Young Adolf

by Beryl Bainbridge

  Meyer, caught off balance by the piteous cry behind him, wavered in intention. The man in the raincoat held out his hand authoritatively. Passively the woman delivered up the child. Carrying the boy under one arm, the man with the lantern made for the stairs. The room was plunged into darkness.

  Raising his head, Adolf saw it was almost dawn. He gripped the edge of the stack and pulled himself to his knees. Above the river wisps of scarlet cloud trailed across a strip of dark blue sky. Below him a procession of children, some holding babies in their arms, accompanied by five or six officials at the most, were being herded towards a black Maria parked at the corner of Scotland Road. In every doorway along the length of the street stood men and women, perfectly silent, watching the children go.

  Descending into the house, Adolf and the doctor found Meyer seated at the broken table in an attitude of dejection. He looked up as Kephalus approached and raised his hands in despair.

  ‘Ai, ai,’ he wailed.

  ‘We saved a few,’ comforted the doctor. ‘Next time it will be more.’ He patted Meyer clumsily on the shoulder.

  ‘Who were they?’ asked Adolf. ‘The men with the lanterns?’

  ‘Civil servants,’ answered Kephalus. ‘Men from the City Corporation.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Adolf. ‘There were hundreds of you and not a dozen of them. They didn’t even use the police.’

  ‘Let the minority act with enough authority,’ cried Meyer bitterly, ‘and the majority will walk like lambs to the slaughter.’

  He told Adolf it would be more prudent if he went home alone. It would do him no good to be seen in this vicinity with either the doctor or himself. The boy he had met earlier at Kephalus’ house would see him safely to Stanhope Street.

  ‘Wear this,’ said the doctor, thrusting a cap into Adolf’s hands. ‘You want to hide that cut on your brow. Ask Mary O’Leary to bathe it with salt and water.’

  The youth with curly hair escorted Adolf through the back streets of the town, indicating by signs and gestures that it was too dangerous to use the main thoroughfares. Arriving by a devious route at the bottom of St James Road, he led Adolf to the gates of the cemetery.

  Adolf stood his ground. The boy urged him forward.

  ‘No,’ said Adolf. He was exhausted enough as it was, without stumbling along the winding paths of the graveyard.

  The boy pointed across the cemetery towards the catacombs and the steep wall of granite that rose to street level. He mimed the climbing of a cliff.

  ‘Out of the question,’ snapped Adolf.

  He strode purposefully away around the curve of the railings and began to ascend the hill towards Hope Street.

  After a moment’s hesitation, the boy followed. Crossing to the opposite side of the road and glancing nervously at Adolf, he walked abreast of him up the hill.

  Such precautions, thought Adolf, were absurd. Meyer had delusions of grandeur. He had spoken as if he were plotting a revolution, and all he had done was to position a few men on a few roof-tops and ring a bicycle bell. It wasn’t only the wretched inhabitants of Argyll Street who had been cowered into submission by a handful of men acting with authority – Meyer too had bleated like a sheep at the first scent of the wolf.

  He had turned wearily into lower Stanhope Street, the boy still keeping pace with him though still on the other side of the road, when he saw several policemen approaching from the opposite direction. He faltered and looked across at the boy, who had stopped and was clearly judging the distance between himself and the advancing constables. Making up his mind, the boy shouted something to Adolf and began to run towards them.

  Adolf was convinced the boy was making a futile effort to reach the safety of Mary O’Leary’s basement. He too began to run desperately in the same direction, though he had no such conviction. He argued to himself that one could hardly be arrested for running at a policeman. If he failed to reach the basement in time and they accosted him, he would denounce the boy and say he was chasing him because he was a pick-pocket. Panting, various fantasies rushing through his mind, the blue uniforms looming closer, he pursued the youth and was startled to find that he had swerved down an alleyway and they were no longer on a collision course with the forces of law and order.

  ‘Hurry, hurry,’ shouted the boy, who had now stopped at the base of a stunted tree that grew beside a brick wall. Urging Adolf to climb on to a withered branch, he pushed and heaved him aloft.

