Young Adolf

by Beryl Bainbridge

  Restricted by such considerations, Bridget walked resentfully along Lime Street towards the tram shelter. It was quite likely she wouldn’t see either Alois or his brother again until after the public houses had closed. Alois could talk the hind leg off a donkey, and he wouldn’t recollect for one moment the supper drying up in its pot on the fire. Mr Meyer was a great talker too – though he had a terrible habit of leaving things out. He spoke of tragedies, of dilemmas. He was forever alluding to the ‘fragile history’, as he termed it, of his only child, and never quite making himself plain. Until six months ago the portrait of a young man in the uniform of the White Star Line had hung above the mantelshelf in the front room. The space left by Mr Meyer’s son was noticeable; indicating with mournful eyes that luminous oval of flowered paper on the dark wall, Mr Meyer hinted at intolerable suffering. Sometimes Bridget thought it was the powerful nature of Mr Meyer’s hints that kept her in thrall. On other occasions, when he came upstairs of an evening for a cup of cocoa and sat with Alois at the hearth, dandling the baby on his knee, she felt she must be a wicked girl; she couldn’t take her eyes from Mr Meyer’s hand stroking her son’s plump limbs in the firelight.

  The tram stop was in Renshaw Street, beyond the Mission building. They were setting up the trestle tables ready for the evening meal of charity soup; the bowls and the wooden spoons were stacked on the mosaic floor of the entrance hall. I’ve seen it all, thought Bridget – the tables, the spoons splashed with mud, the men with the sacks over their shoulders against the rain. If asked, she was sure she could give an account of it. It was Alois’s opinion that she moved through life as though blind. ‘Tell me,’ he would demand of her from time to time, ‘what did you see in the streets, in the washhouse? How many women with grey hair? How many with yellow? Of what colour and pattern were the tiles in the starching room?’ But she never could tell him. The expression in his eyes and the tone of his voice silenced her; she stood mute, the words driven from her head. It was the same when, lying in the privacy of their brass bed, he interrogated her in the dark. Is this right? Is that good? The questions, she felt, implied certain set answers that she must always get wrong. Once, before the birth of darling Pat, Alois had won on the National at Aintree and had taken her to Monte Carlo for a holiday. His restaurant in Dale Street had been doing moderately well. He was pleased at the thought of his coming child. Strolling along the road above the bay he had been full of good humour, idly swinging his stick and murmuring on in his expansive way about the vastness of the sky above, the smoothness of the Mediterranean below. She was so accustomed to his chatter that she hardly distinguished his words from the droning of bees in the wild flowers that grew beside the path. Turning to her, he had inquired: ‘What colour, do you suppose, is the sea?’ ‘Why, blue,’ she had answered. ‘Why, blue,’ he had mimicked, and squeezing her arm viciously had shouted: ‘The water is a composite of white and blue and green. It is a reflection of the earth and sky, you docile bitch.’ For several days after this correction he had ignored her. She sat alone in their hotel room, with its view of the absorbent sea, and looked at her bruised arm in the dressing-table mirror. Had he cared to ask, she could have told Alois, without stammering, that her skin in one particular patch above the elbow was turning black and blue, ringed with a faint tinge of mauve.

  Boarding the tram, Bridget was alone in the car save for a woman draped in a shawl and a boy without shoes. His feet swung backwards and forwards above the wooden floor as the tram lurched round the corner past the church and the lighted windows of The Golden Dragon Restaurant. The child was grinning at the sight of a terrified horse pulling a baker’s cart whose narrow wheels had caught in the rut of the tramlines. Its nose almost touching the rear of the tram, the horse galloped frantically up the street behind them; a long trail of sparks, showering from the electric cable overhead, rolled along its back. The baker stood upright, his peaked cap falling over one ear, the reins held tight to his chest. Running to the end of the tram, the boy leapt on to the outside stairway and crouched there like a monkey, bouncing up and down and drumming his fists on the rail. Because of the trapped cart the tramdriver accelerated speed. Rattling and throwing up spray on either side like a ferry boat, they breasted the hill to the Infirmary in record time.

