Tying Down The Lion (17 page)

Mum and Beate talk in German like two old women queuing at the bakery, courteous rather than sisterly. They could be saying, “Nice weather, duck”, or “Will you be going for the crusty farmhouse, dearie, or are you having that last bloomer?”

Or maybe, “So you survived the war in one piece, dear?”

“Yes, thanks for shoving me in the dark for years.”

“No, no, thank you, my dear, for nearly getting us arrested.”

I take Victor and Grandma to the toilet, glad to escape. Axel follows, his claws clicking on the polished floors.

“Jacqueline,” Victor calls out after a few minutes, “I don’t know what to do. There’s this little ledge inside the toilet.”

“So what?”

“Well it’s sat on there.”

“What is?”

“Come and see.”

“Oh God in Heaven, there’s a stinky just perched there,” Grandma says.

“The flushing water won’t swoosh it down,” Victor moans.

“Bloody hell, Victor, it won’t shift.”

“But I can’t leave it. How does it ever go down?”

“Maybe German cackers behaves itself.”

“Well, mine doesn’t.”

“Now why in the name of Engelbert Pumperstink would I want my doings to roost on a shelf? I suppose they have to inspect them before they flush.”

We have to fetch Mum to deal with it and then go back for the coffee and cake. Victor has to hold T-K out of Axel’s reach because there’s already a puncture wound on his left pectoral. He and Sebastian are given milk in a triangular cardboard container. Victor folds his arms and says, “I’m not a bloody baby,” but he’s pleased with the straw. We only have them at birthday parties. He slurps away, teaching Sebastian to blow bubbles.

Sebastian sits in a high-chair painted white with big black polka-dots. Like a miniature man, he’s wearing a spotless white shirt and black trousers. His unblinking navy-blue eyes, the only colour in the room apart from our crushed holiday clothes, stare at me as he drinks his milk, refusing to copy Victor’s rude gurgling. I think he’s drugged. When he speaks, I marvel at his fluent German until I remember he’s not one of the foreigners here.

The cake is warm and buttery with stewed plum underneath and a crumbly topping strewn with almonds.

“Not that dratted Hun flan, is it, Bridge?”

“Plum flan, Nell. Same recipe as mine.”

“Lord help us. Oh well, I can feed it to the dog.”

Axel looks up at Grandma and grizzles with fear.

I add a dollop of sweetened whipped cream to my third slice. It’s heavy-going, similar to Mum’s, but I’m starving, and at home we only have cream at Christmas. Victor slings his messed-about piece onto my plate when no one is looking. Beate piles on even more, beaming and saying I look half-starved. Mum frowns and Beate beams even more. She eats all the rest and clears the cream-pot. I feel like Twiggy beside her, but I imagine even Grandma does. Bessie Bunter would look like a wafer.

Grandma asks questions in steely, loud English that Beate understands. She offers Grandma a glass of Schnapps and Grandma produces her Three Barrels.

“Where do you light your bonfire, duck?” Grandma shouts. Presumably an important issue when you meet your daughter-in-law’s long-lost sister.

“No fire,” Beate says. “Not permitted.”

“Strike-a-light, I’d love to live in this flat. You could stake your life on Mrs Pither lighting one the second Bridge puts the washing out. The smoke gets to my chest even with the window shut. Oh, it’s terrible to be trapped in your own home.” She lights a cigarette and sits a box of Liquorice Allsorts on the table. “Dig in, Beattie.”

Beate smiles at Grandma and passes her a cup of tea.

“Is this real tea, love? You haven’t put lemon in, have you? I only ask because you continentals have ideas. When Bridge was first in my house, she kept popping fruit in my cuppa. She didn’t even know milk comes in glass bottles.”

I feel a longing for home, even for the psychedelic carpet that Grandma says looks like someone was sick over it and for the chipped enamel let-down, which judders when Victor and I are eating our tea on it, especially if the one o’clock express is knifing through Oaking Valley Cutting at the time. When Grandma complains her teeth aren’t up to Mum’s stuffed hearts, I even miss Deborah squawking, “Suck it!” At least I think that’s what she says.

The flat smells of fresh coffee instead of stewed tea, but reeks of cigarette smoke the same as everyone else’s house. The tall ashtray with the plunger is similar to ours, except Beate’s is black rather than tarnished brass with a dent where Mum once threw it at the tallboy. The same long bars of late sun paint diagonal stripes across the floor, just like at home.

