The Sea House (8 page)

‘Right…’

‘And you’ll be back next week, anyway. Won’t you? Lily? Come on, don’t be like that.’

Lily felt Grae watching her, leaning into the frame of the door. He was waiting for her to finish so that he could go to bed.

‘Let’s talk about it tomorrow.’ She tried to sound breezy, as if she didn’t care. ‘It’s just I’m… using someone’s phone.’

‘Oh.’ Nick’s voice was deflated as if he’d been looking forward to a row. ‘Right, then. Speak to you, then.’

‘Goodnight,’ she said cheerfully, and she turned into the room. ‘Thanks so much. Can I give you something towards…’

‘No, no, it’s fine.’

Grae went to the back door, and without another word held it open for her as she slipped out. She stood in the dark, the stars clustered above her, hard and glinting, crackling with light. ‘Bastard.’ She let herself say it out loud, and warm tears of disappointment rose up into her throat.

There followed three days of unseasonably hot weather. Lily took her towel and a bag of books and straight after breakfast she walked down to the beach. She lay there, soaking up the sun, leafing through photographic studies of the buildings that had been built in Europe between the first and second wars. Long, low houses, great sheets of glass, and she looked at these structures and thought that despite their Modernist predictions most people still lived in tall narrow terraces, row after row of them, stretching interminably through city streets. She read the short biographies of each of Lehmann’s colleagues, Austrian and German, for the most part Jews. She traced their migration to Britain or America, the influence they had had there, or the inevitable dates of their deaths if they stayed on. But hard as she tried to concentrate, she soon became distracted by the beach. She had to sit up to watch Ethel, her shoulders sloped and freckled, her dressing-gown a warm white puddle on the sand. There was something magisterial about the way she strode into the sea and the moment when the orange flowers of her costume disappeared from view. Shortly afterwards a man came to exercise his horse. He thundered it along the sand, pulling it back time and again from its natural desire to swim. The horse was wild, its front legs rearing as it tried to escape the harness of its reins. By eleven, women with small children were starting to arrive, dragging pushchairs, windbreaks, bags packed with bottles, blankets and spare clothes. Lily watched these women caught between laughter and despair as one child dashed towards the sea, while another, wailing, lay face down on the ground. They stood there, unable to move forwards or back with the pack horse of a pushchair stranded wheel-deep in sand. By mid-morning Em and Arrie had appeared. Lily watched them as they scouted round the beach. They liked to surprise her, to jump out at her from behind a dune, and they’d wait until she least expected it before creeping up and digging a moat around her towel.

‘What do they say at school?’ she asked eventually when the day-trippers had receded, and they had the beach back to themselves. ‘Don’t they mind about you never going in?’ She was stretched out, still and patient, while they buried her with sand. The grains were damp below the surface, dry and ticklish on top.

‘It’s half-term.’ They shook their heads, staggered by her ignorance. ‘And anyway,’ Em said, ‘we saw you sunbathing. You said you were only renting Fern Cottage so that you could do your work.’ She picked up one of Lily’s books. ‘Which house would you like best?’ And the girls hovered over it, gasping, sighing, muttering, as they flicked through for their dream home.

13

Max was almost at the Lehmann house. His scroll, when he unfurled it, spread right across the living-room floor. A length of green and brick and window, birds and cats and sky. He was tempted to pin it like a border round the room, but more than anything he liked the secret knowledge of it, rolled up under his arm. As an experiment he took a sharp black pen and made a tiny sign. A miniature fisherman’s squiggle on the front door of Marsh End. He hid another under the eaves of Heron House, and the strange lopsided K that stood for the family Gottschalk, he slid into the porch of Sole Bay View.

