The Sea House (13 page)

‘Em?’ She started after them. ‘Arrie?’ The land on either side was high with gorse, caves and mounds of darkening green. She walked slowly, looking to each side, expecting them to jump out at her, holding herself ready for the pretence of shock. But they were nowhere and she found herself peering into lanes of water falling away into still black pools where whole trees grew quite happily submerged. Where were they? She spun around, and then between the bushes there was the opening of a path. She followed it, and found herself at the top of a flight of steps. They were the steps to an old bunker, its concrete shell half hidden, its corners crumbling, eaten away as if by mice. Lily put her foot on the first step and called, and her voice seemed flattened by the walls.

‘One minute,’ Em shouted back, ‘we’re coming.’ There was no hint of invitation in her voice, so Lily walked off round the bunker, stooping to peer through the rectangular openings, arrow slits towards the sea. Down below her were the huddled shapes of Em and Arrie bent low over some kind of shrine. She moved as quietly as she could to get a sideways view and saw that they were laying out biscuits, taken from a packet she’d last seen in her own home.

‘Coming,’ Em called, turning towards the stairway, and as they moved away Lily saw they’d been attending to a bed of plastic bags, black crinkled sacks laid out in lengths, with a black sack bolster at its end. The bolster was stuffed with clothes, spilling out on to the damp grey floor, and on its top were four flaked almond biscuits.

‘Lily?’ The girls were skipping round to find her. ‘Where shall we go now?’ But before she could ask what they’d been doing, ask whether it was safe, they were racing off along a straight grass path that led towards the mill. Lily ran after them, the rain falling faster now, slanting into her face so that she could hardly see. When she caught up, they were standing, their tongues out, catching enough drops to make a drink.

Lily tilted her face too and just then there was a crack like the buckling of metal and the rain came crashing down. The noise of it, the sheer grey volume, huge drops the size of pendants, splashing and pounding, so that it seemed pointless to attempt any kind of cover, and they rushed, their legs and arms gleaming, out from the shelter of the mill.

They shouted like small warriors as they hurled themselves about, and Lily followed, half blind, deliriously happy although she couldn’t imagine why. But then as suddenly as it had started the rain fell away. Small patches of blue appeared, and a streak of sun blazed out across the grey. They stopped in the curve of the dunes and shook themselves, wringing out their hair, flicking the water from their faces with the backs of their hands.

‘There’ll be a rainbow,’ Arrie said, and they all looked towards Eastonknoll, where, as if they’d wished it, an arc of colour formed itself before their eyes, strengthening, widening, until it spanned the estuary, one foot planted by the ferry hut, the other striping down into the sea.

They took their shoes off and walked towards home, their eyes fixed on the rainbow, drawing them towards it for their pot of gold. They stopped when they got to the car park, and stood in front of the one wooden house, watching as the colours finally began to fade. Their clothes were steaming now, heavy and wet, and so they turned up the last stretch to home. Even from the Green Lily could see that the Volvo was gone. The lane was empty, just the two flat backs of the Renaults, parked side by side. Em and Arrie began to run. Lily watched them, waiting until they were through their front door, and then, head down, she walked on. She hadn’t meant to look through the window, but at the last minute she’d given in, and then immediately, shocked, she’d jolted her head away. The room had been destroyed. The table lay sideways, books and toys were scattered across the floor, and in that moment she’d seen Grae, bleeding from a gash across his face.

Lily locked her door and stood with her back pressed hard against it. She’d caught Grae’s eye just as he’d looked up to greet the children, to smile and show it was nothing but a scratch, and in that instant he’d seen her looking, and he’d warned her with a savagery that was chilling, under no circumstance should she go in.

21

Max began to dream about the Sea House. Sometimes he climbed that steep ladder alone, stood looking out surrounded by water, but more often he was there not as he wished to be with Elsa, but with Gertrude, her hand in his, the hot pulse of desire flooding up his arm. He wandered through the rooms with her, pressed her strong palm as they admired the view, and then sank on to that downy bed, her arms outspanning his, her grey bun releasing, the coils of her hair like Brillo streaming to her waist. Sometimes he woke, his nightshirt cold with sweat, and tried again, tried to find Elsa through his sleep.

