Young Adolf

by Beryl Bainbridge

  Eagerly Bridget trotted forward, the baby bobbing on her hip.

  Meyer stood on the path, shoulders slumped; a grey cobweb drifted from the brim of his black felt hat. He stared wearily in the direction of the unseen road masked by the high wall and the ragged elms.

  ‘You are tired,’ said Adolf. ‘Stay here and rest. I’ll accompany Bridget.’

  ‘On the contrary,’ said Meyer selflessly. ‘It is you who must stay here. I’ll attend to Frau Hitler. You explore the church. There are many interesting architectural features. It was built in the twelfth century.’ Standing at Adolf’s elbow he indicated the squat Norman tower.

  ‘Come with me,’ urged Adolf. ‘One cannot always be at the beck and call of women.’

  ‘True,’ murmured Meyer. ‘But then I am in possession of the scissors.’

  ‘I’ll take them to her,’ said Adolf, and he held out his hand for the shopping bag.

  ‘You are not suitably equipped for hacking wood,’ pointed out Meyer. ‘You have no gloves.’ It seemed he was determined to sacrifice himself.

  At that instant a man’s head, wearing a checked cap and trailing a strip of white cloth like a pig-tail, floated horizontally and disembodied above the churchyard wall. As Adolf gazed open-mouthed at this apparition, the head drew level with a wooden gate and he saw a man on a bicycle flash past, his two-tone golfing shoes whirling round and round as he pedalled furiously down the lane. Meyer, who was now walking away, didn’t appear to have noticed anything out of the ordinary. Before Adolf had time to call out, the checked cap had vanished altogether and Meyer was swallowed up among the trees.

  18

  Adolf spent a depressing ten minutes trying to gain entrance to the church. It wasn’t his day for opening doors or gates. Testily he kicked at the massive oval of wood studded with nails. Recoiling, he curled his stubbed toes within his boot and hopped up and down, cursing. The pain was terrible. Removing his boot he fingered his worn sock and was relieved to find he wasn’t bleeding. Had he known how to reach the station he would have left there and then. The foolish whims of his sister-in-law were none of his business. Obviously Meyer was too weak and sentimental to order her to forage for her own Christmas greenery. Let them shop together like the peasants they undoubtedly were. Thoroughly irritated by Meyer’s indiscriminate attentions to others, he stumbled from the porch, boot in hand, and hobbled round the back of the church. He distinctly heard voices and the breaking of twigs. Coming to a gap in the thick hedge of briars he fought his way into the forest beyond. He didn’t wish Bridget and Meyer to wander so far that he would lose touch with them entirely.

  He had only travelled a short distance when he became aware of someone behind him, blundering through the undergrowth. He spun round and listened. For a moment he thought he glimpsed the white blob of Pat’s woollen bonnet, but it was only a bird’s feather drifting from the darkness above. Cautiously he walked on. Again he heard those unmistakable sounds of pursuit. Careless of the branches that plucked his hair and tore at his clothing, he began to run deeper into the woods. He didn’t know why he was so afraid. Once he glanced over his shoulder and saw, fragmented by trees, the figure of the man on the bicycle, bare-headed now, the strip of cloth dangling over one ear as, fleet-footed as an Ogellalah Indian, he tracked him through the pines.

  Suddenly the ground sloped upwards. A broken bough, pointed like a spear, jabbed Adolf in the ribs. Grunting, he reached the edge of the rise and toppled into a hollow lined with blown sand and pine-needles. With his last ounce of strength he raised one arm and lobbed his boot blindly into the trees. A patch of white sky rocked above him as the branches shifted in the wind. There was no escape. Defenceless, he awaited the stranger’s approach.

  ‘My dear boy,’ exclaimed Meyer, looking down at him with an expression of concern, ‘have you injured yourself?’

  ‘I have no need of self-inflicted wounds,’ said Adolf, struggling to regain his composure. ‘Not when everyone else is determined to harm me. I am perpetually stalked by unknown enemies.’

  ‘What has happened to your shoe?’ said Meyer.

  ‘I have suffered enough,’ Adolf cried. ‘They are everywhere. On boats, beside railway tracks, outside picture houses, smiling above beards. Just now there was another with a bandage about his head.’

  ‘Another what?’ asked Meyer, bewildered.