Max walked up and down the lane. Passing and re-passing the Lehmann house. He’d become acclimatized to thatches, pantiles, pebbled walls and bays, and now he could not think how to begin. He remembered an article from the early 1930s about a house Lehmann had designed. It was in a suburb of Hamburg, had been commissioned by the director of the Deutsche Bank, and Max remembered his father marvelling at it, predicting that this young architect was destined to be Germany’s next star. Slowly the sun curved around the corner of the house. It crept over the picket fence and washed the glass with colour. Max sat on his painting stool and noticed the dark wood softening, saw how the panelling turned from rust to gold to grey, so that the whole garden was reflected in its windows, the leaves of the beech tree opposite dancing in the open panes of glass. Max closed his eyes. All day he had been haunted by the smell of gherkins, the smell of the barrel in the grocer’s shop in Vitte that stood just inside the door. He used to sniff them, lean into the pickling water and breathe in, and now as he let his face hover, he could hear the shopkeeper talking to his mother, telling her there was no more wool in the colour she desired. She could, he told her, order it from Stralsund, and then it might come in on the steamer by the end of the week. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Maybe I’ll do that.’ And then Kaethe’s strong hand came up behind him and pushed his head down into the barrel. His nose brushed against the gherkins, his mouth filled up with brine, and there was the cold sharp pain of vinegar water seeping into his ear. Choking and spluttering, he came up. Before him was his mother, furious and alarmed. ‘Max!’ she scolded, and then he saw his sister, her hands folded innocently behind her back. ‘Max,’ Kaethe reproached him softly, and she took a handkerchief from her pocket and began to mop his neck.

Max realized he was moaning, still sitting on his stool. He staggered up, embarrassed, staring round, and as he moved, his ear shot through with pain. He put one hand to it, and found that it was seeping, a thin translucent liquid trickling from the drum.

‘Gertrude,’ he whispered as he stumbled into the house, and, not finding her at home, he soaked a tea towel with cold water and pressed it to his head. It seemed ridiculous that his ears should still be capable of giving him such pain. They should feel nothing, should be removed, the drums pulled out, but just then he heard a little pop, and after it a strange clear gust of air. His heart leapt. It was there, a tunnel of sound, but then everything closed up again, like a screen door easing shut, and he was left with the familiar low whirr and echo all trammelled through with pain.

‘You should have fetched me,’ Gertrude said when she came in. ‘I was only at the vicarage, helping with preparations for the fête.’

‘There’s nothing that can be done.’ Max was slumped over in his chair, shivering, longing for a blanket to wrap around his back.

Undeterred, Gertrude lit a candle and, pouring a pale oval of oil into a spoon, she began to warm it over the flame. ‘You forget,’ she told him, pressing his head to one side, ‘I’ve looked after children all my life,’ and she eased the liquid into his ear.

‘Thankyou,’ he mouthed, and she nodded brusquely and laid her hand across his forehead. It was comforting, the cool, broad strength of it, the calluses on the curve of her palm.

‘You’ve got a fever?’ And when he nodded she went through to run him a cold bath. ‘Go on, then, get in,’ she told him, holding open the bathroom door, and when he resisted, whimpering, she threatened to take off his sweat-soaked clothes herself. To his surprise the first chill of the water helped him. It seemed to bring him down into himself, and he took the metal cup from the side of the bath and began emptying it over his head. Soon, his teeth stopped chattering, and his face began to cool. Now there was nothing left except the pulsing of his ear, a sick and heavy agony that tasted, when he thought of it, of tin.

Gertrude helped him up the stairs, turning to the window as he settled into bed. ‘Can I bring you anything?’ she asked, but Max’s eyes were closing, and with his hand pressed between the pillow and his ear he sank down into sleep.

Gertrude had been careful not to use the word ‘analysis’, but had explained her idea to Mrs Wynwell more as a kind of cosy chat. ‘It’s been over a year since your husband…’ – she didn’t believe in letting sentences trail off – ‘since Harry died. A year, Mrs Wynwell, that’s a long time in a child’s life.’

