Sisterland

by Linda Newbery

  ‘How odd!’ Hilly gave him a sideways look. ‘It’s exactly what she said, every detail – the Stirling, the man breaking his leg. But on the tape she was talking about Cologne.’

  ‘Coincidence? Muddle?’ he asked. ‘What d’you reckon?’

  Hilly thought. ‘She could have read about this and got confused. Here’ – she indicated the page – ‘or in some other book. Or people might have been talking about it when she came here at the end of the war. Maybe something like it happened in Cologne too, and she got the two crashes mixed up. That’s the most likely explanation, isn’t it?’

  ‘Is it?’ said Reuben. ‘Your gran’s always had you believe she came here after the war, but – what if she came earlier? What if she slipped up in that interview, and talked about something that happened here during the war?’

  ‘But what would have—?’

  ‘Couple of weeks ago,’ Reuben said, ‘you were telling me how odd it was for her to come here after the war. To the enemy country.’

  ‘That’s right, yes. Mum says her adopted grandparents were friends of the family. She had nowhere else to go.’

  ‘Just imagine it,’ Reuben said slowly, ‘the other way round. End of the war, you’re an English child, orphaned, both parents killed by German bombs. How likely is it you’d go to live in Germany?’

  ‘I know, it’d be the last place you’d want to go. But if there was no choice?’ Hilly looked at him. ‘What are you getting at?’

  Reuben said nothing, waiting for her to assimilate what he had said. Her head reeled sickly; the migraine wasn’t going to let itself be ignored. Pills, Hilly thought, I must take the pills. Her thoughts flew to her bedside cabinet, the pills in the top drawer, and, on top, the Rachel und Sarah im Garten photo face-down underneath The Great Gatsby, out of Zoë’s sight but ready to show Reuben. ‘I still haven’t shown you the photo, have I? The new one I found—’

  ‘Shh!’ Reuben nudged her with his elbow. She turned to see Heidigran at the patio doors, supporting herself with one hand on the frame.

  ‘Thought I heard voices,’ Heidigran said. She looked at Reuben, then at Hilly. ‘Patched up your quarrel, have you? Where’s Rose?’

  ‘Upstairs, Gran, getting changed.’

  ‘You going to play the piano?’ Heidigran said, with a touch of sharpness.

  ‘We’re having a lesson,’ said Hilly, ‘nothing very interesting. Scales and stuff.’

  Heidigran nodded, gave them a rather disapproving look, and went back outside, but stayed on the patio, picking off wilted flowers from the planted tubs. Hilly watched her, really wanting to continue her conversation with Reuben; but Heidigran hovered, evidently to keep an eye on them.

  ‘Lesson first, then?’ Hilly said to Reuben. ‘But I’ve hardly touched Für Elise, the last few days.’

  ‘Too many distractions?’ He gave her a suggestive glance, meaning, she supposed, Rashid.

  Rashid! The name – the mere thought of his name – was enough to make her blood rush and her skin tingle. He had said he would phone tonight. And Zoë – what had today brought, for her? Relief, or a sharpening of worry?

  ‘Distraction,’ she said lightly, ‘tell me about it!’

  She looked at the opening of Für Elise, with the sense of meeting it after an immensely long absence. Maybe her fingers remembered. Reuben made her practise the scales and arpeggios first, then the easy beginner’s piece from her tutor book. When he was satisfied, he removed the book from the stand, centred the Beethoven and looked at her expectantly.

  She held her breath and began: the lightest of touch, almost trembling on the opening E and D sharp, then leaning into the surer weight of the deep notes in the left hand, feeling herself caught almost immediately in the spell, the simple, yearning beauty that could not be obscured by the fumbling uncertainty of her fingers. If only her hands were as clever as Reuben’s, and could caress the keys, transmit the music instead of hampering it! She played as well as her limited capability allowed: for Reuben, for herself, for Heidigran. A wrong note here, an uncertainty there. Tantalizingly Beethoven, frustratingly Hilly.

  ‘That’s it.’ She looked at Reuben for approval. ‘As far as I can go.’

  ‘OK, not bad. You’ve obviously practised it a bit. I’ll do the left hand this time, so you only have to worry about the fingering in the right.’