  ‘Another man,’ Adolf said. ‘Less than a week ago he leapt through the roses in the top room of your house.’

  ‘Through the roses—’

  ‘I’m distraught,’ admitted Adolf. ‘But I’m not stupid. I can put two and two together.’

  Meyer lowered himself on to the rim of the slope and stared thoughtfully at the ground. ‘You are telling me a bearded man wearing a bandage jumped through some flowers—’

  ‘No,’ said Adolf. ‘He was clean-shaven. He came through the wall. Later he wore your golfing shoes, the ones I saw in the wardrobe. Brown and white—’

  ‘Brown and white?’ repeated Meyer. He flung up his arms in despair. ‘Do I look like a man who plays golf?’

  ‘Be that as it may,’ said Adolf darkly, ‘first he was on a bicycle and then he was on foot.’

  ‘He came through the wall on a bicycle?’ Meyer said.

  Furious at this evasive conversation, Adolf attempted to stand up. His legs were so weak he felt they would snap under his weight. He succeeded merely in crouching on all fours like a dog.

  ‘Lie down,’ advised Meyer. ‘Lie down and breathe deeply.’

  Adolf rolled sideways and lay with his knees drawn up to his chest.

  Presently he murmured: ‘There are several men following me. Some are bearded, some are not. There was a man in the square whom I thought I recognised. I spoke to him, imagining we had met before. It may be he was on the channel steamer. He stole my cap.’

  ‘Who has stolen your boot?’ demanded Meyer.

  ‘No one,’ said Adolf. ‘My boot is only mislaid.’

  After some moments of silence, Meyer asked: ‘Why are all these men following you? Are you in trouble with the police?’

  ‘Certainly not,’ protested Adolf. ‘It is Alois who has criminal tendencies, not I.’ He sat up and shook the sand from his hair. ‘I am the innocent victim of a failure in postal communications.’ It was unmanly of him, he felt, to confide in Meyer, but he could no longer keep his fears to himself. Assuming it was curiosity and not pity that caused the older man to watch him so attentively, he endeavoured to explain his position. ‘When I first left Linz for Vienna I notified the authorities of my new address. I realised I would soon be eligible for military service—’

  ‘Ah! Now I understand,’ said Meyer, with irritating perception.

  ‘Allow me to finish,’ cried Adolf. ‘You are jumping to conclusions. In giving my change of address I was acting with the utmost correctness. Unfortunately I didn’t have the same address for very long, or any other address for that matter. Circumstances forced me to spend the next few years wandering the city like a tramp. I can’t be blamed.’

  ‘My dear Adolphus,’ Meyer said. ‘It is obvious to me that your dreadful experiences in Vienna have temporarily affected your natural good sense. If the authorities pursued every young man who avoided military service, they would bankrupt themselves in no time. In any event they would be unlikely to follow you on bicycles.’

  ‘I avoided nothing,’ shouted Adolf. ‘I received no letter or documents. The postman doesn’t deliver mail to doss houses or park benches.’ In his annoyance he raked the ground with his fingers and sent a shower of sand into one eye. ‘Damn and blast,’ he moaned.

  ‘Quite,’ said Meyer soothingly. ‘It wasn’t your fault. I’m convinced your particular state of mind primarily arises from frustration. You are essentially an artist and by that I do not necessarily mean you are a painter. Such a temperament can be expressed in many activities.’

  Eyes painfully watering, Adolf blinked up at him. Though gratified by Meyer’s recognition of his
artistic abilities, he still smouldered under the earlier implication that he was a coward.

  ‘At the moment,’ continued Meyer, ‘you are poisoned – one might almost say opulently swollen – by creative urges that have no outlet.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Adolf. He looked doubtfully at his thin wrists protruding from the sleeves of his second-hand coat.

  ‘What is more,’ Meyer said, ‘you can’t be blamed for imagining you were being hunted. Had I known you were quite so distressed I would have taken you into my confidence. The man with the bandage round his head is an acquaintance of Kephalus and myself. His name is Michael Murphy. He can have no possible interest in you. Indeed it is he who is being followed.’

  ‘By whom?’ asked Adolf. ‘And for what reason?’

  ‘It is a private matter. Between Mr Murphy and the police. I can say no more.’