  Stubbornly Adolf clung to the tree and refused to go further. He hadn’t an ounce of strength left in his body. The blast of a policeman’s whistle sounded from beyond the alleyway. Springing for the wall, he scrambled over the top and dropped into a back-yard. The boy landed lightly as a cat beside him and, dragging him by brute force towards a door, opened it and thrust him inside.

  There, sitting astride his bicycle in a dimly lit passage, was the man in golfing shoes, and beyond him, his hand on the rail of the stairs, waited Meyer. A tremendous hammering began on the front door.

  ‘Take him upstairs,’ said Meyer to the man on the bicycle.

  ‘It’s no use,’ protested Adolf. ‘I prefer to give myself up. I have done no wrong.’

  ‘Your papers are not in order,’ said Meyer curtly. ‘Go with Michael Murphy and he will show you how easy it is to reach home safely. Remember only to close the door behind you. You will be in your bed before five minutes is up, I promise you.’

  Michael Murphy ran ahead of Adolf up the stairs. On the second landing they passed a woman of frightening pallor sitting on a deck chair nursing a coal-black baby. The woman nodded and wished them good morning. She seemed oblivious both of their villainous appearance and of the noise issuing from the hall below. The English, thought Adolf, are a nation of eccentrics and fearfully dangerous. No wonder they ruled an empire.

  Reaching the third floor, Michael Murphy opened a door at the end of the passage. The room faced on to the dance hall opposite.

  ‘I’m not climbing along window-ledges,’ cried Adolf passionately.

  The next moment Michael Murphy laid violent hands upon him. He was turned to the wall and hurled towards it. He lifted up his arms to shield his face. There was a sound of paper ripping and then he was lying across the mattress in Meyer’s top room.

  Remembering to close the door after him, he crept down the stairs to the second floor. Without bothering to remove his cap or his coat he flung himself on to the couch and fell instantly asleep.

  27

  Bridget decided to take the baby to the park on Sunday afternoon for an airing. Hearing the pram bumping down the steps, Mary O’Leary poked her head round the basement door and asked: ‘Are you going to visit your cousin?’

  ‘I’m away to look at the ducks. I’ll go out of my mind if I stay cooped up there much longer.’

  ‘I’ll walk with you,’ said Mary O’Leary. ‘There’s someone I have to see.’ She hadn’t a dinner to prepare. Not today. Meyer was off his food.

  Bridget walked up and down the pavement while Mary O’Leary stoked the fire. Across the road a well-dressed man had stopped to read a notice attached to the railings of the church.

  ‘The more I think about it,’ said Bridget, as they walked up the Boulevard against a bitterly blowing wind, ‘the more I’m inclined to swallow my pride. I’ve nothing to lose.’ She was talking as usual about writing to her mother in Ireland and suggesting that bygones be bygones.

  Mary O’Leary, who had taken part in this conversation many times before and never tired of it, agreed she hadn’t. It seemed to her a miraculous thing to have a mother, even one not on speaking terms.

  ‘I’ve darling Pat to consider,’ said Bridget. ‘Alois isn’t a man to rely on. He studies young Adolf more than me. I never saw a penny of Adolf’s wages yesterday and by the look of him this morning he lost the lot during the night.’

  ‘He was out gambling, was he?’ asked Mary O’Leary.

  ‘He was out somewhere, that’s for sure. You should see the state
of him. I’d counted on putting a few coppers aside for a rainy day. Alois could be off into the blue tomorrow and then what would I do?’

  ‘Suffer and wait,’ said Mary O’Leary. ‘That’s all we’re good for.’

  They crossed the road and went through the ornamental gates into the park. It was too cold for crowds.

  ‘I should have kept on with me singing lessons,’ fretted Bridget, gazing discontentedly at the brutally pruned rose bushes spaced at intervals along the borders of the gravel path. ‘When I was sixteen a gentleman in Dublin said I had perfect pitch.’ She felt she’d been cut back in her prime and would never flower again.

  ‘I was good with the needle,’ recollected Mary O’Leary. ‘As a girl. I could have gone for a milliner.’

  ‘You told me,’ said Bridget, and she tried not to look at the destroyed ribbons swinging from the remnants of Mary O’Leary’s bonnet.