  Hilly concentrated hard, managing at least to play the notes in the right order.

  ‘You’re doing some awkward fingering we can straighten out. Here, try this –’ He took a pencil from his bag and wrote 5, 4, 3, above a run of notes – ‘then you’ve got a better reach with your thumb for the C.’

  ‘It’s all so practical,’ Hilly said. ‘I mean, you’d think it was all about getting into the heart and soul of the music. What it actually comes down to is getting your fingers organized.’

  ‘Well, it’s both. Start again – still right hand only.’

  ‘Hang on a minute.’ Hilly rubbed the back of her neck, feeling the one-sided pain tightening its grip. ‘I’ll just go upstairs first.’

  As she mounted the stairs – what an effort two flights seemed, once the grogginess set in! – she heard Reuben start on the Scriabin he was learning now, a restless, agitated piece she didn’t much like. Thinking about the book he had brought round, about Heidigran’s muddle, she remembered the photograph. She took it from underneath The Great Gatsby, glanced at it, read the writing on the back.

  Only when she got to the bottom of the stairs, registering that Reuben had stopped playing and seemed to be arguing with Heidigran, did she realize that she’d forgotten the pills she went up for.

  Heidi had been feeling perfectly content. She had all she wanted: the late-afternoon sunshine still warm, a mug of tea, a magazine to flick through, and a comfortable seat. Shame there weren’t any biscuits, some of those nutty chocolate-chip ones would have been nice, but she really oughtn’t to eat between meals, and someone would start cooking soon. Hilly was here, yes, Hilly, and Rose was upstairs getting changed. That meant someone would be here, all through the evening, and again tomorrow morning. There were butterflies on the buddleia tree, spreading their wings on the purple flowers: Red Admirals, tortoiseshells, peacocks, she knew their names. People said there weren’t the butterflies about nowadays, but they came flocking when the buddleia was in flower. One Painted Lady, she’d seen earlier, sunning itself. She had a buddleia just like that in her own garden; Ken had planted it for her, one birthday. And the boy was here too; she knew his name if only she could think of it. Anyway, she’d seen him often enough, the thin boy with the sharp, intelligent face, Hilly’s special friend. Friend, not boyfriend, Hilly always insisted, though they certainly spent a lot of time together and Hilly had been almost beside herself yesterday, when they’d quarrelled about something or other. He’d look better, in Heidi’s opinion, if he did something about that curly mop of hair, got it cut neatly, but there was no telling the young how they should present themselves.

  Reuben, that was it. The name made her feel edgy. There was really no need for it. It wasn’t safe to say it out loud.

  And they really oughtn’t to play Rachel’s piano without asking. Rachel wouldn’t like that. She and Rachel sometimes played together, but otherwise no one else touched the keys. Now Rachel’s fingerprints would be smudged all over with Hilly’s and the boy’s.

  She went to check what they were doing, then noticed that Rose really wasn’t looking after her garden pots very well – those regal pelargoniums would carry on flowering for another month or two if you kept dead-heading them. Her back was stiff as she bent to tweak off the withered blooms.

  Scales, exercises, over and over again, nothing worth listening to. Then a pause, and – she tilted her head to listen more intently – the tune she remembered better than any other. Her tune, Rachel’s tune! Had Rachel come, at last?

  Heidi let the dried petals fall from her fingers. Her soft-soled shoes made no sound as she crept back to see. Disappointme
nt was like a gnawing at her insides, a weeping hollow. Not Rachel, but these two again. They were playing together, left hand and right hand, the way she and Rachel used to. Who had taught them to do that?

  She steadied herself with a hand on the door frame, watching them. Two people making music together, both of them focused and attentive: it was like loving. Their hands moving, each giving to the other.

  ‘Again,’ said the boy.

  The beginning bit was easy; I used to play that, Heidi thought. She flexed her fingers, wondering if they still knew how. But only the beginning. Not far in, the music got darker and rumblier, the manuscript clotted with notes, and Rachel had to take over both hands. These two kept going over and over the opening bars, never reaching the deep growlings that waited inside the piano.

  ‘Play the whole thing,’ she was about to say – but just then the girl said something and went out of the room. The boy, left on his own, started to play a quite different piece, modern and discordant. His hands were strong and sure on the keys. Like Rachel’s.