  There’s no help for it, thought Bridget. He’ll be sitting now in his dressing-gown, polishing his evening shoes with a scrap of velvet. Resigned to what might happen, she was none the less surprised to find, when alighting from the tram, that she’d missed her usual stop near the dairy and been carried half way down the Boulevard towards the park. She had to walk back along the avenue beneath the dripping chestnut trees. By the time she reached the house she was wet through.

  She let herself into the hall and went straightaway to the door of the cellar. Opening it, she peered downwards. It was like the black hole of Calcutta below stairs and there was a terrible smell of damp.

  ‘Have you him safe?’ she called.

  After a moment Mary O’Leary shouted that the baby was upstairs asleep in his box. He’d had his tea.

  Mr Meyer came out of his room and stood in the passage. He was in his stockinged feet and wore a shoe on his hand. He looked inquiringly up and down the hall.

  ‘Where is your sister-in-law?’ he asked. ‘I don’t see her, unless she is very unobtrusive.’

  ‘Ah well,’ said Bridget. ‘There’s been a bit of an altercation. It’s not what we expected.’

  ‘It is often the case,’ said Mr Meyer.

  ‘It’s his half-brother that’s come instead.’

  ‘The artist brother?’ Mr Meyer suggested. ‘Adolphus, the lone wolf?’

  ‘That’s the one,’ said Bridget. ‘He walks funny.’

  ‘Like this, perhaps?’ Mr Meyer bustled towards her along the passage, arms held stiffly to his sides, the patent-leather shoe pointing at the linoleum.

  ‘No,’ Bridget told him. ‘More like this’, and sliding adroitly past him she minced to the foot of the stairs. She laid her hand on the rail and faced him.

  ‘It’s his shoes,’ said Mr Meyer. ‘Either too large or too small.’ He stayed where he was, drooping against the wall. Over his shoulder was draped a brilliant red duster, once a piece of Mary O’Leary’s petticoat.

  Regretfully Bridget began to climb the stairs. On the half-landing she leaned over the bannister and volunteered: ‘The tram ran away with us. I’m all shook up.’

  ‘Your husband was pleased to see him?’ asked Mr Meyer. He stared up at her with his head to one side, his grey hair curling against the bright cloth on his shoulder.

  ‘Not that you’d notice,’ said Bridget. ‘There’s been something in the past. Something to do with a letter and his mother. He hasn’t a particle of luggage save for an old book, and he’s lost that.’

  ‘There’s always a letter,’ observed Mr Meyer darkly. ‘Or a cablegram, or even some words printed small in a newspaper.’ He padded silently up the hall to his room and went inside.

  The aspidistra on the second-floor landing was dying. It’s seen too much, thought Bridget, pushing open the door. Darling Pat was asleep in the bottom drawer of the wardrobe with his fist to his mouth.

  She took off her coat before lighting the kerosene lamp on the table. Mr Meyer had installed the electric light, but there was only one bulb hanging from the centre rose of the ceiling and the room was large. She poked the fire into a blaze. Still, there were dark corners and shadows everywhere.

  When they had first moved in, Alois had unrolled his precious carpet, salvaged from a previous business investment in a boarding house, and been mortified to see that it looked like a dropped napkin on the expanse of floorboards. After some consideration he had thought that careful placing of the furniture would make the room appear smaller. Putting the table, the chairs, the mahogany wardrobe, the hat-stand, the couch and the kitchen cupboard on to the carpet, he stood well back at the door and found he now had a large room with a quantity of things piled in the middle an
d the carpet not showing at all. Depressed, he had left it that way for several months and only gradually shifted the furniture further back, piece by piece, until at last, as though the tide had gone out, the carpet reappeared and the wardrobe, the cupboard, the couch and the hat-stand stood finally washed up against the skirting board. It would never be a room of intimate proportions.

  After Bridget had set the table and basted the shoulder of mutton in its baking tin on the hob of the fire, there was nothing left to occupy her. She wasn’t going to move the linen from the bed to the couch, not with Adolf looking as though a good wash would kill him. He’d have to make do with a flannellette sheet and those two blankets Alois had conveniently found abandoned in the corridor of the boat train to Paris.