‘He’s always been quiet,’ Mrs Wynwell said, ‘and I thought what with the piano…’ She looked up at Gertrude to show that she was grateful, but would rather not. It was true, Alf had always been a quiet child, playing in a corner while his mother worked, and Gertrude had admired the way they moved around each other, attached invisibly, but with no great fuss. But after Harry’s boat went down, Alf’s voice turned to a whisper, and then stopped.

‘After his tea, then?’ Gertrude persisted, smiling, her eyebrows raised, and they agreed he might come to her on Wednesdays at half past six.

Gertrude rearranged the furniture, shifting the sofa out into the room, and moving her chair a little nearer so that she could stare out at the lawn. She had a toy for Alf, a bag she’d sewn herself, and in it she’d put a rubber ball and seven jacks. She knew it was unethical to trade gifts for trust, but from her own experience with children in the war nursery knitting clothes for dolls had often done more to console them than any amount of wise words.

Alf arrived just after six, slipping as usual into the hall. ‘Come and sit down,’ Gertrude called, and he sidled into the room. Alf kept his eyes fixed on his shoes, his face mournful but shiny as if it had just been washed. He sat as directed on the sofa. ‘So,’ Gertrude said eventually, ‘how are you today?’

Alf looked at her, clear-eyed, as if he were running over everything in his life, and then – maybe it seemed to him that he had told her – his face closed in and he stared down at his feet.

‘Well.’ Gertrude smiled. ‘I’ve been very busy, helping sort through the raffle prizes for the summer fête.’ There was nothing really there to interest him. A watercolour of the estuary, a bottle of whisky, another of rum. ‘We might,’ she said instead, ‘have a “Guess the currants in the cake” competition. Or we could hoodwink them, what do you think, and just put in one?’

Alf was staring into the garden, chewing his lip, watching two magpies pecking at the grass. One for sorrow, two for joy, Gertrude thought, but all the same she felt a quiver of misgiving when one of the birds flew off over the hedge. Gertrude waited fifteen minutes, and then, leaning towards him, she gave Alf the jacks. She’d made the bag out of a scrap of curtain, and plaited green ribbon to make a string. Alf drew it open.

‘Shall we play?’ Gertrude offered, and Alf slipped down off the sofa and tipped the jacks on to the parquet floor. He caught the ball which was skittering away from him, and waited while Gertrude pushed away her chair. Her knees cracked as she knelt down beside him, her heel stinging as it dented into wood. Alf flashed her a smile. His two front teeth were missing, and she hadn’t known. He bounced the ball and picked up the first jack. He bounced it higher and scooped up two. Three, he had to scrabble now and the ball hit the side of his knuckle. ‘Bad luck.’ It was Gertrude’s turn. She bounced the ball, not too high, not at an angle, but expertly giving herself time. Two, she swept them up and turned her wrist to catch it. Three, but the ball was thrown too high and it hit the link chain of her watch. ‘Ahhhh,’ she let out a sigh of frustration, but Alf had already started his turn. This time he was more careful. Measuring the bounces, not taking his eye from the ball. He scooped up three and let it fall neatly into his palm. Four. He’d done it. ‘Five,’ Gertrude whispered, and they smiled as the tension mounted, as slowly, carefully he aimed the ball. It bounced high. He scooped and swept the floor, but he had to take his eye away for one flick of a second to find that last fifth jack. Down the ball fell, skimming his palm. ‘Bad luck,’ Gertrude exhaled, and Alf laid his jacks down.

Gertrude was determined to do at least as well as him. Not all children appreciated it if you let them win. She arranged the jacks carefully, a bright cluster of kisses, with just the right amount of space in between. She stared at them, holding their formation, determined not to look down. But no, she misjudged it, picked three jacks instead of four, and, although she caught the ball, she had to relinquish her go. She could hear Alf’s breathing, feel his heat as he squatted on the floor. With quick flicks of his wrist he scooped and turned his hand. Six, Gertrude’s heart was beating, she wanted him to win, and then he was scooping up the seventh jack, cramming it into his hand. ‘Yes,’ the word escaped him, and he caught the ball.