Beate takes us for a walk in the courtyard garden, arm-in-arm with Grandma, although they’ve clinked glasses so many times they’re probably propping each other up. A large hutch is tucked in a corner out of the sun. Victor gasps at the rabbits, one white, one black and one a patchwork of both. Beate hauls them out and fills his arms with them. Stroking the beautiful creatures, their lop ears silky in his fingers, he forgets the horror of stewed plums and strange toilets.

Beate and Grandma become such firm friends they freeze Mum out, the way Gillian and Gaye sometimes slot me into the ice-box. “Put three women together and one always gets a raw deal,” Dad often says. “You end up with a trio of witches bent over a cauldron, two of them stirring with one spoon and whispering while the other has to sever the tongue of newt and dissect the liver of bat.”

“Beattie says you remind her of Ilse, Jacqueline, and the joy of being young,” Grandma tells me, cutting with ease through Beate’s thick accent to the core of what she wants to say. I would tell her it isn’t all that joyful thanks very much, but since their youth was all about fear and suffering, I just smile.

The trim curl of the moon emerges, and the rabbits are prised from Victor’s arms. We troop inside and Beate demonstrates every piece of her gleaming kitchen equipment to Grandma, including an oven that roasts with steam—“Don’t your spuds go soggy, Beattie love?”—and an electrified bowl that spins muddy potatoes clean—“Lawks, Beattie, that thing sounds like a Vesper with exhaust trouble.”

The evening meal is seedy: dark bread with seeds, dark ham with a seedy rind and coloured bits in it and yet more cake, this time with the added surprise of caraway seeds.

“Do you know Sunblest? What about Battenberg? That sounds German enough,” Grandma says, giving up on the food and vibrating her Jew’s harp to twang out the seeds between her teeth. She opens her Elastoplast tin and shares it with Beate, who is glad not to sully her elegant plunger.

By the time Victor and I are told to go to bed, I’m shattered and suffering terminal indigestion. It’s strange to have no stairs and just walk two yards into another room for the night. Victor’s hand slides into mine as we inspect the twin white beds.

“Jacqueline,” he says in his serious voice, “if you were stuck on the other side of the Wall, I’d throw a piece of raw steak to the guard dogs, crawl under the barbed-wire, dodge the mines and save you. Sometimes, with the small lamp on, you’re quite pretty.”

Maybe he’s had a nip of the Schnapps.

But until now, no one in this flat has mentioned the divided city. How does Beate just carry on with her new black and white life while Ilse is stuck on the dreary, grey-brown side? I suppose everyone is pretending this is an ordinary holiday, if such a beast exists.

We are like a television-commercial family in our new brushed-nylon pyjamas. But we almost couldn’t buy them because Dad said a man in the street had swiped Mum’s housekeeping money from his pocket when we all knew the five-to-one favourite had fallen two furlongs into the three-thirty at Epsom, and Grandma had ended up lending us a ten-shilling note from her funeral tin.

We keep saying, ooh, jolly nice plum-cake and ooh, apple-bloody-strudel and how
schön
to have filter coffee with England full of tea-drinkers and isn’t life grand with no war looming over us like a great miserable buzzard. But Ilse will never be here, and Mum’s putrid lie has burst over me like pus from a giant boil. What next? Maybe we’ll discover Grandma’s descended from the Navajo.

Beate is staggering like a spider rescued from a glass of whisky. Grandma is shouting for a leg-up into her bed. Dad is horribly quiet, practically smoking two cigarettes at a time. And what the hell are these puffy things on the beds?

“Continental quilts,” Mum says, breezing in and talking as if everything here is thrilling and we are a picture-book mother and daughter. Bloody ugh. “Feel it, Jacqueline. Filled with goose feathers. No need for sheets and blankets at all. Just this.”

While she keeps patting it and fluffing up the feathers, as if she’s trying to knead my surliness back into a manageable shape, I wander into Sebastian’s little white room, where Beate is folding his clothes. Apparently they have to be perfectly square, not hurled inside-out into a festering corner. Dad looks in and spots a battered old copy of
Grimm’s Fairy Tales
on the shelf.

“Ma read these to me when I was little,” he says, brightening. “Mind you, she was far too good at cackling when the witch shoved Hansel in the oven.”

While Dad shows Sebastian the picture of the gingerbread cottage, Mum stalks in and whips the book away.

