The Songs

by Charles Elton

  I had the privilege of working alongside your father for a few years. He was an inspirational medical practitioner and I learned so much from him. And he had so many passions — I remember his delight when a coat of arms was bestowed on your family. There was a lot of sherry drunk that day, I can tell you! But he was never the same after your mother died of cancer in 1955.

  Your father’s suicide soon after was a very painful event for all of us. I had always suspected that he suffered from depression, but people did not talk about those things then and he was a very private person. He never talked about what happened to you after you left in 1947. It was reported in the papers that you had simply vanished. There was a lot of gossip: people said you had died or were on the run from the police because you had stolen a great deal of money. I knew that was not true. The one thing I know about you is that your integrity has never been in question. You have shown that by your life and work, for which I am full of admiration even though my political persuasions go in other directions.

  The strange thing is that I have known for many years who you were. There was a report on the television about a demonstration you were involved in and I saw you singing. When I heard your voice I knew it was you. A voice is like a fingerprint —you cannot change it. Of course it was nearly 15 years since I had last seen you and you had changed, but as soon as I heard you sing, I could see past the beard and the long hair and I knew that you were Maurice. Of course I never told anybody. You had your reasons for doing what you did and I knew that they would be good ones.

  That brings me to the reason for this letter: what happened the last day I saw you at school, the last day I ever saw you — I betrayed you. My parents put great pressure on me and, while it is no excuse, I was frightened. The thing I loved and respected about you is that you were never frightened of anything, and on that awful day you behaved with such dignity. I hope after all these years you will forgive me.

  And now I must close. In many ways, I would rather you did not answer this but I cannot tell you how many good wishes I send you, my dear friend Maurice. Please remember me with affection if you can.

  As always

  Arthur Mayall

  After I had finished it, I went into Huddie’s bathroom, locked the door and did something I could hardly remember ever doing before: I cried, but it was more out of panic than anything else. It was as if Iz had adopted us after our real father, the person called Maurice, had died. Now, without him and without Huddie, I had nothing.

  Later, Carla knocked at the door. I was back sitting in Huddie’s wheelchair. Carla came and stood behind me, putting her hands on my shoulders.

  “Are you okay, Rose?”

  “Yes.”

  “What a day! Well, we did call the police. We should have done it much earlier, of course. You were right. I hope he’s okay. Lally thinks they’re going to waterboard him when they find him.” She looked round the room. “All Huddie’s things — what are we going to do with them?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t think we need to keep his wheelchair or his respirator to remember him by. Or ten pairs of tracksuit bottoms.” We were silent for a moment and then I said cautiously, “Carla — you still sound American after all these years. How come Iz sounds so English when he comes from Germany?”

  “Why?”

  “Well, there was a copy of The Grapes of Wrath in German by his bed. I keep forgetting that he even is German. Has he ever spoken German to you?”

  “No, I don’t think he has. He doesn’t talk about Germany. I wouldn’t if my parents were killed in the camps like that. Of course, he came over on the Kindertransport when he was about eight so he started English early. I think he’s just got a good ear for languages: he picked up pretty good Hebrew in Israel after the war. But you’re right — if you didn’t know, you’d think he was English, wouldn’t you? No accent at all. Well, we all know how clever he is.”

  I was playing Racing Demon in the kitchen with Lally when the doorbell rang. It was nearly midnight. Carla came down the stairs, trailed by Joan. We could see a silhouette through the glass of the door.

  Before the policeman had even come in, Lally was saying, “Is he all right? Is he all right?”

  “Mrs. Herzl?”

  Carla normally took Lally’s presence in the house with good grace, but she said, “Actually, I’m Mrs. Herzl,” rather sharply. “Let him come in, Lally.”

  We all sat down at the kitchen table. The policeman cleared his throat and said, “We’ve found Mr. Herzl. He’s in hospital.”

  “But he’s all right?” Lally said.

  “By the time we got there he had collapsed. He fell and hit his head.”

  Lally gasped and put her hand up to her mouth.