‘Well done,’ she said, and Alf got up and very carefully stowed his treasure back into its bag.

Gertrude stood up and stretched her legs. One shoulder had locked as she’d pressed herself into the floor. ‘That wasn’t so bad?’ she said. ‘Run home now, and I’ll see you next week at the same time.’ Alf looked her over warily as if she might be mad, and then, tucking the bag into his pocket, he slipped through the door and sped off down the lane.

14

Folded into the next letter was a plan of Lehmann’s room. He had his own notepaper now with his name and title – Architekt – printed large across the top.
Under the window is a table, and on the right of this table are my drawing things. In the middle is my writing case, and on my left my inkpot and the silver box with your lock of hair. I shall have to make do with their company until I can come home to you. Don’t be sad, don’t cry. I hesitate to say I told you to be careful, not to rush around, and I shan’t say it. Or even think it. But rest now, and wait, and I’ll be home soon to look after you. I know a child is the one thing you most want, but don’t forget that you’ve got me.

Lily searched hungrily for the next letter, examining the postmarks for 1932, for June.

Next to the picture of you on my table, a dark red carnation is standing in a narrow vase. Just as you love them, it is admiring you. But you look sad, and I’m trying everything to make your lovely eyes a little happier. Last night I lay awake, thinking about our plans for Palestine, and all the difficulties involved in settlement and travel. You must bear the possibility of this in mind, my love, because the time is coming when we will have to find somewhere else to go.

Lily folded the letter, the cream of the paper, the grains watery as silk, and as she slid it into its envelope she pressed it to her nose. There was the sweet, sour smell of tobacco, the dry dustiness that threatened to make her sneeze, and she wondered if this was Lehmann’s smell, sealed in a capsule, or more likely the smell of a cupboard in North London where the other Lehmann had stored them in their carrier bag through all these years.

Dear Nick
,

I’m still here. I just thought, as you were working so hard
… Lily chewed the end of the pen. She hadn’t told him she was taking Fern Cottage on for another month.
I just don’t know if I’m cut out to be an architect
. She hadn’t meant to write that, but since she’d been here she didn’t know if she was the right person to redesign a kitchen, organize a team of builders while they refurbished a house. Was she ambitious enough, she didn’t know, to create her own buildings, to do what Lehmann had done, to invent himself, not once, but twice. ‘So? What then…?’ She could see Nick’s face. ‘Go back to waitressing?’ She felt a wave of anguish that after three years of training she still didn’t know what she wanted to do.
I’d like to make a house
, she was doodling now,
not just design it
. It would be surrounded by larches, looking out to sea, it would be sustainable, adaptable, in tune with its environment.
Maybe I’ll go on one of those self-build courses
… and she remembered that there were packs you could order from Sweden. Wooden houses with verandas running round two sides.

When she’d first met Nick she’d been a waitress at a restaurant in Covent Garden. She’d started working there part-time to supplement her art school grant. But gradually her hours had lengthened, doubled, until, almost without realizing it, the restaurant was at the centre of her life. It was like a family, the small evening world of it, the hierarchy, the bonuses and rules. It gave her pleasure, slipping into her uniform, the black and white of such a limited choice. She loved arriving, walking against traffic, when everyone else was finishing for the day, and now she thought of it, she could almost feel the linen skirts of the tables, smell the cane baskets and bread sticks, hear the crunch of the tiny Hoover as it rolled over the tablecloth for crumbs.

But when she met Nick she’d felt ashamed. ‘Is this what you really want to do?’ He’d cupped her face in his hands, looked at her so intently she felt she must be worth much more.

‘Not necessarily,’ she faltered. ‘Not for ever…’

Lily’s paintings were ranged around her walls. They snaked in and out of her bedroom, were lined two deep along the hall.

