Our Endless Numbered Days: A Novel

by Claire Fuller

  Downstairs, in the sitting room, Ute stood with her back to the windows, talking about me.

  “. . . a very difficult time,” she said before she trailed off, and all heads turned at once.

  A man, tall and good-looking, stood up.

  “Oh, Peggy, you didn’t get changed,” said Ute.

  “The skirt doesn’t fit me. Nothing fits me any more,” I said, looking at the girl on the sofa. Her hair was unexpectedly brown and curly; I wondered if she’d had a permanent wave. Her legs, in tan tights, were pressed together, knees pointing the other way to her body, which she held upright on the edge of the seat. She smiled at me, her mouth splitting her face in two, revealing the pink of top and bottom gums, and then her lips closed as if she were trying to restrain her escaping teeth. Smoothing her skirt over her bottom, Becky half rose but thought better of it and sat back down.

  “It’s nice to see you again, Peggy,” said the man.

  He seemed about to step forward and shake my hand. I pulled at the hair over my ear and stayed near the door.

  “Peggy, this is Michael,” said Ute. “Do you remember Michael? One of your father’s . . .” I knew that Ute was about to say “friends,” but she trailed off with a weak “group.”

  “A survivalist?” I said, and shook my head. I couldn’t place him; I tried to imagine him in black and white, with a beard, but I was sure he wasn’t in the photograph I had found that morning.

  “A Retreater,” he said, and gave an embarrassed laugh. “But that was a long time ago.”

  “Please, sit down, Michael,” Ute said. “Oskar, perhaps you would put the kettle on and make us tea.”

  He was standing by the bureau, but she didn’t look at him when she spoke. He walked stiffly from the room. Michael sat on a chair in front of the windows and Ute sat opposite Becky. I remained standing, ready to bolt.

  “Your mother is looking very happy,” said Michael. “She was telling us she’s started playing the piano again.”

  Ute dipped her head.

  “I was just asking her if you or Oskar played.”

  “Not really,” I said. We were all quiet, listening to the rumble of the kettle coming from the kitchen. I decided it was safe to sit at the other end of the sofa from Becky. I wanted to stare at her, soak up the image of her face and replace the outdated one I had stored inside for nine years.

  At last Michael spoke. “It must have been very odd to come back and find you have a brother you knew nothing about.”

  “Everything’s odd about being home,” I said. “I thought you were all dead.”

  “Oh,” said Becky. “We all thought you were dead.”

  And we were silent again, while Becky’s mouth flashed white and pink with embarrassment.

  “We visited the cemetery,” I said to fill the gap.

  “You’re going to have a funeral?” Michael said to Ute. The words seemed to come out much faster and louder than he expected.

  Ute looked at me, as surprised as Michael.

  He hesitated, started and stopped twice before he said, “There’s something I’ve been wanting to say. I’m ashamed I once counted James as one of my friends. That we all did. As far as I was concerned, all that survivalist stuff was only talk, bravado, boys playing games . . .”

  Michael trailed off as Oskar came in with the tray laden with the best teapot, the bone china cups and saucers from Germany with the ivy pattern, and the Apfelkuchen that Ute had set out earlier. He slammed the tray down, so the china tinkled and tea slopped out of the pot, and then he sat on the floor with his back to the bureau. Michael reached forward and grabbed at a camera that was on the corner of the coffee table, wiping off a few drops of spilled tea onto his trousers. The camera reminded me of the man in the grounds of the hospital.

  “Speaking for myself, I don’t know if I could go to James’s funeral,” Michael continued.

  Perhaps I should have stopped him and told him that I hadn’t meant we would be having a funeral, but I didn’t.

  “The others of course might feel differently, not that I’m in touch with many of them.” He looked down at the camera and twisted the lens so that it moved in and out.

  “Oliver Hannington,” said Ute. The words came out of the blue; they weren’t even a question.

  Michael looked up sharply.

  “I mean, do you still know Oliver?” she said more lightly.

  “I haven’t heard from him for years,” Michael said. “I’m pretty sure he went back to the States after James disappeared. He didn’t join in the search for Peggy and James in France; I have a vague recollection of him tying one of those yellow ribbons on the trees in the front garden. He’s probably hiding in a bunker with a stash of guns, although I always thought Oliver was only in it for the attention.” Michael lifted the camera up to his face, focusing on the piano at the other end of the room. “Playing games with us all,” he said, and in a smooth, practised motion he turned his body and the camera toward me and clicked.

  I flinched as if he had slapped me.

  “Sorry,” said Michael, dropping the camera back into his lap. I understood then why he wasn’t in the photograph of the survivalists.

  “Tea,” said Ute. “Becky, would you like some tea?” She leaned forward and poured out five cups.

  “Any news from the police on that wild man? Have they caught him yet?” said Michael.

  Watching him take a sip of milky tea made my stomach flip.

  “They are meant to be telephoning today,” said Ute.

  “He wasn’t a wild man,” I said at the same time.

  “Let’s hope they have good news, so we can all sleep a little sounder,” said Michael.

  “Is he here then, in Highgate?” said Becky, sitting up straighter.

