‘Where’s my tray cloth?’ asked Bridget. Neither woman could understand what he was blabbering about.
‘Aren’t you ashamed?’ admonished Mary O’Leary, gazing flabbergasted at his bare feet and naked chest. In vain Adolf tried to tell her about the noise, the running footsteps and the sudden disintegration of the solid and freshly papered wall. He said the man must still be in the house, hiding somewhere. The sounds from next door had been like an army of men on the rampage. They were probably creeping down the stairs towards them at this very moment, or possibly they were outside, surrounding the house. He shut the sitting-room door and wedged the back of a chair under the handle.
‘Don’t do that to my good chair,’ scolded Bridget, and she put it back in its place at the table.
Striding to the window Mary O’Leary inspected the street below. ‘An army!’ she scoffed. ‘Then they have dug themselves into trenches. There’s no one out there.’
Adolf waited for Alois to come home. The two women warmed themselves at the fire and dug each other in the ribs from time to time.
‘There’s no mistake,’ whispered Mary O’Leary. ‘He’s not all there.’
Alois returned in a cheerful state; something had gone well for him. He took from the pocket of his coat a chocolate soldier wrapped in silver paper and placed it on the table for the baby to find in the morning. He listened with a fatuous smile on his face to Bridget’s tale. Eyeing the scratches on his brother’s chin, he asked hopefully: ‘Have you been drinking?’ It occurred to him that Adolf might have given up his namby-pamby ways and become involved in a brawl.
‘I was hardly in a position to drink,’ snapped Adolf. ‘I spent the best part of two hours standing in the rain outside the Adelphi Hotel.’
‘Ah, well,’ Alois told him. ‘There seemed no point. They haven’t an opening for you until after Christmas.’
‘Upstairs,’ said Adolf. ‘The wall fell in. I swear it. Come with me and look.’ He jumped to his feet and caught hold of his brother’s arm.
But Alois wouldn’t budge. He said it was none of his business if the roof blew off.
Adolf’s sleep was filled with nightmares. He dreamt his father held his mother by a hank of her long brown hair – with the open palm of his hand old man Hitler struck alternately her plump shoulders and those tearstained wobbling cheeks. Adolf started up from the cushions convinced he heard the slap of flesh on flesh in the stillness of the night.
In the morning, before anyone in the house was awake, he left his couch and mounted the stairs.
The door on the third floor was ajar. From the end of the passage Adolf could see his boots placed neatly side by side on the mattress. When he entered the room he found there wasn’t a particle of dust on the rough flooring. Someone had rubbed the toecaps of his boots to a shine. There was no hole in the wall. Not the slightest tear or blemish disfigured the smooth surface of the rose-strewn paper.
16
The approach of Christmas unsettled Adolf. He had nothing to contribute. He couldn’t bear the tedious conversations centred on food and drink and seating arrangements. Alois and Meyer were involved in endless discussions concerning a goose they planned to buy. Every Friday the two men put money into a kitty towards its eventual purchase. Should they wait until Christmas Eve and pick up one cheap just as the street market was closing, or would they trust the word of the under-chef at the Adelphi who had promised to deliver a prime bird to the house on Christmas morning? What a disaster if he drank himself under the table the night before and never showed up! About the liquid refreshments they had no such worries. Kephalus wouldn’t let them down. Being better off than either of them, he was providing the wine and some cheese. Along with the doctor, a woman called Mrs Prentice had been invited. She, poor soul, would bring nothing apart from herself and four of her nine children. The festive meal would be devoured off the large scrubbed table in the cellar. ‘I’m not sitting down with Kephalus,’ cried Adolf when he heard.
‘Good,’ said Alois. ‘Let us know when you’re leaving.’
He was constructing darling Pat a little train on wheels. Adolf thought it a waste of time. Pat would only use it for a teething ring. Alois might as well hand him a block of wood and be done with it.