‘Can I?’ Nick was heading for the largest of them, while Lily lurched forward in alarm.

‘No,’ she said, ‘please don’t.’

But Nick ignored her, turning a whole row round to face the room. ‘They’re lovely.’ He was staring into a pale and chalky landscape, a light-filled space of calm. ‘But… Unless you show them, have an exhibition, you’ll be working as a waitress when you’re ninety-three.’

Lily turned each painting back to face the wall. She didn’t want anyone to see them. Dreaded the thought they might be spirited away. Once, her landlord, who lived downstairs, had arranged an exhibition. He’d knocked on her door, beaming, to tell her a friend of his who had a café in Highbury would be happy to let her hang them on his walls. ‘You might even sell some, you never know.’

Lily had stared at him. Shocked to hear herself shout, ‘No, I don’t want that!’ People flicking spaghetti, discussing their love lives. Her face, she was sure of it, must be bright red. ‘Tell him he can’t.’

Her landlord had backed away. ‘I just thought you’d be glad of the exposure, not to mention the extra cash.’ He looked rueful. ‘If they sold.’ She guessed he’d been thinking how much he’d like to raise the rent.

‘Come with me.’ Nick had seized his car keys. ‘Come on, let’s go for a drive.’

It was late, and London was slick and black and empty. They drove towards Victoria, lit up by the lights along the palace garden wall, over the bridge at Vauxhall, and along beside the river. ‘My favourite view of London,’ Nick told her as they crossed the river again, at Waterloo, and hungrily they twisted their heads from side to side to try and take it in. The strings of lights across the water, the arches and tunnels of the bridges, the boats, the buildings, their every shape of window, the green and gold of their roofs. ‘Drive more slowly,’ she begged, but there was a car behind them, and they were forced into the tunnel of the Holborn Viaduct and up towards Bloomsbury. Nick parked outside the British Museum and they got out and clung to its railings. It was lit up to glow like Egypt, the orange light trickling warm over its steps. ‘How would you feel?’ he asked her, ‘if you had any part in something as beautiful as that?’ They gazed at the great heads of the lions, the beauty of the pillars and the new glazed dome. ‘You’re mad,’ she told him, and he said that it helped when submitting plans for someone’s toilet if you were thinking on the most dazzling scale. He picked her up and spun her round and they fell against each other, laughing, staggering as if they were drunk.

More slowly, they drove into the City, along the narrow gorges that ran between old buildings and new. ‘When,’ he asked her as they came out into the clearing of St Paul’s Cathedral, ‘did you last climb up?’

‘With school?’ She could only dimly remember the flurry of bodies, the coats and bags as her whole class wheeled to the top. ‘And, anyway, I didn’t think you were allowed to admire St Paul’s. I read somewhere that Wren wasn’t a true architect, although I can’t see how…’

‘You’re right.’ Nick leant across and kissed her ear. ‘But it’s the buildings you can see from there that should force you up. And, anyway,’ he grinned at her, ‘if we want to admire St Paul’s Cathedral at two in the morning, then who’s to know?’

‘I’ll go up tomorrow.’ She kissed him back. ‘Or today.’ And inspired by his passion, and his faith in her, she applied to his old college to study architecture on a three-year course.

There was a cupboard at Fern Cottage filled with maps.
Maps
, it said helpfully on a sticker pasted indelibly to the outside. There were maps of East Anglia, local footpath maps, Ordnance Survey maps dating back over seventy years. With all this information it seemed ridiculous that she still hadn’t found the Lehmanns’ house. Each day she imagined she would come across it, see it somewhere on the corner of a lane, but there was nothing in the village that wasn’t thatched or gabled, pebbled, terraced, beamed. Lily pulled out a map of Steerborough and spread it over the floor. The houses were drawn in little blocks, sitting for the most part along the village’s main street. There were some she already recognized. The old Dutch house that leant to one side, the double-fronted cottage that had once been the pub. It had been moved by wheelbarrow, brick by brick to its new site beside the shop. ‘Was that a common practice?’ she’d asked Ethel. And Ethel had told her about a converted barn behind Kiln Lane that had travelled eight miles. Maybe, Lily thought, the Lehmann house had moved. Had been taken off to another village by wheelbarrow, had even been discovered and submitted by a more imaginative student as the winning project of their term. She should ask Ethel. Ethel would know. Ethel may even have remembered Lehmann. Might have known Elsa, known what had happened to her in 1953 after Lehmann died.