  “No, no, of course not,” said Ute.

  “He wasn’t a wild man,” I repeated. “He was my lover.”

  All movement in the room stopped: Becky with a lump of cake in her cheek, Michael with his teacup halfway to his mouth, and Ute. Ute was looking straight at me and I saw her eyebrows lower, her open mouth close, and her eyes move down over my chest and come to rest on my stomach. Something changed in her face—understanding, realization—as I knew something was changing in mine.

  It seemed that everyone was still for minutes, but eventually Becky said, “You should have some cake, Peggy. It’s lovely.”

  “Peggy has got a bit of an upset stomach today,” said Ute.

  Becky looked at me while she took another bite of Apfelkuchen. “I sold another story, the one about the King of the Mussels, so there’ll be buns for tea,” she said with her mouth full, and we both laughed. There were crumbs of cake in her teeth, but I didn’t mind; instead I felt a burst of hopefulness, as if perhaps sometime in the future we might be friends again.

  When Michael and Becky had left, the three of us sat down in a row on the sofa with Ute in the middle.

  “When your brother was born,” Ute said, “I was on my own. I telephoned the hospital and called for a taxi. I was very frightened. I did not know what to do—the baby was coming at any moment.”

  “Mum,” complained Oskar, and rolled his eyes.

  “I open the bedroom window and call to an old man walking down the street. He takes a long time to look around him and find who is shouting. ‘Ich habe ein Baby!’ I yell, and only when another contraction has passed do I realize I have been calling to him in German. Finally he understands, but he takes a long time to get into the house because all the doors are locked for reason of security, and he has to break a window. So much glass smashed in this house.” Ute leaned back on the sofa, remembering. “By the time the man came to the bedroom, my little Oskar had arrived already. Do you know why I name him that?”

  “It was the old man’s name,” Oskar said, as if he had heard this story a million times before. He had taken my father’s leaving note out of his pocket—the pieces taped back together—and was holding it in his hands.

  “No, that is not co
rrect,” said Ute. “There have been too many lies. It was Oliver Hannington’s middle name.”

  My brother and I stared at her, confused.

  “I was angry with James for leaving, for taking Peggy, for not coming back, for me having the baby all by myself. So I call the baby Oskar.”

  “After Oliver Hannington?” I said, trying to make things clearer in my head.

  “Yes, Oliver Oscar Hannington,” she said. And then to my brother, “He was your father’s friend . . .” She paused, choosing her words with precision. “. . . and mine. When I became pregnant, I did not know if the father was Oliver or James. I told your father that, on the telephone from Germany. This is why he left.”

  I remembered how I had often thought Oliver Hannington was a dangerous influence on my father, but now it seemed I had been worrying about the wrong parent.

  “I should have kept quiet,” Ute continued. “Of course, as soon as you were born I could tell James was your father. But by then it was too late—he was gone. And Peggy with him.”

  Oskar stared down at the note.

  “It is all my fault,” Ute said, and was about to say more, but the telephone rang. She and I looked at each other, then she hefted herself off the sofa and left the room. I heard her pick up the phone in the hall.

  “Hello?”

  “What? What is it?” said Oskar, looking at my face.

  “Shh,” I said, standing up and walking to the doorway. “It must be the police.”

  Ute wasn’t talking. When I peeped into the hall, she’d sat down on the telephone seat, the same one that had been there when I was a child. She looked at me and her face drained of colour while she listened to the voice on the other end.

  “Have they found Reuben?” I said to her. But she put her hand up to silence me, still listening.

  “No, I think you must be not correct,” she said into the receiver. “This is not possible.”

  “Have they found him?” I hissed at her again, but she turned her back on me.

  “What about the name carved into the cabin?” she said down the phone.

  “Why are the police calling?” said Oskar, tugging on my sleeve.

  I yanked myself loose. “They went back to die Hütte, to the cabin, to look for Reuben. They said they would phone today.”

  “Yes, that is correct, but she is receiving treatment for the past two months,” Ute was saying. “Yes, OK. Tomorrow.” She replaced the receiver with care and stood up.

  “Have they found him?” asked Oskar. Ute came back into the sitting room, went to the piano, and held on to it. Without turning around she said, “I would like you to go to your bedroom, Oskar. I need to talk to Peggy alone.”

  “Why?” he complained. “What did they say?”

  “Please, now, Oskar.”

  Her voice frightened me, and it must have scared my brother too because with a pout he left. I heard his feet on the stairs, although I suspected he may have been marching on the bottom step and was still listening outside the door. I needed to see Ute’s face, but she didn’t seem about to turn around, so I went to the piano and sat on the stool in front of the closed key lid.

  “He’s dead, isn’t he?” I said, already worried for the creature inside me.

  “No, Peggy, he is not dead.” She turned to look at me and I held her gaze. “They said he never existed.”

  Her eyes slid away from mine and I opened the key lid and saw again the row of polished teeth.

  “They only found your fingerprints . . .” She paused. “. . . on the axe.”

  With quiet deliberation I laid my fingers out across the keys in the position for the start of La Campanella.

  “They searched the other side of the river, but there was no camp. Do you understand, Peggy?”

