‘We should have gone and chatted to him,’ Claire proclaimed when they had all gathered outside. ‘I thought you knew him.’
‘I’ve met him once or twice,’ Helena kept her voice flat.
‘Well you should meet him again.’
‘Don’t listen to her. She just wants another bod to nosy in on our delicious threesome. And one who’s made it onto every American highbrow’s pick of the year list,’ Nick hugged his wife.
‘I didn’t know that,’ Helena murmured.
‘That’s why you have me here,’ he put an arm around each of their shoulders. ‘I’ve booked a table at Joe Allan’s. A brisk walk to whet the appetite ladies.’
‘I’ve told you. I’m not a lady,’ Claire grumbled, then grinned,’Lead the way, Sir Galahad.’
The restaurant, beyond its almost invisible facade, was as always abuzz with voices and laughter. At the long crowded bar, suited bleary-eyed men and glossy-haired women clinked glasses and rubbed legs. The unostentatious red-checkered tables groaned with the weight of wooden salad bowls and heaped plates of traditional American fare.
They were shown to a table in the wide second room. For once Helena turned her back on the merry crowd.
‘Tired?’ Claire asked her.
‘I’ve got masses of catching up to do.’
‘And you’re probably still jet lagged. All this galloping around the world can’t be good for you. Though it would be great for me,’ she chuckled.
‘Poor old downtrodden wife,’ Nick patted Claire’s head playfully. ‘Did I tell you I’m taking her to Paris next weekend?’
‘Because I threatened to go on my own.’
Helena let them banter. She couldn’t seem to concentrate. Going to the lecture had been a distinct mistake.
It was when they stood to leave that she saw him, right there, at the other end of the room, sitting at a table with some six other people. The woman who had introduced him had her hand on his arm.
Claire saw him too. ‘There’s that Adam Peters. Shall we go and tell him how much we enjoyed the lecture.’
‘They’re all busy talking. There’s no point.’
But Nick was already at the other end of the room, was shaking Adam by the hand, greeting what seemed to be an acquaintance, gesturing to them to join him.
‘Never let it be said that my husband is a slouch,’ Claire murmured.
‘Guess that’s how he gets all those programmes made.’
Adam was standing when they reached the table, gazing at Helena sombrely.
‘Will you excuse me,’ he mumbled to the others. He took her arm and physically propelled her towards the bar. She could feel Claire’s eyes on her back.
‘Take your hands off me,’ she hissed.
He loosened his grip. ‘I’ve been trying to reach you for days,’ he sought out her eyes, ‘weeks, in fact.’
She wouldn’t meet them.
‘Let me get you a drink.’
She shook her head. But he had miraculously found a single empty stool at the far end of the bar and short of making a scene, she couldn’t refuse it. ‘Alright, a glass of wine,’ she said. She had told herself she wouldn’t be afraid. And there was no reason for it, except for that touch on her elbow. She edged her arm free.
He was sipping his whiskey and staring at her.
‘There’s a man, isn’t there? You lied to me.’
‘I lied to you?’ she was incredulous. Then she remembered Nick, with his demonstrative kiss, his arm around her in the lecture theatre. She laughed. ‘I guess lying is in the air.’
‘Is that why you ran off Helena? Look at me,’ he raised her chin, scrutinized her face.
‘I met your father,’ she said as evenly as she could.
‘You met my father?’ It was his turn to look incredulous.
She nodded.
He laughed abruptly. ‘How? Why? Did you enjoy it?’ There was an obtuse air on his face.
‘I went to interview him. Yes, I enjoyed it. In a manner of speaking. He told me about his grandchildren,’ she paused expectantly.
‘Yes, he’s very fond of them,’ he looked into the distance for a moment.
She waited for him to say something. He would have to tell her now. But all he said was, ‘Look, I want to talk to you, see you. Alone. Can we go somewhere. My hotel?’
She flinched.