  She knelt down beside the wardrobe and called softly to Pat, nuzzling her little finger into the warm fold of his neck, hoping he would waken so that she could play with him.

  ‘I’m here, Pat,’ she crooned. ‘Mother’s here. Who’s Mother’s best boy?’

  But the baby didn’t stir. Mary O’Leary had worn him out.

  ‘I’m here,’ Bridget repeated, this time to reassure herself.

  She went restlessly to the window and leaned there, listening to the muffled sounds of traffic from the Boulevard; it was so dark outside and so gloomy within, despite the lamp and the flickering fire, that she felt as though she’d fallen down a hole. I’ll never be seen again, she thought.

  Across the street the darkness yielded suddenly to brilliant light. In the upper room of the public house the gas candelabrum blazed under its shades of tinted glass. She could see the plaster cherub by the door, holding aloft an ornamental lamp. They were stacking the chairs against the windows, ready for the evening’s dancing. It was necessary to protect the panes of glass. Last summer an irate dock labourer with throbbing toes, pausing in the middle of the Turkey Trot, had limped in a half-circle about the floor and heaved his partner clean through the window and into the street. The room was inflammatory enough with its scarlet walls and the crimson streamers that dangled from the ceiling, twisting and trembling in the draught. Mr Meyer had told Bridget that the choice of red for the walls was deliberate. It made the people feel hot just looking at it, and so they felt thirsty, and that way they drank more. It was good for business. There was no end to his knowledge. When Alois had first hung pictures in the sitting room – a photograph of his father and three oil paintings of different horses stood in front of some old mountain – Mr Meyer had come upstairs and walking up and down with his chin thrust out pronounced them painted in such-and-such a year after the manner of so-and-so. If he was wrong, Alois hadn’t let on. Coming to the portrait in its damaged frame above the hat-stand, Mr Meyer had snapped his fingers. ‘That uniform,’ he exclaimed. ‘A custom official’s, if I’m not mistaken. What a stern man … a man of iron.’ He was certainly in the right of it there, though Bridget wondered how he’d arrived at such a conclusion. To her eyes old man Hitler, with his fat cheeks and that pale fuzz of hair on the top of his head, was the image of darling Pat at six months of age. Save for those grand moustaches he looked for all the world like Pat had when, full of milk and propped on pillows, he’d wobbled in his chair. Mr Meyer was a terrible know-all.

  From somewhere downstairs came the murmur of voices, followed by loud laughter. The windows rattled as the front door slammed.

  A moment later, a black umbrella bobbed on the pavement below. Reaching the corner, Mr Meyer crossed over to walk beside the church. Violin case dragging along the railings, he squelched into the night.

  When he’s in the house, thought Bridget, I’m bothered to death. Yet when he’s gone, there’s regret. She was perpetually surprised that Alois, with his undoubted gift for observation, hadn’t noticed the way it was. And how could she tell him? ‘It takes two to make the bargain’ was one of Alois’s favourite expressions. He had said as much to her own father when, outraged by their elopement, he had pursued them to England. Discussing his two incarcerations in prison for theft, once in Dublin and another time in Paris, the details of which Bridget didn’t understand, Alois spoke of the special relationship existing between the thief and the man of property. ‘They are not separable,’ he said. ‘One cannot function without the other. It takes two to make the bargain.’ Though doubtful about thieving, Bridget was convinced by his argument. She had come from the affectionate arms of her family in Ireland into the passionate arms of her husband. She naturally smiled and clung – Mr Meyer was not entirely to blame. He had proved himself a good friend to Alois. When the restaurant had failed he’d found him night employment as a waiter in the smoking room of the Adelphi Hotel. Half the time it was the left-overs from the kitchens that kept them alive. He had never increased the rent by so much as a farthing. If only his friendly gestures had stopped at Alois.

