The Sea House (22 page)

‘I was born here, and then, well, it was my good fortune to be left this house.’

‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘How wonderful. And do you drive up and down from London in this car?’

He turned to her, seeming to study her question for offence.

‘No,’ he said, ‘I take the train.’

‘Right.’ Lily got out, and as if by accident she let her fingers rest on the warm grey bonnet of the car.

‘Miss Brannan?’ He was holding open the door.

‘Lily, please.’ And she followed him in.

The porch smelt damp. So did the house, and for a moment Albert Lehmann stood lost in the middle of the room. Where was he going, anyway? Lily thought suddenly. Taking his car into the marsh?

‘The photograph,’ he said. ‘Ah yes.’ Slowly he turned around. There was a sideboard full of shelves and drawers. Lily stood behind him as he opened it. Biscuit boxes, napkins, folded and old, table mats and ribbons and some cocktail sticks and ancient straws. The man bent down and peered into a cupboard and then, randomly it seemed to her, he walked through to the kitchen and opened the larder. One pot of jam stood on a shelf and two corked bottles, their contents flecked and brown. Lily looked back at the room. Above the fireplace was a painting of a man, young and thin, his clothes loose around him, the outlines filled in with watery paint. Below the painting, on the mantelpiece, was a box. Lehmann must have seen it as she did, because with sudden eagerness he moved forward and lifted it down. He set it on the oval table, and began to finger through, lifting out photographs in small creased piles. Lily caught snatched glimpses – women, hatted, leaning into the wind, and figures in army uniform, too quick to see which side. There was a man, handsome in shades of sepia grey, an eel dangling proudly from one hand, and a dark-haired woman with two babies, her face stricken, a bundle lying helpless in each arm. ‘Here it is,’ he said and Lily, eager, reached out her hand. But the photograph wasn’t of the Sea House. This house had a fence around the roof, and the steep glass wall beside the door was shadowed with reflected leaves.

‘Where is this house?’

Lehmann was at the French windows as if he needed air, and she could see him from behind, struggling with the bolt. ‘How could I have missed it?’ The bolt came up and he jolted open the doors. ‘It’s gone,’ he said. ‘The house was destroyed, five years ago.’

‘No!’ Lily felt close to tears. ‘How?’

‘There was… a crisis. My brother and I…’

Lily interrupted him. ‘But are there plans?’

‘The plans are lost.’

‘How can they be?’ She realized that she was shouting. She turned the photo over and saw in that familiar blue-black hand,
1950. Hidden House
. ‘But how was it destroyed?’

A. L Lehmann shook his head. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I should never have asked you here.’

‘But so little is known about him. At the Architectural Association, at RIBA, when I went to look in the archives there were only photographs of chairs and bookcases. Some plans for loft conversions and the Heath Height Flats. Nothing else. I wrote to Germany, to Hamburg, to the Historical Archive, and the Lands Archive, and apart from details of one spectacular house that had already been demolished, there was not even a mention of his name.’

‘All Jewish architects were removed from the files,’ and then, almost in spite of himself, he said, ‘Shall I make a copy for you?’ He reached across the table for a pen and paper and very carefully he began to draw. He kept the photo in his sight but mostly he drew blind, sketching in the turret, the staircase, the steps like a ripple through the glass. ‘There,’ he said, when he had finished. ‘I hope this will help.’

Lily held the paper carefully before her as he showed her to the door. ‘You inherited your father’s skill,’ she said, looking down at the fluid lines of Hidden House.

‘Yes, Yes.’ But he sounded almost angry as he cranked open the door.

‘I might see you again?’

Albert Lehmann shrugged, and it was only then that Lily thought of the letters and remembered the Lehmanns had never had a child.