Tonight, instead of searching for her, he began building a cupboard out of shells. It had tiny compartments lined with samphire, hangers of seaweed and mother of pearl drawers. Look, he called, stepping back in admiration, but it was Helga who took him by the hand. Helga, in her green dress, the day of their engagement. They’d had a party to celebrate on the twenty-first of June, a midsummer party out of doors, and his mother and Helga’s had each made a tureen of eel. Eel cooked with onion, flour and water so that the chunks of grey flesh sat in a transparent stew. He could see the little lengths of skeleton, the knuckled backbone and the spray of fins, and feel the downturn of his mouth as he pushed each forkful in. There was a salmon too, caught and smoked by Helga’s father, sweet and orange as jelly, and small round sunflower Brötchen, crisp with seeds, the soft dough warm on the inside. There were bowls of pickled vegetables, cabbage, carrot and green vinegary beans, and they drank beer, and afterwards small glasses of yellow cream liqueur. They’d carried the feast into their shared back garden, and on along the lane, across the path, and down on to the soft sand of the beach. Helga’s brother had run about collecting wicker beach chairs, wide enough for two, and after they’d eaten Helga had turned his face towards her, and told him that she loved him, the slippery smell of the burnt onion still hovering on her skin.

Sometimes Max climbed the ladder all night long, his hands folding over each rung, his head almost level with the ceiling, but somehow never reaching the next floor. ‘Love, I love, Ich liebe liebe love…’ He could hear the words as feathery as splinters, and it was Elsa who was whispering them, who was waiting for him to appear.

Elsa he now saw every day. She came and sat near him as he painted – first the Sea House, then the little fleet of huts that stretched back over the marsh. She didn’t mention Klaus, but he knew from Gertrude that there were problems with the library – another architect’s drawings were favoured above his – and in the meantime he was designing a terrace for a lady in Pimlico so that her dogs would not have to go down two flights of steps to the street. ‘It’sa disgrace,’ she said. ‘A man of his talent.’

Elsa watched Max as he filled his scroll with white. White wood, white cloud, and the white sand of the dunes that sloped up in between. He’d finished the tea shop, painting in the heads of the people, the waves of the sign, the geraniums on the ledges. He was considering climbing the steps towards the pub, starting on the cabin where Mrs Wynwell lived with Alf, when a car drove slowly past, threading its way through silt and pebbles until it stopped by the Sea House steps.

A woman climbed out, holding a baby, hauling a toddler by one arm, and then a man rose up out of the driver’s seat and stretched. There was another woman, older, and she was opening the porch door, while out of the back of the car children uncoiled like springs. Max began to walk towards them. One child was shouting in excitement over the discovery of an eel net slung between the stilts, and another, he could see through the glass front door, was shooting up the ladder, no doubt leaping with its boots on to the quilted bed.

The woman moved inside and began unpacking baskets of food, picking cups up from the dresser, using one finger to test if they were clean. Above him on the terrace the younger woman appeared, the baby pressed against one shoulder, stopping as her eyes stretched out to sea.

‘No,’ he wanted to call up to her. ‘This is my house.’ It WAS his house. He hadn’t known it until then. ‘Elsa,’ he called, desperate, forgetting that she had gone. ‘Elsa!’ and it was only then he saw the faces of the visitors, peering at him, concerned.

That night he lay awake in the quiet of his room and thought of Kaethe. Not the dying Kaethe, he tried not to think of her, but the sister she had been to him through all the years before. Fierce and haughty, clever, strong, saving him, making a home for him, writing to him weekly when he was interned. But hard as he tried to hold her she began to wither in his arms. Shrunken, yellow, wincing from her own thin smell, it had taken her eleven months to die. Her face became a silver mesh of lines, her hair was coarse, her wrist a knot of bone. Once Max caught her, staring at herself in an oval mirror she then hid quickly in her sheet, and he knew that, just like him, she was thinking of their mother, following her last days in a dormitory at Buchenwald, feverish and stinking, with no one to nurse or hold her, no one who even cared to know her name.

‘We should not have allowed it,’ Kaethe wept to him. ‘Eating, and laughing, forgetting for whole minutes at a time.’ She’d stretched her hand out and clutched his arm with force. ‘Don’t believe that. Promise me you won’t?’

Max switched on the light. There was a mirror hanging on the wall and he looked into it. No, he did not have his father’s face. His father was darker, broader, more handsome than his son, although they shared the same unruly eyebrows, the same brown eyes and pale skin. And of course his father’s shoes, stacked up with solid strips of leather, had given him an awkward height.

Jos Meyer wore these shoes, provided by the government, a new pair each year, whether he needed a new pair or not.
For injuries sustained at the battle of Loos. One pair of shoes, black, size 42
. Jos Meyer, war veteran, decorated for bravery, baptized into the Christian faith. At first there had been preferential treatment for heroes of the war. Jos was allowed to continue his practice as a lawyer when so many others had their licences revoked, and the Meyers lived on at Heiderose undisturbed. ‘Why emigrate?’ They had discussed it. ‘When our life here is not so very bad. To leave with nothing, with no promise of work. With no prospects…’ They’d looked at Max, already twenty-four, and he knew that they were wondering how he’d manage, their invalid of a son. Kaethe had moved to England, had a flat in London, shared with a young woman, Gertrude Jilks, a nurse, and she wrote regularly, telling them about her teaching and her passion for her work.

