Dark Angel

by Sally Beauman

  His name was Franz-Jacob, he was ten years old, he was German, and he was Jewish. He arrived with the first contingent of orphanage children, part of the small group of five or six German boys who stood a little apart from the English children who came to Winterscombe regularly every summer.

  I think perhaps my parents had known his family, who were still in Germany, but whatever the reason—it could simply have been that he was known to be exceptionally clever—special arrangements had been made for Franz-Jacob which singled him out from the others. He lived with the other children in the dormitories, which had been built years before in the old dairy and laundry buildings. He was invited to join in their games of cricket and tennis, the swimming parties and nature rambles that were organized that year, as always. But he also came up to the house every morning to join me at my lessons.

  Since my mother was away, those lessons were conducted entirely by Mr. Birdsong and concentrated on his own strong points: Latin, history, mathematics, robust and heroic English poetry. I was not very good at any of these subjects, and I think, looking back, that it must have been very tiresome for Mr. Birdsong to have to teach me, although, if so, he disguised his impatience well. From the first day that Franz-Jacob joined my classes, Mr. Birdsong blossomed.

  I was still struggling then with long division and making little progress. Franz-Jacob, whose English was limited, provided Mr. Birdsong with a chance to try out his German—that was the first excitement. The second excitement was his ability at mathematics. They began, I remember, with equations: a textbook was produced and Franz-Jacob bent over his desk. The sun shone; the room was warm; his pen scratched. In the length of time it took me to complete two sums, Franz-Jacob had completed an entire exercise.

  He took it up to Mr. Birdsong and presented the pages with a small bow; Mr. Birdsong checked them over. He nodded; he clicked his tongue in admiration; he appeared at first surprised and then became pink in the face, a sign of excitement.

  “This is very good, Franz-Jacob. Das ist werklich sehr gut. My goodness me, yes. Shall we try our hand at some fractions?”

  Franz-Jacob shrugged. The fractions exercise was completed equally quickly. From that moment on, Mr. Birdsong was like a man reborn: He entered the schoolroom with a new energy in his step. I saw, for the first time, a glimpse of the man he used to be: a gifted mathematician at Oxford who, at his father’s behest, had abandoned an academic career to take up Holy Orders.

  I was neglected after that, but I did not mind. Mr. Birdsong might set me poems to learn or might encourage me to write out the important dates of the Reformation, but although he remained kindly there was no fire in his eyes when he heard the poems or the lists of dates. The fire was reserved for Franz-Jacob. They had moved on to calculus, and Mr. Birdsong’s hand shook a little when he opened the textbook.

  I thought Mr. Birdsong’s reaction was entirely proper. Franz-Jacob was exceptional—I, too, could see that. He was unlike anyone I had ever met.

  To look at, he was small and slightly built, but with a wiry strength that made the bigger English boys wary of bullying him. He had a narrow, intense face, dark eyes, and thin black hair worn cropped short at the nape of the neck and long at the front, so it often fell across his eyes when he worked; he would push it back impatiently. He rarely smiled. There was in his eyes an expression I was unfamiliar with then, though I have seen it since many times, an expression peculiar to those Europeans whose families have been persecuted in the past and may yet be persecuted again: European eyes, which regard even happiness warily.

  He was a solemn child, in many ways an old-fashioned one; he was lonely. I, too, was lonely, with my parents away; I think I was solemn, and I was certainly old-fashioned, for I had been brought up to believe in a way of life and a set of standards that were already dying. Perhaps it was not so surprising that we should become friends.

  All summer Franz-Jacob and I were inseparable. At night, when he returned to his dormitory with the other boys, we would signal Morse code messages to each other from our windows, with flashlights. During the day, when lessons were over, he would remain with me at the house. He became a great favorite with my aunt Maud, whose German was idiosyncratic but effective. Aunt Maud bombarded him with stories about Kaiser Wilhelm, whom she had known but disliked. She took great pleasure in explaining Franz’s dietary needs to the servants and the rest of the family.