  “What do the doctors say?” Carla asked.

  “They’re doing some tests,” the policeman said rather evasively. “They say he’s stable. I think you should call them.”

  “But what was he doing?” Lally said.

  “He was at a school in Godalming, a private school for boys.”

  “Godalming?” Carla said, as if it was the Galapagos Islands. “What on earth was he doing there?”

  Lally was confused: “A private school? Iz has never believed in private education.”

  “But what was he doing at a school?” Carla asked.

  The policeman looked rather awkward. “Schools are very careful about security these days. They called us to say there was a man behaving strangely.”

  “Strangely?” Carla said.

  “Well, they considered an unknown man loitering around a school for several hours to be strange.” The policeman paused. “Could we have a word with you in private, Mrs. Herzl?”

  Carla looked surprised. “No, it’s fine, you can say anything you want to all of us.”

  “Very well. It’s rather delicate.

  We all waited.

  “Have you known him to do this kind of thing before?”

  “What kind of thing?” Carla asked.

  “Loitering around schools. We have to take that kind of thing seriously when young people are involved. Does he have a computer? We might need to take it away.”

  There was a look of confusion on Carla’s face.

  “They’re asking if he’s a pedophile, Carla,” I said.

  Lally got to her feet. “Oh, this is terrible,” she moaned. “Do you know who Isaac Herzl even is? It’s so unfair to make unfounded allegations about such an extraordinary man! And he’s done such remarkable things for you people,” she said, pointing at the policeman, who was black. “He was at Sharpeville, he marched at Selma with Dr. Martin Luther —”

  “Lally,” I said. “Sit down. They’re only doing their job.”

  I turned to the policeman. “My father is not a pedophile, I promise you. In fact, he has no interest in children at all. Anyway, if he wanted to hang around schools, he wouldn’t need to go to Godalming. He could come to my school, which is practically round the corner, and I can tell you he’s never done that in his life. Anyway, aren’t schools like Eton and Harrow tourist attractions? They must be full of people loitering around. Do you bring all those Japanese tourists in for questioning? He doesn’t have a computer but you can search the house if you want to. You won’t even find a photograph of me and my brother. The only one you’ll find is of a little boy in a sailor suit playing the violin.”

  “Was there a reason why he might have gone to the school?” the policeman said.

  “He doesn’t do anything without a reason.”

  I sat in Huddie’s dark room. It was at times like this — times when I was confused and a little frightened — that I missed him the most. Who else would I have been able to talk this over with? Not Carla or Lally. What I had read in the letter was unbelievable, but I knew that did not necessarily make it untrue. Huddie and I would have worked out the truth of it. We would have treated it like one of our problems: If x equals Iz Herzl and y equals Maurice Gifford, what would the square root of the sum of x and y be?


  I imagined Huddie in the room with me. He would tell me to turn the computer on and say, “Google Maurice Gifford.”

  I might protest: “There’ll be thousands and thousands! It’ll take hours.”

  “I’ll just have to cancel my marathon. Put the name in quotes. That’ll weed out people called just ‘Maurice’ or ‘Gifford.’ ”

  I was imagining him speaking fluently, but I knew I would have had to ask him to repeat things and take time to let him dribble his saliva out and wipe his mouth.

  I tapped it in. “There are twenty-one hundred entries.”

  “What’s coming up?”

  “There seem a lot for a Lord Gifford who was a Tory in the House of Lords.”

  “A Tory? He’s not going to have anything to do with Iz. Filter him out.”

  “Then we’re down to twelve hundred twenty hits. Now there’s a lot of stuff about some colonel called Maurice Gifford.”

  “The army? No way.”

  I would laugh. “Listen to this: he was wounded in the second Matabele war in South Africa. He had the bullet that shot him in the arm set in gold and then he gave it to his wife as a wedding present!”

  Huddie would gurgle with laughter, which would make him cough. I filtered the colonel out. “Four hundred thirty-four hits. That’s more manageable.”

  “Okay — go through them one by one.”