  Adolf experienced a profound sense of relief. Though it was already late afternoon and the sky was the colour of ashes, he could have sworn he felt the warmth of the sun on his neck. He smiled broadly. But for inhibitions he would, out of sheer gratitude, have embraced Meyer on both cheeks.

  ‘And those others,’ he enquired. ‘The ones with beards. Are they also wanted by the police?’

  ‘Now there,’ replied Meyer regretfully, ‘I cannot help you. I have no knowledge of any persons, bearded or otherwise, who may be following you.’ The subject seemed closed. He was anxious to return and find Bridget.

  Thinking it over, Adolf comforted himself with the thought that there could be no smoke without fire. If Meyer consorted with criminals then his house was bound to be under surveillance. It was Meyer who was being watched, not himself.

  They wasted some time looking for the thrown-away boot.

  Finally Meyer insisted that the search should be abandoned: the evening mist would be bad for the child’s chest.

  When eventually they struggled through the hedge into the churchyard, Adolf was not surprised to discover that Bridget had been unsuccessful in her hunt for holly bushes. She too was probably acquainted with the wounded Michael Murphy. Though it would hardly keep the body and soul of a sparrow together, he had seen her secrete three portions of toast inside her shopping bag before leaving the house. He passed no moral judgments on either Murphy or his fellow conspirators. He felt equal contempt for the underdog and the forces of law and order. It amused him, however, to think of Alois, so desperately courting respectability, unknowingly enmeshed in a tangle of shady-dealings and secret intrigues. Every time he opened his pigskin suitcase full of those damnable razor blades someone, God willing, was loitering in a doorway taking down notes in shorthand or watching him through binoculars.

  They filed out of the churchyard and into the road.

  Adolf offered to carry darling Pat to the station. Bridget made various comical references to his stockinged foot. She said he was a terrible man for losing things and she’d never forgive him if he misplaced the baby.

  With Pat safely snuggled against his breast, Adolf wondered what Meyer had in mind when he had hinted that there were many outlets for a creative personality. Architecture was out of the question. He didn’t have sufficient grades to sit for entrance to the university. It was surely too late for him to learn an instrument. He didn’t have the stomach to be a doctor. Perhaps dealing with people was his forte – after all he had been someone of influence among the occupants of the various homes for the destitute in which he had stayed.

  It was pleasant to hold the warm child in his arms. Pat’s moist, accepting smile brought tears to his eyes. His anxieties over the last few weeks had affected him more than he had realised – now, freed from demons, he was filled with emotion. The fields which earlier had stretched drably to the horizon now appeared appropriately seasonal and but for the absence of snow worthy of a painting by Breughel. He was astonished at the tenderness evoked by the sight of Bridget’s shoulders hunched in her shabby coat as she marched gamely ahead; a bunch of her hair, escaping from beneath the knitted tam o’ shanter, rippled like a flag in the darkening lane. He was homesick; yet he had no home to go to. All the way to the railway station he held the shawl carefully at an angle so as to screen the baby from the damp night air. He was disproportionately hurt when Bridget failed to remark that he too was good with children.

  19

  Two days before Christmas, while Bridget was out shopping, Adolf took a square of card from the inside of a biscuit tin and propping Pat in his high chair began to draw him. He was delighted with his efforts. He felt that the sketch had a delicacy of line totally in accord with its subject. The dimple on the right cheek could have been more subtle, but there was something little short of miraculous in the shading of the left eyelid. When the drawing was finished Adolf placed it inside a newspaper and hid it under the couch, together with a book he intended giving to Meyer. The book was a life of Mozart, bound in leather. Adolf had procured it from the reading room of the public library. Taking two volumes from the shelves he had sat down at the table provided, making sure that he cleared his throat loudly enough for the official behind the desk to notice him. Half an hour later he had slipped one book inside his coat and secured it under his armpit. Pushing back his chair, he had made a fearful racket in standing up and returning the remaining volume to the shelf. He could tell by the pinched look on the librarian’s face as he went out of the door that he was glad to see the back of him.