Not an evening passed without Meyer returning from the hotel, violin case bulging with supplies. Beaming, he spilled forth nuts and raisins and crystallised fruits and Havana cigars only a quarter smoked. Then Bridget, shrieking with pleasure and alarm, gathered up her precious materials out of harm’s way. She was making the baby a new outfit. The table was spread from morning till night with pieces of calico and Scotch wincey and flannellette. Alois moaned perpetually about the cotton threads adhering to his coat. Finally, as soon as he stepped over the threshold he took to placing his hat inside a bag fashioned out of newspaper. He said it was damaging the pile, having to attack the brim so regularly with the clothes-brush.
The last Sunday before Christmas, Meyer asked Adolf if he would care to accompany Bridget and himself on an outing into the countryside. Bridget wanted to forage for pine boughs and holly, in order to decorate the front room; Adolf could search for chestnuts. He accepted. Though he would have liked to be alone with Meyer, anything was preferable to staying home with Alois, who was confined to bed with a chill. Alois had a nasty habit of tapping imperiously with his stick on the brass rail of the bed whenever he needed something. Adolf hated being at his beck and call and detested entering that intimate room with its great lump of a matrimonial bed, the lamp throwing a greenish light on to the ceiling, the combs and hairpins and jars of baby ointments scattered across the crocheted mats on the cheap dressing table. Unused to seeing Alois without his hat and coat, he found it difficult to keep a straight face at the sight of his stout brother comparatively naked, garbed in a frayed nightshirt, his plump neck still bearing the imprint of his collar stud as he lolled feverishly among the rumpled pillows or, desperate for a smoke, scrabbled in the wardrobe for the butt of a forgotten cigar, coughing as he bent over his pot belly, his shirt rising up above his muscular milk-white legs. Stripped of his fine clothes, his watch-chain and tie-pin, his silk scarf – now dangling from a nail behind the door – Alois was infantile and fractious. When he wasn’t wheezing and whimpering he was calling out for sips of water, a clean handkerchief, a copy of the Racing Gazette. Adolf was tempted at such moments to pounce on him and stuff darling Pat’s dummy down that open, demanding throat.
Bridget had intended to leave the baby with Mary O’Leary, but Meyer insisted that the fresh air would do him good.
‘Fresh,’ she said doubtfully. ‘It’ll turn his lungs to ice entirely.’
But she trusted Meyer’s judgment. Before serving the Sunday dinner she toasted some bread at the fire and left it to harden. When she had washed up the pots on the landing, she put the bread and a container of water in a bag, along with her sewing scissors and an old motoring glove she had picked up in the street.
‘You’d think we were off to the North Pole,’ she said apologetically to Adolf, who was waiting impatiently at the window. She was worried in case Alois would set fire to the bedclothes while they were absent. ‘Is it likely, do you think?’ she asked Adolf.
He shrugged his shoulders. Though he wouldn’t like Meyer to lose his property, he wouldn’t have minded things getting hot for Alois.
They set off for Exchange Station, the two men dressed all in black and Bridget following behind, a tam o’ shanter on her red hair and a black shawl of Mary O’Leary’s bound tightly about her. Within its folds, encased from head to foot in woolly garments, the child was so closely strapped to its mother’s body that he had little space to breathe, let alone howl.
‘I think you will enjoy where we are going,’ said Meyer. ‘Sandhills and sea. The wind blowing through the pine trees. You are, after all, a country boy.’
‘My formative years were spent in the city of Passau,’ Adolf informed him. He didn’t like being taken for a yokel. ‘It wasn�
�t until I was seven that my family moved to the country.’
‘Ah,’ Meyer said. ‘That would explain your accent.’
‘I’m not ashamed of my origins,’ said Adolf stiffly.
When they reached the station and climbed into the comparative warmth of a third-class carriage, Bridget unwound darling Pat. He emerged scarlet in the face.
‘You’re right about the fresh air,’ she told Meyer admiringly. ‘Will you look at those cheeks.’ And triumphantly she stood the baby on her knee and bounced him up and down.
The train pulled out of the station and moved in near darkness through fields of mud, caught between the river and the stagnant waters of the ship canal that cut inland to Manchester and the cotton mills of Lancashire.