  It took some time. A lot of them could be easily discarded — a dentist called Maurice Gifford in Pasadena, or references to the Facebook pages of various different Maurice Giffords. I went on scrolling through the entries. “There’s a record of a school choir, each year’s members. A Maurice Gifford was a member from 1943 to 1947. Somewhere called St. George’s College.”

  “Where?”

  “In Godalming…” We would look at each other, or rather I would look at Huddie because he found it hard to move his neck. “Maybe that’s what Iz was doing: he was going back to his old school…” I felt my heart quicken. It was odd to feel excited to be on the trail of something I did not want to be true.

  “He sang! He was in the choir,” Huddie would say. “It says he joined it in 1943. Say that was the year he went to the school so he’d probably have been thirteen. The letter said he vanished when he was seventeen. That would have been 1947, the year he stopped being in the choir. Put it into the search.”

  I added “1947.” I found an entry heading which was a piece from a Kent newspaper, the Ashford Gazette, dated August 15, 1947. It was a blurred facsimile and I had to increase the magnification to read it properly. It was only five lines long and headed “Missing Boy Sought by Police.” In a village in Kent called Runton, a Maurice Gifford, seventeen, had vanished with five hundred pounds stolen from his uncle, a local farmer called Jack Gifford. So far, the police had been unable to trace the boy.

  Further on, there was another entry dated six months later: “Body Found in Quarry.” The decomposed body of a man had been discovered in a lake in a disused quarry two miles outside Runton. He was thought to be Maurice Gifford, aged seventeen, a farm worker already wanted for questioning by the police in connection with a theft. He was thought to have drowned. There were no suspicious circumstances.

  “Do you think it’s the same person? He can’t be both a choirboy in Godalming and a farmworker in Kent, can he?” I would say.

  “Go on through the entries.”

  I got to the last page. “No, there’s nothing else.”

  There did not seem anywhere else to go. We might have stopped then, except on a whim I looked up Iz’s entry in Wikipedia again. I read it through carefully. It covered all the things I already knew but near the beginning of the entry there was a sentence that I would never have taken any notice of before: Isaac Herzl had trained to fight in Palestine on a Jewish-funded farm in Runton, Kent.

  I would turn to him and read the entry and we would look at each other in amazement, but of course there was no Huddie. I was alone in the dark with nobody to talk to about what we had discovered or what we would do with it.

  The next day Carla, Lally and I had taken the train down to Godalming to see Iz. When we got to the hospital, a doctor took us into a small room and asked us to sit down. I had a sinking feeling.

  “Mr. Herzl is comfortable,” he began.

  “When can he come home?” Lally said.

  “He’s had a stroke.”

  Lally gasped.

  “What does that mean?” Carla said in her calm voice.

  “There are many different kinds of stroke,” the doctor said.

  “And what is this one?” I asked. I was the only one in the family who knew anything about medicine.

  “We think it’s occurred in the brain stem. It affects both sides of the body. He is paralyzed from the neck downwards and shows signs of aphasia. He has difficulty expressing himself, though he may understand what you’re saying to him. He may improve over time but that’s by no means certain. He will need significant care.”

  “We’re used to that in our house,” I said.

  We went into the ward to see him. He had a big gash on his forehead where he had fallen, but otherwise he looked fine. Although his eyes were open, he certainly was not talking and did not react to us at all, not even when Lally practically threw herself on top of him. Carla and Lally were still perplexed about why Iz had gone to Godalming. I was not: I presumed that he was simply going home.

  A few days later it was just like old times in the house in Muswell Hill: a new carer had arrived to look after Iz, who was using Huddie’s wheelchair and wearing his tracksuit bottoms. It was lucky we had not given them all away. I had moved out of Huddie’s room and was in Iz’s old room on the first floor. The ground floor was the invalid’s floor.

  Lally was staking her claim to be the one who would look after Iz: there was already tension between her and the carer. The first thing Lally got him to do was to move all the furniture down from Iz’s study and then pack all the archives up in boxes. She thought he had not been careful enough.

