Bombs on Aunt Dainty

by Judith Kerr

  “What shall we do now?” asked John Cotmore, and Barbara’s voice answered him in the darkness, “Let’s go home.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Anna never quite knew, afterwards, how she got home. Somehow she walked past the two shapes in the doorway, retrieved Papa’s hat and rode home with him on the tube. The fact that he needed her was a help and at the sight of his face, still not quite reset in its usual ironic composure, her own tumultuous feelings receded into some kind of proportion.

  But Barbara! she thought. She could have understood if it had been his wife. How long had it been going on? Since the holidays? Or even last term? And did Barbara know about her? Had she and John Cotmore perhaps talked about her and laughed at her and her idiotic devotion to him? Showing him all her drawings, buying him saccharine in her lunch-hour…Each thought was more painful than the last and part of her wanted only to burst into tears and blurt it all out to Papa, while another knew that she couldn’t possibly bear to talk about it.

  “Are you quite well?” asked Papa. “You look pale.”

  She nodded. “How about you?”

  He was sitting next to her in the tube, nervously massaging one hand with the other.

  “I’ve got pins and needles,” he said, and it was such an anti-climax after all her emotion that she laughed, and at the same time tears came into her eyes and she leaned against him and cried, “Oh Papa! Oh, dear Papa …!”

  “There,” he said, putting his arm round her shoulders, “I’m sorry I frightened you.”

  She shook her head. “It wasn’t that.”

  For a moment she was afraid he would ask her what was the matter, but he only said, “There,” again and then, very tenderly, “Whatever it was, it will pass.”

  The next day was dreadful. There was nothing to do at the office. Mrs Hammond didn’t come in and even Miss Clinton-Brown and Miss Potter were away on holiday. Anna spent the morning alone with thoughts of John Cotmore while she pretended to busy herself with index cards and skeins of wool.

  There’s nothing left, she thought. Nothing I want to do, no one I want to see. She searched for phrases to comfort herself. Jilted? Abandoned? Crossed in love? They were corny, but they did not make her laugh. They could not keep out the humiliating memories of how she had smiled at him and hung on his lips, how she had been ready to take his arm that evening at the restaurant – and all the time he and Barbara…he and Barbara …

  After lunch Mrs Riley arrived with a large scrapbook.

  “My life on the boards,” she said. “I’ve brought it to show you.”

  There was nothing better to do, so Anna spent the afternoon with Mrs Riley by her side and Mrs Riley’s miasma wafting over her. She looked at Mrs Riley in spangles in 1891, Mrs Riley in fishnet tights in 1902, Mrs Riley with a shepherd’s crook and a stuffed sheep, Mrs Riley in bathing drawers. And all the time something inside her cried out for John Cotmore, for last night not to have happened, for everything to be as it had been before.

  She got back late, for there was no more point in going home than in going anywhere else, and was completely unprepared for the desperate figure which rushed out to meet her.

  “Anna!” cried Mama, all tears and clutching fingers. “Oh, Anna!”

  “Dear God,” said Anna, since the worst seemed determined to happen. “Is it Max?”

  It was not Max. It was Papa.

  Mama drew her into the house and then stopped and clutched her again in the hall.

  “I found him when I came home,” she said. “He was on the floor in his room. He’d been there for hours. His voice is all strange and there’s something wrong with one of his hands.”

  They stared at each other.

  “Sam is coming to see him – thank heavens he’s in town.” Mama let go of Anna’s hand. “He’ll know what to do.”

  “Can I go up to him?”

  They went to his room together.

  Papa was on the bed – Frau Gruber had helped Mama to lift him. His face looked heavy and half-asleep, but when he saw Anna his lips moved as though he were trying to smile.

  “Papa!’ she said.

  The lips moved again. “I’m sor-ry …” His voice sounded thick and he could not find the words he wanted. One hand gestured helplessly while the other lay limp on the cover.

