Serenity House

by Christopher Hope

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘You’re welcome,’ said Jack, and showed her his other eye.

  Jack emerged from the underground somewhere in downtown London, nose twitching. He saw a man in a funny hat stuck right up there on his column. Like he’d jumped up there to get away from an attack by killer rats! Didn’t help – the pigeons got him anyway – flying rats! He chose a road at random, a road with an overhead arch, and found himself on a highway, coloured red, grass on either side – a lake, ducks. The highway ended suddenly in high black iron railings and a fountain thing with gold statues sitting right up there, all shining, and loads of foreign people standing around chattering just as excitedly as the pigeons had done in the square, where the man in the hat stood.

  From the railings Jack took a good look. At first he thought it must be an hotel. Standing outside, in neat little houses like skinny dog-kennels, were these guys in red blouses and funny black hairy hats. He figured it was maybe some kind of hokey British theme park. Small scale. About as high as the Howard Johnson’s in Kissimee, Jack reckoned, but a lot wider and a hellavu lot older. And the same colour as Aldo’s Pasta Palace over Apopka way. The guys in red blouses could hardly have been doormen because they were carrying rifles and every once in a while they’d step out of these neat little wooden kennels and stomp up and down. He turned to a little Japanese who was clicking away with his camera.

  ‘Say, you know what this is?’

  The photographer lowered his camera and stared. ‘This is a palace.’

  ‘Go on,’ said Jack, ‘pull the other one.’

  Even the Pasta Palace, out in Orlando West, was a darn sight bigger. Fountains out front and great creamy columns. Four courses, plus antipasti, including your entrée. All ten dollars fifty. Now that was a palace!

  ‘Buckingham Palace. Where the Queen lives.’

  Jack nodded amiably. Little Japanese fucker, thinks he can take me for a ride. First they buy the Rockefeller Center and half of fucking Hollywood and then they take the piss out of a guy who’s new to London!

  Jack got off in the mote-laden air of the station and faced a very steep escalator that wasn’t working. ‘We apologise for the inactivity of the escalator’ a handwritten notice attached to its black handrail explained. ‘Those unable to manage the stairs are advised to continue to the following station and disembark there.’

  ‘Disembark,’ Jack said. Man, that wasn’t a word, it was a fucking book! Jack had read a book once. It was called Elvis: The Truth. Never again. Bad head for days. He ran up the wooden stairs two at a time: ‘Dis-em-fuckin’-bark!’ said Jack. ‘Un-fucking-real!’

  Greyacres. An old house on Highgate Hill. Everything was so old! Strawberry bricks and the grey slate roof which gave it its name. The branches of a weeping willow hung like the finest tracery across a great picture window.

  Jack opened the gate. He walked slowly down the path. He took from his pocket the long letter which had caused Mr Kaufmann such excitement. He pressed his eye to the glass spyhole in the front door.

  Nothing to see. He went around the corner of the house, his brown cowboy boots sinking into the lawn, adjusting his red neckerchief across his mouth till he looked like – a highwayman, stick-up man, bank robber, (all of ’em!).

  Sitting at a table in the apartment downstairs before a single egg in a wooden cup, was an old man with thick white hair. A blonde woman carried a ball of white string. Round and round the old man she walked. It looked, through the window, like spaghetti. She was breathing hard. He saw her breast moving. She went on walking until the old man was trussed so tightly he could have turned to stone. He seemed to have something in his ear, running down the side of his face. Pure gold!

  And so Jack got to coming back regularly to the garden of the house in Highgate where the old boy had been tied to the chair. He felt pretty happy about that. He took a room at the Avalon Hotel, small, dark and cheap. Just around the corner: ‘Holy Jeezles,’ chirruped Jack to himself when he saw the damp hotel lounge that smelt of soup even though meals had last been served there many years before, ‘happy hour at the morgue.’ Just a five-minute walk to the house.

  All through the final troubled days of the Grand Bargain Jack watched and waited. He took note of Lizzie’s struggle with her father. If he crouched beneath the living-room window sill he could hear everything. The blonde with the string had a husband. She used to tell him loudly: ‘I’m at the end of my tether. It’s like having a child in the house. No, it’s worse than that. A child, a sick child, a difficult child, might at least get better, grow up. But he’s only going to get worse.’