‘I don’t mean that. Anywhere. Anywhere quiet. I have something to show you.’
‘You can show me here.’
He shrugged, ‘I’d like to talk to you, Helena.’ He took her hand.
She kept herself very still. Yes, he would talk to her, would tell her that it didn’t matter about his wife. Would smooth talk her into anything. She was suddenly angry, she pulled her hand away.
‘So it didn’t mean anything? Just another little fuck in a distant country?’ He was scowling at her.
‘Don’t be crude.’
‘The holier than thou always brings out the crude,’ he threw it at her contemptuously. Then he turned and strode away.
Helena leaned shakily on the bar, sipped her wine. She had to compose herself for Claire and Nick.
But in a moment he was back. He unbuckled his briefcase and then thrust a photograph in front of her. ‘There, is that your Max Bergmann?’
Helena stared at the picture, saw an old man, confusion in his eyes. She shook her head slowly. ‘No, that’s not him.’
She looked up at Adam. It didn’t make sense. A few minutes ago, she would have sworn he knew Max - that lecture, that letter on his father’s desk. She cleared her throat. ‘Was this the man who came to the house?’
‘No, but that’s all I came up with after three weeks of scouring the vicinity.’
‘Oh,’ she swallowed hard. ‘I’ve located him in any event. I should have let you know. I didn’t think.’
‘No, you didn’t think.’
She couldn’t bear that contempt on his face.
‘And you lied to me about that too,’ she suddenly hissed at him. ‘You did get a letter from Max. I saw it on your father’s desk.’
‘Snooping again, were we?’
She flushed, ‘That doesn’t alter the fact that it was there.’
‘Another drink, Sir, Madame?’ The barman smiled at them sweetly.
‘Whiskey please,’ Adam nodded, as Helena shook her head.
They were silent for a moment.
‘So where did you find your Max the father?’ he said at last.
Helena ran a hand through her hair, looked into the bar mirror, saw Adam’s face reflected there. She turned back to him. ‘I haven’t exactly found him, I just know where he’s going to be on April 20th,’ she murmured.
‘I see. Well I guess, I should say I’m pleased for you.’
‘Thank you.’
He met her eyes for a long moment. ‘So I guess that’s that.’
‘That’s that,’ she echoed him.
He gulped down his whiskey.
‘Shall we go back?’
She nodded.
She had just stepped off the bar stool, when he suddenly stopped, ‘Wait a minute, I’ve just thought of something. There was a letter. I sent it on to my father. A letter in an old fashioned script addressed to Eberhardt. I assumed that someone in the neighbourhood must have thought the old ones were still alive, so I posted it on.’
‘You didn’t open it?’
‘It never occurred to me.’
They walked slowly back to their table. Helena suddenly felt an overwhelming wave of sadness engulf her. ‘I’m sorry it can’t work,’ she mumbled at him, then planting a bright smile on her face, she nodded at Claire and Nick. ‘Shall we go?.
They rose, said their goodbyes. Just before Adam took his place again, Helena said, ‘By the way, I’m not certain you’ve been properly introduced. My friend Claire Stanton, her husband Nick Foster. Thanks for your help, Adam.’
He looked after her with utter bewilderment written on his face.
Chapt
er Twenty-One
If Adam Peters in his lecture had suggested that people stumbled into the future while looking backwards into the past, Helena felt over the next weeks that she had obliterated any notion of the future. She was trapped into grubbing around in the swamp of her personal history.
It was only partly intentional. The process having been started, she now found herself subject to shards of uncomfortable childhood memory which cut across her line of vision, no matter how hard she concentrated on work. And she worked like a demon, putting in long hours in the office, arguing at editorial meetings, rooting out stories, placing word after word on the screen. She knew that she was also trying to wipe out Adam, overlaying with words and activity the presence which loomed in the forefront of her imagination. Yet despite it all, whole swathes of his conversation would erupt on her, ironic phrases that had begun to displace Max’s uplifting tones which had always served as her guide to the future.