  “Papa,” said Anna again and sat on the edge of the bed. She put her hand over his unmoving one and smiled. She did not say anything, so that he wouldn’t have to answer.

  “Sam will be here soon,” said Mama from the foot of the bed.

  Papa seemed to nod and closed his eyes. After a while Mama made a sign to Anna and went out.

  She stayed where she was and looked at him. Was he asleep? His eyes had remained closed and his face looked calm. The curly grey hair at the sides of his head (there had been none on top as long as Anna could remember) straggled a little on the pillow. She suddenly remembered how, when she was quite small in Berlin, she had played some form of Happy Families with Max. She had usually lost because she had sacrificed everything to getting hold of one particular card in the pack – the baker, who had a thin face and a balding head. “He looks so pretty,” she had explained to Max, “just like Papa.”

  Now Papa was lying there with his shirt collar undone and breathing slowly. Of course he was quite old. Seventy-one? Seventy-two? Anna had always known this, but it had meant nothing. He had not seemed old. He was different from other people’s fathers, but not because of his age – because of the sort of person he was. Suddenly, while she was looking at him, he opened his eyes and looked straight back at her.

  “An-na,” he said very slowly.

  She tightened her hand over his and said, “Don’t talk,” but there was something he wanted to say.

  “An-na,” he said again and then, with great difficulty, “The con-cer …”

  She nodded and smiled, and in spite of terrible obstacles his face moved, his lips stretched and he smiled back. “It was …” The word eluded him, but he pursued it and tracked it down.

  “Beau-ti-ful!” said Papa triumphantly.

  The Professor confirmed what Mama and Anna had already guessed. It was a stroke.

  “How bad?” said Mama.

  He shrugged his shoulders. “We’ll know better in a few days.”

  Papa could not be left, so Mama stayed with him always, sleeping on a makeshift bed in his room. Anna relieved her for a few hours when she came home from work. Papa clearly knew exactly what was happening to him, but did not seem afraid. On the third day, when his speech had become easier, he suddenly said, “Strange.”

  “What?” said Anna.

  Papa gestured towards himself, the bed, the shabby sickroom. “This,” he said. He added, almost admiringly, “An amazing experience!”

  When the Professor came to see him again he seemed pleased with his progress.

  “We’ve been lucky this time,” he told Mama. “He should recover quite quickly.”

  “Completely?”

  He nodded.

  “Thank God.”

  “But whatever possessed him?” said the Professor. “A man in his condition – to climb up to the gallery of a theatre?”

  Mama was laughing with relief. “You know what he’s like,” she said. “And of course he didn’t know – he had no idea—”

  Something suddenly struck her.

  “Did he?” she asked.

  He looked at her with his sad black eyes.

  “Three weeks ago,” he said. “He came to me with all the classic symptoms. Headaches, pins and needles, very high blood pressure. I warned him then to be careful. And straightaway, what does he do? Drags himself up about a thousand steps to listen to Beethoven!”

  Mama stared at him. “He knew,” she said.

  Anna remembered Papa during the Seventh Symphony.

  “I suppose,” she said, “that was why.”

  They were sitting in the garden. For once it was a warm evening. The Woodpigeon was mowing the lawn, the Po
znanskis were arguing with each other in Polish, and Frau Gruber was shelling peas into a basin.

  “You said earlier,” said Mama, “‘we’ve been lucky this time.’ What did you mean?”

  “Just that,” said the Professor.

  “But—‘this time’?”

  The Professor seemed put out. “My dear,” he said, “your husband has had a stroke which could have been fatal. Instead, I think he’ll make a complete recovery. So be grateful!”

  “I am,” said Mama, “but what did you mean?”

  “For heaven’s sake –” the Professor glanced uneasily at Anna – “you must know how these things are. Once there’s been a stroke there may be another. Perhaps not for years, but your husband is not a young man. And next time—” He spread his hands. “Next time,” he said sadly, “we may not be so lucky.”