Adolf thought the entire venture a mistake. They could have bought several Christmas trees in the market and garlanded the house with holly from top to bottom for the price Meyer had laid out on the tickets. He stared in disgust at the warehouses and the coal-yards and the stacks of timber rotting beside the railway track. From the chimneys of numerous ramshackle factories clouds of sulphurous smoke rolled under a sky so leaden and uniformly grey it seemed to fit like a lid on the box of the earth beneath. Behind the industrial buildings and the meadows turned to rubbish tips, rows of back-to-back cottages sloped to the edge of the dock road.
‘I have rarely seen such beautiful countryside,’ he announced gloomily. ‘It’s breathtaking.’
‘I expect it’s too cold to paddle,’ said Bridget, gazing complacently at the wretched view beyond the glass.
‘All cities are alike,’ Meyer said. ‘Liverpool is no worse than any other metropolis. If you have heavy industry you have waste products and obsolete machinery. It’s merely the miserable climate of this particular part of the world that accentuates the ugliness. If the sun was shining and the trees were in leaf, we would observe it quite differently. You, Adolphus, with your understanding of the Darwinist principles of the survival of the fittest will readily comprehend the necessity for all this.’ And he pointed at the stunted bushes of elder and pussy willow that grew like clumps of tangled wire amid the sheets of corrugated iron and the sprawling mounds of brick.
‘Flowers, Pat,’ cried Bridget, staring intently at where Meyer pointed. Determined to see the crock of gold at the end of the rainbow, she held the baby up to the window and cried again: ‘See the pretty flowers, Pat.’
However, once Seaforth was reached and the limits of the docks, the track curved inwards to the coast, until finally the train puffed between fields of cabbages and potatoes and a strip of wind-blown heath bordered by hillocks of sand that dipped and rose upon a deserted beach. Then the sky lifted and white clouds rolled along the horizon.
‘America,’ said Adolf out loud, pressing his face to the carriage window and straining to catch the last glimpse of a dwindling ship that toppled on the edge of the sea. Beyond the stretch of black water lay the Atlantic ocean and the continent of Old Shatterhand himself.
‘I have always been excited by the thought of the Americas,’ remarked Meyer. ‘I would like to have taken part in the Gold Rush.’
He turned to Bridget and asked: ‘Tell me, do you think a country such as America, lacking as it must music and art and culture, is preferable to one’s own?’
Bridget was acutely uncomfortable when Meyer talked to her like this. In the past she’d given herself a headache trying to work out his questions, only to find he didn’t want any answers. It was baffling to her the way educated people like himself tormented themselves over books and paintings. You’d think wearing their eyes out reading and looking at the old things would be enough. Besides, her country was Ireland and, as everyone knew, between cutting the turf and following the gee-gees there wasn’t a particle of time for messing with pictures. It hurt her jaw to sit there looking at him intelligently when she hadn’t a thought in her head on the subject. Presently she told him: ‘I have six cousins gone to Boston. And a brother who got off the ship and died while waiting to pass through the immigration.’
‘It’s a terrible thing,’ suggested Meyer, ‘to come face to face with freedom and opportunity.’
‘It was terrible for me mammy,’ said Bridget. ‘Not knowing if he was buried decent.’
17
They alighted from the train at a small station some twelve miles from Liverpool. After the noise of the city the place was uncomfortably quiet. Apart from the ticket collector, and a donkey tied by a rope to a painted fence, there wasn’t a soul in the world save themselves.
‘Over there,’ said Meyer, indicating a bicycle shed and a line of poplars blowing in the wind, ‘there’s a lane that cuts straight through to the woods and the shore.’
He insisted on carrying the child on his back. Fashioning a sling out of the black shawl, he tied the ends about his waist. The baby laid its cheek against his coat and sucked drowsily at its woollen fist. Locking his hands behind him to support the slumped bundle of darling Pat, Meyer galloped energetically past the bicycle shed and turned the corner.
‘Isn’t he good with the children?’ said Bridget.
Stumbling over the words, Adolf told her that in his opinion men without families were often more sensitive to the young.
‘He’s a son of his own,’ Bridget said, ‘somewhere or other. And a wife living in the Midlands.’ She flew ahead, red hair blowing about her red cheeks, anxious to keep the child under surveillance.