  “No roast pork for Franz-Jacob, William,” she would pronounce in a ringing voice. “I believe I asked for salmon. Ah, yes, here it is! Now, Franz-Jacob, you may eat that quite safely. I went down to the kitchens to supervise the cooking myself, and I know about such things! Have I mentioned my friend Montague to you? Yes, of course I have. Well, Montague was not entirely strict, you understand, but even so I made quite sure he was never offered bacon in my house. And as for sausages—I banished sausages from the breakfast table. And a very good thing too. I am suspicious of sausages. As I have always said, one never quite knows what goes into them….”

  My uncle Freddie took to him, too, especially when he discovered that Franz-Jacob liked dogs and was more than willing to exercise the greyhounds. Uncle Freddie had a new project, a new enthusiasm that required him to spend long hours in the library with notebooks—an enthusiasm whose precise nature he refused to explain. A stout man, reluctant to walk any distance, Uncle Freddie was delighted to be able to remain in the library, leaving the greyhounds to Franz-Jacob and to me.

  All summer, it seemed, Franz-Jacob and I walked: We walked down to the lake and along the river; we explored the village and the decaying cottage, alone at the end of a lane, where Jack Hennessy lived. We walked up past the cornfields, which always produced such an unsatisfactory crop, and along the boundary walls of my father’s estate.

  We walked and we talked. I taught Franz-Jacob some English and he taught me some German. He told me about his father, who had been a university professor but who had, the previous year, been relieved of his post. He described his mother, his two older brothers, and his three younger sisters. None of these members of his family were to survive the coming war, and although he could not have known that, I used to wonder afterwards if Franz-Jacob had had some intuition of what was to come, for although he spoke of them with affection, his eyes were always sad. They were fixed on that European horizon, filled with a future, yet remembered, pain.

  I had never had a confidant of my own age, and by nature I was not secretive. We explored Winterscombe and I told Franz-Jacob everything. I told him about the house and how it ate money; I told him about Uncle Freddie’s enthusiasms and the way they fizzled; I told him my Uncle Steenie’s mysterious ambition to be the Best-Kept Boy in the World; I told him about Aunt Maud, and the amber velvet dress that did not fit; I explained the terrible misfortune it was to be born with freckles and red curly hair.

  Franz-Jacob, who knew better than I did what true misfortune was, was patient. Encouraged, I told him the more terrible things. I told him about Charlotte, my godmother Constance, and my terrible lie. I told him about the prayers I still said, every morning and every evening. I held my breath, for I was in awe of Franz-Jacob and I quite expected him to damn me.

  As it was, he merely shrugged. “Why worry? This girl is a stupid girl, and your parents, they are good people. Das ist alles selbst-verständlich.…”

  No condemnation; he whistled to the dogs and we walked on. It was that day, I think, when we returned to the house, that Franz-Jacob—who had been talking about mathematics, which he said he liked because they were perfect and inevitable, like the best music—suddenly stopped on the steps that led up to the terrace.

  He looked down into my face, his expression intent, as if he saw me for the first time. “You know how many freckles you have?” he said at last, stepping back.

  “How many?” I remember thinking it cruel of him to count.

  “Seventy-two. You know something else?”

  “What?”

  “I don’t mind them. They’r
e all right.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Natürlich.”

  He gave me an impatient glance, as if I were being slow, the way he did sometimes when we took our lessons. Then he ran up the steps, the dogs at his heels, and left me at their foot, scarlet and rejoicing.

  The special day came many weeks after this, toward the end of August. I didn’t know it was going to be a special day until it was almost over, but it was an odd day from the very beginning.

  That morning, for the first time in three months I left out the prayer about New York and my godmother Constance. I had begun to understand the folly of that particular fiction and the impossibility, once Charlotte returned from Italy, of sustaining it. Franz-Jacob’s robust dismissal of Charlotte—This girl is a stupid girl—had given me strength. Why should I care what Charlotte thought? I neither liked her nor admired her. She might judge my family dull and shabby, but Franz-Jacob, who was a much better judge, said Winterscombe was a magical place—ein Zauber Ort—and he knew my parents were good people.

  I felt clean for leaving out the prayer, and curiously freed. Even my lessons with Mr. Birdsong went better than they usually did; I could be promoted quite soon, he hinted, to algebra.

