sense to rewrite the letter, crossing out the description of her trip with Gunnar up north to Kopasker—“I’m so glad Mother took to him so readily, they were the best of friends right away”—and cut down the tedious account of what a good family he came from. “Olafur, my prospective father-in-law, studied medicine with Father but I didn’t find out until recently . . .”

She, the angel. I, the black sheep.

“You must give the impression that you’re married,” Mrs. Brown had advised me before we went to Somerset. “People in the provinces don’t approve of unmarried couples living together. Any more than anywhere else . . .”

“You haven’t been living together this winter, have you?” wrote Jorunn. “Mother thinks you have but I told her it couldn’t possibly be true.”

Pretending that she was trying to help me!

No, I didn’t find it easy to be pleased for her when she wrote about her forthcoming marriage to Gunnar Olafsson, chemist.

Who can blame me?

I got to know Anthony early in ’38, when Jakob and I had been in Somerset only a few months. He lived a short distance away from us at a small country lodge owned by his family, called, if I remember right, Whitewood Hall. Now the lodge and its flourishing, fertile estate have been forfeited, run through their hands like so much else. When passing Whitewood Hall I would frequently stop and admire the house. I’d get off my bicycle, lay it on the grass or lean it up against the solid stone wall and walk up to the gate or sit down on a tree stump outside it. The building itself was a delight to the eyes and so were the lawns around it, mown as closely as a Persian rug. Near at hand they were a brilliant green but over by the house they took on a bluish hue and sometimes the house looked like an island in a lake. I used to chew a stalk of grass or do nothing but gaze and imagine what it would be like to live in a house like that, seeing myself descending the broad sweep of the staircase in the morning, stretching toward the growing light, opening the window and inhaling the scent of newly mown grass, listening to the birdsong.

Later, when Anthony rescued me from Iceland, he told me for the first time that he had noticed me outside the gate more than once. He also mumbled, half-embarrassed, that he had often fetched a telescope to watch me.

Anthony lived with his two aunts in the house. Neither of them had the slightest sense of humor, which might explain why he was such a frequent visitor to Jakob and me. He would invariably appear shortly before supper, bearing a bottle of wine or a little something for me, cheese or eggs from the old tenant farm or a volume from his library, usually poetry. He and Jakob had known each other since Jakob’s first term at Oxford but my acquaintance with Anthony went deeper from the very beginning.

Once I said to Jakob.

“You know Shirley Jones?” Shirley Jones was the daughter of our neighbor, a pretty, amusing girl. “I think Shirley Jones has a bit of a crush on our friend Anthony. Perhaps we should invite them to a meal together?”

I was surprised by how unenthusiastic Jakob was about my proposal.

“Do you think there’s any point?” he asked.

“Isn’t she good enough for him or something?”

“Of course she is, but—” he hesitated, “I’m just not sure it’s a very good idea.”

“What?”

“Well, I’m not sure they would suit each other.”

“Wouldn’t it be worth giving it a try?”

He shrugged.

“It’s up to you.”

The evening was enjoyable but nothing much happened. Shirley Jones flirted constantly with Anthony but he didn’t seem to notice. He joked with her as he did with us but when he put his arm around her in a fit of laughter, it was as if he was touching his sister.

The following day Shirley came to me for advice.

“Has he mentioned me at all to you or Jakob?” she asked.

I had to admit that he hadn’t.

She looked despondent and I felt sorry for her. When she asked me to talk to him and try to get an idea of what he was thinking, I didn’t have the heart to refuse.

But nothing ever came of it. The events of the following week saw to that.

I have always tried to do my best. My friends know that I put my all into things, I never shirk or expect more of anyone else than I do of myself. My friends know this and I like to think that our guests at Ditton Hall know it too. Our bookings in recent years testifies to our reputation; it says all that is necessary and so I will refrain from quoting all the newspaper and magazine articles which have been written about us, both in England and abroad. I will just mention the
Daily Telegraph,
Vogue,
the
Financial Times, Town and Country,
and
Le Monde.
“An oasis in the desert,” said the headline in
Town and Country,
for example, and although most of the articles were mainly interested in how we managed to offer international cuisine during a time of isolation and rationing and—I may add— the ignorance of so many English people, there is no question what opinion the writers had of our cooking. Even a child could read between the lines.