  “These are irreplaceable things!”

  “Oh, Lally, he’s not the removal man.”

  She did not like him being in the room while she was doing the scrapbooks so she kept sending him out of the house for pointless errands.

  “It’s just that he’s so intrusive, Rosie.”

  “He’s a carer, Lally! You can’t just let him sit outside the room like a dog and then call him in when Iz needs his trousers changed. Anyway, if he went, there’d just be another carer. Maybe a woman this time. Would you prefer that?” Lally would certainly not prefer that.

  After Lally had gone in the early evening, Carla went into Iz’s room to spend some time with him. Joan never set foot there. She was busy preparing their “Evening of Sister Songs,” which was happening in a few days. I had heard them practicing and once I had sneaked in to listen. There were six women, and, in front of them, Joan was standing conducting. I had thought that it was meant to be Carla’s time, but now she seemed to have become just another member of a group led by Joan.

  I was in the kitchen when Carla came out of Iz’s room. She sat down at the table and poured herself a glass of wine.

  She let out a sigh. “Oh, I don’t know, Rose, I hope he’s happy. Well, as happy as he can be. Do you think he even understands what we’re saying to him? It’s funny, he looks so distinguished, doesn’t he? In his wheelchair he’s like the Lincoln Memorial in Washington — you know, the huge marble statue of him sitting in a chair.”

  “Well, he is distinguished.”

  “I worry that people have forgotten him, all he did. Maybe he’s become irrelevant.”

  “Lally’s not going to let that happen,” I said, and we laughed.

  “You have no idea what he was like when I met him. I was terrified when my father said he was coming to dinner in Boston. He had such a reputation. Of course, he was married to your mother then. I only got to know him when I came over here a few years later. And you two — you and H
uddie were gorgeous, so tiny and frightened. Iz didn’t want more children, but I had you. Iz gave me so much then.”

  “And now?” I said carefully.

  Carla looked away. “Things change, Rose.”

  “Yes, I know that.”

  “Iz was the love of my life, really he was, but he didn’t make loving him easy.”

  I nodded.

  “I need to sing again, Rose. I need Joan. I hope you can understand that.”

  I nodded again.

  “You know, it’s the future not the —”

  “Carla — if one more person says that to me again, I’m going to throw up,” I said.

  I tried to think what Huddie would have wanted, and it took me a few days to work out what that would have been. I was not a timid person, but I felt nervous about it. Still, I had decided and I was going to do it.

  Before leaving, I went into Huddie’s room — I did not think of it as Iz’s room yet — and went over to the open French windows where Iz was sitting in his wheelchair facing the garden. I drew up a chair and sat beside him and put my hand on his. It felt completely neutral, neither hot nor cold. It had been a long time since I had touched him. I began to talk to him even though I knew he could not respond and probably would not even be able to understand.

  “You never told us what kind of people you wanted us to be, Iz. You never helped us. If we’d have known, Huddie and I would have tried. Maybe you wanted us to write songs or to be singers like you, but we wouldn’t have been good at it. Anyway, I don’t believe in rhyme. Everyone thinks there’s some logic to it but there isn’t. You’re shoehorning words together to make them sound smooth. You wouldn’t write a political speech in rhyme, would you? You’d want to pick the exact words and you couldn’t necessarily make them rhyme. It’s often the wrong words that are the ones that rhyme.

  “I don’t know where you come from, Iz. I know it’s not Germany. I don’t even know who you are. I read that letter your school friend sent you. I’m not going to tell anybody, I promise you. It would be nice to think that you’d have told me about it one day, but I don’t suppose you would have done. I would have loved to have a secret that only you and I and Huddie shared. I’d like you to have made us understand how you became the person you are even though once you’d been someone completely different. I can’t work that out. Maybe Huddie could have understood it, but it’s too late now. I used to think that when Huddie died he would just be gone, that he would have packed his bags and left, but now I’m not so sure. You should have got to know him better. You were careless with him. You were careless with all your children, Iz.”