  They discussed Mrs Prentice’s Elsie and a woman who’d been caught putting a sliver of glass in her husband’s scouse and whether Dr Kephalus had a woman or not. It would be like keeping company with an ashtray. Mary O’Leary had once observed him going into that shop in Brownlow Hill, the one selling books wrapped in brown paper covers. Bridget said she had no doubt Alois was a regular customer at the same counter. They were all brutes. Neither of them mentioned Meyer in this connection.

  When they had walked twice around the railings of the pond, Mary O’Leary said she’d be off. She preferred streets to parks. It made her feel lonely with only pieces of grass and bits of trees to look at.

  When she had gone Bridget sat down on a wooden bench and with a twig poked back the wodge of newspaper that had worked free from the gaping sole of her boot. Several boys ran past, rolling old bicycle wheels along the path. Approaching her from the other side of the pond, and cutting directly across the grass, was a tall gentleman comfortably clothed against the weather. When he was only a few yards from her she thought it was the same man she had seen outside the church.

  Tipping his hat to her, he asked: ‘Have you by any chance seen a lady in a brown fur coat pass this way?’

  ‘I’ve not,’ said Bridget. ‘But then I’ve not been looking.’ She wasn’t a fool. She looked across the expanse of park. There wasn’t anybody in sight. ‘I’m a respectable married woman,’ she said, and rising she let the brake off the pram.

  ‘Let me take you into my confidence,’ said the man hurriedly, and he removed his hat altogether and stood there, twirling it round and round by the brim. ‘I have reason to believe we have mutual friends. I am anxious to get in touch with them. Would I be right in saying your husband is a man with exceptionally blue eyes?’

  Bridget wasn’t sure what to do for the best. He looked a gentleman, but then one could never tell. She thought she detected the faintest hint of brogue in his speech. Alois was always so secretive. He said he was out selling his old razors but he could be up to anything. She didn’t want to land him in trouble. She began to walk away, pulling the pram behind her.

  ‘Wait,’ called the man. ‘Please.’

  He wasn’t a bad-looking fellow. He had blue eyes himself and a well-trimmed beard.

  ‘The person I’m referring to,’ he said, ‘is a devoted husband and son. I have seen him going into a certain hotel in the town. I’m very anxious to contact him.’

  ‘Well, I can’t help you,’ said Bridget. ‘My husband is six-foot tall, dark as the ace of spades and he doesn’t like me talking to strangers.’

  Swinging the pram round she wheeled it rapidly towards the gates. When she looked back over her shoulder the man hadn’t moved.

  28

  Adolf slept for fifteen hours and woke to find himself on the floor behind the sofa. Rising, he surprised Alois and Bridget at their supper.

  ‘He’s returned to the land of the living,’ cried Alois, without bitterness.

  Adolf thought Meyer must have had a word with him.

  When he saw his reflection in the upstairs mirror it was apparent that for once Alois had behaved sensibly an removing him from the couch to the floor. His coat was torn at the elbow and hem and covered in a mixture of soot and dust, as were his hands and face. He wouldn’t have looked out of place down a coal mine. Worse, he discovered a score of insect bites that extended over his chest and arms. When he had scrubbed himself clean he carried his coat and shirt downstairs and dropped them on the landing beside the aspidistra. Later he would take them into the back yard and flap them about in the air.

  ‘Don’t tell me you’ve lost your shirt?’ said Bridget, seeing the bare throat beneath his jacket.

  ‘I need a pair of scissors,’ he said. ‘I’m unable to take off this hat.’

  Bridget was amused at having to cut the cap from his head. She stopped smiling when she saw the reason for it.

  ‘Whatever was Mr Meyer thinking of?’ she scolded.

  Fetching a bowl of warm water she added a dash of vinegar and with a scrap of cloth began to sponge the congealed blood from his forehead.

  ‘You certainly had a night on the town,’ said Alois admiringly. ‘It must have been hard work to keep pace with you.’

  Adolf scratched himself and said nothing. The cut wasn’t deep, but he had a lump the size of a half-crown above his left eyebrow.

  ‘You best wash your hair,’ Bridget told him. ‘You smell like a chimney sweep.’