  It had started with a fatherly chuck under the chin and progressed to an all-out embracing of her person. Whenever he had the opportunity, either in the dark lobby or on the second-floor landing, Mr Meyer would seize her and lifting her from the ground hug her to him, laughing as he jiggled her up and down. He didn’t attempt to kiss her or to take liberties with her clothing. He merely struggled with her in mid-air, so to speak, chortling throughout. She couldn’t think how to break him of the habit. Had she been a child instead of a married woman she supposed she mightn’t have known what jigging up and down could lead to. Even so, there was surely an element of danger about the whole procedure. ‘Ho ho ho,’ he would cry, chin between her breasts, his face turning from ivory to scarlet until, breathing rapidly, he fell into a kind of swoon. She herself experienced a degree of sad excitement. His eyelids fluttered; at first Bridget had thought she was watching him die. His arms slackening, she would slide down him. Cheek to cheek, the aspidistra rocking on its stand, they swayed in the shadows like lovers in a ballroom.

  Just then the lights in the dance hall were extinguished. It was now almost totally dark outside. Someone had thrown a brick through the gas-mantle of the lamp on the corner and it had never been replaced. All Bridget could see was the glow of the distant city thrown up against the sky and a glimmer of light touching the pale dome of the church. In the opposite direction the street sloped endlessly downhill, out of sight, past the rows of blackened dwellings, the Brewery and the Home for Incurables, the Soap Works and the Bovril Factory, and ended at the warehouses and the docks. There wasn’t a tree growing on it from here to the river.

  4

  Alois took his brother to a public house on Lime Street. He had no sooner guided the weary traveller through the doors than he sighted a business acquaintance he was anxious to avoid. Taking Adolf by the arm and murmuring vaguely that the place was too crowded for comfort, he bundled him on to the pavement again. Adolf had caught a brief glimpse of the almost empty interior and felt there was something sinister in their hasty retreat. Drenched with rain and shivering, he allowed himself to be propelled further along the street. He was bewildered by the crowds that marched shoulder to shoulder in either direction, jostling and bumping into one another. He thought wildly that he must have stumbled into a demonstration, an uprising of some kind. At one moment he was forced into the gutter and almost run down by a brewer’s cart pulled by a horse the size of an elephant. Rosettes in its harness and water streaming off its massive haunches, the animal thundered past him. He had never seen such a horse. Trembling, he clung to Alois’s arm and was dragged into a public house on the next corner.

  Here he sat at a little round table beside a panelled partition with a screen of glass above, elaborately cut and patterned. Normally he detested spirits, but now his whole body was shuddering with cold and fatigue. His teeth chattering against the rim of the glass, he drank his measure of gin at one gulp.

  Alois began immediately to talk about himself and his ambitions for the future. He made no apologies for claiming to have been the youngest as well as the most popular under-manager ever employed by the Ritz Hotel in Paris. He knew his own worth. W
hen the band struck up and the diners rose from their tables, the women couldn’t resist bumping into him. Many a time, one lady or another, foxtrotting across the polished floor, feathers trembling in her head-dress, had glanced over the shoulder of her partner and flashed him messages with her eyes. His progress in London had been equally splendid … The people he had met … And as for Liverpool, though he said it himself, he had done so well that within six months of arriving in the city he had bought his own hotel and later a restaurant. Not for the riff-raff, of course … his customers had mainly consisted of shipping kings and cotton magnates … the real swells. But his undoubted ability at catering was as nothing compared with his flair for commerce. His superior knowledge of the market concerned couldn’t fail to build up an enterprise that would eventually be worth millions. In no time at all it would become an empire. If only he had the trifling funds necessary to launch such a venture.

  Adolf was bemused. The gin had gone to his head and he felt as though he was on the channel steamer again, rising and sinking with the waves.

  ‘In a while,’ Alois prophesied, ‘no one will think of using anything else. In my capacity as chief salesman for the whole of the North West, I’m in a position to judge. I have contacts in Bradford … in Manchester. You name the big names … I know them.’

  Adolf knew no names. He thought he had missed some important turn in the conversation. They seemed to have abandoned the frivolous area of the dance floor in favour of big business. ‘Once,’ he confided, ‘I had the idea of enclosing old banknotes in celluloid, thus making them more durable. Of course one would have to make them smaller.’