To make matters worse, she had had notes from both of them.
Adam’s had come first - in response to the article on his father she had sent him. It was a formal little note, thanking her for the piece, saying how he had enjoyed it. And then had come that postscript, ‘I thought I was falling in love with you. Still can’t get you out of my mind. Or my body. Odd really, given the circumstances. But there we are.’
It came to her that no one had used the word love to her since an admirer at University had sent her reams of not very wonderful poems.
She took the letter home, put it into her top drawer.
Two days later the cards had arrived from Max, three of them in an envelope, from which the postmark had vanished beneath a stamp. She gazed at the pictures. Glacial mountains beneath a pristine sky. The Grosse Hundstod, the inscriptions on the backs of two of them said. And then another card of a quiet lake nestling amongst hills, too quiet, perhaps a reservoir. Some kind of building was visible in the distance. Sylvenstein-Speicher, the print announced.
There was no message on the cards, simply Max’s name. A statement that wasn’t a statement. She rang James to ask him whether he too had heard something and James in turn rang the list of friends. Her cards were the only ones. Again she was confronted by the sense of her specialness and again those notions of Max being her father took up their refrain, as resonantly as they had while she had been in Germany.
What did it mean to have a father? She wasn’t quite sure. The only person she had known who fulfilled that role had been Tom Moore, whom she had been schooled to call ‘Dad’, but whom she had never considered as such. He was someone to be feared and avoided, his temper always unpredictable, blows as likely to erupt from him as words, though there were perhaps fewer of the latter. Not at her though. She didn’t remember him ever hitting her. Yet she lived in fear, tiptoing round him, trying to make herself invisible, sensing the violence in him even when it was held at bay.
And then, as she grew older, the threat of him took on an added dimension. ‘Like father, like son,’ Mrs. Moore had been wont to repeat either in pride or anger; and the words for Helena - particularly after Billy had begun his sexual bullying - had taken on an aura of intolerable menace.
That had been her only direct experience of fathers. There had been indirect ones, of course. She had met, during her grammar school years, the fathers of friends, kind men with a slightly absent look in their eyes, whom their daughters would treat with an offhand respect or tease and cajole. It was the latter which most fascinated her. It struck a note she had never heard, a note which was at once a signal of underlying trust and its opposite - an address to another who had to be appeased, pacified, flattered.
It came to her now, as she meditated on these things, that this teasing and cajoling was something which spilled over into her friends’ relations with men. She herself had rarely if ever been capable of it: this blithe coexistence of contradictions, an ability to trust and yet to recognize the danger in what one trusted. The danger, she sensed, had something to do with sexual excitement as well as with power.
She had refused both trust and danger. Or kept them at bay in discrete packages tied with innumerable safety knots, though occasionally festooned with ribbons so it looked as if they could be easily opened.
But all of that led her to Adam again and not to Max. It was Max she needed to think about.
When she had moved in with Emily, the world had begun and ended with women. Oh, of course, there had been the occasional male visitor, and the occasional physics master at school. But those apart, the only men were those august presences who peopled the shelves of the library, the Dickens and Tolstoys and Trollopes whose names stood out boldly from the spines of books. There was Virgil, too, chanted over breakfast with metric aplomb in the Latin whose hard sounds bore a distinct relation to Emily’s German pronunciation.
Sometimes, it was true, Emily talked of her own father. She always spoke of him or quoted him in that tone of mingled reverence and gratitude, not unlike her citations from Virgil, so that in Helena’s mind his image fused with the austere face of the ancient poet who looked out blindly from the frontispiece of the Aeneid.
Perhaps it was the residue of that image that she had transferred to Max when she had first met him shortly after Emily’s death. Certainly the awe she held him in was not so very different from Emily’s for her dead father. And it came to Helena that she quoted from Max in much the same way that Emily had cited not only her father, but the old masters in her library. A received image, given flesh by Max’s presence.