Confused by this startling piece of information, Adolf remained rooted to the spot. He had no idea what the Midlands might be. Was it possible that the generous, milk-of-kindness Meyer had abandoned his wife in a field? Perhaps in his references to obsolete machinery and waste products he had been alluding to Frau Meyer.
‘Hurry, hurry,’ called Bridget, dodging briskly round the corner of the shed.
Deep in thought, Adolf followed. He came into a cobbled yard fronted by a public house with shuttered windows. Set to one side was a wicket gate leading to a cinder path running black as a river through a waterlogged field and a coal-yard fenced with poplars. In the distance he was in time to see Meyer and Bridget closing a second, larger gate. He shouted, but evidently they couldn’t hear him. As he watched they scurried up a slight rise, Meyer hump-backed under his burden and Bridget apparently scrambling on all fours as she endeavoured to keep up with him. Then the ground dipped and they fell out of sight.
Whistling to show he didn’t care, Adolf sauntered through the wicket gate and along the path. There were crows stalking the hills of slack behind the trees. At the sound of his slithering boots they rose with outstretched wings and circled like vultures. He was damned if he was going to break into a sprint to catch up with his sister-in-law and Meyer. Obviously it wasn’t to be one of those gentle afternoon strolls enlivened by conversation and a study of nature. They had set out too late. If only Alois hadn’t whined for his dinner – already mist was beginning to seep across the flat meadows of sodden grass.
Upon arriving at the second gate he was surprised to find it wouldn’t open. He shoved without success. It was tied to a post by wire so rusted and fiercely entwined that he was forced to clamber over the bars. Spreadeagled along the topmost slat, he had a clear view of the bleak landscape ahead. An uneven stretch of waste ground, edged by a thin avenue of pines, tapered to a blur of trees on the horizon. He heard what he took to be the dull roar of waves breaking on a far-off shore. There were no winding streams or wooded hollows, no hedgerows thick with winter berries. He couldn’t think why Meyer had imagined he would enjoy such a desolate, moaning place. Save for that line of black firs he was alone on a blasted heath under a sky so vast and stormy he was no bigger than an insect on the mossstained bars of the gate. Below him at the base of the post writhed slugs, slippery as fish among the rotting strands of grass. Shuddering, he slid to the muddy earth and cupping his hands about his mouth shouted again. This time he was answered.
Entering the crackling shadows of the pines he found Meyer examin
ing the trunk of a tree. Bridget was kneeling dishevelled on the ground, giving darling Pat sips of water out of the container.
‘There you are,’ said Meyer, as if Adolf had been deliberately elusive. ‘What kept you?’
‘I’m no good at running,’ said Adolf.
‘Always the lone wolf,’ cried Meyer jovially.
‘The gate was fast shut,’ Adolf said, growing red in the face.
‘It was bound with wire,’ suggested Meyer.
‘And yet I saw you open it. Or rather, I saw you close it.’
‘It would be more correct to say we went through it,’ said Meyer.
Adolf stared at him.
‘Wriggled,’ explained Meyer. ‘Between the bars.’
I’m not blind, thought Adolf. Nor did he think that Meyer, resembling as he had done the Hunchback of Notre Dame, could have squeezed through two slabs of butter, let alone a five-bar gate.
They continued on their way, Meyer carrying the shopping bag and Bridget the baby. At intervals Meyer stopped to gather pine cones and to consult his watch. It didn’t seem likely that they would find a holly bush within a hundred miles.
Gradually the trees became more numerous. The low booming of the sea grew louder. They stumbled at last through a forest so dense that the sky was blotted out. The child, small face shimmering like a pearl in the green dusk, clung solemn-eyed to his mother’s neck.
‘Not much further,’ said Meyer, and holding up his arm to ward off the webs of spiders slung from branch to branch he guided Bridget through the gloaming.
They emerged on to a path leading to an ancient church ringed with tall elms and bounded by a wall of crumbling stone. Adolf realised that they were still some distance from the sea. The roaring he had continually heard in his ears was no more than the wind blowing in the lofty branches of the pines.
Again Meyer consulted his watch. ‘We haven’t a great deal of time,’ he said. ‘If I remember rightly there are holly bushes behind the church.’
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