  She called him Albert. He called her Lizzie. Albert and Lizzie kept Jack occupied many a night. Jack heard how much Lizzie loved Daddy but real professional help was required; Albert let him know Daddy’s name and Jack was very pleased. ‘Mmmmm for Mmmmmax,’ Jack would whisper to himself as he crouched in the darkness.

  Albert told Jack about a place called Serenity House.

  ‘The sooner you get him in there, the better,’ said Albert. ‘Before you do him some permanent injury. You were jolly lucky he didn’t pop off in that chair.’

  Jack also felt jolly lucky. He found Serenity House easily. He rang the bell, did Jack. And Mr Fox welcomed him with open arms. Answer to a proprietor’s prayer.

  And Jack watched Max. Lizzie said she couldn’t face him any more. Albert came down to bath him now, red-faced from the steam, towel in hand, while Max chatted shrilly to him about something called a comma, the Queen and the Common Market. Max walked tall, like he was some sort of space-commander, and the large pink man called Albert, with the dark blue bath towel, was a slave. But when the Albert man went back upstairs, Max would sit on his bed and put his face in his hands.

  One night Jack watched him get into bed. But he didn’t go to sleep. As soon as Albert and Lizzie had hit the sack, Max got up, turned on his bedside lamp and took from the big brown cupboard beside his bed an old leather suitcase. He packed the case and then he fetched himself a pot of paint and brush and, while Jack watched, he painted his name in big white letters on the side of his case. So big Jack could read them easily from twenty feet: Max Montfalcon, b. 1909, Greyacres, Highgate, London N6.

  So it was that, in late November, when Serenity House opened its doors to admit a new guest, the day Max asked Albert about mercy killing, and Lizzie thought she’d scream if she heard the sound of her father’s finger rubbing his gum for another second – Jack was ready and waiting.

  Jack waited. When the Turbervilles thought they were safe, he made his move. Lizzie opened the door to the young man from Serenity House with the yellow hair and the square head.

  ‘Yes? What can I do for you?’

  Jack took out the letter, a bold hand on big white pages, and waved it like a handkerchief. He had to wave it three times before she reached for it.

  She held the letter with the very tips of her fingers. She shook her head in astonishment. With her nose, only her nose, she pointed to the address. Her address.

  ‘Who do you want?’

  ‘Mmmmm-Max!’

  ‘As you know, father doesn’t live here any more. Is this his letter? Where did you find it?’

  ‘I didn’t mean to hurt him,’ said Jack in a passable imitation of Lizzie’s own words about her father. Jack circled his head with his finger – tying himself up with string. He only stopped when she invited him in.

  She led him into the pink and gold sitting room. Watching her leading him Jack decided that this was a real lady in her olive green floral skirt and cream silk blouse, with her careful but delicate step and her hips swaying gracefully as she walked. Yes, sir. One of those real English ladies.

  ‘Mr Albert be home soon?’

  ‘My husband? Yes. Who are you?’

  ‘Jack,’ said Jack.

  She seated him on the leather chesterfield beside the fire. She did not offer him tea. She did not pour him a drink. She looked at this boy with his intensely yellow h
air and his red neckerchief and his oddly coloured eyes. He was without doubt a strange-looking creature, one of the strangest she had ever seen. His head was the most curious shape; his hair, full and thick, was somehow unhealthy in its aggressive sheen and texture. He didn’t say anything. Just nodded in a friendly way when she asked if she could keep the letter. And when she reminded him her father now lived in Serenity House, the boy simply nodded again and stuck his finger in his ear.

  ‘Well, now,’ said Lizzie, ‘is there something I can do for you?’

  Jack got the word out: ‘Mmmmoney!’

  She looked at the letter. She looked at Jack. ‘I really don’t understand. Perhaps I will call my husband.’

  ‘Yes, please,’ said Jack. ‘Call him.’ He stood up when she left the room. He could be polite, could Jack.

  But when Lizzie came back into the room he was gone.