  Heidi stood, listening, thinking of that other, long-ago room that smelled of sun-warmed carpet. Rachel’s feet on the pedals were neat and small, in plum-coloured bar shoes that were fastened by little round buttons covered in the same plum leather. The piano stool stood squarely on a patterned rug, and if you moved it you could see the worn flattened indentations its feet had made in the pile, with dust and carpet-fluff pressed in. It was a world of feet down there. She looked at the boy’s feet. They were large, considering how skinny he was, in scuffed black boots that trampled all over Rachel’s pedals.

  When Sarah was very small she had liked to shelter under the piano by Rachel’s legs, watching her clever feet. Sometimes she would press one of the pedals with both hands and listen to the difference it made. One of them made the sound swell and boom from the heart of the piano, the other made it linger in the air, like when Sarah had been allowed to play the cymbals once at school and she had felt the sound, a golden wave in the air, that tingled against her ears and slowly receded. She would have liked to sit down by the pedals now, in the cave of sound, but she was too stiff to get down to the floor, and getting up again was even more difficult.

  Reuben. She looked at the back of his neck, at his head bent intently over the keyboard, at his tangle of hair. He was Reuben, she felt quite sure of that. Someone ought to tell him.

  ‘You know you don’t have to keep it,’ she said loudly, approaching from behind.

  He stopped playing abruptly, swivelling round to look up at her. ‘Oh – you made me jump!’

  ‘You can change it,’ she repeated.

  ‘You don’t like this?’ said Reuben. ‘Shall I play something else?’

  ‘Change it. It’s safer that way.’

  Now he was looking at her in complete bafflement. Didn’t he understand?

  ‘Safer? Sorry, change what?’

  ‘Your name. That’s what I did.’

  ‘You changed your name? What, when you got married, you mean?’

  ‘No – no!’ She heard the frustration in her voice. How could she make him see? ‘Change it. No one need know.’

  The Hilly girl was back, silent and staring in the doorway. The boy looked at her; they both looked at Heidi.

  ‘What do you mean, Gran?’ said the girl. ‘No one need know what?’

  ‘What his real name is.’ Heidi looked at her. ‘What’s that you’re holding?’

  A glance passed between the girl and the boy. Too many secrets, those two had. Then the girl, suddenly decisive, held out a photograph. ‘I found this, Gran. This picture of Rachel.’

  Heidi took it, smiled in recognition, looked and looked. ‘Now wherever did you get this? Thought I’d lost it!’

  ‘In your cupboard,’ said the girl.

  Heidi giggled. ‘Mutti ought to have told me my knickers were showing! It’s not nice!’

  ‘No, that can’t be you – it says Sarah—’

  ‘It is me,’ Heidi said, and her voice came out as Sarah’s.

  ‘Can I see?’ said the boy.

  Slowly, reluctantly, Heidi passed it to him; he examined it closely, turned it over and read the writing on the back.

  ‘Sarah?’ he said, looking at her in a way that showed he understood. For a moment she felt cold with panic. What had she told him? ‘You changed your name from Sarah?’ he repeated.

  ‘Changed—’ The girl’s face produced a comical range of expressions, ending up all Os – round eyes, mouth open. She swallowed, said something incoherent, then tried again. ‘Gran? You’re Sarah?’

  ‘I might have been, once,’ Heidi said; then, more cheerfully: ‘I remember that picnic!’

  ‘This is you, Gran, in the photo – are you sure?’

  Heidi nodded. ‘Under the tree in our garden. The bobble tree, we called it, but that wasn’t its real name. What was it, now – p, p—’

  ‘Never mind the tree, Gran—’

  ‘D’you mean a plane tree?’ said the boy. ‘There’s one outside our house.’

  Heidi nodded. ‘Wasps kept coming after the lemonade. There was Battenburg cake. I liked that. It was someone’s birthday, not mine. Now, whose was it?’ She felt happy now, remembering. But a strange hush had settled over Hilly and the boy. Of course, they hadn’t been there.

  ‘Heidigran,’ said the girl, and her voice came out hoarse and strange, ‘you’re really saying this is you – you’re Sarah? And Rachel’s—’

  ‘My sister, that’s right,’ Heidi said proudly. ‘She’ll be here soon, I expect. Are we having a picnic? There are more chairs in the shed, aren’t there. Shall I put them out, ready, or shall we sit on the grass? Whose birthday is it?’