  Papa recovered quite quickly. Even after a week, his speech was back to normal. His hand still troubled him, but by the time Max came on leave he was up, and Max was surprised to find so few signs of his recent illness.

  “He just looks a bit tired,” he said.

  But they all knew that from now on Papa was living on borrowed time.

  Anna found it almost impossible to grasp.

  “Don’t worry,” said Papa, glancing towards the ceiling. “The old rabbi up there is on my side.”

  Anna looked at him across the breakfast table, at the eyes now studying the newspaper, at the hands (one still a little clumsy) manipulating the knife and fork on the chipped plate, and tried to imagine that one day he would not be there. It seemed impossible.

  She spent as much time with him as she could, always haunted by the thought that one day he would no longer exist. When she saw his spiky handwriting, so proliferous on his desk, in his room, everywhere they had ever lived, she thought that suddenly, one day, there would be no more of it. She even had the mad idea of asking him to write something, a whole lot, so that it would somehow not matter so much when he stopped.

  She tried to paint his portrait. He sat for her patiently in the room above the garage, but it was no use. There was so much that she wanted to put in. Every time she had got anything down she wanted to scrap it and start again.

  And all the time the best news of the war was coming in, like a film unrolling irrelevantly in the background. Paris was liberated, then most of France. Letters arrived from French friends who had, miraculously it seemed to Anna, survived the German occupation. If only Papa didn’t have another stroke, if only Max didn’t get killed, if only a buzz-bomb didn’t fall on one …

  One day Papa asked her, “Why don’t you ever go to art school now?”

  “Oh,” she said. It all seemed so long ago. “I fell out with my drawing teacher.”

  “And that’s all?”

  “No.” They were sitting in his room after supper – Mama was playing bridge. “I don’t know,” she said. “Perhaps he was all I was ever interested in, really. I don’t seem to be able to draw any more. I don’t even want to.”

  “A phase,” he said.

  She shook her head.

  “Has the term started?”

  She smiled at his vagueness. “About six weeks ago.”

  “Then you must go back. You can’t give up your work just because you’ve had a tiff with someone.”

  “It wasn’t just a tiff!” she cried, but he raised his hand.

  “Please,” he said. “I wish you to go back. Please go tomorrow.”

  She found the school much changed. The class had grown, and the whiskery man who had been with John Cotmore at the concert now shared the teaching with him. John and Barbara were openly devoted to each other and it was common knowledge among the students that she had moved into his house, and that it had taken her three days to clean up his kitchen.

  “Where have you been?” he asked Anna, and she answered carefully, “My father has been ill.”

  She had drawn almost nothing for weeks, and waited tensely for the class to start. Perhaps at the sight of the model something inside her would revive. The model was fat and sat well back in the chair, with one hand on her knee. It was not a bad pose, but when Anna looked at it there seemed no reason why she should draw it. She felt quite dead. What am I doing here? she thought. How am I going to get through the evening?

  In the end, rather than sit there doing nothing, she made some pencil marks that vaguely resembled what was before her, but there was no purpose in them and they bored even herself. When John Cotmore came round to see her she turned her drawing-board round to hide it, but he did not seem to notice.

  “I’m glad you’re back,” he said. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you.”

  Her spirits rose violently. He was going to explain. Barbara was really his sister…his cousin…his aunt …!

  “How would you like,” said John Cotmore, “to have a scholarship?”

  “A scholarship?” She was confused.

  “Yes – full-time art school attendance for three years, no fees and a grant to live on.”

  She stared at him.

  “How? When?”

  “By showing your work to a selection committee, on your teacher’s recommendation. With luck, beginning next September.”

  She could not think what to say.

  “It won’t arise until the spring,” he said. “But the war looks like ending fairly soon and people are beginning to think about the peace. There are only going to be a few of these scholarships available, and I’d like to recommend you for one.”