She debated with herself whether she should fly out to Germany early to try and find him, but decided it would be another fruitless chase. Better to wait until the appointed date in Berlin. Max, as Bradford Summers had said to her in Boston, might simply have chosen to have a period of solitude.
Meanwhile, she decided actively to fill out the geography of her childhood memories. She was a big girl, now, she told herself. She could take it. But she started, nonetheless, with the easiest point of entry: Emily’s close friend, Mrs. Fenton.
Mrs Fenton had moved into a pleasant first floor flat close to the Soane Museum just behind the LSE. The front room into which the spry old woman ushered Helena was filled with the memorabilia of a lifetime. Photographs of children who had long fled the coop and a cluster of grandchildren vied with images of the Aldermaston marches, old theatre programmes, and the plunder of travels - Javanese puppets, a nest of beautifully painted Russian dolls, an assortment of lacquered boxes.
‘I had to get rid of a great deal when I moved again,’ Mrs Fenton smiled ruefully, as she watched Helena’s eyes move over the room. She was pushing along a trolley laden with Wedgewood china and a plump ginger cake. ‘But one acquires far too much in the course of a lifetime. Emily was far better than I in keeping herself unencumbered. Sugar, my dear.’
Helena shook her head.
‘I’m so pleased that you’ve come to see me. I know how busy you must be. All these wonderful things you young people do now, I’m quite in awe. We never thought of the health of the planet in my day. Oh yes, I’ve been reading your articles,’ she looked at Helena with bright eyes. ‘Emily would have been so proud of you.’
Helena made a modest murmur and then added, ‘It’s Emily I wanted to talk to you about, Mrs. Fenton.’ She paused for a moment. ‘Do you know what ever made her adopt me.
The old woman smiled, ‘Now that, my dear, is a very easy question to answer and a very difficult one.’ She looked out the window as if she could see her old friend there. ‘Emily always wanted something of her own, you know, apart from the school. And after Rafi Lever died, her great and only love, really, well there was the occasional man here and there.’
Helena listened intently, not daring to move.
‘But she really wasn’t interested. What she was interested in was having a child. Well, you know Emily, she was such a rationalist - the most rational person I’ve ever met - she convinced herself that there was far too much risk in having one’s own chil
d, even if there were a man to have one with. And there was an equal risk in adopting a baby. One never knew if one would like them when they grew up. She hadn’t been all that fond of her own mother, a silly, slightly tittering woman. Her father was a different story: she idolized him, claimed he taught her everything she knew, but he died when she was still in her teens.
‘In any event, when you appeared on the scene, it was the answer to her deepest dreams. You were such a frail little thing,’ Mrs. Fenton looked at her as if it were almost impossible to put together what she could see before her with the image she held in her mind.
‘But fierce, too. And obviously intelligent. Emily had told me about you well before you arrived at the house. She thought you were wonderful and she saw that she could only do good by taking you on. You were the answer to her dreams.
‘Another cup of tea, me dear. Some more of this cake?’
‘Please,’ Helena nodded. ‘I’ve been wondering,’ she cleared her throat, ‘did Emily find out anything about me, about my parents, that she might not have wanted to tell me?’
The old woman scrutinized her carefully, rearranged a stray lock of white hair behind her ear. ‘I don’t think so. Emily believed in honesty, and if there was anything to tell, she would have done so. At an appropriate time, if necessary. Why? Have you discovered something?’
Helena shrugged, then decided to come out with it, ‘Just this stray fancy that she might have been my real mother.’
Mrs. Fenton sipped her tea. Shrewd eyes looked out at Helena from above her cup. ‘Well, anything is possible, my dear, though I think I would have known. Let’s see when were you born.’
‘1957,’ Helena prompted her.
‘1957, Mrs. Fenton reflected.
She looked, Helena suddenly thought, as if she were trying to determine whether it would be best to encourage Helena in her speculations or dissuade her.
Dreams of Innocence Page 61