And then one night Jos disappeared. He was working late in Hamburg, had promised to be home early the next day, but when Max’s mother called him to say goodnight there was no reply. She called again at midnight, at three in the morning, at dawn, and then her cousin Marie telephoned to say that her own husband, who worked for the bank, had been taken away.

‘What can we do? Is there nothing we can do?’

His mother despaired. Other wives and relatives rang to report the arrest of their own men, and after each call she became more frantic, running over and over the arguments they had made for staying, cursing the trick played on them, making their lives just bearable enough so they would not leave. That night, all over Hamburg, Jewish shops were smashed and looted, synagogues were burned, and no one knew when those arrested would be seen again.

But on the evening of the second day Jos reappeared. ‘It’s all right.’ He was labouring slightly on the ridges of his shoes, his face and neck dark grey with stubble. ‘Everything is all right.’ He slept a little, ate, but would not say a word. ‘No.’ He shook his head, but even as he said it, he looked round anxiously and placed a large cushion over the telephone as if the mouthpiece had ears. Later he went down into the basement and Max watched him as he chose the boards to make a box. He sawed and planed and chiselled, fretting the teeth and sanding smooth the grooves until he had a crate.

‘You will go first,’ he said to Max, and into the box they placed the feet, the legs, the two smooth leaves of Max’s table. ‘Wait.’ Jos put a hand on his son’s arm, and he returned with the Renoir that hung above the drawing-room fire. He pressed it out of its frame, carefully releasing the tacks that held it to the wood, and when it was flat, its corners curling, he slid it between the table’s top and its one drawer. It clung there, a perfect fit, just above Henry’s letters. ‘Kaethe will take care of you till we come.’

Two years later, in an internment camp on the Isle of Man, Max met a man, a Mr Guttfeld, who asked him if he was related to the lawyer Joseph Meyer.

‘Yes.’ Max felt his blood lie still. ‘I am his son.’

‘We were arrested together,’ the man went on, ‘in November 1938,’ and he told him the story of that night. How he’d been at home in bed in his apartment on the Esplanaden when he was startled by a knocking on the door. ‘Open up!’ There was one moment of civility as the soldiers asked to see his papers, watching as he folded them away, and then, when that was done, they took hold of him and dragged him down the stairs. He was thrown into a truck. It was dark, but he could make out others, lying where they’d fallen on the floor. He managed to stagger up and push himself to the back, before twenty, maybe forty more were forced in. Some of these stumbled on the metal lip, tripping themselves and those behind, so that when the truck finally pulled out of the city, it was full of moaning, injured people, too densely packed in to stand up. It was almost one o’clock in the morning when the truck came to a halt.

‘OUT.’ Everyone began to stir. ‘OUT! NOW!’ the soldiers screamed, and they began hurrying them, pulling them out by limbs or hair, beating them where they had fallen until they struggled up. Guttfeld had been standing at the back, and it was then that he saw Joseph Meyer, and recognized him as the lawyer who had won for his cousin’s textile company an important case. He took his arm and jumped with him and they landed together, still upright, on the ground. Now they were forced to march, on and on through the forest, for ten kilometres at least. ‘I lost sight of your father then,’ Guttfeld said, ‘but when eventually we were allowed to stop, he was standing beside me in the line.’

They were in a clearing in the forest, surrounded by pine trees, tall and widely spaced. Fallen needles lay mouldering on the ground and all around was the smell of damp, thick, woody sweetness, and nothing but the silence of the night. Beyond they could see the wire mesh of a camp. And then a car roared out through its gates and an SS officer jumped out.

‘He walked very slowly up and down before us, inspecting us, looking into each exhausted face. First, he told us, we were never to discuss a single detail of this night unless we wanted those we loved to suffer, and second, we should do everything in our power to disappear. “Disappear from Germany.”

‘He clicked his fingers, and then a man, a prisoner, whispered something to his neighbour, just one word out of the corner of his mouth, and before the curl of his breath had faded, the order was given and he was pulled from the line. A soldier kicked him hard so that he fell, and then another stepped forward and stamped on his face. You could hear the splintering of bone, the crack of his nose and cheek, and then the first man, greedy for more, kicked him in the side. His ribs crunched, he let out a moan, and when I looked again the man was dead. Now everyone was standing, chins in the air, chests pushed forward, eyes straight ahead. We stood, hardly breathing, into the dawn. Birds began to sing, the branches of the trees rustled in the wind, and then finally, as the sun came up, two carts arrived and served out soup. I felt grateful for that soup, so grateful…’

Guttfeld turned away in self-disgust. And then, remembering, ‘Your father. Is he here?’

‘No.’ Max shook his head. He could see the cushion squashed over the telephone, as if its bulk would save their lives. ‘No.’ His father had not disappeared from Germany, and in that moment he knew he would not see him again.