  After lunch Franz-Jacob and I took the greyhounds for their walk. We took the path down by the lake, as we often did, and stopped to look at the black swans; then—and this was more unusual—we turned in the direction of the Winterscombe woods. For some reason Franz-Jacob disliked these woods, although I loved them at all seasons of the year, and particularly in the summer for the coolness of their shade.

  That day it was very hot; Franz-Jacob gave one of his shrugs and agreed to go that way. We might, even so, have just skirted the edge of the trees and then branched off on the path to the village, but the two greyhounds caught a scent and raced off; we were forced to follow them, calling and whistling, deeper and deeper into the woods, where the paths became narrow and overgrown.

  We passed the place where my grandfather had kept his pheasant pens, and then turned aside, down a path thick with brambles. I was a little ahead of Franz-Jacob; I could hear the dogs crashing in the undergrowth, and I could see in front of me the open sunlight of a clearing, where I had walked sometimes with Jenna.

  “They’re through here, Franz. Come on,” I called back. I heard him hesitate, then the movement of the undergrowth and the snapping of sticks underfoot as he followed. It was only when he came out into the sunlight of the clearing, and I saw his face, that I realized something was wrong.

  Franz-Jacob was always pale. Now his face was drained of all color; sweat stood out on his forehead; he shrank in the warmth of the sunlight, shivering.

  “Come away. Come away.” He pulled at my sleeve. “Come away from this place.”

  “Franz, what is it?”

  “Gespenster.” He glanced over his shoulder toward the trees and the undergrowth. “Ghosts. Ich spüre sie. Sie sind hier. Es ist übel hier. Komme, lass uns schnell gehen.”

  Fear communicates itself very quickly. I might not have understood that rush of German words, but I understood the expression in Franz-Jacob’s eyes. A second later and I was frightened too. A familiar and pleasant place became lowering and full of shadows. Franz-Jacob seized my hand and we both began to run, faster and faster, slipping on moss, tripping over branches. We did not stop running until we were out of the woods and back on the lawns below Winterscombe.

  “What happened there? Something happened there,” Franz-Jacob said. He stood looking back across the grass toward the trees and the two greyhounds, who were just emerging from the undergrowth.

  “In those woods?” I hesitated. “Nothing. There was an accident there once, I think. But that was ages and ages ago. No one talks about it.”

  “It’s there now.” Franz-Jacob was still trembling. “I could feel it. Ich konnte es riechen.”

  “What? What? I don’t understand. What did you say?”

  The dogs had reached us; Franz-Jacob bent over them. They must have caught a rabbit or a hare, for when he straightened up I saw they had blood on their muzzles and Franz-Jacob had blood on his hands.

  “I said I could smell it.” He looked at me with his wide, dark European eyes. “I could smell this.”

  He held out his hand and I looked at it stupidly.

  “Blood? You mean you could smell blood?”

  “Nein. Nein. Du bist ein dummes englische Mädchen, und du verstehst nicht.” He turned away. “Ich konnte den Krieg riechen.”

  I understood, that time. I understood that he thought me stupid and English. Tears came to my eyes. I was hurt, and because I was hurt, I lost my temper. I stamped my foot.

  “I do understand. I do. And it’s not me who’s stupid. It’s you. You’re imagining things. You can’t smell war. How can you smell war, in a wood?”

  I shouted the question, then shouted it again. Franz-Jacob turned his back. He walked away, the dogs at his heels, and even when I ran after him, when I caught his sleeve and asked the question a third time, Franz-Jacob did not reply.

  That night we had a party. It was an improvised party, suggested by Aunt Maud, who complained at being left alone all day. Aunt Maud, too, in her way saw ghosts—in her case, the ghosts of Winterscombe’s glorious past, the sad specters of parties long gone.

  “There were always people here,” she said at dinner, in a mournful way, casting a reproachful glance down the long table. “Look at us now! Rattling around like four peas in a pod. Four people, and I remember when this table used to seat forty. There was dancing, and bridge—billiards for the men—music and champagne, Victoria! Footmen behind every chair … And what have we now? We have William—and his shoes squeak. Freddie, you must have a word with him.”