  As if it were not enough for a man who had had a hard day in the House of Commons with a vindictive former mistress who shows him police reports over lunch, he has to arrive home to find his wife in tears.

  ‘Steady on, old thing,’ said Albert Turberville. ‘Tell me again. I hadn’t a clue what you meant on the phone. Where is this boy?’

  ‘Don’t you bloody patronise me,’ said his wife.

  She told him how she’d opened the door to find ‘that boy’ on the step. ‘Albert, he gave me this.’ And she handed him a letter.

  Albert drew the curtains. He poured himself a large whisky. He sat down with the letter.

  Marta, my dear friend. I am writing to ask you for help. In the final days, back then, in our old work place, when things were so mad and bad, and you were so brave, as the Russians swept ever closer and the normal regularities of life in the Facility, which we had struggled so hard to maintain in our time together (a time I must say I recall with great affection and admiration) were fatally and finally interrupted, it seems that certain belongings of mine were discovered behind the fireplace of my old house.

  Marta, you can imagine my shock when I was told of this discovery. I was by then myself a prisoner of the Russians having been captured on the Eastern front where I was serving as a regular soldier. You remember how I left the Facility. You remember the curses of the Commandant, and in particular Dr von Hehn, which were heaped on my head. Even while he, Dr von Hehn, enjoyed the comforts of Berlin at least once a month, I sat in three feet of snow and broken boots outside Minsk. Be that as it may – what does it matter now? I have forgotten about it. Yet I must confess that scholars, archivists and researchers all gave of their best in the Russian campaign and what a toll it took of our best men. Poor Dr Lück killed fighting the Maquis near Périgueux. Stelzebind lost in the U-boats in the Arctic. The medievalist Professor Vanille, who did such great work in establishing the varied intermixtures of races in Eastern Lands in ’41, killed fighting partisans in Warsaw. Dr Max Dollinger who died when his niece’s apartment block in Spandau was destroyed in the Allied bombing of Berlin. Even, poor, useless Behrens, by then I believe in charge of an Einsatzkommando in Lvov, and, so I am told, by then carrying the rank of SS-Untersturmführer (will wonders never cease?) killed by a booby-trapped case of wine. Did Behrens ever learn to think before he handled something? It seems not. But you and I know that. We have only to recall the damage he did, almost without trying, to our materials in the Facility. If anyone could be said, single-handed, to have held back the advances of ethnic research, Behrens was that man.

  But I wander – as an old man will. My favour which I have to ask of you, let me come to that. The pieces hidden behind the fireplace (a precaution induced by the war) were a few samples of my work, tools of the trade, I suppose you might call them, as well as a few letters written to my wife Irmgard, in Cologne, in 1941. Poor Irmgard was a victim of allied bombing but my letters to her survived. The fortunes of war! Perfectly innocent, indeed dull, if occasionally sentimental, these letters mean nothing to anyone except me. If it is the case that you have been holding these few mementoes for me all these years I cannot tell you how thankful I am to you for your faithful custodianship. If you would now give a last token of your loyalty to our old friendship and return them to me at the address above you will have exceeded even my fondest and most cherished memories of your good heart.

  Naturally, I would undertake to defray any and all expenses required to return my property to me as quickly and as safely as possible. Let this run into a few pounds (dollars to you) or into thousands, I would not hesitate, dear Marta. In fact I would be honoured to cover such expenses, twice or even threefold.

  I know I can depend on you now, just as I did in the past. Let me hear from you soon.

  With greetings and profound respect,

  M

  ‘What does it mean, Albert? It has our address on it. I suppose it must have come from Daddy. But what would he be doing writing to someone in Florida?’

  Albert Turberville did not reply. He drained the last drops of whisky. He said: ‘Lizzie, I don’t know how to say this.’

  Then he said it anyway.

  ‘Not Daddy!’ said Lizzie when he’d finished. ‘A police report? All these years. Here. Without anyone knowing about it.’

  ‘Harwich.’ said Albert bitterly. ‘Some kind of Teutonic joke. Your father appears to have been fooling us for years.’