31

It was raining the next morning but Gertrude was undeterred. She had slept badly, waiting for Max, but then she must have drifted off because all of a sudden it was dawn and Max’s hat was on the table in the porch. The first drops of rain were falling, pattering against the roof, and as she stood there in her nightdress she felt a strange hot anguish that her lesson was about to be called off. By a quarter to ten she had hardened her resolve. She put on her plastic raincoat with its matching scarf, and took a huge umbrella that was intended for the sun. The umbrella made it difficult to see, casting shadows for several feet around, so that at first she didn’t notice Alf, leaning over the rails of the bridge.

‘What are you doing?’ she asked, moving closer to draw him in out of the wet, but instead of answering he reeled in his line of string to show a family of crabs. The crabs were clinging to a fish head, its flesh ragged and grey, and she felt her stomach turn as with great care he shook the crabs into a pot. She watched them for a moment as they clawed the sides. Alf dropped his bait again. This time one giant crab came up, its legs hairy, its back red. Carefully he eased it to the level of the bridge but this crab was old and clever, and, taking one last bite, it dropped back to its bed.

‘I didn’t think you’d come.’ The young man startled her. He had no umbrella and his hat and coat were already dark with rain.

‘Good morning,’ Gertrude said brightly and into her dry circle came his arm.

‘Thomas… Thomas Everson.’

‘Well…’ He looked towards the sea, but he must have caught defiance in her face, because he added quickly, ‘We’d better make a start.’

Everywhere was greyness. Flattened grass, the wet sludge of sand. Gertrude tried to shelter him with the umbrella, but he was taller than she was and soon her arm began to ache. They walked back and forth, holding their bodies stiff to avoid touching. ‘Possibly,’ Thomas suggested, ‘we could choose an interior. I could set up a still life and we could have some tea.’

‘Yes,’ Gertrude agreed and, with the umbrella rammed before them, they hurried up the hill.

Fern Cottage was remarkably untidy. All around were plates of paints, cups, mouldering sticks of flowers, half-eaten toast.

‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘Mrs Wynwell came, but I couldn’t let her in.’

Gertrude looked for somewhere to sit. There was an old cane chair scattered with paper, and one moth-eaten stool. She began moving books on to the floor, unearthing an old ripped letter and a tobacco pouch.

‘That’s where it is.’ Thomas looked amazed.

And then Gertrude almost sat down on a small fine Stanley knife embedded in the folds of the seat.

‘You’re sopping wet,’ she told him, noticing the worn ends of his jersey, the wet footprints of his socks, and for the next fifteen minutes she listened while he roamed around the room above her, opening drawers, banging cupboards, cursing occasionally. Then she heard the roll of wheels as he moved the bed.

Eventually he came down. ‘Just one sock,’ he said, apologetic, ‘and I’ve just thought, I don’t have any milk.’

Gertrude looked at the fine bones of his foot, the high arch, the toes, long knots of white. ‘You’ll freeze,’ she said. ‘Don’t you own slippers?’

‘Yes.’ His eyes lit up, and then, as if remembering. ‘I’m not sure…’ Instead he lit a fire. Wood and paper and kindling were mercifully heaped beside the guard. He formed them into a perfect pyramid, layer upon layer. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘the matches,’ but to Gertrude’s relief he found them in the hearth. Thomas sat and watched the flames. The cuffs of his trousers sent out curls of steam.

‘So,’ he said eventually, ‘what shall we do?’ He gathered the vases together and shook up the flowers. He took the best from each bunch and rearranged them, trying to spring life back into them with his hands. A drooping chrysanthemum, its petals burnt, and a sprig of overgrown mint.

Gertrude hardly dared move. A pencil was placed in her hand, a sheet of paper on a board on her knee, and as she began to trace the forms she thought how definite each mark she made, how revealing each wrong stroke.

Thomas sat opposite and began to sketch. The sound of his pencil scratching soothed her ears. The fire spat, the rain hissed outside and she began to enjoy the nursery frill of each petal of her flower. She imagined the borders of a bedtime book, daisies and pansies holding hands, and soon she stopped looking altogether, lost in a memory of some other time.