  William, who was standing three feet from Aunt Maud when she made this pronouncement, continued to stare straight ahead of him, since he was fond of Aunt Maud, used to her ways, and had been trained that the best servants should appear deaf.

  Uncle Freddie blushed and ate a second helping of steak-and-kidney pudding. He cheered up later in the meal, when it came to gooseberry crumble. It was Uncle Freddie, I think, who suggested that after dinner we might try a little dancing. Aunt Maud, too, revived at this and became quite energetic. No, she pronounced, the drawing room with the carpet rolled back would not do; it would be the ballroom or nothing. As far as I knew, this ballroom was never used; it lay at the far end of the house, added on by my grandfather as if in afterthought, a cavernous place decorated in spun-sugar colors.

  Uncle Freddie and Franz-Jacob busied themselves. William was called upon to fetch stepladders, light bulbs, and my mother’s wind-up gramophone. Once the chandeliers were lit, the room revived and its gaiety looked less tawdry. Franz-Jacob and I explored the box that had been built for the orchestra. It overlooked the floor below like a box at a theater, with a curved front ornamented with gilded cherubs. It had pink silk curtains, now very tattered.

  “Such a splendid evening!” Aunt Maud might have been referring to that evening or to others of the distant past; she unlocked the French windows and threw them back. Fresh warm air; a few moths, attracted by the blaze of lights. “Whenever was this place last used, Freddie?” Aunt Maud demanded, and from my perch in the orchestra box, I saw Uncle Freddie hesitate.

  “I’m not quite sure …” he began, and Aunt Maud gave him a look of scorn.

  “You remember perfectly well, Freddie, and so do I. Constance’s dance. Her debut. She wore a most vulgar dress. Freddie, wind the gramophone!”

  My mother’s taste in music was not catholic: From a collection that mainly comprised Beethoven piano sonatas, with some Mozart and Haydn, Uncle Freddie had contrived to find two suitable records for dancing; both were Viennese waltzes.

  To the strains of “The Blue Danube,” Uncle Freddie and Aunt Maud took the floor, Aunt Maud erect and regal, Uncle Freddie quickly out of breath.

  Then it was the turn of Aunt Maud and Franz-Jacob. Franz-Jacob danced
, as he did everything, solemnly. Approaching my aunt he bowed, then put his arm around her waist. Aunt Maud was tall; Franz-Jacob was short for his age. The top of his head was on a line with Aunt Maud’s carefully corseted bosom. Franz-Jacob politely averted his head and they began to circle the floor. Franz-Jacob was wearing his best suit, which was brown, with trousers that ended at the knee. On his feet he wore, as usual, stout and well-polished boots, more suitable to a country lane than a ballroom. They made an odd couple: Aunt Maud all Edwardian dips and sweeps, Franz-Jacob neat and jerky as a marionette. Uncle Freddie and I watched them for a while. I took a turn with Uncle Freddie, who confided he had been a whiz at the Black Bottom and the Charleston, and that this wasn’t his line at all. Then it was the turn of Franz-Jacob and me.

  Aunt Maud seated herself on a small gilt chair and called out encouragement: “Bend, Vicky—from the waist. Be supple! Goodness, how stiff the child is!” Uncle Freddie mused by the gramophone, and Franz-Jacob and I plodded our way around the floor.

  I had only the vaguest notion of the proper steps, though Franz-Jacob’s knowledge seemed sounder, but I did not mind that I stumbled, that we were slow while the music sighed and sped. It was bittersweet music, and a bittersweet dance. We turned, and I dreamed of another world: of blue evenings and violet dawns, of melancholy cities and young girls, of white shoulders and white gloves, the scent of patchouli, the prospect of the distraction of romance. A Viennese dream in an English house. I pretended to myself, I think, that I was my godmother Constance. I could hear her whisper to me in this, her ballroom, as we danced.

  It was not until the gramophone was rewound, and Franz-Jacob and I danced a second time, that I looked at him at all. When I did, I saw that his face had a look of fixed concentration, as if he focused upon the intricacies of the steps to avoid other, less pleasant thoughts. I remembered his behavior that afternoon, his expression when we looked back at the woods, and I wondered if he still saw his ghosts, for his sad eyes looked haunted.