  “But—” She still couldn’t take it in. “I can’t draw,” she said.

  “What do you mean?” He was becoming irritated with her lack of enthusiasm.

  “Just that. I haven’t done a decent drawing for months.”

  “Oh.” He laughed briefly. “A bad patch. Happens to everyone.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “For heaven’s sake,” he cried. “You’ve thought of nothing but this for years – what’s the matter?”

  She looked round the room for guidance – at the model, the students bent over their work, Barbara frowning at a piece of charcoal. While she looked at her Barbara glanced up and caught her eye. The frown disappeared and she smiled. Anna smiled back uncertainly. Then Barbara nodded, with a sidelong glance at John Cotmore, and did the thumbs-up sign. What did she mean? Did she know what they were talking about? Then, suddenly, it hit her. Of course she and John Cotmore had discussed it. It was all arranged – a consolation prize. Poor little Anna, she’ll be so upset, let’s at least get her a scholarship.

  She turned back to John Cotmore.

  “I don’t want it,” she said.

  “You don’t want a scholarship?”

  “Oh, leave me alone!” she said. “I don’t know what I want!”

  She continued to go to the classes, partly to please Papa, but nothing much came of them. Some of her drawings turned out better than others, but they all had a pedestrian quality which infinitely depressed her.

  She dreaded the journey home on the tube, with nothing to think about except the failures of the evening, and carried a book with her wherever she went. As long as she was reading she couldn’t think. It didn’t seem to matter what she read – Tolstoy, Jack London, Agatha Christie – just as long as it was print. If she had finished a book, or forgotten it, she flew into a panic only to be assuaged by buying a newspaper. She wore her oldest clothes and forgot to wash her hair, because nothing mattered any more and there was no particular reason why she should exist.

  And then, on top of everything else, Mama got ‘flu. Anna found her red-faced and feverish one day when she came home, with Papa sitting on the edge of her bed. Mama had the huge thermometer from Paris tucked into her armpit, and they were having a ridiculous argument about Papa’s work. Papa was saying that his prose was the best thing he had written, but Mama insisted that the poems were better.

  “Ach, lyrical poems,” said Papa. “They’re easy.”

  “Nonsense!” cried Mama, causing the
thermometer to quiver.

  Papa shook his head. “The prose will last longer. After all, I wrote it. I ought to know.”

  “But you don’t!” Mama half sat up in bed. “Just because you find the poems so easy, you underrate them. No one else can write poems like you.”

  Papa got quite angry.

  “I prefer the prose,” he said. “If ever there’s a chance of reprinting I should like it to be the prose rather than the poems. I shan’t be here, so you’ll have to see to it.”

  It was like a door closing.

  Mama extracted the thermometer and found that it was 102.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she cried. “Get off my bed, or you’ll only catch it too!”

  She was quite ill for a week.

  It was bitterly cold, and there was a fuel shortage. To keep even a meagre fire in the lounge in the evenings, Frau Gruber and the Woodpigeon had to go each day to a distribution centre and collect some coal in a makeshift handcart. It was as they returned from one of these expeditions that Aunt Louise met them. She had come to commiserate with Mama, now sitting up in her dressing gown, and she was horrified by the cold in the hotel.

  “You’ve got to get out of here,” she said. “You’ll never get well in this icy place.”

  Mama demurred, but Aunt Louise would not be denied, and the following day she arrived in her car to wrap Mama in a large rug and carry her off to the country.

  “Anna can look after her father, can’t you, dear?” she said.

  “There’s nothing to do, anyway,” said Anna ungraciously, and she and Papa waved from the freezing lounge as the car drove away.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  “It’s fearfully cold,” said Papa the following week. “Do you really think you should drag all round Golders Green in this weather?”

  “I’d better, I think,” said Anna.

  Aunt Dainty had rung up two days before to say that Victor, who had been getting steadily worse for months, had finally died. Since Mama was away, Anna had promised to go to the funeral.