  Softly, I pressed my fingers down. The piano didn’t make a sound. I thought again about the beautiful silent piano in die Hütte cleaved in two with the axe that Reuben had used to kill my father.

  “They found your den, but they didn’t find Reuben’s hat. There was no hat, Peggy!”

  I lifted my fingers off the keys and heard the muffled click of the hammers moving.

  “They only found blue mittens, that is all there was.” Ute leaned forward and the concave scoop of the piano held her. “They found two names cut in the wood. But they told me that when they cleaned your room in the hospital, they see that you cut the same names into the wall. Peggy?” She looked at me, wanting answers, but I had none to give her. “They said you have invented Reuben, but if that is so, then it wasn’t Reuben who killed James. And if Reuben isn’t real, it means the baby . . .” She looked at my stomach again and didn’t finish her sentence.

  I pressed the keys once more, harder this time, and let my fingers follow the flow and pattern they knew by heart. I was aware of Ute turning toward me, of a sharp intake of breath which she held while I played, but I closed my eyes and went with the music. And when Ute propped open the piano lid, the room was filled with a magical sound and I knew the music came from somewhere real and true.

  My mother stood at the kitchen sink, peeling potatoes. I put on my duffle coat and lifted the torch from a hook behind the cellar door.

  “I won’t be long,” I said to her, and stepped outside the back door before she could stop me. Even though it was night, the frost was gone and the air warmer. I let my eyes get used to the dark, following the same route down to the bottom of the garden that Oskar and I had taken earlier that day, to the chain-link fence. I lifted it up and slipped underneath. The smell of ivy and undergrowth in the cemetery was stronger than before. I still didn’t put the torch on, but let my memory guide me through the trees until I came out beside Rosa Carlos. I switched the light on and shone it up into the angel’s face, illuminating the underside of her chin, the concern in her brows, and the narrow slit of her eyes as she looked sorrowfully down at me. I bent and scrabbled in the same dirt I had dug in only hours earlier, and with the help of the torch I found James’s face, undamaged despite his time in the ground. I put him in my pocket and switched off the light, letting the night settle around me, and went home.

  “Let’s have some hot water, Mrs. Viney,” I said to my mother as I went past her in the kitchen.

  She gave a half-hearted laugh and carried on preparing dinner. I went into the sitting room, and from the bureau drawer I got the photograph with the hole where James’s face should have been. On my way upstairs to Oskar’s room I turned the thermostat down and heard the heating click off.

  “Have you got any tape?” I asked him.

  He was lying on his bed, reading a book about knots.

  “Desk,” he said, without taking his eyes off the page. “Did you know, the only animals that are able to tie knots are the gorilla and the weaver bird?”

  I fished the dot of James’s face from the corner of my coat pocket and placed it on a piece of tape. I set the photograph over the top so that James’s face slotted back into the space he had left earlier that day. I put the picture on Oskar’s desk; he didn’t look up from his book when I went from his room.

  In the bathroom, I ran a shallow bath and took off my clothes, letting them drop on the floor. I slid into the tepid water, watching the very top of my belly rise above it like a tiny island. I closed my eyes and remembered the warm summer sun turning the tips of Reuben’s hair orange.

  Acknowledgements

  Many thanks and much love to Tim, who not only tolerated me spending so much time writing, but encouraged it, and without whom our family would be hungry and without clean clothes. Thank you also to India for her critical eye, and to Henry for the fishing advice.

  I’m incredibly grateful to Jane Finigan for her enthusiasm and guidance, as well as the rest of the team at Lutyens & Rubinstein; to Juliet Annan for making every page stronger and to everyone else at Fig Tree and Penguin who has had a hand in publishing this book; and to Janie Yoon for her invaluable suggestions. Thanks also to Masie Cochran for her attention to detail, and to all t
he team at Tin House.

  For reading and giving feedback, thank you to Louise Taylor, Jo Barker Scott, the rest of the Taverners, Heidi Fuller, and Steve Fuller. Special thanks to Ursula Pitcher for her boundless excitement. I’m also hugely indebted to Judy Heneghan for her unfailing support and advice. Finally, thanks to Sam Beam for providing my writing soundtrack.

  PHOTO © TIM CHAPMAN

  CLAIRE FULLER lives in Winchester, England.

  Our Endless Numbered Days

  BOOK CLUB QUESTIONS

  1.What do you think of Peggy’s attachment to her doll, Phyllis? Is it a normal childhood attachment or a sign of something more?

  2.Some might call Peggy an unreliable narrator. At what point did you question the authenticity of her story, if indeed you do?

  3.Peggy seems to blame Oliver for what happened. Who do you think is the most culpable of the adults in the novel and why?

  4.Many lies are told in the novel—characters lying to each other and to themselves. What do you think is the biggest lie in the novel?

  5.How did you feel when Peggy first meets Rueben in the woods?

  6.Do you agree with Peggy’s doctor that she has Korsakoff’s syndrome and that malnourishment has had an effect on her memory? Or do you think it is something else?

  7.What do you think of the ending? What do you prefer to believe?

  8.How well do you think you would survive in the wild with only an axe and a knife?