Lily folded the map. There was one road, Mill Lane, down which she’d never ventured, on the corner of which foundations for a house were being laid. ‘Hidden House’ the map had said, but there was nothing there but mud and rubble now. Mill Lane ran behind the garage, curved round towards the sea, and she’d avoided it because it looked so recent, had a pale, suburban gravel drive. But the gravel was misleading. The houses on each side were ancient, elaborate, huge lawns behind wrought iron gates, the only sound the twitter of small birds. No, Lily told herself, there is nothing useful here, but she walked on anyway, lulled by the silence and the curve. Almost at the end of the road, nestled to one side, she could just make out the corner of a house. It was old and low, a rhubarb shade of pink, and as she drew nearer she saw that welded into the crook of its two halves was a 1950s porch.

Lily leant against the gate. The house looked abandoned, its curtains open, its porch empty and chilled. She pushed the gate, but the grass around it had grown up solidly and it would not move. Lily glanced around and, seeing no one, she jammed her feet against the wooden slats, and, climbing on to the gatepost, she jumped down from the top. Quickly she knocked on the door. She waited, watching for a shadow behind the watery glass, and then, when no one answered, she edged round to the back. Her heart was thumping, her ears magnifying every sound, but she had to keep on. The garden was round, a green bowl tipped up to the sky, with a lawn so dense and springy it might have been nibbled flat by sheep. In the centre stood a tall thin tree, with one branch, high up, just asking for a swing. Lily breathed, a little calmer now, and turned to look at the house. A bench, French windows, eaves and arches all looking out to sea. The windows were dark, the wood and glass doors bolted shut. Lily tiptoed closer and pressed her face against the glass. Inside, everything was neglected. Tattered furniture and threadbare rugs, dishevelled somehow, and suffering, she could smell it through the wood, from damp.

Lily walked to the back of the garden. If she could slip through the hedge, she might come out on the marshes, on the flat waterlogged heathland that led up to the sea. She climbed into the scrub of the hedge and felt her way along, looking for a weakness, feeling with her hands and feet for a gap. But the branches were matted, prickling with hawthorn, and Lily was forced to walk back through the garden and climb over the gate. It was then she saw the car. An old grey Morris parked right up by the fence. Lily stopped and stared at it. Surely she would have noticed if it had been there before, its fawn and blue interior, its roof as round as a bald head. She put out a hand to touch it, to see if it was warm, but was halted by the sensation that she was being watched. She swallowed, glancing at the house, but there was no light, no shadow. All the same she turned away, and, as quickly as she could, she crunched back along the drive.

Working like crazy. Going well. Should know soon if we’ve won.
It was Friday again and Nick had scrawled his message on an official envelope from college which he’d forwarded on. She should call him. It was stubborn and stupid not to have called before, but then if he really was working so hard there wasn’t much point in interrupting him, unless to wish him luck. Yes, she thought, she should call, but when she went to the phone box she found that it actually was broken. Broken or full up. 999 calls only, the message flashed.
Call 999
.
Wait by the wall
… The note was still there. It was held down by the same grey pebble, the edge jagged and torn. Lily pulled a pen out of her pocket and made a tiny mark, a little zigzag in the corner, and then, self-conscious, she looked round to check if she’d been seen. Stop it, she told herself, there’s no one there! And shaking her head, wondering if she really had now spent too much time alone, she walked back across the Green.