  All the way to Stanhope Street he walked with his arms held tightly to his sides like a military man. Only when he was safe indoors – and even then he turned his back on the windows overlooking the dance hall – did he remove his overcoat. He wasn’t sure what to do about a present for Alois. He had tried to perfect the piece of metal intended as a gramophone handle, but he lacked the tool needed to cut the thread correctly. Besides, he didn’t want to provoke Alois who, unwrapping such a gift, might possibly receive it in a less than Christian spirit and use it for a purpose not actually meant. He didn’t want to be brained for his trouble. As an afterthought, he retrieved the drawing from under the couch and wrote across one corner: ‘To Bridget and Alois Hitler, with regards from A. Hitler. Liverpool. December, 1912.’

  At midday on Christmas Eve he was called downstairs to the basement and put to work scraping potatoes and chopping the brown bits out of the brussels sprouts. Darling Pat, looking like a little old man at the barber’s, a towel tucked about his fat neck, sat in a chair pulled to the table, thwacking with a wooden spoon at links of sausages coiled on a newspaper. There were basins overflowing with forcemeat, with chestnut stuffing, with jellies not yet set. A jug of buttermilk stood amid lemon peel and chicken livers and lumps of dripping. Each time Pat jabbed downwards with his spoon a quantity of shallots and several damp cigars rolled back and forth across the table. But for the unhygienic conditions and the abandoned way in which Mary O’Leary manned the sink, bailing water as if the basement was listing, the amount of provisions would not have disgraced the kitchens of the Adelphi Hotel. The air was thick with the mingled smells of soap and pastry, blood and tangerines. In the absence of holly, Bridget had secured paper chains from the lamp above the table to the clothes rack over the range. So intense was the heat and so great the activity that at regular intervals the loops broke from their moorings and one strand or another whipped across the table and trailed on the floor. ‘It’s not for me,’ Bridget confided whenever this disaster occurred. ‘It’s Mrs Prentice’s children I’m thinking of, poor souls.’ And standing on a rickety chair she attached the paper ends once more, now bearing droplets of buttermilk or globs of stuffing and stained brown from the smear of chicken livers.

  Adolf resented the way the women treated him as incompetent. Hadn’t he cooked the meals for his sister Paula when his mother was ill? Numerous times Bridget or Mary O’Leary sent him out on trivial errands – to buy a twist of salt, to have the knives sharpened, to see if the publican over the road would lend them empty barrels for the children to sit on – but when the mome
nt came to fetch home the piece of ham roasting in the baker’s oven Mary O’Leary threw a shawl over her bonnet and prepared to go herself. She spoke to Bridget across him, as though he wasn’t there. ‘He’ll only break a leg,’ she said. ‘Or lose the dish, or fall down a manhole.’ He sulked in a corner and stared gloomily at the Christmas tree propped in a bucket against the wall, its branches threaded with tinsel and hung about with chocolate pennies wrapped in silver paper.

  ‘Will you stop scrowling,’ said Bridget firmly. ‘You’ll turn the milk.’

  ‘Mary O’Leary returned with the ham and with Mrs Prentice, who wore a man’s cap and an old flannel shirt over layers of bedraggled skirts. Against all odds she was apparently cheerful, for upon being introduced to Adolf she squeezed his arm familiarly and bellowed with laughter. When she saw the food on the table she pressed her hand to her shapeless breast as if her heart might fall out with the shock.

  ‘Jesus!’ she cried. ‘You’se gone overboard and no mistake.’

  ‘There’s things for the children,’ Bridget said. ‘Little things, mind. Nothing to write home about.’ She had made a rag doll for the youngest girl and hemmed a handkerchief for each of the others – though God knows, judging by the usual state of the children, they’d never understand what they were for. It had been Meyer’s idea to invite Mrs Prentice. As he was providing most of the food, Bridget wasn’t in a position to argue. She fully intended to scrub darling Pat from head to foot with carbolic soap, once the party was over.

  ‘God will bless you,’ promised Mrs Prentice, wiping away a happy tear with the ragged cuff of her sleeve. She wasn’t stopping; she was off to see her Elsie in Chatham Street. Elsie was expecting again and low in spirits. Every time she coughed she thought her whole caboodle was dropping out. She wouldn’t forget to bring the cards. She spoke in such a strange tongue and screwed her face up to such an extent that Adolf wondered if she were sane. When she was leaving she squeezed his arm again and shouted in a voice like a derisive trumpet: ‘Tarra, lamb-chop.’