Then this fat lump came into my life. This distortion of the flesh. And gave herself airs. As if she had some point to make. As if she knew some secret which is hidden from everyone else—everyone except her!

She arrived on a Friday evening, just before seven. Instead of asking if she could meet me, she plumped straight down in a chair in the dining room and asked for an aperitif. She was fawning about the food as she ate it, no question of that, so the impertinence of her review took me by surprise. When she drove away it was past ten o’clock and the car groaned under her weight.

The article appeared a week later. And the statements, my goodness, the ignorance and pretension! Reading it made me a little sick.

“The salmon is fresh but slightly undercooked for my taste.” How did she want it? Like shoe leather? She ate enough of it, anyway; there wasn’t a scrap left on the plate when it came back to the kitchen. She must literally have licked it clean, lapped up the sauce with her tongue!

“The duck was tasty but the tiniest bit tough.” The only person who would find this duck tough is someone with bad teeth. “Melts in the mouth,” said Elizabeth David when she visited us once. And which of them do you suppose is the more reliable? Elizabeth David herself or this monster in human form? This dollop . . . this tub of lard?

“And she didn’t even pay,” I complained to Anthony. “She ate here free. Imagine!”

“Disa, you didn’t want her to pay.”

“I won’t let people walk all over me like this.”

“Don’t even think of retaliating. It’ll just make bad worse.”

“Saying the duck was tough . . .”

“She did praise everything except that and the salmon.”

“. . . and the salmon undercooked.” No, her words wouldn’t be allowed to stand.

I sat down in the conservatory and in less than an hour had written a response. Instead of posting it the same day, I took Anthony’s advice and slept on it until the following morning. Then I adjusted a word or two but left it largely unchanged.

As time passed I regretted having responded to this dollop. Not, you understand, because I was worried about what I wrote, far from it, I could have been much more pointed. But I should have realized that some people would side with her out of pity.

Certainly some people were shocked when I offered to post her the bones of the duck which she had left behind on the plate. “It won’t matter,” I wrote, “if the parcel takes a while to arrive as there’s not a single morsel of flesh left on the bones.” I said I was also prepared to increase the number of dishes on the menu before her next visit as “she obviously went home hungry, having managed to put away only four starters and three main courses. Not to mention dessert, of course.” I also promised to invest in wider chairs for the dining room.

When I attended a conference of Restaurateurs de l’Europe in London that autumn, I was surprised that people should still be talking about my article. Some fell silent when I walked by, their eyes shifty like those of children caught in some naughty act, others behaving as if I made them nervous.

“To hell with this rabble,” I said to myself. “I have never needed them. To hell with them. I will never be reduced to that.”

In the autumn of ’38 Jakob became seriously worried about his family in Germany. Admittedly, he had never been one of those who regarded the rise of Nazism as no more than a nasty infection which the country would shake off sooner or later, but even so he didn’t realize where it was heading. He made fun of the fact that Aryans were forbidden to work for Jews, saying that no one would listen to such ravings. Frau Hoffman, his parents’ housekeeper, disregarded this ban and she was no exception. I suspect now that it was largely his mother’s letters which blinded him because she avoided referring to anything unpleasant in them, not wanting to worry him or cause anxiety. “Concentrate on your editorial work, my dear,” were the closing words of every letter.

“There’s not much news of your father and me. We enjoy God’s blessing of being in pretty good health, though your father’s prostate bothers him at times. But Dr. Werfel is keeping a close eye on him so he is free from the worst discomfort. Yesterday we had tea with Herr and Frau Krull . . .”

Descriptions of the weather and accounts of trips to concerts, a few words about a book she had read, news of friends.

“Frau Blumenfeld read in an American magazine that our intestines are thirty feet long. I don’t know why she told me that . . .”