‘Well, then,’ Thomas Everson said when she was still. He rose and stood beside her chair. ‘Is there anything you want to ask?’

Gertrude blushed. Her sketch might have been done by a child. ‘Until next week, then?’ she offered, and, seeing the spiked lines of his own drawing, she leant forward to see what he had done. But he was already there. He gave it a quick look and, twisting it into a ball, he threw it into the fire.

‘We need to find something that actually interests you,’ he said before Gertrude could speak, and he walked to the door. ‘Would a shilling be too much?’

‘Of course.’ Gertrude fumbled with her purse. ‘Next Tuesday then, and I’ll bring milk?’

Max watched the sky from the windows of the Sea House and wondered how he would finish his scroll. There were three small cottages on the Common, graded like steps into the slope, and he’d hoped to add them to the existing houses on one long ribbon of blue sky. He’d set a tent up, made with wind breaks and umbrellas, but water had fallen in a great loop from the roof and been blown in.

‘It can wait.’ Elsa stood beside him, holding his hand below the level of the sill. ‘Tomorrow the rain might stop.’

They lay down on the bed, their bodies forced together by the weak mattress’s dip. ‘Tell me,’ she said, ‘where did they send you? Where were you interned?’ For three days now they’d lived each other’s lives, sharing each other’s histories, making each other’s pasts their own.

‘Where? I was sent to Australia.’ He was getting better at this. Talking. He could feel the words roll almost happily from his tongue. ‘I was taking a course in book-keeping. Kaethe had arranged it, so that I would be able to get work with a law firm or a bank. I was sitting in a room with three other men, when a policeman came in and arrested me. “I am not a criminal,” I told him, but he answered that during wartime there were worse criminals than murderers and thieves. First I was taken to a prison and held in a cell, then I was moved to a barracks, and then to the Isle of Man. After only a few days I was transported to Liverpool, and put on board a ship. There were about two thousand of us, all Austrian and German, emigrés and refugees. We were crammed into the hold, and had to sleep in layers, three-deep. Some were on the floor, others on wooden tables, and the luckier ones, in hammocks strung above.’

Would Elsa like to hear, he wondered, how soon the floor was awash with vomit, and how those more enterprising among them, in true Prussian style, set up the Toilet Police? There were ten toilets for two thousand, and so, it could be calculated, that each prisoner was allowed seven minutes a day. The Toilet Police set up a strict rota, calling up people as vacancies arose. ‘Drei Männer rechts ran zum Pinkeln.’ Three men to the right for peeing. It surprised Max that these words were still clearly etched into his brain.

‘We did not know where we were going,’ he told her. ‘And the older the people were, the more they complained. One died, and then another, and I often lay awake at night and thought how much worse the conditions must have been for the slaves brought across from Africa. They died, a third at least, on each voyage. I was lucky. I had a hammock and almost no possessions. Some had managed to bring small treasures with them, and when they went missing it caused no end of sorrow. Three times we stopped. Once in Takoradi, which was a miserable shanty town as far as I could see, once in Cape Town, where I hungered to get off, and then in Fremantle in Western Australia, when I was too ill with an infection in my ear to go on deck and see it.

‘Finally after nine weeks we arrived in Sydney. I see now that we were lucky to be sent away. In every respect our lives were better than they would have been if we’d stayed. The sun shone, the food was plentiful, and we were safe in our camp at Hay by the Murrumbidgee river. But we were allowed no news. No letters were written or received, and the silence was a torture.’

Max remembered the Australian newspapers and how flimsily they reported the war. They were full of the results of horse races and lurid descriptions of divorce. Sex in Australian newspapers was censored, but divorce came under Law. The editors made full use of this. Trousers, panties, doors opening unexpectedly and husbands coming home. The men would read aloud to each other and the thin canvas of their beds would groan. Sometimes in the back pages it was possible to glean a little information on the war. The bombing of London, the atrocities in France. But there was nothing that told him if Kaethe was still living, if his parents had managed to remain in their own home. And then the ban was lifted and they were allowed to write. Max’s letter took three months to reach Kaethe, and hers another three months to reach him. She was alive, and the following week she wrote again, and the week after, again. She was his life line and his anchor, his mother, father, sister, his only link to himself.