  She looked from one face to another. They seemed oddly trapped in stillness, as if they daren’t make any sudden movement. There was that playground game where you had to creep up on someone without them noticing. What was it called? – Yes, grandmother’s footsteps! That’s funny, she thought, because I am a grandmother, aren’t I? That’s why they call me Gran. She gave a splutter of laughter, but could tell from their faces that they hadn’t seen the joke.

  ‘Er – Heidigran,’ said the boy slowly. ‘What was your other name? Your surname? Rachel and Sarah—’

  ‘Oh, it was – yes, I know that.’ Heidi thought for a moment, puzzled, looking at her feet. ‘R – R – now what is it? I used to know. Oh, of course!’ she said, brightening. ‘It’s Reubens, same as yours!’

  What were they staring at now? It was funny about names, how they came and they went. She was certain now that she must have been called Sarah Reubens once, but that wasn’t her name now and she had no idea why she’d changed it.

  ‘Can we have Battenburg cake?’ she asked. ‘Rachel likes that.’

  Hilly felt as if the whole world had gone blurry; nothing quite in focus, nothing quite as she expected it to be. She stood in the patio doorway, while Heidigran arranged garden chairs on the lawn. ‘Schmidt!’ she told Reuben, with an effort of memory. ‘But her German name was Heidi Schmidt!’

  ‘While you were out of the room,’ Reuben said, ‘she as good as told me she’d changed her name. Why would a German girl called Sarah Reubens want to change her name?’

  ‘Because it’s a Jewish name?’ Shutters closed in Hilly’s mind – impossible.

  ‘Sarah Reubens sounds Jewish. Heidi Schmidt doesn’t. That’s why she changed, or her family changed it for her. That’s why she wants me to change my name. She thinks we’re back in Nazi Germany.’

  ‘She changed her name in case people thought she was Jewish?’

  ‘No,’ Reuben said. ‘I think she changed her name because she was Jewish. That’s why she came to England. That’s why—’

  ‘You’re saying Gran’s Jewish? Sarah Reubens – German and Jewish? No, how can she be? – have been? The things she says – you’ve heard her! She’s just confused. Seeing that photograph has muddled her – she thinks it’s her, when really it’s someone else, someone calle
d Sarah Reubens.’

  Reuben shook his head. ‘There’s too much that makes sense. Like the crashed bomber in town. She was here during the war, like I said. She couldn’t have stayed in Cologne – not if she really is Sarah Reubens. She must have been one of the children who came here as refugees – we watched a documentary about it in history. If her parents stayed behind—’

  ‘God! And Rachel? What could have happened to Rachel?’ Hilly’s head was reeling.

  ‘Rachel might have been too old – she looks about eighteen, would you say? The Kindertransports were only for children, weren’t they?’

  ‘Stop. Stop now.’ Hilly covered her eyes with her hands, pressing with her fingertips. She could not grasp one coherent thought from the swirl inside her head.

  Reuben put a hand on her arm. ‘I know, it’s …’

  Cautiously, Hilly opened her eyes and looked out at Heidigran in the garden, unable to make the adjustment. Heidigran was Heidi, of course, and had always been! The present was all there was to get hold of. The rest was a spider’s web of what-ifs and supposings. ‘Hang on, though! Wait,’ she told Reuben. ‘What about the other photo of Rachel, the first one? When I showed it to Gran, she didn’t even recognize her—’

  ‘Could have been pretending,’ Reuben pointed out.

  ‘Yes, I know, and I think she does pretend, sometimes, but what she said was, “I only saw her once.” Only saw her once? Her own sister? That doesn’t make sense at all. We must have got this all wrong. Rachel can’t be her sister! But then why does she go on about her so much?’

  ‘There’s only one person who knows,’ said Reuben.

  Heidi was looking forward to the party. There would be nice things to eat, and games, and presents. Should she have bought a present? Only she couldn’t now remember whose birthday it was. Not Rachel’s, she knew Rachel’s – March 15th, and it wasn’t March now, it must be – oh, August, or September, something like that.