  ‘I simply can’t believe it.’ She took the letter, folded it and laid it on the table as if it had nothing to do with her. ‘He’s the writer of this? Daddy is this M? Then who is Marta. What does he want back from her?’

  ‘Where is the boy now? The American?’

  ‘Falkenberg?’ Elizabeth frowned her disbelief.

  ‘Montfalcon. He simply anglicised it. Neat.’ Albert poured himself another whisky. ‘The boy – did he say anything else? Where did he get the letter from?’

  ‘Why did no one know? Surely there were checks after the war? Even if it’s true. Just because they say it’s true, it doesn’t mean they’re right. I’m sure I read somewhere that people coming from those countries were checked.’

  ‘The American,’ Albert persisted, ‘where did he get the letter from?’

  ‘God knows. But I’d say he’s sure to come back.’

  ‘Of that’, said Albert Turberville, ‘we can be sure. For God’s sake, buck up, Lizzie. If it’s any consolation, we’ve got time to think things over. He doesn’t seem to be in any hurry, this boy.’

  But nothing, Albert knew, would ever console him for the way he had heard the news earlier that day.

  CHAPTER TEN

  How Albert Got the News

  Albert Turberville was lunching off steamed cod and brown rice in the Members’ Dining Room when Erica Snafus sat down beside him, stared accusingly at his hands, and said, ‘Well, Albie. What have you been up to?’

  Erica was on the MCC, the Members’ Cuisine Committee, which had been instrumental in changing the eating habits of MPs. White rice had gone the way of cigarettes. Although not able to remove all fried foods from the daily menus she had campaigned for months for a separate seating area for those who wished to indulge fatal appetites for French fries or bacon or doughnuts. The MCC was also known to younger, more profane Members in the bars of the House of Commons as the Mad Cow Council, a slighting reference to Erica’s campaign to right what she saw as a monstrously dangerous wrong: the decision to slaughter, and then bury, all cows found to be carrying mad cow disease. All such animals should be exhumed and incinerated, Erica argued, since spongiform encephalitis was a virus which could last for years in the soil and threatened to enter the food chain. It was a time bomb ticking away, threatening the health of the nation. When the Government balked at the huge expense of this scheme, Erica had advocated building walls, or at least tall fences, around the grave sites of these deceased and lunatic animals, and marking the places with some appropriate warning symbol, a green cross, for instance.

  Ms Snafus, if she has her way, would turn parts of Britain into something akin to the battlefields of t
he Somme …

  commented one newspaper with that peculiar mixture of exasperation at the endless silliness of political life, mixed with undergraduate glee at having found something clever to say about it. Albert hated the smart editorials in the quality press.

  … Will she also support some sort of War Graves Commission for these departed lunatic ruminants?

  the editorial concluded with a neat flourish in which was to be heard the brassy trumpet note of chest-hugging self-satisfaction. Two hundred years of crusading journalism and all it does is end up as a chortle, Albert thought bitterly.

  Erica Snafus was also part of the unofficial team that had dedicated themselves to watching – or indeed encouraging, or even forcing? – the passage of the War Crimes Bill through the House of Commons. A Labour MP of many years’ standing, a woman of distinct discernment, Erica was one of the people (and their numbers were on the increase) dedicated to getting things done. Together with Gavin Pertwee and Herbie Long, Erica had been indefatigable in reviving the flagging attentions of fellow MPs in the matter of suspected Nazi war criminals living in Britain, during those long months when the War Crimes Bill was off and on the boil.

  On the day that Erica sat beside him in the dining room and looked so hard at his hands, Albert put down his knife and fork. He hid his hands in his pockets. Erica wore a grey suit that matched her eyes. Her expensively dyed blonde hair was cut square across her forehead. Even at fifty-two she looked trim, packed. The pink Hermès scarf at her neck depicted interlocking chains of some marine kind, golden and grappling. She reminded Albert of a missile, a weapon, a kind of human mortar loaded, primed and ready to fire.

  ‘Surprised to see you weren’t in the House yesterday, Albie.’

  He flinched. Her own pet name for him. He’d never liked it. It made him sound like some sort of foreign little mannikin.