‘Say Hay for Happy,’ he spoke the song they used to sing.

‘And you feel snappy
And you don’t want to die.
Even if you sell your overcoat,
for just the sight
of one more bite,
of tasty butterbrot…’

‘So you were happy there,’ Elsa interjected.

‘Yes.’ It hardly counted, but now he thought of it, he was.

‘We set up a school,’ he told Elsa, relief spreading through him, the memory of joy. ‘It was possible to learn any language, and I worked every day on my English, promising myself I would not speak German again.’ He looked up at Elsa and smiled. ‘I took a course in higher mathematics. There were classes in Astronomy, Calligraphy, the Classics. Among the internees were several highly skilled doctors who all examined my ears. One suggested it was a build-up of wax that could be cured quite simply with a syringe, and another that it was a disease called Ménière’s. Soon I would lose my balance, deteriorate, and die. Another doctor, who had also studied in Vienna, told me there was nothing wrong with me at all. A stubborn desire not to communicate, was his conclusion. And so stubbornly I ignored him from then on.

‘It took a long time for the British to recognize that we were not enemies or spies, and when they did they sent a Major, an English-born Jew, to decide who should return. I was on that first ship with several dozen others, mostly married men. This time I had a cabin to myself and was waited upon by a host of Chinese stewards. They ran me baths and coaxed me with ice-cream, and when we arrived at Cristobal in the Caribbean I was given a pass by the ship’s captain to go ashore.’

Max remembered how the whole town had become a brothel for the Americans, who were guarding the Panama Canal. In each shop window stood a woman, bare-breasted, her chest in sunlight, her face in shadow behind. Men strode up and down, deciding which bosom to choose, and when they’d made their choice, they disappeared inside.

‘And did you have any money to spend?’ Elsa asked him. ‘In Cristobal? Did you make a choice?’ She moved closer to him.

‘I had enough to buy bananas.’ Bananas, he had heard, were impossible to find in London and he wanted to surprise Kaethe with the gift. But the bananas ripened in his cabin, and as he sailed up the Mersey he ate the last one, brown and soggy, and threw the skin into the Liverpool docks.

Kaethe had been there to meet him, but at first it seemed the authorities would not let her take him home. The voyage had confused him, made him think he would be welcomed, offered an apology even, but this was not to be. Where were his papers? Why was he here at all? Was he fit to join the army? If not, he should once more be interned. It occurred to him then he should have stayed in Australia, joined the Hay Association, who vowed to meet up once a year, but Kaethe was trying hard to convince them.

‘He’s harmless,’ she told them. ‘Harmless!’ she shouted into his ear and when he didn’t flinch they relented and let him go.

That night Max lay desolate on his bed in the new house in Muswell Hill. While he’d been gone Kaethe had found the Renoir concealed in his drawer. She had taken it to a gallery in Cork Street and sold it for three hundred pounds. The dealer said it was a bread and butter Renoir, not worth very much at all. But it had been enough to buy a two bedroom terrace house, and proudly Kaethe had hung his own painting of her in the hall.

Elsa put her arms around him. ‘Max…’ She was breathing words to him he couldn’t hear. ‘Max.’ He turned to find her laughing. ‘Look.’ She was pointing to the cupboard opposite, a label pasted to its door.
Spare sheets, blankets, pillowcases and life jackets
.

Max kissed her. ‘Sing Hay for Happy…’ He tried to lilt a tune.

‘Did you never learn to make signs?’

‘No.’ He looked appalled. ‘My father said that would be giving in.’

‘Don’t give in.’ Elsa was teasing, her fingers sliding between the buttons of his shirt. ‘Never give in.’ And she rolled into the warm curve of his body so that with his hands he could listen to her breath.