  Adolf asked if he could have a word with Alois in private. Grinning, Alois followed him on to the landing. When shown the insect bites he smiled more broadly than ever.

  ‘Next time,’ he said, ‘you want to be more careful which little lady’s bed you step into.’

  Nauseated by the implication, Adolf protested that he had spent the entire night on his feet. ‘I need a bath in Lysol. And my clothes disinfected.’

  ‘This isn’t a Salvation. Army hostel,’ shouted Alois, growing annoyed.

  Adolf went unhappily up the stairs to the bathroom. Taking off his trousers and jacket he attempted to open the door set with coloured glass. He was unsuccessful; it had been nailed into place. Contenting himself with the thought that if he had succeeded his trousers would undoubtedly have blown into the yard below, he shook his clothes over the ancient bath. Then he washed his hair and dressed again.

  When he returned to the living room, Bridget sat him at the table and brought a comb through from the bedroom. Since his arrival in England his hair had grown.

  ‘You can’t go to work with that old lump showing,’ she said. ‘They’ll think you’re a fighting man.’

  Parting his hair at the side she began gently to comb a section of it downwards so that it concealed the cut on his forehead.

  ‘You may be wondering,’ said Adolf, ‘why I haven’t given you my wages?’

  ‘I did wonder, yes,’ said Alois dryly.

  ‘I’ve been thinking things over,’ Adolf told him. ‘You’ve been very generous with me, very patient. I’m not an easy person to live with.’

  Alois looked at him suspiciously – he seemed to be sincere.

  ‘I was telling the truth,’ continued Adolf, ‘when I said Angela offered me the money you sent her. I didn’t ask, believe me. You know Angela. She was never one for travelling, and as things stood it seemed the best way out. But now I think I ought to make a clean breast of it to the authorities.’

  ‘I’d rather you didn’t go into details,’ said Alois hastily. ‘It’s none of my business, though I could give you a word of warning. Whenever I made a clean breast of things I found myself in jail. Perhaps in my case they were justified.’

  ‘It takes two to make the bargain,’ murmured Adolf.

  ‘Quite so,’ said Alois. ‘I had hoped that after steady employment at the Adelphi you might want to come into the razor business.’ He didn’t believe what he was saying but felt it was expected of him. He was sure his brother, if engaged as a salesman, would either lose his box of samples or inadvertently slit a prospective buyer’s throat.

  ‘I don’t think it woul
d suit me,’ said Adolf. ‘But you see my difficulty. I had intended to give you every penny of my wages. But I’ll need the money for the ticket, won’t I?’

  ‘What’s he saying?’ asked Bridget.

  ‘He’s not going to give us any money,’ said Alois bluntly. It would serve no purpose to insist on Adolf’s handing over a proportion of his wages for food. In the long run it would be cheaper to subsidise him. In his head he worked out that on Adolf’s present rate of pay it would take several months for him to save the sum required.

  ‘Why isn’t he going to give you any money?’ asked Bridget grimly. She flung the comb down on to the table.

  ‘He’s going back to Austria.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Bridget, trying hard to conceal her delight. ‘And he’s never even been to New Brighton.’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking of Austria,’ Adolf said. ‘I had in mind somewhere further off.’ He didn’t say how much further.

  ‘Not go home?’

  Alois looked at him in astonishment. It was one thing to scrape the money together for the fare to Linz, quite another to talk of distant regions of the earth. He was damned if he was going to let Adolf live at his expense if he was thinking in terms of South America.

  ‘You forget,’ Adolf told him. ‘I have no home. Not since Mother died.’ His eyes filled with water as he fought to restrain himself from scratching a spot on his neck. He had a bite under the ear that was crying out for attention.

  ‘What the devil’s up with you now?’ asked Alois.

  ‘I have my feelings,’ said Adolf between clenched teeth.

  ‘Sheer bloody sentimentality,’ muttered Alois.

  Bridget remarked that it was a pity Adolf was leaving so soon. She hoped she sounded regretful. Already she was thinking how much it would cost to buy a few yards of fabric to recover the couch. She’d burn the old one or make it into dusters.

  ‘He’ll probably be here for months,’ remarked Alois bleakly. ‘Possibly years.’