“Not that book please, Roy,” she says.

“It is a very good book, Birgit,” Beate says, her moustache bristling.

“Do you not remember, Beate? The Nazis praised the young people in the stories for their awareness of purity.”

Oh dear. If we were inside that gingerbread cottage right now, you could cut the atmosphere clean in half with a wooden spoon and the whole place would fall into slices.

“I thought the Allies stopped it being published in Germany,” Mum goes on.

“But I have kept this for so long now. I have so little left from the past,” Beate says, letting Sebastian turn the pages.

“You keep something the Nazis approved?” Mum asks, her voice so low that even Sebastian turns his head on his little white pillow and looks up at her in surprise.

She leaves the room, and Beate slurs a lullaby while the rest of us shuffle off to bed. Mum recovers enough to dart in and out of our room, checking we have all we need, showing off to Beate that we’re her dear little kiddies. At home, she just shouts goodnight up the stairs before dashing away to fill Grandma’s hot water bottle or hack the black crusts off her sponge cakes.

Beate lumbers in and out, puffing and sweating, to show us the lamp switch and the spare pillows in the wardrobe and how the fan operates. The room has white walls, white quilts and a white floor. My clothes look like a wrinkled rainbow on the chair. Beate tries to fold them, while I’m still struggling into my new nylon nightie, then gives Victor and me big damp kisses that smell of peaches pickled in alcohol.

I can’t sleep under the goose-cloud. It feels like a flock of dead birds have landed on top of me.

“Jacqueline,” Victor whispers, “why does Deborah have a mirror?”

“So she thinks she’s not alone.”

“Oh. She’s not trying to kiss herself then, like you do?”

It’s horribly true. I pout at my mirror at home to see what I’ll look like when I kiss Peter.

“You look like a puffer-fish,” Victor says, his voice quivering.

I beckon him and T-K to climb in with me and they don’t waste a second. Although I would never admit it, the warmth that radiates from a cleanish seven-year-old boy is somehow utterly comforting.

“I don’t like the noise of the feather quilt thing,” Victor says. “Every time I move it sounds like a thousand army-boots marching through bracken. And why did she come in and kiss us? Will she do that again? Will she do that every night? How many more nights are we here for? Will she give us stewed plum every day?”

When Victor has a cold, he asks if he’s going to be ill for three weeks, the longest span of time he comprehends.

“Jacqueline, I don’t want to go see-sighting tomorrow. I’d rather stay with the rabbits.”

“It’s sight-seeing you clot. And you want to see the TV Tower they’re building in the East, don’t you?”

“But the Wall’s in the way, twit-face. We can’t walk through it like ghosts.”

“No, but we can still see the tower, you pig-dog. Behind the Wall and behind the Reichstag. The East wants it seen from the West so they can show how good it is to be communist. It’s their way of being noticed, like a person poking out their tongue in the background of someone else’s photograph.”

“Dad said they haven’t finished it yet anyway.”

“No, but it’s quite tall and they’re making a great big ball to stick on the top. When it’s finished they’ll be able to listen to Western radio and jam it so their people can’t be polluted by us.”

Victor considers this. “When the men in the crane at the top of the tower look down from all those millions of feet, can they see the Wall?”

“Don’t know. Ask them.”

“If they can’t see it from up there, Berlin must look normal again.”

“Nothing’s normal here,” I tell him, reaching for my notepad and writing that down.

Victor watches me draw another spider and takes off T-K’s jacket. “I won’t mind the sausages. They call them hot-dogs in America. The Germans just know how to make them.”

“I think they come from Frankfurt actually, Victor, which is in Germany. They’re called Frankfurters.”

“No. Dad says they’re hot-dogs. Because they look like those sausage-dogs. Oh sod it, T-K’s foot’s poking through his pyjamas. It’s made a great big hole, Jacqueline.”

I look at the nibbled plastic toes sticking out of the small paisley trouser-leg that is a scrap of my old skirt. When I remember Mum making the trousers as a surprise for him when he had measles, a great wave of homesickness slops about inside me. Either that, or the plums are seeking revenge. Or I recall how vile he looked with all those spots.

“T-K should cut his stupid toe-nails, Victor. Now turn out the light, will you?”

“But I can’t sleep.”

I throw off the quilt-thing and cover us with cardigans.

“How do we turn off the fan?”

“Go and ask Beate.”